Visual Poems

Some Wordle word clouds made from the writings here, and a poem or two about Whitman. Just for fun.

Whitman Sutra (Tantrayana)

I sing the body physical
    shaping my cells out of the orgasm of creation
    pulling DNA-rapt bones around me like a Navajo blanket
    wrapping myself in the illusion of matter, eternally foaming
    living light wrapped in the thunder weave and quantum sea
I sing the body mental
    never separate from the physical
    but abstracted and far too full of myself
    able to build whole worlds but
    contradicting myself with hidden truths divisive
    double-willed, double-walled
I sing the body emotional
    pulling me into lust and action
    towards you, my infinite row of loves
    those I have loved, those I love, those I will love
    loving the women in the men and the men in the women
    equal balancing, newly incarnate,
    hope-fear under the rose
I sing the body spiritual
    the angel-beast ceaselessly climbing into the light
    pulling me onto then off of paths of desire
    divining the twin pulls of head, hand, and heart
    leading me with glimpses to find the good red road
I sing the body erotic
    fingers button-pushing energetic nerves of activation
self-touched and touching, tickles of sweat down ribs
    joineries of lips, hands, thighs, breasts, and fevered loins
    the whole skin come alive at once and tingling
    flushed from eartips to tarsals, brown aureoles red aflame
I sing the electric body
    grown hard and handsome in the cyberlight—
    if the body is to be transcended, let it be
    in the way of ecstatic spirit, not of ascetic cybergnosis,
    the avant-garde agnostic denial and scourging of the meat
no, no, yes I will yes, I sing the body sexual
    the pulls of semen and milk
    every flavor of sweat and secretion, febrile and erotic
    fevered and glowing in the inner eye
I sing the sensual sexual refrain proclaimed by the Old Body Poet
the first electric god, who if he’d had a guitar
    could have out-ecstasied Jimi and all the rest
I proclaim the body sensual
    all girls and boys of every age filled
        with adolescent hormone surge
    all pornographic incandescent illicit pleasures
        those lovely mergings of fluids
        minglings of desire and intent so dangerous
        to the stability of the State
    all engagements and weddings of every gender
    all wedding rings and love rings and sex-rings
    all starving naked poets drooling toothless and drunken
        over pretty boys and girls unclothed in summer’s heat
    all old ones grown wise as crones, and still in love
I proclaim the poetry of the body
    poetry of bodies aflame with desire
    poetry of self-loving masturbation
    poetry of coupling and uncoupling and tripling polyamory
        until the numbers rise past count
    poetry of touching yourself and touching each other
        in loving touch, gentle and tough and desirous
    all the poets of lust and innocence and masturbation
I sing the fulfilling promise of the timeless ecstasy of orgasm
    merging of sperm and saliva and vaginal pomegranate juice
I sing the forever moment
    encapsulated in chemical explosions in nerves and brains and groins
    involuntary spasm twitch of structural muscle and bone
    surge of vibrant juices
    tingles in belly and behind the knees
I sing the ultimate man, the ultimate woman,
    the compleat tumescent naked boy, the uncensored uncensured girl
    the men and women and children who freely exchange their very beings
        trading couplings and loving experiments
        like bees encircling their goddess-queen,
        the eyes of rising sunflowers
I sing all of myself and all of you
    joining in one quivering sexual thrill
    worldwide simultaneous orgasm that never falls off the crest
    exploding forever in lifelove
        (and Shiva dances in the flames:
        the world, the world’s on fire)
    resetting itself to one with every tick of tiniest quantum clock
    always on, even as everything flickers a billion times
        in and out of existence as I sing
I sing the man-woman of many parts and all time
    being and oneness rising from nothing
    decaying into glowing compost of spacetime
    bio-luminescent and strangely attractive
I sing the divine body
    perfect form of the lover
    who waits at top of stairs with glowing eyes
    and dissolves into diamond seawater sparkles at our touch
I sing every moment of absolute sexual fulfillment
    from hugest singing whale to oldest sun-loving lichen
    every million years or so adding a new verse to the eternal song
        a new chorus of voices rising into light
    coming round and round to the chanted refrain
    uncountable voices crying every moment in ecstatic climax release
I sing the music that never dies, that cannot die
    love of men and the love of women
    love of every moment for every location
    mutual masturbation of exploding spacetime
    the big bang, continuously created universal orgasm
I sing the coming and becoming
I sing the one that is every one
I sing the word that is every word
I sing the one song that is every song
I sing the creator seeing itself through the eye of the created
I sing every love-drunken poet who ever lived
    to proclaim the frantic lovemaking
    of one universe endlessly permeating itself
    penetrating and receiving in timeless mutual bliss
I sing every lover, every boy and girl, every girl and boy,
    and every boy and boy, every girl and girl
    and every boy girl boy, every girl boy girl
everyone and everything
I sing that I am you, that I am myself
I sing that I am everything and everything is me
I am singing to you, you are chanting back to me
    words of union and respect
    cadences of desire and sustaining love
    one final chord of resolution in each other’s arms
we sing the dissolving oneness of the divided
    yin melting into yang, yang melting into yin
    oneness that underlies all twoness
    union with the Beloved
we sing the mutual interpenetration of bodies
    and of hearts and minds
we sing each other into being
    coming together, two made into one
I sing you and you sing me
we sing each other into being
    we sing the body physical
    we sing the body mental
    we sing the body emotional
    we sing the body spiritual
    we sing the body erotic
we sing the body electric
we sing the body electric
    the Old Gay Poet, birds nestled with love in his beard,
    was right, was right, was always right
we sing the body electric

