Good Morning. My thanks to you for asking me to share some words and play some music for you today. And my gratitude to Mariah Dixon and Becky Pujals-Jones, my Blue Cove colleagues for their music and Diane Walker Priesmeyer for her assistance with the special music.
I’m talking today about words and about what it is I call poetry. But before the word, the language, is the perception of sound which later we interpret into music.
I want to speak about those points where individual consciousness joins with the norm of others – most easily through music and, more complexly, through specific words linked together in language and moving toward those universal symbols found in poetry; found in dreams.
One of my key reference books for this talk is Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation. From Bambi to Balzac, Aristotle to Einstein, Koestler examines the nature of human curiosity, humor, magic, art and science as new ways of thinking or expressing emerge. I am deeply indebted to the incredible breadth of Koestler’s scholarship and I recommend his not light writing to anyone with curiosity towards science, literature, the conscious mind and its mirror, the unconscious.
To
begin, I have as a signature on my emails the following quotation from Albert
Einstein "Behind the secrets of nature
remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this
force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion."
The quotation encapsulates human ambition, human curiosity, human creativity.
A poet, not unlike a scientist, attempts to trace the silhouettes of those secrets, those forces, and, by trial and error, conjuration or imagination begins to discover their details.
Most often the content of our language is within the context of conscious, filtered thought, requiring little courage. Images, arising unfiltered from the unconscious, often surprise, delight; even embarrass.
Koestler quotes Einstein in a chapter called “Thinking Aside”. Einstein noted the “narrowness of consciousness” which most of us rely upon in our daily routines and inhibits us to thinking “inside the box” (of comfort). To which I would add two observations: First, the emotion of insecurity, of fear, often further serves to narrow our consciousness.
Second, solutions, ideas, phrases, musical tunes often come to us shaving, performing our daily ablutions (I won’t use potty talk at NCUU), mowing the lawn or drifting into or out of dreams … those times when Thinking is put aside. Often as a flash they come.
And others slowly emerge into the conscious mind in the form of non-verbal “knowing” which crawls into our field of vision or emerges like a deer at sunset into our verbal field.
It has been amazing for me to realize that random thoughts, linked by bits of language, approximations of natural sound or visual images can recreate a universal experience.
The accumulation of sounds and words – experience, observation, trivia, reading, personal detritus – partially determines who we are and how we process and progress on this journey.
Like
most firstborn, I was doted upon by grandparents. My father’s father I named “Mi Mi”
(because he would sing as he held this curious child). He was the second generation from
Here is a typical Welsh hymn, hummed to me by grandfather; later heard in the octagonal sanctuary of the Welsh Miami Avenue Presbyterian Church, the majority of the congregation singing in harmony. Where crystal voiced tenors vie with brilliant sopranos, muted altos supplying lush inner voices and all forged upon the resonance of the basses would transport themselves to their cultural roots.
Ebenezer, called in Welsh “Ton-Y-Botel” (Tune in a Bottle), was published by T J Williams in 1890.
Play Ebeneezer No Repeats
The Welsh title is “Tune in a Bottle” allegedly from a fragment of melody found in a bottle by Williams as he walked the beach. Like most Welsh hymns resides in a minor key and conveys hope of the oppressed via the universal language of music. I’ve played this tune for the Holocaust Memorial service as it parallels the cantorial modes of Jewish services.
My
father used to joke that the Welsh were part of the Jewish Diaspora. The
dispersion of the Jews early on in the Common Era spread 12 tribes from
The Hebrew lyrics to Anim Zemirot are: “I sing hymns and compose songs because my soul longs for You. My soul desires your shelter to know all your mysteries.”
We never fully pull away from previous experience, like the ever expanding compartments of the chambered nautilus, my poetry has grown from the auditory and musical experiences of my youth. For instance, my grandfather read to me from McGuffy’s Reader and these were among the first words I closely heard.
To be honest, poetry was foreign until college. Students at this 1,200 student Lutheran university were required to attend chapel services three times a week.
Looking back, required chapel forged a questioning of belief and questioning authority. Seeds of the sixties were planted by the generation who survived war, survived economic hardship and theological quandaries with rock-solid, unquestioning, unwavering faith. Our world is not theirs, yet their world echoes in ours.
Calvinistic predestination, Lutheran dogmatics and the post-WWII existentialism helped weld and wed music and words for me. College questioning elicited answers in the form of poems, poems arising from observed nature and internal dialogue.
Writing poetry became a kind of emotional/mental epiphany/orgasm – more often an “eargasm” for me. Sounds thus traced something natural, forming words around the phenomena of nature as in this untitled poem.
And the rain changed to snow
As the tip drip patter
Of the slap dropping rain
Fell into spaltterdash puddles
Fell into patterless puddles of stillness
And the white curtain came down.
This is an imagist poem. It reflects an image in the sense of impressionist art of the late 19th century – exterior reality mitigated by internal impression. The Imagist poems are in tune with the consciousness of existentialism and the emotional coolness of Zen Buddhism.
Biographically, after college and the tumult of the 60’s, combined with a taste of graduate school, I taught high school speech and English for a year then joined the rural revolution and moved to Maine for the next 18 years.
