Walt Whitman:

a 21st Century Gathering

Michael Heller
SAG HARBOR, WHITMAN, AS IF AN ODE 


I.

And so again, to want to speak—as though floating on this world—
thoughts of Sagaponak, of Paumanok, "its shore gray and rustling," 

To remember late sun burnishing with a pale gold film 
the feathery ghosts of blue heron and tern, of that same light 

furrowed in the glyphed tracks to bay water.  And at night, 
to scrape one's own marks in sand, a bio-luminescence underfoot 

by which we playfully signaled, as the heat of bodies also 
was a signal to turn to each other in the guest house buried 

in deep sunk must and trellised scents.  As though, again, to be 
as with mossed graves which, even as they lie under new buds, 

are worn and lichened, chiselled over with letter and number, 
entrapped, as in the scripts of museum words, trypots and scrims.  

And so, like whalers, whose diaries record a lostness to the world 
in the sea's waves, to find ourselves in talk's labyrinth where 

the new is almost jargon, and we speak of lintels of a house 
restored or of gods who stage their return at new leaf or where 

pollen floats on water in iridescent sheens.  

 
II.

But also now, to sense mind harrowed in defeats of language, 
Bosnia, Rwanda, wherever human speech goes under a knife.  

And to be unable to look to the sea, as to some watery possibility 
which would break down the hellish rock of history that rides 

above wave height as above time.  Strange then, these littorals 
teeming with sea life, with crab and ocean swallow.  Strange then, 

to walk and to name— glad of that momentary affluence. 
And so to find again the vibratory spring that beats against 

old voicings, old silences, this waking to those fables where 
new bees fly up, birthed spontaneously from the log's hollow, 

to hear again the latinate of returning birds keeping alive 
curiosity and memory, as if the ear were to carry us across hope's

boundary, remembering the words:  Now, I will do nothing but listen!  


	
from Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems — Salt Press, (2003) 
 
 


Alan Catlin
Walt Whitman's Melancholy Tide 

Out into rain stretched roadways
    cobblestones flickered by the skimming 
    hooves of a multitude of horses
    burned by the vicissitudes of war;
Down refuse strewn alleys, drunk and bedraggled
    sinners, homeless angels wounded by
    peripheral wars in honky tonk ale houses,
    brain fevered and dazzled by unfettered years
    of carnal dissipations, pores leaking effluvial
    blood and pus and beer;
Staggered by impossible situations: whole armies laid down
    in ruinous combat, ravaged by disease, dysentery,
    incessant scourgings of the flesh, delirium tremens
    like dreaming a St. Vitus Dance of death;
Cruising the shadowy, ruined places, mass burial grounds,
    the Civil War dead revisit after hospital hours carrying
    tapers along Washington DC avenues, caissons for the killers
    and the killed, muffled drums beating for the assassins
    and the assassinated deformed and deformants clutching
    missing limbs to torn, open breasts hearth fires
    extinguished inside and out, taps signaling the dousing
    of campfires all along ravished battlefields, listen close
    and you can hear them, the tramp of the embalmed
    armies marching into twilight Time.


Walt Whitman's Sickness of the Well
 
       "The doctors say my sickness is from having too
       deeply imbibed poison into my system from hospital." 
                         —   Walt Whitman, 1864
 
Places of asylum are not
the safest places to be
in times of war such as
these when diseases are
flourishing as disinfectants,
medical supplies against
communicable diseases are
rare, non-existent or unknown.
This is how we, the well,
acquire the sicknesses of
dying and infirmity, how we
come to emulate what
cannot be cured.  As we
look into the faces of those
who are no longer human,
their lives stolen by pain,
grief, illnesses beyond our
knowing, we become as
they are; something that
cannot be saved.  If we
survive it will be worse
than what they were made
to endure a living hell.
No mirror made by man
will hold our reflections.
 
