I’m going to be out on a limb in this Project’s treehouse of horror this Halloween. How so? With today’s post I’m starting to present what at completion will be a larger musical piece than this Project usually presents, and I’ve decided then to publish this poem setting in sections over a week, as movements or a kind of suite. That in itself is a bit ambitious. Among the hundreds of pieces the Parlando Project has issued, only two strike me as similar. The most ambitious of those two? I set with music all of T. S. Eliot’s Modernist landmark “The Waste Land” – and that piece too was presented here in sections, but it was composed and performed over a period of years. The other similar suite of songs goes back to the formative times of this Project: a series of songs largely written by long-time Parlando collaborator and keyboardist Dave Moore about the pioneering early 1950s late-night horror movie host Vampira – but as I recall, all those Vampira songs were written and recorded before the first one was published here. I knew what I had before I made them public.
Not so with this planned Halloween 2026 piece, which is Conrad Aiken’s narrative poem “The Vampire.” As I woke up this morning, I had a rough idea for the final section, and some music for that section recorded, but no vocals for that. But if I’m going to present this longer poem serially this week, I would need to start with the first section. I had Aiken’s words, and nothing else.
Conrad Aiken: harvest time or sundering time?
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So after a quick breakfast and glass of iced tea, I was onto composing the music for what will be the first, and shortest, section of Aiken’s “The Vampire.” Working quickly, I started with modifying a drum sequence to use as a guide track for the rest. I next laid down two cello parts, a track using a pair of tape banks from the computer-emulated version of a 1960s’ tape storage “virtual instrument” the Mellotron,* and a clean electric guitar part. Despite the different instruments being sounded, and playing them one at a time, those three tracks were all played on an electric guitar, the non-guitar parts being played thru a MIDI pickup. I finished with an arco string-bass part – that one played on a little plastic keyboard MIDI controller because I want to use its volume wheel to articulate the bowed bass notes. “Real Musicians” and trained composers will recognize the simplicity of these parts. To explain myself, I’ve taken to calling compositions like this “Punk Orchestral.” This is shorthand to explain that just as a melodically simple 2-3 chord rock song played in an entirely non-virtuosic manner can still arguably be an effective piece, so too one might attempt the same thing with instruments we associate with “classical music.” The vocals here are both spoken and sung. I have a limited skill set for this sort of singing, but I’m the one handy to realize this composition.
As we start then with my series of “The Vampire” I feel called to do the Andrew Hickey** thing and warn listeners that this Aiken poem I’m presentingis a dark and distressing fantasy. I had considered a more playful Halloween piece this year, partially because my country and the world has generated non-imagined horrors a plenty. Perversely, Aiken’s poem may have captured my attention because it approaches those current practical levels of fear, terror, and pity – and it has (I believe) a message about the dangers of human fancies. Today’s section of the poem isn’t telling us yet what will occur before we reach the poem’s end, for Aiken opens his story quietly with the world of his poem meeting a distressed and mysterious creature. You can hear it with the audio player below. Has the world darkened, and you can find no such player? This highlighted link is your only hope (and fear) – it will open a new browser tab with its own audio player for the piece.
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*One tape bank is a Mellotron string section, the other male choir voices. The voices are mixed very low today, for they are off in the distance in this part of the poem’s story.
**Hickey’s long-term project, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is amazing and goes further into detail and research on its subjects than even I do on mine. I think Hickey’s project’s title is less attractive than the series is – for yes, music nerds might be up for it, but it’s much more than that: it’s a still unspinning story about history, culture, capitalism, the large caldron of creativity, and racism, and sexism. Hickey is meticulous about warning listeners that they’re going to be hearing more than a treatise on what color a record’s original pressing label is or the most effective settings for a Fender Deluxe guitar amp.
Hans Arp was born split in two. His mother was French. His father was German. I just called him Hans, the name he was given at birth, but he used a French version of his first name as well, Jean.* He was born in Alsace–Lorraine, a set of disputed provinces that were alternatively French and German as wars whipsawed borders. During Arp’s lifetime, those two countries, those two languages, would be fighting as principals in two World Wars. Just by existing Hans Arp could be an enemy alien simultaneously in two ways.
Until this month I knew Arp vaguely as a 20th century modern artist, but while scrolling on Bluesky I saw four lines of an Arp poem that had been translated by Herbert Read as “The Exit To” posted. That immediately intrigued me.
