Bersone on Poetry, Hart Crane and Ted Hughes

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Sunday May 24, 2009 6:44 AM Bersone:

Buff,

The mornings are like something peeled away the scabs from the eyes, even the view of the Oakland container docks -- huge seavans stacked like a giant child's blocks beneath white cranes hanging still in the summer fog, the freeway empty. Everyone sleeping. I remember being bugged by the light on in the hall of the barracks, knowing that someone was on duty down in the office: there should be times when everybody sleeps, to give the world some relief. I suppose, though, as we age, we are heading for a state of Eyes-Wide-Open. Sleep is a condition of health and communing repose. Like looking into a soft pond -- maybe I got that from a poem, yes, I think maybe from Hart Crane "angles of repose" he said, looking at the light slanting down into a slumbrous pond. Unfortunately he jumped off the fantail of a cruise ship coming back from the tropics. Didn't want to come back. His great work was a long poem about the Brooklyn Bridge: his mistake was struggling to integrate the scientific-industrial world with that of art, a sort of poetic bau-hous, That was his mistake, that and not accepting his homosexuality. We're well past the temptation of suicide. At any rate: angles of repose. Slumbrous as a salamander still moving like a predator from the dinosaur age, beyond our time, that's for sure. When did we come up with Time? Tie your shoes, kids.

I've been reading Ted Hughes' poems, from the seventies, when I met
him; he was into farming, and wrote some vivid unflinching poems
about birthing calves, rain -- the larger events, told with passion
and objectivity.

Ruby read our correspondence; she correctly observed my tendency
toward verbosity. Well, some people have trouble even opening up
their yap. I remember Wallace Stevens, in a letter to a young woman
who was trying to turn him onto Henry Miller, that he thought Henry
was prolix, although, he conceded, perhaps he wanted to be prolix. I
think they were contemporaries, but at that point he felt too old for
the cancer books. both great writers. this world spits out many
stars, some lie in the alluvial mud like rubies until some poor
fucker feels around for them with the desperate intuition of a beggar
fumbling for his cock in a soaked sleeping bag on Market Street. God
help us. It's the spirit that makes the flower bloom, the flagrant
flame even cast off in an effort to catch the train. Things is what
they seem, in a certain light, altering everything. Dim Sum.