Sea Fever: Issa's Sunday Service, No. 121

When I began this feature on Issa's Sunday Service two plus years ago, I imagined two things: one, that I would be digging very deep into the classic canon of rock and roll and, two, that I would be getting tons of suggestions (since I was offering two free issues of Lilliput Review as incentive - and still am) for the list from newer artists I was unaware of, being something of a dinosaur myelf. Though both of those thoughts are at least partially true, something happened I never imagined and that was that I began stumbling on things left and right through a variety of methods too arcane to delineate.

Today's selection is a result of one of those stumblings. I have a pretty wide net cast for poetry via google reader and one of the things I tend to run into as a result is musicians putting out new albums which have some affiliation with poetry or literature. This week I found an album, though it originally came out in 2006, with a distinct country folk rock feel by Kris Delmhorst.

And what an album it is: Strange Conversation. The conversations are perhaps not as strange as the title implies, but they are skewed enough to make it appropriate. Delmhorst interprets, reworks, and just plain sings works by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Browning, E. E. Cummings, James Weldon Johnson, George Eliot, Rumi, Byron, John Masefield, Walt Whitman, Robert Herrick (links are to specific works Delmhorst performs), and two cuts derived from Hermann Broch's novel The Death of Virgil. Heady stuffy, possibly lethal in some cases - the culture clash on the Rumi will just twist your head around and, if you are like me, you'll be screaming no, no, no - until you realize that the scream has the pinkish-red tinge of the ecstatic.

More on that one in a future post, I'm sure.

But today's selection I believe is the most unlikely of all and, with sweet irony, the best cut on the album: "Sea Fever," based on a poem by the largely forgotten, once immensely popular poet, John Masefield, who served as Britain's poet laureate from 1930 till his death in 1967. The fact that the Delmhorst rendition is, to my ear, exquisite is in no small way a measure of how fine a poem "Sea-Fever" really is.

Masefield was a poet and novelist of the country and the sea and today's song/poem is one of his most famous and one of the few of his considerable catalog still known today. He must, in some ways, have felt a man out of time. Certainly he came at the end of the great agrarian and sea faring eras and his work more comfortably fits in the 19th than the 20th century into which he was born. He has been slotted Georgian and that in and of itself is limiting, damning, and true, all in one fell swoop.

In any case, a tip of the ol' sailor's cap to Delmhorst, in loving memory of Masefield, and this one goes out to any who've spent time "the call of the running tide" or sailing her wide spread "silver plain."

Here's a fine, straight-forward reading of the poem with lyrics.



"And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over."

-----------------------------------

This week's poem from the the Lillie archive comes from issue #67, way back in April 1995. I don't know what Mr. Masefield would have thought - the inner sea and all that - but I like it. Hope you do, too.

the foraging poet

searches inside herself for metaphor
finding the sea: slippery fillet of kelp
scallop-smooth muscles thicken
in buttery baths mollusk-soft

the melting blaze of saltshore fires
against oceans rising

Patricia Ranzoni

my dead mother--
every time I see the ocean
every time...

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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James Wright , Jack Kerouac, Charlie Smith, and Chuang Tzu: Full House

Cover by Bobo

In Monday's post, I mentioned James Wright's groundbreaking collection, The Branch Will Not Break. Intrepid correspondent Ed Baker remembered the ending of another powerful poem from that collection. Here it is in its entirety:

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm
in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for a home.
I have wasted my life.

James Wright

As evidenced in Ed's memory of this last line, the power of the poem is hard to underestimate. Perhaps that power has been slightly diminished via much imitation; still, I am bowled over every time I read it. The precision in execution, the attention to detail, and, perhaps, the allusion in the first line to Chuang Tzu's (Zhuangzi) famous

"I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. "

Whether the allusion is there or no (just a dream of mine, perhaps), the general flavor of Eastern work permeates The Branch Will Not Break. I've been revisiting this volume on and off all year and reading the Selected Poems sent me back again. No matter how many times I return, the well continues to be plenteous.

Many thanks to the Poet Hound for her take on issue #165 of Lilliput Review. Sidle on over: she features poems by Greg Watson, David Chorlton, and John Martone.

