Entries tagged with “poets” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

Dear readers:

You're hereby invited to a Bike Bash at 8 Mile Creek (240 Mulberry St., near Prince), sponsored by my awesome local bicycle shop, Bicycle Habitat, the evening of Thursday the 8th.

I'll be one of five finalists reading original odes to our bicycles, all competing to win a new Trek Soho S. The audience will vote on our performances -- so I need friends to be there! The party lasts from 6 to 9; happy hour is in effect until 10. The first 50 attendees get a free drink! The readings will take place around 7 or 7:30. The event will be held in "The Creek Bar," downstairs.

The bike I've written a poem for is my recently retired crappy red Schwinn. I rode it hard and it served me well. I've written about it lovingly before. I'd publish my poem here but that would spoil the surprise, so turn out and lend me a push! (If you turn out and help me win, I promise to post the poem here.)

As we begin work on our cultural history of New York City, Bryan and I are starting with the premise that one of the things that will make our distinctive is its organization around different "scenes" that have existed during the city's history. This principle was inspired by the account of the "downtown scene" that Bryan gives during our Writing New York lecture course at NYU. Where possible we want to locate these scenes in particular geographic locations such as neighborhoods, parks, buildings, or even street corners. And we're looking for "tour guides" to help us make our way through these different scenes, polymathic individuals whose encounters with the city and its denizens will suggest the networks of cultural affiliation that will help us give shape to our history.

So I've been working on Walt Whitman's New York. I'm working for the moment on Whitman's early career and my "scene" is centered on the ferry between Brooklyn and New York. I'm expecting Walt to lead me around Brooklyn, to the Lower East Side, to the opera, to the lecture hall to hear Emerson lecturing about the duties of the poet.

Today, however, I've been thinking about another encounter: between Whitman and William Cullen Bryant, the author as a young man of "Thantopsis" and editor-in-chief, from 1829 to 1878, of the New York Evening Post. I started by thinking about whether "Thanatposis," with its blank verse and trisyllabic second line, can be seen as a precursor for Whitman's free verse experiments, but a little rummaging around the stacks led me back to this piece from Whitman's Specimen Days: