Music and Poetry (Part 1)

My portal into poetry came in large part through the pop and rock songs I listened to as a teenager and 20-something. I know this is true for a lot of poets.

One musician from my youth whose music and lyrics had a particularly deep and resonant effect on my spirit was Joni Mitchell. The first record of hers I discovered and wrapped myself around completely was Blue. I was 16 or so and in the midst of having my heart broken for the first time. That record was like a mother’s arms in which I was cradled for a few weeks while the bleeding stopped. Ironically or not, it was the heartbreaker herself who gave me the record. (Was it for want of torture that I listened to it—or comfort?) Regardless, it was Christmastime and I’d gone to my aunt and uncle’s in a tiny town in Central Illinois to celebrate with my family. It was cold and snowy outside on Christmas Eve and I remember singing hymns while holding a candle in the Methodist church that inside was warm, dark and snug—as if it had been carved from the inside of an enormous tree.

I will never forget how despondent I was, sulking those few days while listening to “River” and “Little Green” over and over on my Walkman.

As the years went on I bought everything by Joni and she became a kind of muse to me. Her lyrics are musical, wise, tough, cynical, critical, empathic, symbolic, iconoclastic, imagistic, archetypal, sensitive and deeply personal—everything I believe poetry should be. The albums that left the deepest impressions on me are Blue, Hejira, The Hissing of Summer Lawns and her live album, recorded with the L.A. Express, Miles of Aisles.

Hejira is such an interesting record. It’s haunting in its mood. Solitary. Detached. Meditative. I believe what happens with certain artists and musicians whose work speaks loudest to us is it wakes something up in us, an awareness and familiarity that are innate, latent or dormant inside. Some of this is universal, some unique to a select collective of people. And I think a lot of what gets awakened is the archetypal structures for poetry and song and rhythm and feeling that are built into our DNA.

We all have certain artists who speak to us at various times in our lives. But only a few actually make it to the point of being teachers, guides or gurus; we actually become a bit like them, or a part of them becomes a part of us. I’d say this is true for Joni. Thirty years later, bits and pieces of her lyrics will pop into my mind as snippets of poetry, something alliterative, a metaphor, a phrase turned just right and relevant to the moment.

Today, listening to my iPod on shuffle, her song “Jungle Line” from The Hissing of Summer Lawns came on. It’s not one of her signature melody pieces, but lyrically a stream-of-consciouness homage to jazz and its origins. And like so many of Joni’s songs, it tells a story. This may be what I am attracted to most in Joni’s music—the paradox of often comforting melody alongside dark, cynical lyrics critical of the absurd, middle-class American lust for status and stuff. This is particularly true in her later albums, which get darker both lyrically and melodically the further in the chronology.

Remembering James Wright

“Poets, it should be noted, keep shaping their metaphors out of the ruins of their existence, in contradistinction to the powerful on this earth, whose stock-in-trade is the fable of their victories.” —Stanley Kunitz

Yesterday was the birthday of James Wright. I was going to send a shout out on twitter or facebook, but the day got away from me and I’m only just now, early the next day, getting a chance to reflect and offer up a birthday wish.

I would count Wright as one of the top five poets whose work has been most inspirational for me. Is that right? To say a poet’s work is “inspirational?” Somehow that word does not capture the potency of my emotional relationship with his work. There was a time in my life when I read him constantly. Over and over again. Like a favorite record, music and lyrics I could never get enough of. In fact, my copy of his Collected Poems is so tattered and natty, the binding having disintegrated long ago, it’s taped and re-taped, pages falling out and reshuffled. I think I own every book he ever published. Two Citizens and To a Blossoming Pear Tree are particular favorites, though I love as much his early formal work of Saint Judas and The Green Wall. When I was in graduate school, his work was held up as a quintessential example of achievement in contemporary American poetry. We all wrote bad imitations of “A Blessing.”

