Our friend at SpokenVerse has done it again, with a masterful reading of Hart Crane’s “At Melville’s Tomb”.

The editor of Poetry, Harriet Monroe, received this poem in 1926 and first rejected it, asking:

“How dice can bequeath an embassy (or anything else); and how a calyx (of death’s bounty or anything else) can give back a scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph; and how, if it does, such a portent can be wound in corridors (of shells or anything else).”

Hart Crane gave a remarkably good answer, which she printed, citing other poems which make no literal sense and arguing that poetry has “another logic”. You can read all about it here in The New York Observer:
http://www.observer.com/node/39822