I Sing the Body [electric]
I turned on my local NPR station, WKAR (our motto: "Nostalgia for 1965 is Not a Crime") a station I was raised on and which I love, only to find another bitchin' harpsichord solo underway. Why, Gurus of Classical Music, with the wide range of exquisite, carnal, mesmeric classical music in the world, does Public Radio feel compelled to play harpsichords?
If classical music has fallen out of favor with the younger generations I hold East Lansing's WKAR, and in particular, Mark Schwitzgoebel and Jody Knol, personally responsible. I mean, come on guys, there's Prokofiev's The Alien God and the Dance of Evil Spirits from Scythian Suite. There's Khachaturian's Dance of the Mountaineers from Gayne Ballet with that impish Sir John Barbirolli conducting. There's Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt. There's Tan Dun's Bitter Love featuring the splendiferous Ying Huang. There's Oni Buchanan. But no, nothing that might raise the blood pressure or bring duende to the listening audience. No, today we will be listening to yet another harpsichord solo.
All this talk of high blood pressure and the Arts brings me to this morning's mail. Waiting for me in my In-Box when I woke up was a letter from Bravissimo, the Detroit Opera News.
WANTED: Super Studs with Buff Bods; Must be willing to Pump and Flex for Thousands of Adoring Fans
Michigan Opera Theatre announces an urgent open casting call for the upcoming production of Vincenzo Bellini's Norma.
Local aspirants with a lifelong dream of performing on the opera stage, or those who simply want to flaunt their pecs and abs, can fulfill those desires in one of opera's most dramatic works, Norma. No advance preparation is necessary. Interested men should possess exemplary physical strength, an imposing physique and similar, 'studly' attributes, as selected men will portray Roman soldiers.
That would be fantastic! I love opera and I would love to be on stage in front of "adorning fans." Granted, it would be nice if it was for my poetry, but as the canny Scott Engineer of the tramp steamer The Inchcliffe Castle, Colin Glencannon , put it, "beggars can no be chewers." Sadly, being vaguely Jewish, I doubt I'd pass as a Roman.
Speaking of gentlemen with walrus mustaches, perhaps we need to address a subject that plagues both Glencannon and poets alike (plague being too strong a word, I think, co-existence much better) that being delirium tremens and the tendency of poets being some what out of shape around the middle.
Now, I am not saying a life-time of alcohol abuse leads to being out of shape. Glencannon had his Duggan's Dew of Kirkintilloch, or as Guy Gilpatric himself put it: "[that] most gorgeous of all liquids that ever dripped golden from the nozzle of a still to mingle its perfume with that of the heather in the cold highland mists." On a complete sidebar I find interesting, the author of the Glencannon series, before he began writing for the Saturday Evening Post, was famous as:
[in the 1930s] an American ex-aviator living in southern France, pioneers use of rubber goggles with glass lenses for skin diving … In 1934 Gilpatric writes of his Mediterranean exploits for The Saturday Evening Post, and in 1938 publishes The Complete Goggler, the first book on amateur diving and hunting. Among the book's readers: a French naval lieutenant named Jacques Cousteau.
But, for poets and their connections with booze1 poet Sharon Olds says: "There are some fine books and essays about [poetry and alcoholism]. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die."
And die we do! The poets who have died in September seems to fill up half of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. E.E. Cummings (3, 1962); Pablo Neruda (23, 1973); Dante Alighieri (13, 1321); Alabama Poet Laureate Elbert Calvin Henderson (15, 1974); Paul Blackburn (13, 1971); Arnold Weinstein (6, 2005); Robert Penn Warren (15, 1989); Robert Lowell (12, 1977); John Greenleaf Whittier (7, 1892); (and because Brigette at work told me his lyrics changed her life and who can say no to nurse aides?) Tupac Shakur (13, 1996). Maybe that is where today's villanelle should begin?
you're pretty/ but you got to die one day/
9 simple words/ remixed/ played by DJ/
It occurs to me that something should be done about poets and death (note how we craftily shifted from one subject to another? That, my friend, is due to a serious lack of caffeine). In light of this, one of the philosophies that has fallen out of style of late is the Post-Modern concept of the artist as both creatively fit and physically fit. Or was it Sparta that came up with the idea? — no matter! The whole idea that our art is linked to our souls and our souls and bodies are one and the same is an old idea. "And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?" asks the Good Gray Poet, Walt Whitman. What indeed?
you're pretty/ but you got to die one day/
when you touch/ down upon this earth speak/ these
9 simple words/ remixed/ played by DJ/
as dance halls dim/ fall away/ our dismay
at pang given freely/ like the bee's knees/
you're pretty/ but you got to die one day/
strum that on your lyre, boy/ now you obey
this priapic boy/ these, his Orphic please:/
9 simple words/ remixed/ played by DJ
over and over/ scratching then replay
of kismet/ fate/ hap/ a song: all in threes/
you're pretty/ but you got to die one day/
my: you're pretty/ you're pretty/ you're pretty/
Eurydice, love!/ lost love in dark/ Hades'
9 simple words/ remixed/ played by DJ
till I bleed/ afterbirth of pang, blood, clay/
after/ words haunting me/ words like disease:
"you're pretty/ but you got to die one day"/
9 simple words/ remixed/ played by DJ
- Quick Quize #34. Question: What do Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz all have in common? Answer: Confessional Poetry and Gin and Tonics! [back]