Singer-Songwriters and Poetry

Any of us can get into a good fight arguing over singer-songwriters whose poetic lyrics we champion. And some singers, Leonard Cohen or David Berman (of The Silver Jews) for instance, publish books of their own poetry. In the seventies, a number of singer-songwriters made references to poets: Bob Dylan to Dante, Verlaine & Rimbaud, Patti Smith to Rimbaud, Lou Reed to Delmore Schwartz, and, um, Aerosmith quoted from "Hamlet." But who are some of the younger singer-songwriters referencing poems by other poets? (Steve Burt, who will know them all, is limited to two responses).
For two of the best, click continue reading this entry, below.

Palace Music Bonus Disc

One of my favorites, the blessedly darkness-haunted Will Oldham, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy, includes this late poem by D. H. Lawrence (rather brilliantly edited by exclusion of the first and last two stanzas) on "Black/Rich Music". (The whole cd is included as a bonus on “Palace Music” as well). I don't think anyone but Oldham could pull this off (this well).
The Risen Lord
The risen lord, the risen lord
has risen in the flesh,
and treads the earth to feel the soil
though his feet are still nesh.
The risen lord, the risen lord
has opened his eyes afresh,
and sees strange looks on the faces of men
all held in leash.
And he says: I never have seen them before,
these people of flesh;
these are no spirits caught and sore
in the physical mesh.
They are substance itself, that flows in thick
flame of flesh forever travelling
like the flame of a candle slow and quick
fluttering and softly unraveling.
It moves, it ripples, and all the time
it changes, and with it change
moods, thoughts, desires, and deeds that chime
with the rippling fleshly change.
I never saw them, how they must soften
themselves with oil, and lard
their guts with a certain fat, and often
laugh, and laugh hard.
If they didn’t, if they did not soften
themselves with oil, and lard
their guts with a certain fat, and often
laugh, and laugh hard
they would not be men, and they must be men,
they are their own flesh. – I lay
in the tomb and was not; I have risen again
to look the other way.
Lo! I am flesh, and the blood that races
is me in the narrows of my wrists.
Lo, I see fear in the twisted faces
Of men, they clench fear in their fists!
Lo! on the other side the grave
I have conquered the fear of death,
but the fear of life is still here; I am brave
yet I fear my own breath.
Now I must conquer the fear of life,
the knock of the blood in my wrists,
the breath that rushes through my nose, the strife
of desires in the loins’ dark twists,
What do you want, wild loins? and what
do you want, warm heart? And what
wide eyes and wondering spirit? --not
death, no death for your lot!
They ask, and they must be answered; they
are, and they shall be, to the end.
Lo! there is woman, and her way is a strange way,
I must follow also her trend.
I died, and death is neuter; it speaks not, it gives
no answer; man rises again
with mouth and loins and needs, he lives
again man among men.
So it is, so it will be, for ever and ever.
And still the great needs of men
will clamour forth from the flesh, and never
can denial deny them again.
***
On "North Star Deserter", his newest and maybe his best cd (with arrangements that shift from quavery whispers to choral harmonies to throbbing epiphanic rock), Vic Chesnutt includes a stripped-down song called “Wallace Stevens” on which he sings
I saw a blackbird thirteen ways and then strew a fist many mountains away
My evangelism felled brutally taken by breezes that rubbed me and lifted light raven
I stretched to borrow fine antebellum to encase all the scrapings of us civilized fellow
I wanted to stash them to secretive cages with that fabulous blackbird of thirteen stages
Alright, that’s a reference, not a quote. But on an earlier cd, "Little," Chesnutt sings these lines from “Not Waving but Drowning” by Stevie Smith (who during an interview with the Queen, once explained that she composed most of her poems while “Hoovering”:
nobody heard him the dead man,
but still he lay moaning:
i was much further out than you thought
and not waving but drowning
poor chap he always loved larking
and now he's dead
it must have been too cold for him, his heart gave way
they said.
oh, no, no, no, it was always too cold
still the dead one lay moaning
i was much too far out all my life
and not waving but drowning
oh, no, no, no, it was always too cold
still the dead one lay moaning
i was much too far out all my life
and not waving but drowning