Comments on: Singer-Songwriters and Poetry

By: Mark Eisner

Mark Eisner — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:57:51 +0000

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
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By: Becca

Becca — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:55:16 +0000

Now if only the PoFo would collect all of these mp3s and put them into a feature for us to download….
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By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:42:32 +0000

Greek composers set lots of Greek poetry to music–Seferis’ Sto Periyali To Krifo became a popular song.
Certainly 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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By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:33:47 +0000

I’d like to mention Syd Barrett’s version of James Joyce’s “Golden Hair.” There, I did it!
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By: John Sakkis

John Sakkis — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:27:52 +0000

Bjork covered an ee cummings poem on Vespertine…
Junior 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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By: Jilly

Jilly — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:10:29 +0000

Kevin Gordon has an MFA from Iowa.
Lucinda & Miller Williams do gigs together – they did one here in Nashville a few years ago.
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By: Forrest Gander

Forrest Gander — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:57:51 +0000

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.
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By: Claire Donato

Claire Donato — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 03:22:02 +0000

Hey Forrest–My favorite songwriter, Joanna Newsom, who
is 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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By: jane

jane — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:34:32 +0000

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.
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By: David Wojahn

David Wojahn — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:06:55 +0000

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.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:52:47 +0000

“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.
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By: bill

bill — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:42:30 +0000

Oh, and also, the St. Paul songwriter Ben Weaver (bloodshot records) has self released 2 quite good books of poems.
The most recent one is called “The talking comes later”.
benweavermusic.com
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By: bill

bill — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:39:58 +0000

Ra Ra Riot have a song whose words are largely pulled from the ee cummings poem “Dying is Fine”. You can hear that here;
http://www.myspace.com/rarariot
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By: Travis Nichols

Travis Nichols — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:33:19 +0000

A couple more songwriters to poets and back again:
Tupac.
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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By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:39:47 +0000

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.”
Sophie 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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By: Kt

Kt — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:12:21 +0000

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.
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By: NEG

NEG — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 03:31:11 +0000

Hey Forrest,
You 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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By: Franklin Bruno

Franklin Bruno — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 01:58:39 +0000

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.)
The 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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By: Forrest Gander

Forrest Gander — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:21:26 +0000

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.
Thanks 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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By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 20:52:55 +0000

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.
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By: becca

becca — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 20:05:53 +0000

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.
Destroyer’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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By: john

john — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:47:03 +0000

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:
http://www.myspace.com/johnderoo
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By: john

john — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:23:53 +0000

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.
Here’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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By: Vivek Narayanan

Vivek Narayanan — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 14:38:12 +0000

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?
And 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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By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 02:54:17 +0000

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.
Further 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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