The Poetry Of The Brooklyn Bridge
It's times like this I wish I lived in New York City. Poets House, a national poetry library and literary center, is sponsoring its 14th annual poetry walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on Monday (June 8th). Participants will gather on the Manhattan side, joined by poets Hettie Jones, Galway Kinnell, Thomas Lux, Natasha Trethewey and Kevin Young, and stop along the walk across the East River to Brooklyn, reading from the wealth of poetry the bridge has inspired. The walk concludes with a sunset reading of Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," after which participants can join Bill Murray (!) for dinner.
It may seem odd for a bridge to be a focal point for poetry, but the Brooklyn Bridge has inspired a remarkable number of good (and some great) poems. The Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky was moved when he first saw it in 1925, as he described in his poem "Brooklyn Bridge:"
...it stretches on cables of string
to the feet of the stars.
I stare
as an eskimo gapes at a train,
I seize on it
as a tick fastens to an ear.
Brooklyn Bridge--
yes....
That's quite a thing!
At the time of Mayakovsky's visit, the American poet Hart Crane was writing his great poem "The Bridge." Crane lived, for a while, in an apartment overlooking the East River, and in his visionary mind the Brooklyn Bridge became a springboard to the spiritual. Here's an excerpt from the opening:
O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,--
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .
In 1956, the beat poet Jack Kerouac celebrated the bridge in another visionary poem (Kerouac's visions may have had a little...help) called "The Brooklyn Bridge Blues":
I looked at the red winter
disgusting dusk of the world,
saw the alleys beyond,
Brooklyn, Wolfe's redbrick
jungle (that I'd only
last night walkt, unto
Gowanus Cana!)----O!
--& I remembered the dreams
the dreams about racks
and Joan Adams and drear
and a tear appeared
in my eye over the river
on the Bridge of Sights
that as soon as I'd
(c r o c o d i l e)
crossed it, had taken
me to the shore
I was looking for!
Svaha! I am
the perfect man
the Buddha of This World
In case you're new to the Beats, you shouldn't worry if the poem doesn't make total sense. You might want to worry (c r o c o d i l e) if it does.
Whitman wrote his great poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" before the bridge was built, but it celebrates the exact spot where it now stands. Just an excerpt can make one feel for New York--past, present and future--as Whitman would want:
The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away;
The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them;
The certainty of others--the life, love, sight, hearing of others.
Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore;
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the
heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an
hour high;
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others
will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling
back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
The event starts Monday, June 8th at 6:30 PM. You can go here for information/tickets.
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Sets the mind to reeling, perching particularly on Marianne Moore’s “Granite and Steele” and a 1913 drawing of “Roebling’s monument” (as Moore calls it) by Hopper contemporary John Marin, a lively cubist affair.
In expiation for a post I just sent in about a complex bit of poetry that purports to relate to the Brooklyn Bridge may I suggest a visual treat? Wonderful poems have been written about this great bridge. Paintings too!
One of my very favorite paintings (which I saw in Atlanta) is called "Path of Gold". Here's a site that shows this great painting: http://www
In the movie, a "Tree Grows in Brooklyn", an aspect similar to Path of Gold is shown. It is from a Brooklyn rooftop -a view of the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge, looking south. it is the last scene.
Thank you! I just saved the painting to my hard drive. Lovely.
Frederico Garcia Lorca wrote a poem that, at least in the title, referred to the Brooklyn Bridge. Here is the first stanza, there are a few more, and those are just as obtuse to me as the one below. Lorca wrote in Spanish, not your high school Spanish I would think, and incorporated classical and cultural references into what is descibed as abstract or surreal verse.
Ciudad sin Sueno (Nocturne del Brooklyn Bridge)
or City Without Sleep (Nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge)
No one sleeps in the sky. No one.
The creatures of the moon smell and circle their cabins.
Live iguanas will come to bite the men who don't dream
and he who flees with broken heart will find on the corners
the still, incredible crocodile under the tender protest of the stars.
Yeah, -the Brooklyn Bridge. The first stanza alone tells me I would need to be taken by the hand and led word by word through this opaque piece. I'd wouldn't half mind studying this but i know of no resources.
I wrote a poem about the Brooklyn Bridge for an assignment my first year of college. I published it here: http://hub
Notes from a Broken Finger
conversation before the Brooklyn Bridge
“Is it dangerous?”
“Of course.
Everything is dangerous at night.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“But the lights!”
“The lights...
And God?”
“Yes, God.
And the water.”
“Over the water, not under...”
“Of course.”
“Then yes. Let’s go.”
- September 25, 2006
I am so jealous that I can't be there. The first time I read the Walt Whitman poem, I cried and felt that he had literally touched me or was looking down at me. But that was one of his methods, to make you feel that he had touched you. "Who touches this book, touches a man". I think Allen Ginsberg used that as a heading for one of his poems and he was a great lover of Whitman himself.
Not heading, two lines below the title. Not a dedication either, just a quotation.
That is fun stuff.
The Green Lady
I used to hope that I’d inspire a symphony
or an epic
but that damn Bridge gets all the accolades
not that I take it personally
When your complexion’s gone
and no one’s
about to immortalize you
it’s time for a girl to take stock
I’ve surely done my part
lacking Aphrodite’s charm
the Virgin’s innocence
I stand here in this outrageous garb
lifting a torch in the sullen night
mortal metal
bearing wishful words, flickering light.
--Jim Lacey
I need to be in New York! I enjoyed all poems, but those beat poets interest me more than others at times.
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