Whitman declares: “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” (112). Can the United States simultaneously exist as a poem and nation? How does this metaphor emphasizes unity, structure, and grapple with the vision of the United States, a singular state that happens to be composed of many nations. In other words, what are the implications of imagining a country really be a poem?

Rothenberg and Taboada arranged the Map of the America's as a subsection of “A First Gallery”, a portion of The Serpent and the Fire that concludes with a burst of Walt Whitman (“Come, Said my Soul”, “This Compost”, “Respondez, or Poem of the Propositions of Nakedness:, and Good-bye My Fancy!”, juxtaposed by Pablo Neruda's “Ode to Walt Whitman” (92-98). This second juxtaposition of Whitman with Mir replicates the the composition coordination of Whitman with Caribbean and South American poets advances the principles of omnipoetics:

no. 2: Omnipoetics as an attempt to create a horizontal corpus of works that can facilitate a mutual communications across borders, bringing it all into a continually expanding “symposium of the whole.” (xli).

A second engagement with Whitman in conversation with American poets from South American and the Caribbean showcase the new arrangement of literary knowledge at out disposal if we adopt a Hemispheric approach to American Literary studies.

Whitman's expansive poetics connects the bodies that people cities, the insects that hide under leaves of grass, and the rocks, bugs, and soils—all of these beings composes the expression of the United States according to Whitman's particular arrangement through his poetry. "Starting from Paumanok" in the “Map of the America's” arrangement attempts to create a new vision of the American Literary imagination through a concentrated and intentional expansion of what it means to be “American”. Whitman muses about national unity through an particular embrace of the sounds of the indigenous languages into the poetry of the new America. Whitman reveals his aesthetic of a new American poetry by integrating indigenous names into the body of “Starting from Paumanok”. Its important to read these names as phonetic possibilities of a distinctly American English. The presence of Indigenous language though nation names and places names do not exist in the poem for the purpose of information the reader about Indian Wars or to represent the cultural contributions of the particular indigenous people.

The red aborigines!
Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names;
Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco, Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla- Walla;
Leaving such to The States, they melt, they depart, charging the water and the land with names. (Rothenberg 120)

Although Whitman's list of indigenous names might read as lazy or disengaged from the people behind the semiotic reference, Whitman claims the names as phonetic possibilities for American poetry that comes out of a community of American peoples who value the linguistic enlargements American English.

The metaphor of Indigenous nations melting away integrates in the history of the United State's government's territorial disputes with the Indigenous Nations, the violent the expansion of “American” territory by mapping over the indigenous nations within the nation. By drawing his readers attention to the similarity shared between nations and natural elements, ie water, the indigenous names direct the reader to think about the effects of the passage of time. The sublimation of indigenous nations into place names, rivers, counties, states, and national parks, might not be the most ideal way for the past to influence to future generations; however, the nurturing function of water, the innate desire for the living to be near water,to consume it, to allow the charge melting water to permeate the soil of the American poetic Imagination in similar way the nature of water will over saturate the soil, that is, Indigenous language has the potential to fill the the new American landscape through the structural influence of landscape names, an inheritance of geographical imagination that passes on phonetic substances despite being divorced from their original form.

With the subject of nature and the environment become objective interpretations of reality, even though such premonitions originated in the fleck of the imagination of a poet might take on the American nation, the country, the politics, the people, the land, all of America as subjects in their poetry; therefore, the indigenous sound carries through place names contributes a desired aesthetic quality of potential unity. Rothenberg and Taboada pull experts from section 1, 16, and 17, from Whitman's segmented poem.

The soul,
Forever and forever—longer than soil is brown and solid—longer than water ebbs and flows.
I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most spiritual poems;
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my Soul, and of immortality. (6)

This omission of the spiritual component of “Starting from Paumanok” might service their critical move to emphasize the influence of Whitman's geographic imaginary on American poets outside of the boarders of the United States. Yet, I ask you to linger on the opening lines of seg. 6, that return the reader to the image of water.

What does the juxtaposition produce in the mind of the readers who interact with Whitman's prophetic vision as a cultural export, and they seem to ignore, or perhaps leave room for, the reader to suggests the relationship between the two poems beyond the similarity?

Spanish, translated by Jonathan Cohen, "Contracanto a Walt Whitman" Similar to Whitman's “Paumanok”, Mir writes a segmented poem of seventeen stanzas, however, he number only 16, leaves the first unnumbered segment.

Those of you who do not want Walt Whitman, the democrat,
but another Whitman, atomic and savage.
The one who want to outfit him with boots
to crush the heads of nations.
To grind into blood the temples of little girls.
To smash into atoms the old man's flesh.
The ones who take the tongue of Walt Whitman
for a sign of spraying bullets,
for a flog of fire.

Notice the poetic iconography of Whitman's beard and face

• “(¡Oh, Walt Whitman de barba luminosa…!)” | (Oh, Walt Whitman of the luminous beard…!“) seg. IV
• ”(¡Oh, Walt Whitman de barba insospechada…!)“ | (Oh, Walt Whitman of the undreamed beard…!”) seg. V
• “¡Oh, Walt Whitman, tu barba sensitiva /era una red al viento!” | Oh, Walt Whitman, your sensitive beard/ was a net of wind!“ seg. VI

The arrangement suggests that the editors want to shape the container of Whitman's literary legacy around the legacy of American imperial hegemony, a post-colonial reading that argues the cultural production of American poetry in some sense colonized the minds of Carribean and Latin American poets. Why implicate Walt Whitman in the manifest destiny? What does the editor gain in the framing of Whitman the artist and the symbol of his literary aesthetic on the federal government's management of western expansion?

Constructed in a parallel structure that plays with the concept of plurality and singularity, the relationship between an individual and the collective. The expression of a unity of being between people under the construction of a national project that subsumed the nations within nation, the grammatical nod to the pronoun of individuality and the doubling of the individual in the places of a radical inclusive or a rejection of dependence and a radical egoist sensitivity, a pull inward so strong that the individual disappears, or at least becomes concealed behind the image of the collective.

Anyway, Mir leads with the Spanish first person singular pronoun “yo”

Yo,
un hijo del Caribe,
precisamente antillano.

I,
a son of the Caribbean,
Antillean to be exact.

Which is pretty neat if you ask me. Rothenberg thinks so to, or at least his critical framing brings down this subtle linguistic shift in structure, ”“Whitman's spirit can only be redeemed by a new pronoun, the we of all those nations and people that have been othered” (123). I'm not sure if Whitman's spirit needs to be redeemed. But the juxtaposition between poets places the readers in a new literary geography composed in the service of omnipoetics.