Search Results for: silent beaches

A dead body near the Gowanus Canal

What happens when you open the floodgates of the wonderworld and let the ocean onto campus?

Something like Silent Beaches, Untold Stories, Elizabeth Albert’s great show  at the Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery on the St. John’s Campus in Queens until November 9.

I’ve walked through the show twice so far, once with the curator, but I feel I’ve only dipped my toes into its expansive waters. At the bottom sits the rich historical stew of maritime New York. Exploring a series of New York’s forgotten, marginalized, or polluted waterfronts, from Dead Horse Bay to Newtown Creek to Hart’s Island, which still serves as the city’s potter’s field for the burial of unclaimed bodies, the show returns forgotten  spaces to our eyes. Drawing on photographs from the Library of Congress, the Museum of the City of New York, the New York Public Library, and other sources, the items on display unveil a dissonant watery history that mingles industrial expansion with sailing ships, steel bridges with wooden boats. I kept looking for a picture of Ishmael at Battery Park, looking south, thinking about whales, facing away from skyscrapers.

Hart Island Project

Bridge in Progress

These watery histories are poignant and powerful, but surfacing these pasts isn’t the only center of Silent Beaches. The historical materials are entangled with the work of  contemporary artists who are exploring maritime New York. The materials include drawings by George Boorujy, a pair of stunning large-scale wood-block prints by Marie Lorenz as well as video from Lorenz’s Tide and Current Taxi project, which has been exploring the city’s waterways since 2005, a looping documentary film by citizen advocate and filmmaker Melinda Hunt, images of Mary Mattingly’s Waterpod project, and more. Moving through the gallery’s striking historical images, including a documentary film of New York’s riverside made by Thomas Edison to the playful and experimental work of twenty-first century artists provides an appropriately marine shock, as if the sands were shifting under our feet.

Art encrusted with local maritime history pushes all my buttons, but two more elements of Silent Beaches  keep running through my head as I continue to think about the show.

The first, which I didn’t quite notice until the curator pointed it out to me last Thursday, is an audio piece, playing from a speaker in the far corner of the gallery. The tinkling, flowing sound was recorded at Dead Horse Beach at low tide, as the gentle surf washied back and forth over the accumulation of trash. The debris at Dead Horse comes from a landfill that’s long-since been capped, so the objects that remain on the beach are those that decompose slowly: glass, ceramics, some plastics. The music of ocean on glass, it turns out, is gorgeous, subtle, strangely soothing.

Dead Horse Beach

My favorite place of all in the exhibition, however, may be a glass case full of objects rescued from assorted New York beaches, many of which come from personal collections or recent scavenging trips. An old life-guard whistle from Staten Island. A couple of guns. The bones of dead horses. Heartbreakingly, a doll’s leg, the mate to which — but not the body — was found a little way down the beach.

A doll’s leg

So far, I’ve spent more time looking at this leg than any other single object in this great show. I like to look at it, think about it, savor its soft tones and the sheen that ocean water has given to its long-submerged plastic. I like to imagine its serpentine voyage from child’s toy to art installation. I’ll read a poem about the leg’s journey at the Underwater New York  poetry reading at the gallery on October 29. A human-and-inhuman limb, returned from the sea, testifying without words.

Try to get to St John’s before November 9!

Here I was on Tuesday night 10/29/13, the one-year anniversary of Sandy’s rude arrival in New York, sounding out the sea poetry in a reading organized by Underwater New York and the Silent Beaches show. 

After an intro by the three ingenitors of Underwater NY, the event started with an “Ode to Far Rockway” read by Nicole Cirino to mark the day. Then Bob Fanuzzi spun a gorgeous tall-tale about his family’s history in Staten Island and its waters, including the deep-sea exploits of Uncle Ed, who joined us at the reading that evening. I read a poem about a doll’s leg that had been discovered on Dead Horse Beach, and another about my coastal Connecticut Sandy adventures. (Both those poems are now published on the Underwater NY site, with links on a new page on this blog.) I also read a prose piece that I’ll share a bit later.

Gabe Brownstein read a funny & moving story about growing up near the 125th St. sewage treatment plant, improvements to which made possible my fairly-clean-water swim up the Hudson in September. Lee Ann Brown read an amazing Whitman poem about trickles and drops as well as several of her own pieces and some mermaid poems she’d collaborated on with her students. Nelly Reifler closed us out with a brilliant, dark, enticing story about a formica table, a family, and the lure of violence.

Talking with Ed Fanuzzi

Such a pleasure to share the event with so many distinguished writers, and to have a lively crowd out at St. John’s on a Tuesday night!

