Poetry and Music: In “(After),” the Aaron Irwin Trio Orchestrates Nine Poems

I’m not a music critic. I read and review a lot of poetry, but most days I don’t consider myself a poetry critic, either. But I love listening to music. Lately, when I go on long walks three to four times a week, I’m listening to Eremo by Jeff Johnson and John Van Deusen.  

In their new album (After), the Aaron Irwin Trio has combined music and poetry to create something decidedly different. Each of the nine compositions orchestrate a poem; three include a recitation of the poem. “Orchestrate” may be the wrong word here; the musicians describe each selection an interaction “between sound and verse.” 

 

And what the listener experiences is a wide array of emotions and responses – joy, chaos, beauty, anxiety, and more. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Destruction of Sennacherib, poem by Lord Byron – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

It Happens to Those Who Live Alone – poem by David Whyte.

 

‘The Body of a Woman and the Heart of a King,’ speech by Elizabeth I as the Spanish Aramada loomed – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.

 

At John Keats’ House – Spitalfields Life.

 

New Every Morning – poem by Tania Runyan at Every Day Poems.

“Christianity and Poetry” by Dana Gioia

Does poetry matter to your faith? 

Most Christians would likely be puzzled at the question even being asked. 

 

Poet Dana Gioia says it should matter. A lot.

 

In the essay “Christianity and Poetry,” first published 10 years ago, Gioia goes a lot further than saying it should matter. “It is an essential, inextricable, and necessary aspect of religious faith and practice.” It doesn’t matter that most Christians would find that statement absurd, he says, because it’s true. 

 

And then he considers the evidence. How did David pray to God? In poetry called psalms. How did Ruth respond to Naomi’s plea to go back home? In Poetry. The books of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes are all poetry. So are the Song of Solomon and Lamentations (and the Psalms, of course). While he doesn’t specifically mention it, what is chapter one of Genesis but an oral poem of creation; God speaks the physical world into existence.

 

The gospels and epistles of the New Testament bear the imprint of poetry. The book of Revelation is a prose poem, he says. The Beatitudes are shaped by prophetic verse. Mary’s announcement of the Incarnation in Luke is a poem. Some scholars believe the Aramaic of the Lord’s Prayer is a poem. “When Jesus preached,” Gioia says, “he told stories, spoke poems, and offered proverbs.

 

Dana Gioia

Both Protestants, via modern translations of the Bible, and Catholics, via Vatican II, ground poetry out of Scriptures. The music and the mystery were deemphasized in favor of the strictly rational. And in the process, we forget, or deny, a key aspect of God.

 

Yes, it’s a startling essay, and it goes on for 32 pages. But the man makes a solid argument. To ignore the poetical nature of the Bible is to miss fully understanding it.

 

I came to poetry late. Yes, I was exposed to the poetry we all were in middle and high school, with a strong infusion of British poetry in college. But it wasn’t until I began writing speeches as a central part of my career that I began to take poetry seriously, as something that mattered.

 

And what I began to notice, because I was a church-attending Christian who read and studied on his own as well, was that the Bible was one of the most poetic books I’d ever encountered. It’s almost as if poetry is the language of God.

 

Gioia has published six poetry collections, several works about poetry, and a number of translations, including the recent The Madness of Hercules. He is a former poet laureate of California and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He’s written four opera libretti and collaborated on many musical compositions. His awards include the American Book Award, the Poet’s Prize, Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern Poetry, and the Walt Whitman Champion of Liberty Prize, among others. 

 

Related: 

 

Dana Gioia and Meet Me at the Lighthouse: Poems.

 

Rediscovering Seneca: Dana Gioia Translates The Madness of Hercules.

 

Dana Gioia’s Pity the Beautiful: Poems.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

A paper manifesto – Elizabeth Stice at Current Magazine.

 

Editing: Scratch That, Try This Instead – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review. 

 

10° – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher. 

 

Churches at the City Boundaries: St. Andrew’s, Holborn – A London Inheritance.

 

The Great Beast – artwork by Jack Baumgartner at The School of the Transfer of Energy.

“Yellow Feet” by Glenn McGoldrick

The Dark Teesside stories of Glenn McGoldrick often feature small-time criminals or non-criminals who happen to find themselves engaged in criminal activity. There’s usually a twist, sometimes ironic, and the tables often get turned. Even the best-laid criminal plans can go awry. 

Glenn McGoldrick

In his newest story, “Yellow Feet,” the “darkness” is internal. Brian is dealing with the impact of a rather unfriendly divorce, talking with a therapist, taking time off from working to try to get his head together. Short scenes with the therapist and his daughter are interspersed with walks along the river or to the local cemetery. As he walks, he makes note of the yellow feet painted on the walk to indicate where to go.

 

Writing since 2013, McGoldrick specializes in short stories. He’s worked for both land-based casinos and cruise ships for a time, basing many of his stories on those experiences. His stories are dark, gritty, often involve a twist, and inevitably open insights into the human psyche. And his characters run the gamut of good, bad, and something in between, and often find themselves moving far beyond the boundaries of acceptable behavior. He lives in northeastern England. 

 

“Yellow Feet” describes a man not realizing how much he’s struggling with his failed marriage and his anger. It’s another classic Dark Teesside story.

 

Related:

 

Three New Dark Stories by Glenn McGoldrick.

 

“Six Down,” “Somewhere in England,” and “Dark Progresion” by Glenn McGoldrick.

 

 4 Stories by Glenn McGoldrick.

 

3+ Stories by Glenn McGoldrick.

