Any of us can get into a good fight arguing over singer-songwriters whose poetic lyrics we champion. And some singers, Leonard Cohen or David Berman (of The Silver Jews) for instance, publish books of their own poetry. In the seventies, a number of singer-songwriters made references to poets: Bob Dylan to Dante, Verlaine & Rimbaud, Patti Smith to Rimbaud, Lou Reed to Delmore Schwartz, and, um, Aerosmith quoted from “Hamlet.” But who are some of the younger singer-songwriters referencing poems by other poets? (Steve Burt, who will know them all, is limited to two responses).
For two of the best, click continue reading this entry, below.
Palace Music Bonus Disc
One of my favorites, the blessedly darkness-haunted Will Oldham, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy, includes this late poem by D. H. Lawrence (rather brilliantly edited by exclusion of the first and last two stanzas) on “Black/Rich Music”. (The whole cd is included as a bonus on “Palace Music” as well). I don’t think anyone but Oldham could pull this off (this well).
The Risen Lord
The risen lord, the risen lord
has risen in the flesh,
and treads the earth to feel the soil
though his feet are still nesh.
The risen lord, the risen lord
has opened his eyes afresh,
and sees strange looks on the faces of men
all held in leash.
And he says: I never have seen them before,
these people of flesh;
these are no spirits caught and sore
in the physical mesh.
They are substance itself, that flows in thick
flame of flesh forever travelling
like the flame of a candle slow and quick
fluttering and softly unraveling.
It moves, it ripples, and all the time
it changes, and with it change
moods, thoughts, desires, and deeds that chime
with the rippling fleshly change.
I never saw them, how they must soften
themselves with oil, and lard
their guts with a certain fat, and often
laugh, and laugh hard.
If they didn’t, if they did not soften
themselves with oil, and lard
their guts with a certain fat, and often
laugh, and laugh hard
they would not be men, and they must be men,
they are their own flesh. – I lay
in the tomb and was not; I have risen again
to look the other way.
Lo! I am flesh, and the blood that races
is me in the narrows of my wrists.
Lo, I see fear in the twisted faces
Of men, they clench fear in their fists!
Lo! on the other side the grave
I have conquered the fear of death,
but the fear of life is still here; I am brave
yet I fear my own breath.
Now I must conquer the fear of life,
the knock of the blood in my wrists,
the breath that rushes through my nose, the strife
of desires in the loins’ dark twists,
What do you want, wild loins? and what
do you want, warm heart? And what
wide eyes and wondering spirit? –not
death, no death for your lot!
They ask, and they must be answered; they
are, and they shall be, to the end.
Lo! there is woman, and her way is a strange way,
I must follow also her trend.
I died, and death is neuter; it speaks not, it gives
no answer; man rises again
with mouth and loins and needs, he lives
again man among men.
So it is, so it will be, for ever and ever.
And still the great needs of men
will clamour forth from the flesh, and never
can denial deny them again.
***
On “North Star Deserter”, his newest and maybe his best cd (with arrangements that shift from quavery whispers to choral harmonies to throbbing epiphanic rock), Vic Chesnutt includes a stripped-down song called “Wallace Stevens” on which he sings
I saw a blackbird thirteen ways and then strew a fist many mountains away
My evangelism felled brutally taken by breezes that rubbed me and lifted light raven
I stretched to borrow fine antebellum to encase all the scrapings of us civilized fellow
I wanted to stash them to secretive cages with that fabulous blackbird of thirteen stages
Alright, that’s a reference, not a quote. But on an earlier cd, “Little,” Chesnutt sings these lines from “Not Waving but Drowning” by Stevie Smith (who during an interview with the Queen, once explained that she composed most of her poems while “Hoovering”:
nobody heard him the dead man,
but still he lay moaning:
i was much further out than you thought
and not waving but drowning
poor chap he always loved larking
and now he’s dead
it must have been too cold for him, his heart gave way
they said.
oh, no, no, no, it was always too cold
still the dead one lay moaning
i was much too far out all my life
and not waving but drowning
oh, no, no, no, it was always too cold
still the dead one lay moaning
i was much too far out all my life
and not waving but drowning
I wish I knew them all. Two worth special mention: Karla Schickele of Ida, recording as “K.,” has a version of Plath’s juvenile villanelle “Mad Girl’s Love Song” that, to my surprise, made me like Plath’s poem, and the Pastels– though it was twenty years ago– recorded Auden’s “If I Could Tell You” in a way that made it sound like Auden was writing, not Tin Pan Alley-inspired modernist anti-modernist lyric poetry, but the words to a very good rock song.
