Jam session

From time to time, people show up my house for a jam session.

Watch on Vimeo

My cousin Tony Bonta, a member of the up-and-coming Bald Mountain Band, and his fellow Baltimore-area musician Terry McBride stopped by Tyrone to pick up my brother Steve on their way to a Hillbilly Gypsies concert in northern Pennsylvania. They had just enough time for a quick jam session in Plummer’s Hollow.

This is a true jam in the sense that we hadn’t practiced anything together, and a couple of us were less than expert. Terry (who also plays a very credible banjo) is still learning the fiddle, and said he felt somewhat abashed about playing it in front of others but forces himself to anyway. Steve is an great frailer but hadn’t played some of these tunes in that style before, so was picking it up on the fly. I wasn’t going to join in on the harmonica but couldn’t help myself. (Note that I wasn’t intentionally hiding from the camera; there just wasn’t any way to fit us all into the frame without being a camera nazi and ordering everyone about.)

Regular readers will remember a podcast feature I did about these same three guys and their thoughts on banjo playing the last time they stopped by.

Because of my slow internet speed, it’s excruciating to try and upload too large a file, so I was very selective here — perhaps too selective. I wish now I’d included more of the two-banjo conversation between Tony and Steve. Because three-finger style players and frailers are in two separate, usually warring moieties (bluegrass vs. old-time), and because most bands only have one banjo player, one doesn’t hear this combination nearly often enough. I could’ve listened to it all afternoon.

Consequence

Already, the year cracks its spine further open
and the leaves let in more phosphor, more light—

Already, dreams turn down the alleys and shed
their delirium of pink petals on stone—

I’ve set into motion the ball that strikes
another at the end of a silver string—

And what will be will be, says the poem
that grows word by word into lines—

So eat, grain by pearled grain, of the pulp
that glistens and clings to the rind—

 

In response to small stone (204).

Dim-witted gods and the importance of poetry

God of Wednesday:

I think the brilliant character of the giant Utgard-Loki, with his wry attitude toward that little fellow Thor who “must be bigger than he looks,” is a stand-in for Snorri [Sturluson] himself. They share the same humorous tolerance of the gods. There is very little sense throughout the Edda that these were gods to be feared or worshipped, especially not the childish, naïve, blustering, weak-witted, and fallible Thor who is so easily deluded by Utgard-Loki’s wizardry of words. What god in his right mind would wrestle with a crone named “Old Age”? Or expect his servant-boy to outrun “Thought”?

It also fits with why Snorri wrote the Edda: to teach the 14-year-old king of Norway about Viking poetry. This story has a moral: See how foolish you would look, Snorri is saying to young King Hakon, if you didn’t understand that words can have more than one meaning, or that names can be taken literally? The story of Utgard-loki is, at heart, a story about why poetry matters.

Tracks

This entry is part 12 of 29 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2012-13

 

When I was seven I wanted to run away from home,
miserable child alone in her solitude while adults
hurled insults and knives and forks across
the breakfast table, or threatened to scald
each other with boiling water snatched
up from the stove. The neighbors craned
their necks toward the fence or peered
outright through windows to watch our
daily theatricals of grief. And where
did I think I was going when I packed a set
of clean handkerchiefs and my toothbrush
into a brown paper bag, unlatched the gate
that always was kept so guardedly close?
Not three blocks away, before I reached the end
of the street where it curved away into town,
a kindly neighbor recognized me: saw
my tearful, shuffling progress along the sidewalk,
asked gently if I needed help returning home…
After all these years I no longer remember exactly
how the incident resolved, only that we retraced
my small, fugitive steps back; and no one
had even noticed I had tried to go—

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Annotations

The quiet, broken by the muffled chiming of a clock—
Wet rag at edge of driveway, that used to be someone’s good shirt—
The square that fills with a sudden rush of shadows preceding
sunlight or wings—
The dream, returning after forty years, of flying above a linen sea—
The footprints stamped like trails upon the snow
that by evening have dissolved into regret and rain—
Here by the orchid spray is where you sat
looking past the garden gate, wife by your side
and hair not even grey—

 

In response to Morning Porch and small stone (203).

Twickenham

erasure of a page from Pepys' diary

[I went to Twickenham to sit
I went to Twickenham to think
alone in a closet
I played on my flageolet
till the bell-man came by with his bell
and left my wife and the maid a-washing still.]


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 16 January 1659/60.