 
Walt Whitman's Sacrificial Years
 
The poet's scribbled caption beneath
a period, studio photograph says,
"Civil War Soldier," though this odd
looking man wore a civilian's suit;
seated on a chair by a dwarfing column,
one that makes him appears somehow
malformed: a protuberant forehead
intense as Edgar Allan Poe eyes staring
straight ahead, the kind of gaze that sees
what no other man would and be glad
of it, an intensity, one suspects, not
applied to playing the guitar prop he is
holding.  Unlike the other keepsake
portraits of men Whitman helped nurse
back to health or eased from this world
to another, this casualty wears no regimental
colors, no stripes of rank but it is compelling
for the long-after-the-decisive-battle wound,
the incongruity of man and objects, but
mostly for what is missing, the greater
part of his left leg represented by a trouser
rolled into a circle, a dark hole, a fatal gap
bridging the points of what came after;
an unassuageable pain and the near maddening
insistence of the phantom limb.
 

Walt Whitman, Phrenologist
 
is justly famous for a time,
his long, thin fingers described
by those who felt them as:
penetrating as pincers heated
over a blacksmith's forge, his
breath on the scalp, bare neck,
as fierce as a bellows or hard,
adamantine as sculpted stone
fingers scraping the humps on
the subject's head, wrenching out
hidden spirits from tonsure tufts,
cranial mounds black birds of death
are hidden in awaiting just this sort
of release or soft, supple fingers,
tracing elliptical shapes of what
rests beneath bone, drawing hemi-
spheres to the surface as maps to
unknowable worlds, as transcribed
scores of symphonic scale reduced
to one instrument only the phrenologist
may play; some who had their fortune
charted swear by the future foretold,
all the blown glass embryos that lay
scattered at his feet after, tiny
monsters growing within the bulbs,
each small world self-contained,
better than no worlds at all, what was
before.  Others, though, felt an all-
inclusive dark curtain slowly being 
drawn over their faces, then their bodies,
their kin, suggesting a long string
of breech births, one longer than MacDuff's
interrupted, his knotted line, severed at
the wrist, a whole lifetime of pain
the only light the phrenologist allows in.
 



Cameron Scott
Fishing with Whitman

With a cork handled rod he casts his line across the water
like a giant eraser forgetting everything about his life.

With a cork handled rod, water that fell as snow
passes around his legs, and rocks turn over
beneath his felt soled steps.

His long white hair curls in the morning light
tumbling from beneath his hat.

Trout flee from his shadow and so he crouches down
placing the fly on a side current
watching it slowly carry beneath blades of overhanging grass.

It isn't necessary to call sparrows
by kneeling in silent prayer
for they spin in currents of air
above the hatching mayflies.

But still he calls on them from a house 
of pine boughs, pressing his hand into the earth.

And the day spreads across the fresh sheets of the wind.
And he has searched a thousand rivers and will search a thousand more.  

The past is a wide open interpretation, this old man that smells of fish and sage
crushed and swept into the pocket of his flannel shirt.

I celebrate rivers,
And what they are I have become.
Every drop of water carries me onward.

Often on the horizon I have smelled water
Or heard, in the quiet evening, the rush of water over stone,
And have drawn near upon my knees, parting the tall river grass
Next to a heron, or parted the spring willows and been whisker to whisker
With a beaver chewing on a soft green shoot.

Beneath the ceiling of the dusky evening
Stars appear in the quiet water, rings spread
From rising trout, rippling a universe
Where I have felt all things emerging, all things falling away.

And though snow falls for the thousandth time, 
Henceforth I shall ask nothing more of the winter than for it to end. 
Give me the mud, give me the soft moist earth, 
until the underlying ice, ten inches deep, thaws into spring.

Henceforth the snow shall come at night while I am asleep
and steal away at dawn like the ghosts of all my lovers.

From this river I love most that which does not come from heaven
Though all things come from the river, and the river is where all things end.

 


Christina Manweller
His 3-Tined Life

in the dark a migraineur works an alphabet of curtailment

    pelican in the Mojave  :   pinion pinned  :   prowless scull

(a lark!)

