Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
I’m not sure why books and music are in the same category. It made sense at the time, I guess.
I’ve been kind of shy about posting any home-made music to the blog lately, but Rachel forced my hand. The bamboo jaw harp known as the kubing may be from the Philippines, but it goes great with Appalachian music. Here are a couple of examples, inexpertly rendered under the influence of a couple bottles of homebrew. These were recorded live over the internet, so the video doesn’t quite keep up with the audio due to my slow connection.
Late last night I finished compiling this second (and probably last) series of videos. If you haven’t watched the first one yet, I’d recommend doing that first, since it includes a higher proportion of big-name acts — though I have plenty of those in this one, too. Gems like the opening and closing videos are kind of hidden in plain sight on YouTube, since it’s often impossible to tell what’s a real film and what isn’t until you play it. (I think music fans tend to assume the music can speak for itself. At least I imagine that’s why they’re not too good about annotating their uploads.)
This one’s longer. The first playlist was a mere 3 1/2 hours long; this one clocks in at 4:17:47. That’s because I’ve included more multi-song videos, such as the first part of a concert by Mance Lipscomb, as well as a wonderful short documentary by blues scholar David Evans on the fife-and-drum tradition of Gravel Springs, Mississippi, complete with footage of Otha Turner cutting cane and making a cane flute. There are also more long guitar jams — though not nearly as many as I could’ve included if I were a more typical blues fan. (More about that below.)
I’ve included more younger performers, more Texas blues and more jazz-blues than in the first playlist. I’m obviously far from a blues purist, but remain conservative about including performers from outside the African-American community, favoring those who, like Doc Watson, made the music their own, rather than slavish imitators like Eric Clapton… but see Buddy Guy’s passionate speech about the importance of the “British invasion” (and the band Cream specifically) in #21. As collectors, promoters, appreciators, and (since the 1970s) audiences, white people on both sides of the Atlantic have been essential to the survival of the blues. It’s great to see a younger coterie of players, black and white, taking the blues in new directions. The next to last video, for example, is from a young Serbian guitarist, Ana Popovic, who clearly isn’t afraid to use the blues to address the intense ethnic tensions in her own country.
I discovered a couple of new-to-me artists in the process of putting this playlist together, for which I’m mainly indebted to John Hayes’ Any Woman’s Blues series of portraits of female blues guitarists at the excellent, multi-author music and poetry blog Robert Frost’s Banjo. I remain personally more interested in blues as a vocal art-form, but as I said on Facebook last night, there’s always something powerful about a woman with a guitar. I think my favorite discovery was Barbara Lynn, whose career exemplifies the familiar woman’s trajectory of taking a couple decades off to raise a family. But it also exemplifies something that I love about the blues: there’s always been a strong place for older performers. Like jazz, and unlike rock, blues is music for grownups.
And that leads to the last point I want to make today. Unlike most white guys in my generation, I didn’t come to blues from a classic rock background. I listened to a lot of folk music growing up, including my brother Steve’s clawhammer banjo, and more than anything I think it was that latter sound that prepared me to love the haunting, droning style of traditional Mississippi blues when a college roommate with a great record collection first exposed me to guys like Robert Johnson, Elmore James and Muddy Waters. I remain fondest of the country blues in general, because I think it’s more musically diverse and much more interesting lyrically than the more commercial stuff.
When I did get into rock music in my early 20s, I found myself gravitating toward genres where the role of the lead guitar solo was minimalized, and the emphasis was on killer riffs — mainly thrash metal and punk. So to balance what I said above about the importance of white fans in keeping blues alive, I think this may have also retarded its development quite a bit, because so many fans are in it for the electric guitar leads, and prefer blues that sounds like classic rock. Where are the great blues pianists and saxophonists these days? Playing jazz for Cassandra Wilson and Dee Dee Bridgewater, apparently.
