There is no noise, only sounds:
|
|
PREFACE TO A MUSICIAN
Do you know how to begin?
Take the string or the reed,
And grow old with it in your hand.
Wake in the night
To feel if you hold it with freedom.
Let your mornings be heavy
With wonder if your suppleness remains;
And the day a long labour;
And the years a fear of stiffness.
Then perhaps towards the end,
Time frosting your joints,
You will make music,
Shake hills
Drag men in their multitudes
As the moon drags the sea.
RICHARD CHURCH
(1893-1972)
Let's begin the beguine, as the song goes – so do we know ever how to begin? There are as many ways to talk about the many connections between a poem and a piece of music as there are ways to begin either of them[1].
I chose to begin to discuss precisely with a poem mainly because what we are talking about here is TEXT. In Church's advisory tone to a musician we can also read a subversive advice for a poet – there is nothing compose unless someone composes something (notice my usage of the verb, as it serves both fields) – hence the first step – put something on paper (v. 2). Then, once you got the practice going, “grow old with it in your hand”, as it becomes a labour of love even with “Time frosting your joints”. Finally, a poem, like a song, has the effect of dragging “men in their multitudes/ As the moon drags the sea” - this is the story of the 20th Century Music (and Poetry, we may argue) in a nutshell, with the eruption of pop-rock music for the masses, fueled by both the rise of teenager culture and of a individualistic consumer-focused society.
Since this century is my main field of interest, and given all the food for thought it provides for an article of this nature, I shall concentrate my strenght on few illustrative examples on artists who have flirted with boths sides of the coin, drawing my examples, like snapshots, from it.
First of all, nevertheless, let's proceed with this musing on words.
PRELUDE: Music, Memory and Muse: Musing on words
As we all know, the word MUSIC comes from the greek word “Mousa”. From here many other words rooted, notably MUSE and MUSEUM. Little less known, though, the word “Mousa” first appears in Greece coming fro the sanskrit root “MANTRA”.
MEMORY, on the other hand, comes from the same root as Mantra>Mousa – music is the art of memory and repetition, of connection to a sound that becomes a mantra, and that itself is a text.
We can now see full circle better.
Given the lack of space I am allowed in this type of articles, I will opt to convey an image to express the many tangible terms between these sister arts:
PATTI SMITH: “Rimbaud kind of Buddhist thing”
"I don't consider writing a quiet, closet act.
I consider it a real physical act.
When I'm home writing on the typewriter, I go crazy.
I move like a monkey.
I've wet myself, I've come in my pants writing."
Patti Smith (1946-) is a “strange messenger”[2] (in)between worlds. Mostly know for her music than for her other connections with the arts[3], she is often called the 'Godmother of Punk', given her unique talent to improvise like she was reciting, which in itself is a basic DIY feature of the musical movement.
What most people don't know about Patti Smith is that she is, ultimately, a poet, and that's exactly how she envisions herself. Some years before she got her musical career kicked out[4] she got into the poetry scene, after a long experimentation with other mediums, and got to music also via the recitals her friends, lodged like her in the Chelsea Hotel, invited her to perform in.
Her first devotion was the french poet Arthur Rimbaud[5]. She not only travelled to France to visit his grave, she organized an anthology of his poems. He is not only a major influence on her own poetry writing but also on her music - her songs till this day feature him heavily – the pinacle being the shout “Go Rimbaud” in the anthem “Gloria” (1975). Here is the poem “Dream of Rimbaud” (1973) and a paradigm of her poetical style:
Oh arthur arthur. we are in Abyssinia Aden. making love smoking cigarettes. we kiss. but it's much more. azure. blue pool. oil slick lake. sensations telescope, animate. crystalline gulf. balls of colored glass exploding. seam of berber tent splitting. openings, open as a cave, open wider, total surrender.
What matters to Patti Smith, is the work, and the way to express it, the sacred medium of the word[6].
She sees her work as musician and poet as a whole, feeding on each other, and in close paralell to that of the prophet, a seer or a mystical being who wants to convey a message. As she says in Just Kids (2010):
[…] what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of colour and graphite scrawled upon a sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind becomes a light, life-charged. [...]
