while the place is still open... One of the greatest things I've seen lately is a video project called 'Whitman, Alabama' →[More:]

In which people in Alabama recite Walt Whitman poems. My two favorite clips are the one I linked above and this one.

The New Yorker wrote about it as well.

Somehow I decided in high school (when Whitman and Dickinson were presented together) that I much preferred Dickinson but in the past few years I have gained some respect for old Walt. Especially this passage:

I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman,
Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or woman,
Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or any one else.

Is it wonderful that I should be immortal? as every one is immortal;
I know it is wonderful, but my eyesight is equally wonderful, and how I was conceived in my mother’s womb is equally wonderful; 20
And pass’d from a babe, in the creeping trance of a couple of summers and winters, to articulate and walk—All this is equally wonderful.

And that my Soul embraces you this hour, and we affect each other without ever seeing each other, and never perhaps to see each other, is every bit as wonderful.

And that I can think such thoughts as these, is just as wonderful;
And that I can remind you, and you think them, and know them to be true, is just as wonderful.