A Walt Whitman Birthday Party with Poetry Readings, Presentations and Cake

A Whitman Reader by Holy Cow! Press

"Give me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling!"
--Walt Whitman

There were undoubtedly many significant people born in 1819. A short list might include Abner Doubleday, credited with founding American baseball; Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick and other great stories; Alan Pinkerton, the famous detective and founder of the Pinkerton Agency; and Queen Victoria,  who shares a May 24 birthday with Robert Zimmerman, preceding it by 122 years.

And then there was Walt Whitman, one of the most influential poets in the American canon.

On Friday evening, May 31 from 7:00-9:00 p.m. there will be a celebration here in Duluth of his 200th birthday at the Hartley Nature Center on Woodland Avenue. Organized by Duluth Poet Laureate Gary Boelhower, the event "Walt Whitman at 200: A Birthday Party with Poetry Readings, Presentations, and Cake" will feature readings by Duluth Poets Laureate Bart Sutter, Deborah Cooper, Sheila Packa, Ellie Schoenfeld, and Gary Boelhower along with presentations by Mara Hart, Professors John D. Schwetman, and Chris Johnson.

The event is free and open to the public and refreshments will be served.

Events like this one give evidence that the poetic vision and spirit still lives for as Whitman himself wrote, "To have great poets, there must be great audiences too."

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A few noteworthy lines from this 19th Century bard...

As for me, I know nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under the trees in the woods,
Or watch honey bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown,
Or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring,
What stranger miracles are there?

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"It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess."

* * * *
"Peace is always beautiful."

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Related Links
Why Walt Whitman Called America the "Greatest Poem"
Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song
Whitman, Dylan and Me: Uncanny Connections

10 Minutes with Author/Poet Barton Sutter of the 2016 Duluth Dylan Fest's Poets of the North Country

As noted several times May 24 marks Bob Dylan's 75th birthday and with that comes many celebrations of this occasion in all parts of the world. Here in the Northland, the Duluth Dylan Fest team has stepped up its game with a number a new events, and several amped up versions of existing events. This is the third year that a poetry event is slated for the 8-day week of Dylan Fest. But thanks to poet/publisher Jeffrey Woolverton this year's Poets of the North Country, to be held at The Underground on May 25, is going to be an exceptionally special event.

Readings by Duluth Poet Laureate Jim Johnson, Past Poet Laureate Barton Sutter, and local poet Ellie Schoenfeld have already begun creating anticipation. The fourth featured speaker will be Minnesota writer and publisher David Pichaske, author of Song of the North Country, followed by readings by local poets including Gary Boelhower, Michelle Matthees, Julie Gard, Liz Minette, Jan Chronister, and more.

As a warm-up I've been reaching out to several of the poets so I could introduce them here in greater depth. In addition to being selected as Duluth's first Poet Laureate in 2006, Barton Sutter has won the Minnesota Book Award for Creative Non-fiction (Cold Comfort: Life at the Top of the Map) along with numerous other awards. Sutter is the only author to have won the Minnesota Book Award in three different categories -- for fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction.

EN: How did you come to take a serious interest in poetry? Who were your biggest influences?

Barton Sutter: I had a terrible teacher for Freshman English in high school, but we had a very good text, and I was struck by quite a number of poems in that book. I also participated in competitive speech, and that sort of work is apt to develop your ear and draw you toward poetry. As Donald Hall says somewhere, “If, when you read it aloud, it gets better, it’s literature.”

My deepest influences were probably 1) the reticent Scandinavian-American culture in which I grew up, where I absorbed the idea that words were too valuable to waste, 2) my father’s work as a Lutheran minister, where I saw him shift back and forth between everyday speech and something I’d call “utterance,” 3) my maternal grandmother’s way with a story, and 4) my brother’s work as a folk singer specializing in Celtic and Scandinavian music.

If you’re talking about more strictly literary influences, I would name Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Bly, James Wright, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Maxine Kumin, and that’s just for starters. Not Wallace Stevens, that son of a bitch.

