Ode to Hoboken: I
HOBOKEN, SEPTEMBER 6, 2025. On a late-summer afternoon I set out from my apartment with pen and notebook in search of insights into Ho-Ho-Hoboken. By which I mean insights into, like, you know, existence, reality, whatever. Because as William Carlos Williams says in Paterson, Anywhere is everywhere.
Can I do for Hoboken what Williams does for the gritty city of Paterson? Nah, too high a bar by far. Paterson is the magnum opus of Williams, the great American poet, who toiled over his 284-page anti-epic through the 1940s and 50s.
Does that mean Williams oppresses me with his greatness? As Eliot oppressed Williams? Hell no, I can’t compete with these dudes, I’m immune to anxiety of influence. Reading Paterson makes me feel inspiration, not dread.
I mean, I feel dread, but only because I’m old, death looms, and my country is seized by madness. Paterson, if anything, soothes me, reminds me of the weirdness, the miraculous improbability of things. Poetry helps me cope, it puts tyranny and mortality in their place.
Paterson is often called an “epic” poem. I call it “anti-epic” because… Oh, geez, do I have to spell it out? Williams is glorifying a town in “the Garden State,” home to such un-garden-y emblems of brute utilitarianism as the Pulaski Skyway, which spans the Passaic River, which oozes through Paterson.
Pulaski Skyway under construction in the 1920s. This charming landscape is just west of Hoboken.
You don’t have to dig deep to find irony in Joisey (Joysey?). Nuggets of irony lie on the ground, you can scoop them up with a shovel. Paterson, I hear, is especially Joisey-ish.
FYI: Williams didn’t live in Paterson when he wrote Paterson. He lived in nearby Rutherford. But he worked in a hospital in Paterson, delivered babies there. He knew Paterson intimately, its people and things, its history.
I don’t know Hoboken intimately, and my roots in Hoboken are shallow. Do I even have roots? Doubtful. I’ve always felt rootless, especially here in Hoboken, where I live alone. I’m a floater, a drifter. I’m nonetheless entitled to pay attention to Hoboken and record what I see.
By “entitled,” I mean no one cares enough to object. I can write my Ode to Ho-Ho-Hoboken in rhyming couplets, free verse, Morse code, whatever. And I can illustrate my writing with my photos or drawings, again, because no one gives a shit. I got gobs of negative liberty.
Okay, enough dilly dallying, time to observe Hoboken. I’m outside my apartment building, on the waterfront. I gaze upon the Hudson, crisscrossed by boats, and at Manhattan’s skyscrapers, manifestations of my species’ tumescent ambitions. There’s the Freedom Tower, risen from the ashes of 9/11.
Question: Do things seen from Hoboken count as Hoboken things? Hmm, tough one. This dilemma feels deep, linked to the whole subjectivity-versus-objectivity mess and hence the mind-body problem. If I ponder this conundrum, will I be rewarded with an epiphany? Meaning something worth jotting down?
Umm, maybe, but I don’t want to do that now, brood over an abstract puzzle. I want to look at real, tangible stuff in Hoboken. Like William says, No ideas but in things, or my corollary: No ideas but in people. I sit on a bench facing the Pier A lawn, populated by sunbathers sprawling on towels and chairs. People and things.
What about geese? They’re neither things nor people. Do they count? Hoboken swarms with Canadian geese. They shit everywhere. They’re all over the Pier A lawn, nibbling grass and turning it into turds.
Geese encircle a bikini-clad woman reclining on a chair, eyes clothed. She could be a goddess, the geese her devotees. Like all worshipers, the geese seem vaguely menacing, they could turn on their idol at any moment.
Remember when that goose attacked that girl right here on Pier A? She was sitting peacefully with her pals when a goose ran at her, beak agape, and pecked her hair. The girl screamed and screamed.
Is it appropriate to think of geese as “bad”? No, because that suggests geese are morally culpable, which is silly. Geese don’t possess free will, like we do. Still, they can be annoying.
Vicki texts, asks what I’m doing. I say I’m doing research for my Ode to Hoboken. She wishes me good luck finding “meaning in Hoboken.” This is a little joke between us, her denigration of Hoboken as uncool, maybe even less cool than Jersey City, where she lives. She lives on the Heights, she literally looks down on Hoboken.
Vicki, technically, does not belong to Hoboken. But I text her, “You are part of Hoboken my Jersey girl.” She texts me a round yellow face spewing a torrent of green goo. Yes, a barf emoji from the Jersey girl! Let that go into my Ode to Hoboken!
I have never used an emoji. Not once. It was a point of pride at first, just as keeping my old flip phone was a point of pride. Who needs those fancy “smart” phones? I felt superior when I passed human drones staring at phones. Being the “guy who doesn’t have a smart phone” was part of my identity.
Eventually I decided that shunning smart phones isn’t cool and non-conformist, it’s stupid. Smart phones offer conveniences, the camera, map app, internet searches and so on. I bought an iPhone in 2020, just as the pandemic broke.
My refusal to use emojis is beginning to feel like my refusal to buy a smart phone: compulsive, not principled. Emojis can be convenient, they save time, so I can do… important things. Maybe I’m too attached to my self-image as “the guy who refuses to use emojis.”
Sometimes I fear my personality, this thing I call my “self,” is just a cluster of mindless habits: I do this, don’t do that, because I did this, haven’t done that. So much for positive or negative liberty.
But I possess free will! I choose to be out here today wandering among my fellow humans, taking notes. Gathering insights for my own anti-epic prose-poem. I’m not doing this out of habit, or compulsion, but because I want to do it.
Wait, haven’t I been doing this all my life? Standing apart from things? Watching rather than living? Jotting down notes? Did I really choose this life? I nibble experiences and turn them into words.
Oh for god’s sake, let it go, forget yourself, look around, marvels abound.
I get up from the bench and wander down the path bordering the Pier A lawn. A goose stands by the fountain at the base of Pier A, basking in the spray, now and then dipping her beak to sip from the puddle at her feet. I’m guessing the goose is a girl.
I take a photo of her with my iPhone, although I doubt a photo can capture her joy. If a goose can feel joy, why oh why can’t I?
Maybe I’ll illustrate this Ode to Ho-Ho-Hoboken with a barf emoji. Yeah, that would be funny.
Postscript: My pal David Rothenberg, a philosopher who teaches at New Jersey Institute of Technology, urges me to check out Edward Abbey’s essay “Manhattan Twilight Hoboken Night.” Abbey, who started writing Desert Solitaire while living in Hoboken in the early 1960s, says Hoboken “is much too sweet, pure, romantic” to be lumped together with other Jersey towns. David contemplated moving to Hoboken when he started teaching at NJIT in 1992 but changed his mind after reading Yuppies Invade my House at Dinnertime, a 1987 report on Hoboken’s gentrification. That book says many people saw Hoboken as “a punchline, a place synonymous with Nowheresville." That view is still pretty common, at least among my snobby Manhattan friends.
Further Reading:
What’s Poetry’s Point? A Riff on “Paterson”
How Ho-Ho-Hoboken Became My Home
Drawing Pretty Pictures in Troubled Times
For more of this sort of thing, see also my work of auto-fiction Pay Attention.