So this is how the process worked.
You can see the pencil sketches underneath, on the light table.
And then I would ink it in.
And there's the final.
This is kind of like my little nod to Walton Ford.
I don't know if you guys are Walton Ford fans or anything.
But he's just magnificent, unbelievable artist.
But he kind of goes for these perverse sort
of images with natural history.
And I also love box turtles.
This is-- What I did is I based, just like Whitman, I
tried to bring aspects of my own life into the work
in order to follow Emerson's mandate that one's words
and art should smell of pine.
And what he meant by that is that you're bringing
the everyday life into--
You're not drawing so much from other art.
You're drawing from lived experience as you know it.
And that's how this post-revolutionary generation
had come to grips with how to make uniquely American art.
We have to get away from the European mode.
Well what does it mean to be an American poet?
What does it mean to be an American artist?
And what you have to do is get back to the first poem.
You have to go the elemental route, as it were.
And this was my bid to do this.
Now this is a fishing shack on the East Coast of New Jersey
on a barrier island.
It's about 300 yards from the water.
Hurricane Sandy almost knocked it out.
We thought for sure it was going to.
It's been there for over a hundred years.
This was a common building type in Northeast at one time.
But this is one of the last.
My friend Bill--
This is a State Park property but it's
leased out by the family who sold it to the state.
And my friend Bill, who you'll see later
in full Whitman regalia.
He's 6 foot 5, big burly guy.
Think of like an uppercase me.
You get Bill.
[LAUGHTER]
Anyway, so I put Bill in here as well.
So you can see I've tried to--
I do this time and again with the book.
Any Sun Ra Arkestra fans?
No.
OK.
[ROARS]
You must be from Philly too.
They're a bit of a Philly institution at this point.
Sun Ra has ascended to a higher plane, as we all know.
And Marshall Allen has been the leader of the band.
But in Western Philadelphia, these guys
are very much revered.
They still live in a compound out in West Philly.
And they've devoted their lives to the legacy of Sun Ra.
So it only seems fair, as a Philadelphian or somebody
who lives in the Philadelphia region,
to put in Marshall as well.
Just turned 90, bless his heart.
And all kinds of street scenes as well.
You want to keep both feet.
You want to put one foot in the urban and one in the rural.
And that's what I tried to do.
I do this in my own daily life.
I do conservation work out in the Pine Barrens.
And I also spend an awful lot of time in New
York and Philadelphia.
So it's only right that we have street scenes and neighborhood
scenes, with the obligatory South Philly
fruit there in the form of Converse sneakers.
Yeah.
We call those South Philly apples.
Yeah.
And every once in a while, you know, I find old
wrecks on the side of the road.
And then this is an example of where Whitman and I will
diverge in our imagery and our attack on a certain subject.
With this one, you know, this is his account
of the Alamo, the entire account of the Alamo.
And instead of showing a dead soldier or something
hackneyed or obvious like that, I went with a mood piece,
almost like an illustration version of B-roll.
You're trying to evoke a mood not necessarily a subject.
You're trying to evoke not describe.
This is me doing some reconnaissance
in the middle of the winter in the Pine Barrens.
I'll talk about the Pine Barrens ad nauseam but I'll keep it--
It's the last remaining piece of wilderness between--
on the Eastern seaboard, between Boston and Washington DC.
And we're fighting like hell to keep it alive.
There's orchids in there.
There's carnivorous plants.
There's tree frogs that live nowhere else on Earth.
It's a very special place.
But our beloved governor is really giving us
a hard time right now.
So I threw myself in here.
There's my little bid for immortality.
And by immortality, I mean five years.
[LAUGHTER]
But this is one of my favorite passages in the book.
So it just seemed appropriate, just kind of clicked.
This is again-- you see the rough sketch and the inking.
And I'm trying to figure out where
the spots are going to go.
You know.
And this is a poster by the way.
This is the other one.
There's the grass baby.
You can see.
Now you know, this is one of the few points where Whitman
will actually employ metaphor.
And in fact, it's the only example of metaphor
I could find in the entire poem really.
