Whitman's Grandchildren: Becoming and Unbecoming Walt Whitman

The January 2013 issue of PMLA has a pretty cool article ("Whitman's Children") by Bowdoin College English Professor Peter Coviello (pictured here) that takes as its starting point a couple of babies born after the U.S. Civil War that were named Walt—a nominal tribute that two veterans paid to Walt Whitman after receiving Whitman's care during the war. William H. Millis, for example, wrote to Whitman more than a decade after the war to say, "We have not forgotten you & want to hear more from you. We have had a son borned since we heard from you & We call him Walter Whitman Millis in honer to you for Love for you." And in 1868 Benton H. Wilson wrote to tell Whitman that his (Wilson's) once-rocky marriage worked out and that, "My little baby Walt is well & Bright as a new dollar."

This is suggestive, Coviello argues, because while Whitman didn't have any biological children, the pair of baby Walts bearing his name should prompt us to think about the nature of reproduction and parenthood more generally and especially about the model of "queer generation" that Whitman—as a surrogate parent to the men he nursed and as the baby Walts' namesake—might have imagined. During a war that split a nation and its families—pitting North against South and brother against brother—Coviello wonders if Whitman worked in his writing and caregiving to "restore carnality, in its world-making force, to family and especially to parenthood" as a way to produce the future, or to at least "wonder...if a future can be something you parent, with and through sex but not heterosexual reproduction." Embodying the roles of lover, brother, father, mother, uncle and comrade—all roles that meet at the bedside that Whitman so frequently occupied while working as a nurse during the war—Whitman imagined a "sexually saturated sociability" that didn't police human tenderness or caregiving by making desire "the province of one exclusive set of attachments" (like husband and wife), but that instead turned sex into what Coviello calls "a mode of relation." In a time when the nation was "a nuclear family turned violently against itself," he argues, Whitman was after a "recast familial structure" as well as "the prospect of a mode of generation that is sexual, though not quite normatively heterosexual nor normatively reproductive."

As is the case with much of our favorite academic scholarship, we like and admire Coviello's piece a lot but nevertheless wonder how it might shed light on, and/or become more complex via its relationship to, certain aspects of popular culture. When one looks, for example, there are more baby Walts out there than just the real-life sons of Civil War veterans Millis and Wilson. These other Walts are fictional Walts, yes, but Walts that possibly indicate the persistence or reach of Whitman's "queer generation" (at least as realized in the literary or artistic realm). Take, for example, Don Draper, the poetically-simmering advertising executive and lead character of AMC's award-winning television show Mad Men. (That's Draper reading Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency pictured above; you can watch the scene in which he recites O'Hara's verse in voiceover here.) As fans of the show know, "Don Draper" was not in fact Draper's birth name; it's the name of a soldier shot and killed next to Draper during the Korean War whose identity Draper adopted (or stole) by switching identification papers in hopes of escaping his past. Draper's birth name was—you got it—Dick Whitman. So, even though the real Don Draper died in the war, his name lived on, and the name Dick Whitman went into history as KIA. It's as if Dick Whitman were born one of the baby Walts mentioned in Coviello's article except that, instead of carrying on the Whitman family line, he chose to scrap it (during another war that split another country in half, mind you) in order to do his own act of re-imagining the future.

