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Margaret Ronda on Walt Whitman ("This Compost")
2.1k Plays8 months ago
How does life grow from death? When we taste a fruit, are we, in some sense, ingesting everything the soil contains? Margaret Ronda joins the podcast to discuss a poem that poses these questions in harrowing ways, Walt Whitman's "This Compost."
[A note on the recording: from 01:10:11 - 01:12:59, Margaret briefly loses her internet connection and I awkwardly vamp. Apologies! Rest assured the remainder of the episode goes off without a hitch!]
Margaret Ronda is an associate professor of English at UC-Davis, where she specializes in American poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End (Post*45 Series, Stanford UP, 2018), and her articles have appeared in such journals as American Literary History, Post45 Contemporaries, and PMLA (for which she won the William Riley Parker Prize). She is also the author of two books of poetry, both published by Saturnalia Books: For Hunger (2018) and Personification (2010). You can follow Margaret on Twitter.
As ever, if you enjoy the episode, please follow the pod and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! And sign up for my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I'm very happy today to be talking to Margaret Ronda about a poem by Walt Whitman called This Compost.
00:00:15
Speaker
This is a strange and wild kind of poem. I was really excited when Margaret proposed it for the conversation. We'll get to that, and we'll get to Walt Whitman in a minute. Of course, I can remind you that for those who want to be looking at a text of the poem, you can find a link to that in the episode notes. Margaret Ronda, as I'm sure many of you know, is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Davis.
00:00:43
Speaker
where she specializes in American poetry from the 19th century to the present. And she's the author of one critical book, which is a fantastic book called Remainders American Poetry at Nature's End. It was published by Stanford University Press in the post 45 series that they run in 2018. And I was thinking of what to say about this book.
00:01:11
Speaker
and looking at it and so forth. And then I thought, oh, there's a previous guest on this podcast, Oren Eisenberg, who already said a beautiful thing about it.
Margaret Ronda's Work and Eco-Poetics
00:01:25
Speaker
The first thing I want to say is to quote Oren on Margaret's book. He writes this, Remainders shows us how the very things that make poetry untimely
00:01:38
Speaker
bearing old forms into the present, making present the discarded or lost, investing in barely conceivable futures, can make it the timeliest of arts, best attuned to the ecological calamity of our era.
00:01:54
Speaker
I'll say a word more about Margaret's writing and what I admire so much about it in just a moment, but let me tell you that you can find her writing in addition to finding it in that monograph in the book Remainders.
00:02:09
Speaker
You can find her academic essays in places like American Literary History, Genre, and PMLA, many other places besides. I should say that her essay in PMLA won the William Riley Parker Prize, which is the prize given annually to the outstanding article published in PMLA. It's a really prestigious award and Margaret.
00:02:34
Speaker
was one of its winners. You can also find her writing in places like Post 45 contemporaries, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Jacket Two. Margaret is one of several guests we've had on this podcast who is not only a scholar and a critic, but also herself a poet. She's published two books of poetry. The more recent of the two is called For Hunger, which was published in 2018.
00:03:01
Speaker
And her first book of poems is called Personification, published in 2010, both of them by Saturnalia Books. And I think you'll hear in the kind of conversation we have today that Margaret brings both of these writerly stances, the stance of the critic and scholar and the stance of the poet to bear,
00:03:27
Speaker
on any engagement with poetry. It's part of what I find most exciting about her work. She is someone who is interested, often though not always, certainly I wouldn't say this defines her work, but it's been an important through line in it in
00:03:46
Speaker
fields we might call eco-poetics or eco-criticism. Maybe we can talk about what distinction we might want to locate between those two terms.
00:04:00
Speaker
She, as you could probably tell from the title of the book and the sentence I quoted from Orin's writing about the book, that this is a book about ecological calamity, about the ecological calamity that we all have been living through, wherever we are on this planet and however old we are on this planet, that is true. And it's about poetry as a
00:04:29
Speaker
as a site or as a mode or as a way of being in relation to that ecological calamity across the period that Margaret calls the Great Acceleration. And her emphasis
00:04:44
Speaker
You know, hers is, of course, not the only work that takes up that problem or that topic. Part of what makes her work, I think, distinct and particularly worthy of our attention is that her emphasis isn't so much on poetry's capacities either for innocence, that is for suspending the knowledge of what's happening all around us,
00:05:11
Speaker
Or for what we might take to be innocents' kind of counterpart, it's easy counterpart, which is to say simply righteous outrage, though I'm sure personally Margaret feels her fair share of righteous outrage often enough.
00:05:30
Speaker
But rather her book is focused on poetry's uncanny capacity, now these are her words, to give a sense of living on amidst accumulating planetary disruption. The way in which poetry is attuned to the ambivalence of what it's like to be alive as the world seems always to be ending.
00:05:58
Speaker
That's a thing that, it's this part of what I love so much about this work. She's pointing out something about the way we live, that because it's the way we live, it's very hard to see clearly.
Whitman's Poetry and Ecological Themes
00:06:16
Speaker
And she's finding it in a kind of writing where you might not think it would appear, but where once you see it, it seems really to be everywhere and to explain so much. And so it's my great pleasure to have Margaret on the podcast. Margaret joining us from Davis, California. How are you doing, Margaret?
00:06:41
Speaker
I'm very well, Cameron, it's so wonderful to be here with you and what a gift that introduction was. Thank you so much to hear once I'm thinking refracted back in with such eloquence and grace. Thank you. Sure.
00:07:00
Speaker
And I'm so excited to talk about Whitman with you. I'm excited to talk about Whitman with you. I don't know, we made it 40 something episodes into this podcast run without Walt Whitman coming up. And I was saying to you before,
00:07:17
Speaker
Well, actually, just very briefly as an aside, it occurs to me that one thing that might explain that is that by the nature of the sort of format of this podcast, it's much easier to choose a short poem.
00:07:32
Speaker
It's not as though Walt Whitman didn't write short poems, but the poems for which he's most well-known tend to be really loose and baggy and long, right? So this is to say, yeah, you have a thought about that. Well, I was going to say, too, I mean, this compost is so interesting as a kind of counterexample, you know, as a more contained
00:07:57
Speaker
self-contained poem. There are others, absolutely, but it kind of is unique in what it does and how the shape of it and how it moves. But also, I think maybe one of the reasons
00:08:12
Speaker
I would who knows but potentially one of the reasons why Whitman hasn't come up is has to do with that word that you used innocence and and there's that there's something often in his poems that might feel a little resistant to
00:08:31
Speaker
the kind of close reading that you do in this podcast and the kind of inquiry into paradox and contradiction or ambiguity that Whitman seems to be someone who has a framework for seeing the world and there's a kind of sameness across many of his poems or across Leaves of Grass
00:08:59
Speaker
in terms of that register, right? So once one feels like once you've imbibed it and understand it, maybe there's a limit in terms of what can be said about it. Now, I think this compass is so interesting because it pushes against some of those received ways of thinking about Whitman, but I do think that might be in that sort of innocence and, you know, sort of
00:09:26
Speaker
Will naivete of Whitman is so much the note in so many books. That's fascinating. The theory I was going to offer, which I suspect is really just describing something like the same set of qualities or the same phenomenon, but approaching it from a somewhat different angle, is to say,
00:09:51
Speaker
It makes just as much sense to me that Whitman has not been on the podcast yet as it does that Dickinson was pretty early on. These are two poets who are often reflexively or instinctively paired as the two poets. I say this
00:10:09
Speaker
Please don't get mad at me, 19th century American Americanist poetry scholars. I know the 19th century is not reducible to those two figures, but in the literary imagination that we participate in, often it seems to be. And they are sort of offered as a kind of, I don't know what, mother and father of modern American poetry or something like that. Right. Queer as we are. Right. Yeah.
00:10:37
Speaker
And so really what I'm saying is I think we had Virginia Jackson on the podcast, so she would talk about lyricization as this ongoing historical process that has distilled a more varied
00:10:54
Speaker
range of poetic production into the kind of crystalline, unmediated, temporally suspended lyric that's so often sort of forced onto or attributed to Dickinson and that Whitman doesn't participate in that tradition in the same way and the length of his poems is one indication of that. The innocence or the kind of resistance to
00:11:19
Speaker
a hermeneutics of suspicion or something like that might be another as you're describing it, Margaret. And so, yeah, for all of these reasons, he might seem like an uncomfortable fit for this podcast format, which is why I'm so glad we're doing it and I'm interested in it. But let me just sort of back up for a moment and say,
00:11:45
Speaker
You know, I want to invite you to imagine, Margaret, you're addressing an undergraduate lecture or some kind of Gen Ed course where perhaps students have heard of Walt Whitman but don't know very much about him at all. Because surely that will be true for some people in our audience here. And I guess I'm just curious, like, is there some
00:12:10
Speaker
sort of sketch of the place he occupies beyond what you've already said and you've said so much in the history of American poetry that you could distill as a kind of way of introduction and maybe by way of saying how this particular poem is and isn't of a piece with that portrait you have in mind of Walt Whitman.
