When, on January 19, 1939, W.H. Auden boarded at Southampton a ship bound for New York City, he could not have known that he would never live in England again. But some months earlier, he had told his friend Christopher Isherwood that he wanted to settle permanently in the United States. Almost as soon as he arrived in New York, he began to rethink his calling as a poet, and, moreover, to reconsider the social role and function of poetry. (He also began a spiritual pilgrimage that would lead him to embrace the Christian faith of his childhood.)
When I began taking my morning run up the middle of the Diagonal—along with all the local runners—I entertained the thought that has plagued countless American visitors to Europe since time immemorial: Why can’t we do this? My case of Europe envy was exacerbated by recent events in New York City: for example, the plans for radically reimagining the section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that runs along the edge of Brooklyn Heights—the so-called triple cantilever—that went exactly nowhere. And then, of course, there was New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s last-minute decision to shut down congestion pricing, a system (for which $500 million worth of sensors had already been installed) that would have charged drivers a $15 toll for entering Manhattan below 60th Street during peak hours. The billions of dollars collected were supposed to fund a variety of much-needed mass transit projects. Instead, this bold change, along with so many others, had seemingly evaporated on the brink of implementation.
As ever, Smith delights in sportive wordplay, but those obliquely iterating titles belie a frank clarity of purpose. The world is on fire, Ali Smith is here to tell us, and this emergency calls for some urgent semiotics.