Posted By: Steve on September 20, 2008 at 10:54 pmFurther references available upon request. Also, are you going to blog about your new… novel? I just discovered today that it exists!
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Are we allowed imaginary wishlists? Some days I would give anything, just about anything, to hear a deep roots reggae version of “Burglar of Babylon” — http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/elizabeth-bishop/the-burglar-of-babylon/ — by some singer with a real nice voice, maybe Burning Spear or even Tosh back from the dead. Can’t you just hear it?
Posted By: Vivek Narayanan on September 21, 2008 at 10:38 amAnd that reminds me also of the 10,000 Maniacs’ startling early riff on Wilfred Owen’s Dulce, with its gas gas gas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY69uFpcv5U
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Personal plug: I’ve set poems by Edward Thomas, J. M. Synge, Blake, Shakespeare, 2 by Dickinson, Leigh Hunt, Faye Kicknosway, Sam Shepard, a Frances Densmore translation of a Papago song, 19th popular poets, anonymous poets from Mother Goose to internet doggerel, as well as prose by contemporary writers; my “original” lyrics quote poets and writers from all over.
Posted By: john on September 21, 2008 at 1:23 pmHere’s my setting of an obscure Mother Goose poem:
http://thatsoundsgood.net/10%20A%20man%20of%20words.mp3
Here’s a song that quotes Tennyson, Francis Scott Key, the Bible, George W. Bush, and alludes to Joseph Conrad and Coppola, Eugene Debs, Freud, Kipling.
http://thatsoundsgood.net/09%20Apocalypse%20again.mp3
I wrote it after Bush declared War on Terror.
Back in the ’80s and ’90s I published some poems in obscure ‘zines and journals but haven’t sought publication in many years.
Totally randomly, I was on the front page of Saturday’s Seattle P-I playing guitar at an outdoors art event. I sang one of my Dickinson settings in that set.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/379929_noparking20.html
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Also: My friend John de Roo (a different John) has set Frost and Millay and a Howard translation of a Baudelaire poem. He’s a terrific songwriter and musician:
Posted By: john on September 21, 2008 at 1:47 pmhttp://www.myspace.com/johnderoo
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Steve, do you know where I can find that K. “Mad Girl’s Love Song” ? I did some searches but didn’t come up with anything.
Posted By: becca on September 21, 2008 at 4:05 pmDestroyer’s “3000 Flowers” references Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” Music critics are constantly calling frontman Dan Bejar a poet (sometimes disparagingly!). Here are the lyrics to “3000 Flowers” (you can hear it at myspace.com/destroyer):
She was part of an inner circle.
Daughters of The Motherland.
Like a ship lit up at sea,
with scars where its talons used to be…
I was a slow learner, I moved in flourishes.
I was a late-bloomer, I moved in flourishes.
Last man on the scene…
Fresh face on a dying scene…
100th of a ‘wet, black bough’…
100th of a ‘wet, black bough’…
I was Clytæmnestra on a good day, dispensing wisdom to
the uninitiated…
The initiates brought out in tumbrils shat out by the dawn…
Shat out by the dawn…
And, like a woman, I was kept as the wealthy
American Underground wept
at the sight of Rhode Island sinking into the sea.
And the sky still reigned supreme over the land as The Music Lovers
sat cross-legged in the sand and in Time and in Space, and (in other
words) in a band who, much like churchgoers, fuck themselves… up…
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Becca, I apologize: Schickele sets not “Mad Girl’s Love Song” but another villanelle from Plath’s juvenilia, “Telegram.” It’s on the first full-length K. disc, called “New Problems,” and I do recommend the setting, and the song. I hope you’re not too disappointed that my memory switched in the more famous for the less famous villanelle.
Posted By: Steve on September 21, 2008 at 4:52 pmReport this comment
Thanks Becca. Hadn’t known about him– and appreciate the warning about Rhode Island sinking into the sea. I thought it was just me. And John, I like yr high blues and that harmonica on Apocalypse– and the Seattle PI piece was right timely. (There’s a bit of Oedipus in that song too, no?) Vivek– that Bishop is a choice selection. Tell me that in India, you know what it means to have two contos in the pocket. I don’t believe it. The 10,000 Maniacs is a turn-on for me. Thanks for pointing that out. Curious to imagine what Owen thinks of it– listening our way.
