It’s the birthday of two American poets, one of whom, Walt Whitman (1819-1892), is so famous and highly revered that he threatens to completely overshadow Poet Number Two, Al Young (b. 1939), who is also a novelist, essayist, and screenwriter. (Did Walt Whitman write any screenplays? No, he totally did not.)

Whitman was born on Long Island and raised in Brooklyn, where his father dealt in real estate. Though the region was experiencing a real estate boom at the time, Whitman’s father was not a good businessman and the family’s life was unsettled and difficult. Whitman learned the printing trade at a young age and became a printer, a teacher, and finally a journalist and editor. All this time he was reading voraciously and publishing sentimental drivel, but in 1855 he came out with some non-drivel, his first edition of Leaves of Grass. A second edition followed the next year, including more poems and a letter of praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Throughout his life he would publish several more editions.

During the American Civil War, Whitman went to Washington, D.C., to care for his brother, who had been wounded at Fredericksburg. He stayed long-term to help care for the wounded and after several years got a job in the Department of the Interior but was fired because James Harlan, Secretary of the Interior, found Leaves of Grass indecent. (I know my own first thought when picking up a new work of poetry is always, “But what does the current Secretary of the Interior think?”) It wasn’t until an 1882 edition of Leaves of Grass that the work began to sell better and Whitman bought a home in Camden, New Jersey, where he died ten years later.

Young was born in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and attended the U of Michigan and the U of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1969. He has taught literature and writing at a number of universities and won a host of fellowships, including a Wallace Stegner and a Fulbright. In 2005, he was appointed Poet Laureate of California. His most recent collection of poetry is Something about the Blues (2008), and his most recent novel is Seduction by Light (1988).

Young’s poem “The Blues Don’t Change” begins:

 

And I was born with you, wasn’t I, Blues?

Wombed with you, wounded, reared and forwarded

from address to address, stamped, stomped,

and returned to sender by nobody else but you,

Blue Rider, writing me off every chance you

got, you mean old grudgeful-hearted, table-

turning demon, you, you sexy soul-sucking gem…

 

(Read the whole poem here.)

Have a fine Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.