Orrin Schwab's "Transcendence" follows one woman through a single night in New York, from a jazz club to a Chinatown dawn, and asks where transcendence is to be found. The poem's answer is quietly surprising. She does lift above the city, but only by travelling through its roughest corners, and the morning brings her back to earth.
The opening sets up an expectation and then undercuts it. Most nights, we hear, she "swirled / above Manhattan in a long / graceful dance," a line that makes her sound almost weightless, a figure who floats over the skyline. Then comes "but now she / sat in a village club." The verb "sat" is deliberately plain. Whether the swirling is literal dance or a picture of what music does to her, the poem moves from the airy to the grounded. The club scene still glows with sensuous language. The jazz arrives as "a sonorous melody / aromatizing the crowded tables," a strange, almost chemical verb that turns sound into scent, as if the music were something you could breathe. Her beauty is "overwhelming / the small space," and the contrast between that modest room and the huge city outside becomes the poem's central tension.
What happens next shows the poem's real interest. When the applause is over she walks to the docks, "playing to the Hudson / and to the ships passing up / the river." The enraptured audience is gone, and she plays anyway, to water and passing vessels that cannot clap. Her art doesn't depend on being watched. That detail is where transcendence begins to mean something more than performance.
The middle stanzas turn harsher. In Brooklyn "the graffiti / swallowed a schoolyard / and a section of the expressway," and the verb makes the city sound hungry. Yet she "moved like a gazelle / through the maze of projects / on a moonless night." The simile gives her an animal ease, and the repeated *m* sounds of "moved," "maze" and "moonless" carry her along in one smooth glide. A gazelle is also prey, so the grace carries a faint note of risk. The city is "frozen in sleep," and she is the only thing moving in it.
The sound of the language changes as she heads home. The subway comes "cranking / over the Manhattan Bridge," a harsh, mechanical word that replaces the soft, floating verbs of the opening. Dawn breaks over "cracked / sidewalks and tenements," the bodegas pull up their "steel sheds," and "the dull sound of the morning / drifted into the streets." "Dull" is the direct opposite of the earlier "sonorous." The night had music, and the day has only routine noise.
Structurally, the poem has no rhyme, no capital letters except for proper names, and almost no punctuation. The sentences run on like the walk itself, and the line breaks keep catching the reader mid-thought ("a long / graceful dance," "the cracked / sidewalks"), which gives the reading a hovering, drifting pace. The place names (Manhattan, the Hudson, Brooklyn, Chinatown) mark her route across the city and the hours from night to dawn. The woman's name is held back until the last stanza, so for most of the poem she is simply "she," a figure rather than a case history.
The ending is the most telling part. "Suzanne, living in the night / lit a cigarette that glowed in / the sunlight sighing, she fell asleep." The glow of the cigarette is a small, human version of the light she carried through the dark, and it fades against real daylight. The closing "sighing" admits tiredness, and the three short lines taper off as sleep arrives. Judging by this ending, transcendence in the poem is not permanent escape. It is something she achieves nightly, through music and movement, and then has to give up with each sunrise.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It refuses to treat the city as either a postcard or a threat. The gentle and the grim sit side by side, and the poem suggests that beauty means little unless it can survive the cracked sidewalks.