Coviello works through the range of Walt Whitman's wartime relations by tracing a "dialectics of substitution and supplement" in which Walt appears to comfort patients "by becoming them" and by becoming surrogates for their family members, embracing, in the process, "an unresolving, generative play of identity and difference, or multiplying differences." In Mad Men, though, Don Draper doesn't embrace this play; once (as Dick Whitman) he has committed an initial act of substitution for self-serving purposes ("becoming" Don Draper), he seeks to hide if not repress that act in his endeavor to become the single, stable, coherent identity that he wants to be: successful ad exec, hyper-hetero womanizer, and normative Cold War parent who reproduces in normative heterosexual ways. But the fact is that, even though he was officially KIA, Dick Whitman won't stay hidden (because he's still alive; because he has become Don Draper), and much of Mad Men is a return-of-the-repressed story in which the ghost of his former self comes back to haunt Draper in any number of ways. One might say that Dick Whitman thought he was out-Whitmaning Coviello's Whitman by using Walt's "dialectics of substitution" to escape his identity as Whitman's grandchild in order to become a normative parent, only to then discover that the play of identity and difference that he thought promised him liberation and stability is not a one-time deal but, as Coviello puts it, "unresolving." That lack of resolution in what should have been a stable real life identity eats at Draper and the Cold War America he represents in any number of ongoing ways, and it is soothed only, perhaps, by the writing of poetic advertisements, an act (at least as the show presents it) that entails Draper inhabiting the mindset of, or "becoming," the psychologically wounded American consumer—oftentimes via proximity to Dick Whitman—to whom goods and services will be marketed. Don is most fully himself, that is, when he is simultaneously marketer, consumer, Whitman, and Draper.

Draper's not the only character that popular culture has associated with Walt Whitman, however. There's also Walter White—the high school chemistry teacher turned drug manufacturer in AMC's other award-winning show Breaking Bad. (Given the Whitman connection between them, one can't help but wonder if AMC used the same writers for both.) The connection between Walter White and Walt Whitman is suggested not just by their shared initials and shared first name, but by several moments in the show's plot—one where White's laboratory assistant Gale recites "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" in full (watch it here), and another when Walt deflects the suspicion of his DEA agent brother-in-law by claiming that the initials "WW" on a piece of confiscated paper probably stand for "Walt Whitman" and thus make for a misleading or specious clue in his investigation.

Even though he claims to not know "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," more connects Walter White and Walt Whitman than just their names. Like Whitman and Draper, White assumes a second identity (that of meth cook) during wartime (both the war on drugs and the wars between dealers), and his character revolves around the performance of his multiple identities and especially how those identities affect his status as parent; not only is he a biological father (the economic pressures of his son's physical disability plus an unexpected pregnancy drive him out of the classroom and into the drug trade) portrayed as an artist (also like Whitman and Draper) creating new material all the time, but he is also a surrogate parent for his assistant Jesse Pinkman. In their choice of careers, physical appearance, mentoring relationship, and shared trauma, Walt and Jesse in fact seem more like father and son than Walt and his biological son do. (Ironically, Walt's biological son is named Walter Jr., making him a great-grandchild of Walt Whitman, perhaps). Over the course of the show, Walt is many things—father, friend, lover, uncle, comrade, teacher, and so on, oftentimes playing nurse to the frequently wounded Jesse—in a distinctly Whitman-like way. What is remarkable about this is how Walt feels so much more alive in his non-normative context (away from the nuclear family) than he does at home, and the show's topic of drug addiction is really a trope for how he has become addicted to what we might, following Coviello, call the queer generativity of his other life (the science, the production, the parenting and care-giving roles), so that even when he has a chance to walk away, he can't bring himself to do it; the "carnality" or "world-making force" that Coviello sees in Whitman is too powerful to let him return to heteronormative life. Like Coviello's Whitman "laboring" to create a future for the family and the nation that he one day won't be alive to see, Walter White is also busy trying to make a future he won't be part of—laboring under a cancer diagnosis to provide financial security for his biological family in the event of his death.

If Don Draper of AMC's Mad Men knows that he is a grandchild of Walt Whitman and denies that lineage only to be haunted by it forever after, Walter White of AMC's Breaking Bad doesn't know that he is Whitman's grandchild, but the force of that ancestry propels him into the "unresolving, generative play of identity and difference" that is his birthright and inheritance. Whereas Draper can never fully become an authentic self once he opts out of Family Whitman, White finds himself to be most fully himself in the "multiplicity ... the multitudinousness" of non-normative, carnally-driven identities. One might say that if Walt Whitman comforted others by "becoming them" in a dialectics of substitution and supplement, then Walter White, in becoming Walt Whitman, also becomes himself. That most of this happens in contexts outside the law and hidden from the nuclear family suggests that Whitman's "style of queer world making and queer future making" is what history has oftentimes made queer world making out to be: the source of good stories but ultimately illegal—a criminal act.

