Werd Recommends: Songs from Yeats’ Bee-Loud Glade

Happy New Year, dear werds!  I hope you have had the best of times since I last wrote (without the accompanying worst of times).

Image from hearthmusic.com

I’m kicking off another year of blogging with a long overdue post.  Et voila…

Here’s the thing.  I’m not a huge fan of Yeats (with the exception of “When You Are Old” and “Adam’s Curse“).  A long time chorister, I have also sung a number of poems and verse set to music (notably Frost and Shakespeare), and I must say that I very rarely enjoy musical settings of poems, either.  However, I do like free swag, and so when Zach Hudson, author of the lovely blog New Poetry Review, contacted me with an offer of a free CD of Yeat’s poems set to music, I may have squealed a little with glee.  Free swag because of my silly little blog?  Yes, please!

For some reason, I had the idea that the CD would entail a man with a deep voice reading the poetry over a score of melodramatic string music.  To my delight, I discovered that the CD instead consists of songwriter Kyle Alden singing in his slightly rough baritone, accompanied by his guitar, with Athena Tergis on fiddle and vocals and Mike Marshall on mandolin, in a mixture of folk, traditional Irish, and bluegrass sounds.  The instrumentation is clear, resonant, and lovely.  As he says in his introduction to the CD, Alden became inspired to set Yeats’s poems to music after visiting Coole Park and Thoor Ballylee while touring western Ireland with the traditional Irish band “The Gas Men.”  So he knows a bit about Ireland and its music.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LYRICS AND MUSIC

For the most part, Alden picked some of Yeats’s shorter, more accessible, and “lighter” poems–poems that lend themselves well to musical arrangement, such as ”Colonel Martin” which already reads like a folk ballad, due to its chorus at the end of every stanza (“The Colonel went out sailing”) and its meter.

Alden alters Yeats’s words in a few songs by repeating lines as a chorus, and adds a stanza to “The Cloak, The Boat, and The Shoes” to better round out the song.  In some songs, the phrasing is a bit awkward, as I find is often the case with poetry used as lyrics when it was not originally intended for such use.  He struggles with the last few lines of both stanzas of “The Well and the Tree,” for example.

My least favorite song on the CD is “The Valley of the Black Pig.”  The poem itself is contemplative and prayerful.  The music Alden sings to accompany it is upbeat, with a rocking rhythm.  He uses the title of the poem as a chorus, repeating it over and over in order to lengthen the two-stanza, eight-line poem.  I found a note Yeats wrote about the poem on the Norton Anthology of English Poetry online, which says, “All over Ireland there are prophecies of the coming rout of the enemies of Ireland, in a certain Valley of the Black Pig, and these prophecies are, no doubt…a political force.”  Later in the note, he says:

If one reads Rhys’ Celtic Heathendom by the light of Frazer’s Golden Bough, and puts together what one finds there about the boar that killed Diarmuid, and other old Celtic boars and sows, one sees that the battle is mythological, and that the Pig it is named from must be a type of cold and winter doing battle with the summer, or of death battling with life.

 So the poem itself, coming from Yeats’s obsession with mythology, is about a rather weighty subject and deserves more subtle treatment.

My favorite song is the first of the album: “Brown Penny.”  It has one of Alden’s best tunes, with some lovely harmonies.  The lyrics lend themselves well to song, as the third and fourth lines of the second stanza repeat in the fourth stanza and also contain repetition.  Alden then repeats the last words of the fourth line to resolve it: “Ah penny, brown penny, brown penny/ I am looped in the loops of her hair/ [The loops of her hair].”  Athena Tergis’s fiddle is a lovely vehicle for such a wistful poem.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

If you like bluegrass, Irish music, and/or Yeats, I recommend this album.  Thank you to Zach Hudson and Kyle Alden for giving me the opportunity to review it!

You can buy the album here.

More about Yeats here.

Standing on the Rump of the English Canon: Paula Meehan and Theo Dorgan at the Folger Shakespeare Library

Photo from http://www.poetryinternational.org

It’s fall again, dear Werds, and that means one very exciting thing–the O.B. Hardison poetry series at the Folger Shakespeare Library has started up again!  The series began on September 19th with a dual reading by Irish poets Paula Meehan, from Dublin, and Theo Dorgan, from Cork.

