Anti-myth

Anti-myth

Hart Crane (1899-1932) simultaneously enraptures and infuriates me. I once spent a period of time intensively re-reading his poem “Voyages.” The poem passed Emily Dickinson’s spontaneous test of determining what’s worth the effort: I felt “physically as if the top of my head were taken off.”

It is one and the same thing that elicits such contradictory responses to my reading of “Voyages.” In his “General Aims and Theories,” Crane as much as telecasts this possibility when he explains the function of “the logic of metaphor” in his art: “As to technical considerations: the motivation of the poem must be derived from the implicit emotional dynamics of the materials used, and the terms of expression employed are often selected less for their logical (literal) significance than for their associational meanings. Via this and their metaphorical inter-relationships, the entire construction of the poem is raised on the organic principle of a ‘logic of metaphor,’ which antedates our so-called pure logic, and which is the genetic basis of all speech, hence consciousness and thought-extension.”

Crane expanded on “the logic of metaphor” in what is now a well-known letter to Harriet Monroe (1860-1936), the founder and editor of Poetry. Crane was hoping to get published in the magazine, but Monroe had serious reservations. In response to her queries concerning his poems, Crane wrote: “The logic of metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can’t be thoroughly traced or explained outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology.”

Crane, I think, is interested in resonances, sounds, associations vague and concrete, sparks of memory, shades of dream and fantasy–in sort, evocation, not denotation. In many ways, the reader is cast into the sea along with Crane, and left to his own–always inadequate–devices. What did I expect from Hart Crane? Help? His biography shows how misguided this expectation was. Indeed, his life story was a factor in my anger at him. Such exuberance of imagery, such grandeur of articulation–and to end it with a pathetic, drunken plunge into the shark-infested sea.

My poem is ironic in that it attempts to imitate (palely, of course) Crane’s language and imagery. This approach is intended to evoke something of the tension in my response to him, namely, simultaneous admiration and annoyance.

You can read Hart Crane’s “Voyages” here.

Anti-myth
Glenn Wallis

I will not grow rhapsodic with you,
Hart Crane.

Though I too would as soon swoon
To the polyphonous swell of sea
And wave, when at all, rapt
To the landlocked in ecstatic delirium —
My penniless palms clutch only yesterday’s bills,
And my gaze is wrapped in the quotidian.

Have you registered your bequest, unearthly shore,
With the Prodigals lounging on indolent islands?
Or were you bound beat and drunken in their galleons of fire,
Desire devouring your samite days like urchins skinned by sand?

No, I won’t grow rhapsodic with you.

The Orizaba, ship of playing waters,
Straddled the thundering Tropic of Cancer, groping
Like Columbus, for proof of terrestrial proximity.

Eight booming bells sounded the noon;
Then the shrill of the whistle shrieked—man overboard!

What happened when you hit the water?
Did the sea become a mirror refracting your imaged words?
Or did her swollen belly rend you motionless, pajama-less,
Drifting not moonward but abased,
Wafting sprawling plumbing anorexic
Her pathless chasm to dim sleep?

Your elegists crooned that the sea received you,
Offered you the mug of Thor.
But Captain Blackadder spewed a fury of brine:
If the propellers did not grind him to mincemeat, the sharks did.
Was this your transmemberment, Hart Crane?

I will ask you no more questions.

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