The Best American Poetry

Sinatra sings "She's Funny That Way" & Ava sings "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man of Mine"

An Erotic Soundtrack for The Best American Erotic Poetry: The Movie [by Catherine Bowman]

A highly subjective list after looking over my CDs and albums. 

1. All six tracks on the self-titled Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane album

2. “The Very Thought of You” as sung by Billie Holiday or Albert Collins

3. The Canadian Nick Gilder’s pop hit “Hot Child in the City” on The City Nights album

4. “Salt Marie Celeste” from Nurse with Wound. A lost ghost ship at sea. 

5. Portishead’s Dummy

6. Arto Lindsay’s cover of “Simply Beautiful” on Mundo Cililizado

7. Neil Young’s song “Harvest Moon”

8. Gal Costa singing “Dindi." Lyrics by Tom Jobim

9. Tony Joe White’s “Rainy Night in Georgia" as covered by Shelby Lynn.

10. Black Angels. Passover 

11. “Too Marvelous for Words,” lyrics by Johnny Mercer

  as recorded by Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra

12. Stevie Wonder’s song “As (Wonder)” from Songs in the Key of Life

13. Prince’s “If I was your Girlfriend”

14. All of the Sarah Vaughn in Hi-Fi album

*

Ok. Better stop now, though I did leave out my recordings of cheetahs purring.

Any additions?  Favorite make-out music or erotic soundtracks? 

Or what songs would you bring to a dirty song/dirty martini/clean underwear

 party? 

from the archives; originally published February 11, 2008

On Helen Forrest's birthday, "I remember you"

I always think of FDR's death on  April 12 but here's something nice to think about: Helen Forrest (nee Fogel) was born today.  Here she sings a Johnny Mercer lyric:

and wait till you hear this dame sing "Skylark" and "All the Things You Are." -- DL

Over the Moon and Back Again [by Heidi Seaborn]

In an MFA workshop last summer, an acclaimed poet declared that the moon was over, that it had been over used and needed to be relegated to the poetry graveyard with ravens and heart. Just like that. Done. The MFAs took note. No more moons.

But I’m not yet ready to yield the moon. Instead I find myself now obsessed with it, guarding it from extinction. Like Diana, I hunt for moon references. Pounce on moon sightings. I keep an eye on the moon when it rises at night, as it lingers in the sky by day. I wane as it wanes, I am filled by its fullness. When a Super Moon blasts a hole in the night sky, I can’t look away, letting its spotlight hold me, entranced. I’m not alone. Google the recent Super Blood Wolf Moon and you’ll find over 55 million results. For one moon, on one night.

When the moon eclipsed the sun a couple of years ago, the world looked up in wonder. The poets wrote. It’s cultural. Remember moon pies and Michael Jackson performing The Moonwalk? It’s historical. Remember Neil Armstrong’s real walk on the moon? Or just watch First Man and pretend you were alive then.

In fact, the moon stars in nearly 1,000 movies according to IMDb. We croon to the moon, whether we are music fans of Oscar Peterson, Neil Young or Pink Floyd. Amazon lists over 20,000 albums and 60,000 books with moon in their titles. On poets.org, there are 107 pages of moon references. The poet Lillo Way has a prize-winning chapbook Dubious Moon [Slapering Hol Press] that is nothing but moon poems. Here’s one from Way’s book that captures the sensuality of the moon, its powerful draw:

Frame the Moon

Furred out, cased, paned and trimmed,
the opening of a window.

From my position here on the floor
in supine half-spinal twist,

my quarter-revolving eye catches
a perfectly sliced-in-half moon centered

in the upper right corner of the upper
left pane of a window blued by a sky

somewhere between baby-boy daytime
and electric-transvestite midnight –

the perfect globe cleavered by
a celestial butcher-boy –

the first half of hope, not the last,
depending, I suppose, on your viewing point,

mine being spine suppliant to floor,
floor kissing earth and holding the kiss,

earth sucking me hard, the half-moon
mullioned and muntined,

one four-millionth of a light-year away,
beaming me up and off from here –

half an inkling that, when the bones wave
their white phalanges of surrender

to whatever pulls us down – some unthing,
some weightless, scentless, tasteless,

wan thing, draws me up into a moon’s
glowy, showy, half-assed bliss.

