Poem
Rukmini Bhaya Nair
A Politically Incorrect Ode to Whitman
A Politically Incorrect Ode to Whitman
A Politically Incorrect Ode to Whitman
Whitman isn’t inHe will not be in
This year or the next
He’s gone out
Far out where the two
Americas meet like kissing whales
Beyond the net
Of the universities
Whitman celebrates his absence
Old grampus
Without a postmodern
Stitch on him he reads himself
Sitting naked
On leaves of grass
Sounding his barbaric yawp
Forever thirty-seven
And in perfect health chewing
The heads off dandelions and theorists
Which right-thinking critic
Would not like to put to sleep
This unconcerned ecologically hazardous
Phallogocentric brute
Once and for all in that
Endlessly rocking cradle of his?
But damn Whitman!
There’s no putting him out
He says his sex contains all bodies, souls
This his self-description:
Stern, acrid, large, undissuadable
And help! Also draining the pent-up rivers
Of himself
Into women and demanding
Perfection from his love-spendings
Whitman alters
What he grandly calls
The base of all metaphysics
His gods
Are stones and sinews
Or an occult Brahma encountered
Interminably
Far back on that reckless
Passage to India descending radiating
His incantatory texts
And striding back and forth between
Vaunt’d Ionia and Sanskrit and the Vedas
Affected by a chronic logorrhoea
It’s clear the fellow abhors silence, babbling
All the time of puzzles to be solv’d and blanks to be fill’d
Blissfully ignorant
That erasure is essential
Words treacherous and that doubt wafts in every human soul
Ah how I’d like
To introduce Walt to wordplay
Brackets and all the joys of paranomasia
How he’d love it too!
Whit(e)man caring not a whit
Careening down passion’s witless slopes
Waltzing with Whitman
Could be such fun but he flatly
Refuses to rise to all my intellectual baits
He says he will not be
Darken’d and daz’d by books any more
He will steer for deep waters only and the farthest
Shore
And, sorry, poor dullards
Noodling in the groves of academe
Whitman will not
Be in this year or the next
It’s the uncharted courses he’s out to explore!
© 2004, Rukmini Bhaya Nair
From: Yellow Hibiscus: New and Selected Poems
Publisher: Penguin Books India, New Delhi
From: Yellow Hibiscus: New and Selected Poems
Publisher: Penguin Books India, New Delhi
It is worth noting that the famous phrase ‘passage to India’ was first coined by Whitman, who was
romantically fascinated by the subcontinent. This poem was written after I overheard a discussion at an American university about whether or not Whitman should be included in the syllabus, given his overt sexism. Many of the phrases in my poem are direct quotations from him.
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A Politically Incorrect Ode to Whitman
Whitman isn’t inHe will not be in
This year or the next
He’s gone out
Far out where the two
Americas meet like kissing whales
Beyond the net
Of the universities
Whitman celebrates his absence
Old grampus
Without a postmodern
Stitch on him he reads himself
Sitting naked
On leaves of grass
Sounding his barbaric yawp
Forever thirty-seven
And in perfect health chewing
The heads off dandelions and theorists
Which right-thinking critic
Would not like to put to sleep
This unconcerned ecologically hazardous
Phallogocentric brute
Once and for all in that
Endlessly rocking cradle of his?
But damn Whitman!
There’s no putting him out
He says his sex contains all bodies, souls
This his self-description:
Stern, acrid, large, undissuadable
And help! Also draining the pent-up rivers
Of himself
Into women and demanding
Perfection from his love-spendings
Whitman alters
What he grandly calls
The base of all metaphysics
His gods
Are stones and sinews
Or an occult Brahma encountered
Interminably
Far back on that reckless
Passage to India descending radiating
His incantatory texts
And striding back and forth between
Vaunt’d Ionia and Sanskrit and the Vedas
Affected by a chronic logorrhoea
It’s clear the fellow abhors silence, babbling
All the time of puzzles to be solv’d and blanks to be fill’d
Blissfully ignorant
That erasure is essential
Words treacherous and that doubt wafts in every human soul
Ah how I’d like
To introduce Walt to wordplay
Brackets and all the joys of paranomasia
How he’d love it too!
Whit(e)man caring not a whit
Careening down passion’s witless slopes
Waltzing with Whitman
Could be such fun but he flatly
Refuses to rise to all my intellectual baits
He says he will not be
Darken’d and daz’d by books any more
He will steer for deep waters only and the farthest
Shore
And, sorry, poor dullards
Noodling in the groves of academe
Whitman will not
Be in this year or the next
It’s the uncharted courses he’s out to explore!
From: Yellow Hibiscus: New and Selected Poems
It is worth noting that the famous phrase ‘passage to India’ was first coined by Whitman, who was
romantically fascinated by the subcontinent. This poem was written after I overheard a discussion at an American university about whether or not Whitman should be included in the syllabus, given his overt sexism. Many of the phrases in my poem are direct quotations from him.
A Politically Incorrect Ode to Whitman
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