To Hart Crane

[rowens]

This hand beating its head
Against a wall in the empty pocket,
Missing only a postcard of regret:
But still etching,—
These spindrift passages
In the noon of a day.

Focusing, now,
The enwrapt villain, incepting,
Immarginal spirit of air:
Toiling, to and fro, and up and down;
And above and below the river.

Where tallied, the emotional horde
Set swarming, in demonic incubation.
The Fever! The festering mold,
Infested skank of moisture:
—We want more life, Father!

Oh empty!
Of the adolescent achings of the race, incarnate,
You had nothing left to say,
Oh son of man
—And woman: daft patron of the Golden Bough.

I, too, walked out
To descry the homegrown legend;
Its death stillborn in its spirit
Rising.
O Rising!

And followed through the assembled nights,
Tabulated footsteps, leaving my fingers folded
Over caustic images on fallen harmonies,
To strike such chords as you did
That last night in Baltimore.

—To match our regrets,
And forsake that redemption I owe you.
Neglect but not forget, in my lifetime,
That postcard with your face
In the Brooklyn bookstore
That would mark me in your debt.

To closet in a dusty chest
Of token loves and matrimonial acquaintance;
Salvaged from some finite time,
—Eternal, in the hearts of
Strangers, passing by.
Witnesses of my regret, but not my time,
Oh! these fallen leaves in summer.

That name that’s somebody else’s name,
That’s somebody else’s name,
That makes me remember somebody else
That remembers somebody else —

When I count, there are only you and I together
On those early autumn walks,
In green of late dusk evenings.
Nothing said, and less that’s promised;
Only cloak and dagger rambles.
Revels scored in scattered intervals…
—But who is that on the other side of you?

Excessive patron of the broken bough,
Delirious under sundered patronage:
Neither, as voiceless distance again expands,
To hold this desperate choice.

To obscure your mythic logic
For lost searchers and spiritual lives misspent
In recordings ages hence…


.................
There's a lot of people in this poem, including Hart Crane. I twisted his writings to my own purposes in something I made called "More Human Than Human"....And I truly regret not buying that postcard when I had a chance years ago.

[Keith]

wow, hat comes off head and is waved into my midrift as I bow.

[rowens]

Lots of people make appearances; Whitman, Dickinson, Poe, Eliot, me, some other people. But mostly with Crane.

---

I also coined a couple words. Though I don't see why they didn't exist. They might exist somewhere.

[billy]

while it's a decently written poem, i struggled with it's intent or what i perceive it's intent to be because i'm not versed enough with poets works to know who is connected to what. i did think i saw a line almost of ginsberg in there, but that was it. my loss but it's the truth.

[rowens]

I'm not sure what might be from Ginsberg. Most of the allusions are very subtle, and most are references to Crane's poems about other poets. The allusion to Dickinson is in only one word. Crane travelled to the places these people travelled, and wrote about them in an "epic" poem called "The Bridge". A new myth of America. And my poem is about my experiences in these places, compared to what he says in his poems. If anything, I hoped maybe I could get some people interested in Crane; other than a nearly obscure movie about him that came out last year, there's not much attention paid to him compared to the other American poets I mentioned.

[Leanne]

I rate Crane just as highly as Eliot, cummings and WCW -- which is to say, while I admire his work from a technical point of view, it does little to engage me as a reader. I find modernism cold and tedious in the main. Nonetheless, you have done well to emulate the voice of those highly respected American poets.

[rowens]

I think modernism is like recycling. I once very much disliked T.S. Eliot, and loved Byron and Keats and Yeats. But I've since felt broken up as a person, and started to experience things as if on the same dimension as the Wasteland. I've been able to assimilate such experiences into a personal narrative, that's actually a life. And I don't know if postmodernism can be said to 'exist', but I've tried to do the same with ideas of those such as Deleuze. I've tried to collect that cold and tedious trash, and add some warmth. But the dry wasteland has its way of dragging me back down into it, like the sarlacc in "Return of the Jedi", and I'm left with only that pathetic "infested skank of moisture." I like things to be warmblooded and exciting too. I'm heavily involved in prose works that are making more progress. I'm finding a way to a poetry for that. But I'm trying to burn all the trash first, and see what survives.

You've handled contemporary themes very nicely in some traditional forms, Leanne. And your homages to 19th century figures work splendidly. All the moderns had to reach back to older times to find some semblance of purpose and identity, so they could say something that actually appeared to make sense. Sometimes moments just stretch out until they break off into another and then another, and that literally hurts me. My sense of time and abstract notions physically and emotionally twist me apart. I'm a very silly person.

[billy]

I'm not sure what might be from Ginsberg. Most of the allusions are very subtle, and most are references to Crane's poems about other poets. The allusion to Dickinson is in only one word. Crane travelled to the places these people travelled, and wrote about them in an "epic" poem called "The Bridge". A new myth of America. And my poem is about my experiences in these places, compared to what he says in his poems. If anything, I hoped maybe I could get some people interested in Crane; other than a nearly obscure movie about him that came out last year, there's not much attention paid to him compared to the other American poets I mentioned.

non i was just reminded of A Supermarket in California, by the brooklyn bookstore line, (which isn't the same bit it set off a trigger. in his supermarket ginsberg spoke of wally whitman, wanting to poke grocery boys. he used the supermarket to portray whitman life i think, this seems to be doing the same for crane, but as i say, i can't tell how because i don't know crane. there was a jealousy, maybe even a physical one between ginsberg and whitman and i get a little of that here, though nothing as overt.

When I count, there are only you and I together
On those early autumn walks,
In green of late dusk evenings.
Nothing said, and less that’s promised;
Only cloak and dagger rambles.
Revels scored in scattered intervals…
—But who is that on the other side of you?

[rowens]

That's a good thing to summon up. The most obvious people hanging around are Crane, Eliot, and Whitman. And the supermarket would be America, or America would be the supermarket, in my poem. Like George Carlin said, "A shoppng mall from coast to coast..." But there are some other places you can go in this country.