Saturday, May 29, 2010

I haven't exactly been barrelling along with learning Brooklyn Ferry, but I am well into the third (long) stanza, and know the lines to that point pretty well. So I'm over a fifth of the way through. The lines are beautiful to speak, but hardly easy to learn, because they're long & somewhat irregular. There's also so much repetition, so much swooping back to river, sunset & crowd, that it's easy to drift into the wrong place in the text. It's really quite cool though, to sit on the subway, or walk on Broadway, watching the crowds, with Walt's words stored inside your head, knowing that he wrote them for the here and now moment, just for you,& you too, that 150 years is bridged in an instant.