Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet

9. Whitman: Year One - Rowan Ricardo Phillips

{ 172 } 9 Whitman Year One ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS I As a child growing up in New York City I knew two Walt Whitmans . Each seemed large, impressive, and durable; but neither had much to do with poetry. This was a time in my life before I read poetry. And as brief as that time may have been, why deny it its primacy and its privilege? Why not begin from there? There is always a time before poetry. The two Whitmans I knew were not the famed dual identities of Whitman himself. Not the worker Walter Whitman and his counterpart, the poet Walt. The Walt Whitman Library and the perfunctory if not beautiful Walt Whitman Bridge: these were my Walt Whitmans. And when I hear Whitman’s name it still frequently summons an image of either of these two places in my mind. To put it another way: in those days Walt Whitman may as well have been a president. His name was just as splendid, just as righteous and officious. Grover Cleveland, James K. Polk, the ubiquitous Washington and Lincoln: their names seemed before us whenever we needed to line up, be quiet, or get a pass. “Walt Whitman,” like those other names, was a power. Imagine! The man was born from Quakers. But the imprint of his name was like Braille, for even if you kept a blind eye to poetry, Walt Whitman’s residue had acquired a near-­ imperial normalcy. Just as so many of the names of the children I went to school with—­ Jefferson, Jackson, Monroe, Grant—neither sung of nor stung like the past. Whitman { 173 } In retrospect, how fitting those two Whitmans were: the Jeffersonian idea of the American public library on the one hand and on the other a structure that brings land and people together. Whitman was, nevertheless, a name emblazoned on polis-­ approved architecture. What follows should be the volta of this reflection. Of how next I discovered the real Whitman’s work and was moved and instructed and saw my vision changed. But that is not what happened . I did eventually start to read Whitman, and regarding the Whitman that I read, what to say? I admired and then grew skeptical of his ideas—America, democracy, capacious love, instructive death—it was the eighties in New York City after all. Whitman, however, seemed to anticipate this antipathy when he wrote: “Democracy has been so retarded and jeopardized by powerful personalities, that its first instincts are fain to clip, conform , bring in stragglers, and reduce everything to a dead level.” Yet he himself had become one of those powerful personalities: I loved his best poems without loving his poetry. His rhythms seemed marooned by the Bible. He often was hard to believe. It was the era of the Great Communicator. And I never, even at that age, wanted to be a straggler. So I turned to other poets and left Walt Whitman behind. Nevertheless, soon after, I met another Walt Whitman; a Whitman that brought me back to Whitman; Whitman freer and yet less himself, like a horse that has returned home without its rider. II “none of them loved the huge leaves” Lorca’s “Ode to Walt Whitman” begins on the other side of the East River from Whitman’s Brooklyn. Though this poem is by and large about sexual identity and self-­ love, I would like to focus here on the inner workings of the poem and how these relate and tie in to thoughts on both Whitman and race. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Whitman traverses that same East River and sees “the flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset.” Here, at a similar time of day and a little farther up the river, Lorca invokes the slurs of many nations as later in the poem he writes: { 174 } Rowan Ricardo Phillips Always against you, who give boys drops of foul death with bitter poison. Always against you, Fairies of North America, Pájaros of Havana, Jotos of Mexico, Sarasas of Cádiz, Apios of Seville, Cancos of Madrid, Floras of Alicante, Adelaidas of Portugal. Lorca turns from Whitman’s idiosyncratic tactic of monologic pluralism (even his “Song of the Answerer” is in his own voice) in favor of a voice that threatens annihilation of that same voice. The famed Adamic power of naming at use by Lorca here is violent and cyclical: a...