Painting of Walt Whitman by Akira Beard

What or who inspired your poem, “Walt Sublets the Attic Bedroom”?  

I live in Camden, NJ, where Walt Whitman is an ubiquitous poetic presence.  We have his house, which is a museum, the Walt Whitman Arts Center, murals depicting his likeness, a street named for him, his grave, the bridge, and so on.  As someone who lives in the city, my imagination wouldn’t let me get away without thinking about how Walt might react to life in Camden today.  The first in the series plops him down in his old neighborhood where he finds his house no longer available to him.  Naturally, I let him move in with me.

Tell us more about Walt.  What kind of person is he?  Is he misunderstood?

Even though Whitman was the inspiration, I hesitate to say that the Walt of the poem is a historical Whitman.  Someone described my Walt to me as a kind of blubbering buffoon, which is fair.  I think he’s a guy with a kind of aversion to confrontation; he just wants things to be mellow and isn’t quite sure what to do about it when they aren’t.  He’s aimless, but not lost, necessarily.   I have no idea if Walt Whitman was like that or not, but I don’t think it matters.  Verisimilitude can be toxic.  Perhaps the character of Walt represents my poetic imagination: it lives in my attic and is always late with the rent.

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