I did not attempt to take notes during this reading, deciding instead to let the evening wash over me and then frantically scribble away in my notebook on the metro.  And wash over me it did; the reading was a delightful example of the power of poetry when read aloud.

Paula Meehan read first.  A tiny woman with short grey hair, she charmed the audience immediately with jokes and smiles.  She seemed confident and comfortable, and spoke clearly and articulated well.  And then she launched into her reading, with the rhythm, energy, and skillful pitch variation of a bodhrán player.  It was mesmerizing.  She seemed awed to be reading in a place so infused with history, the vaults stories below us full of some of the English-speaking world’s most precious manuscripts.  It’s like standing, she said “on the rump of the English canon.”  Accordingly, she read several sonnets.

Theo Dorgan was much more subdued, but also very comfortable on the stage.  It felt as if we were all meeting in a pub to have a nice chat about poetry.  He had a deep and raspy voice, and tended to go off on somewhat crotchety tangents about the destruction of the environment and, like a true Corkian, about the fight for independence from Britain.  Also like a true Corkian, he tended to mumble.

Image from http://www.news.appstate.edu

Both poets are very much Irish poets, even Dorgan, who uses a lot of ancient Greek literature and mythology in his work.  Both poets emphasized their belonging to the history and land of Ireland, and their sense of commitment to it and to the environment in general.  Meehan’s “Death of a Field,” the first poem in her book Painting Rain, is a perfect example of her themes of the environment, land, history, and culture of Ireland.  Dorgan’s first poem in his book What this Earth Cost Us, ”Night Over the Mountain and the City,” merges a place and a person–descriptions of a landscape with remembrances of someone lost:  ”Here where she laughed in the face of the wind/ not a rabbit darts, not a cloud rolls along the ridge” (lines 5-6).

After reading, the two took part in a short round-table discussion with Joseph M. Hassett, Folger Poetry Board member and author of W.B. Yeats and the Muses.  The two poets were again lively and intelligent and articulate; I could have listened to them talk all night about history, memory, the environment, and poetry.

One of the audience members, who grew up in Cork, asked the two poets what they thought about the practice in Irish education of making students memorize and recite poetry in class.  This practice, he said, made him and many of his classmates hate poetry for years.  While the two poets agreed that this is a common result, they both also agreed that if you look at memorizing poetry as “learning by heart,” rather than “learning by rote,” it can be a very powerful tool.  Once you have internalized the meters and rhymes and images, Meehan said, you can call them up and use them in your own writing.   There are poems, words, and phrases, she said, that become loadstones in our lives.  The best poetry, when we take it in, becomes part of us.

As one must at the Folger, Mr. Hassett asked the two poets what they thought of the “State of Poetry Today” and whether or not they were concerned about poetry going out of print, and about “Young Peoples’” supposed lack of interest in poetry.  If I hadn’t already been in love with the two, their answers would have done it.  Dorgan, the rebellious type, scoffed at the question.  ”When we were younger, we were the ‘kids these days’ the adults were worrying about,” he said in his lovely Cork mumble.  ”Kids these days” (I’m paraphrasing) “are going to be just fine.  They care.  You can tell that they care–about the environment, about politics…they’re all very wrapped up in it.  They’re going to be fine.”  Paula nodded and said (again, paraphrasing) “I think young people are very much engaged in poetry.  Maybe they’re moving away from print, but if you look at YouTube even, they’re uploading videos of their spoken [slam] poetry. They’re actually moving back towards the origin of poetry as a spoken form shared communally, back when poets were the keepers of history, memory, and culture.  Besides,” she said, “poetry is an integral part of human society and has been for thousands of years.  We [poets] are ineradicable!”

I bought two of Meehan’s books and one of Dorgan’s and managed to make it towards the head of the line for signing.  Dorgan was delighted when I told him I studied abroad in Cork, and signed my book “For a Brog survivor…It’s up to you now,” in reference both to my membership of that generation of “Young People” who care and also to the amount of time I spent in a terrible student bar in Cork–an act of which he, of course, approved.

