Interview with Matt Cohen on “Walt Whitman’s Baby Talk”

"In the spring of 1875, the poet Walt Whitman, then living in Camden, New Jersey, received an unusual piece of fan mail from the South..." With wry understatement, so begins Matt Cohen's commentary on this artifact, bizarre even by the standards of Weird Americana. With a commitment to a close examination of the original, unregularized text, Cohen connects Johnson's engagement with Whitman's poetics of Democracy to the revanchist Southern nationalism that emerged after the Civil War, our contemporary wrestling with the problematics of commemoration, and his own experiences of the Tennessee River valley and Northern condescension to ideas of Southern literacy - Walt Whitman's Baby Talk.

Transcript link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BscE3PppfAbPO0tB5hCE4Kt4BfT2iGj0/view?usp=sharing

Explore Hidden Literacies at https://www.hiddenliteracies.org

Learn more about Matt Cohen’s work here: https://www.unl.edu/english/matt-cohen

Hidden Literacies brings together leading scholars of historical literacy to investigate the surprising, often neglected roles reading and writing have played in the lives of marginalized Americans—from indigenous and enslaved people to prisoners and young children. By presenting high-resolution images of archival texts and pairing them with expert commentary, Hidden Literacies aims to make these writers and texts—which too often lie below the radar of American literature curricula—more available and accessible to teachers and researchers.

Hidden Literacies is edited by Christopher Hager and Hilary Wyss.

Christopher Hager is Professor of English at Trinity College, where he teaches courses in American literature and American Studies.

Hilary E. Wyss is the Allan K. Smith and Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where she teaches courses in early American literature, American studies, and Native American studies.

Hidden Literacies was produced with the support of the following staff members of Trinity College Information Technology & Library Services:

Cait Kennedy, Research, Outreach, and Technology Librarian

Mary Mahoney, Digital Scholarship Coordinator

Joelle Thomas, Digital Learning & Discovery Librarian

Hidden Literacies: the Podcast was recorded, edited, and produced by Mary Mahoney.

Sound Credits:

“Crescents” by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)