The ironies of location. While Walt's house in Camden is across the street from the state prison, the house in Huntington stands amidst suburbia. Men's Wearhouse just a few feet to the south. Walt Whitman Fence, Whitman Jewelers, Walt Whitman Road, Old Walt Whitman Road. And a short walk away, the Walt Whitman Mall, where excerpts from Song of Myself are etched into the front of the building. The woozy surreality of seeing this radical, visionary text, repeated over and over, on the same structure that houses Saks and Bloomingdale's. I had the feeling that I might have been the first person ever to stand out there and read it, which might have accounted for the fact that I started to feel like I was about to be targeted as a security risk. How not to be rearranged by those lines? According to someone from the Whitman foundation, more than a few schoolkids come to the house thinking Walt was named after the Mall.
7 comments:
oh, the irony of "the big doors open" above a personnel-only sign. i don't think that is what walt had in mind.
Exactly. That shot was impossible to resist.
I'm teaching "Song of Myself" in my summer course tomorrow, and this is just too much to resist showing them. Seeing that sign, I think of the part where he writes, "Unscrew the locks from the doors !/
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!"
I wish I were named after a mall.... with a Saks.
I have faith that, should retail have a future, there's a James Allen Hall Mall out there to come... or a Lifestyle Center?
I think it's so strange how that wide river of open space moves through the middle of the poem on the walls, as though "Song of Myself" got into the hands of the Beowulf poet...
Is this a 60s structure, does that account for the graphics -- or maybe early 70s?
I think you should get a Niemans, James.
Actually, James Allen Hall is a wonderful name for a mall. "...available at The Galleria, Bal Harbour, the Beverly Center, and James Allen Hall."
Here's a sassy and intelligent blog post about Walt Whitman's mall. http://www.labelscar.com/new-york/walt-whitman-mall
Its history is more interesting than you'd expect. The original mall was built in 1962, with several major renovations over the years. The engravings are supposed to be in the shape of "leaves," which accounts for the spaces in the text, I guess.
My guess is that the engravings date back to the 60s, even though not much of the 60s-era mall remains.
The mall had two big fires, one in '84 and the other in '91. In the latter fire, a McCrory's worker tossed a lit cigarette into a display of silk flowers, killing two of his coworkers.
Here' a direct link to that mall blog post.
I recently had an opportunity to take a master class/workshop with poet and memoirist Mark Doty, whose Fire to Fire won the National Book Award in 2009. The workshop took place one Saturday at the Walt Whitman Birthplace in Huntington Station, Long Island, New York.
Doty was warm, enthusiastic, charming, and eager to involve his 25 students—us amateur poets all, I’m sure—in not just the writing of poetry, but also the study of its nature. In particular, the focus of the workshop was to examine the “local” element and reference in poetry, not just ours, but also that of others. In other words, instead of writing about something that’s “out there,” write about something right where you are, something you can see and feel.
To start, we analyzed in depth a poem, “South,” by poet Deborah Digges, poking at its words, phrases, cadence, and imagery, an exercise that was as fascinating as it was revelatory. Doty often involved us in asking for our impressions, or what we thought this or that meant, and why. The session wasn’t lecture and note-taking; it was interactive and participatory.
Following that, Doty asked us to think of or imagine a place we like to be, or wish we could be. Then we were to take a few minutes to write words and phrases that described that place and how we felt about it. Afterwards, we talked about what we came up with, and how those words and phrases described that special place we had in mind.
Then came the real action. We were told to take 20 minutes to write a piece—poem, prose, or whatever—based on the place we thought of and, if we chose to, use the phrases and words we had come up with in our composition. When we were finished, he asked how we felt about what we had written. And while we did not share our compositions with him or with each other, we were encouraged to talk about our results in this writing exercise.
Doty was quick to encourage us to continue to work on our compositions until we had brought them to a point that we felt was complete, even if evolving.
My piece, which I call “Here,” has evolved. The original poem was…okay, but clunky. I’ve worked it over, and the results are more pleasing to me. I still want to think of it as a work in progress, but I am ready to reveal it to the world. “Here” it is.
__________
Here
Unimaginable not to be,
this respite from the day’s trials,
a space in time, yet out of time,
granting permission to refocus,
offering solitude, comfort, protection from intrusion,
affording lift from burden, to loosen,
yielding escape.
Silent, still, I sit,
relishing sounds and sights,
seeking elements that reach in to pull out the artificial, put in the natural.
It does not take long for soul to reap, to harvest peace.
Home. Hearth. Here.
Unimaginable without.
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