Song of Myself: Way to go, Walt Whitman (no, seriously?)

jonathanrussell72

Oct 26, 2024

8 min read

For some sick reason, I re-read Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself while attending Advertising Week NY a month before the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. I wanted to see how fucked up it felt reading a poem published in 1855 about the promise and wisdom of America. It was pretty fucked up. Not only was Trump re-elected, but for four-straight days at Ad Week, I watched geniuses discuss how powerless we'll all be in the face of AI-driven advertising.

The setting gave a different meaning to the opening lines of Whitman’s 70-page poem:

I celebrate myself,

And what I assume you shall assume

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to

you.

Whitman apparently wrote “Leaves of Grass,” the collection which contains Song of Myself, to stop the American Civil War. Imagine thinking that with a straight face.

Obviously, he did not stop the Civil War. (Although, to his credit, he’s been described as a famous nurse or dedicated visitor to its wounded soldiers.) And 21st-century America seems a million miles away from Whitman’s spirit and unflappable idealism, we’ll call it…

I wrote this blog a month before the U.S. Election and am now editing it a month after it, more or less re-writing it (like Whitman did “Leaves of Grass” throughout his entire life, dare I say?). And I’ve been thinking about Whitman and what promise means and the frightening future and the value of poetry and the unconsciousness that certain figures represent in the broader culture. And at the risk of being a little earnest, I can’t help but come back time and time again to my favourite line in Song of Myself,

I’ve heard what the talkers were talking … the talk of

the beginning and the end,

but I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

Song of Myself: the only living boy

I arrived in Newark, N.J., from Toronto’s Billy Bishop Airport on a bright Sunday morning in October to attend four days of conferences and panels for Ad Week. I read Whitman on the plane.

When I got lost taking the train into Manhattan, I approached this 18-year-old black kid on the platform who appeared to work for the transit company.

“Is this the way for the SkyTrain?”

“AirTrain,” he said. He was so cool, too.

“Oh, I was thinking of Vancouver.”

Something in me needed so desperately for this kid to know I’m worldly.

The train was a metaphor of what I'd see in Manhattan. I’ve never been to a city before where people live so comfortably and easily on top of one another. The train felt and sounded like a nightclub just after the lights come on. Up the aisle a few rows, I listened to a pregnant lady with a thick New Jersey accent rhyme off all the nationalities that comprised her bloodline: “I’m a Mic, an Italian, a German, a Dutch, Scot, a little Spanish, no shit, I’m telling you.. I'm a mutt.”

I flipped open Whitman:

I resist anything better than my own diversity,

And breathe the air and leave plenty after me,

And am not stuck up, and am in my place.

The music on the train came from too many different devices and it made more sense to just sit and look around, out the window. I wanted to listen to Bruce Springsteen, but I was too frightened someone might hear it.

The energy of the heavy train was such it felt like we bounced into Manhattan. That might have been the coffee.

When I emerged from Penn Station, I think I just about wept looking up at the tall buildings. Ugh, God. I am earnest.

What was great was I had nothing to do all Sunday but wander around, read Walt Whitman, charge whatever I ate to the magazine, and maybe drink some beers in the Lower East Side later, catch the Mets game, all of which I did. I walked from my hotel on East 39th Street all the way down to Greenwich Village, passing through Madison Square Park, Union Square (where I visited The Strand Bookstore), and Washington Square Park.

It was impossible not to think of how much it’s all changed since 1855, when Whitman wrote:

The blab of the pave… tires of carts and sluff of

bootsoles and talk of promenaders

The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating

thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor.

The sun literally shone through the leaves, and there were crowds and crowds everywhere. Everywhere. In Washington Square Park, it occurred to me there are more people here now than live in my hometown. Honestly, I walked 30,000 steps (according to my phone) and every step in an idiotic daze.

Jump to the following Thursday, after the conferences and panels, and my eyes were a little less starry, as I had been thoroughly 21st-century’d.

Song of Myself: The poet of the body? What body?

Ad Week comprised of panels in the mornings, followed by writing in the afternoons. For all my pre-Ad Week anxieties, it ended up being pretty straightforward. And to the magazine’s credit, they only asked for three or four articles of about 800 words each. More than doable.

It was this line which went from being lovely to being concerning:

I am the poet of the body,

And I am the poet of the soul

The conference was held in what felt like a shopping mall that sold only shopping malls. An M.C. Escher but all escalators. The place had the air quality of an airport. I could go on.

