One of the things I liked about the early English language Modernists when I began to examine their pioneering works was their clean unshowy language. While they sometimes slipped into colloquialisms (Sandburg, Langston Hughes) their time and place was close enough to my own that I never felt they were trying to talk over my head and state of learning, even if the things they were portraying were extraordinary or profound, and even if they might choose to use inflection and inference to portray a great deal “off screen” from the frame of their poem. Poetry tends to remind itself to do something like that every so often. I can still remember reading Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and agreeing quite readily with his charge to poets of his time to write using the language of ordinary people.
But then too, Poets are always falling back into “poetic diction,” that uncontemporary and artificial language that signals what is being written is a poem, you know, real art asking you to pay special attention. The reasons for this are several. First, of it’s fun to play dress up – fun to wear crowns, put on capes and formal ball gowns, or try on suits of shining armor. We already have slipped from the pitch and timbre of ordinary speech when we are moved to sing, and when words want to dance, we don’t ask them to settle down and walk straight. Those are innocent, even childlike, reasons, but of course there are others that can be in the mix for those choices. One could make the choice as a poet hoping for an eternal audience, believing that one must speak in the language of many ages and epochs to help stake out that claim. Or there can be elements of simple insecurity: these words, that antique cast of phrase, will show that I’m not ordinary and my works are not either.
Young poets are prone to the latter, sometimes thinking their verse must sound like some old poem anachronistically written to sound like a poem and nothing else, to demonstrate that they have risen to poetry. Old poets can sometimes speak extraordinarily plainly. Perhaps they’ve worn all the costumes, engaged in all the playtimes, and have no future to gain with pretense.
Today’s poem, as are all of the poems this month, is from the pages of Louis Untermeyer’s between-the-wars “Modern American Poetry” anthology, and is by a poet that never got to be an old poet, Hart Crane, who died at age 32.* A man who spent time in the tropics, Crane writes here about one of that region’s storms, where winds whip waves and rain until the two are one, blowing down and inundating nature and man’s constructions. Here’s a link to the full text of “The Hurricane.” Or, here’s the text of the poem and an interesting discussion of it and Hart Crane by Allen Ginsberg.
Things modern will soon seem quaint. As terrible as the news conveyed in this circumspect newspaper report reads to me today, with it’s sea voyage delays, creaky “wireless,” and a “Captain Blackadder,” it seems of another age. The father mentioned had disowned Hart Crane, and that family wealth involved was based on a type of candy: the round hole-in-the-middle Lifesavers.
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Had he witnessed one or more hurricanes in his young life in the early 20th century? I don’t know any details, but he doesn’t write his poem as if he’s seeing Model T Fords floating down streets as asphalt shingles are scaled off roofs and telephone and power wires play double-Dutch in flooded ditches. Nope. Crane’s poem is written in language made up of parts Anglo-Saxon epithets and alliteration, parts Marlowvian bombast. Why? I don’t know, but his poem is fun to read, even when my vocabulary’s pride is bruised by “levin-lathered” and “gambade.”*
I performed Hart’s “The Hurricane” as spoken word backed by a rock quintet, two cross-current electric guitars, pelting piano chords with the drum sets levin-gambade, and an electric bass undertow. You can hear that performance with the audio player gadget below. No audio player? It hasn’t been erased by a storm, it’s just that some ways of reading this poem won’t show the player, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*Reading about Crane’s life this week I’m both sad and exasperated, and this Monday is the 94th anniversary of his throwing himself off a boat sailing from Mexico. There’s plenty of reasons for his inability to find his place in the world: a dysfunctional family, society’s lack of acceptance of his sexuality, likely bipolar depression, the innate difficulty of establishing a writing career, alcoholism; but reading accounts from folks who tried to help him he seems quite a handful. I’m probably being uncharitable – the storms inside Hart Crane would take more than this poem to describe.
**Levin is a word for lightning, something I didn’t know. I assumed gambade might be a variation of gambol, which is pretty much correct, a leap – and like Parlando, I think I might have run into it as description of a musical articulation, as used here describing thunder.
Frank Hudson 