The Tattooed Camerado,

Ben

One of the most poignant moments in the conference for me was when we were touring the Whitman House.  I, like most others, was walking slowly and quietly taking everything in.  I was hoping to feel “something” walking where his bootsoles had, but I wasn’t getting anything.  Again, I think I saw other people in awe and couldn’t help but be envious.  Anyway, we progressed through the house, and the upstairs was smaller so only a few of us could be in certain areas at a time.  I was still feeling this block between me and Whitman except–and this is going to sound strange–when I entered his bathroom.  The bathroom, as some of you will recall, was teeny tiny and really couldn’t fit more than one or two people.  So I walked in by myself, and once I crossed into that room, once everyone I was with had disappeared from my scope of vision, it was truly like I was in a new dimension.  For a second or two, I got a little dizzy, I had tears in my eyes, and I really believed that he had been there.  But after those couple seconds, as I exited the bathroom, my connection with him deflated, and I was back to trying to force an experience.  Obviously there is only so much that can be accomplished when you’re thinking as hard as I was to feel something spiritual.  But I am still unsettled because he’s a figure who, given his principles and purposes, should have a more natural significance for me than he does.  He exudes democracy, and I almost feel intellectually/spiritually marginalized when I study him.

So now I have this tendency to see Whitman as sad and lonely instead of unifying.  I’m probably making this too much a black-and-white issue; maybe I’m mourning that that he had things figured out over a century ago but not enough of the world/country does today, especially for how ubiquitous an icon he is.  This is not an issue I’ve given up on, and I will continue to read him to see if I can settle into a more organic relationship with him and his ideas.

I write this post listening to this Fresh Air interview with Robert Hass on Whitman.  Hass and Terry Gross discuss some of the points of democracy/spirituality/narcissism that we explored in class, and it is comforting, I think, to hear these issues played out in other conversations.  For the most part, I think the interview is pretty good for people who don’t know Whitman to listen to.  Additionally, there are some things I think every Whitmaniac will appreciate, but of course there are other things that don’t get the attention they should.  A little over four minutes from the end, his grave gets kind of a negative shoutout which I think might spark interesting conversation from those of us who visited.  Also, at the very end, there is an excerpt from Fred Hirsch’s album Leaves of Grass. I have not bothered to listen to the album in its entirety, so I don’t want to admonish the whole thing, but the small piece of Song of Myself previewed after the interview sounds pretty bizarre.

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.”

I appreciate all of the patience and understanding during this time. It means a lot to my family. Hope everyone has a wonderful break. See most of you in the W.O.M.B.

Meeting under similar weather conditions to the one today (i.e. cold with rain), I was still super excited to see everything. Even though I am a native Virginian, it takes about four and a half hours to get to Washington, D.C. and thus, I have only explored the city (minus trips to Dulles, traveling through or past, etc) once on a field trip in 7th grade. Sad, I know. So, I was extremely excited and and the whole ride up I was chomping at the bit to finally get out of the car and race around D.C. acting like Mrs. Whitman (Sorry, Brendan ;] ). I think pictures captured my favorite moment…you know, when I started tearing up and had to fight back a break down when his haversack was revealed to us. Even his hair or glasses didn’t have the same effect on my emotions as that old, crumbly leather bag. That bag saw things we can’t even imagine, it sat on the ground, on the ferry, on the wooden boards of hospitals. Who knows the kinds of dangerous, gangrenous bacteria that lived on it because of the hospital trips. Could that bag be the a main reason Whitman’s health declined so much? Would Whitman touch the bag, then touch his eyes, nose, or mouth with the same hand and, in that infinitesimal moment, compromise his wellbeing and health? It fascinates me to think “if only that bag could talk”. I wanted to hug and kiss our Library of Congress guide (her name has left me, I’m sad to say-Laurie Ann?) and just thank her for appreciating our enthusiasm and understanding our rabid adoration for this man who some Americans don’t even know about.

