On the radio the other day I learned about this huge cache of Vincent Van Gogh’s letters that’s been made available (and searchable) on the Internet. Immediately searching for Whitman, of course, I came to this passage from an 1888 letter Van Gogh wrote to this sister: Have you read Whitman’s American poems yet? Theo […]
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Kim Roberts, who’ll be our guide on Saturday (http://www.kimroberts.org, http://www.beltwaypoetry.com) has sent these for us: a map of our tour and an image of the haversack Whitman took on his rounds to the hospitals. Map by Emery Pajer. We will be seeing work places 8 through 11 on our walking tour, and boarding house location […]
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The first page of the poem, from all the major US editions of Leaves of Grass.\"Song\" slideshow
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At first I was annoyed that I had to get a new copy of Whitman’s poetry and prose, but it’s been kind of cool to read through the preface without having to see my old notes. I know it gets long-winded sometimes (“No one ever wished it longer,” as Dr. Johnson said of Paradise Lost), […]
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The interview Mara and I did for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities radio show With Good Reason has been broadcast and is now available at http://www.withgoodreasonradio.org/ . It’s a fairly general overview, largely about Whitman’s life during the Civil War, and clocks in at a friendly 16 minutes. On its heels is an interesting […]
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From Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue, an album of Woody Guthrie lyrics they set to music. I’ve been listening to the song for years but never realized until last week in Camden that Whitman’s last surviving direct descendant was, in fact, some kind of niece.
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“The Civil War” (8:20) “Drum-Taps” (8:40) Two episodes from a pretty cool series (online and free–the whole thing is at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/whitman/program/) featuring our own Karen Karbiener as well as other scholars and writers including Ed Folsom, Ken Price, Alan Garganus, and Yusef Komunyakaa.
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