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I started the search for a portrait of Boston in 1897 by looking for news stories of major events: it was the year of the subway and the marathon. And the articles associated with these topics were interesting, but not particularly revelatory; an emergent property of an event being major is that it is known about. To delve deeper is to risk telling the story of the marathon itself, or the subway itself, which subordinates place and time.
Frustrated, I randomized my search; that is, I read the whole paper, and found myself drawn to the strange grumpy-yet-cosmopolitan voice in the Editorial Points. It was compelling because the sensibilities of the voice came clear not in a particular entry, but in the way the entries resonated with each other when read; a kind of pointillism. By culling the editorial notes from throughout the year, I hope to present the impression of the time and place in similar style, allowing events and concerns to resonate with each other; a dynamic blur. It is set in columns to invite the eye to leap. This is no narrative.
``Richard Cory'' is an oft-reprinted poem, but after immersion in a year of editorial notes it felt like a good fit, coupling an intense interest in the doings of rich (``J. Piermont Morgan is going abroad next week. Well, he can afford it.'') with the willingness of the poor to suffer for money (``A man who says he knows from experience just where he is at in the Alaska gold diggings reports that the chief food in that region is bear fat, and that to change one's clothing in winter means death. But nothing can probably stop the rush.''). The poem finishes on the image that money might not be enough. Perhaps the interest at the time in the lives of the wealthy is the search for evidence one way or the other. The present holds a similar interest.
``I've Been There,'' to my knowledge, has never been reprinted. It captures a tension between the city dweller and farmer stemming from the separation of the city dweller from the natural world -- it's rather disappointing that the refrain sets up the tension to be relieved by the exasperated ``I know!'' But I love the portrait of farm life at a time when city life was becoming the mode, and the ending -- though it has little if anything to do with the rest of the poem -- is just a dynamite look at a knowing wink, still the mode many of us favor in talking about you-know-what-I-mean.