00:12:36
Speaker
Yeah. I teach a course in Whitman and Dickinson, which is of course also a course that allows us to ask these questions about the more various 19th century and poetry imaginaries and poetry archives and traditions of the 19th century forward. But so one of the ways that I often try to frame Whitman for those students is to think about
00:13:03
Speaker
the ways in which Whitman has come to be received as this
00:13:10
Speaker
kind of great poet of expansion, a kind of a poet of imaginative expansion where the eye comes to have stand that the lyric eye or the the subjects that the speaker as first person subject comes to kind of represent or stand for all of America as a frontier nation as a settler nation as as a kind of
00:13:36
Speaker
expanding economy with various populations and that the eye kind of can encompass in terms of the length of the line, Whitman's very long lines can kind of catalog and stand for and maybe appropriate or draw in all of these varieties so that the kind of the
00:14:05
Speaker
impulse in a Whitman poem is to try to connect unity and variety through the figure of the eye or the figure of the kind of the first person speaker. And what I want to always tell the students is that this is also a product of
00:14:23
Speaker
a long career in journalism, or a deeply oriented mind in relationship to American politics, that the kind of optimism, you know, and it is a very optimistic, more innocent, poetry has that kind of innocent, optimistic stance, that it comes out of a real confrontation with any type of
00:14:49
Speaker
pessimistic outlook on the real nature of American politics.
Analyzing 'This Compost' by Walt Whitman
00:14:55
Speaker
And then, of course, it's a poem, Leaves of Grass is a long poem, begins in 1855 as one long untitled poem, and then takes on multitudes, takes on many different editions and shapes over its course. And it becomes kind of a chronicle of the varieties of American politics
00:15:18
Speaker
from the antebellum period all the way up to 1881. And so it both kind of contains the different kind of contradictions and various manifestations of American politics, including the Civil War, which is kind of at the Poems Center, at Lee's-Wagras Center, but also tries to find ways to continue to think about
00:15:46
Speaker
the eye, the speaker at the center of this kind of changing, dynamic world that is American politics and American life, American population. And the war becomes a kind of means of thinking about contradiction and synthesis. But the eye remains at the center. And one of the things that's so interesting about this compost is that it's a poem that ultimately kind of decenters
00:16:14
Speaker
that first person, that kind of all-encompassing, aggrandizing, expansionist eye as it kind of, you know, leaves of grass, moves through all these different contexts. But this compost kind of wants to say there's something that the eye, that the human self can't account for, can't internalize and that resists that kind of assimilation or that resists that kind of internalization. And as
00:16:44
Speaker
partly what's so fascinating about it. And I also think it's so fascinating as a way of thinking about the ecological motive in Whitman's poetry.
00:16:55
Speaker
Oh, great. I want to hear more about that in a moment. But, you know, I've been thinking of what is the line from Song of Myself? Every atom belonging to me is good, belongs to you, right? The kind of bravado of a line like that as
00:17:14
Speaker
as related in some ways at the level of image or thematic concern or something with some of what we'll be considering in this poem. But the attitude here feels very different to me, I think, as you say. So that's super interesting. I have a bunch of follow-up questions for you. One, I've just been sort of wondering, I don't even know what my own answer to this question is. Perhaps this is an unfair question to ask, but can you remember when it was that you first read Whitman?
00:17:44
Speaker
I read Whitman in high school and I was really starting to think about myself as a poet and trying to find
00:17:56
Speaker
kind of orientations for thinking about technical matters like the line, but also maybe more fundamentally for what occupies the poet's mind, what occupies the poet's life. What is that occupation? And it's got that great poem, Song for Occupations, right? What would that life look like? And of course, he sort of resists
00:18:25
Speaker
It's funny, it's such a poetry of, you know, come along with me and we're all the same and, you know, identification, but I remember resisting that identification. And often this is a response that students have too, at least initially in my experience is that they, you know, they want to put pressure for all the right reasons on
00:18:49
Speaker
on who's saying this to me, who wants to be my representative. And I remember feeling the same, just a sort of almost like sensory resistance to that call. But over the years, I think I've seen more and more
00:19:14
Speaker
seen into the complexities of Whitman and have come to find him quite irresistible, both for purposes of teaching and just as someone who's good to think with. In part because I think the contradictions and the kind of dialectics of the work are
00:19:30
Speaker
so much more apparent to me now, the more I read him, the more I see that, you know, and the things that he's wrestling with in the poems, and then the way he's sort of trying to manage all of those contradictions. So, but I think when I was young, it seemed to me a little bit more, you know, I don't know,
00:19:56
Speaker
like aggressive, I guess, to be correct. Yeah, provocation. Well, that makes sense. That sounds age-appropriate. I mean, I want to pull on another thread or two of what you said. You referred a number of times to Whitman's innocence.
00:20:18
Speaker
and also talked about how Leaves of Grass as a book or Song of Myself as a long poem within that book emerge from something you refer to, I think, as a sort of settler consciousness or as a kind of settler project.
00:20:38
Speaker
And I wonder, we were talking about innocence in a kind of, using that term in a somewhat different sense, but I think many listeners' ears might have perked up and have been thinking about what we today might refer to as a white innocence or as a kind of willful unknowing. And given the fact that Whitman is writing during a time of
00:21:02
Speaker
you know, during the time of the Civil War, during a time in which slavery is still present as an institution and then into the period of reconstruction and so on. I wonder if, when you use that word innocence, Margaret, is there also a kind of racial component to it that you'd want to comment on? Absolutely, absolutely. You know, I think that's at the center of his work and
00:21:31
Speaker
and his figure of the laborer, his figure of the citizen is entirely dependent on the production or reproduction of that kind of racial innocence. I will say that I think that that's differently valenced vis-a-vis indigenous peoples versus
00:21:56
Speaker
uh, let's say, um, figures of, um, enslavement, um, black populations. I think, um, there's more consciousness in the work about, um, you know, the, the, the problem of slavery, the question of personhood and property, um, the question of freedom, um, that is, you know, that is being routed essentially through the question of slavery. Um, at the same time as I think the, the,
00:22:26
Speaker
the figure, the embodiment of what liberty and freedom and free motion looks like is absolutely raised white throughout the work. His racial consciousness changes over the course of his life and over the course of Leaves of Grass, and it becomes more reactionary, more conservative. As we move farther from the antebellum period in the early Civil War,
00:22:53
Speaker
So that's also something to track. But I would say that there's almost complete occlusion of Native American figures in a kind of meaningful way. It doesn't grapple with what it means to be a settler, what it means to occupy a frontier. It's totally in the language of progress. And I think it comes most explicitly to the four
00:23:21
Speaker
in Song of the Redwood Tree, which is a poem that's just absolutely celebrating the extermination and destruction of the natural world and also of
00:23:35
Speaker
populations, native populations that have lived before, right, and continue to live on land. So I think, you know, that that kind of imagination of innocence and newness and novelty and freshness, we'll talk about vis-a-vis this compost kind of more specific logical terms. There's also absolutely a kind of racialized component to that.
00:24:01
Speaker
It's always kind of working its way through, you know, invisibly or insidiously in the work. And it's part of, I think, what's so interesting to grapple with and troubling to grapple with in the poetry. But again, it's not complete, it's uneven occlusion. I think he is interested in, you know, the problem of personhood as a problem, right, rather than, and the problem of the commodification of the body.
00:24:31
Speaker
to different degrees and in different ways, particularly in the early versions of leaves of grass. So that's in there. It's just the solutions are troubling.
00:24:44
Speaker
Well, I'm glad I asked the question. I had a feeling you'd have a compelling answer to it, and you've really started to draw out some of what is so complex and not simply admirable in our own kind of innocent way about this poet, but interesting to think about and to think along with and in response to.
