Hart Crane at the Windmill, Brixton 9.2.03

sweet band name.

i love the poetry of hart crane. the intimate, "accessible" ones -- like chaplinesque and my grandmother's love letters -- are touching enough to make me interested in his more cryptic works. things like "at melville's tomb" are beautiful just in themselves, to the extent that i don't really even have an urge to figure out what it is supposed to "mean." i want to spend more time with the bridge because i don't think i "get it" the way i do the stuff from white buildings.

anyone else like hart crane?

oh yeah, and that biopic james franco made is absolutely atrocious.

damn i thought the 20 people logged in would jump on this shit. hart crane is great. when i think of a "poet" i think of either crane or keats: both doomed romantics, eternally young. i worry sometimes how much this myth affects my reading of crane's poems. with keats, i think the poems are so extraordinary they could be anonymous and i would feel the same way about them, but with crane, it's more difficult to say.

can a mod change the title of this thead to "Hart Crane will kill your favorite rapper for money"?

James Franco's deluded ideas that he's some kind of supertalented allrounder film genius're wearing my patience thin, man

yeah that movie sucked

i liked when he sucked the clearly prosthetic dick though. that was lol.

hart crane is classic for 'the bridge' alone. that poem is amazing.

I need to read more Crane, I have lots of love for his biography which I read some years back, but I remember thinking Melville's Tomb and Black Tambourine at least were dope

melville's tomb is indeed dope. repose of rivers is another good one. he is good when writing about the ocean, which is sadly ironic i guess.

Also: I'm dreading to see what Franco has done to As I Lay Dying

james effing franco

lol.

here's the bio I was reading. I don't think I ever finished it, but it does a good job of kind of leading one through the works

http://www.amazon.com/The-Broken-Tower-Life-Crane/dp/0393320413

sorry for the superfluous 'kind of'; I think that's a bit of a nervous tic I have at times

i do the "kind of" thing too. that seems good. i watched a video where ben lerner says that hart crane was the last poet to really believe in the medium, in an almost religious sense. poetic language, for him, was very different from prose language and the former was able to describe experiences that the latter just cannot. i think there is something to this idea: he was a very ambitious guy and as eloquent as the poems seem, i also get the sense with them that they were the product of a great deal of labor. but this doesn't make them seem forced: it is touching, i think, that he wrote with that kind of earnesty in the 20s and 30s.

i was talking to the dude who taught my modernist poetry seminar in grad school like near the end of the semester and i asked him why there was no hart crane on the syllabus. he looked at me and shrugged a little and said, "well, hart crane isn't very good" and the scales fell

i'm just going to post At Melville's Tomb

At Melville’s Tomb
By Hart Crane

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Thought you might have been talking about Jess Franco but he is no longer with us.

Crane was not always great at pastiche, but give credit to one of literature's great fanboys:

To Emily Dickinson

You who desired so much--in vain to ask--
Yet fed you hunger like an endless task,
Dared dignify the labor, bless the quest--
Achieved that stillness ultimately best,

Being, of all, least sought for: Emily, hear!
O sweet, dead Silencer, most suddenly clear
When singing that Eternity possessed
And plundered momently in every breast;

--Truly no flower yet withers in your hand.
The harvest you descried and understand
Needs more than wit to gather, love to bind.
Some reconcilement of remotest mind--

Leaves Ormus rubyless, and Ophir chill.
Else tears heap all within one clay-cold hill.

(third stanza ftw)

the last couplet of the third stanza is just perfect.

I was talking about Hart Crane (who I haven't read in many many years) in a dream last night because of this thread.

Hbd HHC

i came here to say something about hart crane in honor of harold bloom, and found a bunch of posts i wrote six years ago, seemingly in the voice of carles from hipster runoff.

anyway, this fucking slays

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43260/at-melvilles-tomb-56d221f8f2f82

what blame to us if the heart live on

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;