Word: poem
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...know about you, but I cannot recall having ever chanted much poetry to myself while walking down the street or waiting for the MBTA. Not because I do not like poetry but because I cannot remember the words to very many poems. The ones I do know by heart are mainly the ones that I wish I did not remember (e. g., "I think that I shall never see/A poem as lovely as a tree...
Ginsberg and friend sing the "Introduction" with mad abandon accompanied by guitar and flute. The melody is so natural and tailored to the poem that it becomes easier to believe that Blake did sing this happy song into Ginsberg's ear, except that Ginsberg claims this particular tune for his own musical talents...
...Introduction" fades into "The Shepherd," a devastatingly simple lyric poem, that like all of Blake's songs, is nevertheless rich in its suggestive power. Ginsberg's music is sweet and flowing but the song is almost spoiled by Peter Orlovsky's bleating voice. Ginsberg solos on "The Echoing Green" and the results here are much better. On the next cut, "The Lamb," Ginsberg and Orlovsky join voices again, and turn what is probably Blake's most popular poem into a tripped-out nursery song. This song expresses the essence of Blake's vision of innocence. Man is Child gently watched...
...Tirzah" was put into the Songs of Experience by Blake, ten years after the rest of the poems were compiled. At first, the poem seems out of place because of its explicit metaphysical concerns and its lack of concrete visual images. However, the poem raises an essential question that mystics have been asking themselves for a long time. Granted both Blake's and Ginsberg's belief in the illusory nature of the universe, and the transience of the ego in any one incarnation, how then does one relate to other men and society? The poem is the voice...
Before he died in 1963 at the age of 79, Williams had treated, by his own count, a million and a half patients and delivered 2,000 babies, while delivering himself of 49 books. These included his five-volume industrial-age epic poem Paterson-along with 600-odd other poems, 52 short stories, four novels, four full-length plays and a brilliant, curiously neglected impression of American history (In the American Grain), not to mention an opera libretto and the translation of a medieval Spanish novel...