April is the Cruelest Month
While it wouldn’t seem to be the case for most of us–with its kindly fair weather and blooming flowers, poet T.S. Eliot opens his epic “The Wasteland”–one of the most famous and revered poems of the 20th century–with the words, “April is the cruelest month…” And a poet could see it that way, what with its temporal beauty and how it stirs the soul toward new beginnings that, all too soon, will end. I wonder if that line is why this month of April also happens to be National Poetry Month. Nonetheless, in honor of this month that celebrates the essence of all art, here’s a tiny little lesson on some poets, who also happen to have inspired some amazing songs by some seriously amazing artists. Let’s just call this a mini-essay about the power of poetry, complete with music.
1.) “Mercy Street” by Peter Gabriel, So (Geffen)
Peter Gabriel’s wonderful album So, a super hit in the eighties, and one of my favorite albums when I was a young teenager, ends with “Mercy Street,” a hypnotically heartbreaking song about the amazingly talented and notoriously and successfully suicidal Anne Sexton. Her biography, her poems, all lie in this gorgeous track. Her complete collection is something I would bring with me to the proverbial desert island, and it’s all because of this song.
Favorite Verse: “There in the midst of it so alive and alone/Words support like bone/Dreaming of Mercy Street/Wear your inside out/Dreaming of mercy/In your daddy’s arms again/Dreaming of Mercy Street/Swear they moved that sign/Dreaming of Mercy/In your Daddy’s arms.”
No matching videos2.) “Walt Whitman’s Niece” Words by Woody Guthrie/Music by Billy Bragg & Wilco, Mermaid Avenue (Elektra)
This rollicking track about a drunken night’s adventure that lands its songwriter Woody Guthrie straight into the room and lap of Walt Whitman’s niece, fully embodies the sensual, ecstatic and wide-open winding narratives of one of America’s most beloved poets, most famous, I would say, for his masterwork known as “Leaves of Grass.”
Favorite Lyric: “My seaman buddy and girl moved off after a couple of pages and there I was/All night long, laying and listening and forgetting the poems/And as well as I could recall, or my seaman could recollect/My girl had told us that she was a niece of Walt Whitman, but not which niece/And it takes a night and a girl and a book of this kind/ A long long time to find its way back.”
3.) “I Wish I Had Sylvia Plath” by Ryan Adams, Gold (Lost Highway)
Once upon a time I was in love with Ryan Adams, the uber-prolific singer-songwriter well-known for many things, most recently his bizarre marriage to former teen-sensation Mandy Moore, which took him out of my favor. However, his debut Heartbreak is still one of my favorite albums, and this love song to another successfully suicidal but amazingly talented poet–best known for her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar and beloved by me for her collection Ariel and the poem “The Eye-Mote”–complete with biographical and poem references, is a gorgeous tune with incredible lyrics, and will always keep him in good stead with me.
Favorite Verse: “And she and I would sleep on a boat/And swim in the sea without clothes/With rain falling fast on the sea/While she was swimming away, she’d be winking at me/Telling me it would all be okay/Out on the horizon and fading away/And I’d swim to the boat and I’d laugh/I gotta get me a Sylvia Plath.”
4.) “Hey Jack Kerouac” by 10,000 Maniacs, In My Tribe (Elektra)
In My Tribe is one of my favorite albums of all time, and this song about the best-known Beat poets (Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs) solidified my love for the Beats even deeper, as I had just read On the Road, and became significantly more meaningful as my understanding of and love for the work of these poets and novelists in particular grew ever stronger. It’s a fantastic introduction to that influential scene, told from a personal slant, like a letter or a phone call from an old friend.
Favorite Verse: “Hey Jack Kerouac/I think of your mother/And the tears she cried/They were cried for none other/Than her little boy lost our little world that hated/And they dared to drag him down/Her little boy courageous/You told your words from mouths of babes got lost in the wood/Hip-flask screaming madmen/Steamin’ cafe flirts/They all spoke through you.”
5.) “Take this Waltz” by Leonard Cohen, I’m Your Man (Columbia)
Far from the madding crowd of his 1960s heyday, the genius songwriter, poet and novelist Leonard Cohen released what many called his comeback, the seminal later-Cohen record called I’m Your Man. Of course, each song on this album is a poem, but “Take This Waltz” adapted musically to suit his hero Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem “Little Viennese Waltz,” is a divine work of music and poetry, a poem by one of his greatest influences, sung by a poet himself. Of course, we get a waltz in here, too, which makes the hypnotic poetry that much more powerful.
Favorite Verse: “And I’ll dance with you in Vienna/I’ll be wearing a river’s disguise/The hyacinth wild on your shoulder/My mouth on the dew of your thighs/And I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook/With the photographs there, and the moss/And I’ll yield to the flood of your beauty/My cheap violin and my cross/And you’ll carry me down on your dancing/To the pools that you lift on your wrist/Oh my love, Oh my love/Take this waltz/Take this waltz/It’s yours now. It’s all that there is.”
6.) Bonus Track–“All the People Who Have Died” Jim Carroll Band, Catholic Boy (Wea International)
This last one is a song by a well-loved underground poet of 1980s NYC, Jim Carroll–an amazing free-form poet better known for this song (and his band)–an underground hit from the band’s first album, Catholic Boy, released in 1980–than for his collection of poetry and prose. My favorite works of his appear in the book Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems of Jim Carroll. Leonardo DiCaprio did a tour-de-force performance of this junky genius in the film based on Carroll’s book Basketball Diaries. I guess you could say this is his ultimate “Song of Myself.”
Favorite Verse: “Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room/Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs/Judy jumped in front of a subway train/Eddie got slit in the jugular vein/And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others/This song’s for you/And I salute you brother/Those are people who died, died/They were all my friends, and they died.”
