(copy/paste the link, the embed option is failing)
My Final Project
The heirs of Whitman project made sense because so much of
Whitman’s poetry is configured as a dialogue with future generations. When he’s
effusing, asking us to find him under our boot-soles he is speaking to
contemporary and future residents of his spaces. Guthrie took up Walt's message
during a national communications shift from readership to more visual/auditory
forms. Walt and Guthrie both believed
their art should be social, democratic, and popular and Guthrie’s context
provided him a new mode to appropriate Walt’s message to make it truly popular.
Walt said in a conversation with future generations: “you
justify me.” I feel the format I chose justifies Whitman in several ways. His message is
encoded in a pop format which is easily digestible yet contains words of wisdom.
It’s an egalitarian, democratic mode that has appeal beyond class lines.
Moreover, the form itself implies Walt’s message, specifically his panoramic
scope and insistence that there’s no thing too small that fails to possess a fair
measure of dignity and divinity, e.g. various fundamental
American pop tropes. Unusual for a pop song, these parts don’t repeat; rather,
they survey what’s available in a pop context, sampling among options just as
Whitman surveys scenes and occupations, lingering for a little while and then
moving on. This effort hopefully constitutes an authentic engagement with Whitman
and the American Tradition by appropriating existing instruments to serve the ends of each of them.
