Everything I believe

[AdamSmith]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spv0rln-egY

[TruthBTold]

He has taught for 50 years! Imagine the people he has known. He just makes me realize how much I don't know.

[tyro]

Now there's a man with a big, wrinkly brain.

T

[AdamSmith]

I took Modern 20th-Century Poetry from him.

 

From him, I learned to think.

[TruthBTold]

I took Modern 20th-Century Poetry from him.

From him, I learned to think.

 

This is my green envy smile. :D

[AdamSmith]

I ought to say: he got me started learning how to think.

[Larstrup]

I ought to say: he got me started learning how to think.

Reminds me of an image......nevermind.

[AdamSmith]

Bloom on the immortal Hart Crane. In a RadioOpenSource program with the marvelous Chris Lydon.

 

http://radioopensource.org/whose-words-these-are-15-blooms-hart-crane/

 

To Brooklyn Bridge

Hart Crane, 1889 - 1932

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest

The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,

Shedding white rings of tumult, building high

Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

 

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes

As apparitional as sails that cross

Some page of figures to be filed away;

—Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

 

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;

 

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced

As though the sun took step of thee, yet left

Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—

Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

 

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft

A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,

Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,

A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

 

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,

A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;

All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .

Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

 

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,

Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow

Of anonymity time cannot raise:

Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

 

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,

(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)

Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,

Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,—

 

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift

Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,

Beading thy path—condense eternity:

And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

 

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;

Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

The City's fiery parcels all undone,

Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

 

O Sleepless as the river under thee,

Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,

Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend

And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

 

 

The Broken Tower

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn

Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell

Of a spent day - to wander the cathedral lawn

From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.

 

Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps

Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway

Antiphonal carillons launched before

The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray?

 

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;

And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave

Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score

Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave!

 

Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping

The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!

Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles out leaping-

O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…

 

And so it was I entered the broken world

To trace the visionary company of love, its voice

An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)

But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

 

My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored

Of that tribunal monarch of the air

Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word

In wounds pledged once to hope - cleft to despair?

 

The steep encroachments of my blood left me

No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower

As flings the question true?) -or is it she

Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-

 

And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes

My veins recall and add, revived and sure

The angelus of wars my chest evokes:

What I hold healed, original now, and pure…

 

And builds, within, a tower that is not stone

(Not stone can jacket heaven) - but slip

Of pebbles, - visible wings of silence sown

In azure circles, widening as they dip

 

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye

That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…

The commodious, tall decorum of that sky

Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

[AdamSmith]

And that is what the divine Harold taught me, above all: If you love something, you deserve it entrance entire into your memory, and conscience, and your being.

[tyro]

And that is what the divine Harold taught me, above all: If you love something, you deserve it entrance entire into your memory, and conscience, and your being.

And if we're really, really brave, we can do the same for/with a someone.

T

[AdamSmith]

And if we're really, really brave, we can do the same for/with a someone.

T

Although tragically the returns will almost never be quite the same.

[AdamSmith]

One more.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM-uBIDqmoU

 

Makes plain how & why he is my generating mental force today & ever.

[BgMstr4u]

Thank you so much for these interviews. I mean it. Thank you!

 

Bloom's work has been a lodestar for me, especially as literature is the first and deepest calling of my life. I never met him, but have a good friend who is a good friend of his, and through her agency treasure two volumes inscribed to me.

 

I think part of his greatness is what has always got him into trouble: the willingness to say out loud what he really thinks, and to list what matters to him. And as his judgment is so informed, so vast, those rankings mean more than they would from almost anyone else.

 

Would Hart Crane be much remembered today without him? Thank you for To Brooklyn Bridge and The Broken Tower. What he would have been if he had not followed his demons into the water.

 

Falstaff and the Wife of Bath: the life force.

[AdamSmith]

The reactor operating with all control rods out. This was his affect when I took his class in spring 1980.

 

 

It was the first time most of us had ever seen true genius at work firsthand. Mind-searing.

 

But, something this video doesn't convey, what was so compelling about his approach to teaching was that he was not only trying to show us, and bring us into, the poems. He was also, so very clearly every class, urgently striving to show us "how to read, and why," as he later titled one of his books.

 

Like very few other teachers, he showed us why what we were studying together was so vitally important to each of our -- and to our shared -- quests to be, and to become, ever more fully human.

[AdamSmith]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spv0rln-egY

Studying with Bloom as an undergraduate was like Cyborg Two.

 

(Google which if needed.)

[AdamSmith]

Becket and Joyce Play Golf.

 

[AdamSmith]

Just beyond belief.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2QYQNfGjnQ

[AdamSmith]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PNV3aJR7Sg

[AdamSmith]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fmQ5dV2tgE

[AdamSmith]