Lyrical Miracle: Emily Rivera Interviews Kirpal Gordon on His New Book

EMILY RIVERA: In the Preface to Lyrical Miracle: Homage to the Great American Songbook you write, “Since the world’s music library is just a click away, why not play the song while reading the prose poem?”

I did as you suggest; I called up the music from YouTube and listened to the song while I read your prose poems aloud. Wow! The pairing of your words in time and tempo to the musical selection really became an interactive experience. Your prose poem made the song more meaningful, and the song provided another context for your prose poem.

It also re-kindled my love of jazz, as a bandmate (flutist), choir member and listener. How did you come up with this idea? Do you personally see it as an interactive experience?

KIRPAL GORDON: That’s my hope. Reading the prose poems aloud or silently to the song, one discovers the sentence’s line and the musical line end on the same beat, and the paragraph breaks signal a new chorus or a change in the form. So by shifting foreground (listening to music) and background (reading the prose poem), Gestalt-like discoveries are possible.

        I didn’t come up with the idea, but I came of age in 1960s New York when an experimental multi-media synesthesia aesthetic was practiced. Concerts had light shows and dance space, visual art and words combined on the canvas and in sculpture, music and spoken word wedded on the bandstand. I liked what Jack Kerouac did, but Amiri Baraka with his NewArk band took it further. So did a number of Big Apple musicians I got to know and work with over the years. They showed me that making music and poetry together can be a love supreme.

Lyrical Miracle is the result of those collaborations.

EMILY RIVERA: It’s really intriguing to know the roots and processes of the project’s formation. Your poem “A Word's Worth” was my favorite due to the combination of repetition and improvisation. I could hear James Brown’s tune as I read these lines:

I feel good like absinthe curing in wormwood, like troubadour-ing in knighthood, like Steely Dan’s Josie alluring the pride of the neighborhood—so good like Djuna Barnes losing her moorings in Nightwood, I got you.

I feel nice like can you live with the throw of the dice if it’s three blind mice, like Eldridge Cleaver breaking out in Soul on Ice, like if the world is the body of Christ, let love suffice, so nice like paradise, I got you.

When I hold you in my arms, I quaff the wild balm of your love charms & when love hurts I know what curse words do the most harm:

What’s bum but a sound the mouth casts out, spoken without need of teeth or tongue. Spit it out: stumblebum, a hole in a human face only a bottle of rum can reach.

What’s homeless victim but a double trochee’s play-it-as-it-lays phrase to separate them that got from them that not while keeping those expanding catastrophes at bay. 

What’s rat but pink feet & antennae nose sniffin’ through plumbin’, comin’ up outta your throne. Rat: a fink, or raton: what’s left when a species starts to eat its own. 

What’s a word’s worth, William, in a world of sound bite, oath & curse, why in silence we can only bow for there’s nothing left to say now among those stung with no tongue.

KIRPAL GORDON: “I Feel Good” is one of my favorite songs, but by riffing on words like bum and homeless, I wondered about a word’s worth in a world afraid to feel other people’s pain. Again, it’s the yin/yang pairing of the tune’s robust vibe with the prose poem’s woeful blues that sets up the possibilities.

EMILY RIVERA: On a more personal note, the dedication page of Lyrical Miracle you write, “In loving memory to my parents, George & Gertrude Gordon.” By connecting with your folks, were you trying to recreate a feeling/memory?

KIRPAL GORDON: My parents connected me to this collection of American folk songs, one hit wonders, Broadway show tunes, Tin Pan Alley ditties, ethnic favorites and love ballads from the first four decades of the twentieth century. I learned what happened before rock ‘n’ roll dominated the radio waves. I remember quite fondly how on rainy Saturday afternoons my mom would play on the piano some of their favorite songs while my dad sang the lyrics: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Toot Toot Tootsie,” “Sentimental Journey,” “Night and Day,” “Pennies from Heaven,” and their courtship song, “Melancholy Baby.”

