How a poem comes together (sometimes)

I just found these old notes on my hard drive while looking for something else. They must have been something I started doing for a class at some time. I seem to have been following the genesis and development of a particularly slippery poem. The notes were apparently originally handwritten, and then transcribed over.  I have no idea how much time went by between one and the next. I'm guessing that the lines of poetry and the metrical notations were the handwritten notes, and the exigeses came when I typed them all up.

FIRST PAGE OF NOTES

I was thinking of writing a ghazal, and since I’ve been thinking a lot about a possible  connection between ghazal and blues, I began with

                the blues

and then tried to fit a couple of lines to it

The first crack of light in the morning was the blues

When all shadows were shadow, that was the blues

and at the same time, I written a phrase I liked the sound of

striped like snakes

and I started thinking of light – morning light, maybe morning light across a bed, striped like a snake, and the next line I tried was this:

She woke up in the morning with her arms around the blues

The morning light lay like a striped

SECOND PAGE

that seems to be as far as I got with that thought. I was in the process of deciding I didn’t want to use “blues” as the monorhyme end word in a ghazal. The next couplet I tried was (brackets around works that were crossed out):

Morning [began] started like a [striped] snake across her bed;

When all shadows were shadow, the dark was her bed.

So I’d gotten rid of two things I really thought I wanted to work with, the blues and “striped snake.”

The next thing I was going to get rid of was the ghazal. It wasn’t working for me; I didn’t feel it. But I still liked the formal regularity of the line, and I knew that the lines and rhythms I was hearing were formal. I decided to try a villanelle.

Day slipped like a snake across her bed.

When the shadows clustered into shadow

She pulled the darkness up around her head.

Then, on the back of the page, a bunch of scattered notes. I was trying to find rhythms that I liked.

  -     /     -        /    -    /      -   /       -    /

day slithered like a snake across her bed

   /        -         /  -    /       -   /      -     /

Day slipped like a snake across her bed.

    /     -       /      -     /   -    /    -

Shadows clustered into shadow

and a bunch of possible rhyme words for the B rhyme:

shadow

meadow

arrow

tallow

and under the list of rhyme words, another line:

hair like snakeskin stretched across her bed

which seems to mean I was moving away from the snake-as-sunbeam image, and this is maybe an example of letting a fine isolated verisimilitude go by.  I think snake-as-sunbeam may well be a pretty good image. But I was allowing myself not to be locked into it, to look around for other possibilities.

So here’s what fills up the rest of this page:

Like a snake she’d let into her bed

which I guess I hated. I hate it now, looking at it. The metric pattern forces the line to sound stilted and awkward – “LIKE a SNAKE she’d LET inTO her BED” -  which puts that horrible, ugly stress on TO. So under it, I have a note for the stress I want:

/    -   into bed  (DA – duh INto BED)

and under that, a line that fits the meter:

Like a snake she’d followed into bed

which I also liked better as a plot line, but I seem to have abandoned it. I go on to try a couple of other lines, using one of the “B” rhyme words. I didn’t have the whole lines, just this much:

-    /     -    /   pretended she was dead

/  -    /    -   , made her skin like tallow

and then filling out the lines (indicating words crossed out, words stuck in, and in the third line, a stressed syllable that had to go in, but I didn’t have yet):

For two days, she pretended she was dead,

                         felt

[made] her arms ^  like clay, [her] breasts like tallow,

Hair [hung] like snakeskin   /   across her bed.

Then, on the back of the page, a couple of lines that don’t seem to be going anywhere, and I think I knew they weren’t going anywhere:

When she was seventeen and newly wed,

 What men were   /    -    pierced her like an arrow

PAGE THREE

By now, I had the beginnings of a poem:

The day slipped like a snake across her bed,

And when the shadows clustered into shadow,

She pulled the darkness up around her head.

They challenged her to prove she wasn’t dead.

She showed her arms like clay, her breasts like tallow,

Her skin shed like a snake’s across her bed.

And it was working pretty well. Except I didn’t like it. I liked the image of breasts like tallow, but “arms like clay” didn’t do much for me. It seemed to be just there for the meter, to fill out the line. “They challenged her to prove she wasn’t dead” seemed like a nice line. It was metrically regular. It said something interesting. Why didn’t I like it?

Looking at it again now, I do kinda like it, and I like the formal poem that’s starting to take shape. But at that point – and I hope my instincts were right – I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t like the form, and I really didn’t like the meter. I wanted to break free of it...into free verse, as a matter of fact. I guess that’s why they call it free verse.

PAGE FOUR

So I changed “wasn’t dead” to “was alive,” and I broke it into two lines, to shake myself loose from the metric regularity:

To show them she was

alive, she wriggled free from

her skin, like a snake, and now

her new breasts were soft, like tallow,

So I’d completely and finally abandoned the snake-as-sunlight image. Too bad, maybe. Or OK, maybe. Anyway, I needed to start stripping things down. I knew I liked the image of breasts like tallow to suggest a new, moist, not-quite-formed body emerging from the shed outer layer of skin. Here’s the next start:

To prove to all three of them she was

alive, she shrugged free from

her skin, like a snake, and when

she turned around, her new breasts

were soft, like tallow,

[and her hands]

[and] her hair was downy, and white like milkweed,

and she blinked in the light.

But she was fast, she had

pads of air under her feet.

[and] She could move in any direction,

she could spin and dance like a leaf.

I tried out the “three of them” to see if they’d open up an interesting plot line, but they didn’t, so I let them go. This was pretty much the last hand-written draft.

That's the end of the notes I have in this file. If there were more intermediate steps, I don't remember them. But here's the finished poem.

PROOF

They asked her to prove she was real,

so she shrugged out of

her skin like a snake, and when she

turned around, her new breasts

were soft, like tallow,

her hair was white like milkweed,

and she blinked in the light.

But she was sudden, she had

pads of air under her feet.

She could move in any direction.

She could flip and scoot like a leaf.

She turned into shadow with the shadows.

  

Books and movies

I'm reading The Green Mile, by Stephen King. I haven't read a lot of Stephen King, but I've liked what I've read. I'm reading this one because it was originally published as a serial, and that's something I've been thinking about a lot.

Anyway, one always talks about books and movies, how the book is almost always better, but of course that's not true. As Howard Hawks said, often a good book will make a bad movie, but a bad book can make a great movie. High Noon came from a Saturday Evening Post story which no one remembers. Shane is from a Western novel that no one reads any more. Maybe genre fiction has a better chance at becoming better on film.  I read somewhere that Clint Eastwood acquired The Bridges of Madison County specifically because he wanted the challenge of turning a perfectly awful book into a good movie. Maybe he succeeded...I spared myself reading the book, and the movie was watchable. David R. Slavitt, poet and translator (his version of Ovid's Metamorphosis was not loved by some critics, but they were wrong -- it's brilliant), translated The Fables of Avianus from Latin. Are they an overlooked masterpiece? I asked him. No, he said. Avianus was a terrible writer. That's why I chose him -- so all the literary credit for the translation can go to me.

The Wizard of Oz is regarded by many as one of the greatest movies of all time, and although the books are beloved, it's hard to imagine anyone putting them on the best books of all time list. Still, I can imagine someone saying, "The book was better."

What about movies that are pretty nearly exactly as good as the book? I'd put The Green Mile on that list.

Lots of novels are written these days with the idea that they'll be made into movies, and the novels are written almost like screen treatments. They generally make serviceable novels, and serviceable movies -- neither is likely to stand out.

An odd exception to this generalization: Grahame Greene's The Tenth Man. Quoting from Wikipedia: "In the introduction to the First edition of his novel, Graham Greene states that he had forgotten about this story until receiving a letter about it from a stranger in 1983. Greene had first suggested it as an idea for a film script in 1937, and later developed it whilst working for MGMduring the 1940s. Nothing came of it and the rights were offered for sale by MGM in 1983. The buyer allowed Greene to revise and subsequently publish the work."

So The Tenth Man was actually written as a screen treatment, but it made a wonderful short novel. Interestingly, when it was eventually filmed with Anthony Hopkins, it wasn't a very good movie.

But back to The Green Mile. The book basically is the movie. The prose is straightforward, the story is the same in both versions. The one literary device that King uses, which is interesting and unobtrusive, is the moving back and forth in time by the first person narrator. The narrator places himself in a nursing home, maybe 40 or 50 years after the action of the novel, which is in the 1930s. So although he's essentially narrating the story as it happens, he's narrating a story that he knows the ending of, so he can jump forward in time and tell you what's going to happen.

Poem online

A poem at Halvard Johnson'sOn Barcelona website.

Who gets paid what?

A rant I posted in response to a Facebook post wherein the writer announced that the recent salary increase given to Seattle pitcher Felix Hernandez had made him hate baseball.

I've never understood all this rooting for management in baseball. It's unique to sports, especially baseball. No one is going to post that they hate computer software because Google pays a top software designer 20 million, or they hate Hollywood because Leonardo diCaprio gets 20 mil for Blood Diamond.
But baseball owners are so historically stupid -- they're the one group of capitalists who have led the fight to denigrate their own product, because they hated free agency so much...they preferred the old indentured servitude system where a Ralph Kiner had to accept a pay cut after leading the league in home runs, because he had nowhere else to go. What other business would have done this? Can you imagine, in the same era, a movie studio advertising BATMAN -- starring Jack Nicholson, who got paid $6 million plus a percentage, and boy, did that ham ever not deserve it?
Putting this in historical perspective again, at the same time that baseball owners were waging a PR campaign against their own product, a Broadway producer who understood publicity, Sonny Werblin, took over the Jets, and immediately paid a young college quarterback, Joe Namath, twice what the competitive rate at the time was. And instead of bitching and moaning about the salary, Werblin played it up -- built a positive PR campaign around it. Result -- the AFL shot up in the awareness of fans and players, and became a gold mine. This was around the same time that Lamar Hunt of the Hunt oil family was losing a million dollars a year with the Houston Oilers. A shocked sportswriter -- probably one of those in the pocket of baseball management -- reported this to daddy H. L. Hunt, who said "Uh-oh. At that rate, he'll only be able to run the team for another 200 years."
Seattle's ownership made what looks to be a smart business decision. They've made their fan base feel proud by locking up the team's best and most popular player. They've shown that they're serious about building a winning team, and that will make the Mariners a more attractive proposition to other free agents. And are you really going to root for those owners who've taken the luxury tax established by baseball to give small market teams a chance to compete, and put it in their own pockets?

Donald Hall on Poetry Readings

From an interview with Hall for the Woodstock Times, several years ago.


“Reading poetry aloud makes a difference in one’s relationship to one’s words,” Hall says. “When I started writing, I thought of poetry exclusively on the printed page, though I was always very much aware of the sound of words. Poe was my first influence, at the age of 12 – then Stevens, at 14. Even when I was writing with no sense of words to be spoken out loud, my throat would move as I wrote.

"But reading one’s own poetry out loud to an audience was unheard of back then. Frost did it. But Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore – they virtually never read out loud

 “So I was writing for ‘sounded print,’ not for the spoken word. Then one day when I was about 27, an agent for lecture tours called me. I was flabbergasted. He wanted to me schedule a tour of reading poems to people…on stage…in public?

 “I started out by reading with my hands at my sides, in a high-pitched monotone. Then I started to think more about what it meant to read poems aloud. When I was young, I’d thought about being an actor—it was between poetry and acting for me—but acting is only a part of it. As a teacher, teaching other people’s poems, I had always tried to implant a voice in the poems I was teaching. Now I started to think about that voice. I started to think about how poetry sounded out loud. What was at one time writing theoretically for voicing, has now become writing actually for voicing.

 “This can do good things for your poetry, but it can do dangerous things, too. I remember a time—it was in 1959—when I was working on a poem, and there was a key word that I knew was wrong. ‘Ah,’ I heard myself say, ‘but in a reading I can make it sound right.’ And, fortunately, I caught myself. ‘Uh-oh,’ I remember thinking. ‘Watch your ass. This can be dangerous.’

