Poet in Winter: Max Blagg Offers His Homage to the Solstice in Tribeca Park
Max Blagg hangs his poems in Tribeca Park. He takes them away when he leaves. "The last time I left them here the Parks Department just ripped everything down," he said. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib
“Would you like a poem? They’re free by the way.”
Max Blagg was standing in Tribeca Park at Beach Street and West Broadway Thursday morning, hawking a poem. The printed sheets of paper hung like laundry from a line strung between two trees. This being one day after the darkest of December days, the poet was continuing a practice he’d begun a few years ago: Giving away a signed original poem to mark the winter solstice.
“I buy the nice paper and print it out. I go get the string from the hardware store,” he said of the ritual. “I feel like a nature poet in some ways.”
While acceptance never comes easily for poets, Blagg subjects himself to the most personal of rejection. It’s one thing to be ignored altogether. It’s another to watch as passersby stop to read a few lines, then walk on.
“You see the rejection we have to deal with?” Blagg said with a laugh, after two young men glanced over his piece before leaving empty-handed. “They look at it and then it’s, 'Nah, I don’t think so.’”
Still, this turned out to be one of Blagg's better solstice poem days. More people than usual stopped to check out the poem, then tug it from the line. A mail carrier, Blagg said, even stood and read “Solstice 2016” aloud.
Then there was Jane Diaz, who paused to read the poem on her way to work.
“Are you a poet?” she asked, her eyes fixed on the paper still hanging from the line.
“I am, yeah. I have been for some time,” replied Blagg, who is 68 and well-established as both poet and performer. (His just published book, “Slow Dazzle,” is a compendium of poems and essays written in collaboration with prominent artists.)
“Beautiful!” Diaz said of the work.
Blagg’s face brightened when he saw a familiar figure crossing the park.
“Oh, here’s my plumber!” he announced. “He’ll take one, surely.” And indeed he did.
Bill Kransdorf, going to his job as a bankruptcy advisor, said he especially related to these lines:
clerks hurry to their desks,
figures from a Russian novel
that won’t end well.
“Ever since November 8, I’ve felt like a figure in a Russia novel that will not end well,” Kransdorf said. “So this is very much speaking to me. Very sad and bleak and that’s where my head is at right now. I’ll put this up on my desk.”
After a couple of hours, Blagg took down the string and the remaining sheets of poetry and returned to his nearby apartment on Beach Street, where he has lived for 40 years. Mission accomplished, even if all 50 copies did not have takers. He had, once again, paid homage to a bit of nature that, as he sees it, is not altogether sad and bleak.
“The solstice is the shortest day of the year, but from then on you get more light every day, like 60 seconds,” the poet said. “And I crave the light.”
“Solstice 2016”
by Max Blagg
Sun weak as milk skulks
behind the Woolworth building,
clerks hurry to their desks,
figures from a Russian novel
that won't end well.
December's shadows
slide beneath the door,
day begins to fade at four,
our lanterns don't impress the dark.
It is a long hike upward
from December to daylight.
Beneath the frozen skin of earth
the tulip's fuse ignites
and aims toward the sun,
uncoiling through cold soil, rising,
a striver arriving fast
propelled by memory of sun's caress.
Mercury in the glass likewise compelled to stir at last, begins its own slow crawl
toward the light that loads the spring.