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Indefatiguable Romance

By Ange Mlinko


Sooner or later, “Cucurrucucu Paloma” finds its way to you, poets, and you swoon — because you are among the last, the very last swooners.
Looking around the web for information on the songwriter, I came upon a credit for one Tomas Mendez. Its first recording ever was by Harry Belafonte on July 20, 1956.
This is almost exactly a year after Wallace Stevens dies, on August 2, 1955. So how do I explain –


But ki-ki-ri-ki
Brings no rou-cou,
No rou-cou-cou.
(“Depression Before Spring”)
or –
There is one dove, one bass, one fisherman.
Yet coo becomes rou-coo, rou-coo. How close
To the unstated theme each variation comes …
(“Thinking of a Relation Between the Images of Metaphors”)
or this:
You Jim and you Margaret and you singer of La Paloma …
(“A Fish-Scale Sunrise”)
I am guessing that some folk version existed before Harry Belafonte recorded it, and Wallace Stevens heard it somewhere and swooned. But what if there’s a less likely explanation? I fancy there is an essence, an eidos of the lyric, whence “each variation comes.”

2007-07-18

Comments (4)

  • On July 20, 2007 at 7:07 am Chris Hayden wrote:

    I’m looking for Galway Kinnell’s poem about Robert Frost reading his poem “The Gift Outright” at President Kennedy’s inauguration. Something about how all the poets listening were distressed at how the wind blew away his papers and he seemed about to give up when he set the papers aside, reached into his great heart and gave us the poem. Talk about a “gift.” Thanks.
    –Chris Hayden
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  • On July 20, 2007 at 7:45 am Peter Campion wrote:

    Thanks for the wonderful post, Ange Mlinko. The “Talk to Her” soundtrack has this (Stevensian) Caetano Veloso version and other hoodla hoo on it, and is worth it.
    But really, what’s up with “swoon?” Is there any other word that’s so overused in poetry right now? Is ours a generation that needs smelling salts? Are whalebone corsets just around the corner?
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  • On July 20, 2007 at 12:01 pm Ange wrote:

    Yes, Peter Campion, agreed. I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek there, actually — since it seems to me those readers who are most keen on swooning dislike Wallace Stevens for not trying hard enough to break their heart.
    Juxtaposing Caetano Veloso and Stevens, I thought, might prove surprising to some.
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  • On July 22, 2007 at 3:55 am Rachel Loden wrote:

    Lovely. And then there’s “Co co rico co co rico” in The Waste Land–Eliot’s equally sampled cockcrow to Stevens’s crying dove….
    Report this comment


Posted in Group Blog, Music on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 by Ange Mlinko.

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