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Jamie,
" ... before any such separation occurred poets already began to see elements of autonomy in the language with relation to what may anyway have been somewhat perfunctory strumming. If I knew Greek I’d be able to talk about Sappho."
Sappho's Lyre
I bet you know more Greek than I do (not difficult) Jamie, but nevertheless I want to stick a plectrum in here -- though intervening in a dialogue between you and Mark in this area is a bit like R&G inserting itself [note the use of the count-neutral pronoun -- beyond gender, I contain multitudes!] between Hamlet and Claudius.
Anyway, "strum along with Sappho" seems to me to get it dead right. How much do we know about Sappho's mode of composition and the relation of what words of hers which have come down to us might have had with music, either in composition, performance, or reception? K, I know there must be more than simply a painting of A Lady Who Almost Certainly Isn't Sappho sitting with a lyre, but I suspect a lot of the, "in the Golden Age of Long Ago Poesy, all words were sung, before the Fall," can be blamed on that particular vase-painting.
Thomas Wyatt wrote a hell of a lot of poems about melancholic lovers Doing Unspeakable Things with or to lutes ...
Wyatt: My lute awake ..
Lute: Sod off jimmy, I've only just gotten to sleep.
... but I've yet to be convinced that he was either adept with the instrument or intended his lute poems to be set. No Lawes or Dowland (may they take their rest in peace) he.
... more briefer ...
Greek Statues
If the paint hadn't worn off, we wouldn't have Michelangelo. (He also wrote sonnets.)
The Deaf Translator
My Greek is non-existent, but I've translated Anacreon and Paul the Usher -- is this cheating?
'Nuff for now. Jamie and Mark and Peter do the police in different voices in this particular novel better than me, so I'm off back to lurch (with admiration for some and malice against ... few).
Robin.
Slightly more seriously, is it even possible to set an epigram to music without diminishing it? Archilochus pre-dates Sappho and Anacreon. As must be pretty obvious, I'm mostly with Jamie on this issue, not a matter of taking sides but that he makes a lot of points that I'd want to make myself, only he does it better. If value-judgements are allowable in this context. R.
On 24 October 2016 at 03:14 Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Mark, I didn’t mean for a moment that the Latin poets dispensing with music meant that all other cultures followed suit immediately and never looked back. Musical accompaniment to verse continues in some cultures to this day. I was giving it as a first example. There may be previous examples I know nothing of, and I suspect that way before any such separation occurred poets already began to see elements of autonomy in the language with relation to what may anyway have been somewhat perfunctory strumming. If I knew Greek I’d be able to talk about Sappho. The Provencal poets certainly valued formal virtuosity, and I’m talking about language and verse forms not music, but I have to confess I know nothing about Provencal music.Two things. The a separation, such as it is, is much more recent. We read the old ballads as verse, on the page, but we also still hear them sung. But we usually don't hear the Provencal poets sung, tho they always were in their day, and by the lyricists. Only some of the music survives.
Dylan didn't merely inherit, he transformed for his own use and the use of his and our moment. He was a decent folksinger but finally not a folkie--way too good for that. Which says nothing about the prize.-----Original Message-----
From: Jamie McKendrick
Sent: Oct 23, 2016 9:16 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: a bit muchQuite a few names were indeed dropped, Peter, but relevantly, and also quite a few individual poems including those by Blake, Yeats, Kavanagh, even Berryman’s Dream Songs. I’m only too aware of the static quality of the discussion, but I doubt it has anything to do with the stubbornness of poets. David Lace, I think, isn’t calling himself a poet, and has admitted not much liking poetry. In this context the progress, if any, has been slow and laborious. I’ve been doing a fair bit of work here and David – no (or not much of a) criticism intended – has just repeated his initial point over and over, and required explanations. Each one of which is met with the same initial response. I’m aware and sorry that much of what I’ve been saying is painfully obvious to many people here.Anyway, your arguments deserve better but for now I can only make a few notes in response, doing that cut-&-paste thing:“What I began doing (and didn't complete) in the introduction to the Denise Riley review was to deproblematise lyric and simplify its understanding, to the point where the skills of writing poems and those of writing "lyrics" are recognised as the same skills - that is, skills in handling form and in constructing linguistic patterning while locating sense / truth of that kind. (lyric).”And the review, as I mentioned before, is valuable for that. Still, I’ve been attempting to re-problematise this pairing, and to argue that different skills (though not always and not in all cases) are involved. My attempt to highlight speech rhythm as against the beat and tempo of songs is one of the main differences I’ve been stressing.