These were eerie, surprising, wild lines – a kind of poetry that has long attracted me.** Was this all of the poem? Could I find it in its original language and work out my own translation for performance? What else could I find out about Arp and his art, visual and literary?
Luckily, I was able to quickly find Read’s 1968 book Arp, which covers Arp’s life and work. The book provides a good number of examples of that work, including not only the entire poem I was seeking in Read’s English translation, but the full text of two versions in the original German (as “Dem Ausgang zu”) and in Arp’s own French translation. Read spends most of the pages on the visual art, but tells us that Arp was a life-long poet that considered his literary work an integral part of his expression.
Arp’s lifetime reflects his dual nature. Born in a then German territory, and soon connected with the early 20th century avant garde in France and Germany, he fled to neutral Zurich Switzerland at the outbreak of WWI. Significantly for the fleeing Arp, Zurich was the birthplace of the nonsense-word-named art movement called Dada.
Dada was formed by young people from all the sides in the First World War, who didn’t want to be on any of the sides offered. As France and the various monarchies ground themselves into doit and wurst on the battlefield, the Dada folks were pretty sure that exuberant non-sense was the best rebuttal. Arp himself dispatched his German draft status by going to the German consulate in Zurich, genuflecting and making the Sign of the Cross at every picture of the German minister Hindenburg there, and making non-sense patterns on the forms. He did not seem to the German recruiters there to have a keen tactical mind, nor the possessor of the cool sanity required to make sacrificial charges and retreats through no-mans-land.
You, valued reader and possible listener, may counter that patriotism and bravery, like poetry and art of wisdom and clarity, are not valueless. I myself am a confused soul. I like to fancy that I, gratefully, can engage with either outlook – a variety. I do weigh and consider that this is a luxury. Earnest warriors and confounding satirists have each expended their lives in dialectic for that luxury in art.
A man such as the great French Surrealist poet Éluard I recently featured here can fight on what I think of as the good side of the two World Wars, and still write Dada and then Surrealist poetry. I know much more about Arp now due to the English poet and critic Herbert Read’s book about him – Read who was a decorated and profoundly discouraged vet of the WWI trenches who became committed to art, pacifism, and anarchism as a result, yet then felt compelled to serve his native country when the armies of fascism were arrayed against his nation in the second World War.
To the best of my initial knowledge, Arp seems like a fine person. Modest, unpretentious though a persistent artist, with a sense of humor and somewhat rare ability among his peers to see value and collaboration with women artists in his circle and romantic life. Spontaneously he took to abstraction in his visual artwork quite early in the 20th century, independently of, and often ahead of other Modernists. He explained this by saying that he felt humans are pretentious when they try to depict nature, and that instead they should create things like nature does – not reflected depictions, but abstract though attractive, palpable things like a stone or leaf.***
So where does that leave him with poetry? Dada enjoyed nonsense of course. Surrealism brought forth odd and even random combinations. We may be more accepting of these tactics in visual object than a poem, but in today’s poem the young Arp is using those Dada and Surrealist tactics in this 1912 poem before either movement had been declared. What are we to make of poetry such as this that seeks to surprise us without the comfort of giving a clear path to a denotative meaning?
We might be attracted to its novelty. We might take comfort in our surprise rather than displeasure in our confusion. We might choose to delight in our sense of disorientation. In the same way that we might enjoy the texture and shape of an abstract sculpture, we can enjoy the words as sounds and texture. But I suspect all these are fleeting things to most of us much of the time. So, let’s look at such Dada verse as Arp’s poem another way, the way I had to in order to make my translation. The world of generative AI could easily produce endless combinations of nonsense, but it’s trained to go the other way, to give us the very thing we’ll think is expected of it. Arp chose his words in German, and then went at it again and chose his words in French. A particular human made a particular set of choices. In Read’s account Arp did intend beauty in his art along with the humor, and he seems absent of any haughty sense of the hermetic artist who means to be misunderstood. He also had a sense of humor. My working understanding of the poem I perform today is that its mood is darkly humorous.
I’ve changed, and think I’ve improved, my last line since I recorded my musical performance earlier this week.
