For this inaugural installment of a new weekly poetry feature, I have chosen an excerpt from the preface of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, first published on July 4, 1855.
While Whitman is known today as an important poetry forefather, when his collection appeared, it was received with disdain by an establishment unwilling to be moved by his exuberant embrace of all humanity, and suspicious of his insistence on the dignity of all people.
For years, I have kept this excerpt tacked above my desk, as I consider these lines simple yet powerful instructions for living a life, that keeps joy and skepticism alive in equal measure—a life in which one’s own existence becomes poem-like, in its approach.
Whitman was also the obvious choice to kick off Sound and Vision, because The Providence Eye’s effort towards more robust civic engagement through transparency and information is a mission Whitman would have gotten behind. Like Whitman, I believe art should be accessible to everyone, and should play a role in civic life. As William Carlos Williams, another poetry hero of mine, famously wrote:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
I am thrilled to curate this new space, and hope that readers will find respite, inspiration,
edifying information in the poems I choose—different from the news, but just as crucial.
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