lovehatethings

You were saved another invective-laced political rant by a poetical happenstance: be happy!

I thought I might try reciting some poetry... was I wrong.

A juxtaposition of poetry written around WWI with some jazz played in the early 1970s. Just dug the mashup. Hope you do too.

EDIT: The music bed is Root Down (And Get It) by Jimmy Smith from his 1972 Root Down LP.

Remembering days of university past and the changing face of authority in literary interpretation.

My abridged session at Podcasters Across Borders in June 2011. I presented early in the morning as evidenced by my wet hair. Embedded below is the Prezi I used for visuals which include all of the video clips I used as examples. If you're confused by the premise, don't worry, so was I. At some point I may try to get the full video and post it myself. Maybe at least the audio anyway. Enjoy!

an audio mashup featuring...

(written stream-of-consciousness between 12:45 and 1:00am on Thursday, June 23rd, 2011)

The sound of rain hit the metal awning
And danced back up in asymmetric reflection
Like Mickey Hart sounds at the Fillmore.

Hunched over the QWERTY
Pondering the blank slate of onyx.

A bash and a crash
And a slam and a bam
And a train in vain
As crazy stock exchange ramped up distrust in the membership
And the club tore assunder to the sound of rolling thunder
And a spike drove through the brain.

Wherefore the minds of sickening songs
Where hollow-eyed drunkards lay plastered 'gainst walls
And humble old beggars sit staunch over pavement altars?
The prayers of the slammed, slammed once more
They faltered and cried a mournful tune that echoed off the stoops
And ricocheted in the alleys behind the granite cascades.

There is a semblance to this madness.
A cause to this effect.
A liberal dose of sprinkled circumstance
Where shred and the shredded meet and blades of grass cry
Plaintiff upended to shrivel in chlorophyll blood and madness.
Nature's Sisyphus of summer only to grow each week
Then ripped asunder and left naked and shivering
Under night rains and lightning flash.

There is a storm coming.

There is a storm that, if people really listened, they could hear from a worlds away.

Like the rattle and hum of some celestial train track
And the forboding single light descending on an entrenched position
We stand, gaze transfixed.
Human caught in headlight of a reckoning that is beyond our comprehension
And yet we fear with unnatural precision.

One day the locomotive bearing down upon us with become
So loud as to render us deaf.
So loud as to make words ineffectual.
So loud as to shake our minds from thought.

So bright as to blind out sight.
So bright as to burn the corneas from our skull.
So bright as to make us translucent.

And with all of this, what we fear most is the light going out.

A dark twisted poem by Robert Service that I remember reading in school. The poem, along with a scan of the entire volume from 1907 is available in scanned book form (plus other formats) from the Public Domain juggernaut archive.org.

Alice - Jersey girl -
Red shoes by the drugstore.
Step right up. 
Come on up to the house 'til the money runs out. 
Anywhere I lay my head, please wake me up.
Please call me, baby.
T'ain't no sin.
Lie to me.

Poor Edward - telephone call from Istanbul...
Better off without a wife.
Fumblin' with the blues, bad liver and a broken heart.
The piano has been drinking:
Drunk on the moon.

Annie's back in town... Hang on St. Christopher!
Pasties and a g-string (at the two o'clock club) -
Watch her disappear way down in the hole: Johnsburg, Illinois.

Danny says Annie's back in town.
So it goes.
Chained together for life, the wages of love, drunk on the moon, 
This one's from the heart.
Watch her disappear.
A good man is hard to find.

Buzz Fledderjohn - in shades - 9th & Hennepin.
Oily night.
In between love.
Gin-soaked boy.
Christmas card from a hooker in Minneapolis,
Nighthawk postcards (from easy street),
16 shells from a 30-ought-six,
$29.00,
A sweet little bullet from a pretty blue gun,
Old shoes:
A sight for sore eyes.

I'm still here Lucinda, Bride of Rain Dog, Big Black Mariah, all you zombies,
This one's from the heart.
Misery is the river of the world;
God's away on business;
Everything goes to hell - cemetery polka.

The ocean doesn't want me.
I want you.
Picking up after you, I wish I was in New Orleans.

No one knows I'm gone. 
We're all mad here.

Closing time.
Hang me in the bottle.

So long I'll see ya.
Looks like I'm up shit creek again.

To some, Ezra Pound was a crazy mofo. To others, he was a crazy mofo genius.

His ability to paint images with words is often hit and miss for me, but generally the hits are illuminating and the misses are because he's written 100 cantos in cunieform.

How many writers can claim such a biological paragraph as framework for their writings:

"After the war, Pound was brought back to the United States to face charges of treason. The charges covered only his activities during the time when the Kingdom of Italy was officially at war with the United States, i.e., the time before the Allies captured Rome and Mussolini fled to the North. Pound was not prosecuted for his activities on behalf of Mussolini's Saló Republic, evidently because the Republic's existence was never formally recognized by the United States. He was found incompetent to face trial by a special federal jury and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remained for 12 years from 1946 to 1958. His insanity plea is still a matter of controversy, since in retrospect his activities and his writings during the war years do appear to be those of a sane person." - via wikipedia.org

With this brief context in mind, (and I encourage you explore his writings and life more) I provide some of my favorite thoughts of Pound.

"And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will."

"Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."

"I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible."