ABSTRACT
In the middle of the night during the biggest snowstorm in 50 years, I had a vivid dream. Manhattan Island was a coherent image of words, with landmark places located where they belong on a map. This “visit from the muse” was so astonishing that I jumped out of bed, found the dusty pile of “Manhattan” poem fragments that had sporadically accumulated over several decades, and began to organize them geographically. After many inspirations and transformations, “Manhattan” was published on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. 1 It was a cartographic poem in the form of the island that could be recited aloud or viewed as a map. It was a map made of words: a “wordmap.”
