“Elvis Presley by Thom Gunn Two minutes long it pitches through some bar: Unreeling from a corner box, the sigh Of this one, in his gangling finery And crawling sideburns, wielding a guitar. The limitations where he found success Are ground on which he, panting, stretches out In turn, promiscuously, by every note. Our idiosyncrasy and our likeness. We keep ourselves in touch with a mere dime: Distorting hackneyed words in hackneyed songs He turns revolt into a style, prolongs The impulse to a habit of the time. Whether he poses or is real, no cat Bothers to say: the pose held is a stance, Which, generation of the very chance It wars on, may be posture for combat. * Music may be the universal language that needs no words—the “language where all language ends,” as Rilke put it—but that has not stopped poets from ancient times to the present from trying to represent it in verse. Here are Rumi and Shakespeare, Elizabeth Bishop and Billy Collins; the wild pipes of William Blake, the weeping guitars of Federico García Lorca, and the jazz rhythms of Langston Hughes; Wallace Stevens on Mozart and Thom Gunn on Elvis—the range of poets and of their approaches to the subject is as wide and varied as music itself. The poems are divided into sections on pop and rock, jazz and blues, specific composers and works, various musical instruments, the human voice, the connection between music and love, and music at the close of life. The result is a symphony of poetic voices of all tenors and tones, the perfect gift for all musicians and music lovers.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:30:33 +0000
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