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?”