Flash forward ([shoutout] to a really great show!) to last night and my contemplation must have stirred something in Whitman. I had a dream where I sat with Whitman (in his last days, think the photo of him with his caretaker in a shipyard, I think it was) and we talked. I held his hand and told him that he left an imprint on my heart a hundred and half years from when he walked the earth. He told me it was simply coincidence that it all happened. He wanted something great to happen and feels like he achieved it with my experience. I don’t remember much more from that magical dream, but when I woke up I couldn’t believe it. I told my mom and she just frowned and said, “Oh, that’s weird…and kind of creepy,” while paying bills or something. I know no one else will appreciate this except for the people who traveled this Whitmanian journey with me. So there ’tis…I hope I meet him again in dreamland, maybe he’ll tell me he’s choosing Brendan over me, and if he does, I’ll just have to smile and hold his hand.

The field trip to DC, as I’m sure everyone would agree, was a fantastic experience for all of us. One of the things that I found the most interesting was going to places I’d already been, but wearing my Whitman goggles. A week or two before the field trip I had been in the National Equality March (something I think Whitman would have supported) which started in almost the same place as the tour and took a similar path. It was very interesting to wander those same streets and imagine Whitman wandering the streets while pigs wandered through the mud.

During this class I’ve found myself more and more able to imagine the people of the past as I stand in places with a lot of history. The field trip definitely was one of the reasons that this happened for me. Listening to Kim list to us in detail various differences between Whitman’s time and ours, like the view he had from his office of the Washington monument, transported me back to that time, I felt as if I could see the mud streets and wandering soldiers.

I had  similar reaction to Ford’s Theater. Listening to the presenter speak about the details of Lincoln’s death made me feel as if I had been there. If Peter Doyle was able to describe that night in as much detail as the presenter I can see why Whitman felt like he had been there that night.

I’m trying to upload the video of the Ford’s Theater presentation since some of you mysteriously don’t remember it even though we were all paying attention, but for some reason youtube hates me and won’t upload it. I’ll keep trying and see if I can get it up there.

Ugh. Day of Finish paper, Take nap, Sleep through Whitman party, Wake up, Post paper late, Go back to bed.

I hate exam week.

Since I did my final project on a revolutionary, Jose Marti, the memory of standing behind the wall on Sunken Road that the Confederate soldiers used has been on my mind a lot. Just imagining thousands of young soldiers lying dead was a very powerful image and really brought Whitman’s post-battle descriptions home to me. And it would not have been those whom we consider “the good guys” lying on the ground in front of Sunken Road. It was a deathtrap for Union soldiers. For me, that contributed to  an already very powerful image that can easily be applied to a revolution and, in light of my recent research and writing, made the weight of Jose Marti’s ideas apparent.

During his life, Marti was calling his fellow countrymen to revolt against Spanish rule over Cuba. Even though Spain was weak compared to the other major European powers at that time, they far outstripped the military strength of the Cuban forces. When he said that he wanted his people to fight with him, Marti knew that he was potentially putting them in the same situation as the Union soldiers were in at Fredericksburg. They were the people who we consider the ‘good guys.’ They were fighting against colonial tyranny. It just casts war in a whole new light to go to a battlefield.

Ben Brishcar

Digital Whitman

Scanlon/Earnheart/Groom

10/9/09

A Kosmos of Voices

            When I was given the option of a nonstandard project for the final for this class, my brain started boggling with options.  Immediately the traditional seminar paper was out the window and my head started going towards the many other options.  Now like many papers and possibly more projects, this one went through many different variations before incarnation in the attached link.

            It started with the far to quixotic undertaking of doing a video in which different people would read one to two words of a section of “Song of Myself” and then splice all the video together into one epic montage.  This was, needless to say, to big of a task and never got off the ground.  The roots where there though for this project.  The next version came with my looking over of my blog posts for most of the semester and realizing that so much of my focus has been on Whitman’s narrative voice that to do a project and leave this issue of voice out of it, would be doing myself a disservice.

            The question arising out of this then, was where to go with Whitman’s voice.  The answer then, came from some of my studies in performance.  Things always sound different when they are read out loud.  Also, with this being a project that focused highly on the idea of ‘voice’ it seemed to call for some sort of audio enhancement.  Now, I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do with the audio, but to many ideas of what to do with the video.  For a while I was throwing around the idea of taping the readers and trying to get their videos to sink up, in much the same way as my first conception of the project.  The fear I had with this, though, was that there would be to much chaos from back and forth cuts, that I would lose the meaning of the voice in all the images.  From there it went to the idea of some sort of slide show, either of pictures of Whitman or of the text of the poem.  Where both of these ideas got dropped was that I really wanted this to be an audio experience and did not want people distracted by the images.

