Still Popular After All These Years: Walt Whitman, Levi's, and Sleeves of Grass

Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent and Walt Whitman geek Eric Conrad sounds his own barbaric yip this second week of July with some ruminations on the Good Gray Poet's recent association with the likes of Levi's Jeans and $59 t-shirts. Spending for vast returns? Waiting somewhere at a cash register for you? Conrad takes us there with his up-to-the-minute "clothes reading" of W.W. in the 2009 marketplace.

For all those Walt Whitman-geeks out there—whose annual patriotic picnics lost their luster when the symbolic 4th of July, 1855, release of Leaves of Grass proved to be a myth—there is finally some good news. Thanks to Levi’s jeans and the marketing minds of Wieden+Kennedy Portland, Whitman finally yawped his way into our pants this Independence Day after over a hundred and fifty years of trying.

Wondering how you’ll fit that Kosmos in your dungarees? Two TV and cinema spots at the core of Levi’s new “Go Forth” campaign hope to assuage the inevitable doubts. The first ad, entitled “America” (directed by Cary Fukunaga of Sin Nombre fame), appeared on the 4th and featured black and white images of San Francisco and New Orleans set to a wax cylinder recording of Whitman reading from his late poem “America.” (Scroll down here to view that ad.) Levi’s forthcoming complement to Fukunaga’s commercial is M Blash’s colorful spot “O Pioneer!” (due to hit screens July 24th) which incorporates a Smithsonian Folkways recording of Will Geer (yes, the guy from The Waltons) reading a few stanzas of Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”

Though very sexy and very sleek, these ads trade on Whitman’s bardic brand name in the obvious ways. Both “America” and “O Pioneer!” ask Generation-O to equate their fastidiously faded denim with a poet who recognized “the potential for greatness that lies in each of us.” Surprise, surprise: the spots due their best to contain the Whitmanian multitudes—Fukunaga by playing with light and shadow in a post-Katrina landscape and M Blash by embracing the homoerotic undertones of America’s “youthful sinewy races.” Though props go out to any ad that might counter Prop-8, in terms of Levi’s branding itself via Whitman (even in terms of Whitman and clothing), the “Go Forth” campaign is more hype than innovation.

While the marketing machine at Levi’s has bloggers abuzz, it might come as a surprise that some boutique clothing designers in New York’s Bowery section beat the jeanswear giant to the punch with their own line of Whitman- inspired fashion. You’ll remember that when Whitman appears arms akimbo, shirt unbuttoned, and hat defiantly cocked to the side in the 1855 Leaves of Grass frontispiece (pictured here), he brands himself with a Bowery Boy-image that precedes even his name as author of that strange volume. So perhaps it’s fitting that in 2009 (well before the launch of Levi’s much touted “Go Forth” campaign) a new generation of New York’s Bowery Boys returned the favor by branding themselves through Whitman’s image. These designers at NYC’s Barking Irons are calling their latest collection—wait for it—“Out of the Cradle.”

Visit Barking Iron’s website and you’re immersed in a Bowery bravado reminiscent of Whitman’s 1855 preface. (Barking Iron boasts, for example, of their “buttery soft vintage- quality garments” distinguished by “an authentically American style that is both steeped in forgotten traditions … and brazenly anew!”) It is easy to see why the company's founders, brothers Daniel and Michael Casarella, turned to Whitman as the face of their own “gritty, unpretentious styling.” The Casarellas look to corner a market with their hipster-chic threads. And though their shirts blur the lines between dandy and rough as W.W. did, at $59 a-pop, “Out of the Cradle” tees (for “Gents” only, mind you) are still best tailored not for Whitman’s masses but for wallets packed with hopeful green stuff swollen.

Eric Conrad is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Iowa where he works part-time for the Walt Whitman Archive.

The Other Side of Pin-Up Poetry

About a year ago, Poetry & Popular Culture spent some time thinking about the fact that poetry was oftentimes printed on pin-up posters like the Vargas-girl centerfolds that were a standard feature of Esquire magazine in mid-century America. Esquire wasn't unique in printing verse next to airbrushed, half-clad hotties, however. Poetry was a regular part of girly-picture culture more generally, escorting co-eds on postcards, ink blotters, playing cards, arcade cards, and matchbooks (such as the one pictured to the left)—a fact that intrigues Poetry & Popular Culture for a bunch of relatively compelling reasons which, if you take a journey back to last year's posting, you can discover for yourself.

Crucial to our curiosity, though, is the fact that the poetry accompanying the leggy lassies and sexy schoolmarms oftentimes seems to trouble the heteronormative masculine subject position that we assume these pin-ups both appealed to and helped to reinforce. It's almost as if, under the cover of ogling some busty babe—a sort of elaborate, Cold War-inspired drag performance of all-American maleness—guys found a freedom to explore alternate sexualities and sexual subject positions. And it was the poetry that was absolutely crucial to this queering of male sexuality, as from one pin-up to the next, the American male found the nature of his relationship to the image recast or re-rhymed in a variety of different ways.

Poetry & Popular Culture has just come into possession of a perfect example of this: the matchbook advertising Gosh's Burr Oaks "Modern Cabins" pictured above that has a poem printed down the length of its inside. On the front, the clever double entendre "Ready to Serve" plays right into the sort of masculine fantasy we expect pin-up pictures to cater to and reproduce. But when we turn to the inside, this is the poem we find:

If in this world there were but two,
And all the world were good and true,
And if you know that no one knew—
Would you?

If you dreamed in Pajamas Blue
Of two strong arms embracing you,
And if you really wanted to—
Would you?

If all the world were nice and bright,
And if I stayed with you all night,
And if I turned out all the lights—
Would you?

If we were in a certain place,
And we were sleeping face to face,
Nothing between us but a little lace—
Would you? Kiss me Good-Night!

Sure, by the end of the poem we realize (via that "little lace") that the poem's speaker is most likely a woman, but until then Poetry & Popular Culture feels that the verse clearly cultivates the fantasy of a male-male union and "of two strong arms embracing you." It's not an understatement, I think—given the hypothetical questions and the unrealistic world that is described (where all are "good and true," where no one would know, where you 'fessed up to wanting to, etc.)—to describe this scene as utopian. Of course, by returning the reader to the female and normative heterosexuality at the end, the poem reveals all of this speculation to be, in fact, precisely the fantasy that it is. But until then, the verse's vague language, conditional tense, and unidentified speaking voice let the American male drift from the moorings of his conventional masculinity and explore another side—not just of a matchbook, but of his desire.