Language and Song

I'm reading C.K. Williams's On Whitman, in preparation for a presentation on WW I'm scheduled to give this coming December, plus of course American Lit and future Modern Poetry and who knows what all else that will call for a little extra studying of this one-of-a-kind poet and seer. Williams writes, "Poetry is song and language at once," which will definitely find its way into Modern Poetry the next time I teach that course. I would have said "language and song," in that order, to make the point that language comes first, but I quibble.

This morning I sat for a few moments looking at an ad in the back of Smithsonian Magazine, an ad for dry-erase boards that can be custom fitted to line the walls of a room. I daydreamed about having a dry-erase-board-lined room, on which I could draw and color and of course write. How geeky is that, to daydream about being surrounded by one infinite dry erase board.

And then thinking of Ben Platt, who won the Tony Award last night for his performance in the play Dear Evan Hansen. He ended his acceptance speech by saying, "The things that make you strange are the things that make you powerful." I feel vindicated in my room-sized-dry-erase-board fantasy. Power!

Those strange poets, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Power!

...to be continued...