            I finally settled on one iconic image of Whitman to run throughout the entire piece.  The reason I left any visual at all was because I wanted this piece to go up through YouTube and have it accessible to more than just our blog.  My feeling on the spirit of this class and the entire idea of a nontraditional project is that it should transcend the boundaries of the semester and stay up as a resource for others to use.  In other words, I was not just building something for a grade, I was building something people will hopefully want to use in the future.

            As far as the video itself functions, it was designed as an experimental look at voice.  The idea was to combine a group of readers, each one embodying a different narrative voice found within Whitman’s poetry.  These seven different voices were then going to bounce off each other to highlight similarities and differences within one section of poem.  The readings were kept to two specific sequential sections of “Song of Myself”, namely sections 44 and 45; by using two sections instead of picking and choosing between multiple sections of Whitman, two things where accomplished.  First, it eliminates much of the debate along the lines of ‘of course I found all these voices, I went out and dug through his full body of work,’ and second and more important of the two, it kept all of these separate voices still within one section of Whitman.  I was already splitting up his voice, but by giving all the readings within one section, I was keeping it all congealed into one Whitman.

            As far as cast list goes for this project, the seven voices I presented were: the Prophetic Whitman, voiced by Professor Gray Richards; Whitman the Good Grey Poet, voiced by Professor Claudia Emerson; the Womanly Whitman, voiced by Professor Mara Scanlon; the Natural Whitman, voiced by Dean Cedric Rucker; Whitman as Witness, voiced by Professor Ana Chichester; the Nurse Whitman, voiced by Taylor Williams, and the Sexual Whitman, voiced by Katie O’Connor.

            To help better put this project into focus, here is how I defined each voice when looking through the poem.  The Prophetic Whitman was the voice that was talking whenever Whitman is casting things beyond himself and reaching for things far beyond the grasp of what normal people could know, this is as close to a metaphysical Whitman as is seen in these sections of “Song of Myself”.  Whitman, the Good Grey Poet, is the type of voice one would expect Whitman to pick up while sitting in a rocking chair and talking to someone; this is the more introspective Whitman, where as the prophet reaches out, the Good Grey Poet reaches in.  The Nurse Whitman is the Whitman that reaches out to his readers or his audience.  The title comes from the image of Whitman sitting next to the men he was nursing during and after the Civil War, hearing their stories and talking directly to them.  The Womanly Whitman is the Whitman in touch with the more motherly feminine side of himself.  The Natural Whitman is the Whitman of the dirt and the soil, the one who goes back to the earth for his imagery.   Walt Whitman as Witness is the Whitman that steps back a bit and looks at what is going on; this voice does not have the all encompassing aspects of the Prophet Whitman, as it is not a voice of announcement, but rather a voice of being separate and reflective.  The Sexual Whitman really needs no explaining, in that if one is to deny the inherent thrusting force of intimacy in Whitman’s poetry, then one is doing a terrible misreading.

            As far as what I’ve discovered from this project is honestly difficult to say.  This experiment was not a failure, as I feel that I have learned much about Whitman’s voice, and I feel that those that watch my video can take away much about Whitman’s voice.  However, upon repeated listening to the audio file, I find that by pulling his voice apart, although I can hear more of the distinct voices differently, I also hear the singular multifaceted voice of Whitman that much more.  It seems counter intuitive but the farther apart the pieces where, the more it sounded like one voice.  One of the first questions I asked myself when I approached what was to become the final version of the project, was would looking at the voices in the piece separately lead to a better understanding of the contradictions and comparisons within the one overarching voice, or would it just be a matter of staring at the Kosmos, so to speak.  I think in this case, what I’ve found is that Whitman’s voice exists because of the contradictions there in and the separate pieces contribute to one larger organism that would not exist without them.

Works Cited

Black, Stephen A. “Radical Utterances from the Soul’s Abysms: Toward a new Sense of Whitman.” PMLQ 88.1 (1973): 100-11. JSTOR. Web. 5 Dec. 2009.

Hutchinson, George B. “Whitman’s Confidence Game: The “Good Gray Poet” and the Civil War.” South Central Review 7 (1990): 20-35. JSTOR. Web. 5 Dec. 2009.

Jay, Gregory. “Catching up with Whitman: A Review Essay.” South Atlantic Review 57.1 (1992): 89-102. JSTOR. Web. 5 Dec. 2009.

