funding for crossroads cafe was providedn part... t departmentsf ucion of t states of... california florida, illinois. and new york. and by thenited stat departme oeducation... and the united states immigration and naturalization serce.

- can i put up ts banner now ? - yes, but hurry. they'll be here any minute. henry, what are u doing tohat floor ? mr. brashov said before he left the airport that he wants this place to shine. you'd think the queen of england was coming if that's all this fuss was about, yououldn't be working this hard. he'll probably be hung. i should

warm up some soup. sojess wh do you think ? i think he'll know he's come to the right place. ctor it is like a palace ! - a very clean palace. this is crossroads cafe. and ese are my very good friends o make it at it . ye yes recognize alof you... from the pictures victor sent me katarina. ra. jamal. and henry. - anjess. - jess ? he must've r out of film. je whiton. meet cssroads cafe's best customer. w do you do ? in fact, his here so much, we are thinking of putting on the payroll. now that's a job i'd come out of retement for. frids

this is my broer and business partner nicolae brasho - hello, mr. brashov. - oh, pleaseplease call me nicolae. - nicolae. - that way you can tell the younger brashov... from the older brashov. you must be starving after your flight. how about a bowl of rosa's famous vegetable soup ? that sounds woerful. everything here is just the way you said it would be. of course it is. i would never lie to my new partner. maybe i should be only a half partneunl i know more about the busiss. nonsense. you have had mo expience than i have ha - nicoe is the manager-- was the manager. was the manager of a large hotel rest on the black sea coast i was wondering why his english was so goo - maybe he should give lessons to rosa. - i heard that. all ght, everyone. step aside. it is time for nicolae to have his

first taste of crossroads cafe. he you are. well ? it's wonderful ! thank you. thank you for everything. vior. [ speaking romanian nicolae, please. my romanian is not what it used to be. how can you forget your own language ? with eva gone, i have no one to talk to. you ould have ought me over before you became samerican. oh, bless you. i must be coming down th somhing do you remember what mama used to do when we were ck ? of cours she would make a bowl of the bt stew. - chorba. - chor

that reminds me. i have aurprise for you. surprise ? yeah. these are more recipes fhome w we can give thesamericans a real taste of romania. yes, perhaps oh, i'm sorry, victor. it was a stupiidea no, not at all. it's just that things are a little different here. and once you get used to the ca it will all make sense. of cours i want to arn everything about what you've done. let me shoyou the bookkeeping system i have been using. that canait, victor. you should get some re. maybe you are right. you have had a long day. my first day in amera. let's go home. okay.

th's great i never would ha thoughof that. perfect that would make it just uer $3,000. now we can buy the supplies before the end of the month and save 20 peent. - checkmate ! - well, victor, i thin we can safely say... that nicolae has learned everything about crossroads cafe.

ess yo he harry ! ybe you could let me make a delivery sometime. have you lost ur mind ? in case you haven'notice you are not a boy ymore. we useto ride cycles all time. why stop now ? i can't agine mr. brashov riding a bicycle. perhaps you would be surprised to know that i was the one who taught nicolae how to ride. - no way ! - it itrue. victor used to cah me every time... it looked like i might fall. you see ? i still have a scar on my knee from the time you didn't catch me. you know, victor we should take a ride together some time. my bycle riding days a over. bedes, who has time for such things ? oh ! your life cannot always be work, workwork. right, jess ? i keep telling victor toake a break from this place for a few days. when crossads cafe takes a eak, i will take a break. right this way

- od morning. - finally. we we startingo worry. - where's vict ? - he took your advice and he is taking a break from the cafe. don't tell me he's finally taking a vacation. no. he is sick bed withhe flu. we st came back from the doctor. this is the week he has all those appointments. - nicolae, do you think we should cancel the? - of course not. i am victor's partner. i want him to know he ca rely on me to manage the cafe. hi, katherine. mr. brashov here ? you' looking at him. - very funny. - charlie, i'd like you to meet. mr. brasv's brother and partner, nicolae brashov. no kidding ? i didn't even know he had family around here. actually, a recent arrival. well, i guess you better take a look at this suppllist for the next cple of weeks. does this look okay to you ? i'm sure iis fine. it's just thtypical things mr. brashoways oers. you casign at thbottom. cuse me, but is it too late toake a fechanges ?

