Many of you may recall sometime in elementary or middle school writing a poem about the weather in the shape of a raindrop — your teacher probably gave you this exercise to teach you what poetry is. But think about this: humans invented rhyme and meter to make stories easier to memorize and re-tell orally, long before the written word. For an art form that originated as strictly spoken, that little elementary school raindrop poem is arguably a pretty radical departure — taking the poetic form all the way to its other extreme: an arrangement of words on the page so visual that it cannot be conveyed out loud; it requires the physical page.
You can think of today's poem as a grown-up version of that popular visual poetic form, the concrete poem. "Manhattan" by Howard Horowitz first appeared in The New York Times on August 30, 1997. For those of you not familiar with this island covered largely in concrete, the content of Horowitz's words corresponds to their location — so, for example, the unicorn tapestries in the Cloisters are located at the northern most tip of Manhattan Island, just as they are located at the northernmost tip of Horowitz's page.
Enjoy.
Ellen
