Whitman at Armory Square

I’m grateful today to have “Whitman at Armory Square” up on Linebreak. Many thanks to the journal, and to Jason McCall for as powerful reading as I could possibly hope for. It’s Linebreak’s treatment of poems, presenting recordings along with the text, that had me hoping they'd take this piece.

I don’t believe in “explaining” poems. It’s a bit like explaining jokes: If you have to explain them, they didn’t work. And Walt Whitman’s place in American poetry requires no explanation; he is a touchstone figure, often perceived as the towering life-force who changed the landscape of poetry and brought it into a true “American” voice after decades of British emulation. (A brief pop culture aside: Given the relatively marginalized place poetry holds in the mainstream these days, it says something that Whitman’s poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” was quoted in full in an episode of Breaking Bad, and I love that it may end up being Leaves of Grass that brings down Walter White’s House of Meth.)

But to explain why I went to this subject and this form: Whitman worked as a nurse, tending to the wounded during the Civil War, and there seems to be little doubt that what he saw at Armory Square hospital changed him permanently. A few years ago, I read that after his experience, he stopped writing poetry. That struck me as so telling, so poignant—this man who had been welling with life, with love of people and deep carnality, with words, struck dumb by seeing the country turned against itself. And how it almost seemed as though his own voice had been taken over by those of the soldiers who wanted him to “speak” for them by writing their letters home, some of them the last words they’d ever utter.

I wanted to write something that showed what happened when Whitman’s life instinct came up against the carnage of the Civil War, and that’s the reason for this form: the non-italicized lines are the life instinct, the italicized ones the voice of the death he encountered, how it might have transformed his relationship with the body. It was designed, in a way, to be a dialogue between Freud’s concepts of Eros (the drive for life, love, creativity, sex) and Thanatos (the drive of aggression, sadism, violence, death) through the figure of Whitman.

The poem can be read straight through, but also as two stanzas one after the other, if you pull them apart at the spots where they mesh. I considered setting them that way, but in the end, I decided, I wanted them touching, blending, to form one narrative as well as two separate ones.

It’s a form I’ve been working with a lot due to the fact that conceptualizing America sometimes seems to require it: voices in opposition to each other, entertwining to make a whole that may be harmonious or acrimonious. Sometimes these voices even come from within a single person. Can these voices coexist? If not, which one will win out?

Whitman at Armory Square, Revisited

For a long time I've wanted to do sound and visuals projects with some of my old poems. This weekend I got a chance to start learning how, thanks to Radio Boot Camp. I went up to New York with colleagues in order to get a first taste of how we might start incorporating audio elements into our reporting, getting to use what I learned for personal projects is a nice side benefit.

I'm excited about the possibilities on multiple fronts, but the first thing I thought I'd try out was working with this odd Whitman poem I wrote some years back, one in which two voices (and two stories) are cut into each other forming a new, more difficult story. Linebreak published and did a marvelous job with the recording, but I always wanted to hear what would happen if this poem was done in layers, in rounds like old folk songs, with the two threads of death and life not coming one after the other but woven so closely they can scarcely be separated. 

That was part of what I was trying to get at in this poem: an intermingling of the threads of Whitman: his boisterous voice and sexuality with the anguish of the Civil War, the intermingling (and eventual effacement) of Whitman's voice with the voices of the soldiers he nursed, an act of mercy that was at once generous and destructive. 

I moved some lines around in the recording, as I found that following the interspersed voices was more difficult without the visual cues that the page provides, but maybe I can get someone with a dramatically different voice than mine to record with me at some point. 



Whitman at Armory Square

People came to him—in the streets, in the alleys.
              Always, his appetite had been huge, his capacity for
Flesh clung to him like sunlight coats wheat fields.
             Taking others into himself. Now he had them
Knowing its home, its resting place, its canvas.
             By the hundreds, boys and men brought in
They would greet him with kisses. Friends wrote
             On stretchers: shredded arms, exposed brain matter;
Of how beautiful he was bathing, of his proud form;
             Some saved by an hour with the saw. On their lips,
How it moved and flexed; they lost, within his sight,
            A whimper for Christ or mother, sometimes
All shame. And he in turn would tongue
            Bloodied spittle. Most surgeries were amputations.
Their bodies onto leaves of paper, spilling
            The pus was drawn into roll on roll of cotton.
Rivers of ink through the soft belly of evening,
            His work was to cleanse, to comfort these ruins
Touching, exquisitely, himself and those nearby
            Dying in the wake of the cut: dysentery, infection.
Until his seed splashed onto the page in long lines,
            Many simply wished to dictate a letter home.
Nothing like any poetry that had been seen before
            He would write the words they could no longer form
A psalm drawn from dirt and kernel,
            With their hands. His own tongue curled up and dropped,
From sweat and wood smoke, from the root.
            A shriveling sinew in a filthy pile of gauze.

 ***