The City
A New Yorker's New York
The Author
Chester Kane has lived and worked a majority of his life in Manhattan. In addition to the "The City," his first poetry collection, “Inside East Hampton," was published in 2014.
New York’s energy and vitality has had an indelible influence on his poetry. His short and intense style, similar to Haiku, reflects a crowded and noisy Manhattan where the power of a single phrase, or word, is required to be heard. Growing up in a chaotic household where he was expected to “listen, but not speak” every word mattered, compounding the necessity to be succinct.
Admittedly not a particularly good student, he would play hooky from school and immerse himself at the library, checking out a sizable list of books voraciously reading them, surprising a few librarians with his appetite for the written word. Early on, it was evident language was an integral part of a difficult childhood. For a time in high school he wrote “very” short stories, but life intervened.
By the mid-1950s, he was at the University of Wisconsin doing many things, but studying wasn’t one of them. It was there he first displayed an entrepreneurial side by selling sandwiches and snacks “after hours” when the dining rooms were closed ꟷfar from any indication a literary future was in the offing.
While he’s pretty certain he took some English courses that required him to write, his literary side lie dormant until he was back in New York City after being ask to leave Wisconsin for academic reasons. While taking courses at Long Island University to rebuild his G.P.A., he took a night job at the Associated Press in Rockefeller Center as a copy boy. The solace and emptiness of the ice rink in the middle of the
night spurred him to write one of his first poems. Decades later it was reconfigured into “Rockefeller Rink” as a part of his New York collection.
But these early poetic machinations were not explored very much. However, his poetic inclinations were the foundations for a more than 40-year career in advertising beginning in the 1950s and ending in 2000 when he retired. More than half of that time he ran his own boutique firm specializing in new product development. Direct and bold “taglines” were the lingua franca of the advertising world where he excelled.
He has raised a family of three children and is predeceased by his wife of 48 years, Margot. They both traveled extensively, exploring gastronomic experiences in Europe while building a second home in East Hampton. It could be said that next to language, food is his greatest passion, although tennis has been a decades-long preoccupation earning him national rankings along the way.
Upon retirement, he delved more into travel, food, tennis and life in East Hampton and New York. At this point, he began to pen short, descriptive poems that reflected his experiences and interactions with his surroundings in East Hampton and New York City. “It was like releasing stored up images,” he says, not only from the years right after retirement, but back to his youth in New York City with its iconic
places and people. “I’m visual person and I had kept so many vivid images in my memory.”
Encouraged by noted critic Julie Sheehan, he published his chapbook “Inside East Hampton” in 2014. As he wrote about East Hampton, poetic ideas about Manhattan percolated, leading to a separate collection of poems about New York and its people, places and things. Plans are underway to publish this series in the near future.