My second poet chair is complete. The first one was Emily Dickinson, with emphasis on her poem “Hope is the thing with feathers.” This one is Walt Whitman’s, I decided to use verse 32 of Song of Myself for this one. In this verse, Whitman explains why he would often rather live with animals than with humans. It reads, in part:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
Here is a slide show of photos of the chair! The cats, especially Pippi, were appropriately very interested in the chair. Pippi was trying to read it. The big piece of funky driftwood had been hanging on my wall for a few years, and I figured it would make a good barbarian for Walt’s famous line: “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
–Shaun Perkins
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 