This is also the vision of the poet according to Blake (again a substantial influence in her own writing and lyrics), but her intertextual literary connections go all to way to Whitman, Virginia Woolf, finding a special cluster among Bob Dylan (he himself another poet and songwriter and a huge influence one her), and most definitely to Burroughs and Ginsberg (Ginsberg was the one who coined the expression above).[7]
I believe that here lies another key element in Patti Smith's bringing up as an artist. She is clearly an example of how Poetry and Music come together because that's precisely how the poets/writers that belonged to the beat generation wrote – note the coinage of the word “Beat”.
On the other hand, she grew up in the late sixties in an environment in a deep political and social turmoil, and has since then become an activism for Freedom and Human Rights. Lie we said, both her poetry and her songs, her performances, are utterly connected with a message conveyed, and this is ultimately her goal, the goal of both arts. As an artist, then, she remains a paradigm of a distant century but also of an attitude that fuse, in a contemporary way, both worlds:
[…] The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It is the artist’s responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labour of creation.[8]
BRITTEN'S POETRY: A recurrent theme in a musical life
Now let's leave popular music and turn to another exponent of 20th century music, the late composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976). [9]
Britten was arguably the most famous British composer since Purcell, and his career spans some of the most important and disturbing decades of the past century. Peter Grimes (1945), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968) and Death in Venice (1973) are just three of the pinacles in his long work output, and three fine paradigms of what we are to discuss here: his relationship with Poetry in particular (and Literature in general).
Before we delve into the songs, and following the structure applied in the first section of this article, I think it would be productive to see what Britten himself has to say about his method of composing. In an interview dated 25 February 1956, he told Timothy Birch's BBC the following:
“I spend 99% of my work thinking about it […] I work on buses, trains [...] Music is fixed in my head and then I work the details. I don't use the piano – only in the very end when I want to confirm that it sounds well. And I do everything myself. First there's the draft [...]”[10]
This passage will suffice to understand that his method is similar to the one of composing poetry. Many poets have said in the past that their method of writing is exactly as described by Britten, which leads us to the following archi-question: what is inspiration in the end, and how does it differ in what is to write a poem, paint a canvas or compose music. Again, the answer lies in that all we are talking about are texts – the final form may differ, as the utensils applied to reach a final artistic product, but the approach will always be the same.
Britten himself was friend of the biggest minds of his generation, including poets. Albeit older, W.H. Auden was a close friend (and influence in his early life), with whom (among other pieces like a Hymn to St. Cecylia) he composed a true anthem of British Television, Night Mail (1935), commissioned by the General Post Office.
Among the most interesting poetical collaborations in Britten career, we have to name 1965's William Blake's “Songs and Proverbs”. This was not the first collaboration with the romantic poet, as by the late 1960s Britten had already adapted selected poems in “Spring Symphonies” or “A Charm of Lullubies”, glittering pieces of light and harmony. The 1965 work, on the other hand, is a 7-piece sequence that was made for his lover Peter Pears, and charts a bleak picture of human experience (a very productive term chez Blake). This is music of deep seriousness, coloured by the dark timbre of a baritone, providing the listener with the same aesthetical experience of the one that reads the poem.
Other collaborations outside the English literary canon were the french poet Verlaine and Victor Hugo and most notably (again like Patti Smith), Rimbaud, for whom he dedication his first major cycle of songs, Les Illuminations (1940), conveying all the eroticism of his verbal vanguard language.
CODA: On Silence
It may seem a bit ironic, to say the least, that I've chosen to end this brief discussion on the analogies between Music and Poetry by discussing, in contrast, the idea of silence, chez Cage.
It is normal that you, the reader, feel this way, and I concede it may raise some brows: Our concept of Silence today is that of Death, immobility, and we certainly identify it with a number of landscapes and emotions that tend to a certain muteness that we like to conceive as absolute.
