“I will know my song well, before I start singing”
—Bob Dylan, A Hard Rain’s Going to Fall

I hope you got out your window yesterday. I did, just for a couple of hours, but it was worth it. My friend M (we’ll call her that) is a young, new poet and she’s learning how to write, and doing quite well. But she worries that she’s trying to copy her favorite writers when she reads them all the time and then writes her own verse. This post is particularly for her.

A dear poet friend of mine is taking me out for a belated birthday dinner tonight (it was almost 2 months ago, but that’s apparently how busy our lives ended up). Afterwards, because it’s a bit of a tradition, we might sing a little karaoke. I hated karaoke until I met her. I sang a bit in school, the national anthem for high school homecoming (which was horrendous), then a bit in college, but for some reason karaoke made me cringe. But then, I learned to pick the songs I really loved. Even if they weren’t popular (usually old standards, some real grandma pleasers). I practiced them, and then I actually learned to be okay at it (not great, but you know, not terrible). Don’t show up and hold me to that, alright?

I bring this up because today, I was having lunch with a fiction writer and we talked about how important mimicry is when you begin delving into your own writing. At least it was very important to me, still is really.

The dichotomy people in the literary world frequently make between mainstream and experimental poetry, conservative and “progressive” poetry, is very similar in form and tone (the attribution of sin to one and virtue to the other) to the dichotomy people (some of them the same people) make in the field of popular music between disco and punk. Disco bears the burden of inauthenticity and ideological mystification, complicity and social complacency—bodily pleasure as the opiate of the masses. I find this still-too-common characterization curious, since disco’s main producers and audiences were black people and gay men. Punk, on the other hand, bears the banner of authenticity and critique, transgression and rebellion, a revolt against the body and enjoyment (see the Sex Pistols song "Bodies"). Rebels of all stripes tend to be rather puritanical.

In my younger and thinner days, I used to go out dancing all the time. In Boston, in Providence (whenever I could get a ride), in Buffalo, in Chicago, I had what might be called “every night fever.” In Boston, where last call was at two, I rarely got to bed before two or three; in Buffalo and Chicago, where last call was at four, I rarely got to bed before four or five.

I went out all the time because I love to dance and I love music, as the O’Jays sang oh so long ago, though unlike them I don’t like just any kind of music, even if it is groovin’. I also went out because I was bored and lonely and I wanted to get laid, or at least to feel wanted. Though I had more sex than I felt that I was having (does anyone ever have “enough” sex?), I rarely got to have the sex I wanted with the men I wanted to have it with. But I had the music, and I could spend a good night in a musical trance, almost forgetting that I wanted to have sex. Almost. There were also the nights when I felt so lonely that a sad song would make me sit on the edge of the dance floor and cry. At first I accidentally typed “fly.” That works too.

For most of my life I have felt very awkward and uncomfortable in my body and in my social presence. I feel better about both now, but still hardly at ease. But when I dance, which is rarely these days, I feel at one with my body. I was a great dancer (no boast, just fact—I rocked the dance floor, and still can) and, a little heavier and out of practice, I’m still damned good. When I’m dancing my movements are graceful and smooth. When I’m dancing I feel attractive, I experience my body as admirable, even masterful, just like Madonna sang in "Vogue." In the days of my constant clubbing, men who would never have slept with me would compliment me on my dancing, buy me drinks (I always chose soda or orange juice), befriend me, even. Sometimes a man would sleep with me because I danced well (as the old saying goes, if a man can dance that well, imagine how well he can fuck), though the dance floor brought me more friends than lovers.

Alicia’s post in tribute to Edward Thomas’s “The Owl” moved me. Especially so since it came after a terrible experience in a shopping outlet. My four-year-old and I were looking for snow boots and while we shared a sandwich in a packed food court I realized that I was only just starting to hear the pounding music in the backdrop: Christmas carols set to frenzied electronic beats.

My favorite carol this year has been O Holy Night. It's the music that makes the carol, and I've had fun dowloading different versions of it to compare. How to sing the words "Fall on your knees:" with soaring sternness like Bing Crosby, or hushed reverence like Josh Groban? You can chart a Melisma-meter with the versions on offer by Avril LaVigne, LeAnn Rimes, and Cristina Aguilera.

