I never thought I’d be here when I wrote
William Montgomery’s Guide to New York City in late 2007, shivering in a top-floor room in Galway, Ireland, thinking back to my years as a graduate student in New York. I was thirty-two, and this poem was my valedictory note to my twenties, a so-long-farewell to the neighborhoods I’d frequented… including the Fort Greene-Clinton Hill area of Brooklyn where I write these words from a café that wasn’t there then. The poem appeared as a companion chapbook to my first collection,
Across the Grid of Streets, and while the collection did as well as could reasonably be expected under the circumstances, the
Guide, a promo item of sorts, quickly slipped into obscurity. In part, it was due to a rushed, indeed botched production job that did it no favors, but when I returned to New York a few months later, the poem’s purpose as a washing-of-hands seemed… irrelevant.
The poem is a revisitation in two ways. First, it revisits an upper Manhattan-centered New York where I no longer live in a period in which gentrification, though already underway, was nevertheless far less advanced. The rent on the large one-bedroom apartment in Inwood where my alter ego lived hovered around a mere $800 in those days. Second, though, the poem (which I have revised lightly where improvements were particularly obvious and needed) is not only from an earlier period of my writing—note the initial caps, which I ceased using after my first book—but this is really my only poem where the city itself is the main, if estranged character. New York has been a frequent setting since, but it hasn't been the subject of a poem of mine in quite the same way.
Rereading this poem, I like it better than I thought I would and am more forgiving of its author than I might have been. I hope you enjoy it.
https://dyadpress.ca/william-montgomerys-guide-to-nyc/