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Sheila Jordan and Cameron Brown: Tuesday Night at Ironworks, 3 March 2015
Still a jazz childat eighty-six, Sheila Jordan – who performed in her duo with bassist Cameron Brownlast night at Ironworks in Vancouver – has a vitality and playful joy that show no signs of abating. Her two sets consisted of well-developed material – medleys of standards and classic bebop, peppered with a few originals – that she’s been performing for decades, emerging primarily out of her work with Harvie Swartz. That said, every song sounds thoroughly fresh, immediate and compelling. Her lower register has taken on a little grain, but her lilting scat lines, the chirrup and purl that are hallmarks of her vocals, are undiminished: the lightly off-kilter cadences of her improvisations are as intimately compelling and as warmly engaging as they have been since her stunning 1962 debut record, Portrait of Sheila (where she defines close relationship to the bass – in this case, Steve Swallow – that comes to shape her music for the subsequent half-century).
We all have our favourite Sheila Jordan records; aside from Portrait of Sheila, which is an indisputably essential album for any collection, I love The Crossing (1984, on Blackhawk) and her performance on Steve Swallow’s settings of Robert Creeley poems, Home (1980, ECM): I often find myself unexpectedly humming “Sure, Herbert . . . ” out of the blue. Despite what can sometimes feel like a timbre of quiet restraint, Sheila Jordan’s voice attains a peculiar resonance; it stays with you, softly plangent and quickly sonorous. The performances last night closely matched the material on Celebration (2005, High Note), which is I think the first live recording of her work with Cameron Brown, but you could never tell that this music was over a decade old. This is late work, for Jordan, certainly, but it’s also vivacious and exuberant; aside from some street noise coming through the club walls, the audience was so quiet and intensely focused on the music you could hear Cameron Brown’s fingers brush along the strings of his instrument.
A Sheila Jordan gig offers enraptured attentiveness, a focused close listening, but she’s also just so infectiously happy, laughing and larking through each song. Commenting on the flubs she sometimes makes in her “old age,” she said there was no need “to get uptight about it. As long as your heart and soul are in it, it doesn’t matter.” She and Cameron Brown started off with an introductory blues – “And so I’ll sing of joy and pain for you / With all the happiness this melody brings” – followed by a standard, “Better Than Anything.” A version of “It’s You or No One” came next, which Brown had also recomposed by adding a new, boppish melody to the changes, and re-naming it “Sheila, It’s You.” Cameron Brown is an extraordinary bassist, his fleet and virtuosic lines emerging from a depth that recalled Charles Mingus. (Shelia Jordan opened the second set with an anecdote about singing in duo with a bassist for the first time when she was sixteen and Charles Mingus called her onto the stage to do a version of “Yesterdays”; they also offered a take, amid a tribute to Billie Holiday, on Mingus’s “Goodbye Porkpie Hat.”) There was a medley of dance-themed tunes dedicated to Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire (“I loved this cat, I’d walk two miles to see him dance . . .”), and another medley of songs associated with Oscar Brown Jr. that included her wonderful version of Bobby Timmons’s “Dat Dere” (which also appears, in tribute to Sheila Jordan, on Rickie Lee Jones’s Pop Pop). To set up her “Blues Medley for Miles” (“Blue Skies,” “All Blues” and Jon Hendricks’s transcription of the trumpet solo from “Freddie Freeloader”), she told a story of Billie Holiday sitting in a dark corner of a club warbling out “Miiiiiiiiles, Miiiiiles” while Davis soundchecked in a basement club in New York: he apparently asked if a stray cat had got into the room, which she thought was hilarious. Sheila Jordan – her music and her persona – is all about jazz history, recounting stories of her encounters with musicians in the 1950s, especially Charlie Parker. She did versions of what might have been “Yardbird Suite” – I’m a little slow on the uptake sometimes – and what was definitely “Scrapple from the Apple”; Bird, sixty years after his death, was still a keen and powerful presence. She also gestured at her own Seneca heritage, vocalizing in an American Indian style to frame a version of the Jimmy Webb country ballad “The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress.” She acknowledged that the Seneca Queen Alliquippa was her great-great-great grandmother, – and so, she said, if it hadn’t been for Columbus she might have been royalty. The second set closed with an invitation to guitarist Bill Coon to join Jordan and Brown for a trio version of her anecdotal “Sheila’s Blues.” She offered her healing, restorative song of recovery, “The Crossing,” as an encore. As she left the stage, she laughed and called out to everyone: “Have a beautiful life, and if I don’t see you again, I’ll meet you in heaven.” Her music and her voice offered us all a gift of affirmation and of colloquial joy.
Ellen Foley, No Stupid Girl
In her disco-punk memoir The Importance of Music to Girls, Lavinia Greenlawfrequently dwells on a disconnect, an existential fracture that shapes and even constitutes her self-image; the book maps out her negotiations – some deliberate, some instinctive – among a conflicted mix of adolescent identities, of identifications, that seem to circulate around what it means to be a girl, to be called a girl, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I’m not being tentative when I say seem to: the work of seeming, as both pretending and appearing, is at the crux of her methodical self-fashioning. The book consistently returns to a vocabulary of wanting, of want. Greenlaw depicts herself as a teenaged wannabe, trading costumes, styles and surfaces: always trying, always coming up a bit short. For instance, she articulates her admiration for “Tina,” role-model for nascent disco queens, by collating a wilting deference to peer-pressure with an ersatz Amazonian fierceness:
I was becoming a girl as instructed by girls but I knew I wasn’t a real girl, at least not of this kind. I wanted to be a disco girl like Tina whose every aspect conformed to some golden section of girldom: her height relative to her shape, her prettiness relative to her smartness, her niceness relative to her toughness. Tina offered certainties. She issued instructions on how to dance, who to like and what to wear. . . . Each morning, her face would be retuned – the brightness turned down, the colour turned up – and she would stride into school, her hips and breasts armoured, her hair a winged blonde helmet. I wanted this shell, which she used to attract or deflect at will. To me she was wise and ruthless, a goddess of war.
Those certainties soon become illusory, their surfaces shivered. Greenlaw’s leave-taking from disco (to take up another set of surfaces, another glamour, in punk) involves an accidental collision – a moment of casual violence – with her friend on the dance floor; as she waits for help with her cut face, she catches a glimpse of herself in a washroom mirror: “the face I saw was mine but this was not a reflection. It was too far away, more like some inner self that had slipped free and looked back at me now with my own fundamental sadness.” Mimesis is belied by its own bad promises. What’s fundamental for her, as a girl, what’s essential to who she wants to be, can never be more than pathos in lack: a likeness – “more like some inner self” – that sadly never can or will make herself whole.
Lavinia Greenlaw’s about my age. My own leap wasn’t from disco but from some sort of sci-fi soft rock – I liked Styx a lot – to punk and after, but the dynamics were roughly the same as hers. Except, of course, for the girl part. I was enabled by the same dynamic as Greenlaw, and I understand her preoccupation with want and fracture, with that fundamental sadness, but I came at it as more of an insider, as a boy. I didn’t seem to need my own version of that armour, and I could choose to identify more directly, though still at some remove, with Joe Strummer or (like Greenlaw) Ian Curtis or with any other self-styled punk frontman. I perceived the homoeroticism in Pete Townshend’s 1980 song “Rough Boys” as emblematic of a transgressive effeminacy in punk ‘s – particularly the Sex Pistols’ – preoccupation with image, although I am not sure how far I was ever able to follow through on its gender trouble.
Still, I was reminded of this version of the girl problem with the release in November of About Time, Ellen Foley’s first album in about thirty years. (I haven’t listened to the record well enough yet, but it sounds to me so far like the power, the tough richness of her voice has remained undiminished, and I’m so glad to be able to hear her belt out some raw, driving rock and roll again.) Ellen Foley’s return to recording recalls how important her first two albums were to teenaged me – Nightout (1979) and Spirit of St Louis (1981) – as well as her vocal presence on Sandanista! by The Clash (who are essentially her backing band on the second record, which was made while she was dating Mick Jones, billed in the liners as “my boyfriend”). She was the girl, as far as I could see and hear then. Her sound, her image and her sensibility yoked together a seemingly fey prettiness – what Greenlaw says she wanted simultaneously to embrace and to throw off – and a powerfully resilient, gutsy resistance to bullshit effeminacy. Despite appearances, she was nobody’s girl, nobody’s fool.
There is plenty to say about what Ellen Foley’s music comes to embody, but I want to concentrate on her take on the iconography of the girl. She first made her presence known in pop music as the female interlocutrix on Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” and she recorded duets with Ian Hunter (who had produced, and performed on, her debut album, Nightout) and others that extend her role as respondent, as the girl you serenaded but who could out-sing and even out-swagger you back. She performed a version of “We Gotta Get Out of Here” with Hunter on “Fridays,” ABC’s short-lived answer to Saturday Night Live, on May 5, 1980, a performance that suggests much about how Ellen Foley takes on a male-dominated stage.
She comes in half-way through the song – you can catch glimpses of her, back to the audience, waiting to pounce. Most importantly, for me, is her refusal to be subdued, even by Hunter’s obvious recalcitrance. (And it’s important to note that these are rock-and-roll theatrics: Ellen Foley has stressed in a number of interviews how grateful she was to Hunter and to Mick Ronson, and how happy she was with their musical relationship.) At the close of the song, she declares into the mike she’s going to have a dance contest with Hunter, and he turns to face her, but does nothing. Undaunted, she goes ahead and has a dance contest all by herself.