Thanks to Elizabeth Albert and to Underwater New York!

Anyone who’s been to any of the Oceanic New York events or students from the “Open King Lear” course last fall who remember our trip to Dead Horse Bay with guest lecturer Craig Dionne might enjoy coming by the gallery Urban Glass in Fort Greene this Saturday 3/25 at 3 pm.

The event will celebrate the final weekend of the exhibition The Glass Graveyard of Brooklyn, and will feature poetry about the Bay written by a gathering of contributors to Underwater New York. I’ll be reading a poem about a doll’s leg that was recovered from Dead Horse Bay and featured in Elizabeth Albert’s exhibition and book, “Silent Beaches, Untold Stories.” 

Come hear a four-hundred year old tragedy speak to twenty-first century environmental catastrophe! The storm-poetry will rage at low tide at Dead Horse Bay’s Glass Bottle Beach on Sept 19 at 5:30 pm!

Join me and the students in my Open King Lear grad seminar to walk this amazing beach, the site of a nineteenth-century landfill and horse rendering plant, with Professor Craig Dionne, author most recently of Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene (Punctum Books, 2015).

We’ll look and listen to sounds of long-ago and still ongoing disasters, talk about how human bodies encounter hostile environments, and explore the boundaries of literary representation and ecological understanding. Professor Dionne will speak about how King Lear reimagines language and humanity in and after catastrophe.

Praise the world to the angel (Rilke)

We’ll also be joined by St. John’s Professor Elizabeth Albert and the editors of underwaternewyork.com, who have recently collaborated on the gorgeous volume Silent Beaches, Untold Stories, which explores the forgotten history and artistic present of New York’s waterways.

Reason not the need! (Lear)

All are welcome! We’ll meet in the parking lot at Floyd Bennet Field / 50 Aviator Road and together walk the 15 min trail out to the beach.

Please contact Steve Mentz (mentzs@stjohns.edu) if you’d like to join us!

Glass Bottle Beach

During this busy fall, one of my favorite tasks has been assembling the many wonderful essays I’ve received for Oceanic New York into a book. It’s hard to imagine capturing the energy and waywardness of that memorable night in Queens last September, but I think the collection we’ve got will do it justice, and extend some of the things we started that night.

Not everything is fully put together yet, but we’re close enough that I can reveal a probably-final table of contents. Look for these frothy pages sometime next year!

Oceanic New York

Table of Contents

Instructions: How to Use this Book

Poem: “Asymmetrical Kicking”

Essays: Salt-Water City

1. Elizabeth Albert, “Silent Beaches”
2. Granville Ganter, “Miss Newtown Creek”
3. Lowell Duckert, “Arctic-Oceanic New York”
4. Jamie Skye Bianco, “#bottlesnbones: tales of oceanic remains”
5. Alison Kinney, “Groundswell”
6. Bailey Robertson, “City in the Sea”
7. Karl Steel, “Insensate Oysters and Nonconsensual Existence”
8. Matt Zazzarino, “Super Ocean 64”
9. Nancy Nowacek and Lowell Duckert, “A Short History of the Hudsonian Ice Age”
10. Steve Mentz, “Wages of Water

Poem: “Two Sublimes”

Essays: The Water is Rising

1. Steve Mentz and Marina Zurkow, “Instructions II: In Case of Immersion”
2. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “The Sea is a Conveyance Machine”
3. Allan Mitchell, “Soundings”
4. Dean Kritikos, “New York, Oceanic City”
5. Anne Harris, “Oceanic Valuation”
6. Julie Orlemanski, “Tourism and the Phenomenology of Knowledge”
7. Jonathan Hsy, “Watery Metaphor”
8. Nancy Nowacek, “Citizen Bridge”
9. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Allan Mitchell, “Oceanic Dispatches”

Four Swim Poems and a Picture

I’ll also add a little taste of my countdown intro. It’s thirteen paragraphs long, but I’ll just post the first two here:

Instructions: How to Use this Book

 13. I don’t imagine you need any rudimentary teaching in how to use a technology like the one in your hands right now. Books are familiar, whether they comprise sheets of paper bound and glued or pixels on a screen. But I’m going to ask you to operate this one differently. I want you, with this object in your hands, to imagine that these pages contain the Ocean and New York City. That makes it a three-fold artifact, Ocean and City and Book.

 12. If this Book were Ocean, how would it feel between your fingers? Wet and slippery, just a bit warmer or colder than the air around it, since the Ocean is our planet’s greatest reservoir of heat, a sloshing insulator and incubator girdling our globe. Oceans splash alongside Cities and continents. Perhaps you think that a Book can’t be an Ocean because the property of the first thing is that we can read it, and the property of the second is that it is too vast for comprehension. But I’m asking that we try. There must be a way to read the Ocean!

