Tag Archive

an invocation to the \/\/ whose it’s?: whitman’s pants p@rt 2

By mfsandler

So last week I gave a little breakdown of the players involved in the Levi’s Whitman commercials, a bit of background on Whitman’s fashion lexicon, and left you with a bit of Whitman’s “Respondez!”– a poem that is decidedly less friendly to the purpose of selling jeans. This week, I’ll float a few ways... »

commodity fetishism gone holistic \/\/ satori holistic center, upper east side

By rachel simhon

Though widely hailed as the father of free verse, Walt Whitman famously identified himself in his epic Leaves of Grass as “a cosmos, of Manhattan the son.” A native of Long Island, Whitman relocated to neighboring New York City during the era when the metropolis first laid down its roots as the cultural and economic... »

popop\/\/the mother of all funk chords

By paul boshears

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself The ceaseless chattering on YouTube can get pretty solipsistic. While there is the lipservice given to the democratic tendencies present in allowing everyone to publish themselves online for everyone... »

getting inside \/\/ whitman’s jeans one hundred years later (pt. 1)

By mfsandler

Part of the scandal caused by Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass on the publication of its first edition in 1855 had to do with the poet’s clothes. It was extremely unusual that the frontispiece of a book of poems might have an image of the author in such casual clothes. But Whitman’s look– the... »

composed before a million universes

By tracey d

I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is, And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud, And I or you pocketless... »

commodity fetishism gone right \/\/ come as you are, toronto

By rachel simhon

  Ah, freshman year in college. Freedom from the oppressive schedules of high school and parental supervision, talking until the break of dawn with newfound friends, bad cafeteria food, worse laundry hassles, goateed professors in corduroy jackets, testing the limits of binge drinking — and of course, plenty of sexual experimentation. My higher education kicked off... »

pfaff’s bar\/\/ loft dance\/\/ 19th-20th century bohemian nightlife

By mfsandler

The avant garde has its origins in a longer culture of aesthetic dissidence in the West known as bohemia. It’s a style of life that mixes poverty and snobbery as accessories, flipping between arch taste and low company, or low taste and arch company. Bohemians are essentially a sub-sect of the middle class that have flamboyantly and... »

a taste for castration? or, what would bob kaufman do?

By mfsandler

The golden age of poetic castration is always well behind us. Even Swinburne was faking it, like in his appropriately titled verse play Chastelard (1865): They say men dying remember, with sharp joy And rapid reluctation of desire, Some old thing, some swift breath of wind, some word, Some sea-blossom stripped to the sun and burned At naked ebb… The... »