Walt Whitman comes to life in the Broadway Cemetery

The old cemetery on Broadway near downtown Sacramento was established and in use by 1854, according to a plaque one finds among its paths. The older graves sit on the hill not far south of Broadway. There aren't many hills in the area, which is in geologic terms the dry end of a swampy delta, and a flood plain building since the days when the Golden Gate began to drain the ancient Ione Sea.

So the hill must have stood out in those Gold Rush days when Sutter's Fort and his dream were overwhelmed by Americans flooding in on foot, on mules, on ships coming around the horn. It was the natural place to bury the dead, even before the first damaging floods hit the city, prompting the building of levees and the landfill project which raised the ground in Old Sacramento to its current altitude.

This year the river has been running at flood stage or just under for two months, and with the record snowpack sitting above us, it is going to stay that way for a while.

The confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers during high water this February.

With all that history, the cemetery is the natural place to have a small gathering of poets come together to read and appreciate Walt Whitman. Pat Grizzell has hosted this sort of event in the past, and when he proposed one for this year I was pleased to be able to make it.

Not being that familiar with the layout of the place, I didn't know exactly where the Civil War statue and the GAR plot is, so I came in through the wrong gate and wasted twenty minutes or so wandering from group to group until I finally went over the highest rise, where the very oldest graves are located, and could see the bluecoat on his plinth, and someone wearing a rainbow tie-dye which would have otherwise seemed out of place in a cemetery.

I ended up reading In Cabin'd Ships at Sea:

In cabin'd ships, at sea,

The boundless blue on every side expanding,

With whistling winds and music of the waves--the large imperious

waves--in such,

Or some lone bark, buoy'd on the dense marine,

Where, joyous, full of faith, spreading white sails,

She cleaves the ether...

The whole poem is only about thirty lines--a veritable haiku by Walt's standards, but full enough of his humor and compassion to make it worthwhile. There's always something satisfying about reading Walt out loud, even better if someone is listening.

The poets all chose exquisite gems from Leaves of Grass and other volumes they had. Pat had a particularly venerable copy of something small, where he found humorous, perceptive, prophetic prose wherein Walt commented on the way language arises out of need, using the iron architecture of the time as his model. All the new terms needed to discuss the uses of iron and the work of using it required new terms, many of which are familiar to us. There were no boilermakers or steamfitters in the age of sail, for instance, so those words did not exist.

My second selection was a few lines from Song of the Open Road:

You flagg'd walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges!

You ferries! You planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined sides! you distant ships!

You rows of houses! you window-pierced facades! you roofs!

As to how a list of ordinary concrete and wood structures becomes poetry, that's genius--don't analyze, enjoy it.

To be sure, this listing of what might seem trivial has given generations of critics a clear path of assault, but all it takes is a reading aloud, allowing oneself to feel the exclamations embedded in the text.

Walt is meant to be read slowly, clearly, and loudly.

The Grand Army of the Republic was an organization of Union soldiers formed after the war, to help meet some of their needs. The plots under the bluecoat statue are filled with the remains of men who fought in the war and lived to tell about it.

The statue also brings to mind Lowell's For the Union Dead with its wasp-waistedness and steady gaze into the future, due West.

As I made my way the veterans of the Spanish-American War I noticed a western bluebird flitting between this faucet and something of interest in nearby shrubbery.