Garden Abstract

The apple on its bough is her desire,--
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.

And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,
Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.

Hart Crane, White Buildings

Tomorrow marks the last official day of our Hart Crane party, which has been splendid in all respects. I will be posting a farewell picture sometime during the day, and as soon as I hear from Tony Williams I will announce the poet we'll be celebrating in December. Fingers crossed for William Topaz McGonagall!

Strange Gratuity of Horses

Back at the erstwhile house
We shoveled and sweated; watched the ogre sun
Blister the mountain, stripped now, bare of palm,
Everything--and lick the grass, as black as patent
Leather, which the rimed white wind had glazed.

[...]

For I
Remember still that strange gratuity of horses
--One ours, and one, a stranger, creeping up with dawn
Out of the bamboo brake through howling, sheeted light
When the storm was dying. And Sarah saw them, too--
Sobbed, Yes, now--it's almost over. For they know;
The weather's in their noses.

from "Eternity," unpublished poem

The ellipsis indicates a strophe about steaming mules that I was forced to omit, because I had no room to squeeze them in. Anyway, here are some horses with weather in their nostrils; here also is an ogre sun licking the mountains. You probably thought I was going to give one of the horses a penis, didn't you, since that would have been so gratuitous! Well, I managed to restrain myself, since I figured we had had enough obscenity for one month. But it turned out I couldn't help it, and I drew the penis anyway. However, I ultimately made the decision to censor the offending part, but instead of writing CENSORED on the little bar I wrote PENIS, so you would know what it was. You're welcome!

I Am Feeling Some Power Bud in Me Right Now

The Moth That God Made Blind

Among cocoa-nut palms of a far oasis,
Conceived in the light of Arabian moons,
There are butterflies born in mosaic date-vases,
That emerge black and vermeil from yellow cocoons.

Some say that for sweetness they cannot see far,--
That their land is too gorgeous to free their eyes wide
To horizons which knife-like would only mar
Their joy with a barren and steely tide--

That they only can see when their moon limits vision,
Their mother, the Moon, marks a halo of light
On their own small oasis, ray-cut, an incision,
Where are set all the myriad jewelleries of night.

So they sleep in the shade of black palm-bark at noon,
Blind only in day, but remembering that soon
She will flush their hid wings in the evening to blaze
Countless rubies and tapers in the oasis' blue haze.

But over one moth's eyes were tissues at birth
Too multiplied even to center his gaze
On that circle of paradise cool in the night;--
Never came light through that honey-thick glaze.

And had not his pinions with signs mystical
And rings macrocosmic won envy as thrall,
They had scorned him, so humbly low, bound there and tied
At night like a grain of sand, futile and dried.

But once though, he learned of that span of his wings,--
The florescence, the power he felt bud at the time
When the others were blinded by all waking things;
And he ventured the desert,--his wings took the climb.

And lo, in that dawn he was pierroting over,--
Swinging in spirals round the fresh breasts of day.
The moat of the desert was melthing from clover
To yellow,--to crystal,--a sea of white spray--

Till the sun, he still gyrating, shot out all white,--
Though a black god to him in a dizzying night;--
And without one cloud-car in that wide meshless blue
The sun saw a ruby brightening ever, that flew.

Seething and rounding in long streams of light
The heat led the moth up in octopus arms:
The honey-wax eyes could find no alarm,
But they burned thinly blind like an orange peeled white.

And the torrid hum of great wings was his song
When below him he saw what his whole race had shunned--
Great horizons and systems and shores all along
Which blue tides of cool moons were slow shaken and sunned.

A little time only, for sight burned as deep
As his blindness before had frozen in Hell,
And his wings atom-withered,--gone,--left but a leap--
To the desert,--back,--down,--still lonely he fell.

I have hunted long years for a spark in the sand;--
My eyes have hugged beauty and winged life's brief spell.
These things I have:--a withered hand;--
Dim eyes;--a tongue that cannot tell.

I thought this would be a good opportunity to post in its entirety the worst poem ever written by Hart Crane, since this website is all about honesty. It's so awful, you guys--with the tissues and the pierroting and the fresh breasts of day! It makes me giggle like a baby, so it is a particular favorite of mine, and has exerted a huge influence on my own writing. In response, I have drawn a picture of God stabbing out the eyes of a moth with a realistic knife. The moon is depicted as a tiny statue squatting to give birth, and the sun is drawn directly opposite, gyrating and shooting out all white onto God's hand. Bonus points if you can spot the fresh breasts of day. Also, do you like how in my picture, it is both day and night at the same time? Do not apply your feeble intellects to the problem of how, just trust in my supreme artistry and encyclopedic knowledge of scientific phenomena.

P.S. Alas, the poem is so rich in insanities that I had no space to include the hot octopus made of light, which I would very much like to have done.

