Call for St. John’s Poets – for Whitman on Walls! (Sat Oct 26th)

Calling all St. John’s Poets!

It’s time to start planning for our big fall poetry event, coming up on Sat Oct 26th.

The event, Whitman on Walls!, will bring to our campus the award-winning international theater company Compagnia de’ Colombari – some SJU-ers might remember their dazzling production of King Lear this past summer – who will screen for us seven short films that present Walt Whitman’s  mini-epic of American multiple identities, “Song of Myself,”

In between each of these seven films, poets from the St. John’s community will talk back to Whitman, to America, and to our own American spaces, from the local to the global. We’ll have our distinguished poet-faculty reading original works, including Stephen Alvarez, Lee Ann Brown, and Stephen Paul Miller. Student poets will also have the opportunity to talk back to the literary canon and to our campus community.

That means – we are looking for student poets! If you’re interested in writing and performing a poem, please contact English Department Chair Steve Mentz (mentzs@stjohns.edu) as soon as possible. If you’d like the poem to be included in a book Compagnia de’ Colombari is putting together about this project, I’ll need to have it in hand by mid-September.

The poems we are looking for should engage with Whitman’s desire to be all things and all people, to create through the imagination a multiple America that celebrates itself and its variety. We also hope that our student poets will recognize that Walt Whitman, though “a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,” was also a white man writing in the nineteenth century. Poets should aim to write back against Whitman’s gaps, his own prejudices and exclusions, and into futures that he could not have grasped 125+ years ago. Spin us your new Americas!

I’m working on a Whitman-y poem myself, in dialogue with my own favorite lines from “Song of Myself,” about swimming in the ocean off Long Island or possibly New Jersey. Here’s the bit of Whitman that I’m grapping with –

You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean,

I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,

I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,

We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,

Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,

Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you. (“Song of Myself” 22)

My working title is, “The Sea sees me, feelingly.” More to follow!

Send us your poems!