Word: poems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...DREAM, HIS REST, by John Berryman. Using a fictional white middle-aged American named Henry as his mouthpiece, Berryman comments on a whole range of human experience, particularly life during the past eleven years, and completes the poem cycle begun in 77 Dream Songs...
Debussy's music provides an iridescent veil which sensitizes each syllable and gesture of the poem. His music illuminates the music from behind. The recitative vocal line partakes of the elastic undulations of the French language in an effort to more naturalistically express character. As he writes, "The feelings of a character cannot be continually expressed in melody. Also, dramatic melody should be totally different from melody in general." Only in a few places, such as Melisande's song at the beginning of Act III and the love duet in Act IV, scene iv, does the melody become genuinely lyrical...
Garry Wills, an Esquire contributing editor with a gift for wit and lucidity, occasionally writes an article that is absolutely unreadable to most people. There was, for instance, his piece in the American Journal of Philology, "The Sapphic 'Umwertung Alter Werte.' " It began: "The poem differs from other early (i.e., pre-Pindaric) Priameln in two respects. First: the catalogue, which seems to be completed in the first strophe with the climactic iyw 8é, is resumed after an interval of three strophes. Second: the relationship between the catalogued values and the climactic one seems tenuous...
...atmosphere of mutual antagonism, provocations have multiplied. Almost every week brings a new incident. Over radio station WBAI-FM, a Negro schoolteacher named Leslie Campbell recently read a poem dedicated to Albert Shanker, the Jewish president of the U.F.T. It began: "Hey, Jew boy, with that yarmulke on your head. /You pale-faced Jew boy?I wish you were dead." The teachers' union has filed a formal protest with the Federal Communications Commission...
...young. It may be that youth finds it easier to grapple with the social commentary found in Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" or in the political-protest songs of Bob Dylan than with the more complicated work of poets like Berryman. Or it may be that the poem as ballad is simply coming back into its own. In any case, the music world is experimenting with a revolutionary surrealism, and contemporary songwriters and poets are apparently enriching one another's work. Many folk-rock lyrics stand up as poems, and some poets-Michael Benedikt and Canada...