I was greeted by some poor kid who’d been dressed up as a “Triangle” from Squid Game. He was part of a Squid Game installation. I shuffled off to the side of the throng to have a quiet panic attack. To keep from getting swept away in a river of earth tones and immaculately manicured facial hair. I stood there, kind of watching everyone. But I became fixated on the poor, faceless, anonymous Triangle guy struggle to stand still. Encased in the world’s smallest prison. I wondered how much money he earned to just stand there. Such cruel and unusual… maybe he was a shoplifter in Malaysia?

Every panel I attended discussed AI.

Apparently there are weird metrics that can measure with more and more accuracy consumer decision making at the point of sale, for instance. I attended a panel where millennials and Gen Zs were unbearably adorable, the panel evoking a ripple of gentle laughter each time “Brat summer” was mentioned. At another panel, I found myself staring at a panelist’s suede shoes. This woman’s shoes are probably a year’ rent for me, was the specific thought.

By Day 2, I realized, oh, they’re just trying to sell shit.

Heading to Day 3 of the conference in the morning, my cynicism was getting the better of me. My western wits had become fat and mean, to quote Emerson. I relished the misfortune of some poor schlub trying to get on the hotel elevator. You have to swipe your hotel key on the elevator. This schlub missed his opportunity, fumbling around in his dumbass pockets, and would have to ride the elevator in the opposite direction he wanted to go. The evil thought I had was, serves you right, Moby, I thought, because the guy was bald? Also, apparently I hate Moby.

Walking from Lexington to the Penn District, I found myself humming Simon and Garfunkel through gritted teeth.

Even my earnest attempts to read and understand Song of Myself were powerless. Near the end of the five days, I kind of just felt a deep sorrow about how many invisible levers will control the world of advertising in like 10 years, how many already control it and how utterly futile it all is to say no to things you obviously don’t need. Meanwhile, the garbage fields in the Pacific continue to grow. As I wandered through the crowds at Ad Week, it was obvious they were kind of selling each other an abstraction, to better sell garbage. The abstraction was like an invisible object that was hovering there between them.

Feeling sorry for myself, I even thought of “Triangle” boy.

I am the poet of the body.

What fucking body?

Song of Myself: No one wants to hear it, babe

There are simply certain things you really can’t talk about earnestly for some reason, and poetry is one of them. Nothing makes you want to strangle someone more than hearing them recite poetry. Unless you’re quite drunk, and even then. It’s the most punch-able offense in civilized society.

I know this because I once drunkenly attempted to recite Song of Myself at a party in Toronto’s west end. And this was during the Obama Administration. If you can’t read Walt Whitman at a party in Toronto’s west end when Obama’s president, I’m afraid there’s just no time or place left for it. Clearly I suffered from the delusion that a) I was that guy who could get away reading poetry at parties unscathed and b) anyone one would want to be that guy. But you know, it’s a little bit what your late-20s or early-30s are for (I guess?).

In my defense, I was drunk and I had a bizarre notion of what the average human can stand, so I read:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the

origin of all poems

My friend, who was hosting the party, tapped me gently on the arm. She leaned in and said even more gently:

“No one wants to hear it, babe.”

When I looked to the room of strangers for encouragement, they murmured the way they did in The Elephant Man.

So let me acknowledge all that before I totally talk about poetry.

Song of Myself: two readings

The difference between my first and second reading of Song of Myself is more than the social clumsiness of reading it at a party or reading it during Ad Week NY a month before the U.S. Presidential Election.

With regards to the election, all I could think about was something from George Orwell’s essay Some Thoughts on the Common Toad:

At any rate, spring is here, … and they can’t stop you enjoying it. … The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

What I came away with on the second reading of Song of Myself is essentially this: Whitman was not trying to be a prophet, envisioning some future world wherein America lives up to its promise (or, in the case of Orwell’s vision, crumbles); instead, Whitman offered poetry as an option for when it doesn’t. It’s an alternate world, but it runs alongside this one, low as it can get, and it’s up to you what you nurture within yourself.

Whether or not this is preferrable to Netflix or YouTube or other slick commercial entertainment or whatever, I don’t know. I know that I feel that I am enriching myself more when I read, and re-read, something like Song of Myself, more than those other options—all of which are trying to sell you something.

Whitman’s not trying to sell you anything.

I contain multitudes…

I too am not a bit tamed … I too am untranslatable...

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search for another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you…

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love. If you want me again, look for

me under your bootsoles...

Song of Myself: Postscript

I copy and pasted this blog into ChatGPT4 and asked it to write a 200-word poem in the style of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.

And for once, shite poetry brought me joy.

Title: I am the Poet of Myself (After Whitman)