She seems here in one sense to have donned the blonde armour, the make-up of girlish deference that Greenlaw describes around disco girls, but – strident in her flashy white pantsuit – she also becomes something more in this clip: unshaken, energized, assured. She owns the last minute of that song. This playful, ironic doubling emerges most tangibly in one of the most memorable covers on Nightout (a song she still performs in concert), the Jagger-Richards penned “Stupid Girl”:
I’m not talking about the kind of clothes she wears
Look at that stupid girl
I’m not talking about the way she combs her hair
Look at that stupid girl
You see the way she powders her nose
Her vanity shows and it shows
She’s the worst thing in this whole damn world
Well, look at that stupid girl
The song first appeared on the Rolling Stones 1966 lp Aftermath, occasioned as both Keith Richards and Mick Jagger have separately admitted by their frustration with female fans and with their failed relationships. Prima facie, as the lyrics make obvious, it’s a misogynist rant. Girls are sick and stupid, Keith and Mick tell us, because they’re so shallow, so vain, because of their obsession with image. (Not at all like Mick and Keith. Not at all.) So why would Ellen Foley choose to sing this particular song? Because the thing is, if you listen to her version, backed by snarling guitars and thumping four-on-the-floor kick drums, you get no sense of anything but absolute commitment, of anything but digging in and digging deep. There is nothing vain, nothing insincere about Ellen Foley’s voice. It sounds completely like she means it.
But what exactly can she mean? Because, despite the venomous lyric, what we hear from her isn’t a woman calling others out, sniping at all the Tinas she can’t ever be. She’s singing the admixture of desire and loathing that the Stones song articulates, sure, but she’s also shoving it back in their faces, in their ears, our ears. I remember hearing this song as an adolescent listener, blasting it out of my stereo, and feeling that mixture of toughness and allure that few singers beyond Ellen Foley, in those transitional years, ever managed to catch. In a lip-synched video of “Stupid Girl” made for the Kenny Everett television show in1980, that catches a little of this pushback in its campy staging around body builders and beauty contestants.
When Ellen Foley sings into the beefcake armpit of some muscleman or into the plasticized coiffure of a pretty second runner up that “She purrs like a pussycat / Then she turns ’round and hisses back,” it’s not at all certain whose image – boy, girl or her own – is being confronted and undone. Rather than self-pity, the fundamental sadness that Greenlaw highlights, Ellen Foley offers her audience a means to uncover another certainty, a centredness that the unshakable timbre her voice enacts.
Mick Jones wrote “Should I Stay or Should I Go” for Ellen Foley. As a provocation, it seems to offer a bitter critique of indecision, of a girlfriend unable to make up her mind and of a boyfriend in thrall to her waffling. I’m assuming the song comes at the end of their relationship, and the recording by The Clash does appear to offer a sort of vindicating, and maybe even vindictive, catharsis for Jones. The thrashing guitars and double time chorus enact a release, a letting go that the lyrics themselves never allow.
A 2007 audience video of Ellen Foley performing “Should I Stay or Should I Go” suggests that her vocal power remains undiminished, and goes a long way to reclaiming her agency, again by taking hold of the song and singing it back at the boy or boys who authored it. More than that, it points to the subtle ways in which the indecisiveness of the lyric comes not from the object of its attention – an interlocutrix who doesn’t really answer back within the framework of the song – but from its male persona, who stays bugged by his own irresolution, by the unsatisfied involution of his own desire. When he says that if he stays there will be trouble, but if he goes it will be double, he’s pointing – at least when we hear the song with Ellen Foley’s voice in mind, in our mind’s ear – to the essential conflict, the trouble, around heteronormative desire, around gender and identity, that Greenlaw’s memoir confronts, and into which it sometimes spins and stalls – the difficult importance of music to girls. And for me, that importance, that insistence, sounds something like the intensity, like the depth and like the ruthless beauty of Ellen Foley’s voice.
Hard Frailties: MD and PiL
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| Always be merchandizing. |
I bought a re-issue on LP of the first Public Image Ltd record a couple of weeks ago, and I have been playing it over and going back to my other PiL records, particularly the key four of the first albums (including Second Issue, Flowers of Romance and Album). I don’t know why, but I hadn’t had these out in a while. Maybe they still have a certain repulsion about them, wanting to push listeners back and keeping them estranged. It’s not exactly likable music. In their specific ways, they also have a raw immediacy and a loose fierceness – not just in the dissonant snarl and visceral whine of John Lydon’s vocals, but in the way the music assembles itself – that shake me every time I put the needle down. Even as each track locks palpably into its particular, febrile groove – and from Jah Wobble to Bill Laswell, these remain definitely groove-based records – you often get the sense that things could also shatter at any moment; songs, particularly on the first album, hang vestigially in scissions and fractures. Sometimes, they sound like the reassembled shards of songs, songs that can’t quite piece themselves together again, if they were ever whole to begin with. Setting the new-age steady on-the-beat pulse of “Public Image” against the unkempt noise of its b-side, “The Cowboy Song,” suggests the antithetical aural tug-of-war in which Lydon and companions consistently engage: centripetal and centrifugal sound. The attenuated slow drag of Wobble’s bass on “Theme” teeters on the verge of collapse, then lurches forward a bar at a time, still locked into its deep rhythmic pocket. These are compelling and unsettling collaborative performances that take aim at the sonic foundations of popular music.
The uncertainties and incommensurables inherent in the collaborative process – that there are differences among performers that can’t be overcome, and instead need to be embraced – seem to me to play a significant part in PiL’s music, in how it unfolds. Still, the track I most want to repeat on the player is “FFF” from Album (1985), and what draws me to it isn’t this uncertainty, but rather a sense of its absolute, unshakeable beat: the confident, driven heaviness of Tony Williams’s drumming, and Bill Laswell’s bass-line. In contrast to the dehiscence that I have been suggesting lies at the heart of PiL’s output, “FFF” and most of the tracks on Album (or Cassette or Compact Disc) feel intentionally stable and powerfully coherent (Lydon’s singing aside, perhaps). Album is famously a Bill Laswell project, assembling studio musicians and colleagues from Laswell’s Material bands, mixing funk players with avant-gardists, to produce a set of tracks onto which Lydon’s vocals could be overdubbed. Lydon’s liner notes to the 1999 compilation Plastic Box admit as much:
In some ways, Album was almost like a solo album, [guitarist] Keith [Levene] and [drummer] Martin [Atkins] weren’t around, and I worked alone, with a new bunch of people. Obviously the most important person was Bill Laswell.
Importantly, Laswell employs a number of forward-thinking – some might even say inappropriate – improvisers to lay down tracks on the record, most peculiarly perhaps acoustic bassist Malachi Favors Maghostutfrom the Art Ensemble of Chicago, although any potentially startling or obvious improvisational work seems to me to be largely lost in the mix here. It’s the idea of employing Favors, perhaps, rather than the quality of his actual contributions, that seems to matter – an instance of artist cred derived from public-image-making, no doubt, although Laswell also withheld the musicians’ names at the time of the record’s release, toying with the weight of notoriety in music marketing. My point is that Laswell’s pool of players offer substantial potential for creative, rule-breaking performances, although he also very audibly, musically, reins every one of them in.
Lydon’s note continues with another significant moment of name-dropping:
But it was during the recording of this album in New York that Miles Davis came into the studio while I was singing, stood behind me ands started playing.
Later he said that I sang like he played the trumpet which is still the best thing anyone’s ever said to me. To be complemented by the likes of him was special. Funnily enough, we didn’t use him.
There isn’t any corroborating evidence that this encounter took place, and it’s not clear what Miles Davis would have been doing in that specific studio at that time. I’m not sure how well Laswell (who had elevated his credentials working on Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock LP, which may have put him in Davis’s viewfinder) knew Davis. (Tony Williams, who would collaborate on Laswell’s Arcana, was one of Davis’s greatest drummers, but the instrumental tracks were done, and only Lydon would have been in the studio that day. Davis may also have been working on Steve van Zandt’s anti-apartheid Sun City project around that time, so their paths may have crossed around those recordings in New York.) Panthalassa, Laswell’s “Reconstruction & Mix Translation” of Miles Davis’s 1969-74 music, only happened years after Davis’s death. (Wikipedia offers another account of a fabled unreleased Laswell-Davis session from the period: “Laswell has stated in numerous interviews that he met with Davis a number of times and discussed working together, but busy schedules kept them from arranging such a recording before Davis’ death, though Laswell’s chief engineer reports an unreleased Davis recording session from 1986.”)
But there are some very real connections that might be worth pursuing about this missed encounter between Lydon and Davis, illuminating something about their respective senses of “voice” and phrasing. Paul Tingen quotes PiL bassist Jah Wobble praising Laswell’s “mix translation” of On the Corner: “The weird thing is that when I thought of On the Corner, I have always heard it in my head the way Bill mixed it. That’s how it really is. Bill’s in the one. That’s the real deal” (Tingen 140). Wobble goes on to associate the music of Davis’s pre-retirement period, the mid-1970s, with the early performance style of PiL:
Dark Magus is my favorite Miles album of that period because it is so raw, with such a hidden power, such a mixture of dark and light. When I first heard it, in 1978, it was one of those magical moments. It had an overall sound that was similar to what Public Image Ltd was about. I couldn’t believe it had been recorded several years before us. I imagine Miles deliberately threw in these new musicians at the last moment because musicians get complacent. I can imagine how he wanted to affect their psychology, and so the music. I also know that musicians can think something is not representative of their best work, and yet it’s actually great and a lot of people love it.
This doubled sense of an improvisationally rough, groove-driven music pushing itself forward even as it seems to come apart at its seams links early Public Image Ltd directly to Davis’s aesthetic, though as (what he called) “social music,” Davis lays claim to a racial provenance that both eludes Lydon and company, and also becomes an ironically appropriated foundation for their work. (“I could be black I could be white / I could be white I could be black” Lydon yawps in “Rise,” rejigging lines from a South African torture victim as a provocation against prejudice; the shock-tactics title of his memoir, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, venomously throws racist signage into its reader’s faces.) But when Lydon recounts Davis saying he sings like he plays, he creates a collision of similitude and difference that results in a species of violent fragility, or fragile violence: an antithesis, a negative identity, that emerges not through or against but as voice: “Like me, / you are unlike me,” Lydon snarls in “Fishing,” recalling Shakespearean manipulations of self-image from Twelfth Night and Othello, in which both Viola and Iago assert that “I am not what I am” – or, perhaps for the latter, “I am what I am not.” Selfhood – as (public) image, as seeming, as performance – consists in its own negation.
