The Best American Poetry

"Tea for Two" on Art Tatum's Birthday (10/ 13)

 

Tea for Two (10 / 13/ 22)

Bessame Mucho

 

If I Loved You. . .

Happy anniversary, Stacey!

 

Ain't that a Kick in the Head [Dean Martin sings three great songs]

Charles Ives's "Charlie Rutlage" sung by Marni Nixon

There's no business like show business. . .

 

"Schubert's Unfinished" [in "Literary Matters"]

Schubert’s Unfinished

Shall I devote a poem to the fragment, the unfinished?

Yes, because each thing is a fragment

and some works were meant to be unfinished

like Schubert’s Unfinished, my prime example

of the aesthetic of incompleteness,

or Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” its sublime ending

belying the fable of the poem’s composition,

an opium dream. Nor shall we overlook

the slaves of Michelangelo, encased in marble,

Shelley’s exit line (“ ‘Then what is Life?’ I cried”)

and Kafka’s novels, which begin everywhere

and end nowhere, as if no ending were equal

to the nothingness at the end of the rainbow,

the wall too high to climb at the end of the walk.

-- David Lehman

Schubert's unfinished" is one of "Three Aesthetic Questions" published  in "Literary Matters."
For the other two poems, click here: https://www.literarymatters.org/16-1-three-aesthetic-questions/

A Toast to Luciano Berio's "Sinfonia," 3rd movement / and the scherzo of Mahler's 2nd symphony

Greatness - the scherzo of Mahler's second symphony ("the Resurrection") with superimposed words culled from Beckett and others. . . .With great thanks to Lewis Saul, who introduced me to this music. -- DL

and here is the scherzo without the words:

Great soundtracks: "Street Scene" by Alfred Newman

"Street Scene" by Alfred Newman

Also note "How Abut You??" by Burton Lane (music) and Ralph Freed (words): "I like New York in June, / How about you?"  Also, the Rodgers & Hart classic "Blue Moon"
See also this article on great movie soundtracks. https://theamericanscholar.org/great-movie-music/#.Xqhe4f9KiM8

The late John Tranter on Ira Gershwin [on the day George died]

That's George Gershwin, on the left, with his older brother, Ira Gershwin, who wrote the words not only for George's songs but -- especially after George's untimely death on July 11,1937 -- for songs by Jerome Kern ("Long Ago and Far Away"), Vernon Duke ("I Can't Get Started"), and Harold Arlen (The Man That Got Away"). As John Tranter, in his review of Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist by Philip Furia (Oxford University Press), puts it, the Gershwins and their confreres "took America’s dreams and set them to music." Here is the rest of Tranter's review.

<<

Shelley claimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but then Shelley was mad. Poets have missed out on the law courts, but they have carved a comfortable niche for themselves in the business of advice to the lovelorn. In the modern world, rhymers have set the rules for popular emotions, especially when young folks’ fancies turn to thoughts of love.

Poetry of course is everywhere, and has been since the invention of radio: vibrating through the walls of our homes and over the oceans, amplitude or frequency modulating waves in the radio spectrum to the tunes of popular songs and ads for hair cream, and squealing from a thousand Walkmans.

Most of these song lyrics are drivel. The Romantic poet Keats set a bad example by rhyming ‘moon’ and ‘June’ in his poem ‘Endymion’, and it’s been downhill ever since. ‘Sun’ and ‘fun’ are generally the best it gets these days, as the Beach Boys remind us. But it’s not all rubbish. Much of this writing was cleverly done, especially in the twenties and thirties, and the best of it had a special sparkle.

New York between the wars was America’s equivalent of the Elizabethan Age: exciting, dangerous, filled with the discovery of exotic art, music and literature. Dorothy Parker and the wits of the Algonquin ‘round table’ were popular among the clever set, but much more widely popular among every set were musicians like the gifted George Gershwin and songwriters like his inventive older brother Ira.

They took America’s dreams and set them to music — George produced the tune, Ira crafted the words. They collaborated on hundreds of songs — by the time Ira died in 1983 he had written more than 700, including But Not For Me, Fascinating Rhythm, I Can’t Get Started, I Got Rhythm, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, Love Walked In, Shall We Dance, Someone to Watch over Me, and They Can’t Take That Away From Me.

There were plenty of turkeys, too — songs like Uh-Uh, Blah Blah Blah, Please Send My Daddy Back to My Mother, The Gazooka, and I’m a Poached Egg.

Ira was born Israel Gershvin in 1896. The family, Russian immigrants originally named Gershovitz, changed their name to Gershvin when they arrived in America (and to Gershwin later, when George had his first hit under that name.) They lived at various addresses in Manhattan as the father moved from one business to another.

