Word: lyrical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...title story, The Music School, makes a lyric out of churchgoing in Pennsylvania Dutch country. It also succeeds in the tricky business of interweaving the self-questioning of a troubled young father undergoing analysis with a description of the significance of the Eucharist. At a Bar in Charlotte Amalie could easily have been just another set piece about a raffish gin mill in which just about every type turns up but the anonymous and unseen narrator. Actually, it is a tense little moral essay on true and false innocence, demonstrated in terms of a hat with dancing birds...
...blues created by these men-and by dozens of others, such as Jimmy Cotton, Otis Spann, Big Walter Horton, Johnny Shines and Homesick James Williamson-inevitably touch on everyday matters of Chicago ghetto life. Sometimes the lyric is as topical as a newspaper headline, as in Junior Wells's Vietcong Blues, about his brother in Viet Nam ("You know they say you don't have no reason to fight, baby,/ But Lord, Lord, you think you're right"). But social comment is only a faint note in the sound of Chicago blues. For the most part...
Kuttner gets violent at the thought of filling his magazine with either slick -- even New Yokerish -- Action or traditional poetry. "It's ludicrous to think of an undergraduate sitting down in 1966 to write a classical lyric." His own writing, both poetry and prose, is "thinkable, but not readable -- there is a majesty and grandeur in something that's in its crude, formative, germinal stages, where the reader can fill in the gaps." And then, characteristically, interrupting his own lecture to shriek. "Poetry is wonderful -- it's nonsense -- I love...
...keyboard and subtly adjusted his tone to bring the music out over the sound of the shower. Wet or dry, it was an excellent performance of Beethoven's last and perhaps greatest piano sonata (in C minor, Opus 111), a piece that alternates between demonic fury and lyric contemplation and requires more than mere competence to bring...
Moss on the North Side (Houghton Mifflin) by Sylvia Wilkinson, 26, a green-eyed elf from the tobacco country of North Carolina, is a lyric evocation of childhood by one of the most talented Southern bellettrists to appear since Carson McCullers. Begun when the author was 13 and rewritten intermittently for more than a decade, Moss transpires in the mind and immediate vicinity of a white-trash waif. The girl's mother, a cold-eyed prostitute, abandons her, and her father, a warm-hearted Cherokee Indian, dies of rabbit fever. Desperate, she seeks in nature the tenderness she needs...