"It's going to be a Whitman freak-out jam by the waterfront," says Zach Layton in a Wall Street Journal piece by Steve Dollar (6/30/10). Zach is organizing an evening celebrating Brooklyn's own Walt Whitman, in which "dozens of artists, rockers and writers" will perform the poet's work, set to music. "I was fascinated with the weird, pyschedelic passages in his work," says Zach. "He talks a lot about orbs, and millions of orbs circling those orbs, which got me thinking about psychedelia."

Zach isn't the only one so smitten by Whitman's poetry. Holly Anderson, a poet and songwriter, is all set to read Whitman's "Locomotive in Winter," backed by her husband's band, known as February, "a multi-guitar minimalist blues band adept at chugging, circular rhythms." Says Holly: "The cadence is kick-ass ... And there's a lot of ... innuendo. C'mon it's a poem about a big locomotive!"

Here's a Whitman sampler: "Fierce throated beauty! / Roll through my chant with / all thy lawless music, thy / swinging lamps at night ..." Whoa, baby! Not all the artists find Whitman so easily adaptable to song, though. "The only challenge is, it's freaking hard to set the lines because there's no meter," says Rick Moody of the Wingdale Community Singers. "Why couldn't they do a Dickinson event? Those could all be sung to The Yellow Rose of Texas.'" The Walt-a-Palooza starts at 5 pm on July 1 and is organized by the Issue Project Room.