Poetry and Jazz: Red Bird dancing on Ivory
Poetry and Jazz: Red Bird dancing on Ivory
Poetry by Christopher Logue, based on Pablo Neruda’s “Veinte poemas de Amor”
Jazz by the Tony Kinsey Quintet. Recorded from London BBC 1959.
Neruda Logue Kinsey
Pablo Neruda’s 20 Love Poems are readily found in Brazilian bookshops, although they are by a Chilean poet writing in Spanish. Neruda says “…this is a pained and pastoral book which contains my most tormented adolescent passions, mixed with the powerful influence of Nature in the south of my country”. In fact, in each poem one can feel the strength of emotion, expressed in impressionist, very creative verbal images. They don’t form a coherent cycle, but run the gamut of emotions of passionate love, mixed with verbal images of the wind, the rain, hills, stars seen through trees….El agua anda descalza por las calles mojadas – “A rain walks barefoot through the street” – once heard, that’s an unforgettable description!
Christopher Logue is an English poet, now turned 80, who has published many poems and plays, but whose main legacy is “War Music”, a rendition of Homer’s Iliad which renders it into dramatic verse which is far from a translation. He has been working on this, and publishing it book by book, for over 40 years! But one of his accomplishments is poetry reading, which he does in beautiful English, with a fine natural sense of drama.
Tony Kinsey is a jazz drummer and – surprisingly – a composer of classical chamber music, who has had a long and successful career in the UK. In the 50s he had a five-strong group made up of trumpet, trombone, a pianist who also played vibraphone, bass and his own drums. They played a fluent, sophisticated chamber jazz, very agreeable, but free of the rebellious bluesy feeling of the American jazz musicians of that time.
Somehow, these diverse elements came together in the late 50s, and a broadcast of Poetry and Jazz was produced by the BBC – which was produced by George Martin, before he became famous as the “fifth Beatle”. Logue re-wrote some of Neruda’s poems, moving far away from the original, but putting them into wonderful impressionistic free verse which sounds great in English. He reads these like an actor, while the jazz group plays in the background, capturing perfectly the sentiment of the poems in the music – which appears to have a basic arrangement, plus improvised passages. The poems are now 11 in number, and have also been roughly ordered, becoming as it were a cycle of a love affair. Here are some samples –
Fascination and conquest
Lithe girl, brown girl
Sun that makes apples, stiffens the wheat
Made your body a joy
Tongue like a red bird dancing on ivory
To stretch your arm
Sun grabs at your hair
Like water was falling….
Here the music is fast, lyrical, but then becomes more contemplative for the second poem “Steep gloom among pine trees“….
Then the drums whip up the tension in
In the hot depth of summer
The morning is close, storm-filled
Clouds shift –
White rags waving goodbye
Shaken by the frantic wind as it goes and
As it goes
The wind throbs over us
Love-making silenced….
Contentment and fulfillment
By the sixth poem the poet has evidently conquered his girl –
Drunk
As drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses
Your wet body wedged between
My wet body
And the strake of our boat
That is made out of flowers
Open sky’s hot rim
The day’s last breath in our sails
Pinned by the sun
Between solstice and equinox
Drowsy, tangled together
We drifted for months…..
And the music is exactly that, drunk, contented, lost in time.
Disillusion and loss
But then, disillusion sets in –
Each day from the sky
The slow light falls
And the leaves fall
And the world falls too….
Why am I rocked then? Why?
Now gay – now melancholy
Now where you are, now not
Now with, and now without…..
But you are gone
Only the smell of you stays in the room
The wind cannot drive it out
Hush – someone’s foot is on the stair
Listen! Who calls? WHO RUNS OUT THERE?
Resignation
Then, with a sad ta-ta-ta-taat pattern from the drums –
Tonight
I write so wearily
Write, for example
I wanted her
And at times it was me she wanted
Write
The rain we watched last fall
Has it fallen this year, too?
She wanted me
And at times it was her I wanted
Yet it had gone, that want
And what is more
I do not care
It is more terrible then my despair
Over losing her
The night
Always vast
Grows enormous without her….
I have been of the opinion for years that this poetry and jazz is a great work of art, worthy of being in any gallery. The trouble is – what gallery? And even more to the point – where is the recording now?
I have put on the Good Listening site a home recording of the original BBC broadcast, plus all the words of the poems. This recording is a rarity (and the quality is not so good). Apart from this, apparently some of the poems plus jazz are available in a CD set called Audiologue – and something can be found on YouTube as well, but not the original broadcast.
