And here is the brief paper commenting on the chaos I have tried to control:

All These I Feel or Am:

Whitman as Hip-Shaker, Self-Promoter, and Idol

By reading Walt Whitman (the poet; the icon) through the images and sounds/musical attitudes associated with Elvis Presley, and creating the hybrid character Wendell Slickman, I originally intended to investigate the general cast of American celebrity.  Presley and Whitman, by my original thesis, could be used to trace a shared (and therefore repeated/repeatable) pattern of ascendancy in the American public eye, relying first on a provocative, highly sexualized presentation to garner early celebrity, and then on a mid-to-late-career campaign to sanitize that sexual image in favor of a more wholesome, continent-encompassing form of American iconicity.  The result would have been a relatively linear narrative, possible to tell in a video that spoke from beginning to end.

I almost misled myself.  In actuality, Whitman and Presley evince both impulses, to sexually sensationalize and to self-sanctify, from the beginnings of their careers onward.  I also realized, and just as pressingly, that my goal was not to use Whitman and Presley as equal partners in a sweeping commentary on American cultural mores.  Instead, Presley serves as a sort of shorthand for the ICONIC AMERICAN, while his libido-flaunting musical medium allows me to reify the more dramatically performative aspects of “Song of Myself.”  The rock ‘n’ roll documentary, a standard venue for discussing rock musicians that comes fraught with its own stylistic baggage, further allows me a set of characters—performer, commentator, collaborators—that help dramatize what I take to be the central textual enterprise of “Song of Myself”: integrating vastly disparate types of narrative authority into an identifiably central voice, a single figure from which radiates both the kosmos and a set of aphoristic claims large enough to fit it.  Whitman essentially creates that core presence by constantly asserting it, thus presenting an illusion of unity that, if not for the force of his repetitive self-assertion, might easily break apart into disconnected (catalogic) observations, or splinter into disconnected speakers for every different voice or style he absorbs.

Much like Elvis, but to an arguably lesser degree, Whitman stands among a rarefied class of American figures whose fame and cultural relevance derive in great part from heavily disseminated images of him, prompting many American cultural consumers to “assume they know Whitman the poet because they are familiar with some graphic image of him” (Allen 128).  That image most frequently follows the template laid out by William Douglas O’Connor, one of Whitman’s so-called disciples, in a pamphlet that gave Whitman the moniker that has long stood as an emblem of his literary/cultural latter-day sainthood.  “The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication,” published in 1867, valorizes Whitman repeatedly to the point of Christliness, proclaiming that Whitman’s “is the great goodness, the great chastity of spiritual strength and sanity” (2).  Bridging the apparent gulf between this image and Elvis’ venerated hip-shaking, O’Connor goes to great rhetorical lengths to characterize Whitman as “one of the greatest sons of men” at least nominally because the poet had just been dismissed from the Department of the Interior due to the supposed immorality of the 1860 Leaves of Grass (Blake 186).  Whitman’s unblinking acknowledgment of the “disorderly fleshy and sensual” (Library of America 50) constitutes the immorality discovered in his work.  But quite significantly, O’Connor defends that “fleshiness” as just the quality that dignifies Whitman’s writing.

“The Good Gray Poet” calls up the “indecent passages” created by a litany of other writers, like Shakespeare, Dante, Plutarch, Virgil, Goethe, and Byron—those “among the demi-gods of human thought” (O’Connor 8)—and even invokes the Bible’s references to genitalia and sexual contact, in order to color Whitman’s supposed indecency with a golden holiness.  Though O’Connor’s efforts may seem like little more than good discipleship, his pamphlet’s broad and persistent influence has allowed even Whitman’s current readers to inherit an impression of the poet as something of an American apostle, while the pamphlet originating the “good gray poet” title sanctifies Whitman’s performance of sexuality, if not necessarily homoerotic desire, as an expression of his natural godliness.  This management of Whitman’s iconic status bears striking resemblance to the common pop-culture impulse to spiritualize eroticism and deify sexy performers, an impulse represented perhaps most popularly by Elvis fans’ desire to both lust after and create shrines to “the King,” untroubled by the possible contradiction between those two acts (Doss 76).

