A Political Companion to Walt Whitman

Chapter 8: Walt Whitman and the Ethnopoetics of New York

Walt Whitman and the Ethnopoetics of New York 185 Holding the pencil like one lonely chopstick & grasping the pad like an empty plate Waiting to be filled: . . . . Nothing decorous but our own clinging minds & the piling of her smooth black hair —John Yau, Crossing Canal Street Introduction: The Whitman Effect WALT WHITMAN’S INFLUENCE ON generations of artists, writers, and poets in America and throughout the world is undeniable.1 The lines, imagery, sentiments, and subjects of attention in his poems continue to emerge in novels, poetry, music, and other art forms. The title and much of the imagery and focus of his poem “I Sing the Body Electric,” for example, have migrated into a wide variety of texts, among which are a science fiction story, a Manhattan novel, and an analysis of jazz.2 Moreover, his song imagery (his most pervasive figuration) has motivated and energized both musical compositions and literary works. In this investigation, my concern is less with the breadth of Whitman’s influence than with its ethnopoetical realizations and reinflections as they are articulated in and on the city of New York. Rather than simply demonstrating influence, my aim is to show how applications and alterations of Whitman’s musico-poetical subject generate an apprehension of the micropolitics of interethnic New York, while CHAPTER 8 Michael J. Shapiro 186 Michael J. Shapiro at the same time capturing interpersonal and person-city resonances, as the rhythms of individual and collective “ethnic” becoming encounter the rhythms of the city. My initial appreciation of ethnic inflections of Whitmanesque urban resonances is owed to a passage in Ralph Ellison’s musically inflected description of one of his New York encounters, shortly after he moved there from Alabama. Describing his adjustment to the city, Ellison writes, “I had discovered, much to my chagrin, that while I was physically out of the South, I was restrained . . . by certain internalized thou-shalt-nots that had structured my public conduct in Alabama.”3 Because New York presented a different set of thou-shalt-nots, Ellison found himself to be a “pioneer in what was our most sophisticated and densely populated city.”4 In this guise, he relates a variety of vexing encounters, one of which is especially germane to this analysis. It occurred in a Fifty-ninth Street bookstore, where he was shopping for one of T. S. Elliot’s works. After striking up a conversation with a “young City College student” and “recounting an incident of minor embarrassment ,” he used “the old cliché . . . And was my face red.” His interlocutor countered with the remark, “What do you mean by ‘red’ . . . what you really mean is ‘ashes of roses’”5 Ellison continues: “I didn’t like it, but there it was—I had been hit in mid flight; and so, brought down to earth, I joined in his laughter. But while he laughed in bright major chords I responded darkly in minor-sevenths and flatted fifths, and I doubted that he was attuned to the deeper source of our inharmonic harmony.”6 While this lyrical, musically figured passage is one among Ellison’s abundant Whitman-like moments, there is a significant ethnic inflection of the Whitman effect in his renderings. As he “emerged as a central figure in the process of writing, he . . . engages the poetics of sonic Afro-modernity by returning time and again to questions of sound, technology, and (black) culture.”7 Thus, although Ellison was clearly influenced by Whitman’s poetry, he wrote from a different locus of enunciation and evoked a different sociopolitical imaginary. The way such differences produce an alteration of Whitman’s perspectives is evident in Ellison’s famous first novel, Invisible Man, where, in chapter 5, his narrator tells the story of the founding of a “Negro” college in an unidentified southern state. Dominating the chapter is a eulogy to the Founder that unmistakably mimics Whitman’s famous poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a eulogy Whitman wrote after the death Whitman and the Ethnopoetics of New York 187 of President Lincoln. As one commentator summarizes the connection, “All the Whitman symbols are there: the lilac, the star, the thrush—the bells and the funeral train.”8 Yet, as he adds, “Ellison employs them for almost entirely opposite reasons than did the bard of American poetry.” While “Whitman was attempting in his poem to...