00:25:06
Speaker
And so thank you for the generosity of that answer. I think we'd better turn to the poem. And Margaret, I want to invite you to begin this conversation by reading it aloud for our audience, whom I'll just remind one more time that they can find a text for the poem, a link to the text of the poem in the episode notes for those who would like to look at the poem as they listen to Margaret read. But Margaret, why don't you take it away?
00:25:36
Speaker
This compost. One, something startles me where I thought I was safest. I withdraw from the still woods I loved. I will not go now on the pastures to walk. I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover, the sea. I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.
00:26:03
Speaker
Oh, how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken? How can you be alive, you growths of spring? How can you furnish health, you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain? Are they not continually putting distempered corpses within you? Is not every continent worked over and over with sour dead?
00:26:30
Speaker
Where have you disposed of their carcasses, those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations? Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat? I do not see any of it upon you today, or perhaps I am deceived. I will run a furrow with my plow. I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath. I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat. Two.
00:27:01
Speaker
Behold this compost. Behold it well. Perhaps every mite has once formed part of a sick person. Yet behold, the grass of spring covers the prairies. The bean bursts noiselessly through the mold in the garden. The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward. The apple buds cluster together on the apple branches. The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves.
00:27:30
Speaker
The tinge awakes over the willow tree and the mulberry tree. The he-birds carol mornings and evenings, while the she-birds sit on their nests. The young of poultry break through the hatched eggs. The newborn of animals appear. The calf is dropped from the cow, the colt from the mare. Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potatoes' dark green leaves.
00:27:56
Speaker
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize stock, the lilacs bloom in the door yards. The summer growth is innocent and disdainful, above all those strata of sour dead. What chemistry? That the winds are really not infectious. That this is no cheat, this transparent green wash of the sea which is so amorous after me.
00:28:20
Speaker
that it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues, that it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it, that all is clean forever and forever, that the cool drink from the well tastes so good, that blackberries are so flavorist and juicy, that the fruits of the apple orchard and the orange orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me.
00:28:48
Speaker
that when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease. Now I am terrified at the earth. It is that calm and patient. It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions. It turns harmless and stainless on its axis.
00:29:12
Speaker
With such endless excessions of diseased corpses, it distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetter. It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal annual sumptuous crops. It gives such divine materials to men and accepts such leavings from them at last.
00:29:35
Speaker
That was terrific. Margaret Ronda reading this compost by Walt Whitman. Margaret,
00:29:45
Speaker
especially with a poem like this that's a little bit, I mean, even though this is, it's funny, I don't wanna, I feel like all I'm doing is talking about, well, there are short poems and long poems and slightly longer ones. Anyway, this is a bit, you know, a bit much to keep in one's mind all at once. So I like with a poem like this just before we dive in to think a little bit about sort of how it sits on the page or how you kind of conceptualize its organization. So,
00:30:14
Speaker
I notice, you know, as of course many other listeners must be right now, that the poem is divided into two numbered parts. Could you say a little bit just from a kind of 30,000-foot view or something about sort of how you conceive of this poem's structure or something, or like its division into movements or parts, or is there some sort of
00:30:43
Speaker
you know, thumbnail version of what part one's relation to part two seems to be or something like that that could help get us oriented. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. So I think, you know, the poem begins with startlement and a kind of a sudden distance from what had seemed to be familiar. And the first section is a kind of inquiry into
00:31:10
Speaker
this response or this sense of defamiliarization, we could say, right? And sort of mystification about an earth and an environment, a surrounding that had seemed familiar. And so the first section is asking these questions, these sort of sustained questions.
00:31:31
Speaker
And so the first half, or this first section, you know, it's full of inquiry, it's full of questions, and it's full of tumult and disquiet and uncertainty. And then, and we can talk more about sort of what constitutes that, but just in terms of the sort of the features, the kind of thinking of the first section. Then the second section,
00:32:01
Speaker
moves into a kind of observation, right, or an answer maybe to the questions of the first section. So to sort of return the gaze more closely to what had been sort of recoil in the first section and defamiliarization and maybe fear of the first section. So the second section
00:32:25
Speaker
there aren't any questions. It's all catalogs. So it's all kind of returning to attention, returning to perception, returning to a kind of list of the various features of what is around. And so kind of familiarization or refamiliarizing. At the same time, the end of the poem
00:32:49
Speaker
moves into the last section or the last stanza of the poem, moves into something different completely, which is when we say some kind of synthesis of the two and doesn't quite allow the poem to resolve on a note of total familiarization or
00:33:11
Speaker
domestication of that initial feeling, right, or resolution. And instead, it kind of retains this sense of terror and sublimity and the kind of unknowing feeling that the beginning of the poem initiated.
00:33:27
Speaker
Uh-huh, uh-huh. Oh, that's terrific. That's really useful. I was taking notes that map that you've just given us of the poem, I think will help sort of guide us and orient us as we go. So I was asking you about the poem at the absolute largest scale, and now I'm going to ask you a question that is at the most minute possible
Themes of Decay and Renewal in 'This Compost'
00:33:50
Speaker
scale. So the poem's title is This Compost, and I'm curious about the word this for you.
00:33:57
Speaker
It feels kind of unusual to me as a gesture for a title. So I don't know. Talk about it, Margaret. Oh, it's so wonderful. This is pointing to something. So how does that get you situated or unsituated or something? I love that question. It's such a great question. Because in some ways, it points to the problem of the poem.
00:34:27
Speaker
is both everywhere and invisible, right? So this of this compost is directing us, directing our attention.
00:34:37
Speaker
But what the poem is ultimately meditating on is precisely what is happening always. It's a process, a biological process that is nonetheless not directly visible to our perception, right? So that in some ways has to become a kind of imaginative transaction.
00:34:59
Speaker
And so the this, right, so because in some ways when we read the title, we want to move right to compost, right, which turns it into matter, it turns it into the concrete. But in fact,
00:35:14
Speaker
that this is precisely what retains that sense of otherness of the question, the mystery of the poem, because where can you find it? Where do you see it? You know, in some ways it's this kind of internal kind of disquiet or this internal inquiry, right? Why can't I see the,
00:35:42
Speaker
consequences or the kind of manifestations of this process. Like, you know, what has happened to, or what is happening all the time to, in death, to death, through death, to life emerging again, right? How is it possible that death can lead to life, right? And so that this in a way becomes the means by which
00:36:10
Speaker
right from the very beginning, from the very first word, that metaphysical inquiry, but also this very material inquiry is being transacted. So thank you. I had not even caught my attention to that, but I think it's all there in this.
00:36:29
Speaker
That's why it's nice to put heads together because you've said so much that I hadn't thought of, but it's a testament to the power of conversation maybe. But let me make sure I'm getting the idea right. I just want to kind of reflect some of it back to you and hear if I'm on the right track.
00:36:45
Speaker
you know, we see the title and naturally, I mean, I did this too. I think you think, oh, there's a poem about compost. That's interesting. And, you know, compost is a thing that has its own kind of cultural history and that is meaningful maybe to us in the sort of early part of the 21st century in a way that it, you know, would have been differently, I presume, you know, in the 19th century, what have you.
00:37:11
Speaker
And then I try to imagine a, you know, so what would the title be like if it were compost just on its own or the compost or something? Or then I think, you know, try to imagine a totally different poem, which were something like this flower or this tree or something like that. I think what I'm hearing you say is there's something in the nature of compost itself that resists the
00:37:39
Speaker
kind of innate impulse we seem to have to want to point at and locate and indicate a particular thing because compost is in a sense invisible and not a thing but a kind of happening or a process or something like that. It can't be indicated in quite that way. And that tension is sort of what the poem is about.
00:38:08
Speaker
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think it's there in this kind of impossible pointing of this, right? And at the same time, even in compost itself, there's a sense of material that is itself in process, right? That itself is on the way from one state to another state.
00:38:39
Speaker
that kind of to look at it is to look at transformation in process, right? That compost is a kind of a, you know, it's an enacting or it's a processual sort of motion rather than a stable entity, which of course that underscores that this is
00:39:00
Speaker
the case for all of matter and all of life and that it is all vital. It would be true of the tree or the flower or whatever as well. It's just not as evidently true or something. It doesn't signify that in the same way. And I should say too, this is maybe jumping ahead, but I'll just say that
00:39:23
Speaker
I think compost for us now, as you said, signifies, you know, it signifies soil and, you know, it signifies a certain kind of organic process that we maybe actively undertake. And that for Whitman, it would be more specifically signifying dead bodies and corpses. And that's sort of more specifically what this poem is about, though it is also
00:39:48
Speaker
more broadly about soil and more broadly about processes of transformation and renewal and decay, but that the meaning of compost for him is actually kind of specifically dead bodies. So it's an interesting kind of defamiliarization that we have to make ourselves as contemporary readers to kind of think
00:40:15
Speaker
from the very beginning, compost is going to signify the decay of human corpses.
