Harp & Altar

Roberta Allen is the author of eight books. Her fiction appears in the current issue of New Ohio Review. She teaches at the New School and in private workshops. A visual/conceptual artist as well, she has work in the collection of the Met. She can be found at www.robertaallen.com.

Kate Greenstreet’s second book, The Last 4 Things, will be out from Ahsahta Press in September. Her first, case sensitive, was published by Ahsahta in 2006. She is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently This is why I hurt you (Lame House Press, 2008). Her new work is in current or forthcoming issues of jubilat, Court Green, VOLT, Fence, and Denver Quarterly.

Poet and translator Jennifer Hayashida was born in Oakland, California, and grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm and San Francisco. She is the translator of Fredrik Nyberg’s A Different Practice (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007) and Eva Sjödin’s Inner China (Litmus Press, 2005). Additional poems and translations have appeared in literary journals and art exhibitions domestically and abroad. She lives in Brooklyn and is director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College.

Lisa Jarnot’s books of poems include Some Other Kind of Mission (Burning Deck Press, 1996), Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001), Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2003), and Night Scenes (Flood Editions, 2008). Her biography of Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus, is forthcoming from University of California Press in 2011. She lives in Sunnyside, Queens, and is the owner of Catskills Organics Farm.

Karla Kelsey is author of two full-length books: Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary (Ahsahta Press, 2006) and Iteration Nets (forthcoming from Ahsahta). In addition, she has published three chapbook-length books: Little Dividing Doors in the Mind (Noemi Press, 2005), Three Movements (Pilot Press, 2009), and Into the eyes of lost storms (Cannibal Books, 2009).

Justin Marks’s first book is A Million in Prizes (New Issues Press, 2009). He is also the author of several chapbooks, including Voir Dire (Rope-a-Dope Press, 2009). New work can be found in the Raleigh Quarterly and Tusculum Review. He is the founder and editor of Kitchen Press Chapbooks and lives in New York with his wife and their infant son and daughter.

Stephen-Paul Martin has published many books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. His most recent collection is The Possibility of Music (FC2, 2007). He is a professor in San Diego State University’s MFA program.

Patrick Morrissey’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, New American Writing, and other journals, and his chapbook Transparency is forthcoming from Cannibal Books in fall 2009. His essay on John Taggart appeared in the previous issue of Harp & Altar. He lives in New York.

Eileen Myles is a poet (Sorry,Tree) who writes fiction (Chelsea Girls, Cool for You). The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art, for which she received a Warhol/Creative Capital grant, will be out in July from Semiotext(e)/MIT. She is professor emeritus of writing and literature at University of California, San Diego. She lives in New York.

Michael Newton’s gallery reviews have appeared in previous issues of Harp & Altar.

Linnea Ogden’s writing has appeared in Coconut, Boston Review, and Ploughshares. She lives and works in San Francisco.

Joanna Ruocco lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she co-edits Birkensnake, a fiction journal. She has published stories in Marginalia, Quick Fiction, Tarpaulin Sky, No Colony, Web Conjunctions, Caketrain, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, The Baker's Daughters, is forthcoming from mudluscious press; her short story collection, Man’s Companions, is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press; and her novel The Mothering Coven is forthcoming from Ellipsis Press.

Rob Schlegel’s The Lesser Fields was selected for the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry and will appear this November from the Center for Literary Publishing. With Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, he is publisher of the Catenary Press. His collaborations with Allison Titus appear in Diode and Make, and he occasionally posts at woodandwhat.blogspot.com.

Zachary Schomburg is the author of The Man Suit (Black Ocean 2007) and Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009). His translations from the Russian have appeared in Jacket, Circumference, Mantis, and The Agriculture Reader. He co-edits Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Andrei Sen-Senkov is a Russian poet born in Tajikistan in 1968. He is now living as a medical doctor in Moscow. He is the author of eight books of poems, the latest of which is Slash (2008).

Jared White grew up in Massachusetts and lives in Brooklyn. A chapbook of his poems entitled Yellowcake was included in the recent anthology Narwhal from Cannibal Books. Other poems have appeared in journals such as Barrow Street, Coconut, Fulcrum, Horse Less Review,The Modern Review, Verse, and Word For/Word. He has written essays for the Poets Off Poetry series and Open Letters, and his last poetry review for Harp & Altar was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. From time to time, he blogs at jaredswhite.blogspot.com and plays the piano and the vibraphone.

David Wirthlin is the author of Houndstooth (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009) and Your Disappearance (forthcoming from BlazeVOX Books). His work has also appeared in Denver Quarterly, elimae, and Sleepingfish. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently at work on a PhD from the University of Denver. He is editor of the smallHABITS chap-journal of innovative fiction.

Michael Zeiss’s writing has appeared in previous issues of Harp & Altar. He lives in Woodside, Queens.

hart!

Eileen Myles

It was a nice two-syllable name. Hart Crane. Even one. He was the son of a candy-maker, the one who invented life-savers. Hart Crane drowned, so that was pretty strange. I read everything he wrote which was only White Buildings and The Bridge which I found a little impossible. And then the fat biography and his letters. I had never read anyone’s letters before. I was 27. It was good being a journalist or whatever I was now because I could do all the reading that was too much in college because now I was getting paid to know. I could see in my reading that Hart was trying to write the great long American poem and I think it was beyond him. Not because he wasn’t great, but the long poem idea seems a little stretched thin and who needs it, really. But Hart kept finding patrons and getting grants. He was like a comic ingénue. He winds up completely isolated on an tropical island in a hurricane or else getting thrown out of Mexico on his Guggenheim he was such a drunk. Meanwhile, writing writing the bridge. Why has no one ever made this film. He was a very familiar man. I felt I knew him. A prematurely white-haired fag, shy-faced and handsome. Wearing one of those Russian sailor shirts he was always leaning against a tree or posing in a group, distractedly touching his own face. He seemed to be gazing into another world. My father looked that way in our family pictures. I figured it meant you were gay. There’s one of me when I was thirteen sitting with all of my friends and I was doing it. Looking right through the camera, back at myself but pleased. Usually the other people in the picture seem to be actually in the world. They’re stopping the balloon from floating off.