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Long time readers here will recall my primary goal in translation: find the images and convey them vividly in contemporary English. I’ll continue to do this, even as Arp’s images wish to burlesque and fracture reality. When an AI LLM hallucinates (and we use that very term) we are disappointed in it. When another human wishes to speak of an altered reality we wonder at the purpose, the intent, even unexpressed or accepted-accidental intent. This isn’t stone or wood that’s being shaped abstractly, this isn’t a dollop of paint, these are words we must array to make our human sounds, and we will find it hard to avoid making shards of meaning out of them. Arp may be laughing as he wrote down these words in one language, and then another – two languages that would be fighting and killing each other multiple times in his era – but he’s also delighting in the sound and stretch of his words, and I tried to convey that in English too. In the first two lines I see reflective eyes and mysterious night. In the next three lines, a litany of time and movement constrained by something as old and massive as the mountain.**** I see a tree’s lifetime subject to a timber harvest, long ago logs, then cut down and floating away. The poem concludes with night birds in barn lantern light gobbling a season’s harvest that must then have needed the labor of a manual threshing floor to gather, while the divine (angels) are effervescently seen condensing in clouds (baskets of air). And the final line: (as “when pigs fly” in another idiom) fish are holding their hiking sticks walking through the stars, a rising litany of impossibility leading to a certainty, that the poem and all our human effort will end.
If Arp was to perform this poem at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, would some patrons be availing themselves of the exit? For that matter, how many are still reading this far down in this post of mine, how many will want to hear this poem?
Did Arp intend for that to be in a cryptic poem about the absurdity of life’s effort? I can’t tell, but that’s what I found there, and he surely didn’t intend hard enough to prevent me from finding this.
You won’t have to work hard to hear my musical performance of Arp’s poem. I composed the guitar part in my head, silently, while doing other things this week, visualizing exactly the fingering I would use to play it. That’s something I used to do in my youth, but I can’t recall the last time I did it as an old man. I derived a chord structure from the guitar line for a piano part, laid down a bass line, and worked out a drum pattern, and there you go: angels in a basket of air. The audio player should be luxuriously there for you, brave listener. No player? No, Elon hasn’t muted Starlink, but you can also use this highlighted link which will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.
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*I’m using Hans Arp as I relied here much on Herbert Read’s book, and Read uses Hans. Wikipedia lists him as Jean, says than name is preferred in English, but there’s a German language page under Hans. Arp seems to have continued to use Hans when speaking German, and Jean when speaking French throughout his life.
** Yes, I enjoy Dada, oftentimes more than I think I would, and I take pride that I work to make fresh English translations of Dada poems publicly available for poetic work that is hard to find online in English, but I have noticed that even my hardy audience, whose attention I’m grateful for, has little interest in this. I cut my recent early Paul Éluard Dada-style poem series short due to lack of interest.
***To give some flavor to Arp sense of unpretentious, humorous absurdity, here’s his 1921 account of Dada first being uttered as a name:
I hereby declare that on February 8th, 1916, Tristan Tzara discovered the word DADA. I was present with my twelve children when Tzara pronounced for the first time this word which has aroused in us such legitimate enthusiasm. This took place at the Café Terrasse in Zurich, and I wore a brioche in my left nostril. I am convinced that this word has no importance and that only imbeciles and Spanish professors can be interested in dates. What interests us is the Dada spirit and we were all Dada before the existence of Dada….The morality of idiots and their belief in geniuses makes me shit.’”
Arp’s last sentence there sums up a lot of my current newsfeed and the pronouncements of our honored and self-sacrificing leader and his cadre of acolytes.
****In the black horse hitched to the mountain litany I thought of an element of Arp’s biography summarized in Herbert Read’s book. Arp joined in and exhibited with The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) group of artists around the time he wrote this poem, and that brought to mind Franz Marc’s 1911 painting that I visit at one of my local art museums.
In my Human Seasons, I awoke to the first cold morning of fall, and I thought that this just completed Edna St. Vincent Millay musical piece would be just the thing to release and write about today. Oddly, I had started working on the music for this in the midst of summer. Millay’s poem is one of those that sits up on the page asking to be sung, and from such temptation I’d worked up the basic musical idea back in a time when I could hop on a bicycle just wearing the clothes I was wearing around the house. This morning I needed a wind-proof beanie, three layers across my torso, and I had to wiggle into tights. An old man getting into tights is a rickety procedure, a vignette unfitting association with carefree bike rides.
