How are we to communicate what we mean by democracy, who we are as citizens, whether we are open to expanding the idea of what the New World is or can be? In 1871, this nation was still reeling from what Walt Whitman called “The Secession War,” which I found interesting. It was a time that while the North had won and saved the Union, the Radical Republicans were pushing the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments to insure abolition and the birth right of formerly enslaved people, President Andrew Johnson pardoned the Confederate traitors allowing some of the most dangerous people to return to their communities, where they wreaked havoc and violently undermined the fragile but important gains made during Reconstruction. Whitman’s novella-length essay “Democratic Vistas” interrogated America’s position after that deadly war. He espoused some of the racist, sexist thinking of his time, but he looked at America and Americans and found much lacking in the nation and its citizens. He saw much that could be done to strengthen the nation, if only poets did it into the future. He could see that the Union win held great mortal costs, but whither would it go and who best to make up that New World?
I grew up in Arkansas during the last two decades of legalized segregation, so I know quite well just how vulnerable democratic institutions are; how language is used to harm and mute citizens or uplift heinous, obnoxious ideas and behaviors; how this culture practices selective amnesia (even with video tapes); and how all too often in American culture, its greater devils push out its better angels.
What is a poet to do? Well, remember what Muriel Rukeyser said in The Life of Poetry: “American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict.” She also considered the position of poetry in the “empire of business,” in which poetry is not even considered. But Rukeyser advanced the necessity of the imagination, marking in many ways what Whitman talked about in 1871 when “Democratic Vistas” was published.
What is a poet to do as this conflicted culture advances away from democratic values, questioning the very idea of who is a citizen and how? These seem like simple questions until we see the cultural landscape where democracy is ruined and where a New World is quickly holding up some very Old World values (monarchy anybody?).
Whitman’s essay, convoluted as only Whitman’s text can be, served as a foundation for a vocabulary prompt, one that over the past several years has generated poems on the environment, social justice, political corruption, a hilarious anti-Elon Musk rant, and some tender lyrics. How to create a project with poetry at its heart and respond to the complications? Well, Walt Whitman, Long Island born, found his own kind of celebrity in Brooklyn and Manhattan. His “Democratic Vistas” is a very long essay, but at its core is a call for the future, “For our New World, I consider far less important for what it has done, or what it is, than for results to come.”
As June Jordan declares in the opening sentence of her raucous and important essay, “For the Sake of a People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us”: “In America, the father is white; it is he who inaugurated the experiment of this republic.” At this moment in our nation’s history, that declaration has a powerful sway. Whitman’s future and Jordan’s interrogation as she asks: “Didn’t he sing this New World, this America, on a New World, an American scale of his own visionary invention?” And yet, Whitman in 1871 saw that the New World as “it is” was lacking and that if there was to be a democracy, then it would come from culture: “its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology” . . . Or as Jordan says, “Listen to this white father: he is so weird!” Of course, she was looking at Whitman’s call for democracy and positioned it against elitist and imitative political and cultural tropes that Whitman knew were failing the Republic.
But Whitman is white, patriarchal, and entertained some truly contemptible concepts along with that expansive sense of a democratic future. Yes, “he is weird,” but I see him as giving us foundational language. Words we can twist and tamper and use to our own advantage. This language explores cultural conflict, especially in the state of New York where progressive movements were started or expanded in an effort to resist conservative authoritarian ideas and policies. That constant argument within the concept of American culture is being played out right now, and it is a perfect time to use Whitman’s “terrible duties” to foster creativity and dialogue in settings that recall progress.
Poetry workshops are almost instant communities in the way that theater productions become instant family. The strangers who sit around a table or at their desks somewhere in the Zoom world agree to respond to the workshop leader’s request. It could be to draft a poem about rags or rage, disease or divinity, morality or mortality. There are no small topics in poetry and there are as many ways to make poems. Whitman’s essay houses language that is exuberant, polysyllabic, tonally sarcastic, bombastic, tender, and urgent. I found myself looking up words I had never seen before, such as cavil and afflatus, and chuckling over phrases like “scornful superciliousness.” The vocabulary prompt allows writers to contain themselves or go over the top—why not let the weirdness fly?
I have used this prompt in a variety of settings, and the idea of making these workshops as intergenerational as possible is a key to my desire to expound on the democratic future that Whitman desired. This nation is at a curious point in its history where the white man who advanced manifest destiny, enslaved millions, and stole and murdered Indigenous people is being lauded, even as social-justice advocacy, revolutionary practices, anti-racist and gender equality movements continue. Poetry is in the middle of all of these, and workshops are one of the few places where divergent yet creative people can give voice to their concerns and open their imaginations.
Across Generations is my way of asking that workshops open up for intergenerational communication. My ambition is to allow the prompt to be used and evolved to let additional poets lead workshops with it. I plan for the workshops to take place in or near sites of progress where people worked for civil rights and suffragism, protested to end slavery, fought against environmental pollution, and resisted the exploitation of labor. New York State is where John Brown’s farm is a state park! While we cannot do all that, workshops will take place upstate in Rochester as well as in New York City.
I was encouraged to see that other poet laureates are creating similar intergenerational projects. Poets often read or work with a range of workshop or audience participants—from inmates to elementary school children to recent PhD graduates. We are challenged to make our imagination available in ways that call for confidence and risk-taking.When you have buried so many, as was done in the midst of the nineteenth century, during the Civil War, it must have been intensely difficult to cultivate any kind of large vista for this nation. Whitman tried but knew that his way was narrowing, that others would have something newer, different in the future.
Well, that future is now, and it is a very troubling one. I have faith that this prompt will do what prompts are supposed to do—generate thought and new poems that can be shared by strangers from a range of ages, ethnicities, sexualities, and genders. Our capacity to imagine democracy as part of the creative process is the complicated legacy of Whitman’s call. But poets make crazy demands upon language, and it seems to me that now is the time to demonstrate what language can do in a time of crisis—not only to protest the indignities of these times but also to protect our spirits. We may be able to see that the possibility of that “New World” will not be abandoned. Workshops are communities in the way that worship services are—strangers who come together, listen to each other, and learn to fear less. If this is but one more form of resistance to the oppressive character of culture at this moment, then maybe, just maybe those cavils will diminish and those dangerous devils will shrink like the Wicked Witch of the West into a puddle of torn fabric.