Walt Whitman's Birthday - "I Celebrate Myself"

It's the birthday of Walt Whitman (books by this author), born in West Hills, Long Island, New York (1819). Whitman worked as a printing press typesetter, teacher, journalist, and newspaper editor. He was working as a carpenter, his father's trade, and living with his mother in Brooklyn, when he read Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "The Poet," which claimed the new United States needed a poet to properly capture its spirit. Whitman decided he was that poet. "I was simmering, simmering, simmering," Whitman later said. "Emerson brought me to a boil."

Whitman began work on his collection Leaves of Grass, crafting an American epic that celebrated the common man. He did most of the typesetting for the book himself, and he made sure the edition was small enough to fit in a pocket, later explaining, "I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air." He was 37 years old when he paid for the publication of 795 copies out of his own pocket.

Whitman spent the last 20 years of his life revising and expanding Leaves of Grass, issuing the eighth and final edition in 1891, saying it was "at last complete � after 33 y'rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace and war, young and old."

Today, most scholars agree that Whitman was likely gay. When he was asked directly, toward the end of his life, Whitman declined to answer. But he did say, shortly before he died, that sex was "the thing in my work which has been most misunderstood � that has excited the roundest opposition, the sharpest venom, the unintermitted slander, of the people who regard themselves as the custodians of the morals of the world."

via http://writersalmanac.org

I celebrate myself;   
And what I assume you shall assume;   
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.   
 
I loafe and invite my Soul;   
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.             5
 
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes�the shelves are crowded with perfumes;   
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it;   
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.   
 
The atmosphere is not a perfume�it has no taste of the distillation�it is odorless;   
It is for my mouth forever�I am in love with it;      10
I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked;   
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.





There are many editions of Whitman's poems, including the free to read online Leaves of Grass at www.bartleby.com

How They Came To Privatise The Night by Maria McMillan

It began with shadows
Our dark selves
Small nights we carry with us
Stretched and shrunk
Rushed into corners

Striding into the sky
Like the Chinese lovers
Whose bridge is the Milky Way �
Distance was nothing to them
Or waiting seven years.

Clearly of private benefit
They said: The shade they offer.
The company. The sense of self.
Hitherto pricing has not reflected
Their true value.

*

Dusk

Emily Dickinson on Gilligan's Island

In reading a post online about some Emily Dickinson trivial curiosities and the one that struck me again (because I heard Billy Collins talk about it years ago in a workshop) was her connection to the castaways on Gilligan's Island.

If you want to sing most of her poems (and I could imagine myself doing this with students), use the theme to TV's 1960s "classic" Gilligan's Island.

Give it a try with the first stanza of "Because I Could Not Stop For Death":

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

If somehow the melody of "The Ballad Of Gilligan's Isle" is not burned into your neurons deeper than any poem, give a listen:



And the why of it working is that Emily usually used the "common meter" in her poems. The TV theme also uses it, and it is used in lots of nursery rhymes and Protestant hymns. It's four beats followed by three beats.

You could play the same game with other songs, but imagining Emily on the beach with Ginger and mar

Albert Park by Alice Miller

I hear the sea how we come back claiming to be altered when

the painting of the barracks shows once we were never

live in what�s now owned by us, round trees curled

down to hear your thoughts starred

bold but let�s walk unscripted to the bar where we sang

when we knew

Love Poem in Allelujah

Here are the things I would hand you �



the smell of roses and something peppery.

the small warmth of sweat.



keys that interrupt still

you used to touch tentatively

child gentle and wild.



Saying you are beautiful is not the whole truth.

You are beautiful and ugly.



teenagers climb wide

on a trunk of pohutukawa



I am drinking

'Taken' by Jo Bell

�When a thief kisses you, count your teeth.� � Yiddish proverb

Let�s just say it was complete surrender.
The wanted word is visceral; the usual
exchange of fluids doesn�t quite compare.
He closed his eyes and tilted back his head
and he was mine, as naked as a worm.
He yielded like a sapling to the axe.

Humility is not an asset in my trade, but
such an ecstasy of loss brought out
the best in