Poets and editors Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Michael Tyrell of Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn will discuss their work on the anthology and share samplings from the book that express the borough’s rich and diverse literary history. This event is jointly sponsored by the Center for American Literary Study at Pennsylvania State University and is free with museum admission.

The program begins at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, October 22. Museum admission is free for BHS members; $6 for adults; $4 for seniors (62 or older), students 12 or older (college students must show ID), and teachers; and free for children under 12.

The DUMBO Arts Festival returns this weekend, with plenty of treats for eye, ear, and mind, and perhaps even for your backside if you choose to perch on one of the rocks upholstered by Elizabeth Demaray, an artist and Rutgers professor with a background in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, shown here working on a project for the Festival, done in conjunction with the design collective Pillow Culture, called “24 Stones I’d Like to Know”.

The Festival will begin this Friday evening, September 23 from 6:00 to 9:00, and will continue Saturday from noon until 8:00 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 6:00 p.m. Outdoor video projections will be shown from sundown to midnight. The Festival will feature visual art, music, performance art, video and projection, literary readings and discussions, and events for kids and parents, as well as Jane’s Carousel.

You can find the Festival on Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. It is produced by Dalzell Productions and Two Trees Management.

Karl is on hand with cam to catch all the action, from opera by Martha Cardona Theater to the BHA’s Dog Show to palmistry to yoga to great photos at Summer Space on Montague Street, then to the Brooklyn Book Festival on Borough Hall Plaza, starting with literary troubadours covering the 1961 Tokens hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and ending with a talk about erstwhile Heights resident Truman Capote by Evan Hughes, author of Literary Brooklyn.

On the tenth anniversary of 9-11, we invite you to join us in discussion with acclaimed author Julie Salamon (Wendy and the Lost Boys, Hospital) as we examine the reasons people choose to do good in the world—the first program in our new Why We Do Good philanthropy series.

The conversation will be framed by Salamon’s 2003 book Rambam’s Ladder: A Meditation on Generosity and Why It is Necessary to Give, which she wrote in the wake of 9-11 when much of New York and the
nation were trying to understand the evil acts that had just occurred. The book explores motivations for doing good and frames them in terms suggested by the 12th century philosopher and scholar Rabbi Moses ben
Maimon, also known as Maimonides or Rambam.

In Rambam’s Ladder, Salamon looks at examples of contemporary giving and how they fit into Rambam’s Ladder of charity—the eight stages of giving—ranging from grudging giving on the lowest rung to the most generous and effective giving on the highest rung. Looking back on the 10 years that have passed since the attacks, Salamon and Brooklyn Community Foundation President Marilyn Gelber will discuss personal
philanthropy in a turbulent and changing world.

Following the talk, through the participation of Poets House, audience members will be invited to walk to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade where New York City-based poet Dave Johnson will read brief selections
from his work as well as Galway Kinnell’s “When the Towers Fell.”

The program, which will convene in Brooklyn Historical Society’s first floor gallery space, is free and open to the public.

If you plan to attend, please RSVP here, or call 347.750.2310.

Tomorrow evening (Friday, April 1), starting at 7:00, the Brooklyn Historical Society, 128 Pierrepont Street (corner of Clinton) will hold the first in what is promised to be a series of poetry readings. This reading, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Girl, is presented in cooperation with A.I.R. Gallery and Cave Canem, and will be held in the society’s beautiful Othmer Library. Readings will be by E.J. Antonio, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Robin Coste Lewis, Kamilah Aisha Moon and Aracelis Girmay. It is free and open to the public.

Our pals at W.W. Norton ponder what it would be like if Brooklyn Heights legend/poet/newspaper guy Walt Whitman was alive today and writing for Groupon, the social media deals thingy. For one thing, he’d WOULD SO be rockin’ that hipster haircut in the photo here and most likely ride his bike to work. And yes he’d TOTALLY order the hibiscus tea at Iris Cafe.

W.W. Norton: Buy One Round of Mini Golf and GET 2 ROUNDS FREE!

Roll on the turf! Let the spheres in their brilliant colors
explore the textures alive under foot. The angles and contours

are the very pleasures of existence! To see our world miniature,
without taking flight; the great challenge of humankind.

We’ll play until star fall is upon us and the smallest fracture
of wind moves the lighting bugs and serves as excuse.

Brownstone Poets will present a poetry reading, with open mic, this Saturday starting at 2:30 p.m. at the Park Plaza Diner, 220 Cadman Plaza West (at the eastern end of Pineapple Walk). Poets featured at this event are G.P.A. the Poetic Unsub (photo above) and Jeffrey Cyphers Wright. Admission is $3; food and drinks extra. More details are here.

From the Festival’s press release:

Ashbery’s connection to Brooklyn and New York runs deep. His biography includes work as a reference librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library and co-director of the poetry MFA program at Brooklyn College. (He has also taught at Harvard and Bard College.) From 2001 to 2003, he was poet laureate of New York State.

“As a young poet I tried to imitate John Ashbery’s famous poem, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.’ I attempted to mimic his wit, keen observation, and linguistic invention,” said Brooklyn Poet Laureate Tina Chang. “Though my efforts failed miserably, I became a student of Ashbery’s by being an observer and reader. Generations of writers have been mentored and inspired in this way, by following his life’s work with remarkable fascination. His literary influence is a force of its own and his living legacy is undeniable.”

