Walt Whitman on the Open Road

Last week, all of us in VVP took a walk around campus and read various Walt Whitman poems aloud to each other. We chose different spaces for each poem--to explore how acoustics and setting affected our hearing of the poem. We're reading Whitman this semester as part of our last writer-artist pairing. (The artist in this pair is Andy Goldsworthy.) We chose Whitman because he styled himself as a distinctly public, and distinctly American, poet, and we thought it'd be interesting to think through what those qualifiers (public, American) mean in the current political and societal climate. Pictures of the walking and reading tour are below, along with the title of the poem that was read at each site.

"Song of the Open Road I"
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 "To a Locomotive in Winter"

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 "Song of the Open Road IV"

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 "That Music Always Round Me"

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"America"