guns

My Life has stood — a Loaded Gun

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

The achievement of Emily Dickinson’s poetry is unusual, but the poem I set to music and perform today stands out even amid the rest of her work. This uniqueness has led to varied interpretations of what the poem is getting at: sometimes esoteric readings of the poem’s matter, written by folks plausibly smarter and more knowledgeable about Dickinson than I.

And so, if I was stopped before approaching this poem to make a song from it, I would have replied with a vague recall of what I’ve read: that it’s about something singularly, perhaps secretly, important about Dickinson herself — a striking, summary image of a rage or force she felt. Well, maybe it is. I’m not proposing that I have any authority to change any charge this poem has given you. I’ve often found myself ignorant or obtuse. Still, I found a rather different poem than I expected as I tried to arrange how I’d express the poem while singing it.

My Life has stood a Loaded Gun

Here’s a chord sheet for today’s song. One intent in providing this is a hope others will sing it, perhaps better than I can.

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The poem I read anew had Dickinson’s poetic voice playing a dramatic role, and the play is a tragedy whose protagonist is a sentient non-animal object, a gun. The gun’s relationship to humans, or particularly to its owner, is subservient and not rage-filled. It self-portrays itself as if it was a loyal dog: happy that it’s been selected like a pup from the pound, happy with a woodland walk in the company of its owner, proud of its sharp echoing bark. The stanza-scene where the gun is snozzled up to its owner’s pillow in bed, as if a sleeping pet, would make the most ardent gun-enthusiast contentedly smile.

Some readings have over-weighed the “stood” in the first line, as a Chekhovian gun frozen in the first act — all unrealized potential violence, a symbol of a quiet hurt or rage.

But then the turn, the volta. In the penultimate stanza the gun’s self-portrayal takes on another aspect: it’s like a gangland capo here, a deadly enforcer. Is it proud of its efficacy and efficiency in killing that it recounts? There’s no clear moralizing, but there is a contrast between that stanza and the sleeping master and gun. They will stir, and awake, while any foe the gun has shot will not “stir the second time.” The final stanza will tip our speaker-gun’s judgement on this.

Am I not diving deep enough into the wreck here? Am I stuck on the surface symbolism and not cognizant of the deeper meaning of what is being symbolized about Emily Dickinson, the middle-class, likely non-violent, non-weapon-toting woman? Could be, but as a singer of subjective quality, as a poor strutting player in this tragedy of the loyal gun, I might be able to convey that deeper stuff by playing the images well.

What was Dickinson’s self-knowledge of what she’s doing here? Was she the gun any more than Shakespeare was Macbeth or that Bob Dylan secretly sees himself as an Early Roman King? Deception and hidden meanings are a Dickinsonian trope, and the final verse clearly intends to be a hermetic riddle. I solve the riddle by thinking that the gun muses that as a non-living durable object it could outlive its human owner — but that in a better, wished-for world, the master would destroy it.

You can hear my performance of “My Life has stood — a Loaded Gun”  with the graphical audio player below. No player seen? There’s one more bullet in your chamber — this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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Long Guns

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s Carl Sandburg again, this time from his 1920 collection Smoke and Steel.   Today’s piece “Long Guns”  is a protest poem of a kind. A few decades later, around midcentury, the folk-song revival in America (which Sandburg had helped to kick-off with his pioneering American Songbag  collection of folk songs) grew a wing that wrote protest songs. Bob Dylan, a man who thought enough of Carl Sandburg to want to visit him as he was revolutionizing songwriting, wrote a few of them himself, even though Dylan once categorized the usual efforts of the protest song genre as “finger-pointing songs.”

So how does one go about writing a protest song or poem? There are probably lots of ways, and some work more often than others. Sandburg, the early Modernist, would sometimes write Imagist protest poems, which is quite a trick to pull off, though the classical Chinese poets that influenced Imagism had figured out how to do this centuries before. “Long Guns”  however, is more in Sandburg’s Walt Whitman mode, what with its parallelism and lists.

Sandburg wants to call attention to the disorder of order established by armaments and guns, but rather than doing this as an essay would, or by leading off with some singular event that will arrest our attention, he starts by addressing an otherwise unidentified someone named “Oscar.”

This is a puzzling way to begin, and I have no idea why Sandburg did this. My guess is that most current readers will just figure Oscar is some random name, and stumble past this, but since I hate to leave specific things unexamined, I eventually had to try to figure out who Oscar was.

It’s likely you’ve never heard of him, but I think it’s Oscar Ameringer, a radical humorist who was styled “The Mark Twain of Socialism.” Ameringer was Sandburg’s contemporary, and both spent time working for Socialist candidates in Wisconsin, though their time in Milwaukee missed overlapping by only about a year. At least to fellow Midwestern Socialists, this call out to Oscar may well have been recognized when “Long Guns” was written.

After this mysterious opening, Sandburg lays out a condensed history of the world, a Genesis story of armed nationhood, a litany of the primacy of guns, speaking too of the long-range artillery that had been part of the new warfare of WWI.

And then, just past midway, Sandburg jumps somewhere else entirely—which is the freedom we allow poetry (as we allow it in music)—to a twisted fairy tale, the payoff. In the end, this is how Sandburg makes his protest point. We are like that child, and we are creating the child in that story.

howlin-wolf

How would Howlin’ Wolf comment on this Carl Sandburg poem?

 

In performing and presenting “Long Guns”  I decided to throw a frame around it. A couple of posts back I mentioned some other Modernists, largely, but not entirely, separate from the recognized literary Modernists. In the same early decades of the 20th Century, some Afro-Americans were “making it new” with a different lyric language and music, which was labeled “The Blues,” and from which Jazz and Rock’n’Roll and modern popular music draw even to this day. There’s no Ezra Pound or T. E. Hulme to point to here, a name that we can say sparked things off. The Blues’ 19th Century Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman-like predecessors are barely known as names. I still want to say more on this later, but as a frame for “Long Guns”  I used a blues line I know from the singing of Chester Burnett who performed as “Howlin’ Wolf:”

I wore my 44 for so long, it made my shoulder sore.

What a striking and original line! If Li Po or Pound had written it, we might read it in a literary anthology. A man whose fear or anger he must carry, like a heavy revolver, painfully, always. As it happened, I know this poetic line from Burnett singing it, as the Wolf; where as part of his performance style his voice is unnaturally raspy, his delivery as if spoken by a spirit, perhaps not a normal man. A man who lives where the running of the world was all in guns. Is that a normal man?

To hear the LYL Band perform Sandburg’s “Long Guns”   framed with music in the style of Howlin’ Wolf, use the player below.