Edition of 100 copies
Ditty bag: 11” x 17”; book 5” x 6 ⅞”; each stack of cards 3” x 3” x 2”
2019
“I look in vain for the poet whom I describe.”
“Bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind; as it is related of Lord Chatham, that he was accustomed to read in Bailey’s Dictionary, when he was preparing to speak in Parliament.”
“The poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence…”
“The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connection of thought. The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols.”
“The meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the memories of men.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, excerpts from “The Poet” in “Essays: Second Series” (1844)
As a visual artist as opposed to a scholar, I am not trained to comment on the poetics of Walt Whitman. But with visual art, published research may be conveyed in novel ways with artistic license. For this project whitmanarchive.org and poetryfoundation.org have been useful resources. Independent researchers such as myself cannot access most literary journals. It is a godsend when universities, like MIT, make all their published research in the humanities available for free. However, members of public libraries may often access databases of articles even from the comfort of their homes.
When people familiar with “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman read the essay “The Poet” by Ralph Waldo Emerson they might experience deja vu. The language, subject matter and words presented in lists evoke Whitman’s poems. The lists of words are what leaped out at me on my initial dive into the various editions of “Leaves of Grass”. I love lists, and have been collecting lost Post-its of lists and making paintings of them for various projects. Yet, the reason I have been interested in “Leaves of Grass” is not for the poetry but for the structure.
While it is natural that upon hearing the title of a book, one would think of it as one book, this is not the case when an author reworks their oeuvre for several decades, constantly publishing, refining, eliminating, adding, reformatting and changing titles. I have worked on two such situations before – Balzac and his 90 novels and stories he considered one work, titled “The Human Comedy”, and Sir John Denham who spent his life working on the hugely influential, imitated and parodied “Cooper’s Hill”. The Bible is the supreme example of many parts ordered and published in different ways over millennia, yet thought of as one book in the minds of many. I’m not sure if this project called “Biblio-a-biblia” or Book of Books, will ever see the light of day for a number of reasons, but I have intended to make visual the shifting structure of “Leaves of Grass” for over a decade. This more complex project appeared in 2020 after having the chance to consult Whitman scholars at the 2019 symposium “Whitman at 200” at University of Pennsylvania. See online archive item “Seeding and Weeding.”
As I begin to investigate a new project’s premise I often get side-tracked, and a work sprouts collateral projects, which may or not be created, or may even supplant the original concept. The idea to turn quotes of Whitman into Post-it paintings, and ultimately an installation, has morphed for the meantime into a game of concentration or memory. After I discovered the Emerson essay, I felt the need to add Emerson cards and add another element of trivia for Whitman scholars. If you do not know the poetry, you can just play concentration. Or, if you have spent a lot of time with Whitman in your life, you can use the faux Post-its placed on a table or used as flash cards to test whether the list is from Whitman or Emerson, and which poem in the 1881-82 Osgood edition the list comes from. I committed sacrilege by removing capital letters from the beginning of lines, because it made it too easy to identify those lists as Whitman’s and not Emerson’s. Proper nouns are still capitalized.
Will fans of “Leaves of Grass” hold Whitmaniads, close to the term Presidentiads used by Whitman in his poems? Anything is possible. But in the long history of artists making games, which often relate to poetry, many of these games are never destined to be played, or only played rarely, such as my other game “Life, Life, Eternal Life – Uncle Wiggily Meets John Bunyan” in 17 copies.
Why make a game that might not be played? To make a point. Whitman took free verse to new levels, in part through long sequences of lists. This project makes that concept visual. It is also an access point to Leaves of Grass. The lists are not daunting, and many of them are humorous, and occasionally poignant. I include lists that highlight some key themes in Whitman: his work in hospitals and on the battlefield with mostly Union soldiers during the Civil War, his attempt to include and elevate every profession and geographical location, his interest in onanism, opera, and people marginalized because of their economic status or as immigrants, slaves, fugitives, prostitutes or people with atypical congenital traits or STD’s. Whitman tried to include “the world” like the 16th century cabinets of curiosities, which took inspiration from the Garden of Eden, Noah’s ark and the traditions of naming things in the Bible. In “Over the Teacups” (1890) Oliver Wendell Holmes jokes about Whitman’s proclaimed egotism in “Leaves of Grass”, “he takes us all in as partners in his self-glorification. He believes in America as the new Eden.”
Whitman’s choice of terminology regarding the world’s ethnic groups hasn’t aged well, nor his inclusion of bad 19th century science, specifically phrenology. This visual biographer did not fall in love with her biographee. The elegiac tone regarding America, the constant use of the word “manly” and the recurrent insertion of women into his lists as seemingly two-dimensional afterthoughts or paper cut-outs of wombs, sisters and mothers, has repelled me like insect spray. I thank Lynne Farrington of Penn’s Kislak Center for helping me to get past this by suggesting the elegiac tone might be considered aspirational. In singing the praises of the peoples and geography and industry of America, Whitman aspired to be the poet whom Emerson described and looked for in vain. This recalls the conceptual art of John Baldessari or Sol Lewitt, artists that made instructions to create art. Whitman heard Emerson’s lecture about the need for a new American poet in New York in 1842, subsequently published in a collection of essays in 1844. He sent a copy of the first (1855) edition to Emerson upon publication.
