DAVID CAPPS | WHERE’S NEW HAVEN?

October 6, 2024

Where’s New Haven?

On the walk from Gray Matter to The Graduate, and past the couple on the steps singing a light-hearted jingle about Adderall, we overhear an old man asking, “Where’s New Haven?” – “This is New Haven,” the lady replies. And it strikes me, given his proximity to the bus station, as much more likely that he had fallen asleep on the bus and just gotten off at this stop than to think that he is both mad and cogently asking a question. Much later, as I toss and turn in bed, thinking about what I can deduce from the facts that writers have so much knowledge at their fingertips and that AI will soon be able to reproduce any given style and wondering whether our situation differs essentially from the postmodernist plight of the exhaustion of literature—it occurs to me that maybe he meant New Haven itself, where had the New Haven gone that he remembered from his youth?

David Capps is a philosophy professor and writer living in New Haven, CT. He is the author of six chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), On the Great Duration of Life (Schism Neuronics, 2023), Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming), and Fever in Bodrum (Bottlecap Press, forthcoming). His latest lyric essay is featured in Midnight Chem.