O how your fingers drowse me! Your breath falls around me like dew— your pulse lulls the tympans of my ears; I feel immerged from head to foot; Delicious—enough.
Beautiful dripping fragments— the negligent list of one after another, as I happen to call them to me, or think of them, The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,) The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me, This poem, drooping shy and unseen, that I always carry, and that all men carry,
‘I will sleep no more but arise, You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms’
31 May 2019 marks the birthday bicentennial of one of America’s greatest and most influential poets, Walt Whitman (1819-1892).
Thanks to our founder, Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull (1868-1918), the Turnbull Library is able to honour the occasion by highlighting some key Whitman works in the collection. Shown here are:
~ Whitman’s first published novel Franklin Evans; or the Inebriate (1842)
~ First editions of Whitman’s groundbreaking (and at the time highly controversial) Leaves of Grass (1855) and Drum-Taps(1865), a collection of poetry about his experiences in and the tragedy of the American Civil War
~ The first edition in original wrappers of his political prose publication Democratic Vistas (1871) in which Whitman condemned America’s ‘Gilded Age’
~ And the first edition of November Boughs (1888), a mixture of poetry and prose published in his 70th year
Today marks the 200th anniversary of the American literary icon who influenced Brooklyn’s artistic and intellectual life in the mid-1800s. Did you know that Whitman was an acting Librarian at the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library? The predecessor institutions of the Brooklyn Museum, the Apprentices’ Library and the Brooklyn Institute, engendered cultural legitimacy in the rapidly expanding village of Brooklyn, and fostered a creative atmosphere that bolstered Whitman’s talents. These institutions played a role in Whitman’s writings throughout his adult life—from Brooklyn Standard, a poem recounting Revolutionary War hero General Lafayette laying the cornerstone of the Apprentice’s Library building, to the multiple Brooklyn Daily Eagle art reviews praising the Institute’s representation of Brooklyn artists. An art aficionado himself, Whitman inspired many young artists, including painter Walter Libbey whose portraits are currently on view in our fifth floor Luce Visible Storage and Study Center. His deep-rooted connection to Brooklyn as a whole is pervasive in his literature: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry describes the common commute of a Brooklynite traversing the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and Leaves of Grass was published here. Even after moving away, Whitman’s lasting love for the borough caused him to return multiple times over the following decades, and his legacy remains alive in Brooklyn today. Come visit the Brooklyn Museum and help us celebrate two centuries of Walt Whitman!
Posted by Alison Hirsch Thomas Johnson (American, born England, 1843-1904). Walt Whitman, ca. 1890. Etching, drypoint, on white wove paper. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Spencer Bickerton, 33.338
“Many literary scholars consider Walt Whitman [the United States of America]’s most influential poet. Widely referred to as the father of free verse, he liberated poetry from rhyme and meter, opening it up to the flexible rhythms of feeling and voice. The works collected in Leaves of Grass pay homage to the freedom and dignity of the individual while celebrating democracy and the brotherhood of man, even though early critics condemned his references to same-sex love as being obscene.
Peter Doyle was a 21-year-old conductor on a horse-drawn streetcar when he and Whitman, who was at the time, began their romantic relationship. During their quarter-century marriage, Doyle became Whitman’s muse…
Despite the men being attracted to each other, family circumstances kept them from living together. Whitman repeatedly told his young partner that he wanted them to set up housekeeping as a couple, but Doyle insisted that it was his duty, as the oldest unmarried son, to live with and care for his widowed mother. And so, Whitman had to be satisfied with spending most nights with Doyle, either at a hotel or at the poet’s rooming house, while the two maintained separate residences.”
Honestly, any poetry is DA poetry if you can recite it from memory or sound intelligent while speaking of it.
