Wednesday before Thanksgiving. We’d been struggling with Walt Whitman lately. Struggling. Struggling. On Tuesday we’d looked at a number of sections and fifteen proved a road block. It’s a Whitman list, a Whitman catalog, a compendium of people and places. So we wrote our own — what have we seen as we walk about Philadelphia — and then ended with these three lines:
And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.
The results were astonishing. So much so that I think I need to make it a bonus activity to re-write their first draft and see what the final pieces look like.
And a Thanksgiving thought:
This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointments with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away…
Controversial in the 19th century, but how about now? Who is truly welcome?
