On Doty's "Broadway"

Mark Doty's "Broadway" is from the beginning making way for the nested poetry of the character Ezekiel, to imbue the incidents and accidents surrounding it with significance. The construction of the voice is especially important to this end, but figurative language and the poem's lineation also play a subtle supporting role.

The first five stanzas are basically a setup - of the scene, the mood, and the voice. The scene is an everyday one, quickly establishing a familiar setting: the relatively famous Grand Central station evokes very specific experiences from the memories of readers who are acquainted with New York, and at least a general sense of the city setting for those who are not. The effect is bolstered, of course, by the title itself, and the mention of Broadway in the second stanza, as well as the mention of more or less specific features of the city - "jeweler's windows" in the third stanza, "doorways of banks" in the fifth, "103rd" in the sixth, and so on.

From the very first lines - "Under Grand Central's tattered vault / - maybe half a dozen electric stars still lit" - a sense of dilapidation is established. The lonely saxophone and the "sheer black scrim / [billowing] over some minor constellation / under repair" in the first and second stanzas lend to this broken-down impression. An accompanying gritty feeling is added by the contrast of the "red wings / in a storefront tableau, lustrous," of the "live macaws / preening" with the makeshift tables of secondhand magazines and shoes the hawkers eye while they shelter in the doorways of banks.