no, go ahead. od [ nicolae ] yes, victor, everything is ne. you just get well. no. don't worry about a thi. no. everything is fine. victor, you've been away ss than a week. how much damage could i possibly do ? alright, victor. oh, that's wondeul ! course. everyo misses you. yes, victor. good-bye so, how's the patient doing ? patient has recovered. he is planning on comi in tomorrow. - oh, that's wondeul ! - yes, i bettemake sur everything is l set.

when people get together they often talk about what's happened since they last met. that is the focus of this episode: sharg past experiences.

and we have finished "word play" for this episode. let's get back to the story. i can't it for ctor to see this. do you think he will surprised ? oh, he'll be surprised all right. well, i hope it will make him el cser toome. maestro. maestro. [ speaking romanian ] hey, victor, welcome back ! well, isn't this wondeul ?

make them stop ! t, victor, i n't derstand stop the music ! this is a restaurant. not a cheap romanian car. are you all right, mr. brashov ? i don't understand ! i am gone less thaa week d ok what hahappened to my restnt. - i thought we we paners. - i better be going. well, don'you all have work to do ? yes, mr. brashov. i told you he'd be surprised.

vior, i was trying to make it me ke home. i thoughit would please you. my he is here... in ts country ! livi here doesn't mean destroying who you are ! i am the same person ilways was ! no, you' not. you arashamed of whe you come om. you are ashameof our customs of our language. you e ashamed of me. i will not talk about this anymore ! i don't knowha has happed to you, victor. but itreaks my heart. it breaks myeart ! i don't want it to happen to me.

myandy my candy ! that's him !right there ! where'd you get th box c ? let me see so identifation. goany change ? you got any chan ?

[ naator ] the experien of ming to a n country n be very exciting. at least at first. a lot of things were going on. i remember getting off the plane.

and billboards everywhere and traffiand a t of horns honking. and one thing happened to me is i lood around me, i w everybody spding around. i actuallytopped a person and said, "excuse me, where is everybody going ?" i was blown away whei first got here. i tht i was abt, you know, a hundreyears into the futur there waa lot ultul shock. just how big life is in the unit stes. [ naator ] when theitement of the journey begins to fade, newcomers may find these cuural differences disturbing. separated from their homeland, thawhich is familia they feel sick. it's great to learn about othecountries and live in other countries, t to severe your ties with one country and move on to ather... definite it's culture ock and it's not fun. it's nofun. the people here seemo be s ch more tied up in themselves.

and back home, you know, peoe e re prered to give you their time. you can co so loly and i ha kwn of pele who have even ntempled suide because... the in a suation where they cn't en now try and buy thr way ck home. [ naat ] as newcome gin to lrn more about the customs and tradions.. of their adopted land and thlauage skills imove, th often begino feel moreomfortable. set my mind to be re. and, you know, i just made an effort to adjusinto life. even most of. the negative feengi initlly, i veow outgrn. d acceptedhe fact that i am ia meltint he and i'er be part of it to bhappy.

well, that's that. - are you all ght ? yes, i'm fine. no, am not fine. is the anything we can do there ist ything anne can in another 12 hours, nicoe ll be back in ran. he wldn't en lete wait until the plane took off. he said he nd to be alon maybit's for the best. how can that be possible ? this ithe united stateof ameca this could havbe his ho. mr. brashov, i've been here for five ars and it never feelsike me - but i thought you were happy here ? - mostf the time i am happy.

t sometimes it hurts so much to be away from myily... and my friends and my lang. change is not for everyone. perhaps not. wh's in the bag, . brhov ? somethg coe wanted me to have. well, aren't you going to open it ? here, you open it. it's beaiful ! he said was something to remember him - hi. - m sorry, we're closed. is the a nicholas bshov here ? you mean nicolae brashov ? - is that you ? - no, i amictor brashov. colae is my brothe looki founthis or at the shopping mall.

