Every Atom | No. 8 | North American Review

June 7, 2019

Every Atom | No. 8

Lauren Haldeman

Introduction to Every Atom by project curator Brian Clements

They come to me days and nights, and go from me again.

But they are not the Me myself.

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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