A Review of: A Year from Today, by Stacy Szymaszek

Format: 155 pp., paperback; Publisher: Nightboat Books; Color: Tangerine; Font: Century Schoolbook; Price: $17. Design: Margaret Tedesco. Months elapsed: twelve. Trains running late: dozens. Representative quote: “did anyone / else’s dentist have the sign / ignore your teeth and they’ll go away         the landmark /                 isn’t going anywhere           nor is the landlord”

Central Question: What does a practice of daily writing do for the poem of traversing urban space?

Take a poem for a walk in a city and you’ll put your foot right into history, maybe. The poem of traversing a city can plot what the philosopher Henri Lefebvre called the “production of space”: the organization of human life as the result of just so many migrations, needs, and struggles. Those struggles aren’t more important in a city versus any other organization of space—but they are more dramatized, by virtue of the sheer density that juxtaposes some people’s misery and others’ comfort. Alternately, the poem of walking through a city could produce something like a document of leisure, a postcard of somebody’s picturesque bohemia. (Benjamin is apt: “Landscape—that’s what the city becomes for the flâneur.”) Whether and how a project stitches a historical understanding into its flânerie has less to do with content per se than with genre, which presents an image of urban space rearranged on its own formal terms. That matters for Stacy Szymaszek’s A Year From Today (Nightboat Books, 2018), a journal poem composed in 2014-15, during Szymaszek’s tenure as director of the Poetry Project. Szymaszek’s poem courses downtown Brooklyn and the Lower East Side in conversational gusts, plotted through the intervals of a capacious daily writing.

“Daily writing” suggests both a method, writing through the temporal constraint of the journal, and a content, something like the metabolism of a life, maybe but not necessarily punctuated by excitement or crisis. Szymaszek’s preface asks: “What if I publically declared (did not exclude, nor confess) the particulars of my day-to-day struggles, formally, in writing?” “Declare” is Szymaszek’s signature verb of the journal form, which is to say that the method of observation, day by day, turns trivial content into a program for life-writing. A Year From Today touches mainly on the quotidian details in Szymaszek’s life, like in anybody’s, not recuperable to some preconceived order of poetic gravitas: she walks her dog, commutes and fumes at the crumbling infrastructure of the MTA, records her dreams, visits family, converses with her then-spouse, buys one watch and then another, gets blood work results by...