And how does that negation sound? (Or maybe better, what does it sound like?) How is it voiced? Lydon may not be much help here, but Davis suggests in his autobiography that he derives his own sense of line, of musical phrase, principally from the human voice:
See, music is about style. Like if I were to play with Frank Sinatra, I would play the way he sings., or do something complementary to the way he sings. But I wouldn’t go and play with Frank Sinatra at breakneck speed. I learned a lot about phrasing back then listening to the way Frank, Nat “King” Cole, and even Orson Welles phrased. I mean all those people are motherfuckers in the way they shape a musical line or sentence or phrase with their voice. (70)
And later on, near his book’s close, comes another version of the same claim:
I had a chance to work with Frank Sinatra a long time ago. [. . .] But I couldn’t make it because I wasn’t into what he was into. Now, it ain’t that I don’t love Frank Sinatra, but I’d rather listen to him than maybe get in his way by playing something that I want to play. I learned how to phrase from listening to Frank, his concept of phrasing, and also to Orson Welles. (395)
There are some structural ironies here as well, given that the text is principally poet Quincy Troupe’s imitation of Davis’s speaking voice, culled from hours of taped conversations: it isn’t really Davis speaking directly here at all, that is. But, more importantly for my purposes here, is the recognition that Davis appears significantly to mishear his own voice. In practice, his fractured, bent phrases – no matter how lyrical they may be – have very little in common with Sinatra’s mellifluous, soporific baritone or Welles’s theatrical declamations. His connection with Lydon comes through, if at all, in the steely and fragile awkwardness of his lines, their bent uncertainty. The Barbadian-Canadian novelist Austin Clarke once told me he heard anger and fierceness in Davis’s Harmon-muted horn; this was no soothing balladry. “Anger,” sneers Lydon, “is an energy.” What’s valuable for me in the early Pil sessions isn’t so much the audible anger as this vicious, cutting lyricism, the probing, needy and breaking articulation that, for me, also makes Miles Davis’s bittersweet electric music of the 1970s so vital.
Books
Davis, Miles, with Quincy Troupe. Miles: The Autobiography.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
Lydon, John, with Keith and Kent Zimmerman. Rotten: No
Irish – No Blacks – No Dogs. New York: St. Martin’s P,
1994.
Tingen, Paul. Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles
Davis, 1967-1991. New York: Billboard Books, 2001.
Sound Tracks: Elizabeth Bishop and Lavinia Greenlaw
This is the text of a colloquium presentation I gave for the Department of English at UBC on 16 March 2012. Please pardon the formality of the MLA style — I decided to put it up on the blog rather than on academia.edu because of its autobiographical content, because of its closely contemporary subject matter, and because it’s still underdeveloped as an academic paper. There are probably also a few formatting glitches; my apologies, I’ll try to correct those. I hope it’s of some interest.
When I try digging through swelling shelfloads of criticism and secular hagiographies that, by her 2011 centenary, have become associated with Elizabeth Bishop, it starts to sound like those of us who read her, and who try to read her “straight through,” have a pressing and symptomatic need each to have our own particular Elizabeth, to craft from her work a genetics of voice to which we can belong, as recombinant latecomers. I want to explore one such attachment today, through the poetry and electroacoustic work of Lavinia Greenlaw – or maybe two such attachments, including my own. It seems to me, though, that it’s important to acknowledge that while many poets have been and continue to be reclaimed, repurposed and tentatively canonized, Bishop forms a particularly crucial case, if for no other reason than her writing practice assiduously troubles and even resists such claims, such figurative colonization, with its deliberately dislocated and dislocating geographies, – or, perhaps better put, with its careful unmooring of what Bishop calls “the family voice / I felt in my throat” (Poems 181).
We’re told Elizabeth Bishop disliked the sound of her own voice. She “read her poems with reluctance in public,” writes J. D. McClatchy in his notes for Random House Audio’s The Voice of the Poetseries, “and she loathed being recorded” (9). She also typically refused permission to tape her readings, although recordings made for Robert Lowell in October 1947 when he was poetry consultant at the Library of Congress (a post for which he would recommend Bishop two years later) provide some source material for this audio compilation, officially issued for the first time only in 2000, after extensive pleas by editors and admirers to Bishop’s reticent estate. Listening to her awkward, plainspoken delivery and to the audible traces of her anxiety, Bishop’s pronounced distaste for her own untrained verbal performances seems justified enough. In a letter to Joseph Summers sent from Halifax, Nova Scotia in August of that same year, Bishop refers disparagingly to “records I made for [Jack] Sweeney” at Harvard in 1946, which she hears as “pretty dreary” (One Art 149). Conversely, she praises Sweeney’s recordings of Lowell, whom she had just met through Randall Jarrell in New York in May 1947: “they aren’t at all professional, but they are extremely good in parts.” Lowell’s own invitation to record her reached her in September, just after her second sojourn in Nova Scotia. Their correspondence had begun in earnest that summer, with Lowell following up on a review by him of her North & South, and, more significantly, responding enthusiastically to the publication in The New Yorker of Bishop’s Nova Scotia poem “At the Fish-Houses [sic],” which had appeared in the August 9 issue: “The description has great splendor,” he writes, “and the human part, tone, etc., is just right” (7). That very human, tonal restraint is clearly also what Lowell hears in Bishop’s voice, and his invitation – which he politely asserts she doesn’t have to accept – is coupled to a plea that she might “oust some of the monstrosities on [his] list” of overblown poets he feels obliged to record (8). The recording session did take place some time on or around October 17, and Lowell enthuses in a letter to Bishop on November 3 about the excellence of a number of her readings:
I’ve at last heard the records and some of them couldn’t be better – “Faustina’s” the best I think, but “Sea-Scape,” “Large B. Picture,” “Fish,” and “Fish-Houses” are wonderful too. “Roosters” is swell in places and not so hot in others. Anyway you’ll get them in a few days and can judge. (11)
Lowell goes on to apologize for some technical shortcomings in the recordings themselves, and laments that “perhaps they won’t do for publication,” which in fact did not happen until the 2000 audiobook. The reasons for his enthusiasm aren’t ever made clear; nevertheless, I don’t think he’s just being polite. There is something poetically remarkable about these awkward, inadvertently suppressed records.
That something might be called their resonance, though I have to be careful to define what I might mean by that term, which seems odd in the context of Bishop, and of these readings. Jo Shapcott describes hearing Bishop read in a “deep rich voice” in the late 1970s at Boston University, but this is surely a combination of mistaken memory and a desire to heighten the posthumous heft of Bishop’s “strange, precise, profound poems” – their poetical depth (113). Profound seems to me precisely the wrong word for what Bishop does. Bishop’s voice, based on the surviving tapes, was never especially deep or rich, but always reticent, diffident and withheld. (Ruff a bit more kindly attributes this shyness to a combination of anxiety and asthma, but I hope it’s clear that it’s not my intention to criticize Bishop for reading poorly or for being somehow shallow: on the contrary, I want to pursue the poetic rightness of what she does achieve.) This hesitancy was a hallmark not simply of her speech, but of her poetics: “I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not writing it than writing it,” she famously tells Lowell in a letter of 21 January 1949, after she herself had, with characteristic reservation, assumed the poetry consultant post at the Library of Congress two years after him. Voice acts both as a harbinger and as a disavowal of self, of what it is to be and say an “I,” an Elizabeth: to speak oneself into external being. As James Merrill among many other has noted, Bishop’s “I” – especially insofar as it remains implicated in personal history, in memoir – models what feels like a formalized disavowal, a writerly reserve:
I think one saw the possibilities, perhaps through Elizabeth Bishop, where “I” could be used with the greatest self-deprecation, humor, a sort of rueful sense of “Well, yes, I did this, but you know what to expect of me.” (Neubauer 85-86)
Deeply suspicious of both the confessional and the expressive, Bishop does not consistently retreat into the detachment of craft, but tends instead to dwell poetically in the tense uncertainties between bios and graphē, the written and the lived.
The year 1947 is significant for understanding the specific genetics of Bishop’s voice, what Michael Donaghy calls her “accent” (Shapcott ). The summer and fall of that year would see the second of her return visits to Nova Scotia after the death of her mother, trips that would provide Bishop with raw matter for many of the poems and stories she would write until her death in 1979. In the final lines of her New Yorker poem, “At the Fishhouses,” she writes herself – distanced a little into a “we” that collects her enunciative I and the readerly you – into what becomes a maternal, liquid and lapidary Atlantic physiography:
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
(Poems 64)
“I have seen it,” she tells us, “over and over, the same sea, the same, / slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones” (63). Hands and tongues, she says, are not so much nursed on saltwater as burned by it, marked by its hard indifference. Bound to our historical and genetic limits, we are incised by but also finally lost to oceanic depth, to “what we imagine knowledge to be” rather than what we can in fact ever know. Brett Millier, like Shapcott, falls into clichés of profundity when he describes Bishop’s first visit to Nova Scotia – involving visits to Halifax-Dartmouth and to Cape Breton – after the death of her mother:
From the many notebook entries of this summer [1946], and the poems that grew from those notes, it seems clear that the trip [to Nova Scotia] was both deeply disturbing and deeply significant to Elizabeth in ways that it would take her years to articulate. (Millier 181)
Poems such as “At the Fishhouses” and “Cape Breton” had their origins in these notebooks, and certainly do speak to Bishop’s tenacious attachment to Nova Scotia as her genealogical locus. Under her yearbook photo from Vassar College, for example, Bishop lists “Great Village Nova Scotia” as her home, while in fact she had lived there only from age 3 to 6 with her maternal grandparents. As Lavinia Greenlaw puts it, “while [Bishop] is justly celebrated as one of America’s most important poets, it was not America that formed her.” Greenlaw – whose poetic enmeshment in Bishop’s work I will soon come to – recasts “At the Fishhouses” to explain the internals tensions within Bishop’s poetic voice, as an effect of cultural genetics, of what Bishop herself might calls the “question” of how she travels, and the complexities of rootedness and uprooting:
The young Elizabeth stayed with her grandmother for just three years but retained her connection with Great Village all her life. Nova Scotia is the setting for many of her best poems, and its geography of vast skies and wild Atlantic coastline is present as a sense of being on the edge of something deep and dangerous into which she might disappear and into which she might want to – an ambivalence that is one of the most striking aspects of her writing.