It would be safe to say Wright played a significant role in taking American poetry in a new direction in the Sixties, and that many trusted and followed. And he would probably admit that new direction was not a trail he blazed through wilderness, but a path he found and followed, though probably hard to distinguish at times, traversed by the ancient Chinese, Whitman, and the later by Spanish, German and South American poets of the early and mid-20th Century. His work was a magical mix of influences—both foreign and domestic—and his own working-class background growing up in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio.

I don’t know. I don’t claim to be any poetry scholar. All I know is how Wright’s poetry makes me feel. (Always the first question I ask when I read a new poem.) And I would say it makes me feel indistinguishably connected to the earth and humanity, at the same time—like few poets do—yet also strangely disconnected, anonymous and transparent. There is a witness quality to his poetry. The impersonal becomes universal, when attributes are transcended and only self remains, as a silent observer in the background of the world's ceaseless machinations. (Oh, I can hear the empiricists groan from here.)

Further, as a Midwesterner, I feel a resonance with his poetry, as I do with the early poems of Robert Bly and John Logan, also Midwesterners. A soft-spoken simplicity, economy and subtle derision—a joy buried in the existential prospect of long hours working alone outdoors in the vast, treeless expanse of the upper Midwest. In those conditions, there is no room for lies or deceptions. There is only room for truth.

That said, I will leave you with this famous poem by James Wright, and one of my favorites:

Lying In a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last years’ horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

A New Poem

Scythe

Air doubles over where I swing
through afternoon's seam.
I'm lost in the body's rhythm
of joint and muscle, clattering
rake of bones—my heart
tapping out meter, weight
and aim at measured swaths.
I begin on wild roses, tentacled
to stone walls; blossoms, pink
and white, divided with a swipe,
interrogate the air with scent
of dollar perfumes. Thistles,
smartweed, Queen Anne's lace—
all tipped to rest like wind-blown
vases on a grave. What music
the blade and stem release,
a sonorous ring—not apology
or warning, in a key indifferent
to the end? If I miss, clip
a stone or stump, rack the edge
rough, I'll whet it clean
along its quarter-moon curve.
My strokes start slow, slide
away off the blade, but soon
scratch faster—a few sparks
flying. I resume my work at
the boundaries of the field
driving steel through rye—insects
leaping before monster swaths,
diving back into wreckage.
All afternoon I swing—anxious
tick, grateful tock—until
I shave the final tuft of hay, drop
the heavy scythe and rest.

In Praise of the Beat Generation

I was talking to a woman the other day I met at a temp job in Freeport, Maine, who was telling me—with pride—about her son, a second year student at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. It's not everyday you meet the mother of a poetry student. Usually, it's the mother of an engineering or poly-sci student. So I was extremely proud for her. She said he is a bookworm, "all he wants to do is read poetry." 'Atta boy, I thought. Apparently, she said, he was thrilled because he recently got to meet Gary Snyder.

It's increasingly hard these days to pursue the arts in high school because of the pressure to achieve academic excellence and be accepted to a "good" school. Of course, easier said than done. I know too it's hard to make a living in the world with an arts degree. But, nonetheless, a smart business should know the value of bringing right-brained thinkers into their organization for balance, a unique perspective and a different take on solving problems. But I digress. The point I want to make is to praise the Beat Generation poets—some of whom helped found Naropa.

I discovered poetry and literature through the passionate fire of the Beat writers, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, etc. I was in high school, too, and not a very enthusiastic student, when a good friend of mine turned me on to "On The Road." To say it changed my life would be an understatement. Let's say the trajectory was set. The arrow pulled back in the bow. Perhaps the most influential book for me was Kerouac's Dharma Bums. I say that because at the same time in my life I'd learned meditation and was soaking up much about Eastern philosophy. And Gary Snyder, who the character Japhy Ryder is based on, was into Zen and Japanese culture. I definitely found more to like about Japhy than Dean Moriarity.

