Yashmak: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Posted on June 13, 2009

BY Erik Schurink | FILED UNDER Brooklyn, Manhattan, Yashmak, history

At this year’s Poetry Walk, Galway Kinnell read Walt Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry for the fourteenth time at the Fulton Ferry Landing, the poem that veiled and unveiled Whitman’s sexual orientation. His poem as yashmak—offering those sensitive to his femininity to look in through the slit he widened with his words, a poem he suspected and hoped might find a larger, more open crowd among the men and women generations after him, seeing mast-hemm’d Manhattan and sea-gulls oscillating their bodies much like he did in his time of thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats. “Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta!” he says, “Stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn! Throb, baffled and curious brain! Throw out questions and answers…”

About Erik Schurink

Erik Schurink
ABC Weblink research and numerous acrostic poetry entries

“Alchemist by chance, designer Erik finds gold hidden in Jamison’s knees, Lubalin’s marks, Neruda’s odes, Pei’s qi, Rembrandt’s sunbeams, Tinguely’s uselessness, vowels, Whiteread’s xanadus, yesterday’s zaniness.” Erik Schurink is a designer of interactive, cultural and art exhibitions. He is a poet, and an assemblage sculptor. He and his wife Rita host salons and art events at their home, presenting poets, dancers, musicians, chefs, film makers, painters, playwrights, and storytellers. He approaches exhibit design as interactive storytelling, his sculptures as celebrations of entropic emergence, while his poems are recipes for momentary environments. In his art he intends for people to gather in conversation. Schurink was born in the Netherlands. He holds a BFA from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He moved to New York in 1983, and lives in Brooklyn, with his wife and daughter.

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One Response to Yashmak: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Lynne Sachs says:

June 23, 2009 at 7:39 pm

What an intriguing meditation on a Whitman poem, how he speaks corporeally, of his own physical sensations, through the brazen undulations of the birds. I would never have understood this “veiled” articulation of his own sexuality if you had not brought it forward. When I watch the images of all the yashmaked, burkaed, outspoken women in Teheran today, I am convinced that somehow these sartorial elements we of the west see as obstacles to expression, are somehow bringing a new strength.

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