“There are other dangers in thinking about reading poetry aloud. You don’t want to be writing for the applause of college students. You don’t want to limit yourself to writing poems that can be understood in hearing, although there’s nothing wrong with writing some poems like that.

 “On the other hand, there are ways it can help. I go through many drafts in writing a poem. I write every day, but an individual poem may take me a year or more to finish. I don’t start reading a poem aloud until the late stages of revision, so all of my initial relationship is to words on a page, but when I do start reading it aloud, sometimes I’ll find my voice will drop when I get to a certain word, as if I subconsciously didn’t want anyone to hear it. That’s a good signal to me that I should be taking another look at that word.”

An audience at a reading, Hall notes, should remember that “it’s different from reading a poem. Basically, you want to listen for pleasure – pleasure in the sounds of the words, pleasure in the moment – with no thought of interpretation. Just take it in, and let it flow through you.

“I compare listening to spoken poetry to learning a foreign language. At first you hear words and translate them into your own language. Then, you get to the point where you can make that leap to thinking in the other language. To get the most out of a reading, you need to make that leap – to turn off the translation machine, and just listen to the flow of that spoken language. You don’t want to be writing a critical essay in your mind as you’re listening.”

Spotify 101

Someone needs to teach a course on how to find things on Spotify. Just because you don't find it,it doesn't mean it's not there.Researching my Godcild thread, I discovered a mention of a big band version, by Chubby Jackson from 1948. I checked -- you can't find this on YouTube, but you can on Spotify with great difficulty. A search on "Chubby Jackson" doesn't work, nor does a search on "Godchild. But if you enter "Chubby Jackson Godchild" you can find it.

It's listed as being on an album called "New York Scene in the 40's," but if you try searching for it on Spotify's search engine, you won't find it. Spotify's search engine doesn't seem to find anything with an apostrophe. So maybe just "New York Scene"? Uh-uh. It seems the only way to find it is to click through from "Chubby Jackson Godchild."

But once you get there -- what a wonderful album! Here's the track list:


1    Epistrophy - Cootie Williams
2    I Can't Get Started See All - Dizzy Gillespie
3    Good Bait - Dizzy Gillespie
4    Double Date - Metronome All-Stars
5    No Figs- Metronome All-Stars   
6    Yardbird Suite - Claude Thornhill
7    Donna Lee  - Claude Thornhill
8    Anthropology  - Claude Thornhill
9    Tiny's blues - Chubby Jackson
10    Father Knickerbopper - Chubby Jackson
11    Godchild - Chubby Jackson
12    All Wrong - Chubby Jackson
13    Nice Work If You Can Get It - Sarah Vaughan   
14    Mean To Me  - Sarah Vaughan
15    It Might As Well Be Spring  - Sarah Vaughan
16    Ain't Misbehavin' - Sarah Vaughan

Birth of the Cool: Godchild

Birth of the Cool 7: Godchild. I'm doing this in the order they appear on the CD, not the order they appeared on the original album.The reason for this choice...actually it wasn't a choice. This happened to be the first track listing I ran across online, not having the album in front of me. If I were to start over, I'd use the original listing. Actually, "Godchild" is the third track on the album. The first four were "Jeru," "Move," "Godchild" and "Budo." They were the first four songs recorded, and the two singles released, someone at Capitol having decided they were the best melodies, and likely to be the catchiest. A good decision, I think -- it's really those first four melodies that hooked me in thinking about the album, and made me want to pursue this. Certinly "Godchild" is a wonderful melody. It was written by George Wallington, an outstanding bebop pianist, and it's probably been recorded in more different version that any other piece except possibly Budo/Hallucinations. In at least one YouTube uploading, the composition is credited to Gerry Mulligan, and certainly his arranger's hand is here, but it's Wallington's tune. Starting with the Birth of the Cool track:

Here's a beautiful version by Wallington with a trio, featuring Nick Stabulas on drums, and Teddy Kotick, who I had the pleasure to meet when he played at Opus 40 with J. R. Monterose, on bass.







AllMusic lists a version several of the Birth of the Cool tracks by Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, and I've dug deep, trying to find them, and have finally come to the conclusion that they don't exist. Apparently there's an LP of Charlie Parker - Miles Davis - Lee Konitz, but it's a teaser. Some of the tracks are by Bird, some by Miles and Konitz.



Here's a beautiful version by a Mulligan tentet featuring Art Farmer and Lee Konitz. Great ensemble work, wonderful opening statement of the melody by Mulligan, lots of room for solos, the Farmer and Mulligan solos neatly resolving in an ensemble restatement of the melody.





Versions you can find on Spotify but not YouTube -- Bill Charlap, Tal Farlow/Charles Mingus/Red Norvo, Howard Roberts. Here's one YouTube does have, from Kai Winding:


 And from the classic Mulligan-Chet Baker quartet:




And finally, Terry Gibbs with a big band:

Birth of the Cool: Deception

Birth of the Cool, track 6. "Deception" was written by Miles, and the arrangement for the Birth of the Cool nonet was Gerry Mulligan's. You can hear the musicianship of both of them at their best here, working in counterpoint to each other, Mulligan's ensemble voicings making a nest for Miles to soar out of.

It came from the last recording session for the album, in March of 1950.


