Uncle Walt, Father of American Poetry
/
Born into the American Experience on this day in West Hills, Long Island (1819) was Walt Whitman, whose wandering life and joyous, staggering poetry gave voice to the chaos and virility of a nation in puberty.
From The Writer's Almanac:Walt Whitman moved back to New York City and started writing for newspapers. He loved the penny papers—the cheap ones—their lively style. He said, 'I like limber, lashing, fierce words... strong, cutting, beautiful, rude words.' He liked to walk up and down Broadway and around in Battery Park.
"He wrote a novel about the evils of alcohol called Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times, (1842). It sold more than 20,000 copies. He went to New Orleans in 1846 to write for a newspaper there. He was amazed at what he saw: the mixture of Spanish and English and French. He saw slaves being auctioned on the block. He came to believe that he should write something to hold the country together, that America needed a poetry unlike poetry of Europe. The first edition of Leaves of Grass came out in 1855, unrhymed, un-metered poetry that combined language of sermons, romantic poetry and working class slang.
More at The Walt Whitman Archive.
Listen (Real Audio) to Garrison Kieller read excerpts from Crossing Brookyn Ferry.
captures the light, the sound, the texture of the artist's life collaborating with nature in the fields, streams, seashores and forests that serve as his studio.
. He spent five years working on it and wrote 1,500 pages of manuscript. He felt he just couldn't put the pieces together and then one night got an idea for a whole different story and decided to follow it. He wrote 15 pages in four hours. He kept working on it in secret for the next few weeks. He didn't tell anybody. He said, "I didn't stop to think about what I was doing or what the critics would think of it and, sweetest of all, I didn't give a single thought to what I was trying to say. I just wrote."
. It came out in 1995, about a creative writing professor named Grady Tripp who can't seem to finish his latest novel. It was made into a movie five years later.
. It came out in 2000, and won a Pulitzer Price. It was the story of a Jewish kid who flees the Nazis just before World War II, has to leave his family behind, and come to America. Along with his cousin, he creates a comic book super hero called "The Escapist."
"I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me. Religion was a part of my subject, of course -- for a novelist from the Indian subcontinent, how could it not have been? But in my opinion I also had many other, larger, tastier fish to fry. Nevertheless, when the attack came, I had to confront what was confronting me, and to decide what I wanted to stand up for in the face of what so vociferously, repressively and violently stood against me.
I will miss the man who electrified so many young people, even when his body, frozen by Parkinson's, was not able to communicate the spirit inside of him.