We're not totally sold on our overall assessment here—hey, we're busy enjoying cherry and raspberry season in Oregon—but we do think it's pretty interesting that Dick Whitman and Walter White join Walter Whitman Millis and Walt Wilson on the extended Whitman Family Tree, and we'd love to see what Coviello would make of it all and how he might go about bridging the real-life historical Walts and the fictional, contemporary ones imagined by folks at AMC. Can we in fact read the television side of the family as Whitman's children and grand-children—and thus as evidence that the "future for sex" that Coviello says Whitman imagined has in fact come to be (or at least lived on) more than Coviello suggests in his essay? What of Whitman do they (or we) thus inherit, and what has the Whitman family become? And are they, like Allen Ginsberg in "A Supermarket in California," also walking all night through solitary streets dreaming of a lost America of love?

Breaking P&PC News for Thanksgiving 2011: Edgar Guest Meets Chrysler

As you're watching today's Lions-Packers game, keep an eye out for the latest video ad (find your preview below) from the Portland-based advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy—the folks who created the engaging, if problematic, pairings of Levi's and Walt Whitman, Levi's and Charles Bukowski, and Nike and Maya Angelou. In their newest project, W+K bring together Chrysler and longtime Detroit-based newspaper poet Edgar Guest (a P&PC fave), all set to a Muddy Waters soundtrack.

Walt Meets Walt: Breaking Bad and "I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"

It is Season 3, Episode 6 of AMC's Breaking Bad, halfway through the season in which high-school-chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-maker Walter White (pictured here) gets installed in a state-of-the-art meth lab to cook for drug kingpin Gus, mild-mannered owner of the fast food restaurant chain Pollos Hermanos. Walt's cancer is in remission, but he's trying to salvage his marriage (Skyler wants a divorce and is sleeping with her boss) and his relationship with his son. Walt's brother-in-law Hank is obsessed with finding the source of the blue meth that Walt has made famous, and he's tailing Walt's former partner Jesse Pinkman in hopes of tracking down the RV he (correctly) suspects of being a mobile lab. Pinkman is clean and just out of rehab but is talking with his friends about getting back into the biz as dealers.

That's when Walt meets Gale (pictured here), the lab assistant that Gus has provided. Gale, it turns out, is everything that Pinkman was not—unassuming, respectful, collaborative, trained, and, most of all, as passionate about the chemistry as Walt. Explaining how he ended up in the meth cooking business, Gale thinks back to graduate school and explains, "I was on my way—jumping through hoops, kissing the proper behinds, attending to all the non-chemistry that one finds oneself occupied with. You know that world. That is not what I signed on for. I love the lab—because it's all still magic, you know? Chemistry? I mean, once you lose that...."

Walt agrees. "It is. It is magic," he says. "It still is."

And then, because Breaking Bad can't exactly break into song to express the magical chemistry moment that Walt and Gale are experiencing, Gale breaks into a poem. "And all the while," he tells Walt, "I kept thinking about that great old Whitman poem, 'When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer.'"

Walt: I don't know it.

Gale: Well, anyway ....

Walt: Well, can you recite it?

Gale [laughing]: Pathetically enough, I could.

Walt: All right, well, come on, come on.

Click the video here to watch Gale's recitation:

Scraps of Literature: Poetry & Popular Culture's Back to School Edition

In his recent London Review of Books essay on Anne Carson's latest book Nox—a scrapbooky, fold-out accordion collage poem assembled in memory of her late brother Michael—Stephen Burt rightly notes that Carson's compositional method recalls the fanzines of the 1980s and 1990s and has a clear historical precedent in the poetry scrapbooks that many people assembled and maintained in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We here at the P&PC home office are grateful for Burt's connections—and for the shout-out he gave P&PC in recommending the Review's readers to check out the examples of such scrapbooks that have appeared from time to time in this blog's postings and that, back when our home offices were located in Iowa City, we began making available at Poetry Scrapbooks: An Online Archive.

