This post continues with the LYL Band’s noontime performance recorded on American Election Day, parts of which I’m sharing here this month. So far, I’d opened the live-in-the-studio session with a selection from a Stephen Vincent Benét poem “Litany for Dictatorships.”   Keyboardist/vocalist Dave Moore followed performing a poem, “Their Beauty Has More Meaning.”   Dave handed it to me after we performed it. “It’s by Robinson Jeffers” he told me.

“I’ve got a surprise for you” I replied, “because this is the next one I have from my stack.” Slouching toward Bethlehem, I handed him this rough chord sheet.

The above is my song-adaptation. To see the full text of Jeffers’ poem as he wrote and published it, see this link.

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This wasn’t the first time I thought about performing this Robinson Jeffers poem. When I went looking for stuff to perform on Election Day, I revisited it again. I already had a couple of pieces I thought I’d do as spoken word combined with music, and so I was now looking for something singable – and for all of its applicable prophetic attitude, this poem of Jeffers just didn’t “sing” off the page for me.

The thought struck me: well then, translate it into a song.*  I took the text of the poem and started to extract the images from the somewhat Latinate rhetoric of the original. One thing that songs like and page-poems often eschew is a chorus, and so moving from poem to song I extracted a line from the middle of the poem, an image reflecting Jeffers’ characteristic focus on geological time compared to the brevity of humanity and its efforts and actions.

Did I help or hurt Jeffers poem with my version? I do think I modified the exact meaning that Jeffers intended his poem to have. His prophetic text (I mean that largely in the Biblical sense) reads as more despairing than what I performed. I flatter myself to think that I fractured but sharpened some of his images. For my purposes it succeeded because I’d much rather sing my version.

I find it interesting to read his poem as Jeffers wrote it and note that it was published just over 100-years-ago. The American Republic’s turn to empire then was largely North and South continental, and its position among the world’s nations, important but not so preeminent and essential. My current nation’s deluded emperor seems prone to all of the bully-boy actions of imperialism – while utterly lacking the skills of alliances, strategy, tactics, and logistics that empires require. Heartened as I am today by the results of the election that was ongoing while we performed this, I remain fearful for the world and my country – and ours is not the only unbalanced and lethal war-lord on this globe. I didn’t gloss over Jeffers troubling concluding image, that humanity, the people whose power we must rely on against kings and oligarchs, are not infallible either. The Bible has its tyrants Herod and Pilate, but Barabbas won a popular election.

My version with this chorus brings forward a thought I think was in Jeffers’ message. The lifetimes of all nations (measured against the entire sweep of history and of the earth nations draw lines upon) are like the bright but short augury of a meteor compared to the long geologic truth of a mountain. Our lives, our citizen lives, are shorter yet – but can our imperfect – though capable of acts of humane worth – republic shine yet as it flies?**

You can hear the LYL Band performance of my version of Robinson Jeffers’ “Shine Perishing Republic”  with the audio player below. Has any such audio player burned out across the sky and struck itself invisible into some earth-bound rocks?  This highlighted link will unearth a new tab with its own audio player then.

Odd isn’t it, that without coordination on our part, both Dave and I had thought of Robinson Jeffers poetry as we considered Election Day. After quickly finding his place in this musical adaptation he’d never heard, I’m grateful that Dave’s organ part helped ground its performance last week. To further bring forward that chorus I promoted from Jeffers’ text, I did the make-yourself-a-multitrack-group-of-backing-singers thing last weekend and mixed that with the live performance.

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*Longtime readers here will know this is what I do when translating work from other languages into English for performance here. I generally don’t try to convey the original syntax or characteristic word order of other languages, and I don’t try to follow some one-for-one recreation of their word-music either. I ask myself, what are the images the poet is evoking, and how can I evoke them in vivid contemporary English? This isn’t necessarily the best way for all poems and purposes, but it’s the default way I go about that task.

**Is it possible this “meteors not less than mountains” was informed some way in Jeffers’ mind from scientific cosmology’s theory that our planet was formed by the accretion of smaller rocks in space colliding and forming our globe? Per this mechanism, there’d be no ancient mountains on our planet’s surface without the preceding mandate of those cosmic ballots being cast! Might this metaphor have occurred to Jeffers as he built his Tor House and Hawk Tower on the coast of California from rocks he hauled and set together “making stone love stone?”

If Jeffers knew of the early versions of the more current accretion theory of planet formation, it might have to have been through Chamberlin and Moulton’s pioneering planetesimal hypothesis.

That’s a bit of wild speculation on my part, but Jeffers’ younger brother Hamilton had achieved a doctorate in astronomy at the time Jeffers was writing his poem.