Poetry & Masculinity, Whitman & War

On my writerly bucket list is the following: publish something in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, the journal of record for Whitman Studies and a go-to source for solid scholarship during my dissertating days. What a delight it was, then, when Ed Folsom, the great Dean of Whitman Studies, asked me to review “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up”: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writing. The book is terrific, and I’m pleased with how the review turned out. It ends with Whitman’s view of the Capitol building and its relationship to the then recent January 6th attacks. The piece appeared in WWQR 39.1.

An another critical note, I finally published “I Know a Man,” my essay-review that considers three recently published books—each writing during a different century—in which three American poets address American manhood. Here too Whitman plays a role.

In a rediscovered prose work, Manly Health and Training (1858), Walt Whitman thinks lean beef, pugilism, and exercise will save manhood. Robert Bly, whose Collected Poems opens in 1962—and who died shortly after publication, at the age of 94—believes that a deep, masculine essence links American men. In Christopher Kempf’s debut collection, Late in the Empire of Men (2017), a fully 21st century poet reevaluates his own masculinity, male friendships, and missteps. The essay opens with current events, dips into my time teaching at an all-male college, and engages such topics as toxic masculinity and the #MeToo Movement.

My thanks to the new editors at Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics for publishing it in issue 32.