there was a piecof paper iit th this address on it, so i figured i'dake a chance. ank you. you e ry kind. i hope you will come back he for lunch y guest. all right,'ll do that. thanks. thank you. good-bye so long. poor nicolae thought it waslen. money, credit cards. pictures may i look ? look athem t. he scute. this must ber. brashov who are these children ? nilae d when we were boys growing up. - is that him sitting on t bicycle ? - yes. and i am holding the handlebars. it loo like he's going to ll off

has ight 1745 le yet oh, good coulyou page sebody for me pleas? nicolae brashov. maybwe should fish eaning up the back. i finished already back there. well, let's finish again. it's an exllent idea. hell nicolae , everything is all right. someone has even found your wallet. yes, we werell surprised. know you need to go. i just called to say... i want to visit you soon. and if you can find a very strong cycle, peap.. we could go for a ride together. like the old days. except, this time... you have to promise to catch m

i love you, nicu.

closed-captioned by captio, inc. los angeles crossroads caf is a series that teaches english... to speakers of other languages. for more information call toll-ee:

a presentation of... major funding for the voices & visions series is provided by and additional series funding is provided by and special funding for this program is provided by and

[hart crane] those who have wept in the darkness sometimes are rewarded with stray leaves blown inadvertently. we who create must endure, must hold to spirit not by the mind, the intellect alone. meditation on the sun is all there is. i find my imagination more sufficient all the time.

i spend my evenings in music and sometimes ecstasy. i've been writing a lot lately. i'm bringing much into contemporary verse that is new. i'm on a synthesis of america and its identity called the bridge. in 1926, the poet whom robert lowell called the shelley of his age returned from new york to his grandmother's plantation home in cuba. he was 26 years old. the great thing of crane in the caribbean is the heat and glare that are captured in a lot of the poems, where you can feel the crust of the

sand in the words. you can feel the lethargy like "the tarantula rattling at the lily's foot," right? you know the tarantula has been stunned by the heat, right and the shake it gives. he's very good on shakes-- shudders and shakes-- and he's excellent on that little shiver. [hart crane] "the tarantula rattling at the lily's foot "across the feet of the dead laid in white sand "near the coral beach-- nor zigzag fiddle crabs "side-stilting from the path (that shift, subvert "and anagrammatize your name)-- no, nothing here "below the palsy that one eucalyptus lifts "in wrinkled shadows--mourns. "and yet suppose "i count these nacreous frames of tropic death "brutal necklaces of shells around each grave squared off so carefully."

crane had first visited his grandmother's plantation home when he was 16. now it was looked after by a caretaker, mrs. simpson whom crane nicknamed aunt sally. the exotic caribbean atmosphere not only prompted him to write lyrics like o carib isle!, it enabled him to resume work on his epic poem the bridge though at first he felt his poetic power stuck and was incapable of writing more than a few lines. [hart crane] emotionally, i should like to write the bridge. intellectually, the whole theme seems more and more absurd. the very idea of a bridge is an act of faith. the form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that i'm at a loss to explain my delusion

that there exist any real links between that past and a future destiny worthy of it. if only america were half as worthy today to be spoken of as whitman spoke of it 50 years ago there might be something for me to say. ♪ friends, folks ♪ ♪ listen to my mope ♪ ♪ hard luck ♪ ♪ i ain't got no home ♪ ♪ chase my sins away ♪ ♪ evil's in my eye ♪ ♪ gone wrong ♪ ♪ too darn mean to cry ♪ ♪ sympathize with my condition... ♪ [hart crane] the bridge is symphonic in including all the strands-- columbus, conquests of water land,

pocahontas subways, offices. the bridge in becoming a ship a world, a woman a tremendous harp, as it does finally seems to really have a career. ♪ overheated and i feel ♪ ♪ low-down ♪ ♪ i wanna be taken by storm ♪ ♪ 'cause i'm lovesick and warm... ♪ [hart crane] i have attempted to induce the same feelings of elation like being carried forward and upward simultaneously in imagery, rhythm, and repetition, that i experience in walking across my beloved brooklyn bridge. ♪ low-down ♪ [derek walcott] crane, both mentally and, of course, physically may have been obeying baudelaire's injunction, which is, if you're going to be drunk, stay drunk. if your imagination is going to be exhilarated

then it would be great if it could continue to the furthest possible lengths of that exhilaration. so that voyage, that mental voyage that he's taking, is a voyage that cannot set itself a horizon. he didn't set himself a finish. [hart crane] i feel as though i were dancing on dynamite these days. i feel an absolute music in the air again and some tremendous rondure floating somewhere. "--and yet this great wink of eternity, "of rimless floods unfettered leewardings

