The Poet Laureate of 100th Street

Like any author in the Amazon age, Esther Lazarson keeps a close tally of how her first book, a collection of poetry, is selling.

“I sold three books since between November and July,” she says, of “Everyday Poems for Everyday People,” which she self-published through Rosedog Books last fall.

The book, all 276 pages of it, is a testimony to Lazarson’s late-stage passion for poetry, a genre she first encountered as a child in Newcastle, England (her mother, a native of Lithuania, loved Pushkin), but one that has flowered as she has reached her 80s, and now 90s, on the Upper West Side.

Lazarson, a sparking 91, writes from her 16th-floor apartment at 100th Street and Central Park West. Her poems, some of which she proudly recited over tea and cake on a weekday afternoon, are almost uniformly wonderful: poignant, funny, intimate, sharp.

“I live alone,” Lazarson says, glancing around a small apartment adorned with black-and-white photos of loved ones, all now gone. “Poetry to me is a way of telling you to pay attention, to listen to what I think about things. “

Here she is in “On Poetry,” the first poem in the book.

I want to tell you what happened,

To me – or to the World.

I want to tell you how I feel

About what happened,

And I want you to listen.

Are you there:

Are you listening:

The paper always listens,

So I gather

My certainties and my wonderings

And make a bouquet of words

As beautiful as I can

And write a poem.

My thoughts and fun and work

Won’t be thrown away,

For this is my book.

Something of me

Will be left over

After I die,

And thus

I may be remembered.

Lazarson’s book makes art out of a biography that could otherwise seem ordinary. She grew up poor in Newcastle, the daughter of a man who peddled clothes to coal miners, and his stay-at-home wife. They evacuated to the Lake District during World War II. Though she went to teacher’s college, and ended up teaching school in London, a career was never what she was looking for.

“I just wanted to be married and to be loved,” Lazarson said. “That’s all I wanted my whole life. It didn’t work out, but that’s all I wanted.”

In fact, she was married twice, first to the family doctor (whom she married at 35, and who was nearly twice her age). “I couldn’t stand him, to tell you the truth,” she says. Then, to a farmer in Israel. That lasted nine months.

She moved to Manhattan with her sister Rose in 1951, worked a couple of dozen different jobs, and now considers herself a New Yorker at heart.

Her book is largely about life in the city – riding the bus, admiring Central Park, going to the symphony. In “My Studio,” she describes the view out of a previous apartment, which was just off of Riverside Drive:

My home is a room

With four windows

I am rich in windows,

A tiny one

In the bathroom,

Not denied me

By modern architecture.

A tall narrow window

By a corner

Is my window on the world.

If you visit

If you push a pram

If you throw sticks to your dog

I can watch you.

White net

Over white cotton

Covers the west side window

The huge wall

Brick, glass and my too-near-neighbor

Are invisible

I am by myself!

Facing me

As I sleep My precious window

Tall and wide

The lower pane is covered

With a white curtain

Today

I open my eyes

To my morning masterpiece

Through the top pane

I see

Wooly white islands wander

Across an azure sky,

And at night

Perhaps there’ll be

A framed picture of the moon

Floating on black velvet.

My home is a room

With many windows

I am rich

Today, Lazarson lives the life of someone a fraction her age. She attends poetry classes, has taken up painting and sculpture, is addicted to Sodoku, and hits the gym, once a week for weight training, and again for an exercise class.

She has no family nearby and no outside help, except for a housecleaner who comes every other week.

Though she writes often in her poetry about the pains of growing old, Lazarson says she is happier today than she has been in a long time, maybe ever. She’s no longer obsessed with what she doesn’t have. “It’s not difficult when you’re old to be entertained,” she says. “It’s something I’m grateful for.”

That said, a decent number of her poems, like “At the Senior Center,” record her fantasies for one last, big fling.

“Would you like to dance?” he said to me,

As we heard

The forceful music

From the other room.

“I would,” I said.

And we wafted from

The Thanksgiving table,

Where the turkey and potatoes were good

And the pumpkin pie,

Full of ginger and unnameable mush

Was uneatable,

Into the ballroom

To dance to ‘Que Sera, Sera.’

He, younger

Me, eighty eight

Being held,

Swaying to the lilt of the words

I asked myself

“How much Que Sera, Sera can there be

Left for me?”

But as I dance in my clumpy shoes,

Twirled by an expert

The clock struck

NOW!

Lazarson reads to me her latest poem, about a friend named Miwa who asked to leave a big, purple suitcase in Lazarson’s apartment while she went away on a trip. Time went by and Miwa never returned to retrieve the suitcase. Lazarson, assuming Miwa had died, opened the suitcase, to see what her friend had left behind.

In her poem, Lazarson transforms the incident from a minor domestic irritation to a meditation on loss.

She asks me what I think.

I tell her it’s perfect, though I also say I would change the title to “The Purple Suitcase,” which I think is more evocative.

“OK, I will,” she says, making the change with her pen (she doesn’t own a computer). “That’s the amazing thing about writing. While nobody else really cares to hear my wisdom, this piece of paper does. It thinks I’m very clever.”