Marsh Hawk Press, under the direction of Sandy McIntosh, has launched a monthly on-line feature in which poets are asked to write up the "chapter one" of their vocations. Among those who have written for the project are Denise Duhamel, Philip Lopate, and Jane Hirshfield. My own contribution is up now. I've called it Opening Shot and this is how it begins:
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In high school I read “Song of Myself” in a course in American literature that began with the poets who had three names (William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Julia Ward Howe, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) and never reached the moderns who went by their initials (T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden). In that context it meant something that Whitman used no middle name and only a shortened version of his forename. I liked this fellow who was “mad for it to be in contact with me,” whether “it” stood for nature, the grass, a particular person, a brook—that was how I felt, too, in my more uninhibited moments. I liked the anthology excerpts so much I bought, with fool’s luck, a thin paperback of Leaves of Grass that called itself the “original edition,” edited by Malcolm Cowley. To this day I maintain that the 1855 edition is the greatest version of this great American poem, which Whitman revised often and not always for the better. >>>
Pictured above: David Lehman Stacey Lehman, Yukiko Kaneda