"samite sheeted and processioned where "her undinal vast belly moonward bends "laughing the wrapt inflections of our love; "bind us in time o seasons, clear, and awe. "o minstrel galleons of carib fire, "bequeath us to no earthly shore until "is answered in the vortex of our grave the seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise..."

there are not many people now living who were closely associated with hart crane. i rank as one of the survivors and i had a curious relationship to hart. i think that hart was in love with me. there were no physical manifestations of this but every time i cast that roving eye at a young woman, hart would appear to break it up. hart was working beside me at sweet's catalogue and allen tate had come to new york. tate had been in correspondence with crane and it was arranged that the two of us together should to go visit hart at 110 columbia heights, which was the building in which roebling had lived

while supervising the brooklyn bridge. from the window of the back room you could have a marvelous view of the bridge. and there we felt that it was our duty to present this astonishing new reality in new poems. it was new york, it was the skyscrapers it was sun leaking into the canyon with the rip-tooth acetylene people plunged down in elevators walking home across brooklyn bridge the tugboats on the river, the memory of the old clipper ships. everything--past, future technology, history,

the indians--seemed to come together for hart. what is very american about crane, as it is in whitman is a sense of power, ambition. these two poets say to themselves, "i am the poet of america." the power is the american thing. he says, "i'm going to be a bloody good poet." whitman says, "i am the homer of this age," not in a showoff way but, "my responsibility is to be that," and he does it. what he was undertaking could have been done in a novel, one of those epic novels about america. it could have been done in photographs or film. he was undertaking it in a poem that didn't have a narrative structure, per se, in a poem that was not going to be a suite,

that was not going to be a series of moods, a sort of tour of america. he wanted to unify the poem by some force. that force could not be his own imagination only. what he attempted to do was not even a symphonic thing of saying i will orchestrate america through its noises. that would be, in a sense like what mayakovski was trying to do in lyric poetry. he didn't have a planned method in the sense that eliot had a planned method about the wasteland. even the brokenness that pound put into shape was a planned kind of collage-- cut from this, cut to that, very filmic. he didn't want montage. he wanted something that would have some of its own propulsion. the only way he could find that force was in the meter that he chose.

crane came from ohio from the midwest from an industrial heartland that had still not lost its links to the older america. he grew up in warren. his first jobs were in akron and cleveland

provincial centers along the railroad which connected to the western spaces in one direction and the eastern cities in the other. warren, at that time, just after the turn of the century, when crane lived here, was a thriving thriving community a thriving industrial area. when you read in the poem where he is giving the slogans that he would pass or advertising that he would see in passing he mentions the erie railroad. that was the railroad that was behind his father's cannery. ahd he mentions mazda. well, mazda was a local firm right here in warren, ohio. it was the area where more light bulbs were manufactured,

for example, than any other part of the united states. he was born in garrettsville, ohio in portage county, a small town. and something that incidentally has remained constant in crane's environment no matter where he lived it seemed, was the presence of water, the presence of some hills nearby-- things that we'd think of as being typically rural. crane, at times when he was estranged from his father, did not give his father much credit for being anything more than just a candy manufacturer. every once in a while he would say "my father was a millionaire. who was your father" his father charles a. crane was a millionaire when hart was a boy. you know, he invented the lifesaver. he was a little ashamed of his father.

he certainly was aware of the provincialism. he was a little appalled at his father's taste in art and he found that provincial. he wrote back to his mother after white buildings had been published and he said he was eager to see what the response would be in garrettsville that they would find it completely beyond their means to understand. the hostility with the father, the identification with grace and with other members of the family whom he found to be sympathetic, and yet the need constantly to break away and then to return-- endless yo-yo effect-- seems to me to have had very complex reverberations in the work. the sound of distraction there is very extreme in the poetry, and it comes from a kind of family romance and the explosion of that romance, certainly.

