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.”

According to Nate DiMeo, late in his life, Marconi came to believe that sound waves never disappeared, but rather went on and on, infinitely in time and space, and that if he could just find the right frequency, he could listen to the past– to great speakers and figures and historical events, to the praise of others that would ensure he would live beyond his imminent death, to the most intimate of moments in his own life.

What an amazing vision of the past and sound, and Mara’s weaving this together with tuning into Whitman’s poetry a century and a half later is masterful. And for me, I wonder how we might be able to imagine the abstract, disembodied sounds of the past re-congeal within the posts of the Looking for Whitman experiment. I’m fascinated by how that imaginative process of constantly accessing the sounds and visions of the past is what we are framing out right now with the web, and what I love about Marconi’s vision is how chaotic, open, and imaginatively out there it was. It’s a vision that beautifully buttresses Whitman’s call across time to each and every reader/listener/dreamer.

The premise of the course is Professor Matt Gold’s brainchild (you can read his overview of the course here), and when he asked me to be a part of the project early on I jumped at the prospect because I firmly believe it’s an important opportunity to illustrate how social media can re-imagine the possibilities for sharing amongst and between students of a similar topic from a wide range of institutions. It in many ways frames the importance of an open and porous ecosystem of sharing not just within a single institution, but across many. It builds upon and amplifies an experiment like UMW Blogs by bringing a number of different institutions into a larger, focused conversation around a particular theme or topic.

And while the courses all still run a face-to-face model at their respective universities, a large majority of the work will be happening online and between faculty and students from entirely different campuses. All of which presents a really fascinating opportunity for re-thinking distributed courses between universities, and opens up an exciting possibility for re-imaging the architecture of distributed learning. Something that just about any LMS on the planet couldn’t even begin to address, or even imagine, given how deeply rooted they are within the logic of a single institution, not to mention how entangled they are in the restrictive logic of stringent permissions and content ownership—yet another roadblock to truly essential innovation brought to you by the LMS!

So, as may be clear by now, I’m pretty fired up about the possibilities of this project because it marries the classroom experience to a more distributed network of learners from a variety of institutions that represent a wide-range of students from all walks-of-life and backgrounds. From the University of Mary Washington to Rutgers-Camden to CUNY’s City Tech to Serbia’s University of Novi Sad, the project represents a rather compelling spectrum of courses from a variety of universities that provide a unique network of students from a wide array of experiences. This is not a “country club for the wealthy,” but a re-imagining of a distributed, public education that is premised on an approach/architecture that is affordable and scales with the individual. It’s a grand, aggregated experiment that will hopefully demonstrate the possibilities of the new web for re-imagining the boundaries of our institutions, while at the same time empowering students and faculty through a focused and personalized learning network of peers, both local and afar.

Now, all that said, what makes it all the more exciting is that we’re building this ship as it sails. We have set up an overarching site premised to some degree on the work we have been doing at UMW with blogging and aggregation, a setup cheap enough that we can direct more of the grant money to hiring people and training faculty and students than worrying about designing and programming yet another framework. The tools are already out there, what we are doing is focusing on hacking an open source application like WPMu and BuddyPress to give us as much flexibility as possible. And, that’s right, we’re pushing the logic of the syndication bus that much further, trying to see just how publication and syndication can create a rather simple, yet powerful framework for sharing, collaborating and conversing. So, to that end, I’m going to talk quickly about two three syndication based experiments we’re working on right now with this project.

Frontispiece Project
The frontispiece project is just under way, and it foregrounds the power of tag-filtered syndication for a distributed series of courses. At UMW Professors Mara Scanlon and Brady Earnhart—a project the other four courses will also be doing—are having the student design their own frontispiece as a means of reflecting upon the 1855 frontispiece from Whitman’s first edition of Leaves of Grass.

They’ve posted the frontispiece in their individual blog (which feeds into a course, aggregated blog you can see here) and tagged it with frontispiece. All the posts from around the Looking for Whitman site are republished in the http://tags.lookingforwhitman.org über blog (created thanks to the Sitewide Tags Pages plugin) which means we can get a single feed of all the posts from around the environent tagged with frontispiece: http://tags.lookingforwhitman.org/tag/frontispiece/feed.

Now, I created a new blog for the frontispiece project at http://frontispiece.lookingforwhitman.org and activated a cool photo theme called AutoFocus. After that I simply dropped the sitewide feed for the frontispiece tag into FeedWordpress, and every post tagged frontispiece will now republish into this project blog creating a very cool visualization of all the students’ frontispieces from all five courses. Tale a look here. It was dead simple, and the effect is not to be underestimated, this is now a space we will see almost 100 frontispieces emerge reflecting the wide-range of students and faculty traveling through this course together.

A Twitter-based RSS Reader?
There have been some rumblings since Twitter took off that it has the potential to replace RSS readers, I haven’t found this to be entirely true in my experience, but there can be no doubt I spend far more time in Twitter than my RSS Reader on a daily basis. And I am pushing hard that this course experiment with Twitter (although I am getting some push back from some analog UMW professors who will feel the wrath of the Reverend, and soon) and one of the things I discovered is that it would be rather easy to have a Twitter account that basically republishes all the students distributed posts at UMW into a single twitter feed. Given we are already aggregating all the UMW-based posts into a single blog, I simply activated Tweetable (my new twitter app for WordPress Mu thanks to Shawn Miller) which allows me to include the project hashtag (#ww20) as well as tweet right from the WordPress site.