00:40:24
Speaker
Yeah, we're not talking about taking one's coffee grounds out to the bin where you've got your kale trimmings and so on going as well. Exactly. And I underscore that just to say that it's a poem that wants to foreground that disgust and that horror. It really wants to ask us to look at it. And even in the poem's title, that's there.
00:40:53
Speaker
Right. And so these corpses aren't just corpses, but they're diseased corpses and so on. And that's part of the mystery of the poem. Good. Okay. So I love the first line. Something startles me where I thought I was safest.
00:41:09
Speaker
Talk about that as just a kind of opening line. What's catching your attention about that, Margaret? I promise we'll go faster. We won't go line by line. No, no, it's so good. First lines are really important. First line is so essential. Yeah, something startles me where I thought I was safest. So that mystery, again, underscored in that first word something, like what?
00:41:40
Speaker
and that sense of, you know, Whitman who's so interested in naming and specifying, you know, wants to always put, you know, a noun to what he's imagined, right? He wants to, he wants to concretize, something startles me.
00:41:57
Speaker
And so that sense of the kind of unsettling beginning of the poem also about not being able to name what the thing is that is unsettling you, right? And then, of course, where I thought I was safest underscores the theme of the poem about sort of risk and bodily
00:42:25
Speaker
safety or fragility, you know, this is a poem about one's own mortality. This is a poem about feeling sort of safe in one's own or stable in one's own, you know, locale, right, environment, but also in one's own body, right? And so this is kind of disorientation that's not just about the outer, about the earth, about the kind of conditions of life
00:42:55
Speaker
but also about what that means for one's own body and one's own health and one's own safety, right? So it's a poem that's about, that's existential in some way. And that safety and comfort or stability is precisely what's going to be undermined as the poem goes forward, right? And that it's gonna have to negotiate that.
00:43:23
Speaker
Those words all seem related to me to the word we were putting so much pressure on earlier that you introduced, which is innocence, namely, that is another way of imagining a condition of safety or of comfort or of stability, right? Yes, yes, I was safe.
00:43:43
Speaker
I was safe here, I was sort of, I was protected from a certain kind of awareness of what's actually happening, right? And the poem is going to sort of rend that veil in a way, right? But from the beginning of the poem there, you know, there is in a sense, you know, here's what I know, here's
00:44:08
Speaker
here's how I know that this works. And even by the end of the poem, there's not much more clarity about what something is, right? Yeah, yeah. Reminds me of the famous frost line, something there is that doesn't love a wall, that same kind of undermining but vague kind of sense of the thing you kind of take for granted as being literally unsettled or something.
00:44:37
Speaker
So then we get this string of, I'm just looking at the poem's first stanza, which is that first line, and then there are four lines consecutively after that that all begin in what I take to be a kind of characteristically kind of Whitmanic mode with the first person pronoun, I, I, I. Though I noticed that
00:45:03
Speaker
So that for people who aren't familiar with, I'm putting on my teacher hat for a moment, is like anaphora, or there's a kind of anaphoric rhythm to Whitman, and we'll get it throughout this poem. So a repetition of an initial element. Interestingly, in this case, I'm noticing, and this is my question to you, like what do you make of this, that all of those eyes kind of introduce
00:45:28
Speaker
not positive assertions, but sort of negations of the conduct, right? So what do you make? Is there a tension in that, or what's interesting to you about that, Margaret? Absolutely. Yeah, it's such an important inversion of
00:45:46
Speaker
what we think of as the kind of characteristic Whitmanian assertion, right? I assume myself and celebrate myself, right? Yeah, I will, right? I, you know, I contain multitudes, right? Like I'm able to move and see and act and name, right? It's all framed in as a kind of positive, like unfettered motion and the catalogs
00:46:16
Speaker
often ones that begin with the first person pronoun, though not always, but they enact this sense of freedom, right? And so here we have inside that the inversion of that negation, I won't, I will not go now on the pastors to walk. I will not strip the clothes from my body. And also this, so this holding back of, or like refusal or tentativeness,
00:46:44
Speaker
in doing the things that his poems do all the time, right? They always are going, stripping the clothes off the body, you know, to meet my lover at the seat, right? And touch me. I love to lean and all that stuff. Yeah, right. And this poem is saying, you know, I can't do that now, right? I've seen something, I've noticed something, something's become, I've become aware of something that,
00:47:14
Speaker
something startled me that has made it so that this natural action is no longer accessible to me. And just to underscore the tenor of the descriptions is all, we say,
00:47:32
Speaker
erotic or amorous, not necessarily like directly sexually charged, though we do have the love or the sea, but it's, but it always, you know, we're often in Whitman's catalogs, there's this sense of, you know, touching attachment, charged connection. And this is what is
00:47:53
Speaker
this kind of embrace or union is no longer what he feels he's able to undertake, right? He has to step back or negate that kind of action. Right. I mean, so often when I think of those kinds of moments elsewhere in his poetry, those moments of kind of erotic touching, let's say, of some kind, in those, they tend to be kind of
00:48:22
Speaker
triangulated or displaced or something, you know, like I'm thinking of the 26 bathers moment and where there's a kind of, I mean, it's very
00:48:34
Speaker
erotically charged scene in Song of Myself, but there's an unseen sort of invisible voyeur that enables that to transpire, or there's a kind of displacement from one body to another. But here,
00:48:56
Speaker
not even that seems to be permitted or even that is kind of shrunk back from. Right, right. Absolutely. And I think one way of thinking about why this is the case or what's happening is, you know, if we move into the next stanza where it's about sort of the
00:49:19
Speaker
the other or whether it's the ground or the tree or another person in Whitman's catalogs often it's portrayed as a kind of mirror of the self. So again, that sense of the I and the you are fundamentally alike. There's this fundamental sameness.
00:49:48
Speaker
or, you know, kind of deep abiding homogeneity, you know, amidst all of our sort of, you know, diverse attributes and, you know, kind of material capacities, it's ultimately we share a kind of sameness of vital energy, sameness of, you know, kind of internal essentials. And here,
00:50:12
Speaker
in the second stanza, the ground suddenly seems potentially a source of sickness, of disease. Suddenly, the eye doesn't get mirrored by, it doesn't mirror the you that is the ground, the kind of the addressee that is the earth. And it becomes this question, are you diseased?
00:50:42
Speaker
you know, how can you be alive, you growths of, growths of spring. So there's a sense, you know, I don't, I actually don't know what I'm looking at when I'm looking at you earth or you soil, you know, it's this sort of misalignment, whereas in homes, there's often this sense of, you know,
00:51:04
Speaker
I see you because you were a reflection of me and vice versa, right? That there's a kind of that intimacy, even across distance, as you say, or mediated in various ways.
00:51:18
Speaker
He can feel the license to touch because it's just himself he's touching or something elsewhere. But here, not so, yeah. So yeah, I like that's where these, you said that the, I mean earlier, you said that the first section of the poem, the first numbered section of the poem is full of questions.
00:51:37
Speaker
And it's in that second stanza that those questions, one after the other, begin to unfold. I'm noticing now, as I just look at the poem on the page in front of me, that right that second stanza is five lines. Again, each one of those lines is end stopped. Each one of those lines ends with a question mark.
00:52:05
Speaker
I'll take that as a good an occasion as any to ask you a question that perhaps in this sense, this poem is typical for all of the other differences that we've identified with other Whitman poems, but perhaps atypical of other poems that have been featured on this podcast and other kinds of poetic modes in which, I mean, I think, sorry, this is just a question about like what the line means to Whitman.
