Leaves of Glass
by David Prater

Puncher & Wattmann, 2013

David Prater’s latest collection Leaves of Glass is based on three years’ correspondence in the late nineteenth century between young Australian poet Bernard O’Dowd and the ageing master Walt Whitman. The epistolary material between these two men, a collection of twenty or so letters currently archived at the State Library of Victoria, forms the skeleton for this collection. Prater deftly plays with these two personae, offering a kaleidoscopic vision of their relationship alongside a number of poems that experiment with the ambiguities of written language and the shifting levels of intimacy revealed by the O’Dowd–Whitman letters. Many of the poems will speak most strongly to a reader who is more than passingly familiar with Whitman’s work. It is not a book to be picked up idly, but one that engages with the often-overlooked sympathies between Australian and American poetic traditions, and offers a compelling insight into the lesser-known figure of Bernard O’Dowd. Beyond this, however, Prater’s artisanal use of language and style demonstrates his flexibility and intelligence as a contemporary poet.

Personal correspondence is a tricky source for creative material. Balancing these individuals’ inner thoughts, their intimate writings to another, and publicly available archived material requires careful attention and creativity. The tension between the categories of private, intimate and public leads to spaces and ambiguity: gaps between what is felt and what is expressed, between what is answered and what is ignored, between what can be found, later, in the archives and what has been left out or lost. Personal letters, or what Dierkz terms ‘familiar letters’, which are ‘devoted to the expression of affection and duty among kin, family and friends’, are used to close the distance between individuals, usually on a very intimate level. Prater’s poems create a fictionalised account of these two men’s lives around the details found in their correspondences, often drawing epigraphs from the archival material to contextualise the poems. For example, epigraphs from O’Dowd’s letters head the poems written from O’Dowd’s point of view. These poetic personae, part real and part imagined, are vibrantly formed, with the O’Dowd persona in particular being marked by a clear and distinctive style. This collection is dominated by O’Dowd’s voice – fittingly, perhaps, given the abundance of critical and creative material written on Whitman and the comparative dearth of writing by and on O’Dowd. O’Dowd’s work, as Judith Wright acknowledges, ‘has dated badly’ despite public appreciation for his poetry during his life (quoted in Prater’s book). Prater offers a poignant and troubled vision of the aspiring young poet: a man beset by self-doubt, entering into a correspondence, both epistolary and spiritual, with Whitman the ‘revered Master’.

Leaves of Glass is bookended by poems drawn from the opening and closing lines of O’Dowd’s and Whitman’s letters. O’Dowd, who initiates the correspondence despite fears of seeming a ‘presumptuous intruder’ (Prater), takes pains to address Whitman with the respect and awe that he considers appropriate for a master poet, who remains an affable yet controlled figure throughout. The letters assume the function of ‘a connector between two distant points’1, and, furthermore, represent an ongoing and evolving relationship between individuals whose only contact is through the correspondence; the letters are, in fact, the sole physical expression of the relationship. Whitman, particularly in Leaves of Grass, recognised the power of the written artefact to stand in for the physical presence of its author. In his ‘Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand’, an exemplary poem of this type, Whitman establishes the notion of physical intimacy and concord between a text and its reader, with the book acting as ‘the new husband and … the comrade’ (116) who is kept physically close to the reader’s body, while also questioning, in the poem’s conclusion, the possibility that a reader can ‘grasp’ an author through the texts that they have written. For O’Dowd the communication, in tandem with his reading of Whitman’s works, results in a non-bodily eroticism – Whitman’s texts become husband and comrade, even in the physical absence of Whitman. In response, O’Dowd’s writing enacts a desire, perhaps partly sexual but predominantly intellectual, that is only ever present in mediated, textual form.

