John Berryman | music clip of the day

Wednesday, 11/30/11

lunch yesterday

Could Van Morrison ever have imagined, in 1969, while recording Moondance, that “Into the Mystic” would serve, in 2011, as aural accompaniment for Wendy’s Natural-Cut Fries with Sea Salt?

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lagniappe

reading table

John Berryman, “Dream Song 14,” Ireland (Dublin), 1967

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

More? Here. And here. And here.

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Sunday, 7/24/11

Last Sunday they sounded so good—let’s hear some more.

The Staple Singers, “On My Way To Heaven,” “Going Away,” “I’m Leaning,”
“I Know I Got Religion”; Uncloudy Day (Vee-Jay), 1959

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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listening room: (some of) what’s playing

• Muhal Richard Abrams (with Malachi Favors), Sightsong (Black Saint)

• King Oliver, Off the Record: The Complete 1923 Jazz Band Recordings (Off the Record/Archeophone)

• Beethoven, Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3 (“Eroica”)/ Arturo Toscanini, conductor, NBC Symphony Orchestra (RCA)

• Bach, Cello Suites, Steven Isserlis (Hyperion UK)

• Morton Feldman, For Bunita Marcus, Stephane Ginsburgh, piano (Sub Rosa) (available as a download from Amazon for 89¢)

• WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
—Bird Flight (Phil Schaap, jazz [Charlie Parker])
—Traditions in Swing (Phil Schaap, jazz)
—Afternoon New Music (Various, classical and hard-to-peg)
—Eastern Standard Time (Carter Van Pelt, Jamaican music)
—Raag Aur Taal (Various, Indian music)

• WFMU-FM
—Mudd Up! (DJ/Rupture, “new bass and beats”)
—Sinner’s Crossroads (Kevin Nutt, gospel)

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reading table

Here are a couple cheery things (ha, ha) from a favorite poet.

John Berryman, Two Dream Songs

More? Here. And here.

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2011

Saturday, 3/12/11

Have you heard of Brandt Brauer Frick?

—Rachael Z., the 20-something stylist who cuts my hair

The Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble, live (rehearsal), Germany (Berlin), 2010

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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reading table

Teenager

Me — a teenager?
If she suddenly stood, here, now, before me,
would I need to treat her as near and dear,
although she’s strange to me, and distant?

Shed a tear, kiss her brow
for the simple reason
that we share a birthdate?

So many dissimilarities between us
that only the bones are likely still the same,
the cranial vault, the eye sockets.

Since her eyes seem a little larger,
her eyelashes are longer, she’s taller
and the whole body is closely sheathed
in smooth, unblemished skin.

Relatives and friends still link us, it is true,
but in her world almost all are living,
while in mine almost no one survives
from that shared circle.

We differ so profoundly,
talk and think about completely different things.
She knows next to nothing —
but with a doggedness deserving better causes.
I know much more —
but nothing for sure.

She shows me poems,
written in a clear and careful script
that I haven’t used for years.

I read the poems, read them.
Well, maybe that one
if it were shorter
and fixed in a couple of places.
The rest do not bode well.

The conversation stumbles.
On her pathetic watch
time is still cheap and unsteady.
On mine it’s far more precious and precise.

Nothing in parting, a fixed smile
and no emotion.

Only when she vanishes,
leaving her scarf in her haste.

A scarf of genuine wool,
in colored stripes
crocheted for her
by our mother.

I’ve still got it.

—Wislawa Szymborska (trans. Clare Cavanagh & Stanisław Barańczak; Here [2010])

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five desert-island poets

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2010

Tuesday, 4/13/10

street music

Milan

Saxophonist outside Duomo di Milano

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reading table

Hearing John Berryman read his poetry changed my life, as I said a while back. I was in college at the time. A year later, he was dead—a suicide (jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis, where he lived and taught). Here, in Dublin in 1967, he reads one of his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Dream Songs (29). Drunk, mannered, idiosyncratic: yes, yes, yes. Obscure at times to the point of opacity: yes. But also (to these ears) exquisitely controlled, deeply moving, utterly unforgettable.

(Want to read this yourself? Here.)

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2009

Wednesday, 12/30/09

Musicians (and composers) fall into two camps: less-is-more and more-is-more.

The less-is-more camp may, in turn, be divided into the less-less-is-more and the more-less-is-more.

And the less-less-is-more . . .

Jon Hassell and Maarifa Street (Jon Hassell, trumpet; Peter Freeman, bass, laptop; Hugh Marsh, violin; Steve Shehan, percussion, laptop), live, Serbia (Belgrade), 2006

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Want more? Here.

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. . . Jon Hassell’s ideas and techniques have so thoroughly permeated lo- and hi-brow contemporary electronic music, albeit often in a third or fourth hand way . . . that it’s difficult to think what contemporary music would sound like without his influence. . . . there’s categorically no doubt that Hassell has had as an important effect on contemporary music as Miles Davis or Jimi Hendrix or James Brown or the Velvet Underground.—The Wire

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reading table

More on John Berryman (12/28/09): Here Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Philip Levine recalls John Berryman (also Robert Lowell) as a teacher at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

He [John Berryman] took that class with a seriousness I had never seen before. . . . He was entrancing. He was magnetic. . . . He had a marvelous sense of humor. . . . He really took this seriously. He was a great teacher. He was the greatest teacher I ever had—and an inspiration.—Philip Levine

Philip Levine, live, England (Aldeburgh), 2009

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2009

Monday, 12/28/09

genius at work

Thelonious Monk with saxophonist Charlie Rouse, working out a number, “Boo Boo’s Birthday,” during a recording session, 1967

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Thelonious Monk (with Charlie Rouse, tenor saxophone; Ben Riley, drums; Larry Gales, bass), “Boo Boo’s Birthday” (Underground [Columbia], 1968)

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reading table

One of the great discoveries I made in college, besides Bach (10/19/09, 10/24/09, 12/25/09) and Blind Willie Johnson (11/15/09) and Bill Evans (11/18/09) and Hound Dog Taylor (10/30/09), was John Berryman. Hearing him read his poetry, not long before he died (jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis), changed my life. Really. That night made me realize, in ways that I never had before, just how lively and surprising and exciting poetry could be. It made me realize, too, that what a great poem offers is an experience—one you can’t get anywhere else. And so I have Berryman to thank not only for his own poems (especially The Dream Songs [which would be on my desert-island packing list]) but also for making Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wislawa Szymborska, Charles Simic, et al., such important figures in my life. Just as my life would be immeasurably poorer without Thelonious Monk (11/2/09, 11/25/09, today) and Vernard Johnson (12/6/09) and Morton Feldman (11/7/09, 12/5/09) and Lester Bowie (9/8/09, 10/28/09), so too would it be without them.

This recording, for all its technical shortcomings (headphones help), captures some of what I heard in Berryman that night almost 40 years ago. Blustery and grandiose and vulnerable, jazzy and funny: he was all these things—and more.