BY TERESE LOEB KREUZER | On June 13, more than three hundred people assembled on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge for what has become for many people an eagerly awaited annual event — the Poets House fundraising walk across the bridge, which is interspersed with poetry readings and ends with dinner at Bubby’s Brooklyn.
Poets House is now celebrating its second year at 10 River Terrace in Battery Park City, where a 50,000-volume poetry library, comfortable chairs and couches, free WiFi, stunning views of the Hudson River, changing art exhibits, lectures, classes and an imaginative children’s room inspire scholars, readers, writers and poets of all ages. Poets House had more than 50,000 visitors last year, said executive director Lee Briccetti at the start of the walk.
The bridge walk was inspired by a Poets House co-founder, Elizabeth Kray, who many years ago chartered a ferry to celebrate the Brooklyn Bridge with a group reading of Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Now that poem is read every year by Galway Kinnell at the Fulton Ferry Landing on the Brooklyn side of the bridge.
“Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!” Kinnell intoned as the sun set over Manhattan. “Clouds of the west — sun there half an hour high — I see you also face to face!”
The Brooklyn Bridge was once called the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, uniting what were then two separate cities, as a plaque on the bridge states. It is one of the greatest structures in New York City, and maybe anywhere, for its beauty and engineering innovations. It is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States and from its opening in 1883 until 1903, was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It combines stone and steel in a marriage that presaged the skyscrapers that would soon rise in New York City. It is a National Historic Landmark and a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.
A German immigrant, John Augustus Roebling, was responsible for the design. He died in 1869 where Fulton Ferry Landing is now after a ferry crushed his foot as he was making measurements for the bridge. A plaque on the bridge commemorates his genius and the work of his son, Col. Washington Roebling, who took over the engineering of the bridge until he, too, was stricken with what was called caisson disease caused by pressure changes as he emerged from laying the foundation for the western tower deep under the East River. He was an invalid for the rest of his life. His wife Emily then directed the construction of the bridge, conveying instructions from her husband but soon becoming an authority in her own right. When the bridge opened on May 24, 1883, she was the first person to walk across it.
Walking across this most poetic of bridges can be a profound experience. From the Manhattan side, the wooden pedestrian path slopes gently upward toward the Gothic pointed arches ahead, suggesting the entrance to a cathedral.
“As a madman enters a church or retreats to a monastery, pure and austere, so I, in the haze of evening humbly approach the Brooklyn Bridge,” wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky in a poem called “Brooklyn Bridge” that was read by poet Terrance Hayes at the first stop in the poetry walk, under the bridge’s western pillar. “Brooklyn Bridge, you’re really something, aren’t you?” the poem ends.
Yes, the bridge really is something, with its “catenary curve from tower to pier, implacable enemy of the mind’s deformity” (from poet Marianne Moore’s “Granite and Steel,” read on the bridge walk by poet Thomas Lux). The strong cables and wires of the bridge create a stunning geometry. On this particular bridge walk, the sun burst through a cloud-filled sky as the walkers approached the eastern tower, bathing its stones in intense, orange light.
Poetry helped to distill the experience. During dinner at Bubby’s there was more poetry, with readings by Frank Platt, co-vice president of the Poets House board of directors, Terrance Hayes, Thomas Lux, Eileen Myles and Bill Murray (a great friend of Poets House, who flew in from Massachusetts where he is making a film, so that he could participate in the dinner).
After dinner, he read three poems including a wonderful poem by Billy Collins called “Forgetfulness” that describes growing old. “No wonder you rise in the middle of the night/to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted/out of a love poem that you used to know by heart,” the poem ends.
Many things can and will be forgotten. The Brooklyn Bridge is not one of them. The annual Poets House bridge walk gives people a chance to discover it again and again.
On Tuesday, June 28, Poets House will open its next big event — its annual showcase of all the poetry books published in the United States in the past year. Around 2,000 volumes will be on the shelves from micro-press chapbooks to volumes from major commercial publishers. The opening reception is from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. The free exhibit runs through July 30. For more information, go to www.poetshouse.org.
