Follow Walt Whitman's Advice and "Your Very Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem"

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is 165 years old today. It's fitting that it debuted on the 4th of July as it is such a distinctly American creation. This preface appeared only in the initial edition and I love the bit about re-examining all you have been told but this whole preface is quite the advice, boldly given.

Excerpts from here:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

 

The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors . . . but always most in the common people. ..... the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors—the fluency of their speech their delight in music, the sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul . . . their good temper and openhandedness— the terrible significance of their elections—the President’s taking off his hat to them not they to him—these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.

 

The old red blood and stainless gentility of great poets will be proved by their unconstraint. A heroic person walks at his ease through and out of that custom or precedent or authority that suits him not. Of the traits of the brotherhood of writers savants musicians inventors and artists nothing is finer than silent defiance advancing from new free forms. In the need of poems philosophy politics mechanism science behaviour, the craft of art, an appropriate native grand-opera, shipcraft, or any craft, he is greatest forever and forever who contributes the greatest original practical example. The cleanest expression is that which finds no sphere worthy of itself and makes one.

Great genius and the people of these states must never be demeaned to romances. As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.

Only the soul is of itself. . . . all else has reference to what ensues. All that a person does or thinks is of consequence. Not a move can a man or woman make that affects him or her in a day or a month or any part of the direct lifetime or the hour of death but the same affects him or her onward afterward through the indirect lifetime. The indirect is always as great and real as the direct. .... Did you guess any of them lived only its moment? The world does not so exist . . . no parts palpable or impalpable so exist . . . no result exists now without being from its long antecedent result, and that from its antecedent, and so backward without the farthest mentionable spot coming a bit nearer the beginning than any other spot.

America prepares with composure and goodwill for the visitors that have sent word. It is not intellect that is to be their warrant and welcome. The talented, the artist, the ingenious, the editor, the statesman, the erudite . . . they are not unappreciated . . . they fall in their place and do their work. The soul of the nation also does its work.

 

Saving the Nation with Poetry

Looking through my mail-in ballot and sad to see that there is still no proposition to tax pop songs to fund actual poets.

You think I'm being whimsical. If so you don't understand what nations are built on. The Grimm Brothers were nationalists and they wandered the country that was not yet Germany to find the stories Germans could tell themselves about who they were and were not. Focus too much on technology and not enough on the stories people use to inform them about what it means to be a particular kind of person and the technology will turn on you.

Imagine regularly hearing songs like this poem from Walt Whitman.

COME, I will make the continent indissoluble;I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon;
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of
America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over
the prairies;
I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other's
necks;

By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these, from me, O Democracy, to serve you, ma femme!
For you! for you, I am trilling these songs,
In the love of comrades,
In the high-towering love of comrades.

"any fool can get into an ocean ..." a poem by Jack Spicer

It's Sunday night. That seems reason enough to post a poem.

“Any fool can get into an ocean . . .”

BY JACK SPICER 1925–1965

Any fool can get into an ocean   

But it takes a Goddess   

To get out of one.

What’s true of oceans is true, of course,

Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming   

Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed

You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess

To get back out of them

Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly

Out in the middle of the poem

They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the

    water hardly moves

You might get out through all the waves and rocks

Into the middle of the poem to touch them

But when you’ve tried the blessed water long

Enough to want to start backward

That’s when the fun starts

Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural

You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown

Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth

But it takes a hero to get out of one

What’s true of labyrinths is true of course

Of love and memory. When you start remembering.

Two Poems by Billy Collins

From Collins' new book, horoscopes for the dead, here are two poems adjacent to each other, in the middle of the book, to give you some idea of how brilliant it is, even at random.

My Hero

Just as the hare is zipping across the finish line,
the tortoise has stopped once again
by the roadside,
this time to stick out his neck
and nibble a bit of sweet grass,
unlike the previous time
when he was distracted
by a bee humming in the heart of a wildflower.


The Meatball Department

there is no such thing as a meatball department
as far as anyone knows.
No helpful clerk has ever answered the question
where do you keep your meatballs?
by pointing to the back of the store
and saying you'll find them over there in the meatball department.

We don't have to narrow it down
to Swedish and Italian meatballs to know
that meatballs are already too specific
to have an entire department named after them
unlike Produce, Appliances, or Ladies' Shoes.

It's like when you get angry at me
for reading in bed with the lights on
when you are trying to fall asleep,
I cannot find a department for that.

Like meatballs, it's too small a thing to have its own department
unlike Rudeness and Selfishness which are located
down various aisles of the store known as Marriage.

I should just turn off the light
but instead I have stopped in that vast store
and I will now climb into my cart,
clasp my knees against my chest and wait
for the manager or some other person of authority

to push me down to the police station
or just out to the parking lot,
otherwise known as the department of lost husbands,
or sometimes, as now, the department of dark and pouring rain.

Litany - as Recited by a 3 Year Old

Happy Friday



Or ...

Litany

BY BILLY COLLINS

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley,
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I am not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

A little Bukowski for Your Morning

about the PEN conference

take a writer away from his typewriter
and all you have left
is
the sickness
which started him
typing
in the
beginning.

- Charles Bukowski

Love: Billy Collins' Poem Excerpt

When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.

You can find the rest of the poem here.

e.e. cummings - the poetic prophet of texting

i remember sometime in high school being taken by e.e. cummings disdain for capitalization and punctuation. it seemed to me stylish. of course at the time, i had no idea that an entire generation might adopt his style to communicate while typing into small, portable phones.

if e.e. cummings role as the prototype of texting were more clear, we could perhaps expect text messages like this:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

e.e. cummings told us what is possible with texting even before it was invented. i, for one, will do more to reach for this standard.

A Poem on Moderation

Moderation is Not a Negation of Intensity, But Helps Avoid Monotony
by
John Tagliabue

Will you stop for a while, stop trying to pull yourself together
for some clear "meaning" - some momentary summary? no one
can have poetry or dances, prayers or climaxes all day, the ordinary
blankness of little dramatic consciousness is good for the health sometimes,
only Dostoevksy can be Dostoevskian at such long long tumultuous stretches,
look what that intensity did to poor great Van Gogh, linger, lunge
scrounge and be stupid, that doesn't take much centering of one's forces,
as wise Whitman said, "lounge and invite the soul." Get enough sleep,
and not only because (as Cocteau said) "poetry is the literature of sleep",
be a dumb bell for a few minutes at least, we don't want
Sunday church bells
ringing constantly

A Poem for Autumn

About every 25 years, I'm moved to write a poem. I've checked with the editorial board at R World and they said, "Hey, if any of your readers can spot a theme in the midst of your compulsive writing, they know more than we do. Go ahead and publish a poem. We do know one thing: it won't impact your advertising revenues."

Autumn Poem

Is it just me
Or do these trees
Look like Nazis?
Standing all in a row
This orchard’s just too neat
Nature so unnaturally tamed

Yet in the midst
of attentive trees
I see a mere leaf
Commit an act of treason
Falling in a pattern so loopy
As if to defy the very
Pattern of patterns
And gravity
And concerns
Of falling

A single leaf carving a path no one will follow
Like your hand upon the hollow
Of my thigh
As if to defy the very reason for reasons
And gravity
And seasons
I’ve fallen
In love