Kaimana Review-- Adele Ne Jame's The South Wind

(from KAIMANA 2012, Paul Nelson, editor.

Hawai’i Literary Arts Council)

by Alan Botsford, editor of Poetry Kanto and author of Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore

In an evidence-based world, we are forever trying to solve the puzzle of the play of appearances and trying to fit the pieces into place. For the poet, however, the pieces won’t fit, the puzzle will never be solved. Out of depths Orpheus-like and at the borders Janus-faced, Adele Ne Jame travels as exile and maker in an exploratory trajectory between seen and unseen, alive to the always-changing pathways towards the sayable. In The South Wind, a new collection of graceful, exquisitely-wrought poems, she navigates her way through the winds of loss, violence, and the ravages of history–via lament and mourning–towards the possibilities of new life. Each poem marks a destination reached that is hard-won, hard-earned, composed of the poet’s alchemic power, emotional steadiness, and spiritual nimbleness. And each destination marks a recovery, however provisional, through poetic remembrance and verbal music, of what time and war have undone.

In the poem “The World is a Wedding,” for example, Ne Jame in three steely-eyed, deft stanzas captures the dynamics of her late parents’ domestic life in New Jersey. The scene she depicts, while evoking their Lebanese origins, is an extended family’s meal together as they recount stories of exotic travels. In the final stanza, with the visiting whirlwind of uncles and cousins now departed from the house, Ne Jame offers this glimpse:

When the house is empty

Mother sits alone

in front of the T.V. watching

an old movie, the hero smoking a cigarette.

Father’s already asleep in the small room

off the kitchen, having given himself up

to the next small loss, to King’s Display

where in a shabby darkroom on West 45th Street

he will develop more prints

for the movies, ten-foot blowups of stars,

heroes on the marquee, the crowd passing by.

In the poem, Ne Jame’s progenitors remain real and hauntingly present to her. Indeed the archetypal Father will be forever among the “ten-foot blowups of stars,/ heroes on the marquee.” Yet the poem’s coup de grace occurs with the implication that the poet herself joins “the crowd passing by” in order to escape the Father’s shadow (History by any other name), an escape which, as Abraham Lincoln famously said, is impossible. If, then, the poet meets the requirements of a historical reality all too ready and willing to assert its control over the poetic imagination, it is a trade-off the poet consciously makes. Being bound thus to memory also frees up energy available to her as poet and is a function of the way she chooses to relate to the world.

You could say she harnesses the elemental wind to her poetic craft, intending the energies of a poem to be felt for what they are—modes or nodes of realization, not only of representation. When bringing such awareness into language, the poet as maker almost has to step aside, for a very clear force is writing through her, one that would declare: I have mastered the art of leaving, I perceive the forms and change them. The hugeness of the heart and vision, in other words, is mindfulness in action. We can learn much from this poet. She touches the nerve of our humanity and looses a freedom our hearts cry out for. We can, her poems remind us, vitally wake up to the voice we hear at dawn.

CONNOTATION PRESS- Featured Guest Editor: Alan Botsford

June 2012  Connotation Press: An Online Artifact
https://www.connotationpress.com/featured-guest-editor/fge-2012/1431-featured-guest-editor-alan-botsford-japanese-poems-in-translation

Featured Guest Editor: Alan Botsford - Japanese Poems in Translation

Alan Botsford has published two poetry collections, as well as the hybrid essay-dialogue-poetry collection Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore (2010). He is Associate Professor of American Literature at Kanto Gakuin University and serves as editor of Poetry Kanto, an annual bi-lingual journal concerned with the interplay of voices East, West, and beyond.

---------

Intro: A Snapshot

 

In contrast to the angst-ridden, gloomy post-war Japanese poetry as exemplified by the leading Arechi (Wasteland) poets Tamura Ryuichi, Ayukawa Nobuo and Kitamura Taro, Tanikawa Shuntaro’s poetry carved a new path and became known for its musicality, its pop culture references, its detachment and, not least, its buoyancy. (For a culture as group-oriented as Japan’s, it is noteworthy that his 2011 retrospective poetry collection in English is titled “The Art of Being Alone” (Cornell East Asian Series)). He writes a kind of ephemeral autobiographical verse with a rhythmic exploration of its sources in jazz music, comics, modern painting, etc. His is not an intellectual but a post-modern voice both shamelessly child-like and ruthlessly detached. There’s an androgyny to his voice seldom found to this extent in the West.

