Ansel Elkins, a thirty-two-year-old poet, lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. “I need silence and stillness when I’m writing,” she says. “If my husband is home, even if he’s just puttering around without talking, I sometimes get bitchy.” She lives from grant to grant. Recently, she won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She also accepts writers’ residencies. At Hedgebrook, an hour north of Seattle, “they put you up in your own cabin with a wood-burning stove, and they cook you all these organic meals. It’s lonely, but productive.”
In May, Elkins applied for a different kind of residency, one organized by the Paris Review and the Standard East Village, a sleek hotel_._ The gig offered free lodging “to a writer who has a book under contract and needs three weeks of solitude in downtown New York City.” A few weeks later, Elkins was at a friend’s house, “picking ticks off the dog and throwing them in the fire, and I stopped to check my e-mail, and I won!” Her reward: for most of July, she would inhabit a twelve-foot-by-fourteen-foot bedroom on the tenth floor of the hotel, within blocks of Cooper Union, a homeless shelter, and several massage parlors and sake bars. Breakfast and coffee would be complimentary; lunch, dinner, and alcohol would not.
On a recent Wednesday, Elkins awoke from an afternoon nap and took an elevator down to the Standard’s well-appointed lobby, which has a kiosk stocked with aspirin, rolling papers, and condoms. A concierge wearing a paisley bow tie said, “Hello again.” Elkins is short—“between Lolita and Lil’ Kim” is how she describes her height—and she has tight curls, dyed auburn and fashioned into what she calls a “frohawk.” She apologized for her “hangover face”; a poet friend had taken her out drinking in SoHo the previous night. She wore a sleeveless linen top, white trousers, and cat’s-eye glasses. “I was thrilled to win this,” she said. “But my first thought was ‘Can I afford it?’ ” Packing for the trip, she set aside a batch of envelopes and slipped a twenty-dollar bill into each one. “I open one every day,” she said. “When I’ve used up the cash, I go back to the hotel.”
In the Standard’s restaurant, she chose an outdoor table, facing the Bowery, and ordered a coffee (free). An oil truck trundled north; jackhammers roared. “I’m not a morning person, but I’ve been getting up at seven,” she said. (Construction noise next door.) “So I come down here with a book until I feel awake, and I watch the parade of fine-looking men in suits. You don’t get that in Greensboro.” She gestured at the patrons wearing expensive sunglasses and canvas sneakers. It was her first extended stay in Manhattan, and the neighborhood was not quite what she had expected. “Isn’t the East Village supposed to be this bohemian place?” she said. “I’ve gotten a bit of a preppy vibe.”
Elkins spent her days indoors, napping and listening to Hank Williams and revising her poems with colored pens. She had lost money on the trip, but not much. Most nights, she went out for three-dollar tacos on Second Avenue and walked back slowly, gazing up at the gargoyles on East Sixth Street. “This late-night walking is the one thing about the city that’s most saturated my work,” she said, mentioning a new poem, an ode to Mae West, that she began writing here. (“Singing in two languages— / English and body; / She jazzes that dazzling verse.”)
Once, when she returned to the hotel at 9 P.M., an elevator attendant asked whether she was on her way to a private party in the penthouse; she explained that she was going upstairs to work. She spent one Sunday with a notebook at the Museum of Natural History, gathering material for future poems. “I spent so long on the dead birds that I didn’t even make it to the whale,” she said.
Her room, No. 1006, is just wide enough for a queen-size bed. She rearranged the objects on her small desk—a fountain pen, an inkwell, the collected letters of Hart Crane, two hydrangeas—to make room for her MacBook. Dusk was falling, and the lights of the Empire State Building, to the north, were flickering on. “Want a drink?” she said. She opened the mini-fridge: a fifth of vodka, a six-pack of ginger ale, plastic water bottles refilled from the bathroom sink. “This hotel is great, but I wish they had ice machines, like you get at a Howard Johnson,” she said. “The only way to get ice here is to call room service. And then you have to tip.” ♦
