I ran into Walt Whitman at Birmingham Airport this weekend as I returned home from a speaking engagement at the Rise to the Challenge conference in Hoover, sponsored by the Birmingham Branch of the International Dyslexia Association and the Alabama chapter of ALTA. He was in a little room just off the C Concourse.
I entered to find a film of people from all over Alabama reciting verses from "Song of Myself." It was part of the Whitman Alabama project. Filmmaker Jennifer Crandall traveled across Alabama, recording ordinary people in the middle of their everyday lives as they recited lines from the great American poet. Her project highlights our shared interconnectedness while offering a fresh perspective on a beloved poet. I'd honestly never paid much attention to Whitman except for the quotes I've seen here or there. I prefer my poetry in smaller doses and am more a fan of Edgar Allan Poe or more recent poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, and Mary Oliver, but Crandall's project handled the pieces of Whitman's poem in segments with movement, music, and visual imagery that made it immediate and noteworthy.
The project includes a segment of a judge in drug court reciting a verse to the addicts in his courtroom, a farming family going about their daily chores, the mascot of the Golden Tigers during a football game, inmates at two Alabama penitentiaries, and much more. Check out the videos and learn more about the project at Whitman, Alabama, and if you are ever at the Birmingham Airport, stop by Concourse C for a little Walt Whitman.
