Unidentified
I am the core,
The heart,
The reason
That people like your lines.
The heart,
The reason
That people like your lines.
Why?! Well... test it!
Separate me from
Your poems,
They'll be hollow,
Corpses,
Unreasonable.
Separate me from
Your poems,
They'll be hollow,
Corpses,
Unreasonable.
Do you ask my ID?
Ah... forget about it!
I am the core,
The heart,
The reason
For wars,
Conflicts,
Death ...
Ah... forget about it!
I am the core,
The heart,
The reason
For wars,
Conflicts,
Death ...
Myself and My Heroes -- David Hockney
[The artist is to the right of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Walt Whitman, who has "the dear love of comrades" inscribed on his figure -- the last line of his poem "I Hear it was Charged against Me."]
I Hear it was Charged Against Me.
ReplyDeleteI HEAR it was charged against me that I sought to
destroy institutions;
But really I am neither for nor against institutions;
(What indeed have I in common with them?—Or
what with the destruction of them?)
Only I will establish in the Mannahatta, and in every
city of These States, inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel
little or large, that dents the water,
Without edifices, or rules, or trustees, or any argument,
The institution of the dear love of comrades.
Walt Whitman included this poem in the 45-poem "Calamus" section of his 1860 edition of "Leaves of Grass." In later editions he both dropped and added new poems, finally settling on 39 in the 1881 edition. A calamus is the hollow shaft of a feather, a phallic-shaped reed with "pink-tinged roots," and a character from the 5th-century poet Nonnos(Kalamos -- "reed" or "reed pen" -- drowned himself after his friend succumbed in a swimming contest and was transformed into a water reed). Others words derived from it are calumet (a Native American ceremonial pipe, calamari (from the Latin name for a reed pen case), and 2 reed instruments, the shawm and the chalumeau (from the French word for reed). Although nearly all critics regard homoeroticism the main theme of the sequence, he insisted (in his 1876 preface to "Two Rivulets") that "the special meaning of the Calamus cluster ... mainly resides in its Political significance." Clearly, the politics of homosexuality could be regarded as the poem's overriding theme.