He will not give up.   He cannot give up.  Brother to Whitman 
and his feuding trees, he can't help himself.  He works the sounds      
he shapes      he plumbs

The cicatrix on left temple a distinct point from which to depart, he takes 
hold the characters the interstices

morphs, knits, alchemizes he spools
it all back

unzippered

        it takes wing     taking wing it glimmers

emboldened (ensorcled?) by his soaring syllabary

the migraineur squints outward now he      unfurls

lifts off in a breviary of ascending 
                                     consonant syllable vowel      he pings!     
sings!     scintillates! 

he and newborn tongue
beat at pages they whip up a whole new world

        together driving outward             to perfection    thoroughly

he comes down bled comes down on his back spent.  He's shielded 
now folded up into a little turtle song.  The anfractuous efforts not a lark

    —no, no a mercy!

with Walt, he's unlocked a blest a glorious paradox oh stumbled upon 
a wordy savior so bless him bless him    bless his scratched and scriven soul
 
 


Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
To Ask and Be Answered 

I am thinking of Walt Whitman 
because the lilac bush in the backyard is blooming, 
because its canes are swaying and rocking, 
swaying and rocking in the stiff spring breeze, 
because its uncomfortably sweet scent coming 
through my bedroom door smells like death, 
because I wish I could say kaddish for the April deaths 
of my grandfather and father and brother, 
because an unkindness of ravens has taken up residence among the 
flowering dead nettles and in their voices 
the chant of another whose visions invade my dreams. 
I am thinking of Walt Whitman 
because I have found myself lonely despite my desires, 
because yesterday I wandered in the supermarket 
with the ghosts of two venerable bards and envied their eloquence, 
because among my intimates I count four poets, 
four musicians, and an artist, all thirsty and true, 
because I want to embrace my lover but find myself 
driving him away with rage and venom, 
because I stood a long time last night gazing up at the moon and her 
beloved Venus dancing through the moist night-air gathering stars as souvenirs. 
I am thinking of Walt Whitman 
because there is a certain slant of sorrow in my heart 
that has transformed everything; 
because I am aching to be expansive, 
to embrace the world as it is,
because I believe that loving the world 
in its wholeness might save me from melancholy, 
because I am convinced that in the refuge of 
his wisdom i will find equanimity 
because I am desperate for a reaching 'round of his lyrical arms, 
desiring to imagine myself sacred in his eyes, 
longing to ask and to be answered in affirmation, 
are you thinking of me, Walt Whitman?

from Work is Love Made Visible — U. of New Mexico Press (2009)
 




Kallima Hamilton
SPONTANEOUS AS ANY
     
           "Behaviour lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass"
     
    We are cloud flesh and athletic snow,
    we run hot and cold—yes—snowflakes
    turning into white lilacs, we drink pale
    blonde beer on sultry summer evenings,
    kiss like Eskimos nestling into moist
    fur patches—I touch you over & over,
    we become drunk on the green eyes of trees,
    delirious, happy—sustaining truth for hours
    til it is subsumed by BIGGER TRUTH—
    the beauty we find swallowing great bubbles
    of fresh air—oh—out in the open
    we turn, we frolic, we are little beasts
    in mud ponds, we sing and shine like
    purple finches, we annihilate egos,
    becoming our Self in this delicious void,
    we lick each other's citrus skin, paint
    the rolling hills with the pinkened bones
    of sunset, ride the electric rush down
    canyon walls.  We go deep and far
    exploring, dip toes in the turquoise
    roil of the Santiam, skinnydipping
    beneath moss-dripping waterfalls,
    go high at altitude tripping on wee
    alpine flowers.  Dizzy from both
    the tiny and the huge, we collapse
    into the miraculous overwhelm of being,
    this invisible yet palpable presence of pure bliss.




Paul Pines
So Long


                                         O thicker and faster— (So long!)
                                         O crowding too close upon me..
                                                        —Walt Whitman

So long
means
              Good-bye or
              It's been so
              long since I've
              seen you or
              will be
              so long before we
              meet again or the suggestion
              of unspecified duration so

Sal was spreading mayonnaise
on the mortadella
while a young Puerto Rican
stared at the knife
and sang:
              Make it nice
              Make it nice
              Put a little more
              meat on that bread

and we laughed
because an April sun was turning
everything in the Deli
liquid gold and
we were warm
after a cold winter
my 39th

then Sal
buttered me a roll
poured a coffee to go
and put them in a bag
as the light struck me
like the slap of
a Zen Roshi

and I realized
it would be easier
than I had thought
to enter my 40's
with a little
dignity
regardless
of my
circumstances
so I told Sal
                 So long, Sal,
                 so long


	
from Taxidancing — Ikon (2007) 
 