It has been argued that ‘Whitman was attracted by forms of eroticism other than those that are expressed in acts between bodies’2, including those displaced physical relations between reader and author that occur through written texts. The letter effectively becomes a fetish object, standing in for the body and self of one’s correspondent. Along with the vigorous, vital, and virile life philosophy that Whitman espouses in his works, this leads to the development of a significant erotic association for O’Dowd. Prater acknowledges the complicated nature of the intimacy between these two men, as well as the tension between public and private writing, in the early poem ‘O’Dowd Seeks Whitman’. Taking its impetus from O’Dowd’s initial introduction of himself to the older poet, this poem is written in the idiom of a twenty-first century personals ad, including the acronyms and abbreviations that dominate both pay-by-the-word classifieds entries and speed-dependent online instant messaging. The personals ad enters into a long tradition of seductive or romantic epistles, with the unique characteristic of being simultaneously public and faux-intimate. Usually written in the second person, there is an ambiguity between the intimate singular and non-specific collective address, which is perhaps intended to make the reader feel as though they are the one and only intended recipient of the contained sentiments. Prater’s ‘O’Dowd Seeks Whitman’ adopts the abbreviations and idiom of newspaper and online personal columns, and positions O’Dowd well and truly as the ‘seeker’, the romantic pursuer whose ideals and desires are met by the figure of Whitman. There is, as in any supplicant’s pursuit of his idol, a certain irony here: the qualities that make Whitman such a desirable figure to correspond with, his genius, generosity, and vitalist life philosophy, also paradoxically serve to make his pursuer, the presumptuous intruder O’Dowd, unfit to correspond with such a Master.

Though an erotic charge arises from this distance, O’Dowd is also troubled by his attempts to reconcile his inner feelings with expressions appropriate to his letters. This is demonstrated by the dramatic tonal shift between the poems addressed as correspondence to Whitman and those exploring O’Dowd’s personal inner thoughts. The public O’Dowd persona, demonstrated by the opening poem, ‘O’Dowd Seeks Whitman’, is seeking ‘fr’ship &/or possible loveship’, keen to enter into a relationship of some kind with a more established poet. The younger poet seems to submit to Whitman’s authority, both as a poet and as the father of a life philosophy founded on variety, vigour, and virility. O’Dowd addresses Whitman as ‘Master’ and tends to copy his elder’s style, mimicking Whitman’s long line length, vocabulary, and cadence as well as echoing his favourite themes. If you compare the poems ‘Sunbathing’ and ‘Cute’, which follow one another in Leaves of Glass but are written by the O’Dowd and Whitman personas, respectively, it is clear that O’Dowd’s emulation of Whitman’s style marks his correspondence: the line lengths, use of couplets, and even the diction of these two works closely match one another, demonstrating how far O’Dowd attempts to shape himself and his writing on Whitman’s model.