However, Whitman’s followers cannot be held entirely responsible for their emphasis on the godliness of Whitman’s sexiness—not when the poet’s own writings champion that same conceptual transformation.  Starting with the 1855 version of “Song of Myself,” long before Whitman and his handlers had retroactively consolidated a better (“good-er?”), grayer Poet persona, the poet delivered this avowal: “Magnifying and applying come I, / Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters, / The most they offer for mankind and eternity less than a spirt of my own seminal wet, / Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah and laying them away” (Library of America 73).  Whitman’s speaking persona here not only endows his sexuality with kosmic significance, linking his “seminal wet” with “offers” made to “mankind and eternity,” but also suggests by this stanza’s sequence that the same “seminal spirt” might equal the “dimensions of Jehovah.”  Sex and spirituality thus emanate in like proportion from the single poetic/priapic source.  Why? How?  In large part, because the persona says so.

Whitman’s rhetorical practice in “Song of Myself” finds him both enacting and attempting to neutralize this tension between the flesh-man and the prophetic poet, taking on voices that switch unpredictably from the erotic to the elegiac, and from unrestrained sexuality to reverent self-commentary.  For example, Whitman lends the passage of “Song of Myself” most frequently described as an orgasm an aftershock denouement that remains in the kind of explicit but elevated hyper-phallicism that precedes climax: “Sprouts take and accumulate…. stand by the curb prolific and vital, / Landscapes projected masculine full-sized and golden.”  The next stanza, though a continuation of that thought, and itself including a relatively “graphic” image of the “obstetric forceps of the surgeon,” actually opens with a sudden turn to the philosophical and aphoristic, with the persona heavily reminding the reader that “all truths wait in all things” (56).  Though the two passages share a common grandness of scale, the first quite clearly emerges out of the “indecent” trajectory of foregoing pages, while the second might be found in any “wisdom literature.”  Presumably, the reader should look for no disjunction between the two statements, since the persona wishes him or her to find none.

In fact, Whitman’s chief poetic project seems to be a muscular synthesis of disconnected vocal styles and subjects by virtue of his single, exceptional, even godlike personality.  Using a Bakhtinian analytical model to search “Song of Myself” for signs of textual dialogism, Dana Phillips argues that the poem’s long catalogues, often containing fragments of narrative like the “suicide” that “sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom” (Library of America 33) but preventing those fragments from taking on an intelligibly linear sequence, create “dissipating, centrifugal effects” (204).  By Phillips’ argument, Whitman’s speaker must constantly assert a “unified and unifying” identity, insisting on “his own lyric personhood” in order to “usurp… the utterances of others” (209).  True to its title, “Song of Myself” remains monologically “poetic” in Phillips’ reading of Bakhtin’s term; appropriately, Whitman’s persona admits “many long dumb voices” only with the condition that they come “through me” (Library of America 50).  In my video, I have sought to separate the single Whitman into at least two distinct voices: the demonstratively sexual performer (Wendell proper); and the eloquent, self-promoting “authority” who seems to study an outside specimen but actually specializes in himself (the rock scholargist—scholar/clergyman—who fabricates Wendell’s journal and self-penned eulogy).  By lending both characters long stretches of “Song of Myself,” I sought both to dramatize the division within Whitman’s self-claimed oneness, and to use Whitman’s text as a unifying presence that blurs the division between Wendell and his disciple(s).

This separation of performative Whitman (perhaps best exemplified by the relatively nonsexual line “It is time to explain myself…. let us stand up” (Library of America 79)) and his self-commenting counterpart further enables me to visually represent the ways in which Whitman envisioned the populace that would deliver him iconic status.  Referring principally to the 1855 Leaves Preface’s Emersonian claim that “the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it” (26), David Haven Blake contends that, because “the audience’s image was central to sustaining [Whitman’s] identity as the authentically American bard,” the poet “would use his poems to project a fictive celebrity until true admirers materialized” (63).  The “scholargist” in my video stands in both for Whitman’s disciples and for the poet’s willingness to act as his own greatest fan, thereby illustrating the great disparity between Whitman’s own sense of himself as the fulcrum on which his nation turns, and the reality of American cultural politics that kept his “immoral” brand of aesthetic self-affirmation from receiving the limitless audience he had imagined.  By insisting so stridently that these divided selves must be identified with the persona as a single generative being, Whitman thus accompanies his countless cries for camaraderie with the sense that he carries the burden of a colossal loneliness equal to his self-proclaimed singularity.

