"The Hill We Climb," Amanda Gorman's Inauguration Poem

Amanda Gorman recites her poem, "The Hill We Climb," on the occasion of the inauguration of Joseph Biden as the 46th president of the United States on January 20, 2021. Gorman was selected as the first National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017. 

National Book Festival 2019

The 19th annual National Book Festival, organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress, will be held on Saturday, August 31, 2019, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. The festival is free and open to the public.

More than 100 authors, poets, and illustrators will be making presentations throughout the day on stages for Children, Teens, Fiction, History & Biography, International, Poetry & Prose, Genre Fiction, Science, and other themes & genres. Speakers include such writers as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, José Andrés, Raina Telgemeier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Barbara Kingsolver, and many others. Further information, including a schedule of events and a map of the festival grounds, can be found at the festival website. Mobile apps are also available for the Festival.

This year's poster was designed by Marian Bantjes; a gallery of all Festival posters from 2001 to 2018 can be viewed here.

Walt Whitman Sings Out at 200

The bicentennial of the birth of the great poet Walt Whitman [1819-1892] is today, May 31, 2019. The irrepressible Whitman still sings in the 21st century, but if you would like to check out his sole surviving recording, circa 1889-90, you can listen to it here. The recording is a recitation of the following poem, though the last two lines are not captured on the wax cylinder:

America 

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, 

All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old, 

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, 

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love, 

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, 

Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

The story of how it came about, and its technical aspects, can be read in Professor Ed Folsom's "The Whitman Recording." The scholarship on Whitman is of course vast, with (re)discoveries in recent years including Whitman's novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, and a lengthy newspaper series curiously called "Manly Health and Training," both texts being uncovered by Zachary Turpin.

The University of Iowa has long been a center for Whitman scholarship, with Prof. Folsom and others maintaining the extensive Walt Whitman Archive and editing the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. The first MOOC (or Massive Open Online Course) that Iowa's International Writing Program ever offered, in 2014, was "Every Atom: Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself.'"

In 2005, Iowa mounted a major exhibition that drew heavily upon the Whitman collection of Dr. Kendall Reed, and for which Prof. Folsom wrote an extensive illustrated catalog, Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman: A Catalog & Commentary. The catalog delves deeply into not only Whitman's writing practice but how his knowledge of printing influenced the design and make-up of his ever-evolving masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. A fascinating study (and freely available online), it begins:  

Walt Whitman is the only major American poet of the nineteenth century to have an intimate association with the art of bookmaking. Everyone knows Whitman as a poet and the author of one of the most studied books of American poetry, Leaves of Grass. What is less well known is that Whitman was trained as a printer and throughout his life spent time in printing shops and binderies, often setting type himself and always intimately involved in the design and production of his books. Whitman did not just write his book, he made his book, and he made it over and over again, each time producing a different material object that spoke to its readers in different ways.

No nineteenth-century American author was more involved in the range of actual activities of bookmaking than Whitman. He began his career as a newspaper worker, learning typesetting at the young age of twelve as an apprentice on the Long Island Patriot under the tutelage of William Hartshorne (1775–1859), a master printer (Whitman called him "the veteran printer of the United States") who later became Brooklyn's city printer. Late in his life, Whitman wrote a poem called "A Font of Type," in which he imagines all the "unlaunch'd voices—passionate powers, / Wrath, argument, or praise, or comic leer, or prayer devout" that lie "within the pallid slivers slumbering" in "This latent mine" of the type-box . . . .

To commemorate Whitman's enduring body of work, the University of Iowa Libraries offers the exhibition, Walt Whitman: A Bicentennial Celebration, through August 9, as well as Walt Whitman at 200: The Bicentennial Symposium, on June 18-19. Additional events and programming nationally can be found at the Walt Whitman Initiative website. 

Note: The illustration above is from the frontispiece for the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), as found in the University of Iowa Libraries' copy. 

The Spirit That Moves Us Press: Morty Sklar

For those who may not know, the poet and publisher, Morty Sklar [1935-2018], died at the end of December 2018 in Jackson Heights, Queens. Morty had ridden his motorcycle out to Iowa City circa 1971, and ended up staying until 1989, when he moved back to New York City. The Common Curator met him in 1988 at a rooming house, where Morty happened to be the resident manager (the property, incidentally, was owned by W.P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe, which became The Field of Dreams phenomenon). Morty was a true character, with a bottomless reservoir of stories and anecdotes, all conveyed with a pronounced New York accent that was never tempered in the slightest by nearly two decades of Iowa living. 

Morty operated The Spirit That Moves Us Press out of his then-quarters in the house, and a key element of his enterprise was a large, archaic IBM composing machine with which he electronically typeset all his books. His most notable publication was no doubt Jaroslav Seifert's The Casting of Bells (1983). In the following year Seifert won the Nobel Prize for Literature, yet was not then widely known in literary circles outside his native Czechoslavakia. Needless to say, after the prize was announced, journalists and critics from across the U.S. and abroad were scrambling to find copies of Seifert's work in English translation, and inundated Morty with book orders. Unfortunately, according to Morty's recounting, he had recently moved, and the phone company had messed up his call-forwarding request, hence he lost many potential sales as well as a good portion of once-in-a-lifetime publicity. Such are the travails of small presses! 