00:52:34
Speaker
and why it is that he feels so attached to aligning the grammatical or syntactical unit of articulation with the line ending and with the structure of verse. As I try to convince students what's interesting about line breaks, I say, well, one thing that distinguishes poetry from other kinds of verbal art is that there are
00:53:03
Speaker
two systems organizing the language into units. There are all of the ordinary rules of grammar and syntax. And then there's this other one, which is line endings. And sometimes they come together and sometimes they don't. And it's interesting to see the ways in which they don't. For Whitman, they really seem to kind of relentlessly. I mean, there are exceptions, of course, but they seem to. And so I wonder what that
00:53:27
Speaker
you know, either taking this particular stanza as an example of it or thinking more broadly about Whitman, what that sort of indicates to you about the way his imagination works or what he thinks a poem is doing that's different from what, you know, another poet, I won't say Dickinson, but pick your poem. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Well, I,
00:53:54
Speaker
One thing that is clear when you read widely in Whitman and certainly when you read the preface to 1855 Leaves of Grass is that he's thinking about poetry in relationship to other kinds of founding documents. So he's thinking about poetry actually on the analogy of
00:54:17
Speaker
the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. As a kind of language that can enact a kind of new sense of union, it cannot just reflect or describe, but actually
00:54:36
Speaker
make happen a kind of new compact, we can say. And in some ways, I think he imagines leaves of grass to be the kind of aesthetic counterpart to, or maybe a kind of compensatory document that can reveal to the citizens what these other documents maybe promised but didn't fully deliver.
00:55:06
Speaker
I think of the line then for Whitman as in some ways a kind of enactment of that sense of
00:55:18
Speaker
a kind of argument in verse that is also a kind of transaction in the world, making something happen, a kind of speech act. And so he's not interested in thinking about poetry as a means of
00:55:39
Speaker
holding complexity or multiple meanings. It's not a very figurative thinker. You're actually thinking more about language as a literal instrument. I think the line as a unit, not to be broken, not to be divided.
00:56:02
Speaker
is part of thinking about politics, is a part of thinking about the body, is a part of thinking of wholeness kind of at different levels. But it's also a kind of enactment of an idea on the page and kind of beyond it. So to think about a jam that would, in a way, be a kind of like sacred violation of- Why would I do that? You would have- It's kind of a political commitment, right? Right.
00:56:30
Speaker
There's some things sort of declamatory about the life. Even though in this case they are full of questions, even those questions are sort of offered in the spirit of declarations of a kind. You suggested to us that the first half of the poem is full of questions in one way to think about the second half of the poem's relation to the first half as well as a kind of answer. But it also seems to me as we read those questions, which
00:57:00
Speaker
You know, when you ask a question, if I were to ask you a question and then before you could answer, I would ask another one and another one and another one. At some point you might think like, well, you're not interested in an answer. These are rhetorical questions. And these questions seem to be a little bit like that. I guess I wonder before we get to the second half of the poem, what you think.
00:57:22
Speaker
Is there a, you know, we got all those eyes, eye statements in the, those withdrawing statements in the first stanza, the second stanza asked these questions. Does the third stanza turn the screw one more time? I mean, is there a kind of progression of the argumentative arc of the poem there that we should note? And is there any moment that you would want to point to that really illustrates that?
00:57:48
Speaker
Yeah, so one thing to point to is the ratcheting up of the kind of gruesome macabre language, right? We get the distempered corpses in the second stanza, but in the third stanza, we have carcasses, you know, we have foul liquid in meat. Foul meat is repeated in the last line. So there's really this insistence on
00:58:17
Speaker
the kind of disgusting materiality of the body, of the decaying dead body, right? So I think, you know, one of the things that the poem does, and I hope we can talk more maybe now is the time to start to think about it, but it's sort of like almost like a parody of of elegy in a way, right? Like it's, you know, so instead of thinking about the kind of inviolate beauty, you know, and sacredness of
00:58:46
Speaker
the dead, right? Whitman absolutely, you know, is interested in other parts of his poetry. You know, there's a strong elegiac strand. Sure. There were his poems, but here, there's just nothing, you know, celebratory, redemptive. There's no note of mourning, right? It's just your, your
00:59:12
Speaker
foul meat, right? That's what you've become. And truly dehumanizing, right? Like reducing the human to this kind of like foul matter. So that's one thing that I think we want to note is kind of
00:59:29
Speaker
what happens to death, how death emerges in this stanza as a way of thinking not about, you know, kind of
00:59:47
Speaker
regeneration or meaning or, and it's kind of like profoundly anti-humanist rendering of death, right? Which, you know, in some ways sweeps away whatever, whatever you'd been, you'll end up
01:00:05
Speaker
And, you know, he's specifically talking about drunkards and gluttons, but I think there's a sense, you know, this is all of our fate. So that's- We are all of us in some sense, drunkards are gluttons. Good, yeah, okay. I like what you say, and that's, I mean, it was suddenly illuminating to me to think of this as a kind of refusal of or an overturning of a kind of elegiac convention.
01:00:36
Speaker
Right. And it's not where have you disposed of, I mean, even that language would be strange, but of these people, but of their carcasses,
Section Transitions and Poetic Devices
01:00:44
Speaker
right? So dehumanizing in that sense. Yeah. I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.
01:00:52
Speaker
I mean, there is a kind of return, I guess, in the last three lines of that third stanza of these I, of these first person, you know, I lines, right? I do not see any of it upon you today or perhaps I'm deceived. I will run a furrow with my plow. I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath.
01:01:14
Speaker
You know if that i at first was retiring now it seems to be back in a way and interested go on moving into that more active role right which then becomes in the second section more of the kind of.
01:01:31
Speaker
active observation, naming, cataloging, that we're more familiar with in women's register as a whole. And I just want to say one thing about that is it's so interesting. Like, again, sort of almost like a parody of elegy, I was saying before, but also kind of like a parody of Georgia, right?
01:01:52
Speaker
this virtuous agricultural work of the yeoman. Instead, here we have this, I'm going to go and try to dig up a corpse. Yeah, it's sort of run through with the Gothic or something like that. Yeah, so it's such a strange repurposing or re-signifying of these genres, just all kind of condensed in that.
01:02:22
Speaker
that one stanza. Okay, and the last thing I want to point to is that we also have this address, which we've kind of maybe pointed to a little bit, but in both the first and the second stanza, there is a kind of direct address to
01:02:38
Speaker
the ground, right? The ground, you know, how can you be alive, you gross of spring? How can you furnish flesh, health, you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, and grain, right? And then where have you disposed of their carcasses, as you pointed to, right? So on this kind of demand and an assertiveness,
01:02:58
Speaker
you know, wanting an answer and then going out to try to find an answer. But so that element of address is also so central to Whitman's poetry, this kind of direct speaking to the other. And then it'll be interesting to track
01:03:17
Speaker
of what happens to that as the poem progresses, right? Well, this is beautiful because you've anticipated my question or my segue here, which the first line of the second
01:03:31
Speaker
section of the poem, which in a way gives us the title again and is an end-stop line, though it also has a stop in its middle too. It's a sort of a doubled line in a way.
01:03:51
Speaker
also kind of imply, I mean, it is an active address, right? It implies that there's no second person in it, but it's implied, behold this compost, behold it well. I mean, there is certainly a kind of change of tone or a change of
01:04:13
Speaker
project that the second section of the poem has, but maybe some of it is explicable by virtue of noting that there is a change of the dressy. He seems no longer to be addressing the ground or the compost or whatever. He's addressing, I don't know, me or you, you know, the reader or something, right? Yeah, yeah, that's so interesting. So it's like something has already happened in a way between section one and section two. Like the answer is,
01:04:43
Speaker
come clear in some way in the sense that there's a kind of almost like instructional or like pedagogical, you know, look at the compost and see what it is, right, and learn from it in some way, right, to behold it in this sense, you know, behold it well. Sort of like learn what I now see
01:05:12
Speaker
In some ways, it shifts from this incredibly troubled inquiry of the first section to something that's more, the answers have at least
01:05:32
Speaker
that not necessarily come clear, but there's a kind of different, yeah, that kind of didactic tone in a way. Yeah. Well, on the topic of tone, how much pressure do you think we could put on the word behold as opposed to say, I don't know, look at this compost or consider the compost or something like that?
01:05:59
Speaker
But we get, we get behold three times in two lines, right? Behold this compost, behold it well. Perhaps every mite has once formed part of a sick person yet behold. So what kind of word is that? You know, how is it, you know, from it, you know, available synonyms or something like that? Oh, it's so, yeah, it's, it's, it's such a, it's such an interesting word because of course it, um,
01:06:30
Speaker
you know, it's about some kind of deeper seeing in a way, I think, right? To behold, like to apprehend in some kind of almost, again, more metaphysical level, right? To see beyond seeing, behold, you get the sense of the kind of tactile and the vision, you know, the multiple qualities of taking in. And,
01:06:57
Speaker
And I think, you know, I should just say, while we're just to digress for a second, that I just in my, I teach a love and desire in American poetry class.