I asked myself yesterday “What did this song need?” How dressed? How many layers? I have been presenting a lot of songs recently featuring acoustic guitar, and the tracks I had from summer were just my voice and guitar – acoustic, yes, but at least there was some variety in that it was my large-bodied 12-string. I pick the 12-string harder than most, hitting the strings with more of the flat-pick surface. This produces a bell-like clang, and I thought I’d underpin that sound with some gamelan gongs. I then added a bass line and thought about a top-line riff. For some reason – woodwinds,* and I played the left-channel part using one of my sampled “Virtual Instrument” libraries with my MIDI pickup guitar. I tried to mix this oboe part to a realistic level as it would be if this was an actual acoustic ensemble playing this live instead of myself playing track by track in a “one-man-band” format. The gamelan gongs? I wanted them distant, as if they were outside the tavern window in the scene of Millay’s poem. The final mix of the song works best on headphones or modern ear-buds, so go ahead and put those in your ears if you have a set handy when you listen.**
In these musical choices I was trying to bring out the mystery I sensed in Millay’s words. “Tavern” could be read superficially as a desire to run a bread-and-breakfast or the like, perhaps somewhere in the Maine of Millay’s childhood. A nice enough way to understand the poem, but Millay put in something that undercuts reading it as a New York Times style section feature on charming getaways: a repeated reference to this inn she envisions being specifically for “grey-eyed people.”
If one searches for what “grey-eyed” might signify, you’ll get the usual cold under-contextualized information that search engines offer up. Grey is a very rare eye color. OK, is Millay saying she’s going to market her inn with some “Think Different” focus on gathering unusual people, perhaps the artists, writers, and bohemian figures of her youthful 1917 Greenwich Village times? Not impossible, but why then does she write about learning from the grey-eyed “long ago.” Is there something else about having grey eyes? There are results that say that eye color is supposed to be a sign of wisdom, including some that report it as an epithet applied to the famously wise Greek goddess Athena. OK, she learned something from the grey-eyed, but that seems an obscure way to say that, though evoking an air of generalized mystery with this grey-eyed matter seems to be part of her intent. The whole casting of her tavern in the poem doesn’t seem selective. It’s near the top of some mountain, but it would seem to be a welcoming place for all who come upon it. Is the voice in her poem going to ask everyone to take off their sunglasses or tinted contacts to see if they’re allowed in “Tavern.” I don’t hear those that arrive pleading at the door: “Look, my fake ID says my eye color right here!”
Another sense I got from this poem is that it was possibly in conversation with another poem, one by Christina Rossetti, her poem called “Up-Hill.***”I don’t know if Millay knew this poem, but it’s not so unlikely. In this case then the grey-eyed are the souls ascending up some mystic mountain toward a heaven or afterlife. They are grey-eyed because their eyes are clouded in the moments after death. One other, allied, possibility for why grey-eyed: her mid-19th century ancestors might have been pictured as early photographs, faces whose colorful eyes would all be rendered in shades of grey. Our poems, our songs, our memorialization, our celebrations around a table – these are to bring colors back to the grey eyed.
Grey-eyed in Carl Van Vechten’s photo, Edna St. Vincent Millay.
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You can hear my performance of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Tavern” with the audio player below. No player on your mountain? Damn your eyes, or rather the way you’re reading this blog which might suppress showing a reader – but this highlighted link will open the door, or new browser tab, with its own audio player.
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*It would have been subconsciously, but perhaps the mixture of oboe, 12-string guitar, acoustic bass, and unusual percussion may have been a ghostly presence in my mind from the times I saw an admired the musical ensemble named Oregon that used that mix of instruments.
Which reminds me of a tavern joke: An ego and a super-ego walk into a Freudian bar. The bartender says, “I’ll need to see an ID with that.”
**I used to have time and opportunity to check my mixes on various ways to listen to them. I particularly miss my old car for this, as it had a great stereo for revealing aspects of a recording mix. In my current living situation I often have no opportunity to mix my recordings on external speakers, much less give them a quality check with these extraverted noisemakers. A check I still do before release: listen to a new song on at least one pair of mobile-device ear-buds, which I assume are the most typical “hi-fi” system for modern listeners.
I have a fair number of “started” to “nearly-finished” musical pieces, but I for various reasons I’ve not been ready to release one for a week or so. This of course is a weird expectation on my part – it’s not normal to present original music that rapidly. Today is a day with a quiet studio space available where I could work on more, and yet here I am at a computer keyboard typing this.
I spent the weekend oddly enough watching two documentaries made over 60 years apart on people doing visual art. Both gave me resonances compelling me to write about them. The first I watched was a 40-minute piece directed by Ken Russell, first shown on the BBC in 1962, Pop Goes the Easel.
