Monday, November 06, 2006

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.

2 comments:

Patricia Lockwood said...

Yesterday, I wrote, "I love the way Victoria's head is leaping off her neck in that really natural-looking way." Stop eating my witticisms, Blogger!

Eat More Beef said...
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