In this poem, Rufo Quintavalle has rewritten Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself keeping the first and last letter of each line, and replacing the middle. Within this strict constraint, Quintavalle the poet has achieved a remarkable and touching intimacy at a distance with Whitman’s inner world. The first fifteen sections of the poem were previously published by corrupt press as a bilingual chapbook with a facing French translation by Ian Monk. Watch Quintavalle and Monk reading from the English and French versions, sometimes alternately and sometimes simultaneously, here.