I didn't know if I was going to find another recording of deception, and when I did, it blew me away. Clifford Brown and Eric Dolphy? I would never have thought of them as contemporaneous. But Clifford died in 1956 -- if you'd asked me to guess, I would have said around 1952 -- and Dolphy was just starting out, playing with local bands in LA. His father -- talk about supportive! -- built him a studio in the back yard, and friends -- like Clifford Brown -- would come by and jam. This is from one of those sessions:

Birth of the Cool: Budo

Birth of the Cool, track Five: Budo. For many years, looking at the album cover, and playing the tracks on it, I pronounced this in my head with a long U. But it turns out to be Bud-oh, a composition credited to Bud Powell and Miles Davis -- arranged by John Lewis for the Birth of the Cool sessions -- but based on an earlier Bud Powell composition, "Hallucinations." Here's the Powell original:

And from Birth of the Cool:



Budo is one of the most widely covered of the Birth of the Cool originals, but strangely, a lot of those versions of this classic have not made it onto YouTube or Spotify -- including versions by Red Norvo/Charles Mingus/Tal Farlow (who also covered "Move" and "Godchild" on the same session), Lee Morgan Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd and Horace Silver, Joe Lovano and Hank Jones. Versions by Miles and Chet Baker, Miles and Charlie Parker, Miles and Diz also can't be found on YouTube, although there is one by Miles and Trane. Here's a nice version by Bud with Stan Getz:



Bobby McFerrin has a very interesting solo version of "Hallucinations," also not on YouTube, but you can find it on Spotify. And here's a great version of "Hallucinations" by Keith Jarrett:

Birth of the Cool: Venus de Milo

Birth of the Cool, track Four: "Venus de Milo" is a Gerry Mulligan composition, and again, it's been rarely covered, not even by Mulligan except on his "Rebirth of the Cool" album, which was basically a mistake. There's a version by Tito Puente and Maynard Ferguson which is good, and you can find it on Spotify, but if you look for it on YouTube, you get, curiously, directed to a whole string of Audiobooks and episodes of The Great Gildersleeve. And there's a lovely version of it by Jimmy Rowles, which you can find on YouTube with some difficulty, and if you keep digging, you'll discover that it comes from a trio album with Rufus Reid and Mickey Roker, on which they performed four Birth of the Cool numbers -- the others being "Jeru," "Godchild" and "Darn that Dream."



Here's the Jimmy Rowles version of "Venus" -- beautiful. I wish I could find the other three "Birth" interpretations, but no luck on either YouTube or Spotify.



And here's the only other version I could find on YouTube (not counting the song by Prince). This one a bit of an oddity, by the US Army Blues Band. Really not bad -- nice Mulligan-like arrangement.



The entire "Birth of the Cool" sessions have recently been recreated by a Dutch tribute orchestra named Cool Dawn -- you can find them on Spotify, if you're looking for a tribute band. Also on an album of Mulligan compositions (including "Boplicity" from Birth of the Cool) by a group called the Latino Blanco band, also findable on Spotify.

Sex, drugs and genius

I did a graph search using Google ngrams of the words sex, drugs and genius in books from 1800 to,the present. Drugs have always outstripped sex, but the gap reached a plateau of wideness in 1918, shrank to almost nonexistent in 1930, and has widened continually since then. In 1800, genius showed up a lot, sex and drugs barely a blip on the radar, which of course did not exist in 1800. Genius has gradually declined over the years, until it fell behind drugs in 1966, and lost out to sex in 1978. What all this means, I couldn't begin to tell you.

Giving away the ending

In June of 1790, Benedict Arnold’s plans to betray his country by turning West Point over to the British were discovered, and he had to flee for his life, his name forever synonymous with treason.

Suppose you didn’t know that was how the story ended. Then you have a dashing young merchant sea captain, a daring smuggler, a loving husband of an unloving wife who gains, loses, and gains another fortune, who gives up a life as the wealthiest merchant in Connecticut to join the Sons of Liberty and then the Continental Army, who leads the first successful campaign of what is not yet even officially the Revolutionary War, winning Fort Ticonderoga and Lake Champlain for the new American cause. You have a commander who leads an ultimately unsuccessful campaign against the British in Canada, but in doing so, stays with his men through the most grueling hardship, winning their love and respect. You have the master strategist, the daring commander, the wounded victor in the battle of Saratoga, and where’s your story going?

If you don’t know that your hero is Benedict Arnold, there’s suspense, there’s indignation, there’s reader identification with this brave man who serves his country brilliantly, but is thwarted, hamstrung and betrayed over and over by cowards, publicity-seeking thugs, and petty political maneuverers.

And maybe it’s a better story that way. Hard to say, because we know the story so well.  As it is, when we read about Ethan Allen stealing the credit for the victory at Ticonderoga, about the treacherous engineer Montresor giving him misleading maps for his journey to Quebec, or the cowardly Colonel Enos turning back with 300 of Arnold’s 1000 men, about the politicians who stabbed Arnold in the back, passing him over for promotion again and again in favor of lesser men, we read it with a sense of foreboding, rather than suspense, and each of these betrayals take on a sense of inevitability. Also, a red flag goes up in our minds every time we hear of a betrayal. Those incidents loom larger in our sense of the story than they might if we didn’t know the ending. Knowing the ending makes it a different story.

E.M. Forster, in his great book Aspects of the Novel, writes about life measured by time vs. life measured by value, “and our conduct reveals a double allegiance. ‘I only saw her for five minutes, but it was worth it.’ There you have both allegiances in a single sentence. And what the story does is to narrate the life in time. What the entire novel does – if it is a good novel – is to include the life by values as well.”  The story of Arnold’s life, because it’s nonfiction and we know the end, is told by values. Betrayer and betrayed – in these moments time stands still. Of course, it’s also told by time. Events unfold chronologically. But time stands still for us as readers when a betrayal enters the story.

What can you say about a 21-year-old girl who died? What if you don’t start the story that way? If you don’t start the story that way, frankly, it’s probably not a mega-bestseller, because you don’t have a story if she doesn’t die, and you’re pretending to a suspense that the reader isn’t going to feel. Take away the suspense,  and the life told by values becomes altogether different.

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love begins with the death of Cesar – old, sick, bloated, ugly, drunk and poor. As he stands up, staggers and falls in the swoon from which he will not awaken, he knocks over the credenza which holds all of the 78 RPM records he made in his life. And for the rest of this wonderful novel, as we follow the young, brash, ruthless, gifted, self-absorbed womanizer, we see him through this veil of sadness.

