Name: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
ISBN: 9780586020838

Elizabeth Smart

Smart was a globe-trotting journalist until she picked up a collection of George Barker's poetry in a London bookshop and decided to fall in love with him. This is a poetic prose recreation of her side of the affair, during which she bore him four children and he remained with his wife.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Jesse Morley

The grief trumpets its triumph. It is raving. It craves violence for expression, but can find none. There is no end. The drowning never ceases. The water submerges and blends, but I am not dead. O I am not dead. I am under the sea. The entire sea is on top of me.

For me, good poetry has an element of universality; the act of reading/interpretation becomes itself an act of authorship (à la Barthes). But the emotional charge in By Grand Central Station seems tied to Smart’s personal experience in a way that limits its accessibility. It feels both shockingly public and elusively private.

I wanted the text to be either more or less coherently grounded in the reality of the events Smart was chronicling (events that require research in order to follow with any degree of clarity). At times the narrative context is handed directly to the reader, but at other times it’s completely obscured (often in its place Smart asks us to build impressions on a sparse framework of intertextual references), while the sense of it being crucial to the text’s interpretation remains frustratingly present.

There’s no denying the power of the cutting imagery that flashes throughout this work, but ultimately I just wasn’t moved by this in the way that I thought I might be.