Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore

SAGE HILL PRESS, Spokane, Washington: 2010
ISBN: 0-9773447-2-X

Available at Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Walt-Whitman-Cosmic-Folklore-Botsford/dp/0977344738/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=


Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore will change the way we think not just about Whitman, but about our relationship to poetry. In the space of these inspired dialogues, lyric essays, and poems, Botsford takes us back and forth across oceans of the imagination, of time and space, to arrive finally back where we started: contemplating a body of literature, only now reinvigorated with deep spiritual energy and laden with the fullness of the enlightened soul. Reading this is unlike no other reading you will do. It transcends the borders of genre, time, imagination, and crosses over into the purely experiential. Alan Botsford, and Walt Whitman himself, dare you to stand on the precipice of true art, sway back and forth in awe, and to fall in.

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"This boundary-crossing work of scholarship and poetic accomplishment offers a deeply felt homage to our original American Bard, a lyrical meditation on the transformative power of the poet's touch and a poetic dalliance with his twenty-first century genius. Not unlike Emerson's own figure for Leaves of Grass as a blend of the Bhagavad-Gita and the New York Herald, Alan Botsford's inspired performance merges the cosmic with the folkloric in an exuberant celebration of the transforming alchemy of Whitman's poetry."

- Michael Sowder, poet & author of Whitman's Ecstatic Union


"Alan Botsford's book doesn't need a blurb, but a broadside to be distributed in all the starstreams of the cosmic poet. By way of meditative essays, prodigiously innocent & inclusive poems of his own, & imagined dialogues, this son of Walt has his say just as Walt tells us that he had his say, & thus in the end could loafe in an ease of praise & acceptance. If we'll read this book as it was written, with Emerson's "flower of the mind," it will enlarge our lives."

- William Heyen, poet & critic


"This is an exhilarating book. Alan Botsford demonstrates, in words as direct as Whitman's own, insights into the poetry's spiritual nature and its relevance to the reader in this moment. His sharp language is often radically amusing, but always serious. The effect focuses ones attention on the erotic unity of body and soul as reflected in the language of everyday, as well as in the high art of poetry. The writing utilizes our most common expressions as well as our archetypal and folkloric heritage to confirm a way forward for the individual and for the society he or she affects. These insights heal and promote growth for the reader in moments of breathtaking clarity.

Clearly, Botsford's aim, like Whitman's, is transformative. In poems, essays, and dialogues, he reveals an understanding of the world anchored in a reading of "Leaves of Grass" that reconciles the seeming paradox of matter and spirit, life and death, and self and other. Not through argument but through art, through insight and sensitivity. In images, too, of transformation occurring through commerce between self and other, in crisis, and in confrontation with death.

This book deserves a place beside C. K. Williams' wonderful new book "On Whitman." What a banner year this is for Walt Whitman, and for the "United States of the Soul.""

- James Gurley


"About Walt Whitman, our most observed poet, it is easy to speak passionately but hard to speak clearly and originally. Alan Botsford does all three in the marvelous adventure of mystic assimilation that is this book."

- Vijay Seshardi, Pulitzer-prize winning poet & essayist


"In Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore, Alan Botsford tackles the question: Where does poetry come from and what is it worth? His answer takes the form of allusive meditations upon, and poetic responses to, Walt Whitman's work. Throughout, Botsford seeks to reorient us toward what he calls Whitman's "United States of the Soul", and away from the present day's "rampant consumerism, unbridled corporate greed...over-consumption, debased human values, and global ecological devastation." In some remarkable, Whitman-inspired lines of his own--particularly those of the poem "The Doorway"--Botsford does the tradition Whitman started proud."

- Michael S. Collins, poet & author of Understanding Etheridge Knight


"Deeply felt and widely knowledgeable, Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore explores the manifold ways in which Whitman's work may speak to us even in the high-tech twenty-first century. In this spirited compilation of essays, meditations, and poems, Ala Botsford offers much wisdom about the creative process, and about Whitman's power, as Botsford writes, "to get through to us and touch us, move us, connect us to the world at our own depths where everything is not subject to use and exploitation but where each separate thing is just what it is, treasures to be found right there on the surface of things..."

- Ann Fisher-Wirth, poet & anthologist