Nathaniel Popkin

by Carlin Romano

Unlike Whitman, Nathaniel Popkin, 32-year-old Philadelphia urban activist and planner, sings of others. But others who aren’t others. Others who are us. Noi. Nos. Uns. Chung toi.

All the we’s and us’s of this bewildering multicultural mesh of people in a “City of Firsts” that also insists on remaining the “City of Most Recents,” still recognizably the same colonial Kosmos that gave the world an idea, and a country, that made the rest of the planet come. In this just-published, exquisitely literary and unabashed prose poem to Philadelphia – the “urban landscape” that powers every electric, heartfelt passage of his accomplished first book – Popkin sounds his highly civilized yawp over the roofs of Cafe Cuong, Mid-City Tires, and Harry’s Occult; of Variety Veracruzana, Cafe Bah Le, and Triple A Poultry; of Corrupted Image Records, Wilk’s Fabric, and PhilaDeli; of Abyssinia, the New Third World Lounge, and Queen of Sheeba; of the 700 Club, Shirt Corner, and Oak Lane Diner; of Funcoland, Fadbulous, and Fantastic Finishes Hair Salon; even of Cliveden and Upsala, the Philadelphia of the standard guide books.

Tonight, at Robin’s Bookstore, he’ll read from Song, in public, for the first time. Most authors – even the big ones (they’ll confide if you press them) – wonder whether anyone will show up for a reading. Popkin faces a different mystery. Will everyone show up? Is that intense, lanky guy watching from the back rapper “Royal P.,” a.k.a. Paul Tucker, whose wrenching, gritty up-from-52d-Street story Popkin tells with fierce emotional attentiveness, yet wholly professional clarity? And the serious-looking fellow in the front row – maybe that’s Siddiq Hadi, hardworking insurance agent, whose dream of “a new ethnic group in America, the Sudanese Americans,” is no dream, but all about him now in the hundreds of countrymen living near Baltimore Avenue and 45th Street.

With luck, other chairs will be filled by Cynthia Bayete, whose history of family devotion to Germantown becomes in Popkin’s hands almost a parable of the American dream of movin’ on up, but not away, leaving Bayete bound to Germantown “by memories, by cultural history, by physical beauty.” And Sara Ortiz, whose more than 45 years in Philadelphia, since she was yanked as a child from her native Puerto Rico to Kensington, pay dividends every day in the successes of the Roberto Clemente School for which she’s fought for decades. And David Young, neighborhood historian extraordinaire, who won’t let petty insults like mugging and burglary interrupt his love affair with Blue Bell Hill.

Can you remember the last Philadelphia reading at which the book itself might boisterously show up – come gloriously alive before your eyes? Of course, Popkin’s exclamatory message is just that. Our city is fantastically, rambunctiously alive: a living, breathing and heaving organism that happens around us every instant we take the time to notice. And in Song of the City, Popkin pulls off what the corporate types he disdains (read his take on McDonald’s targeting of Market Street and 43d Street) might call synergy.

From the left corner flows Popkin’s cascading, urban-rehabber poetry, lifted by a boundless, Bucks-County-native, Penn-grad-in-the-inner-city idealism that considers every mural, every up-by-the-bootstraps neighborhood garden, a triumph akin to D-Day. From the right corner arrive findings of the roaming ingenue reporter without official license, determined to tell fresh stories, lush stories, maybe of the person sitting next to you on the Broad Street bus, or cutting you off on I-676. The literary achievement of Song comes in the graceful, totally natural way that Popkin, whose experience here includes years of work with West Philadelphia’s Center for Community Partnerships, blends his apostrophes about city life in general with Philly life in particular.

Yes, as Popkin declares early on, a city of human beings “cannot be reduced to the booster’s cry, to bulldozing forward.” It is “a collection of swarming cells that change, adapt, grow, shrink.” Those who care about cities everywhere – who read Jane Jacobs or Joseph Rykwert before shutting off the night-light – will respond to Popkin’s policy passion, his urban arabesques. But these are our 135 square miles, and the wino singing Sinatra in the night, the girls in tight shorts leaning over a takeout window quickly burn away abstractions of philosophy and city planning. Are there stories about extraordinary ordinary people in this pothole paradise that you wish didn’t call for a wrap after 900 words? That didn’t leave the impassioned voice of the writer on the cutting-room floor? Didn’t curl to a preordained end? Welcome to Song of the City.

If any editor intervened to control the bracing billows of Popkin’s prose, it doesn’t show. And thankfully not. Song of the City celebrates the visceral, can’t-wait-a-second juice that fuels our asphalt home, the undead dead who built everything around us, and the millions of fellow Philadelphians who are, in fact, the kaleidoscopic family with whom we’re spending our one and only life. It celebrates ourselves.

Copyright © 2002 The Philadelphia Inquirer