Before we close the book on National Poetry Month and International Jazz Day, here’s a musical performance of a poem by Langston Hughes. I didn’t think I’d be able to complete it today — but the opportunity arose, and it’s more than appropriate for both observations.
Langston Hughes was one of the founders of Jazz poetry, and that style of reading poetry that interacts with a musical accompaniment (even if it’s not sung) is an influence for some of the performances you’ve heard here in this Project. I can’t say what year Hughes first performed his poetry that way, but there’s another meaning to Jazz poetry without a band: poetry that writes about the experience of Jazz music itself. And Hughes was repeatedly doing that in the early 1920s.
Decades later, a 1950s Hughes reads his 1920s poem “The Weary Blues” in front of a Jazz combo
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This, a combination that appreciated Jazz, was not a sure thing in the early 1920s. Afro-American intellectuals and cultural critics were not universally fond of Jazz and Blues music, these great Afro-American Modernist musical forms arising right under their noses. There were reasons: it was associated with drugs, drink, criminality, and sexual promiscuity — and none of that promoted Black achievement and excellence in their minds. And some young white folks were taking an interest in Jazz for those very reasons. Tut-tut voices from both racial camps were observing their young people and thinking it was all about mindless, hedonistic partying. Let me repeat myself: when the last decade to be called “The Twenties” was called “The Jazz Age,” it wasn’t meant as a compliment.
I’d suspect this isn’t widely known to many readers. Jazz, to our 21st century Twenties, might be felt as supposed-to-be-good-for-you-but-boring-art music made up of too many weird chords and snobbish old men with a fetish for instruments you blow into. If we take it too seriously, too often now, the problem in the 1920s was they didn’t think it had a serious bone in its body.
Maybe it helped that Langston Hughes was a young man, a teenager when the 1920s began. He appreciated things in Jazz and Blues that even his Afro-American elders didn’t see. He knew it could be a balm to pain and disappointment, its expression and expiation — and he could see the art in it, an art to wrap into his poetry. This small poem of his, published in 1923 in the W.E.B Du Bois/NAACP The Crisis magazine, hears something others couldn’t: he hears a Jazz band cry — or rather his poem reports a woman heard this. Here’s a link to the full text of the poem.
Even in the shortness of his poem, note the dialectic here. The band, earlier in the night, had dancers, “vulgar dancers” it says. The older cultural gatekeepers at the Crisis would agree as they accepted this poem, “I see the young poet is aware of the dangerous moral unseriousness of the Jazz hounds.”
Why could Hughes hear what others didn’t? Well, he’s a great poet, and a poet that wrote often and empathetically of other people’s experiences. There’s another possible element. Do modern ears hear the poem’s second line differently than his readers in the last Twenties? “They say a jazz-band’s gay” he wrote. “Gay” in the 1920s would have clearly meant “happy.” As far as scholarship understands this, gay=homosexual seems to have come into use a bit later, perhaps in the 1930s, and to general readers, that meaning emerged in an even later era.
Hughes’ own sexuality is not something we know a lot about. Some say he was gay, some say he was asexual. One thing I get from reading Hughes’ early poetry is that he’s hearing and telling his stories not just from a stereotypical straight masculine viewpoint. Is it his anima that’s the she who “heard the jazz-band sob” in the poem? Or is he just listening to a woman?
Well, my performance of Langston Hughes’ “Cabaret” is ready to be heard. Unlike the last piece, I made no pretense of Jazz music as it’s classically understood this time, but I do throw in some weird chord extensions. You can hear it with the audio player below. No player to be seen? The dancers have left, and some ways of reading this blog suppress the display of the audio player. If so, use this alternative, a link that will open a new tab with its own player.
Today I take on one of those poetic expressions a great many poets have engaged with: the poem about the state of poetry. The title gets written in Latin to puzzle readers, and because Horace wrote in Latin back when the world had to worry about the whims of tyrannical kings and poets got their words carved in marble. We’re much more culturally advanced now. You can hear this poem anywhere in the world using the Internet. Dozens will listen with you during National Poetry Month. Dozens! Imagine the value of that if that dozens was of eggs.
I briefly hesitated to share this poem of mine publicly. Not only is this project largely about other people’s words, but my Ars Poetica poem starts off comparing some poets to assassins. That’s a metaphor, a conceit, a simile. I’ve shared other civic poems about the fate of nations this month, but I’m not a big fan of political assassination — but then I’m also not a big fan of making fun of poets, and I’m going to do that today. And it is a civic poem. On my way to comparing poets to assassins I make note of the state of mass transit in my fair-sized midwestern American city, which is: pretty bad. Not assassination bad. No! Rather my point is that it would be bad for an assassin. Or for poets trying to get to and from poetry readings.
32 bar AABA tune. Chords are F C Am G and then Cm Gm Cm Dm in the bridge, though there are some substitutions.
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Well, you don’t have to go anywhere to listen to the performance. And it’ll be doubly good to do so because the last day of National Poetry Month in April is also International Jazz Day, and I’m going to make some fake Jazz.* Poets, we get a month! Jazz — like a whole world of it — gets only a day. Well, it’s an international day, sliding across the globe’s time zones, but still…
You can hear me reading my Ars Poetica poem with a Jazz combo using the audio player below. No player? The Jazz Police haven’t come for it, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress it. There’s an alternative: this highlighted link will open its own browser tab with an audio player.
