DUKES FANS:
“And your very flesh shall be a
great poem.”
“A
child said to me, “What is the grass?” How shall I answer
him?”
“I am
large. I contain multitudes”
“Not
I nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far, It is within reach”
From Walt Whitman’s, Leaves of Grass
As
a kid I loved reading, and I loved reading all sorts of things. My mother used
to ban having cereal boxes on the kitchen table during breakfasts because I
would be reading the boxes and not paying attention to the other member of the
family gathered at the table. But Mom loved that I loved reading, and she supported
it. We had encyclopedias Mom provided, and she would regularly asked me what I
had read in them that day and to read things to her from them. We also had a
young person’s mini encyclopedia called. Childcraft that included
volumes on science, geography, folklore, literature and more.. I devoured them,
particularly the literature volumes. They were my entry into the worlds of
mythology, fiction, drama and poetry. Their influence has stayed with me my
entire life.
I think of that now because this year the
nation is celebrating the 200th birthday of Walt Whitman, a man many
consider to be to father of a truly American poetry. Whitman wasn’t in my Childcraft books, as I
recall, but those books made me ready for him. I had memorized several poems in
the Childcraft volumes, especially Henry Longfellow’s Paul Revere’s Ride
and Hiawatha, and Alfred Noyes’ The Highwayman. I loved the rhyme
patterns and the descriptive language in these poems; “The moon was a
ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas” from The Highwayman is still one of my favorite lines of poetry. These
opened me up to the power and magic of words and some of the ways they could be
used. So when, in my high school years, I was encountering new friends in
Rittenhouse Square and the coffeehouses to which my music was taking me, I was also
ready to encounter new approaches to poetry. I heard and read the Beats,
including Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Le Roi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Denise
Levertov, and William Carlos Williams. I also encountered historically, spiritually,
and politically centered poets and modern and surreal poets, including
Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Olson, Ishmael Reed, Kenneth Patchen, Diane di Prima,
Audre Lorde, and tons more. The same Philadelphia Free Libraries that fed my
insatiable curiosity for music at thi time also fed my appetite for poetry and
poets. And as I read more about my favorite poets and their influences, most of
them made regular and strong references to the importance of Walt Whitman and especially
Leaves of Grass.
In reading, studying about, and loving the
works of all the aforementioned poets, I came over time to better understand
Whitman and what he did for and gave to American thought and verse. The
directness those poets feature owe a lot to his unflinching looking at himself,
the places and people around him and what they not only were, but also what
they could mean and be. Whitman was among the first poets to intentionally
write in free, unrhymed verse, and I came[JC1] to see that not rhyming or having a repeated rhythmic
pattern in a poem could allow a writer to do and say things in ways that were
more emotional, direct, and meaningful. He also delighted in the specialness of
the commonplace and the ordinary. He made it clear that if we open a bit and expand
our vision and our awareness, simple things, such as a leaf of grass, could “be
links to much bigger and larger concepts…could, “contain multitudes.” He also saw, named and gave space for the
role so many emotional and sensual things have in our lives and being, no
matter how we might want to downplay, disguise or ignore them. He saw that
looking at ourselves and our world straight on and honestly could have immense
value. And he wrote in a way that forced us, sometimes lovingly and sometimes
intensely, to do just that. Honestly. Directly. Unflinchingly.
I have read Leaves of Grass several times,
and I will read it again this year. It is one of those works that caught me at
the same time it mystified and infuriated me. It is a powerful work: one that always
intrigues, arouses, confuses, angers, and calls to me. Yes, it took me some time
and re-reading to get comfortable with the self-awareness, analysis, and
prodding he was doing both with himself and calling on us, his readers, to do
in our own lives. But each time I read it, in my twenties, thirties, forties
and fifties, it rewarded me in ways I did not expect and could not have
imagined at the time. I expect it will
do so again. Happy 200th birthday, Walt. Thank you for giving me the gift of you
looking at yourself as one of the guides helping me to look at myself and my
world. My enduring thanks to thee, and to your many and continuous offspring.
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