Just as we know the Benedict Arnold story will end with treason, we know how “I’ll sing you the true tale of Billy the Kid / I’ll sing you the deeds that this young outlaw did” will end. By the time he’s 21, he’ll have been “shot down by Pat Garrett, who once was his friend.” But in the case of Little Joe, giving away the ending by telling us that “he’ll wrangle never more / His days with the remuda they are done” lets us know that the life measured by time is going to be short, and the life measured by values will have to be measured against that inevitability. On the other hand, in “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” we have three characters – four, with Big Jim – whose lives are measured in both time and value, and the intersections of those lives leaves room for suspense which is enhanced by our not knowing the ending.

What happens next? Is a key element in every story. Starting out by telling us what happens at the end is a choice you can’t make every time, but sometimes it can be the right choice.

Birth of the Cool - Moon Dreams

Moon Dreams is a standard of sorts, composed by Glenn Miller's pianist and Johnny Mercer, which may very well make it the only instance of of Miles covering Glenn Miller. The Glenn Miller version can't be found on YouTube, although you can find it on Spotify, but you have to search for Glenn Miller Moon Dreams. For a standard, it hasn't been covered much. There's Glenn's version, which isn't all that good, and one by Martha Tilton -- the first recording ever made for the fledgling Capitol Records.





But it seems it took Miles to really find the beauty of the song. As with many of the other Birth of the Cool cuts, it was covered by other artists from the session, like Lee Konitz. Again, not too many others.  But both Airto and Flora Purim have recorded it, separately and together. Here's Flora's version --

Birth of the Cool - Jeru

Birth of the Cool, track 2

"Jeru" is a beautiful melody by Gerry Mulligan that almost no one seems to have covered. Allmusic.com lists mostly versions by Mulligan, Miles, and a few other Birth of the Cool alumni like Lee Konitz. Allmusic lists a version by Oscar Peterson (on a Live in Paris album according to Allmusic), but I can't find either one on YouTube or Spotify. LastFM acknowledges that it exists, but they don't have it. Allmusic also lists one by Stanley Clarke and Patrice Rushen, which I was finally able to find on YouTube, but as "Jazz Straight Up - Jeru." Here it is:

 


I also found a version by the Clare Fischer clarinet choir, which can't be heard in its entirety on any Internet site that I've found, although you can hear the first 30 seconds on allmusic and other sites. And -- I suppose this is why I pursue stuff like this -- found out a lot about Clare Fischer, whom I had never heard of, and who died a year ago almost to the day. Check out his Wiki page -- fascinating guy. He won a Grammy in 1981.

Spotify has a vocalese version by Mel Torme, with Mulligan and Shearing backing him up, but it doesn't do much more than point up Torme's limitations as a jazz singer.

Birth of the Cool: Move

Started thinking about Birth of the Cool, and the original compositions by Miles, Gil Evans and others that made up that session -- what great tunes they all are. Started wondering who else has recorded them. So here's the first cut on the album, "Move," as played by Bireli Lagrene, the gypsy jazz guitarist who first made his mark at the age of eight, playing Django Reinhardt's book.

 

And again by Stan Getz, a live performance from 1951, featuring Teddy Kotick on bass -- Teddy who played at Opus 40 several times with J. R. Monterose.

Guns and Redstaters

I contribute to a small political discussion online forum, and every now and then I write something there that's modestly thought out, so I decided I'd post a few of those here, even though I've mostly stayed away from political postings here.

This has to do with the NRA's sudden discovery that there's violence in the media, and the conservatives' newfound meme that hey, why don't liberals care about media violence the way that we do?

iolence in the media has always been a liberal issue. What's weird now is that conservatives are taking it up, and they don't understand anything they're saying.

Exposure to violent movies, video games, etc., is (according to some theories) a bad thing because:

(a) it may provoke people into putting on hockey masks and slashing up teenagers. (not likely)

(b) it may provoke people (mostly very young people) into thinking that committing violent acts is a good idea, in which case they'll most likely turn to guns.

(c) it may make people (especially young, every easily influenced, not terribly mentally stable people) into thinking that the world is a very dangerous place, and they'd better get an AK-47 to protect themselves, their homes, and possibly even their neighborhoods (e.g., Trayvon Martin case).

Have I left out anything?

The Tragic Polka

The Tragic Polka on YouTube!

The Rocklins

Rehearsal for The Rocklins today -- the play based on a story by Harvey Fite that we'll be premiering June 9 and 10 at Opus 40! Today we worked on the music - by Thomas Workman - which is wonderful and challenging. There's essentially one song in the play - "Spirit of Stone," developed from a one- stanza poem by Harvey Fite in his book "The Rocklins." but different verses are sung at three different points in the play by representatives of three different cultures, and Thomas has varied the melody subtly to reflect each culture, using an Aeolian scale for the Greco-Roman Rocklin, A Phrygian scale for the Egyptian Rocklin, and a pentatonic scale for the Mayan Rocklin. It's very beautiful.

Tomorrow Never Knows

The concluding image of last week's Mad Men stays in my mind. Don Draper has had to find Beatles-type music for a sponsor, and he's out of his depth. "When did music become so important?" he asks his wife.
She gives him "Revolver" to listen to, and as the episode ends, he's standing in his perfect living room, listening to "Tomorrow Never Knows." He, of course, looks perfect as only Don Draper can. And the swirling sitars and guitar tape loops, and the lyrics about people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion, are moving the world into a place where Don's perfection is no longer relevant.
And it's a requiem for jazz. Don Draper is the Playboy ideal. His apartment, even with a wife, is the Playboy Pad. And this is the Playboy of the 50s, of the Kennedy era, of the Peter Gunn era, when jazz was the musical accoutrement to the hip lifestyle. Of course, the Playboy reader was the guy who regularly voted Doc Severinsen as the top jazz trumpeter. Music mattered in this era, the era of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderly and Zoot Sims and Lennie Tristano, but to the Playboy reader it was background...the Playboy-approved background. And as Don Draper stands there, perfect, listening to "Tomorrow Never Knows," he is on his way to cultural irrelevancy, as the Playboy reader moves from choosing Doc over Miles to McCartney over Mingus, or for that matter Lennon over Hendrix.

