Music and poetry

I have this ongoing conversation with my students about how pop music, my great love, doesn't contain many lyrics that stand on their own as poetry. I try to explain how song lyrics sometimes seem more persuasive or more artful than they actually are, because they have the communicative scaffolding of the music to supplement the lack of precision etc in their words.

Still, I aspire to the transportive expressivities of music.

Tonight I listened to two songs whose effects I covet completely. "This Tornado Loves You" by Neko Case (whose strategies of perspective would fit very nicely in the collection I'm working on now) and "Soft Dangerous Shores" by Chris Whitley. In the case of Case, the lyrics actually achieve moments of poetic clarity and precision: "Smashed every transformer with every trailer," as a line of poetry, offers a model of balance and variation, cadence and detail, and compressed force. But these moments cannot be sustained over the entirety of the song, nor should we expect them to be, because the music is there to guide our response, to ensure that we attend to the right beats, the right emphases, the right nuances of tone.

The lyrics of the Whitley song are largely impressionistic, and would make for a disappointing and disjointed read as a poem. But that wave of sound that rises up on both sides of the head above Whitley's murmur-growl....Sheesh! I know exactly what my body is supposed to feel about those lyrics even if I don't know what, exactly, they denote.

I would give all ten fingernails to be able to reproduce in language alone what these songs manage to communicate in four bars. Poetry, poetry, you are such a frustrating gig: all compensation and recuperation, all the time.

An informal poll.

Does the phrase "raw foodist" suggest:

a) dietary extremism?
b) activism?
c) health-consciousness?
d) something else?

I've been thinking about this phrase, and how my responses to it are all positive, probably because the raw foodists I know are all decent, gentle people who cook really well and passionately and variously. But I have a sense that, in the larger cultural conversation, the term smacks of the wacky.

I'm feeling blah, physically, and have been for a few weeks. I'm revamping my diet for a couple of weeks to come, eating mostly vegan and mostly raw (easy because I'm eating mostly from gardens, mine and neighbors' and folks') to see whether it gets me back on kilter. But while I'm enjoying my experiment so far, and while I've been eating really, really good stuff, I feel weird about saying (esp. to people with whom I chance to eat), "Hey, I'm doing the raw foods thing for a while," because I think it comes across as preachy, or aggressive, or fringe, or judgmental. (Like my being a teetotaling vegetarian localvore food snob doesn't communicate enough judgment about how others consume.) (Just for the record, I don't care what you eat.) (Unless you're my kid, and then I try merely to model making healthy choices, and to instill a sense of values but let you make your own decision.) (Even if that means I buy you the occasional chain restaurant hamburger, which, you know, is fine because you're eating SOMETHING besides cereal for a change.) (Even so, I'm glad you prefer the burgers from the local take-out, and call the burgers from SOME chains "chemical sandwiches.") (But, again, I don't judge.)

Anyway, I don't know how long this little experiment will last. I like cheese. And cooked food. But I feel pretty great today, and that's a nice change.

The Year of "Piss Off."

Early last spring, I passed a colleague in the hall, who spun around after I'd passed by and said, "Listen, I'm putting together this conference on Not Your Field, and I'd really like you to present on A Poet You've Never Heard Of. Would you mind?" I responded by saying, "Well, you know, I'm really a Renaissance Girl, and I don't know anything about Not My Field, don't know what the issues are, and especially not in the identity politics that the poet in question seems to have engaged moderately with." My colleague said, "Yes, but you're a poet, and I know you'll do a good job. Just do a fairly informal and slightly flattering paper on this poet, because the poet's family may be in attendance. Thanks!"

So, I agreed, after a fashion.

As you know, I've been beating my head against a book this summer. Forgot about the conference until a couple of days ago. Hadn't hear from my colleague again about it, so dropped hir an email this week asking when it was and what, exactly, was it that s/he wanted from me again...?

The conference is next week. They hope I'll have an eventually-publishable 20-minute paper.

I won't.

I'll have a decent and not remotely fawning 15-minute paper, which I will not be later revising, because I'm writing a book on my field.

I'll have a real thesis but it will be textually based, practically devoid of secondary research (in my defense, there hasn't been anything written on this poet), myopically unaware of whatever cultural forces may be at work because, as I may have said, it's Not My Field.

I'll have verve and style, and that may obscure any lacunae in my knowledge, or at least redirect from them.

And then I will follow the example of a similarly book-focused girlfriend of mine: I will make this The Year of "Piss Off."

The best cookies I've ever eaten (Received As Gift subcategory)

Yum.

For a limited time only....

And mostly, because I've been working on it so long that it needs airing out.

[time's up.]

What I did on my summer vacation, part two.

The direst sign that summer is actually at an end.

Two days of faculty meetings.

Anachronism shmanachronism.

Can I really not use the phrase "for thy" in a poem, in 2009? As in "on that account"? As in:

The dapper ditties, that I wont devise,
To feede youthes fancie, and the flocking fry,
Delighten much: what I the bett for thy?

Or

But if that any aske thy name,
Say thou wert base begot with blame :
For thy thereof thou takest shame.

No? Crap. It scans really well.

The new plan.

Throw in the towel, embrace that I am a crap scholar with no staying power and a fundamental inability to frame, in introductory fashion, the various threads of my arguments, and write poems about pretty flowers for the rest of my life.

UPDATE (four hours later...)

Okay. Scratch that.

I actually had a pretty good day, productivity-wise. If I can pull another couple of those before school, I may have enough Mo (as in -mentum) to push me through the year on this chapter.

The output today: four pages on antenicene theology--just for you, Moria. I realized that I really do have to lay the historical groundwork for the argument I'm going to make, even if I depart from prior critical approaches to the issue. So that means: repeat some stuff that other scholars have said. But I'm also adding some other cool stuff (most of the antenicene material, frinstance) and making sure that the material that DOES retread is colored by the present project's concerns rather than just offering a "here's how this little corner of theology evolved in the Reformation" summary.

So. I guess the flower poems will have to wait a year or two.

(Actually, I am also working on a flower poem. But it's not so much pretty as creepy and pornographic and grotesque and, you know, secretly about representation. 'Cause that's how I roll.)

Are you keeping track? Or is it just me?

Summer productivity so far, by the numbers:

20: pages of marginally coherent thinking on paper about my introduction chapter.

3: paragraphs of that introduction chapter written.

5: days this summer I've actually had to devote to writing said chapter.

2: poems written this summer.

1: number of those poems that's worth reading.

2: courses to teach this fall.

0: number of syllabi completed.

30: days until school starts.

Damn-da-damn damn damn.