HART CRANE – American poet, born (d: 1932). Crane’s father, Clarence, was a successful Ohio businessman who had made his fortune in the candy business by inventing the Life Saver (an odd foreshadowing of the poet’s death, ironically). Crane was gay and associated his sexuality with his vocation as a poet. Raised in the Christian Science tradition of his mother, he never ceased to view himself as a outsider in relation to society. However, as poems such as "Repose of Rivers" make clear, he felt that this sense of alienation was necessary for him to attain the visionary insight that formed the basis for his poetic work. It is one of the classic Gay Archetypes.

Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings (1926), his first volume, ratified and strengthened. White Buildings contains many of Crane’s best lyrics, including "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," and a powerful sequence of erotic poems called "Voyages," written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant marine.

"Faustus and Helen" was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet the modern world with something more than despair. Crane identified T.S. Eliot with that kind of despair, and while he acknowledged the greatness of The Waste Land, he also said it was "so damned dead," an impasse, and a refusal to see "certain spiritual events and possibilities." Crane’s self-appointed work would be to bring those spiritual events and possibilities to poetic life, and so create "a mystical synthesis of America." He meant an epic poem. This ambition would finally issue in The Bridge (1930), where the Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem’s central symbol and its poetic starting point.

Just before noon on April 27, 1932, on a steamship passage back to New York from Mexico — right after he was reportedly beaten for making sexual advances to a male crew member — he committed suicide by jumping into the Gulf of Mexico. Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed Crane's intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed "Goodbye, everybody!" before throwing himself overboard. His body was never recovered.

A marker on his father's tombstone in Garrettsville includes the inscription, "Harold Hart Crane 1899-1932 LOST AT SEA" ("Voyager," John Unterecker, 1969). Crane's suicide inspired several works of art by noted artist Jasper Johns, including "Periscope" and "Diver." Hart Crane: Complete Poems & Selected Letters (Langdon Hammer, ed.)

LONG JOHN BALDRY, born John William Baldry, died on this date (b: 1941) And with him died a piece of rock and roll history. Undeniably, Long John was one of the “Founding Fathers of British Blues' in the 1960s and without his presence the scene, particularly the Blues scene, may have been quite different. Long John Baldry was a pioneering blues singer from England and he had a knack for discovering talent. Ginger Baker, Jeff Beck and Brian Jones all worked with him early on as did other Rolling Stones – Charlie Watts, Ron Wood, and Keith Richards.

In 1962, when The Rolling Stones were just getting started, they opened for him in London. Eric Clapton credits Long John Baldry as one of the musicians that inspired him to play the Blues. And for their internationally televised special in 1964, The Beatles invited John to perform his version of 'I Got My Mojo Working'.In 1965, his band, the Hoochie Coochie Men became Steampacket with Baldry and Stewart as male vocalists and Brian Auger on Hammond organ.

In 1966, Baldry formed Bluesology featuring one Reg Dwight on keyboards and Elton Dean, later of Soft Machine, as well as Caleb Quaye on guitar. Reg Dwight decided to adopt the name Elton John, taking his first name from Dean and his surname from Baldry's first name. Bluesology broke up in 1968, with Baldry continuing his solo career and Elton John forming a songwriting partnership with Bernie Taupin. In 1969, Elton John attempted suicide after having relationship problems with a woman he was engaged to. Taupin and Baldry found him and in a conversation Baldry talked him out of marrying the woman and helped make John more comfortable with his sexuality. The hit song “Someone Saved My Life Tonight" from Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy was written about the experience.

Partial Baldry discography: Baldry’s Out! (EMI) (1979) Long John’s Blues (United Artists) (1964) Looking at Long John (United Artists) (1966) Let The Heartaches Begin (Pye) (1968) Everything Stops for Tea (Warner Brothers) (1972) Mar Y Sol: The First International Puerto Rico Pop Festival (Atco) (1972) Good To Be Alive (Baldry Album) (GM) (1973) After spending time in New York City and Los Angeles in 1978, Baldry chose to settle permanently in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he became a Canadian citizen.
He regularly toured the Canadian west coast, as well as the U.S. Northwest. Baldry also toured the Canadian east, including one 1985 show in Kingston, Ontario, where audience members repeatedly called for the title track from his 1979 album Baldry's Out!--to which he replied, "I'll say he is!"

Repose Of Rivers
By Hart Crane

The willows carried a slow sound,
A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.
I could never remember
That seething, steady leveling of the marshes
Till age had brought me to the sea.

Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves
Where cypresses shared the noon’s
Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.
And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams
Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them
Asunder ...

How much I would have bartered! the black gorge
And all the singular nestings in the hills
Where beavers learn stitch and tooth.
The pond I entered once and quickly fled—
I remember now its singing willow rim.

And finally, in that memory all things nurse;
After the city that I finally passed
With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts
The monsoon cut across the delta
At gulf gates ...  There, beyond the dykes

I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer,
And willows could not hold more steady sound.