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.