01:07:07
Speaker
We just read Ross Gay's Beholding, such an incredible book. The whole book is thinking about the question of how to be holding and what is going to be intimate with others and hold others and to look and look anew and to look at violence.
01:07:29
Speaker
and hold it differently. And so I think there's, you know, it's very different project and sort of prospects, but also I do think there's that sense of, you know, how to look differently, you know, how to see a new, that's funny.
01:07:48
Speaker
Well, I'm laughing because I'm writing about that book right now. And I was thinking about it as we were talking about this line. It's funny that, of course, you name the thing that's on my mind. Amazing. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Ross Gay is also famously interested in compost. So I think there might be something here. Yeah. He might be writing back through Whitman, as I think he often is, and revising.
01:08:17
Speaker
putting pressure on and calling into the gaps. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And I think to that sense of, you know, we've been talking about from the beginning, this poem of, you know, seeing what can't be seen, right? Seeing what is sort of invisible to immediate perception and
01:08:43
Speaker
you know, and thinking about that as a kind of ecological seeing, right? Seeing processes in a way that is both empirically registered, right? That is now going to have a list of all of these natural elements doing their thing. But also what is happening at some other level or scale
01:09:13
Speaker
that in some ways requires a kind of imaginative capacity or the ability to hold something in the mind that isn't quite available to immediate perception, right? That below the apple buds or, you know, within the apple buds is also,
01:09:32
Speaker
human decay and that there's a sort of essential implication of these different components. He's not thinking about it in terms of the specific chemical constituents of soil, but there's something in the way that he's thinking about the kind of visible and the invisible or the empirical and the
01:09:59
Speaker
maybe the metaphysical, that I think is, you know, is a way for him to get his mind around the kind of mysteries of ecology. And so I think even in beholding in that term, you get some of that sense of like trying to accommodate different registers, different kind of epistemological registers, right? And, you know, that kind of go beyond
01:10:29
Speaker
what we might be able to adequately account for in our direct vision. Right. Oh, that's really lovely. On the one hand, if you were to say to someone, well, we've talked about compost as like, well, it's not just a thing, it's a process or it's happening.
01:10:45
Speaker
That's not necessarily visible in a moment's glance, right? It's operating on a somewhat slower kind of time scale than that. Behold, as a word, seems to imply two things, which might feel a little bit like they're at odds with each other.
01:11:10
Speaker
Margaret has just gone, you went away briefly, but then you came back. I see you again. Can you hear me, Margaret? Can you hear me now? Let's see, we're working through a technical problem here. She's having a problem. So I hope we will be able to restore this connection
01:11:39
Speaker
um hang on um but this may have you can't hear me i can hear you i can i can hear you um i can hear margaret but she can't hear me so you know what um we we well um it's okay we what we may have to do and i will see if this works is um
01:12:11
Speaker
We may have to make this a two-part conversation, so we may pause here and see if this can be salvaged. I really hope that it can. What drama has suddenly inserted itself into the podcast?
01:12:31
Speaker
But we will try to stop the recording and see if we've got something here. And if we do, then what you're about to hear after it, I hope, maybe there's a way for me to put these two recordings together or just issue it simultaneously as one two-part episode is the second part of the episode swiftly following after the first. So I'm going to stop the recording now and hope that we have good news for you soon.
01:12:58
Speaker
OK, everyone. And we are back. This is a first in Close Readings history, the many chaptered, many storied annals of Close Readings history. We had some kind of technical issue at the end of just a few minutes ago, actually, for us. And we've rejoined the call. And so I am either, and by the time this comes out, you will know which I have done, I have either
01:13:27
Speaker
figured out how to stitch that recording together with this one, or you've clicked ahead to the next episode to get the conclusion to the conversation. But just as a reminder, I'm talking to Margaret Ronda. We're talking about Walt Whitman's poem, This Compost.
01:13:42
Speaker
If indeed this is a separate episode from the episode in which I introduced Margaret and we talked about the first, I don't know, 60% or so of the poem, then make sure you don't listen to this first. Go back and listen to the beginning of this episode. But Margaret, welcome back. Let's hope the technological
01:14:06
Speaker
you know, fairy dust has been sprinkled over our Wi Fi connection here and that we're good to go. But can you hear me now or are we? Yes. Yes. Thank you.
01:14:17
Speaker
Well, no, thank you. Thanks for bearing with me, and thanks listeners for dealing with this little hiccup. I'm revealing the fact that this is very much a one-person production, and the one person in question tends to be not the most technologically adept. So I'm sure this is my doing. Margaret, we were talking about the second half of
01:14:39
Speaker
of this compost, we'd had a beautiful conversation about Whitman's invitation to the reader to behold this compost. And we were applying some interesting pressure to that word. One thing I noticed in just looking over the second section, numbered section of the poem is that, you know, like a kind of rough sort of rubric suggests itself to me that I'm sure you'll be able to
01:15:08
Speaker
complicate and say more interesting things about. But there are three stanzas of different length or three sort of verse paragraphs or what have you in that second section.
01:15:26
Speaker
They each contain internal variation of a kind, and yet it is roughly speaking true that most, if not all, of the lines in the first of those stanzas begin with the word the. So it's a catalog of the this and the that and the other thing.
01:15:46
Speaker
that the second of those stanzas, they mostly, they're not exclusively begin with the word that, you know, and it's not...
01:15:58
Speaker
I think in no case is it that as opposed to this, but it's rather, it's the, I forget the, I'm slipping my mind, it's the verbal form of, you know, so that in other words, you know, or in order that. And then in the final of those three stances, the lines, not all of them, but all but one of them begin with the word it.
01:16:24
Speaker
And so, you know, is there something meaningful in that kind of observation? We spent a lot of time thinking about how these lines begin and the first words and so forth. And so it's just a thing I noticed at a glance. I wonder if there's a kind of embedded argument for you there. That's really interesting. So I think
01:16:47
Speaker
The first of the stanzas is- Yeah, let's take them one at a time or something. Yeah, all these nouns, right? Like all of these things, these entities, right? The grass of spring, the bean, the delicate spear of the onion, the apple. So naming all of these particular features of
01:17:05
Speaker
the earth, the immediate surrounding, things growing, things blooming. And so there's all, in every image, a sense of renewal or opening kind of vitality emerging from the earth. And this sense of newness, the calf, the potatoes, dark green leaves, the colts. So young things.
01:17:36
Speaker
emerging. And then we move from that sort of set of entities, those named things to this kind of argument that there's chemistry involved in this. There's a kind of art, an earth art of making a process involved.
01:18:02
Speaker
And so that the winds are not really infectious, that this is no cheat, that it is safe. It's like a set of propositions in a way. These are all the things that you can do. These are all the things that you can, these are the ways that you can act.
01:18:21
Speaker
the things that you're able to or like the ways you're able to relate to the earth, right? So in a way it becomes a kind of like a catalog of various forms of action and relation, right? So if the first section or the first stanza is sort of here are all of the things, right? Here are all the things emerging. The second stanza is, you know,
01:18:50
Speaker
you'll be able to partake, right? You can taste the blackberries. They're so flavorless and juicy that the cool drink from the well tastes so good, right? So none of them poison me. So in a way it kind of involves the reader, the eye and the you in this transaction, but to participate. But then the last stanza,
01:19:16
Speaker
turns to it, right? Now I am terrified at the Earth. It is that common patient. It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions. So suddenly, there's this sort of distancing again, this sort of objectification, the sublimity of the Earth, the way in which it
01:19:40
Speaker
out with the imagination, that even as one's able to see and be involved and take part in, partake in, you know, behold and partake in all of these exchanges, right, that there is this kind of all-knowing entity in a way, it's this kind of secular sublime, right, that is
01:20:09
Speaker
the thing that is enacting all this, right? And that is in a way what is, you know, refers back to something at the beginning of the poem and names it, but it names it as it, right? The earth, this kind of entity beyond imagining or describing or beholding. Yeah. So yeah, that is a great,
01:20:40
Speaker
a great way to understand, I think, the progression that I was sort of dumbly noticing or what have you. I love that catalog of nouns in the first of those three stanzas. Maybe we can just pick out a couple of them that seem particularly suggestive to you.
