Lyrical Poetry
Where have the bards of yore gone? Why has the music of love left, the hearts of better men?
When Valentine’s Day rolls around, I often think of lyrical poetry. Also, the poem below, and how it rolled through me, in sound and fury, each word just as it appears on the page, as I sat cold, forlorn, at the foot of Jan Hus, Old Town Square, Prague.
Lyrical poetry is quite misunderstood in my opinion. We don’t see it much any more. The most simplest description is poetry with music. Kenneth Rexroth, reading his poetry to jazz music, Villon and his songs, Eluard and his rhyme, Machado and Lorca with their rhythms. What’s essential to lyrical poetry is what Pound called, inner rhyme. It’s essential and unnoticed, there within words bringing the rhythm along …. here sound becomes meaning. Judge a lyrical poet by their sensitivity to inner rhyme.
She Makes Me Feel The Light
My love, life’s animated lightness.
My heart, a drum
beating out her bold brightness.
Lyrical poetry has these days, completely been absorbed into music for the most part. We don’t hear it much. We prefer are poets as logicians and word tricksters or just plain talkers. The music has gone from it and we need to turn to a Dylan (not the very lyrical Dylan Thomas) or a Cohen or more modern songsmiths.
What’s key to me, is how the poet gets lost in sound. Sound is the driving force, the ear wins and Eros is let loose on the tongue and blown into the world. As Plato said of Eros, son of Aphrodite … “He makes his home in men’s hearts, but not in every heart, for where there is hardness, he departs.” I think these days, there is a lot of hardness in us. Love has become but arrangement and self-fantasy. See my Let’s Clean House.
No canto porque me escuchen
ni porque mi voz es buena
canto porque no se junten
la amargura can le pena.
- Paul Hecht
In English it is …
I sing not so you’ll listen
Nor because I have a good voice,
I sing to prevent the mixing
of bitterness and sorrow.
In that, is some of the essence of what is lyrical poetry to me. The necessity of the poet to speak. He can’t do naught else.
When I think of lyrical poetry, I think of my mentor Irving Layton. A poet who let the poem lose itself through him and then blew it out the other end. I think of those of many ethnic musical traditions who made songs from the ground up - in our tradition, the blues. Lead Belly’s
I don’t want your greenback dollar
I don’t want your watch ‘n chain,
All i want is your love, Darlin’
Won’t you take me back a-again.
Love is lyricism’s faithful companion. Love is there to add the emotion and energy of absolute truth, fidelity to the song. Love is there to sweep up our suffering and make some meaning of it all.
I will keep looking for the lyrical poet of our generation. I’ve still not found one.
I have lost all my notebooks with 100s of my lyrical love poems. Lost, meaning they are left in Nicaragua and Canada. So can’t add more to my book - Love And Other Delicacies. But you might find some poetic nourishment there, this Valentine’s.
Here is the poem I mentioned at the beginning of this post …
I Love You Madly (Miluju Te K Zblazneni)
“In the midst of great love everything is conceived and everything is meaningless — but very holy.” — Jaroslav Iwaszkewicz, Song for a dead woman.
1
I love you madly
like a deer
jumps in the forest
filled with the strength of spring
and the crazy always
of the sun’s invisible haze
cursing through life, the incredible maze
lost we are I say …..
I love you madly
a brick through a window
a madman ringing bells
a foam at the mouth angel
wandering, singing, through many hells.
I love you madly
idea and essence, a fire unlit
waiting for the match
as a writer waits
a white page perfect as it sits
and others gather moss
the velour of their minds.
I love you madly
against the dead flotsam
this unromantic age.
I love you madly
a monkey in a cage
squealing the jungle’s fear
the beast in man so near!
I love you madly
as all love must
love now, forever, beyond
the graveyard’s honest trust.
I love you madly
a ghost embracing your pale skin
fearless, floating beside you
an eternal moment, forever to begin.
I love you madly
despite the aloneness heavy
we carry in our bones
the sadness, I frenzied poet
in silence bleed alone.
I love you madly
twisted by rage, angry at mediocrity
that dares to step before you
monied, gathering only wage.
I love you madly
a tremor through these bones
it dances with the time
that would make them old.
I love you madly
in a heightened and bloated way.
Sure, unmoving rock
I slowly sway
and spread the world, the word
the news, the necessity of my craze.
I love you madly like a tear
so truly, gravitas
slides down the face
swiped by hand, licked
returning,
it nurtures without a trace.
I love you madly as a cloud
so lightly fills the sky
image after image it turns
never asking, needing a why.
I love you madly
a sound whispered passionately in the ear
a sign, a secret
a world our own we only hear.
2.
Miluju te k zblazneni
here in this square of stone,
cold empathy
the huss of hawkers gutting
a colder German to sell their wares,
old buildings with secrets offering frigid stares.
I love you with the crazed humanity
that fills this square’s past —
the butchery the clock has seen
I give you to cast
a spell so the future may be.
Milute se pravdy kazdemu prejte
these words cry out behind so it may.
I do and for you forever sway
singing a song …… I love you madly.
I love you madly
lost in the crowd.
I love you madly
more, more, all that I’m allowed.
I love you madly
deep into the heart’s hurried blood
turning I turn,
everywhere I hear you hum
the song that sprites your eyes
gives me madness, a thousand sighs.
I love you madly
to death and beyond
in love with you, I’m fire
and fire is / was the first dawn.
I love you madly
though you’ll never know enough
how this world so strange,
gold everything I touch
with love of you so much,
surreal, a beggar’s magical crutch.
Miluju te k zblazneni
through the few, the much, the any
the numbers this age only believes
though I believe the one is the many.
I love you madly
blistered lips, tattered clothes I am
the infernal greets the eternal
I run and hold up the flaying emblem of love
I am I scream, I am.
3.
Who are you I madly love?
Is it qualities alone
that push you above
the everyday lust, the ashes waiting to be
the mindless flesh begetting so slovenly?
No. No qualities alone do you possess.
None greets my grazing eye
but alone, purpose you hold
and stretch it over me to hide
as you build the future, a lifetime wide.
You are a person, but most, idea.
Complete,
an image gracing the picture of life
the ending, unknowing death we fear
as the pigeons fly away
— where I ask, where come night do they stay?
Young love, I’ve built this madness upon
the uselessness of all
down onto I fall,
it is all done crazed in your name.
What’s absurd I’ve seen
cowering before you as you played
the game all beauty must,
a game of being, collected shining dust.
You are my shadow
every sin, every forget.
I rage and rage each day
each day, I howl at the sunset
and pray for more following.
Love, I love you madly
gladly, I’d hold up this heavy earth
just so you could live its meager seconds
and give, all else, a drop of worth.
Love don’t forget my mad howl
knocking down as I do
wall after wall,
just to let this too sane, same world
know the praise I pray for,
for after all,
you are the love for which I fall
and love madly here in the dream
the read I’ve hinted in this scrawl
that tells only, I love you madly
whatever may befall
the deer that leaps past spring’s
green, growing sprawl.
– May 24, 1997, 7pm
Stare Namesti, Prague