“Historically I think I'm right to say that words and music did not get joined together: they came together and got separated, perhaps notably by things like the Lucy poems, where the intensity and ecstasis of the high song was maintained by the words alone. And a simplicity of phrase hardly possibly in the 18th Century culture-song tradition (nymphs and shepherds).”My argument was that this ‘separation’ happened a lot earlier (some nineteen hundred years) with the Latin poets using Greek meters. I’m thinking particularly of Catullus where the ‘vernacular’ elements of speech including jokes, obscenities and insults are played against those venerable meters. The Lucy poems are a brilliant example (empiricism, oh yeah!) where song-like elements, the ballad meter, are turned into a poem for the speaking voice. I think we’re in agreement here – except I have a problem with ‘high song’ especially where Wordsworth is deliberately making it low, or lowly matter. More of that in the next.“And having let slip the term "high song" I have probably put my finger on the feelings which lie behind resentment at a "low" songster receiving (or refusing) the Nobel. High song = Dowland, Schubert, church chant, epic, elegy, lament, and all that. "Low" song = pop, knees-up, propaganda, etc. The distinction is really tendentious -- it can be proven only by selected references and any serious attention to folk music destroys it. But it holds good in the specific context of a sophisticated but divided culture. “This works for me. I like the low song – and would include, along with your mention of folk music, the Scottish ballads, the Blues and so on. And Dylan is a worthy inheritor of those traditions of early American folk and more recent singer-songwriters like Woody Guthrie. The Basement Tapes, among other works, show him revisiting the spirit of Harry Smith’s superb Anthology of American Folk Music.Your argument about Denise Riley makes sense to me and is made clearer by the review.The final point about the Nobel doesn’t say much to me. We don’t have to take any prizes that seriously. If it publicises fine work well and good, especially if it isn’t that well known.JamieYes, I recognised a lot of that (tho I don't remember any reference to most of those poets beyond dropping the name) and in the terms you set out here it looks like you're right. But it really wasn't getting anywhere mainly because as usual poets stick in their own agendas and won't budge an inch so we were getting a static and irresponsive exchange on and on and on.What I began doing (and didn't complete) in the introduction to the Denise Riley review was to deproblematise lyric and simplify its understanding, to the point where the skills of writing poems and those of writing "lyrics" are recognised as the same skills - that is, skills in handling form and in constructing linguistic patterning while locating sense / truth of that kind. (lyric).Historically I think I'm right to say that words and music did not get joined togther: they came together and got separated, perhaps notably by things like the Lucy poems, where the intensity and ecstasis of the high song was maintained by the words alone. And a simplicity of phrase hardly possibly in the 18th Century culture-song tradition (nymphs and shepherds)And having let slip the term "high song" I have probably put my finger on the feelings which lie behind resentment at a "low" songster receiving (or refusing) the Nobel. High song = Dowland, Schubert, church chant, epic, elegy, lament, and all that. "Low" song = pop, knees-up, propaganda, etc. The distinction is really tendentious -- it can be proven only by selected references and any serious attention to folk music destroys it. But it holds good in the specific context of a sophisticated but divided culture.The "trouble" with song, as Denise Riley painstakingly explained, is that the words-music combo can act as a kind of lure which is capable of persuading you by that combined force to agree to any kind of falsity, political, personal, philosophical or other. Song issues forth into the world seeking adherents. And by the identity I proposed above poetry also, having appropriated the lyric devices, can very powerfully draw you into all sorts of acquiescence or thoughtlessness determination. There are answers to this.One is time itself. The "memorability" of song-poetry high or low is subject in time to fragmentation, though the music resists this. We are left with bits and pieces of the lyrics which become part of our own vocabularies and their force, their beauty, enters our own song-poetry-writing, shifting them into a different agenda.As for Dylan. The trouble with opening a nomination of the highest eminence to a "low" songster is not a class or elitism affair, it is that once those gates are open there are at once many hundreds of lyricists in the same kind of business who are obviously just as eligible, as against the heroics which seem to be endemic to our inherited (sovereign) culture, the glorification of the supremo, THE ONE. The trouble is not who gets the Nobel or what for, the trouble is the existence of the Nobel.PtrOn 23 Oct 2016, at 14:25, Jamie McKendrick wrote: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: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."Judy warmed up with new respect for poets and songwriter/"musicianers" (as bluesman Cadillac Baby, from Chicago, used to call them)