They showed me what love looked and sounded and felt like. Their blend of voice and piano taught me the secret of collaboration: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Though one could say that much of the Great American Songbook has been driven by salesmen in suits to please a particular generation of youngsters, I learned that a well-made song has a timeless quality to it as well.

To my ears, the music of Ellington, Basie, Gershwin, Mingus, Miles, Monk, Pres, Billie, Bird, Pops and Ella—the whole shebang—lives in the everlasting present along with those who’ve furthered their investigations. The deeper I dig, the more I find that the best thing that ever happened to the Great American Songbook has been its re-interpretation by generations of musicians. The irony of the Black Lives Matter is that African American music is in our nation’s cultural DNA. It’s an integral part of who we are and our greatest export. So I’m celebrating the songs, their composers-lyricists and their interpreters as our boldest ambassadors on the road to freedom, a lyrical miracle forging individual genius in collective improvisation.

EMILY RIVERA: Your remarks on our shared musical tradition echo what Cincinnati poet Ralph La Charity wrote of your new book, “The gates that open into the Great American Songbook are never not discreet, never not unique. They are floodgates, forsooth, but whoever tackles that mega-frisk adequately?  The particulars comprise so many multi-dimensional resonances, at every turn, that it never was wholly comforting so much as eerily uncompromising, which is the promise of Lyrical Miracle, a book that includes more of America than what its troubled and abundant shores alone bequeath. The Poet begs that whole Further. Along for the ride this Poet limns, we of the readerly cubicle, ears cocked, exult in the Poet’s expansive inclusivity: this book is itself a Songbook that contains multitudes – Rejoice, o!”

His reference to our historical struggles toward inclusivity has the ring of Walt Whitman’s work. In your preface you beautifully take us through your love for jazz, which we can see through your expression of recreating these memories, and that feeling of freedom through a Walt Whitman quote. You carry this throughout the entirety of the book at each new section. What is Whitman’s significance to you and the story? 

KIRPAL GORDON: As our political life becomes more distorted through us-them division, reading Whitman, our first national poet, has helped me keep my eyes on the prize. Despite these hooligans holding democracy hostage, we are nevertheless bending toward a more Democratic Vista and a more perfect union. Certainly, our musical tradition is hybrid vigor at work. It’s the true meaning of an e pluribus unum, that is, out of many, one.

Reading Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” in fourth grade was the medicine that helped me deal with Catholic school. I find that I always return to Leaves of Grass. After I had a band and we made a CD, I accidentally played “Take Five” while reading Walt’s “Song of the Open Road.” Paul Desmond’s alto sax choruses fit exactly into sections 1, 9 and 17. I called the band up and said, “Let’s do a Walt Whitman show.” We created “Whitman Meets the Great American Songbook” gigs. We did a few performances at Hofstra University as well. Here is a review of one of those shows:

https://www.thehofstrachronicle.com/category/arts-and-entertainment/2019/4/22/when-walt-whitman-became-a-jazz-artist

EMILY RIVERA: I am a yoga practitioner and a poet. I couldn’t fail to miss how much the book is a kind of yoga-through-poetry. Did you intentionally tie this into the book? For example, in “You Make Me Feel So Young,” a tune Frank Sinatra made famous, you flip the lyrics into a celebration of yogic wholeness: “You make me feel so Jung, so psychically spun, re-done, atoned & at one. Just when I dream it’s the end again you steal around the bend with that No panic, the deck chair’s organic, blowing a Titanic glockenspiel, amen, singing what a deal it is to be a spinning wheel-in-sentience…”

The yoga reference is even more direct in “Create Me, Baby, Shout” set to “Song of India”:

The bird is in the field as the field is in the bird, lover. Sanskrit grammar won’t have it one way over the other. Yes, no, both & neither: every spoken word wheels true, but moons only rise in skies & glow because the wise lyric it so.