In a simplified word, to put it in another way, Silence diverges from Noise, like we would have either two to experience to its full extent. However, this naïve assumption is precisely innocent and shallow: and the first person to highlight it publicly was John Cage (1912-1992), composer of the infinite possibilities of silence (like he said about Rauschenberg's white canvas).
From early on, Cage confesses to have been hit by poetry:
“As I look back, I realize that a concern with poetry was early with me. At Pomona College, in response to questions about the Lake Poets, I wrote in the manner of Gertrude Stein, irrelevantly and repetitiously. I got an A. The second time I did it I was failed [...]”[11]
His tendency towards unconventionality was also acknowledged by others from an early stage, as he reflects in the same foreword to the book of comprised lectures:
“Since the Lecture on Nothing [c. 1949-50], there have been more than a dozen pieces that were unconventionally informative written, including some that were done by means of chance operations and one that was largely a series of questions left unanswered. When M.C. Richards asked me why I didn't one day done a conventional informative lecture, adding that that would be the worst shocking thing I would do, I said “I don't give these lectures to surprise people, but out of a need for poetry”[12]
Let's look closely to his most known lecture, mentioned here before. He begins by stating that
I have nothing to say
and I am saying it and that is
poetry as I need it .
---------------------------------------------
beware of
that which is breathtakingly beautiful, for at any moment
the telephone may ring or the airplane
come down in a vacant lot . A piece of string
or a sunset , possessing neither ,
each acts and the continuity happens
First of all, note how unconventionally he put his text in the page, as the lecture itself was a poem. The question is that for Cage, there is no difference between either one of them. Here he is again, trying to describe exactly what is poetry to him:
“As I see it, poetry is not prose simply because poetry is in one way or another formalized. It is not poetry by reason of its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical elements (time, sound) to be introduced into the world of words. Thus, traditionally, information no matter how stuffy (e.g. the sutra and shastras of India) was transmitted in poetry. It was easier to grasp it that way.”[13]
It's interesting to notice how we come full circle with the mantra etimology of music here. In fact, the pause in Poetry, like in Music, is important, because like we hinted at in the beginning, it is impossible to be completely silent and immobile (as biologically speaking the human species is a downward spiral) – and we need Silence to understand, by contrast, what is that we what to say[14].
To conclude on a personal note, I would say that, as a poet myself, I have tried to tackle with this question in the past. I would then like to end this article with one of my poems, “ How to say nothing”, written in a somewhat dissonant tone Cage might have liked. There is no noise, only sounds, he said. Let's stop here then, let's be silent:
How to say nothing
to John Cage and Merce Cunningham
In order to say nothing it should suffice
to be silent. But that's not how we
efficiently think and manage
silence. Sound is the day's
harmful loan, and all noises
assault us in corners, though we
might not be there trying to engage
with a sentence in the wind.
It's then easy to think that silence
is the quickest way not to
say anything, but that is so untrue
as the mere possibility of a minute
passing by without anything to say.
Even the gestures betray us, our faces deliver
the mute sound of its grimaces. Even the sea,
that never spoke, is itself a sound disguised
in the beauty of a wave, a mirror
in collusion with the sun.
We must then accept the soft
tyranny of silence, which is the
unsaid that is heard, in order to
learn to say nothing, like the chirping
of the birds in front of me as I write
this, or that silence of your eyes
that are not even in front of me.
They don’t need to be
so I can efficiently manage
to hear what they say.
FUGUE:
“To a Friend in Praise of Music and Poetry”
If music and sweet poetry agree,
As they must needs (the sister and the brother),
Then must the love be great ‘twixt thee and me,
Because thou lov’st the one, and I the other.
Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch
Upon the lute doth ravish human sense;
Spenser to me, whose deep conceit is such
As, passing all conceit, needs no defence.
Thou lov’st to hear the sweet melodious sound
That Phoebus’ lute (the queen of music makes;
And I in deep delight am chiefly drowned
Whenas himself to singing he betakes.
One god is god of both (as poets feign),
One knight loves both, and both in thee remain.
