[Alan Sullivan]

Hello, Alicia, from the West Chester Poetry Conference. I know that you are hosting a small conference of your own in Greece, but I doubt that you will have the resources to stage an opera. Admittedly, the "Nosferatu" production here was a scaled-down version, with pianist, four soloists and a small chorus. It was a great success. The music and libretto seemed to mesh exceptionally well. I would like to ask whether you are a fan of opera, and more generally, whether you have written words for music. It seems to me that the enduring popularity of song guarantees that successive generations will remain interested in writing verse. Nevertheless, metrical verse is quite different from verse written for the rhythmic template of music. Making the transition from one to the other is a difficult task.

Alan Sullivan

[graywyvern]

every so often a poem makes music in my head, but i don't have the knowledge to write it down; & i've long wanted to meet the musician who could collaborate with me & make my words into songs... more generally, it seems to me that nowadays musicians are seldom good good poets, & could benefit from such sharing of the labor (&, er...royalties).

[This message has been edited by graywyvern (edited June 11, 2001).]

[A. E. Stallings]

Alan,

Thanks so much for the report from West Chester! I wish I could have seen the production. Actually, I missed a premiere of it of sorts some years back in Macon, GA, due to some foolish navigation (in Macon!).

I grew up listening to opera. My father was a huge opera fan, and also a huge blue grass and old-time country music fan. So I grew up with a weird mixture of Mozart and Hank Williams (Sr., of course).

I do sometimes write things I think of as "songs" (they don't feel like poems exactly--usually simpler in some regard--and naturally in ballad meter--I didn't put any in the book in the end) and some were set to music by a friend (Bob Borne) in a band we were in. They worked pretty well, I think. It was fascinating to hear them with music. He fashioned some lovely melodies for them, by which they gained a lot. They now seem kind of bare & thin on the page, and I can't read them without hearing the music. Sometimes they were restructured, and part of a stanza or a whole stanza became a refrain.

This is one such. Bob added a third "alack" to stanza two, to suit the music. Stanza three was used as a refrain, which I thought was kind of neat (I hadn't planned it that way). This first appeared in "Light":

Lullaby Near the Railroad Tracks

Go back to sleep. The hour is small.
A freight train between stations
Shook you out of sleep with all
Its lonely ululations

Through the stillness, while you slumber,
They trundle down the track,
Lugging cattle, coal, and lumber,
Crying, "Alack, alack."

It's cheap to pay the engineer.
The moon's a shiny dime.
Shut your eyes and you will hear
The Doppler shift of time.

The hour is small. Resume your rest.
Tomorrow will be kinder.
Here comes a freight train nosing west
Pulling the dawn behind her.


Of course, writing FOR music is another matter. I have friends who are wonderful song writers, and write great words to them. But the lyrics aren't poems, they would lose in translation. To take the music away is like taking the third dimension out of sculpture.

An interesting topic!

Alicia

[Richard Wakefield]

Alicia:
Your "Lullaby" is splendid, and although I'd like to hear the musical version it's hard to imagine any improvement on what you have. Working in "ululations" without being stuffy is a feat, but that "pulling the dawn behind her" (cleverly worked into a feminine rhyme, no less) is the highlight, to my ear. The second "alack" works.
Richard

[ChrisW]

I agree with Richard. I don't see the simplicity as "bare and thin" at all. I love the way it's both sad and reassuring at once -- it is also beautiful. Thanks for posting it.

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited June 10, 2001).]

[A. E. Stallings]

Thank you both!

Actually, I was kind of hoping Alan might respond to his own question. I seem to remember reading here or elsewhere that Alan started off as a song-writer, and began writing poetry later. For someone who has done both, what are the differences between composing lyrics and the lyric? (I'm interested, too, in hearing about technical details, such as rime and meter.) One frequently hears that such-and-such a song writer is really a great poet, but then the song-lyrics on the page, quoted as evidence, seem rather flat for that claim. Are their any lyricists you would also put in the poet category?

(I think this may have been discussed on AbleMuse before, but I wondered if you wouldn't mind a brief rehashing?)

[Nigel Holt]

Alicia,

For me, Leonard Cohen and Peter Hammill (ex of Van Der Graaf Generator) are two lyricists that are not perhaps poets in the most formal sense, but are fascinating nonetheless.

Nigel

[Len Krisak]

Hi, Alicia and gang (not at West
Chester, but just back, having
had the benefit of Alan's and Tim's
company--among many others).

I'm with Richard--that dawn pulling
metaphor is SPECTACULAR. Only thing
I can think of even remotely similar
is something I saw recently where
the metaphor for some stormclouds
and rain was a "photographer's cloak"
(for the trailing idea, I mean).

To no other purpose, there is always
Christopher Ricks's eternal
championing (it's beginning to look
like an obsession or idee fixe) of
Dylan.

Cheers to all.

[SteveWal]

Elvis Costello for me. I think I share a cynical sense of humour with him:

"They're playing My Favourite Things again and again
But it's the one by Julie Andrews not the one by John Coltrane."

(from This Is Hell)

"There's still some pretty insults left
And still such sport in threatening."

"Was it a millionaire who said
Imagine no possessions?"

Not to mention the anti-Thatcher "Stamp The Dirt Down", songs like "Pills and Soap" and "Indoor Fireworks."




------------------
Steve Waling

[peter richards]

It's just a rumour that's spread around town.

heh

p