I don’t plan ahead with this project much, which has it’s benefits and costs. Often one piece sort of kicks off the idea for the next one and so on. That was the case with doing my roll up of last year’s section of “The Waste Land”  for National Poetry Month, and then following it up with a very short poem by Sara Teasdale, T. S. Eliot’s contemporary in growing up in St. Louis Missouri.

But I had looked at doing another Sara Teasdale poem other than her “Morning.”   I even went so far as to write a sketch of the music I would use. I liked what I had there, but “Morning’s”  striking compression made it more of a contrast to Eliot.

This project has a lot of inefficiencies like that, poet’s collections I read or skim and then find nothing that inspires me to go further. Ideas for musical combinations that don’t quite bear fruit. Poems that jump out at me as compelling, only to find that they aren’t in the public domain and therefore free to use. Ideas that seem sound but get pushed aside by other ideas that step in front of them.

Given the extraordinary work that I put into this project: selecting my own texts, researching what to say about them, and then composing, playing and recording multiple musical parts, these inefficiencies could trouble me. I certainly don’t want to increase them, but I’m somewhat comfortable in them. Like a meditative walking maze, there’s something in the time and indirectness that lets other thoughts in.

The Official Moon of Shelter in Place. None of you stand so tall. Pink Moon is going to get you all.

 

I’m continuing this project in a time of a global pandemic, which doesn’t aid efficiency either. Luckily so far, I haven’t had to deal with any family members or friends suffering from the Covid-19 virus. In their place, there’s the toll of artists who have succumbed to it. It’s been a tough week for that. Bill Withers, who in his too brief time singing through the music industry, produced songs and performances of them that could carry this troubled workman through his clocked-in days. Adam Schlesinger, a songwriter after my own heart who liked to jump and mix genres. Hal Willner, that most underappreciated functionary in the arts, the impresario, who melded other artists into projects many and wide, projects often aimed (as this one does) to celebrate other artists. And then John Prine, the singing mailman from the outskirts of Chicago, who came from nowhere quickly into the Seventies age of the singer-songwriter, and then stayed like a little public park that you knew was always there, visited by yourself, some others, some pigeons, but nothing elaborate and scenic enough to celebrate.

Prine had some interesting things to say about his job. He said that he considered his mail route as “a library with no books.” As it turns out, he didn’t fill it with books—though he returned more than he checked out—but with that portable, walking art: songs. Actor Viola Davis once said that graveyards contain the stuff of her art while urging you to make it part of yours too.

“Become an artist. They are the only profession that celebrates what it is to live a life.” – Viola Davis

 

When something, someone, goes away it’s a good time to notice what a sum total of things are. Some people are heroes for one thing they once did. Some have career highlights, a dozen or half-dozen models of importance. Others do things for decades, just doing what they do. Prine’s like that. Here’s a guy that in the decade that got called “The Me Decade” wrote songs that had other people in them.  He kept writing, forging his trademark take on the human condition into song after song. No big thing. That’s what he does. Or did, because now he’s dead and you notice something: there aren’t a lot who did that, and we have songwriters and songwriters still who will do something other than that.

Anyway, these thoughts in a pandemic brought me back to this other Teasdale poem, the one I didn’t use, “I Have Loved Hours at Sea.”

It’s a premature, self-elegy. That’s a hard form to pull off, but I think Teasdale does. It’s bitter-sweet, but that’s what we should expect from Teasdale, poem after poem. It can be read as a poem with a moral, a lesson, that we should live our lives fully so that our container of time is fulfilled—but also as Teasdale often does, there’s a gothic undertone to it all: many the blessing she recounts is qualified or undercut and stated by this young poet in a past tense. Here’s the full text of her poem.

So, as you can see with the player gadget below, I decided to go through with performing this second Teasdale poem in a row. I even decided to write and perform a short piece for strings as an introductory lament. In the delay of inefficiencies and skimpy planning, “I Have Loved Hours at Sea”  now seems to have a reason to be performed, and perhaps for you to listen to.