The relations between music and poetry are never easy. It is, of course, easy to say that poetry is “musical,” or that music is “poetic,” but the actual setting of poetry to music—that is, by using a poem as the text of a song—is a delicate business, one made more complicated by the fact that good poetry has its own, often intense, verbal music. And such a music can be an actual obstacle to a composer looking for texts to set. On the other hand, the reading of poetry aloud with a musical accompaniment constantly risks falling into that genre that was first called melodrama. In the nineteenth century, musical melodrama meant something quite specific, and it was a popular form. Richard Strauss, for example, composed music to go under, around, and over a reading aloud of Tennyson’s poem “Enoch Arden.” But no one listens to Strauss’s Enoch Arden these days, and the word “melodrama” now makes us think of soap operas and bad fiction.
The former United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and the Grammy Award–winning pianist Laurence Hobgood triumphantly found their own path and avoided the pitfalls, in performing a program entitled POEMJAZZ in the Sala Musica at the Villa Aurelia on Sunday evening, November 4. And by the way they fulfilled one of the AAR’s most important objectives, which is to encourage conversations across disciplines and between genres. Their performance arose out of a CD on Circumstantial also entitled POEMJAZZ, in which Pinsky reads his own poems and translations (plus one Ben Jonson poem) while Hobgood improvises. This is not a reading with a mere piano accompaniment, but rather an equal dialogue between voice and piano, between poetry and music. To demonstrate the difference at the AAR event, in fact, Pinsky first read aloud Jonson’s tour-de-force two-sentence-long lyric “His Excuse for Loving” and then read it again with Hobgood playing: and the poem seemed to move from black and white into a kind of emotional Technicolor.
“Never the same song twice,” Pinsky once wrote in a poem, referring to a bird’s song—though he might have been alluding to Heraclitus. Hobgood’s imagination and virtuosity are such that he was certainly never singing the same song twice; and one audience member, knowledgeable about jazz, remarked on the richness of musical quotation that raced by under Hobgood’s fingers (including, for example, a quotation from Sesame Street while Pinsky was reading a passage about childhood). But improvisation in traditional print-based poetry is harder to track. Pinsky had the texts of his poems open in front of him, while he was performing, but he was largely off book, and his dramatic range is such that surely he, too, never reads a poem quite the same way twice. The energy and affection between the two performers, the extent to which they were riffing off each other, was clearly apparent.
Pinsky’s work has long been notable, in the landscape of American poetry, for its skill and its demotic appetite, for the way it mixes high culture and low, mythology and the local news, history and autobiography, with a kind of diachronous global vision. Thus, for example, his poem “The Hearts” (performed as the last number in the Villa Aurelia recital) mentions Shakespeare (twice: Romeo and Juliet and Enobarbus), Buddha, Art Pepper, and Lee Andrews and the Hearts. This kind of cultural channel-surfing can be all flash, but with Pinsky it coheres, and in its very multiplicity of place, time, and detail, it provides a perfect invitation to the improvising musician.
Other selections presented at Villa Aurelia included Pinsky’s visionary poem “Antique,” his sparely written and incantatory “Samurai Song” (“When I had no eyes I listened / When I had no ears I thought / When I had no thought I waited”), and “Street Music”(“Coarse sugar of memory / Salt Nineveh of barrows and stalls”). Hobgood offered a wonderful solo entitled “The Heart Dances” before rejoining Pinksy to perform “The City” (“Sometimes I think I’ve never seen the City / That where I’ve been is just a shabby district / Where I persuade myself I’m in the center”). Glimpses of Pinsky’s own working class Jewish American childhood in Long Branch, New Jersey, were visible in the poems “Windows,” “Creole” (which expands to consider the fertile mixings of language: “Creole comes from a word meaning to breed or to create, in a place”), and “The Green Piano,” which Pinsky described as a reminiscence of a time when he felt he had been saved by music. The poet seemed to be serenading the musician directly with his words, during this poem, and the musician to be responding in the voice of the piano. The evening’s dialogue was a delight for all who heard it.