The Spirit That Moves Us magazine was the first thing Morty published, in 1975, and he went on to issue a number of books of poetry, fiction & essays, including: The Actualist Anthology; Nuke-Rebuke; Editor's Choice (a series); Patchwork of Dreams: Voices from the Heart of the New America; and similar collections. In addition, he published volumes by individual poets, including Seifert (several titles), local Chuck Miller, and others. His own poetry, The Smell of Life: Poems 1969-2005, was also published under the TSTMUP imprint. Morty's final book was The Ultimate Actualist Convention: A Detailed View of Iowa City Actualism in the 1970s & 1980s and Its Migration to the San Francisco Bay Area, which came out in 2017.

The Common Curator last saw Morty in the late 1990's/early 2000's at the annual Small Press Fair held in Manhattan, where they both periodically exhibited their wares after leaving Iowa. There's a lot more that could be related, of course, and for those who are interested, below are compiled various resources that touch on Morty's life and career as an author, editor, and small press publisher. He was still giving readings as of last summer, and video of that and other things can be found at his YouTube channel. 

Morty was always a New Yorker through and through, but it seemed that he nevertheless found Iowa to be fertile ground for his fertile mind, and that in the end he gave as much to the City of Literature as he harvested.

May the Spirit Move Us All in 2019!

   *  *  *  *

-- Obituary [Iowa City Press-Citizen, January 1, 2019]

-- The Spirit That Moves Us Press [established circa 1975]

-- YouTube Channel [including readings and miscellanea]

-- The Reminiscences of Morty Sklar [Phoenix House Foundation Oral History Project, Columbia University, September 25, 2014]

-- Poet & Writers Biography

-- Poetry City Actualized: A Look Back at the Birth of an Iowa City-based Literary Movement [Little Village, January 9, 2015]

-- Vibrant Tales In Small Book On Queens [New York Times article about the anthology, Patchwork of Dreams, December 7, 1996]

-- Little-Known in U.S., Nobel Poet Praised Here [New York Times article about Jaroslav Seifert, whom Sklar published the year prior, October 12, 1984]

. . . ''The Casting of Bells,'' a 64-page collection translated by Tom O'Grady and Paul Jagasich, and published in August 1983 by The Spirit That Moves Us Press in Iowa City, Iowa. Morty Sklar, who described himself yesterday as ''publisher, editor, typesetter and stamp licker'' of the press, said his is a small, independent press that publishes two books a year. He published 1,000 copies of the Seifert book, but yesterday, upon hearing the news from Sweden, he reordered 2,500 more. It is available in paperback for $6.

The National Book Festival: Journey to the Unknown

The 16th annual National Book Festival, organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress, will be held on Saturday, September 24, 2016, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. The festival is free and open to the public.

More than 120 authors, poets, and illustrators will be making presentations throughout the day in the theme-based pavilions for Children, Teens, Books to Movies, Contemporary Life, Fiction, Food & Home, Graphic Novels, History & Biography, International, Poetry & Prose, and Science. Keynote speakers on the main stage include Stephen King, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shonda Rhimes, Bob Woodward, Raina Telgemeier, and Salman Rushdie. 

Further information, including a schedule of events and a map of the festival grounds, can be found at the festival website. Mobile apps are also available for the Festival. This year's poster was designed by Yuko Shimizu; a gallery of all Festival posters from 2001 to 2016 can be viewed here. 

Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" as a MOOC

The International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa is offering a Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, entitled "Every Atom: Walt Whitman's Song of Myself." The course is the university's inaugural MOOC, and will run from February 17 to March 29, 2014. Lead instructors will be Professors Christopher Merrill, Director of the IWP, and Ed Folsom, Co-Director of the Walt Whitman Archive and Editor-in-Chief of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. The course is free, and registration can be accomplished online. Information on additional courses can be found at The Writing University's web site.

April Is the Coolest Month

It is fitting that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced during Poetry Month that Kenneth Price, professor at the University of Nebraska--Lincoln and co-editor of the Walt Whitman Archive, had conclusively identified nearly 3,000 documents as the work--at least in part--of Walt Whitman. Whitman lived in Washington, D.C. from 1863 to 1873, and was employed variously as a government clerk, copyist, and scribe in offices of the Army Paymaster, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Attorney General. The exact nature of Whitman's intellectual contributions to these documents will require further study and elaboration, but the documents nonetheless represent an important new archival facet in the life of one of America's greatest poets.

Further resources on Whitman are available at the Walt Whitman Archive, and at the Library of Congress, which has the largest Whitman archives in the world (a guide is available online). A portrait of Whitman as an older man, as well as a link to an online version of his Leaves of Grass (1855), can be found at an earlier Common Curator posting.

World Poetry Day 2011

Every year on March 21st, UNESCO celebrates World Poetry Day (WPD). The decision to commemorate WPD was adopted during UNESCO’s 30th session held in Paris in 1999. On the occasion of this year's WPD, Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, stated in her annual message:

Poets convey a timeless message. They are often key witness to history’s great political and social changes. Their writings inspire us to build lasting peace in our minds, to rethink relations between man and nature and to establish humanism founded on the uniqueness and diversity of peoples. This is a difficult task, requiring the participation of all, whether in schools, libraries or cultural institutions. To quote the poet Tagore, the 150th anniversary of whose birth will be celebrated this year, "I have spent my days in stringing and unstringing my instrument. [read more].

Writing a few years before Tagore's birth, the great American poet, Walt Whitman, starts the final section of "Song of Myself," published in Leaves of Grass [1855], as follows:

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me . . . . he

complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed . . . . I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

And concludes with these lines:

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Fail to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop some where waiting for you

Note: The Library of Congress has the largest Whitman archives in the world; for further information consult its guide to online resources.