In 2009 pinhole photographer Stefan Killen was shooting the NYC harbor for a commercial story about sunken Guggenheim treasure in the waters off Staten Island. Without realizing it he was, from the Staten Island Ferry, being pulled into the imagery that Whitman said future readers of his poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” would experience. Digging deeper into his ferry-riding Stefan read the poem and poet Howard Nelson’s essay on it. Nelson’s observations — about the poem’s kinesthetic quality and about how, in his daily ferry-riding, Whitman was moving among archetypes — reminded him of his blurry, dream-like photos and sparked an idea: to make an interdisciplinary book on “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” that included the poem, his photos, and essays. Join Stefan, Howard, and Whitman scholar Karen Karbiener as they read the poem, screen over fifty pinhole photos of New York City ferries, and discuss Whitman’s sweeping meditation on time, our interconnectedness, and the transcendent power of art.
Stefan Killen is a Brooklyn-based graphic designer and pinhole photographer. His photos, which have been exhibited at the Alan Klotz Gallery and the Center for Book Arts, are included in the award-winning book Out of Focus: Pinhole Cameras and Pinhole Photographs. Stefan is working on several books of his photography, including a meditation on Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” In celebration of Whitman’s 2019 bicentennial he produced Happy Birthday, Walt Whitman, a national public reading of the poem that introduced participants to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and Whitman’s vision of a democratic United States with the question, “What is it then between us?”
Howard Nelson taught for nearly fifty years in the Humanities Division of Cayuga Community College (Auburn, NY), where he is now Professor Emeritus. His books of poetry include Gorilla Blessing, The Nap by the Waterfall, All the Earthly Lovers: Selected & New Poems, and most recently That Was Really Something. He is a contributing editor to The Hollins Critic, where many of his essays about contemporary writers have appeared. He is the author of Robert Bly: An Introduction to the Poetry in the Columbia University Introductions to 20th Century American Poetry series, and he edited On the Poetry of Galway Kinnell: The Wages of Dying Is Love for the University of Michigan Under Discussion series. He was a contributor to Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia and A Companion to Walt Whitman, and his selection from Whitman, Earth, My Likeness: Nature Poetry of Walt Whitman, was published by North Atlantic Books.
Karen Karbiener, president and founding member of the Walt Whitman Initiative, is a Whitman scholar and teaches at New York University. Winner of the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress and a Fulbright recipient, she was the curator of “Whitman and the Promise of America” (South Street Seaport Museum, NY, July – December 2005), “Poet of the Body: New York’s Walt Whitman” (with Susan Tane; Grolier Club, NY, May – July 2019), and most recently, “Robust American Love: Avid Visions by Walt Whitman and John Ransom Phillips” (BlackBook Presents, Brooklyn, August – September 2019).