mamaist

RELEASE DATE:    SPRING 2010

SAGE HILL PRESS

Spokane, Washington

$24.95  hardbound

 Praise for

WALT WHITMAN OF COSMIC FOLKLORE

In Walt Whitman Of Cosmic Folklore, Alan Botsford tackles the question: Where does poetry come from and what is it worth? His answer takes the form of allusive meditations upon, and poetic responses to, Walt Whitman’s work. Throughout, Botsford seeks to reorient us toward what he calls Whitman’s “United States of the Soul"—and away from the present day’s “rampant consumerism, unbridled corporate greed... over-consumption, debased human values, and global ecological devastation.” In some remarkable, Whitman-inspired lines of his own—particularly those of the poem “The Doorway”—Botsford does the tradition Whitman started proud.

Michael Collins associate editor, Calalloo

About Walt Whitman, our most observed poet, it is easy to speak passionately but hard to speak clearly and originally. Alan Botsford does all three in the marvelous adventure of mystic assimilation that is this book.

Vijay Seshadri author of Wild Kingdom and The Long Meadow

In Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore, Alan Botsford has given us something profound and necessary: a finely and perceptively wrought affirmation of poetry’s mysterious, primal, timeless, and transformative powers. Himself a poet, Botsford reconsiders our 21st century existence through Whitman’s poetic consciousness— one that thought poetry to be the direct issue of the body, the soul, the very earth and stars. In an age of pervasive cynicism, the deification of technology, disconnection from our bodies and the natural world, the overvaluing of intellect and reason, and the politicization of art and literature in the academy, Botsford’s book is a crucial reminder that the best poetry puts us back in touch with “the spiritual ethos of Eros” and “a living connection to the gods,” without which we are not fully human.

 Mari L’Esperance author of The Darkened Temple

Alan Botsford brings Whitman's spirit into the modern world and thereby gives his work a whole new context in which to be appreciated, delving into our need for poetry as well as the nature of making poems. Botsford’s scope is wide as he imagines Whitman relative to Lazarus, Buddha, Odysseus. His work is imbued with the wisdom of the well-read.

Sally Bliumis-Dunn author of Talking Underwater

 
...a fresh, titillating look at Whitman. The many perspectives Botsford brings to bear on his poetry serve to vindicate his legacy as the premier voice of healthy- mindedness. The eternal optimist has valiantly withstood the jeers and barbs of the negative naysayers who have derided him for being a simplistic, naive poet of cheer. Well, it seems the cosmic cheer has endured—no, it has prevailed. Whitman’s gift to us is that he holds before us a mirror of ourselves; he shows us our potential. Botsford's book insightfully captures this mirroring effect, as I hear in his own beautiful prose and poetry echoes of the great Dionysian Bard himself. He pays the greatest homage to Whitman by speaking back to him in fresh language but in his own voice, using his own rhapsodic tone....In some ways only another poet could do Whitman justice.

D. J. Moores author of Mystical Discourse in Wordsworth and Whitman: A Transatlantic Bridge

Deeply felt and widely knowledgeable, Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore explores the manifold ways in which Whitman’s work may speak to us even in the high-tech twenty-first century. In this spirited compilation of essays, meditations, and poems, Alan Botsford offers much wisdom about the creative process, and about Whitman’s power, as Botsford writes, “to get through to us and touch us, move us, connect us to the world at our own depths where everything is not subject to use and exploitation but where each separate thing is just what it is, treasures to be found right there on the surface of things...”

Ann Fisher-Wirth author of Blue Window, Five Terraces, and Carta Marina

(Front flap copy)

Essentially a work exploring the spiritual life with Whitman’s poetry as guide, this book treats the poet’s masterwork Leaves of Grass from both analytical and creative perspectives. It includes critical essays on the archetypal sources of Whitman's poetry, as well as dialogues and poems offering fresh imaginings of Whitman in the 21st century. Written over a ten-year period, it is a search for the living ‘poetic lore’ of Walt Whitman. Adrienne Rich, quoting Whitman in a recent speech, said “poetic lore [is]...a conversation overheard in the dusk, from speakers far or hid, of which we get only a few broken murmurs.” Whitman’s poetic journey has created a continuing afterlife, and the countless readings that have accrued since his lifetime testify to the belief that, as here stated by psychologist James Hollis in On This Journey, “The evolution of the cosmos depends on the individuation of each of us.” In this communal narrative, though Whitman the man dies, as keeper of the poetic lore he does not end but instead goes underground to be passed from one generation to the next, much the way folktales and fairytales survive their telling, their spoken limits, to affix themselves by strange alchemy as part of the cultural ferment, if not the modern soul.

(Back flap copy)

Stranger, welcome!
...But... how... how did you know?

You're in a strange new place, aren't you?
...I...I don't understand. What's going on here?

You're in touch with the way things can be understood: that's called listening.
But why do I hear laughing?

Because of the way we're looking at each other, that's all.
Oh! I can see myself well enough... But who are you?

Did you really think the world you live in is what meets  the eye only? Only when your inner eye opens to the world in its wholeness can your true "I" begin to be born.
I don't get it. If I'm looking at myself, I can't see  you. And if I'm looking at you, I can't see myself. How come?

So begins the poet’s dialogue with Walt Whitman. Exploring the manifold permutations of self that make up who we are in the modern world, Alan Botsford creates a wonderful, strange marriage of Amaterasu and OutKast, poem and essay, Odysseus and Urashimataro, Walt Whitman and himself, to create a true plurality of voices, reaching across time and imagination to remind us that in our legends, our myths, our poets, we have answers to live, indeed, more than enough.

(Back cover copy)

Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore will change the way we think not just about Whitman, but about our relationship to poetry. In the space of these inspired dialogues, lyric essays, and poems, Botsford takes us back and forth across oceans of the imagination, of time and space, to arrive finally back where we started: contemplating a body of literature, only now reinvigorated with deep spiritual energy and laden with the fullness of the enlightened soul. Reading this is unlike no other reading you will do. It transcends the borders of genre, time, imagination, and crosses over into the purely experiential. Alan Botsford, and Walt Whitman himself, dare you to stand on the precipice of true art, sway back and forth in awe, and to fall in.

 ***

Alan Botsford’s book doesn’t need a blurb, but a broadside to be distributed in all the starstreams of the cosmic poet. By way of meditative essays, prodigiously innocent & inclusive poems of his own, & imagined dialogues, this son of Walt has his say just as Walt tells us that he had his say, & thus in the end could loafe in an ease of praise & acceptance. If we’ll read this book as it was written, with Emerson’s “flower of the mind,” it will enlarge our lives.

~William Heyen

This boundary-crossing work of scholarship and poetic accomplishment offers a deeply felt homage to our original American Bard, a lyrical meditation on the transformative power of the poet’s touch and a poetic dalliance with his twenty-first century genius. Not unlike Emerson’s own figure for Leaves of Grass as a blend of the Bhagavad-Gita and the New York Herald, Alan Botsford’s inspired performance merges the cosmic with the folkloric in an exuberant celebration of the transforming alchemy of Whitman’s poetry.

~Michael Sowder

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Book designed by Thom Caraway