From the Archive
Issue 3
1982

The third Issue
Preface
to the Third Edition
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SEE THE ORIGINAL WEBPAGE (v2)
In the Preface he wrote for the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Walt Whitman called for a race of poets to make use of the United States, with its “veins full of poetical stuff,” and predicted that the States would make use of the poet as “their common referee.” The great poets were to come from the people and keep the Republic on a course toward perfect equality. The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him the other continents arrive as contributions. His spirit responds to his country’s spirit… An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a superb nation. The soul of the largest and wealthiest and proudest nation may well go half-way to meeet that of its poets…The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he absorbed it. Whitman absorbed the spirit of America, and in return was absorbed by it, but what of the race of poets who he hoped would carry on his work? For this issue, the Mickle Street Review asked for poetry that was “commensurate with a people,” that reflected the poetical stuff that flows in America’s veins more than a century and a quarter after Whitman wrote his Preface. His efforts of modern poets to meet their country halfway compose the principal theme of this issue.
The editors would like to acknowledge with gratitude the sponsors of the Mickle Street Review, Mrs. Doris Kellogg Neale; Camden College of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University; and University College/Camden, Rutgers University.
Table of Contents
- Second-Born Son – Gary Miranda
- Prologue from The Three Kingdoms – John Lane
- An Interview with Dan Hoffman – Frank McQuilkin
- Connecticut Avenue – Eric Nelson
- Buckeye Road in Cleveland Meant the Gulls – M.F. Hershman
- A Whitman Man – John J. Soldo
- Travelogue – Bernie Earley
- Mrs. Franz: Mother Earth’s Daughter – Jim Bogan
- An American Song – C.A. Smith
- An Unsent Letter – Edit Segal
- A Fine Excess – Dan Gerber
- Breaking the Hypnosis – Peter Hohesiel
- The Caller of Birds – Lawrence Hayes
- from Breaking the Net – Marc Widershien
- Walt Whitman, My Contemporary – Jack Lindeman
- Ezra’s Pact – Robert Sargent
- And Theirs, To Remember Them – Judith Offer
- Anthology – Joanne Seltzer
- Researcher – Ida Fasel
- A Symposium on Whitman – Kathryn Greenwood
- At the American Anthropometric Society, Walt Whitman’s Brain is Dropped on the Floor – David Citino
- American Poetry – Sanford Pinsker
- The Patient, Noiseless Spider Inside My Campus Mailbox – Sanford Pinsker
- With My Heart’s Chalk – Lasse Söderberg
- Letter to W.S. Kennedy – Walt Whitman
- from The Adventures of Pome – William Pitt Root
- Two Stanzas from Dozens – David R. Slavitt
- Beginning the Garden – David Walker
- Walt Whitman – Ruben Dario
- The American Stream – Lois V. Walker
- What Whitman Taught O’Casey – Robert G. Lowery
- Bringing It toYou With Full Hands– Nancy G. Westerfield
- In Morgan’s Hall – Ennis Rees
- To Walt Whitman – George Bishop
- Last Tribute – E. Louise Mull
- The Night Whitman Died – Stephen Knauth
- A Whitman Oral History – John Browning
- Escape from the Lost City – Franz Douskey
- Meeting the Ghost of Walt Whitman – Paul Rice
- Virginia State Pen Blues – Joseph Lisowski
- Walking – Judith Minty
- A Celebration for Whitman – Gary C. Busha
- In the Park – Janet McCann
- Poetry and the Noise of Traffic – Gerald Parks
- In New Jersey Once – Maria Gillan
- Walt Whitman Breathes Here – J. Lawrence Lembo
- What Whitman Would Have Seen Sunday – Martin Tucker
- Borrowings – Roger Mitchell
- Map of Fortune – Ron Atkinson
- Revisiting a Beach in Maine – Len Roberts
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Issue Credits
Mickle Street Review is sponsored and published by the Department of English at the Camden campus of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Click here to view the copyright page from the first paper edition of the Mickle Street Review
Initial archiving of issue completed on June 01, 2005 by Jesse Merandy and Evan Roskos
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Original File Archive -
EDITOR
Geoffrey M. SillASSOCIATE EDITOR
Frank McQuilkin
ART EDITOR
John GiannottiASSISTANT EDITOR
Susan CromiakDISTRIBUTION
Jeff BraninTYPIST
Terry Single
Part of the Camden Online Poetry Project.
Copyright | Rutgers University – Camden.
Supported in part by a grant from the
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.