Sound manifests the world our maws mutter, shudder & spout at. A single inflection’s fall separates a seeker from a sunset. Stressed or blessed, elocution’s slippery diphthong admits our own tongue tips to be Shiva lingam, strike-stroking fissures in our yoni-cave mouths where scores of unborn life forms whisper create me, baby, shout.

In Sanskrit birds fly by wildly, but fields only open with the wail of a word or the wink of an eye. If Maya’s veil conceals to us our own divine at-one, then the other is who we seek to entail, reveal & become.

Guttural, palatal, domal, dental, labial: the sutras of Sanskrit elucidate the exact parts tongue & lips play in the art of love—& so exactly the whole of love—yearning to sing & get sung over & over & over again.

Om purnama dahapurnam edam, purnat purnam udachatay, purnasya purnama dhyam, purnat ava vasishatay: This is full & every emanation full for whatever is produced by the full is itself full, so says the bard of the Iso Upanishad.

KIRPAL GORDON: I studied Sanskrit for my foreign language requirement at my experimental undergraduate program, which helped me appreciate India’s yoga traditions. And I learned from my laya yoga (union through sound) teacher from Punjab that it’s the combination and permutation of certain seed syllables repeated in rhythmic cycles that produce altered states of mind. I practiced Sufi dancing and came to see that the 99 names of Allah are also passwords or portals into cosmic awareness. Ditto singing the Siri Guru Granth Sahib of the Sikhs, the chants of the Buddhists, the Hindustani and Carnatic musical trads.

William Blake, among other Romantic poets, and John Coltrane, among other jazz musicians, sought to produce the same effect on a reader or listener. So, if you define yoga as erasing the separation between self and other, subject and object, perceiver and perceived, lover and beloved, then yes: that’s the lyrical miracle that Lyrical Miracle is lyrically miracle-ing.

EMILY RIVERA: How does the cover connect to the overall experience of the book?

KIRPAL GORDON: I love viewing falling water and listening to its sound since I was a little kid drinking from the fountain in the park. As an adult I have built a few meditation gardens with water features. To me, nothing expresses the theme of Lyrical Miracle better than its cover. Like each vowel sound “freed” from its consonant cluster when sung or spoken aloud, each drop of the waterfall “grows” wings on its descent into the pool where it splashes its return.

EMILY RIVERA: My favorite quote by Miles Davis is that “sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.” Being a writer for over fifty years, would you consider this book as a representation of your growth? What was your favorite part about going through the journey of writing this book? 

KIRPAL GORDON: When I starting writing poetry in my teens, I was enamored with the possibilities of free verse. It felt so liberating; I could write on anything for any length and not let formal concerns constrain me. Many of the poems kept getting bigger and some became narratives or monologues in my early books of fiction. When I returned to spoken word poetry, I was glad to have a parameter, even if it were just the number of syllables or rhymes that I could fit into a song’s 32 bars.

So, yes, regarding the Miles’ quote, I had to switch genres, absorb a ton of influences and find a way to take the words off the page and onto the stage with first-call musicians helping me find new meaning in jazz standards. Rather than blow endlessly over the changes, I found that I could deliver word solos that enriched the bands’ musical solos. Here’s an example: 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xe7N7vjnJ1k9ExOExrX43NYiXXf32tw-/view

The Speak-Spake-Spoke Band: 

Amanda Monaco, guitar, musical director; Warren Smith, drums: Arthur Kell, bass; Kirpal Gordon, spoken word; Frank Perowsky, clarinet; Carlton Holmes, piano; Claire Daly, baritone sax.

Their solos inspired my solos and vice versa; it’s how the first three sections of the book were born. It comes full circle in the last section, “Tales in Performance,” which are the songs the band plays when I read selections from my fiction books.

Poetry and prose, music and words, poet and band meeting and mating: That’s the real story of this lyrical miracle and I’m sticking to it.