Nancy Flynn
Ode to the Past & Present Wilt of the Daisy, Bellis perennis, 
   Pressed in The Illustrated Leaves of Grass,     
   a June 1973 Graduation Gift from L


Thirty-eight years between verso and recto and only today I found your white-
   ray confetti, 
            day's ease, dazey, 
            flattened above a skinny-bent stem.

Native of meadow, field, dump, I remember walking home after studying at L.'s
            and that patch, white like a constellation fallen across the rubble 
            that plugged the abandoned Babylon Mine.
L. whose father died when we were ten and her mother slow-dying of cancer so 
   L. worked after school in  the Frye Boot factory across the river 
            to help pay the radiation bills.

*

Chaucer christened you "eye of the day"—half-crazy 
            for the love of you, daisy, the way your head closes at night 
            and rainy days but forever returns, open, reassurance at dawn.

Your every petal's a flower and in your center flowers, too.
You wilt all the others in the vase like Sophia Loren striding into the Oscars. 
Daisy, I still see you now: multitudes!

*

We were flower children in training too young to hitch to Woodstock
            so we buried our bras in that corner of Appalachia, 
            tromped our own Yasgur's Farm midnights up the power lines 
            for more gathering—mad, naked summer night—
            pot parties beside what would be "Chelsea Morning" fields of you, 
            daisy, essence of innocence—
                                                   Oh, we were far past that.
L. had already balled (as we called it then) Joey Cunningham,
            seven years her senior, an ex-con-cum-drug-dealer.
While I had Bob, too-many-to-tick-mark afternoons parking in the shadow 
            of the slag heap up Vine Street—amazing the ways you can 
   tangle two 
            bodies, warm honey compost in the front seat of a Willys Jeep.

*

Speed the decades since we daisy-chained that necklace stem 
            to stem to stem and donned, instead, our serious shoes.
Like you, my circadian marguerite, I've endured—
            the parade of nights, one more dreaming girl who forgot 
            we live the Riddle of the Sphinx.  
Snatched by the roots, every bunch of hopeful's withering soon.

Once plucked, you had to be sacrificed, too.
He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me—
            knots to tie off any prayer of blossoming
            look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening 
            lies. 




Spiel
Whitman's way


I may not be the scholar to make my case, but—I propose (though in ever
shifting proportions) all cultures from all times are fundamentally the
same in this way: Each has its poets/artists/seers who have a distinctive
voice, stand outside the norm, have balls, are censored and perhaps
ignored, hated or even slaughtered by the mainstream—possibly rejected by
their own kind. It's sometimes difficult to remember that Walt Whitman, now
held up as the darling of American poetry, was once cast aside as one of
those dreadful weirdos. 

During an age of literary conservatism, Whitman boldly portrayed sex
sensually and scorned the courteous, somewhat constipated formality of his
time when he wrote:

I press with slow rude muscle
I brace myself effectually, I listen to no entreaties,
I dare not withdraw till I deposit what has so long accumulated within me. 

It's all relative, isn't it, where any given culture draws its lines. Many
scholars attribute such writings of outsiders to courage. I contend that
courage is little more than lack of fear for pressing ahead upon one's
convictions.

Artists tell us about history. Whitman, living in a boring and homogenous
culture, was a precursor of the pack, as any great artist must be. He took
risks with downright sexy passages which remain, not oblique to my eye,
but, well, utterly sexy today. Dig this Whitman passage: A visit to the
garden ditch?

…Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.

He speaks of "touch."

You villain touch! what are you doing? My breath is tight in its throat,
Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.
Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath'd hooded sharp-tooth'd touch!

How positively embedded. Blatant. Is it any wonder this fleshy Bohemian was
cast aside by the staid literati of his day?     

