Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Too tired to say much about the reading, but just want to note it on the blog. Hosted by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, at the newish Battery City Park Ferry Terminal, the event commemorated the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's discovery of the river that now carries his name. The poems were written for the occasion, and read by the poets: Eavan Boland's "The Port of New York, 1956," John Ashbery's "In One Afternoon," Toon Tellegen's "A Poem for Henry Hudson," Jorie Graham's "No Bearing and Disproportion" (an extract), Paul Muldoon's "Lines for the Quartercentenary of the Voyage of the Halve Maen ," and John Koethe's "The Great Gatsby." Michael Schmidt introduced each poet. The ferry engine, coming by at regular intervals, competed with and accompanied the voices.

TLS September 4 2009 from Peter Coates's review of Eric W. Sanderson's Mannahatta: The natural history of New York City : On September 12, 1609, Henry Hudson, a British navigator in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, entered the river that now bears his name. He was searching for the elusive Northwest Passage to the Orient, and continued upriver for over a hundred miles in his yacht, the Half Moon . Neat the site of Albany, New York State's future capital, the water became too shallow for further progress and Hudson finally accepted that this wasn't the way to Cathay. The consolation prize was the discovery of the island that the local people, the Lenape (a branch of the Algonquin Indians), called "Manna-hata" [In the Algonquin language, "Island of Many Hills"]. * One of [Sanderson's] project's most innovative contribution to historical ecology is the concept of the "Muir web". Named after one of Sanderson's heroes,...