Call to Liberty

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Call to Liberty

“I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops

of the world.”--Walt Whitman.

In the fall of 1956, when

I started junior high school,          the English teachers began

                                to tackle poetry in earnest.

                       It was abrupt adieu to limericks

                and sweet nursery rhymes,

        & a swift boy howdy to some

lame epic-length sing-song poem

        called HIAWATHA by a dead dude 

                 named Hank Waddy Longfellow, & most

                        of us were chanting, You’re a poet,

                                  but don’t know it,

                                  even though your feet show it; 

                                  they’re Longfellows;

followed furiously by a sicky-sweet poem

about some royal Greek fags        called OZYMANDIAS

                                  by Johnny Keats, then I think

                           there was a wrestling match with

               some archaic clumsy clunker called 

MY BRIGANTINE by J. Fenimore Cooper,

with Willy Wordsworth next up

               sharing some silly clap-trap verse called

                            I WANDERED LONELY LIKE A CLOUD--

and wouldn’t you know it,

these stomach-churning

overly Victorian romantic & saccharine-sentimental verses

           continued right into high school English,

                     as we were introduced to the Belle of Amherst

                                herself, Miss Emily D, whom Brandon Braggis said

                                          wrote sad depressed poems because she

                                probably was a dyke, & of course all those

                     love sonnets by Shakespeare, & those fey clever lines

                from Oscar Wilde, none of which I can remember,

only recalling that his real name was 

Oscar Fingal O’Flaherte Willis Wilde,

& that he was a stylish infamous queer

at a dangerous time when gay men

were often beaten to death or castrated;

but then in my sophomore year            I was struck with a literary bolt

                        of lightning called Walt Whitman,

& since I already was writing prose                   in creative writing classes,

             I was overjoyed to find out that the stoic rules

             dictating what poetry was, or even could be,

             had been trampled--as I read poems that had

words & phrases that ran wild & free 

like high desert mustangs,

                            that leaped out of the sea nets

like quartets of dolphins                   with the sun glistening on

                            their shining heads;         words that took flight,

               vibrating out of condor & eagle wings.

The first Whitman poem I encountered was a verse of war:

Beat! beat! drum!--blow! bugle! blow!

through windows--through doors,

bursting like a relentless force;

so rattle quicker heavier drums--in bugles wilder blow.

Old Walt was like a huge orange-keeled Ice Breaker,

cracking through my adolescent resistant permafrost,

suddenly cutting the hemp fetters on my own poetics,

                           putting me in mind of war drums

                           & military bugle calls,       as I imagined

                    the look that Davy Crockett gave to Jim Bowie

             when they heard Santa Ana playing the Deguello,

realizing that the fresh troops storming

the crumbling adobe walls of the Alamo

had “no quarter” on their lips;             or those stirring buglers

             leading Cavalry charges during the Indian campaigns

                      way out West--or those German bugle calls heard

                                 over the muddy trench tops, ricocheting

off barbed wire in No-Man’s Land;      or those WWII Japanese

                      bugle calls that signaled a Banzai attack,

                                                             or those eerie haunting

midnight Chinese Bugle calls during the Korean War,

                      often broadcast on loud speakers, & I welcomed all

of those Whitman cronies, those bellicose blood-soaked muses,

for Uncle Walt was truly my Liberator, whelping my undiscovered

poetic yearnings, the Captain of my future wayward voyages deep

into the Sea of Freedom---oh thank-you my Captain, my Admiral,

                                                                my Monarch, my Lord, 

                         for I continue to honor thee,

                         poetically & spiritually. 

Glenn Buttkus

Posted over on dVerse Poets Poetics

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