Songbirds, Past & Present

My favorite record of all time (yes, all time) is Hejira, Joni Mitchell's 1976 sprawling & story-driven exploration of travel, love & heartbreak. Each of its tracks, from Coyote to Refuge of the Roads, is a standalone road story; a top-to-bottom listen shows an intricately woven story in 9 chapters of one woman drifting from place to place in search of an elusive truth. This is Joni at her most vulnerable, her most passionate, her most sincere. The voice has deepened in a way that's nearly imperceptible, because she's maintained the soft ethereality of the earlier work, but the change is present, palpable. Simply put, Hejira is the confession of a road-weary traveler, & the weariness appears in the depth of voice. Her songwriting, too, has changed, moved gently away from the brilliant end-rhymes of Clouds or Ladies of the Canyon toward a subtler poetics, one that fits into the Olsonian idea of Composition by Field. The songs occupy space, & the lyrics are actors, space-takers, interactive pieces of the larger sonic project. The song is a field of action, & in the projectivist mode, sound & language extend from one another to create what can only be described as a full experience of voice. The only way to really know is to hear it, & the best illustration is in the album's title track.



Rhyme appears & melts away:

I'm porous with travel fever
But you know I'm so glad to be on my own
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones
I know no one's going to show me everything
We all come and go unknown
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone

own, bones, unknown, stone -- these words are all getting at something, a thing deeper than the rhyme, something as lonely & dreamlike as the music itself, which is at once airy & thick. Joni's diction & phrasing play no small part in the construction of the songscape, the slow rising & falling of the heart & the voice. Particularly Olsonian in Joni's work here is the breath & its power to shape the line ("the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE," sd O). In short, Hejira, in its nine parts, is a folk-pop-jazz exercise in advanced Olsonian poetics. It's proof that the title of singer-songwriter barely scratches the surface of Joni Mitchell's talent.

& with the recent release of Joanna Newsom's latest record, a two-hour, three-part, 18-track opus, we've found the inheritor of the Mitchell tradition. The thing about inheritance that so many critics forget is the central idea of growth. Of course, Joanna isn't a carbon-copy of Joni. Her choices as both composer & songwriter are considerably more complex & multifaceted. Joanna often departs from Joni's mode of composition, expanding & spinning away to historical & tonal places that her predecessor never quite touched, but the essence of Joni's work is there, & it's important to acknowledge that a young woman, a musician of our generation, is capable of making a post-projectivist album. Have One On Me is just that.

The record's best track is Good Intentions Paving Co., a seven-minute love song that follows, quite literally, the road to the hell. Joni comparisons have already been made, & rightly so, but what the presumptuous folks over at Pitchfork seem to have overlooked are (1) that Joni is far more than her radio-friendly early years, & (2) that musical & poetic similarities & artistic reincarnation are two very, very separate phenomena. That said, imagine a Newsom cover of The Gallery or Judgement of the Moon and Stars. I can think of few contemporary musicians who could do justice to a lesser-known Joni tune, aside from Joanna. But again, doing justice is not the same as doing an impression, or fully replicating the original. It's a project of reinterpretation & reinvigoration that I'm thinking of here, & this is precisely what Joanna does with Good Intentions.



Like Hejira, we have a road story, & like Blue Motel Room, one of Hejira's loveliest tracks, we have a soulful & playful examination of just how a doomed relationship affects the woman at its center. What Joanna accomplishes with Good Intentions Paving Co. is an advanced project of Composition by Field: the motion of the music evokes both a propulsion forward & a circular return to the start. One of the song's loveliest lines, "Like a bump on a bump on a log," condenses this feeling beautifully. There's a sense in Joanna's phrasing that she is interrupting herself -- this statement could be a stutter ("bump on a- bump on a log") or a literal description. Either way, the same thing is articulated, a layered stasis that, musically, pulls the listener forward. Form is content.

