When Reality Gets Tossed, Like A Salad

Tonight’s featured poet at Curley’s Diner was initially drawn to the form by no less than Frank McCourt (Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes), his English teacher while attending New York City’s Stuyvesant High School. Neil Silberblatt began penning his own work while at Cornell University.

In addition to his writing, Neil is very active in organizing Voices of Poetry, a traveling venue for prominent poets and musicians, held at The Sherman Museum, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield), the New Britain Museum of American Art and other locations around Connecticut.

Most recently, Neil has placed two pieces in last October’s “It’s Political” issue of the literary publication Verse Wisconsin. So Far, So Good (Lulu), his 2012 collection, is prized by fellow poet and Voices participant, Joan Kantor, for its blend of “… honesty and accessibility” with humor and elegant word-choice.   

Madison Avenue (part of his New York Suite), Grand Prize Winner in the Open Community Poetry Contest sponsored by Hennen's Observer (which also nominated the poet for a Pushcart Prize), conveys with sparse power how standard mandates of self-worth, opportunity and integrity get twisted out of all meaning on the altar of globalized consumerism:

MADISON AVENUE

At the Viand Coffee Shop...

on Madison Avenue

          which must not be confused

          with the Viand on East 86^th

          or the Viand on Broadway

come the young ladies fresh from

their visit to the Met

or, if they dare, the Whitney

         because one can only

          take so many Rothkos

          or Van Goghs

          in a morning

wearing their

dazzling tennis whites

which have never seen,

and will never see,

a ground stroke,

as they pick apart their

salads

and each other.

Now enter

the ladies

bearing handbags

with names

like children,

     the real thing

     of course,

     no knock offs here

as they survey the

dieter’s special

and eye the desserts

cordoned off

behind the counter.

Their conversations hushed

as they spread

butter

and gossip.

Two blocks away

from the Viand Coffee Shop

on Madison Avenue

     which must not be confused

     with the Viand on East 86^th

     or the Viand on Broadway

stands a refugee

from Senegal

as black as the plum

into which she bites,

its juices dripping

down the side of her hand,

as she quickly sets up

her display of

counterfeit handbags

on the street-corner.

 

She is

real;

the plum is

real;

the bags –

     as she will quietly tell you

     in her rich Senegalese accent,

     with her breath scented by plum -

are beautiful,

but fake.

  

Neil has a second collection of poems, tentatively titled Present Tense, due for release later this year.