Origin Story

         Several years ago, in my incarnation as a Middle School teacher, I came across a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. A threadbare and road-weary vagabond, cast in the image of its author, it had taken quiet refuge on a shelf in my classroom for who knows how many years. In an act of charity, I gathered it home to read it. Four hundred pages of verse. It seemed like the right thing to do.

            And , indeed, it was. Almost immediately the import of Leaves was upon me. With little enough fanfare and no time whatever to pack, I found myself embarking on a journey across the continent with Whitman as my guide. Together we threaded forests, crossed mountains and deserts by stage and train and horseback, camped knee-deep in prairie grass gazing up at the stars. We hiked and plodded from the Mexican Sea to Kanada, from the Northern Lakes to Tennessee and the crowded avenues of Mannahatta. Along the way we made acquaintance with carpenters, midwives, dockworkers and laborers of every stripe; the wealthy, the destitute, criminals and courtiers, the hopeful and the humble. We ate at their tables, slept in their haylofts, swam with them in oceans and rivers, and paid for provision with the equity of our labors: We cut lumber, hoisted sails, ministered to the sick and dying, dug our fingers into farm soil, tended every description of plant and animal, all the while engaged in lively discourse about what it means to be human and afoot in this wonderful world.

            To my delight and surprise, however, the length and breadth of Whitman’s interests surpassed even the expanse of continent we were crossing. As pages unfolded into miles, he declaimed on the body politic, on the ravages of war, on grief and solitude, on all the –isms of sex and race and age, on Languages and Art, on History and Mathematics, on the Sciences of cosmology, atomic theory, continental drift, Geology, Biology and Chemistry, and every possible incarnation of water, rock, and air – in short, a compendium of commentaries on everything a self-respecting Middle Schooler should know and care and think about.

            And so it was that I began to compose from these wanderings a weekly postcard to my students – a snippet of Whitman pulled from the pages of Leaves to grace the chalkboard in my classroom, there to greet them every Monday with something to ponder, to digest, to mull in the week ahead and weave into their own ruminations on the state of the world.  Gradually, willingly, the Weekly Whitman evolved into a broader offering, inviting submissions from the likes of Edward Abbey, Mary Oliver, Wallace Stegner, and a steady parade of celebrated poets, playwrights and parapatetics stretching back to Hypatia, Leucippus and beyond.

            Here, then, is the logical and rightful extension of the Weekly Whitman. A postcard offered for your enjoyment and consideration as you contemplate the week ahead and your place in the works, a forum for discourse with alumni, hangers-on, and other vagabonds afoot in the wideness of the world. As Whitman mused in the final, “deathbed” edition of Leaves:

“These lines, therefore, will probably blend the weft of first purposes and speculations with the warp of that experience afterwards, always bringing strange developments.”

            So, let’s see what strange developments are brought, as we embark together on the open road…

-Don