A while ago I promised Jordan Davis I'd retrieve my WC Williams from North Carolina over the Memorial Day weekend so I could say something not too foolish here about the poems versus the theory. Well, I've got the books now, and I'm gonna do it--but while I was there I read Chris Lott's blog on Walt Whitman's birthday. My great-grandmother used to recite Whitman, including some of the same pieces Chris mentions, so I grabbed old Walt, too.
There's nothing more gorgeous in American literature than Whitman at his best, but, at the same time, if ever there was a reason for Reader's Digest condensed books, Whitman is it. I've come to believe that's because he so distrusted intellect—those immense jumbled catalogs, everything flattened because everything seemed precious except difference. That's not quite right: difference was precious, but only the fact of difference, not the how or the why. The poem Chris quotes in its entirety, "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer," is a little illustrative jewel. I still think it's as gorgeous as I did when Granny recited it, but I now think it's dangerously wrong as well.
This sonnet of mine is a kind of response to Whitman's poem:
Homework
My daughter's learning how the planets dance,
How curtseys to an unseen partner's bow
Are clues that tell an ardent watcher how
To find new worlds in heaven's bleak expanse,
How even flaws in this numerical romance
Are fruitful: patient thought and work allow
Mistakes to carry meaning. She writes now
That Tombaugh spotting Pluto wasn't chance.
Beside her, I write, too. Should I do more
Than nudge her at her homework while I try
To master patterns made so long before
My birth that since then stars have left the sky?
I'll never know. But what I try to teach
Is trying. She may find what I can't reach.
8:45:42 PM 
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