Happily he did not send me to Sidney Lanier. At Jake’s suggestion I dived into Warren Zevon’s “My Ride’s Here,” the title track of his 2002 album. I figured that before analyzing the prosody I’d better listen to recordings, my favorite of which is Bruce Springteen‘s. He uses accordion and fiddle in an acoustic-ish version that gestures toward country more than Zevon’s own synthesizer-and-electric guitar orchestration does. Zevon’s rendering felt oddly like the sort of hymn you might hear in a megachurch (Zevon would hate that), what with the fourteeners he favors (pace Emily Dickinson). Given his references to the American west, where the poem is set, Springsteen’s choice makes good sense to me.
Not that it’s a my-wife-left-me-with-six children-and-my-truck-won’t-start whinge. Think mythic mashup with a half-dozen Biblical references (e.g., Jacob and the angel), a half-dozen popular culture references (e.g., John Wayne), and a half-dozen literary references (mostly name-dropping, though Shakespeare appears only in a silent nod. ‘Tis better so.). Zevon manages to turn this olla podrida into a meditation on death. We come to realize that the refrain—”My ride’s here”—refers to the speaker’s death and possible apotheosis into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He’s waiting for a chariot, after all.
So as you see I started trying to break down Zevon’s lyrics into their constituent parts. I’m not there yet, but it’s an interesting and I hope fruitful exercise for someone aspiring to write lyrics for an art-song.
]]>Today I met with a composer friend to kick around my ideas for a song cycle. He had good questions and useful comments, and I’m hopeful that we can continue our discussion even before Orange County announces grant recipients in September. Several of the poems he liked had imagery about or references to music–which perhaps I should have predicted! Thinking about other song cycles I know, I’m estimating about 3 minutes per song.
I think we have a healthy passel of material on love (and its opposite), nature (a la Bryant), family, and grief. Not necessarily in that order.
]]>I’ve been inspired to assemble a handful of my poems as song lyrics, and to find support for commissioning music so we can perform it, at least around central North Carolina. Of course I have written a little poetry in the past:
For example, this spring (2024) I put together a couple programs of music and (my) poetry at a local CCRC and for a performance at a church-like place. To my surprise, the verse — read by professional actors, thank heavens — was well-received, and made me feel inspired.
Once upon a time I won 1st place for poetry in the Seventh Biennial Greensboro Awards (sponsored by the Writers’ Group of the Triad). The judge, Janice Fuller (a Professor of Poetry at Catawba College) described my submissions as “Delicate and well-crafted…each poem with its own distinctive diction and its own effortlessly realized form.” Mind you, this was in 2010.
I also won a poetry prize in the Jefferson Society Literary Contest at the University of Virginia, where I was a grad student teaching Modern American Poetry. Mind you, this was 1982.
Wish me luck. Maybe I’d better post a poem or two here. Stand by.