Given Burt's blurb and the fact that this is back-to-school season for many people, we thought it timely and appropriate to offer an example of another such album—this one assembled by a young reader, likely for a school project, and probably in the 1920s or 1930s. Titled "Scraps of Literature" and running about one hundred pages long, the collection is bound with two metal rings and contains over 130 (printed, handwritten, or typewritten) poems, assorted articles about their authors and subjects, and many illustrations cut out of magazines that the assembled poems are frequently used to gloss, caption, or otherwise engage.

There's no name in the inside cover to identify who put this album together, but the practice of making poetry scrapbooks part of—or even out of—schoolwork wasn't uncommon. Teachers kept personally-made poetry anthologies as sourcebooks for classroom reading. Children regularly converted their used composition books into poetry collections. Some people even turned their out-of-date textbooks into albums by pasting directly over the printed material of the published page; P&PC owns an old geography textbook that has been transformed in this way, making us wonder if perhaps even Elizabeth Bishop had this practice in the back of her mind when putting together Geography III. Educators were advised to harness the skills evident in such activity—finding, selecting, organizing, "publishing," and otherwise editing material—to make learning a fun and individualized endeavor.

In the process—as the album presented here perhaps suggests—poetry became part of an inter-disciplinary method of learning, as students could combine Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" with articles and pictures about Abraham Lincoln, or Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Old Ironsides" with historical accounts of the navy battle in which Ironsides participated. In the process, students not only learned about poetry and history, but also about the variety of ways poetry engaged and responded to the world around them. On a leaf not pictured in this posting, the maker of "Scraps of Literature" pastes a picture of Old Ironsides next to Holmes' poem and a newspaper article on how schoolchildren contributed to the Save "Old Ironsides" Fund, creating in the process a little triangular relationship in which it becomes visible that poetry not only matters but, contra Auden, helps to make things happen. (Holmes' verse is frequently credited with helping to save the ship from being decommissioned.)

This activity of collecting poems is not entirely a thing of the past; if you think back far enough, you can probably remember a teacher or two who made it an assignment for you to assemble an anthology of verse important to your life. During the past year, P&PC has found out that both Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass (both former poet laureates) have made this a regular part of their teaching over the years—an activity that isn't necessarily centered on, or motivated by, close, analytical readings of poems themselves for the objective values they might exhibit, but, instead, on those poems' relations to people's subjective experiences of being in the world. Reading old poetry scrapbooks today can be a frustrating experience because there is no key or record to how people paired poems up, or why they combined them with the pictures they caption, or how they mattered to their lives. It's clear that the process was frequently an analytical one, but most of what we have to go on today is the material end product of that process. When we hold Carson's Nox in our hands, we read it as a complex text in part because of her literary reputation and the fact that it was published with obvious care by New Directions, but also because of the personal experiences and relationships that motivate that care in the first place. Why shouldn't we give the benefit of the doubt to books like "Scraps of Literature" as well?

N.B. Following are a few sample pages from "Scraps of Literature" and not the entire collection, which is too long to feature here. If you are interested in helping to make this scrapbook, and many others like it, available for public reading in online or other formats, please contact P&PC with your ideas and suggestions. This public service announcement brought to you by Arbiters of Paste—Just Glue It.

Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: The Pint-Sized Edition

Now at the Boston Public Library: The Public Life of Poetry

From now until January 31, 2011, the Boston Public Library is hosting The Public Life of Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, Longfellow, and Their Contemporaries—an exhibition that pulls together a wide range of 19th-century temperance poetry, abolitionist poetry, broadsides, ephemera, occasional verse, poetry scrapbooks, and books and manuscripts relating to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Because of recent budget cutbacks, P&PC was unable to score a plane ticket and make it to Boston to give you a first-hand report. However, we did get a chance to catch up with Nadia Nurhussein (next picture below), the show’s primary organizer and Assistant Professor of English at University of Massachusetts at Boston. Here’s what she had to say.

Poetry & Popular Culture: How did this exhibition take shape?

Nadia Nurhussein: Last semester, I taught a class on public poetry in the U.S. The students and I met once a week at the Rare Books Room of the Boston Public Library (pictured above), where we would select from among the surprisingly impressive collection’s manuscript and printed poems ones that we wanted to examine closely. After the course was over, we organized some of our more interesting discoveries into this exhibit

P&PC: What’s your favorite part of the show?