Speaking of songs

I wrote this some time ago, for the New Country Music Encyclopedia, but it can't hurt to pull it out of mothballs:

Speaking of songs...one of the commonest and easiest cheap shots against country music goes something like this: all country songs are about the same cliched themes, generally about drinkin' and cheatin', lovin' and hurtin', workin' and dancin', or making that good ole country music, with the odd inspirational ditty thrown in. The old joke is that if you play a country song backwards, you get your wife back, your truck back, your dog back...Well, they say every great novel or play ever written is a variation on seven basic plots, so it's hard to figure out why someone who writes two and half minute stories set to music should be criticized for mostly writing variations on the same half a dozen or so themes, especially if he or she does it with style and feeling. Anyway, it occurred to me that if country music is scorned for having such limited range of subject matter, other forms of popular music must be much more diverse, right? So I checked out a few albums at random, starting with the Great American Songbook as represented by Natalie Cole's tribute to her father, "Unforgettable." Turns out there are songs on the themes of lovin' ("The Very Thought of You," "This Can't Be Love," "For Sentimental Reasons," "Our Love is Here to Stay"), hurtin' ("Paper Moon," "Mona Lisa," "Don't Get Around Much Any More," "Too Young"), ramblin' ("Route 66"), and an inspirational ditty about makin' the best of life ("Smile").

Well, maybe we'd do better with the most exciting musical innovators of our time, The Beatles, in "A Hard Day's Night." It has songs about workin' ("A Hard Day's Night"), lovin' ("I Should Have Known Better," "I'm Happy Just to Dance With You," "And I Love Her"), cheatin' ("Tell Me Why"), hurtin' ("I'll Cry Instead"), and an inspirational ditty about livin' life with the right set of values ("Can't Buy Me Love."

How about a master American singer-songwriter, Bruce Springsteen? On "Born in the USA," he writes songs about ("Workin' on the Highway," "Downbound Train" -- actually about workin' and hurtin'), lookin' for love ("Cover Me" "I'm on Fire," "Dancin' in the Dark"), tough times ("My Home Town," the title song), ramblin' (Bobby Jean," "Darlington County"), and an inspirational ditty about livin' life with the right set of values ("Glory Days.")

Surely, I'd find more variety in the work of acknowledged musical genius, George Gershwin? So I pulled out an old vinyl album called "Chris Connor Sings Gershwin" from the back of the shelf and gave it a spin. I found lovin' ("Love Walked In," "A Foggy Day." "Love is Here to Stay"), cheatin' ("I Love You Porgy"), playin' music ("Slap That Bass") and an inspirational ditty about family values "Summertime").

Descort: Dupree Variations

Here's the complete descort, composed for Lewis Turco as an example of the descort for the fourth edition of The Book of Forms.

DESCORT: DUPREE VARIATIONS

Betty told Dupree she wanted a diamond ring

Betty told Dupree, I want a diamond ring

Dupree told Betty,  I’d buy you most anything

Just sleep

little Betty

see what tomorrow brings

Go to sleep my little Betty

see what tomorrow brings

Now it’s only

Dupree

If history and legend have it right,

A man will risk it all to please a mistress.

We know from witnesses that Dupree’s night

Was fueled by coke and weed; his mood was listless,

Then near berserk; at last, by early light

His eyes were bloodshot and his hands were restless.

His mind was fixed. He took a .44,

To get that ring, he’d rob a jewelry store.

His mind was fixed. He took a .44,

The frame was cool and dry; the grip was warm.

To get that ring, he’d rob a jewelry store.

No use to try and hold him back—the door

Clicked softly shut behind him. Like a charm

Or talisman, he held his .44.

You knew that this would be a night for gore.

He smashed the glass with gun and bloodied arm,
And blindly crashed into the jewelry store.

He scarcely seemed to care what lay in store,

And, heedless that he’d triggered the alarm

He grabbed the ring, and waved his .44.

He killed two cops, and wounded several more.

Then, weary in his soul, and sick of harm,

Threw down the ring, and fled the jewelry store.

The law all vowed they'd even up the score.

Dupree beat west, and hid out on a farm

With no companion but the .44

And stalked by nightmares of the jewelry store.

Sheriffs and troopers and Highway Patrol,

Squad car and motorbike, horseman and hound,

Chasing Dupree like a fox to its hole,

Bloodlust won't cease till they run him aground.

Radio says that Dupree has been found,

Betty just listens and says a soft prayer,

Bull horns bark orders and SWAT teams surround,

Dupree walks out with his hands in the air.

Betty asked the sheriff, where will they take Dupree?

Sheriff said Your man's gone down to Atlanta jail.

Betty went to visit, his face she could not see,

They said Your man killed cops, you cannot go his bail.

Oh, please, Mr. Jailer, give him this note for me.

Sail on,

Dupree, sail on.

I don't know where you're bound,

just wish it didn't have to be

so long.

Exigeses of the individual verses to be continued.

Descort part 4

    Sheriffs and troopers and Highway Patrol,
    Squad car and motorbike, horseman and hound,
    Chasing Dupree like a fox to its hole,
    Bloodlust won't cease till they run him aground.
    Radio says that Dupree has been found,
    Betty just listens and says a soft prayer,
    Bull horns bark orders and SWAT teams surround,
    Dupree walks out with his hands in the air.

I moved to a ballade for the next stanza, which moved away from the blues, and brought me to a very different moods. There are many ballades, but the one that always sticks in my head is Edmund Rostand's, from Cyrano de Bergerac -- the part where Cyrano improvises a ballade as he duels with a churl, ending

Qu'a la fin de lenvoi, je toiuche!

There are various translations, but I still like the one voiced by Jose Ferrer in the movie:

Then, as I end the refrain, thrust home!

There's certainly room for this sort of boast in the blues, although not in Betty and Dupree, and not quite in that language:

Going to Black Mountain, with my razor and my gun,
Going to Black Mountain, with my razor and my gun,
Gonna cut him if he stands, shoot him if he runs.

