The origin of Friends of Walt comes from an email that Kim Stafford sent me after our annual reading of “Song of Myself” to celebrate Walt Whitman’s Birthday on May 29th, 2022. Here’s what he wrote:
Following our shining session today, would you like to invite the group to send you citations for Whitmania, to be compiled and shared with everyone: title and author of biographies, the URL for the Billy Collins talk on YouTube, Will’s source of quotation for how Emily Dickinson appreciated Whitman, and anything else. A sort of reading list for us to peruse before the next annual reading?
Just a thought…and if you reply “Good idea–why don’t you do it?” … we can collaborate. (Perrin’s looking up citations now.)
Have I ever told you the story about how my father was saved from being lynched in Arkansas in the winter of 1942 because he was reading Whitman when the mob came? We could put that in the bibliography, too.
–Kim
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Okay, so here we go!
Starting with a poem Kim wrote today (5/30/22) about how Walt Whitman saved his dad’s life:
The story about Whitman saving my dad…which is told in the first chapter of Down in My Heart…and which Keith Scales made into a little play to perform one time at the Portland Poetry Festival for my dad, after his last reading, early August 1993.
Memorial Day: How Walt Whitman
Saved My Farther from the Mob
One Sunday afternoon in 1942, three peace warriors
walked into a little town in Arkansas to loaf by the station
and take their ease. They were strangers there, so locals
gathered, curious. “What’s that you’re writing?” said one,
grabbing the page. “Why sir, it’s a poem.” “That aint poetry—
it don’t rhyme. It’s code. And you! What’s that you’re drawing?”
“Just a sketch.” “That aint no sketch, bub—it’s a map for Hitler.”
“Get a rope!” someone cried out, and time got bright and fast.
“And you!” the hothead shouted at my father, “What’s that book?”
and snatched it, slapped it open, and began to read aloud to prove
poetry had to rhyme. But lynching’s logic faltered as his fury
trailed off in a run of wild words, and time slowed down again.
“Call the sheriff!” someone shouted, as the crowd hummed
and muttered like a hive until the sheriff came, blustered
my father and his friends into his car, slammed the door,
turned and said, “Let’s get you boys out of town.”
Failing to catch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
–Kim Stafford
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Perrin Kerns turned me on to some gorgeous videos by Jennifer Crandall. The URL address is
This is our little homemade archive. Jeffrey Sher and Kim Stafford sent a link to the University of Nebraska’s vast online Whitman Archive. You can find all kinds of treasures here:
Today [5/30/22] I’ve been spending some time at this Grand Central Station of Walt Whitman sources, reading his fiction and journalism, some so pedestrian it makes Leaves of Grass even more miraculous.
Today, May 31, 2022, is Walt Whitman’s 203rd birthday. Happy Birthday, Walt!!! Howard Thoresen sent a link to the wax cylinder recording that Thomas Edison made of Walt Whitman, in his old age, reading or reciting his poem “America.” Here’s what Howard said:
This one has a lot of noise on it but I find it easier to hear than the cleaned up version (maybe because the text is on the screen):
Walt selling freedom, Volvo selling cars…and a little love story folded in where the writer is scruffy hero with expensive wheels. Maybe there’s a Kerouac vibe implied as well.
–Kim
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To celebrate Walt’s birthday today (5/31/22) I want to share one of my favorite short poems of his:
BEGINNING MY STUDIES
Beginning my studies the first step pleas’d me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.
–Walt Whitman
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Will Hornyak recommended a talk that Billy Collins gave on Whitman. Here’s the link:
Here’s an interview I did about “Song of Myself” on Marfa Public Radio in 2017:
Kim sent this:
Need we look further for where Whitman got his cadence than Emerson…perhaps from the essay you mentioned, “The Poet,” which Emerson must have composed, or perhaps revised, aloud, in preparation to deliver it as a lecture, oration, or operatic performance. Think of the young Whitman, after toiling on some journalistic task, encountering music like this last paragraph of Emerson’s essay:
O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.
–from the essay “The Poet” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Walt Whitman self-published his first book of poems, Leaves of Grass, in 1855, when he was 36 years old. It contained 12 poems, including the poem now titled “Song of Myself.” (In the original edition, the poems did not have titles.) He sent a copy of the poem to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who then sent Whitman this letter:
CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS, 21 July, 1855
DEAR SIR–
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “LEAVES OF GRASS.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.
I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perceptions can inspire.
I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.
I did not know until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects.