Hart Crane

During this week's seminar I mentioned the poetry of Hart Crane, and in particular his evocation of the Brookly Bridge in The Bridge (1930). In the Proem to the poem, "To Brooklyn Bridge," Crane writes:

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;


The stanza describes the "thought" of the cinema as a moment of transport: a sleight (trick), an experience of "multitudes . . . bent toward" (turned to, oriented by, organised through) a scene that bears repetition, and points to the future. It's an interesting image to sit beside the experience of the "Masstransiscope" artwork we discussed. From Walt Whitman ("Manhatta") to Masstransiscope, an aesthetic trajectory complements the experience of cinematic modernity.

You can read "To Brooklyn Bridge" here.

This is the cover of the first edition of The Bridge, with photographs by Walker Evans. Note the way in which the material of the bridge comes to look almost abstract, a migration we discussed as symptomatic of the conversion of shapes to objects (and back) in Ruttmann.