NN: One of the exhibit’s most exciting cases is devoted to Longfellow parodies. My favorite is Bret Harte’s “Excelsior”—an 1877 versified advertisement for the popular Sapolio soap brand. As Gary Scharnhorst has pointed out, Harte (pictured here) turned to advertising when his famed literary career was collapsing, selling “Excelsior” to Enoch Morgan’s Sons for $50. Unlike Longfellow’s hero, who carries a banner and summits a mountain with “Excelsior!” as his motto, Harte’s “youth…bore, through dust and heat / A stencil-plate, that read complete—‘SAPOLIO!’” He finds space to hawk Sapolio on crowded fences, alongside similar ads for Bixby’s Blacking and Mustang Liniment.

P&PC: If only he could have put up billboards like Burma- Shave did.

NN: That wouldn’t have been good enough for him. He is so thoroughly a product of late 19th-century advertising that, with stencil in hand, he comically defaces even the natural landscape with the language of commerce. Not satisfied with fences, he manages to get paint to stick to a snow bank and paints every rock on White Mountain, where tourists “to their dismay, / …read that legend strange, always—‘SAPOLIO.’ Finally, he even paints the tourists’ luggage when they get to the top of the mountain!

P&PC: That doesn’t seem to be the best p.r. campaign for the advertising industry, does it?

NN: It’s incredible that Enoch Morgan’s Sons would use a poem that deplores the ubiquity and inescapability of advertising. But, then again, Harte’s “Excelsior” wasn’t permitted to stand alone. Alternating with Harte’s poem are pages of more straightforward advertising, including the imperative to “SCOUR POTS, KETTLES, PANS AND ALL BRASS AND COPPER UTENSILS WITH SAPOLIO.”

P&PC: Were there other Longfellow parodies?

NN: The most parodied Longfellow poem was probably The Song of Hiawatha—and Longfellow was well aware of the parodies. In an 1877 letter addressed to Karl Knortz (who translated Hiawatha into German), Longfellow replies to Knortz’s request for the titles of Hiawatha parodies with which he is familiar. Knortz initially names four parodies, but Longfellow comes up with two more.

P&PC: Why Hiawatha?

NN: Hiawatha’s easily recognized meter (modeled after the Finnish epic The Kalevala) probably inspired amateurs to imitate it. One parodist admits as much, claiming that “already afloat upon the rhythmical flow of the Hiawathan verse, his thoughts yielded to the alluring current and took ‘the form and pressure’ of the occasion.” James W. Ward’s 1868 parody, The Song of Higher-Water (pictured to the left) was written only three days after Hiawatha was published. One review accurately describes The Song of Higher-Water as “just such a brochure as a clever writer might readily throw off for the amusement of a circle of friends; it is scarcely adapted to the dignity of print.” It is, the reviewer concludes, “an excellent work to give away.” In fact, Ward himself claimed that the poem was “chiefly issued for private distribution” and was published only because “some person, from motives, the rectitude of which is not self-evident, has surreptitiously published an imperfect edition of it, which, I am informed, he is selling for his own account.”

P&PC: Tell me about the poetry scrapbooks in the show. (The page pictured here is from Anne Sexton's scrapbook.)

NN: There are some amazing scrapbooks at the BPL. One of my students found one by a man named Julius L. Brown. There was no further information about him in the card catalog, but my research leads me to believe that he was the same Julius L. Brown whose father was Joseph E. Brown, an unpopular governor of Georgia during the Civil War, when this scrapbook was compiled. He was an eccentric graduate of Harvard Law School and was described by the New York Times as a "collector of the rare in all things."

Another interesting scrapbook, elaborately bound and formally titled Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill 1775-1875, was compiled by Mellen Chamberlain, a 19th-century BPL librarian. As the title suggests, he was interested in collecting material related to Revolutionary War battles, including poetic treatments of these battles by Holmes, Whittier, and Emerson (pictured below). We are displaying a fair copy of Emerson's "Concord Hymn," accompanied by a letter by Chamberlain explaining how he came into possession of the manuscript. He writes that Mrs. Charles Porter, Emerson's cousin, offered to "prevail upon Mr Emerson to transcribe his battle hymn into the volume" if Chamberlain would travel with her to Concord. Chamberlain also notes that Emerson, whose "health was considerably broken," died soon after.

