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Well, I don’t know about any of the other Brits in the audience, but I could do with some light relief after a week of political intrigue! Hopefully this will be the very thing to cheer us up. From the Oxford Book of Parodies, edited by John Gross, here is the nursey rhyme Jack and Jill, as Walt Whitman might have written it.

I celebrate the personality of Jack!
I love his dirty hands, his tangled hair, his locomotion blundering.
Each wart upon his hands I sing,
Paeans I chant to his hulking shoulder blades.
Also Jill!

Her I celebrate.
I, Walt, of unbridled thought and tongue
Whoop her up!
Her golden hair, her sun-struck face, her hard and reddened hands;
So, too, her feet, hefty, shambling…

[And a good deal more in the same vein]

Charles Battell Loomis

Create Vivid Images to Bring a Novel to Life

“Vivid imagery makes a story world come alive,” says Stacy Whitman, Associate Editor at Wizards of the Coast (Update March, 2010: Whitman is now editorial director of the Tu Books imprint at Lee & Low.) Everyone agrees that a writer’s ability to create an image in a reader’s head through their words is integral to fiction and effective novels. When writers and editors push toward imagery vivid enough to transport readers to new worlds, there are many options.

A book Whitman has edited is In the Serpent’s Coils: Hallomere (Wizards of the Coast, 2007), by Tiffany Trent, the first of a ten-book dark-fantasy novel series called Hallomere. (Update: Wizards of the Coast is no longer publishing stand alone fantasy novels and this series is out of print, only available from used book sources.) The series features six girls from around the world who are drawn together to rescue their missing schoolmates and prevent catastrophe in an epic battle between dark fey (or supernatural) worlds and the mortal world.

Vivid nature imagery sets mood. Whitman describes this short scene as having vivid nature imagery that sets a dreamy, magical tone for the novel, while emphasizing the Fey’s connection to nature:

But then she saw a dark shimmer by the hemlocks again. The tall man turned, as though he felt her gaze. He wore shadows deeper than twilight, and, as before, she couldn’t see his face. But she felt his gaze, felt it through the swift gasp of her heart, the seizure in her knees. The Captain raised his hand to her, and she saw, despite the dusk, that his hand was shiny and scarlet, as though wet with blood.

Stark, direct description sets mood. Alan Gratz creates a different sort of mood in his award winning book, The Samurai Shortshop (Dial Books, 2006), through what he describes as stark and direct description. In one of the most emotional openings of a story in young adult literature, Toyo helps his Uncle Koji perform the Japanese ritual suicide, seppuku.

Now Toyo sat in the damp grass outside the shrine as his uncle moved to the center of the mats. Uncle Koji’s face was a mask of calm. He wore a ceremonial white kimono with brilliant red wings–the wings he usually wore only into battle. He was clean-shaven and recently bathed, and he wore his hair in a tight topknot like the samurai of old. Uncle Koji knelt on the tatami mats keeping his hands on his hips and his arms akimbo.

Both Gratz and Trent are paying particular

Yesterday's poem, the first of National Poetry Month, was "The Oven Bird" by Robert Frost. The line that caused me to post yesterday's poem in the first place was this one: "But that he knows in singing not to sing". Today, a poem that is related to song - an excerpt from Song of Myself by Walt Whitman.

To best understand this poem, I strongly urge you to read it aloud. There is a lovely rising and falling within the words that only becomes truly evident when read aloud. And the pauses indicated by commas and semicolons are important to the pacing of this poem, and are too easily skipped by if you merely skim through it.

from Song of Myself

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we
&emsp may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic;
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white;
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you, curling grass;
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men;
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of
&emsp their mother's laps;
And here you are the mother's laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon
&emsp out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death;
And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end
&emsp to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward -- nothing collapses;
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.


Born in 1819, Walt Whitman lived, laughed and loved until his death in 1892. Harold Bloom has termed him "the central American poet," although in his day he was under-appreciated. His works are full of sexual references (including homosexual and homoerotic references). His master-work, Leaves of Grass, was declared "obscene" by Anthony Comstock, causing Whitman to lose his job in the Department of the Interior. "Central poet" or "depraved monster?" Let us go with Abraham Lincoln's assessment: "Well, he looks like a man."

Today's excerpt from Song of Myself is the sixth poem, which is frequently referred to as "A child said, What is the grass?" because that is part of its first line. I have taken my punctuation tips, spellings and (in the case of a particular line) word choices, from a very early edition of the poem, published in 1905. The particular line where a word difference exists reads, in other editions, "It may be that you are from old people and women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps", but I've gone with the earlier iteration (as did the aforementioned Harold Bloom in his collection, The Best Poems of the English Language, which I heartily recommend.

He moves from tangible grass, in the child's hands, to the general idea of grass in various places, to grass atop graves. And once he's arrived at the graveyard, he considers the dead, buried beneath the grass, and wonders about their fates. The last two stanzas are lovely, I think -- Whitman concludes that the dead aren't dead, but are alive somewhere. That death is only there to lead forward life, and is not standing about waiting to end it. That life is what is real, and death is what dies (or ends) whenever life appears.

And oh, the beauty of those last two lines:

"All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,/And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier."

And yes, Nerdfighters, this portion of the poem makes a major appearance in Paper Towns by John Green, as I discussed in length at an excellent but under-read post over at Guys Lit Wire. In fact, if you want to watch this oldie but goodie vlog from the days of Brotherhood 2.0, John talks about Whitman and quotes some Whitman, including lines from this-here poem at the end.

Today, I'm particularly proud to be an American. Watching Senator Barack Obama accept the Democratic party's nomination to be their candidate for President of the United States was a moving, historic moment. His speech was pitch-perfect, in my opinion. One of the 29 items (if Keith Oberman is to be believed) that he set forth was "equal pay for equal work" because "I want my daughters to have the same opportunities as your sons." The emphasis on personal responsibility and mutual responsibility, on rebuilding the United States' image and reclaiming its integrity at home and abroad, was truly inspiring, even as it was bolstered with practical and pragmatic expectations. I hope he succeeds in making this into a meaningful election, and not "a big election about small things." (Quotes here are from memory, having listened to the speech last night and again this morning, and may not be verbatim.)

This morning, Senator John McCain, presumptive nominee for the Republican party, selected Alaska's governor, Sarah Palin, as his vice-presidential nominee. She is not the first woman to be selected as a potential vice-president. Walter Mondale had Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, after all. But come November, this country is going to see a major first regardless of which party wins the election.

I selected today's poem out of a renewed sense of patriotism, and hope that our country will eventually be truly a "centre of equal daughters, equal sons".

America
by Walt Whitman

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

You can listen to what is believed to be Walt Whitman's voice reading the first four lines of this poem at the Academy of American Poets.