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Two Poems

Mark Ford, 8 February 2007

... stony beach the ripples whisper, Oh hurryHurry Harry, oh Harry, hurry, hurry . . . The Death of Hart Crane Sir/Madam, I was intrigued by the letter in your last issue from a reader that recounted his meeting, in a bar in Greenwich Village in the mid-sixties, a woman who claimed to have been a passenger on the Orizaba on the voyage the boat made from ...

Three Poems

Michael Hofmann, 5 May 1988

... flowers. I could almost believe the smooth, slabbed plinth that said: They will rise again. Hart Crane The territorial integrity of a battlefield: a small state without frontiers, guarantors or governance, without its own flag to run up its own flagpole – an arm waving in the Caribbean, drowning – a power vacuum ringed by lifeboats. His name ...

Self-Extinction

Russell Davies, 18 June 1981

Short Lives 
by Katinka Matson.
Picador, 366 pp., £2.50, February 1981, 9780330262194
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... Indians’ peyote rite, exacerbating his drug condition. ‘Plentiful tequila’ appealed to Hart Crane – Mexico was his last home shore. Kerouac’s friend/hero/obsession Neal Cassady was found dead there on a railroad track. Jack London did not last more than a couple of years after getting dysentery, and perpetually drunk, in Mexico. Malcolm ...

Roaring Boy

Adam Phillips: Hart Crane, 30 September 1999

The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane 
by Paul Mariani.
Norton, 492 pp., $35, April 1999, 0 393 04726 1
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O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane 
edited by Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber.
Four Walls Eight Windows, 562 pp., $35, July 1997, 0 941423 18 2
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... In so far as there was a shared response to Hart Crane’s poetry after his suicide in 1932, it took the form of invidious comparisons. ‘Crane had the sensibility typical of Baudelaire,’ R.P. Blackmur wrote in 1935, ‘and so misunderstood himself that he attempted to write The Bridge as if he had the sensibility typical of Whitman ...

Never for me

Michael Wood, 2 December 1993

Corona, Corona 
by Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 55 pp., £12.99, September 1993, 0 571 16962 7
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... unmeasured. The book has three sections, the first a serie of ‘lives’ or glimpses of lives – Hart Crane, Kurt Schwitters, Marvin Gaye, an anonymous serial-killer – starting appropriately with a bouncy account of reading Plutarch; the second a series of places, people and moments in the poet’s own life; the third a Mexican (and I think in one ...

Terrible to be alive

Julian Symons, 5 December 1991

Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life 
by William Pritchard.
Farrar, Straus, 335 pp., $25, April 1990, 0 374 24677 7
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Randall Jarrell: Selected Poems 
edited by William Pritchard.
Farrar, Straus, 115 pp., $17.95, April 1990, 0 374 25867 8
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... through, the appalling This Side of Paradise to the triumph of Gatsby. Stevens, Cummings, Pound, Crane, Dos Passos: their merits and possibilities of development were noted at an early stage in their careers. For two decades or a little more, Wilson was almost infallibly discerning about recent American writers, about their British counterparts much less ...

Short Cuts

Jeremy Harding: ‘Inside the Dream Palace’, 6 February 2014

... fails to put in an appearance in Tippins’s book, starting with William Dean Howells and Stephen Crane, up through Thomas Wolfe, and on to anyone you care to name, sliding to an elegant halt with Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland. Largely it’s the names, not the work. You almost get the impression that Arthur Miller might have written After the Fall ...

Hillside Men

Roy Foster: Ernie O’Malley, 16 July 1998

Ernie O’Malley: IRA Intellectual 
by Richard English.
Oxford, 284 pp., £25, March 1998, 0 01 982059 3
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... story in cadences influenced by the early Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and American writer friends like Hart Crane, but with a dry assurance all his own. The heroics come through all the more powerfully in his highly-polished but economical style. The supreme example can be found in the closing paragraph of the book. It is July 1921; the ...

It’s me you gotta make happy

Andrea Brady: John Wieners, 29 July 2021

Yours Presently: The Selected Letters of John Wieners 
edited by Michael Seth Stewart.
New Mexico, 333 pp., £60, December 2020, 978 0 8263 6204 9
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... Hagiographical prefaces to his books by Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley align him with Hart Crane and Keats as a poet vulnerable to the world and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our feet, speaking of ...

Funnelweb

Clive James, 5 April 1984

... sun Fill up his tinted visor like white wine. Few poets get the face that they deserve Or, like Hart Crane, can travel in a tear. Of course Villeneuve was handsome anyway – The Rimbaud of the wheel just oozed romance – But where his class showed was in how that beast Ferrari drew sweet curves at his behest Instead of leading him St ...

At the Pool

Inigo Thomas, 21 June 2018

... West. Williams was buried at sea, as he’d wanted, his body dropped into the Gulf of Mexico where Hart Crane fell overboard and drowned. ‘I’ve always admired the gentleman,’ Williams said, ‘and I never had the opportunity to meet him.’ The pool at the New Orleans Athletic Club was another of Williams’s haunts: ‘Desire and the Black ...

I gained the ledge

Laura Jacobs: ‘Appalachian Spring’, 24 January 2019

Aaron Copland’s ‘Appalachian Spring’ 
by Annegret Fauser.
Oxford, 144 pp., £10.99, November 2017, 978 0 19 064687 5
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... The dance was given its final title only a month before its premiere, after Graham read Hart Crane’s epic poem ‘The Bridge’ – ‘O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;/Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends’. Copland would stress, in programme notes and interviews, that the dance’s name had nothing to do with his ...

Oms and Hums

Julian Symons, 22 March 1990

Ginsberg: A Biography 
by Barry Miles.
Viking, 588 pp., £20, January 1990, 0 670 82683 9
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... impressed by the much older William Burroughs; a year later he encountered Jack Kerouac. He read Hart Crane, adopting and adapting the passion for rhetoric, but ignoring Crane’s attempt to comprehend the culture of the past in a vision of contemporary America. He ignored also ...

On Ange Mlinko

Paul Franz, 5 July 2018

... thing we’re wedded to.This particular fantasy – perhaps recalling the ‘Chaplinesque’ of Hart Crane, another of Mlinko’s acknowledged early influences, which imagines being able to ‘sidestep’ death and social censure – tests the power of the blasé gesture to cut threats down to size. ‘History’ here is deliberately vague; that pun ...

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