Haiku 2012/121

see the bright sunshine
hear the little birdies sing
the heart is elsewhere

fun stuff I may or may not get to: May 2012

On 4 May Old First Concerts presents Lara Downes in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Goldberg: Bach Reimagined, which includes responses to the Goldberg Variations by composers such as Jennifer Higdon, Lukas Foss, Bright Sheng, David del Tredici, William Bolcom, and others. And while I'm mentioning Downes, let me draw your attention to my blogroll to the right, where you can find her fascinating blog, On the Bench: Conversations with Other Pianists.

Volti concludes its season with further adventures in new choral music, 4 - 6 May in various locations.

Cutting Ball Theater presents Tenderloin, written and directed by Annie Elias, 27 April to 27 May. Their Hidden Classics Reading Series continues its Strindberg celebration with The Stronger, Pariah, and Simoon on 6 May and The Keys to Heaven on 20 May.

The American Bach Soloists present Bach's Easter Oratorio and other cantatas, 4 - 7 May in different locations each day.

The New Century Chamber Orchestra closes out its season with an exciting-looking concert that includes Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night) and Commedia dell'Arte, a world premiere by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich; 10-13 May in varied locations.

ACT has Bill Irwin in two Beckett plays, Endgame and Play, 9 May to 3 June, replacing the previously announced Twelfth Night.

The Shotgun Players present Adam Chanzit's The Great Divide, originally described as "adapted from" Ibsen's An Enemy of the People but now described as "inspired by" that play, 16 May - 17 June.

San Francisco Ballet closes out its season with Don Quixote, 27 April to 6 May.

San Francisco Performances closes out its season with lots of Beethoven, including Steven Isserlis and Robert Levin in two programs of works for cello and fortepiano, 19 - 20 May, and Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov playing sonatas for violin and piano, 30 May.

Cal Performances has Dianne Reeves on 4 May and Peter Serkin playing works by Knussen, Wuorinen, Takemitus, and Beethoven (Diabelli Variations) on 8 May.

Michael Tilson Thomas leads the San Francisco Symphony in a program exploring musical life in California from the Gold Rush to the Panama-Pacific Exhibition, 10 - 12 May; Hilary Hahn plays the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 1 on 24 - 27 May, in a program led by Osmo Vanska that also includes Kalevi Aho and Shostokovich. In between the Symphony hosts Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic for two separate programs, the first of which includes Magnus Lindberg's recent Piano Concerto No. 2, with Yefim Bronfman as the soloist.

National Poetry Month: 30

Who better to close out National Poetry Month than William Shakespeare? In Sonnet 55, with the sublime assurance and arrogance of an obscure but true poet, he realizes that the great ones of this world will fade and dwindle, while his words will grow to overshadow them all. Ironically, though he assures his beloved of immortality through his rhymes, no one knows to whom this poem was addressed, or if it was in fact addressed to an actual person at all. There have been endless and mostly pointless attempts to figure out who the beloved was. I’m always amused by critics who insist the Sonnets must describe actual events in Shakespeare’s life, like fourteen-line diary-entries in rhymed iambic pentameter; he turned out to be the world’s greatest dramatist, and who knows why he decided to inhabit these particular situations? Whatever he was describing, it only exists for us because he described it so well. Lover and beloved are long dead, but he was right about his immortal words. Here endeth the lesson.

Sonnet 55


Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the Judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.


– William Shakespeare

Haiku 2012/120

long afternoon light
inches farther and farther
while you long for dark

National Poetry Month: 29

Most of the poems I’ve posted this month have been fairly straightforward in style and vocabulary, even if their implications are subtle and need to be teased out, and even if centuries have passed over some of their words. By contrast this short poem by Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946) may seem impenetrable, but let your mind soak in it for a while. There are puns (sweet tea / sweetie, tray sure / treasure, drink pups / drink cups / drink up), there is rhyme ("these are the wets, these are the sets") and verbal echoing (bobbles / bobolink), and metaphors that make perfect though perhaps unexpected sense (“a nail is unison” – indeed, nails do unite whatever is nailed together). A picture might emerge: sweet tea served by a sweetie, perhaps in the ancient light of an afternoon, on silver trays, perhaps with jelly for their treats, and the nice people drinking say “please”; there is a tea pot, and outside trees waving and trembling, maybe pet puppies lapping water: a scene from the Impressionists, done by a cubist. On the other hand – maybe you get a different picture, and maybe the picture isn’t the point at all; maybe it’s just about the sound and rhythm, breaking the words free of their usual associations and combining them in ways that might bring up other associations, or none at all. “It is a silver seller” chimes delightfully in my ear, even if its meaning remains elusive.

