Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog

I’d almost forgotten to write my post for Week Four of National Poetry Month when I realized it was the last night of April and poetry month would soon be over for another year. I had no idea what poem or poet to feature although, having recently returned from Fall River, MA, where I had been part of the first Poesia Festival there, I thought it might be one of the Portuguese poets featured at the event: Camões, Silveira, Amaral, Pessoa, or Medeiros. (I’d already featured Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen the previous week.)

“It can wait until tomorrow,” I told myself, turning on Game 5 of the Boston Bruins Stanley Cup playoff game against the Toronto Maple Leafs, which my team lost in overtime.

This morning, I woke to the news that Paul Auster had died at 77 years old after a long battle with lung cancer. I have a long, tenuous, and tangential relationship with Paul Auster dating back to the late 1980s, when I was part of a writing group called the “Decompositionalists” and worked in publishing. I texted one of the other members of that writing group who had been a big fan of the author of City of Glass. “I still treasure The New York Trilogy,” she texted back. “Something of a shock to learn of his passing, though every time I saw him he was smoking.”

When I was a young editor at Viking Penguin, Auster, in all his swarthy, 38-year-old handsomeness used to come into the office to meet with his editor. All the young women—or, rather, ALL the women would swoon, and many of the men, too! “He is smoking hot,” a colleague at the time explained to me when I asked what the attraction was. “There’s nothing like a smoking hot intellectual to make an editorial department swoon.”

While Auster was best known as a highly acclaimed novelist and writer of prose fiction, memoirs, and essays, he started as a poet and translator, living in Paris after graduating from Columbia in 1969. It wasn’t lost on me that Auster, who had partaken in the student protests at Columbia University in 1968, died the day the NYPD sent in its surge troops to evict students from Hamilton Hall, a building they were occupying as part of a pro-Palestinian protest.

The earlier protest, which police also cracked down upon on April 30^th fifty-six years ago, ended in violence that resulted in more than 700 arrests and 148 reports of injuries as “officers trampled protesters, hit them with night sticks, punched and kicked them down stairs,” according to The New York Times.

While Auster’s poetry has been overshadowed by his prose, he published several volumes of poetry over his career, including Unearth (1974), Wall Writing (1976), and Facing the Music (1980). Two volumes of selected poems, Disappearances (1988) and Ground Work (1990) along with a volume of Collected Poems (2007), were also published.

His poetry tends to have an experimental, avant-garde style influenced by French writers and surrealists, wherein, as in much of his fiction, he explores themes of chance, games, language play, intertextuality, and the role of the author. While respected, his poetry has received less mainstream attention and acclaim compared to his novels like 4321 (2017), The New York Trilogy (1987), The Book of Illusions (2002), and The Brooklyn Follies (2005).

Auster rather famously wrote with a fountain pen. “If I could write directly on a computer or typewriter, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me,” he said in an interview with The Paris Review. “A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body, and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.”

Auster explores the relationship between the body and language in his poem, “White Nights,” with a characteristic hint of surrealism. RIP Paul Auster (1947-2024). Here is Paul Auster’s poem:

WHITE NIGHTS

No one here,

and the body says: whatever is said

is not to be said.  But no one

is a body as well, and what the body says

is heard by no one

but you.

Snowfall and night. The repetition

of a murder

among the trees. The pen

moves across the earth: it no longer knows

what will happen, and the hand that holds it

has disappeared.

Nevertheless, it writes.

It writes: in the beginning,

among the trees, a body came walking

from the night.  It writes:

the body’s whiteness

is the color of earth.  It is earth,

and the earth writes: everything

is the color of silence.

I am no longer here. I have never said

what you say

I have said. And yet, the body is a place

where nothing dies. And each night,

from the silence of the trees, you know

that my voice

comes walking toward you.

–Paul Auster, from Disappearances: Selected Poems, Overlook Press, 1988