I remember saying something to Leah about how I didn't really read any of Walt Whitman and this surprised her as she thought I have a Whitman-y way about me and my poetry. And it is true, as I work my way through 'Leaves of Grass' how it echoes my themes. Ever the pragmatic individualist that believed in a greater good, I keep dog-earing pages like:
"...he (the poet) is greatest forever and forever who contributes the greatest original practical example. The cleanest expression is that which finds no sphere worthy of itself."
"To him complaint, jealousy and envy are corpses are buried and rotten in the earth...he saw them buried."
-and-
"...but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects...they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls."
In some ways I love Walt Whitman, his exhalations invigorating and in some ways I hate Walt Whitman, his idealism palpable and naive. Actually I think it is the clash between idealism and practicality that I like thinking about the most, Whitman idealized practicality.
None the less, my poetry and really my prose are nothing more than the same exhalations and I cling to individualism and the notion poets are the gray observers, neither trying to expel what is right and wrong but what is present. Even though I disagree and expound that what we see we believe.
Walt was a big influence on Allen Ginsberg, or so it would seem, as his poem 'Howl' is as much a proclamation as any extolling the virtues and the place of a time in being, if not an entirely different viewpoint. He too saw the most direct and practical path as the ideal work and one's voice heard clearest was the one heard best.
Mushrooms
There we sit ripe for entertainment
Waiting for blankets of fog
Less trees and more roads
Watch out for the poison one
For even he is picked in the midst of scarcity and whisked away
Into some white burlap sack
And dropped in a kitchen
To fall into boiling water
Scattering to pieces
Before seeing saliva and warm tissue
Entering into the veins and digestion
Instead of killing, coagulating into stench
Food for microbes and more mushrooms to bear it
It, meaning the raunchy, indifferent and almost seemingly never ending
It, meaning the fight against that consuming urge of survival funneled through insulation of security
It, only never ending because you can't see the end
A fairy tale in youth and warning sign in old age
Oh pretend to separate yourselves from it
The poison, but not the decay
The security, but not the fog
The saliva, but not the warmth
The poison that doesn't kill could be worse and you wouldn't know it
15. A post about the poets and poems you admire or have influenced you. ( 4 pts)
16. A poem incorporating/ about mushrooms. ( 3pts)
20. Study the works of one or more of the following poets. Write a poem fashioned after their work. Jane Kenyon, Jim Harrison, Mary Oliver, Allen Ginsberg, Sharon Olds, Li-Young Lee, William Stafford, Leonard Cohen, Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda, Stephen Dobyns. ( 3pts each)
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