I'm still a bit surprised that a topic that has taken in Dylan's songs, the ancient Greeks and Romans, Blake, Yeats, the Scottish ballads, Burns, Van Morrison, Patrick Kavanagh,Tagore, Amit Chaudhuri, the Blues, and latterly Denise Riley, however superficially or glancingly, should be the cause of more (mock serious?) annoyance on a poetry list than a discussion of US foreign policy, although I can see beside that it's relatively unimportant.
And now a Peter Sirr poem I'd better look up. While I'm interested in what happens when poems are set to music and sung, I often feel that it's not an addition but a dilution. Which goes back to my earlier point that the meter that plays off speech in poems is often lost when it turns into song. And vice versa, again to do with stress and rhythm, when a song is spoken there's a loss which not only the loss of musical accompaniment.
Jamie
Judy Prince wrote:
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> BTW, poetry/music short-shot merges would qualify as mind-and-heart-benders for me, as well. I'd love, for example, to hear a sung and/or instrument-accompanied piece of these two lines from poet Peter Sirr ("Desire"): "On an endless, meandering train,/ the soul puts down its books, fluent again."
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> Judy warmed up with new respect for poets and songwriter/"musicianers" (as bluesman Cadillac Baby, from Chicago, used to call them)
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