Joe Henry is best known in service to others, a writer of songs for stars (Madonna “Don’t Tell Me To Stop”) and producer to everyone from Meshell Ndegéocello and Ani DiFranco to Elvis Costello and Mose Allison. His own recordings tend to be noisy affairs with confessional, expressionistic poetry set to pop-savvy melodies framed in cartoonish cacophony. Over the years, he’s included jazz musicians including Brad Mehldau, Don Byron and Ornette Coleman to bring added spark and soulfulness to match his often surreal words. Reverie manages the soulfulness without the static. It’s stripped down Henry with even more obscure lyrics (“I keep wooden boxes like traps strung with wire/In the light of old ties, piled and on fire”). The acoustic quartet of guitar, piano, bass, and drums is occasionally decorated with pump organ, added guitarist Marc Ribot’s ukulele, and backup vocals from Irish singer-songwriter Lisa Hannigan. The effect is even more melancholy than the often down-beat singer has conveyed in the past, and with reason. “Room At Arles,” dedicated to the late, tragic Vic Chesnutt, is particularly somber (“The curtains wave a flag to say/This afternoon is done/And giving in to evening who has/Beat him like a brother”). Despite the mood and minimalism, Reverie is still “raucous and fractured and noisy” as he asserts in the liner notes’ dedication to his parents. And that’s just the way we Henry fans like it.   –Cabbage Rabbit

REINCARNATION OF A LOVE BIRD, Paul Motian and the Electric Bebop Band ; JMT, recorded June 1994. Motian had a way of layering his sound against the ring of electric guitars and for a while in the ’90s had bands that doubled up on them and saxophones (see Garden of Eden, below). Here’s it’s Kurt Rosenwinkel and Wolfgang Muthspiel adding sustained atmospherics and plucky bebop lines. This may be the best example of Motian’s skill at choosing and reworking jazz standards, taking them from innovators including Monk, Miles, Mingus, Bird and Gillespie. And while there’s only one Motian original, “Split Descision” performed twice, beginning and  end, it illustrates how Motian, that most color-conscious drummer, was extending the moods and harmonic construction of the greats he covers. Would we have pulled this out if the man hadn’t passed? Eventually. Motian’s in our infrequent rotation list, someone we return to again and again as time rolls on.

GARDEN OF EDEN, Paul Motian Band; ECM, recorded November, 2004. We pulled this out a couple weeks back when the man was still on the planet and haven’t let go. Another example of Motian’s two-guitar,-two sax ensemble; this time with seven Motian originals of the kind that send us (the drummer also gets great contributions from his sidemen; hear Muthspiel’s “Waseenonet” from Reincarnation above, saxophonist Chris Cheek’s “Desert Dream” here. What we said before: “Paul Motian plays drums like Bill Evans played piano. Here’s it’s in support of a larger group; the tangle of guitars (Steve Cardenas, Ben Monder, Jakob Bro), brother saxophones of Chris Cheek, Tony Malaby, the try-this-on-for size bass of Jerome Harris. Some Mingus, some originals from the band. But it’s Motian’s “Mesmer” that has a mesmerized. It’s like an Ornette tune at half-speed; inviting, entrancing and ultimately about the human condition.” I forgot to mention the great rework of Mingus’ “Pithecanthropus Erectus.”

MICHAEL TIPPETT DIVERTIMERNTO ON “SELINGER’S ROUND,’ LITTLE MUSIC FOR STRING ORCHESTRA, THE HEART’S ASSURANCE, CONCERTO FOR DOUBLE STRING ORCHESTRA, City of Londo Sinfonia condcuted by Richard Hickox; Chandos, recorded March, 1995. There’s a variety of music here, indicating a range not often associated with the 20th century English composer. Sure, the dancing  “sprung” rhythms of the Concerto catch our off-beat ears but it’s the audible empathy for simple lives, especially heard in the Lament from “Sellinger’s Round” that sticks with us, so much that tenor John Mark Ainsley has to wrestle us back in “The Heat’s Assurance” with a display of  compassion (the music ponders a woman’s suicide, inspired by poets killed in World War II) and passion lost.