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*Way back in the 20th century, when we had to carry the dead weight of a constitution around all the time with laws, and due process, and so forth, a group of local improvisational comic performers used to get together and the agenda was to play bad Jazz. No, not to parody or put down Jazz, more at an honest admission that their musical skills weren’t up to that level, but the desire to have a go at it was still there. That’s me making up this Jazz quartet today. I’ve cut a corrupt deal with the composer to only write things I can play on bass and guitar, and I give the computer the chords to tickle on the piano.
Another poem for April Poetry Month. Another Emily Dickinson poem. Once more, wildflowers. Once more they’re that early spring flower, daffodils. Once more the poet is looking back because something’s missing.
Chord sheet because someone else might sing this better than I can
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Last time the voice in Dickinson’s poem was also alienated from Spring, but there was a taunting wit to that one. The mode in today’s Dickinson is more abstract, and the second, final, stanza is so gnomic here I can’t say I know fully what it’s conveying. Even the first stanza is tied in knots, tangled with those Dickinsonian dashes. Is “an April Day” the “Absent Place” — or is the April day, with present dancing-in-the-breeze daffodils, in contrast to the Absent Place? The stanza’s final line asking us to consider the viewpoint of “the Souls that snow” could be saying then the snow is more full of motion and drifting shapes than mere blossoms — or that April brings forth feelings that makes the Absent Place snow-Souls uncomfortable?
In intent or effect, it may be a shifting Tao — an all of the above in motion with each other?
But the final stanza? I assume “Drift” within is of the snow-Souls’, a self-impediment worse than snowed-in roads or walks, but the concluding two lines are harder to follow. Perhaps she’s saying that snow-Souls are the ”Him” in the last line, and their change and emotion is as strong as (“duplicate”) as the wind-moved daffodils? But “duplicate” is a strange word choice. Even within slant-rhyme it’s quite strained to rhyme with “without.” I even toyed with pronouncing the duplicate as the noun, not the verb, which would be a nice sound-pair with “but.” However, that’s syntactically sour and doesn’t follow the first stanzas ABAB rhyme scheme.
For awhile I engaged in a little fantasy extension of this brief poem while asking why daffodils, rather than another Spring flower. Poet Dickinson famously knew her plants — not just as an avid gardener — but as a woman with more education than most in her time and place (which included science, considered a presentable ladylike field). She was the maker of an impressive book of pressed flowers labeled with their scientific names. Did she know her Greek myths as well as the scientific name for the daffodil, Narcissus? The essential piece of the Greek myths of Narcissus is that the youth of that name dies because he becomes entranced by his reflection, his duplicate. Is the last line’s “Him” Narcissus or something like him?
Or is she taking another route into the roots of the word narcissus, related to narcosis, a drugged numbing? Does the final stanza mean to say that springtime joy can be as numbing as wintertime sadness?
It may be wise to consider my thoughts about the final stanza over-thinking. They’re surely speculative, but it still seems likely that the poem means to link the emotions extracted from Winter and Spring landscapes.
As April National Poetry Month winds down, I’ve fallen into a theme without designing it. Many of us are feeling crabby, dismayed, disgusted, frightened, but Spring doesn’t know that. The cold of Northern April is now behind us, and May lays out ahead with greening and warmth. Is it taunting us by being pleasant and hopeful?
For the music in the performance you can hear below, I fell into it too, as certain and mindless as Spring. The recording started with the chordal guitar part, which I played on my jangling Squier Jazzmaster instead of an acoustic guitar because I was telling myself I’ve been stuck on acoustic playing too much lately, and I hate to be predictable. In timbre and volume it was hardy enough to easily accept the drums and electric bass that I matched with it. The final part was the lead guitar line played largely on the B string of the guitar up and down the neck, in that “I’ve just heard a Ravi Shankar LP” way that was popular in The Sixties — the 1960s, not Emily’s 1860s. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below. No such gadget to be seen? The authorities haven’t shut down the psychedelic ballroom, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress showing the audio player. This highlighted link is an alternative which will open its own tab with its own audio player inside.
The attention I’ve been calling forth this National Poetry Month has been divided up between “civic poetry” about the state of nations, and poet’s examination of Springtime. Today’s piece continues with the wildflowers and wildlife side of April, but because it’s by Emily Dickinson, it’s a complex statement.
Dickinson here uses the ballad meter as she often did, a form also used for many Protestant hymns. This form as common as the robin. Simple music, startling images, another disconnect.
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This poem, approximately dated at 1862, can still startle the modern reader. Over a century and a half of poems have been written since then, yet the language, images, and play of thought within it still seem fresh and surprising. And there’s no wait for the surprise in this one, beginning with the idea that I used for a title for the resulting song I made of it. Dread of Robins? This common North American bird is anything but frightening. It’s not large, or fierce, no raptor or raven. In the context of the poem, the outstanding thing about the American Robin is that it’s a migratory bird whose arrival is a sign of Spring. Yet it causes pain somehow.
The next stanza seems to amplify sound. The song of the robin is not that loud, but the sound of wild birds in Spring taken together does have a choral aspect. In their territoriality and mate-seeking, there is a shout to their throats. Dickinson hears some music in it, but it’s not altogether pleasant. The Piano in the Woods image delights in sideways incongruity. The piano is Dickinson’s instrument, the one she played, but as an acoustic guitarist one thing I know about the piano is that it can be overpoweringly loud. And placing the piano with its wooden case in a woodland implies a metamorphosis. Perhaps ED hears a piano whose notes are bird calls? “Mangle” here is another characteristic unusual word choice by Dickinson. In her day she’d know the machine named with the verb: the wringer for squeezing water out of laundry. Spring is putting the speaker in the poem through the wringer.