I will say, however, that much as I share Buddy Guy’s oft-expressed impatience for contemporary blues fans’ adulation of Stevie Ray Vaughan, specifically, making this playlist reminded me that he did have a unique and soulful sound — especially compared to some of his contemporaries. I couldn’t leave him out. Ditto with Albert Collins and some of the other axemen and -women in the playlist. Perhaps it’s time to revisit my indifference to screaming guitar solos. But mostly, I’ve found that compiling these playlists has reminded me why I love the blues so much in the first place: its bittersweetness speaks to me. It makes we want to get up and get down, and the years drop away. Also, I still think I might be able to dance like Cab Calloway if I just concentrate a little harder…
I’ve been working on this off and on since last Friday: a YouTube playlist designed as a comprehensive introduction to the blues, restricted solely to live footage. Music on YouTube is of course dominated by uploads of songs accompanied by still images, so simply sorting through and identifying live videos was time-consuming in itself. Musically speaking, I’ve cast my net widely, including some songs by performers usually associated with other genres (old-time Appalachian music, gospel, R&B, Sahelian guitar, Mississippi fife-and-drum, etc.) and some pieces by performers usually classed as bluesmen which are not, strictly speaking, blues songs. I wanted to suggest something of the broader context from which the music emerged; I even included a snippet of a lecture (illustrated with music) by multi-instrumentalist Dom Flemons from the African-American string band Carolina Chocolate Drops.
My focus has been on the “greats,” but I’ve also included some fairly obscure artists and a few younger folks as well. I tried to balance the playlist geographically and by gender, style, featured instrument, etc., but unavoidably there are still more guys with guitars playing in the Clarksdale/Chicago style than anything else. I’ve tried to squeeze in as many performers as possible, so very few singers appear more than once, and I didn’t stop till I got to 50 videos. Rather than trying to watch the above embed in one sitting, it might be a better idea to bookmark the page on YouTube and browse at your leisure.
Don’t wait too long, though, because videos are always being removed from YouTube for one reason or another. Just in the past week that I’ve been working on this, one of the videos I’d originally selected has already gone missing. It was a good one, too! It’s almost enough to give a guy the blues…
I suspect my students think they were assigned to read The Good Soldiers so they could be better informed about the war in Iraq, and presumably that is part of the common reading’s purpose. But a good book, like a true war story, does so much more than merely inform. Given the pictures that both Finkel and O’Brien paint of war, what does either writer want us to “do” with that information? Once you get a vivid taste of what war was like for a particular group of soldiers at a particular time, how does that awareness change you as a reader and a citizen?
A good book, like a true war story, can help you become better informed, but it also can (and perhaps should) make you a more earnest asker of questions. Forget about what happened in Vietnam or Iraq; instead, raise the question of why it happened. If there is a lesson to be learned in any war (or in any war story), what are those lessons, and have we learned them?
These days, the Moomin characters have turned into a global franchise; and yet when I think about my own relationship with these books that were so formative of my imagination, I realise that what I owe these books is something much more private and intimate, a philosophy of sorts. Because in Tove Jansson’s books, when I re-read them now, I find a fierce recognition of the importance of solitude; an expansive sense of friendship—not a friendship that erases solitude, but one that is a kind of mutual recognition within it; a sense of delight in the world, its seasons and its changes, that doesn’t require any form of transcendence; and a hospitable generosity of spirit that manages, in one way or another, to accommodate even the most awkward and tricky of characters—not just eccentrics, stove-dwelling ancestors, hemulens, free spirits and oddballs, but also genuinely alarming creatures such as grokes and philosophers.
A small pin-striped bird alights
on the dead cherry tree next to the porch
& starts gleaning its breakfast
from crevasses in the decaying wood.
At length I remember its name,
black-and-white warbler—
& in so doing, forget the name of the author
whose Collected Shorter Poems I hold
in my lap. They’re orphaned for more
than a minute by my poor memory.
If I can just get the first letter…
something beginning with a G, perhaps?
That letter like a smile
warped into a grimace…
Or a T, that tall gallows.
The warbler stops to issue his usual
six whispery notes. Bill Knott.
*
I’m the proud owner of 15 new “homepubs”—homemade publications—from the great contemporary poet Bill Knott, who prints them up and bundles them off along with a limited edition print and an original painting to anyone who orders a painting through his website. Check it out. I find I like the whole concept of home pub, especially now that I have a new batch of homebrew ready to drink (more on that soon).
The difficult syllables clash
in my mouth. Your knitting
needles make short
work of the yarn,
like the dream-woman
who gave An Twig-Belly
his nickname, filling
his disemboweled gut
with a tangle of twigs
until his intestines could
be put back where
they belonged, in all
their tortuous windings.
