From the last poem written by the genius of Hart Crane (1899-1932), “The Broken Tower”, will come the title of an Hollywood movie, based on the adaptation by Paul L. Mariani, as a biopic of the poet himself, who gained popularity with his Brooklyn-Bridge inspired “The Bridge”.
The movie will mention the Oscar-nominated actor Michael Shannon (“Pearl Harbor”, “Revolutionary Road”) and James Franco (who’s recently played Allen Ginsberg in his cine-story “Howl”).

The novel will be the base of the movie itself, as Franco already told to the media: “It’s important for u sto befocused on crane’s final despairing months in Mexico and his only heteroexual affair (with Peggy Crowley). The novel illuminates previously shadowy corners of the writer’s life and makes a convincing case for Crane as one of the greatest American poets of the past century, despite not so known by the mainstream audience. He committed suicide at the age of 32, and it’s important for us to make a light on his art”.

Hart Crane, his poetry and symbolism, in a surely successful biopic!

“The Broken Tower”
by Hart Crane
1932

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.
by Ilaria Rebecchi