Poetry

[Belgrove]

Weds 27 April
10pm - Free Thinking
[I]Anne McElvoy discusses the legacy of Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)…[/url]

Thanks for the alert to this. I learnt something from the programme, particularly the challenges that musicians face in setting Rilke’s poetry.

It’s always struck me that Rilke’s verse lends itself to a musical treatment, yet I have no example of his work set to music in my library. Can anyone suggest musical settings of his verse that matches its quality? The excerpt used in the programme by contributor Ninfea Crutwell-Reade was very beautiful.

[Serial_Apologist]

Thanks for the alert to this. I learnt something from the programme, particularly the challenges that musicians face in setting Rilke’s poetry.

It’s always struck me that Rilke’s verse lends itself to a musical treatment, yet I have no example of his work set to music in my library. Can anyone suggest musical settings of his verse that matches its quality? The excerpt used in the programme by contributor Ninfea Crutwell-Reade was very beautiful.

A setting of the Duinese Elegie, Op 90 by Egon Wellesz for soprano, choir and orchestra, composed in his Schoenbergian late manner, partly using Sprechgesang in the solo part, which I heard broadcast in the late 1960s and found very moving.

[gurnemanz]

In my collection I can find:

Hindemith song cycle Das Marienleben to Rilke texts with Roxolana Roslak accompanied by none other than Glenn Gould. Recommendable. https://www.prestomusic.com/classica...no-piano-op-27

I recently got Berg Complete Songs from Brilliant. Three Rilke settings including the best-known, Traumgekrönt from Sieben frühe Lieder which I have in several versions https://www.prestomusic.com/classica...complete-songs

Schoenberg set Rilke's Am Strande. It's on this 4CD set from Capriccio which I snapped up when it came out. https://www.prestomusic.com/classica...complete-songs

Shostakovich set some piano songs to Rilke. His most famous setting is probably in the 14th Symphony: Der Tod des Dichters. YouTube

[Belgrove]

Thanks for the suggestions- will investigate.

[Padraig]

By the Shortcut to the Rosses

By the shortcut to the Rosses a fairy girl I met,
I was taken in her beauty as a fish is in the net.
The fern uncurled to look at her, so very fair was she,
With her hair as bright as seaweed new-drawn from out the sea.

By the short cut to the Rosses 'twas on the First of May
I heard the fairies piping and they piped my heart away;
They piped till I was mad with joy, but when I was alone
I found my heart was piped away and in my breast a stone.

By the shortcut to the Rosses 'tis I'll go never more,
Lest she should steal my soul that stole my heart before,
Lest she take my soul and crush it like a dead leaf in her hand,
For the shortcut to the Rosses is the way to Fairyland.

Nora Hopper Chesson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rosses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGZckMaw7U4

In association with Irish Fridays.

[johncorrigan]

By the Shortcut to the Rosses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGZckMaw7U4

In association with Irish Fridays.

There's nobody quite like the Count, Padraig.

This bears no relation - I just happen to have been reading it this last couple of days and I'm not sure I'd read anything by Lowell before.


Sailing Home from Rapallo

[February 1954]
Your nurse could only speak Italian,
but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week,
and tears ran down my cheeks....

When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body,
the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova
was breaking into fiery flower.
The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds
blasting like jack-hammers across
the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner,
recalled the clashing colors of my Ford.
Mother traveled first-class in the hold;
her Risorgimento black and gold casket
was like Napoleon’s at the Invalides....


While the passengers were tanning
on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs,
our family cemetery in Dunbarton
lay under the White Mountains
in the sub-zero weather.
The graveyard’s soil was changing to stone—
so many of its deaths had been midwinter.
Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts,
its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts.
A fence of iron spear-hafts
black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates.
The only “unhistoric” soul to come here
was Father, now buried beneath his recent
unweathered pink-veined slice of marble.
Even the Latin of his Lowell motto:
Occasionem cognosce,
seemed too businesslike and pushing here,
where the burning cold illuminated
the hewn inscriptions of Mother’s relatives:
twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks.
Frost had given their names a diamond edge....


In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin,
Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL.
The corpse
was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.