•

This poem was originally written in 1995, as one of the Sutras. It was the first of three poems that I've written, so far, to and for Walt Whitman, icon and poet and grandfather. Published here and now in slightly revised form, summer 2009. (©2009 AP Durkee)

Also in this series:

Ode to Walt Whitman (2008)

Walt Whitman's Summer Wander Across North America (2009)

The Ode to Walt Whitman is also part of a series of Odes I am writing for and about queer poets have mattered to my thinking and writing.

Thinking of Walt Whitman

Whitman photographed late in life, at his home in Camden by artist Thomas Eakins

Walt Whitman's 190th birthday was yesterday, May 31. Whitman was city-born and city-bred, apprenticed to a printer, made his living largely by working in publishing and the newspaper business. He lived many years in Brooklyn, and later in Washington, D.C, and ended his life in his home in Camden, NJ.

Yet Whitman is also the poet of the open road. His multitudes include those who live in the countryside as well as the city. His poems extol the open air, the beauty and virtue of the country life. He encompasses all of North America in one of his famous lists in his poems, in which he says how he is in all these places, and has traveled in person to many of them. I feel this directly for myself: I've now traveled to many places in North America, enough to have a feel for all its varied climates and terrains, its open lands and various kinds of people. It's a big continent, and I'm not done exploring it—or making photographs of its beauty—but I feel as though Whitman is a fellow-traveler, a road-companion, whenever I journey off on another distance-eating roadtrip.

One section of Song of Myself is a set-piece of young men bathing in a stream in the countryside. The nude bathers are observed by a young woman, who caresses them with her gaze as though she physically moved among them:

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.
She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.
Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.
Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.
Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.
The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun,
they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.
—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1855)

It's not hard to imagine that the young woman in the poem is standing in for Whitman himself: as observer, as viewpoint character for the moment, as one whose eyes caress, and who would touch also with fingers. Why did Whitman present himself as a woman in the poem in this way? It is one common way gay that writers have always coded their artistic work: by presenting it as being heterosexual, by simply flipping gender. And rather than using the personal "I" as he does in so much of Song of Myself, the poet also codes a third-person viewpoint into this watching woman, thus stepping further back into coded acceptable literary norms. Yet I also think of the gender-blending that gay men experience in themselves: the mix of masculine and feminine aspects of self in their spirit and flesh alike. This section of poetry was the direct inspiration for Thomas Eakins' well-known painting The Swimming Hole.


