One thing I loved doing to stretch my culture and entertainment dollar back in the 20^th century was to go to a used record shop and look for unusual records. The more disorganized and undiscerning the shop, the better for my purposes then—since the lowest price was important, and whatever the time spent, it was enjoyable.

It felt so good to come home back then, less a dollar or two, but with a record by someone I’d barely heard of, or never  heard of. What would it sound like? What would they be trying to express? There’s a universe of art out there, commercial and not, music, words, every art. What hides itself, unlooked at, unheard, while our summarized cultural attention is elsewhere?

This project has allowed me to do the same thing with the poets of the early 20^th century.

One way to find the overlooked is to read contemporary journalistic accounts of an era. They are unfiltered by later consensus, and focused on the day to day of their day, not overly informed by the judgements of history (which aren’t complete, much less unerring). And so, I’ve spent time this week reading Harold Monro’s* 1920 book Some Contemporary Poets.  Monro is himself a poet I thought might be an interesting minor writer to examine. Instead, his book led me to at least two other writers that I found immediately interesting. Today you get to hear something from the first of them.

Monro didn’t much like Walter J. Turner, who he refers to as W. J. Turner.** He leads off his book’s short notice on Turner by saying that Turner was “Rumoured in literary circles” as “a genius.” Monro then wastes little time getting on to disputing that, saying that Turner has only learned “the ‘tricks of the trade’ in the neo-Georgian school.” So facile but vapid? No, Monro, extends his critique to Turner’s technique too: “Simple monosyllabic epithets like cold, dim, dark, pale, wan, bright, grey, still, occur in all he has written to such excess that they cloy the reader’s memory like some unwanted tune.”

I happen to think that one of the common faults of poetry is its resort to too many and too uselessly fancy a set of adjectives, so I looked at a few Walter J.Turner poems. I didn’t have to go far to see one that called to this reader’s memory for some—who knows?—unwanted tune.

I haven’t found out much yet about Turner’s life, but those rumors of greatness back in 1920 largely came from William Butler Yeats—a blurb any lyric poet would be glad to get. Turner isn’t as fluid a poet/word-musician as Yeats is (is anyone?) but he seems to have been struck by the fanciful, exotic and even occult aspects that are one thread in Yeats. Today’s piece “’There Came a Lion into the Capitol’”  shows this.

Besides poetry, Turner wrote music criticism.

 

Turner published that title in quote marks, but I can’t find the literal phrase he might be quoting exactly. Lions and rulers and rulers’ seats are a rich trope of metaphor in general, but he may be referring to Cassius speaking about Julius Caesar in dialog from Shakespeare’s play. If so, his poem is very impressionistic, mentioning nothing that links it to Caesar, to Shakespeare, or any particular time or place.

The poem is entirely fantastic, in the strict sense of the word. The title lion somehow materializes from the page of a book (Shakespeare’s plays? The Bible***  or some equivalent? A spell-book? Some other book of lore?) and an apocalypse occurs. By the last stanza, planet Earth is gone and cold space is left.

Musically, I may have unintentionally copped a bit of the sound of one of my favorite used record store finds, the masterpiece of one of the great overlooked Afro-American-led bands of “The Sixties,” Love’s “Forever Changes.”****  My playing and arrangements don’t reach that level, but the orchestration of “Forever Changes” is what comes to my mind when I think of acoustic guitar mixed with a horn section, so maybe one of those dark-horse used records from long ago did become a muse here.

Hey, what happened to the rest of the band? A classic LP cover and my W. J. Turner parody of it.

 

To hear my performance of Walter J. Turner’s “’There Came a Lion into the Capitol’”  use the player gadget below.

 

 

*H. Monro is not to be confused with H. H. Munro, the other writer whose penname was “Saki.” Monro and Munro were contemporaries. This might have been embarrassing at literary get-togethers!

**Not to be confused with J. M. W. Turner. He’s the painter.

***Lions appear in the Bible from the Old Testament to Revelation, but though the title phrase sounds like it could be in Revelation, I haven’t found an English translation that has it.

****The group Love was led by Arthur Lee, not to be confused with ace guitarist Albert Lee, who in turn is not to be confused with Albert Lea, the county seat of Freeborn County in south-east Minnesota. If you haven’t heard Love’s “Forever Changes,”  you should. “Forever Changes”  sold next to nothing—and the lyrics and some of the melody lines are unusual enough to explain that I suppose—but the LP’s arrangements are so rich and attractive that it’s difficult to imagine the real-world timeline that we actually lived through, the one where this wasn’t one of the biggest records of 1967. In our still ongoing time continuum, maybe Flying Lotus or Frank Ocean ought to do a tribute mixtape.