Poetry and Jazz and memories of love affairs….
Good Listening!
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So here is the Poetry and Jazz –
1.
Lithe girl, brown girl
Sun that makes apples, stiffens the wheat
Made your body a joy
Tongue like a red bird dancing on ivory
To stretch your arm
Sun grabs at your hair
Like water was falling
Tantalize the sun if you dare
It will leave shadows that match you
Everywhere
Lithe girl, brown girl
Nothing draws me towards you
The heat within you beats me home
Like the sun at high noon
Knowing these things
Perhaps through
Knowing these things
I seek you out
Listening for your voice
For the brush of your arms against wheat
For your step among poppies grown underwater
Lithe girl, brown girl
2.
Steep gloom among pine trees
Waves’ surge breaking
Slow lights that interweave
A single bell
As the day’s end falls into your eyes
The earth starts singing in your body
As the waves sing in a white shell
And the rivers sing within you
And I grow outwards on them
As you direct them
Whither you make them run
I follow for you like a hare
Running reared upright to the hunter’s drum
You turn about me like a belt of clouds
the silence, though it is stupid
Mocks the hours I lay
Troubled by…… nothing
Your arms – translucent stones wherein I lie
Exhausted
And future kisses
Die
Lust
Your mysterious voice
Folds close echoes
That shift throughout the night
Much as the wind
Which moves darkly over the profitable fields
Folds down the wheat
From all its height
3.
In the hot depth of summer
The morning is close, storm-filled
Clouds shift –
White rags waving goodbye
Shaken by the frantic wind as it goes and
As it goes
The wind throbs over us
Love-making silenced
Among the trees like a tongue singing
A warning or just singing the wind throbs
And the quick sparrow’s flight is slapped by the wind
Swift thief destructive as waves
Weightless without form
Struck through and through with flame
Which breaks
Soughing its strength out
At the gates of the enormous, silent, summer wind
4.
That you may hear me
My words narrow occasionally
Like gull-tracks in the sand
Or I let them become
Tuneful beads
Mixed with the sound
Of a drunk hawk’s bell
Flick me your wrists…..
Soft as grape skin – yes
Softer than grapeskin I make them
Which is a kind of treachery against the world
Yet
You who clamber
Over all the desolations of mine
Gentle as ivy
Eat the words’ meaning
Before you came to me
Words were all that you now occupy
And now they’re no more these words
Than ever they knew of my sadness
Yet
Sometimes
Force and dead anguish still drags them
And yes
Malevolent dreams still betimes
Overwhelm them and then
In my bruised voice
You hear other bruised voices
Old agues crying out of old mouths
Do not be angry with me
Lest the wave of that anguish
Drown me again
Even as I sit
Threading a collar of beads for your hands
Softer than grape skin
Hung with a drunk hawk’s bell
5.
Hum, white bee
All drunk with honey
From that part of me the world calls soul
If all is said, white bee
Why speak at all
Except to leaves that leave a spiral of grey smoke
Around the twisting world
White bee
I am like one who could
Crinkle all the world and wide
In his palm’s small span
And had it read for him
And lost the smaller and the greater span
Imagining the earth as how he saw the world
And could not hold his tongue
My quiet one
Close your eyes
Wherein the slow light stirs
Strip off your clothes
Like new-cut flowers, your arms
Your lap as rose
Close your eyes
Wherein the slow light stirs
Breasts like paired spirals
Lap as rose
And mothy shadows in your thighs
The slow light stirs within your eyes
My quiet one
Rainfall
From the sea a stray gull
A rain walks barefoot through the street
Leaves on the trees are moaning like the sick
Though the white bee has gone
That part of me the world calls soul
Still hungers
The world is not so wide
I cannot hear its bell
Turn in the spiral of grey wind
My quiet one
6.
Drunk
As drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses
Your wet body wedged between
My wet body
And the strake of our boat
That is made out of flowers
Feasted, beguided
Our fingers lip-tallows
Adorned with yellow metal
Open sky’s hot rim
The day’s last breath in our sails
Pinned by the sun
Between solstice and equinox
Drowsy, tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips
Eyelids all sticky
And we longed for lime
For the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well
Then
Came we by night
To the fortunate isles
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses
7.
