In Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” he writes, “I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and end.” In celebration of the poet’s 200th birthday, members of Poetry Atlanta and The Queer Literary Festival have partnered to recite Whitman’s poems- from beginning to end.
The event will take place at the First Existentialist Congregation in Candler Park this Friday evening at 7:00 p.m.
Atlanta poets Rupert Fike and Kodac Harrison stopped by the studio to speak with “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes about the event.
Whitman was a self-taught writer, who was inspired by Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, and the Bible. At 17, he taught in Long Island for five years until he began pursuing journalism as a full-time career. Shortly after founding the weekly newspaper, The Long-Islander, he moved down to New Orleans to become an editor of their newspaper, Crescent. He stayed less than a year after witnessing the auctioning of enslaved individuals.
He returned to Brooklyn and co-founded a “free soil” newspaper which he edited through the following year. Even though his attitude towards race was never consistent in his writing, he did celebrate human dignity. In 1855, he wrote the first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” which consisted of twelve untitled poems, the first and most popular being “Song of Myself.”