Killingsworth, Myrth J. “Whitman and Motherhood: A Historical View.” American Literature 54.1 (1982): 28-43. JSTOR. Web. 5 Dec. 2009.

Stovall, Floyd. “Main Drifts in Whitman’s Poetry.” American Literature 4.1 (1932): 3-21. JSTOR. Web. 5 Dec. 2009

First line: “Ten years ago I was permitted to run my hand through the beard of Walt Whitman.”

I thought this article spoke to our class too well to not share it. In case the link doesn’t work, the article is “A Professor and a Pilgrim” by Thomas Benton, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education Vol. 52 issue 49.

<A href=”http://ezproxy.umw.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.umw.edu:2048/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=21949374&site=ehost-live”>A Professor and a Pilgrim.</A>

Abstract: Throughout the semester, I used the FlipCams to film the sun rising over the Potomac, walking to and from school, to work, on my way back from brother’s house in Westmoreland, just life. Some of the footage is from my own camera that does small, short videos. There are three pictures I used from google images and one from Facebook; the Korean conflict memorial (from Facebook), a photo of a soldier in Vietnam, a photo of a Middle-eastern man holding an automatic gun, the infamous photo of the little girl running who had napalm on her back, and picture of Whitman’s frontispiece. I used a few videos from Youtube which I converted using vixy.net. The videos include the mob scene (which is spliced into three different spots of the cinepoem), the bomb blowing up at 4:43, the homeless person digging for food at 4:45, footage of Bloody Sunday (London) at 4:49, the three children laughing at 4:53, footage of Devil’s Marbleyard in the Blue Ridge Parkway (which I have been there, but I did not shoot it) at 4:57. I selected to use one band, The Verve, and already had the music, so I just took it from my iTunes library and added it into my iMovie production. The song at  the beginning of the cinepoem is Lucky Man and the song ending the poem is Bittersweet Symphony.

Works Cited

“37 Years Later, Girl in Vietnam War Photo Spreads Hope.” Web. 10 Dec 2009. <boards.library.trutv.com/ showthread.php?t=294622>.

“children laughing.” Youtube. Web. 10 Dec 2009. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4h8f38IaZU>.

“Bloody Sunday, 30.1.1972.” Youtube. Web. 10 Dec 2009. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuBaAzH7Kkw&feature=related>.

“Fred Phelps supporters attacked by mob.” Youtube. Web. 10 Dec 2009. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrFVjg79_iM>.

“view from Devils Marbleyard in the early morning.” Youtube. Web. 10 Dec 2009. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5sG9pOju0M>.

Whitman, Commercialism, and the Digital Age;

What does this mean for Whitman?

Today’s culture is centered on technology; literature and education are fighting to stay current. Gone are the days when families watched the sunset or sat on the porch after dinner to watch nature happen as their night’s entertainment. Also, gone is the age in which college classes are almost strictly taught by stuffy professors in front of simple blackboards, and with students writing not typing. Our seminar on Walt Whitman is a testament to the new age of education and that it is effective. Therefore, college has maintained its purpose and is still gradually changing for the future of collegiate education. Literature has amazingly survived as well, despite the odds of television, the internet, and radio; wait, not only has literature survived, it has evolved. The vessel of literature may have changed, the new technology has created another layer to analyze, but the message and meaning is still current and powerful.

The media world and literature have merged, most noticeably, in a commercial sense. Combining poetry to advertising, such as Langston Hughes’ poem A Dream Deferred used in a 2008 Nike advertising campaign, or creating movies based on renowned novels, like Pride and Prejudice in 2005, provide a transition of literature to the twenty-first century.

Walt Whitman is recognized as the culmination of patriotism, the voice of America and its culture. Through the different versions of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman shed his skins and it is easy to see him evolve through with the augmentations he made in each edition of Leaves of Grass. However, when he died in 1892, it would seem that the changes in tone and voice died with him. Walt was dead, and Leaves of Grass would carry on, but it could not vary in tone anymore. However, this proves to be a shortsighted claim when the medium of Whitman is changing from wood pulp to computer chips, when the words on the paper turn into commercials seen by pixels through the computer chips. The changing of the medium has brought criticism and mixed emotions about the smooth (or failed) translation of Whitman’s message that is being reintroduced to a more 21^st century-friendly medium. This evolution runs the risk of the works loosing pieces of their integrity, meaning, and being dehumanized.