 

The moon rules the tides of our oceans, of women’s bodies. It may orbit our earth, but we are in its powerful cosmic sway. Even Brenda Shaughnessy’s poem “I’m Over the Moon” [Human Dark with Sugar, Copper Canyon Press] where the moon is dismissed as: “A kind of ancient/date-rape drug” and “It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band./Better off alone” acknowledges it is the lover we can’t ever truly leave. Maybe we are destined to howl at the moon in our poems, to shoot past cliché to discover the ancient and constant inspiration of our one and only moon.

Dmitri Shostakovich -- Waltz no. 2 [with quotes from the composer]

"When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something."

"If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth."

"What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn't laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in 'serious' music."

Keep your eyes wide shut while listening to this waltz . . .

 

 

"It Had to Be You" (music Isham Jones, lyrics Gus Kahn)

One of the top ten love songs in anybody's book; as sung by Dick Haymes and Helen Forrest) -- DL

 

Come Rain, Come Shine, This Time or Some Other: a perfect division of labor [by David Lehman]

On Valentine's Day, the day before Harold Arlen's birthday, the day after Eileen Farrell's birthday, listen to this song with

Music by Harold Arlen
Lyrics by Johnny Mercer
Vocals by Eileen Farrell
Instrumentals by Leonard Bernstein

then follow with the same duo doing "Some Other Time
((lyrics Comden and Green, music Bernstein) 

There is No Final Word [by Vincent Katz]

For my final Guest Author post (already!) I am going to do a survey of things I see around my desk that are inspiring me as I look out the windows at water dripping off pendulous icicles and streaks of shadows and dying sun on the softening snow.

First off, there is Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), in which Carson makes a representation of the classical text in its original language. She makes the fragmentary textual condition palpable. Many ancient poems come to us from papyruses that have been irreparably torn, resulting in the loss of words, lines, stanzas. Other fragments come to us in citations from later authors. Unlike most previous translators, who chose to translate only poems of Sappho’s that approach or can be made to emulate a complete state, Carson translated all the fragments we have. In her introduction, Carson writes:

In translating I tried to put down all that can be read of each poem in the plainest language I could find, using where possible the same order of words and thoughts as Sappho did. I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through. This is an amiable fantasy (transparency of self) within which most translators labor.

Carson is funny when discussing the uses to which poetry may be put by grammarians and pedants. We possess one of Sappho’s lines because someone named Apollonios Dyskolos in the second century CE cited it in his treatise On Conjunctions. The line is, “Do I still long for my virginity?” What a fantastic line! And how tantalizing not to have the rest of the poem.

She even goes on to that most remote category all classicists are familiar with, alternately delighting and despairing: when a song of Sappho’s is referred to but not quoted. In this category is a famous line from Solon recounted by Stobaios:

Solon of Athens heard his nephew sing a song of Sappho’s over the wine and since he liked the song so much he asked the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked why, he said, So that I may learn it and then die.

Carson writes, “As acts of deterrence these stories carry their own kind of thrill—at the inside edge where her words go missing, a sort of antipoem that condenses everything you ever wanted her to write…”

The Solon story reminds us that Sappho, as most ancient Greek and Roman poets, was a musician as well as a lyricist. In addition to her poems, she is credited with inventing the plectrum and the Mixolydian mode.

Carson’s translation of fragment 118 reads in its entirety:

yes! radiant lyre speak to me

become a voice

Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion, first published in 1903, helped to introduce a much more various method of understanding the ancient Greek world. She was one of the first to examine pre-Olympian cults and rituals, extending the study of mythology farther into the past and comparing it to similar patterns in diverse cultures.

