Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes).
Walt Whitman is a man for every season, the great bard and proto-beatnik whose Leaves of Grass is a work to which readers can meaningfully turn again and again. Personally, I like reading aloud from the book on quintessentially American occasions — like the start of baseball season or the Fourth of July.
As part of a Whitman Weekend, those interested in taking part will have the chance to share a bit of their own rendition of Leaves of Grass during a marathon reading of the book on Sunday, April 9, from noon to 6 pm at the Providence Athenaeum. Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline is among the readers slated to participate.
The idea grew out of related events taking place that weekend at the University of Rhode Island library on the Kingston campus, including a lecture on “Walt Whitman, Maker of Books,” between 10 am and noon, on Saturday, April 8, in the Galanti Lounge. (For more info, visit www.uri.edu/library/special_collections/whitman_weekend.html.) While the Athenaeum planned to display its autographed first edition of Leaves of Grass from 1855, poet Brett Rutherford, a board member, suggested that bringing the words to life would be more fun.
Readers interested in taking part should contact Christina Bevilacqua, the Athenaeum’s member services director, at 401.421.6970 x28, or by writing cbevilacqua@providenceathenaeum.org. (Disclosure: Bevilacqua is an occasional contributor to the Phoenix.)
Bevilacqua hails Whitman — a gay New Yorker known for celebrating Gotham’s hurly-burly and for tending to injured Civil War soldiers — as an “an iconoclast who spoke in a very modern American vernacular and who speaks to a lot of people still in a very immediate way . . . He kept celebrating the variety and the mix and the heterogeneity that made this country. And this is something, when we are in a time of looking at our borders and who are we — and who’s one of us and who isn’t — that reminds us that the best part of ourselves is letting everyone’s voice be heard and celebrating the idea of how the multiplicity of voices is what defines this nation.”
