Mr. J. arrived at Pier 1 for Thursday’s Whitman event before I did, and saw some of the earlier acts. Clearly underwhelmed, he went to video some skilled piano players further north on the pier.
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Whitman Celebrated in Speech and Song, but North Heights Residents Suffer
Holly Anderson recites Walt Whitman’s “A Locomotive in Winter”, accompanied by Jonathan Kane’s February, a band whose influences seem to include Steve Reich, Hüsker Dü, and Mississippi John Hurt, at last night’s Whitman festival on Pier 1, Brooklyn Bridge Park, sponsored by the Brooklyn Heights Association in collaboration with ISSUE Project Room.
This very 21st century celebration of Brooklyn’s great 19th century poet drew a large crowd to Pier 1′s harbor lawn to hear readers and musical groups, some of the latter inspiring, like February, others less so. (more…)
WSJ Plugs BHA’s Pier 1 Whitman Blast
Reminder: the Brooklyn Heights Association’s celebtation of Walt Whitman, produced in collaboration with Issue Project Room, will be this Thursday evening, from 5:00 to midnight, on the harbor lawn of Pier 1, Brooklyn Bridge Park. According to today’s Wall Street Journal:
So while a mobile, marathon reading of “Leaves of Grass” begins at 5 p.m. and occurs all over the park, Animal Collective sidekicks Prince Rama will mix Sanskrit chants and synthesizers, and Shannon Fields, from the band Stars Like Fleas, will lead a seven-piece ensemble in songs inspired by 19th-century shaped-note singing—that most democratic of American musical forms. Other performers, from avant-garde jazz bassist Henry Grimes to funk and folk acts, will lend music to Whitman’s words.
Also participating are the Wingdale Community Singers, a group that includes novelist Rick Moody, author of, among others, Garden State, The Ice Storm, Purple America, and The Diviners.
For more information, see the BHA website.
Brooklyn Heights Poet Daniela Gioseffi Outs Emily Dickinson as “Wild” Heterosexual
Poet, novelist, literary critic, and Montague Street resident Daniela Gioseffi has had an eventful career. The most recent anthology of her works, Blood Autumn, won the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. She started the Brooklyn Bridge Poetry Walk which, in this year’s incarnation, included actor and poetry enthusiast Bill Murray. She is also poet-in-residence for Brooklyn’s public schools.
Now, Ms. Gioseffi has delved into the writings and archives of perhaps America’s best-known woman poet, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). Though dissed, along with fellow New Englander Robert Frost, by Simon and Garfunkel in The Dangling Conversation, Dickinson’s reputation as a poet whose verse anticipated modern poetics and presented profound observations in terse style has grown in recent times. (Publisher’s Note: See Ms. Gioseffi’s comment below about the photo on the left.)
I Do Not Doubt I Am Limitless: Walt Whitman’s Brooklyn
The BHA is getting psychedelic with its July 1st Walt Whitman event.
The BHA is collaborating with ISSUE Project Room for a special outdoor performance, “I Do Not Doubt I Am Limitless: Walt Whitman’s Brooklyn.” This free event will channel the psychedelic spirit of poet, journalist, humanist and Brooklynite Walt Whitman, set against the stunning waterfront backdrop on the Pier 1 Harbor View Lawn of the new Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Musicians and bands — including the Wingdale Community Singers, Christy and Emily, Prince Rama, and others — will perform original work along with new pieces set to a marathon reading of “Leaves of Grass,” recited by some of the nation’s most interesting poets.
For more information, check out the BHA site here.
Heights Couple Host Whitman Birthday Celebration Wednesday Evening
David Fuller and Judith Jarosz, Montague Street residents and Executive Director and Producing Artistic Director, respectively, of Theater Ten Ten, are curating hosting The Walt Whitman Project, their seventh annual celebration of the anniversary of the publication of the third edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, this Wednesday evening at 7:00 (doors open at 6:30), at the Theater’s space in the undercroft of the First Christian Church, entrance at 1010 Park Avenue, between 84th and 85th Streets (yes, to celebrate this great Brooklyn poet, you must schlep to the Upper East Side). According to Fuller and Jarosz, “It will be a joyous evening of poetry, prose, and music. Birthday cake and refreshments return to this year’s event.” Participants include actors, musicians, poets, a Whitman historian, Greg Trupiano and Lon Black of The Whitman Project, and film producer and BHB contributor Heather Quinlan.
Admission is by donation, and no one will be turned away. For reservations and information, call 212-288-3246 ext. 300 (24 hrs).
Walt Whitman: the First Beatnik?
It’s not a great stretch to see stylistic, and perhaps even thematic, similarities between, say, Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”. The relationship between the poetry of the nineteenth century Bard of Brooklyn (see some local folks reciting Whitman’s verse here) and that of the Beats a century later is the topic of an all-day conference tomorrow (Saturday, March 27) at St. Francis College, Remsen Street between Court and Clinton. (more…)
Solstice
A breeze batters branches;
the honey locust whispers,
¡Esperanza, esperanza!
On the harbor, tugs flit
on fathomless errands,
and beyond, the dentate skyline
no longer bears the memory
of Yamasaki’s towers, their image now
recumbent in brass at my feet.
A squirrel, brazen, fixes me
with blank eyes while lithe young women,
buttocks bobbing in tandem,
do pushups against a park bench.
Toddlers screech and stumble,
as nannies share news in lilting
island accents. The sun arches
on its marathon course as I turn
toward home. A gust rattles
the gingko: “It’s all downhill from here.”
Claude Scales
First published in Self-Absorbed Boomer, June 21, 2007.
Days of Awe
Hm . . . Memorable . . . what? (He peers closer.) Equinox, memorable equinox. (He raises his head, stares blankly front. Puzzled.) Memorable equinox? . . . (Pause. He shrugs his head shoulders, peers again at ledger, reads.) Farewell to–(he turns the page)–love.
– Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape
In Florida, autumn came
as a change in the light
in late afternoon,
around mid-October.
I hardly noticed it
until I was nineteen.
A girlfriend left me.
I wrote a poem, ephemeral
as the love it mourned.
At sixty, autumn seems
like that last song
sung by Dave Guard’s Trio
(later covered by Sinatra):
vintage wine, days decreasing.
And now, in Brooklyn
(I’ve lived life backwards:
Florida, Manhattan, Brooklyn),
an older voice whispers
gently, to my gentile ears,
L’shanah tovah.
Claude Scales
(First published in Self-Absorbed Boomer, September 26. 2006.)
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