Click here for Mark's post and a fuller account of the day.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
And So It Was I Entered the Broken World
Our trip to Northeastern Ohio has been a bit of a whirlwind: a joint reading at Cleveland State on Thursday night, a joint craft talk at Akron State last night. (In the midst of this, Mark has been teaching a four-day workshop at CSU, and I've been attending to the second round of my Fairfield packets back in the hotel room). Earlier yesterday, along with Michael Dumanis and a band of other poets and scholars, we toured Hart Crane's hometown of Garrettsville out in the country northeast of Akron. We saw his grandfather's house, now the rectory of St. Ambrose's Catholic Church. We saw Hart's house, now a private home, whose owners, Dave and Kym Kirk, were kind enough to let us inside. The small dark birthing room into which Hart came into the world houses a padded raspberry-colored table, with an oval cutout at one end. Instantly I thought, Hart Crane was born on that table? born through that oval?--before I recognized it as a massage table. Maybe I hadn't had enough to eat. Still, hours later, I couldn't quite shake off the connection between birth and massage, which seems to cry out for a poem I wouldn't know how to start.
Click here for Mark's post and a fuller account of the day.
Click here for Mark's post and a fuller account of the day.
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3 comments:
Some info on the pictures, for the curious:
-- the river runs through Garrettsville, and on the righthand side was Hart Crane's grandfather's maple syrup business. The syrup was cooled by river water in the cellar.
-- the white house belonged to Arthur Crane, the grandfather, who outlived Hart.
-- the plaque is in front of the gray house, which Arthur built for Clarence and Grace Crane, Hart's mother and father. They moved when the poet was quite young, and he spent his adolescence in a house in Cleveland that no longer exists.
-- the headstone, of course, doesn't rest atop Hart's body, which was never found. His name is carved, ironically, on the side of his father's stone. Perhaps because it was the early thirties, they didn't feel they could spring for a separate stone. Or maybe they preferred to keep Hart to the side, under his father's shadow.
the father invented lifesavers
the son drowned at sea
file under "you can't make up that sort of thing"
the sea keeps its beautiful shadows
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