The rest of the scansion story -- and here it gets really boring, unless you're a poet, or even if you are -- it's hard to imagine Gregory Corso reading this and not throwing his laptop across the room in disgust. Well,  it's hard to imagine Gregory Corso having a laptop, or any circumstance under which he would not have thrown it across the room. But back to scansion. This particular ballade was written in dactylic tetrameter, which means it goes DA-da-da four times. Except, of course, it doesn't go DA-da-da four times. It only goes DA-da-da three times, and then ends with DA. Or anapestic tetrameter, which means that it doesn't quite go da-da-DA four times, more like one DA and three da-da-DAs.

That's called a catalexis, and that's a term I only learned recently from R. S. (Sam) Gwynn, who...well, the expression is, has forgotten more about scansion than I'll ever know, except that he hasn't forgotten anything about scansion. Anyway, a catalexis occurs when you truncate one of the metric feet,  either at the beginning of a line or the end. I first fell in love with this gambit reading W. H. Auden:

Time, that with this strange excuse,
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardon him for writing well.

Before I learned about catalexes, I would just have described that line as either truncated iambic or truncated trochaic, but what I loved about it is that there was always a tipping point, where the line subtly moved from one to the other:


TIME, // that WITH // this STRANGE// exCUSE,
PARDoned // KIPling // AND his  // VIEWS,
AND will // PARDon // PAUL // ClauDEL,
PARDon // HIM // for WRIT // ing WELL.

Anyway, my favorite poem employing that galloping anapest is Browning's "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix":




And I think Dupree takes on a little of that rollicking British hunting song quality in this stanza.

Groupthink

Some advice I offered to a friend who's teaching her first creative writing class:

The one thing I'd emphasize -- workshopping student work is an important part of the course. You're expected to do it, and the students sort of expect it. But once you give it to them, they don't know what to do. Because critiquing the work of others isn't something that comes naturally. It has to be learned, and it's not always easy to learn. So -- you'll find you own way to teach this, but it has to be taught.

One way is to offer discussion questions. I can't really do this -- it's not natural to me. But it's one way.

Another -- and this works better for me -- is to set up forums on Blackboard. Divide the class into smaller discussion groups -- say, for to six in each group. Everyone in the group is to post his or her assignment, and everyone is to critique the work of the other members of the group. Then you start a dialogue, critiquing their critiques, suggesting things they might have thought of, encouraging perceptive critiques. Most of the first ones will be awful. I loved this -- it reminded me of my own grandmother. This had a really good flow to it. That sort of thing. As I said, they won't know what to say -- they won't have any sort of critical vocabulary. You encourage them to do the same things you encourage them to do in writing about literature -- go to the text, focus on specifics. What more could the author do to make this the poem it wants to be?

Don't do in-class workshopping right away. Start giving them that vocabulary first, and the encouragement that it's all right to be critical, and how to constructively bring out the things that are good about the piece -- not all criticism has to be negative.

Do some workshopping in small groups, and some in the whole class. But this will be one of the most important skills you'll teach them all semester.

You MUST read the article I just read today in the New Yorker -- Groupthink, by Jonah Lehrer. It's absolutely fascinating about the ways people make progress in groups, and the ways that they don't.

And some more thoughts on Lehrer's article. He discusses the history of brainstorming. It was a technique invented and promoted by advertising genius Alex Osborn in the 1940s -- its most important tenet, encouraging a free flow of ideas by absolutely forbidding any negative feedback at all. Negative feedback discourages creativity by inhibiting the participants. In this stage, Osborn says, you're looking for quantity, not quality. "You're loosening up an unfettered imagination -- making your mind deliver." Lehrer gives a little more history -- the idea was an instant smash, and has been used by businesses and other organizations ever since, He also gives a history of research on the technique. Research emphatically shows that id doesn't work. Blind studies of one control group who brainstormed an idea, and another who split up so that each member worked on the problem individually, invariably showed the same results. You got more ideas, and more good ideas, from people working individually. And working in groups? It has value too, but much more value if people are allowed to criticize and argue. I have been in writers' groups, and I have friends who have been in other writers' groups -- the kind which are about sharing and mutual support, and don't allow any criticism. Well, any writers group is good for one thing -- it makes you write. If you meet a bunch of folks every week to talk about your writing, you're going to want to write something every week. But outside of the fact that it would drive me crazy, I never believed the sweetness and light approach would do anyone much good. Now I stand validated.

What's my name?

I've been talking to my daughter about characters' names. She says that one of the reasons it's so hard for her to write a novel is that she can't name her characters. Most of her short stories, she says, are about lost, lonely women who don't really have names, and I think actually that this is one of the strengths of those stories. The characters have a haunting, unsettlingly memorable quality that could be blunted by naming them. But in a novel you pretty much have to name your characters, and what if you choose the wrong name? Will it throw everything off, or get you pointed in a wrong direction.

Poe did very well with unnamed characters. But what about full-length fiction?Are there novels -- other than really experimental ones -- where the character doesn't have a name? There's Proust. We generally call his character "Marcel" because that's Proust's name, and the novels are so clearly autobiographical. But actually, he only refers to himself as "Marcel" once in the seven volumes, and that fairly far along. Mostly, he has no name.

Can you go through a private eye novel without naming the lead character? I bet you could. Spenser only has one name. In the Sergio Leone Westerns, Clint Eastwood is The Man With No Name. In Lady in the Lake, Philip Marlowe has a name but nothing else -- we never see him except for a couple of shots in mirrors, we just see what he sees. A first person narrator can tell or withhold whatever she likes, and no reason that she can't withhold her name. Instead of saying "My name's Honey West," or whatever, it can just be "I told him my name."

Anything you deny yourself can be made into a strength. Those writers who self-censored, or were censored, away from George Carlin's seven dirty words lost a certain realism, but gained the creativity of circumlocution --"He told me to do the impossible to myself!"

Here's a nice use of that device from Tom T. Hall, in "A Week in a County Jail."

