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Poet in New York (in Spanish, Poeta en Nueva York) is one of the most important works of Spanish author Federico García Lorca. It is a body of poems composed during the visit of the poet to Columbia University in New York in the years 1929/1930.
A Poet in New York is a British drama television film that was first broadcast, in a 60-minute version, by BBC One Wales on 30 April 2014. A longer 75-minute version was later broadcast by BBC Two on 18 May 2014.
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Personal and national depression
Lorca arrived in New York City in July 1929. During hisresidence in the city he stayed in a room in John Jay Hall, a dormitory on the Columbia Universitycampus. His plan was to study English at the university, but he withdrew from class after a week because he believed himself unable to learn the language. He stayed in New York until April 1930, when he was invited to lecture in Havana, Cuba. Four months after García Lorca arrived in New York, Wall Street suffered its horrendous stock market...
Activism and artistic expression
Lorca lived in Harlem (while residing at Columbia University) and frequented its establishments. He befriended African American writer Nella Larsen, with whom he often visited local cabarets and theaters. On the streets of Harlem, he would listen to jazz being played and witness the daily lives of thousands of local inhabitants. Meanwhile, bringing the disparity right into the neighborhood, whites came to attend Harlem clubs and parties and listen to jazz artists like Duke Ellington. Because...
Cuba
Lorca resided in Havana from March until June of 1930, invited there by the Hispano-Cuban Institute to give lectures on his works. Times were dismal in this country too. Cuba suffered greatly in the worldwide Depression. The sugar industry, the mainstay of the economy, saw prices tumble to all-time lows. Thousands of Cubans lost their jobs and tens of thousands were chronically underemployed when sugar prices first fell in 1926. By the early 1930s, thousands more had become jobless. In search...
Contents summary
Poet in New York contains ten sections. The first, labeled “Poems of Solitude at Columbia University,” reflects the loneliness and isolation Lorca experienced in New York. He sees himself as a victim of the chaos of life and meditates on the innocence of his childhood.Section Two, “The Blacks,” and Section Three, “Streets and Dreams,” are centered around the religious motifs of Paradise Lost and the Dance of Death. In “The Blacks,” Lorca portrays the African American community as the innocent...
“El rey de Harlem”
This poem comes from the second section of the book, “Los negros” (“The Blacks”). A surrealistic barrage of images, the poem begins with four stanzas that introduce a pent-up Harlem, full of despair and oppressed African Americans. It is a dark, primitive scene that expresses a tragic vision: “With a spoon / he gouged out the crocodile’s eyes / and thumped on the monkey-rumps” “the little boys smashed little squirrels” (Garcia Lorca, Poet in New York, p. 19). It hints at the potential of blac...
“La aurora”
From the section “Streets and Dreams,” this poem portrays New York City as a modern, technological, industrial behemoth that poisons its inhabitants with its artificial environment. It is a city of skyscrapers and cement, steel and glass, compared to Lorca’s native Andalusia, a beautiful rural region of olive and citrus groves with no large cities. Lorca blamed the modern urban conglomeration for the plight of the average New Yorker; he felt that it caused humans to lose sight of what is impo...
Anderson, Reed. Federico Garcia Lorca. London: Macmillan, 1984. Craige, Betty Jean. Lorca’s Poet in New York: The Fall into Consciousness. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1977. Garcia Lorca, Federico. Poet in New York. Trans. Ben Belitt. New York: Grove Press, 1983. Gibson, Ian. Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life. New York: Pantheon, 1989. ...
Poet in New York (Poeta en Nueva York) consists of 35 poems divided into ten sections that follow his travels and experiences in the United States and Cuba: Poems of Loneliness at Columbia University, The Negroes, Streets and Dreams, Double Poem of Lake Eden Mills, At the Farmer’s Cabin, Introduction to Death.
Jan 15, 2008 · Newly translated for the first time in ten years, Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York is an astonishing depiction of a tumultuous metropolis that changed the course of poetic expression in...
Jun 28, 2019 · These are the 10 poets who have best captured the collective experience of New Yorkers, but also have managed to touch the hearts of those who live far beyond the city’s limits. Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
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This influential collection portrays a New York City populated with poverty, racism, social turbulence, and solitude--a New York intoxicating in its vitality and beauty. After the tragedy of September 11, 2001, poets Pablo Medina and Mark Statman were struck by how closely this seventy-year-old work spoke to the atmosphere of New York.