 

In the hyper-rational culture of the West there exists the mind-set where in order to speak one has to “break” the silence and where distinctions in language are made, it often seems, at the exclusion, even obliteration, of what lies beyond. In the more traditional East, on the other hand—as in the modern Japanese lyric-- the act of speaking preserves, or honors, silence as its root. Or in Sugimoto Maiko’s words, “Poetry is a thing that emerges upwards out of silence.”

 

What Japan’s modern lyric poets offer is more than a critique of modernity—they embody the effort to think outside modernity. If the ethics or essence of Japan is as “a non-accountability organism”, according to contemporary artist/blogger Hikosaka Naoyoshi, and if it is true, as he says, that “power structures of Japan have a sweetness and looseness, with roots in primitive cultures, not in civilization as in China or the West” [unofficial translation], then its poets and artists contemplate the root-world, the non-West world in such a way as to authenticate the reality of the tree in its wholeness, reminding us how, without its unseen roots, the tree falls.

 

The issue we are all facing-- what I would call ‘The West Issue’-- is critically a male and female issue. Artists and poets have the incredible capacity to cultivate the third eye, to see the symmetry of the underground or invisible world, not only History as linear ‘male’ narrative but Time as ‘female’ cycles with sources found in non-Western cultures, tales, songs, lullabies, nursery rhymes, prayers, chants, and so on. If the West is the upper world of the tree, the East is the lower world of the roots: reality and imagination; tangible and intangible; seen world and unseen world. To balance these forces in a give and take is what true and enduring art accomplishes.

 

Offered here, then, by the kind graces of Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, is a sampling from the wide spectrum of voices in contemporary Japanese poetry, including Tanikawa Shuntaro, Abe Hinako, Nomura Kiwao,  Tanaka Yosuke, Takahashi Mutsuo, Toshiko Hirata, and Yotsumoto Yasuhiro, along with younger female poets who have come into prominence such as Minashita Kiriu, Hachikai Mimi and Sugimoto Maiko. Allow me to thank all the poets for their permission to feature their poems in this column, as well as to acknowledge the generous efforts of the translators whose contributions (poetry translations, essay, interview and commentary) have been assembled here--they each cannot be thanked enough.

review of WALT WHITMAN OF COSMIC FOLKLORE-- WWQR

WALT WHITMAN QUARTERLY REVIEW

Volume 29, Number 3 (2012)
Special Double Issue: Whitman and the South

Numbers Two/Three Fall 2011/Winter 2012

by Michael Sowder

Alan Botsford.  Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore. (Sage Hill Press, 2010)

As Emerson famously said Leaves of Grass resembled a mixture of the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald, so Alan Botsford, one of Whitman’s “poets to come,” combines in Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore poetry, criticism, dialogues, myths and folktales, hip-hop rhymes and postmodern surfaces interwoven with the wit and wisdom of Whitman’s visionary embrace of the reader.  Botsford is an American poet living in Japan, the author of two poetry collections, A Book of Shadows (2003) and mamaist: learning a new language (2002), and an Associate Professor of American Literature at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, where he co-edits Poetry Kanto, Japan’s leading bilingual poetry journal. 

Books about Whitman written by contemporary poets often make for satisfying reading, and Botsford’s book is no exception, for Walt Whitman as poetic progenitor stands as the great exception to Harold Bloom’s thesis on the “anxiety of influence.”  From the late Eliot, to Langston Hughes, Alan Ginsberg, and C.K. Williams, poets are enabled rather than intimidated by Whitman’s looming presence.  Spencer may have sought to “over-go Oriosto,” and Blake wrestled famously with Milton’s angel, but what would it mean to “overgo” Walt Whitman?  What would such a poetry even look like?  

Befitting its precursor, Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore is a unique book.  In many ways it recalls the Whitman imagined by the early disciples, such as Richard Maurice Bucke and Edward Carpenter.  Here, Whitman speaks as a spiritual teacher, poet, and guide, aligned less with the newly-minted spiritual movements of the nineteenth century, than with those popular today in the West, such as Zen Buddhism and Jungian-inflected anthropology and psychology popularized by mythologists like Joseph Campbell and psychologists like James Hillman.  This spiritual focus offers a refreshing read, for, as I have argued elsewhere, Whitman saw himself first and foremost a spiritual and religious poet.    