EMILY RIVERA: The print and e-book versions are for sale at the Writer page at www.KirpalG.com. Here’s what critics have said of your performances with the Speak-Spake-Spoke band:

His work swings with around-the-corner wit, but also with real gravitas, with a ludicrous tragic craziness that’s at once wild and frighteningly familiar. He chooses tunes that are sweet and heartfelt but also elegant and formally graceful—his voice levitating rich and smooth and right on the rhythm. I’ve never heard the marriage of music and the spoken word done with greater harmony.    

—Bill Seaton, director, Poetry on the Loose

A poet with unstoppable chops, Kirpal Gordon is a spewer of jewels with the baddest ear in the hemisphere and an unbelievably well-hung mother tongue…. His voice is wed to the energy of a singly hearted ensemble.                                                             —Mikhail Horowitz, The Blues of the Birth

Hearing Gordon’s poetry with his jazz band at Sweet Rhythm is like seeing Salvador Dali’s paintings: he’s a shape shifter of the first order.                                    —Lara Pellegrinelli, National Public Radio

Precise of word and rhyme and ready of wit, his pairing poems with pearls of jazz and his erudition in world lit (licks from Eliot, Yeats and the Upanishads flit by like Dexter Gordon’s quotes) add further dimensions to his verbal inventions; at poetic peak he’s internally rhyming, eternally scheming, keeping this hot band dancing on the point of Cleopatra’s needle.                        —Fred Boucher, All About Jazz

Having graced our stage many times with his spoken word collaborations, we call Kirpal Gordon our poet laureate at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola.           

—Todd Barkin, proprietor, Dizzy's, Jazz at Lincoln Center

If you think the notion of mixing jazz and poetry is hopelessly old-fashioned, let his swinging scansion and vivid imagery relieve you of that perception. Gordon swings.     

—Steve Smith, Time Out New York

Lotsa people go at it, but it’s Kirpal G who IS it—the Real Deal, the Chilly Willy, the Absolute Rootin’ Tootin’est Poet Qua Non—like the rain out of the blue. When my life is through and the angels ask me to recall the thrill of them all, I will tell them I remember Kirpal!    

 —Bob Holman, proprietor, Bowery Poetry Club

Whitman in Vegas by Jim Cohn

Whitman In Vegas

 

In my dream, I see Whitman in Vegas,

Scarlet caped, pulling up in a long

Black limousine, telling the crowd “I always win,

Walking deeper into that field you have made of yourself,

Unmoved by the wind––

Its famines and pestilence, upheavals crowded into months––

Knowing the peak has been revealed,

The summit of the peak right under you,

That’s surely no other peak, that’s no peak at all.”

  

Boulder, Colorado

8 August 2008

 

––Jim Cohn, from his forthcoming collection, Treasures of Heaven

photo by Scott Cohn 

Giant Steps Press Welcomes Two New Students to Its Internship Program

Giant Steps Press is pleased to welcome two new interns to its publishing and promotion team: Emily Rivera and Betty Araya. These undergraduates develop professional-level aptitude through learn-by-doing publishing projects with GSP co-founder Paul Kirpal Gordon. 

Ms. Rivera, a third-year senior at Hofstra University’s School of Communication, is a Public Relations major with a Photography minor. A member of the Alpha-Theta Beta sorority and its chairperson in Public Relations, she is also a member of the Yoga club; GiveKindness; SP!T, a poetry club; and WRHU, the campus three-time, Marconi-award-winning radio station where she writes, produces and broadcasts. 

Born in Queens and raised on Long Island, she brings skills in website and book design as well as marketing, interviewing, copy writing, photography and videography. Her essay, “I Dare You: Reflections on Identity,” is part of the curriculum of Writing Studies Composition 1 at Hofstra. It has been of great service for first-year, first-semester students coming to terms with their own identities as learners (https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2018/10/i-dare-you-reflections-on-identity-by.html).

