ROBERT BLY POETRY AND BANJO PICKIN

emilie brzezinski

I've been reading a fair amount of poetry the last several months. It started when I bought Louise Gluck's Collected Poems last year. It waits in a stack beside my reading / movie viewing chair beside my reading lamp, a floor lamp that is a half inch chrome pipe from floor to lamp and shade. I like a simple lamp. Louise Gluck inspired me to take John Berryman's, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, off the shelf to read a poem whenever the notion strikes. Bought a new book of poems by Bill Nixon, Brazen Throats, that concern Vietnam war. Then I brought down from the shelf Robert Lowell, then Robert Bly, May Swenson, Gregory Orr, Greg Kuzma and George Seferis, one at a time over a period of weeks. I went ahead and bought Robert Bly's new Selected Poems, Stealing Sugar From the Castle. These others I like an awful lot, but Bly satisfies what I want from a poem. That's not absolute. Like John Berryman's book, Love and Fame, takes my breath from first page to last. I feel in sync with Robert Bly's flow somehow. It's been at least twenty years, even more, since I've dipped into my poetry books. I read Bly in the past, in the decade of the 70s. I probably read more of him than any of the others of the post WW2 American poets. His book, Light Around The Body, satisfies me immensely. Bly wrote an anti-war poem of Vietnam called The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last. It is ten verses and eight pages. It's powerful. I heard Bly read it at a reading in 1975 or 76, College of Charleston. He read it powerfully, dramatically, loud without bombast, furious, making his statement on war in poetry. Poetry and pop songs that deal with politics die at the moment the political issue is over. Political poems date as quickly as fashions. I have a cassette tape of Bly reading Teeth-Mother. I played some of it for my old Regular Baptist preacher friend, Millard Pruitt, some time in the 1980s. He listened closely and said, "Who is that, Buck Shaw?" Shaw is a preacher in the county. I had to laugh inside. If Bly knew an old Appalachian preacher in the old way took hearing him read Teeth-Mother for an old-timey hillbilly preacher, Bly would love it. Giving it some thought, I imagine he'd be happy with the likeness. It fit. Bly was preaching, speaking dramatically with rhythmic emphases, the way the old-timers preached.

 

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Bly gets down and dirty in Teeth-Mother like the great anti-war song of the time by the Fugs, Kill For Peace. It went farther than any of the other anti-war songs of the time. Bly in Teeth-Mother does not tiptoe over modest sensibilities. He puts you in the fighter pilot's seat dropping napalm on a village. He puts you inside the grass hut when it explodes. He takes us on a flight roaring over jungle and rectangular fields driven by jet engines. The opening three lines:

 

 Massive engines lift beautifully from the deck.

 Wings appear over the trees, wings with eight hundred rivets.

 

 Engines burning a thousand gallons of gasoline a minute sweep over

          the huts with dirt floors.

 

 

This reading of the Teeth-Mother, half a century after the war that in Vietnam now is called the American War, the poem has not dated one minute. The war is historical by now, but Bly's poem has immediacy that brings it into the present moment, now, as we speak. I feel in the presence of important writing. After thumbing through the pages when the book arrived, stopping at short verses for brief previews, I went to The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last the first time sitting down with it. Read it three times so far. I love its rhythms. The words make their own rhythms. It has a good flow for reading aloud in a small auditorium, Bly a poet who draws a good-sized audience in the university world. He gives a good reading. Poets, who tend to be inward people, often don't like giving readings, and many are boring in the delivery. Bly holds the audience attention as a stage performer whose performance is talking, like a preacher. In the time I witnessed him reading he wore a big serape all the time. I took it for a stage prop, like musicians in bands have their stage shirts, that is in bands where they wear shirts. The serape gave color and pizzazz to his plain Minnesota protestant person. I don't know, but imagine he came up in Scandinavian Protestantism, in his case Norwegian. The preacher I grew up influenced by was Swedish from Minnesota. He was so hard core the Southern Baptist Association would not accept him though he tried every year to get in. He was zealous.

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Robert Bly's poems excite me in a way similar to how good lyrics in a pop song can excite me, like the Rolling Stones', Wild Horses or Brown Sugar, or like Jane's Addiction's Mountain Song and Pigs In Zen. Just now went to YouTube to hear Mountain Song. I'm remembering seeing the band in 1991 on their last tour, and what an ecstatic experience it was hearing them at concert volume, the guitars, the vocals. I've taken a moment to read about a dozen of Bly's poems picked randomly. In one way, his writing is natural with a smooth flow, and in another way, he goes into the subconscious dreamscape within using the "magical realism" of Latin American writers unto seeming obscurity. Example from a poem found opening the book randomly, The Sympathies of the Long Married:

          Let's not drive the wild angels from our door.
          Maybe the mad fields of grain will move.
          Maybe the troubled rocks will learn to walk.

He takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary, as does Henry Miller in his prose in a different way, his own way. The present moment is full of associations from the past, from our deepest feelings to our deepest mind that includes insights from the higher self. I feel like Bly's poems start as an attempt to reach the higher self, a line at a time, a step at a time, he finds his way and enters a new world of understanding that includes the soul's understanding. Having this review of a poet I admired almost half a century ago, I'm finding subconscious influence of what I've learned from Robert Bly is at work unconsciously in my own writing, in my thinking, same as I found reviewing Henry Miller's writing. I had no idea how much Miller influenced my thinking and writing. Miller helped me to pay attention to the people around me, to appreciate each person's unique place at the center of the universe. I suspect Bly acted as a guide for me in his approach to a poem, in his search for the higher self within, to include the dream as reality, the same as looking out the window, seeing a donkey switching its tail and grazing, even to appreciate that which I otherwise might not. Bly's poems can be a discouragement to a young poet in the same way the banjo picking by Fred Cockerham can make a young banjo hopeful say, I'll never be able to do that no matter how much I practice or how long I live. Bly, like Cockerham, makes it seem so simple even a beginner could do it. But when you pay close attention to what he's doing, it can be like listening to a high school senior's valedictory talk to a second grader, over the head and unimaginably complex. For some, it becomes a goal. For others, it can be discouraging, not allowing that Fred Cockerham was once a beginner, too, learning his first chords and figuring out how to hold the strings down to make them ring and not go thud.

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I'm thinking of young Cheyanne, just turned seven, holding her first banjo looking for how to make the chords she could remember with her left hand, striking the strings and they go thud. It didn't matter. It was the first time her fingers had touched tuned banjo strings. Just that it made a sound delighted her. Of course, the adult impulse is to say you have to hold the strings down tight to make them ring, you don't hit the strings like that, you do it like this, giving instruction: I know more than you do. I said to myself, This is the first time she's ever held it, leave her alone, let her teach herself; that's how it's really done. I let go of my ridiculous mind and joined Cheyanne in her delight that she made the banjo say something. Didn't matter what, just let it say whatever it had to say. I feel an impulse to play for her Alice Gerrard singing, I'm goin around this world, I'm a banjo pickin girl, goin around this world, baby mine. But I don't want her to hear advanced banjo pickin yet, don't want to discourage her before she starts. That's for later when she finds the music. I want her own fascination to be her guide. Holding it, making sound with it, brings her light to the surface and makes her glow. It seems a deep inner need like she knew the banjo from a lifetime past. I'm recalling a time my banjo pickin friend Jr Maxwell told a guy who came to him asking Jr to teach him bluegrass banjo. Jr said, "If you can't figure it out for yourself, you don't want to play." I'm not going to hold Cheyanne to that, or anything. Will only encourage, not push. In my own writing as art form, not holding "art form" as something lofty, but everyday life, I am following the way of the mountain musician. It's not about money. It's about fun, having fun. It's not called playing because it's work. It's about going with your own style, what works for you, because it's fun. It's about playing better all the time, steps at a time, reaching for the best you can make it every time. It's called playing by ear. The ear tells the fingers what to do. There comes a time in the mastery of making music that mind leaves altogether, leaves an open passageway between ear and fingers. That's when the music flows. Writing the daily blog is my own form of banjo pickin, setting the music in motion and flowing with it. The most fun I have in any day is the day's writing. It's play. I listen to the rhythm as I write, and even sometimes leave mind in the writing. My own personal search is for a balance between head and heart, in the writing as well as in the living, to honor the feminine as well as the masculine, allow them to dance. Thank you, Robert Bly, and thank you, Henry Miller, for pointing the way for me to follow my own path, not somebody else's.

emilie brzezinski

 

 