Richard Barnfield (1574–1620)
BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY:
AA.VV., Music & Sweet Poetry: a verse anthology compiled by John Bishop, London, Autolycus Publications, 1983.
AA.VV., Music's Spell: poems about music and musicians, edited by Emily Fragos, Everyman's Library Pocket, NY, London, Toronto, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
AA.VV., The Jazz Poetry Anthology, edited by Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana UP, 1991.
BONNEFOY, Yves, L'Alliance de la poésie et de la musique, Paris, Galilée Editions, 2007.
BUDD, Malcolm, Values of Art – Pictures, Poetry and Music, London, Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1995
CAGE, John, On Silence: Lectures and Writings, London, Marion Boyars, 1961.
DAYAN, Peter, Art as Music, music as poetry, poetry as art, from Whistler to Stravisnky and beyond, Farnhem, Ashgate, 2011.
DONOVAN, J., From Lyre to Muse: A History of the Aboriginal Union of Music and Poetry, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner Ltd, 1890.
SAMPSON, Fiona, Music Lessons, London, Bloodaxe, 2011.
WINN, James Anderson, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the relations between Poetry and Music, New Haven and London, Yale UP, 1981.
[1] Ruth Padel, for instance, names about 52 ways, one for each week of the year, in her influential book 52 of Looking at a Poem, published by Vintage in 2004. It was based on her own weekly articles on a selected poem, published around 1998 in The Guardian.
[2] I borrow the accurate expression from the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition “Strange Messenger: The Work of Patti Smith”, organized by The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, back in 2002-3.
[3] We shall not endeavour on her relations between poetry and painting, but she has incorporated much of her poetical words in her own canvas, very much in a avant-garde way, as done in her collages in hommage of the 9/11 theme.
[4] This happened by mistake, according to her in the memoir Just Kids, and after she saw Jim Morrison in concert and thought poetry was “not physical enough”.
[5] A good article that conveys this influence is here: "Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance" by Carrie Jaurès Noland, Critical Inquiry, Spring 1995, Volume 21, Number 3.
[6] Accurately enough, Joe Tarr refers this connection between word and music is mediated by poetry itself in Smith's case, and to this physical attention to the performance of the word: “Although she is a poet in her own right, Smith's best work derived its power from the act of performance. It is one thing to read the lyrics to “Radio Baghdad” - quite another to hear Smith chant “sleep, sleep, sleep, run, run, run”. How exactly do you convey the power of such a song? Or explain it? I don't think it's possible, but it's remarkable enough to discuss.” [in TARR, Joe, The Words and Music of Patti Smith, Westpoint, Connecticut, Greenwood, 2008, p. XIV].
[7] Ginsberg was the one who coined the expression above. Ginsberg is the epitome of the Beat poet, and Patti Smith knew him while an unknown and struggling artist in NY. Her devotion to him to this day remains as she frequently performs, all around the world and several times a year, normally with Philip Glass, a hommage recital based on his work. He is also present in her songs, the last of which is “Spell”, a personal take on Ginsberg's Footnote to Howl (1958), the end part of his most famous and controversial book.
[8] Just Kids, 2010.
[9] Many thanks to the British Library for the showcasing of his work in the exhibition “Poetry and Sound: Benjamin Britten”, in the occasion of celebrating his centenary this year. It is my wish to celebrate him by including him in this article.
[10] This sound recording is permanently available in the British Library Sound Archives under the reference 9CL00310008.
[11] Foreword to Cage, 1961, p. X.
[12] Op. Cit, p. X.
[13] Op. Cit. p. X.
[14] This concern of Cage was ultimately awaken by interests in the Dada Movement and Zen Aestethics and Philosophy.
Do you know how to begin?
Take the string or the reed,
And grow old with it in your hand.
Wake in the night
To feel if you hold it with freedom.
Let your mornings be heavy
With wonder if your suppleness remains;
And the day a long labour;
And the years a fear of stiffness.
Then perhaps towards the end,
Time frosting your joints,
You will make music,
Shake hills
Drag men in their multitudes
As the moon drags the sea.