Posted By: Forrest Gander on September 21, 2008 at 8:21 pmThanks as usual Steve. I couldn’t find tracks of either, although I found The Charlottes doing a version of Mad Girl’s Love Song. But your rocking Auden description (and not limestone) is worth my digging around some more…
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It should be pointed out that David Berman, an MFA student of James Tate’s at Amherst, might as aptly be described as a poet who releases singer-songwriter records as the reverse, though it is true he’s been recording (and, very recently) performing more than publishing in the last few years. This is not to say that having an MFA is a necessary or sufficient condition for counting as a poet, just that he comes at “the page” from a different angle from, say, Billy Corgan, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, or Jewel. Leonard Cohen, similarly, had several books out before releasing an album; it’s doubtful he would have turned to songwriting at all but for the territory opened up by Bob Dylan. (Something similar might be said of Patti Smith; several chapbooks coming out of the LES/St. Mark’s scene predate her fronting of a band.)
Posted By: Franklin Bruno on September 21, 2008 at 9:58 pmThe undersung English group The Blue Aeroplanes have used of a number of poems favored by their singer, Gerard Langley, as lyrics, including Sylvia Plath’s “The Assistant,” Louis MacNiece’s “Bagpipe Music” (a natural, I daresay), and a fairly ambitious collage of sections from Auden’s The Orators, under the title “Journal of an Airman.” I commend their work to interested readers; Langley’s own lyrics are often rewarding as well.
Jon Langford of the Mekons made surprisingly effective three-chord rock and roll out of the “Butter” section of Stein’s Tender Buttons on his 1998 solo album Skull Orchard. (Oddly enough, I just saw his band perform this at the Knitting Factory, accompanied by a 45-voice Welsh men’s choir.)
No Promises, the 2007 album by Carla Bruni (now the wife of Nicolas Sakrozy), consists entirely of settings of poetry: Dickinson, Yeats, Auden again, Christina Rossetti, and others. (I’m willing to count her as a singer-songwriter, as I believe she’s responsible for the French lyrics on her other albums.)
Perhaps this is not what you had in mind, but the text of Talking Heads’s “I Zimbra” is one of Hugo Ball’s sound poems.
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Hey Forrest,
Posted By: NEG on September 21, 2008 at 11:31 pmYou didn’t answer Steve’s question about your novel. I’m sure there are a lot of us out here wondering about such a turn…do tell!
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Not to get picky, but your reference to Will Oldham has one slight error: Will Oldham’s alias is actually Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, not William.
Posted By: Kt on September 22, 2008 at 10:12 amReport this comment
Iowa City’s own Greg Brown set Blake poems to music, on the album Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Here’s a very strange video–not the official video–for Brown’s version of “A Poison Tree.”
Posted By: Nick on September 22, 2008 at 10:39 amSophie Auster recorded tracks featuring poems by Apollinaire, Desnos, and her very own dad, Paul. She’s big in certain pockets of Europe. Fifth pockets.
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A couple more songwriters to poets and back again:
Posted By: Travis Nichols on September 22, 2008 at 11:33 amTupac.
Jill Scott.
Vic Chesnutt does a few Stevie Smith renditions live and on, what, Little? Can’t remember now.
And Bonnie Billy was in Providence hanging out with Brown U. poets back in the nineties. Asking for coffee milk. So I’m sure in that vast catalog of long as hell live shows there are some more poems set to music.
Chan Marshall had a poem in Open City a few years back, too.
Prince has a book coming out with some poems in there (seriously!)
That dude from System of a Down wrote a book.
Art Garfunkel did too.
The Fugs are rather poetic.
Didn’t Ted Berrigan get a writing credit for “People Who Died”?
Thurston Moore wrote a book called Alabama Wildman.
Dean from Luna read aloud from Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s a lot.
When does Joshua Clover’s first album drop?
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Ra Ra Riot have a song whose words are largely pulled from the ee cummings poem “Dying is Fine”. You can hear that here;
Posted By: bill on September 22, 2008 at 11:39 amhttp://www.myspace.com/rarariot
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Oh, and also, the St. Paul songwriter Ben Weaver (bloodshot records) has self released 2 quite good books of poems.