Ira was a clever boy —  he won a scholarship to Townsend Harris Hall, a high school for bright kids from the Lower East Side. But when the family bought a piano, it was George — likeable, impulsive and energetic — who got to play it. Ira was the shy and thoughtful one — family friends said he was usually to be found standing a little to one side, out of the limelight, browsing through a book.

The teaching of English has so degenerated these days that it’s hard to believe that Ira’s school curriculum included a rigorous training in classical verse forms such as the ballad, the triolet, the rondeau, the villanelle and the sonnet, but it did.

In the first decades of the century the daily newspapers in New York were full of poetry too: there were columns devoted to light verse, and often a theatre review or sports notice would be written in couplets or quatrains. Ira used to cut out his favourite poems and pasting them into a scrapbook, and imitate them in his school magazine. He was soon buying anthologies of verse, and eventually owned more than two hundred volumes. He drew on all that knowledge for his songs.

In an introduction to Lyrics on Several Occasions, a 1959 collection of his work, Ira wrote ‘resemblance to actual poetry, living or dead, is highly improbable.’ Maybe; but the literary skill required was formidable.

His songs were apparently simple — they had to be — but that simplicity took a lot to achieve. He wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote again. His nickname among his colleagues was ‘The Jeweller’.

The songwriter of the period was looking for a balance between wit — which often involved puns and complicated rhymes — and ‘singability’, the fluent flow of syllables along the surface of the tune. Ira achieved this balance more often than most, though many of his all-night efforts were dumped when the storyline of a musical or review — the ‘book’, in theatre parlance — had to be changed.

Most of the Gershwins’ collaborative work was done for Broadway musical theatre. They moved to Hollywood in the thirties to tackle the movies — a much more difficult proposition due to the demands of the machinery of movie-making, and the callousness of the producers and studio bosses.

They’d hardly begun when George died of a brain tumour in 1937, and the oomph went out of Ira’s life. He went on working, on movies such as A Star is Born and An American in Paris, struggling to contrive songs that would make the Hollywood moguls happy. He even wrote words for many of the dozens of unpublished melodies George had left behind, in a ghostly kind of posthumous collaboration.

For a writer of sophisticated songs about love and passion, Ira’s own life seems to have been suburban and uneventful. Perhaps, like Flaubert, he led a dull life in order to create the conditions to enable him to make brilliant art.

This book is mainly about that art, and it ends up being not much more than a chronicle of Ira Gershwin’s working life. That has its interest, and as such it is a useful volume. As one might say of a Broadway show, if the ‘book’ is not so hot, at least the lyrics are memorable.

-- John Tranter

from the archive; first published July 11, 2016

A Quick Meditation on Gustave Mahler (born July 7)

Wittgenstein dismissed Mahler’s music, but he conceded
that "very rare talents [were needed] to produce this bad music.”
Leonard Bernstein as conductor of the New York Philharmonic
sparked the Mahler boom of the 1960s. In Visconti's Death in Venice,
you can hear the slow fourth movement of Mahler's fifth in C Sharp minor,
which Mahler conducted in Cologne in 1904. In the movie,
a heavily made-up Dirk Bogarde played himself as a repressed homosexual
with a death wish. Visconti cast Bogarde for the role because he had done so well
as a Nazi in a black shirt with a smirk and an SS symbol on his collar
in The Damned. So I, on a day dominated by Mahler’s Fifth,
thought of the composer who spoke Yiddish as a boy,
"a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian among Germans,
and a Jew all over," on his birthday, July 7, 1860.

--  David Lehman

"Perfidia": the song (sung by Helen Forrest & Linda Ronstadt), and the poem

Perfidia

You don’t know who these people are, or what
They’ll do to you if you’re caught, but you can’t
Back out now: it seems you agreed to carry
A briefcase into Germany, and here you are,
Glass in hand, as instructed. You rise to dance
With the woman with the garnet earrings, who is,
Of course, the agent you’re supposed to seduce
And betray within the hour. Who would have known
You’d fall in love with her? Elsewhere the day
Is as gray as a newsreel, full of stripes and dots
Of rain, a blurred windshield picture of Pittsburgh,
But on the screen where your real life is happening
It is always 1938, you are always dancing
With the same blonde woman with the bloodshot eyes
Who slips the forged passport into your pocket
And says she knows you’ve been sent to betray her,
Or else it is seventy degrees and holding
In California, where you see yourself emerge unscathed
From the car crash that wiped out your memory,
Your past, as you walk into a gambler’s hangout
On Sunset Boulevard, in a suit one size too large
And the piano player plays “Perfidia” in your honor,
And the redhead at the bar lets you buy her a drink.

- David Lehman. From Operation Memory (1990).

