Chelsea Echoes

Will Evan´s pre-Simulationist poem has the intimate feel of a Whitman poem speaking to the New York experience by capturing the sights and the sounds of a Manhattan district (which I know very well, since I lived in Chelsea at 10th St. and 25th Avenue for some time back in the Eighties, just above the Chelsea commons) but yet it is charged with a different eroticism, a blistering visceral force field of hyper commerce superimposed like a time lapse palimpsest on the Chelsea Meat Market as it was when I lived there up until the early Nineties, so that we get a sense of a historical vortex, a place where abbattoirs turned into brothels which then turned into restaurants where bankers went on credit swap orgies.

Reading this poem made me tingle in recognition, since I read the organizing metaphor from the standpoint of the Negro as the Other, the oppressed figure always denigrated and denied access, who can be the invisible man as observer watching the process of a meat space being transmogrified from slaughter zone, to carnal interzone, to hi tech nomad whoredom.

This is a poem that thin slices across layers of contemporary history to lay bare the ruthless transactions by which the urban maw lives and cannibalizes itself. But it is also the poem as snapshot engaging all the senses from the viewpoint of a ´de-privileged´speaker, the I in the poem, who registers the echoes of the carnage nested into carnal and finally looping back as a sensorium, all presence removed, the deal made, the money withdrawn forever.

electrifying portrait of city old and new
from a screaming point of view
stimulates my being through