Introduction
Who knows exactly how to interpret the attachment
of a great poet's namesake to a school-- but at least it makes some sense
to associate a poet with a school as opposed to a bridge, mall, or truck
stop. And then there are countless other invocations that go beyond
association by name: a relief of a likeness hanging in a mass transit station,
verses of poetry etched on a mountain.
The endeavor to understand such a hodge-podge of commemoration is even
more problematic when that poet is Walt Whitman.
Indeed, his image and persona is as elastic today as ever: the Good Gray
Poet, the Gay Poet, the Democratic Poet, the American Poet,
Whitman represents as variegated ideals for people as there are monuments
to him. He persists as the chameleon of cultural icons. For
this reason, his malleable and avuncular poet's blood continues to course
through the arteries of modern poetry, literature, film, visual arts.
For this reason a reference to him carries too much power to be just that;
it is an invocation.
His poetry-- chiefly his formerly eschewed, and presently widely read and
celebrated work "Leaves of Grass"-- is similarly alive today and pulsing
with ambiguity. Just as Whitman revised and republished six editions
of "Leaves of Grass," he so too epitomized elusiveness; just when one thinks
there is a definitive word, image, or ideal about him, it goes and changes
nature before one's very eyes when viewed in another light. There is no
bottom line when it comes to Walt Whitman.
Such is the case in trying to decipher the mixed bag of monuments that
are out there for Whitman, and just what about him they are declaring for
posterity. Level after level of possible interpretations arise.
And surely, this is a hotbed of ambiguous and provocative controversy in
which Whitman would have laid. He was a master manipulator of converging
and diverging realms of meaning-- as relating to memory, identity, perspective.
He willingly wore notoriety like a shroud; he celebrated what was uncelebrated.
The added dimension of difficulty with regard to analyzing monuments, however,
is determining the depths to which one should read into them, and then,
at what point does that depth give way to significance or, on the other
hand, absurdity.
This site is an explorations of merely a few images of and relating to
tributes to Walt Whitman, possible ways to untangle their complex web of
meaning, and their possible greater relevancy within American culture.
This exploration is particularly conducive to this medium for its greater
potential to access, maneuver, and present images and information.
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AT THE MALL