He was a great poet of love. Hart produced in a flicker the blue of veins he spied in a lover’s breast. His rapid twists of attention took your breath away. To him poetry was film. Even lighter. Watching a man’s hands grow not quite thing-ified but resonant—meditative. You got there by looking long. All that looking was compressed in a poem. He published his first one in Poetry, came to New York and got a job in advertising through a friend of his father’s. And that young, 18 or 19, already Hart was a total drunk. They gave him the perfume account because he was “a poet” i.e. fag. Even leaving open vials on his desk to inspire the young poet who stumbled in sick in a dirty shirt, and then shoved the disgusting shit out the window by his desk, ending that. I thought about going into advertising briefly not cause of Hart but because of Eddie. I think I always liked ads.

Hart published a poem called Chaplinesque and he and Charlie Chaplin go out on the town. Charlie didn’t drink, but Hart must’ve been charming, not just terrible, and together they were at a bunch of parties in the village. Imagine some party where he and Charlie Chaplin stroll in.

Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell were talking at a party at Allen’s one night. Lowell was scary. Manic eyes, big glasses, white shirt, of course. Allen wore a white shirt too but Lowell’s just took up more space. Gregory Corso yells at Lowell you’re talking to us like we’re in school. I mean at the reading. Allen yells shut up Gregory.

I went to a giant party in Tribeca one night and Robert Di Niro was there. He was wearing a beret and a plaid flannel shirt. He looked like all of us only a little more deliberate. I was tripping my brains out. It was bright.

I said, are you Robert De Niro, the actor. He paused, waiting.

I am Eileen Myles, the poet.

He smiled very sweetly. At which time about a million women swarmed him. I toured with Jim Carroll. We didn’t really hang out. Except one night we split a pint of ice cream in our hotel. That meant that Jim took a knife and cut the pint in half and we each went back to our rooms, yelling down the hall at each other about the night we split a pint in Milwaukee.

I don’t think you were supposed to become as steeped in your material as I did with Hart Crane. I attached my homosexual poet to him and took a ride. Planes overhead, a train hurtling along its tracks. They had so much time back then and they were meanwhile very interested in speed. They thought the future would be amazing and it is, don’t you think.

I’m thinking about a line Hart Crane wrote two different ways.

“The Bridge of Estador” is the name of the poem the good version’s in. It was just one of those back of the book poems. Really cranky. In many ways Hart was like any weird guy—or the poem was like what you’d find that was great in the back of anyone’s notebook. It was subtitled “An Impromptu,/Aesthetic/TIRADE.”

High on the Bridge at Estador,

Where no one has ever been before,—

Then a few lines below, is the killer: “But some are twisted with the love / Of things irreconcilable,— / The slant moon with the slanting hill,” and then he follows it up, getting all echoey and vatic: “O Beauty’s fool, though you have never / Seen them again, you won’t forget.”

Twisted with the love of things irreconcilable. That was it. That was being gay for me—the slant moon with the slanting hill. The line just never undid itself for me—it’s unbelievable—and every time it ripples in the exact same light.

Hart tormented by the love of a remote (but certain) resemblance that you could not consume but could only view. That got under my skin. I just sat at my typewriter and felt. I thought about Rose. I’m your sister, Eileen, she whispered. What did that mean? I didn’t think incest was so bad. If you loved somebody. She said no. I flipped the pages. He liked sailors.

To write the Crane piece I took a ton of amphetamine. I had this doctor in Queens. Yet I was a drug coward—too afraid to go days on end. I’d go three or four—live sleepless and sad. Accomplishing rote kinds of work in bursts of energy. Cleaning house. It was ridiculous. The very thing I took it for, to write, was in fact entirely sabotaged by the drug. I was like a needle at the final cut of a record just perched there skipping. I had already read everything by him and about him. I was full. And there I sat. Couldn’t go out: nope I’d say on the phone, sipping a beer at my desk, or a cup of coffee. Uh-uh. I am working. I’m doing my Franklin Furnace piece. What are you doing these days. I’m working freelance. Got a piece from Franklin Mint. Yup. Thought you said Franklin Furnace. Yup I guess that is what I said but it’s not what I meant.

Hart Crane’s mother came to visit from Ohio. And she talked a little about staying in New York, which must’ve been scary. Grace Crane in New York. Uh oh. Hart was her family name. He was Harold originally. That’s who probably got the advertising job. C.A.’s son. Harold Crane. Why don’t you call yourself Hart. Hart Crane sounds more like a real poet. She was smart. I bet it was her idea to put the Maxfield Parrish on her husband’s candy boxes.

So the mother and son went shopping, got him socks and a winter coat (which he lost in the waterfront bars on the first cold night). They looked at those wan Preston Dickinsons at the Daniel Gallery on Madison, came downtown on 5th Ave. talking about the paintings and later heard some music. It was just like in Cleveland. Hart went with Grace as a teenager to hear Gertrude Stein.

She went back to Ohio and he took the Staten Island Ferry with a couple of friends. He loved it out there. Leaving the land, hovering in New York Harbor the eerie shimmering place with green liberty holding the giant flame. It was a great day and Hart was one of those kids everyone really loves. He was still really funny when he drank and his friends all encouraged him. Hart was a genius. He wrote his mother, staunchly, about the trip:

I have never felt as encouraged, as free or as clean. Think of me often as such or not at all, for I hope you will understand me.