RICHARD CHURCH
(1893-1972)
Let's begin the beguine, as the song goes – so do we know ever how to begin? There are as many ways to talk about the many connections between a poem and a piece of music as there are ways to begin either of them[1].
I chose to begin to discuss precisely with a poem mainly because what we are talking about here is TEXT. In Church's advisory tone to a musician we can also read a subversive advice for a poet – there is nothing compose unless someone composes something (notice my usage of the verb, as it serves both fields) – hence the first step – put something on paper (v. 2). Then, once you got the practice going, “grow old with it in your hand”, as it becomes a labour of love even with “Time frosting your joints”. Finally, a poem, like a song, has the effect of dragging “men in their multitudes/ As the moon drags the sea” - this is the story of the 20th Century Music (and Poetry, we may argue) in a nutshell, with the eruption of pop-rock music for the masses, fueled by both the rise of teenager culture and of a individualistic consumer-focused society.
Since this century is my main field of interest, and given all the food for thought it provides for an article of this nature, I shall concentrate my strenght on few illustrative examples on artists who have flirted with boths sides of the coin, drawing my examples, like snapshots, from it.
First of all, nevertheless, let's proceed with this musing on words.
PRELUDE: Music, Memory and Muse: Musing on words
As we all know, the word MUSIC comes from the greek word “Mousa”. From here many other words rooted, notably MUSE and MUSEUM. Little less known, though, the word “Mousa” first appears in Greece coming fro the sanskrit root “MANTRA”.
MEMORY, on the other hand, comes from the same root as Mantra>Mousa – music is the art of memory and repetition, of connection to a sound that becomes a mantra, and that itself is a text.
We can now see full circle better.
Given the lack of space I am allowed in this type of articles, I will opt to convey an image to express the many tangible terms between these sister arts:
PATTI SMITH: “Rimbaud kind of Buddhist thing”
"I don't consider writing a quiet, closet act.
I consider it a real physical act.
When I'm home writing on the typewriter, I go crazy.
I move like a monkey.
I've wet myself, I've come in my pants writing."
Patti Smith (1946-) is a “strange messenger”[2] (in)between worlds. Mostly know for her music than for her other connections with the arts[3], she is often called the 'Godmother of Punk', given her unique talent to improvise like she was reciting, which in itself is a basic DIY feature of the musical movement.
What most people don't know about Patti Smith is that she is, ultimately, a poet, and that's exactly how she envisions herself. Some years before she got her musical career kicked out[4] she got into the poetry scene, after a long experimentation with other mediums, and got to music also via the recitals her friends, lodged like her in the Chelsea Hotel, invited her to perform in.
Her first devotion was the french poet Arthur Rimbaud[5]. She not only travelled to France to visit his grave, she organized an anthology of his poems. He is not only a major influence on her own poetry writing but also on her music - her songs till this day feature him heavily – the pinacle being the shout “Go Rimbaud” in the anthem “Gloria” (1975). Here is the poem “Dream of Rimbaud” (1973) and a paradigm of her poetical style:
Oh arthur arthur. we are in Abyssinia Aden. making love smoking cigarettes. we kiss. but it's much more. azure. blue pool. oil slick lake. sensations telescope, animate. crystalline gulf. balls of colored glass exploding. seam of berber tent splitting. openings, open as a cave, open wider, total surrender.
What matters to Patti Smith, is the work, and the way to express it, the sacred medium of the word[6].
She sees her work as musician and poet as a whole, feeding on each other, and in close paralell to that of the prophet, a seer or a mystical being who wants to convey a message. As she says in Just Kids (2010):
[…] what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of colour and graphite scrawled upon a sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind becomes a light, life-charged. [...]
This is also the vision of the poet according to Blake (again a substantial influence in her own writing and lyrics), but her intertextual literary connections go all to way to Whitman, Virginia Woolf, finding a special cluster among Bob Dylan (he himself another poet and songwriter and a huge influence one her), and most definitely to Burroughs and Ginsberg (Ginsberg was the one who coined the expression above).[7]
I believe that here lies another key element in Patti Smith's bringing up as an artist. She is clearly an example of how Poetry and Music come together because that's precisely how the poets/writers that belonged to the beat generation wrote – note the coinage of the word “Beat”.
