My Other Hat: Jazz Lyricist

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

TEANECK NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—5/16/11—As I write here, on my iPod I’m listening to a now obscure album by Mick Fleetwood (and others) called “The Visitor.” The lyrics aren’t very good but, put them to music, and they’ve stayed with me.

Nor were the lyrics very good to the songs of the last album on my iPod, a “Best of . . .” compilation by Pink Floyd. I listened to “Comfortably Numb,” the original version; and then a version from the soundtrack of “The Departed,” Scorcese’s homoerotic (all his films are) Boston cop/criminal film. (Ironically, in the wee hours of last night, up with my Constant Companion, Insomnia, I watched another Scorcese film, “Gangs of New York,” yet again. Another homoerotic anthem; again featuring Leonardo DiCaprio.)

I digress.

Lyrics. Even if they’re mediocre: put them to music, and you may just have a hit. If they’re stellar (Mercer’s “Moon River,” Porter’s “Let’s Fall In Love,” Hammerstein’s “Hello, Young Lovers,” Lerner’s “I Remember It Well,” Russell’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore), they stay with you till you die.

Lyrics were the first thing I ever “wrote,” and I “wrote” them before I could write. Plagiarized them.

I’d heard “Molly Malone” in infancy, apparently, and the first thing I ever dictated to my mother (who, I had learned, could write such things down and read them back to me) was my own take on the old standard. (Years and years later, during an interview with Leonard Cohen, at the Intercontinental Hotel in Athens, Greece, I’d get him to sing, with me, on tape, “Molly Malone.” Some riffs just keep on . . . riffing. They have a life of their own.)

Shakespeare made immediate sense to me because he wrote both poetry and music. Song was never far from anything else in Shakespeare: “He that has and a little tiny wit—/With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,—/Must make content with his fortunes fit,/For the rain it raineth every day.” Sometimes, even “in a darkness like ‘King Lear,’” drama just breaks out into song, as it were. Which I’d been doing, myself, a long, long time before ever I read The Bard.

I wrote from the git-go, my mother conspiring. And it was always rhyming. Tightly rhyming. Emphasis also on clever. Song not ever very far off, either, though I wasn’t, like both my parents, overtly “musical.” I sang, for decades, before I let my voice go to hell in my 40s. My parents, on the other hand, played things, read music, met through music, sang and played till they died.

Words were what I made do with. Words to un-sung music. “Words with a conscience,” in a sense: and that “conscience” involved time, meter, rhythm, rhyme, and the element of surprise.

(Here’s Mick Fleetwood now, singing “Cassiopeia Surrender.” Pretty nice for a throwaway rock-and-roll lyric. Later on, long past Shakespeare in college, Fleetwood Mac would surprise me over and over. Mick Fleetwood, obviously, shares my liking for the small dashed expectation, both in the tune and in the words.)

Sooooo. I wrote a lot of poetry. In college, horrifically, and then, once I’d had my heart rendered-down-for-fat several times (by life and love); studied with Coleman Barks, Henry Taylor and James Dickey; and shared office space with Susan Bartels Ludvigson and Claire Bateman, I got better.

And I came better to appreciate the hell out of just a few chosen poets. I met in person several of them, early, in college: Archibald MacLeish, Elizabeth Bishop, Danny Abse.

I fell in love with MacLeish long before I met him at James Dickey’s house in Columbia, South Carolina. He wrote jejune, expat jewels such as:

“Memory Green”

by Archibald MacLeish

Yes and when the warm unseasonable weather
Comes at the year’s end of the next late year
And the southwest wind that smells of rain and summer
Strips the huge branches of their dying leaves,

And you at dusk along the Friedrichstrasse
Or you in Paris on the windy quay
Shuffle the shallow fallen leaves before you
Thinking the thoughts that like the grey clouds change,

You will not understand why suddenly sweetness
Fills in your heart nor the tears come to your eyes:
You will stand in the June-warm wind and the leaves falling:
When was it so before, you will say, With whom?

You will not remember this at all: you will stand there
Feeling the wind on your throat, the wind in your sleeves,
You will smell the dead leaves in the grass of a garden:
You will close your eyes: With whom, you will say,

Ah where?

 

MacLeish, read in one’s 20s, when one was brought up in Europe, and then yanked out of it and deposited, first, in unsubtle Chicago and, then, in the brain-poor, 1960s South? How could I not swoon?

MacLeish was a bit too naked, though, finally. Tortured, diminutive and literate. I wanted my pathos leavened (remember) by surprise, wit and, increasingly, despair—or a nice fat, open vein of bitterness, with a laughter-chaser. So, Auden.

When I came upon Auden, I pulled up short. My writing changed, as I did what one must do, which is copy, copy, copy Auden! Copy the master.

Auden at his best, as here, in a poem I memorized in the 70s:

“Lay your sleeping head, my love”

by Wystan Hughes Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

 

Aw, hell, though. Once I’d read Auden, and realized I was not Auden, and wasn’t going to become Auden, and was never going to get it done like bloody great Auden, something in me gave up the ghost, almost completely. (Lesser writers will say, Pshaw, you write what you write: you don’t keep trying to be Auden. And that’s why they, and I, are lesser writers.)

Here’s James Fenton, for example. Not Auden. Pretty damn good for a disaffected, beautifully educated, and properly bummed out Modern. But not Auden. Never was; never going to be. Give it up, James. (Although that penultimate quatrain’s a beaut.)

“God, A Poem”

by James Fenton

A nasty surprise in a sandwich,
A drawing-pin caught in your sock,
The limpest of shakes from a hand which
You’d thought would be firm as a rock,

A serious mistake in a nightie,
A grave disappointment all round
Is all that you’ll get from th’Almighty,
Is all that you’ll get underground.