P&PC: What do you mean by occasional verse? Does "Concord Hymn" qualify?

NN: "Concord Hymn" does qualify as occasional verse: it was written and performed at the dedication of an obelisk erected to commemorate the battles at Lexington and Concord. The Mellen Chamberlain manuscript is in the scrapbook case, but the occasional verse case includes a print copy of the poem (donated to the library by the family of William Lloyd Garrison) that was circulated at the event apparently for the purpose of audience participation.

Another interesting bit of occasional verse is a poem written by Holmes for the laying of the cornerstone of the BPL's McKim Building in 1888. On the underside of the cornerstone, two pieces were cut out to accommodate copper boxes that served as time capsules commemorating the ceremony, and Holmes's poem was one of several items placed inside.

P&PC: When I think of Dickinson, I don’t necessarily think “public.” How does she fit into the show?

NN: The exhibit focuses mainly on the marketing of Dickinson immediately after her death. Some of the correspondence between Dickinson editors Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd surrounding the first and second "series" of Poems is displayed, along with the books themselves. One of these letters talks about the cover illustration of an Indian Pipe—a rare white flower that seems to have been chosen to evoke the sense of reclusiveness that was already associated with Dickinson. Her strangeness and reclusiveness were part of the marketing strategy; the preface to Poems, for example, calls her "a recluse by temperament and habit, literally spending years without setting foot beyond the doorstep."

The "public" Dickinson is also reflected in two poems published during her lifetime, probably without her permission: "The May-Wine" (known as "I taste a liquor never brewed") in The Springfield Republican, and "Success" (known as "Success is counted sweetest") in A Masque of Poets. Both were published anonymously. The exhibit also includes a letter from Lavinia Dickinson, thanking Higginson for "giving Emilies wonderful letters to the world"—in other words, for making her public.

P&PC: If you were to do a companion exhibit on the public life of 20th-century poetry, where would you start?

NN: That's a good question! This exhibit actually does extend a bit into the early 20th century, with a case of dialect poetry that includes James Whitcomb Riley's 1908 Orphant Annie book and Paul Laurence Dunbar's 1901 Candle-Lightin' Time. (That's Dunbar pictured to the left.) But, of course, the popularity of dialect poetry didn't last very far into the century. There are also three mid-century photographs related to 19th-century poets. One depicts an event at the Longfellow House for the 1957 sesquicentennial of his birth. Over 2,000 visitors gathered there, and there was even a live television broadcast. (It's hard to imagine such a turnout to celebrate, for instance, Robert Frost, less than 150 years after his birth.)

Perhaps a companion exhibit could begin with the Beat movement, which I think penetrated popular culture in a way that no other 20th-century poetry movement did. I remember watching cartoons that made fun of "beatnik" readings. And apparently Herman Munster was a Beat poet, as Angela Sorby wrote about for P&PC! Even today, the depictions of poetry readings in popular culture usually correspond to those stereotypes of Beat readings.

P&PC: What’s the feedback been like so far?

NN: I've heard from the staff at the BPL that visitors to the exhibit seem to be spending more time looking around than they have with exhibits in the past, which is encouraging to hear. Susan Glover, who holds the title of Acting Keeper of Prints, Rare Books, Manuscripts and Archives at the BPL, suggested that I try to include more visual materials, and I suspect that that has made a difference. Even people interested in books don't necessarily want to look at cases and cases of print! So, items like the broadside of Whittier's "Our Countrymen in Chains!," with its striking wood engraving of a supplicant slave captioned "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" (the central image of the anti-slavery movement), show how verse and images were integrated—in this instance, to make the strongest possible argument against slavery. The exhibit will be up until the end of January, so I hope that P&PC readers who have plans to be in Boston during the holidays will stop by!

