The Walt Whitman Blog / Transnational Poetry

So I am trying to get a head start on my final paper for this course and I’m trying to generate ideas on how I believe Langston Hughes acts as an extension of this umbrella that Whitman embodies as a poet. Stay with me people….

Now, I know it may seem far-fetched, but hear me out. In studying Whitman and how he (if at all) attempts to connect the American experience to the Native American history and tradition, I found an ample amount of similarity in what Hughes attempts to do for African-Americans. For example, there are hints of Whitman throughout Hughes poetic license to include cataloging and his attitude in the presence of crisis and/or recovery.

More so, in class I do believe, there was a suggestion made that what comes off as Whitman’s failed attempt to connect and understand the Native American experience, his failure to be in touch with his history is what leads critics to believe that Whitman lacks commitment to any given thing. However, I believe that it is that very same notion that allows Whitman to be the pioneer of such great poetics, to symbolize and embody America. I don’t think that I believe that Whitman can both commit to a particular thing and remain what he represents now, which is a transnational, universal, omnipresent, “I am large” poet and literary figure.

Moving forward and drawing from my initial assertion that Langston Hughes stems from this umbrella that Whitman creates, Hughes does for the African-American voice and experience what Whitman cannot. Hughes makes a commitment where Whitman can’t or won’t. He speaks to the history and tradition of African-Americans. He searches for a connection. He understands the cultural beliefs.
SN>>>I think Neruda does this as well for the Latin American experience.
I would like to examine how Whitman’s “failure” permits authors such as Hughes and Neruda to commit and represent larger concepts in relation to other contemporary poets of their time as well as other poets who have derived from Whitman’s cannon.

I know this a very broad and generalized overview of my ideas, but this is my starting point.

What do you think? Is this catastrophic thinking?? I am VERY open to suggestions, criticisms…:)

On the first day of ninth grade my biology teacher told us that Joni Mitchell’s lyrics “We are stardust” are scientifically accurate as well as poetic. From the calcium in our bones to the iron in our blood , every element on earth was created deep in the heart of an ancient, massive star. Thus, we are indeed stardust. While Joni Mitchell expressed this sentiment in her song “Woodstock” to symbolize the connection she felt with her generation, scientific theory attests that such a connection exists between all things on this earth.  I am reminded of all of this when I read these lines on page 9 from Juliana Spahr’s “Poem Written After September 11/2oo1”:

The space of everyone that has been inside of everyone mixing

inside of everyone with nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor and

argon and carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and bacteria

mixing inside of everyone sulfur and sulfuric acid

Our class discussion regarding this poem left me thinking a lot about the idea of connectedness. As others observed, the way Spahr’s poetry illustrates this concept of connectedness can lend itself to inspiring or saddening interpretations. Portions of the poem are magnificently uplifting as they tie together descriptions of cells and hands with oceans and the troposphere. Yet the conclusion of the piece introduces “pulverized glass and concrete” as a heartbreakingly vivid illustration of 9/11 and the drawbacks of connectedness. I spent a while puzzling over the line:

How lovely and how doomed this connection of everyone with lungs

I could not decide if the poem filled me hope or sorrow. I had been attempting to label this grand idea of interconnectedness as either positive or negative.  I eventually realized that I was approaching the idea and the poem in a way that was too narrow-minded.  This is not an either/or situation. Spahr is telling us that we are at the same time lovely and doomed by the fact that we are all joined together so inherently. Doomed because despite this intrinsic and universal bond we do harm one another. And lovely because that same timeless connection that dwells between our atoms and all the way up through the mesosphere is what allows us to heal and rebuild.

Juliana Spahr and Whitman certainly have a sense of interconnectedness in humanity present in their poetry in common. Both poets seem to use that interconnectedness to cope (or mourn?) with an America that is going through changes- and not necessarily changes for the better. While considering why each of these poets use an inevitable and unbreakable connection between human beings in their poetry, I have trouble getting down the the bottom of – why. What does it do for their poetry and what kind of affect does this interconnectedness have on the reader?

I, for one, can’t decide if I feel more lonely or less lonely when I consider myself as being apart of every single person in the world, linked inevitably with an “inability to control what goes on in the world in my name”. When considering this “connection” that both Whitman and Spahr so often speak of, should I feel comforted or…insignificant?

Perhaps it depends on the poetry. In Whitman’s poetry I think the interconnectedness has positive connotations. Whitman seems to feel at one with humanity, he feels at one with the rest of America. Besides political and cultural messages of kinship and equality, Whitman captures the unity of human beings not only with each other, but with everything found in nature, in the universe. Spahr’s version of interconnectedness doesn’t give off the same pleasant sense of hope that I found in Leaves of Grass. In “This Connection of Everything with Lungs”, it seems that Spahr feels like she is trapped in this connection with everything else so sinister and that she feels hopeless because there is no way out of it, whereas Whitman basks in it. Spahr uses lists of cities and lists of people killed and pays particularly close attention to numbers, as if we are apart of this number and cannot escape this number, nor do anything about any of this tragedy. Both poets seem to use the theme of interconnectedness in response to a changing of the times but use the connection in very different and unique-to-the-poet ways.