Many of this April’s pieces have featured wildflowers, and specifically daffodils, but the colorful brightness of the flower here does not delight even after the dreary monochrome of a Massachusetts Winter.
Bees are everywhere in Dickinson’s poems, more than angels in Blake or Rilke. She often speaks fondly of their seeking sweetness, their industry, their pollinating agency in horticulture. Dickinson had by interest and education knowledge of these details, yet here the Spring bee too is unwelcome and she feels alienated from them.
In the penultimate stanza the creatures and flowers of Spring are present. She grandiloquently calls herself, “The Queen of Calvary,” suffering as if the crucified Jesus of Lenten Spring.
In the final stanza there’s a parade of sorts, with drums and salutes. “Plumes” here strikes me as an odd choice. It may be a bereaved funeral procession. Black ostrich plumes were apparently used for funeral decorations in the 19th century, so oddly we start with a modest small bird and end with the plumage of one of the largest. The poem’s speaker dreads the robin, yet seems accepting of the plucked raiment of the giant.
Is this a poem of disappointment and depression? Yes, that is there — but it’s majestic too. The poem is a catalog of Spring’s changes, all of which the poem’s speaker is unable to find pleasure in: dreaded little robins, pianos in forests, piercing yellow wildflowers, the energy of bees. There’s wit here, and like a Blues singer, there is a power of being able to sing knowing the score of a bad outcome!
I think this is a poem of a divided mind. I can relate. Spring remains wonderful, much as this Spring I’m experiencing this year, but my civic world has presented us with discordant changes, public cruelty, careless acts, all cloaked in self-serving bluster. Dickinson’s poem is dated to 1862 — the American Civil War, which for now still has a singular name, had started.*
I originally tracked my musical setting here with just my voice and acoustic guitar. I thought that spareness might contrast with the last two musical pieces here with full-on Rock ensembles. I had second thoughts though: this may be a poem about internal sensations, but it’s also about change in a fuller natural and national world. Eventually this arrangement, one that evolves throughout with high wind instruments and emerging synth seemed better suited. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below. No dreadful robin, I mean player, to be seen? You may be reading this blog in a way that suppresses the player, so here’s a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*One reader of a Dickinson blog has a detailed theory of the personal particulars that might have faced ED when the poem was written. Deadly Civil War or mentors splitting for the coast would be matters of mismatched scale. Is the Spring of closely watched bees, and little birds and yellow wildflowers smaller or bigger than those things?
Attention is an investment. Today’s piece combines two poets that had my attention this Spring. Regarding one poet, this expenditure was long-standing, for the other, the attention is more short-lived, conditional. My attention requests yours, so let me get on with this as I try to be brief while providing context.
Fifty years ago I had just bought a cheap nylon-string guitar from the unsold Christmas stock at a local J. C. Penny’s store. I was learning to play it because I, a poet, wanted to write songs. I can’t say much for how substantially I’ve mastered guitar playing, but I have learned how to make songs.
I had models in early 1975 for what I was trying to do. My internal list of influences was shorter than it would be now, but it wasn’t just one or two. Certainly one was a young woman roughly my age who I’d read was performing her poetry with an electric guitar player and who had written a few literary pieces I’d seen published.* In the Fall of 1975 she released her first record album. I bought that LP the week it was released, likely at the sprawling Lloyds store on the edge of town.
The Seventies were a heyday for recording. The record business had recently become bigger economically and Rock music was huge culturally. Oddly, at the same time of this growth there was a falling off of the visionary and exploratory stuff that had attracted me as a teenager. Key artists of the previous decade had died or been diminished. Commercial filters along with endemic chemical narcissism and dependency reduced the force of many of those still recording. That debut record I eagerly bought — Horses, by the Patti Smith Group — was nothing like those compromises, and it retains considerable uniqueness to this day. It’s a poetry record as much as it’s a Rock music record. Large portions are chanted rather than sung. Smith’s words, however delivered, demanded a listen from the heart and the pelvis before taking the long-way around to the brain. What Smith was doing wasn’t unprecedented for a woman (or a man for that matter), but it was rare then, and still is. But I don’t want to diminish the music on the record either, the band, the Patti Smith Group, were also doing things underrepresented in 1975, despite their irregular formation. Writer Lenny Kaye had been the electric guitarist backing Smith at those NYC poetry readings earlier in the decade, and now he had another guitarist, Czech refugee Ivan Kral, to expand the sound, along with a rhapsodic keyboardist Richard “DNV” Sohl, and a drummer, Jay Dee Daugherty, who had joined the group just before going into the studio. They were fellow explorers to Smith, willing to go places they didn’t have charts or established trading routes for.
Horses gathered some attention. It was the spearhead of a musical revitalization movement that soon got a reductionist name: “Punk Rock.” Released on a major record label in this era meant that it had to be reviewed. While Horses is now recognized as a landmark, a signpost to new paths, the reviews then were mixed, though usually respecting its ambition. It was not a commercial blockbuster, sales were modest, but that was OK then as first albums were allowed mere “worthy of attention” response. My own reaction wasn’t as a critic or chart watcher — I needed inspiration, and I overwhelmingly welcomed it.
To get to today’s Parlando piece we need to move on to the PSG’s meeting up with the problematic-second-album syndrome. That album, Radio Ethiopia, sold even less than the first, and the Rock critics were even more mixed in opinions. It was a shot-by-both-sides response. These contradictory judgments were issued: it was even less commercial than Horses, it was trying to be a mainstream Rock record and so wasn’t Punk; it indulged too much in Smith’s self-mythologizing (evidence: she, a woman without credentials, played naïve guitar on the LP’s longest jam), it was too much a band-record featuring the Group instead of Smith.
