Tag: National Poetry Month

Introit & Fugue
By D. Nurkse

After death, my father
practices meticulously
until the Bach is seamless,
spun glass in a dream,
you can no longer tell
where the modulations are,
or the pedal shifts
or the split fingerings . . .

if he rests
it’s to wind the metronome
or sip his cup of ice . . .

but who is the other old man
in the identical flannel gown,
head cocked, listening
ever more critically,
deeper in the empty room?

Howard Moss mines the seemingly thin topic of practicing to gently humorous and perceptive effect:

Piano Practice
By Howard Moss

For Frances Dillon Hayward

1
Such splendid icecaps and hard rills, such weights
And counter-weights, I think I scale the heights
When pentatonic Chinese crewmen start
Up in a cold sweat from the bottom of the keyboard
Only to arrive at some snow-stormed valley
To dissolve in steam-holes and vanish out of sight.

2
The left hand’s library is dull, the books
All read, though sometimes, going under velvet,
An old upholsterer will spit out tacks,
Turn them into sparks and smartly hurl them
Up and down the loudest bowling alley—
His pressure of effects can last all night.

3
Two bird notes endlessly repeat themselves.
Or are they fish scales—iridescent, hard?
Mica into marble back to mica?
No images in trills. They’re formal. Take
Your foot off the pedal. You’re in a wood
Near the sea. And every tree and wave is fake.

4
An underwater haircut by Debussy?
Oh, that’s too easy. Astringent lotions
Let the swimmer down by easy stages
Down among the flashy soda fountains
Down to the bottom where the light bulbs waver
Down where all the mirrors eat their hearts out.

5
Grammar becoming poetry is what
You’re after—say, a rational derangement
Requiring that you forget technique
And concentrate on what is harder like
A fireplace that burns pine needles only,
Before which spills the gore of Persian rugs.

6
A vial of antiseptic meant for Schubert,
One modest, flat meticulous translation
Of Chopin’s lightning undercurrent Spanish—
These are the mere necessities of travel.
Someone you must meet is Dr. Czerny.
Then, through him, Domenico Scarlatti.

7
Seizure are occurring. Despite snow-lightning,
The black keys are bent on mountain climbing—
All of it against a doctor’s warning.
Soon they’re descending like the black dots of
A wirephoto in transmission. An
Erotic black wing hovers up above.

8
Bach is more like opening an ember
And digging hard into the heart of fire.
The heart of fire is another fire.
When it comes to Mozart, just say nothing.
Think of it as milk, and drink it slowly.
Slowly you will taste the cream of angels.

9
This black and white’s deceptive. Underneath
The spectrum rages. Did you ever see
The calmest waters quickly come to life
Because a minnow’s tinfoil flash in sun
Had rent them suddenly? It came. And went.
We take two thousand takes before we print.

10
Don’t try to catch that lion by Rousseau.
Before you wake, he’ll eat you up. If you
Should meet the sleeping gypsy, let her sleep.
Tomorrow they’ll be gone without a trace,
Half fact and half enigma. Now your hands
Are on the mysteries of the commonplace.

Concerto for Double Bass
He is a drunk leaning companionably
Around a lamp post or doing up
With intermittent concentration
Another drunk’s coat.

He is a polite but devoted Valentino,
Cheek to cheek, forgetting the next step.
He is feeling the pulse of the fat lady
Or cutting her in half.

But close your eyes and it is sunset
At the edge of the world. It is the language
Of dolphins, the growth of tree-roots,
The heart-beat slowing down.
— John Fuller

I first encountered this poem in Poems on the Underground, which I found in a London bookstore. Poems on trains and buses are one of the many perks of being a public transportation fan. And here is some “edge of the world” Bach courtesy of the London Symphony Orchestra double-bass player Rinat Ibragimov.

It’s a cliché to say that poets don’t make good novelists (and vice versa). If you paint Fabergé eggs for a living, using the slenderest of sable brushes, can you really cope with slopping paint on the side of a barn with a roller, which is what most novels read like, and possibly how they are written.

But that “most” leaves us a sizable escape hatch, and among the writers who walk through it comfortably is Thomas Hardy, to whom I came to first through a set of poems that I heard sung in arrangements by Benjamin Britten. (Like another Britten piece on poetry and music, it hit me like a thunderclap, and became “mine” in some ineffable but continuing way.) Here is one of the poems, and a link to a performance of the set.

Thomas Hardy: The Choirmaster’s Burial

He often would ask us
That, when he died,
After playing so many
To their last rest,
If out of us any
Should here abide,
And it would not task us,
We would with our lutes
Play over him
By his grave-brim
The psalm he liked best—
The one whose sense suits
“Mount Ephraim”—
And perhaps we should seem
To him, in Death’s dream,
Like the seraphim.

