Tag: Walt Whitman

Today’s One-Liner (#65)

I  want to defend my culture, not theirs, and I inform you that I like Dante Alighieri and Shakespeare and  Goethe and Verlaine and Walt Whitman and Leopardi much more than Omar Khayyam. –Oriana Fallaci,…

Invitations and Incitements

I think it’s best to see Walt, and virtually every other imaginative writer of consequence, as issuing not edicts but invitations. Walt asks us to make his words ours, his vision our own….you can respond…

Containing Multitudes

Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.) –Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 53 [Soen Nakagawa] had many faces: he was a simple monk, a “crazy wisdom” Zen master,…

Camerados

I swore an oath of eternal brotherhood with Yuan-ruo, and pledged him my everlasting allegiance, as an expression of my lifelong loyalty to him.  Chinese people have always treated their friends with this sort of…

Walt, for Andrew, 1.22.24

I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,But really I am neither for nor against institutions, (What indeed have I in common with them? or what with the destruction of them?)Only…

Journals and Commonplace Books

It was becoming a habit with [Thoreau] now to work back over his journals and to reread books, to reengage old subjects in the light of new interests, to revise and recopy his own earlier…

What Came First

I was reading C.K. Williams’s book On WhitmanSeptember 2010And I scribbled on page 97 these three.. A NameAn AvowalA Maxim– Kelly McBride“You Are My Hero”Seven times down, eight times up The “Hero” referenceI’d first scribbled…

Wake Up!

 I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. –Nhat Hahn There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though…