I liked Radio Ethiopia. More inspiration as far as I was (and still am) concerned. A song from that doomed follow up has remained in Smith’s repertoire for the rest of her career: the breakup song “Pissing in a River.” In this linked 20 minute 21st century account of Radio Ethiopia and that song, Smith herself movingly describes her state of mind while making that expression. She was so full of doubts that the wholly committed vocals that mesh with Ivan Kral’s compelling four-chord cycle in “Pissing in a River” are credited by Smith to her brother, who came to the studio just to stand next to her, silently, at the mic. Last time here I spoke of how our relationships with others broaden what we see and report as artists. I teared up listening to Smith’s account this week, another testimony.
The version I used for performance is roughly half the length of the original poem.
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This Spring, as I made tentative plans for National Poetry Month pieces here, I made a note next to a poem “Lilacs” by pioneering early 20th century Modernist poet Amy Lowell: “Long. Maybe do it Patti Smith style?”
I have not played much attention to Lowell, though one musical performance of a poem of hers is a personal favorite of mine. In the landmark era when English-language Modernist poetry emerged, she was a controversial figure — those mixed reviews again. It’s undeniable that she helped popularize the new free-verse style as a poet, anthologist, critic, and promoter — but otherwise these were arrayed against her: she was a woman, not gender-conforming, overweight, and suspected of being a wealthy bougie poetic interloper on the bohemian Modernists. I’ll add my own personal count against Lowell: a lot of her poetry doesn’t consistently reward my interest. My current theory is that she’s something like Wordsworth, a poet whose best work may be diminished by a mass of undistinguished work, and great lines sit next to meh ones. But also like Wordsworth, her value in theorizing and promoting a new prosody must be acknowledged.**
“Lilacs,” the poem that gathered some of my attention, is an example of the good and bad as I see things with Lowell. There’s immediacy in the poem that attracts me for performance (Lowell was an enthusiastic public reader). “Lilac’s” theme, remembering her New England ancestry,*** would befit her cousinoid Robert Lowell later in the 20th century, and I loved lines that sounded like Allen Ginsberg (“Clerks….reading ‘Song of Solomon’ at night, so many verses before bed-time, because it was in the Bible”) and Frank O’Hara (“Parks where everyone walks and nobody is home.”) ****
So, I did one of my “use what fits me best” editing jobs on Lowell’s original text, excerpting what I thought of as the most vital images in the poem, reshaping some of the lines, and following through on my first-thought of performing it in the manner of the Patti Smith Group.
That incantatory “Pissing in a River” chord cycle was a good match. I needed to rotate myself into each player’s role to create the ensemble, getting the rhythmic core down with a drum program, adding a bass line, and then performing each channel of the song’s double-tracked rhythm guitar bedrock. I used a sophisticated arpeggiator to create a right-hand piano part, but on evaluation I was so proud that I could get the just-little-different precision of the doubled guitar parts that I removed the piano.*****
Now it was time for the vocal recording pass. I made an unusual choice to try to improve what I fear is the least successful part of my recordings: as my expedient to Patti Smith’s brother undergirding her resolve, and only as preparation for the take using Amy Lowell’s words, I recorded an entire “scratch take” performance of “Pissing in a River,”
My four-chord riff cycle isn’t played exactly as the PSG recorded it, but the last part of my recording was an even larger departure from my inspiration. As a musician I’m a full-idiot/half-way savant. The part I’m most comfortable in is lead guitar playing, so my version isn’t a copy of theirs, I looked to another mode, their adventuresome NYC scene-mate guitarists: Tom Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, Ivan Julian, and Robert Quine. The performance in my recording of “Lilacs (version)” includes what some (many?) would consider overplaying. As I (too?) often do, I continue to play during the vocal passages. I know this is incorrect — but more than correctness, I worry that it might detract from the song. Asking myself why I do this, my answer is that because my voice can’t provide the melodic elaboration I’d offer if I was a more skilled singer; and as a poet, I think the words can be (are?) powerful enough to compete with wailing electric guitar.
I leave that last thought with this restatement: as a writer, it’s OK to whisper — understatement has its power — but even if you read unaccompanied, or write for the silent but companiable page, consider if your chosen words are committed so they could go toe-to-toe with a cranked guitar. Sometimes you might want that.
You can hear my performance melding impressions of the 1970s Patti Smith Group with parts of the 1920s Amy Lowell poem “Lilacs” using the audio player below. No player? It hasn’t been dropped by the record company man — it’s un-displayed by some ways of reading this blog. This highlighted link is an alternative way to rock it, as it will open a new tab with its own audio player.
**As I mentioned recently, the issue of being too prolix and prolific with putting out work is something I worry about with the Project and myself.
***Like fellow New Englanders Cummings and Millay (and the British Housman) already performed this National Poetry Month here, Amy Lowell is presenting Spring as a memory of the quill-written past wafting through graveyards unkempt by their Modern age.
****As with a lot of early 20th century female Modernists, Amy Lowell dropped off the canonical map in mid-century as High Modernism and the New Critics came to the fore. Lowell’s popularizing efforts gained little credit as poetry sought a refuge in elite understandings and “serious subject” male-centric viewpoints. Our current century is re-evaluating that.
*****As a naïve keyboard player, arpeggiators are a crutch I often lean on. Give them a chord and their rule-based fingers will present a more sophisticated output. I border on shame when using them, though similar tactics are all over modern music. I’ve tried to bargain with my guilt by referring to my favorite arpeggiator as “DNV” — the nickname Lenny Kaye gave to Richard Sohl who was a vital elaborator of the earliest PSG records. “DNV” stood for “Death in Venice” because Kaye thought Sohl looked like an actor from the movie version of Thomas Mann’s story.
