“Almost all poetry is a failure,” Charles Bukowski is said to have contended, “because it sounds like somebody saying, Look, I have written a poem.”
…
Never will I allude to the English Language or tongue without exultation. This is the tongue that spurns laws, as the greatest tongue must. It is the most capacious vital tongue of all, — full of ease, definiteness, and power, — full of sustenance, — an enormous treasure house, or ranges of treasure houses, arsenals, granary, chock full of so many contributions from the north and from the south, from Scandinavia, from Greece and Rome—from Spaniards, Italians, and the French—that its own sturdy home-dated Angles-bred words have long been outnumbered by the foreigners whom they lead—which is all good enough, and indeed must be. America owes immeasurable respect and love to the past, and to many ancestries, for many inheritances, — but of all that America has received from the past from the mothers and fathers of laws, arts, letters, etc., by far the greatest inheritance is the English Language—so long in growing—so fitted.
Dwight Garner quotes Bukowski and cites with link the Whitman essay (The Atlantic, April 1904) in his article “Dwight Garner Shares From His Stash of Other Writers’ Words” (NYTimes, 11-1-20).
(c) 2020 JMN
EthicalDative 
On a Parlous Trek the Ground Slopes East
The gap between China and the United States is shrinking as China is the only major economy expected to report economic growth for 2020 despite the pandemic. And brawling with itself at some crossroad truck stop far over the horizon lay my lost homeland.
Paul Salopek is walking around the world. He’s at work on a book about his experiences. Two things leap from his essay in the NYTimes: (1) the eloquence of a prize-winning journalist; (2) the intrepidity bordering on death wish of his undertaking, partnered with a capacity for punishing exertion and privation.
Walking through Afghanistan in 2017, I saw how little the outside world’s disdain for Central Asia has changed since then… The only visible evidence of America’s catatonic, $2 trillion war in Afghanistan was the exhausted face in my pocket shaving mirror.
… Meanwhile, the world walks on. And the ground slopes east toward an Asian century… In Kazakhstan, Chinese workers dressed in spotless coveralls came out to gape as I led my cargo horse through their colossal oil field. I must have seemed a raggedy apparition from the distant past, some mirage conjured by the wild steppe. I felt like one. They fed me ice cream.
(Paul Salopek, “Shadows on the Silk Road,” NYTimes, 1-16-21)
(c) 2020 JMN