As part of the Brooklyn Book Festival, NYU Whitman scholar Karen Karbiener and Walt Whitman Project Artistic Administrator Greg Trupiano will introduce and read Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” on the actual ferry Saturday, Sept. 22. Pretty cool! The poem, part of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” was published in 1856 and is about a man taking the Brooklyn ferry home from Manhattan at the end of a working day. Here is an excerpt:

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

To attend, assemble at the Dumbo/Brooklyn Bridge Park landing of the East River Ferry Company at 1 pm; board the northbound ferry at 1:27 pm. Free with an East River Ferry ticket ($4 one way, $12 all-day pass). For more information, click here.
Photo by East River Ferry


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