We puzzle through
the genealogies, struggle
to picture the raw land
rising behind the words,
yet somehow these grim stories
bring us closer together.
Young men described
as promising will end up
wallowing in each other’s gore—
we know this.
Beautiful women will goad
their thin-skinned mates
into horrific acts.
A shepherd boy is smashed
against the ground so hard
his spine snaps, & two years
after his miraculous rescue
An Twig-Belly dies
a quick & needless death,
split by an unheroic sword.
You frown at your knitting
& decide it too needs
to be unraveled. I watch
the dark garment which was
to have been mine dissolve
in your expert fingers.
You smile.
I feel light as air.
See Rachel’s photographic response: “Seed.”
Braided Creek: a conversation in poetryWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
This is an old favorite, which I first blogged about back in 2004. I re-read it yesterday, sitting out on my porch on a lovely spring morning and savoring each of its 340 short poems (four to a page), so even though today is May 1, this still counts for my April poetry-reading challenge. I want to say a little bit about both this book and what I’ve learned during this past month, the third time I’ve marked National Poetry Month in this way.
Braided Creek is the result of a poetry correspondence between two old, white male poets at the top of their literary game, struggling to come to terms with aging and all its associated ills. There are no blurbs, no preface or afterword — no background on the project aside from the description on the back cover, so let me quote most of that because, while the poems could still be appreciated without it, knowing how they came into being adds so much more to the reader’s experience:
Longtime friends, Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser always exchanged poems in their letter writing. After Kooser was diagnosed with cancer several years ago, Harrison found that his friend’s poetry became “overwhelmingly vivid,” and they began a correspondence comprised entirely of brief poems, “because that was the essence of what we wanted to say to each other.” […]
When asked about attributions for the individual poems, one of them replied, “Everyone gets tired of this continuing cult of the personality… This book is an assertion in favor of poetry and against credentials.”
I love that last bit especially, and it’s worth pointing out that Kooser was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for the first of two terms the year after this book was published, so these guys aren’t exactly unknown poetry bloggers.
Bloggers, hell — they wrote letters. I think we’re meant to understand that they literally sent these through the post, on paper, a practice that some younger readers may know about only from history class. I’m not sure that really makes a difference, although from the sound of things Harrison’s cabin may not have had much in the way of Internet access:
The big fat garter snake
emerged from the gas-stove burner
where she had coiled around the pilot light
for warmth on a cold night.
One of the things that makes this exchange work as a collection is that both poets live in rural areas in the American Midwest, Harrison in Michigan and Kooser in Nebraska, so they draw on a common body of imagery. Having read a number of Japanese linked-verse sequences (renga) over the years, I’ve been intrigued by how well a free-verse “conversation in poetry” can work without anything like renga’s welter of rules. Some of the same principles of connection do seem to apply: adjacent poems usually connect in some way, as in renga, often in less than obvious ways that only reveal themselves to the slow, meditative reader. Any two adjacent poems may be read as a two-stanza poem for an even richer reading experience, especially given the way the publisher has placed them on the page, with nothing but a wide space between them.
But aside from those casual resemblances, no one would mistake these poems for traditional Japanese verse. They are very much in the Western micropoetry tradition as represented in the Greek Anthology, the two-line meshalim of the Hebrew Bible, etc. The poems on page 33, for example, are clearly linked by a didactic and not merely an imagistic thread, and they bristle with metaphors:
How can Lorca say he’s only the pulse
of a wound that probes to the opposite side?
I’m wondering if he ever rowed a boat backwards.
The black sleeve falls back
from the scalded fist:
a turkey vulture.
At 62 I’ve outlived 95 percent
of the world. I’ll be home
just before dark.
All my life
I’ve been in the caboose
with blind glands
running the locomotive.
One gets the impression they’ve included the entire correspondence, not weeding out the less-than-successful poems (such as the last one above), which is refreshing. Because they’ve chosen not to attribute the individual poems, a dud here and there shouldn’t tarnish either of their reputations. As on the Internet, it seems that semi-anonymity enables greater risk-taking.
When I watched her hands
as she peeled a potato,
I gave up everything I owned.