I was led to this film by reading a short excerpt from American history professor Sean Wilentz’s new Bob Dylan biography covering the bard’s early performing years. This is essentially the period covered in the recent Dylan Hollywood biopic, but the level of detail and narrative appears to be at the more granular level a book provides. In the excerpt, Wilentz recounts Dylan’s first trip to the UK in 1962, ostensibly to take a featured acting role in an original TV drama. Turned out Dylan was a washout as a conventional actor, so the teleplay was rejiggered to make him a folk singer who sang some songs, a role that he must have been entirely convincing in, though no video survives. While there, Dylan did what visiting American folk singers habitually did in those days, he absorbed Martin Carthy’s arrangements of a couple of British Isles folk tunes and fashioned them into his own songs.* For habitation, he had to put up with staying in the London flat of a beautiful young woman, an artist named Pauline Boty. Wilentz figures that Dylan got a song out of that too, a somewhat awkward song about a somewhat awkward affair, lashed to a floating-between-lyrics folk tune that I know as “Lily of the West.” **
Wilentz mentions the artist Boty had been in a documentary about young artists, and I found Russell’s Pop Goes the Easel online here to watch. After the tweed-suited and stiff to the point of parody series host intro,*** the film starts with the only artist in the movie I knew anything about before this month, Peter Blake. Blake is found, slightly chunky, closely approaching 30, bearded, dressed in work clothes, sawing on a door (I cannot help but make the Blakean pun that he’s cleansing the doors of perception, to be what they are: infinite). We are then led to a pair of younger, good-looking men of the narrow tie and nicotine milieu, who like Blake are making Pop Art out of the commercial detritus of contemporary culture: comics, SciFi prognostications, movie and pre-Beatles pop stars. Like Blake, we see them making their art and earnestly talking their gallery catalog place cards about it. Intercut are scenes of them cavorting in a clearly French Nouvelle Vague way about London and at a circus midway. Among these three young men, a beautiful woman also appears as part of the group, and the documentary’s final segment lets us know she’s the fourth artist. This is Boty.
All these 20-somethings are a bit self-consciously playing roles, but Boty is better at it, easily more charismatic. One quickly sees how she achieved the sobriquet “The Wimbledon Bardot” – but here’s the punch-line, the kicker: her artwork is also easily the equal of the three men. Not to slight those men, all of whom are clearly serious as the French would say about their art, and all of whom would be still making art into their eighties and into our current century. Boty though died Keats-like at 28 – her illness, cancer, a few years after this film was made. Maybe less than two-dozen of her art works survive. The film doesn’t show this of course, no more than Russell’s film knows it’s being made within a year of when Bob Dylan revolutionized song-lyrics or the Beatles made self-contained quartet bands of young artists a model to follow. But we as modern watchers are able to appreciate the unheard music on that black & white TV Grecian Urn as we hear the films found sound-track of pop music hits from the “decade” of the early 1960s that happened before The Sixties™.
Only around a couple dozen of Pauline Boty’s art works are known to have survived. Some of her early work used stained glass, and here are two examples.
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And then the next day of the weekend, I watched Who Is Martin Mull, a long-story-about-how-it-got made documentary about the singer/comedian/actor/visual artist Mull. In place of Ken Russell we have a work helmed by Bob Saget, a club comic and actor who admired Mull’s work. Apparently filmed over a period of years with extensive interviews and scenes of a 70-something Mull in his home studio working on his visual art, as well as testimony from friends and family about Mull’s character and achievements. Then in 2020 Saget unexpectedly died from a lonely hotel room closed-head-trauma injury after a fall on tour. Then in 2024, subject Mull died at age 80. From subsequent efforts of others, the film about a dead “cult figure” class actor made by younger sort-of-famous comic was completed this year. That’s remarkable, but it would generally promise to be either a work of the “you didn’t know all the dirt about” or the “gee, he’s dead, let’s all say nice things about ‘em” sort.