In reading through a little of the two poets’ work on the page, my suspicions were confirmed.  I don’t find their poetry particularly compelling in print, although Meehan’s is a bit more so.  I do find them personal, dear, and full of heart, especially Dorgan’s.  But both poets’ work comes alive when read out loud and shared with others.  Meehan especially brings out and emphasizes rhythms, music, and humor in her poetry that is otherwise quite subtle.  These are poets of place and community and sharing, and I was honored to be invited into that community for an evening.

Lazy Labor Day Reading

Image from http://www.popartmachine.com

On weekend or holiday mornings, there are few things this Werd enjoys more than sitting at the breakfast (OK, more like brunch) table with a book or a newspaper, a cup of tea, and some nosh.  I can spend hours devouring pages, occasionally getting up to make more tea or toast, which, if I’m home for the holidays, irritates my perpetually productive parents to no end.

So, for this Labor Day, I wish you a similarly lazy afternoon.  To help you along, here are some werdy articles I have enjoyed recently:

• From “Flavorwire,” “The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History.“
• From The Washington Post, “Independent Bookstores Adding a New Chapter.”
• From The New York Times, ”Font Pain and Poetry:  So Much Depends On a Curve.”
• From The Paris Review: “Anne Carson:  The Art of Poetry.”
• From “New Poetry Review,” a review of our friend Matthew Ladd’s The Book of Emblems.

Happy reading!  Don’t labor too hard today…

“Broetry?” Oh Noetry! Part Dos: The Aftermath

Classical music.  It makes you smarter.

And, admit it, you could be more cultured;

you just picked up a book called Broetry.

–Brian McGackin, “Why You Should Listen To Classical Music”

My readers probably remember my last post about Brian McGackin’s new book of poetry, entitled Broetry.  I must admit that I didn’t realize quite how caustic it was until I went back and re-read it.  When  I mentioned this to a friend, he said “Yeah, it was really mean.”  Yikes.

I would have just shrugged my shoulders and written a saccharine next post to cut the acid a bit–except that, as you can see, the “broet” himself commented on my post and, far more graciously than I probably deserve, begged me to read the whole book.  He promised me that “It isn’t all popped collars and solo cups.”  Chagrined, I bought the book, and promised to give it a chance.  It’s the least I can do when I’ve beaten his work into bleeding pulp based on one article and a few select poems.

Mr. McGackin has been nothing but nice to me (hey there, Brian!) and I would love to get a beer and wings with him some time and chat about poetry.  He seems like an affable comic book/sci-fi nerdy bro who just likes to drink beer, play Magic, and have a good time.  He has a good sense of humor–some  of the poems made me laugh.  He feels like someone I know, and he’s someone many people can relate to.

Because of this, I wish I could say that reading the whole book completely changed my view of it.  Unfortunately, I can’t say that.  However, I can say this–I enjoyed it more than I expected.  I’m willing to admit that I overreacted a little to the NPR article.  And I can, in this post, simply focus on the things about it that I did like.

For one, I like that McGackin writes about contemporary culture in an easy-to-understand way.  As he said in his first comment on my post, he writes about or references things like “Dancing With the Stars” (“Ode to Nichole Scherzinger”), Taylor Swift, Reese’s, George Foreman grills, Bruce Willis, Harry Potter, anime, the college experience, and “Star Trek,” in a sonnet  called “When Patrick Stewart Rules the World.”

I also like that McGackin has a lot of fun with form.  He imitates or satirizes popular poems by the likes of William Carlos Williams (in the poem on the front cover), Frost (“Stopping by Wawa on a Snowy Evening” and “The Road Unable to Be Taken Because I’m Trapped Behind a Line of Dudes in Stormtrooper Armor Who Feel the Need to Take Pictures with Every Girl They See Wearing a Slave Leia Outfit”), and Whitman (“Oh Captain, My Captain America!”), as well as popular music (“Do You Believe in Magic?” and ”Now I Assume Everyone Named Harry is a Wizard,” based on the song “Magic Man“).  He writes sonnets, odes, haikus, free verse, and lots of iterations of rhyme.  And he also writes an entire poem about teenage relationships using only titles of movies (“Not Another Teen Movie”), a poem in the form of “Jeopardy” (“I’ll Take Crazy Bitches for $200, Alex”), a poem as a game of truth or dare (“Truth or Dare”) and a poem as an equation (“College+Love-Love=College”).  Playful, fun, creative.

