Hart Crane in LA, 1927

Peter Balakian

We sat in leather chairs

around cocktail tables and the candidates

came and went with badges on their jackets, proud and scared,

full of knowledge and uncertainty.

Everyone was animated as the conversation

drifted toward an idea of the idea of the text.

One colleague pointed out in an interview that it was here

right in this room under this chandelier that a poet

once came for a while in uncertainty and fear;

that he rode into LA’s great pink vacuum of

sunsets and spewed Rimbaud out on the Boulevard.

The candidates kept coming and going,

other colleagues dropped over to say hi or to chat about

the menu at the other hotel; and someone else said

that the poet loved this place and that we should stay here

where he had come to devour pâté and lobster,

where Ivor Winters met him for old-fashioned cocktails

and noted later that his hands looked

like a seasoned pugilists’, his face like bad road.

Another colleague said you couldn’t understand Crane’s big poem

without context, the other said you couldn’t understand

context without the poem. Another said listen to the

strange sound the words make when you let the silence in.

The first colleague said the words were so clotted and glued

that it was impossible to decipher meaning, real meaning.

But someone else reminded the others that the poet

was so desperate he pawned his grandmother’s watch

and then wrote to Gide “no Paris ever yielded such as this.”

Later when things got worse, when the houses

turned the color of stale mayonnaise,

he went down to the beach to read Hopkins

and claimed the drawling mockingbirds drowned out the spondees.

The first colleague said his idea of the poem was

too big for any life to carry and so the end was inevitable.

Then the waiter appeared, slightly harassed, and everyone

ordered a lobster club and a diet coke, before the next candidate arrived

as another colleague repeated with an edge in her voice, “inevitable?”