The hyperbole here, while perhaps warranted by the occasion of an effusive book review, is wholly out of step with Bishop’s poetic, although we can certainly hear the echoes of the ironically-framed sublimity at the close of Bishop’s poem (as well as the falling from the world that informs “In the Waiting Room”). Greenlaw isn’t wrong to affirm that Bishop’s writing is marked by Nova Scotia; but if you have ever been to Great Village, you will know that it is hardly a place of vast skylines or wild coasts. (These stock-phrases sound more to me like the figural language of Canadian tourism.) The disturbances, instead, are much more closely personal and, importantly, accentual.
In a 1947 letter to Lowell, Bishop remarks – coincidentally, in a paragraph immediately following a description of having herself recorded “like a fish being angled for with that microphone” – on the “strange rather cross-sounding accent” of Cape Bretoners, a hybrid of something “Gaelic,” “Scotch” and “English,” she thinks (147). What I hear in Bishop’s voice on those Library of Congress records, after her return from two summers in Nova Scotia, aren’t anything so overt or so strong as those Anglo-Celtic brogues, but I do hear the pronounced and, to me, self-evident traces of time spent in the Maritimes. Her voice obviously – obvious, perhaps, to anyone who’s from there – migrates and shifts through an inconstant array of East-Coast inflections. When I first heard these readings, I thought Bishop sounded like my grandmother, who comes from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and of whose voice I have a cassette tape, still. There is something in the way that both Bishop and my grandmother pronounce their Rs, pulling the rhotic slightly back, swallowing it just a little, to create what linguists call, if I’m not mistaken, a rounded retroflex approximate – which is a fancy way of saying an east-coast R, an inflection that among others you can still hear in recordings of Bishop.
I have to pause here to tell you a story, a story about me. My reading of Bishop has an even more personal angle than its link to my grandmother’s recorded voice – it connects to my own colloquial speech genetics, too. Here is my story. I was presenting a paper at a conference at UC Santa Cruz – the American Pacific Southwest – in December 2009. The paper was on the poetry of Charles Simic and its relationship to the music of Charles Lloyd. At one point in the talk, I discuss Simic account of hearing Thelonious Monk play in a New York bar. At the end of my talk, I took questions, of course, anticipating discussion of improvisation and aesthetics, or the complex relationships between music and poetry. A younger colleague of mine put up his hand and asked: “Are you from Nova Scotia?” I was a bit dumbfounded – “What?” “Are you from Nova Scotia?” he repeated: “you said baerr.” Apparently, despite a continent of distance and a good two decades of life elsewhere, my mouth still betrays my adopted origins. It’s been ingrained, coded into my tongue. So too, I think, it might be with Bishop. Leaving Great Village at six, she never can shakes its inflection, shoring against her embouchure.
2.
Lavinia Greenlaw is one of a number of younger British poets who claim Bishop as an influence. She has written numerous reviews of Bishop’s work, has produced a audio documentary for BBC Radio 3 on Bishop’s childhood, and, perhaps most significantly, has directly repurposed and reworked a number of what you might call Bishop’s keywords into the core of her own work: “Questions of Travel,” “The Casual Perfect,” and others. But Greenlaw is more than a fan, and “influence” is hardly the right term for her relationship with Bishop’s work. Greenlaw has remained a decidedly London-based writer, but her interests tend to gather around resisting the genetic determinants of her Anglocentrism. Her voice characteristically oscillates in her writing, a crucial ambivalence that has frequently been misread by reviewers of her work as hesitancy, between where she comes from and where she’s looking to, between the way she speaks and what she hears.
The Importance of Music for Girls, Greenlaw’s disco-punk memoir, begins with an account of her own near-death at age 4 when her mouth was accidentally pierced by a length of bamboo garden cane: “It could have affected your speech,” her mother tells her, “by changing the shape of the roof of your mouth” (3). Voice is both determined and deformed by her domestic, maternally-governed backyard. I want to claim that the difficult vagaries of Bishop’s accent, its complex dislocations, help to explain something of Greenlaw’s fraught lyricism and her attention to the displacements of public, performative language. Greenlaw’s shape-shifting elocution involves a recombinant genomics that synchs her to a poly context in which the dislocations and displacements of recording technologies come to inform how we sound ourselves.
Greenlaw’s poems resonate with Bishop’s, or perhaps alongside them. “Millefiore,” a lyric from Greenlaw’s 1997 collection A World Where News Travelled Slowly, thematizes resonance – as the sympathetic material attunement of molecular glass with intensified sound – but also recovers a fractal sounding, a version of the disavowed recorded voice that I have been tracing in Bishop’s poems. “Millefiore”’s dedication to the Scottish poet Don Paterson, who happens also to be an accomplished jazz guitarist, suggests that Greenlaw wants self-consciously to re-frame an ars poetica here, but a poetics that is at once intermediate and multimodal, aspiring conditionally to the feel of vocal music. The glass eye described in the lyric is “vitreous not ocular,” externalizing its opaque substance rather than pretending to be an organ of vision: neither poor prosthesis nor crafty fake. The inherent fluidity of glass – which as the long viscous drip of cathedral windows remains us, is not solid but a silicate liquid – allows the eye to hold rather than transfer the light of “everything,” but also enables it materially to oscillate, and Greenlaw imagines the eye recreating the ceramic texture of millefiore, an interlace of a “thousand flowers.” Despite its lyric trappings, this is not the visionary sublime, but a material registering, a sonogram, of someone’s artful voice: that is, it’s a glass phonograph. The inscribed sound-waves are apparently unplayable, vibrating senselessly in a dysfunctional skull socket. But in registering the limits of that listening, of what’s knowable, in the lyric textures of her poem, Greenlaw produces what she would later term an “infinite [as in, non-finite?] proximity,” a collision of the immediate, embodied auditory and the mute, representational visual at, and in, the virtual surfaces of poetic text. In her review of Exchanging Hats, a posthumously-published collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s paintings (which Greenlaw calls “poems made in pen, ink and water”), Greenlaw takes Bishop’s seeming lack of painterly technique, her uneasy primitivism, more deliberately as emerging from Bishop’s poetics of disavowal: “The wobbliness of it all is her argument with what the eye expects, how the eye wants to tidy up what is really seen.” Both Greenlaw and Bishop have sometimes been castigated for a forced formalism, a willful tidying up; in fact, the work here dwells not on the well-turned artifact, but in the argument itself with form, what David Kalstone presciently names Bishop’s “becoming a poet,” rather than ever her claiming actually to be one.
The open-ended discovery of an unsettled and unsettling poetic voice is mapped as a kind of mistaken listening, a creative misprision, in an episode from Greenlaw’s The Importance of Music to Girls, in which she outlines her first encounters with recorded music, specifically Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. As a child overhearing her parent’s music, she admits that she can’t quite make out the words to “Lay Lady Lay,” which she hears as “lay, lay, delay.” This goofy distracted mistake becomes foundational to her own work as a poet – with the book open in front of us, we overhear, at a silent remove, the moment at which she first feels her way toward a poetic re-making of language, its resilient fluid stuff. There is also a specific lyric temporality, its “delay” – her own version of a Bergsonian durée– that can only come from not understanding Bob Dylan, not hearing him correctly. Significantly, there is also a peculiar genetics of accent at work in her description. She transliterates the surreal nonsense that she hears in Dylan’s lines: “brass bed” becomes BRA SPED. Admittedly this isn’t IPA, and I’m putting some undue pressure on the accuracy of her transcription of her own audition of the song, but Dylan does not say or sound out “BRA,” ever, in the song. In a peculiarly throaty falsetto, he sings with a nasally Midwestern American accent something like “BREH.” I don’t mean to criticize Greenlaw’s ear at all by nitpicking this way; what I do want to notice is that she overlays her own London accent onto Dylan’s voice – she hears her own inflection, herself, re-sounded on Dylan’s very strange, idiosyncratic vocal performance. She has Dylan intone, like a slightly posh Londoner, BRAWSS. This imposition might be understood as antinomian, as reciprocal to the traces of Nova Scotia we can detect, liminally, in Bishop’s 1947 recordings. Greenlaw’s accent goes in the opposition direction, expressed rather than impressed. But it nonetheless re-casts that wobble as reciprocity, as give-and-take rather than determinism – regardless of what trajectory any tidy closure might follow.