EN: There are some who have written that because of the manner in which poetry is being “performed” (presented in live readings more often than read) that poetry has been changing. What are the pros and cons of live poetry readings?

Barton Sutter: Poetry began and persisted as an oral art form for centuries before the invention of the printing press. It was closely related to music and drama. I think it still should be. Fine poetry well performed can move an audience to tears, laughter, wonder, even provide a spiritual experience. That’s why we still go see Shakespeare. I’ve performed in a poetry-and-music duo with my brother for more than 30 years. My fourth verse play will be produced in June. Obviously, I’m a big believer in the performed poem. On the other hand, I also really value the solitary reading experience, with the chance to re-read, mull, and savor. And performers get away with a lot of crap because they’ve got a blue mullet or swear a lot. Honestly. Some of the dreck that people applaud in live performance, it slides right off the page. Nothing worse than a bad poetry reading, whether dull, pretentious, or melodramatic. As Michael Dennis Browne says, “I’d rather watch re-runs of Hawaii Five-0.”

EN: I heard it said that when you were named the first Poet Laureate of Duluth you demurred and said there was another before you, meaning Dylan. Care to elaborate?

Barton Sutter: I don’t remember saying that. I might have because I run my mouth much more than the Scandinavian farmers I grew up around. If I did say it, I shouldn’t have because Bob Dylan left Duluth as a wee boy, so I suspect his oeuvre was pretty limited at that age, nor did he write much about this place later that I’m aware of. But I’d be happy to vote for him to be made the Poet Laureate of Hibbing. I’m sure he’d appreciate that. Or not.

EN: What is it that has made Dylan such a significant influence over the course of our lifetimes?

Receiving the Medal, painting by Ed Newman

Barton Sutter: First, the guy is in the running for greatest American songwriter ever—and he would be even if he had quit halfway through his career. He’s original, but he knows his stuff, knows the tradition and uses it. He’s been tremendously prolific, and he’s mastered a multitude of styles. Second—and I think this is just a gift because plenty of excellent songwriters don’t have it—for the first ten years or so of his career, he absolutely channeled the spirit of the times. He’d react to something personal, but the song he produced based on that incident spoke to the concerns of thousands, millions. I mean, it was a quantum leap from the enjoyable chewing gum of the Everly Brothers and the Beach Boys to “Hard Rain,” and most of a generation made the jump with Dylan. Third, lots of his lyrics last. They hold up and still apply. They linger in people’s heads. I look around at the landscape of this year’s election: There’s Trump and his followers; there’s Bernie and his backers. And the Washington insiders don’t know what the hell is going on. And in my head, I’m hearing, “Because something is happening here, / And you don’t know what it is, / Do you, Mr. Jones?”

EN: Where did you grow up and how did you end up in the North Country?

Barton Sutter: I spent the first six years of my life in a village of fifteen people outside of Roseau, which may explain my lasting affection for hockey. For some reason, I don’t see many other poets at hockey games. Didn’t have many playmates, spent a lot of time alone, wandering around in the woods and hanging out in culverts, which make a cool sound when you bang on them with sticks. Then a village of fifty, south of Jackson on the Iowa border, great place for kids, where we ran wild on the river and in the gravel pits. Then—exile!—over the border into Iowa, a village of 200, surrounded by corn and beans, where, among other things, I discovered the music of Bob Dylan. I was a nature boy, read Sigurd Olson, and vowed I would make it back to the green spaces on the map of Minnesota I had hanging on my wall. I went to Bemidji State for my first two years of college and began making runs over to the North Shore with friends. Dropped out at one point and spent a year in Grand Marais. My maternal grandparents spent all of their adult lives in the Twin Ports. My mother graduated from Denfeld. It’s a long story, but this place was mythic in my mind, so, finally, at age 37, I moved to Duluth without a job—and stuck. Still love it, peculiar as it is.

EN: Do you have a website or place online where some of your poems reside?

My poor website is perpetually out-of-date. But the Poetry Foundation hosts several of my poems: As does the Writer’s Almanac.

