In the essay “Conspicuous Erudition: The New Black Poetry” (Yale Review, April 22,2020),  poet and critic Jerome Murphy discusses how we might admire Whitman’s range of vision while questioning its specifics. In this conversation, Murphy and WWI president Karen Karbiener discuss how bringing a greater “dynamic range,” or wider understanding, to the artist’s vision, can provide a fuller picture, and how this understanding affects both literary criticism, and our own artistic inspirations.

Jerome Ellison Murphy earned his MFA from the CreativeWriting Program at New York University, where he currently serves asUndergraduate Programs Manager. He co-curates the Bespoke reading series atBureau of General Services Queer Division bookstore. His critical writing has appeared in The Yale Review, LAReview of Books, Publishers Weekly, Adroit Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, LambdaLiterary Review, and elsewhere, while his poetry appears in Narrative Magazine, LitHub, The Awl, TheCortland Review, Spunk, Bellevue Literary Review, and more. Hepreviously served on the board of Lambda Literary Foundation, the world’s foremost non-profit supporting LGBT literature.

Karen Karbiener, president and founding member of the Walt Whitman Initiative, is a Whitman scholar and teaches at New York University. Winner of the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress and a Fulbright recipient, she was the curator of “Whitman and the Promise of America” (South Street Seaport Museum, NY, July – December 2005), “Poet of the Body: New York’s Walt Whitman” (with Susan Tane; Grolier Club, NY, May – July 2019), and most recently, “Robust American Love: Avid Visions by Walt Whitman and John Ransom Phillips” (BlackBook Presents, Brooklyn, August – September 2019).