<Crane and Poetry at Sea>

Crane and Poetry at Sea

People have been asking me, since I returned in early June, “How was the Poetry at Sea cruise??”. Here are a few impressions: intersections of poetic energies dancing with each other through unusual venues—deck chairs basking in the sun, Formal Night on the promenade deck, night clubs and casinos, feasts and buffets--a setting stripped of many of life’s usual distractions. Ashore at various Carib isles, Glen and I swam in incredibly gentle blue water, kayaked through a warm hard-driving rain, and snorkeled among deep-colored fish.

The readings and workshops carried poetry throughout the week, and at the group reading and discussion of poems from the new Oxford Anthology of American Poetry, Hart Crane felt very near as we steamed towards the Caribbean. I considered reading "O Carib Isle" but, feeling deeply Crane's tragic loss at sea, instead read "At Melville's Tomb" and "Voyages: 2," remembering how my father used to read the latter aloud; I had included several lines as an epigraph for his elegy.

But my passion for Crane reaches beyond this connection (and our shared name Crane, one of my middle names) to a shared desire for boundarilessness, high rhetoric, and intuitive logic driven by the agilities of meter. Crane is essentially a religious poet--as opposed to, for example, Whitman. Whitman is a spiritual poet, evoking spirit inside and outside of himself equally; he celebrates, appreciates, and exults, but does not worship. Crane, by contrast, wants something outside himself to believe in.

Yet, however religious he may be, Crane is not what we usually think of as religious in the Judeo-Christian sense. His temperament desires to worship, but he feels himself and everything in the world as sacred also. For all his agonies of desire, he never feels himself, nor the "inventive dust" of the physical world, as in any way less than the deity. Crane is a poet who can be claimed as akin by poets of many kinds; for my part, I feel him to be a fellow poet of the Goddess, of immanent yet ritual-worthy spiritual power.

David Lehman did a wonderful thing at the group reading, opening a discussion of a Crane poem he said he was confused by ("Chaplinesque"). We all, students and teachers, mulled it over, discussed it, and recited and read other favorite poems by many poets. I could have continued that poetry talk all day, even while the deck chairs beckoned below.

On the days when workshops were held, I couldn't resist the chance to learn from all the other faculty there. I sat in on Denise Duhamel’s “Funky Forms” class and enjoyed writing a glossary poem, discovered the playful non-judgementalism which lends David Lehman the inspiration to write so many poems, drew and folded paper with Nick Carbo, and felt how hate opens you up to love at Gabriel Gudding’s unique workshop on insults and prayers.

Souvenir photos, and the poem I wrote at Denise's workshop, will be published soon at Mipoesias Magazine, another creation of the cruise's magnificent organizer Didi Menendez: http://www.mipoesias.com/

Later this week: the West Chester Poetry Conference, and three new anthologies.