 

Five Mysteries: 2 Short Stories, 2 Novellas, and a Long Story.

 

The Dark Stories of Glenn McGoldrick.

“Smart People,” a Play by Lydia Diamond

Smart People, a 2016 play by Lydia Diamond, has been staged by several companies around the country. It’s set in 2008, shortly before the presidential election. Four people (and they are the only characters in the play) are connected to Harvard University. One is a surgeon, one is a psychologist, one is an actress, and one is a teaching neuropsychiatrist. All are, to one degree or another, interested in how the brain works. And all four are, to one degree or another, looking for love and affirmation. 

But then there’s politics. And politics saturates the characters’ thinking. Only a small part of that politics concerns the presidential election; it almost serves as an unspoken theme off-stage. But there’s academic politics (and what happens when cancel culture rears its head). And there’s what happen when the politics of relationships inserts itself into what might have been love stories. For all of their understanding of how the brain works, for all of their expertise, and for all of their intelligence, the characters of Smart People seem unable to overcome the politics they supposedly know so much about. 

 

Lydia Diamond

Yet these characters are all recognizable. In their own ways, they are all compelling. That isn’t to say a reader of the play finds them sympathetic. Each is disagreeable, the neuropsychiatrist in particular. He’s an academic close to tenure, something of a rainmaker for bringing all kinds of grants and recognitions to his department. He’s looking for what in the brain makes people racist. He himself is “evolved,” as he describes it, and has transcended his own racist leanings. Except he suddenly faces cancel culture for something he says in the classroom. 

 

One doesn’t today expect such a probing treatment of the academic and cultural left, but that’s exactly what Smart People does.

 

Diamond’s plays include Stick Fly, Harriet Jacobs, Voyeurs de Venus, The Gift Horse, Inside, and The Bluest Eye (a stage adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel). A graduate of Northwestern University, she has taught at DePaul University, Columbia University, and Boston University. She is currently a clinical associate professor of Theatre at the University of Illinois – Chicago. 

An Incredible Review of "Dancing Prophet"

Writing a novel is a hard, lonely work. You often struggle through a story, writing and rewriting and editing and deleting whole sections because, well, they're just bad and aren't going the way they need to go. And when you finish writing a novel, if there ever be such a thing, you have all the worry and anxiety and disappointment of how people will respond. 

And then you read a review, like “A Prophet Raised Up for Such a Time as This” by Luke Herron Davis.  And you tell yourself this is why you write. 

“Queen Anne” by Helen Edmundson

Start with historical fact. Queen Anne of England, who ruled from 1702 to 1707, had a longstanding friendship with John and Sarah Churchill, who would become the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. Anne became queen on the death of her brother-in-law, William III (he of William and Mary). Married to Prince George of Denmark, Anne would carry only one child of 18 pregnancies to birth. The boy died at age 11. She would be succeeded by George I who established the House of Hanover.

For several years before and after Anne became queen, the Churchills wielded great influence. John’s fame skyrocketed with the victory at Blenheim; his reward was a dukedom and land near Oxford to build a suitable home – what became Blenheim Palace. And then the Churchills fell from favor, Sarah first, followed by John.

That’s what we know. How it might have happened is the subject of the play Queen Anne written by Helen Edmundson and staged in Stratford-upon-Avon at the Swan Theatre in 2015 and restaged in London at the Royal Haymarket Theatre in 2017. The 2017 performance starred Ramola Garai as Sarah Churchill and Emma Cunniffe as Queen Anne. 

The play is fascinating. Queen Anne begins as an insecure princess, desperate to bear an heir, resisting William III’s attempt to have her meet her possible Hanover successors, and ends as a woman who knows her own mind, one who has understood how those closest to her have used her for their own ends.

Helen Edmundson

The play artfully blends parliamentary and palace politics, the concern over an heir, the War of the Spanish Succession (in which England and its allies fought Louis XIV over who would sit on the Spanish throne), and how politics played out in satire and broadsheets. The authors Daniel Defoe and Johnathan Swift are characters in the play involved in writing short comedies about the Queen and the Churchills for their own private amusements, until Sarah Churchill stumbles into them and decides to use them for her own benefit.

Edmundson is a British screenwriter and playwright. In addition to Queen Anne (2015), Edmundson’s original plays include The Clearing (1993), Mother Teresa is Dead (2002), The Heresy of Love (2012), and Mary Shelley (2012). Her plays adapted from literary works include Anna Karenina, The Mill on the Floss, War and Peace, Orestes, Gone to Earth, Life is a Dream, Swallows and Amazons, Coram Boy, and Therese Raquin. Her film and television scripts include The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (2014), An Inspector Calls (2015), and Mary Magdalene (2018). 

Queen Anne is a fascinating study of power politics, friendship, trust, and betrayal.

Related: Review of the 2017 play by The Guardian.

Top photograph: A scene from the London play, starring Emma Cunniffe and Romola Garai.

Poetry Review: The Submerged Depths of Lapse Americana

Sometime in our late 30s, perhaps our 40s, we become aware of time passing. Our 20s and early 30s are spent trying to hurry time; after that we try to slow it down, until in our 60s when we realize the train is hurtling ever faster. Time to stop and enjoy the ride.

With the slowing comes understanding, and occasionally wisdom. We understand a life, our life, to be an aggregation of people, events, places, decisions, choice made. And we grasp the vital importance of childhood.

It’s that sense of realization and understanding that permeates Lapse Americana, Benjamin Myers second volume of poetry.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.