Ms. Araya, a third-year student, is majoring in Global Studies and Journalism and minoring in Creative Writing. Born in Ethiopia and raised in the deep South, she is making her mark as the Assistant Features Editor for the Hofstra Chronicle, as a tutor at the university’s Writing Center, and as a peer teacher in the Writing Studies and Rhetoric Department. She brings skills in copy editing for Taking Giant Steps Press blog as well as interviewing authors and reviewing their works.

Her essay, “The Revolution Is Love,” is part of the curriculum of Writing Studies Composition 2 at Hofstra. It has proven to be greatly beneficial to students interpreting films by Wim Wenders, Jamie Uys, Lena Wertmuller and Nicholas Roeg (https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-revolution-is-love-20-by-betty-araya.html). More recently, she was the MC and co-producer of “Walt Whitman Meets the Great American Songbook” last Spring with GSP first’s intern Benny Gottwald.

Mr. Gottwald graduates this May. His four essays at Taking Giant Steps Press blog are part of Hofstra WSC 1 and 2 curricula, and his piece “El Chapin” has been featured in the undergraduate journal The Dangling Modifier as well as the syllabus of trans-lingual scholar Sarah Alvarez. In addition to his role at GSP, Mr. Gottwald is in the process of completing his debut novel, Looking Up, as well as his first album of original songs.

Since his introduction to GSP, Mr. Gottwald has taken on the role of Musical Director. In three campus concert performances (https://www.thehofstrachronicle.com/category/arts-andentertainment/2019/4/22/when-walt-whitman-became-a-jazz-artist) over the last three years, his insightful eye and ear to Whitman’s poetry, his band leadership as well as his arrangements of jazz standards and his own songs, have taken GSP-sponsored projects to new heights. An aspiring New York jazz musician and songwriter, Mr. Gottwald studies with Dave Lalama, a Hofstra music faculty member who has played with Buddy Rich and Stan Getz. In addition to being musically involved with GSP, Mr. Gottwald has worked as a freelance copywriter, book designer, and editor with various clients. After graduation, he is moving to Brooklyn when he will take up his diverse passions full time.

“Why Walt Whitman Matters” by Peter Arvan Manos

 

Looking back at last month’s celebrations of Walt Whitman’s 200^th birthday, it is clear why America needs Whitman’s unifying vision now more than ever.

“Poetry is meant to be heard—it is an oral tradition,” said Rupert Fike, the emcee and organizer of Poetry Atlanta’s marathon end-to-end reading of “Song of Myself” on the 200^th anniversary of Whitman’s birth, one of many such celebrations around the world. (Photo: May 31^st, 2019 at the sanctuary of Atlanta’s First Existentialist Congregation.)

One morning back in 1979, in Beacon, NY, Pete Seeger took the empty seat next to me on the long train ride down the Hudson to Grand Central Station. I didn’t notice it was the famous folk singer until a few stops later. I was reading, focused on Walt Whitman’s poem, “Song of Myself.”

When we made eye contact, he glanced at my copy of Leaves of Grass and asked if I liked Whitman. I said I liked Whitman a lot. Then I asked him the same question. He turned and stared straight ahead, as if he were trying to identify something far away.

He finally said, “I like Woody Guthrie’s line about Whitman.”

“What was that?”

He then intoned: “I must forever and ever stay away, from the wallowing waters of Walt Whitman.”

Yes, Whitman wallowed. He did so with such wild exuberance; it made some want to “forever stay away.” But where some stood along divided shores, Whitman swam in a single sea.

Without having to get all wet, we can gain clarity through Whitman’s vision for America. While Whitman drew upon ideas from great thinkers of his day and from those of prior eras, his is a vision grounded not in abstractions, but in his connection to Nature and in the related voice he took on, as a representative of common American men and women.

As the Atlanta-based poet Rupert Fike said in a recent interview with Atlanta’s NPR station, (City Lights: Poets Rupert Fike and Kodac Harrison, 5-30-2019), “Whitman was a ground-breaker in going conversational, and in speaking in the voice of the common man and common woman.”

