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PBS film looks at Long Island poet Walt Whitman

BY VERNE GAY | verne.gay@newsday.com

April 14, 2008

People walk toward the Old Walt Whitman house for a tour at the Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site and Interpretive Center in West Hills on Saturday, April 05, 2008. (Newsday/Ana P. Gutierrez)

The America around Walt Whitman's birthplace in West Hills today is not exactly the one he heard singing. There are parking lots to the north, south and west, while that particularly vast one to the east, across Route 110, serves Walt Whitman mall. Listen and you hear the roar of an 18-wheeler, the whine of a hundred SUVs.

Or - if you have a dog-eared copy of "Leaves of Grass" handy - maybe even the poet's voice.

"There was a child went forth every day, and the first object he looked upon ... that object became part of him...."

In the opening and closing seconds of tonight's PBS film (9p.m., WNET/13) on the American bard from Long Island, the first objects we look upon are boughs of green, luxuriant foliage. The camera picks its way through this jungle - remnants of the howling wilderness of Whitman's ancestors - when suddenly the scene breaks into the broad expanse of a beach.

"As I ebb'd with the ocean of life," wrote Walt.

"As I wended the shores I know."

Allusion and illusion

And so, over the span of just a few paragraphs, you, too, can understand why any filmmaker who wends his way through the life of a great poet like this one must have lost his marbles. Poets' birthplaces can be in inconvenient places. The world they knew is hardly the one we know. Their medium was the page, and their language was the language of allusion and illusion.

Yet there it is, on-screen, tonight: a big, strapping beautiful film that brings Whitman and his world to life, and latter-day relevance.

You also should know that tonight's two-hour "American Experience" is drenched in the sweat (and perhaps tears) of the man who made it, Mark Zwonitzer - a PBS star who also produced one of its finest "ethnic" specials, "The Irish in America," a decade ago.

"The thing that drove me to do this," he said in a phone interview, "is that I think Whitman is sort of a misapprehended character. Anytime you become a rest stop in New Jersey or a mall in Huntington, then everyone knows your name, but they don't remember what [you're] all about."

Yet, he adds, "It ended up being quite a daunting challenge. It almost destroyed my business and put great stress on my family. It was a very, very difficult project to make and the producer and a.p. went off to Greece for months to recover."

Zwonitzer eventually threw up his hands in semi-defeat: This wouldn't be just a portrait of the man - "a slightly slippery figure" - but of the magnum opus itself. What viewers see tonight are not only the usual academic talking heads - and very good ones, like University of Iowa Whitman expert Ed Folsom - but poets such as Martin Espada and Yusef Komunyakaa, or novelist Allan Gurganus. Threaded through all this is an artful, and photographic, rendering of Whitman's world - of Brooklyn tenements and Civil War battlefields, so vivid that you can almost smell the stench of each.

Lust and life

The film explores Whitman's homosexuality as well - often avoided by scholars who would prefer readers go to the work itself to pick up the graphic clues. (And there are many, indeed.) Tonight's film even includes - briefly - the only gay scene in "American Experience" history, as two young men embrace, kiss and then do whatever.

That scene - and others - are designed to grab the viewer by the shoulders, shake them, then say: Whitman is the poet of blood, breath, appetites, lust and life. Whitman is you (just as he would have it).

The film is in two parts. The first covers Whitman's efforts to prevent the gathering Civil War, as if poetry (and "Leaves of Grass," self-published in 1855) were the balm of love and healing. That effort failed - outrageously - and the second half follows Whitman as a humbled "nurse," tending to the sick and dying in hundreds of field hospitals around Washington:

"Of the dead on their backs with arms extended wide,

"I dream, I dream, I dream."

So, watch tonight and learn why someone who died 116 years ago still lives and breathes today.

Plus, you'll never look at Walt Whitman Mall quite the same way.