01:21:03
Speaker
Um, you know, I'm thinking in a way of like, you know, maybe modernist that I am or whatever of, of William Carlos Williams or something like that, by the road to the contagious hospital, the spring and all, um, home where, which is similarly, I guess, about a kind of sickness and spring sort of emerging. Um, yeah. Um, yeah, good. So, um, you know, what, um,
01:21:28
Speaker
in this collection of nouns, like are there particular aspects of these things that seem, once we look at them in sequence, sort of stacked one on top of each other to be emerging as suggestive to Whitman, and I suppose this is all kind of framed by his
01:21:52
Speaker
and joining of us to behold these
Imagery of Life, Death, and Transformation
01:21:55
Speaker
things. So what is it that we're meant to behold? Pick a couple of these that seem particularly interesting to you. Right, absolutely. So one thing to say is that this poem was initially titled,
01:22:09
Speaker
at the wonder, no, poem of wonder, at the resurrection of the wheat. So I do think that the image of the wheat resurrecting is so interesting, right? And again, the sort of secular
01:22:26
Speaker
secularizing of religious language is so evocative here, right? And all through this poem, there's this sort of, you know, secularizing impulse that's also about this kind of, you know, this otherness, this kind of omniscient force that can be understood, right? And so the wheat has this kind of almost sacred
01:22:54
Speaker
cast to it, the resurrection of the wheat and humble and profound at the same time. So I mean, that would be one line that I want to point to. I think, you know, it's
01:23:11
Speaker
In part, all of these images and thinking about the animal images, the newborn of animals appear, the calf is dropped from the cow, the colt from the mare, coming right on the heels of these images of foul carcasses.
01:23:28
Speaker
these images of these decaying bodies. So then we have these images of like pure sort of perfected newborn being and coming into life. So we have that sense of this kind of cyclicality
01:23:49
Speaker
of the poem in that image kind of moving from the dead decaying this again sort of macabre image of almost like digging up the grave and then to this image of this kind of purified resurrection and renewal and ruinous in these images of new bodies.
01:24:09
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the poem sort of naturalizes it in such a way that I guess I hadn't really noticed it until you were just saying this, but you know, the stanza begins by telling us to behold the compost, but pretty quickly we're not in any kind of literal way being shown the compost.
01:24:28
Speaker
No. Or unless this compost means something else. Yeah. It almost means all of this, right? Because we're looking at animals and so on. Yeah. Right. Yeah. To see the compost is to look at this when you're looking at these
01:24:45
Speaker
you know, blades of grass appearing in the resurrection of the wheat, you're actually looking at this thing that you can't see, which is. Sure. But, but I guess also when you're looking at a calf being born, you're looking at compost or something, right? Right, right. That the compost is like the category for all. And we've been thinking about it in terms of, you know,
01:25:09
Speaker
decay and metamorphosis on one end, right? But actually he's saying you have to look at it at all points, right? And then that is almost just as much as the disappearing and horribly present dead body, right? Yeah, I love that.
01:25:31
Speaker
Right. I was struck by the phrase, the lilacs bloom in the door yards because it reminds me of another poem by Whitman when lilacs last in door yard plumed, which is an elegy for Lincoln. Right. So
01:25:51
Speaker
I don't know. He liked that image. He liked that phrase. Do you have thoughts about the connection of this to that? Is there anything to observe there? Earlier you were talking about elegy as something that Whitman's resisting. So what's going on here? Yeah, I do think, you know, there are all these images that make their way through and kind of get remade and meditated on anew in Whitman's poems. And so this is one, right? And so you see it in,
01:26:19
Speaker
one poem referencing this sort of transfiguration and new vitality that is like the principle of all life. And then you see it in the poem that's an elegy for Lincoln that is kind of more specific, right? It's more connected to particular death and a particular
01:26:46
Speaker
body and a particular kind of condition of mourning. And so it's actually would be an interesting way to track some of the progressions of Whitman's career and his poetic thinking towards something like the way in which Lincoln comes to stand for
01:27:11
Speaker
the nation and the union in a way that in earlier versions of Leaves of Grass and Song of Myself, there's no one representative. In fact, he's quite critical of seeing any one figure, certainly governmental figure, as standing for
01:27:37
Speaker
the kind of the totality of the people. So it's kind of just thinking about the lilacs coming to mean something that's much more particularly elegiac in that later poem, as opposed to what it signifies now. And also just the kind of all of these images in this catalog, they still have this kind of Gothic macabre
01:28:03
Speaker
residue hanging out on them. And that's part of what's so interesting about them. Whereas that's going to be completely erased in the lilacs poem, the elegy for Lincoln. Right. Right. Right.
01:28:19
Speaker
Yeah, no, good. That's great. That's great, which is almost like a kind of, um, I don't know. I don't want to press the point too hard, but it's almost like a poetic version of composting or something going on. Right. Where that material is getting kind of re cycled in some way. Yeah. It gets reworked and means different things or yeah. Yeah. Signifies differently. Um,
01:28:48
Speaker
in different moments. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. What chemistry? So that's how the second stanza of the second section begins, that the winds are really not infectious. I guess all of the that's are like implied what chemistry that this, what chemistry that that. Right. So
01:29:17
Speaker
If the poem began with this startling recognition that the thing that had been taken to be familiar and safe and so on was in fact full of death and disease and was perhaps therefore threatening,
01:29:34
Speaker
And then we start to look at what's happening. Here we're getting the resolution of a principle that would explain that fact or something. I think that's right. So it's like transmuted through
01:29:53
Speaker
poetic image and figuration, right? So sort of cleansed in a way through this act of naming, right? I think that's, you know, that itself is a kind of, you know, the action of the poem is to also to kind of
01:30:14
Speaker
produce the effect that it's describing, right? That it's through the process of kind of moving through this new awareness. It itself is a kind of metamorphosis, right? It's like a metamorphosis, an awareness, a kind of chemistry of in language that then allows one to partake again, right? To experience
01:30:39
Speaker
Yeah. Same features, right? To drink and eat and, you know, walk upon the earth, but with a sense that somehow all the time, mysteriously, these
01:30:57
Speaker
these exchanges are happening or this kind of transformations are kind of invisibly at work. So you kind of hold that in the mind and the poem facilitates that internal metamorphosis or awakening. Even as we do that, yeah.
01:31:20
Speaker
Yeah, as we pluck out some of these lines, I mean, just in isolation, they feel really to have some of the kind of innocence that we were
01:31:28
Speaker
finding more typically in Whitman, and less so in this poem, but it seems to have returned in a line like, that all is clean forever and forever, or that the blackberries are so flavorous and juicy, that when I recline on the grass, I do not catch any disease, right? In lines like this, there is a
01:31:52
Speaker
It's almost like a return to Eden or something? Yes, that's right. And in a way, like this sense of being...
01:32:08
Speaker
like being held, being protected, that I am indeed safe on this earth or in this particular landscape or eating the food that I eat, that I am indeed healthy, right? But the poem has to kind of travel the distance in order to
01:32:32
Speaker
move back into that consciousness of what it means to see the earth as a place of sustenance as opposed to this more threatening surround, which of course I think in that part of the poem we connect as contemporary readers with this awareness of
01:32:57
Speaker
ever-present risk of harm, right? You know, what is in the water? What is in the, what is in what we're eating? And, right, so in some ways, the poem, as it is here, sort of ultimately moves through that toward a certain kind of resolution. But, but still that sort of question remains, and I think to read it now is to think about those questions about
01:33:26
Speaker
um risk and health and fragility and you know different forms of toxicity that we're all kind of navigating all the time and Whitman's thinking about those questions like in his own language and his own framework um what he had available to him but um but that's coming through and worked through this poem
01:33:48
Speaker
You know, part of what's so interestingly emerging for me here is that there's a kind of analog in the poem to the thing, you know, in our experience of the poem, it's like an analog of his experience of the world, right? So it's as though we get, you know, like he thinks, oh, I can eat the blackberries after all. They're juicy and safe or whatever. And we think maybe
01:34:17
Speaker
Well, this poem was really upsetting and gross and whatever, but now it's nice again. And in both cases, the mystery is how did I recognize and take full stock of all the death and disease and so on?
01:34:38
Speaker
And now I've got a blackberry to eat. What do I do with that? And I guess it would be a different poem entirely if it ended with the lines, that when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, that probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.
01:35:01
Speaker
But that moment or something, I suppose, gives way immediately to a different kind of movement and mood in that third and final stanza of the second section of the poem. So Margaret, I want to invite you to discuss what it is that prompts the terror that Whitman seems to feel at the beginning of that stanza. Now I am terrified at the earth.