My Fingers Are Too Fat to Draw, So I Offer a Poem Instead

Paraphrase

Of a steady winking beat between
Systole, diastole spokes-of-a-wheel
One rushing from the bed at night
May find the record wedged in his soul.

Above the feet the clever sheets
Lie guard upon the integers of life:
For what skims in between uncurls the toe,
Involves the hands in purposeless repose.

But from its bracket how the tongue can tell
When systematic morn shall sometime flood
The pillow--how desperate is the light
That shall not rouse, how faint the crow's cavil

As, when stunned in that antarctic blaze,
Your head, unrocking to a pulse, already
Hollowed by air, posts a white paraphrase
Among bruised roses on the papered wall.

Hart Crane, White Buildings

Teat-Squeeze Redux

Euclid Avenue

To be or not to be--?

But so to be the denizen stingaree--
As stertorous as nations romanized may throw
Surveys by Maytimes slow...Hexameters
Suspending jockstraps for gangsters while the pil-

Bland (grim)aces Plutarch's perch. And angles
Break in folds of crepe that blackly drape
The broken door...Crouch so. Amend

Then; and clinch.

Sweep...
Clean is that cloven Hoof. Then reap
Strain, clasp oblivion as though Chance
Could absent all answer save the chosen rant.

Stop now, as never, never. Speak

As telegrams continue, write, strike
your scholarship (stop) through broken ribs; jail
(Stripe) answers Euclid. Einstein curves, but does not
Quail. Does Newton take the Eucharist on rail
Nor any boulevard no more? I say...

For there are statues, shapes your use
Repeals. Youse use. You're prevalent,--prevail!
Youse
Food once more and souse, like all me under sail.
My friends, I never thought we'd fail.

That dirty peacock's pride, once gory God's own story:
It didn't belong no more; no, never did glory
Walk on Euclid Avenue, as didn't Wm.
Bleached or blacked, whichever t'was. What milk
we've put in blasted pigs! I says...O, well--

But I say, what a swell chance, boys. No more
Cancers, jealousy, tenements or giblets! Death, my boys,
Nor blinkers either--

Four shots at who-knows-how--how

Many-it-was unsupervised

Grabbed right outa my mouth that final chew--
Right there on Euclid Avenue.

I'm on a roll with these squirting udders, you guys. At first I thought I would go a more conventional route with this one, but at the last minute decided to continue to explore the dangerously edgy theme I introduced yesterday. The pig, as you can see, is extremely blasted, and the disembodied squiggling teats of out-of-picture cows have decided to come to his rescue with their milk, which they spray forth with their inerrantly-aimed hooves.

Announcement!

I meant to post this a month ago, but I am so forgetful: when you aren't sending beautiful drawings to me, you should be sending them to Stacy Elaine and her kidnappers, who call themselves THE IMAGINATIVE ACTION REGIME, over at the Los Angeles Project. It is a neverending source of delight for me, and I mean to send the kidnappers something soon--you should too! What do they want? Your childlike solutions to adult problems, of course.

I'll Touch Your Children with MY Milk Wand!

"Out of the seagull cries and wind
On this strange shore I build
The virgin. They laugh to hear
How I endow her, standing
Hair mocked by the sea"

from "To Liberty," a fragment

Today is a holiday--I was finally able to pick up a copy of Hart's collected poems, which means that I can post entire strophes and poems now, instead of whatever measly few lines I was able to scrawl on a napkin before they hustled me out of the bookstore.

In this interpretation, I have cast the speaker of the poem as a devil-eyed cow. The cow is "building" a grilled cheese sandwich resembling the Virgin Mary with flamboyant streams of milk--the whole scene is reminiscent of those horrible Kraft commercials where the cow fairy touches children with her milk wand and makes their sandwiches fill up with cheese, except in my version, the cow is gripping her own udders between clumsy hooves and spraying milk directly on the Virgin's face. You will surely laugh to see how she endows her. On the same beach stands Cousin Itt, who stares philosophically across the water while the ocean taunts, "I'm fingering your girlfriend with an octopus RIGHT NOW!"

Thank God for Biblical Clip-Art

Gorillas die--and so do humanists--who keep
Comparisons clear for evolution's non-escape
And man the deathless target, of his own weak sheep...

from "I Have That Sure Enclitic," a fragment

I apologize for the sad delay; this masterpiece took me much longer than I was expecting, what with having to fuse so many disparate elements--gun, sheep, tombstones, Christopher Lambert--into a coherent piece of art. After all is said and done, I am quite pleased with the result. I think you will find the clip-art I used as a background extremely beautiful--I love the way the shepherd's hand has disappeared wholly into that sheep's hungry ass. You'd think this was an ingenious touch of mine, but I can assure you that it was present in the original drawing. Also, I have no idea why one of its hind legs tapers off bloodlessly at the knee.