Perfidia

You don’t know who these people are, or what
They’ll do to you if you’re caught, but you can’t
Back out now: it seems you agreed to carry
A briefcase into Germany, and here you are,
Glass in hand, as instructed. You rise to dance
With the woman with the garnet earrings, who is,
Of course, the agent you’re supposed to seduce
And betray within the hour. Who would have known
You’d fall in love with her? Elsewhere the day
Is as gray as a newsreel, full of stripes and dots
Of rain, a blurred windshield picture of Pittsburgh,
But on the screen where your real life is happening
It is always 1938, you are always dancing
With the same blonde woman with the bloodshot eyes
Who slips the forged passport into your pocket
And says she knows you’ve been sent to betray her,
Or else it is seventy degrees and holding
In California, where you see yourself emerge unscathed
From the car crash that wiped out your memory,
Your past, as you walk into a gambler’s hangout
On Sunset Boulevard, in a suit one size too large
And the piano player plays “Perfidia” in your honor,
And the redhead at the bar lets you buy her a drink.

- David Lehman. From Operation Memory (1990).

A June 11 Playlist: Happy birthday to all who were born on June 11

Let's celebrate with Linda Ronstadt, Juan Diego Florez, Fats Waller, Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra, Charlie Parker, Doris Day. . .

On Judy Garland's Birthday (June 10): How About You?

 

Music by Burton Lane, lyrics by Ralph Freed. "I love a fireside, when a storm is due / I like potato chips, moonlight, and motor trips, / How about you?  // I'm mad about good books, / can't get my fill, / And Franklin Roosevelt's looks / give me a thrill. . .

 

"Wrap Your Trouble in Dreams"

When skies are cloudy and grey
They're only grey for a day
So wrap your troubles in dreams
And dream your troubles away

 

Until that sunshine peeps through
There's only one thing to do
Just wrap your troubles in dreams
And dream all your troubles away

 

Your castles may tumble, that's fate after all
Life's really funny that way
No use to grumble, smile as they fall
Weren't you king for a day?

 

Just remember that sunshine
Always follows the rain
So wrap your troubles in dreams
And dream your troubles away

Sung by Sinatra; arrangement by Nelson Riddle. From album "Swing Easy" (1954) Lryics by Ted Koehler, music Harry Barris. First Sinatra album with all Riddle arrangemrents.

Dean Martin on His Birthday: Volare, On an Evening in Roma

“I can't stand an actor or actress who tells me acting is hard work. It's easy work. Anyone who says it isn't never had to stand on his feet all day dealing blackjack.”

Volare o o
cantare o o o o,
nel blu dipinto di blu
felice di stare lassù,
e volavo volavo
felice più in alto del sole
ed ancora più sù,
mentre il mondo
pian piano spariva laggiù,
una musica dolce suonava
soltanto per me. . .

 

"Too Marvelous for Words": Lyric Greatness (by Johnny Mercer, as sung by Michael Feinstein)

You're simply too spectacular

to be in my vernacular!

the sweetest words in Keats and Shelley's lyrics

aren't sweet enough to be your panegyrics

 

 

Renee Fleming: June Is Bustin' Out All Over

 

Sing, Sing, Sing on Gemini gem Benny Goodman's birthday (May 30, 1909 in Chicago)

"Sing, Sing, Sing"
is the epitome of Big Band swing!

music and lyrics by Louis Prima; drum solo Gene Krupa

From Wikipedia: <<< On July 6, 1937, “Sing, Sing, Sing” was recorded in Hollywood with Benny Goodman on clarinet; Gene Krupa on drums; Harry James, Ziggy Elman, and Chris Griffin on trumpets; Red Ballard and Murray McEachern on trombones; Hymie Schertzer and George Koenig on alto saxophones; Art Rollini and Vido Musso on tenor saxophone; Jess Stacy on piano; Allan Reuss on guitar; and Harry Goodman on bass. The song was arranged by Jimmy Mundy. >>>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2S1I_ien6A

Happy birthday, Artie Shaw [May 23, 1910]

Born May 23, 1910. Band leader and clarinetist whose versions of "Stardust," "Frenesi," "Begin the Beguine" "Moonglow," "Can't Get Started," "A Foggy Day," and others are sublime. He was a Gemini with huge sex appeal and a host of wives including Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Jerome Kern's daughter Betty. He had chutzpah. “Presumption is the mother of all fuck-ups,” he explained. He was also a sharpshooter with a rifle. He and Benny Goodman disagreed, Goodman saying ""We both play clarinet." Shaw said, "You play clarinet. I play music." He also said, "Jazz was born out of the whiskey bottle, was raised on marijuana, and will expire on cocaine." He was a good looking stud but it was the music that enchanted the fillies. "“You have no idea of the women I didn’t marry,” he said. He lived to be ninety.

And here are Helen Forrest's songs with the Artie Shaw band:

Artie: “Somebody asked me once, ‘Do you think that swing will ever come back?’ And I said, ‘Do you think the 1938 Ford will ever come back?’"

It's nice to go traveling. . .