Although I was the only Tech student able to attend the Whitman Conference, there was a diverse mix of opinions, cultures and presentations that somehow managed to include all aspects of the project. For example the students from Novi Sad translated Whitman’s poems into Serbian while the students from Mary Washington came up with a mix of Papers, Poems and Video Projects.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. To start with, the train ride over was absolutely gorgeous. Looking out the window, I saw streams, open fields and old buildings – things you don’t see that often in the city (At least not without having to pay or wander deep into the middle of a large park).
In a way, there was a physical time line along the tracks. The closer we got to Camden, the older the buildings. Most of the remaining structures were churches, mansions or old factories.
The Camden Campus was everything you’d expect from a dorm college. Besides large yet somehow unimposing buildings that housed classes, the campus was large with plenty of areas to lounge around or study outside of class, and of course a Starbucks because far and few between are the college students who can go the entirety of their academic career without coffee.
After a short wait, the rest of the students arrived and I was finally able to put faces to some of the writers whose work I’d read over the semester. It’s one thing to see an image of a person online, but it’s completely different to meet them in person.
There was a Whitman statue on campus that everyone stopped to look at on the way to the campus center to lounge, talk about our experience and wait for pizza.
Everyone I talked with agreed that the project and the various types of work that went into it were completely new and challenging experiences. Personally that surprised me since most of the students were english majors and graduating ones at that. However challenging the class was, everyone’s opinion of the course was the same. The Looking for Whitman project was something that made the college experience unique not only for the students, but for the professors as well. The mixing of technology – blogging, tweeting and making use of social networking- with classic poetry made for a class that produced work as original and quirky as Whitman himself.
A perfect example of that is Sam P’s final video project ‘In search of Wendell Slickman’ which mixed the life of Elvis Presley with Walt Whitman’s which as unlikely as the idea sounds, works perfectly.
We watched Sam’s project along with the presentation of a few others over pizza before hopping on the bus to take a tour of Whitman’s final home at 328 Mickle Street.
No cameras were allowed inside the house, but everything in it was photo worthy. Chairs that Whitman sat in, the stove he cooked on, the stairs he walked up and the bed he slept in – we got to see it all and experience Whitman in a way you can’t get just by reading his work. I couldn’t get any pictures of inside, but I got plenty of photos outside the house and of his garden.
The trip didn’t end here. After visiting Whitman’s home we went to the only other place in Camden where we could feel a physical connection to him – his grave.
Unfortunately the Cemetery was closed, but that didn’t stop us from getting in to see Whitman. A conveniently placed and obviously well used hole in the fence allowed us to get to the final resting place of the great writer and bring some closure to the semester. The area in which Whitman and his family are interred is absolutely beautiful.
It was an emotional moment for many of the students as we took turns reading the last few lines of Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’. Reading one of Whitman’s greatest works in a place where he could be truly felt brought some closure to what has been the most challenging and rewarding project I’ve ever participated in. The Looking for Whitman project was a long journey that led many a student in frustrating circles, searching for some link to Whitman to make his presence more tangible than just some old writer remembered only through his books and honestly I don’t think anyone could phrase it better than Whitman himself:
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.
– Walt Whitman “Song of Myself”
It was also a little intimidating to be taking a class with English graduate students. Their responses were always well thought out and they thoroughly analyzed Whitman’s work. They also went the extra distance when it came to doing video projects. I honestly didn’t know what to say in response to most of their posts because they covered almost every base of the whatever topic was being discussed.
I wouldn’t recommend this class to anyone who already has a heavy course load or isn’t accustomed to or willing to accommodate hard work. There’s no way to earn a decent grade in this class if you aren’t willing to take the time out to read and update blog posts, travel around to various Whitman related sites and do heavy research. On a more personal note, this at least gave me a glimpse of what’s expected of you when doing graduate level work. It’s definitely not easy, but at least I know I can do it.
The field trips and projects were a welcome breath of fresh air in comparison to the rest of my classes. You can learn just as much out of the classroom as in it, and this class was proof of that. I learned more about Brooklyn than I ever knew before- about the borough’s history and about the significance of landmarks that I’ve seen but ignored all my life. I got to visit a library that looks like it came out of a bookworm’s dream. Despite all the late nights and pots of coffee I needed to finish everything- the class was worth taking.
]]>Bands of filthy wretches whose very touch was offensive to a decent man; drunken loafers; scoundrels whom the police and criminal courts would be ashamed to receive in their walls.
He went on to call them “sly, false, deceitful villains” and true to his nativist beliefs called on his fellow Americans to defend the country against an “unterrified democracy” ruled by “Irish rabble”.
Whitman seems to have despised Catholics, calling them “a gang of false and villainous priests, whose despicable souls never generate any aspiration beyond their own narrow and horrible and beastly superstition”. He never passed up a chance to criticize them, a far cry from the accepting poet I’ve come to know over the semester, who was never this blatantly insensitive and insulting even when addressing people with views that opposed his. Whitman was and is indeed the people’s poet, so long as you’re not Catholic, Irish or an immigrant.
]]>Then we moved on to the Brooklyn Promenade where Abraham Lincoln himself once said “There may be finer views than this in the world, but I don’t believe it.” While the landscape is notably different than what Lincoln saw during his time in New York, the impact is the same. When you know where to look, New York can be breathtakingly beautiful.
Even today, there are still water taxis.
Even from a distance, the Brooklyn Bridge is an impressive structure- you don’t need to be close up to see all the detail and hard work that went into a bridge that decades after its construction, still stands solid.
After that we made our way over to the Eagle Warehouse, a now residential building that once housed the ‘Brooklyn Eagle’ where Whitman worked as an editor. Whitman used to look out his second floor window at Manhattan street. The street below it is still cobble-stoned.
Standing on the uneven stone, I couldn’t imagine how people drove carriages or even walked on the streets without falling over.
The last stop on out tour was the Fulton pier. Or outside of if at least. The pier was closed for filming today- go figure. That aside, we read the first 4 sections of “Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry while taking in the sights and sounds of Old Fulton Street.
I didn’t just learn about Whitman today, I gained a greater appriciation for the borough I live in.
]]>Mother, Father, Water, Earth, Me:
First off, I can’t help commenting on the descriptions of the New York Whitman grew up in.
Many of the things Whitman lived through, I can’t really relate to. ‘The Red Death’? I can’t imagine living in a world where one disease could kill 100’s of people a day without a cure in sight. The book describes farms and open fields- the last things to come to my mind when thinking about New York City. The only streams I see are torrents of water going down the gutter on rainy days and all the horse stables have either been demolished or converted into modern looking apartment buildings. Not to say there’s nothing of the New York he grew up in left- the ferry ride from Long Island is more or less the same, and Brooklyn can still easily be seen as the ‘City of Churches’. You can’t go more than 15 blocks in any given direction without seeing one.
The Shadow and the Light of a Young Man’s Soul
My generation is used to keyboards and tiny entry pads, not selecting characters out of boxes to be laid on printers. Reading about typesetting reminds me of the things I take for granted like printing out directions on a map or a last minute homework assignment…They’re all things I do in under 30 seconds when the job Whitman did had to take at least 10 minutes, probably more.
]]>Suffering through hardships, fighting tooth and nail to lay down your opinion- to chip it into the stone of history so that it may be appreciated not for the society of your time, but for all the generations that may come later. That is the true fate of a great writer.
]]>What makes the Brooklyn Bridge so special (to me at least) is that it never changes- no matter how far back in time you look it stands a solid fixture in New Yorks rich history.
]]>They didn’t have air tanks or fire repellant gear and technology to pump water from engine to hose had just been invented. Fire hydrants weren’t readily available like they are today and there was often a distance between a water source and the fire. There was also the issue of how many firefighters were on the job. At the time of the fire, there were only about 1,200 firefighters in a city in the middle of an economic boom. Though this is just my opinion, I think that the fire wouldn’t have been as devistating if the city hadn’t been overcrowded.
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The runaway slave came to my house and stopped outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsey and weak,
And went where he sat on a log, and led him in and assures him,
And brought water and filled a tub for his sweated body and bruised feet,
And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north,
I had him sit next me at table….my firelock leaned into the corner.
I picked this part of the poem to write on because it is the most distant to me. During the 19th century South, African Americans didn’t sit at the table to eat dinner or get clean clothes and they most certainly weren’t taken into the home of random Caucasians in the south for a week. They were hunted like criminals and had bounties put on their head. To house, bathe, feed and clothe a runaway slave was one of the greatest taboos of the time period. It’s a testament to how different from everyone else Walt Whitman was.
]]>There’s no T.V.
I can’t text,
I can’t call,
I can’t Tweet.
There’s no electricity.
There’s no T.V.
How I got here is beyond me.
I’m printing homework one minute and the next time I look up?
I’m in another century.
Printing.
On one of those ancient printing press thingies. How? Why? Don’t ask me.
Well…technically not printing…
More like making the ink.
I haven’t been here long, not more than a day.
But apparently I’m a printer’s apprentice.
The ‘Printer’s Devil’… what a name…
It’s not because the job’s evil… I think.
Maybe it has more to do with the fact you end up covered in that God forsaken ink.
At the end of the work day I let my feet carry me, as my mind drifts away.
It seems like hours…It probably was.
I’m spacey that way.
The lights around me are lit with gas, what with the lack of electricity.
I walk to the door of a nearby house and dig in my pocket for a key.
…I’m used to solid pavement, cars and trains…since when is my house surrounded by trees?
Judging from a sign on the corner, I’m somewhere in Long Island.
Goodie.
There’s still no T.V.
The smell of alcohol perforates the air.
There are bottles on the floor…
I don’t think I want to be here.
But my stomach grumbles- arguing otherwise and I can’t understand my sudden fear.
I mean, other than being in some foreign house in a strange time
Where you can buy expensive things for a dime
Where lights are lit by gas
Where printing is done by hand
Why ever would I need to be afraid?