Today, the watchword is, “Were you there this morning?” Although I arrived around 9:30, I have to answer “no,” since the only there that counted was one’s presence at 6 a.m., when defenders massed to forestall the threatened removal of rebellious bodies from Zuccotti Park, ostensibly to facilitate a city-mandated cleanup operation. By the time I did arrive, it was old news that the park’s owners (read: the Masters of the City) had backed down. But the euphoric energy was still palpable.

I read Walt Whitman; it seemed the only thing to do–once I had concluded an extended conversation with my friend K., who greeted me the moment I entered the park, exclaiming that her son, a high school senior, has been heavily involved in the occupation. “Is he sleeping here?” I asked. “Oh, no, I won’t let him do that!!!”  K., a political scientist, went on to tell me in a bemused though still proud tone that her son’s take on her observations about the whiteness of the protest has been “telling me that people have to abandon their tribal identities and interact as individuals, if they want to be part of this!” (It is useful, now, to have friends with offspring of high school and college age, because how else is one to learn how the relevant generation thinks?)

I don’t know if it was simply because everyone was still enjoying a contact high (“what happened early this morning–that was THE BEST!” exulted a usually quite sober labor movement comrade of mine) or because of the peculiar properties of Whitman’s work, but my experience reading this morning was the most exciting I’ve had so far. I began with “A Song for Occupations,” which happened to be the first thing I opened to in my copy of Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems, edited by Francis Murphy (Penguin Education, 1975). Such was my strangely elevated and distracted mood that it only occurred to me hours later, when I was walking homeward over the Brooklyn Bridge, that the “occupations” referenced in the poem were the various forms of labor listed by the poet (oh, poet who shared Marx’s vision of intelligent toil as the “maker” of human identity)–not politically motivated “occupations” of Wall Street or other public spaces. I had actually been under the impression while reading–an impression that continued as I read “A Broadway Pageant” with its strangle Orientalist though still touching evocation of “our Antipodes”; and then the matchless “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and the sumptuous “I Sing the Body Electric”–that Whitman was writing with Zuccotti Park in mind.

And here are some of the reactions and interactions that my reading elicited. There was the woman who explained she was a little punchy after getting only four hours’ sleep (“oh, no, I’m not sleeping here, I have an apartment in Manhattan”) who said that hearing me read was making her think maybe Ginsberg read his own work the way he did because of his reading of Whitman. There was the man who said, “You know who my favorite poet is, but I guess he’s really politically incorrect–Ezra Pound! The thing is, even though he went astray, he was really intrigued by how economic systems work.” There were people who looked me full in the face as I read, taking in the sounds of the words but also the meaning of the words as reflected in my own face. (That is the thing about Zuccotti Park right now–it’s perfectly okay to look strangers in the face. You can walk around and talk to anyone, or just smile in acknowledgement of what both of you are feeling about what it means to be there.) There were the two young guys, maybe 17 or 18, speaking Spanish to each other, one of them waving a large “Don’t Tread on Me” banner, who thanked me for coming and said they lived in Queens, had been there all night and seen the moment of truth when the authorities backed down, and just wanted to thank me because it meant a lot to them that the older generation was showing up to “support the youth.” (I smiled inwardly and thought to myself, “And here we elders had been wondering why it was taking the youth so long to get their asses into gear!”) There were the two very young Asian women with limited English who politely interrupted my reading to ask me to explain the meaning of my sign: BECA– USE THEY’RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF. I talked about environmental destruction, climate change, starvation in the horn of Africa, and how the massive appetites of corporations contribute to these ills; I said it wasn’t just about jobs, though that is important….I should have had more to say about proliferating wars (Obama today announced the deployment of “combat-ready troops” to Uganda…..). There was the young woman standing on my right who said she was standing next to me because she loved the poetry, and the older man standing on my left who asked me if I thought Whitman was a Buddhist. There was the man who came up to tell me that the graphic on the cover of my book (Thomas Eakins’s painting “The Swimming Hole”) was his favorite work by Eakins, “but that’s a lousy reproduction.”

In the afternoon, Ben & Jerry’s was serving free ice cream in the middle of Zuccotti Park. Somebody said that the guys doing the scooping were the actual Ben and Jerry. I’m not sure about that. But I know that tomorrow Occupy Wall Street is taking on Chase Bank. I have a Chase account. I guess it’s time to shut it down.