For each of the examples below, we will ask the following questions:
- What Whitmanian energies–or complex meshing of energies–does the text draw out?
- What is at stake in the text–For Whitman, for us, and/or for our world?
Apple’s iPad Air commercial
Levi’s “O Pioneers! and “America” (Go Forth ad campaign) and Parody w/ Charles Bukowski
Anne Waldman
“On Walt Whitman’s Birthday”
O Strategic Map of disasters, Hungry America
O target for the song, the jouncing poem, the protest
A long imperfect history shadows you
Let all suffering, toil, sex &
sublime distractions go recorded
Let the world continue to breathe
It’s simple: a woman gets up & stretches
The world is her mirror and portal too
Whitmanic morning task: wake the country to itself
Allen Ginsberg
“A Supermarket in California”–Audio
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the
streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit
supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles
full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! — and you,
Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the
meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price
bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and
followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting
artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does
your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel
absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to
shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in
driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you
have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and
stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
Larry Levis
“Whitman”
“I say we had better look our nation searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease.” –Democratic Vistas
“Look for me under your bootsoles.”
On Long Island, they moved my clapboard house
Across a turnpike, & then felt so guilty they
Named a shopping center after me!
Now that I’m required reading in your high schools,
Teenagers call me a fool.
Now what I sang
Stops breathing, like the daughter too high on drugs
To come back, in your arms. Her white dress
So hopeful, & beside the point.
And yet
It was only when everyone stopped believing in me
That I began to live again—
In the thin whine of Montana fence wire,
In the transparent, cast-off garments hung
In the windows of the poorest families,
In the glad music of Charlie Parker.
At time now,
I even come back to watch you
From the eyes of a taciturn boy at Malibu.
Across the counter at the beach concession stand,
I sell you hot dogs, Pepsis, cigarettes-
My blond hair long, greasy, & swept back
In a vain old ducktail, deliciously
Out of style.
And no one notices.
Once I even came back as me,
An aging homosexual who the Tilt-a-Whirl
At county fairs, a Mardi Gras tattoo on my left shoulder;
And the chilled paint on each gondola
Changing color as it picked up speed, made me smile.
I thought you caught the meaning of my stare.
I thought you caught the meaning of my stare:
Still water, merciless
As my laughter.
A Cosmos. One of the roughs.
And Charlie Parker’s grave outside Kansas City
Covered with weeds.
Leave me alone.
A father who’s outlived his only child.
To find me now will cost you everything.
PBS American Experience series–Walt Whitman (2008)–watch first two minutes
