{"id":5975,"date":"2024-02-15T16:07:48","date_gmt":"2024-02-15T05:37:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=5975"},"modified":"2024-02-15T16:07:50","modified_gmt":"2024-02-15T05:37:50","slug":"poetry-spotlight-new-york-by-aidan-coleman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2024\/02\/poetry-spotlight-new-york-by-aidan-coleman\/","title":{"rendered":"POETRY SPOTLIGHT: ‘New York’ by Aidan Coleman"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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This week’s poetry spotlight shines on Aidan Coleman’s poem ‘New York’, which was included in the 2009 anthology Catch Fire: Friendly Street Poets 33, <\/a><\/em>edited by Aidan Coleman and Juliet A. Paine. <\/strong><\/p>\n

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Post written by Polly Grant Butler<\/pre>\n
On Monday I made the journey back to Victoria and, having now become accustomed to Adelaide\u2019s dry heat, was instantly worried about what sort of weather would await me. My pleasant surprise at the balmy evening quickly turned to anguish when the next day a storm hit the eastern part of the state (while fires blazed on the opposite side) and I watched from my balcony as the trees violently shook, listening to the sound of falling branches forcefully hitting the deck. Then the power went out, followed by phone service. After the storm had calmed, I ventured out in search of food but of course eftpos machines were also affected (a reminder to always carry cash!), and I returned home empty handed. I was lucky, and power resumed late that night, which was not the case for many, the power outage supposedly one of the largest in the state\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
So, for this week\u2019s spotlight, a poem about the weather, though perhaps I\u2019ve made a tenuous connection, given Aidan Coleman\u2019s feature poem concerns snow in New York. Oh well, good enough.<\/p>\n
On the surface, this is a more accessible poem than some of Aidan\u2019s work, reminiscent of Frank O\u2019Hara and the New York School of poets. The first stanza immediately draws you into the scene, followed by a subtle and tender repetition. The third stanza references Wallace Stevens, an early modernist poet I am not familiar enough with. I like when poems reference other poems, acknowledging the dialogue that is inherent in any artistic tradition, wherein the author is always speaking to the past. Mainly I like it because finding new poems to read is a favourite pastime, so after googling \u2018Wallace Stevens \/ snow\u2019, I found myself immersed in ‘The Snow Man’ (1921).<\/p>\n
In Stevens\u2019 poem, the snow man symbolises a kind of Nietzschean perspectivism: unlike the human it is without bias. Rereading Aidan\u2019s poem through this lens, I thought about the sky removed from the speaker, and imagined this in relation to snow \u2018falling \/ skyward\u2019, how the sky is something close to objective, sucking up the snow and our breath and the dust of our bodies. Aidan was probably referencing something entirely different, but that doesn\u2019t matter, because it provoked me to think, something good writing should do.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is a lovely, romantic poem that I guess can be seen as a belated Valentine\u2019s gift from me to you. Enjoy!<\/p>\n\n
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This week’s poetry spotlight shines on Aidan Coleman’s poem ‘New York’, which was included in the 2009 anthology Catch Fire: Friendly Street Poets 33, edited by Aidan Coleman and Juliet A. Paine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[792,80,315,855,8],"tags":[864,856,46,862,858],"class_list":["post-5975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australian","category-for-fun","category-poetry-2","category-poetry-spotlight","category-we-love-books","tag-australian-poetry","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-poetry-spotlight","tag-poets"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4v1Of-1yn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5975"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6003,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5975\/revisions\/6003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}