Comments on: Good Morning Blues

By: Via Negativa » Blog Archive » The evolution of a reading

Via Negativa » Blog Archive » The evolution of a reading — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:32:10 +0000

[...] I can’t help thinking that poets who give lackluster readings are just being lazy — unless, as Marly suggested, they are deliberately affecting “a toneless, mechanical sort of reading,” stemming from a “desire for the inaccessible.” Just because I’ve written a poem doesn’t mean I automatically know the best way to read it right off the bat. I thought it might be fun to record myself in three different stages of comprehension of a given poem, using the most recent thing I’ve written. If I’d saved a recording of every take, this would’ve been close to an hour long and about as exciting as listening to a guitarist practice the same riff over and over. [...]

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 19:03:58 +0000

Fred – See, that’s the problem with videos. Like Johnny Cash in “Delia,” I would probably have to appear as myself impersonating a very different person. And people might get the wrong idea. Or worse yet, the right idea.

Now if we could get R. Crumb to do an animation for it, that would be cool.

Bill – What about Fats Domino? He seemed like a pretty pure New Orleans product, but he made it big. Luck of the draw, I suspect.

Gina – Thanks for the comment(s), and welcome! I’m glad you found the minimalism of those lines effective — I worked half the day with a whittling knife, as you can probably imagine.

By: Gina Marie

Gina Marie — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 17:32:21 +0000

Hmmm… didn’t mean for that last comment to be anon.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 17:30:35 +0000

I like the lines:
“Our rubbing together
built up less & less
of a static charge.”

I says so much without saying much at all.

By: Bill

Bill — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 16:48:06 +0000

Looking/listening to those James Booker videos and thinking of your question “Why didn’t the ‘Big Chief’ become a superstar” it seemed to me that New Orleans was so distinct from mainstream media culture that it is hard to imagine a competion between the two. Booker appearing onstage at Montreax seems a shelled trove freshly uncracked with all the fragrance of New Orleans steaming into the European air. As well Booker’s instrumentals seem to connect to an earlier century of elaborate trills, when the piano was the voice of home and community, and had not yet lost it’s place of prominace to the wail of the electric guitar. In those videos from the ’70s he seems deeply rooted in the past and undisturbed by his times, even wearing the tradional piano-man’s vest.

By: Fred Garber

Fred Garber — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 16:20:11 +0000

I could see a music video of this. You and the woman sitting at a small table in the kitchen. The hazy morning light. And Leadbelly leaning against the counter playing his guitar……Then at the end R. Crumb runs in and asks if anyone has seen his deck of cards….

I liked the liesurely pace at which this poem unfolded.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 03:10:26 +0000

Thanks for the comments. I’m glad y’all liked the apple on the laptop image – I was hoping that would work. As for Leadbelly’s quote, it’s quite unusual for something like that to have made it onto record back in the 1940s, but I assume it came out of his association with communists and other leftists in the Greenwich Village folk music scene. Josh White, too, was urged to make the blues “socially relevant,” I think. That’s not to say Leadbelly didn’t actually feel that way, of course.

I think the term blues in fact originated with whites. Not only that, white musicians performed blues songs and blues ballads (Muleskinner Blues, John Henry, etc.) almost from the beginning. But there was this whole, huge and grotesque history of minstrel shows – the theft of black songs and impersonation of black musicians – lurking in the background. Much of the evolution of 20th-century popular music in America seems to have been driven by the desire of black musicans and performers to stay one step ahead of their white imitators.

By: leslee

leslee — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 02:12:17 +0000

Then there’s Martin Mull’s blues song about coming home and finding both the Mercedes and Cadillac gone (“I got so upset, I threw my martini across the lawn”).

Nice poem. I like the apple on the laptop.

By: mb

mb — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:13:16 +0000

Pale blues like this, a fading or fatigue of passion, can sometimes be harder than something felt more strongly, sort of like an elusive thing you can’t pinion, can’t even get your hands into.

By: robin andrea

robin andrea — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 20:00:23 +0000

I think anyone hungry for something can sing the blues. I like the laptops in the morning, and fewer glances over the rims of their cups. The morning paper is like a return to the primitive. A kind of lust for ink on the fingers and a tangibility that glowing screens can not provide.