Right now, all my urges indicate that we are no longer appalled, nor
necessarily turned on or off by, most sexual language (except those on the
extreme religious right—and I often wonder if they are as appalled as they
pretend), so we breeze right past it. In a poem, it simply is the addition
of colorful but formerly forbidden language to advance the "picture." 

So we're only faced with the simple question: What else is the poem about? 

In seeking the impetus for the use of explicit language in my own work, I
look back to the 40s and the whisper of Mrs. W. behind my back into my
mother's ear to announce that she was uhhh… pregnant. It made no sense to
me as an eight-year old, given that I had just assisted my father in
lambings by more than one hundred ewes in death defying below-zero weather.
I knew where babies came from. And I always felt embarrassed as a kid at my
father's churchy, pink-faced embarrassment when his male friend's used the
word, hell, in my presence.

Fast forward to 1989. The first word I expressed outside the hospital room
after my father's doctor informed me that he, only seconds before, had
perished: Fuck! I shouted: His most despised word. And I'm certain if he
was hovering above, he was not at all surprised at my choice of words. He'd
come to expect it of me in my adult years.      

Now—2008. Me: His queer son, a poet. Of late, wondering if my father had
ever read Walt Whitman—I don't know. I was not a poet when he was alive. We
had never talked of poetry. And I wonder if Whitman were alive today, would
he weave explicit language into his poems? Would he say Fuck! upon learning
of the death of his father—or, better yet, the death of a lover? In his
brilliance, I certainly do not find him cowering in the cause of dignity.
He was a rebel. And so, by nature, am I. I lack his genius. But not his
passion, as in his lines:

Perfect and clean the genitals previously jetting, and perfect and 
        clean the womb cohering,
The head well grown and proportioned and plumb,…

In theory, having bounced my premise off several revered colleagues who
know well the work of Whitman, the answer comes up: Yes, he would be likely
to use the explicit words of today, taking care to write aesthetically
pleasing lines. And he might love the first fifteen minutes of the bawdy
atmosphere of a Slam Poetry session, but quickly find himself bored by the
bullshit of it     

Before an attentive audience of Pueblo poets, I performed one of my more
ornery poems; ornery because it takes an unpredictable twist in its fourth
stanza (which happens not to be explicit in language). Humor of the twist
aside, its lines are written intentionally and with an ear for aesthetic
movement. I delivered it with characteristic passion, holding Whitman in
mind—genuinely believing he might have applauded it if he were there,
(second and third "explicit" stanzas below, "twist" stanza not included). 

he plugs me through the night 
makes me believe he needs me
moans words of heat i starve to hear
& when he splits 
i'm memorably riveted

ass tingling like a twinkling star
moustache fragrant with his second load
sheets drenched with his third 
my mattress bursting 
with the wildness of his air 


There I stood in the old Union Depot in Pueblo's Old Historic District,
during this age where increasingly large chunks of primetime TV are
occupied by mega-funded adsters hawking products from detergents to lawn
fertilizer masterfully geared to appeal to our most base and prurient
psyches. In this age when primetime is rife with women of all ages who all
but bare their nipples in unlikely situations, (churches, school board
meetings, funerals, on Wall Street), where frequent and nearly blatant
sexual vernacular is the norm rather than the exception, where queerness is
often presented without prejudice—suddenly, castigation arose from within
ranks of that audience of local poets about my frequent use of "explicit"
language during my performances; apparently, secretive protests were made
about my distasteful appearance; I was dis-invited from appearing there
again!

Yet I'd envisioned Whitman wearing old Levis and a faded blue denim shirt
like mine—standing at my side, egging me on. Outraged by my dis-invitation?
You bet your sweet ass! Old Walt likely would have said: "Fuck this shit,
dude. Let's get loaded."

But wait…I'd not even used the word fuck in my poem. Well, maybe in my
intro, IF I had used it, it might have been in deference to the day my
father died. You know, like: I dedicate my life and use of language to my
late father…

~

I've been bedding down with Whitman of late—not for sex of course. I am too
old and weary for his taste. But as I lay me down to sleep, for the comfort
I milk nightly from these, his exquisite words:

Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this touches a man,
(Is it night? Are we here together alone?)
It is I you hold and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms…

Ohhh, give it to me, Walty, yeahhhh….