A Picture of Our Poets

Awhile back, one of the P&PC office interns was reading Cane—the 1923 Jean Toomer book that mixes poems and prose to become what many people would call a "novel" but which we're going to call a collection of poems interspersed with prose—and wondered about a detail in part three of the "Bona and Paul" section (Chapter 28) where Art Carlstrom plays the piano.

In that scene, Art and his friend Paul (who is not only "cool like the dusk, and like the dusk, detached" but also the story's point of view) are picking up Helen and Bona for a double date in Chicago. While they wait for the girls, Art is asked to play the piano. Here is that passage:

"Come right in, won't you? The young ladies will be right down. Oh, Mr. Carlstrom, do play something for us while you are waiting. We just love to listen to your music. You play so well."

Houses, and dorm sitting-rooms are places where white faces seclude themselves at night. There is a reason...

Art sat at the piano and simply tore it down. Jazz. The picture of Our Poets hung perilously.

What in the world, our intern wondered, is "the picture of Our Poets"? Is it possible that at one point in U.S. history people actually purchased and displayed pictures of American poets in their homes? Or is Toomer making some sort of metaphor here—exercising some sort of, well, poetic license?

We can't say whether or not Toomer had one himself—it's not visible in the office scene above, at least—but we can say that yes, at one point in U.S. history people actually purchased and displayed pictures of American poets in their houses. In fact, we finally purchased one (pictured here) for the P&PC Home Office! It's small—just over a foot long and five inches high—and features (left to right) little oval portraits of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The existence of "Our Poets" doesn't mean that Toomer wasn't using the framed piece of home or dormitory sitting-room decor just literally, though, for when Art tears it down at the piano, the sounds of a modern African American art are enough to make the foundations of white American literary history tremble (even when—or especially when?—played by Paul's "red-blooded Norwegian friend"). And is it just us, or is Walt Whitman implicated here as well, as Toomer's "Houses and dorm sitting-rooms" sounds like a jazz riff on "Houses and rooms are full of perfumes" from the beginning of Whitman's "Song of Myself"? All in all, it's a part of Cane that makes us want to dance.

Absorbing Joyce Kilmer: From the Poetry & Pop Culture Mailbag

A few weeks back, P&PC received the following letter from Ernest Hilbert— Phila- delphia- based poet, blogger, and editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review—which pleased us to no end. It's not often that the office gets mail, let alone fan mail, let alone fan mail with photos, let alone fan mail about Joyce Kilmer with photos of the Joyce Kilmer Service Area in New Jersey (pictured here). Talk about making us feel special! Here's that letter and our response.

Hi P&PC,

I am up in Boston for a lecture and reading I gave last night. On the way up, we stopped at the Joyce Kilmer Rest Stop. I always intone "I do not think that I shall ever see / a poem as lovely as a tree" while swooping up the ramp. My wife said, "You should take a picture for Poetry & Popular Culture," and that is what we did. Yours is the only legitimate poetry blog around as far as I am concerned. All best,

Ernie

*********************************************************************************

Dear Ernie,

We're sorry it's taken so long for P&PC to reply to your letter, but your note drove us deep into the office archives in search of some items that might help return your kindness. Rest stops named after poets are not entirely unheard of and, in their own artificially-lit ways, ask us to pull off of the standard literary-critical interstate, grab a Snickers bar, and think seriously about what it would mean to measure poetry as Walt Whitman proposed in the Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass that it might be measured. "The proof of a poet," he wrote there, "is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it."

Take the "Hoosier Poet" James Whitcomb Riley, for example, who, if the P&PC office research team is not mistaken, has a rest stop named after him in Indiana. Riley has been left off of most maps of American poetry despite (or because of?) the way he's been absorbed by the rest of America. Did you know, for example, that Riley's 1885 poem "Little Orphant Annie" was not only made into a 1918 movie but then became the inspiration for naming Harold Gray's daily comic strip—itself the subject of more movies, plus radio and tv shows? Pursuing Whitman's standard of measurement, one might say that Riley was so absorbed by his country that he's nigh disappeared.