Works Cited

Allen, Gay Wilson.  “The Iconography of Walt Whitman.”  The Artistic Legacy of Walt Whitman: A Tribute to Gay Wilson Allen.  Ed.    Edwin Haviland Miller.  New York: New York University Press, 1970.  127-152.  Print.

Blake, David Haven.  Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.  Print.

Doss, Erika.  Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith & Image.  Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1999.  Print.

O’Connor, William Douglas.  “The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication.”  The Walt Whitman Archive.  Ed. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price.  Web.  24 November 2009.

Phillips, Dana.  “Whitman and Genre: The Dialogic in ‘Song of Myself.’”  Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”  Ed. Harold Bloom.  Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003.  195-221.  Print.

Whitman, Walt.  Poetry and Prose.  Ed. Justin Kaplan.  New York: Library of America, 1996.  Print.

And…

Finally, I have prepared a brief guide to the movie’s references/background, in order of appearance:

1. Opening graveyard scene: shot in and around my family’s plot at Elmwood Cemetery in Norfolk, Virginia.  Ellwood and Lucy Lee, whose stone is visible in the title shot, were/are my great-great-grandparents.

2. “1935-1992”: Combines Presley’s birth-date with Whitman’s century-removed year of passing.

3. Performance 1: “I’m Just a Lonely Guy,” released in 1955 on Specialty Records as the B-side to “Tutti Frutti.”  All performances shot in this basement are loosely modeled after the sit-down, girls-sitting-around presentation seen during Elvis’ “1968 Comeback” television performances (for example, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1OLU5IsJ7g).

4. Scholargist: “I have heard what the talkers were talking…. the talk of the beginning and the end… Always the procreant urge of the world” (Library of America 28).

5. Performance 2: “That’s All Right, Mama,” written by Arthur Crudup and released as Elvis’ first single in 1954 on Sun Records.  Contains a verse based on Whitman’s line “Press close barebosomed night!” (47).

6. Shacky Mansionette: extremely loose approximation of Sam Phillips, owner of and producer for Sun (in this case, Slam) Records.

7.  Shacky: “Bootsoles” (88).

8. End of “That’s All Right”: “YAWP” (87).

9. Performance 3: “One Night (of Sin),” written by Dave Bartholomew, Pearl King, and Anita Steiman and released by Elvis in 1958 on RCA.  Elvis tamed the original version, which was preoccupied with a night of sexual profligacy that the lyrics claim would “make the earth stand still,” and substituted these suggestive themes with a banal proposition of faithful monogamy (“One night with you / is what I’m now praying for / The things we two could plan / would make my dreams come true”).  Quite notably, Elvis returned to the original first verse in his ’68 “Comeback” performance of “One Night,” choosing to re-sexualize a song that he and his handlers had long before sanitized. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plQIs3zoDHE for the 1968 version.)

10.  Scholargist: “They do not know how immortal, but I know” (33), with “eternal” replacing “immortal.”

11.  “”: “I might not tell everybody but I will tell you” (45).

12.  “”: Wendell as “the [singer] of the body… and of the soul” (46).

13.  “”: Wendell Slickman, “one of the roughs, a “kosm[ic]” conman (50).

14.  Performance 4: “Milk Cow Blues Boogie,” written by Kokomo Arnold and released by Presley in 1954 on Sun Records.  All performances shot in this close-framed, hair-in-bun style refer to Elvis’ famous waist-up, shoulder-shaking performance of “Heartbreak Hotel” filmed in 1956 (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKYf8LGRyHw).

