
Every Time You Close Your Eyes
by Bel Schenk
Wakefield Press, 2014
Bel Schenk’s third poetry collection, Every Time You Close Your Eyes, is sparsely written, yet deeply self-aware. Taking the form of a verse narrative, the book is a series of poems exploring events commonly referred to as the ‘New York City blackouts of 1977 and 2003’, similar in circumstance, yet as Schenk demonstrates, vastly different due to the temporal space between them.
Schenk begins by introducing a power-less 1977 New York, a city already powerless against financial crisis, increase in crime, and at the beginning of a heatwave. The darkness of the blackout further distorts social boundaries already under question and rioting and looting is soon to breakout:
New York City
Summer, 1977
The lights go out just before dark.
There is a blackout in the city
and people blame lightning.
There are many different ways to tell this story.
This is one of them. (2)
The attention Schenk brings towards the act of fictional representation allows her poetry to allude to the similarities between the construction of history and myth. Schenk further highlights such connections between the historical and fictional by evoking a late twentieth-century milieu through the representation of two individuals greatly influencing American society at the time: actor Christopher Reeve and criminal David Berkowitz. Schenk’s references to Reeve and Berkowitz not only signify contemporary socio-political events of New York City in 1977, but gesture towards the type of anxieties a post-9/11 New York City in 2003 will experience.
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