I think I mentioned recently that I have found the panorama setting on my cam and have become slightly obsessed. There is just so much bananas stuff to experiment with. Bananorama?
Anyhow, above, see some pics of the obsession with bridges and the obsession with panorama setting colliding on the 617Midway blog.
All the while taking these shots I had Cockroft's first line: "Hart Crane stepping from the prow of a boat" ringing in my head. Not because craned leaped from a bridge (he plummeted from a boat- read the poem) but because of Crane's fascination with the bridge as metaphor. This is central to Cockroft's poem.
I was going to say Berryman leaped from a bridge, but I think he jumped from a hotel next to a bridge. Or an apartment building. All of these poets and leaping!
Yes, I did run home and re-write: Hart Crane leaping from the lip of a bridge. But this should not be surprising to those who know I appropriate Cockroft's first rate lines to make third-rate poems as a rule.
In the "12 days of Xmas" it should be "however many poets leaping." Countless poets leaping (and then the background singers break-in and hum "infinity" in a case of musical one-up-man-ship).
I ran home, after the bridge, and recently reading some new Alexie (Face, which is worthwhile and wonderful in parts, and inspiring, and funny and Alexie who is humbling and amazing... check out "Villify" and "Inappropriate."), and thinking of Cockroft's line and I wrote. OK, I didn't run, but I wrote.
And I sorely needed to post on blog, so I posted. I posted these pics. I made a panorama of blogging from posting bananas bridge-oramas.
Happy Friday.
1 comment:
I'll never sing the 12 Days of Christmas the same way again.
Berryman leaped from the bridge, which was just beyond his apartment building. But he missed the water.
I guess Randall Jarell sort of "leaped" in front of a car. Spicer leaped down a bottle. Robin Blaser leaped from Spicer's shadow and fell in love all over again. I leap in February no matter what.
I think there's a poem in there somewhere.
And congrats on the sales of the paintings. We're reading Asher Lev in one of my classes. Is it true that, at least at first, there's a sort of pang or at best ambivalence about selling a painting?
Have corresponded with JoKlink. The central subject of our letters is leaping.
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