As far as I’m concerned this is the most satisfying collection of poems either of them have written — which is saying a lot because Harrison is a genuinely great poet. But he does have a tendency to go on a bit too long, to beat dead horses, and the brevity of the form kept that tendency in check here. Kooser, for his part, has often struck me as a bit too obvious, but epigrammatic verse is too close to riddling for that to be as much of a danger in this collection.
That winter the night fell seven
times a day and horses learned
to run under the ground.
Nice to see the American tall-tale tradition making its influence felt here and there. The frequent self-deprecating humor and wise-cracks also contribute to the distinctly American and Midwestern feel of the collection.
“What I would do for wisdom,”
I cried out as a young man.
Evidently not much. Or so it seems.
Even on walks I follow the dog.[…]
Sometimes fate will steal a baby
and leave an old man
soft as a bundle of rags.
Nor do they shy away from political remarks — side-swipes at the Republican Party, or condemnations of politics in general:
DNA shows I’m the Unknown Soldier.
I can’t hear the birds down here,
only politicians shitting out of their mouths.[…]
All those spin butchers drooling
public pus. Save your first
bullet for television.
Conversation of one sort or another is at the root of inspiration, in my experience. Though like most writers these days I rarely collaborate explicitly, and value solitude for the removal of distractions, I’d have a hard time writing if I couldn’t at least imagine an interlocutor. Ever since the Romantic era, we’ve imagined the lone artist as someone who takes inspiration direct and unmediated from Nature, but that’s nonsense: the cultural template comes first. I don’t think I’m at all unusual in needing often to read something before I write in order to prime the creative pump. Braided Creek has been that something more often than I can count.
We are in conversation with authors whenever we read, regardless of whether we’re writers ourselves. I mean, we let their voices into our heads. How more intimate can you get?
Suddenly my clocks agree.
One has stopped for several
months, but twice a day
they have this tender moment.
This past month, my poetry reading was wondrously improved by the addition of an interlocutor over Skype: a very active listener with uncommonly good short-term memory, whose comments on the poems I read were often more perceptive than my own — and she didn’t have the benefit of the text in front of her. Sharing the poems in this fashion, which I was able to do for at least part of about 2/3rds of the books I read, also made me more attentive to word music (or lack thereof).
This was such a successful experiment, in fact, that I think it’s more than likely we’ll make it a regular (weekly or bi-weekly) thing. In the short-term, though, blogging may be a bit light for the next couple of weeks, as the interlocutor will be gracing Plummer’s Hollow in person.
Watch/listen on YouTube (player shrunk here to minimize distracting and clichéd still images)
I stated a month ago that I wanted to vary my April poetry blogging with some reviews of audio and video texts, but somehow it’s April 30th already and the only non-book I’ve managed to review was that videopoem chapbook by David Tomaloff and Swoon Bildos. So let me include an appreciation of a cantata that I’ve loved for years, Fernando Lopes-Graça’s História Trágico-Marítima — one of my all-time favorite pieces of choral music. I’ve included a player for a YouTubed copy of the same performance I have on record, which is also available through Amazon, used. Gyula Németh conducts the Budapest Symphony Orchestra with Oliviera Lopes, baritone, and the Hungarian Radio Chorus. If, like me, you don’t know Portuguese, it probably won’t be too distracting to listen to the work while reading the rest of this post. Here’s the composer’s description from the liner notes in my LP:
From its formal standpoint the work is articulated as a seven-lieder cycle (following the order and number of the poems by Torga under the same heading), the first and last relating to each other both in material and expressive intentions, as prelude and epilogue of the plot. A kind of idée fixe or recurring theme somehow ensures the unity of the work.
While collaborations between poets and musicians may sometimes seem like an exciting new development of the digital era, they have of course been going on since the dawn of time — if it isn’t too artificial and ethnocentric to presume any fundamental separation between poetry and music in the first place. In the Western classical tradition, librettists haven’t always been recognized as the poets they are, but in this case, Miguel Torga is generally lauded as one of the two or three greatest Portuguese poets of the 20th century, nominated several times for the Nobel Prize — on a par with the composer, who’s similarly among the top three 20th-century Portuguese composers (and in my opinion the greatest). I collected the LP years ago out of enthusiasm for Lopes-Graça, buying up all six records available in a catalogue of international classical music that my brother Mark used to get in the mail. For years — in fact until I could research him on the internet — the name Miguel Torga meant nothing to me, and I still haven’t read any of his work aside from this seven-part poem, included with English and French translations in the liner notes.
