i.
Thinking of early 20th Century poets lately, and the sense of cinema in their composition.
So many poems read for me like films -- ones that zeroed in on a blue mood of suspicious clarity. It's as if I flew on the wings of the camera into the modeled set of Citizen Kane -- the one with the neon blinking lighting on the roof of the night club and going down a skylight to where the reporter interviews sad and drunken Susan Alexander.
Blaise Cendrars, particularly, but also Garcia Lorca, and Guillermo Apollinaire seem influenced by the journalistic dispatch, extreme abstraction, the collage, and the camera eye view. I only discovered Cendrars recently and was blown away by the mood his poems encompassed, bordering on something like a black&white Warner Bros movie - say, Across the Pacific.
One poem leads to another when the spirit is right, and Cendrars eventually took me back to My Poetry Bookshelf and a work of Hart Crane.
ii.
Both Crane and Cendrars have the slight distancing of the modernist. The Cendrars's travels I'm thinking of take place in Panama, at an encampment on what a EuroAmerican perspective would have as toward the edge of the world.
But with Crane it's so much - a mad thesaurus rummager, incredibly rolling and musical lines, sense as Waldo Frank said, of the mystical importance of America (shared with Blake, with Whitman). His epigram entrance to "The Bridge" is a quote from Plato that speaks of a "harmony in system" that his poetics, in their turn, achieve.
The mood evolves much as in Crane's poem "Eternity", except that Crane's setting is north of Panama in Cuba. (I think - could be Mexico.) The poem is dated 1933, which I understand is a year after Crane's death. Should mention that death here as it is one that generally attaches to most considerations of the poet. His life's journey is well depicted in the YouTube video above, a part of a worthwhile PBS poet's series.
He was a son from wealth in Ohio, who went to New York and entered the literary world, as well as Greenwich Village sailor bars. Heavy drinking and cruising. Produced a special poetry that mixed the modern and the classical. Something of the Ash Can school. Aware of the march of industry and mass communications. Verse like real talk. Simple as Blake, except the words perhaps in echo of the era are so mellifluous. Connected Whitman to, eventually, Wallace Stephens and William Carlos Williams. Got a grant and traveled down to Cuba. Stepped off the side on the ship back to U.S. - sunk into the Gulf and immortality. His epic was The Bridge.
iii.
Featuring here an excerpt from a poem called Eternity. From Hart Crane: The Complete Poems and Selected Letters, Anchor Doubleday Edition, 1966.
The Scene: Tropical camp. After a monsoon or earthquake – evidence of carnage and chaos on chaos.
The morrow’s dawn was dense with carrion hazes
Sliding everywhere. Bodies were rushed into graves
Without ceremony, while hammers pattered in town.
The roads were being cleared, injured brought in,
and treated, it seemed. In due time
The President sent down a battleship that baked
Something like two thousand loaves on the way.
Doctors shot ahead from the deck in planes.
The fever was checked. I stood a long time in Mack’s
talking
Talking New York with the gobs, Guantanamo, Norfolk--
Drinking Bacardi and talking U.S.A.
Note: "Gobs" = "Sailors".
iv.
The camera appeared about the time of Poe and in my opinion gave people a new way of understanding the world. The Imagist and Symbolist and Beat movements seemed to bring this increasingly to the fore. At some point the motion picture camera gained prevalence over the still camera and, it effected poetry, philosophy and science in even greater amount. Think: Einstein’s thought experiments with moving trains. Of course the most dynamic impact was felt in painting, which in turn amplified the effect on poetry and film. It's been said that Modernist poets write of the mythology of the machine age.
In time, the feeling of industry and jazz seemed to permeate the work of many of the above poets. Hart Crane's dispatch from Eternity is on this spectrum.
As notable too is his poem Chaplainesque, also included in the Anchor Doubleday Complete Poems. It is a poem that pulls a picture from the cinema of Charlie Chaplin, then imbues it with some of Hart: We see the Little Tramp and "...we have seen/The moon in lonely alleys make/ A grail of laughter in an empty ash can." - Jack Vaughan
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