I have taken too much time already, and there are numerous significant collisions and collusions with Bishop in Greenlaw’s poetry, but I want to conclude with a brief description of a recent electroacoustic project undertaken by Greenlaw at two railway stations in England, Manchester Picadilly and London St. Pancras, called Audio Obscura. Greenlaw created two audio installations which recorded the random chatter of travellers on their way through a rail station; that chatter was then edited to script and re-recorded by voice actors, and the resulting audio tracks made available for listening (on personal audio players with earphones) to passers-by in the stations in which they originated. In a print version of the transcriptions, which have been aggregated and shaped into fragmented lyrics, Greenlaw asserts that she has mined a kind of verbal DNA, caught in passing, and distilled a poetry that exists between vox populiand the solitary lyric voice. The resulting pull between close attention and diffused distraction, she suggests, enacts the subjective becoming of poetic voice, as its texts “hover between speech and thought,” or “somewhere between what is heard and what is seen, what cannot be said” (6). The texts themselves, as concatenated fragments, incline toward the legibility, the sense, promised by a poem – they look like poems – but finally resist hermeneutic finality:
Most of us don’t set out to scrutinise those around us or to listen to their conversations yet we find that faces, gestures and phrases stand out and are remembered whether we like it or not. Things catch our attention because they raise a question and fail to answer it. We are left in suspense. (4)
Those unanswered questions derive for Greenlaw directly from Bishop’s questions of travel, which Bishop distils into one key interrogative in her poem: “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” (Poems ). Home becomes unheimlich, dislocated and disturbed in under Bishop’s scrutiny. Or, in Greenlaw’s hands, interstitial, transitional. Her set of glosses on William Morris’s Icelandic journal, also published in 2011 alongside Audio Obscura and The Casual Perfect, involve Greenlaw taking up phrases from Morris’s prose and writing her way across and through them, not so much as explanation or expansion, not footnoting, but to recognize the intersubjective disturbance, the wobbles, of travelling. For her, Morris offers
the document of a journey that becomes a description of all journeys: the tensions that set in once the decision has been made, the hope that something will keep you at home coupled with the fear of missing your plane or boat or train, the realization that you are dis-equipped however much luggage you have brought along with you, the dropping of habits and co-ordinates, the ease with which you cobble together new ones, and the point at which you stop travelling and start heading home. (xxiii)
That turning point, that peripety, is where the voice, both for Bishop and for Greenlaw, feels its way into audibility, into view.
Books and Such
Bishop, Elizabeth. Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2011. Print.
– – -. Exchanging Hats: Paintings. Ed. William Benton. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. Print.
– – -. One Art: Letters. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1995.
Greenlaw, Lavinia. The Casual Perfect. London: Faber, 2011.
Print.
– – -. A World Where News Travelled Slowly. London: Faber,
1997. Print.
– – -. Audio Obscura. East Anglia: Full Circle Editions,
2011. Print.
– – -. The Importance of Music to Girls. London: Faber,
2008. Print.
Kalstone, David. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with
Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1989. Print.
Millier, Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Print.
Shapcott, Jo, and Linda Anderson, eds. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet
of the Periphery. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2002. Print.
“Sweeney, Jack and Maire.” Archival Finding Aid, University
College of Dublin. http://www.ucd.ie/archives/html/collections/sweeney-jack&maire.htm. Web.
Travisano, Thomas, with Saskia Hamilton, ed. Words in Air:
The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and
Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2010. Print.
What This Thing Is Called Love: Helen Merrill, Part Two
I have heard Helen Merrillperform live twice, on two nights bookending a week-long gig at the Bermuda Onion in Toronto in August, 1990. If I’m remembering right, I was there for the first night of her run, which I think was Monday, August 20. The Bermuda Onion was a pricy dinner club, located upstairs above a few high-end shops, its floor-to-ceiling windows looking onto Bloor (somewhere, I think, near Bay); I believe it had a garish purple neon sign in the shape of an onion flaring out over the street. It had maintained a jazz booking policy, but with only moderate success. On opening night for Helen Merrill, the place was practically deserted. I went with my friend Peter Demas, who lived in the city, and we sat at a table close to the bandstand. There might have been five or six others in the restaurant. I don’t think we ordered much food – the price-point, as they say, was prohibitive – though we might have got a plate of fries, and maybe a drink. But we weren’t there to eat, anyhow.
The Sunday Star had run a picture of her in headscarf and sunglasses, leaning on the restaurant’s piano beside her husband and accompanist, Torrie Zito, “American jazz great Helen Merrill, “ the caption read, “is weaving her wonders at Bermuda Onion until Saturday.” (I clipped it out.) That Monday night I remember her wearing basic black with pearls. Not that it matters too much how she was dressed, but my sense is that she had downplayed appearance, the show-biz aspects of a performance, because music came first, always. To drive this point home, her closer for each of her two sets that night was “Music Makers,” a tribute she had composed with Torrie Zito for her 1986 collaborative album of the same title (on Owl) with Gordon Beck, Steve Lacy and Stéphane Grappelli that speaks directly and with unadorned, faux-naif candour to the affective value of jazz, its weave: “Music makers / thanks so much / for the joy you bring.”
The other few faces in the restaurant that evening, who I would have assumed were dedicated fans like I was, must actually have been jazz reviewers; brief pieces on Helen Merrill appeared in the Star and The Globe and Mail in the next day or two. Geoff Chapman linked Merrill’s selective audience to the accomplished subtleties of her singing – even after so many years, not everyone had heard her or heard of her:
Helen Who? The one whose 1954 album with Clifford Brown was rated by one magazine the best jazz album ever made? Or is she the one whose recording 35 years later with Stan Getz was voted jazz album of the year?
Right on both counts. And thus it’s a matter of serious wonder that Helen Merrill is so lightly regarded in North America, save by jazz musicians, while European and Japanese fans can’t get enough of her.
[. . .]
Last night, overcoming a late arrival, a bothersome air conditioner and minuscule rehearsal time with the local bass-drums combo of Gary Binstead and John Sumner, la Merrill weaved wonders with a moody “Round Midnight” and a big, rangy version of an enjoyable tune that you realized, later, was good old “Autumn Leaves” in new guise.
[. . .]
The small, enthusiastic gathering, more aware than most perhaps of the thinning ranks of the great jazz singers [. . .] will treasure what they heard. (“Helen Merrill Weaves Wonders” Toronto Star21 August 1990: E2)
Mark Miller was a little less enthusiastic, but still drew attention to Merrill’s astounding handling of ballad form:
Some jazz singers have made their names by the number of notes they can squeeze into the four beats of a bar. Some have made a style out of the number of bars they can squeeze into a note. . . . The long notes are the ones to wait for, the ones that draw the whistles, in a Merrill song – there was a note in You and the Night and the Music that simply turned transparent as it drew out in mid-air. They give her interpretations a quietly dramatic, sultry quality and lend a variety of softened textures and subtle shadings to the most familiar standards. The good effect in Monday’s second set, however, was often undermined by the bruised quality of her voice, a voice apparently “sabotaged” – that was Merrill’s word – by the club’s air conditioning. (“Revival Act” The Globe and Mail 23 August 1990: C3 )
I was there, so I can confirm that she did complain about a problematic air conditioner; her voice remains a sensitive instrument, and the ways in which she re-shapes a melodic line, slowly unfolding notes like delicate origami blooms, means that her breath and her pitch are closely responsive to their immediate environment. In some ways, her style is more suited to the rarefied immediacy of a recording studio than exposed to the unpredictable elements of background and stage noise. Her performance that night was, indeed, much less subtle and nuanced than those I’ve heard on record, although there were moments – like those mentioned in the reviews, but also in her version of “Lilac Wine” – when you could feel your heart stop beating, when the room seemed briefly suspended in time.
Given that Peter and I were almost her whole audience, and the only ones sitting up close, when she left the stage after her first set, she came over to our table. Her manner was a bit wry and ironic; I think she asked us if we had a cigarette lighter, but neither of us smoked. I think I bungled saying something complementary, about how much I enjoyed her albums. She cocked her head a little, as if unsure as to whether or not I was putting her on, looked me in the eye, and asked: “Do you have the one with Thad Jones?” I didn’t. I think she told me I should try to get hold of a copy, though it was probably out of print (which it was). He was great, she said. “A Child Is Born” is a beautiful song. And then she left us for the back of the club.
Years later, Emarcy France would reissue not one but both of her albums with Thad Jones – The Feeling Is Mutual (1965) and A Shade of Difference(1968), although they soon dropped out of print again, until Mosaic Records put them together on one limited-edition CD as The Helen Merrill–Dick Katz Sessions. It’s not just the presence of Thad Jones, but the gathering of two groups of musicians’ musicians – Jim Hall, Ron Carter (with whom Merrill would later record an incredible duo album), Pete LaRoca, Richard Davis, Elvin Jones, Gary Bartz, Hubert Laws – makes these sessions astoundingly special. Alongside her albums with Gil Evans, Bill Evans and John Lewis, I think it isn’t a stretch to call The Feeling Is Mutual her masterpiece. In the liner notes to the second record, pianist and broadcaster Marian McPartland suggests that what makes these recordings so brilliantly alluring is a lyrical tension, both within Helen Merrill’s voice and in her subtle interactions (I’d suggest) with the other musicians:
I remember vividly the first time I heard Helen Merrill sing. It was some years ago, and I was listening to the radio, late at night, while driving to New York. Suddenly I heard a voice with an unusual timbre and such poignancy that I pulled over to the side of the road to listen more closely. [. . .] The contrasts in her voice are most intriguing: on the one hand, like eggshell china, and on the other a heartfelt cry, a depth-of-the-soul moan of deep feeling.
She was right, of course, about “the one with Thad Jones”; while her performance that Monday night might have been a bit marred, a bit “bruised,” there is something even in that heartfelt late effort that partakes of the idea of the cry, of crying: a grainy emollient pathos. A few years later, I tried to write about it, in a small lyric tribute of my own to Helen Merrill, which appeared in Descant in 1997; strangely, I used the same metaphor as Mark Miller, the bruise, although for him it was a fault, while for me, it is the essence of what Helen Merrill does. Late recordings, such as her duet on “My Funny Valentine” with Masabumi Kikuchi, only heighten the subtly attenuated grain of her voice, its lovely expiring.
The second gig I attended was the closing night of her Bermuda Onion run, the Saturday. My parents had come to town, to visit the CNE, and my dad offered to take us all out to dinner, so I suggested we go see Helen Merrill. He paid, which was pretty nice. The club was packed that night. She was great, a bit more showy, a bit higher energy, a bit less nuanced. Afterwards, I asked my mother what she thought. “Great legs for sixty,” she said.
