Morgunbladid / The Morning Paper
The Complete Article

Iceland’s most widely read daily
Friday June 21st 2002 ARTS section

“I am the poet of the body and I am the poet of the soul”

Poetry Reading
Kaffileikhusid
“Pure Grass”
Poet: Walt Whitman
Performer: Bruce Noll
Cafe Theatre June 11th

We Icelanders don’t often get the opportunity to hear high-quality live performances of the high-quality poetry of a departed poet such as the American, Walt Whitman. This is exactly what the Cafe Theatre offered us last Tuesday evening, and many accepted the offer, despite the fact that outside was was the glow of a beautiful summer evening on the warmest day on record for more than a century.

The performer, Bruce Noll, an American professor at the University of New Mexico, is a great and sincere admirer of Whitman’s poetry. For years he has traveled around the United States with a program he calls “Pure Grass” which he has put together from Whitman’s poems that appeared under the title Leaves of Grass in a variety of editions 1855-1892. Noll’s performance in the Cafe Theatre was, however, his first outside the United States.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is without doubt one of America’s most important poets, if not the most important (some would have him share that place with Emily Dickinson; it would be difficult to find two poets less alike). Whitman revolutionized the American poetic tradition, which did not please too many people to begin with. He went his own way in his poetry, cared little for rules of form; his poems are long, narrative in nature and in form something like a powerful current. His subject matter was also considered revolutionary, the way in which he wrote about the individual, whose body and soul he saw as inseperably involved with the forces of nature, shocked many a respectable citizen; many readers found his poems on the human body and its wonders especially upsetting. Whitman’s poesy is above all erotic, expressing an intoxication with the joy of life that one can’t help sharing.

Whitman’s “aesthetic” is actually very simple: he wants to touch his reader without the intervention of aesthetic barriers: “The person who approaches my poems as some literary game, or attempt at such a game, as something that aims to be art or aesthetics, he will not make contact with them,” Whitman once wrote. He wished to identify with his reader if it was at all possible, and the pronouns “I” and “you” recur frequently, bearing witness to the poet’s longing to touch his readers directly. Whitman defined the poet as a seer and as “the only perfect lover of the universe” which is why the poet’s task is to convey his experience of the world to others.

In his performance Bruce Noll demonstrates Whitman’s desire for close contact between the poet and the reader. He makes a point of establishing direct contact with members of the audience by looking each and every one in the eye, by touching them (both physically and spiritually) as he recites the poetry with the assurance of one who has taken it to heart. Noll’s program lasts about an hour and was captivating in its sincerety and lack of affectation. As mentioned earlier, the program is put together from poems and parts of poems from the various editions of Leaves of Grass, including parts of the well-known “Song of Myself” and “I sing the Body Electric”.

This hour in the Cafe Theatre was well worth the sacrifice of a summer evening. Bruce Noll will repeat his program at the Icelandic Emigration Center in Hofsos in the next few days and I urge Northereners not to miss it. In closing I should remind readers of Sigurdur A. Magnusson’s translation of the whole of “Song of Myself”; it was published by Bjartur in 1994 (the title of this article is taken from Sigurdur’s translation). That edition has long been out of print so there is every reason to urge Bjartur to reissue this excellent work as soon as possible.

Soffia Audur Birgisdottir

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Translated by Wincie Johannsdottir