In 1979,
admittedly under the poetic influence of Robert Frost, this from early years in
These woods
Do not forgive the fields
Which, untended, return
Each species reclaiming
A piece of what was theirs.
Sour earth and stone
Have filled the cellar holes
Along the
Retaken by alder, birch and popple
Leaving a small hollow
Rimmed by granite slabs.
These woods
Do not forgive
The purple lilac
Or the Macintosh apple
Sagging from the tug
Of deer and ice.
And these woods
Down the
Behind the two stories of brick
Run fragments of stone fence
-- phrases from a journal
In an antique hand.
This poem arrived as a trail of words “These woods do not forgive” like tracks in the snow and reflects a de-mystified view of nature expanded into images and only secondarily became a verbal soundscape.
After I met and married Nadia Caron Andrews in the mid-80’s, we
moved, from
We
connected to music at Dunnellon’s Sunday Sampler and were invited to jam
sessions at Margaret Longhill’s home on the bluffs above the
Among the musicians who moved us, we heard a women’s group called Rosewood Station who closed their performance with an acapella selection. It was 1998, and this poem emerged from their singing.
Barred owl
recites our
catechism
hidden in
oak overhead.
Coyote marks
cold air under
star’s domain,
climbing
the scale of sky.
Honey bees pirouette
(legs tapping
an odd pas-de-deux
toward a compass
rose) where answers
may blossom.
Acappella,
two-legged women
make song,
hugging harmony
like a newborn,
like a lover.
Music moves
through sinus,
breast and belly.
Prana, Pneuma,
Spiritus Sancti,
breath’s violin,
braiding hymns,
psalms, mantras --
each a grace
-note hanging
on air, humming,
as if a chickadee
flew between
your voice
and our ears
resting like a child
asleep
in our arms.
A courtship between poetry and music began. Gentle pleasantries replaced the urban workday hectic frenzy. We became older and we tasted a bit of the earth’s wisdom.
Pianist Svatislav Richter said – “Music is the poetry of the air”.
So the sound-entranced writer of the sixties attempts more ambiguous images. My poetry remains influenced by the sounds of nature and the music of the words (a tip of the hat to Dylan Thomas and the Welsh bardic DNA).
Taking lunch one day in 1998, I parked beneath the limbs of a large live oak. A mockingbird was calling above me.
Duet
Mockingbird lands,
on the broken limb
lying beside this truck
And sings as I eat lunch.
Flattered, by a bird,
my puny puckered
lips provoke
a limping reply.
Open beaked, it searches
live oak limbs above. All the
while improving the tune
by repetition. At Last,
Recognizing my mocking,
this bird flits to the cloister
of clustered oak,
there to sing a new solo.
In 2003 a fusion of poetry and ideas about music came to me -- the notion that our individual and internal dialogue was analogous to music. Here’s the poem:
Place your ear beside
a song you truly love.
Complimentary notes slide
as graceful fingers in a glove.
Listen beneath the tune
to octaves, fifths and thirds
sung like first birds at dawn
distant and not quite heard.
Listen too across this life
to your score of years, of days.
Within one voice, another
not heard upon the page.
Transpose the music of these days
harmonizing with your inner voices;
rising notes of spirit, truth, and light,
from exotic and unseen sources.
By joining the concepts of music and words I am forming my own mythology, my own theology. Remember the quotation from Einstein -- "Behind the secrets of nature remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion."
Thomas Stearns Eliot said this about music – “You are the music while the music lasts.”
And, if you ask a musician what they are thinking about while performing a memorized piece, they would agree with Eliot. Watch cellist Yo Yo Ma and you realize that his conscious mind is very slightly engaged with the task. He is often gazing absently at his audience. He has become the music.
In fact, musicians say that if they stop to “think” about what note, fingering, bowing or special technique comes next, they invariably lose “track” of where they were in the tune. Good music, must be consciously ingrained and becomes subconscious, unconscious. The music bubbles from below conscious thought. It is, as Koestler wrote… “Thinking Aside.”
We have arrived at a point where science, poetry and music drift far from concrete, harder to quantify, yet like the fringes of quantum physics, poorly understood and made verbal by crude principles. Tracing silhouettes.
It is noted by those who wield the mysteries of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging machinery that music crosses the barriers of our brain’s hemispheres. The hemispheres erased, swept away in a wash of linear mathematical frequencies on the left hemisphere bearing tonality, volume and intensity and washed down with a pleasant quaff of bioelectrical enzymes capable of eliciting emotion, awe or passion on the right.
Listen….
Play Ashokan Farewell.
This piece of music by Jay Ungar is called Ashokan Farewell. Ungar wrote it in one of those moments of melancholy and regret at the end of a music festival.
Essayist Aldous Huxley wrote “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
In my personal journey to quantify our humanity and/or divinity, a basic tenet is that we join together in this search for truth as an act of fellowship; joining together to confront the mysteries of good and evil; of being and not being. So, does the creation of a small, manageable, known community who share common goals and inculcate – compassion, tolerance, love -- become an answer itself?
At the most primitive level, poetry and music impart common resonance – our common kinship. Music, once sung or played, fades into silence….we think. Perhaps it courses its way into the cosmos like a tune in a bottle hurled across the curvature of the universe.
This Web Page Created with PageBreeze Free HTML Editor