"I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island"

To wish to be the poet laureate of Coney Island is to embrace the carnival as canon, the boardwalk as academy, and the hot-dog stand as a lectern. Wilder’s imagination often found eternity pressing against the ordinary; here, the desire elevates the gaudy, democratic spectacle of American leisure into a vessel worthy of lyric witness. Poet laureate is an august title, freighted with courtly gravitas. Coney Island is its antic twin: neon and salt air, barkers and sideshows, grease and laughter, a republic of delights and disappointments. The pairing rejects the old hierarchies of high and low. It announces faith that truth can arrive wearing sequins and that wisdom might be overheard between the roller coaster’s scream and the ocean’s hush.

Such a wish is also a critique of official culture. Why bind poetry to parliaments when the real parliament is the crowd shuffling past the Wonder Wheel? A poet of Coney Island would testify to the transient and the tawdry, to working-class holidays, teenage bravado, immigrant families, lovers with pockets of sand. The laureateship becomes a vow to honor the overlooked, those who buy tickets to forget, and those who take tickets to survive. It’s Whitman’s yawp, retuned for cotton candy and nickel rides.

Coney Island is theater: entrance gates as proscenium, midway as chorus, dark rides as descent and return. A poet stationed there would speak to ephemerality, the peeling paint and twilight glow, the way joy is both real and rented. The place is an archive of American dreams: mechanical utopias, electric futures, spectacles that promise transcendence for a quarter. To preside over such a domain is to translate kitsch into myth, to find the sacred in the profane and the cosmic in the carousel’s loop. Wilder’s aspiration suggests that the nation’s deepest narratives are not confined to marble halls but whirl, loud and luminous, where the ocean meets the lights.