There are, they say, endless criteria that make “a New Yorker,” as opposed to someone who just lives here for a spell. Some say it’s three years minimum before you’ve earned the title. Others say five. Six. Ten.

Still others say you’re not a New Yorker till you’ve hit a milestone like crying in public. Like stealing a cab from a stranger down the block. Taking a suitcase to work. Finding a gynecologist. Visiting something like 80 subway stations or more (an online quiz I’ve taken twice, garnering “NYC Lifer” status the second time [136 stations visited in all 5 boroughs]).

Someone we often forget was a New Yorker is Walt Whitman. Whitman lived and worked in Brooklyn, as I do now. You may remember “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:

What is it then between us?

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,

I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,

I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it…

I’m underread on him, but not for lack of effort. I tried reading the full Leaves of Grass a couple of years ago and only got to the end of “Song of Myself” before I threw in the towel. Whitman’s is a lush style, which can come across as languid and frantic at once. (My reading log from 2017 mentions my fascination with Whitman’s phrase “amorous wet.” Which is still pretty great.)  

The main thing I balked at was Whitman’s treatment of his subject: the self. At the time, it felt like someone giving a naked monologue before an audience of one (me) in a tiny, hot room. It seemed to me he was too enamored with himself for me to have any space to appreciate, breathe, reflect.

Obviously it bothered me that I wasn’t receiving America’s patron saint poet with the adoration of pretty much every other poetry reader ever. It still bothers me. I know I’m allowed to have an unpopular opinion, but this one isn’t that well-founded and is certainly not a hill I care to die on.  

My slightly negative slant on Whitman was challenged a few weeks ago on a visit to the New York Public Library. Right now they’re holding an exhibition in honor of his bicentennial, which includes a video installation of Jennifer Crandall’s film project Whitman, Alabama. The film depicts residents from my home state reciting passages from “Song of Myself.”

In the gallery, underneath the screen are two handheld speakers on the wall attached by a steel cable, not unlike the kind used on antique telephones, for visitors to hear the video. I stood there and stood there, listening to poetry recited in my native dialect, intercut with footage of forests and fields and highways like the ones I knew as a child. Song of myself, indeed.

I was captivated by the first subject, a white-headed lady named Virginia Mae Schmitt. She sounds just like my Granny, who also sits in a favored armchair beside a table littered with prescription bottles. Schmitt looks proudly into the camera and begins Verse 1:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

She claims Whitman’s 37 years, referenced in line 8, and is hoping to cease not till death. She speaks the final line and says, “Did we get it?”

I’m in Alabama now as I write this, having spent the day on a sunny back porch in 78-degree weather. I’ve seen my Granny yesterday, held her arm as she climbed steps, eaten Easter lunch with her and the rest of my family, in the house I was brought home to as a newborn. My mom, like Granny and Mamaw before her, made a spread big enough for a small army, complete with sweet potato casserole, Honey Baked Ham she shaved off the bone, and banana pudding from scratch. She bought rolls and petit fours from the bakery that made my first birthday cake.

Do I celebrate that? Sing that? Because, even though I don’t live here anymore, Alabama is me. On this porch, there’s no edge between my skin and the pollen-thick air. I could visit all 472 subway stations in New York City, and that would never change.

Whitman accepted who he was, relished it, yawped it. I think I have something to learn from that. But even now, rereading his words, I’m nowhere near as moved as I was watching the subjects of Crandall’s film—which also included a young Muslim woman and the host of a radio show for callers looking to swap things—recite the same lines.

Maybe I was moved because some of the film participants are marginalized members of society, celebrating themselves beautifully with Whitman’s electric verse. Maybe the film makes the ordinariness of my childhood—its familiar faces and places—wondrous again, heightened even. Maybe it’s that I miss my Granny.

Either way, Walt wore me down. I’m trying Leaves of Grass again. Amorous wet ahoy!