On the other hand, she grew up in the late sixties in an environment in a deep political and social turmoil, and has since then become an activism for Freedom and Human Rights. Lie we said, both her poetry and her songs, her performances, are utterly connected with a message conveyed, and this is ultimately her goal, the goal of both arts. As an artist, then, she remains a paradigm of a distant century but also of an attitude that fuse, in a contemporary way, both worlds:
[…] The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It is the artist’s responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labour of creation.[8]
BRITTEN'S POETRY: A recurrent theme in a musical life
Now let's leave popular music and turn to another exponent of 20th century music, the late composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976). [9]
Britten was arguably the most famous British composer since Purcell, and his career spans some of the most important and disturbing decades of the past century. Peter Grimes (1945), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968) and Death in Venice (1973) are just three of the pinacles in his long work output, and three fine paradigms of what we are to discuss here: his relationship with Poetry in particular (and Literature in general).
Before we delve into the songs, and following the structure applied in the first section of this article, I think it would be productive to see what Britten himself has to say about his method of composing. In an interview dated 25 February 1956, he told Timothy Birch's BBC the following:
“I spend 99% of my work thinking about it […] I work on buses, trains [...] Music is fixed in my head and then I work the details. I don't use the piano – only in the very end when I want to confirm that it sounds well. And I do everything myself. First there's the draft [...]”[10]
This passage will suffice to understand that his method is similar to the one of composing poetry. Many poets have said in the past that their method of writing is exactly as described by Britten, which leads us to the following archi-question: what is inspiration in the end, and how does it differ in what is to write a poem, paint a canvas or compose music. Again, the answer lies in that all we are talking about are texts – the final form may differ, as the utensils applied to reach a final artistic product, but the approach will always be the same.
Britten himself was friend of the biggest minds of his generation, including poets. Albeit older, W.H. Auden was a close friend (and influence in his early life), with whom (among other pieces like a Hymn to St. Cecylia) he composed a true anthem of British Television, Night Mail (1935), commissioned by the General Post Office.
Among the most interesting poetical collaborations in Britten career, we have to name 1965's William Blake's “Songs and Proverbs”. This was not the first collaboration with the romantic poet, as by the late 1960s Britten had already adapted selected poems in “Spring Symphonies” or “A Charm of Lullubies”, glittering pieces of light and harmony. The 1965 work, on the other hand, is a 7-piece sequence that was made for his lover Peter Pears, and charts a bleak picture of human experience (a very productive term chez Blake). This is music of deep seriousness, coloured by the dark timbre of a baritone, providing the listener with the same aesthetical experience of the one that reads the poem.
Other collaborations outside the English literary canon were the french poet Verlaine and Victor Hugo and most notably (again like Patti Smith), Rimbaud, for whom he dedication his first major cycle of songs, Les Illuminations (1940), conveying all the eroticism of his verbal vanguard language.
CODA: On Silence
It may seem a bit ironic, to say the least, that I've chosen to end this brief discussion on the analogies between Music and Poetry by discussing, in contrast, the idea of silence, chez Cage.
It is normal that you, the reader, feel this way, and I concede it may raise some brows: Our concept of Silence today is that of Death, immobility, and we certainly identify it with a number of landscapes and emotions that tend to a certain muteness that we like to conceive as absolute.
In a simplified word, to put it in another way, Silence diverges from Noise, like we would have either two to experience to its full extent. However, this naïve assumption is precisely innocent and shallow: and the first person to highlight it publicly was John Cage (1912-1992), composer of the infinite possibilities of silence (like he said about Rauschenberg's white canvas).