Whitman wanted to get away from metaphor.
He felt that it was an affectation.
It was a very eurocentric sort of thing to do.
So you know, he went in for his cataloging.
He's using the Bible and that sort of thing,
and the, and the, and the.
You know.
But yeah, this is a child, the produced babe
of the vegetation.
I actually had to do a talk at the Montessori school
this week.
I have a stack of incredible cards
that they made me and everything.
And one of the girls wanted to know why
I had a dead baby in the book.
I just-- Oh kid.
That made me feel terrible.
It really did.
OK.
And here, I'm trying to be relatively
oblique about the sexual parts.
In the 1855, there's a lot of frankness.
There's physical frankness but there
isn't that much explicitness.
That comes in the later editions with Children
of Adam and the Calamus poems.
It does-- it isn't really that explicit in the 1855 edition.
That comes later.
So we have a flaming snail vulva in there,
if you want to see it that way.
Otherwise, you could just think that they're
a couple of snails wrestling.
[LAUGHTER]
You know.
Yeah.
And this is a cardinal sin in graphic design of any kind.
I don't know how many are familiar with the term
"gutter."
But I'm running really intricate designs across this thing
and just asking for trouble.
Because if they don't join up, then it looks like hell.
But the people that put this together did a beautiful job
and it just came together seamlessly.
So the gamble paid off.
And in some cases, the type is the image.
This is one of those instances.
And this is another one of my favorite passages
from the book.
You don't really have to do much in some of these
because Whitman, he wasn't entirely sure
what he was going to be doing with all
of these notes he was taking for the several years
before Leaves of Grass.
If you look at the original notes,
they're all really jittery and very shaky.
And that's because he's one of the first writers
in American letters to be one of these writers that's
on the move all the time.
He's on ferries.
He's on omnibuses.
He's walking all over the place.
He's bumping into people and it's just--
all that agitation is in--
you can see it in the notebooks.
And so, you know, he wasn't entirely sure
if he was going to be--
going on the lecture circuit.
I mean, he didn't know if he was going to be making an opera.
He was really into opera for some reason.
It was interesting.
Here's somebody who wanted to--
Such a weird contradiction, you know.
--somebody who was really into the idea
of a purely American form of literature and he's
really into Italian opera.
He would be really--
he would just follow it constantly.
But in any case, with something like this,
what you're doing is you're--
Again, you-- just a very simple image.
And "I effuse my flesh in eddies and drifted in lacy jags."
It's like you can hear that music on the page.
And that's kind of unusual for a lot of 19th century writers.
Usually, it's in how they're speaking
where you get the music.
But the music is actually on the page with Whitman too.
It's a kind of sheet music.
Here's another one where I just kind of let Walt have his day.
I just-- Now this was another failure.
I was kind of playing around the idea of using
like a graffiti sort of mode.
Because the one element that I had going for me
that Whitman couldn't add to this particular book
was the element of time, the passage of time
and bringing these words into our world, our time.
And so I was trying to use idioms that would denote that.
And of course, you know it just didn't work.
So I went with a much simpler solution.
I'm very-- This is one of my favorite spreads in the book
actually.
Because it is such a very well-known passage.
And I felt like I had to give it the respect it deserved.
Now I also kind of played with scale as well.
There are moments in the book where
you think you're looking at a regular magnolia or something.
But it's not.
It's actually a cosmic magnolia.
Because if you look, you see-- sometimes
I'll put a Where's Walter in here.
Just-- I got a little punchy down in the basement,
I have to say.
I was there like, I'm going to put a little Walt there.
And like I said last night, this is me in 20 years
because I chose to go into publishing.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
Warn the kids.
Now this is another moment where I've kind of taken Walt's words
and kind of run with it, try to bring him into our world,
but also kind of keep one foot in the gist of what
he was trying to get at where he's saying,
"And I say there is nothing greater
than the mother of men."
You see obviously that a spacesuit kind of
has the same proportions, bodily,
as an infant with the umbilical cord.
So I try to put Easter eggs like this throughout the book.
I mean that's why--
obviously that's why I did it.