Yeah.
It's my first time in Tucson.
I have yet to meet an unpleasant human being.
It's like, where the hell are you keeping them?
I'm from Jersey.
I'm kind of freaked out by that.
I'm just-- I'm sorry.
It's my problem.
I know it's not yours.
Yeah.
But I'm just deeply honored that you guys
would take an evening out to listen to me yammer
on like I'm about to.
So I apologize.
And I apologize to Jonathan-- the camera--
if I'm going to be jumping around all over the place.
So I'll try to be less of a jumping bean tonight.
So I'm going to start things off with sort of a canned speech.
Hopefully I'm going to keep it within seven minutes.
I do this because I get nervous in front of crowds,
because I usually live in a basement,
working on things like this.
So I just want to make sure that I kind of touch all the points
that I want to touch on, so you guys can actually
ask follow-up questions later.
So I apologize in advance if this sounds a little bit stiff.
I'll just pop this over here.
OK.
In 2011, Tin House published Matt Kish's
visual interpretation of Moby-Dick, in which he
made one drawing for every single page of Melville's
great work.
I was taken by the ambition of the project,
and I soon decided to attempt my own interpretation
of an American literary classic.
While mulling over the various approaches
I could take with such a project,
it occurred to me that the next obvious step
would be to incorporate the text into the imagery--
in other words, write the entire text by hand.
So a full-length novel was out of the question.
"Song of Myself," the poetic heart of Walt Whitman's Leaves
of Grass, was the obvious choice,
and not just because it was the perfect length
for the illustrative book I had in mind.
It also represents a watershed moment in American poetry.
The poem itself is a litany of emblems
and has attracted far better artists than myself,
such as Rockwell Kent--
the great Rockwell Kent, I should add.
Its themes were also broad enough in scope
to maintain my interest over the year it would
take to complete the work.
Not least of all, the naturalistic tone
of "Song of Myself" posed an interpretive challenge,
which would force me to take all sorts of visual digressions
rather than merely reflect the poem.
I wasn't entirely sure I was able to maintain that freshness
as the year progressed, which, of course, meant
that I had to try--
much to my dismay.
[LAUGHTER]
I selected the original 1855 version
of "Song of Myself," because it's more experimental, free,
and uncompromising in form than the more structured versions
found in the six later editions of Leaves of Grass.
I intended to take the 1855 version
and make it even more loose and wild,
so that it not only ran in a torrent,
but in multiple directions, like a bustling crowd or a mountain
stream.
I thought of Whitman illuminated as more of a design project
than an illustration project.
The book is lavishly produced but aesthetically plain, even
a bit rough.
To me, Whitman's work calls for what I would
term as an artful artlessness.
In the weeks before I committed to the project,
I struggled with how to tackle "Song of Myself."
I was almost ready to give up on the idea.
I in fact called my agent earlier that day and I said,
I just don't know how I'm going to do this.
But later that night I crawled out of bed,
sat down on my desk, got out of my own way, and simply drew.
And happily, it all clicked into place.
I guess it's what Edison would have
called this hypnagogic term.
I didn't use the brass balls on the plates or anything,
but I was half asleep and then it just snapped.
The next challenge was figuring out
how the text should flow through the book.
To remain visually coherent, each two-page spread
had to have a focal point-- a subject, theme, or mood.
So I broke down "Song of Myself" into verse clusters
that could stand on their own in a two-page spread.
Whitman Illuminated was designed to directly affect
the reader's experience.
It's meant to be both viewed and read.
Its small size and graphic density,
combined with the nonlinear arrangements of text,
invites the reader to traverse Whitman's poem
in digressive ways.
It compels the reader to slow down, turn the small book
in their hands, and ponder the images and text.
My hope is that a few readers might actually
decide to absorb only a couple of pages each day
over the course of a few months, so that they might immerse
themselves in "Song of Myself" in the similar way I
did during the 14 months I worked on the book.
To read "Song of Myself" is to create "Song of Myself."
Each reader changes the text, makes it new.
Whitman wanted "Song of Myself" to be
different for every reader, and this book
takes that idea even further, by making "Song of Myself"
different with every reading.
Throughout the seven editions of Leaves of Grass,
Whitman constantly moves the lines of his poems
around, similar to collage.
So in Whitman Illuminated, the emphasis
on the order of the lines is secondary to the gist
of the clusters of verse that curl around the images.
You may not read Whitman Illuminated in the same order
as the original "Song of Myself" or even
in the same order as you did last time, and that's OK.
This book is merely an interpretation,
and as such it's meant to supplement rather than rival
Whitman's editions.
My sketchbook didn't get much use
during the making of this book, because there was never
enough time to figure out what to do for the next spread.
And that is true.
Every morning I was starting from scratch, and so the book
itself became the sketchbook.
This was a good thing.
It meant the artwork stood a chance of staying
spontaneous and fresh.
My hope is that because this improvisation was sustained
throughout the making of the book,
the reader will have no idea what to expect
when they turn the page.
And because I was making things up as I went,
readers are likely to notice, as they progress through the book,
how the artwork and type evolve.
I wasn't interested in merely reflecting Whitman's words--
such a project would be pointless.
"Song of Myself" does not need to be bolstered by imagery--
the sturdy, pungent, oratorical passages stand on their own.
Instead, I wanted to create a parallel visual narrative
to Whitman's words, forming an interpretive gap
in which the reader or viewer may travel.
Now, I'm not a scholar or an academic,
nor am I a leading expert on all things Whitman.
I'm just an illustrator.
But I have my own take on Whitman's poetic mission.
As I worked on the book, it became clear to me
that the raw simplicity of form and language in "Song
of Myself" hides a complexity of intent.
In fact, I'm not sure that I think of "Song of Myself"
as a poem at all.
Framing it in that conventional way
seems to diminish its power and potential.
I'm more inclined to think of it as a kind of mystic ur-text
that has given rise to countless poems.
To butcher the words of Ezra Pound,
Whitman chopped the wood that others must now carve.
For me, Whitman's insights often outshine his poetics,
particularly his exultations of the body
and of the democratic self, which
remain radical even today.
"Song of Myself" is saturated with tenderness and empathy,
in part because it doesn't shrink from death and sorrow.
I can't imagine a better time to revive
Whitman's humane vision of the American soul than right now.
Whitman's Democratic sensibility in "Song of Myself"
is more profound than political.
Through his eyes, we see a glimmer of ourselves
in everything and everyone around us.
We're connected-- a part of life's eternal hum.
We're both small and vast.
In the beginning of "Song of Myself,"
Whitman holds a blade of grass.
By the end of "Song of Myself," he's become the grass.
The I in "Song of Myself" expands
as the poem progresses, until it disperses, becoming everything,
including us.
It's no accident that "Song of Myself" begins with I
and ends with the word you.
By celebrating himself, Whitman celebrates us all.
And so that's the end of the canned part of the evening.
So I'm glad to get that crap out of the way.
All right.
So what I'm going to go through now, guys,
is I'm going to take you through how I made the bloody thing.
So I'm going to stand over here, because I
know I have to be in--
yeah.
Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]