APPEARING NIGHTLY,Carla Bley and Her Remarkable Big Band; ECM, 2007. Lively, playful, wonderfully arranged music that jumps jives and gets serious all in a matter of moments. Full of respect for the tradition as well as inside jokes and running gags, the bulk of them perpetrated by trumpeter Lew Soloff. The 25 minute suite that lends the disc its title is a historical overview with the band shouting jive to accent the period feel. “Greasy Gravy” and “Bad Coffee” burns with sax and trumpet reflux (although at different tempos). Emotional highpoint: when the trombone (is it Beppe Calamosca?) blares a warning above the groove and shimmer from Bley-mates bassist Steve Swallow and Karen Mantler on organ. Did I mention Steve Swallow? Who else could play with this noisy of a band and sound like an entire section on his own?

Walter Mosely’s meditation on his first memories in The New York Times is a detailed account of awakening consciousness. Mosely, at the age of three — the year most likely is 1955  –  opens his eyes in front of the television in his parents’ home. He is suddenly flooded with images and sensations. He says, “in some essential way,” it was the beginning of his life.

“There was a sense of excitement tingling in my shoulders and thrumming at the back of my head; an electricity that made me want to laugh out loud, but I didn’t laugh…There was dark blue carpeting beneath my knees and the room I was in, the living room, was bright because of daylight that came through the windows and also from the front door of the adjacent dining room. This door was open but the screen was closed.”

What might have been stolen from this memory had the television been on?

That Mosley’s visual memory of  specific events some 55 years past are so acute and detailed isn’t so surprising in light of his fiction, which is also acutely visual and focused. His 2010 novel, The Last Days of Ptolmey Grey,  centers on a nonagenarian who suffers the consequences of reviving lost memory. But it’s safe to ask:  Does Mosely really remember all this detail? Does he really remember the floral pattern of his mother’s dress, the “spiky” feel of the grass beneath his bare feet, the paleness of the violet dahlias his father was digging with a hand trowel?

I’ve often been credited with unbelievable recall of my early years. I astonished my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles with details of an overnight stay in Children’s Hospital, a horse sticking its head through unshuttered windows one humid night on  distant cousins’ south Texas farm, the events surrounding my sisters birth; all occuring just before and when I was three. As I picture these things well over a half century later, I remember the times I remembered them and wonder if my memory is just recall of the memories, something akin to imagination, and not the memories themselves.

Mosley’s account, clearly remembered as he states, recalls the same kind of awakening Chris Ware illustrates in his last couple graphic novels as the pixels of toddler consciousness gather into image.  But Mosley goes on to express doubt at the depth of his formative memories. Nor does he attribute recollection to the mind:

The boundaries have become smaller as I have aged. The passions have receded and the sun shines less brightly. But none of that matters because the primitive heart that remembers is, in a way, eternal.

In the way a poet might, Mosley ties imagination, a creative function, to a symbol of the human spirit. It’s a brilliant piece, poignant and meaningful to our experience as well as his. –Cabbage Rabbit

Welcome news today that Philip Levine has been appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. I enjoyed Levine’s 2010 collection News of the World with its recycled memories and working class tales as well as its plain-spoken language , something often required of American poets; see Ted Kooser but, not so much, Levine’s predecessor W.S. Merwin. I’m hoping this will result in an updated collection of the 83-year-old poets work, so we may chart his aesthetic course even as his poetry springs more and more of memory.

Gil-Scott Heron, dead today at 62,  was equal parts social commentator, freedom fighter and pop star. Known as the Godfather of Rap, a title he vehemently denied in an interview I had with him in 1995, he none-the-less influenced generations of rappers and was sampled dozens of times. Most rappers ignored his plea to “not lean so heavily on rhyme and concentrate on the message” (and he meant the socio-political message).

When I talked to Scott-Heron that first time, he had just ended 12 years of recording silence with Spirits. The opening track, “Message To the Messengers” (“if you gonna be teachin’ folks, you gotta know what you’re sayin’…”) was directed at the hip-hop generation, asking them to see where their movement had come from and what it should be about. I was in New York and was hoping to talk to Scott-Heron in person on his own turf.  Complications ensued and I suspected, not without reason, that the man who wrote “Angel Dust” and “The Bottle” was chasing his program, whatever it might be (what did Elridge Cleaver say in Soul On Ice about the sensitive and their vulnerability to drugs?). Most likely,  despite a new recording, he just didn’t want to spend time with a reporter from L.A., or anywhere for that matter.  There was a certain irony in our cellphone conversation as he pursued something around the city’s Upper Westside. The signal kept cutting out.