From early on, Cage confesses to have been hit by poetry:
“As I look back, I realize that a concern with poetry was early with me. At Pomona College, in response to questions about the Lake Poets, I wrote in the manner of Gertrude Stein, irrelevantly and repetitiously. I got an A. The second time I did it I was failed [...]”[11]
His tendency towards unconventionality was also acknowledged by others from an early stage, as he reflects in the same foreword to the book of comprised lectures:
“Since the Lecture on Nothing [c. 1949-50], there have been more than a dozen pieces that were unconventionally informative written, including some that were done by means of chance operations and one that was largely a series of questions left unanswered. When M.C. Richards asked me why I didn't one day done a conventional informative lecture, adding that that would be the worst shocking thing I would do, I said “I don't give these lectures to surprise people, but out of a need for poetry”[12]
Let's look closely to his most known lecture, mentioned here before. He begins by stating that
I have nothing to say
and I am saying it and that is
poetry as I need it .
---------------------------------------------
beware of
that which is breathtakingly beautiful, for at any moment
the telephone may ring or the airplane
come down in a vacant lot . A piece of string
or a sunset , possessing neither ,
each acts and the continuity happens
First of all, note how unconventionally he put his text in the page, as the lecture itself was a poem. The question is that for Cage, there is no difference between either one of them. Here he is again, trying to describe exactly what is poetry to him:
“As I see it, poetry is not prose simply because poetry is in one way or another formalized. It is not poetry by reason of its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical elements (time, sound) to be introduced into the world of words. Thus, traditionally, information no matter how stuffy (e.g. the sutra and shastras of India) was transmitted in poetry. It was easier to grasp it that way.”[13]
It's interesting to notice how we come full circle with the mantra etimology of music here. In fact, the pause in Poetry, like in Music, is important, because like we hinted at in the beginning, it is impossible to be completely silent and immobile (as biologically speaking the human species is a downward spiral) – and we need Silence to understand, by contrast, what is that we what to say[14].
To conclude on a personal note, I would say that, as a poet myself, I have tried to tackle with this question in the past. I would then like to end this article with one of my poems, “ How to say nothing”, written in a somewhat dissonant tone Cage might have liked. There is no noise, only sounds, he said. Let's stop here then, let's be silent:
How to say nothing
to John Cage and Merce Cunningham
In order to say nothing it should suffice
to be silent. But that's not how we
efficiently think and manage
silence. Sound is the day's
harmful loan, and all noises
assault us in corners, though we
might not be there trying to engage
with a sentence in the wind.
It's then easy to think that silence
is the quickest way not to
say anything, but that is so untrue
as the mere possibility of a minute
passing by without anything to say.
Even the gestures betray us, our faces deliver
the mute sound of its grimaces. Even the sea,
that never spoke, is itself a sound disguised
in the beauty of a wave, a mirror
in collusion with the sun.
We must then accept the soft
tyranny of silence, which is the
unsaid that is heard, in order to
learn to say nothing, like the chirping
of the birds in front of me as I write
this, or that silence of your eyes
that are not even in front of me.
They don’t need to be
so I can efficiently manage
to hear what they say.
FUGUE:
“To a Friend in Praise of Music and Poetry”
If music and sweet poetry agree,
As they must needs (the sister and the brother),
Then must the love be great ‘twixt thee and me,
Because thou lov’st the one, and I the other.
Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch
Upon the lute doth ravish human sense;
Spenser to me, whose deep conceit is such
As, passing all conceit, needs no defence.
Thou lov’st to hear the sweet melodious sound
That Phoebus’ lute (the queen of music makes;
And I in deep delight am chiefly drowned
Whenas himself to singing he betakes.
One god is god of both (as poets feign),
One knight loves both, and both in thee remain.
Richard Barnfield (1574–1620)
BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY:
AA.VV., Music & Sweet Poetry: a verse anthology compiled by John Bishop, London, Autolycus Publications, 1983.
AA.VV., Music's Spell: poems about music and musicians, edited by Emily Fragos, Everyman's Library Pocket, NY, London, Toronto, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
AA.VV., The Jazz Poetry Anthology, edited by Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana UP, 1991.
