The Reader 160625_whitman

Program Introduction

Papa Whitman’s birthday had just roll-over. The Reader lights some posthumous voice-incense for the voice of life and the universe. One excerpt from the “Salutation to Walt Whitman” by Alvaros de Campos, another excerpt from late poet Mary Oliver’s memories, then another “Key for Walt” by an anonymous underwriter. All texts included. With wars raging all over, and faked images and generated poems flooding the sea of information, to go back to a primitive universe of ours, natural or mechanical, mirths less and less momentum. “Unscrew the locks from the door!” Thus wailed Papa Whitman, but what if there is no more screw on the door…. We are left with our own self to celebrate and to disarm the lockerage.

Voice-incenses for Whitman

Whitman: a tribute (from “Upstream”)

Mary Oliver

Ohio, 1950s, 

I had a few friends who kept me sane, alert, and 

loyal to my own best and wildest inclinations. 

My town was no more or less congenial to the fact of poetry 

than any other small town in America — 

I make no special case of a solitary childhood. 

I never met any of my friends, of course, in a usual way —

they were strangers, and lived only in their writings. 

But if they were only shadow-companions, 

still they were constant, and powerful, and amazing. 

That is, they said amazing things, and for me it changed the world.

This hour I tell things in confidence,

I might not tell everybody but I will tell you.

Whitman was the brother I did not have. 

He remained, perhaps more avuncular,

He was the gypsy boy my sister and I went off with 

into the far fields beyond the town 

with our pony, to gather strawberries. 

Whitman shone on in the twilight of my room, 

which was growing busy with books, and notebooks, 

and muddy boots, and my grandfather’s old Underwood typewriter.

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,

With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.

When the high school I went to experienced a crisis of delinquent student behavior, 

my response was to start out for school every morning 

but to turn most mornings into the woods instead, with a knapsack of books. 

Always Whitman’s was among them. 

My truancy was extreme, 

and my parents were warned that I might not graduate. 

For whatever reason, they let me continue to go my own way. 

It was an odd blessing, but a blessing all the same. 

Down by the creek, or in the wide pastures 

I could still find on the other side of the deep woods, 

I spent my time with my friend: my brother, my uncle, my best teacher.

The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,

The suns I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place,

The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place. 

Thus Whitman’s poems stood before me 

like a model of delivery when I began to write poems myself: 

I mean the oceanic power and rumble that travels through a Whitman poem—

the incantatory syntax, the boundless affirmation. 

In those years, truth was elusive—

as was my own faith that I could recognize and contain it. 

Whitman kept me from the swamps of a worse uncertainty, 

and I lived many hours within the lit circle of his certainty, and his bravado. 

Unscrew the locks from the doors! 

Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! 

And there was the passion which he invested in the poems. 

The metaphysical curiosity! 

The oracular tenderness with which he viewed the world- 

its roughness, its differences, the stars, the spider—nothing was outside the range of his interest. 

I reveled in the specificity of his words. [rebel]

And his faith—that kept my spirit buoyant surely, 

though his faith was without a name that I ever heard of. 

I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—

or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel. 

Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing—

an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness— 

wonderful as that part of it is. 

I learned that the poem was made 

not just to exist, but to speak—to be company. 

It was everything that was needed, 

when everything was needed. 

I remember the delicate, 

rumpled way into the woods, 

and the weight of the books in my pack. 

I remember the rambling, and the loafing—

the wonderful days when, with Whitman, 

I tucked my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time.

Salutation to Walt Whitman (an excerpt)

Alvaro de Campos

I know that the way I sing of you

isn’t by singing of you

but so what

I know it’s by singing of everything

but to sing of everything

is to sing of you

I know it’s by singing of me

but to sing of me is to sing of you

I know even to say

I can’t sing

is to sing of you

Walt, to sing of you

to salute you

I’d have to write the supreme poem

which more than any other supreme poem

would embrace in a total synthesis

based on an exhaustive analysis

of the whole universe

of things, living beings and souls

the whole universe of men and children

the whole universe of acts, gestures

feelings, thoughts,

the whole universe of the things mankind makes

and the things mankind experiences

professions, walls, norms, medical science,

fate written this way

and that constantly criss-crossing

on the dynamic paper of events

on the quick papyrus of social groupings [pa-pi]

on the pama set of continuously renewed emotions

for me to salute you

to salute you as you should be saluted

I need to make my verses

into a steel, a horse,

make my verses into a train

make my verses into an arrow

make my verses sheer speed

make my verses the things of the world

you sang everything

and in you everything sang

magnificent receptivity of your sensations

with their legs wide open

to the outlines and details

of the whole universe

Key for Walt

father day, 2025

we,

having this one and only

holy soul of ours

is the key-holder of our universe

a quantum door is there

between the self

and the world outside

no screws

most of us

by instinct or by study

acknowledged the presence

of such a non-visible key

but few would use it

even fewer realize the magic:

that you don’t just insert the key

into the key hole

you need to turn it

the turning,

the act itself

triggers

the opening

the opening of yourself to the world

all that happens

on your side

without you turning the key

the other-side is helplessly ummoved

dead, motionless, remote

so let’s be imagined

the turning

is the turning of your heart

that enlivens the realization

of knowing how lucky we are

to be able to activate this disarmament of lockerage 

and how stupid it is

to expect change from the otherside

that the door

will open itself

it never will,

without you

and if not,

within you.