1. Altman, Janet Gurkin. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1982. Print ↩
2. Mulcaire, Terry. ‘Publishing Intimacy in Leaves of Grass.’ ELH 60.2 (1993): 471-501. Print. ↩
3. However, it is clear that O’Dowd considers himself a poor disciple to the ‘revered Master’, and this tension between emulation and internal self-doubt is adroitly hinted throughout Prater’s collection. O’Dowd’s initial introduction of himself, found as the epigraph for ‘O’Dowd Seeks Whitman’, runs thus: ‘I am 24, red hair, plain features, and a little too backwards for my own good’1. This backwardness, the backwater domesticity and plain speaking that characterise O’Dowd’s life, seem to burden him with self-doubt, despite Whitman’s acknowledged ‘sympathy & love to all dear friends men and women’2 and the democratic nature of his life philosophy. Indeed Whitman, the poet of democracy, must have been overwhelmed by O’Dowd the idolator’s constant worship. However, it is O’Dowd’s side of this correspondence that dominates Leaves of Glass, and it is the tension between O’Dowd’s intimate-yet-public writings to Whitman and his internal voice that provides the greatest interest within these works.
4. The poems that depict O’Dowd’s private persona, caught up in self-doubt, have a starkly different style to those in which the worshipful O’Dowd endeavours to foster intimacy with Whitman. In ‘I Was the Abortion’, the O’Dowdian poem of inferiority and repression, the persona opens with ‘i look at what I wrote / and feel shame’. He writes of a deeper sense of worthlessness that he can only express in writing that he subsequently destroys. There is a great tension between this poem and ‘The First Letter’, which precedes it, and which is a joyful celebration of Whitman’s life philosophy. In contrast, in ‘I Was the Abortion’, we get a strong hint that the ‘new religion’ of ‘The First Letter’, the sense of desire and selfhood as ‘rivers finally leaping free of drought’, is still an idealistic fantasy to the younger man, trapped as he is in a heterosexual domestic reality replete with ‘wilting calendars’ and a wife in ‘starched armour’. ‘The First Letter’ is joyous, with long lines and exclamation marks in the best Whitmanesque style, but it is immediately followed and counterpointed by ‘I Was the Abortion’, in which the lines are stark and short, the poem is entirely comprised of a single, run-on sentence, and the tone is resolutely nihilistic. This represents a strong distinction, throughout the collection, between private poems, which demonstrate O’Dowd’s internal feelings, and those which enact the correspondence. Though these latter poems are intimate, they always mask O’Dowd’s inner self through attempts to emulate and impress the master to whom they are addressed.
5. There is far more to this collection than this semi-fictional, quasi-archival persona play, though these works demonstrate a psychological adroitness that stands in contrast to much of Prater’s more experimental work. Pieces such as ‘Gowayz ob Lol: O Kitteh! Meh Kitteh!’ and ‘W00t Wiitmeh: ‘To a Commawn Pron’ rewrite some of Whitman’s best-known works in the Lolspeak language popularised by internet memes such as LOLcat. These are intriguing, if a little superficial, but dovetail with Prater’s interest in the intersections of online and literary language. Indeed, in any other collection such works might seem out of place, but Leaves of Glass engages with a number of these kinds of partial translations – from Gaelic in ‘Google O’Dubhda’, or from the abbreviated language of pay-by-the-word personals ads in ‘O’Dowd Seeks Whitman’. Prater is often caught up in language use that is partial or fragmentary. Beyond the persona-based poems, this collection shows a resurgence of his characteristic half-bracketing technique, in which numerous parentheses are opened within a piece but never closed. This loss or stripping back of punctuation forces the reader to guess where the proliferating brackets end, and thus grapple with ambiguous readings. That technique has become Prater’s trademark, and the poem ‘The Germ’ demonstrates it to full effect. The nesting of the germ (of inspiration, infection, or both) within layers of the self is echoed by the nesting parentheticals. However, in this case, the interpretive complexity that often accompanies this technique is tempered by repetition of sentence elements, creating a fractal pattern in which each new line is built on what has come before:
6. I have a germ inside meh (love I have a gun
7. Inside meh (bang I have a truth inside meh (
8.
9. Death I have a life inside meh […] (Prater 32)
10. The correspondence-based pieces in this collection establish the personae of Whitman and O’Dowd. In other poems in the latter part of the collection, we see something that is recognisably, undeniably Prater sneaking into the work, inflecting his other personae and bringing a contemporary sensibility to bear on a relationship that was couched in late-nineteenth century propriety.
11. This collection showcases Prater’s capacity to deploy a variety of different poetic forms and voices while maintaining a compelling sense of narrative. The O’Dowd–Whitman correspondence provides scaffolding for this collection, which is nevertheless a masterful engagement with complex poetic techniques of voice and structure. Leaves of Glass is not an easy book, though it is highly rewarding, especially to a reader with some familiarity with Whitman’s work.
However, this is far more than a stuffy exercise in poetic biography. The adept portrayal of two distinct personalities, particularly the troubled O’Dowd, and the carefully crafted language throughout the collection, ensures that the reader is engrossed and delighted with every new experiment.
12.
13. Prater, David. Leaves of Glass. Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann, 2013. Print. ↩
14. ibid ↩

References
Altman, Janet Gurkin. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1982. Print.
Dierks, Konstantin. ‘The Familiar Letter and Social Refinement in America, 1750-1800.’ Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Eds. Barton, David and Nigel Hall. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2000. 31-41. Print.
Mulcaire, Terry. ‘Publishing Intimacy in Leaves of Grass.’ ELH 60.2 (1993): 471-501. Print.
Prater, David. Leaves of Glass. Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann, 2013. Print.
Whitman, Walt. ‘Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand.’ Leaves of Grass. Eds. Bradley, Sculley and Harold W. Blodgett. Norton Critical Editions. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. 115-17. Print.

*Sally Evans is an Australian poet and academic currently based in Wollongong. She has taught poetry and literary theory at the University of Wollongong, and her work has appeared in Islet, TIDE, Rabbit, AUMLA, and JASAL.

**From Cordite http://www.cordite.org.au