I could write ad infinitum about the Beats. They were a huge influence in my initial discovery and interest in poetry and the literary arts. They also inspired me as a young man to take some risks and seek adventure outside of the isolated world I grew up in. At one point I got away from the Beats and fell into reading more contemporary and traditionally academic poetry—all good in its own right—and even found myself looking down at the Beats. Their work was not as polished, certainly, or refined as the academic writers. But that opinion has come and gone. I am at the point now of fully appreciating their work and contribution to American literature.

Subjectivity is my favorite subject

I've been working on a presentation of poetry and photographs for the upcoming PechaKucha Portland, Maine. Hopefully I will get it put together soon. Time's a-wastin'. My plan is to read excerpts from the poetry of Georg Trakl while projecting photographs I've taken this spring and summer with a Holga camera, scanned and manipulated in iPhoto. Photos are inspired by Trakl's poetry but not literal interpretations of his poems.

What I love about Trakl's work is its ambiguity. And if anything, this is what the photographs achieve as well. Curiosity. Like an artifact found centuries later and the discoverer is pondering what it is, how was it used, what value did it offer daily life? I know now this attraction I have for the ambiguous comes from childhood. My grandparents had a painting hanging in their living room of a still life. An acorn was part of the picture, but I never saw it as an acorn. I saw it as a hat or beret. Only when I looked real close, studied it, did I see that it was in fact an acorn. Poorly represented, I might add.

It's these impressions, misinterpretations of reality, where we apply our own meaning to something, though that isn't at all what the object truly is. Yet, is it any less "real?" It is real for the observer. This is what subjectivity is all about. And why the rationalists, the analytical types, despise it. It can't be defined as a specific thing. It is whatever you want it to be. I love that.

Tracking Trakl

I've spent time this summer reading the poetry of Georg Trakl. I've also been traveling between Maine and Vermont, which has given me a chance to shoot landscapes with a leaky Holga camera that are informed metaphorically by Trakl's poems. I've always been drawn to Trakl's work, since reading early versions and translations by John Logan. Trakl's poems partly inspired the rise of the deep image poets. The poems are dark and heavily imagistic, and range wildly from the sublime to the grotesque. They are also rich with Christian symbolism. I believe his imagery and symbolism awakens something profound in us, whether the spirit or the slumbering soul or the fear of death.

At night I found myself upon a heath,

Stiff with filth and stardust.

In the hazelbush

Crystal angels rang again.

His poems and images have inspired me to shoot photography that attempts to capture the moods--loneliness, solitary joy or melancholy, despair. I've asked my neighbor to read the poems out loud to me in the original German. (I love the sound of the German language.) There is also a connection I make with Trakl and Win Wenders' film "Wings of Desire," from the late 1980s, a movie that had a profound effect on me. Since then I've been fascinated with German, the passion of the culture and language, including Rilke and Goethe.

Trakl was a tortured soul. He was a drug addict and rumored to have had an incestuous relationship with his sister. He died of a cocaine overdose at the age of 27 at the beginning of WWI.

Words & Images

For as long as I can remember, response to outside stimuli has been more physiological than intellectual for me. Our bodies absorb the world, stimulus through the senses, that pings emotion, to give us a primitive response. Music does the same thing, obviously, though that may be more immediate than an image or a quietly spoken phrase. There is a haunting feeling to this image. A distance, distraction, yet at the same time immediacy. It seems old, antique, like the world, though it is not. I thought of Leonard Cohen's song "If It Be Your Will."

That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing

From this broken hill

He sings about a broken hill. Metaphorically. Mythically? What does it represent, this hill, in our subconscious mind? I also think of Anthony Hecht's poem "A Hill" that, too, evokes something deep within the unconscious self. These images, obtuse places, snapshots, moments out of our lives that run together arbitrarily, memories, collide and make meaning or not. Nonetheless I feel it deeply. It enters my body like the hands of a psychic surgeon, not to remove disease but to implant a trinket, a charm or talisman, an impression, a memory that I will take to the grave.