• T. S. Elliot
Didn’t write much poetry, but what he did write is dense with meaning
• Wisława Szymborska
Any of her poems are instant winners, for a great collection I would recommend Map: Collected and Last Poems
• William Shakespeare
Classic, cannot go wrong with any of his works
• Anne Sexton
For bonus points, listen to the song “Mercy Street” by Peter Gabriel based on the poem “45 Mercy Street”
• John Milton
Paradise Lost is always recognizable by name
• Homer
Both The IliadandThe Odyssey are the best known works, bonus points if you are able to read them in their original Greek for the full effect
• Edgar Allen Poe
Although The Raven is his most notable work of poetry, his short stories are also enjoyable
• Robert Frost
An acquired taste compared to my other favourite poets, but my top four are definitely “The Road Not Taken”, “Mending Wall”, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, and “Acquainted With the Night”
• Mark Twain
Recognizable in name and work
• Lord Byron
An older poet, much of his language is obsolete in the modern era yet conveys meanings we could not hope to comprehend without it
• Sappho
An excellent romantic, “Slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl” Bonus points if you read it in the original Greek for the full effect
• Walt Whitman
The modern-day version of a classical poet: free verse is his specialty!
• Edgar Allan Poe
The O.G. dark academic, the literature teacher’s favourite Halloween lesson. Nothing can beat the simple and unsettling Poetry of Poe!
• Oscar Wilde
Nothing will ever be as iconic as The Picture of Dorian Gray has become in the DA aesthetic! a definite must-read.
Read this article and watch a writer spin connections between Walt Whitman, Dick Whitman (Mad Men), and Walter White (Breaking Bad). I feel stunned for having never noticed these parallels before. Same writer?
These days, it often seems the world has tilted on its axis: nothing is the same, we’ve broken with the past, there’s no going back. But we’ve still got an old friend kicking around—the barf bag. In these uncertain times, Hollywood’s horror filmmakers still turn to sick bags as a primo promotional gag. For there is still vomit in this realm, and still a need to contain it in the face of extreme spectacle. Cara Buckley writes: “After a moviegoer apparently vomited during a Los Angeles screening of the French coming-of-age cannibal flick, Raw, the theater began handing out barf bags … The move is a vintage publicity stunt going back some fifty years. Among the standout bags in movie history: The keepsake vomit bag from the 1963 splatter film Blood Feast came with an encouragement, ‘Spill your guts out!’ ‘Guaranteed to upset your stomach!’ proclaimed the bag from the 1981 Italian film Cannibal Ferox. The bag for The Beyond (1981) came with the thoughtfully worded warning, ‘Individuals with sensitive constitutions may experience stomach distress,’ and advised that the bag be used only once and not overfilled.”
One of the most amazing things about poetry is its seemingly infinite capacity for interpretation. To illustrate that fact, TED-Ed launched a great poetic experiment. We gave one Walt Whitman poem to three of our in-house animators, and asked them to interpret it using three different styles of animation. They were each given a recording of the text to work from, which was supplied by three local poets who also interpreted the text using their voices. The result? A stunning video that breathes three very different lives into Walt Whitman’s timeless poem, “A Noiseless Patient Spider.”
“A MARCH in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown; A route through a heavy wood, with muffled steps in the darkness; Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating; Till after midnight glimmer upon us, the lights of a dim-lighted building; We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building; ‘Tis a large old church at the crossing roads–'tis now an impromptu hospital; –Entering but for a minute, I see a sight beyond all the pictures and poems ever made: Shadows of deepest, deepest black, just lit by moving candles and lamps, And by one great pitchy torch, stationary, with wild red flame, and clouds of smoke; By these, crowds, groups of forms, vaguely I see, on the floor, some in the pews laid down; 10 At my feet more distinctly, a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen;) I staunch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is white as a lily;) Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o'er the scene, fain to absorb it all; Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity, some of them dead; Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor of blood; The crowd, O the crowd of the bloody forms of soldiers–the yard outside also fill’d; Some on the bare ground, some on planks or stretchers, some in the death-spasm sweating; An occasional scream or cry, the doctor’s shouted orders or calls; The glisten of the little steel instruments catching the glint of the torches; These I resume as I chant–I see again the forms, I smell the odor; 20 Then hear outside the orders given, Fall in, my men, Fall in; But first I bend to the dying lad–his eyes open–a half-smile gives he me; Then the eyes close, calmly close, and I speed forth to the darkness, Resuming, marching, ever in darkness marching, on in the ranks, The unknown road still marching.”
