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Saturday, January 22, 2005
Don’t Know Much About Poetry Part 2: New Venues And Forms
A number of Eternity Road readers wrote to quarrel with your Curmudgeon's previous tirade in this little series. The comments ranged across a great breadth of themes, but the most piquant one was this:
No fair presenting a music lyric as an example of what you like! Song is a confining form. It practically doesn't allow the sort of liberties free-verse poets take.
This is largely true. But there are pockets within the musical world where the straits of conventional song structure don't confine quite so tightly. Songwriter / performer Al Stewart is well known for his essays in that area: "Roads To Moscow," "Modern Times," "Year Of The Cat," "End Of The Day," "Running Man," and many other Stewart compositions make it plain that this lyricist can operate equally well within and without the strict lyric disciplines of conventional song or "formal" poetry.
The musical subgenre in which the most daring and impressive poetry can be found is progressive contemporary, sometimes called "prog-rock" or just "prog."
A number of prog-rock bands have produced pieces of significant poetic power and quality. Yes, the Flower Kings, Spock's Beard, and Dream Theater are all well known for the intricacy of their work. But at the pinnacle of the art, for this Curmudgeon's money, stand the compositions of Fred Schendel and Steve Babb, the mainstays of Glass Hammer.
Schendel and Babb start out with an advantage: They don't "work from a clean sheet of paper." Their narrative roots are in classic fantasy and Biblical stories, and they use them without embarrassment. That's not to say that their compositions are unoriginal, merely that they pay homage to stories and storytellers that have gone before them. In fact, one of the most striking things about Glass Hammer's libretti is how original they manage to be while still staying faithful to the soil from which their lyrics grow.
On one of Glass Hammer's C. S. Lewis-inspired albums, On To Evermore, they tell a story of a great artist, a Sculptor whose whole life has been devoted to his art. In consequence, he's found himself alone despite the overwhelming acclaim his creations have earned. But Evermore is a land of magic, where contending forces struggle for dominion over the souls of men -- and the dark force, Lliusion, is eager for the chance to corrupt the Sculptor through his yearning for love.
To summarize, Sculptor attempts a Pygmalion gambit: he shapes his fantasy of "the perfect woman" out of marble, and employs a forbidden spell, animated by Lliusion's power, to chant life into it. But the resulting creature, Arianna, is without a soul, and thus unable to love Sculptor as he had wished. Unwittingly, his suffering over her inadequacy, mediated by his tears, infuses a new degree of consciousness in her -- but not one that responds fully to his love or her debt to him. She abandons him to explore the wider world.
But Arianna is necessarily an incomplete creature. Her genesis and her flaws render her a "junkyard angel": a beauty capable of beguiling mortal man beyond his power to resist, but incapable of sincere emotion. She carries forever within her the dark magic, redolent of Lliusion's deceits and power to corrupt, that gave unnatural life to immobile stone. And so we come to our verse for today:
Junkyard Angel
As I walked home one night
a junkyard angel tried to catch my eye
The rain had got in her wings
and weighed them down far too much for her to fly
I whispered a silent prayer
to see if I had the strength to pass on by
But the will of a mortal man
was brought low by one soft and unearthly sigh
Another voice from through the mist of space and time
I heard, but could not place
And when I turned to see its face,
it said to me,
"Never yearn,
never burn
for a junkyard angel:
Never cry,
never sigh
for a junkyard angel."
Across the sands of Nevermore
A faceless lord upon a throne
Of onyx cold, and brittle bone
Does his mind to his minions reach
as on their knees they would beseech.
These abandoned souls of Evermore,
Their timeless torment make an end:
Their souls to lasting darkness send
Though such a hope is truth be told.
Another dagger in each soul...
As I looked in her eyes,
I felt so alive
She made such a promise
of unending passion
The voice and its warning,
like shadows in mourning
Disappeared without a trace
in the new rising sun of her smile...
(or was it just guile?)
I heeded the call
to be fully enthralled
To take on the mantle
of fate she had shown me
For though she was doomed
I still blindly assumed
The power of love would
shatter the chains on her soul
(or so I was told)
Across the sands of Nevermore
A deep laugh echoes through the halls
On cold stone floors and marble walls
The dust of ages thick has spread
Where mortal feet shall never tread
Another soul of Evermore
Entrapped by a bewitching stare
of helplessness and flowing hair
Begins the journey forth from light
To kneel before the throne of Night
As I put on my irons
The angel still tried to hide her smile from me
I guess it could have passed for love
for we would be together through eternity
And once again through the mists of space and time
I saw the master's face
And when I tried to turn away he said to me,
"Never yearn,-- Fred Schendel --
never burn
for a junkyard angel;
Never cry,
never sigh
for a junkyard angel."
There are four distinct metrical structures in this lovely piece. The transitions from each to the next coordinate with the narrator's passages from one imagistic or emotional state to another. Each one is perfect in its self-containment. Over the whole rides a consistency of mood -- the narrator's dark, ardent yet despairing longing in the face of innate, unsuppressible knowledge that what has enthralled him is not what it appears, and still less what he yearns for it to be. The progression of images -- an angel rendered flightless by the Earthly handicap of rain; a faceless, sinister lord on a throne of black stone and broken bone; a throng of tormented souls pierced by daggers; the mocking laughter of Lliusion as the narrator surrenders to his snare -- reinforces the mood by steps, with the thunderous I-told-you-so from the unseen Lliusion to provide a full and final stop.
Thus, Schendel has departed from the "classical" lyrical form, but to create something larger and more intricate: a spiritual-emotional epic structured very like a small symphony. Along with the fantasy milieu and themes of C. S. Lewis, it puts your Curmudgeon in mind of the early romantic passages in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.
To be piercing and memorable, a complexity such as "Junkyard Angel" must cling tightly to its unifying theme. Failure to do so would doom it to the lesser realm of collage, an assemblage of parts that adhere solely because the composer glued them together by force. But here we have one of your Curmudgeon's favorite banjos: the insistence that art worthy of the name must possess a theme of some importance and express it in a focused and coherent manner.
More anon.
("Junkyard Angel" was reproduced by permission of Fred Schendel.)
Comments
Just the mention of Al Stewart’s name made me go find, dust off and play,"Time Passages” my personal fav.. although I like and have all of his albums (12” black vinal kind). Man, man your time is sand, your ways are leaves upon the sea. I’m the eyes of Nostradamus all your ways are known to me.....
gm
Posted by on 01/22/2005 at 09:12 PMFirst heard ‘roads to moscow’ and ‘on the border’ sitting at a very noisy bar in Iowa. I could just barely hear the lyrics over the conversations and I thought for a moment that I was getting flashbacks from some of the more interesting experments in better living through chemistry. Then I slithered over the bar and discovered Al Stewart.
Sigh. I wish rediscovery was as much of a rush as discovery.
JDPosted by on 01/24/2005 at 03:59 PM
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