Chapter 14 of my new novel.
As a reminder, you’ll want to quote Whitman in the original, not from my chapters, as I took out most of the punctuation.
Best,
Mike
14.
Chicago
September 25, 1972
Cousin Yale is performing five songs and I’m performing as Walt Whittman this weekend at a coffeehouse called The Dangling Conversation. As expected, I’m nervous before each performance.
I’m sitting behind the stage, looking in a mirror. I give myself a beard – a beard like Walt Whitman’s in the 1860s. I put on a homespun suit of the mid-1800s with a wide-collared shirt of unbleached linen, open at my neck. I tilt my hat – a soft gray felt sombrero – all the way back, in the Quaker manner.
The audience is set and it’s time for me to take my seat on the stage before I’m introduced as Dylan Steffan, impersonator of Walt Whitman. I pick up a bowl of flowers, walk out, and set it on the table next to the lectern on the stage. I look out at people with an extra dose of mildness and receptivity in my eyes.
A few moments later I hear myself being presented as “a daring poet”, “burning with urgency”, “chanting of our inclusive, generous selves”, “selves with dissolved boundaries”, “the poet of triumphant affirmation and exuberant joy”, who “radiates vitality, heroic empathy, warm regard for our fellow human beings”, and who “takes a stance toward reality in which he realizes how magnificent reality is”. And then, “ladies and gentlemen, the printer, schoolmaster, fiction writer, editor, shopkeeper, housebuilder, citizen of the cosmos, internationally acclaimed writer, and poet of an egalitarian and all-inclusive America, Walt Whitman!”
After a nice round of applause, I say hello as Walt Whitman almost always said hello. “Howdy. Howdy, Chicago. Just going to recite a few fragments of my poems”:
Come said the Muse
Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted
Sing me the universal
In this broad Earth of ours
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag
Enclosed and safe within its central heart
Nestles the seed perfection
By every life a share or more or less
None born but it is born
Conceal’d or unconceal’d the seed is waiting
Over the mountain-growths disease and sorrow
An uncaught bird is ever hovering, hovering
Higher in the purer, happier air
From imperfection’s murkiest cloud
Darts always forth one ray of perfect light
One flash of heaven’s glory
O the blest eyes, the happy hearts
That see, that know the guiding thread so fine
Along the mighty labyrinth
One’s Self I sing, a simple separate person
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse
The Female equally with the Male I sing
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man
Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power
Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws Divine
The Modern Man I sing
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road
Healthy, free, the world before me
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose
Henceforth I ask not good fortune
I myself am good fortune
Strong and content I travel the open road
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and
imaginary lines
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute
Listening to others, considering well what they say
Gently, but with undeniable will
Divesting myself of the holds that would hold me
I am larger, better than I thought
I did not know I held so much goodness
Be not discouraged, keep on
There are Divine things well envelop’d
I swear to you there are Divine things
More beautiful than words can tell
There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied
in you
There is no virtue, no beauty, no pluck, no endurance in others
But as good is in you
O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!
You have not known what you are
You have slumber’d upon yourself all your life
Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time
I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you
Whoever you are, your true soul and body appear before me
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you
That you be my poem
Of the progress of the souls of men and women
Along the grand roads of the universe
All other progress is the needed emblem and sustenance
O for the joy of my spirit uncaged – it darts like lightning!
O for the joy of that vast elemental sympathy
Which only the human soul is capable of generating
and emitting
In steady and limitless floods
O for the joy of increase, growth, recuperation
The joy of soothing and pacifying
The joy of concord and harmony
O the joy of my soul leaning pois’d on itself
Receiving identity through materials and loving them
Observing characters and absorbing them
My soul vibrated back to me from them
From sight, hearing, touch, reason
Articulation, comparison, memory, and the like
The real life of my senses and flesh transcending my senses
and flesh
My body done with materials
My sight done with my material eyes
Proved to me this day beyond cavil
That it is not my material eyes which finally see
Nor any material body which finally loves
Walks, laughs, shouts, embraces
O while I live to be the ruler of life, not a slave
To meet life as a powerful conqueror
No fumes, no ennui, no more complaints or scornful criticisms
To these proud laws of the air, the water, and the ground
Proving my interior soul impregnable
And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me
O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted!
To find how much one can stand!
To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face!
To mount the scaffold
To advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance!
O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys!
To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on!
To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports
A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys
“And now,” I say, “I’d be happy to take any questions that may have arisen in your minds as you heard my poetry.”
I receive five questions and I answer them as best I can as I stay in character as Walt Whitman:
A lady near the back pipes up first. “Mister Whitman, what’s your philosophy about people?”
I as Whitman reply, “My philosophy sees a place and a time for everybody. One of the things if not the main thing implied by my philosophy is that there are countless men on all sides, in all countries, who contribute to the great result.”
The second question comes from an older man near the front. “What does your philosophy say about the soul?”
“My” answer: “I believe in the eligibility of the human soul for all perfect things.”
Next I hear a young man in the middle of the hall ask, “Walt, why are we not able to enjoy the life you’re talking about? What’s blocking us?”
“I” reply, “I think there is a damnable disposition sometimes to deny, to affront, the substance, the spirit, the life, the joy, of things.”
“Well, then,” asks a midlife lady near the front, “how do we approach each day?”
I as Whitman respond, “We should meet each day as it comes with the assumption that we can make this day the best of days.”
Fifth, a young woman in the back asks, “What is the essence of Leaves of Grass?”
“That there is something back of phenomena, in phenomena, which gives it all its significance – the most real thing of all, an august power enclosing, explaining, all.”
This turns out to be the last question. I look at my audience and say goodbye as Walt Whitman almost always said goodbye. “So long. So long, Chicago.”
Beautiful writing!