Music

Tom Waits’ many, many moons

by Daniel Silliman Music
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Waits has a thing for moons, and has been working on lyrical variations of this one metaphor for gong on 40 years.

Tagged as: metaphors, moon, music, Tom Waits

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Ur Poems: David Shapiro

by David Shapiro Music
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My first memory of my father is: “Hurled headlong flaming!”

Tagged as: Christmas Carols, David Shapiro, Latin, Milton, poems

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Meditation on Apollinaire

by Joe Weil Memoir
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I must describe the physical sensation this poem had on me. It was a hot and humid day, and the house was full of fans whirring, and flies buzzing, and no one was home.

Tagged as: Apollinaire, Johnny Cash, Le Pont Mirabeau, Long Black Veil, Mirabeau Bridge, Refrain

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Joe Weil’s Album: I Hate Life

by Poetry Blog Editors Music
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[Recording: Joe Weil]

Tagged as: i hate life, Joe Weil

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Sondheim, The Demon Lyricist of Broadway

by Alfred Corn Music
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Sondheim isn’t a man to cloud the expression of his judgments with considerations like politeness or collegial complicity. Were his rivals still alive, they might want to take out a contract on him.

Tagged as: Alfred Corn, finishing the hat, lyricists, pacific overtures, song writing, stephen sondheim, sweeney todd, west side story

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Jazz, Workshop, Fake books, & Misremembering

by Joe Weil Music
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By the shores of gitchee goomy, / Stood the noble Hiawatha / quoting from the other shore: / Only this and nothing more.

Tagged as: alliteration, fake books, jazz musicians, personal anthology, song of hiawatha, workshop, writing habits

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NOTES ON NOISE

by Sarah V. Schweig Music
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People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share…
-Paul Simon

Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds….
-Vladimir Nabokov

To my wife Anne, without whose silence this book never would have been written.
-Philip K. Dick, dedication page from The Man in the High Castle

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As If She Were a Symbol of Something

by Sarah V. Schweig Aesthetics
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Before I post my regularly scheduled post, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I give you an excerpt from James Joyce’s “The Dead.”

Tagged as: James Joyce

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To Make Bach the Grund of Grundrisse and the Chaconne of a Shocked Shack

by David Shapiro Aesthetics
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Today I thought I should add my secret voice to your evaluations.
Your intelligence may be genius, but remember as my mother saids also always to be nice.
A seventh grade teacher consoled me when I was teased:
You can always tell the genius by the enemies who surround him.

Tagged as: Bach, Chatterton, Henry James, John Ashbery, Joyce, Kafka, Marx, Meyer Schapiro, Polonius, Pound, Proust, Shakespeare, Villon, Walter Benjamin

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An Annotated ‘Some Enchanted Evening’

by Stuart Krimko Aesthetics

I recommend playing all the videos at the same time.

Tagged as: 1001 Nights, Broadway, Camus, David Crosby, Fleetwood Mac, Patsy Cline, rickroll, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stevie Nicks

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that gum you like is going to come back in style

by Ben Fama Film and TV

With the creation of one of the high achievements of mankind, Twin Peaks, David Lynch made a world so ecstatic it demanded its own reality. I’ve been really thinking about Julee Cruise and Twin Peaks SO MUCH lately. What makes it so good? Where did this music come from? Who is Julee Cruise *really*!?

Tagged as: David Lynch

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Blogging through Grossman, Part 3: Poetic Promiscuity.

by Micah Towery Art
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We recent poets have two great tools at our disposal: freedom of poetic license, and freedom of publishing. Generally, we can say whatever we want, and get a significant number of people to hear what we have to say. The question is whether this freedom has led to better poetry or degeneration. Perhaps that’s not the best way to put it. The question should be, even if somebody is doing something amazing and new in poetry, would we even see it? Will we travel all this way to find that we really did need the gatekeepers of poetry??

Tagged as: A. R. Ammons, Allen Ginsberg, Allen Grossman, Armond White, Chris Robinson, Chronicle of Higher Education, Confessionalists, Ezra Pound, Film and TV, Hart Crane, John Ashbery, Oxnian Review, Persons, Poetry and Poetics, Post-modernism, Publishing, Robert Lowell, T.S. Eliot, The Sighted Singer, W. B. Yeats

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