Unit 8 Realism and Impressionism/ Overview

Assignment 2:  Whitman's Realism

Whitman by Mathew Brady

Experiment with Walt Whitman's style of realism by choosing your favorite place or urban setting and listing its qualities in a realistic way.  Use free verse (unrhymed lines) to give your writing the same sense of natural conversation that Whitman's has.  Revise at least once to use the best images and most interesting--and realistic--language possible.  Here is a section of Whitman's I Hear America Singing, if you need to take another look at his style:

from Whitman:

I HEAR America singing, the varied carols I hear;
Those of mechanics—each one singing his, as it should be, blithe and strong;
The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work;
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat—the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck;
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench—the hatter singing as he stands;
The wood-cutter’s song—the ploughboy’s, on his way in the morning, or at the noon intermission, or at sundown;

Here's my try at a poem, conversational, listing qualities of an urban setting:

Downtown

Walking in the heat I see a sign, spelled wrong,

"no parking in allyway," the Goodwill Store, the warehouse, once

Lewis Lumber.  Last summer this street was home to a bent

man with a lisp, he sold tomatoes,

cantaloupes, and corn

Wednesdays and Saturdays.  Now he's moved to Boca Raton,

his job taken over by the Amish woman waiting with

her grandson, straightening

baskets of green beans, red and yellow

peppers, rough-ruby beets, celery, bright white onions all

out of her garden, picked in blistering sun but soon you learn

they were actually trucked in last week

from Arkansas.

Note: I got this idea from a photo of "no parking in allyway" I took in my home town in Western Kentucky. I began with the first line and the rest of the lines just came to me as I wrote the poem and remembered another conversation I'd had later with an Amish woman.  It's really just three or four sentences.  When I edited this poem I worked on word choice and played around with spacing in order to add some musical rhythms and give some phrases more importance.