NYC NOW - April 28, 2023: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

Record high prices in New York City have shut out many renters from being able to afford apartments in the five boroughs. A new report from StreetEasy found that only about one in three rental listings were affordable for households earning median incomes. And finally, National Poetry Month is coming to an end. WNYC’s Michael Hill talks with poet and music critic, A.B. Spellman about his work and his advice for poets honing their craft.

Good evening and welcome to NYC now. I'm Jenae Pierre for WNYC. In New York City, affordability for renters is getting worse and worse as rents soar across the Big Apple. A new report out this week from the real estate search company, Street Easy, finds that only one in three market rate rentals are affordable for New Yorkers earning median incomes. Even fewer apartments are affordable for black and Hispanic New Yorkers, who on average earn less than white, households. Street EZ economist Kenny Lee authored the report. Affordability has declined for all people in the city because of fast increases in rent. However, the effect of those increases have been felt disproportionately by race and ethnicity.

The analysis comes as Governor Kathy Hokel's plan to spur housing development fell apart in budget discussions this month. However, state legislators will continue discussions on housing policy in Albany in the coming weeks. Stay close. There's more after the break. April is National Poetry Month, and as it comes to a close, we hear from A.B. Spellman, a poet, music critic, and civil servant. He was a pioneering voice in the Black Arts movement during the 60s and 70s. My colleague Michael Hill talked with Spellman about his work and his advice for poets honing their craft. You have a new anthology of poems coming out next year called Between the Night and its Music, New and Sucing. elected poems. You penned some of these works more than 60 years ago from your days living in the

village. Tell us, what was it like to be a young artist in New York at that time? It was, I think, as close as America ever got to having something like Paris at the turn of the last century, when there was so many artists, painters and poets and musicians, all commingling together in the left bank and making art together. I think a pickup game. in Tompkins Square Park, you know, where there were poets and playwrights and painters and sculptors and composers, all just hooping out together. I mean, it was that kind of community. And it was just alive. It kept you, it kept you working. It kept you stimulated. So many people see the artist and the critic is diametrically opposed. The artist creates in their medium of choice, and then the critic dissects. As someone known and respected for doing both, how does the skill you have developed as a critic sharpened your practice when it comes to writing poetry?

I think it was more the other way around. I think that it's most important that anyone who presumes to be a critic have experienced making art. I think that if you don't know what goes into creating a work, then from nothing, from putting something on a page that is blank and building that into something that has a chance to live, If you haven't done that, then I think it's very hard to make any kind of judgments and art. Another thing is that, again, going back to Paris at the 10th of the century, you had poets who were writing about artists, about painters, because the established critics didn't know that these new artists were as great as they were. So you had Baudelaire writing about Manet or a Pollaner writing about Picasso. And the artists were teaching the poets how to write about them. And that's the way it was with a lot of us in Lower Manhattan at the time

when the musicians were teaching us how to write about them because we hung out with them. We knew them. They were our friends. We've spent a lot of this month talking to independent, young, and up-and-coming poets. As a writer with a long and storied career, what's your advice for our listeners trying to hone their craft? Revised, revise and then revise again.

The thing is, poems are, to me, poems are made. They're not spewed. And if you're not meticulous about your craft, you will never reach your full potential. A lot of people, when they start writing, don't think that revision is important. They clean it up once and then they think they've made a piece. But I always find that there's a better word, a better phrase, that there are things that aren't working. and what felt good to me when I drafted them first. And you have to be ruthless about editing your own work

because you have to make it as clean and as pure as you possibly can make it. We like to end every poetry amount of conversation with the reading. Do you have a work you'd like to read for us? Happily. It's called After Vallejo, after the Afro-Peruvian poet, Cesar Vallejo, who died, I think, about 1929 around there. Here it goes.

After Vallejo, I will die in Havana and a hurricane. It will be morning. I'll be facing southwest, away from the Gulf, away from the storm, away from home, looking toward the virid hills of Matanzas, where the orisha rise, lifted by congeros and masks of iron, bongoceros in masks of water, timbaleros and masks of fire, by all the clave that binds the rhythms of this world. I'll be writing when I go,

revising another hopeful survey of my life. I will die of nothing that I did, but of all that I did not do. I promised myself a better service. than I could make, and I will not forgive. You will be there complaining that I never saved you, that I left you where you live, stranded in your own dream. When you come for me, come singing, no dirge,

but scat bat eulogy in bebop code. Sing that I died among gods, but lived with you. with no God and did not suffer for it. Find one true poem that I made and sing it to my shade as it fades into the wind. Sing it presto. And for four time

in the universal ghetto key of B-flat, I will die in Havana in rhythm. Dumbayo, Montuño, Gua-Guang-Co, dense strata of rhythm, pulsing me away. And the mother of waters will say to the saint of crossroads, well, damn, he danced his way out after all. That's poet and music critic A.B. Spellman talking with my colleague Michael Hill. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WNYC. And welcome to our new listeners. If you like what we're doing, subscribe, leave a review, and share widely.

Quick shout out to our production team. It includes Sean Boutich, Ave Carillo, Audrey Cooper, Leora Noam Kravitz, Jared Marcel, and Wayne Schoemeister, with help from the entire WNYC Newsroom. Our show art was designed by the people at Buck, and our music was composed by Alexis Quadrado. I'm Jenae Pierre.

We'll be back on Monday.