Word: lyrically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...rubber face, a protean voice, and a Stoic endurance of pratfalls. His is a virtuoso performance, and at one point his delivery of a line stops the show cold. When he sings, there is Merman in his voice, or Rudy Vallee, or whatever will milk a laugh from a lyric. What he can't do with his voice, he does with body English, wiggles, or Cossack leaps...
...home at a civil servant's desk as in a poet's leafy glade. No more. Washington, no less than other world capitals, is a city of prose-in triplicate, quadruplicate, or burnt brown Thermo-Fax. In such surroundings, Katie Louchheim stands out as clearly as a lyric line, for she is one of the last survivors of a lost race: the poet-bureaucrat or bureaucrat-poet. Which comes first is hard to say, for last week, just a few days after she was promoted to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs-highest rank...
...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...