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The past is present at Walt Whitman Birthplace

VERNE GAY

April 14, 2008

The Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site and Interpretive Center at 246 Old Walt Whitman Rd. in West Hills is what might be called an oasis - a tiny piece of the distant past amid the bustle of the insistently modern. It is a treasured fixture in the Town of Huntington, but also a place that not everyone knows about. "Some people," says Cynthia Shor, executive director of the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, "think we're named after the mall."

Of the birthplace, she says, "We're trying to get back on the radar because other people have called [Whitman] America's greatest poet; I'd like to think of him as a Shakespeare, and this be [his] Stratford-on-Avon." (Shor says visitors have come from as far away as Europe, Japan and India.)

The association is busy on several fronts - although it has no tie-in with tonight's PBS film. Because "we're big promoters of literacy," says Shor, there are numerous poetry readings - Aeronwy Thomas, daughter of Dylan Thomas, read her own poems recently - while every year on May 31, the association holds the Walt Whitman Birthday Celebration.

This year, the association's poet-in-residence, Brooklyn-born Alicia Suskin Ostriker, will read from her own work and hand out prizes to children, from grades 3 to 12, who have entered their own poems in a poetry competition. "Everyone," says Shor, "is welcome."