Finally, as I said above, several of the poems made me laugh.  ”Oh Captain, My Captain America!,” made me chuckle.  ”Jenga Fries” about the delicate process of sharing fries, set out on the page to look like Jenga, is pretty cute and contains these lines:

Novice eaters lack the experience

necessary                           to navigate

potato terrain without assistance

from a guide.

“Part-Time Job Search” is a humorous response to the all-too common experience of college grads having to look for part-time work at Best Buy and Dairy Queen.  ”Do You Believe in Magic,” about the card game, is my favorite poem because it’s just so very nerdy:

If you believe in Magic, slaying demons and orcs,

chilling in mom’s basement with a bunch of dorks,

reading Tolkein, re-watching Dr. Who, 

I can’t really condemn you because I’ve been there, too.

Your geek bar’s risen past an Asimov moon,

kill streak longer than summer on Dune.

And, finally, there’s “Why You Should Listen to Classical Music,” quoted at the beginning of this post.

So, yes, Broetry is not entirely my cup of, er, beer?  But overall the book is kind of funny, kind of fun, and doesn’t take itself too seriously.  And, Brian, if you’re ever in D.C….beer’s on me!

“Broetry?” Oh Noetry!

While looking through npr.org recently, I came across this article about “broetry.”

Brian McGackin, the self-proclaimed "broet." Image from NPR.org

I’m sure most of my readers know what a “bro” is–a teenage to mid-20s male, often, but not always, a frat boy, who likes sports, beer, and chicks, drives a souped-up car or truck, and is obsessed with brand names and appearance.  It is not generally considered a positive adjective.  The term has spawned the word “bromance” (deep friendship between heterosexual males).  Here on the other side of the country and amongst my group of friends, “Hey, bro” is often used as an ironic greeting.

When I saw the heading for this article, I was at first amused and intrigued.  I was hoping this would be an intelligent, ironic take on the “bro” culture.  The poems printed as part of the article certainly aren’t something “The Situation” from “Jersey Shore” would or could write.  They’re not the worst thing I’ve ever read.  But they’re also not great.  There’s just no THERE there, you know, bro?

What I mean is, a project like this has the potential to engage with, examine, celebrate, and criticize popular and “bro” culture, and the poems presented in the article don’t live up to that potential.  For the most part, they’re trivial and fall flat.   It’s great to use modern and contemporary images, words, ideas, and details in writing–it keeps the writing fresh and speaks to the culture for which it is written.  But poetry that only does that, that doesn’t also evoke themes that cross generations, will last about as long as “owling.”  Writing about, say, the experience of being cyber-bullied can be relevant across generations because the experience of being harassed and bullied is not new, although the means of doing so is.  And, as one of the commenters on this NPR post pointed out, slam poetry demonstrates that pop culture and witty, intelligent, meaningful verse are not antithetical.

Furthermore, I find the poems, the word “broetry,” and “bro” culture in general somewhat disturbing and certainly disheartening.  For instance, one of McGackin’s poems that I found more successful is “Impact.”  A lot of people can identify with his images of unemployment and hopelessness.  A lot of people also like football, or at least understand the need to lose oneself in a favorite pastime.  However, the image the poem presents–of an unwashed, unshaven, beer-guzzling, wings-eating, unemployed, arrogant slob is not one that I care to glorify–although one that is too often celebrated in popular movies and T.V. shows (think “The Hangover,” “Family Guy,” or anything by Adam Sandler).  Often, as in this case, the glorification of said character is somewhat self-aware and wry–but that doesn’t means it’s not still glorification.

Such depictions of men in popular culture define what is considered masculine and what is not.  We seem to be living in a time of anti-intellectualism, where “real men” are those who eat only steak and hamburgers, drink lots of beer, and watch football with the bros (think George Dubya).  Hence, writing poetry, an artistic and intellectual pursuit, is not something a “real” man does, and hence Brian McGackin feels that he has to make a bro joke out of it.  The NPR article quotes McGackin as saying “If you think you don’t like poetry, you just haven’t found a poem that’s right for you… Broetry is poetry that’s right for you.  Broetry is a literary chili cheeseburger.”

