As the sun set one evening last month, Idra Novey, a poet, strolled across the Brooklyn Bridge with her friend Rob Casper, director of the Poetry Society of America. In front of them were a hundred other people who, if not poets, were ardent lovers of the art.

“Poets are hidden in the city,” Novey observed, laughing. “It’s nice to get us outside!”

For 13 years, the “Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge” has not only given poets a break from their muses, but has raised money for Poets House, which is moving from its small Soho offices this fall to an 11,000-square-foot space in Battery Park City.

Before setting off for Brooklyn, Lee Briccetti, executive director of Poets House, spoke to the crowd. The theme of the talk was Poets House’s new headquarters and naturally Briccetti described her feelings with a poem. 

“As Robert Frost said, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, /They have to take you in.’”

With that said, they were off. 

Maria Eliades, a Poets House intern and English literature major at Drew University, was one of several volunteers who led the group with small flags held aloft. She was looking forward to reaching Brooklyn’s Fulton Ferry Landing where Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Galway Kinnell would read Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

“It’s great when poetry is tied in with an actual event and Walt Whitman is so quintessential New York,” Eliades said.  Brooklyn, after all, was where Whitman had lived in his youth and worked for several newspapers. It was also where the group would dine, at Bubby’s.

“Food and poetry,” Eliades enthused. “This is my idea of a perfect evening!”

Pausing beneath a soaring arch of the bridge, the group seemed oblivious to the steady rumble of cars beneath them as they listened to Kevin Young read the lines of “Juke Box Love Song” by Langston Hughes and Hart Crane’s “To Brooklyn Bridge, which begins:

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,

As if on cue, a flock of geese flew north in perfect V formation, as majestic as the thousands of crisscrossed cables below them.

“It is the spirit of Hart Crane!” someone exclaimed, looking up.

At Fulton Ferry Landing, there were tables of sushi and lemonade awaiting the walkers, who nibbled as they listened to Kinnell’s mellifluent recitation of  Whitman. The great poet had crossed the river daily by ferry.

Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!

Among those listening to the reading was Cheri Fein, a veteran of four poetry walks.

 

“The amazing cables and sky are a confluence of nature and the best of man-made creations,” she said, reflecting on her experience. “And then to add poetry to that makes it sublime.”