Emerson highlights the power of naming and listing, and connects it to sacred traditions. Long lists of names of God have formed an important part of religious and occult practices since ancient Babylonia, especially in later religions based on the Old Testament. The letters of the Hebrew alphabet are names of god, and have numerical values. Ancient occult practices involving names of God were passed down orally, to initiates, so the knowledge we have is incomplete. The lists of names and numerial values are connected to the epic poem Gilgamesh, to the Sephirot trees of life and the universal knowledge and enlightenment machines designed by Jesuit and Dominican scholars in Renaissance Europe.
Emerson also connects the use of unusual, even offensive, language to memory, and condones its use. The “knowledge machines” of the Renaissance were attempts at memory systems, featuring cues from Cicero’s techniques for public speaking, or rhetoric, still in use today, and referred to as memory palaces. The weirder the mental image or symbol or emblem, the more likely you are to remember it. There is also a tradition in Medieval religious texts of base language of a scatological and sexual nature, of combining high and low, sacred and profane, taken up in the 1500’s in the texts of Martin Luther and Sir Thomas More.
Lastly, Emerson and his contemporaries were interested in spiritual and scientific fads of the day – Swedenborg’s angels, Mesmer, water cures and phrenology. Whitman took a leaf from Emerson and sprouted it, but he was particularly involved with phrenology. When it was debunked, Whitman admitted difficulty in letting it go (full disclosure: Fowler and Wells’ Phrenological Depot of New York published the second edition of Leaves of Grass), yet acknowledged Oliver Wendell Holmes’ amusing analogy of phrenology to palpitating a safe. In “The Professor at the Breakfast Table” (1859), Holmes writes: “So when a man fumbles about my forehead, and talks about the organs of “Individuality”, “Size”, etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt the outside of my strong-box and told me that there was a five-dollar or ten-dollar-bill under this or that particular rivet.”
It would be easy to laugh at phrenology as utterly silly today if not for its disturbing connection to eugenics. Phrenology gripped the first half of the 19th century in Europe and the US, and is reflected throughout the fiction of some writers seeking to promote science in their work, like Balzac. Writers also wished for tools to determine psychological and hereditary traits, their own, in Whitman’s case. It is fitting that a famous fiction writer who happened to be a renowned anatomy professor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, should actively debunk phrenology to his massive following in The Atlantic Monthly.
While aspects of Walt Whitman and his work will always repel me, I can appreciate his attempt to embrace the world and all of its denizens, regardless of ethnicity, class or sexual orientation, even if he envisioned himself as a prophet in doing so.
My attempt to convey Whitman’s poetic style and emulation of Emerson may or may not be fun to play. There are no dice to roll in this game, but I conclude with Holme’s blessing of Whitman as playful and innocuous, despite the grammatical lapses and lack of rhythm and meter in Whitman’s poetry:
“…there is room for everybody and everything in our huge hemisphere. Young America is like a three-year-old colt with his saddle and bridle just taken off. The first thing he wants to do is “roll”. He is a droll object, sprawling in the grass with his four hoofs in the air; but he likes it, and it won’t harm us. So let him roll, — let him roll!”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes, Over the Teacups (1890)
Let the game begin!
Rules of the Game
Any number of players may play each version of the game. Our memory is a muscle and it helps us to exercise it. But having an excellent memory is not virtuous, and does not indicate superior wisdom regarding Whitman’s work. The winner of the English Language Scrabble tournament was a French national who memorized the Scrabble dictionary but didn’t know the meaning of the words.
Game of concentration or memory:
Place as many of the 96 pairs of lists as desired face down on a table. In turn, each player reveals two cards, leaving them visible for all to see for a moment. If there is a match, the player collects the pair and wins a point. Otherwise the cards are turned over again and the next turn begins. The player that earns the most points is the winner.
Trivia game:
Part I
Only half of the cards are used, i.e. the 96 unique lists. The cards are placed in a stack face up on a table, or held up as flash cards. One participant is designated The Answerer. They hold the answer key, and tell each player when they have guessed correctly whether the list belongs to Whitman or Emerson. They can also tally each point for the players. As the game proceeds, the Whitman cards are separated from the Emerson cards.
Part 2
The stack of only Whitman cards are placed face up on the table. The Answerer still holds the key. In turn, a player guesses the title of the Whitman poem the list comes from, and keeps the card if the guess is correct. If they guess incorrectly, the Answerer announces the correct poem title and the card is withdrawn from play. The winner is the one that accumulates the most points in Part I and Part II.
Colophon
Ditty bag sewn by the artist with repurposed bedding, dishcloths and cloth napkins, in honor of THE SLEEPERS, and the elevation of domestic work and professions involving physical labor in “Leaves of Grass”.
Text gold-stamped, computer-formatted, laser-printed, silkscreened, ironed and photo-lithographed in Times in homage to Whitman’s various early occupations as newspaper publisher, printer and journalist in his beloved New York.
Cover gold-stamped by Legatoria dell’Unione, Bologna, on ochre buckram similar to the Osgood Edition (1881-82). Pamphlet sewn and inserted into the cover by the artist.
Pocket silkscreened at Inuit, Bologna, and ironed by the artist. Playing cards photo-lithographed by Opero, srl in Verona.
Digital typesetting by Sira Dingi, Bologna.
For John L. Lorenz, born and raised in Manhatta and Long Island.
Quotes on ditty bag pocket and end pages
(Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1881-82)
Pocket – A SONG FOR OCCUPATIONS.
P.1 – BY BLUE ONTARIO’S SILENT SHORE.
P.2 – MANHATTA.
P.3 – CROSSING BROOKLYN FERRY.
P.18 – SONG OF THE BROAD-AXE.
P.19 – SONG OF THE BROAD-AXE.
P.20 – I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC.
Angelonium 