[hart crane] "where the cedar leaf divides the sky "i heard the sea. "in sapphire arenas of the hills "i was promised an improved infancy. "sulking sanctioning the sun, "my memory i left in a ravine,-- "casual louse that tissues the buckwheat "aprons rocks, congregates pears "in moonlit bushels "and wakens alleys with a hidden cough. "dangerously the summer burned "(i had joined the entrainments of the wind.) "the shadows of boulders lengthened my back: "in the bronze gongs of my cheeks the rain dried without odor." i am happy here in my room

with the victrola playing ravel, the fairy garden piece. when i think of my tower room in cleveland it is almost to give way to tears because i shall never find my way back to it. it was the center and beginning of all that i am and ever will be the center of such pain as would tear me to pieces to tell you about. it was there that i first thought about the bridge. out of unhappiness, longing, and ambition the young crane began a search for the ideal in poetry, an absolute language. in the poems that he collected for his first book white buildings, he tried to transcend human isolation to create a fresh lyrical idiom. the epic side of his ambition found its first expression in a longer poem also begun in the tower room in cleveland.

it was called for the marriage of faustus and helen which, on a smaller scale than the bridge tried to achieve a mystical vision, using the sensations of modern existence. i think he saw himself as a visionary poet from the very beginning. it comes out in his earliest letters about the bridge which were in february of 1923. [hart crane] i am too much interested in the bridge thing lately to write letters ads, or anything. it's just beginning to take the least outline, and the more outline the conception of the thing takes the more its final difficulties appall me. very roughly, it concerns a mystical synthesis of america. the mystic portent of all this is already flocking through my mind,

but the actual statement of the thing the martialing of the forces will take me months, at least and i may have to give it up entirely before that. it may be too impossible an ambition, but if i do succeed, such a waving of banners such an ascent of tower, such dancing will never before have been put down on paper.

unless poetry can absorb the machine, that is, acclimatize it as naturally and as casually as trees, cattle galleons, castles, and all other human associations of the past then poetry has failed. this process demands an extraordinary capacity for surrender, at least temporarily to the sensations of urban life. [malcolm cowley] it was madness it was technology, it was unhappiness it was bustle, it was noise, but also it was a great spectacle to be celebrated.

you heard marvelous jazz all over this damn place. there was a frenzy of the age that finally much as we tried to avoid it seized us from within. new york, for him, was the intoxication of nights on the town. it was truly the jazz age. you danced. in the broader sense i think the marriage of faustus and hel is a marriage of machinery and myth.

i think crane's complete belief is that much as he admired the power and tried to represent the power of contemporary machinery, that he knew that the faustian part of modern man the doomed part of man is the machine that helen is the old beauty that fuses. that first impact of power-- meeting helen on the subway-- is to reinvest that myth not with nostalgia-- in eliot, there are always references to a further lost beauty. in the conditional is where the difference lies. but in a sense pound and eliot are conditional poets in terms of time-- what could have happened what should have been-- but in crane it is "this is now. i've got to make it be now." [hart crane] "the mind has shown itself at times "too much the baked and labeled dough "divided by accepted multitudes.

"across the stacked partitions of the day-- "across the memoranda, baseball scores, "the stenographic smiles and stock quotations smutty wings flash out equivocations." "the mind is brushed by sparrow wings; "numbers rebuffed by asphalt, crowd "the margins of the day, accent the curbs "convoying divers dawns on every corner "to druggist barber and tobacconist "until the graduate opacities of evening "take them away as suddenly to somewhere virginal perhaps less fragmentary, cool." "and yet, suppose some evening i forgot "the fare and transfer yet got by that way "without recall,-- lost yet poised in traffic. "then i might find your eyes across

an aisle, "still flickering with those prefigurations-- "prodigal, yet uncontested now half-riant before the jerky window frame." when crane got to the big city he began to read not only the writers he'd come equipped to read, but those french symbolist writers who gave him a new sense of how to accommodate failure-- failures to be whole to be one, to be single-- and they were ways of going off into every possible direction at once-- wonderful fragmented and centrifugal energies.

he wants to incant. he wants to get us beyond merely understanding the words. he wants to move us into a kind of strangeness a kind of alienation which will--he will take almost any occasion to elevate. and one of his elevations is vocabulary, and one of them will be a grammatical movement against the expected run of the sentence-- a line like, "our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise." one feels that that's a kind of latinate line, where crane is crazy about the way those syllables move.