Harrison’s words and her demonstrations of a shift from female- to male-centered religion resonate today:

To the primitive matriarchal Greek Pandora was then a real goddess, in form and name, of the Earth, and men did sacrifice to her. By the time of Aristophanes she had become a misty figure, her ritual archaic… Pandora is in ritual and matriarchal theology the earth as Kore, but in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely changed and minished. She is no longer Earth-born, but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus… Hesiod loves the story of the Making of Pandora: he has shaped it to his own bourgeois, pessimistic ends… To Zeus, the archpatriarchal bourgeois, the birth of the first woman is but a huge Olympian jest… Such myths are a necessary outcome of the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy…

Denys Page’s 1959 book, History and the Homeric Iliad, like similar books in this University of California Press series by E.R. Dodds and Hugh Lloyd-Jones, derives from the Sather Lectures he gave at UC Berkeley in 1957. Attempting to analyze the historical basis of the epics, he writes the following about the so-called dark ages in Greece after the end of the Mycenean era:

Towards the end of this period of eclipse a single voice was uplifted loud and passionate enough to ring through the ages. On the summit of a stony, rugged hill near Mount Helicon, among the untrodden ways, stood the joyless hamlet of Ascra—a bad place in winter, and disagreeable in summer, according to old farmer Hesiod. The earliest Greek personality known to us since the Mycenaean era, he tells us what he and others thought of the times in which they lived—not only the immediate present, but all the years since the age of heroes ended. And the emphasis falls not so much on the material as on the spiritual degeneration of Greece.

In order to best comprehend poems from Classical antiquity, it is necessary to consult the comprehensive commentaries that are periodically published to accompany specific authors. In the case of Hesiod, two massive publications by Martin Litchfield West (1937-2015) are essential reading. They are Theogony Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1966) and Works & Days Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1978). West brings a seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of manuscripts, Greek and Latin literature of all periods, usages in all of Homer and all other Greek poets. In addition, he was one of the first Western scholars to study systematically parallels and predecessors in Babylonian, Hittite, Jewish, and Egyptian traditions, not to mention relevant later parallels.

We’ll leave this week’s final words to him. Here is West on Theogony:

When I say that Hesiod’s narrative is more condensed than Homer’s, I do not mean that he never says a word more than he need. His brevity is a brevity of thought, not of language… The most important and not the least remarkable fact about the dialect of Hesiod’s poems is that it is essentially the same as that of Homer…

Written language was a recent importation to Greek culture when Homer’s and Hesiod’s poems achieved the forms in which we have them now. In his intro to his Works and Days commentary, West writes this on Hesiod’s compositional process:

It is not to be supposed that having written a poem down Hesiod ceased to recite it, or that he abstained from reciting it in the middle of writing it down. With the work growing by stages, each activity may at times have run ahead of the other. After composing a passage in his mind he might either recite it to people before he wrote it or write it before he recited it. There is no reason why it should make a visible difference to our text. What he recited, however, would probably be closer to the written version when he had already written it than before, because the act of writing or slowly dictating a particular version must inevitably have tended to impress it on his memory. In the end, then, he was probably reciting a multipartite poem much like what he left in writing.

Except no! Keeping to our theme of song as poetry, we’ll end with Eric von Schmidt (1931-2007), a singer-songwriter who inspired Dylan in the early days (and whose album The Folk Blues of Eric von Schmidt appears on the cover of Dylan’s seminal Bringing It All Back Home, among other culturally significant detritus). Von Schmidt has a heart-breaking intensity to some of his vocal performances. It is so on his haunting version of “Fair and Tender Ladies,” written by Maybelle Carter of the Carter sisters. But in true folk tradition, von Schmidt invents lyrics to add to Carter’s. And in that, he is right in the tradition of the rhapsodes of Homer and Hesiod’s time. See you at the intersection of Song and Word!