Last year, I bought an autographed copy of a Japanese album, a session Helen Merrill did with Teddy Wilson – another significant pianist in the music’s history. (Helen Merrill produced a handful of solo piano albums in the seventies, including significant recordings by Tommy Flanagan and, my favourite, Roland Hanna – playing Alec Wilder.)
The signature, presumably for a couple she likely doesn’t know, reads “with much love always, Helen Merrill.” The thing is, I think she means it. What she does, what she gives, on these records and in those performances, despite whatever conditions there might be, is a genuine moment of feeling, a pathos that makes you pull your car over and listen. A kind of love.
Lilac Wine: Helen Merrill, Part One
This past week, I discovered one of the remaining records on my wish list of almost impossible-to-find music: Helen Merrill’s American Country Songs, from 1959. My find wasn’t on vinyl, though, but that’s still fine by me. I’ll take what I can get. Worn copies of this never re-issued LP have appeared occasionally on eBay in the last decade, going for fifty bucks or more, and I’ve never managed to come out on top of the bidding. I have found the occasional Helen Merrill disc at my local used record store, but American Country Songs has eluded me. (A few months ago, I came across another one on my list, the triple-LP version of Keith Jarrett’s 1979 Concerts, so it’s been a pretty good year for the collection.) Atco WEA-Japan put out American Country Songs on CD in mid-January, and iTunes followed suit with a download. And there the music finally was, widely accessible again after more than fifty years of relative obscurity.
This record’s a peculiar genre hybrid, and it’s certainly not Helen Merrill’s best album. But its rarity has made it hugely alluring for me, and anything, anything, by Helen Merrill is going to be revelatory, never short of pretty much excellent, so I’m happy to have access to it, and to hear it. Helen Merrill has defined herself for more than half a century as a quintessential jazz singer, so country-and-western isn’t going to be her forte. A few country-jazz hybrids were emerging at the turn of the sixties, notably guitarist Hank Garland’s recordings with Gary Burton; Sonny Rollins’s Way Out West (with its famous William Claxton cover photo and its versions of “Wagon Wheels” and Johnny Mercer’s “I’m an Old Cowhand”) had appeared in 1957. But I’m not aware of any vocalists melding idioms; Patsy Cline’s “Walking After Midnight” had been a country-pop crossover hit in 1957, and the arrangements for strings (by Chuck Sagle) on American Country Songs draw overtly on contemporary country-pop style. Guitarist Mundell Lowe, who had notable associations with Sarah Vaughan and recorded third-streamish arrangementsof Alec Wilder, performs on the album, along with George DuVivier, Milt Hinton and Jo Jones, lending the music an artful legitimacy, although there are no searching improvisations; as the title suggests, the record aims to link jazz and country as forms of Americana, styles rooted in the same musical loam.
The record starts off with a string-rich arrangement of “Maybe Tomorrow,” with Merrill’s smoky lines overdubbed in stereo harmony. (“Devoted to You” gets a similar vocal duo treatment later in the set, but with a small backing band – vibes, guitar, bass, drums – instead) The effect is to draw a light but palpable resonance from Merrill’s voice: a barely breathy, gently grained texture that had become a hallmark of her own style. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” stands out, with its half-speed vocal (“when time goes crawlin’ by”) set against warbling electric guitar and a double-time steam train shuffle, the drum-line falling somewhere between Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” (no kidding) and a C&W version of “Cherokee.” She works with and against time, threading it like tensile gold, attenuating its viscosities like taffy. On the whole, the album sound is playful, the arrangements mostly commercial and a little kitschy (“I’m Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail” is plain goofy, but cute): a bouquet of late 50s MOR, mostly sweet and lonely ballads swaddled in strings. But Helen Merrill’s syllable-by-syllable melodic craft, feeling her way along the purr and pull of each note, makes this music work.
The string section also gestures back (though not formally, merely as a kind of auditory trope) to her more sophisticated Mercury albums, particularly Helen Merrill With Strings(1955) and her collaboration with Gil Evans, Dream of You (1956). The opening track on the 1955 record is “Lilac Wine” – a song she was still performing when I saw her live in 1990 (which she described as “unusual”) and which was the title track of her 2004 album (which, unusually, also includes a cover of Radiohead’s “You”). The lyrics describe lilac wine as “sweet and heady, / like my love,” which also suggests about the timbre of her voice, its veiled headiness, its honeyed closeness. In an interview with Marc Myers for his Jazz Wax blog, in 2009, she recalls working with Gil Evans in July, 1956:
JW: Your phrasing on that session sounds like the basis for Miles Davis’ approach with Gil a year later in 1957 on Miles Ahead.
HM: I have no idea. Miles used to love my sound and always came to hear me sing. We were dear friends. He told me he loved my whisper sounds. That’s a technique Iused by getting up real close to the microphone. I’d sing almost in a whisper, which created a very intimate sound. I developed this by listening to my voice and trying different things with the mikes.
JW: Do you think Miles learned from your whisper technique?
HM: Miles learned from everyone. He was incredible. He took the best from everyone and threw away the rest. He was brilliant. One of the things he told me he loved about my voice was how I used space—both in music and between my voice and the mike.
This is a pretty big claim, and it seems a little suspicious to call Miles Davis a “dear friend.” But the comparison of their articulations is also deeply apt; their ballad styles are strikingly similar, with an attention to the delicate surges, the intimate breath-pressures within each note. And while American Country Songs can’t achieve the layered depths of a Gil Evans record (or of a Gil Evans-Helen Merrill record), the seductively undulant sound-space that Helen Merrill can and does create makes it an album so worth hearing.
These Poems, She Said: Jan Zwicky and Robert Bringhurst
Jan Zwicky and Robert Bringhurst read together at Green College, at the University of British Columbia, on Wednesday, March 20, in the late afternoon: the last event in this year’s Play Chthonics series. I was set to introduce them to the 40-odd people who had come to hear them in the Graham House fireside lounge – a capacity crowd for a poetry reading, for that intimate space – and Jan reminded me about one of the first times we had met, which was in a two-term graduate seminar led by Don McKay at Western in the fall-winter of 1986-87. She was teaching philosophy at Waterloo, I think, but would come weekly down to London to audit the Monday evening class; her Wittgenstein Elegies had been published by Brick Books earlier that year. I was a master’s student, and was just getting underway writing what would turn out to be a thesis on the poetry and poetics of Robert Bringhurst, which McKay was supervising. The seminar was called “Poetry After 1945,” if I am remembering right, and each week was focused on a different book, a different poet – chosen, I’m pretty sure, not for any particular thematic or ideological reason, but because Don was interested in them, and he thought that theirs were poems that we ought at the very least to know about, to know: Robert Lowell’s Life Studies and For the Union Dead, Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares, John Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Ted Hughes’s Crow, Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies, and selected poems from Denise Levertov, Daphne Marlatt, Seamus Heaney, Charles Olson, others. One guy in the seminar was keen to do something with Sylvia Plath. (I remember also discovering, through Don, Charles Wright’s The Other Side of the River that year.) And, near the end of term, Don had put on Robert Bringhurst’s The Beauty of the Weapons.
I don’t know what had drawn or what was drawing me into Bringhurst’s work at the time, whether I had picked it out from McKay’s syllabus, or found it on my own and then taken the seminar to hear more about it and to encounter those poems more fully. There was something that spoke to me quite forcefully and seriously in those days, from Bringhurst’s writing, something important. And he was also one of the few poets I had discovered who had a rigorous interest in philosophy, in thinking. What caught my ear was that Bringhurst didn’t ever merely namecheck Heidegger or Levinasor the Pre-Socratics, never merely rehearsed Zen traditions (via Gary Snyder) or First Nations mythtelling; he took these inheritances up with a keenness, a self-awareness and a deliberateness that I had never met before, and he did it not simply in but through poems, as poetry. Bringhurst aimed to have his work converse, materially and essentially, with what Kinnell called(in his brief “Prayer”) “whatever what is is.” Later poems would make this conversation more formally explicit – his “Blue Roofs of Japan” had just appeared in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music, Bringhurst’s just-issued collection from McClelland and Stewart. The way I remember, it was this kind of poetically-informed conversation to which I hoped that seminar aspired.
By the start of second term, after I had been working at Bringhurst’s books for some time and with the in-class discussion of his poetry fast approaching, I was certainly aware that both McKay and Zwicky had been somehow more directly and closely implicated in his writing than I might have realized at first (although I knew McKay knew Bringhurst personally, and had sent him a few questions on my behalf about sources for poems). “Sunday Morning,” from Pieces of Map, is dedicated to them both, and suggests a kinship of thought and approach – around listening, around wilderness, around alterity and ontology – that Bringhurst characterizes as an interest, an inter-esse, in “the musical density of being.” Their poetry, in many and various registers, aspires to sing, to attain the condition of song. They were concerned, in the late 1980s, to reactivate a particular trajectory of the lyric, its noetic intensities.
So, what happened in the seminar was: one of the assignments involved presenting a close reading of a poem. I had chosen to examine Bringhurst’s “These Poems, She Said,” partly in response to an emergent line of questioning in the class around gender politics. Bringhurst placed the poem first in his selected, to enact a distancing irony, and to suggest a self-awareness about the contingency of the seemingly sculptural monumentality, the mythic reach, of the texts that followed:
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study.