Well, I told him who I was and told him I was working steady
And I really should be gettin' on my way
That part about me bein' who I was did not impress him
He said, "The judge'll be here any day."

Perhaps not naming a private eye cloaks her/him in a layer of invulnerability. Someone who won't even share her name with her readers is a very guarded, close-to-the-vest person. Just as naming a character makes, consciously or unconsciously, certain character choices, so does not naming a character.

More Descort

The Byronic stanza, of course, had ended with a couplet, and I decided to take that couplet, sandwich a third line in the middle, and make it a villanelle stanza. But you can't really give the flavor of a villanelle in one stanza, so I had to write the whole villanelle.

Here the question of form dictating mood gets a little wobbly. Certainly it's possible to write a comic or sardonic villanelle. The form is wonderfully flexible, and if you don't believe me, look at the new anthology edited by Annie Finch and Marie-Eizabeth Mali. (I'm in it -- not with this one -- but there are lots of real poets, too  -- using that famous question that was put to Carl Sandburg -- "are these real poems or do you just make 'em up yourself?")

Anyway -- forms that use repetition can be playful and not so playful, and of course the blues goes in both directions too.

I think there's a real connection between the blues and the ghazal. But use repetition, both come from Africa, and both frequently make use of the poet/singer's name. I don't think there's much likelihood of a cultural connection between the blues and the villanelle, but as Joseph Campbell pointed out, we're all part of one big mother myth, and there are many cross-cultural correspondences.

So I found myself going back to the grim fatalism of "Betty and Dupree" with the villanelle, but I also found myself being more literary -- the villanelle pushed me that way, as a blues would not.

His mind was fixed. He took a .44,
The frame was cool and dry; the grip was warm.
To get that ring, he’d rob a jewelry store.

No use to try and hold him back—the door
Clicked softly shut behind him. Like a charm
Or talisman, he held his .44.

You knew that this would be a night for gore.
He smashed the glass with gun and bloodied arm,
And blindly crashed into the jewelry store.

He scarcely seemed to care what lay in store,
And, heedless that he’d triggered the alarm
He grabbed the ring, and waved his .44.

He killed two cops, and wounded several more.
Then, weary in his soul, and sick of harm,
Threw down the ring, and fled the jewelry store.

The law all vowed they'd even up the score.
Dupree beat west, and hid out on a farm
With no companion but the .44
And stalked by nightmares of the jewelry store.

Descort part 2

My descort included a 12-bar blues stanza, a Rubliw (a syllabic form invented by Richard Wilbur), an ottava rima stanza in iambic pentameter, a villanelle in iambic pentameter (because one villanelle stanza does not demonstrate the form, I used a whole villanelle), a ballade stanza in a catalectic dactyllic tetrameter (Lew—not sure I described that right), an alexandrine with ABABA rhyme scheme, and a cinquai I'm not exactly certain that a descort -- this descort, anyway -- is as interesting to read as it was to write. But I found that writing it gave a real insight into how form influences content. I decided to do variations on a theme, because I suspected that there'd be a problem with, if nothing else, emotional continuity, so it made sense to come at the same thing in different ways. "Betty and Dupree" is a blues ballad, with a story line, so I could advance a plot at the same time I was working out stylistic variations, and whatever came with them. Also, by choosing a blues, I had my first stanza form.

DESCORT: DUPREE VARIATIONS
Betty told Dupree she wanted a diamond ring
Betty told Dupree, I want a diamond ring
Dupree told Betty,  I’d buy you most anything

  "Betty and Dupree" begins with a hopeless situation. Dupree will do anything for Betty, but he will never be able to afford a diamond ring. The blues stanza is not particularly designed to carry a plot. Its AAa form presents a statement, generally an emotional predicament, repeats that statement for emphasis, and then resolves it, with a fatalistic inevitability or an ironic twist.  "I've got 19 men, and I want one more / I've got 19 men, and I want one more / If I get that one, I'll let those 19 go" (Bessie Smith). Bt "Betty and Dupree mak s it work. Each stanza is a separate and complete chapter in the story.  

Just sleep
little Betty
see what tomorrow brings
Go to sleep my little Betty
see what tomorrow brings
Now it’s only
Dupree

  I got this form wrong (sorry, Lew!) A rubliw, invented by Richard Wilbur (hence the name) is supposed to be a monorhyme -- each line rhymes to the same sound. But I did have the syllabic pattern -- 2, 4, 6, 8, 6, 4, 2 -- and I chose it because I could keep the AA lines of the blues, using the second stanza of "Betty and Dupree" almost intact. But then I needed to shrink the final line, which in the original is "When you wake up in the morning, you just might have your diamond ring." I had thought that in spite of the tragic nature of the original, all this playing with form would result in a playful, mostly comic poem, but that didn't happen here. As the form closed in on itself, so Dupree's options were closing in on him, awake and alone in the dead of night.  

If history and legend have it right,
A man will risk it all to please a mistress.
We know from witnesses that Dupree’s night
Was fueled by coke and weed; his mood was listless,
Then near berserk; at last, by early light
His eyes were bloodshot and his hands were restless.
His mind was fixed. He took a .44,
To get that ring, he’d rob a jewelry store.

  The ottava rima stanza is Byron's, and it's hard to approach it without Byron's ironic distancing. Nothing could be farther from the blues, which is all about empotional directness and intensity. I think this is one of the main reasons that the blues has lasted as important art form -- it is uniquely able to express deeply personal and powerful emotion. "Betty and Dupree" tells a story in the third person, but it's still Dupree's story, and the narrator is powerfully involved with him. The first important artist to use the blues as a storytelling vehicle with an ironically detached narrator was Chuck Berry. My third stanza ends with the song's third verse -- "Dupree took a pistol, it was a .44 (2x) / To get that diamond ring for Betty, he had to rob the jewelry store." The song gives us Dupree's isolation and desperation. Byrony irony puts Dupree in a historical/psychosical context, and moves us away from Dupree. We only know his story from witnesses. More later.