The Poetry of Rock'n'Roll [by Vincent Katz]

Aaron Johnson as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy (2009)

“I was writing poetry and singing since she [his aunt Mimi, with whom he lived] had me. All the time I used to fight and say, 'Look, I'm an artist, don't bug me with all this maths. Don't try and make me into a chemist or a vet, I can't do it.' I used to say, 'Don't you destroy my papers.' I'd come home when I was fourteen and she'd rooted all my things and thrown all my poetry out. I was saying, 'One day I'll be famous and you're going to regret it. I'd seen these poems around, the sort you read to give you a hard-on. I'd wondered who wrote them and thought I'd try one myself. Mimi found it under my pillow. I said I'd been made to write it out for another lad who couldn't write very well. I'd written it myself, of course. When I did any serious poems, like emotional stuff later on, I did it in secret handwriting, all scribbles, so that Mimi couldn't read it.” — John Lennon, The Beatles Anthology

I am listening to Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott’s performance of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” on WQXR. It’s Schubert’s birthday, and also Philip Glass’s. And I am thinking that John Lennon’s song “Julia” is as good as Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” They both rely on an ostinato pattern, and they are about the same length. Schubert used a pre-existing text; Lennon wrote his own ode to his mother, who may have been bi-polar and with whom he had a complicated but very meaningful relationship.

I am trying to learn to play “Julia” on the guitar. So I am watching a YouTube tutorial (props to my son Isaac, who has learned to play largely via YouTube tutorials combined with his dedication and skill!). The instructor makes a good point. To the casual listener, “Julia” flows along easily as anything, giving the impression that Lennon is lightly strumming the guitar, and allowing the listener to focus on the highly evocative lyrics. But when you start to break down what he is actually playing, first of all it is an impressive technical performance, and second, as often with the Beatles, songs that sound simple reveal harmonic complexities in their chord choices and rhythms.

The point is, you might never have known this — though somewhere you feel it, listening to the song — had you not taken the time to learn in depth what this great artist has actually done to create the effect. And this is quite like the process of translation. Translating takes you deeper inside something, where, hopefully, there can be a moment in which you gain a greater respect for another artist’s work.

Coincidentally, while I am working on my translations of Hesiod’s poems, some poems of mine are making their ways into other languages. I wrote a poem for Nicolas Leong and Judy Chung’s project of combining Nicolas’s photographs of Italian sites with texts by contemporary writers. Here is the poem:

Better at finding pleasure
That and that one, they
Look down over city
See near windows lit up

A life in each, a Rome
The winter moon haloed
Distant desires, some fulfilled
Would there be time?

Bells roll in, assurance
A trunk cracked, cut in logs
A garden to repair to
That and a figment of light

Nicolas and Judy wanted a translation into Italian, as they will be presenting this project in Rome, so I reached out to Brunella Antomarini, an Italian critic and translator, who, with the help of painter Donna Moylan, turned around the translation in a couple of days. It was interesting to me, receiving their translation, as it caused me to think more deeply about my own poem. For the phrase “Bells roll in,” they used the phrase Partono le campane. I knew that partire is the Italian verb for “to leave, depart,” but I did not know that it can be used for the beginning of something, music for example. While I was learning that, I wrote to Brunella that the phrase “Bells roll in” is meant to evoke that moment when the church bells start to ring, from various churches. It should evoke those moments in the day or night (in this case) when that happens. But also, the phrase itself, “rolls in,” is used, for example, to describe mist or fog coming in to cover a previously clear situation. So, the idea here is that bells have a physical quality that starts to come in to the situation of the poem. It’s different from just saying, “Bells start to ring” or “I hear bells” or “I begin to hear bells.”

And now I am seeing everything as translation. Going back to the Beatles, in the beginning they were translating the sounds and poetry of Little Richard, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and others. There’s a terrific bio pic, Nowhere Boy (2009), directed by photographer and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson, about John Lennon’s teenage years, the period when he discovered music, met Paul McCartney and George Harrison, formed The Quarrymen, and started performing and writing songs. It stars Aaron Johnson as Lennon, Kristin Scott Thomas as his aunt Mimi, and Anne-Marie Duff as his mother, Julia. The film too is act of translation, bringing a story, of which there are only tantalizing glimpses in photographs and interviews, to life.