Here’s a poem by British poet A. E. Housman that’s not an Easter poem — and then again, might be. On its heathered surface it’s a poem about wildflowers. My wife, who likes to hike in natural areas, could probably make good sense of it on first reading — but if you don’t know your wildflowers and aren’t attune to some Britishisms, you might be left with just a pretty set of words.
Right off in the poem we’re rambling on “brakes.” As a bicyclist, “hilly brakes” might make me think of brakes squealing on my old much-missed mountain bike. While I’d like to think of Housman in a tweed jacket enjoying such a ride, the “brakes” here are a Britishism for a thicket or area of shrubs and other undergrowth. Other words that would have “special” British or archaic English meanings? Young girls are asked to “sally” — which is not the given name of one of the girls, but a word meaning to go forth. In the first stanza besides the “brakes” Housman calls the place of the flowers “hollow ground,” a word-choice that’s a little harder to parse. Hollows are an old word for a small valley, which is likely what Housman means (he calls out valleys in the last stanza). One reading I came upon thought the “hollow” a variant of “hallow,” as in “hallowed ground,” and derives from that the idea that Housman’s wildflowers have sprouted in a graveyard. I can’t find a cite for that variation, but hollow is a somewhat odd choice here, and without regard for hollow meaning hallow, graves do produce hollows in the ground.
Our first wildflower, primroses, are found in that opening stanza. Next stanza, next wildflower, the windflower, which I first thought was a Gerard-Manley-Hopkins-like compound word, but windflower is the common name for another wildflower. The stanza goes on to introduce the flower featured in the poem’s title: The Lenten Lily which the poem tells us “dies on Easter day.”
Third stanza, the primrose and windflower are still present to decorate May Day, but the daffodil we’re told is not. And the poem ends with a final stanza telling us again that the daffodil dies on Easter day.*
Here’s more wildflower ignorance on my part: the Lent or Lenten lily is the daffodil — just another name for the same flower. I’d never heard that Lent lily name, but for a long time I really didn’t know the daffodil either. The daffodil is a common wildflower, but unlike my wife, I don’t know it to call it out by its name and properties on sight. I knew the daffodil not from the book of nature, but from the famous poem by William Wordsworth** “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”
A few years ago while visiting England in the early Spring I came upon an entire lawn at Kew Gardens filled with yellow flowers. “Daffodils” my wife told me. This was a London park, not the hilly brakes of Britain’s Lake District, but I suddenly found myself, from her knowledge imparted to me, inside Wordsworth’s poem and the physical, now knowing, presence of this flower. The dark green grass and the sunny yellows in array before me were ever brighter because back at my home in one of the most northern states, things were still snow covered in early April.
My view soon after entering Kew Gardens.
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Housman is telling us something else about the daffodil: not only is it one of the earliest blooming Spring wildflowers, giving rise to the Lenten lily alternative name for it, but it’s also one of the quickest flowers to die and disappear. That name, that property, gets us to the question of “Is this an Easter poem?” Housman is not at all a Christian devotional poet — he was a devoted academic classics scholar and agnostic.
Well, maybe that’s his point. Easter is the particularly Christian holiday of resurrection and eternal life. Housman, not a Christian believer, has written a poem that refrains on something natural — this flower — that’s not spiritual like a soul or godhead, but a piece of lovely, wind-caressed carbon that dies by Easter Day. In that natural order, this brief wildflower certainly dies. A Christian apologist could easily counter: that’s the promise of The Resurrection, that it is something else. One can read the poem and see either side. Of course, there is a thumb on the balance: Housman has written a poem, and I’ve gone along with him and made a song of it. Poems are not so much about what they say — because they have sound and a carefully selected order, they are more about what it feels to say or see or sense something.
You can hear what I made of what Housman’s poem portrays with the audio player you should see below. What, has any player disappeared like the daffodil? It’s not that — some ways of reading this blog don’t believe in showing the player. So, you can roll away the stone and use this highlighted link to hear it instead.
**As it turns out, William Wordsworth based his daffodil poem partly on journaling done by his sister Dorothy Wordsworth who had accompanied him on his Lake District walks. That’s a wonderful thing about our relationships with others: what we see and sense can be informed by them.
I will not write much about the Yeats poem I present today. Unlike some others I’ve performed here, it’s quite well-known. Phrases in the poem like “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” “the ceremony of innocence,” “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” and “what rough beast…slouches towards Bethlehem to be born” have been quoted, reused, and brought out as touchstones and summaries alongside distressing events. Still, if you’d like to see the entire poem “The Second Coming” as it appears on the page, here’s a link.
Where folks do explainers for this 1919 poem, it’s usually pointed out that the Irish poet William Butler Yeats studied mysticism and magic, and alongside this short poem, he wrote other texts explaining his esoteric theories of the rise and fall of epochs. This was more than colorful stuff for poetry for him, he believed it, and believed that the 20th Century was some kind of end-times. Now that we’re a quarter of the way into the 21st Century, we seem to be running a little late — but Yeats was writing of millennia, so being off a hundred years or so might be a rounding error. And as he starts off writing of the cycles, the widening gyres of history, his sonorous phrases of dread keep coming back to us.
Yeats as wizard. Here are some of Yeats magical weapons. Photos from “Yeats, The Tarot and the Golden Dawn by Kathleen Raine” which I found at this web page.