As a poet, Ashbery was particularly influenced by the American abstract expressionistic movement. He also worked as an art critic in France during the 1950’s and 1960s, and later in the United States. “My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me,” he told the Times of London. “I don’t think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life.”

A full schedule of Sunday’s Book Festival events is here. A schedule of “bookend” events taking place Friday, Saturday and Sunday is here.

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. After February, CSC Funk Band took the stage and performed one long, rousing number. They were about to start another (it was now around 10:00) when ISSUE’s Zach Layton took the mike and, apologizing to the band and audience, said “We have an agreement with the Park.” With that, the band members started packing up their instruments and some people got up to leave. After a minute or so, Layton came back to the mike and announced that there would be a final, unamplified acoustic set featuring novelist Rick Moody and Hannah Marcus, his singing partner from the Wingdale Community Singers.

Moody and Marcus sat at the edge of the stage and sang Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”, as they had adapted it for music, for a small group of people who gathered around them. The rest of the crowd continued gathering up their blankets and bags, and chattering. Thus the poor aucoustic quality of the above clip, which improves at the end as Marcus and Moody seem to find their voices and harmonize nicely. Here is the text of the poem:

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts, the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the learned astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

As I was walking home, I checked my BlackBerry, and found an e-mail from a friend who lives on Columbia Heights between Cranberry and Middagh, urging me to put something on BHB about the horrendous sonic assault he had endured that evening from amplified music coming from the park. It was so loud, he said, that he couldn’t hear his TV despite having his windows closed. He feared this might be a precedent for similar occurrences in the future. Today I received another e-mail, from a different North Heights resident, making a similar complaint and expressing the same fears.

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.

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.)

The result of Gioseffi’s research is a “biographical novel” about Dickinson, Wild Nights, Wild Nights, the title of which comes from one of Dickinson’s poems, few of which had titles and are therefore known by their opening lines:

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!

Professor Leila Melani of Brooklyn College, CUNY, calls this “a poem of unrestrained sexual passion and rapture.” It seems completely out of character if one accepts the conventional view of Dickinson as an asexual recluse. While she never married and, later in life, largely withdrew from society, even to the extent of conducting conversations through a closed door, she had many friendships with both women and men, though some of these were conducted largely or entirely through written correspondence. Gioseffi took as her task determining the identity of the person to whom “Wild nights! Wild nights!”, as well as other poems referring to a “Master”, were addressed. Her conclusion, in her own words, is that he was:

…a man by the name of William Smith Clark, a botanist and geologist far more famous in his day than Dickinson. He was the first Ph.D. scientist with a European doctorate to teach at Amherst College, and he lived on a hill behind the Dickinson Homestead, now a museum and historical site of the poet’s life. “On the hill/ the house behind,/ there paradise is found. /…” wrote Dickinson.

A botanist may have been a natural match for Dickinson; her Wikipedia entry quotes Judith Farr, from her book The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, as noting “that Dickinson, during her lifetime, ‘was known more widely as a gardener, perhaps, than as a poet’.”

Gioseffi is editor and publisher of the popular poetry website PoetsUSA. If you would like to purchase a signed, personalized copy of Gioseffi’s book, please contact her at daniela@garden.net

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.

Admission is by donation, and no one will be turned away. For reservations and information, call 212-288-3246 ext. 300 (24 hrs).

“We hope to break new ground in addressing Whitman’s presence in the works of Beat writers and the reception of Whitman’s poetry by the Beats,” said co-chairman of the conference St. Francis College Communication Arts Professor Scott Weiss. “Our panelists will explore, in depth, how the legacy of the Beats, their perspectives of their era and artistic innovations can be traced to Whitman’s influence on American literary culture.”

Among the topics to be discussed in a series of panels will be sexual identity, power and politics, media, technology and art, notions of time and space, and poetic form and style. Some of the papers include: Ambassadors of Power: Whitmanic Anarchism, Eroticism, and the Beats’ Opposition to the Cold War State; Humanizing War: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings, Robert Altman’s MASH, and the American Anti-War Movement and Time, Space, Self, and Walt Whitman in Allen Ginsberg’s “America.”

There will be a keynote address by Ann Charters, professor of English at the University of Connecticut and a renowned authority on the Beats. Registration for the conference is from 8:00 to 9:00 tomorrow morning, at 180 Remsen Street. Panel presentations will be from 9:00 to 12:15 and from 2:15 to 5:30; Ms. Charters’ address will begin at 1:00 p.m. Beginning at 6:00 p.m there will be a concert by New Music New York “celebrating Whitman themes and Beat poetry.”

The conference will conclude on Sunday, March 28, with two walking tours. The first, covering Whitman’s Brooklyn, begins at 180 Remsen at 12:00 noon and goes until 2:00 p.m. The second, covering the Greenwich Village of the Beats, meets outside Minetta’s Tavern, 113 MacDougal Street, between Bleecker and West 3rd, at 2:30 p.m., and continues until 3:30.

There is no charge for any of these events.

Claude Scales
First published in Self-Absorbed Boomer, June 21, 2007.

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.)