In the summer of 2009, the denim company, Levi’s, took on an advertising campaign that features Whitman’s poems America and Pioneers! O Pioneers! “Whitman is an involuntary spokes-celebrity here” and the lack of control he has over peoples perception of his works (for instance, having them paired with video clips he did not choose) creates palpable tension. (Stevenson) The counterargument is the idea of simply getting Whitman to the masses, the route or direction does not matter. However, the most pertinent question is “who is using who”? Is Levi’s using Walt Whitman or is Walt Whitman using Levi’s?

When answering the first part of the question, Levi’s is using Walt Whitman, especially in the commercial that uses a supposed recording of Walt Whitman reading four lines from America. Yet, the message of the commercial is one that’s distinctly anti-capitalism. Ironically, capitalism rests on advertising and commercialism to keep the capitalist-cycle going round. From the first 15 seconds to 18 seconds of the commercial, it portrays a CEO look-alike being chauffeured in a slick town car, then he is behind a dark desk in front of a large, one-paned window that shows a cityscape with skyscraper-type architecture. Both times we see the CEO, he seems disgruntled and worried; this dark play on America’s uncomfortable state is troubling. With the market down and the war on terrorism a black hole, Whitman pops through the speakers and reminds us that there is a light at the end of the tunnel; there is beauty in us despite our plight. Thus, at the end of the commercial, the viewer is left with the sounds and sights of the ad. After 58 seconds of provocative, beautiful, and patriotic scenes, the last two seconds show a red Levi’s emblem while a definite gunshot is heard after fireworks are shown booming and lighting the screen.

When the viewer thinks back to the commercial, after almost a minute of Whitman’s reading accompanied with beautiful cinematography, Levi’s motive is to get the viewer to feel inspired enough to buy their specific brand of jeans (again, that capitalist pull, quite anti-Whitman). The demographic that Levi’s caters to are ages 18-34, most people beyond or younger than this may not feel the pull which the commercialized cinepoem seeks to enforce. The scenes of the commercial show people of all ages, from all walks of life, running, jumping, laughing, and watching other people; it is powerful in showing human nature and the unpredictable way of life. In Levi’s print campaign, they are using a tagline “specific to the economy, including ‘Will work for better times’.” (Clifford B1) Obviously, if the audience does feel the pull, then the capitalist game comes full circle and the people feel good because if they are buying something for “better times”, then the better times will be here soon. Right? The completion of that cycle, no matter how “American” capitalism seems, is not the America that Whitman was advocating or would be proud of.

Granted, Whitman’s own feelings towards commercialism are scattered and unclear. Whitman “himself had permanently mixed feelings on the subject of sales” and whether he should censor himself or make more “socially appropriate” moves in his own commercialism. (Earnhart 192) The lack of direction is unsettling. Whitman was very aware and keen of the business aspect of the written word; after all, he wrote his own raving reviews to help sell Leaves of Grass. However, because the advertising world has changed so drastically since Whitman’s time, it is hard to determine if any action using his works is justified. The answer to that question lies in the context of what company would use Whitman and to what means.

Having the Whitman seminar in a digital, evolving capacity is parallel to the way Levi’s, Starbucks, and other companies have digitalized and reintroduced Whitman. In the classroom, and classroom blog spanning four different college campuses, it combines traditional, meaningful verbal discourse and analysis with a new digitalized way of learning. This would be comparable to watching a cinepoem of a selected reading from Leaves of Grass instead a traditional reading and analysis of the same reading featured in the cinepoem. The traditional reading can provide a more personal experience and relationship with Whitman. The traditional classroom experience is somewhat stagnant, rarely do field trips happen outside of high school, but part of the multi-sensory class experience includes travel, correspondence with other students studying the same concept. The way the classroom experience leaves you with multiple understandings and levels of analysis, a cinepoem can alter, enhance, and even delude your perception of the poem. If a poem is being used only in the setting of a classroom to enhance the experience of the students, it still alters the original perception the student had of the poem. Thus, even if there is no commercial motivation in creating a cinepoem, the only original perception of a work of literature can be from the readers actively reading it for themselves. Anything other than that is tainting the original meaning of the work for the reader; which is never the intent of the author; especially when after their death, their work is used in something they never intended. Even in an innocent cinepoem, a reader’s perception of what Whitman was trying to convey could be drastically different from what they viewed in the cinepoem.