It’s great that McGackin wants his poetry to be accessible, particularly to people who might not already be into poetry.  But to me he seems to be saying “If you’re a real guy, a real bro, you don’t/can’t like/understand real poetry.”  That seems like such a limiting, stick-figure idea of “guyhood” to me.  What about the guy who likes both video games and swing dancing?  Or the competitive athlete and physical trainer who loves to watch musicals?  I’m sure that when he named his book, McGackin was simply attempting to be funny and relevant, but something about it gives me as much heartburn as that chili cheeseburger would.

McGackin  also says, “A lot of poets have broetic qualities…Robert Frost liked baseball; he wrote about sports. His poetry was always very accessible. Even Shakespeare – Shakespeare was just writing about chicks.”  Obviously, McGackin must be being flippant.  But, come on now.  Frost’s poetry is not just accessible–it’s accessible on multiple levels and it is subtle, well-crafted, intelligent, versatile, and universal.  And Shakespeare wasn’t “just writing about chicks.”  He produced some of the most beautiful, subtle sonnets written in the English language, and many of them were to or about men.  Yes, I do take umbrage at McGackin associating himself with these poets by claiming them as “broets.”  They were poets, who (like Milton, Langston Hughes, and Wordsworth) happened to be male, but who didn’t feel emasculated by writing poetry or feel the need to defend doing so by making it “more masculine.”  Anyone who has read Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Virginia Woolf, Eavon Boland, or Adrienne Rich can tell you  about the male-dominated history of poetry in Western Europe and how it has long been perceived as the highest form of intellectual and creative written expression.  In fact, when many of our favorite male poets were writing, the prevailing opinion was that women were not intelligent, creative, or vigorous enough to write poetry.

So how much of this rant of mine is justified?  Do I just not have a sense of humor?  Am I just a stick in the mud?  Can’t a poor, alcohol-soaked imitation of a Frost or Williams poem simply be a regrettable but harmless piece of drivel?  Possibly.  But writing and films both reflect the way our society thinks and influence the way we think, in a complex cycle of thought and thinker, influence and influenced (I myself freely admit to having drunk deeply of the liberal arts kool-aid).  And if we don’t think about and question what and how we read, write, and watch, well…that can lead to problems.

In conclusion, here’s one of my favorite poems by that decided NON-broet, Robert Frost.  Enjoy!

Guest Post Numero Dos: Saskia’s Review of THE KITCHEN DAUGHTER (and Bonus Recipe!)

Besides reading, there are few things this Werd enjoys more than food.  Combine the two, throw in some wine, music, and good company, and you have my vision of Heaven!  My sister has accused me of being a hobbit at heart.  Honestly, I wouldn’t mind living in Bag End…

Speaking of good company, this week’s post comes from one of my werdiest of  friends, the lovely Saskia.  And, as a bonus, she has included a recipe!  What more could a Werd want?

A TASTY MORSEL

Image from sheistoofondofbooks.com

Book:  The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry

Release Date: April 12, 2011

Gallery Books (Simon & Schuster)

My mother makes something called pollo cuaranta ajo. Very simple to make: take a whole chicken, put it in a pan, surround it with assorted herbs and obscene amounts of garlic, stuff it with an unpeeled lemon, and leave it in the oven for four hours or so. There’s nothing to it, but it was always my favorite meal, because it fills your senses. Served with potatoes, it’s the perfect meal: homey yet exotic, elegant in its simplicity.

That is what Jael McHenry’s novel, The Kitchen Daughter, is like.

McHenry’s narrator and protagonist is Ginny, a young woman with undiagnosed Asberger’s syndrome whose parents were just killed in an accident. The story is one of her coming into her own, recognizing who she is and where she comes from, but it’s about every step of that. The story, like Ginny, is too shy, too cautious, to move beyond itself, and therefore stays in present tense the whole way through.