Steve Burt’s quote from Wallace Stevens’s letters (in Alicia's comments section) also sent me to its source. One of the reasons to go back to a favorite poet’s letters—and Stevens never disappoints in this regard—is to confirm to oneself how uncannily history repeats itself. Or to realize maybe that it’s not history repeating itself, exactly, but our sentiments about history, our relation to it, that remains glumly constant. I had to smile, rereading a passage that I might have written on a sour day:

So (as Seamus Heaney might begin this). My husband and I actually went to a concert last night, which we have not done in an age. He had managed to swing tickets to a sold-out Alfred Brendel concert at the Megaron Mousikis, an evening of Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart. But we almost didn’t go, because it meant leaving our toddler at home with a raging fever. In the end, his grandmother came over and looked after him, and we guiltily fled for the concert.

Greek audiences are not quiet audiences. They are lively and engaged, even the rather aged, mink-clad dripping-in-Chanel set that is likely to attend a pricey classical concert. Greeks aren't quiet even in church on the holiest night of the year—there is fidgeting, whispering, the inevitable chirping of cell phones. Still, at a classical concert people know better. Nonetheless, during the first movement of the Haydn, I was actually thinking to myself, you know, this is a pretty fidgety audience (everyone in there seemed to be muffling emphysemic coughs) when Alfred Brendel abruptly stopped playing and announced to the audience that if there was not complete silence, he would not continue.

So many strands/strains of the old country and other people’s cultural traditions inform the arts of the Americas, even if we do not readily acknowledge them. Klezmer, Blue-grass, Deep soul, southern Gospel, the Blues: these musical styles embed in me, and I’d be so lucky to exact poems that are their equivalents in spirit and expression.

I am often asked after a poetry reading, maybe too frequently, by some earnest undergraduate, if I listen to music while composing a poem, because, well, my poems sound so rhythmic, “even on the page,” a dubious observation, at best, in my opinion. It’s like saying water is liquid. Probably the query of music listening is 2nd only to “creative process.” (Then, third would be: “What hip-hop artists are you listening to these days.” I wonder if my buddy Billy Collins is posed that question.)

A couple of my fellow blogsters also have little ones underfoot, so I’m sure they will appreciate the problem of “toddler music.” (I need to track down Steve’s suggestion of a couple of weeks ago.) I was given a four cd set of toddler tunes, and also own some Rafi and other singers big in the little people set. Yes, I know, there’s no reason toddlers can’t listen to “real” music. Now my son (3) would just as soon listen to “Peter and the Wolf”, which he says he “watches,” because I guess to him it is like a movie, only scarier, perhaps, since the wolf as a sound rather than image on a small, two-dimensional screen seems freer to roam about the room and lurk in the dark corners of the house. But as an ex-pat, I was keen that our son learn all the English children’s songs and rhymes of my own childhood, so out came the toddler tunes.

Rigoberto's got me thinking about poetry and music, and I've been thinking about my favorite singers, who always seem to be poets at heart.

So 1 a.m. on Sunday morning is the perfect time to unveil my guilty pleasure, the man second only to Smokey Robinson in my heart. This was tonight's lullaby, the song I needed to hear in order to end the day, and the reason I'll wake up with a poem in my pen tomorrow.

Goodnight, all.

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There are certain songs I cannot listen to anymore because they remind me of someone associated with the pain of loss. R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” reminds me of an old heartbreak in college, Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” of a more recent heartbreak, and listening to Luther Vandross’ “Dance with My Father” is my quickest trip to tears because it speaks to the emptiness I feel after the death of my own father. Music, it seems, owes its popularity and success to the way it can be absorbed by the listener and given a personal context. We give intimate meaning to a song, responding to the sentiment of it in the same way we will mouth the lyrics—we make it about us.

Sooner or later, "Cucurrucucu Paloma" finds its way to you, poets, and you swoon -- because you are among the last, the very last swooners.

Looking around the web for information on the songwriter, I came upon a credit for one Tomas Mendez. Its first recording ever was by Harry Belafonte on July 20, 1956.

