Clockwise from upper left: Amy Katz and Bill Murray; Anne Carson; Galway Kinnell, Tina Chang
Photos © 2010 David St.-Lascaux
Granite and Steel, Reflected
Poets House Poetry Walk
June 14, 2010
By David St.-Lascaux
Now
My canvas
Is unobstructed
As it stretches on cables of string
to the feet of the stars.
– Vladimir Mayakovsky, from “Brooklyn Bridge”
On a splendid, near solstitial evening, Poets House hosted its fifteenth annual Poetry Walk and benefit. Physically, the event involved a leisurely stroll from City Hall Park, near Poets House’s must-visit new facility, to the Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn; intellectually, the Walk has become an annual affirmation of poetry and affinity in New York. Thomas Lux spoke and Anne Carson read (Frank O’Hara’s “Steps” and an excerpt from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick) before the walk, with welcoming remarks provided by Poets House Executive Director Lee Briccetti. On the walk, at the Manhattan-side tower of the Bridge, Brooklyn’s Poet Laureate Tina Chang read Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Brooklyn Bridge” and Audre Lorde’s “Bridge Through My Window,” and Mr. Lux read Hart Crane’s “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge” and June Jordan’s “Toward a City That Sings,” which closes thus:
And while the we conspires
to make secret its two eyes
we search the other shore
for some crossing home.
In Brooklyn, the eminent Galway Kinnell sonorously completed the public reading with Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” as the sun set serenely behind him in Manhattan. The public event was followed by a patron’s dinner at an adjacent restaurant in honor of 2010 Elizabeth Kray Award winner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, at which patron Bill Murray spoke and the evening’s featured poets read their own work: Ms. Carson one of her “Short Talks,” Mr. Lux “Apology to my Neighbors for Beheading Their Duck,” Ms. Chang “Praise.” Mr. Kinnell again read Whitman: Section 52 from “Leaves of Grass.”
Describing the importance of Poets House and the Poetry Walk, Mr. Murray said, “Something happens when you read poetry, and for me it’s exciting to come every year and have it happen, and the great poets that read great poems, and you get to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, which is a great poem in itself.” As Whitman, channeled by Kinnell, intoned,
It is not you alone, nor I alone;
Not a few races, nor a few generations, nor a few centuries;
It is that each came, or comes, or shall come, from its due emission,
From the general centre of all, and forming a part of all:
Everything indicates – the smallest does, and the largest does;
A necessary film envelopes all, and envelopes the Soul for a proper time.
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