During a small montage of Brooklyn sites as the VW chugs its way across the Bridge, Warden recites some verse which begins "Who knows Brooklyn? Stranger, O, Stranger..." I have tracked down that poem without success. It sounds like Whitman, but I have never found it in any of his collections. Or was it
just made up for the film? Can somebody help me identify it? Thanks.
Not positive, but I think Thomas (not Tom) Wolfe wrote it...
shareI think it is Whitman. He lived in Brooklyn, didn't he?
share“Who knoweth Brooklyn?” the VW’s driver, Brownsville native Barnet Weiner, asks sardonically. “Stranger, oh, stranger, I answer you. I will answer you that only the hungry-hearted manswarm, the dreamers of dry dreams in the wind-spanned womblocked avenues called Pitkin and Church and Neptune and Ocean and Blake and Rogers and Tilden—” Weiner interrupts his Whitman-Wolfe pastiche to note that they are lost. “In short, chaverim,” he advises his companions, “we are a little, little bit fahrblunged.”This is quoted from Christopher Sorrentino's piece for Tin House called "On Wallace Markfield's TO AN EARLY GRAVE."