[. . .] These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. (Selected Poems 75)
The gesture at Plato isn’t just a philosophy joke about an authoritarian metaphysian’s aversion to the erotic. (It’s worth comparing Zwicky’s recent Plato as Artist, which recuperates an alternative Plato.) Bringhurst creates a miniature Socratic elenchus, replete with self-deprecating irony. Uncharacteristically for Plato, however, the interlocutor in this poem is female; the text’s antithetical manoeuvres, shifting from iterated critique to discomfited reaction, both sustains the authority of the male poet’s voice – everything remains filtered through him, and he is the one who affirms, at the poem’s close, that the woman’s voice has spoken “rightly” – and also dismantles any grounds he might have, other than a kind of empty verbal aestheticism (“You are, he said,/ beautiful”), to claim argumentative high ground. He sounds like he wins, but he can win only by losing, since the love he craves entails receptive openness rather than the abstract and detached rhetorical management of a well-turned phrase or line. In the seminar, I think it was difficult for me to hear the conflictedness at the core of the poem, and instead I focused only its apparent claim to rightness, its mistaken feel of surety. This reading, as you can imagine, didn’t sit well with Jan, and she told me so. What she valued in the poem wasn’t any feint of attention or pretense of listening, but a deliberate, intentional disavowal of ego; the poem, for her, in the white space that slashes through its penultimate line on the page, opens itself to what remains otherwise, to its ungovernable outside. (As I write this, I don’t think those would have been Zwicky’s terms; this is me, I’m sure, re-casting her critique. But however she put it, her point was a good one.) She argued.
What came out wasn’t just a corrective for me. More importantly, it was the sense that there were real stakes here, that something in this poetry mattered. And what mattered was the honing and the intensification and the acuity of thinking, of thought as an exacting, lyrical unknitting of selfishness, of self. That debate about poetics wasn’t just a remedial exercise, but an enactment of this rigorous openness, one that takes itself seriously. “Knowing, not owning” as Bringhurst puts in what he then called “Thirty Words,” which he would incorporate into his “credo” in later editions of his selected poems: “Praise of what is, / not of what flatters us / into mere pleasure” (Selected Poems 159). Neither Zwicky nor Bringhurst takes this demand lightly; poetry is careful, serious business, and since that evening seminar in 1987, I have tried to learn from and through their work – and I continue to do so – to correspond with, to be responsive to and responsible for, that care.
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| Robert Bringhurst Reading at Green College |
The Play Chthonics reading, for me, reactivated this commitment to a poetry that matters. Both Bringhurst and Zwicky presented principally new work, but their tactics and idioms were still closely and thoroughly enmeshed in the kinds of lyric thinking they have been practicing, in their distinctive ways, for decades, and for which I have, for decades, admired them. Bringhurst read from a set of what he called “language” poems, works that have little to do with idiomatic American experimentalism, but addressed themselves to the foundational becoming, the ontological pluralism, that he has pursued throughout his career. Zwicky’s poems, by contrast, focused elegiacally on the essential unknowability of things, on lost connections and on gaps and silences. But her poems also distill their music from that loss, a music that wants to draw out some of the human resonances with a world in which we are all implicated, to converse openly with the unvoiced plentitude of what we are not, which is also what we are. At different points, both she and Bringhurst coincidentally described encounters with a heron as an image of this attentive address.
After the reading, I picked up a copy of a CD that Zwicky had recorded (in June 2011) called, simply, Jan Zwicky Reads. I have been listening to it off and on for the past month. As at the live reading, I find that as I listen certain of her lines seem to hang in the air, to resonate: “that bare light not yet sweet with birds.” Zwicky’s melopoeic technique, her mastery of the phonemic music of language, evident here in the audible meshwork of consonants and gently modulating vowels, is more than “sweet” craft; what inheres in these voicings – I’m sure that’s the right term for this lyric practice – is more than the mere pleasures of listening. Zwicky offers in small, in lines such as these, a musical elenchus, a negation (“not yet”) that highlights the hiatuses and epistemological uncertainties that poetry seeks to bridge, as metaphor, but also construes as its substance, as its inevitable shortfall, again as metaphor, as approximation, as asymptote: a version, I’d say, of what Bringhurst has called, translating Paul Celan, “the caught light’s closeness / to audibility” (Selected Poems 143). The sweetness Zwicky’s poetry seeks out is never the sugary or the saccharine, but is consistently a resonance, a harmonic sweet spot, where the disparate textures of an unclosed world can briefly, barely, touch and argue, catch and hum, collide and sing.
A Windy Boy and a Bit
[This is another review essay that never made it into Canadian Literature. I delivered a version of part of this text as a paper to the Dylan Thomas Society of Vancouver in October 2003, I think.]
A Windy Boy and a Bit: Dylan Thomas at Full Volume
1.
When I was fifteen — in tenth grade in Truro, Nova Scotia — poetry started to matter to me. What held me was the built-in abstraction of any poem, what I took to be its inherent difficulty — something that appealed to my pretenses of alienated sophistication, one of the worst of teenage vanities. Small town adolescence creates a dire need to believe in your own young genius. You end up driven by palpable faith in your unheralded yet overwhelming significance, and you’re pushed by cosmic injustice to be, for a flash, “famous among the barns,” singing tragically in your local chains.
Late in that school year I horned in on a song by Pete Townshend, longstanding bard of teenage wastelands, a song I thought nailed my predicament dead-on (from Rough Mix, a record he made with Ronnie Lanein 1977): “I want to be misunderstood, / Want to be feared in my neighbourhood. / I want to be a moody man, / Say things that nobody can understand.” Well, maybe I didn’t want to be feared, but at least found out, remarked for my cryptic and appallingly contrived bitterness. The poetry I liked — and I was very particular about it from the get-go, although I’d barely read enough of anything — resonated with what I thought I absolutely knew, the crux of my goofy, half-baked intellectual machismo. I craved poems with a kind of latter-day masculine bravura, perhaps to offset what I wrongly assumed were the frailties of artistic work, and I wanted hard and strident voices to make their way into my breaking, pubescent croak.
So, there were three writers to whom I gravitated immediately. Robert Frost’s formal elegies, his temporary stays against confusion, bespoke an untenable paternity setting its teeth against its own inevitable collapse: it was heavily Oedipal, and I heard in Frost’s arch lines a way to wrestle with the laws laid down by all the fathers, my own or anyone’s. (For Christmas that year, my mom and dad gave me A Tribute to the Source, a Frost selected with misty New England photographs by Dewitt Jones; I couldn’t ever get past “Buried Child,” and still can’t.) The second of my triumvirate was John Newlove. I had found his selected poems, The Fat Man, in the high school library, and their chiseled ironic edges cut at the world the way I thought I wished I could, grimacing through the hellish existential manhood of his Samuel Hearne. (I had also asked for a copy of Newlove for Christmas, but the cashier at the bookstore sold my mother Irving Layton as a substitute, telling her it was “the same sort of thing.” Not exactly. Although Layton’s “Cain” — a poem of restrained father-son violence — is still one of my favourites, for some reason.) And then there was Dylan Thomas.
I bought a used copy of Thomas’s Dent Collected Poems from the “Nu to Yu” shop. I’d also saved some money from my summer job as a boxboy at the IGA, and bought Quite Early One Morning — a scrapbook of reminiscence, poetry and radio scripts — and, probably the first book I can say I really valued as a book, as an object: a sandy-colouredNew Directions hardback of the 1930s Notebooks, edited by Ralph Maud. This rough and unready Dylan had a sprawling immediacy that seemed especially ripe in my own meager time and place. He had remained suspended on the page young enough to be relocated to small town Nova Scotia, I think, because of the way those obscure and elitist performances, an adolescent brashness finding and wagging its tongue, tended and still tend to lift themselves out of history, out of context — even, or especially, as the material aspect of those unfinished holographs in scribblers, tends to reassert those very limits. These books unknotted and then retied their lacings, and became Truro poems, teenage poems: mine.
For me, as for many readers, Thomas’s recorded voice offered a form of verbal religiosity, of spirit possession; the man himself long dead, his speech could nonetheless carry forward from the spiral scratch of a phonograph track to animate and stir our tenuous present. I found a Caedmon double-album of Thomas readings in the Truro public library, and kept renewing it. (I had recently progressed from the Junior to the Adult card, a major shift in borrowing possibilities.) From this compilation, however, I found I leaned toward the later poems of ecstatic resignation, flush with fractured verbiage and hobbled by overripe nostalgia; the spittle-cloyed choruses of “Lament,” the hawk- and curlew-heavy upheaval of “Over Sir John’s Hill,” and the chiming, verdant bluster of “Fern Hill.” Harper Audio has issued Dylan Thomas: The Caedmon Collection, an 11-CD set gathering all of Thomas’s spoken-word recordings released by Caedmon. Thomas’s records, as many will know, were both the foundation and the mainstay of Barbara Cohen and Marianne Roney’s Caedmon label, which went on to release some of the most significant recordings of poetry and prose in the mid-twentieth century. Thomas also recorded a number of poems included in this set both live and in the studio for the CBC at Vancouver in “late May 1952,” as the notes to the collection point out, when he was on the second and last of his two reading tours of the West Coast. (This date, however, remains problematic; according to some sources, Thomas read and recorded — in conversation with Earle Birney — on 6 April 1950; his second appearance in Vancouver was on 8 April 1952, and he was not likely here in May of that year. Surviving letters and postcards place him and Caitlin on a ship at sea that month.) The transplanting that I managed to effect as a teenager, carrying Thomas across time and the Atlantic into my own embrace, retooling “Wales in my arms” for Canadian reception, was already ghosted into the recordings themselves; his voice had already arrived here, only to take flight again into the false eternal present of the stereo lp.
The Caedmon Collection reproduces in CD-sized miniature the covers of Thomas’s albums. As anyone who collects records knows, their particular material presence, their 12-inch square glossy cardboard, matters a lot, and the Caedmon compilation gestures at this nostalgia, in a conveniently reduced format; you can hold all the transcriptions of Thomas’s voice, his digitized remains, in your hand. This wan materiality emerges in Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Bookcase,” from Electric Light. In his lyric, Heaney eyes the coloured spines of his books, and remembers not merely voices but encounters, intersections, coursings; the thickness of paper and binding melds with the poems themselves, their verbal textures:
Bluey-white of the Chatto Selected
Elizabeth Bishop. Murex of Macmillan’s
Collected Yeats. And their Collected Hardy.