Our reading took an exciting twist this week. We read “This Connection of Everyone With Lungs,” by Juliana Spahr. She is a lovely writer that I really enjoyed reading. Her use of cataloguing and repetition let us know right off the get-go that she was a fan of Walt Whitman. I had my children take turns reading the first poem, “Poem Written After September 1/2001,” to me while I was driving them to Spartanburg for the Halloween festivities.  They were hilarious reading to me because they thought the poem was so funny.  They were in hysterics, I guess because of all the repetition, by the end of the poem. And they were chanting it so rhythmically that it made listening to the poem very enjoyable and a really happy time for all of us. The boys kept sing-songing different parts of the poem all weekend long!
All of this is to say that when we began to discuss the poetry in class Tuesday, I was still floating on the happy cloud of our fun-in-the-car poetry reading. Apparently, her poetry was not as fun and happy a read for others as it was for me. I felt like, in spite of the serious and somewhat negative material that Juliana Spahr was writing about, her work managed to be read as a positive outlook in a not so positive world.  This is evident to me particularly in the following portion of her poem:

“Then all of it entering in and out.

The entering in and out of the space of the mesosphere in the
entering in and out of the space of the stratosphere in the entering
in and out of the space of the troposphere in the entering in and
out of the space of the oceans in the entering in and out of the
space of the continents and islands and the entering in and out of
the space of the nations in the entering in and out of the space of
the regions in the entering in and out of the space of the cities in
the entering in and out of the space of the neighborhoods nearby
in the entering in and out of the space of the building in the
entering in and out of the space of the room in the entering in
and out of the space around the hands in the entering in and out
of the space between the hands.

How connected we are with everyone.”

I read the beauty of this world through her eyes. I see real beauty in all of us being so very connected. Her listing, cataloguing, and repetition adds to the severity of us all being one great collection of spiritual oneness.

I found This Connection of Everyone with Lungs utterly fascinating, mainly because it made me think about the kinds of technological filters that keep us from possibly engaging with one another on a daily basis.  One of the key themes I noticed in the poem is how the narrator is constantly, yet willingly it would seem, bombarded with imagery from the internet, news, and radio, and how this imagery creeps into, and very often pervades her daily interactions with other people.   As a matter of fact, I would go so far as to say I would be hard-pressed to find too many instances in the poem where people interacted with each other without a technological filter (or the byproducts of these technological filters) interfering with or straining the relationship somehow.  For instance, does the narrator ever go to the beach and connect with someone else without a memory of a news broadcast spoiling what should be a purely human interaction?  So for me, technological filters were basically adding distances to the relationships that the narrator was struggling to make.

These distances are apparent even when she seems to be lauding the beauty of her beloveds: “When I speak of your thighs and their long muscles of smooth-\ness, I speak of yours cells and I speak of the British Embassy \ being closed in Kenya”.  When she speaks of their cheeks: “I speak of the \ NASA launch and the child Net safety law and the Native Linux \ pSeries Server.”  I’m not trying to read too much into the multi-layered metaphor of the narrator’s beloveds, but whichever metaphor you pick, it appears she’s trying to describe someone she wants to be close to through a technological filter–various reports she’s seen on the news and possibly advertisements for the mainframes that power the Internet.  However, is a Linux Server the first thing that comes to mind when we think about “someone I want to get close to?”  There are plenty of moments like these that crop up where the internet, news, what have you, seems to obstruct the human connections in the poem. 

Yet Spahr’s poem is not without it’s moments of optimism, where people do seem to connect momentarily by harnessing technology; however, I felt they were few and far between.  One good instance is when the narrator and her friends turn the tables on these filters to organize protests: “We talked on the phone about this glimmer / We read each other’s reports. / We said optimistic things”  and “Those who broke up suddenly discovered new lovers and their / new sensualities in this glimmer despite all the burning.”  Yet when she downloads images of protestors in other parts of the world, keep in mind that she’s not actually at the protest, but seems to be looking at a still frame through a monitor when she says: “I imagine the bodies of friends in the crowds of various cities, feel \ moments of connection with the mass as I imagine it down to \ individuals”.  The connotation I got from the language was that she needed to imagine her own friends inside a picture of some other city being displayed on her monitor, in order to feel “moments of connection” with the people who actually lived there.  So even though the moment is optimistic, there are abstracted layers she needs to work through (imagining a mental picture of another picture that is framed within a larger one) in order to feel a connection and bridge the gap. 

This is really the aspect of Spahr’s poetry that delighted me.  How maybe our consciousness (or cognition maybe–I’m not sure which) is shifting into global awareness fueled by technology, inundating us with information, maybe at the expense of what used to be “personal” relationships?  I’m not trying to say anything good or bad about this shift, other than I think Spahr’s poetry captures it somehow and that it keeps my synapses sparking.