The poetic sequence, however, I learned nearly by heart, reading the imperfect translation just often enough to internalize the approximate meaning of the Portuguese. I guess professional-level classical and opera singers do this all the time, though, don’t they — memorize or nearly memorize whole texts in languages they don’t really know, but learn to love through music. The addition of a tune makes it of course so much easier to remember poetic texts. I’ve struggled to memorize even the most regularly metered, end-rhyming poems, yet here I am lip-synching with the chorus:
Vinha de longe o mar…
Vinha de longe, dos confins do medo…
Mas vinha azul e brando, a murmurar
Aos ouvidos da terra o tal segredo…(From far away came the sea…
From far away, from the ends of fear she came…
But she came blue and gentle, whispering
that secret into the earth’s ear…)
There was a video going around last week on Facebook, produced by Oliver Sacks, that shows an elderly man stricken by dementia perk up and begin to speak in full sentences after listening to a few of his favorite songs from when he was young — he hadn’t spoken that much in years, they said. It seems the weave between music, language and memory is even tighter than anyone had imagined. If (God forbid) I ever get that way myself, listening to História Trágico-Marítima might very well help me remember who I am — an odd thought, considering my lack of connection to the country whose own identity and memory are so much at issue here. Miguel Torga’s poem derives its title and some of its material from an 18th-century book by Bernardo Gomes de Brito, an anthology of tales about shipwrecks and other disasters that had befallen Portuguese navigators. Torga’s poem is more than a simple retelling, though. As the liner notes by Nuno Barreiros put it (recasting somewhat the wretched English provided),
It is more of a meditative than an epic evocation of one of the greatest achievements in Portuguese history, presented in a non-triumphalist fashion and seen from an anti-colonialist point of view. Lyrical and dramatic elements merge in a literary style of vigorous strokes with allusions to the popular narrative. The sea is demystified, while preserving the lyrical quality proper to an evocation. Graça’s musical setting stays well within these lines, magnifying the deep universal resonances of the poem.
And I suppose it’s the way in which the sea symbolizes — or more than symbolizes, embodies longing that makes me catch my breath every time the music shifts from the stormy shipwreck in Part 6 to the calm of Part 7 and the chorus singing mar.
Sea!
You had a name no one feared:
It was a soft soil to till
Or some tempting lure…Sea!
You had the weeping of the sufferer
Who cannot either stop, or yell,
Or raise, or stifle the wailing…Sea!
We then went to you full of love!
And you were neither a soil for tilling
Nor a body wailing her pain!Sea!
Deceitful raucous sad mermaid!
It was you who came to seduce us.
And it was you who then betrayed us!
And I always get at least a lump in my throat when the music changes pitch for the last verse and the baritone’s voice rises to near the top of his range for the last two syllables, leaving the melody unresolved, his question hanging in the air:
Mar!
E quando terá fim o sofrimento!
E quando deixará de navigar
Sobre as ondas azuis o nossa pensamento!(Sea!
And when shall the suffering end?
And when on the blue waves
Shall our thoughts cease to sail?)
“História Trágico-Marítima” is an indictment of romanticism that doesn’t try to deny the allure of the romantic; I think that’s what appealed to me when I first heard it as a teenager, and it’s not surprising that I later learned to appreciate American blues music, which is similarly drenched in unsentimental sentiment. The poetic sequence appeared in Torga’s Poemas Ibéricos (Iberian Poems) from 1952, evidently a “reinterpretation of the collective past of Portugal as an Hispanic nation,” within which “História Trágico-Marítima” appears as “an original mythic-symbolic rereading of the Portuguese sea adventure, under the intertextual shadow of the homonym work by Bernardo Gomes de Brito and the shipwreck imagery coming from it.”