Thomas Eakins, The Swimming Hole (1885)

One edition I own of Whitman's Complete Poems is decorated with this painting on its front cover.

Walt Whitman is my fellow-traveler. He accompanies me on this journey—not least because he is the poet of inclusion, of taking into himself all of life, all of experience, all masculine and feminine, and embracing them equally—not least for all that, but also because I am a reflection of his lifelong quest to express, artistically, his love for other men. We are alike, or rather I follow in his footsteps, in our love of men and our use of art to depict that love. We seek similar inclusions. I cannot but reflect his art in my own.

I wrote over a year ago my own Ode to Walt Whitman, which says what I feel about Whitman right now, still, better than I can say in prose. Maybe these sorts of thoughts need to be poems, not essays. I will struggle with this for now, and maybe turn to poems later.

And there remain mysteries, perhaps visionary, even mystical parts of life and art, in Whitman's life and work:

One of the parts of Whitman's life-story that I have been thinking recently about was his visit to Louisiana, sometime before ora round his first publishing efforts. We don't have a great deal of information about this trip to the deep south; Whitman himself didn't discuss it much. It has been speculated that the poet underwent a personal crisis there and then, which led to his own opening up—spiritually, sexually, and as a writer. It was the 1850s when Whitman came into full flower as a physical (sexual) and mental (artistic) person. After the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, which was the single most expanded edition in the book's publishing history, there was a turning-inward, a self-censoring of the fearless sexual openness of the 1860 edition, represented in the two sections called Children of Adam and Calamus. Starting with the 1867 edition, Whitman rewrote some of the poems to be more covert about their homosexual content, and dropped many entirely. But what draws me to the 1855 edition over all the others is this very open sexuality, this male-male sexuality; of course I'm not alone in this. What happened to Whitman in the south? Was it a mystical experience? A sexual awakening? An artistic explosion? Some combination of all of these? The only real clue we have is what Whitman himself says, obliquely, in one of the best-known of the Calamus poems:

I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and
twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana
solitary in a wide in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.

Homosexual literature has often been coded; what remains startlingly contemporary about Whitman was how often he could be explicit rather than coded, especially in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, the most expansive, sexually-inclusive edition of the several that Whitman published in his lifetime. There are layers of meaning in this poem, it seems to me, that refer to love, to bonding, to not only sexuality but spiritual companionship and connection with another. I view it as a poem of marriage, in a way.


Whitman with Peter Doyle

Of course, Whitman did have several longtime companions in his life; Horace Traubel was the last one; but Whitman was often photographed with or wrote in letters about his other close friends, his comrades, his serial beloveds.

What I feel connected to, in Whitman—and what I wrote of in my own Ode—is this very comradeship he speaks of. It moves in cycles in my own life, which has often been virtually celibate and monastic, but rarely lonely. I too see the tree uttering joyous life without a friend or lover near—and I too know that I want that friend or lover near, as Whitman does, whether or not I can survive alone or not. There is surviving, and there is living. I want to live. I want to live on the open road, and return to my small town, as I have done before, changed utterly by my travels, yet still myself, to return to my small-town homeplace enriched by experience, enriched by wisdom in describing experience such as is found in Whitman's most homoerotic poems.

Book Reviews: Sex, Music & Poetry

An ongoing series of short reviews of interesting LGBT books from my personal library.



