Our Terminus: "A Certain Racy Wild Smack"
Well, you've done it. You've saluted the nobles at each of the six stops.
What hurts is what had to be left out, though you're invited to dig deeper into
Denver's literary history on your own to create a customized tour.
You'll find novelist John Fante's old Italian immigrant North Denver roots in
the neighborhood around Our Lady of Mount Carmel church. His work has been
rediscovered with the sort of buzz-filled fervor that accompanies the entry of
a hitherto hidden classic American voice into the surprised, traditional canon.
James Ryan Morris awaits you, too, a latter-day '70s radical Denver poet and
publisher who overcame severe personal obstacles to re-energize the local
anti-literary community before his accidental overdose late in 1978.
If you drift near the
University of Denver campus, then you're moving closer
to the locus of untold stories of noted Swallow Press founder Alan Swallow as
well as novelists John Williams, Sandra Dallas, Seymour Epstein and Rikki Ducornet.
Finally, you'll come across old Walt Whitman, who lingered in the fall of 1879,
long enough to declare his unabashed crush on Denver in a passage that deserves
to be quoted in full:
"I have lived in or visited all the great cities on the Atlantic third of the
republic-Boston, Brooklyn with its hills, New Orleans, Baltimore, stately
Washington, broad Philadelphia, teeming Cincinnati and Chicago, and for thirty
years in that wonder, wash'd by hurried and glittering tides, my own New York,
not only the New World's but the world's city-but, newcomer to Denver as I am,
and threading its streets, breathing its air, warm'd by its sunshine, and having
what there is of its human as well as aerial ozone flash'd upon me now for only
three or four days, I am very much like a man feels sometimes toward certain
people he meets with, and warms to, and hardly knows why. I, too, can hardly
tell why, but as I enter'd the city in the slight haze of a late September
afternoon, and have breath'd its air, and slept well o' nights, and have roam'd
or rode leisurely, and watch'd the comers and goers at the hotels, and absorb'd
the climatic magnetism of this curiously attractive region, there has steadily
grown upon me a feeling of affection for the spot, which, sudden as it is, has
become so definite and strong that I must put it on record. So much for my
feeling toward the Queen city of the plains and peaks, where she sits in her
delicious rare atmosphere, over 5,000 feet above sea-level, irrigated by mountain
streams, one way looking east over the prairies for a thousand miles, and having
the other, westward, in constant view by day, draped in their violet haze,
mountain tops innumerable. Yes, I fell in love with Denver, and even felt a wish
to spend my declining and dying days there."
As Walt put it elsewhere, Denver had "a certain racy wild smack, all its own,"
and it still does on certain streets, at certain moments. Just by participating
as a reader of these online sketches, you've begun your own expedition. Onward!
DENVER'S LITERARY LANDMARKS DRIVING TOUR