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Even ignoring all the mystical back-story, this is a poem about the breaking of nations. Therefore,“The Second Coming” fits with the theme of civic poetry, and I put this poem down on a short list of poems to consider combining with music for this April’s National Poetry Month, but we’re nearly half-way into the month before I could complete a version that I felt was presentable.* Given its grand scope it called for some big music, and my orchestral scoring skills have atrophied from where they had developed earlier in this project. Another way to make a large noise is to perform it with a full rock band, and I have been trying to recover my skills in that kind of ensemble playing this Spring. But there was another obstacle: I found that, unlike other Yeats’ poems, this one isn’t easy to fall into singing. The blank verse here tends stentorian, and I’m not a big-voiced powerful singer. For one stubborn section of the poem, I felt I needed to break into chant rather than try to keep the lyrical lift of singing. This sort of thing is a consequence of a composer needing to rely on a limited singer to realize the work.
The raw tracks I recorded for today’s song were somewhat messy due to the number of instruments: three guitars, organ, piano, bass, and drums, It was quite the operation to mix them even to my “good enough” level. You can hear that musical performance of W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” with the audio player you should see below. What, has that rough beast not slouched onto your screen? It’s not the end of the world — some ways of reading this blog suppress showing the player gadget. Here’s an alternative, a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*As I write this sentence, I take stock and consider that since this Project began 9 years ago, I’ve been composing and recording the more than 800 pieces presented here at a rapid pace. To create a single album’s worth of music in a month is considered a challenge — since 2006 there has been an “RPM challenge” to write and record an album of songs during the month of February. I’ve been doing something like that, nearly every month, for nearly 9 years!
Has that been good for the quality of the work? I don’t think the answer is a straightforward “Of course not.” While there are times when I wonder about some months-long work focused on a single composition, at my age I figure anything I want to explore or express needs to be a matter of getting down to it and getting it done as well as my current skills allow.
I’ve been dealing out the civic poetry so far this American National Poetry Month, but for today’s Poem in Your Pocket Day here’s a charming poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. If I understand Poem In Your Pocket correctly, its idea (as distinct from the entire Poetry Month) is to put emphasis on publicly sharing other people’s poetry. The rest of Poetry Month has a lot of examples of encouraging the writing of poetry oneself: poetry prompts, daily haiku writing pledges, poets putting forward their own work, and so on. That’s all fine—but this Project from its beginning has sought to go beyond the supply side to encourage the consumption of poetry. With the recorded musical versions we make here, there’s a modest hope of community in singing or speaking the poetry aloud. A song not heard is one of those trees-falling-in-an-uninhabited-forest things—whatever the result, it means to be a sound. Now onto today’s poem, situated in a forest.
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“Counting-Out Rhyme” indicates with its title that it should be considered as that children’s game or process. As a game, a counting-out rhyme is a delineated incantation, each beat accompanied by a pointed indication around a group until the ending beat arrives and the final pointed-to individual is chosen. The most common folk poem in this manner in my childhood was “Eenie, Meanie, Miney, Moe.”*
I, having emigrated from the republic of childhood so long ago, have no idea if kids still use this process on playgrounds. From my more recent experience as a parent, modern younger children who would use it seem more supervised more often than my cohort, and responsible adults might be likely to select without rhymes. In my day, when the 20th century still had decades to run, kids just knew how this worked via the folk process.
Despite its title, as I worked with Millay’s poem I couldn’t really think she authored it for playground uses. Though not a long poem, it’s longer than it needs to be for selection, and the poem seems utterly beholden to its own, internal, incantatory powers. It picked up from the Imagists the flagrant naming of colors, decoration not needed for utility. I suspect Millay is remembering her own New England childhood here, much as E. E. Cumming was recalling his in his Spring poem, and the poem is rather more a magical spell, one meant to bring on Spring or bring one back to when the woodland sights of it were unprecedented and wonderous. It’s lovely word-music, and I heard it from off the page — and then played it in the musical version below — as a languid song, not the hurried rota of trying to make a quick, randomized choice.
In a week when chronological adults (whatever their maturity) are playing counting-out games with numbers that will empty or fill pockets and prisons, I share this poem from my pocket — not legal tender, but Spring tender. With the audio player below you can hear me perform this with 12-string guitar and sparse contributions from an ensemble of viola, violins, flute, clarinet, English horn, and silence. No player? You won’t need to find a wood-nymph to cast a spell, I provide this highlighted backup link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*In my experience from my times and place, the following line always included that dammed ethnic slur that makes the opening line of nonsense words almost offensive in anticipation. I noted in the Wikipedia article on that verse that the ethnic slur was an American variation, and there are multiple theories of the rhyme’s origin without it. I have no full accounting of the harm the slur brought by its childhood ubiquitousness — but I was somehow pleased to read as an aged adult that it was something the folk process added in America, and in order to form a more perfect playground republic, the same process can remove it.
The other similar selection process I recall from childhood was deciding which side would bat first in kids-run baseball games by alternating two kid’s hand-grasp up the length of the barrel of a bat until the final grasp topping the length was up first. Wouldn’t flipping a coin be faster? I’m not sure we had coins in our pockets back then.
I woke up to economic tumult around the world this morning after finishing a mix of this song I made from a poem by Carl Sandburg last night. I’d gone back and forth on mixing this simple piece of music. At one point I thought it needed piano. I tried an arpeggiated part. Hmmm….no. I tried a coda with underlying low-register sustained intervals. Nope too. So, no piano. I was going to post the remainder yesterday when I began to wonder if the bass line was mixed too high. I told myself I’d reconsider in the morning and went to sleep.