So, in short, whenever a post is re-published on the course blog, a tweet is sent out through the @whitmanumw twitter account, so you can follow this account as a kind of course RSS reader, or simply search the hashtag #ww20 to see the latest posts as well as what people are saying about it on twitter, if anyone at UMW actually tweets, which the dearth of is highly annoying to me. I mean the course is titled Digital Whitman, not Analog Whitman, get with the program hippies!

Discourse
This idea is one I have been playing with for a while, and I have never really seen it pan out, but I figure what the hell, I’m already losing the Twitter battle, might as well unload everything at the very beginning, and cry myself to sleep thereafter. I created a separate blog at http://discourse.lookingforwhitman.org that I themed with P2, which is basically a Twitter knock-off theme for WordPress. And while students can become authors on this site and use it as a quick and easy space for discussion (something better handled on Twitter in my opinion, you hear that Mara, are ya listening?), I actually think of it as a way to integrate the Twitter conversation into the ecosystem of the Looking fro Whitman site via the feed for the #ww20 hashtag on twitter. Finding the feed for a hashtag is made easy by http://search.twitter.com—you can see the feed for the hashtag #ww20 on the wrongfully reviled Twitter here.

Once I got the feed for the hashtag, I simply activated FeedWordPress on the Discourse blog, and dropped it in there, and automagically all the tweets with #ww20 republish within this blog, and become part of the Looking for Whitman ecosystem. They are now searchable and discoverable through recent posts, sitewide search, and simple RSS feeds dropped in the sidebars of course and/or individual blogs.

So, it is just the first week, but as you can tell, the experimentation will be fast and furious, we have plans for digress.it (or what was CommentPress) as well as Google MyMaps, YouTube, FLickr, and all those other not-so-new-fangled sites. So, stay-tuned to the bava for evermore cutting edge instructional technology, your one-stop-shop for brilliance writ large

Walt Whitman Jim Groom, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and breeding,

No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or

apart from them,

No more modest than immodest.

Unscrew the locks from the doors!

Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

_________________________________________________________________

It’s amazing just how much Whitman’s “Song of Myself” frames some deeply problematic questions for me right now. While studying the iconic frontispiece to the 1855 edition of “Leaves of Grass” and working through the poem I find within it everything that has been plaguing my ego for the last two years of so. This question of framing an identity, being both a finely tuned persona as well as a fleshy, eating, drinking and breeding man. A spectrum of identities that are fragmented and often weighty in their incongruity and dissonance. In fact, after reading Gary Richard’s post that provocatively frames Whitman as a poser in the frontispiece (in the perjorative, rather than literal, sense of that word) I began to think a bit more about the construction of an identity (or identities) in relationship to some sense of authenticity.

Gary frames his argument by means of an image of a distant relative from the 19th century, whose distended paunch and work soiled clothes provides us with an arguably more authentic “rough.” In fact, he gives us an image that can be understood as a more documentary vision of the 19th century citizen—is he somehow realer? Such a strain of thought suggests the complex tensions between an artist’s framing of their subject—interestingly shedding Whitman’s list of people and types in as much a documentary as a poetic framework. Which, to follow a line of thought, brings to mind texts like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or films like the Maysles Brothers’ Salesman (1968) or Gray Gardens (1976), wherein the documentarian are both artists and interlopers, very much constructing their space within these films as both archivists and artists. Capturing a moment as well as amplifying its particular tensions, beauty, and purpose.

So then, how do we begin to deconstruct the relationship between Whitman the poet and his seemingly infinite identities and poses in “Song of Myself” as a literary documentarian of an entire nation of people, a figure that attempts to encompasses all races, genders, and classes? How might the construction of innumerable identities, be at once the erasure of self though imposing one’s own self on everyone?

In all people I see myself, none more and not one barley-

corn less,

And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.

Now while these questions may lead me down a rabbit hole I won’t soon emerge from, they also help focus some issues surrounding my own identity. For a large part of my identity, rather than being deeply embodied as we see Whitman figuring in his poetry, is predominantly disembodied and fragmented. Blogging almost daily over the last four years about a wide range of ideas places one within an ongoing stream of thought that is personal, public, and professional all at once. A space wherein one’s constant publishing and re-publishing around a series of ideas ultimately gives way to a particular trace and sense of one’s identity that is just as much constructed as authentic. Often times equal parts fiction and fact, a partial and inadequate representation of one’s work and life, that is both mindful and hungry for an audience, while at the same time pained and imprisoned by it.

At the heart of this identity—which for me is online and almost entirely disembodied—there’s a schizophrenic transition to alternative selves that seems to me at the core of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a sense of performance, construction, and laying bear. In fact, the frontispiece image I chose above is a portrait immediately following a short film Tom Woodward and I made that is premised on the struggling with the idea of an online self and the concomitant act of bearing and tracing one’s life through a series of fragmented streams across a variety of loosely connected sites. “I Just Shaved” is a rather physical and filmic attempt to deal with this question of fragmentation and disembodiment. The portrait is premised on an overt quote to The Royal Tenenbaums that is fused with a highly personal and documentary recording of both transformation and the willingness to bear it all in this new environment, which is often as painful as it is liberating.

Yet, that’s exactly the magic of Whitman “Song of Myself” in my mind, he manages to both fragment and disembody his identity throughout the poem in order to reconstitute a much richer composite of identities that, oddly enough, re-imagine a sense of authenticity through posing. A shadowy idea of truth through types. It’s alchemy, and I love it.

This hour I tell things in confidence.

I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

Image credit: The great Bionicteaching’s “Rebirth of slick”