It’s not. It’s tender and relaxed about telling its story, and the story is a man who at the age in life of our British quartet of pop artists, and just four or so years later than them, graduated from a prestigious American art school. Just like the Pop/Easel artists, this American’s work seemed to be based on reexamining how we view the world through our commercially infused culture and art. His family, or at least his father, put no value on visual art and artists, and perhaps the US puts less value on art that the UK did or does, but Mull never envisioned the lottery work of trying to establish an artist’s career. As it turns out, he was also musically talented, and the suddenly post-Beatles and Dylan world offered work for musical performers. This is where I knew Mull’s work. In 1970 he had a fluke C&W hit when a gender-playful answer record/parody song of his, “A Girl Called Johnny Cash,” was recorded by a Nashville singer, and he began to tour himself as “Martin Mull and his Fabulous Furniture.” It was a weird act, but one that you might see reflected in others’ performing acts: Steve Martin, Biff Rose and Leon Redbone, or in other comics who would bring an instrument on stage like the Smothers Brothers, Neil Innes and Eric Idle, or folk musicians who told comic stories like Billy Connolly or even Leo Kottke.
But Mull the performer was his own thing. His act was performed in persona, a smarmy chap who deconstructed the nature of performance and audience expectations. The bit I remember most was his presentation of young white folks getting into the Blues by playing bottleneck slide on a ukulele using a nipple-equipped baby-bottle. The difficulty of the trick? He had to make that inefficient pairing work musically. How well could he make it work? He might be performing it while opening for an act like The Allman Brothers at some early 70s hippie musical ballroom or theater show. Live recordings indicate the joke went over, and the minstrel show critique inside the bit must have been absorbed by some.
After working that act for a decade or so, he transitioned to becoming a comic actor in TV and movies. It paid the bills. He found a happy marriage. Had a kid. Got old. But remember, that’s not the story. His story is an aged-American version of the young UK Pop/Easel artists in a way. The story is: he is, always was, a visual artist. He paints. He always paints. This might sound – the danger is it sounds – like a “weekend painter,” the hobbyist who paints to relax. But he insists – and the testimony of others in the film buttresses this – his constant internal conviction was: he’s an artist and the other stuff was just a “day job.” The amount of work, the decade after decade length of its effort, the variety and quality of that work, says this is not some vain-glorious affectation.****
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The part that moved me the most? The scenes of Mull gratefully working on his art in his 70s in his studio space. This is inescapable: I think: that’s me – but the possible diagnosis of vain-glory is a differential yet to have all the test results returned for my case. It appears that, at least in general, Mull knew he was good. He did the work to make his work seem skilled to others. I can’t say the same for my own work, which I think has value, and also imperfections.
As my day progressed, I had to know the song Dylan is supposed to have written to visual artist Pauline Boty in 1962, and the surest way for me to know the song is to perform it. “Liverpool Gal” kept deep cover, even after decades of Dylan instigating the modern Bootleg/Special Edition album. For most of its life it was known by a single obscure performance of it done by a little-known act Lennon & Hyam live for a BBC radio broadcast in 1992. How Lennon & Hyam heard the song is mysterious. It wasn’t until a year ago that a rough performance by its author emerged, taped at a party in Minneapolis by local musician and writer Tony Glover back in 1963. Dylan stumbles on his own lyrics in that recording, and the song differs slightly from the Lennon & Hyam version. I quickly cobbled together a third version and a quick and dirty arrangement for acoustic guitar and my voice of subjective quality. Quickly – my studio-space time was now limited – I did four takes all the way through, the last one was the best I think. I call my interpretation “London Gal” as it dispenses with the appendix of Liverpool origins to a London-set story. Even cutting the final (dispensable) verse in my version, it’s a long song, over 7 minutes, ambling along in its plot like many a traditional folk song. Here it is via an audio player gadget. No gadget seen? Lennon and Hyam didn’t steal it to protect their monopoly position, and Tony Glover has joined the blues-harp choir invisible, but I also offer thishighlighted link to hear it via a new tab which will supply its own audio player.
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*For Dylan, “Masters of War” and “Bob Dylan’s Dream” tunes were copped from “Nottamun Town” and “Lord Franklin” via Carthy. Paul Simon swiped a guitar arrangement for “Scarborough Fair” from Carthy on an early Sixties UK trip of his own. The Folk Process is promiscuous.
**Wilentz makes an interesting point: this early Dylan “love or something like it” song is a predecessor to the kind of complex songs about romantic relationships and power-relations that would become a Dylan specialty. This kind of writing seems so embedded in Dylan’s songwriting that it would probably come out anyway, but a moot court case could be made that Boty engendered it.