BONNEFOY, Yves, L'Alliance de la poésie et de la musique, Paris, Galilée Editions, 2007.
BUDD, Malcolm, Values of Art – Pictures, Poetry and Music, London, Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1995
CAGE, John, On Silence: Lectures and Writings, London, Marion Boyars, 1961.
DAYAN, Peter, Art as Music, music as poetry, poetry as art, from Whistler to Stravisnky and beyond, Farnhem, Ashgate, 2011.
DONOVAN, J., From Lyre to Muse: A History of the Aboriginal Union of Music and Poetry, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner Ltd, 1890.
SAMPSON, Fiona, Music Lessons, London, Bloodaxe, 2011.
WINN, James Anderson, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the relations between Poetry and Music, New Haven and London, Yale UP, 1981.
[1] Ruth Padel, for instance, names about 52 ways, one for each week of the year, in her influential book 52 of Looking at a Poem, published by Vintage in 2004. It was based on her own weekly articles on a selected poem, published around 1998 in The Guardian.
[2] I borrow the accurate expression from the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition “Strange Messenger: The Work of Patti Smith”, organized by The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, back in 2002-3.
[3] We shall not endeavour on her relations between poetry and painting, but she has incorporated much of her poetical words in her own canvas, very much in a avant-garde way, as done in her collages in hommage of the 9/11 theme.
[4] This happened by mistake, according to her in the memoir Just Kids, and after she saw Jim Morrison in concert and thought poetry was “not physical enough”.
[5] A good article that conveys this influence is here: "Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance" by Carrie Jaurès Noland, Critical Inquiry, Spring 1995, Volume 21, Number 3.
[6] Accurately enough, Joe Tarr refers this connection between word and music is mediated by poetry itself in Smith's case, and to this physical attention to the performance of the word: “Although she is a poet in her own right, Smith's best work derived its power from the act of performance. It is one thing to read the lyrics to “Radio Baghdad” - quite another to hear Smith chant “sleep, sleep, sleep, run, run, run”. How exactly do you convey the power of such a song? Or explain it? I don't think it's possible, but it's remarkable enough to discuss.” [in TARR, Joe, The Words and Music of Patti Smith, Westpoint, Connecticut, Greenwood, 2008, p. XIV].
[7] Ginsberg was the one who coined the expression above. Ginsberg is the epitome of the Beat poet, and Patti Smith knew him while an unknown and struggling artist in NY. Her devotion to him to this day remains as she frequently performs, all around the world and several times a year, normally with Philip Glass, a hommage recital based on his work. He is also present in her songs, the last of which is “Spell”, a personal take on Ginsberg's Footnote to Howl (1958), the end part of his most famous and controversial book.
[8] Just Kids, 2010.
[9] Many thanks to the British Library for the showcasing of his work in the exhibition “Poetry and Sound: Benjamin Britten”, in the occasion of celebrating his centenary this year. It is my wish to celebrate him by including him in this article.
[10] This sound recording is permanently available in the British Library Sound Archives under the reference 9CL00310008.
[11] Foreword to Cage, 1961, p. X.
[12] Op. Cit, p. X.
[13] Op. Cit. p. X.
[14] This concern of Cage was ultimately awaken by interests in the Dada Movement and Zen Aestethics and Philosophy.
Ricardo Marques (Sintra, Portugal, 1983) holds a PhD in Portuguese Studies from Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where he develops post-doctoral research on Modernism literary journals. He is also a poet and translator. He has lived in London, where he was commissioned to compose two poems for the 60th anniversary of the Organ in the Royal Festival Hall. He has translated different poets into Portuguese: Anne Carson, Billy Collins, D.H. Lawrence, Edwin Morgan, Patti Smith, Vicente Huidobro and Tennessee Williams, among others. His most recent poems in English were published in the anthology "Europoe - an anthology of 21st century innovative European poetry" (Kingston Univ. Press, 2019). In the fall 2019, a groundbreaking anthology on European Futurist poetry, organized and translated by him, was published for the first time in Portuguese. His most recent poetry book is Lucidez (não edições, 2019).