Fike also noted the key role Whitman played when it comes to the development of free verse. Most poetry in the English language before Whitman, according to Fike, “was metered and rhymed, and was mostly meant for the upper-class Englishmen, but Whitman broke those boundaries. And we owe Whitman a great debt of gratitude to this day, for creating this American voice that goes on now through songwriters and rap artists and many others. He was a liberating influence, and his words still resonate today.”

Along with his love for common men and women, Whitman also had a great love for all that we have in common, and he defined democracy in precisely such terms. Whether one wants to “stay away” from his poetry or not, none of us should stay away from Whitman’s call in “Song of Myself” for a democracy where we “accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.”

Whitman’s call for democracy holds all of our rights in common. Now, tribalistic views tend to pit one group’s needs against those of another. An example in recent decades would be the idea that a law banning unfair discrimination against a minority ethnic or racial group is equivalent to “reverse discrimination” against the majority group.

Whitman drew many other important circles of commonality, rather than dividing lines, in his poems. In “I Sing the Body Electric,” he proclaims the unity of body and soul. And in “Goodbye, My Fancy,” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” he expresses oneness between himself and his future readers.

While some may view the common circles Whitman drew as “feel good” poetic devices, for his devotees they are transcendent truths.

The most important lesson for us today has to do with the common message that runs across all of the different circles of unity Whitman drew, because it is a message that helps to counteract the blindness that arises when we label everything in divisive terms.

Even where the labels that divide seem real and true, we gain a sense of balance and wisdom if we can carve out even a fleeting moment in which to step back and look at the grander reality where our precious labels are meaningless.

Throughout the wide sweep of the 52 verses of “Song of Myself,” Whitman brings everyone into a circle of oneness, famously writing “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.”

In the opening of “Song of Myself” Whitman wrote something that some people take as a mere analogy, when it seems clear that he was also reaching for something grander. It is in the third line of the poem:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself

And what I assume you shall assume

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

You can read the third line above as saying: “As good, every atom belonging to me also belongs to you.” In this way, Whitman draws a circle around “me” and “you,” making a unity of identity, instead of a mere “as good as” type of comparison. (Tellingly, Whitman removed the comma from “for every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you” after his first few editions of Leaves of Grass, and had it as shown above in his so-called deathbed edition.)

We may think it is too difficult to have such a deep sense of empathy with everyone. Can’t we simply apply the Golden Rule instead? But if we allow ourselves to feel even an inkling of this sense of unity, it is more powerful and real than abstractly telling oneself, “I need to do unto others as I would want them to do unto me.”

Finally, a difficult union in Whitman’s work spans the divide between nature and technology. It is an important union for us to understand today. But we should first note that the shifting line we now draw between nature and technology is very specific to our current era.

Consider how we may now tend to think of the voyage in 1620 of the Mayflower as something closer to nature than, say, a cross-country drive in a nice new 2019 pickup truck. But in another 400 years, it is likely the pickup truck will be viewed as being similar to the Mayflower 800 years earlier, with people saying things along the following lines: “Look how much closer to nature this car and ship were than our warp-drive starships—all of their components were made from terrestrial plants, animals, and minerals, and they were both fueled by energy directly from the Earth!”

Labels become blinders. We think we know what we mean with the label “nature” and the label “technology.” But what matters, ethically, is what we do or don’t do as a result of how we apply those labels. This is where we can gain some healthy confusion, if not clarity, from the circle of unity Whitman drew around the two.

By healthy confusion I refer to our asking questions that help us clearly examine (and consider partly erasing) the hard and fast lines we have drawn. For starters, let’s note that we romanticize nature’s awesome power at times, while at other times we seek to protect it like a fragile baby.

