“The poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and rational dissoluteness of all the senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, to only keep their quintessences. Inexpressible torture where he needs all the faith, all the superhuman strength, where he becomes, above all others, the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed, – and the supreme Savant! – For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone else! He reaches the unknown, and when, terrified, he ends up by losing the meaning of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die of his bound through the unheard-of and countless things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other has succumbed.”

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The Cold Green Element

At the end of the garden walk
the wind and its satellite wait for me;
their meaning I will not know
until I go there,
but the black-hatted undertaker

who, passing, saw my heart beating in the grass,
is also going there. Hi, I tell him,
a great squall in the Pacific blew a dead poet
out of the water,

Crowds depart daily to see it, and return
with grimaces and incomprehension;
if its limbs twitched in the air
they would sit at its feet
peeling their oranges.

And turning over I embrace like a lover
the trunk of a tree, one of those
for whom the lightning was too much
and grew a brillant
hunchback with a crown of leaves.

The ailments escaped from the labels
of medicine bottles and all fled to the wind;
I’ve seen myself lately in the eyes
of old women,
spent streams mourning my manhood,

in whose old pupils the sun became
a bloodsmear on broad catalpa leaves
and hanging from ancient twigs,
my murdered selves
sparked the air like muted collisions

of fruit. A black dog howls down my blood,
a black dog with yellow eyes;
he too by someone’s inadvertence
saw the bloodsmear
on the broad catalpa leaves.

But the furies clear a path for me to the worm
who sang for an hour in the throat of a robin,
and misled by the cries of young boys
I am again
a breathless swimmer in that cold green element.

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Likely, you’ve heard of Grizzly Bear. You may even have very interesting opinions about which album or set of unreleased revisions or remixes you prefer. Maybe you know exactly how much to swoon when you hear the key change in the middle of Central and Remote. You may even despise their music, denying their attempts to move you by not trying too hard. Regardless of where your opinions lie, recently, Grizzly Bear in combination with some very talented visual artists and directors, have created some incredible music videos.

If Two Weeks is too catchy for you, give the video a shot. It’s confusion and pleasure wrapped around a glossy piano riff and not-too-complex-but-not-too-simple vocal harmonies. The second video, “Shift,” is an acoustic revamp performed in the bathroom of a Parisian hotel. The song originally appears on their 2004 release, Horn of Plenty, recorded and produced by La Blogotheque. The last video of three, “Ready, Able,” is off of Veckatimest, alongside Two Weeks. The claymation work is, as I interpret it, a homage to Frank Zappa’s use of Bruce Bickford in his own movie, Baby Snakes.

I am not sure if anyone knows if music videos are still relevant, but I don’t think that matters. While Shift is certainly artistically filmed, it’s a real-capture of their performance, unity and sensitivity as a group. The other two, certainly music videos, fall equally into the categories of music and visual art. They produce a sensation in me as a viewer which is distinct and different, and not to be measured against the sensation evoked in me while acting as a listener.

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Have pity on a girl, perdurable, playful,
And delicate as a foal, dutiful, available,
Who is waiting on a bed in a room in the afternoon for God
His Majesty is on his way, who long ago has died.
She is a victim in the kingdom, and is proud.
Have pity on me a thousand years from now when we meet.
Open the mummy case of this text respectfully.
You find no one inside.

– Frederick Seidel, from The Death of the Shah

Open the dust jacket of Frederick Seidel’s latest collection (Poems 1959-2009) and your presented with critic Adam Kirsch’s declaration, “[Frederick Seidel is] the best American poet writing today.” Seidel is what you can call a poet of the contemporary. While he has been writing for an incredibly long time, his popularity is probably at its height. Undergraduates everywhere seem to be picking up his books. In fact, it’s the only  book of contemporary poetry that I have stumbled upon when anxiously going over a new acquaintance’s poetry shelf. This has happened twice. It is astounding.

Historically speaking, Seidel can be linked to Lowell, Eliot and Whitman. And he very much is a traditional poet, a formalist. He cares about detail. He cares about structure.

In talking about the actual poetics of Seidel, there’s a reason I haven’t written about him on LADP. I’ve spent a lot of time writing academically about the man, but colloquially, he’s a tough cookie:

I oink when I fuck but have feelings and wings.
Pigs can fly.