As for my own subtle embroideries, I have depicted the sheep shooting lasers out of their eyes at the unkillable shepherd; one of the sheep has taken the further measure of arming itself with a gun, which will do it no good. You can tell the sheep are weak because they have lady-breasts and one of them is shouting, "Let me show you my little enclitic, Christopher Lambert!" I arrived at this version after a great deal of trial and error, having first given them parasols and trailing tampon strings between their legs.

Totally Worth the Undereye Rash, I Think You'll Agree

Invariably when wine redeems the sight,
Narrowing the mustard scansions of the eyes,
A leopard ranging always in the brow
Asserts a vision in the slumbering gaze.

from "The Wine Menagerie"

This is the best picture that Elegant Choice managed to take of me in the three seconds after I had applied large gobs of stone-ground mustard to my face and before that same mustard began to burn so, so badly. So badly. So badly that I hardly had the strength to Photoshop a gangling bald man tattooed like a jungle cat onto my forehead--I persevered, though, and I'm so glad I did. I hope to God you people appreciate my daily sacrifices.

There Is a Line You Must Not Cross, but Round These Parts We Generally Ignore It

Cuchulainn has posted a brain-bending interpretation of the last line of "Voyages I" over at his non-blog--go look!

Ana Makes Habitable My Heart with Furniture and Houseplants of Pure Joy

I have been full of moody lousiness for the past few days, which has prevented me from giving birth to any more delicious drawings, but this morning Ana swooped into my inbox with a timely piece of art and rescued me from my doldrums. She writes: "I have attempted an artistic rendering of the first stanza of 'At Melville’s Tomb', albeit with a slightly contemporary, political air. The lines are as follows:

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.

In this particular rendering, D. Rumsfeld is the mythical He (Melville won’t mind); he observes the dice of drowned men’s bones (i.e. the vote) as they bequeath the Senate unto the wave, emblematic of Freedom. As he watches, the numbers gleaned from those selfsame dice beat to Playboy upon a dusty shore.

I hope you won’t object to the small liberties taken in the interpretation of Crane’s poem."

Object? Hardly. I wallow in small liberties of interpretation like so many hippos, as you have almost certainly learned by now. I delight in the many layers of this particular contribution: the looming head and crooked finger of the bygone bastard himself, the metaphorical significance of the dice and their numbers, and the obligatory high-minded sexual euphemism. The numbers are beating...off! Well-played, Ana. The hippos of my earlier metaphorical wallowing now tromp in the squealing mud of your brain-power and bask in the rays of your wit.

What This Hart Crane Party Really Needs: Part Two

Where the cedar leaf divides the sky
I heard the sea.
In sapphire arenas of the hills
I was promised an improved infancy.

from "Passage"

Infancy is pretty delightful in the first place, I think we can all agree--what with the continual rubbing of ointments and the angelic hairlessness--but the one thing that might make it slightly nicer is extra breasts. At first I just drew a regular baby rolling in the sapphire hills, but then I realized that I could add another dimension of poignancy if I used Babyfaced Dino instead, whose turbulent friendship with the character Breast Cob is a constant reminder to him that his infancy was a poverty of merely two. The dino body rollicks with anticipation, and the fat-legged baby face screams with excitement at the promise of more.

What This Hart Crane Party Really Needs Is Some Half-Naked Women

Cuchulainn writes: "Here's an ice-breaking eyesore for the "I Heart Hart" party. As you know, I tend to wax pedantic, so you'll surely want to compress the introduction of this masterpiece into your own, pithy words. It's pretty self-explanatory, but here goes:

It is a violent scene, from the first movement of Hart Crane's 'Porphyro in Akron'. The setting is a street in downtown Akron, Ohio, and in this Old World collision, the Greek immigrant is represented by Elizabeth Stamatina Fey, whose heritage is Greek, and about whom I often have somewhat classically Greek thoughts. The Swede is model Victoria Silvstedt, conjuring that memory of her beloved Fjords that dangles within her ample bosom like a locket.

Rising from the street grating, miasma-like, is hip-hop diva Pink. She looks perhaps pensive or impatient, and is imploring us with her formidable, concentrated brainwaves to Get This Party Started.

PORPHYRO IN AKRON

I.

Greeting the dawn,

A shift of rubber workers presses down

South Main.

With the stubbornness of muddy water

It dwindles at each cross-line

Until you feel the weight of many cars

North-bound, and East and West,

Absorbing and conveying weariness, ---

Rumbling over the hills.

Akron, "high place", ---

A bunch of smoke-ridden hills

Among rolling Ohio hills.

The dark-skinned Greeks grin at each other

In the streets and alleys.

The Greek grins and fights with the Swede, ---

And the Fjords and the Aegean are remembered.

