We’ll get to a remarkable short Emily Dickinson poem today, but first a few words about the music.

One of the things I like about this Project is not caring about what style of music I make to combine with the poetry. You see, I don’t like “silos” — those ways of viewing music as having borders, types, genres, labels. Some days I want to make acoustic music, some days I go inside computers to see what I can score and program to happen, other days I want to take an electric guitar and lean into the amp so that I can hear that guitar respond to its own screaming. Then I’ll be so audacious as to fake music that I have no right nor sufficient understanding to make. Jazz and orchestral music are fields where extraordinary musical knowledge is required — or it would be if I paid attention to the rules. When delving into those kinds of ensembles and approaches I make do with quite simple ideas.

In the music for this Project I’ve become dependent on acting as the musicians that work with my composing self, and the composer knows the musician’s limitations intimately. At least the musicians in me can depend on the composer to keep them from being bored with the same challenges all the time.

Does this variety succeed or fail? I don’t know. Perhaps I am steeled in this effort by writing poetry for years before composing music. Poets in our age generally don’t know if they’ve succeeded. Poetry’s audiences are small and what audiences poetry has may be too cowed by the pretentions of the art to allow us mere listeners footing to talk about it.

Today’s audio piece combines unlike things even before it gets to combining with Emily Dickinson’s striking short poem. I took some very old things: A Telecaster (a 1950 design, meant for bar-room and dancehall cowboy music*) and a small Fender Princeton electric guitar amp I’ve had for more than 40 years. But instead of playing birth-spanking music for dancing and carousing, I played slow, spare music, exactly stumbling though while still keeping itself upright. That part of the piece’s musical approach has a label within the catch-all of indie rock: the sub-genre is called slowcore. To this I decided to add (or perhaps preserve is a better word) some artifacts of its making that you, I, or the next recordist might think defects. The mic was picking up a lot of the pick strikes on the guitar’s strings —well sobeit, they are the crickets or the tapping implements of this soundscape. And to this I decided to mic the floor beneath me as I performed this to capture my foot stomping time as I played.**

I believe this combining pairs well with the difference of Emily Dickinson. I’m not entirely sure what Dickinson meant to achieve in the short poem we title with it’s first line “If all the griefs I am to have.”   What was her internal intent in writing this, what did it mean to its author? Was she writing something to herself? Or was it expected to be a little greeting card epigram to thank someone else for the gift of joy? The first line we use out of need for a title leads us to think it’s about grief, and a recipient of this might think it awfully strange to think this a thankyou message — yet one through-line of the poem’s two stanzas is that the poet’s present mood is so joyful that a lifetime’s accumulation of grief wouldn’t phase her at the poem’s moment, and that any imagined accumulation of a lifetime’s joys would only measure the same as what she says “happens to me now.” We might assume the poem’s occasion is some joy then, yet this poem doesn’t say that outright.

Emily often enclosed poems in letters or gifts to others. I don’t know if this was one, but can one imagine being an acquaintance or family member of Emily and receiving these 8 lines? Others might be jotting down “I thoroughly enjoyed your visit/garden party/whatnot” in bread & butter notes. You open Emily’s and it’s “If all the griefs I am to have would only come today…”  Awkward. But to her mind the thought of all that grief, all the sadness, all that pain, all taken at once — it’s something to envision and grapple with. And your cherries jubilee was scrumptious.

A goth who loves dessert? Emily was a dessert maker of some note to her friends and family.

.

If you follow the logic, that’s what the poem could be saying. But the way of saying it, the framing of saying it*** causes one to see grief in an equivalent measure to joy. I see this poem as a Taoist statement, that there is one unified, effortless, way in things.

Is that Taoist reading an accident, an illusion I’m imposing? I’m frankly not sure. One thing I’ve learned as I’ve leaned into Dickinson this century is that her mind had within it a mode of trying to express vast philosophical points in tiny poems, and that the central thoughts that are embedded in just a few words in these poems can be difficult. She was reading Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and they were among the first Americans to try to come to grips with East Asian philosophy. Her poem does  explicitly say grief may seem an illusion to joy, which can flow around it; and that nothing (including joy) is so large that something else cannot be larger.

Well, that’s my awkwardness for today — but you can hear it with music if you use the audio player below. And if the audio player isn’t giving you a RSVP, this highlighted link is supplied for those ways of reading this that suppress showing the player, as it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*A great many musicians discovered that it was good for things well beyond what it was designed for. One side-effect of Leo Fender’s guitar design was that its bridge pickup was to deliver bright, clear notes which meant that no matter how much you smeared it with reverb and ambient effects or applied fuzztones and distorted murk, it still let its intent cut through. For today’s guitar part the Telecaster had things that went against this bright, clear nature: I tuned it down a full step (D to D instead of the conventional E to E) and the motifs tend to be played on the lower strings here. And the guitar was strung with flat-wound strings. Almost all modern guitarists use round-wound strings, which let the lowest pitched 2 or 3 strings have a brighter sound and bring out more of the harmonic series above the root frequency of a note. Flat-wound strings are wrapped with a tight flat layer of wire that suppresses that, which makes them contrast with the ringing plain, un-wound top 2 strings all the more. This timbral contrast can make the single guitar sound almost like two differing instruments.

**I had intent there, even though the sound and rhythms of today’s piece were unlike its model: John Lee Hooker’s early records were often just Hooker’s voice and electric guitar, and his work-boot stomps were clearly audible as percussion on some of them. When I listen to exemplary slowcore band Low’s spare drumming I  sometimes think it has the same effect as Hooker’s sole-music.

*** In poetry, unlike say the essay or expository writing, the way of saying is brought forward to be as important as the message of what is said.