– from Song for Cole Porter

Without a doubt, he is one of my favourite poets. Seidel is a type of dark Whitman; he is political, he is solipsistic, he is charming. But while Whitman’s controversy has worn out, Seidel’s exceeds. Reflecting America, like Whitman, Seidel embraces the role of poet as cultural confluence; Late Capitalist America is Frederick Seidel. He is Whitman without Lincoln; he is the poet, without a hero:

They were our gods working all night
To make Achilles’ beard fall out and prop up
The House of Priam, who by just pointing sent
A shark fin gliding down a corridor,
Almost transparent, like a watermark.

– from Our Gods

When listening to the reading that I have attached, remember one thing: Seidel is not to be written off for his shameless and depraved obscenity. His obscenity is good for poetry. Movies such as Paul Anderson’s There Will Be Blood or Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds share Seidel’s approach in their extreme amplification of immoral or traumatic events as means of social commentary. It seems to me to be a characteristically postmodern phenomena that our most shocking and morally bankrupt artistic compositions really are our most compelling and socially progressive.

Following no doubt a slightly different line than the others,
Seeking sexual pleasure above all else,
Despairing of art and of life,
Seeking protection from death by seeking it
On a racebike, finding release and belief on two wheels,

– from The Death of the Shah

Attached is a fantastic reading by the poet himself:
The New York Review of Books, Frederick Seidel Reading

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Roger Miller has such a way of singing. If you’re quick, you’ll notice it was he who played the Rooster, wrote and recorded the soundtrack for Disney’s Robin Hood. A movie I remember for the music – I still well up during Not in Nottingham. Little Green Apples has quickly become one of my favorite songs. A member of individual songs that have their own separate meaning, regardless of genre, mood, or style – it’s Written by Bobby Russell, and rearranged by Roger Miller, featured on his record A Tender Look At Love

And I wake up in the morning with my hair down in my eyes and she says hi
And I stumble to the breakfast table while the kids are going off to school, goodbye.
And she reaches out and takes my hand and squeezes it and says how you feeling hon?
And I look across at smiling lips that warm my heart, and see my morning sun.

And if that’s not loving me, then all I’ve got to say,
God didn’t make the little green apples, and it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summer time.
And there’s no such thing as Dr. Seuss or Disneyland and mother goose, no nursery rhymes.
God didn’t make the little green apples, and it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summer time.
And when myself is feeling low, I think about her face and go and ease my mind.

Sometimes I call her up, at home, knowing she’s busy.
And ask her if she can get away, meet me and maybe we can grab a bite to eat.
And she drops what she’s doing and she hurries down to meet me, and i’m always late.
But she sits waiting patiently, and smiles when she first sees me, because she’s made that way.

And if that ain’t loving me, then all I’ve got to say,
God didn’t make the little green apples, and it don’t snow in Minneapolis when the winter comes.
And there’s no such thing as make-believe, puppy dogs or autumn leaves, no bb guns.
God didn’t make the little green apples, and it don’t snow in Minneapolis when the winter com

Roger Miller – Little Green Apples

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Arnold Schoenberg was the Leader of the Second Viennese School , prominent composer, developer of the Twelve-Tone Atonal Technique, and outstanding musical pedagog. His pupils include among others Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, and John Cage. This excerpt comes almost completely unabridged from his Theory of Harmony, beautifully translated from the original German to English by Roy E. Carter. In it, the subject is broadly determined as Tonality, though if your medium is not music, replace that word with whatever you choose, any genre of Art. The chapter is Diatonic Chords, and he is speaking of how to instruct a pupil. As a reward for reading that much text, at the end is featured a performance by Glenn Gould of his Opus 11, for piano.

It is nevertheless necessary, as I said before, that the pupil learns to manipulate the devices that produce tonality. For music has not yet evolved so far that we can now speak of discarding tonality; moreover, the necessity for explaining its requirements arises also from the need to recognize its functions in the works of the past. Even if the present allows us to envision a future freed from the restrictive demands of this principle, it is still, even today, but much more in the past of our art, one of the most important musical techniques. It is one of the techniques that contribute most to the assurance of order in musical works of that order, consistent with the material, which so greatly facilitates the untroubled enjoyment of the essential beauties in the music. One of the foremost tasks of instruction is to awaken in the pupil a sense of the past and at the same time to open up to him prospects for the future.