This is almost exactly a year after Wallace Stevens dies, on August 2, 1955. So how do I explain --

YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL (YAB) is my favorite public art collective based in Chicago.

My children are musicians. In this I am living a desire vicariously through them. I have been scrupulous about avoiding that kind of thing. After all, while it seems quite difficult to come up with any unselfish reason for having children, to blatantly try to live out one’s fantasies through them seems somewhat self-involved and, at worst, a clear path towards therapy for the child as an adult. But in this I have not been able to avoid that pathology. They are, all three of them, musicians. And I just think it is fantastic. Now I could be called a musician, but I don’t really believe that. I learnt how to play the guitar when I was eighteen. This means that some friends taught me three chords and that was it. My then girlfriend (who would become my wife) took time to teach me chords and to encourage my playing. She was a real musician. She had done music lessons—piano lessons. She could read music. She could harmonize as a singer, and she played the guitar. She would always look too small for the guitar as she ran her fingers over the frets, bar-chording and picking out phrase by phrase notes. Whenever I got the guitar, I worked my three chords, learning, in the process to complicate my playing with rhythmic ploys. I was no musician. Reading music was (and still is) a mystery to me. I would go on to play in a three bands, record two CDs, to write hundreds of songs, and to even compose music for a full-blown musical that was performed on the West End in London, but I still don’t call myself a musician. My children, though, are musicians. They real deal, they are. You see they can read music. They play instruments, the play in band and orchestra, they talk music. It is a fascinating thing to me that pleases me no end.

John Cage "The Norton Lectures," Harvard, 1988-89 [MP3]

1. Q & A, Part I
2. Q & A, Part 2
3. Mesostic I-VI Part I
4. Mesostic I-VI Part 2

Let’s make a Venn Diagram. Circle one consists of Einstürzende Neubauten fans; circle two, Dante aficionados. If you’re in the overlapping region, it’s time to check out Radio Inferno (posted at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog), a 1993 collaboration between E.N., Andreas Ammer, and the late great new-music DJ John Peel. (Thanks to Kosiya Shalita for the link.)

For no good reason, I’ve been reading the liner notes to Direction Reaction Creation, the Jam boxed set (boxed set of Jam sounds delicious) from—I was going to say “a few years back,” but this thing came out in ‘99! (Or ‘97, if you’re a vinylist.) The booklet, which is rather massive, keeps falling open to this passage—a sure sign that I should transcribe it for you:

The strident ‘Here Comes The Weekend’, with its enigmatic reference to human rights abuses in Zaire, was followed by ‘Tonight At Noon’ which once again saw Weller turn to poetry for inspiration—this time that of Liverpudlian beatnik Adrian Henri, whose verse had been anthologized in a 1967 Penguin paperback and British beat poet bible The Mersey Sound. Weller lifted two whole stanzas from Henri’s In the Midnight Hour, suggesting that he was running short of lyrics himself.

Jeffrey’s post about Lorca reminded me of when FGL appeared on my radar—I was reading “Astral Weeks,” Lester Bangs’s essay on the Van Morrison album of the same name, a gorgeous piece of writing that was knocking me out, paragraph by paragraph. And then . . . well, I won't ruin it for you. The piece (included in the first Bangs collection, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung) can be found online (though you should definitely find and buy the book as well). I promise it’ll be the best thing you read today.

This is an animated video of the song Christobel by Joan As Police Woman. Joan is a wonderful musician who lives in New York. I'm a huge fan of hers. Every now and then she performs with poets. We might do a show together in early May at the Bowery Poetry Club. If you want to see more of her stuff go here, where there's a live concert.

Eros and Thanatos are in the house for this Def Poetry performance by Kanye West.

[ There are 29 MP3 files in this post. ]

Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate,” written between 1922 and 1932 was the greatest sound poem of the 20th century. Below the fold, you can find 9 versions of it by sound artists from around the world. Schwitters was primarily known for his Dadaist collages and visual art works, but I feel that the “Ursonate” is the most important and significantly influential work he made. His own legendary recording of his work was lost for years. It finally turned up in an attic in Holland the late ‘80s. You can read more about the discovery here. You can view the wonderful score here.

Is this poetry?