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Poets of the North Country will be a catered event that begins with an opening reception at 5:30. Readings by featured poets will start at 6:00, with an afterparty at Karpeles Manuscript Museum Library, music by Cowboy Angel Blue. Details here. The Underground Theater is located in The Depot, adjacent to the Train Museum.  Note: This event is Free and open to all.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Get into it.

Whitman, Dylan and Me: Uncanny Connections

This year I keep running into allusions to Walt Whitman. Just yesterday someone sent me an essay by Philip T. Nemec (on the power of music) that opens with these Whitman references.

One afternoon as a young man, I read the line from a poem in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, “I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing”. Mysteriously, this line, a simple statement, overwhelmed me, and tears welled. Its secret power defied rational explanation. After all, at that point, I had never even been in Louisiana or seen a live-oak. Decades later, my son, known more for his athletic prowess than literary sensitivity, faced his first assignment to analyze a poem. To my utter amazement, after searching our shelf of poetry books, he came to me with my dog-eared copy of Leaves of Grass opened to that same poem. Choked with emotion he recited, “I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing.” My son had never been to Louisiana, seen a live-oak, or had the poem read to him. The power of that declarative line locked our two generations together in a deeply felt moment. Not surprisingly, when I read the poem now, I relive that experience with my son. That line and the relationship with my son are permanently bonded.

I know that a brief essay on music should not, in the name of discipline, wander into poetry even if the “Good Gray Poet” titled many of his efforts, “songs,” but this experience with my son is the best example I can dredge up for illustrating what happens to us all with music. I do not offer this as a breakthrough musical insight; rather, I write about it to celebrate its universality, its commonness – the coupling of music to the most intense moments of our lives. It is a Song of Joys to use a Whitman title, and it is an emotion understood everywhere on planet earth.

Because of social media I have re-connected with a friend from high school whom, as chance would have it, owned a home in Fredericksburg just a few houses away from my uncle on the same street. I had driven within spitting distance from his front yard several times in the past few years without knowing it. This was not the only surprise. I learned that Charlie is also an actor who has played the role of Walt Whitman in a one-man show he's performed in the Great Hall of the National Portrait Gallery. Over dinner last spring we discussed, among other things, his strong interest in Whitman and the manner in which the bard was profoundly touched by attending to the needs of the wounded during the American Civil War. You can read here a review that appeared in the Baltimore Sun titled "The Essential Walt Whitman."

Dylan Talks of Whitman, Too
As any regular reader of this blog already knows, I have been a fan and follower of Dylan's music and career for much of my life, writing about him with measured frequency. One result of this is that people like to send me Dylan-themed articles or links to articles that might be of interest to me. And so it is that I was sent this particular Rolling Stone article in the midst of which were statements about Whitman. "Dylan has become our great American poet of drifting, inheriting a baton that was passed from Walt Whitman to Vachel Lindsay to Carl Sandburg to Allen Ginsberg." A few paragraphs later the author elaborates.

When tabulating literary influences, Dylan summons the name Walt Whitman, for Leaves of Grass continues to inspire him. Toward the end of his life, Whitman was preparing a "Death-Bed" edition of Leaves of Grass, reflecting on the indignities and ragged joys of growing old. "I don't think the dream of Whitman has ever been fulfilled," Dylan says. "I don't know if Whitman's spirit is still here. It's hard to say if it holds up except maybe in a nostalgic sense. That westward-expansion thing has been dead for a while now. When Whitman started out, he had such great faith in humankind. His mind must have been destroyed when the War between the States fell at his front door. His vision, which was so massively phallic, suddenly must have become plundered, ruined and emasculated when he saw all that indescribable destruction."

We talk about Whitman serving as a nurse in a Washington, D.C., hospital during the Civil War, draining gangrene from a wounded soldier's limbs. "I think you can see the change in Whitman," Dylan says. "Before that and after that. He had the most grand view of America. Almost like he's America himself. He's just so big, and he's all that there is. The Greek Empire. The Roman Empire. The British Empire. All of European history gone. Whitman is the New World. That's what Whitman is all about. But it isn't the New World anymore. Poor man. He was hounded and mistreated, too, in his lifetime. And ridiculed. Emerson, Thoreau, all those guys, you don't know what they really thought of him."