Applied to our present concern, that means: Let the pupil learn the laws and effects of tonality just as if they still prevailed, but let him know of the tendencies that are leading toward their annulment. Let him know that the conditions leading to the dissolution of the system are inherent in the conditions upon which it is established. Let him know that every living thing has within it that which changes, develops, and destroys it. Life and death are both equally present in the embryo. What lies between is time. Nothing intrinsic, that is; merely a dimension, which is, however, necessarily consummated. Let the pupil learn by this example to recognize what is eternal: change, and what is temporal: being. Thus he will come to the conclusion that much of what has been considered aesthetically fundamental, that is, necessary to beauty, is by no means always rooted in the nature of things, that the imperfection of our senses drives us to those compromises through which we achieve order. For order is not demanded by the object, but by the subject. The pupil will conclude, moreover, that the many laws that purport to be natural laws actually spring from the struggle of the craftsman to shape the material correctly; and that the adaptation of what the artist really wants to present, its reduction to fit within the boundaries of form, of artistic form, is necessary only because of our inability to grasp the undefined and unordered. The order we call artist form is not an end in itself, but an expedient. As such by all means justified, but to be rejected absolutely wherever it claims to be more, to be aesthetics.

This is not to say that some future work of art may do without order, clarity, and comprehensibility, but that not merely what we conceive as such deserves these names. For nature is also beautiful where we do not understand her and where she seems to us unordered. Once we are cured of the delusion that the artist’s aim is to create beauty, and once we have recognized that only the necessity to produce compels him to bring forth what will perhaps afterwards be designated as beauty, then we will also understand that comprehensibility and clarity are not conditions that the artist is obliged to impose on his work, but conditions that the observer wishes to find fulfilled. Even the untrained observer finds these conditions in the works he has known for some time, for example, in all the older masterworks; here has has had time to adapt. With newer works, at first strange, he must be allowed more time.

But, whereas the distance between the onrushing brilliant insight of the genius and the ordinary insight of his contemporaries is relatively vast, in an absolute sense, that is, viewed within the whole evolution of the human spirit, the advance of his insight is quite small. Consequently the connection that gives access to what was once incomprehensible is always finally made. Whenever one has understood, one looks for reasons, finds order, and what we claim to perceive as laws defining order and clarity may perhaps only be laws governing our perception, without therefore being the laws a work of art must obey. And that we think we see laws, order, in the work of art can be analogous to our thinking we see ourselves in the mirror, although we are of course not there. The work of art is capable of mirroring what we project into it. The conditions of our conceptual power imposes, a mirror image of our own nature, may be observed in the work. This mirror image does not, however, reveal the plan upon which the work itself is oriented, but rather the way we orient ourselves to the work.

The positive gain of a work of art depends upon the conditions other than those expressed by the laws and is not to be reached by the way of the laws. But even what is negative is gain, since through avoiding such particulars as presumably hinder the realization of artistic values the pupil can lay a foundation. Not one that promotes creativity, but one that can regulate it, if it will allow itself to be regulated! Instruction that proceeds this way accomplishes something else, as well.

It leads the pupil through all those errors that the historical struggle for knowledge has brought with it; it leads through, it leads past errors, perhaps past truths as well. Nevertheless, it teaches him to know how the search was carried on the methods of thinking, the kinds of errors, the way little truths of locally limited probability became, by being stretched out into a system, absolutely untrue. In a word, he is taught all that which makes up the way we think. Such instruction can thus bring the pupil to love even the errors, if only they have stimulated thought, turnover and renewal of intellectual stock. And he learns to love the work of his forebears, even if he cannot apply it directly to his own life, even if he has to translate it in order to put it to very different use. He learns to love it, be it truth or error, because he finds in it necessity. And he sees beauty in that everlasting struggle for truth; he recognizes that fulfillment is always the goal one yearns for, but that it could easily be the end of beauty. He understands that harmony – balance – does not mean fixity of inactive factors, but equilibrium of the most intense energies. Into life itself, where there are such energies, such struggles – that is the direction instruction should take. To represent life in art, life, with its flexibility, its possibilities for change, its necessities; to acknowledge as the sole eternal law evolution and change – this way has to be more fruitful than the other, where one assumes an end of evolution because one can thus round off the system.

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i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

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In recognition of two wonderful posts by Mangan and Sarsfield concerning Miles Davis’ Porgy and Bess, and Nina Simone, here the two are together. A live performance in 1960 of I Loves You, Porgy, starting with a little of “Dey’s so fresh an’ fine”.

Some important facts to remember: Miles’ tunes were the result of Gil Evans and Himself reworking George Gershwin’s songs from his Opera. Porgy and Bess the Opera was first performed in 1935, Miles Davis’ recording came out in 1958, Kind of Blue came out in 1959, and Nina Simone is performing this in 1960. She is 27 years old.

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