Walt, glad you are dead these hundred years.
Some poets came to the project with Whitman's presence already suffused through their daily existence. Rosemary Winslow, who teaches at Catholic University, lives on a street the poet once called home. She summons Whitmanesque images of waving grasses and immeasurable heavens playing against contemporary scenes of piercing headlamps and the search for respite from artificial light.
Others sought to apply Whitman's brash expressions of American life to a new context. Daniel Pravda, who teaches at Norfolk State University, places his "Poem Written in Barbeque Sauce" at an Arby's at 1:25 p.m.
Some guy angrily announces, "I said no mayo!" and "the big lady behind the frier" coughs as she "scoops curlies into cups," and here is Whitman himself, paying "for coffee with pocket change and the senior discount." Whitman "blinks and pours a packet of salt in his coffee, and pulls the PUSH door."
A century and a half after Whitman left town, his Washington remains a city of monuments, stone and breathing. Here, Myra Sklarew, who teaches literature at American University, finds equal measures of burden and hope:
Each of us has monuments in the bone case of memory. Earth-
bound, I take my sac of marble and carry it down lonely city streets where our
generals on horseback and a tall bearded man keep watch over all their citizens.