You will sometimes read discussions of Stein’s work that I think of as secret-decoder-ring interpretations; i.e., “cow” equals “female orgasm” so “as a wife has a cow” is a coded way of saying . . . well, you get it, which is the problem I have with that style of interpreting Stein: it’s very reductive, and it tends to favor autobiographical readings rather than her imaginative life as an actual poet, that is, someone entranced by words, moving them around to different effect. Even if she meant female orgasm as one of the implications of “cow,” that doesn’t settle the question of why she chose “cow” over all the other words available. The implications of the choices are what's interesting, though indeed her more hermetic works resist ultimate interpretation, and at some point people are simply going to cut their losses on this sort of thing: life is short. (Personally, I think of it as “reading Ulysses but not Finnegans Wake.")

Stein’s poem pushes to a radical extreme the general poetic requirement that you, above all things, slow down and pay attention, letting the words play in your mind. We all slow down for different things; that’s fine. Enjoy what you can.

Susie Asado


Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado.
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado.
Susie Asado which is a told tray sure.
A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers.
When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller.
This is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly.
These are the wets these say the sets to leave a crown to Incy.
Incy is short for incubus.
A pot. A pot is a beginning of a rare bit of trees. Trees tremble, the old vats are in bobbles, bobbles which shade and shove and render clean, render clean must.
Drink pups.
Drink pups drink pups lease a sash hold, see it shine and a bobolink has pins. It shows a nail.
What is a nail. A nail is unison.
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.


– Gertrude Stein

Perhaps due to the slipperiness of the language (sweet tea, sweetie!) and the elusiveness of its meaning, Stein’s work lends itself very well to musical treatment; the words melt into each other and you hear them differently, and they mean as music means. In fact today’s poem was set by Virgil Thomson as an early experiment in setting Stein, before he started work on their opera 4 Saints in 3 Acts. You can hear the piece on the recording Mostly About Love, sung by soprano Nancy Armstrong with Thomson biographer and New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini on piano.

Haiku 2012/119

again I cut grass
what day is there but today?
what labor but this?

National Poetry Month: 28

We have a couple of vocabulary-enrichment words today. First is ekphrasis. Dazzle your friends with your knowledge of rhetorical terms! And if they ask you to define it, the answer is “a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art.” The following poem by William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963) is an example, but not the only one we’ve had this month. How ever did we manage without using the technical term? The next word is kermess, which means “an outdoor fair or carnival in the Low Countries.” The work of art being ekphrasized here is, as you see in the first line of the poem, “Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.” (There are alternate spellings for both Breughel and kermess, but I’m going to use the ones in the poem for the sake of clarity.)

This poem has stuck in my mind since I first read it decades ago, partly because Breughel is one of my favorite painters and partly because Williams, known for his free verse, makes memorable use of rhythm to convey the rolling and circular feeling of the painted dancers’ movements. His vocabulary – the butts, the shanks, the fiddles, the squeal and blare – captures the robust and earthy qualities associated with the Flemish painter.

I was going to link to a copy of the painting but there are a couple of Breughel works called either The Kermess or Peasant Dance. Besides, I discovered that some of the images are embedded in National Poetry Month discussions of this very poem. Well, just because the idea isn’t original doesn’t mean it’s not good.

The Dance

In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess,

the dancers go round, they go round and

around, the squeal and the blare and the

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

tipping their bellies (round as the thick-

sided glasses whose wash they impound)

their hips and their bellies off balance

to turn them. Kicking and rolling about

the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those

shanks must be sound to bear up under such

rollicking measures, prance as they dance

in Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.