Finally, another act of translation at the intersection of music and poetry for which I remain eternally grateful. For a number of years, while he was director of Young People’s and Family Concerts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, David Amram led a group called The Beatles Magical Orchestra. They faithfully recreated, with exactitude and loving enthusiasm, some of the Beatles’ later, more complex songs. You can find them all on YouTube. Here is my favorite, their recreation of “I Am The Walrus.”

They even include a different radio recording of the bit from the end of King Lear! It is beautifully filmed, allowing the viewer to focus on individual contributions.

Poetry You Can Dance To [by Vincent Katz]

I’ve been thinking, looking out at the bright snow that fell all day yesterday, knowing that the temperatures will be in the teens for the next three days, how music is always such an integral part of poetry. After dinner last night, someone mentioned having heard a performance of Ancient Greek music. Only a couple of scraps of notation survive, and it is not at all clear how to interpret those. Greek and Roman music is essentially lost to us as to how it was composed. On the other hand, from visual depictions and accounts by ancient authors, we know quite a bit about the kinds of instruments they had and the uses to which music was put in society.

Music accompanied just about every social activity in ancient Greece, from religious ceremonies to athletic spectacles, to private dinner parties, known as symposia, because everyone drank together, to funerals. And it is safe to say that music probably accompanied most, if not all, presentations of poetry. Epic poetry was recited by professional rhapsodes, who travelled from place to place, giving performances of selected episodes from the epics. Those performers were also known as aoidoi, or singers. Lyric poetry gets its name from the tortoise-shell lyre that was played to accompany it. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, grew out of the choral dithyrambs, which were dedicated to Dionysos. Music and dance formed essential elements of Greek tragedy and comedy.

So it’s only natural that we should continue to associate poetry and music. For myself personally, I’ve always thought that popular song of any genre is a form of poetry. Everybody needs poetry, and everybody gets it. Most people get it from songs. Which leaves me thinking about poetry per se. Why did it separate from music, and where does that leave it? Poetry seems stranded in some sparsely populated zone, where some people light up at the sound of it or read it peacefully by a window, but where often it is met with complete incomprehension, even by those interested in the other arts.

What should poets do about this state of affairs, if anything? Should they simply listen to their own playlists, as everyone does, go to their own concerts? Should they try to dosomething with poetry, to bring it back into contact with music and movement and the stage? I believe that they can and should. Collaboration, as a process, is always fruitful, and the results of such experimentation can be spellbinding.

To a certain extent, though, these questions are rhetorical. Poetry is what it is, and those who need it will find it somewhere. Gregory Corso spoke of being a poet as a higher calling, or at least a level of verbal composition not achievable elsewhere. He made a point of denying that Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison were poets. I think he is right to make a distinction between what we call poetry and what we call song lyrics, and I applaud his pride in being a poet, which I also share, but I would argue that musicians who use lyrics intelligently use them in a way that makes them a form of poetry.

It doesn’t change the fact that poetry is out in the woods somewhere. People don’t line up around the block for it — most of the time. There are certain poets who have that star attraction, and they do pull in crowds. Partially, that is because they have branched out into other areas. Often fiction, or some other form of writing, will reach a larger audience, which can then be drawn in to the poetry. But really, it’s a quality in the poet herself (the poets I am thinking of with this star quality are all women). It’s about hitting the times with something they needed without necessarily knowing it. And then poetry makes it to the pedestal reserved for more popular forms. It’s exciting to see, and a reminder of what poetry can achieve.

But still I am fascinated by the relationship of poetry to music. Somewhere in it, music must live. It’s there for us, as poets and readers, to find. And then, maybe, we can dance.

[Image: Wall fresco of a seated woman with a kithara, 40-30 BC, from the Villa Boscoreale of P. Fannius Synistor; late Roman Republic.]