[hart crane] "we will sidestep, and to the final smirk "dally the doom of that inevitable thumb "that showly chafes its puckered index toward us "facing the dull squint with what innocence and what surprise!" [malcolm cowley] what he felt about chaplin went into the poem-- the sort of man who would have a kitten in his sleeve gentleness combined with the outlandish. he loved the humor. chaplinesque was one of the poems in crane's first book, white buildings, the manuscript of which circulated for more than a year before a publisher picked it up. most of the poems were difficult, densely constructed.

crane's intent in poems like legend, praise for an urn, chaplinesque and the wine menagerie was to compound all the senses in a single mood to create a poetic language with its own logic. it would start with a vision of a poem he wanted to write. the next step would be assembling words phrases, and lines that ought to go into the poem. he would take out an envelope and on the back of it write a word or a phrase that he had overheard or a line that had occurred to him and treasured that. it was sometimes elizabethan because he was impregnated interfused with elizabethan language.

hart said one needs to ransack-- and he underlined the word-- the vocabularies of shakespeare, ben jonson, webster, for theirs were the richest, and add on scientific, street encounter and psychological terms, et ceera. one must be drenched in words literally soaked with them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. between the collecting of subject and line would have to come another stage. that was the deadly stage. that was the crucial moment at which the materials would transform themselves into at least the rough draft of a poem. that had to be a moment of illumination.

that had to be a moment of ecstasy, of frenzy, and this was eventually the fatal thing-- that he had to find ways for bringing on ecstasy or frenzy or illumination. ♪ some of these days ♪ ♪ you'll miss me, honey... ♪ that was his justification for drinking too much, for sexual orgies, for dancing, for listening to music always with a heavy beat-- it was ravel's bolero or after that it would be sophie tucker. ♪ you won't leave ♪ ♪ 'cause you know, honey ♪ ♪ you've always had your way ♪ ♪ and when you leave me ♪

♪ you know it's gonna grieve me ♪ ♪ gonna miss your big fat mama ♪ ♪ your mama ♪ ♪ some of these days ♪ ♪ some of these day-ay-ays ♪ ♪ you'll miss me, honey... ♪ in 1925, crane wrote a sequence of love poems called voyages, inspired by a relationship with a merchant marine emil opfer. [hart crane] for many days now i have gone about quite dumb with something beyond happiness. perhaps for the first time in my life i have seen the word made flesh and i know there is such a thing as indestructibility. in the deepest sense where flesh became transformed through intensity of response to counterresponse where sex was beaten out where a purity of joy was reached that included tears.

[richard howard] crane seems to have taken joseph conrad's wonderful advice-- "in the destructive element immerse." marianne moore says, "the sea in its surrendering finds its continuing." it was almost as if he chose precisely the dangers and the discrepancies and the difficulties of a language and an experience that was beyond him in order to find his poem. crane revised the six sections of voyages constantly and published several of his early drafts. he had sketched two sections of the poem even before meeting opfer. he did not want to describe or even evoke their relationship but to use the occasion to explore the logic of metaphor,

to find what he called the "imaged word." he writes about the sea this wonderful line, "her undinal vast belly moonward bends," right? and "vast," "moonward," "bends," fine. but, you see, the wonderful thing is "undinal" because the spirit undine, the spirit of the wave is there. and the shape of the line is "undinal... "vast... belly" goes up with a little lift. the wonderful thing is "bends" because bends is generally the other way. the pregnancy of the sea the fertility of the sea pulled by the moon can be drawn, actually as a line. like any great line, virtually has a calligraphic equivalent, you can say, "her undinal vast"-- then it rises-- "belly moonward"-- then the surge of the pregnancy at the end--"bends."

it follows the shape of the wave and the sea in moonlight just as "scrolls of silver snowy sentences" does that. [hart crane] when i speak of adagios of islands the reference is to the motion of a boat through islands clustered thickly, the rhythm of motion. it seems a much more direct and creative statement than any more logical employment of words such as "coasting slowly through the islands."

with the completion of white buildings, crane was free to work on the bridge. it was to be an epic poem with various sections, mixing past and present, history and autobiography, and encounters with poets like whitman and poe.

