final project

Earlier, I believe I expressed a desire to expand my "Walt in pop culture" post. I thought it would be interesting to create something exemplifying this rather than research pre-existing instances. Does Whitman become misunderstood, misrepresented, used etc through this? Does it even matter?  I (with technical help, of course) recorded the last two stanzas of the death carol in Lilacs and made it into a dubstep-ish,rave-ish, electric (?) weird thing.

The night, in silence, under many a star;
The ocean shore, and the husky whispering wave, whose voice I know;
And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veil’d Death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.
Over the tree-tops I float thee a song!
Over the rising and sinking waves—over the myriad fields, and the prairies wide;
Over the dense-pack’d cities all, and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death

Anyway, here it is:

dub carol

9/11

Collective loss, trauma and the way we deal with it never has a clear answer. Whitman and the 9/11 poets all deal with collective loss in an individual way. How do we come back from the horror? The way we deal with it is the most difficult, and can be done in many ways, but most notably expression in art. The process of creating something out of destruction fulfills the creator in some way; through the process of grieving death, he/she has made something new.
Most of the 9/11 poems I read were annoyingly abrasive, but that may have been the only way they could understand the images of people jumping out windows etc. The ones I read were less poetic than Whitman. The loss of Lincoln was symbolic for many things, but he was one person, whereas 9/11 resulted in the death of a mass amount of people. Lincoln was more concentrated and easier to find an enemy, while 9/11 resulted in ambiguity and so much misdirected hatred.
The fall of the twin towers can be seen as an attack on capitalism. maybe I didn't look through enough poems, but I would have liked to have read a less visceral one and more symbolic one (i guess?) It just gets tiring when most poems highlight America and how horrible 9/11 was, but hey, that's how people dealt with I guess.