CARDBOARD SKY [iii]

On an airplane once I read a Scottish
detective novel, set maybe in Glasgow.
Years later I remember nothing but an opening scene:
a young man thinks to bully, humiliate

a geezer in a pub. Stumbling out hours later,
he (the younger man) gets hit hard
perhaps with coins wrapped in a sock
by the patient older man, lying in wait.

The image stuck with me. The lesson
too obvious to explain, luminous in the facts
as related, even in my second hand account.
In my memory it has the power and immediacy of Homer.

CARDBOARD SKY (II)

The "real life bride" of Lorca's
Blood wedding dies an old woman,
the newspaper reports.
Not very attractive, lame

from childhood accident,
she ran off with her cousin
the eve of her wedding.
Attacked on the road with shotgun

the cousin was killed;
she survived. But Lorca
takes almost nothing
from this sordid account.

The journalist's realm is fact--
mine, like Lorca's, is fiction,
whether drama, poem, or novel.
Paca, this woman, is not in fact

the bride of the play,
nor is the dead cousin Lorca's
"Leonardo" nor the cousin's mule
Leonardo's mythic horse.

Absent from "real life" accounts
are the bridegroom's fierce mother
and her fear of knives,
her hunger for revenge

for her husband and son, slain
by Leonardo's kin. How then,
is Lorca's play not a work of fiction?
What idiot wants to see it as "real life" in disguise?

My new style of poetry

Reading some Robert Creeley poems one day a voice
popped into my head--earnest,
direct, sincere--not my "bad poetry"
voice, not a parody of anything else.

It didn't (doesn't) sound like Creeley--
fortunately I am a bad mimic, but
reading him lodged loose an obstacle
in my head, let me speak, so to speak,

as myself. Still, it is a "persona"
deliberately assumed, among
several possibilities. But a persona
allowing the expression of sincere beliefs

along with some insincere ones,
I suppose. Then I got to thinking
all poems should be prose poems
except the ones that aren't.

To not be prose, it would have to rise
to the level of being cantabile. This would
be a rare event, and
very welcome.

Amargo

Here in Madrid I saw a Lorca play, "Diálogo del Amargo," last night.  Ian Gibson was there, so I got to meet him, along with the director and the actors. Anyway, the Lorca text on which this was based is very short, so to make a play of an hour with it involved repeating the text three times and adding material to it, much of it from other Lorca works, and making it a play about Lorca's own death (big surprise). Gibson seemed to like the idea of making it about historical memory.  That is his thing, of course.

I didn't say anything to anyone there, but I tend not to like making Lorca's work about Lorca's own death. Paul Julian Smith talks about this tendency. I also don't like padding Lorca texts with other Lorca texts to complete them. It ends up as a kind of pastiche, right? I saw another play like this in Feb. of 19 that does a similar thing. The added bits will be un-Lorca like and sentimental, and the bits from other Lorca texts will be de-contexualized. What's wrong with putting a phrase from Ode to Walt Whitman into Bodas de sangre?  Everything, I would say. Would you put extra material from Waiting for Godot or Watt into Ohio Impromptu? Doesn't a work by Lorca have as much integrity as a work by Samuel Beckett?

The director is a good one, and the actors did a good job with what they were given. I just happen to disagree with the entire premise.

Ambient Noise

On the plane to Spain I saw a movie called "The Sound of Silence." The premise is that there is "house tuner" with obsessive personality who solves people's living discomfort by correcting the ambient tuning of their apartments, including the hum of appliances and such. It has some of the typical drawbacks of indie films: it is underlit (I could hardly see some scenes), without a strong narrative arc, and the main character is a bit passive. There is supposed to be some romance / sexual tension with the woman who's apartment he is tuning, but this doesn't get very far. But some of the screenwriting, sound design, and acting is excellent. I really bought into the premise, though it is the kind of movie that doesn't get much beyond its brilliant premise. The main character assigns a specific key to each neighborhood in Manhattan, so that Central Park is G Major. I loved that so much I wished it could be true.  

In my hotel I put on some stupid gossip show on the tv in the background. The voices had that very identifiable Spanish intonation, so different from the Mexican soap opera I turned on later. A dubbed show in Spain will have very stylized intonational patterns, idiomatically correct but still unnatural sounding. I am wondering what the exact pitch relations were in these different dialects.

In a bookstore later in the day I saw a book called "Bird Therapy," by Joe Harkness. (The book was in English). He talked about stepping outside and listening to the birds.  Everything in my day made me tune into sound in new ways. I bought a book in French by Michel Serres on music.

Cardboard Sky

Behind Proust's fictive sonata with haunting melody
some try to identify the "real thing," as though
Proust--of all people!--could not make something up.
What piece could he have been thinking of?

They wonder... But isn't Proust's music more real
than what they hope to find? If fiction is cardboard
cutout of something of thicker substance
what good is it anyway?

Art Song

The "art song" is both the most "literary genre" and the most "vernacular."  From a post from Kyle Gann's blog, "The Epistemology of Elitism."

The only pop/classical distinction that ever made sense to me was the one Bob Ashley told me on a bar stool in Chicago in 1986: “Over five minutes it’s classical, under five minutes it’s pop.” Accordingly, I’ve always thought of Schubert’s songs as really, really good pop music. And of Brian Eno’s Evening Star album, with its long tone poems, as utterly classical. Imagination is near the top of my virtues list, and I hear more imagination in almost any Eno song than in all the Elgar I’ve ever heard put together.

Now this is very helpful to me. Doesn't the Lied flourish in romanticism, with the interest in folk music? One feature of the art song is its brevity, which also means that there is not going to be the complexity of form that comes in longer forms. The brevity is a direct consequence of the brevity of the lyric poem itself.