15.  Scholargist: “What is commonest and cheapest and nearest and easiest is” him (38).

16.  Wendell: “Very well, then (I contradict myself)” (87).

17.  Scholargist: “Disorderly fleshy and sensual” (50).

18.  “”: “Gathering and showing more always and with velocity” (58).

19.  Performance 5: “Baby Let’s Play House,” written by Arthur Gunter and released by Elvis in 1954 on Sun Records.

20.  Scholargist: “I do not decline to be the [singer] of wickedness… Evil propels me and the reform of evil propels me” (48).

21.  “”: “With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds” (52).

22.  Performance 5: “Heartbreak Hotel,” written by Mae Boren Axton, Thomas Durden, and Presley, and released on RCA in 1956.  This performance relies on a stanza from “Song of Myself”: “There was never any more inception than there is now, / Nor any more youth or age than there is now; / And will never be any more perfection than there is now, / Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now” (28).

23.  Scholargist: “O Christ!  My fit is mastering me!” (69).

24.   “”: “I do not despise you priests; / My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths” (77).

25.  Performance 6: “Trying to Get to You,” written by Rose Marie McCoy and released by Elvis first as a 1955 Sun single, and then as a track on his first RCA album, Elvis Presley.  One of the few early Elvis songs to explicitly describe the continental grandness of Whitman’s poetry (the song begins “I’ve been traveling over mountains”), “Trying” begins in this version with a characteristically sweeping self-assertion by Whitman’s speaker: “I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe…. and am not contained between my hat and boots” (32), “and can never be shaken away” (33).

26.  Scholargist: “All these I feel or am” (65).

27.  “”: “These are the thoughts of men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me… If they are not the riddle or the untying of the riddle… If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing” (43).

28.  “”: “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand” (28).

29.  Performance 7: “Queen Jane Approximately,” written Bob Dylan and appearing on his 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited on Columbia Records.  This performance’s first verse includes a paraphrased form of Whitman’s “lunatic… carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case,” restructured to fit the mood and rhyme scheme of Dylan’s song:

When the lunatic carried from the foot of his mother’s mattress

Is waiting for her in a home for the insane,

And he sends all of his poems to the wrong address,

Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?

The chorus is also extended to include another Whitman line:

Won’t you come see me, long-hair?

“I am the man, I suffered, I was there” (64).

30.  Scholargist: “There is that in [this]…. I do not know what it is…. but I know it is in [this]” (86)

31.  “”, paraphrased: “Perhaps I might tell you more… OUTLINES! …. It is not chaos or death…. it is form and union and plan…. it is eternal life…. it is happiness” (87).

32.  Eulogy: a patchwork of moments in “Song of Myself” I find especially elegiac, even self-eulogizing.

“My final merit I refuse you… I refuse putting from me the best I am” (53).  “Logic and sermons never convince, / The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul” (56).  “Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing and wicked and real, / Ever the old inexplicable query… ever the sobbing liquid of life, / Ever the bandage under the chin…. ever the tressels of death” (75).  “And as to you corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me” (86).  I remember…. I resume the overstaid fraction, / The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it…. or to any graves, / The corpses rise…. The gashes heal…. the fastenings roll away” (71).  “The last scud of the day holds back for me, / It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds, / It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. / I depart as air…. I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, / I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags” (87-88).  “By my life-lumps!  becoming already a creator! / Putting myself here and now to the ambushed womb of the shadows!” (75).

33.  Performance 8: “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” written by Tom Waits and placed at the end of his 1985 album Rain Dogs (Island Records).  Because of its lyrical intensity, articulated in bodily images that are at once familiar and unfamiliarly lurching (“My head is spinning ‘round, / My heart is in my shoes”), and because of the way in which the chorus manages to feel both self-assured and remarkably lonely (“Anywhere I lay my head, boys, / That’s where I’ll call my home”), I have long found this one of the most Whitmanic songs in C(c)reation.  In order to more directly call out the funereal quality of the song, I aligned “Anywhere” with part of “Peace in the Valley,” the highly recognizable gospel song by Thomas Dorsey that Elvis performed on the Ed Sullivan show in 1957 (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNE9wsh8ld4).