David Guy, The Red Thread of Passion: Spirituality and the paradox of sex. (1999) This book covers a lot of psychological terrain, and asks many questions important to us all, LGBT or otherwise. About half of the people profiled, interviewed, or examined are queer or bi or openly affirming; including Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Kramer, and Alan Watts. Basically this book revolves around a key question: is sexuality the enemy that must be subdued before one can have a powerful spiritual practice? or is it rather a vehicle for enlightenment, as well as a powerful creative force in its own right? There are no simple or definitive answers to these questions—but there are long-enduring traditions of spirituality that accept sexuality and harnesses its power, ranging from Tantric rites through affirming literature. The author responds to the question by focusing on his own life and spiritual practice, and by examining the lives and work of people who were pioneers about affirming that sex and spirit are not-two, but one. Sex workers are discussed as well as poets and meditators; this is no cerebral, academic book. There is understanding that the reconciliation of sex and spirit will always be paradoxical, as is recognized in the examples of several Zen masters who were promiscuous rather than celibate; and in the Zen koan that gives the book its title: "Why is it that the most clear-eyed monk cannot sever the red thread of passion between his legs?" It's part of the paradox, not surprisingly, that there is a great deal of mysticism around sex: the sexual experience itself can be a mystical experience, with all that that entails. Very highly recommended.

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John Gill, Queer Noises: Male and female homosexuality in Twentieth Century music. (1995) One of the first of its kind, and still one of the better ones, this book looks at a wide range of composers, performers, and musicians, all queer, all famous. The book is easy and fun reading without being fluffy; Gill can be very opinionated, and ask hard questions. Some of the names covered here in the book's 18 chapters: Benjamin Britten, John Cage, Boy George, Pet Shop Boys, Gary Burton, Bessie Smith, Billy Strayhorn. Some of the chapters are studies of the impact of queer people on specific musical genres—but Gill also examines the gay cultural response to performers who were inspired by gay subcultures, or inspired them in return, by emphasizing sexual ambiguity or metrosexuality: David Bowie, Madonna, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, Janis Joplin, etc. There is also extensive reporting on pop music's connection to civil rights organizing, LGBT activism, and queer political responses to social problems; the book actually grew out of political activism, which accounts for some of its tone at times. Nonetheless, there's lots of meat in this book, even as the writing style is breezy and quick. It's the sort of book LGBTs into all kinds of music will greatly enjoy, and probably learn something they'd never known about before.

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David Rees, Words and Music. (1993) David Rees was an influential critic, gay author, and reviewer in Britain until his death just as this book was published. What we have here are almost two dozen longer review-essays, most never published prior to this book, covering both music and literature. Sometimes Rees is a bit harsh in his opinions, but in many ways I think his critical assessments are right on target. (He explains just why Edmund White is overrated as a gay fiction writer; an assessment I've always shared, but could never articulate why exactly, before Rees explained the problem.) What I like about Rees is his ability to separate the artist's reputation from the quality of each individual work: where a writer succeeds, Rees can show why, and where a composer may have in fact done something completely original, you find out why; simultaneously, weak spots, weak books, bad compositions, are not ignored but called what they are. Fans of certain writers and composers will no doubt feel some ire if one of their idols is chastened in one these 20 essays; but you'll also be introduced to assessments of the artists in question from a gay perspective, which was completely new when Rees was writing, and is still a fresh viewpoint.

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Gary Schmidgall, Walt Whitman: A gay life. (1997) The first and still singular study to look at Whitman's life and poetry from an explicitly gay perspective, explaining the powerful connections between Whitman's life as a lover of men and his legacy as a landmark, paradigm-changing poet. There are four major sections in the book, roughly chronologically showing Whitman's growth as an artist and person. But there is also a personal essay from the author that tells of the impact of Whitman on the author's life; and a section devoted to exploring the similarities and differences between Whitman and Oscar Wilde, who Schmidgall has also written about. This is a very long book, citing its material rigorously if not tediously. It draws extensively from Whitman's correspondence, private journals, and poetry; there's no doubt material in here you've never heard of before. Schmidgall's argument is compelling, and well-supported by the documents: that Whitman was a very sexual man, ardently pursuing his love affairs which in turn fueled his creative energy: ecstasy pursued and achieved in worlds both personal and literary. I won't say that this is the easiest book you'll ever read about Whitman, but once you get into it, it's a real page-turner, very engrossing. Highly recommended.