The Miraculous
The Miraculous: New York
26. (The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum)
By Raphael RubinsteinOn a trip to New York in the late 1960s, a 20-year-old Chilean woman who is equally drawn to art and to poetry visits the Museum of Modern Art.
The Miraculous: New York
27. (Ridge Street, Attorney Street, South Bronx)
By Raphael RubinsteinA young graffiti artist creates an elaborate series of tags on the wall of a handball court on the Lower East Side. His mentor, a poet-playwright who learned the craft of writing while serving a sentence for armed robbery in Sing Sing, admires the graffiti so much that he urges a painter friend to immortalize it on a canvas.
The Miraculous: New York
28. (A series of telephone booths in Midtown Manhattan, several addresses in the East Village and an unidentified location in the Bronx)
By Raphael RubinsteinA poet in his late 20s begins to feel too restrained by his medium. Looking at a sheet of paper on his writing desk, he sees it as a plan-view of a house and realizes that he wants to escape the page, escape the house, go out into the street and leave the paper and poetry behind.
The Miraculous: New York
29. (Saint Marks Place)
By Raphael RubinsteinHaving achieved by his early 30s far more success than he could have reasonably hoped for when he first arrived in New York as a Midwest college dropout—his byline appears regularly in the Times and the Village Voice and he has published several well-received poetry collections—a poet-art critic decides that it’s time to choose: poetry or art criticism.
The Miraculous: New York
30. (Harlem, Flushing Meadows)
By Raphael RubinsteinIn 1928, a writer living at 119 West 131St Street publishes an essay that includes the sentence, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.”