 – William Carlos Williams

Haiku 2012/118

goldfish in a bowl
circling their tiny castle
content in their sea

National Poetry Month: 27

When I attended UC Berkeley in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the city was in an odd transition period: the glory days of the hippies and the 1960s protests had passed, but the aura of those days lingered, and had drawn many of the city’s inhabitants, both students and others, to Berkeley in the first place. There was a division, but a porous one, between students and the people who actually made their homes either in the city or on its streets. Street people looking to score drugs sometimes showed up in our dorm rooms; I woke up from a nap one afternoon, having left my door open because it was warm, and I saw a disheveled young man patiently waiting. Half-awake I remembered that the guy who had lived in that room the year before had been a dealer. I told the street guy that I was sorry but I didn’t have anything. He left as considerately as he had waited while I slept. It’s impossible to imagine that encounter happening in a dorm now, which is probably just as well. Not everyone is as gentle as my visitor was. Then shortly before I graduated National Lampoon's Animal House hit the movie theaters and suddenly there were toga parties in the streets and people really wanted to join fraternities and sororities, and majoring in business became a big thing. So, yeah, the 1980s had started.

There were a number of street people we saw regularly, whose seeming eccentricity made them stand out, making them seem like colorful "characters" of the city. One of them was known as “the Bubble Lady” because she would stroll around Telegraph Avenue, blowing iridescent pretty soap bubbles. She was usually dressed in a black dress or black skirt and sweater with a yellow tam-o’shanter. Eventually I realized she was a poet and sold copies of her own works in thin booklets with blue covers while she wandered the street blowing bubbles. I realized this because she walked up to a group of my dorm-mates and me in a cheap Telegraph Avenue restaurant and asked us if we were interested in buying a copy, priced at dollar. There was some smirking among the others and they seemed surprised when I said I would like to buy one. She probably noticed the smirking but was no doubt used to it from students and was agreeably dignified as I gave her the dollar while she signed a copy of Street Spiels for me. That was also when I found out her name was Julia Vinograd. I liked the poems and bought a few more of her books from places like Cody’s Books, now gone. Her poems are generally brief, often wry in ways both bleak and witty, offering views of a life that looks marginal from the perspective of mainstream imperialist materialist American society (though not from the perspective of those living that life). Poverty and addiction are constant and troubling companions.

I moved away to Boston and then I moved back home to the Bay Area and though I go to Berkeley fairly often I haven’t seen Vinograd in many years. A quick Internet search leads me to believe she is still active, though. And it looks as if her work is still available. If you’ve clicked on any of the links I’ve been putting in these National Poetry Month entries, you may have noticed that I haven’t linked to bios or Wikipedia entries; I’ve linked to places from which you can buy the poet’s work, because the life is of interest only because of the works, and giving money for a poet’s work is a solid way to celebrate National Poetry Month. I’ve put several of Vinograd’s poems here, since they’re more difficult to find than those by, say, Milton and Wordsworth, but I encourage you to buy and check out her work for yourself.

Café Comment

“I forgot my cigarettes in the med;

I left a full pack on the table

in plain sight

and when I went back for them they were still there;

what’s the matter with everyone?

I mean, I knew the place was getting pretty straight,

but a full pack, you know,

they must only be letting in zombies these days,

no derelicts or street trash,

just registered zombies, maybe blind registered zombies,

I’m not going back there

unless I need the coffee.”

The Trouble with Political Poetry

We hate our own true love

harder than we hate the enemy,

the government or even the monitor.

Because our true love hates us back

and knows our names

all night long.

Welfare World

For the first week we’re millionaires

and for the last week we starve.

It’s not only hard to get money,

it’s hard to take money

seriously.

Money certainly doesn’t take us seriously.

We live in both extremes

and neither matters because the other comes round again

and soon,

though of course nothing else matters

at the time.

And this happens every month

as if there had never been a month before.

Against Punk

It is better to light

one candle

than to praise the darkness.

Coke

So many lines,

do they make up a poem?

Cheers

We’re on the rocks

so add some gin

and then begin

to go away

again.

 – Julia Vinograd

Haiku 2012/117

goodbye to the rain
sweeping off our jagged coast
for another year