Description
"Manhattan" by Howard Horowitz, a concrete poem in the shape of Manhattan Island first published in the New York Times on August 30, 1997. The poem's text references various neighborhoods and landmarks — Harlem, the Village, Wall Street, Central Park, Times Square — placed in their approximate geographic positions within the island's outline, so the poem is simultaneously read and navigated. Horowitz is the author of "Close to the Ground" (tree planting poems) and creates cartographic works that visually integrate geography, history, and poetry. The piece sits at the intersection of concrete poetry, typographic art, and mapping — a literary work whose meaning depends on spatial arrangement, connecting to the traditions of Guillaume Apollinaire's calligrams and the shaped verse of George Herbert.