Conclusion of 'This Compost' Discussion
01:35:28
Speaker
It is that calm and patient. It grows sweet things out of such corruptions and in those lines, right? So what is, you know, in your understanding, prompting that terror for Whitman? Yeah. I love that question. And I just want to say one thing about the last piece of your comment, which is that I think that this shift to this last stanza
01:35:56
Speaker
is the result of what is a desire to repress, a desire not to know, or a desire to move back into some condition of comfort. And this is a familiar mode of thinking for all of us all the time. What do we repress? What do we not look at at different scales, at different moments about
01:36:24
Speaker
are ecological surround, right? And I think the poem would have been different if it ended with that line that you quoted because the repression would have been kind of achieved, right? Or there would have been this sort of this turn back toward comfort and safety and innocence, we could say. But the poem doesn't end there, right? Instead, it confronts.
01:36:54
Speaker
something that is terrifying, right? Which is that we don't know, we don't understand. It is a mystery to us and whatever language or framing we have at our disposal to understand
01:37:11
Speaker
these workings, it doesn't solve the mystery, it doesn't resolve that kind of fundamental terror. And it's a terror in part of the inevitability of death, right? Of our mortality, but also of this kind of larger set of exchanges and transformations that are happening all the time, right?
01:37:36
Speaker
that the Earth can somehow absorb death and grow things anew. This is something kind of monstrous and terrifying about it, right? That we simply cannot internalize.
01:37:54
Speaker
I think that it's like this confrontation with the limit of our imagination. And and I love that ending because I think it's so, you know, refuses to humanize or domesticate or or again repress this harder, you know, truths or limits, we could say. We get a return of the repressed.
01:38:24
Speaker
We get a return to the oppressed. And yeah, so it's all well and good to say, well, the Blackberry tastes good. And it does, right? It's juicy and it tastes good and it doesn't make us sick. But somehow it seems as though the poem can't unknow the knowledge that it has about what it is that made the thing that is juicy in your mouth, the delicious way that it is. And that's
01:38:48
Speaker
an incommensurate kind of, it's unassimilable or something. That's right, that's right. And I think that that is formally featured in the fact that there isn't a return to the address to the earth, right? That's happening in the beginning of the poem. But by the end, the earth is it, right? The earth is cannot be spoken to and responded to. You know, there's not that kind of
01:39:16
Speaker
intimate transaction, right? It is working on its own terms. So there isn't that sense of colloquy that's so essential to kind of how we think of Whitman, the sort of all-absorbing, all-knowing I, right? But actually, he says, I don't get it, you know? Yeah, right. Or, yeah, sorry, go ahead.
01:39:39
Speaker
No. So I was just going to add, or the other kind of Whitman that we might think of the Whitman at the end of Song of Myself says, look for me under your boot soles and so on. The Whitman who's addressing you, the reader, that's not here at the end either. It's this thing that can't be known, that is fundamentally
01:40:06
Speaker
alien, though I guess I want us to say, I want you to say something about the very last line of the poem.
01:40:18
Speaker
It gives such divine materials to men and accepts such leavings from them at last. Clearly, that word leavings is super interesting for Whitman. It's calling to mind, of course, leaves of grass. But leavings here, I think, has some other meanings, or draws out some of the meanings that were perhaps inherent in leaves of grass to begin with, but brings them to the surface. So what do you see in that last line, Margaret?
01:40:46
Speaker
Yes, right. So there's exactly that recalibration of or recycling or composting of leaves as leavings. So almost as like the second order, the thing that's made
01:41:10
Speaker
by humans, right? Or the thing that we do with the divine materials that we're given is sort of, it's, it's, it's the leavings. It's the sort of the, the, the, the cast off in a way, or the diminished thing. And the earth accepts that, right? Or the leavings, of course, also the
01:41:31
Speaker
You know, it's all kinds of remnants or residues or the things, you know, the body itself, the corporeal thing, right? It's all of that kind of after life has escaped, right? It has moved on to...
01:41:51
Speaker
as less of a body. Yeah, so sort of interesting alignment here of the aesthetic artifact, leaves of grass, right, with the kind of the corporeal frame diminished, you know, the things that are left over. At the same time, I think, you know, that's an interesting, almost melancholy ending.
01:42:21
Speaker
And at the same time, I would say just in line with something that you pointed us to earlier about the compost is also the
01:42:33
Speaker
caps being born and the partly the kind of imaginative imperative of this poem is to say, look and see the thing that you think is not in the thing in front of you. So see the death, see the dead body in the newborn calf. See in the diminished thing, in the cast off,
01:42:58
Speaker
see the kind of vitality of all things, right? See the divine materials in the thing. So I think that's the project of the poem is to try to get us as readers to sort of hold these contradictions or seeming contradictions in our mind as not contradictory at all.
01:43:17
Speaker
Yeah, also maybe it is. Now I'm going to contradict myself. And very well, I am large. I contain multitudes. Maybe the ending of the poem is a bit like, look for me under your boot soles, right? Yes, that's right. That in fact, the most profound poem is this compost, right?
01:43:48
Speaker
kind of leaving, right, is what seems to be the strange poem or the poem that has to look at the ugly thing, right, not just at the beauty, not just at the energy and the vitality and the, you know, the freshness of things, right, but also at the corpses and the foul air and
01:44:10
Speaker
And in some ways, that's what you can pass on to the reader. This is the leaving for the next cycle to start again.
01:44:25
Speaker
Right, right, right. It reminds me too, though, I suspect this would take us too long to fully take up, but the word leavings is reminding me, as we're talking about it, of your word, remainders, doing a similar kind of work, melancholic, but also kind of forward-looking kind of work.
Final Reading and Closing Remarks
01:44:49
Speaker
Margaret, I don't want to push our luck much further technologically. I feel like we've gotten to the end of the poem. That's terrific, and maybe we can just cross our fingers now, and I can invite you to read the poem one more time, and then we'll call it a day. How does that sound? That sounds beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me again. All right, this compost. One.
01:45:14
Speaker
Something startled me where I thought I was safest. I withdraw from the still woods I love. I will not go now to the pastures to walk. I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover, the sea. I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.
01:45:33
Speaker
Oh, how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken? How can you be alive, you growths of spring? How can you furnish health, you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain? Are they not continually putting distempered corpses within you? Is not every continent worked over and over with sour dead?
01:45:56
Speaker
Where have you disposed of their carcasses, those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations? Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat? I do not see any of it upon you today or perhaps I am deceived. I will run a furrow with my plow. I will press my blade through the sod and turn it up underneath. I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat. Two.
01:46:22
Speaker
Behold this compost, behold it well. Perhaps every mite has once formed part of a sick person, yet behold. The grass of spring covers the prairies. The bean bursts noiselessly through the mold in the garden. The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward.
01:46:42
Speaker
apple buds clustered together on the apple branches. The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves. The tinge awakes over the willow tree and the mulberry tree. The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests.
01:47:00
Speaker
The young of poultry break through the hatched eggs. The newborn of animals appear. The calf is dropped from the cow, the colt from the mare. Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potatoes' dark green leaves. Out of its hill rises the yellow maize stalk, the lilacs bloom in the door yards. The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
01:47:27
Speaker
what chemistry, that the winds are not really contagious.
01:47:33
Speaker
What chemistry, that the winds are really not infectious, that this is no cheat, this transparent green wash of the sea which is so amorous after me, that it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues, that it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it, that all is clean forever and forever, that the cool drink from the well tastes so good, that blackberries are so flavorless and juicy,
01:48:02
Speaker
that the fruits of the apple orchard and the orange orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me, that when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease. Now I am terrified at the earth. It is that calm and patient. It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions. It turns harmless and stainless on its axis,
01:48:31
Speaker
with such endless excessions of diseased corpses. It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetter.
Reflection and Gratitude
01:48:40
Speaker
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops. It gives such divine materials to men and accepts such leavings from them at last.
01:48:54
Speaker
Well, Margaret, Rhonda, thank you so much for this conversation about this compost. I learned so much from you and I had such a great time and I'm really grateful for your time.
01:49:06
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you so much, Cameron. It's such a pleasure. Yeah, yeah. Pleasure on mine. And listeners, I hope we're able to make something. I feel like there's an allegory here of the poem itself where we're going to make a crop out of the compost of the technological mishap and present it to you. I hope you've enjoyed it. And we'll keep listening to the podcast and share it with friends and so on. But until then, be well, everyone.