Happy Birthday Walt . . .
A lonely 36-year-old closeted homosexual from a family of misfits, a printer, an editor, a sometimes teacher who hates teaching, loves opera, oratory, the streets, the rivers, bohemianism, reads widely but indiscriminately, an inveterate scribbler, note-taker, self-promoter, huge ego, reinvents himself in a poem, becomes the poem, concussively confident, gutsy, enthusiastically high on life, a Kosmos, embracing everyone and everything, celebrating everyone and everything, inventing a distinctly new art showcasing a presumptive “I” and an assumptive “you,” unshackling the line, the rhyme, the rhythm; its utter wildness changing the course of world literature; embodying the ideals, attributes, subjects, and speech of his native land, America; foreshadowing Allen Ginsberg’s century-later pronouncement of spontaneous and fearless first thought best thought: his 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass is far and away the best of all nine; later versions suffer bloat, hamstrung by self-indulgence and overwork; how he did what he did as mysterious as how Shakespeare did what he did; as rivetingly inexplicable as what his contemporary and fellow literary revolutionary Emily Dickinson did; Leaves flips poetry on its head, turns it upside-down, becomes the Holy Grail before which other poets prostrate themselves. (Click here for copy of Poesy Cafe report)