Awaking, I found the news of international economic fears overlaying the world of our current sustained carelessness and cruelties. Well, I thought, maybe it’s not all that important how perfectly the song is recorded or mixed. It’s time to get this little bit of Carl Sandburg out to our modern world for National Poetry Month.
This Project spends a lot of time in the previous decade to be called The Twenties, a time when all the arts and poetry had to deal with a changing culture that ended with a great falling of commerce. For much of the decade it was written up as a time of fashionable Modernism, easily pilloried as a faddish, brainless rush. The label “The Jazz Age” wasn’t meant as cultured praise. Even Afro-American intellectuals were worried that Jazz was just some fast-tempo frivolity, a soundtrack for licentiousness. Luckily for us, some Black composers and songwriters kept on making their form of Modernism.
From our time, we know the plot arc of that last Twenties. A great worldwide depression began in 1929. Fascism rose in multiple countries. Poets may have started the decade engaged with new, freer verse modes, but by The Thirties they’d be charged with dealing with the IRL world of racial-nationalist authoritarians, widespread economic hardship, and war.
I believe it’s easy to forget what an early and fervent Modernist Carl Sandburg was. He was close to his brother-in-law Edward Steichen, who was thoroughly engaged in the international visual arts Modernist revolution. His poetry helped popularize English language free-verse. His collections were peppered with clean, concise poems as Imagist as any written within that vanguard. It appears to me that he may have written Jazz/Blues literary poetry even before Langston Hughes.* Like some others in his American Modernist cohort, Sandburg had early ties to political economics of a leftist kind. How would he traverse this change in the artistic climate?
He was going to go folksy.
Much of his energy would turn from poetry to a giant biography of Lincoln, who he’d portray as a canny folklore-sage. He would publish a popular landmark book of collected folk songs. He brought his guitar to poetry readings. A Robert Frost may have made much of his farmer neighbors, but his blank-verse eclogues were orchestrated with a more academic formality.**
Sandburg’s long-form poem “Good Morning America” is a case in point. It’s a civic poem, a stock-taking set of observations of the United States, peppered with folk-wisdom admonishments uttered in Sandburg’s version of contemporary vernacular. I picked out this section of it to use here because I noticed it riffs on a phrase also used in a remarkably durable American folk song: “Sitting on top of the world.”
As a lyric refrain that phrase appears in a song by The Mississippi Sheiks, an Afro-American jug band. As members of the continuum of the folk-process (i.e., appropriating and reusing any good stuff they could grab) these non-Arabian Sheiks stole a harmonic cadence from Tampa Red, who had used it in another oft-covered Blues song: “It Hurts Me Too.” “Sitting on Top of the World” quickly integrated itself into American folk music. It became a country and Bluegrass standard, but it could also be done with the force of a Howlin’ Wolf or by a classic British rock power trio like Cream.
It would be a neat package for me to say that Sandburg heard the Mississippi Sheiks and shaped this poem from their music, but the timeline doesn’t work out, though it gives me more connections to mention. Sandburg published “Good Morning America” in 1928. The Sheiks record of their song was released in 1930. Sheik Walter Vinson says he came up with it while playing a white dance. He and that audience might’ve been familiar with a 1926 hit song sung by Al Jolson which used the same phrase. The Jolson “I’m Sitting on Top of the World” is a friendly ragtime ditty about a man who cites his tenuous status in the economic prosperity around him as beside the point because he’s about to marry his sweetheart. Vinson on that dancefloor stage is going to fuse Tampa Red’s riff from a song about a singer who confesses empathically that his sweetheart’s troubles trouble him, because “when things go wrong…it hurts me too” with some new lyrics.
We don’t know what lyrics Vinson sang on that first performance. As the song proceeded over the years, new verses were plugged in by various singers, but the Sheiks’ recording we can hear starts off with both economic and romantic losses. Objectively, the singer isn’t presenting a happy life, but still he refrains he has “no worries…because I’m sitting on top of the world.” This is an ambivalent statement. Is it a mantra of positive thinking in the face of misfortune? A call to party on the dance-floor even if the rest of life is hard times? An easily seen-through statement of questionable bravado? Is it even possibly sarcasm, an answer-record dis of the happy sap in Jolson’s song?
In between Jolson’s Roaring Twenties white song using that title and Vinson’s post-Black-Friday Black version, Sandburg wrote his poem, closer to Vinson’s version that would follow. Sandburg’s poem is about national wealth and hegemony, but it wants to say that that’s temporary. All it takes is one mad king blind to any contradiction. So, I sang this part of Sandburg’s poem this month, with music leaning more toward the Mississippi Sheiks. You can hear that version with the audio player below. What, has a circuit-breaker stopped trading in graphical audio players? No, some way of viewing this just won’t show it, so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
In adapting the 14th section of Sandburg’s long poem, I doubled the number of times “I’m sitting on top of the world” is refrained and re-lineated it from the page to fit the music.
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The audio player for my version:
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*As I read the two of them, Hughes and Sandburg, I often feel an American kinship in their voices.
**The Southern Fugitives took another, if Copperhead, path on Modernist poetry tied to an agrarian tradition in the era between the World Wars. Sandburg would leave the urban center of Chicago, first to Michigan and then to rural North Carolina and a working goat farm in the between Wars era — but he never fell into the reductionism that the “real Americans” are Anglo-Saxon-stock farmers.
If Frost didn’t haul a guitar around like Sandburg, Edwin Ford Piper recounts that between-Wars Frost was willing to offer his own renditions of folk songs at informal poet’s after-party hootenannies.