In conclusion, the digital classroom is valuable for creating a multi-sensory experience and provides layers for the students to delve into. On the other hand, a cinepoem reflects too much of what the director interprets and not the untainted message the poet was trying to convey in their work. If Whitman had been able to create his own cinepoems, or another type of multi-sensory experience, it is hard to believe that there would be a better way to interpret his poems other than his original text. Calamus and Drum-taps are both very personal works that almost feel invasive when imagining the images he describes and uses. Oddly enough, the invasive feeling means Whitman succeeded; how readers of his works come to care for him, his first person point-of-view creates a relationship with the reader that makes he or she feel like they could have been Whitman. All the feelings and emotions from the text of Leaves of Grass, without the help of a cinepoem or technology, still creates a plethora of emotion in the reader. Cinepoems are creating another layer for literature, but it is not yet obvious how long that will last. It is safe to say that the test of a truly good poem is when it can stand on its own for 150 years. Lucky for Whitman, it’s been almost 160 years since 1855’s fresh Leaves of Grass.

Works Cited

Clifford, Stephanie. “In New Campaigns, Spots Take On a Rosier Hue .” New York Times 12 Oct 2009, Tues: B1. Print.

Earnhart, Brady. “The Good Gray Poet and the Quaker Oats Man: Speaker as Spokescharacter in Leaves of Grass.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 24. (2007): 179-200. Web. 8 Dec 2009. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/wwqr/pdf/anc.00305.pdf>.

Stevenson, Seth. “Walt Whitman Thinks You Need New Jeans.” Slate (2009): n. pag. Web. 8 Dec 2009. <http://www.slate.com/id/2233597/>.

Wignot, Jamila, Prod. Walt Whitman. Dir. Mark Zwonitzer.” Perf. Chris, Cooper. PBS.org: 2008, Web. 8 Dec 2009. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/whitman/program/>.

A collection of annotated poems from Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps.

With an introduction by Brendon Bottle.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Brendon Bottle

1861

Long, Too Long, O Land

I Saw Old General At Bay

As Toilsome I Wander’d Virginia’s Woods

Come Up From the Fields Father

A Sight in Camp in the Day-Break Grey and Dim

The Dresser

Hymn of Dead Soldiers

Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice

Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All

Works Cited

I’m pretty new to Google docs, so my paper looks pretty intimidating until you put it in Word. Well, it’s still long, but not quite as scary.

I also have the spread sheet with all the answers; I think the map is up but just in case: Whitman Spread

Before this project, I taught Whitman a lot, in three or four different courses, but had come to focus almost solely on “Song of Myself”– sometimes 1855, sometimes Deathbed, sometimes with humor, sometimes with aggravation, always with an appreciation for poetic genius, and always with a pretty clear picture in my head of the kind of guy I was dealing with: macho, swaggering, egotistical.  You know, this guy:

The Enhanced Manly Whitman

Even his radical inclusion had begun to feel at best appropriative, at worst cannibalistic, consuming the American people to feed his vast, virile self.  “Song of Myself” was like a poetic codpiece.  I couldn’t see the forest for the fibres of manly wheat.  You understand me.

I exaggerate, of course, but don’t entirely lie.  During the re-immersion in Whitman that I undertook about a year ago, something happened.  In between blaming Whitman for Charles Olson and rolling my eyes at his father-stuff, I began to see someone unexpected emerging–someone with soft hips and warm eyes, someone surprisingly quiet, a good listener, a bringer of lemons and ice cream, a moon-watcher.  This person:

The Marriage Photo, with pleased smiles and fleshy hips

And this one:

Whitman, about 1869, sad

This Whitman appeared in the memoirs of his friends, in letters to his mother, and, powerfully, in the Civil War writings to which I was turning fresh and focused attention.   (To my surprise, when I went back to “Song of Myself,” of course this Whitman was all over it.)  Right now my favorite work of this Whitman may be “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” which is here.