As stated in the video’s credits, all of these arrangements (including the vocal parts for the last scene), performances, and lyrical alterations were created specifically for “In Search of Wendell Slickman.”

Location : 406 Princess Elizabeth St.

Poem: Whoever You Are Now Holding Me in Hand

Cartoon

Free Lance Star, 11/3/09

WW notebook #94, Library of Congress American Memory site

WW notebook, photo by MNS, Library of Congress

The one on top is from a link to the Library of Congress I gave the class a few weeks ago, urging them to use these digitized images to study what OMW recorded about the soldiers.  The bottom was taken on our field trip, and is surprisingly focused given that I, Brady Earnhart, and our students were nearly all literally in tears in that weird institutional room with lockers, blackened windows, and government-issue tables.  Unless we were crying with simple gratitude for the incredible time that Barbara Bair had given us (or because we were soaked to the bloody skin  and had been standing for 10 hours with two or three to go), why were we?  Nothing was much easier to read in person, as those of us who stumbled reading aloud can attest (writing still spidery, bleeding through paper, plastic protection on many items reflected flourescent glare, etc.).  We couldn’t touch anything (though, good lord, we certainly breathed all over it), couldn’t feel the paper, the wood, the leather, the hair (the hair!).

Whitman's hair, deathbed edition, photo by MNS 10/24/09

I couldn’t even smell the leather of that haversack or of its decay, and I have one good super-sniffer.

cue to tears: the haversack, photo by MNS 10/24/09

Obviously, what I am suggesting is this: the artifacts of the Library of Congress archive were in some ways no more accessible or immediate (indeed, let’s be honest, a lot LESS accessible or even immediate if we mean time instead of proximity) than the digitized images of those artifacts online.  I saw that the inside of the haversack is brown canvas.  Brendon found a fingerprint and will NOT entertain suggestions that it belongs to anyone but Walt Whitman.  But tears?

Presence.  Through the blog we are present to each other online even when we are physically apart during the week (or have never seen each other: hallooo out there, Brooklyn, Camden, and Novi Sad!).  Agreed.  But finally Saturday we were (good) old-fashioned groupies, we were Whitman lovers, and we were bodies (finer than prayer, but, geez, we were a bit rank by Hour Ten of the marathon).  We desired the physical–the textured, the pasted, the water-stained.  We may have cried because the broken skins of brittle pages and fragile covers, the light-sensitive [associative digression: Whitman's Camden eyeglasses: so small, and with one lens protectively glazed over after strokes] and subsequently entombed haversack, and the tickets to a lecture on Lincoln long since delivered were as close to Whitman (brittle, entombed…) as we are going to get, as present as we can be.  Unlike the wounded soldiers, we won’t get the healing presence of his 200-pound, hirsute, maroon-coated, deep-pocketed self.  But it turns out that the digitized can’t hold a gas lamp to the physically present, and even if it’s paper and not flesh, I’ll take it.  Whitmaniacs, pass the tissues.

Edwin Booth BOOST

Here Edwin is looking pensive (or moping about his footwear):

Edwin Booth, thespian

And here is a famous photo we saw at Ford’s, with John Wilkes lurking around at Lincoln’s second inaugural (Lincoln center, JWB top row).  Read more at this blog post on The Blind Flaneur.

JWB stalking MLL

This nauseating bit about JWB is something I learned this summer at Harper’s Ferry.  Here, from Wikipedia:

Strongly opposed to the abolitionists who sought to end slavery in the U.S., Booth attended the hanging on December 2, 1859, of abolitionist leader John Brown, who was executed for leading a raid on the Federal armory at Harpers Ferry (in present-day West Virginia).^[60] Booth had been rehearsing at the Richmond Theatre when he abruptly decided to join the Richmond Grays, a volunteer militia of 1,500 men travelling to Charles Town for Brown’s hanging, to guard against any attempt by abolitionists to rescue Brown from the gallows by force.^[60][61] When Brown was hanged without incident, Booth stood in uniform near the scaffold and afterwards expressed great satisfaction with Brown’s fate, although he admired the condemned man’s bravery in facing death stoically.^[40][62]

Whitman, American Rebel Idol.

