Last week’s foray into the world of Makey Makey left me thinking a lot about creativity and the way we form connections. It was amazing to see the journeys that each group went on: first figuring out what on earth this gadget does, and finally deciding what it was that the group wanted it to do. I also left campus thinking a lot about “obstacles” and road blocks. When working with the Makey Makey, in order to really make something completely new and completely one’s own, you have to have the time to surpass any obstacle that gets in your way. For me, this is a lot like writing–you get stuck and then forage on. And, somehow it is also a lot like taking a trip, going on some kind of journey, moving from a familiar place to someplace else.
I took two literal trips since class on Wednesday–one to do some work upstate (amidst a snowstorm), and the other to P.S. 1 in Queens. I’d never been to P.S. 1 before and highly recommend it–it is a great museum inside an old elementary school in Long Island City. I went because they have an exhibit up by a Pakistani artist I like–Huma Bhabha. That work was amazing, but one of the great things about museums and travel (even within my “hometown”) is that I always fall in love with something new. This time it was James Turrell’s “Meeting”–an installation that is a room with a beautiful sharply cut rectangle in the ceiling so one can just sit and watch the sky. Inside that room was a kind of community of strangers–all of us looking up, laughing, chatting–it made me think a lot about how little I sit still, how little I look up.
Leaving the museum, my friend and I realized we were across the street from the famous 5 Pointz–an old factory building that is now an art space where graffiti artists from all over the world come to share their work.
Being there reminded me of our class–the way that we’ve been talking about those “New York” spots that we don’t notice. I notice graffiti because it feels like a huge part of the history of New York–the subcultures of graffiti and hip hop really ran parallel to each other in the 1970’s and 1980’s. But, graffiti is mainstream now, and I found myself both in awe of 5 Pointz, and thinking about what it means that there is now this space dedicated to legal graffiti work.
Similarly, the Brooklyn Bridge is something that I pass over multiple times a day, but the idea that there was a time before this connection did not exist is a bit mind-blowing to me. The poems that we read for today span NYC both before and after the bridge–Whitman writes about the ferry, and Reznikoff, Mayakofsky, and Crane all write about the bridge. The forms of these poems are strikingly different–Whitman’s sprawling free verse in contrast to Reznikoff’s tight couplets, but they are still dealing with the same expanse. What does that teach us about this landmark? And, in 2013, what can we add to these poems? What’s left unsaid?
Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” was published in Leaves of Grass–the book Whitman is most famous for–the edition published in 1891 (it was originally published in 1855). I can’t help but think of Whitman’s introductory notes to the 1855 Leaves of Grass whenever I read this poem: “…the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women and of all events and things. They shall find their inspiration in real objects today, symptoms of the past and future…” What does this mean for us? How does it shape our reading of any of these poems?
