ANY PLACE ANY TIME — The David M. Katz Poetry Blog

Cropped to emphasize its stunning verticality, this amazing photo by Dorothea Lange captures a silent moment of the city at a particular place and time (The Bronx, June 1936), but also any place, any time.

Commissioned in the depths of the Depression by the Farm Security Administration, the photo resonates with the early days of the current pandemic, for example, when the city looked like a ghost town. More specifically, it has the feel of my 1950s early childhood on the Lower East Side—especially those baby carriages.

And while Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning is dated 1930 and was described by the painter as "almost a literal translation of Seventh Avenue,” that painting flows into a common stream of consciousness for me that also includes my poem from In Praise of Manhattan:

Abandonment on Avenue C
From deep in the streets, winding through the backstreets,
Out of this rare moment of quiet in the summer streets,
I hear the delicate moan of a child far away,
The plaintive tone of a child in Manhattan,
And it is the same sound I hear
In that painting of a downtown row
Of one-story structures facing me,
As if out of a scene from my childhood
On Avenue C, each window discrete
Yet all of a piece in Hopper’s painting—
A barber pole tilting, a fire pump squatting,
No human being, Early Sunday Morning —
That same sound of parentless quiet
When I ran away from home,
Only to be stopped by the terror
Of abandonment on Avenue C—that sound,
And Hopper’s sound, and my sound right now
All stemming from the child’s plaintive cry,
My childhood fleeing yet fearful of flight,
And Hopper at his lonely easel.

Early Sunday Morning (1930), Edward Hopper

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