Some people oppose sustainable approaches by insisting that economic growth comes first. They believe the prime importance of economic growth should allow us to use technology to treat nature as a resource we can exploit, even though the long-term result of unchecked over-exploitation is economically ruinous.

Other people view rolling green meadows, and fields of corn or wheat as being “natural” even though they are the product of thousands of years of interactions where human beings deforested vast regions of the planet and domesticated wild plants into more productive varieties.

A related (and deliciously confusing) insight comes from the author of the best-selling book, Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, who argues that we may be giving ourselves too much credit when we claim that human beings domesticated wheat—step by step he shows how it is much more likely that wheat domesticated human beings.

Finally, in total disregard of our nature vs. technology distinction, the laws of physics apply equally to things we label as coming from “nature” and things we label as coming from “technology.” Along these lines, tellingly, Whitman said, “I see that the elementary laws never apologize.”

Armed now with our “healthy confusion” we can look with fresh eyes at how, more than 150 years ago, Whitman expressed wonder at the renewal that occurs every spring, and wrote, “Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,” in his haunting poem “This Compost.”

In a similar state of healthy confusion, we can look at Whitman’s poem “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” where he lists “Log-houses, clearings, wild animals, hunters, trappers,” but then also includes “multiform agriculture,” as well as mines, factories, and “labor-saving machinery” in the same list!

In the radio interview referenced at the opening of this piece, the host, Lois Reitzes, mentions how Whitman looked back with nostalgia at agrarian life. This is a romantic and unrealistic view, one where we forget that log cabins often had door-latches made with iron from mines, and rugs made with labor-saving machinery, from farms’ wool or cotton.

Whitman was actually looking forward. Multiform agriculture and labor-saving machinery were the high technology of Whitman’s day, along with the first use of electricity for communication—the telegraph. Whitman used the word “electric” in several poems, perhaps partially because it is a beautiful and exciting word, but also because it is a force of nature and was a new technological marvel in his day.

Also in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” Whitman says: 

Fear grace, elegance, civilization, delicatesse,

Fear the mellow sweet, the sucking of honey-juice,

Beware the advancing mortal ripening of Nature,

Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of states and men.

Fundamentally, when we draw a line between nature and technology, we lose a certain level of connectedness. We have to revisit how we use those labels. In some situations they shed light. But in other situations, we are better off dropping the labels so as to see the presence of a fundamental larger unity. If we focus how we use technology so as to be more aligned with nature, the economics of decisions will take into account the longer-term perspective required for healthier lives for future generations.

Similar benefits come to the forefront when we approach other lines we have drawn. Remembering we live in our body, and it is connected to our soul, enables us to be more present, simply breath, and to think and live in a healthier manner. Similarly we may need to keep a line between “I” and “you” to negotiate in a business or job situation or to make our way through traffic jams or to balance our checkbooks, but occasionally erasing the line between “I” and “you” is still a good way to get past resentments and to reconnect with a healthier way of looking at our relationships with one another.

Whitman’s circles of unity force us to find the common factors that unify the things we label as being separate. It is, ultimately, as simple an observation as saying two divided by two equals one. But simple is not easy!

So whether we enjoy wallowing with Whitman or not, when it comes to addressing challenging issues we face as Americans, let’s honor Whitman’s great vision by tapping into “nature without check,” and a sense of our unity with everything. And everyone.

******************************************************************************

Peter Arvan Manos has written extensively about renewable energy and smart grid trends in Transmission & Distribution World and his poems have appeared in The New York Times, AbstractMagazineTV.com, Yellow Chair Review, and other publications. 

References

The three quoted poems utilize Whitman’s final edition of Leaves of Grass. The referenced page numbers below are from the Walt Whitman Archive at this link: Leaves of Grass (1891-92)

1. "Song of Myself," Page 29, Leaves of Grass, (1891-92)

2. "This Compost," Page 285, Leaves of Grass, (1891-92)

3. "By Blue Ontario's Shore," Page 264, Leaves of Grass, (1891-92)