But what of your Joyce Kilmer (pictured in uniform here here)—the New Jersey poet of "Trees" who was 31 years old and considered the leading Catholic poet of his generation when he was killed at the Second Battle of the Marne in World War One? Like Riley, Kilmer is not remembered for being a strangely modern writer—Riley came after most of the Fireside poets and during the late 19th-century advertising boom, and Kilmer was included in all sorts of "modern" poetry anthologies—so much as the source of a small jingle or two, especially that 1913 ditty you yourself intone on the way to the rest stop that now bears Kilmer's name:

Trees

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

There's not only a rest stop named after Kilmer, but schools, a forest, and even Camp Kilmer in New Jersey which, according to Wikipedia, was "activated" in 1942 and became the largest "processing center" for U.S. troops heading out to, and returning from, Europe during World War II. We here at P&PC find it especially despicable that, as the matchbook pictured to the left and above indicates," "Trees" was pressed into propagandistic service of these military activities. Here, via the arboreal imagery on the booklet's cover and the Kilmer poem printed inside, Camp Kilmer is not at all being presented as the site for massive military operations that it actually was, but as a sort of poetic summer camp instead.

Camp Kilmer's matchbook edition of "Trees" makes us think about the various complications of that 1855 Whitman quotation, "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." Not all Americans used "Trees" as deceptively as the U.S. military did, however, as the poem was printed over and over in newspapers, magazines, school textbooks, anthologies, and church booklets. It was cut out and saved in poetry scrapbooks, like the one pictured here; "Trees" is at the bottom of the middle column. (If, by the way, you look at this page up close, you'll see that the album is not made out of a commercially-issued blank book but was, curiously enough, put together on the "blank" pages of a braille book. Go figure, right?)

Back in the day, though, lots of poets wrote poems praising trees, and poems were frequently read at Arbor Day or tree- planting celebrations all around the U.S. In 1927, for example, graduating high school student and future director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop Paul Engle would himself pen "Dedication Poem Read at the Planting of the Cedar by the Class of 1927." (A copy of that poem is included in Engle's papers at the University of Iowa Special Collections, so you can check it out for yourself the next time you're in Iowa City.) And, if you take a closer look at the upper left-hand corner of the braille-scrapbook page (pictured here), you'll find yet another tree poem—this one a translation of a poem first written in Norwegian by 1903 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Bjornstjerne Bjornson. Apparently, the market for tree poems was so robust around the turn of the century that the U.S. began importing them! If you want to be even more convinced of this tree-poem phenomenon, check out all the verse in the 1896 "Annual Program for the Observance of Arbor Day in the schools of Rhode Island" which includes—you better believe it!—the very Bjornson poem collected in this scrapbook alongside Kilmer's "Trees."

If these examples suggest how "Trees" was part of an entire genre of leafy poems—not unlike Whitman's "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing," perhaps—that were fully and continually absorbed into U.S. culture, then the album page pictured here (taken from a different scrapbook altogether) indicates the singular importance of Kilmer's "Trees" to that genre. Take a look at the item pasted on the left-hand side of this scrapbook page, for instance, where the album's editor has placed an article about the "breath-takingly beautiful" royal poinciana tree. Not only does that article take its title from Kilmer's "Trees," but it then quotes the last two lines of the poem as the definitive word on metaphysical dendrology. "The royal poinciana," the author writes, "is so radiantly lovely and so flamingly vivid and gorgeous that one can scarcely bear to take one's eyes off it. The sight of this tree in its springtime robe brings to mind Joyce Kilmer's appreciative and immortal words: 'Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.'"

So, we've come a long way from that New Jersey rest stop, Ernie, but we hope it's been worth the ride and that we've convinced you that a school of criticism taking Whitman as its source is not only a viable, but also a valuable, way of tracking how our literary heritage speaks through our culture—just as Kilmer spoke through you between Interchanges 8 and 9 on the New Jersey Turnpike. Make sure your lights are on, and drive safely.

Yours,

The Only Legitimate Poetry Blog Around

On the Twittification of Walt Whitman

I cLebr8 myself,
& wot I assume U shaL assume,
4 evry atom belonging 2 me az gud belongs 2 U.