By Mitaya La Pierre
Walt Whitman made a statement the day he decided to write “I Sing the Body Electric”; the statement being that poetic form shouldn’t be restrictive. And by having his poem be comprised mainly of listless body parts, and nonuniform speech, he conveys the uniqueness of going against that grain. As well as show boating what it means to be American; to do things differently. This was significant because it detached itself from the former British way of writing poetry; with calculated beats, and rhythms. Now it goes without saying that Walt Whitman’s poem does have rhythm, but it’s faster and far more provocative than poems before it. This “Free Verse”, as it has been coined, inspired Luis Alberto Ambroggio to write his own version of “The Body Electric” called, “We Are All Whitman: #2: Song of/to/My/Your/Self”. The rhythmic enumeration of both of these poems is very similar, especially the repetitive ‘listing’ and song; but there are also some key differences.
While Whitman talks about parts of the body, Ambroggio’s ‘lists’ are that of actions rather than parts. An example of this in lines 10-14,
“Child with the wisdom of questions,
offspring of poor and rich, of lettered and unlettered,
of rails, planting times, classes and cares,
which will sprout, embodied, with nothing forgotten,
seed in its newly bloodstained earth,-”
While here he is describing objects; ‘Child with wisdom of questions’, ‘offspring of poor and rich’, ‘lettered and unlettered’, he is also listing these things with as much fervent effort as Walt Whitman did in many of his lines,
“Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,
Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids,”
And stanza 9, line 7 is just one example. But this isn’t the only thing both of these poems do. In “We Are All Whitman: #2: Song of/to/My/Your/Self”, while he is listing these objects, he gives the exact same cadence that Whitman’s does. Lets take a look at line’s 43-47 in Ambroggio’s poem.
“This Self is Puerto Rican, Chicano,
from Cuba free dancer of merengues,
from Santo Domingo and all the Caribbean,
from El Salvador and Nicaragua.
It comes from Mexico, Central America,-”
Here he is explaining the areas of which he came from, in turn stating that these are the parts of his body; these of which being lyrics that he sings, that completes him as a human being. “-is Puerto Rican, Chicano, from Cuba free dancer of merengues, from Santo Domingo-” every pause or comma we see here is a new part of himself he lists in constant cadence, just like;
“Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,
Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,” (lines 9-10)
this line in Whitman’s Poem, ‘Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition’; go up and down–much like a heart beat. ‘Of, the’, ‘and, the’ are syllables swoon down very quickly and then pick up right after the fall– ‘Nose, nostrils of the nose, partition’. Now looking at this, we can see the exact same method in previous lines of Ambroggio’s poem, “Santo Domingo and all the Caribbean, from El Salvador and Nicaragua.” Did you see that? ‘And, all’, and ‘from, and’ are all typical falls that don’t have as much ‘oompf’ to their sound, and thus end up being picked up by very strong nouns, like ‘Santo Domingo, Caribbean, El Salvador.’ Carrying a beat much like a heart would, what with it having a constant rise and fall of cadence, just like Whitman’s poem.
And that is the true translation of Whitman in Ambroggio’s poem, is that they both have an upbeat, constant rhythm of syllables that don’t stop and in their own way move the body into ‘dance’. The most precise thing about Ambroggio’s poem though, isn’t that he lists off things as Whitman did; its the context behind it. Whitman indirectly was saying something about America, about it’s stubbornness and how we choose things our own way–but, so was Ambroggio. Allow me to transcribe a line found in the poem,
“They will not manage to deny me or ignore me or declare me undocumented:
I am written in you, in all,-”
Here the poet is declaring he will not be undermined for his culture, for any culture as a matter of fact. Simply because his culture MAKES America; ‘I am written in you’ he states. When he is writing the descriptions of culture, the actions of people, and the culture that compiles him; he is also describing the metaphorical “body parts” that make up “America”; much like Whitman does with his poem having body parts describe “the person”.
Introduction to Poetry 