Curtis, over at Blogging Along Tobacco Road, has mounted a YouTube video of Kerouac reading some of his haikus. In case you haven't seen it (or I should say heard, since it's a YouTube vid with a single picture fronting the audio - close your eyes and think "YouSpeaker"), here it is:





In addition, Curtis has been featuring videos he is making of poets reading haiku, as with the one by Roberta Beary posted here recently. This calls for some more sidling to see his vid of Charlie Smith and other goodies. With Curtis's permission, I'm also posting it here:




Charlie Smith


Ron Silliman has pointed to an interview by Doug Holder of the prolific poet, critic, reviewer, and small press legend, Hugh Fox that might be of interest to folks. Hugh has published the occasional poem here and is author of the Lilliput broadside, "Slides," which was issue #112. Here's a link to the old Lilliput blog (beware, pop-up zone), "Beneath Cherry Blossoms," with some sample poems from that broadside.

This week's featured back issue of Lilliput Review is #63, from December 1994. Be sure to check the Back Issue Archive, where you can find sample poems from 75 back issues. Enjoy.




A Basic Understanding

Cause links one
Reason to another,
And at the end
Of the chain
Sits a stark
And elemental is.

Ed Anderson

Sentence (from a sequence)

Too painfully large for word
or phrase, our small talents
despair of meaning, and we are
on buses tapping seat rails
unsure of the stop for today,
pausing as fingers glide
along reflective chrome
streaked by syllables
of familiar streets.

Tim Scannell

Gifts

Behold
this snow: light
fallen to show us through darkness
toward spring. Please
lift this sighting forward
on worthy words. I
don't know how.
But I believe in you.

Patricia Ranzoni

Snowflakes
Turds falling from 5 billion human rumps,
------5 billion snowflakes falling
----------from a single cloud.

Antler

The constant wavesound,
the chant,
slow-grinding thought and bone
to sand

christien gholson

The Knobadoor Diamond

Four boys
found a glass doorknob on the beach.
They called it The Knobadoor Diamond
and it made them rich.

Cal Sag

¶ someone's gotta fall
--babe
--make sure the bottom's still there.

scarecrow

best,
Don

Brautigan Drives on Deep into Psyche

I was all set to put up a post about Gerald Stern (it would begin “I’m in love with Gerald Stern”) when, thanks to The Writer’s Almanac, I realized yesterday was the anniversary of Richard Brautigan’s birth.

I can’t think of anything more momentous for the small press than Richard Brautigan’s birth. In fact, I can’t think of anything more lyrically momentous than Richard Brautigan’s birth when it comes to the legacy of that flower generation. You know who you are out there: bankers, lawyers, cheats, lovers, cowards, colleagues, lechers, thieves, poets, screamers, corpses, parents, betrayers. There was a moment in your lives, all your lives, when, briefly, in your field of vision, in the middle distance, everything coalesced; it all made perfect sense, there, there it is: and like a wisp of scent, it wafted off.

Gone.

Richard Brautigan, gone. What he left behind has been praised, ridiculed, despised, laughed at, admired, wept over, and, most tragically, forgotten. Among others, he was the reason that an entire generation of men let down their guard. What a thought! How many took up the pen when they realized they could say, with varying degrees of proficiency, what they felt rather than what they knew. Imagine that!

Imagine.

So, I scurried off to my bookshelf to leaf through my collection of Brautigan poesy for something momentous to post and, lo and behold, it’s almost nowhere to be found. Just two copies of Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt and a copy of Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork. This is what happens when you decide to patch some plaster and the next thing you know, you are painting two rooms and moving everything around, including the floor to ceiling books that were stuffed into said rooms. In a panic, I head off on the net only to discover, at brautigan.net, that his poetry collections, annotated at that, are all up and online. The presentation isn’t very appealing but it is what it is: the work. I highly recommend you knock yourself out. For some it will be nostalgia, for others, truth.

I believe, for me, the word is love.

Well, I can hardly continue without at least one Brautigan gem, to entice you toward the others. From Rommel …

Feasting and Drinking Went on Far into the Night

Feasting and drinking went on far into the night

but in the end we went home alone to console ourselves

which seems to be what so many things are all about

like the branches of a tree just after the wind

stops blowing.

This week’s featured back issue of Lilliput Review is #142, published in January 2005:

Artwork by Wayne Hogan

between

breathing

in

&

breathing

out

everything

else

Ed Baker

Pacifist

Another good day.

No one wanted my life

and I returned the favor.

Carl Mayfield

Pencil Sharpener: Hand-Held

Dunce cap with a razor crease

Thin plastic on the outside,

but the cone recedes

to infinity. Perhaps there is

a tree of knowledge. You

get wood shavings, lead dust.

Mark Cunnigham

fronds, their dog, balm of gilead

stories unfold in the ferns

if you know how to find them

and pick with respect

you can live on what you hear

and never go hungry

and never get full

Patricia Ranzoni

I’d like to think that Richard would have liked these poems. Very much.

Till next week,

Don