A few examples:

Walt Whitman High, Bethesda, MD

Walt Whitman High School, Huntington Station, NY

The Walt Whitman Bridge (PA-NJ)

The Walt Whitman Mall (Huntington Station, NY)

Walt Wit Beer (Philly)

LOC image, Whitman cigar box from 1898

Whitman-Walker AIDS clinic, Washington DC

Walt Whitman Hotel, Camden , NJ

Walt Whitman T from LOLA (one of many)

Walt Whitman Fence Company (NY)

Mad Magazine, 1967

Campers at Camp Walt Whitman, Piermont, NH

Jesse Merandy (CUNY) with WW impersonator (Camden)

Walt Whitman Service Area

What?

Historical marker (NY)

Walt Whitman Golf (Bethesda)

WW Park (Brooklyn)

Obvious College Football connection

As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve just completed a major first step in the redesign of our own web-based project. You should be seeing a new header image on the home page of the site, along with new sitewide navigation and better frontpage tag navigation. Our “courses” and “projects” tabs now allow visitors to quickly and easily access various parts of the site.

This is only the first step, though. Coming soon will be a reworking of the main section of the frontpage so that we’ll be better able to feature the work of students in the course (right now, the righthand sidebar is extraordinarily active, while the main section of the homepage is relatively static). We’ll also be installing the new header across various parts of the website (especially the profile sections) to create a more seamless browsing experience.

We hope you like these new changes. If you have ideas for ways we could improve the design or functionality of the site, please let us know by leaving a comment on this post on the Announcements blog.

Announcements – project-wide announcements
WhitTech – our tech-support blog

Our hope is that adding these feeds to your course sites will increase the visibility of important posts that should have relevance for everyone involved in the project. If you or your professor decides that the course blog is better suited only to student and faculty posts, we can easily remove these new blogs from the feed.

We had a wonderful first week of the project, and I’m excited by how much energy and enthusiasm I’m seeing on the site.

But I want to encourage all of you to make a special effort to reach out to students in locations other than your own. Visit the Courses page and read the blog posts of students from other classes. Check out our member directory and use member wires to communicate with one another. Check out existing groups and feel free to create your own.

In short, play with the site and use it to its fullest capacity. And please remember that a site redesign is coming soon.

“Welcome Sign” by Flickr user davidking

As Project Director of “Looking for Whitman,” it gives me great pleasure to welcome students from the University of Mary Washington, New York City College of Technology, Rutgers
University-Camden, and University of Novi Sad to our project website!

This is an exciting moment in higher education, when traditional methods of teaching and learning are changing dramatically as new kinds of technologies allow us to connect our classrooms to the world in exciting ways.

And that’s what this project is all about: taking individual classrooms of students from different institutions and connecting them to one another as they embark upon a joint semester-long study of Walt Whitman’s poetry and the places in which he lived.

Each school involved in the project has been carefully chosen for its lead faculty members, its location, and (of course) for its students. ”Looking for Whitman” centers on three locations, each very important to Walt Whitman’s life and work:

In New York, where Whitman lived from his birth to mid-life, students from the New York City College of Technology, CUNY will explore Whitman’s connections to the Brooklyn Waterfront, Lower Manhattan, and Long Island, and will focus particularly on Whitman’s early work, including the landmark 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass. At the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, students will consider Whitman’s mid-career experiences as a nurse in the Civil War, and will focus on his war-related writing of the 1860s. Students in two classes at Rutgers University-Camden will explore Whitman’s late career as they investigate Camden, the city in which Whitman spent the final decades of his long life. Our fourth location, in Serbia, is a wonderful addition to the project that will make it international in scope.

The faculty members involved in this project have been meeting for the better part of a year to come up with plans for the Fall 2009 semester. We’re excited about the connections and collaborations that are going to take place through our joint projects and assignments, and we hope that you, the students involved in the project, will take advantage of this website to document your encounters with Whitman’s fascinating writing.