Nimrod of the sky
Between two moons
Half a wind is anchored
In the darkening air it comes
And moon-blue metal scarves are forged
As the wind
Grown full between two hills
Comes tearing huge trees, wheat
And the dead
Out of the earth
Your face is turned to cloth
I cannot describe
It moves too much and too far off
Like desire
The wind
In the darkening air it comes
Then moon-blue metal scarves are forged
The wind
Grown full between two hills
Comes tearing huge trees, wheat
And the dead
Out of the earth
Grows up a little
Changes into bells
Buries the bells
And smelts them into a white knife up to the haft in my
Still red hot
In my still, red, hot……
Between two moons
Half a wind is anchored
Nothing may happen says the crow
His beak like a little hole
Full of litter
8.
Wings whirr by moon and midnight
Slatted moon hunched under the pine’s bark
Pines used as masts are varnished by the level moon
Sails like enormous flakes of rust
A bird hovers
Hovering close to the bollards
Your mouth is loose and wet
And my mouth covers it like a rag, dryly
Bells toll
The sun struggles to rise, it is hard
And rising, sillies the moon
Birds drown
Breath smells
No matter how hard you scream the birds are dead
No masts will curve
Nor the pine’s bark fall across
Your lime-white throat delicately
And if our body shouted out with both its voices
There is not breath enough
To fill even the smallest sail
So we may as well sleep here
Entwined as poor love’s twins
Who gasps around their fore-arm cradle
Where birds are strangled by the woman’s hair
And the man blames her
9.
Each day from the sky
The slow light falls
And the leaves fall
And the world falls too
What if I write your name on running water?
The water spun on it shall wither the two
Among these yellow leaves
Your limbs are stretched
More fair than they
Yet not so fair
For time will set less easily in thee
Than things that die
Turning down summer air
Outside
Grey rain falls slantwise
Down the sky’s lime white throat
And the wind drags anywhere old leaves
That are then come stick
On the side of a damaged moat
Filled with dead birds and water
But if you stay, I will bring
After the tempest, out of the hills
Some hazel-nuts and fruit
To ease your cares
Or write your name on stone
Not running water
10.
Can you put shadows like this
Thick like this and……
What? You set birds free?
Your very light breaks energies
Hoods suns, drains seas
Shoe running horses
Ride them down a sword’s edge
Run open-mouthed through the streaming mist
Hands out, beating a drum as you leap
Stones, trees, deep holes!
Wearily
Changed?
And aye?
Hush!
Someone’s foot is on the stair
Listen!
Who calls? Who runs out there?
Stop! Stop!
Can shadows talk?
STOP!
Time passed, and no-one calls….
Why am I rocked then? Why?
Now gay – now melancholy
Now where you are, now not
Now with and now without but never still
Some kind bird will tell me it is not
What? You say no?
When you say no, your mouth is like a small red bitch
Barking in a box
And when you say yes
A wren flies out
Who builds his nest
In the side of a dead horse
But you are gone
Only the smell of you stays in the room
The wind cannot drive it out
Hush – someone’s foot is on the stair
Listen! Who calls? WHO RUNS OUT THERE?
11.
Tonight
I write sadly
Write, for example
Little grasshopper
Shelter from the midnight frost in the scarecrow’s sleeve
Advising myself
The night wind throbs in the sky
Tonight
I write so wearily
Write, for example
I wanted her
And at times it was me she wanted
Write
The rain we watched last fall
Has it fallen this year, too?
She wanted me
And at times it was her I wanted
Yet it had gone, that want
And what is more
I do not care
It is more terrible then my despair
Over losing her
The night
Always vast
Grows enormous without her
And my comforter’s tongue talking about her
Is a red fox barred by ivory
Where
Does it matter I loved
Too weak to keep her?
The night ignores such trivial disputes
She is not here
That’s all
Far off
Someone is singing
And if to bring her back
I look, and I run to the end of the road and shout, shout her name?
My voice comes back
The same, but weaker
This night is the same night
It whitens the same trees, casts the same shadows
It is as dark, as long, as deep and as endurable as any other night
It is true
I don’t want her
But perhaps I want her
Love’s not so brief that I forget her
Soul
Nevertheless
I shall forget her
And, alack, as if by accident
A day will pass in which I shall not think about her
Even once
And this
The last line I shall write her
Reader: Christopher Logue
Tony Kinsey Quintet: Les Condon (trumpet), Ted Ray (trombone), Kenny Napper (bass), Bill LeSage (vibes and piano), Tony Kinsey (drums).