“IT IS ALWAYS MODERN TIMES”

A poem often on my mind these days is “Always Modern Times,” by Bradford Stark, a poet who died much too soon—in 1980, in his thirties. I knew the poem—and the poet—long ago, and it speaks to me again, recalling for me the image of the abstract street grid of Manhattan, which was so often bare in the early days of the pandemic. Here it is.

ALWAYS MODERN TIMES

       By Bradford Stark

The history of the city

is a history of congestion

and despair.

Look around you.

What is there but plaster

                                        falling

and stores to clean your laundry.

Even the rich are fooled.

In his treatise

The scholar can note only

the invention of the watercloset in 1596

as crucial.

The history of the city

is a history thriving

on the intimate processes which are used to describe it.

It is always modern times.

The “modern times” of the title strikes me today as almost certainly an allusion to the 1936 silent film Modern Times starring Charlie Chaplin. In it, Chaplin’s indelible character, the little tramp (in this film a sometime factory worker) is intermittently trapped, literally, in the cogs of industry—nightmarish, Rube Goldberg-like industrial machines with threatening gears.

The speaker in Stark’s poem is also trapped. In his case, it’s in a “Groundhog Day”-like circularity. Our time is always modern times in the sense that innovation, like the 1596 invention of the toilet, occurs in any age, and any age seems modern to its denizens.

But the whirl of invention spins around a changeless core, in which we find ways to meet our persistent human needs—for a bathroom, or for stores, the poet remarks with a certain wryness, “to do your laundry.”

Everywhere, however, our static habitat decays, like “plaster/falling,” the descent indicated effectively by a single word “falling” to the next line, as if into an abyss.

This is a sad and dark poem—though cathartic, perhaps, in voicing our sad, dark, and claustrophobic times for us. “The history of the city/ is a history of congestion//and despair.” That last word falls heavily in my heart.

But there’s a suggestion of redemption, of a lift, at the end, without which the poem would be almost too painful to endure. (“For beauty’s nothing/but the beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear,” as Rilke writes in his first Duino Elegy. ) There is after all, a dynamism, a life through which the city thrives. “The history of the city/is a history thriving//on the intimate processes which are used to describe it.”

That dynamism can stem, for example, from a scholar’s notation of the city’s necessary inventiveness or, especially, on “the intimate processes” of a poem or a great film, say, in which our inner workings are laid beautifully bare.

"Charlie Chaplin, 'Modern Times'" by thefoxling is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0