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I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Another Niedecker

I sit in my own house
secure,
follow winter break-up
thru window glass.
Ice cakes
glide downstream
the wild swans
of our day.

She is so good it puts me to shame for calling myself a poet. The challenge here in musical setting is finding longer melodic lines when the phrases are so short. I'm seeing four phrases.  I need an instrumental interlude between the two halves of the poem. The vowel sounds make it very singable, especially the sounds of "ice cakes / glide downstream."  The ending fades away rather than being resolute or emphatic. These are not Yeats's wild swans.

***

Update:

The division between inside and out: the speaker is in the security (comfort, safety) or her own house, looking out the window. "Winter break-up" sounds negative at first, like the break-up of a relationship, but it is winter itself breaking up, exemplified by the frozen-over river ice breaking up into smaller fragments, "cake." {Solvitur acris hiems] Gliding downstream is a smooth movement; they are white so they remind her of swans, perhaps of Yeats's poem. In "our day," our times, we are content with more humble images of beauty, not the typical swans of symbolist poetry. So emotionally the poem is in tension, with the various elements: security, coldness thawing out, cakes [something nice to eat in other contexts], beauty, and humility. You wouldn't set it to music as a triumphant anthem or as a dirge, but as a nuanced exploration of these emotional tensions.

Second update:  "ice cakes float down stream" is four long vowels in a row. Exploit parallelisms with winter / window.

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