The Ginsberg Experience
Tales from the
Shadow And the marriage of poetry and music
Chronicles By Allen Shadow
http://www.allenshadow.com/Pages/stories.ginsberg.html
I had seen Allen Ginsberg read a number of times — in New York City
and at the Naropa Institute in Boulder — but it was his visit to a
small college in upstate New York in 1998 that turned out to be the
"aha" moment in my writing life.
During a pre-reading discussion with students, Ginsberg began talking
about exactly the subject I was about to query him about — the
challenges of working with poetry and music.
First, a primer. When many people hear the word "poetry" associated
with music, they assume that means lyrics that are poetic in nature.
In other words, doesn't poetry per se already exist in music? Isn't it
really kind of everywhere? Isn't it in Gershwin and Stoller and James
Taylor and certainly in Dylan and Lennon? Well, yes and no. It's a
little hard to tease apart, but for writers, who have worked in both
fields, the difference begins to become more apparent.
Here are some of the differences. Poetry is generally written for the
page as well as the voice. The writer is free, especially in
free-verse form, to explore ideas without the requirement of
conforming to a set melody. He can let the muse take him to surprising
places, even, at times, the profound poetic leap. All of this, mind
you, is accomplished within the territory of the writer's voice. Yes,
the voice to a poet is not only vital — it is paramount, which brings
us to the next, and, perhaps, most pivotal point in the challenge of
marrying poetry with music.
The voice, or let's say the language itself, has a music all its own.
When you listen to a poet reading his work, you get a sense of "a
music" in his voice, in the language itself. The music inherent in the
writer's voice is essential to its overall power, as important as the
skeleton is to the body. Now, imagine the poet trying to take that
voice, complete with its own music, and somehow link it with some form
of popular music. Popular forms of music have a kind of singsong
structure that is actually fairly ornate, besides being restrictive in
meter. An analogy might help here. Try to imagine a fairly busy
painting placed in a very ornate frame. The two would probably clash,
the prominence of the frame actually distracting from the presence of
the painting. That's kind of what happens when you try to put, let's
call it, literate poetry, into the melodic framework of a popular
song. Simply put, there are two musics competing. The song music
easily becomes a distraction from the voice music of the literary
poetry.
This probably sounds like a bunch of horseshit, but it's true. I
hadn't ever read or heard anything about all this. It was only through
my experience — a poet and songwriter trying to make my "poetry voice"
work within the framework of popular song — that I discovered and,
ultimately, wrestled with this phenomenon. I documented a number of
the specific challenges and thought that I might be a little nuts in
this endeavor until the day I heard Ginsberg start to talk about it at
that college in upstate New York. Later in the afternoon, I had the
opportunity to talk privately with him about it. I was aware of his
work with blues poetry and, in recent times, with many alternative
rock bands. But to hear him talk about the challenges of really
marrying poetry with music, was both enlightening and affirming. He
outlined all of the challenges I had encountered, from the distraction
of the melody to the limitations of the meter.
"Free verse lines want to be longer than what you find with pop
music," he said. I was excited to hear all this — that Ginsberg, the
guru, was not only aware of all these special challenges but was
equally frustrated in his quest to overcome them. That experience
helped solidify my ambition in service to this quest. If it's good
enough for Ginsberg, I figured, it's good enough for me.
**** This is all okay, except: Ginsberg died in 1997...
**** Any opinions on Allen Shadow?
http://www.allenshadow.com/index.html
Anyone ever heard of him? I just ran across him wandering around the
internet... lots of great things being written about him, apparently,
including Billy Collins, who calls him "...engaging!".
"Crossroads of America" Mp3:
http://tinyurl.com/3y6l8
Crossroads of America
Words and music by Allen Shadow
Minnie Mouse gets grabassed
by a white whiskered alchy
in the leftover 50's light
of the arcades of 42nd Street
jazz Cadillacs scream in octaves
generations wait at the cosmic light
Chorus
At the crossroads
of America
The ghosts of Kerouac and Monk
waltz with the wrecker ball
they dance the runaway dream
for leave sailors and poet boys
the masterbuilder's crane is chewing
spitting out the pits of B-movie queens
The millennium bus is coming
the ball's about to fall
the mean streets of inspiration
metamorphose into a mall
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