Slumped in the recesses of a Great Barrington coffee shop, I want to write about Whitman. But other things keep getting in the way. For instance: Bob Dylan has a new album coming out tomorrow. How have I missed this news? But wait — the album is titled Together Through Life, a phrase that several close readers have traced to Whitman’s “When I Peruse the Conquer’d Fame.” Dylan has been considering Whitman for years, as evidenced by his back-cover blurb for Allen Ginsberg‘s Collected Poems: “Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius, con man extraordinaire and probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman.” So, as the new album’s last song assures us (while also, apparently, terrifying us), “It’s All Good.” Dylan and Whitman can share space in this post.
Dylan’s appropriations — from Ovid, from Joyce, from Henry Timrod — have been much discussed. But what about Whitman’s similar borrowings? A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel with Matt Miller, author of a forthcoming study called Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass (University of Nebraska Press, 2010). Miller’s provocative thesis goes like this: “Whitman invented collage.” Whitman did so by lifting sections from various works — The Birds of Manhattan, anatomy textbooks — and inserting them into his grand catalogues. (For those of you with six minutes to spare, go to the 14:05 to 19:55 stretch of the panel video. You’ll see a photo of Whitman’s stunningly chaotic Camden office and hear Miller’s commentary about Whitman’s writing process.) Referring to literary collage as “the signature method of modernity,” and relying on examples ranging from Marianne Moore to hip-hop, Miller makes a convincing case for Whitman as the forefather of all things cut-and-paste. As Whitman instructs near the end of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (in a line he would eventually axe), “Blab, blush, lie, steal, you or I or any one after us!”
At the end of “Song of Myself,” Whitman offers these comforting words: “Missing me one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you.” One place to find him: at The Walt Whitman Archive, co-directed by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price. (Miller spent time encoding Whitman’s notebooks for the Archive.) Another (non-virtual) place: inside of his final home, a modest row-house on Mickle Street in Camden. I visited the house fifteen years ago, coming away with a brick that I still sometimes use as a bookend. (Around the same time, at a music festival in Memphis, I persuaded a roadie to give me Dylan’s discarded comb. Anything can become a fetish object.) I visited the Mickle Street house again recently, where I was given a tour that included peeks at Whitman’s worn leather boots and his chamber pot. After the tour, and after gathering details about Whitman’s housekeeper’s dog (name: Watch; breed: Dalmatian), I made a quick pilgrimage to Harleigh Cemetery, where the poet and several of his family members lie entombed. (After noting the stone engraving, you’d be forgiven for guessing the mausoleum belongs to Walt alone. “Conquer’d Fame”: not so much.)
What is it that we hope to obtain from such real (and imaginative) contact? Why make such pilgrimages? In Galway I once read Joyce’s “The Dead” atop the grave of Michael Bodkin — the real-life model for the story’s doomed lover, Michael Furey. For the last three months I’ve been living in the home of Amy Clampitt. Sometimes I watch her on video at three in the morning and imagine her wondering how I broke into her house. Other times I pick up one of her books from a shelf and think, This isn’t just Amy Clampitt’s The Kingfisher — it’s Amy Clampitt’s Amy Clampitt’s The Kingfisher.
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And I wonder how she’d view such an obsessive turning-over-of-things.
But now we’ve wandered a fair distance from where we started — just as Whitman does in “Song of Myself,” just as Dylan does in “Thunder on the Mountain.” Thanks to all of you — friends and enemies — for reading this post. To use an idiom that Whitman was particularly fond of: So long.