This just in . . . poetry leads to song!

Lyric poetry is . . . well . . . song!

So it shouldn't surprise anybody that poets write songs too.  Of course, songwriters can write poems as well.  And sometimes, when the two talents or gifts or impulses are closely aligned in an artist, you might get pretty good stuff in both categories: poems that swing and songs that have some depth.

My first poem, written at around 10 years old, was a song, a cowboy song, probably because I watched 'The Lone Ranger' and 'Rawhide' and 'Gunsmoke' and 'The Rifleman' every week as a kid.  Like everybody else did.

I mean, I really dug it when some old cowhand or drifter pulled out a guitar or a harmonica or a squeezebox around a campfire and sang a song -- sad, silly, serene.  Forget the guns and the fist fights.  I listened to the song.

So now let me introduce you to 50 Sent Songs, a project I worked on throughout 2022/23: fifty songs posted to Bandcamp every week for 50 weeks (at 50¢ apiece, or more if you've a mind to pay more -- that's how Bandcamp works).  And yes, they're all still out there on my Bandcamp page and still just 50¢ apiece.

Go there & you'll find poems by Shakespeare and Thomas Gray, Emily Dickinson and Leigh Hunt, Richard Lovelace and Caedmon, and of course Yours Truly set to music, and plenty of songs where, if I must say so myself, the lyric is as much the thing as the melody.  Each for a mere 50¢!

So again, head to YTLB (me) at Bandcamp and check it out.  Please.  Check it out.

Hi-ho Silver, away!

The Shepherd's Calendar - a chronicle of the plague year in New York City

The artist Barbara Nathanson and I began working together in Los Angeles in the mid-1990's.  We met in a small artist-curated/operated gallery in downtown L.A., before that part of town became overrun by development and encampments.  

Nothing came of that project, except for a now-35 year working relationship.  For more than 10 years, we "conversed" across disciplines, a poem or line of a poem sparking an image which in turn provoked another poem or line of a poem which again occasioned a painting or a passage in a larger composition.  Eventually, we created a body of work -- dozens of paintings and about 150 poems -- out of which came exhibitions around the world, and work published in journals in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

In 2019, I proposed a new project, a more focused effort that resulted in The Shepherd's Calendar.  The poems and songs of this book are based more or less loosely on the first Shepherd's Calendar, by Edmund Spenser, featuring some of the old characters, like Colin Clout, Hobbinol, Rosalind, Thenod and Cuddie, all doing somewhat the same things as their original counterparts: shepherding (dog-walking, in this case), carousing, singing, competing for honors and prizes, and falling helplessly in love as the year waxes, wanes and dies, January through December.

Only in my Shepherd's Calander's case, that waxing, waning and dying occurs on the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Far Rockaway, Queens, during the very depths of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

Barbara, as before, read the drafts and manuscripts of the poems and "replied" visually, with some sometimes stunning, always intriguing visual metaphors and paintings.  The result is a large-format book of four-color plates and text printed on glossy paper -- good reading and worthy of any coffee table you have in the house that needs something new and conversation-worthy lying on it.

The Shepherd's Calendar (2022, self-published), $15.00.

Click here to order a copy.

It's been a minute

Indeed! I took a long break from blogging and poetry talk (and the W@1 salon) after the pandemic to concentrate on writing and making music.  Let me introduce you to one of the products of that hiatus: The Weather in Bluffton, Ind.  

It's a 2024 book, launched in June, of prose poems and what you can think of as "lyric fictions."  In its 65 poems you'll encounter a loneliness that intrudes at the dinner table; a billboard that speaks (in Portuguese) to a busy executive; Popeye in Crete; a sex robot with good table manners; a hole in a man's pocket that leads to Eternity; a blue day, a brown town, a grey neighborhood; and of course, the weather in (mythical) Bluffton, Ind. where the month of February is subject to a permanent recall by the Campaign to Eliminate Winter.

These poems explore many themes of small town/medium city life: community, isolation, gossip, routine, outsiders, and for sure, life, death, the weight of the past.

Slender Book Press is a private publisher devoted to small and art books in short, high-quality print runs.

For more information, leave a message in the comments or contact page below.  

The Weather in Bluffton, Ind., is available in hardcopy ($15 paperback only) or digital format ($7).  

Click here for the hardcopy.  Be sure to leave a mailing address.

Click here for digital copy.