sus

Moderator
That O'Hara reads like someone doing an offensive impersonation of an autistic person. I can hear it in my head all in monotone.
Have you heard his actual voice reading? It helps yes very charismatic voice wise
 

luka

Well-known member
HE SPEAKS IN YOUR VOICE AMERICAN

AND THERES A SHINE IN HIS EYE THATS HALFWAY HOPEFUL
I was thinking about how appaling this is just the other day. Itz a benchmark. I really do think its the worst piece of prose ever written. Im very confident about that.
 

sus

Moderator
Thats why i said im incoherent in my opinions about american poetry cos i like o hará for some reason but it is totally ridiculous
Why is it ridiculous to try and capture colloquial American voices the way Frost OHara Ginsberg DeLillonall Gaddis Bellow Miller Pynchon all them try? Because theyre not little pinky finger out speaking like landed gentry whove held land and had teaparty etiquette lessons since 12th century?
 

sus

Moderator
Used by extremely erudite men to ironically point out how much they don't care about their own erudition (before launching into a disquisition on the parallels between Greek tragedy and volume integrals or somesuch).
See I think playing high/low registers at once is the best American feature. You get it in Ralph Ellison and nobody complains because he's representation for primitives but we're all primitives you see I'm the only one advocating for capturing the primitive white American voice on equal ethnographic footing
 

version

Well-known member
Why is it ridiculous to try and capture colloquial American voices the way Frost OHara Ginsberg DeLillonall Gaddis Bellow Miller Pynchon all them try? Because theyre not little pinky finger out speaking like landed gentry whove held land and had teaparty etiquette lessons since 12th century?

I don't think that's what Pynchon's doing. He's doing a Looney Tunes thing. It's the narrator taking the piss and winking at the reader, a hokey routine.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Dunno, I'm trying to figure out where Hart Crane fits into this.


Voyages
By Hart Crane

II

—And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,—
Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
 

version

Well-known member
How does Twain fit in
Screenshot-2025-04-06-at-23-32-49-the-versioncore-canon-Page-9-Dissensus.png
 
  • Wow
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Benny Bunter

Well-known member
It's a really really strange mix of the English romantics and Whitman and Melville and I don't think it always comes off, a lot of it is a dogs dinner, but I don't think it's straightforward rubbish, there was definitely something there. You made me think of him when you talked about straining and gargoyle words.
 

luka

Well-known member
It has to have a gasping quality. Versions guy has it. His model rimbaud obviously has it.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
 

luka

Well-known member
Theres lightness to the breath o!o!o!

Crane has a clogged clotted quality, hair in the plughole. Its really ugly and stupid.
 
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Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Smile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset — earth of the mountains misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
 
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