“Message To the Messengers”  is a lecture of sorts, a plea for peace in a movement that had turned on itself (“they’re glad we’re out there killin’ each other…”). Scott-Heron’s was asking the rap community to remember what had gone before, to show respect and generational brotherhood. It’s also a call to action : “what we did was to tell our generation to get busy/because it wasn’t going to be televised.” Knowing that the revolution has not and will not be televised is as appropriate today as it was in 1972 and 1994: the media is not our message but theirs, we are in this together but not everyone is together with us. “[Rappers] have to know they’re not going through anything new” he told me, “it’s the same stuff I went through back then. They’ve got to remember it’s not about them. It’s about community and the people.”

One of my favorite Scott-Heron tunes, “Lady Day and John Coltrane,” addressed the power of music in our lives. Scott-Heron’s music, socially relevant and politically charged, brought truth to that power. Sing on.   — Cabbage Rabbit

Now here’s something: a collection of poetry inspired by a comic strip. Monica Youn’s Ignatz is surprisingly like George Herriman’s classic cartoon: suggestive, surreal, catty. It’s focus, despite its comic derivation, is the caginess of love,  it’s impact on psychology and our perceptions. There are two voices speaking here, Krazy Kat and Youn; and when in “Ignatz Pursuer”  it’s wished she could spit out her heart into her palm, we hear both.

If we’re to truly understand the Kat whose love prompts her (his?) beloved to fire bricks at her head, we must see the relationship, like Youn, as symbol, as a panoply of images and sounds.  In Krazy Kat’s world, love is both blind and a vision. Like the shifting scenes  in Herriman’s strip, Youn’s poems present us with ever-changing backgrounds holding unmoving characters. Krazy Kat’s love will never change. Ignatz mouse’s disgust with the same won’t either.

With doses of wit (“Weight/is the end//of wanting”), Youn makes Kat’s obsession serious, deep and unfathomable. She avoids Herriman’s phonetic spellings but not the phonetics: “O my dear devoir/O my dour devour”//Your name:/an arrow/with a rope attached/could pull/this raft/across this river.” The comic’s focus on unrequited love is made substantially dark, its humor dependent on the hope seen in hopelessness.

Yet somehow, hope persists. Each of the book’s four sections begins with an love poem (Krazy’s Song) in verse. “O Ignatz won’t you meet me/by the blue bean bush?” Each of the four sections ends with a  poem entitled “Death of Ignatz,” and it’s here that the weight of love squeezes perception. “The mesas/sink to their knees//and let the snickering dunes /crawl over them.”  Could the absence of an unloved mouse change the landscape like this?

Indeed, background is permutational. In “Landscape With Ignatz,” six views of the same place — “The sunburnt mouth of the canyon biting the swollen blue tongue of the sky… The blistered thumbs of the canyon tracing the blue-veined throat of the sky.” — all frame “your soft, your cerulean eye.” Youn’s ability to create and link images distinguish her poems. “The clockwork saguaros sprout extra faces like planaria stoked by/a razor,” she says in “Ersatz Ignatz.” The connection of time and regeneration in the desert setting is held in a man’s shaving. Sound and vision share symbol: “Chug chug say the piston-powered/ground squirrels.”  And always the hand of Ignatz and his creator:

The yuccas pulse softly under grow-light sconces.

Here is the door he will paint on the rock

Here is the glass floor of the cliff.

He’ll enter from the west, backlit in orange isinglass, pyrite pendants glinting from the fringes of his voice.

These poems are so smartly worded (“isinglass” is a collagen obtained from sturgeon bladders used to clarify wine), so true and smoothly constructed that it’s apparent Youn could make something meaningful out of any subject. That she chose Krazy Kat’s voice to represent her own gives her collection natural entry into a variety of comic and tragic themes: the foolish and obsessive qualities of love, the errors of action and the delicacy of perception.

Like heart-on-its-sleeve Krazy Kat, Youn also invites us to examine her heart, there, in her poems, in the palm of our hand.–Cabbage Rabbit

Aphorism, the gemstone of rhetoric,  succeeds on sound. To be memorable, aphorism must have rhythm, ring and poise. Does that make the aphorism poetry? In turn, can poetry be aphorism?

Of course.  Poets distill their parade of image and observation into aphorism. It’s become something of a formula: the poet creates a scene and scenario then draws something not quite Aesop out of it. The great success of this form has inspired a million imitations.  Who is better prepared to put music and laconic meaning together than poets? Wit and wisdom have been serving poets since Homer. Aphorists think poetry as they piece together words.