A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR Letter to Reader by J. Aaron Sanders, author of Speakers of the Dead
America was on the verge of war, again. A tidal wave of immigrants unleashed a discriminatory backlash. Political corruption was rampant, and the disenfranchised protested with bricks and firebombs. New York was the center of the world.
In 1858, lower Manhattan looked much as it does today, only with horses. 700,000 citizens crowded its tenements and walked its filthy streets. There were 260 churches, 3,000 saloons, and 100 schools. Cholera claimed 2,000 lives, typhoid 2,800, and the infant mortality rate was 250 in 1,000.
America had 32 states, 300 congressmen, 500 firemen, 4,700 policemen, and one woman doctor: Elizabeth Blackwell.
This is her story …
This is the premise for a TV show called The Infirmary I pitched with Robert Palm in 2012. Though the script and the premise are damn good, the show was not picked up, killed in one part by Copper (BBC) and in another by The Knick (Showtime). Still, working with Robert Palm was a pivotal moment in the evolution of Speakers of the Dead.
I happened upon Elizabeth Blackwell when reading about medicine in the 19th century. I was amazed that more had not been written about her, since she was the first woman doctor in the United States. Her admission to Geneva Medical College was a fluke: the headmaster thought her application was a joke and so he opened the question of her admission to the other students. They voted to accept her and were flabbergasted when she showed up. She earned her degree, despite many obstacles, and I knew she had to be a character in my novel.
After graduating from Geneva in 1849, Blackwell moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a surgeon. There, while treating an infant with ophthalmia neonatorum, she lost her sight in one eye when some of the contaminated solution squirted in her eye. Blackwell returned to New York City, where she opened her own clinic. Her sister, Emily, along with Marie Zakrzewska, both MDs, joined her in 1857 to help run her newly established New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children.
When I pitched my idea for a TV show about Elizabeth Blackwell, Robert had no real incentive to help me. But he did it anyway. Later, he would tell me that some Hollywood old-timer helped him and basically told him to do the same.
Robert Palm is a reporter turned screenwriter. He got his start on Miami Vice, and his first produced script—Sonny Crockett’s wedding—was viewed by 34 million people.
Later, he would work with Dick Wolf on Law & Order, and later still, he was the show runner for Law & Order SVU, among many other writing and producing credits.
Robert came to Columbus, Georgia in March 2012 where we created a beat sheet for The Infirmary pilot episode. In retrospect, I’m not sure how much I “created.” Instead, I watched Robert map out the beats with such a finely tuned sense of story I felt like I had been allowed to go behind the curtain to watch a master at work. That is not overstated. I spent the entire three days trying to keep up. But I was learning too: how to create more efficient and varied story beats, how to twist stories, add conflict, and how to eliminate dramatic redundancies. When we separated on Tuesday, we had mapped out the entire pilot episode. Now all we had to do was write the damn thing.
We divided up the pilot into acts: Robert would take acts 1 & 3; I would take acts 2 & 4. I wrote and rewrote and rewrote Act 2, and when it was time to share the pages, I was terrified. Again, Robert encouraged me with this baseball analogy:
In TV land, one always expects the rookie to whiff, hopefully not looking, while secretly hoping he or she hits it out of the park. And knowing that a clean single is more than okay, while a sharply-lined double is gravy. I’d say you crushed one deep into the corner, and while I’d like to wave you on, I’m going to hold you at third, knowing you’ll go in face first.
I was elated. Of course Robert had to clean up Act 2, but he found a way to do it that also encouraged me. I could go on about how he helped me through the process, but I think I’ve made my point. Robert mentored me in such a way that I learned how to write a good story. He would continue to mentor me through the pitch stage in Hollywood, and later in the writing of Speakers of the Dead. I will never be able to thank him for what he did for me.
In our script, Robert came up with the idea to call Marie Zakrzewska “Zacky.” I kept this nickname in Speakers of the Dead to pay homage to Robert Palm. I also like the significance of Elizabeth’s and Zacky’s relationship: a mentorship. Blackwell dedicated her life to helping women in medicine: both as caregivers and patients. She did this because she believed in what she was doing, and she wanted to help. Zacky (and her sister, Emily) benefited from this mentorship. Just as I did.