Vocally, Have One On Me shows a progression away from a long-dismissed "childlike" tone, with Joanna focusing her voice in a way that, in certain phrases, is absolutely reminiscent of early Joni. That soaring higher register & an uncanny ability to allow descents of melody to articulate a deeper, more heartbroken layer to the love song. Joanna goes high with hope & low with reality. & Lyrically, the same beautiful ambivalence that only the best female songwriter can accomplish:

And I know you meant to show the extent
To which you gave a goddang
You ranged real hot and real cold but I'm sold
I am home on that range

This is what sets the great women apart from the great men. A truly subtle female songwriter gives you the full range of emotion, the hot & cold, & a very clear awareness of just how doomed her great love really is. That multidimensional aspect, the fact that Joanna knows the car's headed straight to hell & she isn't getting out, is so beautifully Joni-esque, is a condensation of the female perspective that I've only once seen in the work of a male poet, & not even in a love poem. What's more, the poem I'm thinking of, "I Know a Man," by the much-celebrated (on this blog, at least) Robert Creeley, is paralleled in Good Intentions. & this is where I'll close, letting, for once, the poetry speak for itself.

Creeley writes:

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, -- John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

& from Joanna:

And I did not mean to shout, just drive
Just get us out, dead or alive
A road too long to mention, lord, it's something to see!
Laid down by the good intentions paving company

Reflections on Creeley in Death

For the beginning is assuredly
the end– since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond
our own complexities.

-- W.C. Williams, Paterson

The death of a poet offers a peculiar moment of reflection, wherein the poem itself becomes a final manifestation of the substance of a writer’s lifelong engagement with language – the record of the shared memory of the poet and his reader. Poems resurface, resonant artifacts of his life and acts on the page, various articulations of a particular voice that coalesce to form a complete body of work. The posthumous reading replaces the formerly living body of the poet with the literary corpus; the constellation of experience, lived and written, is finally embodied in the work itself.

Not simply an inactive record of past experimentation, the work is a self-reflective body, a palimpsestic representation of the whole of a poet’s oeuvre. Nearly five years after his death, Robert Creeley’s work shows no evidence of growth, per se, but is instead representative of a consistent, lifelong engagement with a process of projective introspection. The outside always in conversation with the inside, the particulars made always into the general, Creeley’s poems – from the beginning to the end of his career—are examinations of the complexities of perception, as it occurs momently.

Published as On Earth, Creeley’s last poems are the condensation of a life of such examination. A poet without a masterwork, with only one widely anthologized poem, Creeley’s legacy lies in a deftly executed poetry of pieces, the divers articulations of particular experiences in a precise language of simplicity. On Earth consists of poems that could have easily appeared in the minimalist experiments of his early career. Time, a pervasive theme, is relevant to Creeley’s poems only in its seemingly circular motion. Less circular, in fact, than an overlapping spiral: moments in time seem to exist alongside one another, echoing, speaking in a context of the poetry itself, rather than in a precise temporality. Take, for example, “Which Way”:

Which one are you
and who would know.
Which way
would you have come this way.

And what’s behind,
beside, before.
If there are more,
why are there more.

Creeley’s questions are punctuated as statements, the implication being that the answer is contained within the inquiry. The employment of this device is an echo of the earlier work; the recurring questions of place, time and human presence, their interactions and effects upon a personal consideration of being-in-time, are approached in their incomprehensibility as self-evident. For Creeley, the precision of language in his poems becomes a means of deciphering the mysteries of content. The question is, has always been, how to make sense of the self in an uncertain setting of expanding space and time. The rarely voiced “I” is referenced only in reflective terms: Creeley’s speaker-self approaches the problem of personal reconciliation through an examination of the unknown externalities of his circumstance. Thus the interrogation of the “you,” its identity, its arrival and point of departure, the trajectory of its movement, is an articulation of Creeley’s curiosity as it pertains to the unknowable. The “you” is one among many unknowns, the manifestation of a projected uncertainty of identity.

An earlier poem, “The Measure,” indicates an early articulation of just such an uncertainty:

I cannot
move backward
or forward.
I am caught

in the time
as measure.
What we think
of we think of ---

of no other reason
we think than
just to think---
each for himself.

The focus shifts to the “I,” its stasis within the confines of time and solitary contemplation. Creeley considers the position of the individual, voiced here as both “I” and “himself,” in terms of an equally static “we.” The immobility of the self-conscious speaker is projected onto an external collectivity, so that the particular aspect of the self is made general. In this case, externality is less representative of a mysterious unknown than a shared inability among the we-self to know anything beyond the I-self’s own thought. That is to say, the only known is the paralytic sense of isolation, a shared condition that unites speaker (“I”) and reader (“we”).

