Just a few days ago I was posting my rough and untrained voice singing with orchestral instruments. Today I’ve got nothing but a small and plainly ordained acoustic guitar and I’m going to whop on it to deliver a performance of a poem by David McCord that I found in Modern American Poetry,  the between-the-world-wars anthology curated by Louis Untermeyer that I’m using as my theme and source for my celebration here of National Poetry Month.

McCord the poet specialized in light verse and poetry for children, but I don’t know if he intended today’s selection, “Reflection in Blue,”  for kids. Perhaps that’s not critical to know. Going through the hundreds of poems in Untermeyer’s book, I marked it down as one that might welcome my performance without knowing. The poem is a delightful little painting in musical words, suitable for any age. The visual riff that it wants to play with and develop is to link three natural things in light blue: sea water, bird eggs, and the sky. While interleaving the words describing each of these things, McCord is constantly zooming perspective in an out: he starts with a bird in nest with the blue eggs, but the sea comes in and yet from some higher perspective the sea is smaller than the global blue sky, but then he’s musing on the blue eggs in the bird’s nest being like the sky dome and that it contains the sea stuff of birth – the Earth is like a giant egg encased by the blue shell of its sky.*

I did this as a playful, proclaiming song in a non-standard form that used elements of Blues musical expression. As I said, I used my small mahogany steel-string guitar for this, an instrument which has a strong midrange bark when picked hard, and that’s just what I did. Even before I played guitar, I loved those that could use the strings separately to voice in different registers and play against each other – it seemed so magical, a whole ensemble you could hang from your shoulder. That sort of playing is usually done by plucking the strings separately with the thumb and one or more fingers. When I started to teach myself, that’s what I intended to learn to do. There’s a long story that follows about that – but in the end, I don’t play that way now. Every note you hear in today’s piece is played with a single flat-pick, which I skip around from string to string to give the impression of finger-picking.

A picture and blurbs from a children’s poetry book of McCord’s from later in the 20th century.

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But before we go to that performance, a few words about the few things I’ve been able to find out about the poet McCord. McCord is a little like Robert Hillyer whose words were used with that recent orchestral piece: both now remembered more for their long-term positions at Harvard University than as poets, even though Hillyer did win a poetry Pulitzer and McCord was still publishing children’s poetry that was up for awards well into the 1970s. Light verse and children’s poetry are not reserved slots in literary poetry anthologies, but Untermeyer wanted to include some of that, and preserved examples of those approaches in his book. Would Hillyer and McCord rather have been remembered as poets, as I’m remembering them this month? I don’t know. I remain appreciative of Woody Allen’s joke “I don’t want to be immortal from my work – I want to be immortal from not dying.” McCord lived to be 99, so he came nearer to that measure than most.

There’s a graphical audio player below so that you can hear my musical performance of David McCord’s “Reflection In Blue.”  What, has that player disappeared behind a cloud? No, it’s just that some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing the player, so I provide this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab that will supply its own audio player.

 

 

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*Just as with the Lake Superior poem I started this month off with, this pairing of a natural scene with blue sky and blue waters may have attracted me for local angle reasons. My state’s name, Minnesota, is a version of a Dakota, indigenous, word meaning water like sky. Now to be sure, my first impression of that was a cartoon bear mascot of a local beer company dancing to some tom-tom jingle about being from “the land of sky blue waters.” But now as an elder, I think it’s appropriate to celebrate poetry this month (and all year) since we live in the state named by its natives for a simile.