***Oh, let’s give Huw Wheldon his props: he was a decorated D-Day landing veteran, and as a producer he not only helped introduce Ken Russell, he boosted David Attenborough, and later Sir Kenneth Clark’s mighty Civilization series. His host job was largely to act as a flack-catcher to divert fellow Greatest Generation types from strafing the BBC for giving attention those frivolous young people.
****I gather the fine art world doesn’t truck much with the person who isn’t publicly artist first, not hyphenate – allowed to be an artist who becomes a celebrity, but the reverse is suspect of affectation. And there’s nothing in the film that says Mull did the grants application and hob-nobbing prerequisites for most modern American arts careers. He was AARP age before he had his first small gallery show.
I was reading a social media thread this week and John Keats name came up as a youthful gateway into poetry. Being a long-obsolete child, I don’t know if 21st century young people, and particularly young Americans, are introduced to Keats and the British Romantic poets in high school as I was, and as I suspect many of my ancestors were. It would be good to establish that the time of my youth was another era. Poetry was probably a bigger part of the arts, the arts an obligatory part of education, and we were only about a generation past the late 1920’s American poetry anthologies for young people that were oversubscribed with UK authors. We got Shakespeare and Milton and a smattering of 17th century poets from before the Americans even got up to bat, and we moved on to the principle British Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly, and Keats.* The last three easily attractive to the adolescent mind and emotions.
That trio’s language was close enough to modern while far enough removed to seem a little exotic. The emotions in the poems, anger, desire, dread, disdain, close to the skin.
Did it help that all three could be fitted into foundational “live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse” models? Why is that stance catnip to so many young people? Is it a force multiplier for their considerations and thoughts to add as context that they are distressed, senses intent or bent, experienced in risk taken and disregarded, living or not caring about mortal danger?** Does that sound harsh to say? Well then, I sometimes see myself reaching for the same imminent mortality filter in my old age. Poets don’t necessarily outgrow this reflex.
It probably helped these poets that back in my youth we barely had our Buddy Holly and James Dean, and as yet no full constellation of dead young music and movie stars to compete with poets.
John Keats writes today about old age, which he didn’t get
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Of the three young romantic poets, all doomed to die young,*** I was team Keats all the way. He seemed the wisest of them, and I could identify with his unprivileged background, and his earnestness about writing. I still remember telling myself that Keats died at 25 back in my twenties, and so I had better get on with my writing. Now past three-times that I don’t allow myself the luxury of worrying what years I squandered in incomplete, mistaken, or mediocre work, or of insufficient promotion of my best stuff, taking comfort that it will all be forgotten, even the best of it. In many cases, we old folks no longer play the immortality lottery, and so forego the costs and damaging mitigations of a busted ticket.
The romantic young Keats writes often of dun mortality while propounding the ardent song of beauty. Let me be clear: in Keats’ case, this dichotomy is more than a stance. Sometimes a young poète maudit risks finding themselves, embarrassingly, surviving – but this wasn’t Keats’ fate. With his medical training and caretaking through to the death of his brother he knew his own tuberculosis prognosis for a full year before he died. He wrote “The Human Seasons” in between that brotherly caretaking and his own onset, and in this poem he presumes a full lifetime, the titular seasons being perhaps a couple of decades each, while he’d be dead in three years. The dying was indeed young, but in consideration there’s these dancing words that still may ask for a tune. Here’s a link to Keats’ words.
You can hear my performance of John Keats’ “The Human Seasons” with the audio player you should see below. Audio player called home? No, likely just a side-effect of the way you view this blog, but I can prescribe that you take this highlighted link that’s been shown effective in opening a new browser tab with a working audio player of its own. Side effects include hearing my voice “of subjective quality,” acoustic guitar, cello, and contrabass.
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*What about Blake? Nope, not in my schoolbooks, I had to seek him out on my own. Did my textbooks move on to Americans Whitman, Dickinson, and Poe? Yes. From my recall the American Fireside poets may have been already largely relegated out for high school readers, though I knew Longfellow from illustrated children’s books. Then there was some Browning, Tennyson, and “Dover Beach” and finally Frost, Eliot, and Sandburg – those final three still living, literally and in practice treated as contemporary poets.
**Beyond the self-imposed dangers some young people choose or are led into, I don’t want to minimize the real dangers externally inflicted on them: war and oppression exist, and such titanic Cronuses devour children. I’m speaking here of the young who generate or amplify mortal risks because it makes them seem louder.
***Shelley 29, Keats 25, and Methuselah Lord Byron at 36.
