Place of Leaves derives from the combination of House of Leaves, my recent read, and Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

These two works feel foundational to my perspective in life currently.

House of Leaves is a mind-bending experimental thriller novel that takes a lot of effort to get through. There are layers of narrators within the story and layers of realities throughout. Leaving me to wonder if they all exist within one mind – which is full circle because a single author created multiple worlds of fiction presumed reality within the same space. The themes I recollected from the book itself are tied to obsession – how deep it can go and how it manifests into the physical world, and how the lack of self trust can deteriorate oneself. Admittedly, I have not finished the book. I am a slow reader and once I put something down it is hard to pick back up. But roughly, 75% complete, I feel the impact already. Feeling like I need to go back and read every single foot note, regardless of the impact on the story. Feeling like the man who is drowning in the story he is trying to salvage, his body and mind falling prey to the darkness he can no longer escape. The house itself feels like a metaphor for my own body and mind. Hallways with no end and no light, shifting and stretching with the prisoner’s depiction in mind. A house inhabiting the minds which inhabit it. Days and weeks can pass by, risking starvation and psychosis. With a monster lurking and growling and no show of face. The fear invisible but created by your own perception. Would highly recommend.

Leaves of Grass is the life long work of Walt Whitman. He has published 6 additions, starting with 12 poems, which he printed himself in the printing press he worked at. And his deathbed edition, accumulating over 400 poems. Leaves of Grass came into my life when I was searching for reconnection with myself. Though I feel like I have always been doing this, I was reaching for things that already existed within me. I had always written poems. Scribbling notebooks full all throughout high school and beyond. But with no intention or no idea why I had the itch to produce the words on paper. And never sharing, unless it was with someone I was especially close to. Even then, it felt exposing.

I’ll need to deticate a whole page to Him. But for now here is the introduction to “Song of Myself”:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

He embodies every living being. He is the same as you and me and acknowledges the life that we all share. He is the past, present, and future. And he knows it.

I felt connected to his writing because I was in a place where I was experiencing intense overwhelm of being confined to one body. Being aware of all the people around me and what their lives entail and how I will never know them and they will never know me and I will never be anyone else than an observer of others. It was very distressing and still is to observe and feel trapped in myself. But with Whitman, he embraced it. His observations may have felt overwhelming, but there was no sorrow present. His writing was not about the distaste of being oneself. It was to “celebrate [himself]” and celebrate others as they are the same. And acknowledging the start and end to all life. And the little things in between made of the same things. Such as a blade of grass. A thing we step on and see every day, an infinite life which we are familiar with. Yet overlooked in it’s beauty, with ambient foliage dressing infinite sceneries. For who would display leaves of grass in a vase on the dining table?

So I like the details of things. The patterns in solid carpet. The flecks in linoleum tiles. The caverns in the bricks outside and inside, weathered thumbprints of their lives.

This is how I approach poetry. As an indulgent observer. And I never realized that’s what it was to me until last year. So I embraced it. And I spiraled into obsession of details and objects and people and I wished to be an object. I wished so badly to not be a person. I’ve finally accepted I cannot be and maybe I don’t want to be. Because then I wouldn’t be able to express all of this here. Or there.

So the combination of House of Leaves and Leaves of Grass can be left open to interpretation. I tend to leave my own thoughts open to interpretation, undecided or unwilling to define the feeling as diction.

So this is my Place of Leaves, attempting to settle on the ground.