It would be an exaggeration to say we're working hard on the extensive endnotes for our illuminated poetry book Prophecy & Doggerel. But I got several e-mails wondering about the reference to "Hart Crane the Hobo" in the recent nonsense poem Evacuate the Species Prayer. The full line - "Flying over Brooklyn like Whitman or Hart Crane the Hobo" - is a reference to how both American poets wrote about crossing into Brooklyn, Whitman by ferry, Hart Crane by Brooklyn Bridge.
We had looked up Brooklyn Bridge poetry because for our William McGonagall projects. He famously disses the Brooklyn Bridge in his poem "An Address to the New Tay Bridge", which inspired us to set it to hot hip-hop beats & ignite a rap battle between Dundee's Tay Bridge (once the longest in the world) & the mighty Brooklyn Bridge. Turns out there's plenty of poetry about the latter, but none quite as doggerelesque as McGonagalls, & certainly none that call out challenges to lesser bridges. Gold Diamonds rapped a lyric by D. B. Steinem, Brooklyn Bridge at Nightfall. But Hart Crane's poem we deemed too good. The whole battle is at our Department of Bridges.
Hart Crane published The Bridge in 1930, two years before he jumped off an ocean liner at age 33. I was trying to echo The Bridge's westward train trip in "Evacuate the Species Prayer", & I couldn't resist the hobo passage in "The River":BehindMy father’s cannery works I used to see
Rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery,
The ancient men—wifeless or runaway
Hobo-trekkers that forever search
An empire wilderness of freight and rails.
Each seemed a child, like me, on a loose perch,
Holding to childhood like some termless play.
John, Jake or Charley, hopping the slow freight
—Memphis to Tallahassee—riding the rods,
Blind fists of nothing, humpty-dumpty clods.
Yet they touch something like a key perhaps.
From pole to pole across the hills, the states
—They know a body under the wide rain;
Youngsters with eyes like fjords, old reprobates
With racetrack jargon,—dotting immensity
They lurk across her, knowing her yonder breast
Snow-silvered sumac-stained or smoky blue—
Is past the valley-sleepers, south or west.
—As I have trod the rumorous midnights, too...
I'm not sure is the breast is twelve-year-old Pocahontas's (as the symbol of Natural America), or some sort of Grand Teton. I wondered, considering the hobo connection, if John Hodgman had jumped on any reference in his "Here are the 700 Hobo Names You Have Requested". I don't see any Harts or Cranes, but there's plenty of Johns, Jakes, & Charleys. "Humpty-Dumpty Clods", from the poem, would be a good hobo name. You know there's a website called E-Hobo.com where people have been posting their illustrations of the 700 hobos. Here's #112 Lois "Charles" Ladyfingers:
Also, I just put up a another excerpt mini-book from Prophecy & Doggerel on Scribd, the poem Remember Artie Wongay, with illustrations by Grainne Proinseas (taken from her Beautiful to Forget travelogues) & Olaf Mary Mohammad:
..seize this window of opportunity.
-Mixed metaphor from a coalition of British corporations responding to climate change
Steve Martin, in his memoir of his early career as a stand-up comedian, writes that he used to get a laugh by claiming that in Bananaland it's true both that all chairs are green & that no chairs are green ("In the Bird Cage," October 29th). "I loved implying that the one thing I believed in was a contradiction," he writes. Actually, those claims are not contradictory: if there are no chairs, both claims are true. (The negation of "All chairs are green" is, rather, "There is at least one chair that is not green.") I would like to think that his audience included some logicians who cracked up at the thought of a chairless Bananaland.
-Alexander George, Professor of Philosophy, Amherst College, Mass.
The New Yorker's The Mail, December 24th, 2007.
1) No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste-The famous Lewis Carroll syllogism, which Martin quotes as being an inspiration for some of his early absurdist stand-up comedy.
2) No modern poetry is free from affectation
3) All your poems are on the subject of soap bubbles
4) No affected poetry is popular among people of real taste
5) Only a modern poem would be on the subject of soap bubbles
THEREFORE: All your poems are uninteresting.
Around 1976 I began to hear the microwave-over variants, & I inserted the following summary example from Utah into the second edition (1978) of my text-book The Study of American Folklore: "[a] child ... accidentally sprinkles the cat with a hose & puts it into a microwave to dry out, whereupon the cat explodes (p. 111)." The phrase in the Arizona text, of the animal being "cooked from the inside out," more accurately describes the molecule-jiggling effect of microwaves than the account of the pet exploding in my text (the only way I have heard it). I am told, however, that eyes might possibly pop when bombarded with microwaves, just as eggs or potatoes are said to do if inserted into an oven whole. People's notions about what would happen to a living creature caught in a microwave oven are doubtless colored by a vague fear of the new devises and intensified by such things as the warning signs posted on public-access microwave ovens and the news stories about microwaves beamed by the Soviets into our foreign embassy. Whatever those mysterious invisible waves may do to a person - or to a pacemaker, as the posted warnings imply - they certainly would not be healthy for the family pet. The animal would surely cook & die in the oven, so the fear is quite realistic.
When writing, please avoid these failed palindromes:
Slow speed: deep owls
Drat That Tard
Two Owls Hoot Who Owls Hoot Too (Owt)
Sour candy and Dan C.
Roused Desire still lisps: Arise! D.
A man, a plan, a kind of man-made river, planned.
Hobos! So!
Eh, S'occurs to Me to Succor She
Tow a What? Thaw!
Posts
All Comments