“Vigil Strange” imagines a private wake for a young dead soldier, kept through the night by an older, grieving comrade.  It is not a perfect poem, being marred by weird syntactic inversions and being, arguably, maudlin.  But it is intensely moving in the quietness of its grief:

Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way,

Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)

and its acceptance of the unacceptable:

Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade—not a tear, not a word,

Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,

As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole . . .

and in its exquisite, unbearable gentleness:

My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form,

Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet,

And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited. . .

“Vigil Strange” has a rhythm that approaches incantation or lullaby–long, frequently repetitive lines that are calming (cut short abrasively by the reality of war in the aborted rhythm of the final line/action: “And buried him where he fell”).  The swaddling of the “son,” “my soldier,” in his blanket is, I’m going to suggest, not masculine, not even paternal.  It is maternal, tender, womanly.

What problems arise from my assertion?  A lot, and two of them have to be addressed.  First, unquestionably my desire to call this voice the Womanly Whitman is rooted heavily in a construction of the womanly and the maternal that is traditional, nurturing, compassionate, the angel in the hospital ward.  It is the construction I invoked in the domestic scene that began this post.  It is a construction with which I am utterly at odds ideologically and which I have doggedly and sometimes fiercely interrogated in my teaching, my politics, and many of my life choices.  Second, there is a complication in casting the speaker of “Vigil Strange” as maternal, a Freudian complication best indicated by the title from Lawrence (curse, growl): “Sons and Lovers.”  My casting of this soldier as maternal effectively recontains the homoeroticism of the poem:

One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I shall never forget,

One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground,

Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,

Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way,

Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)

The language of “my son,” “dear eyes,” and “boy” can mask the power of that body, those kisses, the assertion of love that will transcend death (less so, perhaps, if you’ve read the repeated use of the word “son” in Whitman’s letters to his partner Peter Doyle).  OR, and this is equally problematic, I am mapping “gay” over “tender, feminine, womanly” as though they are fundamentally interchangeable.

Oy vey.  Now I’m really in the total animal soup of essentialism.

But I want that term.  Maybe because in some ways it is MY “womanly”– that is to say, “womanly” is a tag not unlike the “myWW” tag I append to certain posts to indicate a connection to Whitman that goes beyond admiration of the poetic line, the image, the nest of guarded duplicate eggs you have to have to throw over the literary establishment.  It is, I will say on safer ground, a non-patriarchal Whitman: tender, generous, nurturing, doubting, equalizing.  It’s the Whitman this semester has given me, and I’m grateful.

Cum on and check out my paper on Raunchy Whitman!

1) Did anyone else notice that “Fat Kids” was on the Bill of Fare for the dinner party in the movie? A quick google search failed to enlighten me as to what this could be other than actual chubby children. which leads me to my second observation.

2) The description of Chatham “looming over Fredericksburg for years” has me convinced that Chatham Manor is in fact the Shrieking Shack. Discuss.

Now, onto the actual post. As far as actual Whitman stuff is concerned, I was rather disappointed that this was the only (non publicity video) reference I could find  to my favorite Wound Dresser (besides Megan of course). Regardless though, I was determined to find the connection on my own. My Whitmania led me around the grounds looking for someway to feel as if I was walking the same ground as Whitman. I certainly didn’t find it here, although realizing that what looked like metal swizzle straws were actually catheters made me cringe. And I didn’t find it here, but seeing the ammunition up close made me realize how terrifying it must have been to be on the battle field. I can’t imagine how it would feel to see one of those immense shells flying towards me. I didn’t even find it here (and here), although maybe if I had been able to stay longer without getting the heebie jeebies thinking about the pile of amputated limbs I would have.

It wasn’t until after all of this that I realized where Whitman was. He was infused with the entire building. He had been there, he had talked to, loved, and comforted wounded soldiers there. Then I saw where he was, he was right in front of me. He had stood on this lawn and seen the same sights I was seeing. At that moment I found my connection to Whitman. As I drove down the rode on which Presidents, generals, soldiers and Whitman himself had walked I had to stop. I could feel the presence of all the people that had walked that road, I could feel their pain, their determination, their joy, and their loss. I left with an inkling of how Whitman must have felt as he watched hundreds of soldiers pass through the doors of the hospitals he worked in. I left understanding that Whitman truly was The Better Angel

Ah, the ’70s. The eBay seller’s come-on is, “Walt Whitman’s Sex Writings – SEALED!”

You can have a listen here at the Mickle Street Review.

Starting bid only 12.00. Any takers?