[Nigel Mace]

As this wonderful thread has developed I've been struck by how it has yet to recognise one of the most publicly widespread means by which poetry has made connections with its public in the 20th century - song, and the poetry movements which were associated with it. For many that was where their verse remained but for a number it also led to some slender volumes which, to me, stood out as memorable moments in my reading of poetry. Prime among those, for me, were the poems of Fran Landesman and especially in this collection which tacks between large scale politics and the politics of the personal, between love and its disappointments with eloquence and almost unbearable poignancy. There are weaker pieces, of course, - even slipshod ones too 'easy' in their drive and thus too pale to gain traction - and there are ones I can never forget. So let me pitch for this haunting little book and the gems like "The Grooves of Change", "Make Lemonade", "The Artist v. Death", "Missed Understandings", "Semi-Detached" and, perhaps especially, the bitter sweet "The Early Winds of Morning" and the joyfully ecstatic "Come With Me" which never fails to move me with its absolute affirmation of shared love. The other books also have their charms - perhaps most of all in "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men" - but this is, to me, the gem.

[R. Nemo Hill]

62. The Bridge by Hart Crane

A masterpiece, and one that breaks absolutely every rule that Eratospherian critique here establishes. It is unabashedly ornate, hyper-modified, riddled with archaisms, filled with cataclysmic shifts of tone and diction, unapologetically dense. I’ve returned to it again recently, more well-versed than I once was, and I am amazed at how almost every school of poetry is recalled or prefigured within its diverse yet interrelated parts. And amazed as well as what appears on first read to be the mesmerizingly impenetrable music of surfaces yields up a complexity of thought that clarifies its own mystical leaps of intuition. No less a myth of our times than The Wasteland, yet one (in Hart Crane's own estimation) less assailed by pessimism. Indeed, despite the grim circumstances of its author’s life, or perhaps because of them, it takes to anguished heart Rilke’s dictum that poetry be, above all else, an act of praise.



This from Part VI, Quaker Hill...

So, must we from the hawk’s far-stemming view,
Must we descend as worm’s eye to construe
Our love of all we touch, and take it to the Gate
As humbly as a guest who knows himself too late,
His news already told? Yes, while the heart is wrung,
Arise—yes, take this sheaf of dust upon your tongue!
In one last angelus lift throbbing throat—
Listen, transmuting silence with that stilly note

Of pain that Emily, that Isadora knew!
While high from dim elm-chancels hung with dew,
That triple-noted clause of moonlight—
Yes, whip-poor-will, unhusks the heart of fright,
Breaks us and saves, yes, breaks the heart, yet yields
That patience that is armour and that shields
Love from despair—when love foresees the end—
Leaf after autumnal leaf
.................................break off,
..............................................descend—
.................................................. ...........descend—



And this from the final section, Part VIII, Atlantis...

We left the haven hanging in the night—
Sheened harbor lanterns backward fled the keel.
Pacific here at time’s end, bearing corn, —
Eyes stammer through the pangs of dust and steel.
And still the circular, indubitable frieze
Of heaven’s meditation, yoking wave
To kneeling wave, one song devoutly binds—
The vernal strophe chimes from deathless strings!

O Thou, steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
The agile precincts of the lark’s return;
Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing
In single chrysalis the many twain, —
Of stars thou art the stitch and stallion glow
And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom—
Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time’s realm
As love strikes clear direction for the helm.



The book is readily available
http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?keyword=the+bridge+hart++crane&mtype=B& hs.x=0&hs.y=0
Though I salivate for this edition:
http://www.alibris.com/booksearch.detail?invid=11289741801&keyword=the+br idge+hart+crane&qsort=&page=1

Nemo

[R. Nemo Hill]

63. Exile by St.-John Perse

Really the Bollingen Collected Poems is full of one gem after another, but it is the single work Exile that is dearest to me. When I first discovered the poems of St.-John Perse I was instantly fascinated—I’d never encounter anything like them before and devoured the Collected cover to cover, as well as his letters. Most people I know are not familiar with his work at all, despite his 1960 Nobel Prize. Those who are, know of him almost exclusively through T.S. Eliot’s translation of Anabasis. Perse wrote exclusively in the prose poem format, but there can be little doubt that the language he employs is unadulterated poetry. One of the most captivating parts of his work is his vocabulary which is so sensually rich in technical terms that a list of the words I learned through reading him is a poem in itself.

...seisms, phasmas, vanessas, almagesta, portulains, spandrel, natron, alburnum, latria, uriae, aurochs, saltwort, crockets, culm, achene, anopheles...

Timeless and resoundingly mythic, to me these poems sound like long-lost anonymous manuscripts discovered in some forgotten cave or cask. Indeed, though he led a very public life as a statesman and diplomat, Perse seems to have purged his work of all details of selfhood, choosing a path of self-effacement—in stark contrast to that chosen by the confessionalists who are legion. His is a voice that always seems to come from very far away. And yet the great paradox of this otherworldly approach is that it manages to come across as intensely political, and—for me—almost unbearably intimate.


“...He who, in the midnight hours, ranges the stone galleries assessing the title-deeds of a beautiful comet; he who, between two wars, watches over the purity of great crystal lenses; he who rises before daylight to clean out the fountains, and the great epidemics are at an end; he who does the lacquering on the high seas with his daughters and his sons’ wives, and they have had enough of the ashes floating above the land...
.....He who soothes the insane in the great blue-chalk asylums, and it is Sunday over the rye-fields, the time of great blindness; he who, at the entry of the armies, goes up to the organs in their solitude; he who dreams one day about strange quarry-prisons, and it is a little after mid-day, the time of great bereavement; he who, at sea, below the wind from a low-lying island, is awakened by the dry scent of a little immortelle of the sands; he who stays awake in the ports, embraced by women of another race, and there is a vetiver flavour in the armpit smell of the low, receding night, and it is a little after midnight, the time of great opacity; he whose breathing, asleep, is one with the sea’s breathing, and at the turn of the tide he turns on the bed like a ship putting about...”

(translated by Denis Devlin)


I did a reading in New York City of this single long poem, Exile, about six or seven years ago—one of the best performances I’ve ever given. I had goosebumps for the duration.

http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?qwork=14047134&matches=3&cm_sp=works*li sting*title


"...There has always been this clamour, there has always been this splendour."

Nemo

[David Rosenthal]

Crane, The Bridge -- absolutely right. Good thing you looked in, Nemo.

David R,