5
" This hour I tell things in confidence.
I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.
To publish these lines is, of course, to tell everybody. Much as he wants to take us into his confidence, seduce with the warmth and directness of his voice, he's also making one of his sly jokes: he's created an intimacy with all the doors and windows open, in which you could be anyone at all. Even as I laugh at the line, I feel the gesture of his arm around my shoulder, drawing my ear nearer his mouth. What is the difference, in a poem, between performed intimacy and the real thing? What, in a work of art, is not performed? Whitman, perhaps more than any poet before him, explored and exploited poetry's strange duality. In the best poems, we feel the poet's breath, the almost-physical presence of the speaker created by all the tools at the writer's disposal. I sometimes feel that Walt has just walked into the room, as present now as he ever was, a sensual, breathing body that he somehow seems to have constructed of nothing but words. "
― Mark Doty , What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
7
" We were collectively defining our identities by what we would not do, and such an act of definition can be a strange, subtle sort of self-murder. I understand that such a radical act might be necessary, in the face of an intractable self-destructiveness, to save one's life. But I can't bring myself to embrace it, because in any such act of self definition (I'm Mark and I'm an addict) the other selves, some of whom are not named because they don't belong in this context, and some of whom aren't named because they cannot be, but remain phantoms, potentialities, shadows, little streams into the larger liquidity--well, all those aspects of oneself are more or less banished from the conversation, and they retreat a little farther away, and then a little farther again. "
― Mark Doty , What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life