The Promised Land Project: Setting Out on the Whitman Trail

Turning Vision into Action....at least hypothetically

Strike up the music of the band
We're blazing a trail for the promised land
Heaven on earth is within you.

Through the writing of stories, poetry, essays, and a novel, I’ve creatively contended with the consumer culture and the problem of the ideal in the modern era. This preoccupation in time would lead to a vision of cultural transformation and where I believe our democratic society needs to go to truly progress beyond the modern era. Conceding my limited credibility, this blog provides a synthesis of recognized visionaries, poets, and writers with the objective of making a credible argument. Ultimately, it is a certain feeling the project strives to inspire and sustain on a certain level, making more vital use of poetry and the arts; consequently whether one agrees or not is less important than whether one senses it and feels it over time.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Setting Out on the Whitman Trail

This is unfinished business with me….how is it with you?
I was chilled with the cold types and cylinder and wet paper between us.

I pass so poorly with paper and types….I must pass with the contact of bodies and souls.
-- from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, 1855
So begins the second poem from the first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1855. The opening poem of that edition, later to be titled, “Song of Myself”, would cause a revolution in written poetry and provide part of the foundation of what would become modern poetry. Part of the genius in Whitman’s poetry is that at he can have a way of addressing the reader as though he were talking over your shoulder; and as the second poem begins, Whitman seems to look back at the ecstatic assertions of the opening poem and already recognize the limitations of poetry in written form.

The Promised Land Project is about moving poetry from the pages to the people. We recognize the limitations of the written word. Consequently, it's not so important to read everything I write nor is it to understand or agree with what I write. Written communication has its contribution, as does written poetry, but ultimately it is the affect that we're after, or the feeling, beyond the symbols. The project is about taking a poetic approach that is the creative use of symbol and metaphor to evoke the spirit. Thus we're creating a kind of poetry-based spiritual movement. But we're attempting to move beyond paper and types, that is, the written poetic. We're attempting to move towards a poetry of bodies and souls, that is, the living poetic.