Calmus by Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman's wooly personage is now confined in school textbooks to pedestrian treatments of some of his more mundane poems.

The fact of Whitman's 'queer-ness' is never taught in high schools.

Using paintings and contemporary criticisms which accused Whitman, in print no less, of being a sodomite, a punishable crime, I try to re-appropriate the poem WHEN I HEARD AT THE CLOSE OF THE DAY, part of the homo-erotic Calmus section of LEAVES OF GRASS, and return it to it's queer place in history.