In “Part One: The Vision of the Dance,” Botsford presents three dialogues between the book’s author-persona and Uncle Walt, inter-leaved with retellings of Japanese folktales.   The dialogues, lively, humorous, and often ecstatic, present a convincing, modern-day Whitman speaking.   In the first dialogue, Whitman invites a hesitant author-persona onto the open road of spiritual journeying and transformation.  Whitman speaks in italicized lines:  “I guess what I’m more concerned about is losing the integrity of my margins, and therefore the organization of my self.  / Everybody, of course, has got to find their own way of getting a grip on themselves and keeping themselves together.  But as anybody can tell you, being both ‘nobody’ and ‘everybody’ at the same time is what being ‘somebody’ is about.” / “Sounds like a lot of suffering is involved” (18).   

Puns, allusions, and wordplay, provide much of the humor of these pieces.  After some extensive coaxing and encouragement, Whitman begins to reveal the nature of the journey: “Yes, there may be nothing in the world more serious than play, but make no mistake—this body is a means the world has of coming into meaning.  And that is your story . . .” (21).  In the last of the dialogues, “Odysseying,” we come to the crux of the matter.  As befits a twenty-first century Walt channeled by an American living in Japan, the dialogue takes on markedly Buddhist tones.  

The struggle to be remade out of this pregnant emptiness will seem endless, for the way’s circuitous.  But be not afraid of your aloneness, your uniqueness, your ‘I am’ ness.  It’s the cost of doing business.

* * *

Go ahead—now peer into the heart of your darkness. . . . Do you see the 10,000 corpses with your likeness? 

* * *

You must give assent and say yes, in utter nakedness.

* * *

Sing, O sing your heart out, Orpheus!  Grieve and mourn your losses.  (46-47).  

A prose narrative, “Thinking Outside the Cave,” retells the myth of the Japanese sun-goddess, Amaterasu as a Whitmanian myth for our times.   Amaterasu retreats to a cave after her brother has violated her and her temple.  Darkness covers the land and the crops are ruined.  Finally, the other gods devise a means of bringing her out.  The bawdy Goddess of Myrth, Uzume, stages a dance before the cave and a mirror is placed before it.   Amaterasu comes out, like a newborn Whitman, or Eve in the morning, enticed by her own naked beauty and retakes her proper place in the heavens.   Botsford envisions her as “Mother Earth,” abused by modern civilization and capable of healing only by a new vision of the body, by our “experienc[ing] Earth once again as lover” (25).   

Part Two: Filled by the Spirit” presents nine essays on Leaves of Grass.  The essays are more impressionistic than argumentative and and like the work of a poet reading Whitman in the open air rather than that of a scholar in the library.  The subject is the spiritual/corporeal terrain that opens up between Whitman and his sympathetic readers.     In "Whitman and Us," my favorite of the essays, Botsford says this: 

Indeed, in its generosity of spirit, its abundance of love, its depth of wisdom, Whitman's Leaves of Grass' offers readers an order of experience different from what we would expect from modern works of art, for Whitman returns the work of art to its original and primary function: a vehicle of awakening, of enlightenment (78).  

Two essays pick up the folkloric theme, reading Whitman within the context of the tale of the “King with Donkey Ears,” as a means to explore the tension between Whitman’s openness and secretiveness.  The king in the tale must acknowledge the (open) secret of his donkey ears, just as Whitman learns to acknowledge the secret of his forbidden desires, which can then become the seed from which his poetry springs.  

The essays maintain that poetry matters, especially Whitman’s, and that poetry makes things happen.  They see Whitman’s work as one of healing, enabling the reader to discover the self “where boundaries dissolve and re-coagulate in constant flux,” to encounter an “otherness” within that paradoxically is the key to a reconstructed and redeemed identity (80). 

After these essays, “Part III: The Cosmic Flow,” offers Botsford's own poetry in sympathetic response to Whitman.  The first section of Part III unfolds in thirty three prose poems or cantos.  Here is XXXIII: 

Diving head first into nature, this hot pursuit of the right to know (colorful world in all its varied hues) starting over again, at the bottom (a vulnerable labor of love) where the tale catches the rock in a hard place come in from the cold but feeling the heat in a hole so deep that no amount of tender loving care can fill its shoes . . .  (209).