As soon as I knew
That his spirit was gone
I thought this his due,
And spoke, thereupon.
“I think,” said the vicar,
“A read service quicker
Than viols out-of-doors
In these frosts and hoars.
That old-fashioned way
Requires a fine day,
And it seems to me
It had better not be.”

Hence, that afternoon,
Though never knew he
That his wish could not be,
To get through it faster
They buried the master
Without any tune.

But ’twas said that, when
At the dead of next night
The vicar looked out,
There struck on his ken
Thronged roundabout,
Where the frost was graying
The headstoned grass,
A band all in white
Like the saints in church-glass,
Singing and playing
The ancient stave
By the choirmaster’s grave.

Such the tenor man told
When he had grown old.

Thomas Allen singing this song from Britten’s set, Winter Words

And as for Hardy’s novels, they have been one of the great rewards of a reading life. Like Beckett, it’s easy to take what he saying, but he’s not lying to you.

 

 

Three verses from Shakespeare (of his many) on music:

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O! it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour.
(Twelfth Night, 1.1.1-7)

Thou remember’st
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the sea-maid’s music.
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1.153-9)

Where should this music be? i’ the air or the earth?
It sounds no more: and sure, it waits upon
Some god o’ the island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father’s wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air: thence I have follow’d it,
Or it hath drawn me rather. But ’tis gone.
No, it begins again.
(The Tempest, 1.2.452-60)

Orpheus’ lute was strung with poets’ sinews,
Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones,
Make tigers tame and huge leviathans
Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands.
(The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 3.2.79-82)

Two “Gentlemen of Broadway” doing (somewhat crude) honor to the bard, courtesy of Cole Porter.

Today, still inspired by Elizabeth Bishop, a musical poem by a contemporary and friend of hers:

The Victor Dog
By James Merrill

for Elisabeth Bishop

Bix to Buxtehude to Boulez.
The little white dog on the Victor label
Listens long and hard as he is able.
It’s all in a day’s work, whatever plays.

From judgment, it would seem, he has refrained.
He even listens earnestly to Bloch,
Then builds a church upon our acid rock.
He’s man’s—no—he’s the Leiermann’s best friend,

Or would be if hearing and listening were the same.
Does he hear? I fancy he rather smells
Those lemon-gold arpeggios in Ravel’s
“Les jets d’eau du palais de ceux qui s’aiment.”

He ponders the Schumann Concerto’s tall willow hit
By lightning, and stays put. When he surmises
Through one of Bach’s eternal boxwood mazes
The oboe pungent as a bitch in heat,

Or when the calypso decants its raw bay rum
Or the moon in Wozzeck reddens ripe for murder,
He doesn’t sneeze or howl; just listens harder.
Adamant needles bear down on him from

Whirling of outer space, too black, too near—
But he was taught as a puppy not to flinch,
Much less to imitate his bête noire Blanche
Who barked, fat foolish creature, at King Lear.

Still others fought in the road’s filth over Jezebel,
Slavered on hearths of horned and pelted barons.
His forebears lacked, to say the least, forbearance.
Can nature change in him? Nothing’s impossible.

The last chord fades. The night is cold and fine.
His master’s voice rasps through the grooves’ bare groves.
Obediently, in silence like the grave’s
He sleeps there on the still-warm gramophone

Only to dream he is at the première of a Handel
Opera long thought lost—Il Cane Minore.
Its allegorical subject is his story!
A little dog revolving round a spindle

Gives rise to harmonies beyond belief,
A cast of stars . . . Is there in Victor’s heart
No honey for the vanquished? Art is art.
The life it asks of us is a dog’s life.

The Leiermann referred to in second stanza is the mysterious figure that the protagonist of Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (Winter journey) encounters in the last song.

To celebrate National Poetry Month, I’m offering 30 days of poetry (mostly on music) with a few links and comments thrown in, as I can’t help myself.

To start, American poet Elizabeth Bishop:

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

Anything but the superstar poet during her life, Bishop wrote very little, but all of it to an extraordinarily high standard. (Her prose is faultless and radiant too. When I need to reset my compass for a certain kind of dappled clarity I re-read her 1938 essay on Gregorio Valdes.) She lived in Key West and Brazil, which also seems perfect somehow. Since her death in 1979, her work has become well known, and well loved.

And since the earliest idea of this blog was to combine images, words and music, here’s a bit of Bach played by Wilhelm Kempff, an arrangement of the Siciliano from The Flute Sonata No. 2. His poise and supernatural calm as a pianist evokes “A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool.” And because supererogation is how I roll, here it is in its original instrumentation.