The itch to write aphorisms has infected a number of poets. Scot rhymer Don Paterson’s acclaimed Rain followed his Nick Hornby-praised Best Thought, Worst Thought: Aphroisms. Sometimes poets’ aphorisms aren’t written as aphorisms. Instead they’re journal entries. Anna Kamienska’sIndustrious Amazement: A Notebook in the March,2011 issue of Poetry, with scribbled thoughts including,  “A poet is a person translated into words,” and “Accidents are the atoms of life….”.

James Richardson is one of the more polished aphorist poets.  His 2004 collection Interglacial: New and Selected Poems & Aphorisms contained One through Three-Point- Oh editions of aphorisms written between 2000 and the book’s 2004 publication.  Because he’s such a lyrical poet (by today’s standards), the aphorisms seem less than music. Still many are clever: “The road reaches everywhere, the shortcut only one” and “Happines, like water, is always available, but so often it seems we’d prefer a different drink.” Like the poems, they express a thin optimism and a can-do-except-when-you-can’t attitude.

Richardson’s latest collection, the National Book Award finalist By the Numbers, draws the distinction between poetry and aphorism more sharply. Richardson may write aphorisms but the poems are largely empty of them.  There is action, there is consideration and choices that remain unchosen. If there’s a lesson, it must be drawn by the reader. Richardson won’t spell it out. Go to the aphorisms for that.

Both the poetry and the aphorisms break their themes from common materials. The poems place an emphasis on the components of speech . “Subject, Verb, Object” stays practical: “‘I’ …a kind of motel room/ yours to the end–/of the sentence that is.” The title poem is a counting game with annotations. “Metallurgy for Dummies” is a compendium of glinting image.

Richardson is down on love except when he isn’t. That, of course, is where the problem lies.  “In Shakespeare” tells us something we already know, “…a lover turns into an ass/as you would expect…” In Classic Bar Scenes” we find, “the chase is a tired/and tiring metaphor.” From the aphorisms: “Passion is faintly rhetorical, as if we needed to convine ourselves we were capable of it.”

Fear defines many of these poems, highlighting the uncertainty, the dichotomy that clouds Richardson’s world view. Poems including “Emergency Measures” and “Head-On” address mortality in ways we can’t deny. “Don’t look down death’s dress,” the poet urges.

Richardson also obsesses on the gods, putting them on bar stools, and making them give press conferences. He reminds us of our animist heritage (“It was the small gods we talked to/before words”) and lets us know that God hated Adam because the man sang out “stupid names for the animals.” At the same time, Richardson loves science.  In the long and long-lined poem “We Are Not Alone or Physics You Can Do At Home,” a sort of technical essay illustrated with household objects, he makes the connection between quantum physics and the commonplace.

The best poems are the shortest. These tend to be more aphoristic, obviously musical and quicker to surprise. “Prokaryotes” ponders the chance of life as well as the way we experience it.  “Say we found it on Europa,/DNA, an alien line,/could we wait a billion years to ask/How was it for you –/blue, that whiff of ammonia, Time? ”

The aphorisms please more often than they don’t, and are clever enough to overcome their own preachiness. “Nothing dirtier than old soap,” goes one; witty but without much weight. That’s the way Richardson seems to like it; simple observations on complex subjects. “Faith is broad. It’s Doubt that’s deep,” is clever and rings of truth but sounds like cocktail talk. You can almost feel Richardson patting us on the shoulder as he tells us this, spilling our drink in the process. Still, many are perfect, just as they should be: “The odds against today were insurmountable, until it happened,” and  “The reader lives faster than life, the writer slower.”  Even as Richardson’s poetry moves away from aphorism, his aphorism moves closer to poetry.

It would be interesting to interview Richardson, Don Paterson and others on the relation of aphorism and poetry and how writing one affects the writing of the other. Looking for common qualities, note both Paterson and Richardson are musical writers, not afraid of rhyme and rhythm and adept at image. Their aphorisms aren’t always any different.–Cabbage Rabbit

Because The New York Times didn’t know about my poem:

Fall Back

I.

The moon hangs motionless,

not sliding or ascending,

patient in place between faces,

shiny as change left on the bar.

We’re lost in stop action

a tick past last call, the second

bottoms up this over-served

autumn night.

We could sleep through the do over,

do nothing and lose the given minutes.

Instead, turned out of juke joints

in a hung-over hour, we watch the sky

where unchanging stars

are burnished by an endless race

of small clouds washed in moonlight.