It's Roy Eldridge Day! [by Sean Singer]

Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Hill, Minton's Playhouse, New York, N.Y., c. Sept. 1947

    January 30th is Roy Eldridge Day. Eldridge was a major innovator in jazz trumpet, and his concept shows how jazz developed. He was born in 1911 in Pittsburgh, an industrial city with an important jazz history, into a middle-class / upper-middle-class African-American family, and he was the key figure in the development of jazz trumpet between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. He died at 78 in 1989.
        Notoriously competitive, and ferocious on his chosen instrument, Eldridge was nicknamed by Ellington’s saxophonist Otto Hardwick (pronounced with a long O sound)— “Little Jazz” because of the juxtaposition of his ferocity and size. Because he was a major Swing Era figure, who nonetheless was a stylistic precursor to BeBop, Eldridge is sometimes thought of as a transitional figure between stylistic eras (not unlike the transition between Romanticism and Modernism in poetry); however, he was his own thing.
         Eldridge was a child prodigy, beginning as a six year-old on drums (who buys a six year old a set of drums?) and though he dropped out of high school, practiced trumpet as a teenager between eight and nine hours a day, and was playing professionally from 16. He moved to New York in 1930 and played in many Harlem dance bands. His rhythmic power and virtuosity in the upper register of the trumpet made him a star. In the 1930s he joined the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, and recorded, with the tenor saxophone specialist Chu Berry “Christopher Columbus”
        He made some important recordings in 1935 with Billie Holiday and the pianist Teddy Wilson such as “Miss Brown to You”, also a glorious example of Holiday at her peak powers or “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”.

        In April 1941, though he received many offers from white big bands, Eldridge joined Gene Krupa’s Orchestra and made some recordings with the vocalist Anita O’Day. They can be seen in a short film known as a “soundie” singing their infectious, novelty duet, “Let Me Off Uptown,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8yaW6BluwY) perhaps their most well-known effort.
Although he was the featured soloist in these big bands, the racial segregation in the apartheid South created many terrible racial incidents that affected him. Artie Shaw, for example, said: “Droves of people would ask him for his autograph at the end of the night, but later, on the bus, he wouldn't be able to get off and buy a hamburger with the guys in the band.”
        After Krupa was arrested for marijuana possession in 1943, Eldridge tried, albeit unsuccessfully to form his own big band where he recorded “Heckler’s Hop” which shows how he influenced the development of BeBop. In the post-war years he joined Norman Granz’s tours of the Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts, toured France with Benny Goodman, and led a band at Birdland in New York City.
        In 1960 he joined the Jazz Artist’s Guild, a group that briefly existed in Newport, Rhode Island, and was formed by the business and musical partners Charles Mingus and Max Roach, and they recorded “Mysterious Blues” with the Newport Jazz Rebels. In the 1970s he performed regularly at Jimmy Ryan’s club on West 54th Street, but after a heart attack in 1980, he stopped played altogether.
        Roy Eldridge’s competitiveness and sticktoitiveness made him more than just a precursor to Dizzy Gillespie, and the revolution known as BeBop; he was an effective transmitter of his own style and personality during a the Swing Era, the time when jazz music was the most popular form of entertainment in the United States.
    In terms of poetry, the question of how to get one’s own voice across, particularly when emotional intensity and technical skill are valued, is especially anxiety-producing. In other words, how can you be more like yourself, and less like everybody else? Maybe some close listening to this music can steer us in the right direction.

Starting tonight at midnight and continuing all day tomorrow, Jan. 30th, for 24 hrs. it's the Roy Eldridge birthday broadcast on WKCR.

Sean Singer is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; and Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015)

What's So Interesting About Works and Days? [by Vincent Katz]

I am on a train on my way up to Yaddo, where I'll be for the next three weeks. Last time I was up there, it was also February. I like it in winter, when the isolation is increased. A certain kind of person is attracted to that extreme. That other time, I wrote a poem for the people I met there, who impressed me with their dedication to their art. It’s called “The February People.” I’m curious who will be there this time.

While I look at the snow on the tracks and the ice in the river, I am listening to The Beatles’ Anthology 1collection. I’ve also been reading about why Pete Best was fired. Apparently, it was a combination of his playing ability, his lack of a sense of humor, and his refusal to comb his hair forward. It is interesting to think about the Beatles' Hamburg period. They did three stints there over a two-year period, and it was there, over many hours of club playing, that they honed their arrangements and their commitment to the lifestyle.

