Poetry Ain't Sissy

When I was in middle school and high school I didn't like poetry. I read voraciously, almost anything I could get, from The Hobbit to Moby Dick (seriously, I read the whole thing), and all those books they assign you in English class, like Silas Marner. But when it came to poetry they lost me. Shakespeare was all right, but I liked the blood and guts and ghosts better - and the severed body parts in Titus Andronicus - than I liked the sonnets. Keats, Coleridge, Yeats, I could do without them all. Ode to Grecian Urn my ass. Poetry was not for me.
   Then I got to college, or specifically to my alma mater, Austin College (go 'Roos!) and an upper-level English class. We got to the inevitable poetry component, which I was determined to gut out like a recruit in boot camp. Dr. Gray had us read some old coot named Walt Whitman. So I put off the assignment as long as possible, and only a few hours before class did I crack the Norton Anthology and read 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.'
   After the first stanza it was like somebody punched me in the gut.
   I read it. And read it again. And a third time. It's not long but it is powerful. Nuclear. If this was poetry I was hooked. The lyricism, the immediacy, the raw energy of Whitman's words made me feel like I was there with him, waiting to cross the East River into 1858 Manhattan. Read it, please, and read it again. If you don't like poetry you will after you read 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.'
   A lot of what we think of as American democracy, the populist, inclusive, celebratory spirit that informs our national image comes from Whitman. His work was controversial because of its frank sexuality and sometimes erotic imagery, but that's part of what makes it so good. If nothing else poetry should be honest and evocative, and Whitman's work is absolutely those two things.
   I'm telling you, if you haven't read Walt Whitman you're cheating yourself. Go to the library - or libary - and check out a volume of 'Leaves of Grass.' Doesn't matter which one, he revised the thing every few years for most of his life, just get it and devour it. You'll thank me, I guarantee it.


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