in may, 1926 crane went south to cuba-- first to havana, then to his grandmother's plantation. in three months, most of the bridge was written or carefully outlined. it opens with ave maria, in which crane imagines christopher columbus returning from the discovery of america and gazing at the coast of spain. [hart crane] i'm flashing a signal from the foremast. i am supposed to be don cristobal colon returning from cathay, first voyage for mid-ocean is where the poem begins. what i'm really handling is the myth of america. thousands of strands have had to be searched for sorted, and interwoven. so the reader is gradually led back in time

to the pure savage world while existing at the same time in the present. it concludes at midnight at the center of brooklyn bridge. "insistently through sleep-- a tide of voices-- "they meet you listening midway in your dream "the long, tired sounds, fog-insulated noises: "gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails far strum of fog horns... signals dispersed in veils." these are perhaps the great sections of the bridge-- ave maria, harbor dawn.

the dance is a very great poem. my favorite section is the river. he wanted to put it all together in one poem that would present the myth of america. it was a transcendent ambition and absolutely impossible of fulfillment. in the river he says, "stick your name on a signboard," and so on. obviously he owes a lot to cummings because it's a montage-collage thing going on but then he pushes past cummings. on the line, he even has "thomas a ediford." so from edison you move to the next billboard, which is thomas a edi--ford. it's wonderful. the speed of that is contracted. so he imitates he's a very mimetic poet in terms of gesture. so that flashes past but the meter

accelerates. there's a nice phrase by stephen spender "the elate meter of her wheels"-- talking about a train. you're on the train, and the tracks are the edges of the pentameter. the propulsion of the train is imitated not only visually by the signboards, but also by the rhythm. then, as always happens in a long journey, there is a point at which you begin to float. now the images come by and you can absorb them. [train whistle blows] "stick your patent name on a signboard brother-- "all over-- going west--young man...

"so the 20th century-- so whizzed the limited-- "roared by and left "three men, still hungry on the tracks... "time's rendings time's blendings they construe "as final reckonings of fire and snow; "strange bird-wit, like the elemental gist "of unwalled winds they offer, singing

low "my old kentucky home and casey jones, some sunny day." [playing harmonica] "i heard a road-gang chanting so. "and afterwards, who had a colt's eyes--one said, "jesus!" "oh i remember watermelon days!" ha ha ha! "--and when my aunt sally simpson smiled..." it was almost louisiana, long ago." "behind my father's cannery works i used to see "rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery... "john, jake, or charley, "hopping the slow freight "--memphis to tallahassee-- riding

the rods, blind fists of nothing humpty-dumpty clods." when he does come across passages that have a physical encounter of some kind they're wonderfully dramatized they're funny-- the bums on the track, the crazy guy in the bar. when he does come across incidents, he can encapsulate them as well as any american novelist. i feel crane re-encounters whitman whenever he meets these figures. the bums, to me, are whitman. the person you get is a prototypical thing in american literature the old pioneer. it's like always he sees whitman's face in front of him. [hart crane] cutty sark is built on the plan of a fugue. two voices that of the world of time and that of the world of eternity, are interwoven. the atlantis theme that of eternity is the transmuted voice of the nickel-slot

pianola. this voice alternates with that of the derelict sailor and the description of the action. the airy regatta of phantom clipper ships seen from brooklyn bridge on the way home is quite effective, i think. music still haunts their names long after the wind has left their sails. "it's s.s. ala-- antwerp-- "remember kid to put me out at three she sails on time. "i'm not much good at time any more keep weakeyed watches sometimes snooze..." "a whaler once-- "i ought to keep time and get over it--i'm a "democrat--i know what time it is--no

"i don't want to know what time it is--that damned white arctic killed my time..." [hart crane] "rose of stamboul o coral queen-- "tsed remnants of the skeletons of cities-- "and galleries, galleries of watergutted lava "snarling stone--green-- drums--drown-- "sing! "a wind worried those wicker-neat lapels, the "swinging summer entrances to cooler hells... "outside a wharf truck nearly ran him down "--he lunged up bowery way "while the dawn was putting the statue of liberty out-- that torch of hers you know--" the brooklyn bridge looms across all 15 sections of crane's poem. it is the great curve by which man can approach god. in atlantis the last section