Ten year ago, when I was seized with the idea for a book-length anti-heroic poem about culture contact in what is now the American Southwest — Cibola — I think these poems must’ve influenced my decision to preserve the mystery about what really happened, why the Cibolans killed the African conquistador Esteban, and to simply present the reader with multiple alternatives. “O Regresso” (“The Return”), Part 4 of the cantata, features a blind bard who may or may not be telling the truth, and whose retellings seem to be influencing events themselves, as in the observer’s paradox.
The man scanned the horizon…
“Land, land, Captain…”
And the Mother knew no more:
Was it the man at the topsail,
Or the singing blind man?
“My soul is only God’s,
My body shall go to sea…”
And the Mother nodded her head
And waved with her hand…
“The devil burst with a bang,
The wind and sea abated.”
And when the blind man stopped
They were aground beaching the ship…
I love that. But more than anything, I love and acknowledge the lasting influence of Torga’s idea that the dream of being elsewhere is a dangerous thing, at the root of the colonial adventure. In fact, I’ve come to believe it’s the fundamental sickness of urban civilization. But that perhaps is an argument for another day.
Not Coming Back: 11 poems by Dale FavierWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
If you’re a reader of Dale Favier’s long-running blog mole as I am, you probably don’t have to think twice before ordering a new collection of his poems, because chances are very good you’ve already read them and know you’re in for a treat. This collection especially interested me because it was so unlike any other chapbook-length collection I’ve read in its design and execution. Nina Tovish, who blogs at Something Beautiful, used a service from Hewlett-Packard called MagCloud, set up to produce glossy paper and PDF magazines, and filled it with gorgeous photos chosen to play off Dale’s poems. The result is a poet’s fantasy of a magazine: no ads, no infographics or news notes, just “news that stays news” from front cover to back. Inevitably, some of the groupings of poems and photos work better for me than others, but all in all this is a happy-making booklet.
One interesting side-effect of presenting poems in this format so associated with a different kind of media, I find, is that any oddness in the text seems much more striking. “Spring,” for instance, almost shouts in its white text on a dark green page, and I’m like, whoa! Spring is pissed off.
The strength is coming
back into my hands, and the warmth is coming
back into the soil. Strange rooted things exult
and push into the air; tendrils
cinch on bricks and tear the mortar.Your houses are falling. Your cars
are sliding sideways down the drives;
Your marriages split like melons
dropped from a grocery bag.
I’m back. As if I’d never gone.
In one of my favorite pairings in the book, Nina placed a full-page photo of a riverbank after a flood, with scoured boulders and small trees festooned with dead weeds and grasses, opposite the poem “Clean and Pretty,” which begins:
It becomes familiar, the taste of a household
being dismantled. All its shifts revealed:
the squalid corners no guest ever sees …
Another imaginative conjunction: “Anna’s Hummingbird, Nesting” with a photo of a mimosa bloom, which suggests hummingbird motion and color and is simultaneously a bit nest-like — brilliant! And Dale describes the hummingbird fledgling like this:
She is the stylus of an etch-a-sketch,
the point of a glitter pen;
frantically motionless; hanging; the sky’s
avian crucifixion.
I find I like the fact that I can fold the booklet open at any point and flip it over to read it — something I suppose I could do with any saddle-stapled chapbook, but wouldn’t really want to for some reason (and it wouldn’t stay open if I did). I can roll it into a U-shape in one hand while carrying a mug of coffee in the other. What I’m saying is, the magazineness works for me. I got the PDF too, because it was bundled into the cost of the print edition, but since I don’t have a mobile device, it’s not very portable in that format. Considering how good the color reproduction is, it’s worth paying a few dollars extra for the tactility of the paper incarnation, I think.
The back cover features a macro of water drops on something very red, presumably flower petals, with a poem called “Mouse” superimposed in a cream-colored font. Somehow I missed this when he posted it to mole, but it’s one of the best penis poems I’ve seen. An interesting way to close a collection that begins with a poem about swearing off church, “Outside the Walls”:
Thank you for letting me in.
Thank you for letting me gaze
at your strange and bloody pictures.
Thank you too, Nina and Dale, for much the same thing. And thanks for, in a sense, redeeming the medium. So many magazines are filled with a kind of useless beauty, because who really wants to hold onto them? But it’s hard to throw out something so pretty, so there they sit on dusty shelves or in boxes in the attic. This is one magazine-like thing that I will keep, and add to my book collection, without a qualm.