Overlap: Drew Gardner's Blog

Another view of Logan on Crane: "At least Logan's given up the pretense of literary criticism... and is openly focused on trying to police poetry that shows signs of not being lifeless."

Condescension is probably the worst sin in a critic. Any idiot can find bad lines in Whitman or Crane. Finding purplish or overwritten passages in writers makes a certain kind of critic feel superior. Aha! I wouldn't have written that! He says. Yes, but did you invent an entire new style, like Whitman did? Did you ever write a single phrase half as brilliant as "adagios of islands"? Quondam dormitat Homerus.

Condescend to Hart Crane at your peril.

The class I'm teaching this semester is on anonymous and nearly anonymous oralature. Claudio Rodríguez, the poet I studied in my dissertation and first book, wrote his Master's thesis on a particular genre of children's poetry, the corro or game played in the round. While Claudio was no scholar, he could have been a brilliant one. There are two main ideas in his thesis, which has been published in collection of his prose writings.

There is a kind of magical thinking, or poetic nominalism, in which the word supplants the object which it refers.

Rhythmic and phonemic elements are predominant; texts are generated by sound rather than meaning per se. Meaning is often obliterated.

Taken together this results in a sort of Cratylism and "primacy of the signifier."

We see the influence of this in Lorca's work. "La monja / está dentro de la toronja." [the nun is inside the grapefruit]. The "logic" of this poetic utterance is in the rhyme itself. In Claudio's own poetry, where the river Duero is seen, phonetically, as "du[rad]ero" (long-lasting).

There's also a quite technical study of Rimbaud's rhythm, which Rodríguez wrote in 1953 when he was 19 years old, as an academic study. It's full of really keen observations about the prosody of Rimbaud's regular verse, his free verse, and his prose poems. What's interesting is that Rodríguez himself, in his own poetry, does exactly what he describes Rimbaud as doing. Rodríguez, then, is not the idiot savant that he is taken to be. He knew exactly what he was doing. Look at the jagged intonation of this passage, (which is metrically regular I think):

Et toute vengeance? Rien! ... Mais si, toute encore,
Nous la voulons! Industriels, princes, sénats:
Pérrisez! puissance, justice, histoire: à bas!
Ça nous est dû. Le sang! Le sang! la flamme d'or!

One of the myths of jazz is that the raw material on which improvisation was based was dreck, and that jazz musicians took a largely hostile attitude toward this raw material (the popular songs of the day.)

Well, actually, no. These are great songs for the most part. And my hypothesis is that musicicans chose songs that they liked over those that they didn't like. Hence the huge preference among jazz musicians for the big four of Gershwin, Porter, Arlen, and Rodgers.

Take the example of John Coltrane playing "My Favorite Things." We know this melody is by Richard Rodgers, from the "Sound of Music." What is the more parsimonious interpretation? That Coltrane played this song in order to mount an attack on Richard Rodgers, or that he played it because he loved the song? Or take Monk's preferennce for Gershwin's "Nice Work." Monk only played a few standards, and he liked to play them over and over.

I think these Russian Jews who created Tin Pan Alley Americana were on to something great and that the black jazz musicians resonated with their creations. And what about Russian Jewish musicans like Stan Getz? Or Hungarian Jews like Benny Goodman? I don't think you can understand American popular culture without getting this fusion of Eastern European and African-American influences in the 1920s.

Not to mention Hoagy Carmichael and Vernon Duke.

Not necessarily in this order, but

Rodgers and Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Billy Stayhorn, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, Johnny Green, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin. Jerome Kern, Fats Waller, Dorothy Fields, Rodgers and Hammerstein...

What can I say, I'm a sucker for a good song. It's just one of those thiings, just one of those marvelous things, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. A foggy day in London town.. A piano tinkling in the next apartment, those stumbling things that told you what my heart meant. Someone to watch over me.

I never thought much of moonlight skies, I never winked back at fireflies. The way you wear your hat. The way you sip your tea. The way we danced till three. A fine romance. You say tomato and I say tomahto. Suddenly I saw polkdots and moonbeams. I'm going to sit right down and write a letter and make believe it came from you. I'm a sentimental sap that's all, what's the use of trying not to fall. Holding hands at midnight, neaht the moonlit sky, It's nice work if you can get it and you can get it if you try. It's the tender trap. Tangerine, with her lips of flame. In the wee small hours of the morning. East of the sun and west of the moon, and then I saw the midnight sun. It's moonlight in Vermont and Autumn in New York, April in Paris. I'll remember April and be glad.

I bought you violets for your furs. I get no kick from cocaine. I can't get started with you.

All of me, why not take all of me. Can't you see, I'm no good without you. You got the part that once was my heart so why not take all of me.

The advice to omit the extraneous is always redundant.

Al cielo llaman cielo
porque es muy altó
y al corro, corro, corro
porque es redondó
ay, ay, ay
porque es redondó

[They call the sky sky
because it is very high...
And the game played in a circle
they call it corro corro corro
ay ay ay
because it is round]

Ok, I know I'm going overboard with the possibilities of tags or "etiquetas" as they are known here. Every post must have a new "etiqueta," or an absurd number of them. I went back and tagged some posts in the archive, but am a long way from doing a complete job of it.

A player almost anonymous... I won't make you guess about this list. These are (some of) my favorite players who aren't household names or super "canonical" figures:

Illinois Jacquet. He was a straight-ahead tenor who did a lot of work in the JATP.

Harold Land. Another straight-forward tenor mostly known for his role in the Clifford Brown/Max Roach groups. He could hold his own with Clifford Brown so that's saying quite a bit.

Paul Chambers. Maybe he's a bit too famous for this group, because of his work with Miles Davis and Coltrane. Still I am obsessed with Paul Chambers. I can't figure out what makes his playing so perfect.

Sonny Clark. He had some excellent recordings with a trio with Philly Joe and Chambers. He wouldn't necessarily be in anyone's group of top 10 piano players of all time, but his groove is so deep.

Billy Higgins. He is countless records but never achieved the degree of recognition of a Tony Williams.

I guess what I like about these players is that they all follow established modes of playing with a great personal style, but without necessarily being innovators or virtuosi of genius. I wouldn't make exaggerated claims for any of them (except Paul Chambers), but simply say they are the ones who make the music feel good, give it substance and richness at a level just *below* that of the canonical forgers of a new style. They are all very "tasty" players in the mode of Teddy Wilson or Jo Jones. They aren't the Art Tatums or Elvin Joneses of the world.

Nobody ever says: "the language is improving." In narratives of linguistic change the past is always pristine, the present a time of decadence, and the future a time when language will undoubtedly be worse.

What makes a particular time in the past especially prime to be the object of linguistic adulation? Maybe it's prescriptivism within that era itself that's to blame? So then the 18th century would be the ideal locus for this sort of idealization... or the 17th if you were French.

Linguist Mark Liberman makes an eloquent point here: that the idea of a perfect, elegant, and correct language is always displaced unto a past, but that this past is always imaginary. That is to say, people never have spoken in this *perfect* language, and nobody seriously thinks that we should return to 18th century, or 17th century, norms--or to the norms of whatever period is considered the golden age of language usage. It's a fundamentally dishonest argument, because the norms of usage, whatever they are, must always necessarily be those of the present, never those of the past. [I hope my paraphrase does some justice to Liberman's post]

And so it is too with the norms of the "poetry language" (Kenneth Koch). We can't seriously propose to bring back Victorian ideals, or Elizabethan ideas, because we wouldn't be happy with the result even if we could actually bring back those ideals. We are stuck in the present, and that present is more lively and interesting because it is *our* time. "As if you would never leave me and were / the inexorable product of my own time."

Part of time is the way in which time is *felt*. I'm thinking of the "feel" of a musician or poet for time itself. Think of how Charlie Parker changed the way we perceive the passage of time from one second to the next! (Cortázar wrote about this in his story "El perseguidor.") Creeley felt and understood Parker's innovation.

Time to teach grammar!

Miles Davis
Billie Holiday
Lester Young
Charlie Parker
Bill Evans
John Coltrane
Frank Sinatra
Ella Fitzgerald
Clifford Brown
Johnny Hodges
Dinah Washington
Milt Jackson
Sarah Vaughn


What is this a list of? (What is it's guiding principle?) Who else belongs on this list? Is the order I've put the names here the correct one?