Oh he said: ‘If you lay off the crumpet
I’ll see you alright in the end.
Just hang on until the last trumpet.
Have faith in me, chum—I’m your friend.’

But if you remind him, he’ll tell you:
‘I’m sorry, I must have been pissed-
Though your name rings a sort of a bell. You
Should have guessed that I do not exist.

‘I didn’t exist at Creation,
I didn’t exist at the Flood,
And I won’t be around for Salvation
To sort out the sheep from the cud—

‘Or whatever the phrase is. The fact is
In soteriological terms
I’m a crude existential malpractice
And you are a diet of worms.

‘You’re a nasty surprise in a sandwich.
You’re a drawing-pin caught in my sock.
You’re the limpest of shakes from a hand which
I’d have thought would be firm as a rock,

‘You’re a serious mistake in a nightie,
You’re a grave disappointment all round-
That’s all you are,’ says th’Almighty,
‘And that’s all that you’ll be underground.’

Then, so, I wrote my own best little formal effort, and gave it all up for a while:

“An Awful Piece of Trickery”
A Villanelle for Henry Taylor
Written in fifteen minutes on an Atlanta Airport bus

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Yes I admit this poem is just an awful piece of trickery
But I am sick of sonnets, sighs, sobriety and celery
And this is something pleasant, if a little Hickory-Dickory.

I will not write another one. I swear it! (Knock on hickory.)
I’d rather turn out mysteries (like Agatha and Ellery).
Yes, I admit this poem is just an awful piece of trickery.

But it can save your sanity: with this you cannot dicker.
Reason tells us silliness keeps bats out of the belfery.
And this is something pleasant, if a little Hickory-Dickory.

My measured, structured zaniness is gigglable and sicker
And exorcises more than costly analytic teller
Though I admit this poem is just an awful piece of trickery.

So follow me through ins and outs, through thinness and through thickery,
Through poetry as purple as the buttercups are yellery
For this is something pleasant, if a little Hickory-Dickory.

Just write a villanelle a day and check out of the sicker
And give up sonnets! Spread some peanut butter on that celery!
Oh I admit this poem is just an awful piece of trickery
But this is something pleasant if a little Hickory-Dickory.

There were other wrecks in which to dive, other books to write, other places to be, in my 30s and 40s, which had all been-there/done-that-before when, at 49, I met my jazz-musician-husband, Dean Pratt, and he said, casually, “What’s the difference between this rhyming, contrapuntal stuff you write . . . and jazz lyrics?”

And I saw that there was no difference, really, and that writing, with a tune in my ear—the tune, always, in my ear first—might be the ticket

Flashback: I’m driving (being driven, in fact) from Pendleton, South Carolina, down-state to Charleston, in a convertible—some sort of late-model American convertible; big-ass and 1990s-gas-guzzling—by a former love who is really, really committed to Pop music. We’re playing U2’s latest, at the time, “The Unforgettable Fire”: “Pride,” “Bad,” etc. Really, really loud. With the top down.

This might be better than Auden, I hazard. In its own little post-Auden way.

But it’s not brainy enough, thank you. It’s unforgettable, true, but The-Regal-We can do better than this.

So then, when my (new, musically literate) husband plunks things such as Bill Evans’s “Bill’s Hit Tune” on my then-CD-player, I almost shout: “You mean no one’s ever written a LYRIC for this tune?”

Not yet.

Flash-forward: I’m on Corfu, writing a travel book, a pot-boiler (briefly, back in the late 90s, travel writing did boil pots, Oh Best Belovéd), and I’ve brought along “Bill’s Hit Tune,” and I’m walking around heartbreakingly beautiful Old Corfu Town, missing Dean, who’s back in New York, and brimming over with all that repressed, but well-drummed-in MacLeish, Auden, Henry Taylor, and even glorious, young Glyn Maxwell (author of “The Breakage: Poems,” Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999).

 

And I write, I wrote, a song, a lyric for that Bill Evans tune, a poem I called “Adagio In Pearl.”

It goes like this:

“Adagio in Pearl”

by Bebe Herring*

(Rubato section:)

Adagio in pearl,
a nest of feathers on the sea,
an island hovering in space:
nostalgia’s alabaster face.

The dust of whitewash on our skin
the bee’s ambrosia on our lips,
the rigging singing in the spars,
the streets a labyrinth of stars.

(In tempo:)

We shared a Turkish cigarette,
and August wrote a sonnet on the sand.
An arabesque of dolphins in the bay;
red pomegranates colored every day.

While in the azure clouds, a swallow turned,
the shadow of September in her cry;
the names of lovers never to come back
were falling from her little mouth of black.

Remember!

Whole new languages we learned,
and turns of phrase that hypnotize:
the shell of Botticelli’s muse
held out by hands one can’t refuse.

A cat’s paw in an icy pool,
a ruffled seabird on the quay,
an island darkening in time,
nostalgia’s legacy is mine.

My lost adagio in pearl:
a trail of feathers in the dark . . . .

*Bebe Herring, my childhood nickname, is the name under which I publish jazz lyrics

And it would be yearrrrrrs before it was recorded, arranged and sung by Scott Whitfield (and Cheryl Bentyne) on a jazz CD called “Speaking of Love” (available through http://www.scottwhitfield.com/ and http://www.summitrecords.com/product.tmpl?SKU=472).

But, that process—of despairing over not being Auden, of giving up poetry due to not being Auden, and then of rediscovering the other side of the poem, of poetry, which is music—brought me up on the sweet shores of lyric-writing. At last.

Who mourns Auden when she has Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter and Yip Harburg? After all, you can’t hum Auden.