I was listening to Ella Fitzgerald. I often do but recently I have been
listening more carefully than usual.
I had been pressed to choose a favourite and was pressed to stop denying
the validity of that. In frustration I said Nina Simone. (Now I attend
carefully to both and am beginning to agree with myself)
After that I was rebuked as I had previously nominated Ellington as a major
composer – at which I said he was second only Olivier Messiaen and was then
left alone.
Anyway, Ella, worked her way mistressfully through the lyric including
“I don't want fish cakes and rye bread
You heard what I said
Waiter please, I want mine fried
I want the frim fram sauce
With oss-en-fay with sha fafa on the side”
and “You heard what I said” leapt at me.
I went back to MacDiarmid and The Second Hymn to Lenin, which includes the
curious declaration that he, HM, is aiming at more than Lenin but that
Lenin comes first... It is the Hymns to Lenin which eventually cured me of
incipient MacDiarmid idolatry, but I also greatly admire them.
Anyway, he says
“Are my poems spoken in the factories and fields,
In the streets o’ the toon?
Gin they’re no’, then I’m failin’ to dae
What I ocht to ha’ dune.
Gin I canna win through to the man in the street
The wife by the hearth,
A’ the cleverness on earth’ll no’ mak’ up
For the damnable dearth.
’Haud on haud on; what poet’s dune that?
Is Shakespeare read,
Or Dante or Milton or Goethe or Burns?
You heard what I said.”
“You heard what I said”
How different the two utterances, yet the same words.
The former is cadenced by the music.... And HM himself growled them
That's all I have to say just now
L
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