I don’t know which I love more: words or music. I have played the ‘cello since I was 10 years old. A LONG time. I write poetry about music. I collect poetry about music. I love to read aloud. I believe in wordplay. Here’s a poem about sound:
The Moon
lasted all night and seemed to burn
toward noon
after just that brief blue darkness
nightfall bound by worlds.
And we turn to that rising
again & again
we turn and like stars, like debutantes
like false teeth
we come out.
How would we know
blinded by words
as we are
the blood guess of morning on the rocks
how it dawns on the gulls
creak of their throats against salt wind.
One of my favorite books on music, Mixed Voices Contemporary Poems about Music, edited by Emilie Buchwald and Ruth Roston has 184 pages of musical poems. Here are a few
“To Play Pianissimo” by Lola Haskins
Does not mean silence.
The absence of the moon in the day sky
for example.
Does not mean barely to speak,
the way a child’s whisper
makes only warm air
on his mother’s right ear.
To play pianissimo
is to carry sweet words
to the old woman in the last dark row
who cannot hear anything else,
and to lay them across her lap like a shawl.
“Instructions to the Player” by Carl Rakosi
Cellist,
easy on that bow.
Not too much weeping.
Remember that the should
is easily agitated
and has a terror of shapelessness.
It will venture out
inner mysterioso
but from a distance
like the forest at night.
And do not forget
the phase between.
That is the sweetest
and has the nature of infinity.
“Saxophone Julie” by Susan Firer
The one that works Holly hock Alley,
she blows sunflowers and pumpkins,
moons, stars and tinseled potatoes
blow out her saxophone’s bell.
She rolls down her socks:
blue balloons in red geraniums,
sticks out her stomach, plays
the black inside black-eyed Susans,
and the music is like the plastic door
put in the side of the cow a the state
Fair. The music lets you look inside her.
Oh, Sandman, it’s dirty in there
like barns
something’s happen in there
like lovers leaves in their hair.
It’s hot and wet: a whirlpool, maybe
a summer night’s shower.
Oh, Julie , play the rainbow of death again;
let me swallow every color like a flame eater,
let the musical grace fall down on me
encircle my breath beautifully as the green bands
around a ring-neck pheasant’s throat.
Gas by Gerry Gordon (after John Coltrane)
Riding high into the night
on John’s Good Gas we shot thru
Ravenna and Rootstown and Shalers-
ville digging on Pablo Cruise &
Bob Seeger, & the heavy night but
when Trane came thick on tenor
Something snapped, she shifted
Into low in that unknown home
Where the wind peeled our
Heart open to the bone
Rita Dove’s book, Sonata Mullatica includes poems about Mozart and Beethoven. The one I will include is titled LINES WHISPERED TO A PILLOW (Staff Quarters, Esterhazy Estate)
Little monkey, little cow,
Can you hear me listening? Now:
Ticking clock, piano plink _
Watch me hear you, feel me think.
Sharon Chmielarz, a Minnesota poet put together The Other Mozart One poem included in that book is “A Blue Note”
The success of other women musicians:
Regina Strinaschcchi, Nancy Storace. The established
Josepha von Auernhammer, Maria Teresia von Paradis,
Even Constanze Weber, that two-bit squeaking
field mouse procured a solo at St. Peter’s.
Only because of Wolfgang! The list lengthens,
a struggle against envy. Therese Friberth.
Gretl Marchand, her latest three sonatas.
Carnival has been a fairyland of awards for her –
a shower of earrings, pendants, pearls, bracelets,
Count von Seeau’s gifts to the brilliant sixteen-year-old
who is so at home with the new pianoforte.
”You’d like the touch, Nannerl,” she writes,
“It’s so easy to play. I could show you how in a minute.”
Even I have a book of poems about music, titled, Behind The Cello. I include two:
Creative Protest
Albert Schweitzer leaned close to his friend and said,
“It is better to create than to protest.”
Pablo Casals responded,
“Why not do both, create and protest?”
Imagine those two in Zurich, 1951,
standing in the cold in their overcoats and respectable hats,
shaking hands, cutting to the chase.
They know about time,
how much there has been;
how little has been learned.
And for my nephew, a bass player, I wrote
Bass (for Mike Pearce)
This wood sounds like a tree knows it sounds,
the trunk proud to be chose,
tortured; reactivated
into a brown shell,
alive,
grooving.
Y’all stay happy now. Carol