Gian Lombardo
Unblotting the Sun
The story of Harry Crosby’s life tends to overshadow, and almost obliterate, his body of work. He was the rich, spoiled scion of Boston Brahmin who murdered his mistress and then took his own life. But he was also a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I who saw the worst horrors that war can inflict and who won a Croix de Guerre. His exposure to death led him to lead life to the fullest extent possible, always crossing the line into self-indulgence and self-preoccupation. Paradoxically, he was fascinated and attracted to death, ultimately snuffing out two lives as the expression of (what should have been) life-affirming love. Instead, it was death that celebrated his love.
Crosby, when alive, together with his wife, Caresse, published his own work through Editions Narcisse and then Black Sun Press. After he died, his wife pulled together his work posthumously. Everything they did were very limited printings. Today, copies of his work sell for thousands of dollars and most can only be found in library rare book collections. Hardly a way to build an audience. There was no concerted effort to keep him in print or in circulation (wider distribution). Publication of Geoffrey Wolff’s biography and the reissue of Shadows of the Sun, Crosby’s diaries, in the 1970s did little to generate interest in Crosby’s work but rather perpetuated the black cloud that is the story of his life.
This focus on his life has persisted because – even though Harry and his wife traveled among the most well known literary expat figures of the 1920s and published many of them – the critical estimation of Crosby’s oeuvre that developed from those that had the privilege of reading his not-readily-available books was that he was a minor poet, derivative in his approach and not worth reading nor did he merit any further discussion other than as an historical oddity. To this day, Crosby is absent from any major anthology of twentieth century American poetry.
Yet, there have been crosscurrents. Jerome Rothenberg has been instrumental in the attempts by some to focus on the work, and not the man. Rothenberg included Crosby in two anthologies, also in the 1970s, that focused on developing and nurturing a different strain of American poetry. Crosby was rightly seen as an important antecedent to what many typify as either experimental or avant-garde poetry. From my perspective, formed by straddling the world of what could be considered mainstream poetry (that I was inculcated in the classroom) and who I was led to by reading surrealists, Dadaists, existentialists and others, the apparent relegation of Crosby’s work to the dustbin of letters was not just a reaction to the life he led (and ended) and his peculiar religion – his fanatical worship of the sun – of one, but also a reaction to the facts that Crosby was conscious of, and greatly influenced by, writing of continental Europe – primarily of France and namely Dadaism and surrealism – and that Crosby was writing in a highly questionable and irregular form – prose poetry – for a poet writing in English. I am not quite sure why there has been so much suspicion of continental influences in American and British literatures. Possibly there might be some lingering resentment at the sullying of the Anglo-Saxon tongue by the Norman Invasion. But Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales would not have existed without Boccaccio’s Decameron. And I would hazard to speculate that Elizabethan poetry and drama would have been far different had not the Provencal troubadour tradition of lyric poetry had existed and made its way somehow across the English Channel.
What brought me to edit and publish Seeing With Eyes Closed: The Prose Poems of Harry Crosby was an attempt to address a shortcoming in the history of American literature. Independently, Bob Heman and Robert Alexander brought Crosby’s book Sleeping Together to my attention as one of the first books written consciously as prose poetry by a writer writing in English. Sleeping Together was first published in 1929 shortly before his suicide. With prose poetry becoming more accepted into American poetry in the latter half of the twentieth century, there seemed to be a glaring omission in its trajectory in not having this book in wider currency.
As work on Sleeping Together advanced, it became evident that Crosby’s contribution to the genre was far more extensive. Sleeping Together was based on dream narratives published in transition 18, and another full book of prose poems, Torchbearer (with an introduction by Ezra Pound), and a chapbook of prose poems, Aphrodite in Flight, were also published in posthumously. (And Sleeping Together was reissued posthumously as well in 1931 by Black Sun.) There were also prose poems scattered in two other books of poetry -- Mad Queen and Chariot of the Sun. What made better sense was to present not only Sleeping Together but also to recognize by the sheer volume of what Crosby wrote that he was the first poet in English to work extensively in, and explore, the form.
Arguments as to who is a major poet or a minor one seem to be more reflective of an individual’s tastes than a serious estimation of the importance of a poet to the art and culture as a whole. One role of the critic is to provide their perception as to why a work or a poet should be read. The intent behind Seeing With Eyes Closed is for the reader to determine whether Crosby speaks to them or not, whether his words garner resonance for them. The intent for this book is to acknowledge that this work existed and provides in some measure an alternative history of contemporary/modern American poetry. (http://www.quale.com/Seeing_HC.html) He relied on the subconscious (the dreamworld) and on the object and on the concreteness of words. He was also concerned with the visual presentation of the poem as well as the aural presentation, and gives us the document poem. Stein came out and reimagined language from one direction and Crosby came at language from another. Both deserve to be remembered because they have altered the landscape for poetry, but not because of some external cultural baggage placed on them. Crosby, despite being a harmful and deeply flawed person, has something speak to speak to us across time.
