Hills & Gardens: News & Views from Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill and Carroll Gardens
Brooklyn Heights Press & Cobble Hill News
By Trudy Whitman

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It was the talk of the town and the "The Talk of the Town." Clinton Street pedestrians were alerting friends and neighbors to the amusing anti-honking poetry that began showing up on utility poles around this time last year in a form that adhered to the rules of Japanese haiku - three lines of 17 syllables in a 5, 7, 5 pattern. The "honku" expressed our collective frustration with insensitive drivers who lean uselessly on their car horns during traffic snarls. Passersby added their own ballpoint verse to the bottom of Aaron Naparstek's poetry, and the press jumped on this great Brooklyn story. NPR's "The Next Big Thing" featured a segment on the Poet of Clinton Street on March 2; The New York Times followed on March 17; and then The New Yorker ran a droll piece in "The Talk of the Town" on March 25. (Faithful Hills & Gardens readers may remember my coverage beginning March 7.) 

Honku was soon a media phenomenon, spreading throughout the country and then across the pond to newspapers in England and Scotland. It even got ink in Sweden. And all because an inspired young man who lived on Clinton Street checked his impulse to throw things at the offensive motorists and took a creative path instead, "I chose to observe the thing that was driving me crazy and tried to crystallize it into a pithy little 5, 7, 5 honku," said Naparstek, a 32-year-old writer and interactive media producer. It was an anger management technique that started to lead to a little bit of change on the street." Naparstek was referring to several days of police action during which officers from the 76th Precinct issued warnings to a surprised bunch of honking Harrys who had become accustomed to exercising their heavy hands with impunity.

Because he has recently moved to Union Street in Park Slope with his fiancée, Joanne Nerenberg, whom he credits with helping him with the, admittedly, illegal poetry postings, Naparstek doesn't know what the current traffic noise is like on Clinton Street. "It's pretty quiet on Union," he observed. Although it's a busy street, his house is in the middle of the block. "That makes a huge difference honk-wise," he noted. "The corner of Clinton and Amity where I used to live was the perfect storm of honking. There was a confluence of traffic phenomena that just made it extremely honky." (Naparstek, an accomplished raconteur, has a tendency to invent words, but, hey, so did Shakespeare.) 

And the honku saga continues. "People started inviting me to tell the honku story and read some poems," Naparstek disclosed. The way-cool literary journal McSweeney's (brainchild of Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) coordinates monthly events at a bar called Galapagos in Williamsburg. The monthly events at a bar called Galapagos, in Williamsburg. The folks involved became aware of the honku through a Brooklyn band, One Ring Zero, that had used one of Aaron Naparstek's honkus as a lyric for a song. At the reading he bowled his friends over, he recalled, because he was sharing the program with One Ring Zero, Thurston Moore of SonicYouth (another well-known band), and Jonathan Ames, an up-and-coming, young Brooklyn author. 

What's next? A book, of course. Publishers had approached Naparstek during the honku press phenomenon, but he thought the subject was a bit thin for a book. Then friend and author Douglas Rushkoff insisted he call an agent he knew. She loved the idea and asked Naparstek to write up a book proposal. The agent then sold the book to Random House in a New York minute. Honku, the Zen Antidote to Road Rage is due out in June. Other honku artists' work accompanies Naparstek's, but the subject matter has been broadened for a more general audience. "It's not just about honking and New York City anymore," Naparstek explained. "Resident rage doesn't exist m most of the rest of the country, but road rage is everywhere."

The behavior of rude drivers has turned Aaron Naparstek into an activist. He has been a regular at meetings of the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming project and, as a member of Transportation Alternatives, has been particularly focused on the Car-Free Prospect Park campaign: "What got me involved in the Prospect Park project was really the whole honku thing. Living in Cobble Hill in the '90s, I was getting a sense that we were being overrun by traffic. I was frustrated by the number of cars, the way cars are driven, and the way motorists act. Honku was the first time I took action and it was a whimsical, quixotic kind of thing. Now I am more directly involved in trying to solve transportation problems." 

Just this month, Transportation Alternatives joined a contingent of City Councilmembers and other car-free advocate groups to celebrate a significant victory; they had convinced the Department of Transportation to test car-free winter hours in Prospect Park for the first time. Until April 4, drivers are not permitted to go through the park on weekdays, except from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Said Naparstek, who does own an automobile himself, "I think it's a real step forward. When you tally up all of the new hours, we created approximately 100 new car-free days in Prospect Park over the course of the year." 

Aaron Naparstek will take over the position this week as Brooklyn Chair of Transportation Alternatives. Oh, yes, he is also very excited about his upcoming wedding in September. The venue for the nuptials? Prospect Park, of course.

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