There has always been a connection between poetry and music. To paraphrase Mr. Pound, if you can’t dance to it, it can’t be very good.

I’ll be working on a few things up at Yaddo. One is a translation of Hesiod’s poem Works and Days. I’ve now finished his Theogonyand hope to get close to finishing Works and Days during these weeks away. Works and Days is 828 lines long. I’ve got about 600 to go.

When I finished my translations of Sextus Propertius, I decided I wanted to go back to Greek poetry, as it forms such an undeniable basis for the Roman poets. Almost all they wrote — in terms of the genres, the ideas, the mythology — comes from Greek poetry. Of course, the great Roman poets altered and innovated, and in at least one case — satire — they invented. But to understand Roman poetry, you have to know Greek poetry, and poetry only truly lives in its original language. The translation of a poem into poetry in another language is the creation of a new poem based on the original.

So, I pondered for a long time. Archilochos, Kallimachos, Sappho, Alkaios — they all hold enticements — but I finally decided on Hesiod. I was most fascinated by the Theogony, as I wanted to delve more deeply into Greek mythology. I’ve always had a hard time keeping it straight — who has had sex with whom, which gods or demigods are the offspring of which parents, and in which versions, as Greek and Roman writers famously invented or sought out variants to suit their purposes.

There was another reason for choosing Hesiod. He is so highly regarded among ancient poets, and yet the existing translations into English make him sound terribly dull. I was certain Propertius, among many others, wouldn’t have had time for a dull poet, not matter how edifying. I had a hunch there was more to Hesiod than met the eye. Certainly, it wasn’t only for genealogies and information on early Greek agricultural practices that he was praised so highly.

And so it proved to be. I found, translating the Theogony, a spicy wit and a collage-like element. The latter may be partially because Hesiod is so early (he is considered a contemporary of Homer’s by contemporary scholars), and there may have been interpolations by early readers and editors. But I think some of the shifts of subject and narrative are native to the poet. His poems are in the epic form; they are in dactylic hexameter and rely on the Ionic dialect associated with epic. But they can be considered non-heroic in aspect. Hesiod is the first Western poet to mention himself by name and to discuss his family background and current situation, giving him a good claim to being the first personal poet.

On coming to the end of my translation of the Theogony, I decided to take the plunge and translate the same poet’s Works and Days, as I would thereby have in my hand a translation of Hesiod’s entire extant work. I embarked with less enthusiasm than I had on the previous poem, but something strange happened. My hunch came into play again. I am finding this poem thoroughly enjoyable as a work of writing.

The poet’s attitude towards women is of course a problem, but we shouldn’t fail to investigate an artist because of their personal failings, no matter how egregious or disturbing. Within his own limitations, as well as those of his time and place, he is a remarkable artist, and I am grateful for this opportunity to examine his poetics in detail — his word choices, his use of adverbial phrases, his development of the longer poem. It is inspiring me to write something longer, and that is that best thing that can result from translating, or from reading — the desire to go to the keyboard or notebook and embark on a new attempt at writing poetry.

Make Believe: Several Ways [Happy birthday, Jerry Kern]

"Get that ice or else no dice" R.I.P. Carol Channing 1921-2019

January 10: Swing along with Max Roach [by Sean Singer]

Max Roach (c) Herman Leonard, 1954

    Though it doesn’t appear on any calendar, January 10th is Max Roach Day. He was born in Great Dismal Swamp, North Carolina in 1924, but moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn when he was 4. He died August 16, 2007 at 83. Max Roach was a percussionist, composer, bandleader, and a virtuoso on the American jazz drum kit, which is multiple percussion on a single instrument.

            Max Roach was one of those singular people who, to paraphrase Phil Schaap, “was essential to making others’ music sound better and his music sound best.” He was on Stan Getz’s first recording, Miles Davis’s first recording, and the first recordings of the innovation called Be-Bop. An innovator of percussion, Roach shows the drummer’s responsibility, which is to swing.

