| Sam Abrams on Walt Whitman, New Poems, and Misc. |
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| by Andrei Codrescu |
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when I start to brood...
WHEN I CONSIDER when I start to brood over all the stuff I have fucked up because of my cowardice, conceit and sloth I console myself that I never sunk so low as all those eminent professors who condone who even praise the Library of America’s so called “Complete Poems of Walt Whitman”
which is of course wouldn’t ya know anything but complete
which is shockingly grievously definitively incomplete
in it you will not find Respondez! a poem loved and admired by great poets by Louis Zukofsky by W.H. Auden by William Carlos Williams
indeed Williams cited it as the best example of Whitman’s most important contribution
in it you will not find the poems he wrote on his deathbed the third annex to Leaves of Grass called Old Age Echoes which Whitman specifically authorized for inclusion in any future Collected Poems
in the library of America misnamed Complete Poems of Whitman you will not find this deathbed gem which Horace Traubel Whitman’s executor included, as instructed by Whitman, in the 9th edition of Leaves
Of Many a Smutch’d Deed Reminiscent Full of wickedness—of many smutch’d deeds reminiscent –of worse deeds capable Yet I look composedly upon nature, drink day and night the joys of life, and await death with perfect equanimity Because of my tender and boundless love for him I love and because of his boundless love for me. Wow! Way to go! That’s not the only homoerotic poem that you will not find in the Library of America Whitman. At times, Whitman tried to hide his sexuality, so this poem in the printed edition read Once I Pass’d through a Populous City Once I pass’d through a populous city imprinting my brain for future use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions, Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met there who detain’d me for love of me. Day by day and night by night we were together—all else has long been forgotten by me, I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me, Again we wander, we love, we separate again, Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go I see her close beside me with lips sad and tremulous. But here is how the poem read in Whitman’s manuscript
Once I pass’d through a populous city imprinting my brain for future use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions, But now of all that city I remember only the man who wandered with me, for love of me. Day by day and night by night we were together—all else has long been forgotten by me, I remember I say only one rude and ignorant man, Who, when I departed long and long held me by the hand, with silent lip sad and tremulous. Think what that could me to a gay youth, isolated in the provinces, burning for poetry, or to a sad old queen, lover of rough trade. All in all in the false Complete Poems, you will not find poetry that occupies 94 pages in the Norton Critical Edition of Leaves. Some of these poems, including Pictures, Whitman’s first breakthrough poem, are of great interest. But don’t believe me. Get ahold of the Norton. Check it out.
How can it be that there is not sustained and vociferous protest against this phony edition? This loud silence throws shame on the pillars of the American literary establishment shame on the universities shame on Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Chicago shame on Naropa shame on the endowments shame on the National Endowment for the Arts and on the National Endowment for the Humanities shame on the state arts councils shame on the departments of English, Creative Writing and American Studies shame on all their esteemed professors shame on the independent writers centers shame on Beyond Baroque shame on Poets and Writers shame on the Poetry Project shame on Writers and Books shame on City Lights shame on the reviews shame on the New York Times Book Review shame on the New York Review of Books shame on the American Poetry Review shame on The Nation and The National Review shame on Harpers and The New Yorker shame on the MacDowell Colony on Yaddo shame on the Modern Language Association on the Poetry Society The English Institute shame on the Associated Writing Programs shame on Harold Bloom and Marjorie Perloff shame on the academies shame on The Academy of American Poets shame on The American Academy of Arts and Sciences
How could this shabby phony edition of our great national poet be allowed? Doesn’t anyone see that emperor has no clothes on? What kind of a country tolerates so faulty edition of its national bard? What does this say about the prestigious institutions responsible for its publication? The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, Random House what does this terribly deceptive edition say about our culture? shame shame shame why is it left to a fool like me to cry out against this injustice to Whitman, this injustice to readers this fraud, this toxic botch polluting the sacred well of the Muses?
Note I absolve from condemnation three brave editors who published my critiques of the edition: Andrei Codrescu of Exquisite Corpse, Ed Folsom of The Walt Whitman quarterly Review, Stephen Merriam Foley of Modern Language Studies and Foley’s university, Brown. John Oakes and Dan Simon, of Four Walls Eight Windows Press, who published my book, The Neglected Walt Whitman. I tried. Ed. Note: Who’s your daddy?
IN WAR In War George Washington first fucked up November 1758 dusk dark deep in thick woods somewhere in the wilds western Pennsylvania Washington’s 1st Virginia Regiment fire fight! fire fight! against who who is it oh God stop stop cease firing it’s Mercer’s 2nd Virginia Regiment
40 casualties dead & wounded officers & men
the sages agree in war expect only the unexpected
in the American idiom SNAFU Situation Normal All Fucked Up
Sam to Andrei, June 19, 2011
So glad you are enjoying your live stock. Have you noticed that pigs hate to be laughed at? Try it. We used to have a tame 500 pound sow, raised by hippies who’d get in the pen and smoke pot with her….I could walk her like a dog… when I took her for her annual breeding/fuck, she wd run up the ramp into the truck…but she got real pissed off when she found that the old boar had been replaced by a young un…
I guess you found the appropriate retreat...what cd me more surreal than dropping turkeys from airplanes? yecch!
I also enclose revised IN WAR and pasted below my latest, of which I am inordinately proud, tho uncertain about burying the up/sleep ½ rhyme…
LOVE IN THE NIGHT
for barbara
60 years into a great marriage what i can do for you
is not get you up when the pain won’t let me sleep
____________
God I wish I was 1/10th as prolific as you, but console myself that I am about as prolific as Philip Larkin, who wrote what I consider the single greatest iambic tetrameter in English po : They fuck you up your mum and dad.
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