There’s no reason for you to know this, but Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is one of my favorite poems. It found me at a time of great sorrow (I’ll save that tale for another time) but it left me with such a gift.

At Fulton Landing on the Brooklyn side of the East River Coast, you’ll find Whitman’s words stenciled on the guardrail:

FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face;

Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose

I hear these words every time I cross the Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn to the City. Long gone are those days of ferryboats shuttling people between boroughs. Yet Whitman’s clairvoyance and eloquence, his hymn to New York City, to America, more than a century later, haunts and comforts. Perhaps in this instance, we can consider Whitman the patron saint of Poets in Unexpected Places (PUP). Poets Samantha Thornhill, Jon Sands, and Adam Falkner are the triumvirate behind this ars experimental endeavor. A few weekends ago, they gathered at the feet of the Gandhi statue in Union Square, corralled a few of their poet friends and took poetry to the streets– err, the trains. It’s something that many of us in the scene had talked and talked of doing one day, many years ago. Leaving the comfort of our sleepy or vibrant open mics, bars and ‘sanctioned’ places for sharing art, to engage audiences elsewhere. The world doesn’t always know how much she needs poetry sometimes unless she hears it.

Samantha credits a mutual friend and poet as part of the inspiration for starting PUP.

Subway riders weren’t necessarily sure how to respond. In the beginning we watched them take on the classic New Yorker subway face— that glassy disaffected stare at the spectacle or fixed gaze on a redundant advertisement overhead, avoiding contact. But eventually, bodies relaxed, eyes focused, ears opened. The poets seduced them with their energy, truth, and wit. The biggest gift was the joy that there was nothing expected in return. The connection between the commuters and poets created an intimacy and exhilaration for some weary travelers on a bright Sunday afternoon. That’s rare to witness.

There will be audio/video of these excursions available online in the near future. But for now, here are some pics I took Sunday on this adventure with poets Jeanann Verlee, Jared Singer, Marcy Alexis, Ed Menchavez, Darrion Dauchan, Jon Sands, Adam Falkner, and the den mother, Samantha Thornhill. We crossed Brooklyn Ferry four times on Sunday on the Q train. And while I observed and took pictures, I wondered what New Yorkers of yore must of thought of Whitman in his day. The mad man wandering all over New York City, babbling wild lines to himself and to strangers, then scribbling them down,  constructing this epic narrative our very existence. Whitman was time and timelessness. Perhaps this is why this poem is the epigraph to the novel I’m writing. Perhaps it’s why I couldn’t miss this moment Sunday with the PUP crew because of these words from Whitman:

We descend upon you and all things—we arrest you all;

We realize the soul only by you, you faithful solids and fluids;

Through you color, form, location, sublimity, ideality;

Through you every proof, comparison, and all the suggestions and determinations of ourselves.

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers! you novices!

We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward;

Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us;

We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us;

We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also;

You furnish your parts toward eternity;

Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.