I expected something as sensually indulgent as Like Water for Chocolate, given the similar structure: chapters built around recipes. And yes, McHenry’s novel is sensual, but in an innocent, thoughtful way. Her attention to the flavor of daily life, from how a voice tastes to the savoriness of marabou on your wrists. A surrender to detail, usually lost after childhood. It’s only to homey senses, to food and its preparation, that Ginny loses herself. Everything else shows her insistently, stalwartly reserved. Not frightened, not hysterical, as a less sensitive author might have shown such a character; simply particular, like a temperamental ingredient resistant to being used or handled any way but as is correct. Cooking is an understandable retreat for her: normal is whatever she chooses. Its artistic, improvisational nature means she can’t misstep, and its specificity satisfies her need for definition. It’s a dance she knows. Something literally in her hands; she can’t accidentally mess it up, unlike turning her sister’s “voice like orange juice,” usually “sweet but sharp,” “watery and harsh with tears”:

“Panic, panic, can’t panic. Think of food. Think of sugar. I am a sugar cube in cold water. I won’t dissolve. Precise edges. Made up of tiny, regular, secure parts. If the water were hotter, I would worry, but it’s cold. I stay together. Precise. Clean. Surrounded but whole.

“Okay. I need to cook. It’ll calm me down.”

Similarly, she relies on dictionary entries for comfort, needing a life of definition: “whether I am normal or not, whether my life is a good one or not, I know it isn’t my perception that matters. Ma’s did. Dad’s did. Amanda’s does. Really, my perceptions seems to matter less than everyone else’s, if it even matters at all.” Throughout the course of the novel, though, she becomes more secure in her own right to determine herself and her world, without becoming bitter and antagonistic.

No recipe, no family, no individual person is prescriptively “normal.” It is McHenry’s celebration and illumination of that fact that gives her book its warmth; its heartbeat. Exactly what a tender, unusual novel about human connection, cooking, and normalcy needs.

RECIPE FOR POLLO CUARANTA AJO

Pat a whole [free-range, locally grown, raised on jelly beans and rainbows] chicken dry with paper towels and put it in a pot breast-up. Heavily salt and pepper the chicken. Pierce lemon skin with a fork, then stuff whole, unpeeled lemon inside the chicken. Rub papery shell mostly off of garlic cloves and throw cloves in pot (usually about 1.5 bulbs’ worth). Make sure some cloves are between the legs and in the bird. Throw on some olive oil (3-4 tbsp, ish), rosemary, thyme, flat-leaf parsley, marjoram, tarragon, and any other herbs you think are good with chicken. All herbs must be FRESH, not dried. Cover well, with a very tight lid or lots of tin foil. Bake it at 350F for 2-3 hrs (sometimes longer; check the chicken before serving). Very good with boiled potatoes.

Jobs for English Majors: Color me Wonderful

As a Werd who occasionally dabbles in creative expression of the written variety, I’ve always thought that writing fortunes for fortune cookies would be an awesome job.  Amongst the truisms and promises of longevity, I would gleefully disperse the unexpected–such as “Avoid mirrors this week” and “Your suspicions about your mother-in-law are correct.”

This week, however, I have discovered a career almost as appealing.  According to the New York Times, paint companies have lately begun giving their paints more creative names in order to lure in customers during a poor economy–names that may give no clues about the actual color, such as “Weekend in the Country” and “Prestige.”  These paint companies apparently put their employees through creative workshops that encourage them to invent a story around the color in order to come up with interesting names.  Yep, sounds like a great job to me!  So, of course, I had to take a stab at it.

WERD’S SEVEN SUGGESTIONS FOR PAINT NAMES:

Image from tlc.howstuffworks.com

• Clockwork Orange (pea green)
• Nebulous Future  (silver)
• Epic Guitar Riff  (royal purple)
• Monthly Horoscope (robin’s egg blue)
• Inside Scoop (A Martha Stewart exclusive–deep cream/beige )
• Anticip-pation (fuchsia)
• And, my favorite (stolen from a friend):  Fawning Empty Nester (sunny yellow)

I think we as a nation can also benefit from this naming phenom by using it in our usual lexicon.  Think, for instance, how ordinary conversations can suddenly become much more interesting:  ”Hey man, I like that shirt–epic guitar riff is my favorite color.”  Suddenly, romance novels can acquire new depth:  ”She looked deep into his eyes, which were the perfect color of nebulous future.”

But, for now–paint companies, my resume is available upon request!