The Whitman Archive’s annual holiday lunch has a call for parodies. This year’s call had the following theme, courtesy of Andrew Jewell.
What if Whitman was a member of the Whitman Archive staff and produced Whitman Archive documents? For example, how would it look if Whitman wrote an NEH proposal, or marked-up one of his own poems, or designed a web page? What if Walt Whitman was the third co-director of the Archive?
I sought inspiration in the library’s 3,000,000th volume, a copy of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. And my contribution, “What You Shall Assume,” is a markup guide, which I’ve attached as a PDF document.