As in “Which Way,” Creeley uncovers the relations between space, time and perception, as they speak to the consciousness-in-isolation. The later poem, however, exhibits a precision of observation that is reflective of a more focused understanding of circumstance. That is to say, the later work represents a condensation of the various aspects of confusion that plague the speaker, reconciling, at least in part, the tensions of fragmentation that characterize his body of work as a whole. The questions are far from resolved, yet the accumulation of experience offers a sharpened clarity of observation – in age, Creeley is able to strip away the excess, articulating his preoccupations with an economy of language that speaks to a maturity of voice not present in the earlier work. Creeley’s growth, then, is exhibited not in a change of theme or tone, but instead in an increased precision of thematic articulation.

Without a sense of finality in any one poem, Creeley’s body of work is a collage of interactive verse, early and late poems conversing on the shared plane of a fragmented collectivity. His beginning is reflected in his end, everything unknown but the fact of the unclear self, composed of self-evident complexities. Thought, space, time, processes of perception – these are all questions, answers in themselves, striving toward a clarity that presents itself only Creeley’s precision of language. Nothing is resolved, not even in death, so that the confused body of Creeley now lives in the confused body of his work.

Maximus & Minimus

One of the most powerful aspects of Projective Verse is the transformation of text through reading. Olson's emphasis, in the 1950 essay that named his (& Creeley's) method, was on breath. Always breath, so that space on the page equals time in the reading:

Because breath allows all the speech-force of language back in (speech is the "solid" of verse, is the secret of a poem's energy), because, now, a poem has, by speech, solidity, everything in it can now be treated as solids, objects, things; and, though insisting upon the absolute difference of the reality of verse from that other dispersed and distributed thing, yet each of these elements of a poem can be allowed to have the play of their separate energies and can be allowed, once the poem is well composed, to keep, as those other objects do, their proper confusions.

This is magnificent. Space becomes Time in the translation of text to speech, and with Creeley, this aspect is beautifully clear. Take this reading of "The Dishonest Mailmen," an early poem that never fails to astound me:

They are taking all my letters, and they put them into a fire.

I see the flames, etc.

But do not care, etc.

They burn everything I have, or what little
I have. I don't care, etc.

The poem supreme, addressed to
emptiness - this is the courage

necessary. This is something
quite different.

All the space is there in his reading. There was a time when hesitation at enjambment would frustrate me, as it interrupted the continuity of the text & resulted in my distraction from content & a subsequent focus on form. As I've developed as a reader & writer, however, it's become quite obvious that FORM, as Creeley sd, IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT, & those hesitations are just as vital to an understanding of a poem as is the close analysis of a single word & its etymological roots. When I consider Creeley's body of work as a whole, the hesitation at enjambment is not only important, it's necessary. Those forced silences are what his poems are struggling against, the voice against the void. His reading style, even toward the end of his life, is beautifully indicative of that tension.

Olson, however, is a reader in the performative vein. If Creeley whispers, Olson shouts (to borrow a metaphor from a comparison once drawn between my work and that of another, v. talented writer). They're fighting against the same void, but their delivery is fantastically different. Here, Olson reads "The Librarian," an exquisite poem, the text of which I won't quote here, considering the length of the piece:



Listen to that voice! Watch those gestures! Olson is a whiskey-swilling force to be reckoned with, a giant of poetry with Things to Say & a voice with which to say them. But, just as we saw with Creeley, rhythm & breath are paramount to his reading style. There are moments in so many Olson readings where he stops the poem, mid-line, to begin again, with a better voice, clearer breath, stricter rhythm. The loyalty to the text is clear, and what makes Olson's style so captivating is the palpable strength of his connection to the language & the shape it takes as it leaves his body. He isn't just reading that poem. He's feeling it, along with all of the source tensions that gave birth to it. Speech, as he said, gives verse its solidity. Nowhere is verse more solid than in an Olson reading.

[Hit the UPenn archives for audio files of both Olson & Creeley reading their work, including the poems cited here.]