The story of Harry Crosby’s life tends to overshadow, and almost obliterate, his body of work. He was the rich, spoiled scion of Boston Brahmin who murdered his mistress and then took his own life. But he was also a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I who saw the worst horrors that war can inflict and who won a Croix de Guerre. His exposure to death led him to lead life to the fullest extent possible, always crossing the line into self-indulgence and self-preoccupation. Paradoxically, he was fascinated and attracted to death, ultimately snuffing out two lives as the expression of (what should have been) life-affirming love. Instead, it was death that celebrated his love.
Crosby, when alive, together with his wife, Caresse, published his own work through Editions Narcisse and then Black Sun Press. After he died, his wife pulled together his work posthumously. Everything they did were very limited printings. Today, copies of his work sell for thousands of dollars and most can only be found in library rare book collections. Hardly a way to build an audience. There was no concerted effort to keep him in print or in circulation (wider distribution). Publication of Geoffrey Wolff’s biography and the reissue of Shadows of the Sun, Crosby’s diaries, in the 1970s did little to generate interest in Crosby’s work but rather perpetuated the black cloud that is the story of his life.
This focus on his life has persisted because – even though Harry and his wife traveled among the most well known literary expat figures of the 1920s and published many of them – the critical estimation of Crosby’s oeuvre that developed from those that had the privilege of reading his not-readily-available books was that he was a minor poet, derivative in his approach and not worth reading nor did he merit any further discussion other than as an historical oddity. To this day, Crosby is absent from any major anthology of twentieth century American poetry.
Yet, there have been crosscurrents. Jerome Rothenberg has been instrumental in the attempts by some to focus on the work, and not the man. Rothenberg included Crosby in two anthologies, also in the 1970s, that focused on developing and nurturing a different strain of American poetry. Crosby was rightly seen as an important antecedent to what many typify as either experimental or avant-garde poetry. From my perspective, formed by straddling the world of what could be considered mainstream poetry (that I was inculcated in the classroom) and who I was led to by reading surrealists, Dadaists, existentialists and others, the apparent relegation of Crosby’s work to the dustbin of letters was not just a reaction to the life he led (and ended) and his peculiar religion – his fanatical worship of the sun – of one, but also a reaction to the facts that Crosby was conscious of, and greatly influenced by, writing of continental Europe – primarily of France and namely Dadaism and surrealism – and that Crosby was writing in a highly questionable and irregular form – prose poetry – for a poet writing in English. I am not quite sure why there has been so much suspicion of continental influences in American and British literatures. Possibly there might be some lingering resentment at the sullying of the Anglo-Saxon tongue by the Norman Invasion. But Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales would not have existed without Boccaccio’s Decameron. And I would hazard to speculate that Elizabethan poetry and drama would have been far different had not the Provencal troubadour tradition of lyric poetry had existed and made its way somehow across the English Channel.
What brought me to edit and publish Seeing With Eyes Closed: The Prose Poems of Harry Crosby was an attempt to address a shortcoming in the history of American literature. Independently, Bob Heman and Robert Alexander brought Crosby’s book Sleeping Together to my attention as one of the first books written consciously as prose poetry by a writer writing in English. Sleeping Together was first published in 1929 shortly before his suicide. With prose poetry becoming more accepted into American poetry in the latter half of the twentieth century, there seemed to be a glaring omission in its trajectory in not having this book in wider currency.
As work on Sleeping Together advanced, it became evident that Crosby’s contribution to the genre was far more extensive. Sleeping Together was based on dream narratives published in transition 18, and another full book of prose poems, Torchbearer (with an introduction by Ezra Pound), and a chapbook of prose poems, Aphrodite in Flight, were also published in posthumously. (And Sleeping Together was reissued posthumously as well in 1931 by Black Sun.) There were also prose poems scattered in two other books of poetry -- Mad Queen and Chariot of the Sun. What made better sense was to present not only Sleeping Together but also to recognize by the sheer volume of what Crosby wrote that he was the first poet in English to work extensively in, and explore, the form.
Arguments as to who is a major poet or a minor one seem to be more reflective of an individual’s tastes than a serious estimation of the importance of a poet to the art and culture as a whole. One role of the critic is to provide their perception as to why a work or a poet should be read. The intent behind Seeing With Eyes Closed is for the reader to determine whether Crosby speaks to them or not, whether his words garner resonance for them. The intent for this book is to acknowledge that this work existed and provides in some measure an alternative history of contemporary/modern American poetry. (http://www.quale.com/Seeing_HC.html) He relied on the subconscious (the dreamworld) and on the object and on the concreteness of words. He was also concerned with the visual presentation of the poem as well as the aural presentation, and gives us the document poem. Stein came out and reimagined language from one direction and Crosby came at language from another. Both deserve to be remembered because they have altered the landscape for poetry, but not because of some external cultural baggage placed on them. Crosby, despite being a harmful and deeply flawed person, has something speak to speak to us across time.