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OLD-TIME MUSIC RAMBLE

found art in Sparta

Monday was a good time for parking in front of Food Lion. A lot of parking spaces to pick from. The store was not crowded at the registers. I thought I may as well grocery shop on Mondays since it is inevitable that I need to drive to town for one reason or another every Monday. It is the day of the week I'd rather stay home and get over the weekend of staying up late three nights in a row. I'm becoming nocturnal. I really do my best after midnight. It took the whole day to get over waking up and by midnight I'm ready to read, write, paint. The day's obligations are over, the phone is not going to ring unless somebody died. All that I love to do I do best after midnight. If I remember correctly, which I don't, it seems Eric Clapton sang a song After Midnight in his electric rock star years, maybe with Cream. It's a shame how good they were in that time and are good in this time. Then there is Thelonious Monk's tune Round Midnight, one of my favorite jazz numbers and I don't know why, kind of like in bluegrass and old-time Maple On The Hill is about my favorite song and I don't know why. It just vibes with me right. Same with Round Midnight. That just put me in a mind to put on some Monk playing live at the It Club in LA with Charlie Rouse on tenor. One of those magical moments in recording that puts me into a minor bliss like Horowitz playing Schubert, Tommy Jarrell playing fiddle and Fred Cockerham playing banjo, and the other way around, on their album Tommy & Fred. Both are very soulful hillbilly musicians.

At the moment Josh Blevins of Whitetop VA is picking open-back old-time banjo. It's a field recording made available to we who love this music by the label Field Recorder's Collective. A lot of beautiful music from field recordings has been available at this label Field Recorder and the website is self-explaining. It is a dynamite catalog of old-time music. The label is a service to humanity. It is a non-profit so buying the cds helps the label toward the expense of bringing out a new one. All their cds are fine examples of old-time music, some of them having that magical accidental quality that makes them stand out from all the others. I felt like Gaither Carlton's cd of old-time fiddle and banjo was hanging down on a string  from heaven like a fish hook if you want a little taste of heaven. I think I'd like to be bunked on the old-time music corridor with the music of these mountains from before electricity was imagined. I love the old squawking fiddle of Marcus Martin and Gaither Carlton. Tommy Jarrell and Fred Cockerham play that old squawking hillbilly music that makes my heart flutter for the beauty of it. Fred plays on George Pegram's Rounder #001 album. Fred squawked his fiddle and sang with his old hillbilly voice that wasn't about pretty, but was about delivering the words of the songs with music, often while playing the fiddle too.

I went looking for Kyle Creed's Heritage cd, Bobby Patterson's label in Woodlawn, Virginia. I was having to dig deeper than I wanted to go and came upon Kevin Fore's Round Peak, The Tradition Continues. He plays banjo and sings songs with fiddlers like Benton Flippen, James Burris, Kirk Sutphin and Eddie Bond who plays fiddle on some, guitar on several and sings on several. Several Round Peak musicians like Chester McMillan on his rhythm guitar, Joey Burris on guitar, Verlin Clifton on mandolin. It is a kind of all-star album of mostly Round Peak musicians by Bobby Patterson's label, Heritage, Kevin Fore the banjo player. It is a good example of music from this region of the mountains about half way between Sparta and MtAiry off Highway 89. It's some almighty fiddling and banjo pickin. At this moment Eddie Bond is playing the fiddle and singing Rockingham Cindy, Kevin Fore and Kirk Sutphin playing banjos. A good rendering of the Tommy Jarrell great song. To my ear, Jarrell made that song his own. That doesn't stop these guys from giving it a respectable go. Round Peak, the next generation. Almost put on a Clark Kessinger album. May hear it next. I don't know why I play music so seldom. I've come to prefer silence. I can hear myself think when there is no racket. Music holds my attention, clears my mind. Silence lets the mind run until it slows down to a walk.

It was early afternoon when I went into the grocery store. Food Lion has a little space unto itself where they keep the produce in a cooler temperature than the rest of the store. Pushing my cart toward the entrance doorway, a man and woman who looked awfully married were standing directly in the middle of the doorway discussing whatever it was that was important to them. I waited a moment wondering if they'd wake up any time soon. A woman about my age walked up from behind me with a cart. She waited a moment. Then she headed for the exit door and I followed her. All I wanted to do was get a bag of oranges. I dropped them into the cart and exited through the exit, swung back around to get some bananas and the couple had just made a decision that whatever they wanted was not inside the doorway where they stood unconsciousness as people, we and others, lined up and went around them to the exit door after waiting like at a traffic light.

If one of us had spoken to them noting they're blocking the doorway, they'd have exploded in apologies, Oh we're sorry! Explaining and shittin and gittin. It would have brought them into consciousness from a deep cavern in unconsciousness so fast it might have given them the bends. I thought of girls in high school talking in the doorways before and after class. A bunch going in see a bunch coming out and they talk in the doorway while the guys on both sides of the door fume waiting for them to get in motion and unblock the door. They don't do it intentionally. They do it unconsciously. The adult couple in the doorway at the grocery store did not irritate me. They must have reasonable IQs. I just marveled at the unconsciousness. I thought these people actually get around in traffic. Obviously city people, they must drive in city traffic and they drove from wherever to Sparta. I jotted it down in my head as the inexplicable event of the day.


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