Posted By: bill on September 22, 2008 at 11:42 amThe most recent one is called “The talking comes later”.
benweavermusic.com
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“People Who Died” – I couldn’t find a co-credit for it, but Jim Carroll’s a poet in his own right, as they say… or in his own write, as John Lennon would say.
Posted By: Don Share on September 22, 2008 at 11:52 amReport this comment
I’m glad Forrest Gander mentions Jon Langford, Vic Chestnut, and the Silver Jews, whose work does more for me than many contemporary poets. The Blue Airplanes do an especially striking version of Plath’s “The Applicant,” and Paul Westerberg, of the late lamented Replacements, has a scary and poignant song about Plath, entitled “Shackle and Drag.” But my favorite of this sub-genre is a a song called “Everything’s Turning To White” by the great Aussie singer Paul Kelly, who in about 4 minutes retells Raymond Carver’s story “So Much Water So Close to Home,” without pretense, and with astonishing complexity and compression.
Posted By: David Wojahn on September 22, 2008 at 1:06 pmReport this comment
The French, in fact, cannot stop setting Apollinaire to music, particularly the poem “Le Pont Mirabeau” — not just Sophie Auster but Leo Ferré, Thomas Fersen, Marc Lavoine, and so on, plus those distinctly not-that-French rum fellows, the Pogues, who characteristically spelt it wrong.
Posted By: jane on September 22, 2008 at 2:34 pmReport this comment
Hey Forrest–My favorite songwriter, Joanna Newsom, who
Posted By: Claire Donato on September 22, 2008 at 11:22 pmis on the same label as Will Oldham/Bonnie Billy
performs a gorgeous live rendition of the 18c poem (turned
song?) “Ca’ The Yowes to the Knowes” (Robert
Burns from Isobel Pagan):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugB-CgoIfdU.
I also have an mp3 of this performance I can pass along!
claire
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It’s worth noting that that articulate Franklin Bruno post complicating the notion of poet-singer-songwriter is by, yes, that most articulate poet/singer-songwriter Franklin Bruno. HIs songs are exceptionally smart, and the lyrics take advantage of his long obsession with (and in) poetry. If you haven’t checked out his music, it’s a memorable, deferred pleasure.
Posted By: Forrest Gander on September 23, 2008 at 6:57 amReport this comment
Kevin Gordon has an MFA from Iowa.
Posted By: Jilly on September 23, 2008 at 9:10 amLucinda & Miller Williams do gigs together – they did one here in Nashville a few years ago.
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Bjork covered an ee cummings poem on Vespertine…
Posted By: John Sakkis on September 23, 2008 at 3:27 pmJunior Burke (chair of Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School) had one of his songs recorded by Bob Dylan…
Sonic Youth recorded a song called Pink Steam after the Dodie Bellamy book…
Strangers Die Everyday all went to Naropa…
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I’d like to mention Syd Barrett’s version of James Joyce’s “Golden Hair.” There, I did it!
Posted By: Don Share on September 23, 2008 at 3:33 pmReport this comment
Greek composers set lots of Greek poetry to music–Seferis’ Sto Periyali To Krifo became a popular song.
Posted By: Alicia (AE) on September 24, 2008 at 6:42 amCertainly not new, but the Smiths’ Cemetary Gates has “Yeats and Keats are on your side/ Wilde is on mine”… or some such.
I don’t know if she has aleady been mentioned; I adore Kris Delmhorst’s Strange Conversation, that has versions and settings on it of Cummings, Browning, Millay, and Byron, among others. (Some are settings of poems, others are lyrics freely based on poems.)
I was privileged to play a gig or two with Vic Chestnutt (and Burnley Vest) in the 90s in Athens, GA…. It was a great experience. (Yes, I was in a band, like everyone else…)
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Now if only the PoFo would collect all of these mp3s and put them into a feature for us to download….
Posted By: Becca on September 24, 2008 at 2:55 pmReport this comment
There’s been a lot of Neruda covers, especially by Latino artists surrounding the 2004 centennial. My favorite is the Brazilian Girls’ (none of them being Latina, only one being a woman) rendition of Love Poem XV Me gusta cuando callas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov0q58AL8OY
Posted By: Mark Eisner on September 24, 2008 at 9:57 pmReport this comment