stonepicnicking_okapi

Well, I like it enough to post it, but I definitely see the arrogance you're talking about but I suppose it doesn't irritate me the way it does you. I've read other parts of Leaves of Grass, but they haven't really resonated with me.

In thinking about posting poems for June, I read all 48 poems in the Poetry Foundation's Queer Love collection and by the end of it I was in abject despair because I only liked, maybe, 4 of them. One was this and the other was Wild Nights. And the other two were written 300 years ago.It was a bit awful because I started having, you know, that familiar and dangerous spiral about not being sophisticated enough or intelligent enough or SOMETHING enough to appreciate a body of art. But most of them are a kind of word vomit of 'I banged a dude after AA yesterday and it rained.' I don't know. There's the message and there's the craft and at least Whitman has craft. I think of him like Hemingway, rightly or wrongly, a dude with a place in the English language but probably someone I'd never want to spend any time with.