The plough, the sword,

The trowel, ---and the monkey wrench!

O City, your axles need not the oil of song.

I will whisper words to myself

And put them in my pockets.

I will go and pitch quoits with old men

In the dust of a road."

To which I responded: "You know how sometimes when you have been making out too long, your teeth start to feel like they are being zapped with joyousness or whatever? That's happening to me right now."

Bless you, Cuchulainn. This party could not have asked for a more ingenious or sweet-smelling foot to start out on.

Crane: His Thoughts Can Kill

Biography:

Modern American Poetry

Poems:

Modern American Poetry

Oldpoetry

Academy of American Poets

The Complete Poems

Articles:

New Yorker

New Criterion

New Yorks Times Archives

Washington Post (In Which a Certain Fucker Asserts That Hart Crane Was a Better Poet Than Wallace Stevens--You Fucking Wish, Merle)

We Will Make Our Meek Adjustments

Cuchulainn has spoken: Hart Crane wants a party! I think this is a truly excellent choice; I have been revisiting the man's work over the past few days and I have a thousand ideas for costumes, drawings, and cartoons. It's already the 3rd, so we had better behave like very fast animals in order to make up for lost time. Hart Crane, your party begins NOW.

As of this very minute, I am accepting Hart Crane submissions at happybirthdaywallace at yahoo dot com, since I see no reason to get a new email address each month. I will post your contributions as they come, starting with a few of my own--and possibly Cuchulainn's, too, if he desires to be a trailblazer. I'll also be posting a ton of Hart Crane links and resources as soon as I can--there has been a great deal of revived interest in him lately, due to the recent publication of his poems and letters by Library of America, so there's a lot to sift through. Note: I was previously unaware of how completely awesome-looking he was. No wonder Cleveland wanted a statue of him looking like a stony dandy!

We Do Not Prove the Existence of the Poem: Day Infinity

Here is a picture of Wallace Stevens giving a total blowjob to the word "weather," as described in the eleventh section of "A Primitive Like an Orb":

Here, then, is an abstraction given head,
A giant on the horizon, given arms,
A massive body and long legs, stretched out,
A definition with an illustration, not
Too exactly labelled, a large among the smalls
Of it, a close, parental magnitude,
At the centre on the horizon, concentrum, grave
And prodigious person, patron of origins.

Do you like his frilled shirt? I do. I wanted to make this drawing extra-classy because the last technical day of the Wallace Stevens Emperor of Ice-Cream Cakes party was two days ago, and I wanted to award our hero one last eyeful of my sumptuous art to propel him through the next hundred years of bored afterliving.

This party is far too majestic to let die, so I have decided that we should devote the rest of our lives to creating artistic desecrapretations of the poems we love. Together we will pick a different poet each month to massage with our collected talents, beginning with three poets that will be chosen by our prizewinners. That's right, my geniuses, I am awarding you Intangible Prizes of Imperial Choice--Cuchulainn will pick a poet for November, Tony will pick a poet for December, and Ana will pick a poet for January. I will, of course, continue to welcome any Wallace Stevens submissions I receive as long as our eternal party here lasts, since we have only managed to scratch the surface of his euphemistic brilliance in the past few weeks, and also because I am kind of disappointed that I never got to dress up like a silentious porpoise.

I anxiously await the decisions of Cuchulainn, Tony, and Ana. I trust the judgment of each of these people implicitly, and though I will be rooting very strongly for James Whitcomb Riley to be the second mastermind to receive my nuanced treatments, I will be delighted to accept whichever poets they choose. More news as it comes, little partygoers--I hope you will stay all night and well into the morning.

HAPPY PONDEROUS AUTUMNAL HALLOWALLACE

Hallowallace! That is what Ana, who is rich in cleverness, named it. She writes: "alright. i thought before October ran out i HAD to contribute in some fashion--here is a PONDEROUS, AUTUMNAL HALLOWALLACE. yes, i'm yelling. with joy!" As did I when I laid my eyes on her creation. I was sadly unable to post this yesterday, seeing as how I was attending many dozens of frightening parties with my wealthy and attractive friends*, but Wallace does not mind, seeing as how he is dead and the concept of days and lateness are so silly to him now. The quote "inanimate in an inert savoir" is taken from "The Plain Sense of Things," which I will reproduce here in its entirety because I love it so much and it is so appropriate for the bygone scary holiday.

The Plain Sense of Things

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

We have not come to the end of the imagination yet, though, my friends. I will make a surprising announcement later today**, when I also announce what prizes I will be awarding the three geniuses who won the contests. Be full of anticipation!

*This is untrue.
**And by "later today," I mean "tomorrow," because my ultimate drawing is not quite finished yet. I think you'll find it worth the wait, though. Extra apologies to my three geniuses who have been waiting for news of their prizes!