Every Atom | No. 8

Months later, while organizing sections of the Walt Whitman Archive for a course at the University of Iowa with Ed Folsom ...

The title of the section -- [Scene in the woods on] -- immediately haunted me.

What followed were frantic fragments written during Whitman's time in war-time hospitals.

An editorial note in the archive explained that some of these words served as the basis for poems in Leaves of Grass.

So I followed them over to "Song of Myself." But what was I looking for? I didn't quite know.

I found inklings of what might have been calling out to me inside the 1855 edition.

But it wasn't until I discovered the poem "Spirit Whose Work Is Done" that I felt I was close.

There were ghosts here, I just knew it. And when I started making erasure poems from these lines I was looking for my own ghosts

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Lauren Haldeman is the author of Instead of Dying (winner of the 2017 Colorado Prize for Poetry), Calenday (2014), and the artist book The Eccentricity is Zero (2014). A comic book artist and poet, she’s received an Iowa Arts Fellowship and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award. This poetry-comic is an excerpt from a graphic novel manuscript in progress titled Team Photograph.

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Every Atom

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Every Atom | No. 8

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