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The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to pay attention. Dreamed last night of a senile woman who’d taken up piano-playing; dementia had etherealized her features. Like a seasoned, reputable coach, I stood behind her while she fumbled through Schubert. The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to remember the history of song, and to remember the reasons that troubled people have looked toward song to relieve pain and to organize, with other sufferers, in resistance.

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With curiosity and reverence, I pulled down, from the shelf, the legendary No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women, the original paperback edition, 1973, edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to revisit books to which we have ceased paying sufficient attention, books we have failed adequately to love.

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On a transcontinental flight I read Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable. I wanted to live in the crevice where words broke down, and where matter arose to compensate for the loss. Some words I found in The Unnamable: “grapnels,” “apodosis,” “sparsim,” “congener,” “paraphimotically globose,” “circumvolutionisation,” “inspissates,” “naja,” “halm,” “thebaïd.” These words—obstructions in the throat—seemed specimens of rigorous, refined accounting, of a system so late-stage, so desolate, it could only satisfy description’s mandate by lodging in words virtually never used. And, while 39,000 miles in the air, I imagined an island where the only currency, for the stricken inhabitants, gumming their porridge, was the obsolete word, the rare word, the word stigmatized, in the dictionary, as “literary.” I was imagining an island—call it the planet Earth—after most of it was rendered uninhabitable, where there were no words or only the most elementary words or only the most obscure words, only those words so specific, so paraphimotically globose, that they could function in this new, eviscerated terrain. Imagine, then, an ecology of language, where only “cang” and “ataxy” can make the rivers flow, where only “serotines” and “naja” can serve as verbal cenotaphs for the missing bodies, whether made of words or of matter, that failed to arrive at this final, spectral island. If we don’t live on that island now, we may, one day, and we might not be “we” any longer; we might be sparse tuft or diatomaceous phlegm. Read More

Walt Whitman in 1891. Photo: Samuel Murray. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

There are poets who find their strength in brevity, who use as few words as possible, arranged in the minimum number of lines, to evoke sense perception, emotion, and idea. Walt Whitman, it goes without saying, is not one of those. He is most comfortable on a broader scale. His great poems—“Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”—straddle hundreds of lines, providing the poet with room to catalogue particulars (The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, he calls them), to stack up parallel statements, to address his reader, to depart from and return to his argument, and to construct a kind of poetic architecture designed to be mimetic of the process of thinking, and thus draw us more intimately near. This is why his shorter poems often feel like parts of a larger, more encompassing one; even satisfyingly complete shorter pieces such as “To You” and “This Compost” might be seen as outtakes, or gestures in the direction of some overarching intention.

One reason for this is perhaps the speed at which Whitman composed. He said he’d been simmering, before Emerson’s New York lecture of 1848, then Emerson’s passionate call for a distinctly American poet had set him to boil. Nonetheless, it was seven years before the first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared, containing twelve poems. Fired by the book’s publication, Whitman began to work faster; his second edition, only a year later, contained twenty new poems. One of them, “Sun-Down Poem,” later to be retitled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” is one of the great poems written in English in its century or any other.

The new look of the second edition is telling. The oversize production of the first, destined for the parlor, its intricately wrought title stamped in gold, gave way to a more streamlined look, perhaps because he was no longer bound to use the large paper his first printer had provided. But I suspect he had recalibrated his sense of audience in a way more suited to his mission; the green book was now sized to fit in a pocket of one of those work jackets Whitman liked to wear, meant to be carried everywhere, and read in the open air every season of every year of your life. Hefty, encyclopedic in its proportions, the book came more to resemble the new gospel that Whitman intended, a book that would convince us that the known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet. Read More