Walt Whitman was an author for whom nothing was more important than connecting to his audience. He wanted to shrink the distance between writer and reader, to reach up out of the page to touch the eyes and hands exploring his body of work.

In 2009, the connections that Whitman dreamed about in the nineteenth century can be realized in new ways. As you spend the semester taking photos, making movies, writing essays, exploring research archives, and, most importantly, reading poetry, we hope that you’ll share your discoveries with your peers, and with the world, as generously and with as much enthusiasm as Walt shared his work with us.

Allons! The road is before us!

It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well.

Allons! Be not detain’d!

Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!

Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!

Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!

Let the preacher preach in the pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.

Mon enfant! I give you my hand!

I give you my love, more precious than money,

I give you myself, before preaching or law;

Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

– From “Song of the Open Road“

I can’t wait to hear what your own Song of the Open Road will sound like.

– Prof. Matthew Gold, New York City College of Technology, CUNY

Tech support is new group where faculty and students can post tech questions for help from members and Jim.

Matt and Jim will add tabs for fora and will fix course blogs so they draw in essential feeds.  We should each think about what feeds we want for course blogs and individually arrange them with techies.  (Grab URL for RSS feed of specific tag on a site like delicious, then go to widgets in dashboard of own blog to add RSS feed and  paste in address.)

Note re: Delicious.  Use bookmarking tools to add buttons to browsers and then you can just click the button from website you want to save and it will automatically save to account and will let you add tags, description, etc.

Tab for Resources on frontpage which we will build together– links to MLA citation, WW Archive, etc.  Also a Press tab for articles etc.

Two central sites for aggregation: course blogs and LFW home site.

Jim and Matt will set up various editions for annotation for each class.

Mechanics/Ideas for shared annotation assignment:

• we will all start with 1855 Song and use it for image gloss assignment so classes complement each other.  Specific words from text will be linked to blog post glosses. 
• March planning notes divide eras of WW writing for different classes– after the initial image gloss annotations of Song, class annotations will focus on additions to Leaves for particular era–e.g., Camden may do very late poem additions, or Fred may do Drum Taps, Lincoln poems, etc.  Annotations can be linked to visual, will be researched as appropriate, could be secondary criticism, primary or historical research, local geographical supplements, etc.  Jesse Merandy’s article on “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” in Mickle Street Review is an example of deep annotation of single poem.
• faculty should communicate schedule for annotations and exact poems as those are decided in course planning over summer

Some final product ideas: video, mp3 reading, online museum entry, essay, deep annotation or scholarly edition, wikipedia entry, cinepoems or mashups like documentary on WW and Camden——> projects that are designed to educate wider public

 Change profile by going to My Account.

Planning blog now has summer assignments for faculty.

Collaborative work: supplementary, collective knowledge building AND dialogic exchange

• Material culture entries across campuses: ask students to compare, to consider two together, to take two from other campuses and discuss re: WW text, etc.
• required comments and reading
• shared projects like annotations
• field trip documentation
• feeds: Matt and Jim will work out best way that each person in/teaching a class will be able to view in one place all the posts happening across the site.  Will include group wires– can and should it include forum posts?

Flickr account for each class.  Make album, make slideshow, and take embed url to make it a blog post.  Flickr feed on LFW homepage sidebar.  Tag all images that go to Flickr Whitman20 to feed it in.

whitman20 is now tag for all outside sites (flickr, delicious, etc.) to draw in to project