This evening I’ll be doing something I’ve not done in maybe 15 years: reading a poem of mine in public. The poetry reading at the Silent Beaches exhibition is co-sponsored by Underwater New York, a digital poetry journal and collective. On the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy’s landfall, we’ll be reading poetry about maritime New York.

My contribution is about a doll’s leg found at Dead Horse Beach. It’s titled
“Asymmetrical Kicking,” and written in the voice of the leg during its Jamaica Bay odyssey: from beach to sea to beach again. 

Enjoy!

I knew she’d miss me.

Points of fingers digging slightly,

Varying pressure across my unfeeling thigh,

Holding whatever was around us.

Touch binds emotion to dead things.

It skates along filaments to sinews,

Plastic to skin to salt.

She brought me to the beach, into the surf, out here:

That was her mistake.

Beneath the surface flows another world.

Sideways I kick inside it,

Detached,

Solitary.

Lashing out, I move

Asymmetrically.

No longer attached to body or world or girl,

I swim alone.

The salt burns and trickles inside me,

Filling me up.

A dark motion holds me for a long time.

Returning is another leaving.

Never stepping twice onto the same sand,

Out of the same salt water, alongside the same

Dead things.

Air feels empty after so much water.

Now when I kick nothing moves.

When schoolteacher-turned-whaleman Ishmael walked the streets of “your insular city of the Manhattoes,” he knew New York as oceanic city and commercial capital. Standing on the Battery looking south, he saw a cityscape “belted round by wharves as Indian islands by coral reefs – commerce surrounds it with her surf.”

Today commerce dominates but the surf lies hidden. This round-table event digs into New York City’s asphalt, pries up the streets, and finds underneath not beach, but – ocean.

Oceanic New York aims to recover traces of the salt-water past that still lies beneath New York’s urban feet. Taking inspiration from Elizabeth Albert’s gorgeous and startling exhibition, “Silent Beaches, Untold Stories,”  — about which I’ll have more to say soon — we’ll plunge into the urban and the oceanic. “Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon,” entices Ishmael. Everywhere people stare toward water. “Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land,” says the mast-head philosopher. That’s where we want to be.

Dead Horse Beach

The twentieth century witnessed the drying up of New York: shifting the industrial port across the harbor to Newark, exhausting the oyster beds, turning South Street Seaport into a museum,. That’s where the mighty four-masted USS Peking sits today, her 170-foot steel mainmast dwarfed by skyscrapers. The twenty-first century, however, with its ecological crises, extreme weather, and growing recall of oceanic history, is returning to New York’s salt-water identity.

Drawing on the forgotten waterscapes of the city, the catastrophic floods of Hurricane Sandy, and still-wet histories and legends, these talks and conversations surface the oceanic substrata on which New York floats. Oceanic New York goes beyond insular Manhattoes to Dead Horse Bay, Breezy Point, Gravesend, Hell Gate Bridge. Anywhere salt water seeps into our shoes and stains our clothes.

Three weeks from today…

A JPEG of the publicity flyer

The semester is almost upon us! One of the things I’m planning for this early fall is Oceanic New York, a Round-Table and Conversation event at the Yeh Art Gallery at St. John’s on Sept 26th. I’ll post updates via the Oceanic New York Page on this blog, and probably add a few things here as well.

Here’s the flyer: Oceanic New York Poster

And here’s what the Page has right now —

Welcome to Oceanic New York, a round-table and discussion that will take place in the Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery on the St. John’s University campus in Queens on Th 9/26/13, from 6 – 8 pm.

We’ll be exploring the relationship between New York City and the Ocean, building our remarks variously from artistic, literary, eco-theoretical, or personal perspectives. The participants include academics and artists, sailors and swimmers, bridge-builders and castaways. We’re hoping to uncover watery connections between urban living and oceanic space.

The Gallery space where we’ll meet will feature Elizabeth Albert’s new exhibition, “Silent Beaches, Untold Stories: New York City’s Forgotten Waterfront.” We’re hoping to contribute to this show’s surfacing and re-figuring of the watery coastlines of NYC.

I’ll post previews and further information to this page as we get closer to the event. The round-table is free and open to the public.

 

Current participants include

Jamie Skye Bianco, NYU

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington U

G. Ganter, St. John’s U

Eilleen Joy, BABEL Working Group and Punctum Books

Allan Mitchell, University of Victoria

Nancy Nowacek, Artist

Karl Steel, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Marina Zurkow, Artist