Yeats of “Memory.” Hardy of “The Voice.”
Voices too of Frost and Wallace Stevens
Off a Caedmon double album, off
different shelves.
Dylan at full volume, the Bushmills killed.
“Do Not Go Gentle.” “Don’t be going yet.”
Unlike the Heaney of this reminiscence, or Thomas, I was never much of a drinker — in fact, when I was wearing a groove into “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” I remember being more often than not strangely prudish; poetry seemed to fill the same selfish gaps as Heaney’s Irish whiskey might, that indulgent loneliness every boy wants to pickle in — but I know exactly what he’s writing about here: the poem that wants not to fade away, to keep going, even as it manages to sustain nothing but, nothing much more than, its own bald longing.
In “Dylan the Durable?” — the interrogative title is significant, and suggests much of the unresolved duplicity of “The Bookcase,” where the invitation to stay that remains largely unanswered — a 1991 lecture reprinted in part in his Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001, Heaney reads in Thomas’s villanelle a formal reflex “turning upon itself, advancing and retiring to and from a resolution”:
The villanelle, in fact, both participates in the flux of natural existence and scans and abstracts existence in order to register its pattern. It is a living cross-section, a simultaneously open and closed form, one in which the cycles of youth and age, of rise and fall, growth and decay find their analogues in the fixed cycle of rhymes and repetitions.
While Heaney seems keen to fall into step with mid-century mythopoeic interpretations of Thomas — the Biblical archetypes, books of nature and Blakean contraries that saturated the first flush Thomas criticism — he nonetheless finds the vital instability at the core of this thoroughly formalized not-yet-an-elegy. But where Heaney abstracts and generalizes this uncertainty into a thematic of “youth and age,” the poem is actually more specifically gendered: it is about fathers and sons, a refusal to relinquish the bond to his father, even as it takes up the poetic work of fathering, of parthenogenesis: the poem itself, rather than merely producing formal analogues, rages against a deathly, stultifying parental stricture even as it affirms, in that contradiction, a fierce and fatherly imperative. And it performs that rage, most famously, in the contradicted doublet of its penultimate verbs: “Curse, bless, me now.” The child, as Wordsworth says, is now father to the man; Jacob and Isaac exchange places, and then trade again, in the urgent pleading of Thomas’s blasted prayer. This demand, as simultaneous question and plea that refuse not to be put, seems to me best grasped as adolescence. It cannot accept its dutiful forms, and chooses defiance of the paternal in order to affirm its surging and unruly life-force that drives its green age, even as it wants only to inhabit those forms for itself, and discovers itself blasted and made dumb by childishness. It wants, like all adolescents, to be both adult and child at once. If we scan Heaney’s selected essays, we discover too what is obviously a need for poetic maturity and respect — he tends to write only about the poetry of Nobel laureates, Harvard lecturers and old friends, to position himself within a kind of transnational academy — coupled with a pervasive nationalist pastoralism, all those Irish vowel-meadows where he ran and the peat-bogs where he dug in his youth. I don’t mean to deride Heaney, but instead to point to the necessary and vital adolescence of what he does. And to use such a claim to look back, and forward, at my own willfully unresolved reading practices.
2.
Heaney mentions no Canadian (and very few commonwealth) writers, and we could hardly expect him to. Or maybe we could. But he does provide a hinge into a more localized nationalism, one that inheres not in artificially stabilized cultural thematics, a Canadian-this or Canadian-that, but in its own ardent instabilities, an adolescent discomfort that is not to be overcome but embraced. This sweetly duplicitous craving permeates Albertan (now Mexican-resident) Murray Kimber’s illustrationsfor Fern Hill (from Red Deer College Press), the middle volume — from 1997 — in what now appears to be a trilogy of work commencing with his brilliant 1994 collaboration with Jim McGuigan, Josepha: a prairie boy’s story, for which Kimber won the Governor General’s Award for Illustration , and concluding with The Wolf of Gubbio, a retelling of a legend of St. Francis of Assisi by Michael Bedard, published in 2000. But where both of these texts are narrative, and lend themselves to a kind of captioning, as events from story are depicted by brush, Thomas’s “Fern Hill” has, at most, only shards of plot, and coheres musically rather than descriptively, in the relative abstraction and obliqueness of time remembered, a blurring of present recollection and past recollected in incantatory pastoral surges: “Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs . . . .” Temporal modalities collide in this famous opening gambit, interlocking the immediacy of the poem’s writing, the jetztzeit of that conventional “now,” with its historically orchestrated and orchestrating subject, “I was.” Kimber intensifies this interlace of here and there, now and then, both in the arrangement of his sixteen illustrations and in their subject matter.
Kimber’s work focuses on two principal figures, represented in two small watercolour cameos that frame the main text: on the title-page, he offers us the head and shoulders of a prepubescent boy, rendered in reddish fleshtones against a purple wash; on the recto of the last page, facing a page-sized reprint of the complete text of “Fern Hill,” he sets his counterpart, a patriarch in tweeds and cap, whose open eyes and quiet pinkish smile suggest a knowing serenity. This final image echoes the first illustration, apposite to the first three lines of the poem, which shows the same old man, now rendered in light blues with oils on canvas, but now with his eyes closed and mouth gently crimped. Kimber’s intention is to suggest the poem’s tenor of reverie in age, despite the fact that Thomas was in his early thirties when he wrote it, and to link memory both to aestheticized wonderment — the “darling illusion” of recollection as Charles G. D. Roberts once put it — and to pastoral vitality; the green apples that decorate the old man’s red scarf (their tones in sharp contrast to his pallid complexion) displace the real apples of those sagging boughs onto textile pictorial, past life sustained as lovely wearable art. In the second illustration, we see this capped figure walking, but now the boy and a horse run forward from him, surging right toward the next page of the book. The palette, too, shifts from blue to peach, yellow and deep green, as the present is revived in “the heyday of his eyes,” that splendid driven vision.
Kimber’s fourteen oils (not including the watercolour miniatures) form a visual sonnet, structured in a nested frame. The image for the first three lines, the solitary face of the dreaming man, are recapitulated in the image for the last three, the same figure, now shown head to toe in the middle ground walking alone with his bare feet in the surf; the second image — man, boy and horse — is replayed in the second to last illustration, where these three figures are rejoined, although now to close the loop as we go “riding to sleep” under an equine constellation, the forward push of the former image moderated by dark purples, as man and boy, his old and young selves, walk homeward hand in hand, their backs to us as they depart across the pasture into a shadowed, moonlit farmhouse. Thomas’s poem, though highly formalized, bears little resemblance to a sonnet, but Kimber’s visuals nonetheless uncover a version of the form, dividing the first and last stanzas in three, and the remaining four stanzas in two (grouped mostly in clusters of three or four lines, with no illustration crossing between the existing stanzas). In effect, Kimber’s illustrations surround a core octave, made up of four pictorial pairs, with two tercets or triptychs, creating a recursive envelope (3-[2-2-2-2]-3) that, as I’ve already tried to indicate in my description of the opening and closing illustrations, affirms a fixed architecture. The strong outlines and lapidary textures of Kimber’s figures confirm this essentially sculptural, even monumental tendency to his style, an effort I think to stay the mutable, and to arrest the ragged arc of time. Recurrent motifs — farmhouse, ladders and fences, a married couple holding hands or standing kissing, burnished barns, even the vertical trunks of trees — solidify this stasis, a circularity that emerges from the almost obsessive repetitions of motifs and even whole phrases in Thomas’s poem: “green and golden,” “nothing I cared.”
Simultaneously, Kimber energizes this visual torpor, the viscosity of his oils, with diagonal flashes and unresolved tangents: river flow, shooting stars, floating drapes, running horses that refuse to be contained by borders or grids. This kinesis, too, comes from Thomas’s poem, in the ungraspable syntax of the third stanza, for example: “All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay/ Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air/ And playing, lovely and watery/ And fire green as grass.” The run-on, thematized in the poem itself, distends and stretches Thomas’s closed, formal architecture like so much verbal taffy. Time, though chained and bound, sings excessively, testing the tensile bonds of poetic enchainment. Kimber’s paintings embrace what Thomas appears to understand as the creative push of memory, the force that drives his green age, in their lovely dehiscence, as they catch at the fraying of time itself, at the doubled assembling and dismantling that inheres in the sustained “now” of the image.
So, this is much more than a children’s book; perhaps the music of this sometimes confused and difficult poem would attract a child’s ear, though the nostalgia of the text itself is fully that of an adult. It is best thought, perhaps, as an adolescent work, the text and visuals hovering between the child-like wonder the writer craves and the deathly adulthood he wants to refuse. It is a fine and engrossing work of male desire, of longing.
Kimber’s work is also mindful of its history; his landscape style echoes primarily the post-impressionists, especially Paul Cézanne’s rectangles and triangles, although his green forests clearly draw on Emily Carr’s vortices and his fields on the horizontal plains of Illingworth Kerr (perhaps something of a carry-over from his work on Josepha ). His portraits fuse the blue ovals of early Picasso with the ripe colours of Frederick Varley, I think. I’m not suggesting that Kimber’s work is derivative, nor do I wish to claim that he has merely Canadianized early European modernism. Rather, like my own youthful transport of and by Thomas, Kimber’s paintings position themselves in a kind of negotiated middle, resolutely of this place and yet thoroughly conscious of their own displacement. Thomas’s poem, Welsh though Fern Hill itself may appear, actually takes place nowhere, or rather in the many imagined nowheres of memory from afar. It can’t quite be grasped, but can only be, to take Pete Townshend out of context, misunderstood, misprised and, as Heaney suggests, respoken at full volume, reintroduced into your own place and time. Just as the poem would have time stretched into the present, and across it like a screen, so too can Thomas be reimagined, remade in the crucibles of eye and ear, as he and you and I go running together “out of grace” and into a world where, however much unheard, we can still somehow sing.
Flow, Fissure, Mesh 