A collection of Blake-like aphorisms follows in “Notes Toward a Cosmic Poetics,” which orient us toward the kind of poetry at stake.  It calls for “Poems like a samurai preparing for a beheading at any moment . . . Poems like Emily Dickinson’s honoring the ‘daily crucifixion” (210).   After these preparations, the final work of the book exfoliates into an eighty-three part poem, entitled “Singing With the Dead.”  The poem opens with an invocation of Whitman as forefather and muse:  “There in your sky, Walt, in your celestial garb / Come down, come down to earth for us . . . Be a taker, Walt, take us into you, take us where/ We can give back to you . . . “ (214).  Individual sections appear like holograms or leaves of grass, each with an image of Uncle Walt, bearing titles inviting us in: “Lazarus of Walt,” “Wound of Walt,” “Walt Reading Emily,” “Daedalus of Walt,” “Crazy Blues of Walt,” “PR of Walt’s I(magi)nation.”  This long poem is a pastiche homage, a hip-hop, postmodern celebration, a spiritual canticle courting and cohabiting with a loved cosmic Other.  

Alan Botsford in Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore, steps forward as one of Whitman’s “poets to come,” part of a “new brood, native, athletic, continental”—and intercontinental.  Along this spiritual-corporeal road Whitman invites us to travel, Botsford has come out to pull down fences, repair bridges, and loaf with us and our uncle, observing spears of grass, journey work of the stars. 

-- Michael Sowder

POETRY KANTO - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry_Kanto


Poetry Kanto (ポエトリ関東) is a Japan-based, English and Japanese bilingual poetry print journal founded and originally edited by award-winning translator William I. Elliott and internationally acclaimed poet Shuntarō Tanikawa. The annual journal, currently edited by Alan Botsford, is published by the Kanto Poetry Center at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan and showcases modern and contemporary Japanese poetry in English translation, as well as contemporary English-language poetry from the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Wales, South Africa, Hong Kong, Canada, Ireland, and other countries. Bridging East and West, Poetry Kanto features "outstanding poetry that navigates the divide of ocean and language from around the world."^[1]

Goals[edit]

Poetry Kanto devotes itself to introducing Japanese poets and English-speaking poets to a wide audience at home in Japan and abroad. It aims to promote dialogue between Japan and the English-speaking world. Each issue features an in-depth look at poets from both sides of the cultural divide, setting up a blend of cultures and traditions unique among literary publications. The hope is for readers to step outside their limited cultural spheres and engage in cross-cultural dialogue for a rebirth at the crossroads of culture and imagination.

In a recent interview, editor Alan Botsford said, "I feel very fortunate… to play a role in a cross-cultural mission as wall as literary exploration. I think cultural identity and that struggle, for many people across the globe, the struggle of cultural identity per se and also between cultures, speaks to what Poetry Kanto tries to offer. As editor, I envision Poetry Kanto as a transformative space where poetry’s insights are made available for, and can engage the entire range of, cultures, not just getting into the cultural mix but adding to it, enriching it, fermenting it beyond our ideas of Japaneseness and Americanness."^[2]

History[edit]

The journal's origins can be traced back to the founding of the Kanto Poetry Center in 1968 by Professor Emeritus William I. Elliott, when he proposed a four-fold center to be housed at Kanto Gakuin University—the first of its kind and scope in Japan, to include a library of contemporary poetry, a poetry journal, regular poetry readings in the university, and an annual poetry conference.^[3] The Center, modeled after American counterparts, was originally directed by Kanto Gakuin's Prof. Naoyuki Yagyū and his colleagues, Kazuo Kawamura and William I. Elliott, and has over the years sought, in Elliott's words, "to promote the health of poetry both as an art and a discipline within university structures."^[4] The Center has carried on by the cooperation and funding of successive university presidents, from 1968 to the present.

The Center has held poetry readings with many readers, including Shuntarō Tanikawa, Naoko Kudo, Masayo Koike, Arthur Binard, and Kisako Ryō. It also successfully launched the bilingual journal Poetry Kanto, and continued holding its annual conference until 2005, when the founding editors retired. Over the years, the Center's annual conference, or Summer Institute Program, featured among the non-Japanese poet-readers-lecturers and seminar teachers James Kirkup, Gary Snyder, Harry Guest, William Stafford, Denise Levertov, W.S. Merwin, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray and Jon Silkin, with the preponderance of the logistics of the conference carried out by Kazuo Kawamura.

