Uncle Walt

First prize goes to my sister Rayda for guessing via email that WW is Walt Whitman! I'm sure plenty of people could guess that anyway but he is one of my favorite poets and has been for a long time. Once upon a time I wrote lots of poetry and some of my style is modeled after him. I used to look around for biographies about him and it seems more people are interested in him being a gay poet rather than just a poet. I've read all of Leaves of Grass and there are definitely some homo-erotic poems there (yuck) but most of it is not. I think it's a shame that people might look at him that way but what I get from his poetry is his absolute love of America. He is all about being American and he captures every day life beautifully. One of my favorite poems about America is "I Hear America Singing". Otherwise, I just like his style of writing. The quote to the right is from a very long poem "Song of Myself".

Rayda also guessed correctly that LH is more modern than Whitman. Tonya finally figured it out but her first thought was Lionel Hampton. I thought this was interesting because Hamp and the other LH lived around the same time. Hamp was one of the great jazz vibraphonists of the 20th century. The other LH was called a jazz poet, maybe because of his style of writing or because he actually said stuff about jazz in his poetry a lot. In one of my favorites, Theme for English B, he writes something like "I like a pipe, Bessie, bop and Bach" (Bessie Smith, a blues singer; be-bop jazz; and J.S. Bach?).

Also about the title of this post, the quote below from HDT and part of the title of the blog--they are all related to each other by a movie. Can you guess which one and who HDT is?