All truths wait in all things...Walt Whitman
...I’m recycling myself again, from a comment left on Brooks’ latest blog post...which I was enticed into...even though I always read her anyway...by one of my favorite Whitman poems when I first read him twenty years ago...but that I'd almost completely forgotten until I saw those first few words...unseen buds, infinite, hidden well...god, how I love old Walt...Leaves of Grass remaining probably the closest thing my intrinsically vague personal religion has to a holy book...
...gotta admit I didn’t like him particularly at first...reading bits of Song of Myself and maybe some other stuff in an American Lit class...didn’t do a thing for me, really...but for some reason knew there was something I was missing...got a copy of Leaves of Grass, walked a mile through the woods from campus to the beach on Puget Sound to sit on rocks and open to random pages...generally reading small poems like unseen buds...
...I still have that copy, though it’s fallen apart, gotten yellow and crinkly after living in my backpack through my serious backpacking years...up and down the Appalachians and Rockies, across Zion and Canyonlands and Arches, to the top of the San Francisco Peaks and the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where I spent my twenty ninth birthday and the pack got clawed open by a ringtail cat during the night...
...more recently, taught Song of Myself to students at a couple different colleges...making sure to point out the significance of I loaf and invite my soul...which is, essentially, that it’s Whitman’s instruction on how to read the poem...and, as such, the complete antithesis of reading it in a classroom where they’d be required to write a paper about it and end up being graded on their performance, as I was having them do...and told them something like if you really want to understand this poem, read it on your own when you don’t have to worry about papers or grades...preferably lying in the grass or sitting on a beach on Puget Sound, or way down in the Grand Canyon...but be sure to hang your backpack properly...