Poetry Kanto was first published in 1968 to present to the participants of the Kanto Poetry Summer Institute Program. The second issue appeared in 1970, after which a dozen-year hiatus followed. The journal resumed publication again in 1984 and has been in continuous publication ever since, with Elliott and Tanikawa at the English and Japanese editorial helms, respectively. As of 2005, issue number 21, the "baton" was passed to co-editors Alan Botsford and Nishihara Katsumasa with an advisory board consisting of Shuntarō Tanikawa, Kazuo Kawamura and William I. Elliott, but in 2011, issue number 27, Botsford became sole editor.^[5]

In 2005 the look of Poetry Kanto changed, with the professional designer/publisher's services shifting from Tokyo to Kamakura, the headquarters of the small but growing literary publisher Minato-no-hito (literally "a guy at the harbor", taken from the title of Tarō Kitamura’s poem).

Featured Poets[edit]

Since 2005, Poetry Kanto has featured a wide and diverse range of poets such as Gwyneth Lewis, Ilya Kaminsky, Beth Ann Fennelly, Vijay Seshadri, Harryette Mullen, Ellen Bass, Rigoberto González, Ayukawa Nobuo, Tarō Kitamura, Akira Tatehata, Shuntarō Tanikawa, Gregory Orr, Michael Sowder, Ann-Fisher Wirth, Sarah Arvio, Michele Leggott, Saburō Kuroda, Rin Ishigaki, Kiyoko Nagase, Toriko Takarabe^[6], Inuo Taguchi, Hiroshi Kawasaki, Mari L’Esperance, Ekiawah Adler-Belendez, William Heyen, Linda Ann Strang, J.P. Dancing Bear, Yasuhiro Yotsumoto, Kiriu Minashita, Chimako Tada, Masayo Koike, Naoko Kudō, Ryūichi Tamura, Kenji Miyazawa, Maiko Sugimoto, Junzaburō Nishwaki, Irene McKinney, Jane Hirshfield, Shinjirō Kurahara, Ryō Kisaka, Alicia Ostriker, Judy Halebsky, Hiromi Itō, Jeffrey Angles, Takako Arai, Libby Hart, Gregory Dunne, Niels Hav, William Heyen, and Adele Ne Jame.

In addition, the work of translators such as Jeffrey Angles, Hiroaki Sato, William I. Elliott & Kazuo Kawamura, Katsumasa Nishihara, Oketani Shogo & Leza Lowitz, Marianne Tarcov, Mitsuko Ohno & Beverly Curran, Leith Morton, Takako Lento, Hidetoshi Tomiyama & Michael Pronko, Arthur Binard & Ryō Kisaka, Hosea Hirata, and Ayako Takahashi have in recent years been featured in the pages of Poetry Kanto.

Submissions[edit]

Submissions to Poetry Kanto—poems written in English or Japanese poems in English translation—are accepted from December through May. The journal contains 50 poems or 130 pp. per issue and seeks exciting, well-crafted contemporary poetry in English, and also encourages and publishes high-quality English translations of modern and emerging Japanese poets. All translations must be accompanied by the original poems.^[7]

References[edit]

1. ^ Robert Lee Brewer (ed.), 2012 Poet's Market, pp. 340-41.
2. ^ Kiyo, 2012.
3. ^ William I. Elliott, "Poetry Center Inaugurated," Japan Calling, American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (1969).
4. ^ William I. Elliott, "Miscellaneous Notes on the Kanto Poetry Center and Poetry Kanto," Unpublished manuscript, Aug 9, 1993
5. ^ Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, "An Interview with Poetry Kanto Co-editors Alan Botsford and Katsumasa Nishihara," Yomimono (Volume 16). May 24, 2012.
6. ^ Rollmann, Hans (1 April 2019). "'Heaven and Hell' Offers a Powerful Child's-eye View of Japanese Colonialism". PopMatters. Retrieved 29 April 2019.
7. ^ Poetry Kanto Center (2005). "Poetry Kanto". Kanto Gakuin University. Retrieved 2012-07-02.

External links[edit]

Reviews of Poetry Kanto Issues[edit]

• "Poetry Across Continents" by Stephanie Harper in The Review Review, 2010
• "Pages: A review of Poetry Kanto 2010" in The Compulsive Reader, 2010
• Review by Sima Rabinowitz in New Pages, 2010

Related Websites[edit]

• Poetry Kanto Poetry Kanto
• Poetry Kanto page on blog by Alan Botsford
• Personal blog by Poetry Kanto editor Alan Botsford

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.

*

"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