            Seeing Roach live, which I was fortunate to do a handful of times, was a thrill. He sometimes played with wire brushes and a single snare drum, and was able to create the most harmonic and musical sound in the world that was mesmerizing; you simply lost all awareness of everything outside of whatever he was doing on stage.

            Roach appears on the most important Charlie Parker records, for example the November 26, 1945 recordings on Savoy such as “Now’s the Time” :

 
In 1954 he formed an important quintet with trumpeter Clifford Brown, heard doing magic on the standard “Cherokee,” which demonstrates Roach’s imagination and quick timing.

            When Brown was killed in a car crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1956, Roach was devastated both personally and musically. But he somehow picked up the pieces and formed a new band first with trumpeter Kenny Dorham and later trumpeter Booker Little, heard here on “Cliff Walk”:

            During the political changes in American society that happened in the 1960s, Roach emerged as an innovator again: there is no musician who more addressed the social concerns of progressive thought to freedom. He recorded explicitly political music We Insist! with his then-wife Abbey Lincoln, for example  singing “Driva Man”:

            In what remains a high water mark in the expression of not just jazz, but in all of music, in 1962 Roach recorded “Fleurette Africaine” with Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus:

            In later decades, he performed some pretty extraordinary duets with Anthony Braxton while continuing the solo concerts that I mentioned earlier. He formed an innovative trio that experimented with the Chinese erhu player Jeibing Chen, and did some interesting collaborations with dance companies such as Alvin Ailey.

            Roach’s genius showed, among other things, the suspension of time. By changing the role of the drums from mere timekeeping to music-making, he was not only the driving force behind the swing element in Be-Bop, but because of his idea to shift the pulse of drums from the bass drum to the ride cymbal, was able to create a more flexible or fluid texture to the music.

            In terms of poetry, there are a few lessons I think Roach’s music gives: 1. Always be yourself in your writing. To paraphrase the comedian Bill Hicks, "if you’re yourself, no one else can be you, so you have supply and demand taken care of." 2. Use silence and not just your words to create meaning. Part of form, especially in free verse, is to create these meanings from silence, which is white space. 3. Jazz is about choosing to be joyful in spite of conditions. We must choose poetry every day, not as an academic exercise or historical artifact, but as a way of living.

(Note: Tune-in to or stream WKCR on Thursday January 10th for the 24-hour Max Roach birthday broadcast.)

Sean Singer is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; and Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015).

Ain't that a kick in the head: Dean Martin Died on Christmas Day (1995)

 

 

Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra Collaborate on "How About You" [on TD's Birthday]

I like potato chips, moonlight, and motor trips. . .on TD's birthday ( November 27).

 

Roy Hargrove Dead at Forty-Nine [by David Lehman]

The most talented trumpeter
of his generation,
who played
for us in Albany,
used to hang out
at Smalls, that
low-ceilinged cellar
near us where
he proved he could sing,
a bonus,
because we came for his trumpet
“Whisper Not,”
and when Cyrille Aimée sings “Love for Sale”
and he plays, it’s as if
he’s Coltrane to her Johnny Hartman

"Let's Get Lost" with Cyrille Aimee

 You've heard Chet Baker's take on these lovely Frank Loesser lyrics. Now listen to Ms. AImee. -- DL

 

 

Dee Dee Bridgwater, "Ne Me Quitte Pas": magnifique! [by David Lehman]

Ce chanson est meilleur en francais. La version americaine, "If you Go Away," traduit par Rod McKuen, est beaucoup moins satisfaisant. Dee Dee Bridgewater, qui est nee a Flint, Michigan mais a passe un an a France (ou elle a joue Sally Bowles dans une version francaise de "Cabaret"), hits it out of the park. The video below is excellent, or try this one. Thank you, Rhonda Hamilton of "Real Jazz," for bringing this amazing recording to my attention. My keyboard has no accent marks so please, dear reader, supply the accents aigues where needed. --  DL