John Sinclair lived an eventful life. He’s likely still most well-known for his “10 years for two joints” marijuana sentence, and secondarily for his connection with Midwestern 1960s high-energy rock music as a manager and promoter. Maybe you know too of his founding of a White Panther Party, the quixotic attempt to translate the charismatic radicalism of the Black Panthers to young white hippies.
He was a provocative guy, and he seems to have had a promotional streak to go with that. As I often say about folks like Sinclair: no sane person can likely agree with everything he said and did. Feel free to feel about him however you did before you read this, but there’s a particular reason for a piece using his words today.
This is the last day of (U.S.) National Poetry Month, but it’s also International Jazz Day. The connection of poetry with Jazz seems to have gone back to the very beginnings of Jazz. While Jazz is a predominantly instrumental music, it grew out of a sung Afro-American music that got called Blues. Besides accompanying Blues singers, Jazz musicians often used instruments to evoke the vocal parts of Blues even when the singers weren’t present. And just as Jazz music can use abstract sounds to stand for speech, a lot of Jazz musicians infuse music into the way they talk about their life or their art. The formula of music + words is the formula of poetry.
Long time readers here may recall that I’ve made a point that lyrics in the Blues tradition are Afro-American Modernist verse, and that we can choose to frame them as such — but it’s not so novel for cultural historians to note Afro-American Jazz as an important part of Modernism in music.
Given these connections, it should be no surprise that Jazz Poetry is a long-standing flavor of American verse. Carl Sandburg and Langston Hughes wrote it early in their careers. Sandburg even sang Blues-adjacent songs. Beats adored Jazz, often thought it a literary model, and the mid-century commonplace of bohemians intoning poetry beside a Jazz combo is a influence on this Project that shouldn’t be hard to see. The Black Arts movement welded itself to Jazz too, its poetry often spoke of that music’s artists while Jazz music played.
It turns out that alongside the other things John Sinclair was, he was also a Jazz fan particularly intrigued by Jazz’s rebels. He wrote Jazz criticism, and Jazz poetry before doing anything else he was remembered for, and he kept writing that Jazz poetry throughout his life. When I read that Sinclair had died during the first week of this April’s National Poetry Month, I sought out some of that poetry of his.
The examples you can hear today may surprise you. They did me. For all Sinclair’s association with high-energy music and radical politics I expected some rantings of a passionate sort, strong declamations. He may have written some of that, but these two you can hear me perform were the ones that intrigued me the most. They might seem too casual to be poetry or even public speech, save for his intent to frame them so. They don’t even contain his own words for the most part. Instead, they are statements attributed to Jazz pianist/composer/bandleader Thelonious Monk.
Monk’s a unique creature, even in the highly individualized world of creative Jazz musicians. He was present at the creation of Bebop in NYC in the 1940s, but unlike many of that style’s pioneers there was puzzlement at his skills. To not put too fine a point on it, many connoisseurs weren’t sure he was a good musician. His piano technique was unorthodox, his note choices seemed odd-to-wrong even within the extension of harmonic language that Bebop was proposing. Was that a misunderstanding by (largely white) outside authorities? There’s more: Monk confounded other skilled Jazz musicians who thought he was erratic, not always a steadfast partner in their musical combos that could give the other soloists a predictable foundation to solo over. And on stage he would sometimes extend his eccentricities by leaving the keyboard to sort of dance and wander about the stage.
A remarkable thing happened over a decade or so of this limbo. His compositions became more and more accepted by other musicians, and with wider repetition what once seemed peculiar now seemed irresistibly catchy. Eventually they were deemed masterpieces. Other players started to understand Monk’s unique off-kilter phrasing and rhythm sense. And those odd stage antics became lovable, even if they also could have been worrying. As they would say today, Monk wasn’t neurotypical — and there’s been posthumous talk of schizophrenia-like psychosis. For a Black man working on the fringes of an increasingly marginalized art form in a mid-century America, that Monk eventually achieved so much is a monumental achievement.
Sinclair knew all this. I suspect he trusted you might know this too, and that’s why I’m taking your time to give you this capsule history of Monk. What Sinclair does collect and write down of what Monk says about his art and being an artist seems so modest — both for the poet and the musician. In the first poem, “recollections for allen ginsberg” Monk claims in effect that he’s discovered the pluperfect American music as just being in this America, ready to be gathered and heard. And the lack of esteem and appreciation he’d received by fans, esteemed critics, and other musicians? The second poem Sinclair gathers (gathers like the Jazz that’s everywhere) and titles “worry later – san francisco holiday – for my mother” says he intends to persevere trusting himself, eschewing worry about the lack of understanding. Why does he think that, how does he go on making art? The making itself: “my playing seems to work!” he says. Is he saying that he himself understands the achievement of his own work based on his goals, and so is glad he made it — or is he saying that the concreteness of making something that integrates into a something that didn’t exist before is the best therapy for a life that could otherwise be consumed with worry and doubt? My understanding is that he’s saying both.
My performance of Sinclair’s two poems features my best attempt at realizing a Monk-ish composition to accompany it. There are two unfinished drafts of this post where I tried to come to confessional terms with my feelings about that process of realizing the piece and my audacity to present myself in the context of real musicians with lives devoted to their craft. I decided to spare you all the breast-beating since I came to see that as boring. As a composer, I guess I could conclude with a variation of that Monk quote “I’ll tell you one thing: my composition seems to work.” You likely saw the video link above, but if you prefer just the audio, there’s a graphical audio player below, and this backup highlighted link for those who don’t see the player.
Frank Hudson 