part of his writing life to rewriting Leaves of Grass, just as I’ve devoted a large part of mine to rewriting Rewritten Rewrites Rewritten. Slim justification, I know, for sharing a sentence

with him but, splashing about here in the

shallows, I can’t help

but take heart from glimpses of myself

in the big boys. And

Whitman isn’t my first—

I’ve just as brazenly shared sentences with Ernest Hemingway, Leonard Cohen, E. B. White, and, as an artist, with Alex Colville. I'm working toward being brazenly mentioned, myself, in the same sentence with.

Progress is slow.

It's brazen of me to mention myself in the same sentence with the great Walt Whitman, but I've discovered we have something in common

—he devoted a large