If any American personifies life on what Whitman called the "open road," it's Bob Dylan. 

But it doesn't stop there. Douglas Brinkley's piece continues.

We talk about Whitman serving as a nurse in a Washington, D.C., hospital during the Civil War, draining gangrene from a wounded soldier's limbs. "I think you can see the change in Whitman," Dylan says. "Before that and after that. He had the most grand view of America. Almost like he's America himself. He's just so big, and he's all that there is. The Greek Empire. The Roman Empire. The British Empire. All of European history gone. Whitman is the New World. That's what Whitman is all about. But it isn't the New World anymore. Poor man. He was hounded and mistreated, too, in his lifetime. And ridiculed. Emerson, Thoreau, all those guys, you don't know what they really thought of him."*

It's as if my friend Charlie got it right. His one-man show zeroes in on a segment of Whitman's life that made a profound impact on the bard, and it never left him. It made me half wonder if Dylan could have been in the audience for one of Charlie's shows.

Now for one more interesting twist to this story. During our Dylan Days in May I curated an art show featuring art inspired by Dylan and his music. I sold a couple of pieces from that show, portraits I'd done of Dylan, but one was too large to fit in my car and it had to be delivered to Minneapolis. I posted a note on Facebook hoping to find someone willing to transport it. The gentleman who agreed to help happened to be a book publisher, Jim Perlman of Holy Cow! Press. When we met to make the exchange he left me with a newly updated version of one of the most significant books on Whitman in print today, Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song. It is a beautiful book. But there's something uncanny how many ways Whitman has been popping up on my radar this year.

And yes, I've started reading the book. I'll be sharing more on this sometime soon.

* Read Bob Dylan's Late-Era Old Style American Individualism at Rolling Stone online.]

EdNote: Tomorrow evening in St. Louis Park there will be another Salute to the Music of Bob Dylan, a free concert fund-raiser for Guitars for Vets. The Wednesday show was fabulous I hear.

This Day In History... July 4

On this day in history the American colonies declared their independence from England, setting in motion the Revolutionary War. Had the colonialists lost in their bid for freedom,  the signers of the Declaration would all have been tried for treason and hanged. They were willing to put everything on the line for their ideals.

Most interestingly, two of these signees -- Thomas Jefferson and John Adams -- died on this same date fifty years later, in 1826.

In 1855 on this day Walt Whitman published the first edition of his Leaves of Grass at his own expense.

In 1863 on this day, Union General U.S. Grant's army won the Battle of Vicksburg, one of only two battles from the American Civil War cited for their military brilliance in a list of the top 20 battles of all time. Twelve of the battles on that list were by Napoleon.

In 1934 on this day boxer Joe Louis won his first fight. He went on to become heavyweight champion, defending that title for more than ten years straight. Nicknamed "The Brown Bomber," Louis became a national hero with an impact that went far beyond the punches he threw in the ring.

On this day in 1939 baseball legend Lou Gehrig, afflicted with a fatal illness, bid a tearful farewell at Yankee Stadium in New York. "Fans," he said, "for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth." Nicknamed "The Iron Horse" for his longevity and durability, he was also a remarkable ballplayer with a career batting average of .340, and an amazing on-base percentage of .447. Up until A-Rod broke his record, he'd hit more grand slams than any baseball player in history.

On this day in 1957 the four-cent Flag stamp was issued by the U.S. Postal Service.

On this day in 1960 the 50-star U.S. flag made its debut in Philadelphia.

Barnett Newman (no relation) died on this day in 1970, the year I graduated high school. Newman was a modern era painter famous (among other things) for his Newmanesque zips.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. And if you're playing with fireworks tonight, be careful. There are more house fires on the Fourth of July than any other day of the year.