We make it home in no time.

II.

Even this long night

the world does not repeat itself

but plays in variation

like Elgar’s themes. Chords

progress, tempos change,

major turns minor, diminishes.

Night’s second verse

sounds the first, improvises

on the same old song.

Dawn’s pale ascent

comes coda on a blue note.

What happens adds a beat,

struck and struck and struck again, a stone

up hilltop rolls down and is pushed back.

This is a second chance to sing refrains

Night is not darker or a symbol

of darkness but a dark, eternal symbol.

In these late moments, awake,

asleep, dreams sharp as moonlight

cast in blackness come chorus,

repeat like an added hour.

–Cabbage Rabbit

]]> http://cabbagerabbit.com/2010/11/07/falling-back/feed/ 0 http://cabbagerabbit.com/2010/09/24/the-best-mind-of-his-generation/ http://cabbagerabbit.com/2010/09/24/the-best-mind-of-his-generation/#comments Fri, 24 Sep 2010 19:12:14 +0000 bill http://cabbagerabbit.com/?p=1057

The Rabbit is anxious to see Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Allen Ginsberg film, Howl, which opens today in New York and San Francisco (over a thousand miles from either, I’ll no doubt have to wait for the Netflix release).  Not meaning to sound like Popeye here, but animation fan…

The Rabbit is anxious to see Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Allen Ginsberg film, Howl, which opens today in New York and San Francisco (over a thousand miles from either, I’ll no doubt have to wait for the Netflix release).  Not meaning to sound like Popeye here, but animation fan that I am I’ll be especially anxious to see the animated sequences of the film which seem to have garnered high praise and some not so high. The film, starring James Franco as Ginsberg, centers on the obscenity trial that followed the City Lights’ publication of Howl and Other Poems in 1956. As a rabbit who thinks poetry is often lost in the personal and academic (reminder: “Howl” begins with the word “I”) and needs to address more social and political issues, I welcome any attention brought to a poet that revolutionized both.

Ginsberg’s stock, always high, has increased of late with the release of archivist Bill Morgan’s beat history The Typewriter Is Holy and a deluxe edition of  Jerry Aronson’s 1994 documentary with several hours of added interviews. The recently closed exhibition of Ginsberg’s photos at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. brought out another facet of Ginsberg’s career: chronicler of the Beat movement. Ginsberg annotated many of his photographs. Like his poems, the annotations are revelatory.

But sometimes a photo is worth more than a thousand words.  Ginsberg’s well-known photo of Jack Kerouac taken in 1964 is a lesson in the wages of freedom and a reminder that Kerouac, failed Buddhist, failed Transcendentalist and much-revered American novelist, lived a life that, at times, could be envied, but ended way too soon from the wages of alcoholism. Compare it to earlier photos from a decade before; the beautiful young man exhibiting joy and wonder or famously striking a romantic pose. How short was his life. How short, as Ginsberg pointed out in “Kaddish,” is ours.–Cabbage Rabbit

UPDATE: The mixed reviews of the movie seemed unanimous in their praise of James Franco. Then comes this….

UPDATE II: Stanley Fish explains why the movie is getting such mixed reviews. It’s celluloid literary criticism! No wonder movie critics find it boring. Fish himself seems to like it, for the very reason.

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There’s been much blog ado over The New Yorker‘s “Summer Fiction: 20 Under 40.” Check out the gnashing here, here and here (we promise to complain more in a later post). However the writers learned their craft, they learned to write first sentences well. In fact, we found the lead sentence to be the best part of most of the stories. Clue to craft: Those with the least interesting first sentences tended to be the least interesting stories. As a service to our readers, we’ve taken the first sentence of each of the eight stories and put them together in no particular order, to make a free-association poem of a quality no more dubious than the stories themselves.–Cabbage Rabbit

Max had a name for what had happened to his son: the Accident.

The boy and his twin brother grew up on the streets of Northside,

down in the little choke valley, befouled by industry,

between university hill to the southeast and the neighborhood to the north,

College Hill, which had no college, despite its name,

only modest white houses hinting at the white suburbs to come.

The boy wore a black parka, a matching ski cap, bluejeans, and sneakers;

he appeared to be five years old; and he was weeping.

He hadn’t heard from Kate Lotvelt in two weeks. Early yet, the morning clouds,

the color of silver fox,

and Lazarus was running. Lucky diary! Undeserving diary!

People say no one reads anymore, but I find that’s not the case.