• one blog post per week that will be more structured on focused short writing task/question (post two days before class) + 3 comments by class, at least one on post from another course (self-report in class?)
• frontispiece as start to blog– of self in clothes and pose that they consider apt intro of self to world and LFW community.   Discuss week one and due week two.  Accompany by 6-10 lines of Song they identify with most (this would replace March idea of using image from internet to illustrate the passage) .  Possibly chart on google map.  Personal, familiar contact with WW.
• UMW final project of “My Walt Whitman” (research paper or digital equivalent)
• group annotations of assigned sections.  Randomly reviewed by peers/teachers each week to chart progress.
• Note to Brady and Mara: redistribute readings but make sure to get to Civil War stuff before field trips.  Schedule Chatham and battlefield visits.
• historical context readings possibly handled in teams that will blog/summarize and do oral report.  Where do we put these?  Up front for those things that fertilize the ground for WW. 
• Image gloss.  One related to Song–students choose any image and do annotation or context or gloss (e.g., The Alamo) that includes image, audio, or video.  (Artifact more closely related to Camden and with deeper research later–see below.)  **** See this as starter project for shared annotation project.  Focus on unfamiliar, historical vs. earlier personal assignment.  Quicker gloss than more polished and rich discussion of material objects.***   What is its significance or what does it add to our knowledge base?

 Tyler’s sample schedule:

• First week: intro and tech training
• Second: preface and start to Song, frontispiece due and favorite lines chosen and explained
• Third: Song  + image gloss explained above
• Fourth: Song + rest of 1855 LoG

Common assignments still in play:

• frontispiece/signature image (use as avatar?) to introduce themselves and i.d. passage that speaks to them
• cultural contexts/artifacts assignment from March planning post by Matt– choose appropriately for your geographic space.    May include historical sense of places WW references.  Include image.  Use tag digitalmuseum to aggregate into space that will draw across campuses.  List generated by instructors.  Probably individual student projects.  Stagger digital museum artifacts assignment to point that makes sense to individual courses.
• annotations of LoG. Can be linked to image glosses and digital museum for references.
• video: “This is where I found Walt Whitman” –read-aloud in specific place by end of semester
• documentation of/reflection on field trips

• International Whitman Symposium in Italy focus on 1860 edition, esp. for graduate students– Karen will post link when website is ready
• Library of America + WW archive for other editions, facsimiles, etc.
• Begin with 1855 as shared base text
• WW archive has summary descriptions of various editions

From Jim:

Looking for Whitman as immediate, collaborative space.  Disorientation because your blog is portal or home page but actually we have linked spaces controlled by individuals that feed into readable central site.  Individual–>course—> uberblog of all five courses (Looking for Whitman).  Clicking on individual posts links you back to place it was first written (Ty’s, student’s, course, etc.). 

• Support tab on LFW site has FAQs and instructions for using Wordpress, in text and video. 

If our students make videos (e.g. reading at sites for “where I found Whitman” assignment or cinepoems), they can put it on youtube  (10 minute time limit) or blip.tv (unlimited time, can set up own site or course site) and then upload it through Anarchy onto blog: simply uploading from computer may not work because of size of videos.  Audio files such as podcasts can be uploaded with Upload/Insert Audio button right from computer (own files or downloaded from internet) or with URL into Anarchy.

 LibriVox as resource for audio files (mp3 advised over ogg or mediaplayer files).  Archive.org as another source.

• Possible or optional collaborative project for our classes: good recordings of WW texts for Librivox.
• Consider making a Help group on our site for collaborative support on tech issues.

• TAGS: Frontpage as tab that will send any post to the main LFW site; this is functional use of tagging to send posts to specific spaces.  Tags as key terms and issues also may be used by students to help follow shared interests.  We can have a tagcloud that will include tags from all campuses.  Encourage students to use tags generously as key words for their thinking.  Adding tags is one way to get students to think critically about what they are writing/reading.  Choice of keywords/tags can be topic for discussion in classes since it indicates students’ critical processing of work.

– each student will produce a (low-tech) film: reading Whitman work aloud in a particular place: THIS is where I found Whitman; THIS is what it means to read Whitman in a particular city (vs. in a classroom alone).  This becomes part of our representation of place, as will be our record of field trips and local resources.  May be mapped onto Google maps of the cities/regions.

–production of cinepoems as option for multimedia assignment; could also, e.g., compare interpretive readings from Mickle Street collection.  YouTube examples of Whitman cinepoems available through Mickle Street also.

image credit “Long Live Comrade Whitman!” by birdfarm

Download section 38 of  “Song of Myself”