[“We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.”]

It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently, and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds’ hung havens, hangars. People go by: things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt: a loud auto; a quiet auto; people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, paste-board, and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber.

A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping: belling and starting, stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks: the iron whine rises on rising speed: still risen, faints: halts: the faint stinging bell: rises again, still fainter: fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone: forgotten.

Now is the night one blue dew. Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose. Low on the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes . . . Parents on porches: rock and rock. From damp strings morning glones hang their ancient faces. The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.

On the rough wet grass of the backyard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine . . . with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth, and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening. among the sounds of the night.

May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble, and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

Bolcom knew and loved poetry; one of my pieces included a recitation of a montage of different poems I loved, and he recognized an O’Hara quote, and he told an anecdote, with a beautifully wistful air, of meeting O’Hara at a party when he, Bolcom, was a teenage music-prodigy college student, and O’Hara’s sweetness.

Bill Bolcom was one of my principal composition professors at Michigan, and later a friend. He was a gifted performer as well as composer, and often performed (and recorded) art-songs and popular songs of yeateryear with his wife, Joan Morris. (Again, there were several Nonesuch recordings.)

I do recommend Bolcom’s settings of poetry quite highly, as he really did understand that to *perform* a poem, to act it out, as you say, is essential both to a proper performance but also to a deeper understanding of how to write music for the words, and how to fit them together.

Most poets’ ideas about songwriting are biased towards the words, and often completely miss the point that what makes an effective song is not great lyrics but words-AND-music. It’s a synergy of parts into a greater whole.

From the other direction, as Bolcom pointed out in your seminar, proper setting of the words is also necessary, and one needs to feel for both words-and-music again, not just one or the other.

Joni Mitchell did an excellent version of Yeats’ “The Second Coming.” Mitchell is one of only a small number of singer-songwriters who I think actually deserves to be called a poet.

Loreena McKennitt has done excellent settings of two or three Yeats poems that I am aware of.

For two semesters in college I took Music Composition for Non-Music Majors, taught by William Bolcom, whose mammoth setting of Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience” provided me with one of the great live-music listening experiences of my life. One of our assignments was to set a poem to music. (I set very short ones — a “post card” poem by Faye Kicknosway, and a brief bit of doggerel by the playwright Sam Shepard.) After the in-class run-through of another student’s setting of part of “The Hollow Men,” Bolcom asked the singer to read through the poem aloud, to find the emotional nuances; in short, to *act* the poem as well as sing it.

That one suggestion was the most important thing I learned in the 2 semesters. Get the emotional nuance in your voice, in your body, not just your mind.

Terreson