Robert Lowell

[johncorrigan]

Simon Armitage has started a 10-parter on radio 4 looking at 10 of Larkin's poems as a way of exploring this complex man. Armitage starts with 'Born Yesterday', and explores Larkin's use of the word 'dull' in the poem.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0019yy1

Born Yesterday

For Sally Amis

Tightly-folded bud,
I have wished you something
None of the others would:
Not the usual stuff
About being beautiful,
Or running off a spring
Of innocence and love —
They will all wish you that,
And should it prove possible,
Well, you’re a lucky girl.

But if it shouldn’t, then
May you be ordinary;
Have, like other women,
An average of talents:
Not ugly, not good-looking,
Nothing uncustomary
To pull you off your balance,
That, unworkable itself,
Stops all the rest from working.
In fact, may you be dull —
If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching of happiness is called.

Philip Larkin

[Belgrove]

On the basis of yesterday’s broadcast, Larkin Revisited will be an essential listen. Simon Armitage is such an engaging, sympathetic and knowledgeable presenter (and a pretty fine poet too!). There is a clutch of programmes about Larkin on BBC4 tonight from 10pm.

[Padraig]

The bad news is that Philip Larkin (and Seamus Heaney) have been dropped from the GCSE Syllabus, but the good news is that Emily Dickinson will be included. Did I read this or dream it?

Dreams and reality, living and dead, singular and plural. . . all is revealed in the last stanza, which needs a closer look - itself


Of nearness to her sundered Things
The Soul has special times -
When Dimness - looks the Oddity -
Distinctness - easy - seems -

The Shapes we buried dwell about,
Familiar, in the Rooms -
Untarnished by the Sepulchre,
The Mouldering Playmate comes -

In just the Jacket that he wore -
Long buttoned in the Mold
Since we - old mornings, Children - played -
Divided - by a world -

The Grave yields back her Robberies -
The Years her pilfered Things -
Bright knots of Apparitions
Salute us with their wings -

As we - it were -that perished -
Themself - had just remained till we rejoin them -
And 'twas they, and not ourself
That mourned -

Emily Dickinson 1862 published 1929

[johncorrigan]

On the basis of yesterday’s broadcast, Larkin Revisited will be an essential listen. Simon Armitage is such an engaging, sympathetic and knowledgeable presenter (and a pretty fine poet too!). There is a clutch of programmes about Larkin on BBC4 tonight from 10pm.

I loved the exploration of the 'frank, submissive chord' from Armitage's look at Larkin's 'Love Songs in Age' in today's programme. He asked one of his band colleagues to play a frank, submissive chord and I was sure I recognised one of them from one of Joni Mitchell's early songs, 'The Arrangement', and it somehow made complete sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHNYPBoiEu4

[johncorrigan]

I occasionally listen to 'Pick of the Week' on Radio 4 and was delighted to hear Laura Barton hosting this week's show - I always find her interesting and her choices backed that up. As well as choosing the excellent 'High Windows' episode from Armitage's series on Larkin, Laura also drew attention to this programme, 'The New Storytellers'.
'The Sound Collector' by Talia Augustidis was the Gold Award winner of the Charles Parker Prize for the Best Student Radio Feature in 2022 and featured Roger McGough. It centred round the death of Talia's Mum many years before.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0019yzr

Very moving, and brought a different sense of McGough's own poem.

The Sound Collector

A stranger called this morning
Dressed all in black and grey
Put every sound into a bag
And carried them away

The whistling of the kettle
The turning of the lock
The purring of the kitten
The ticking of the clock

The popping of the toaster
The crunching of the flakes
When you spread the marmalade
The scraping noise it makes

The hissing of the frying pan
The ticking of the grill
The bubbling of the bathtub
As it starts to fill

The drumming of the raindrops
On the windowpane
When you do the washing-up
The gurgle of the drain

The crying of the baby
The squeaking of the chair
The swishing of the curtain
The creaking of the stair

A stranger called this morning
He didn't leave his name
Left us only silence
Life will never be the same

Roger McGough

[Forget It (U2079353)]

I agree the Sound Collector reading and discussion is great radio.

[johncorrigan]

These last few days I've detected a sense up in these parts that Scots feel that if the Queen was going to die, she chose the right place to do it; in Deeside, in Scotland. Scotland's Makar, the ever excellent Kathleen Jamie, reflected this with the poem she composed on the death of Elizabeth, a poem in celebration of their shared love of the Scottish landscape. The Makar chose to write it in an old fashioned rhyming form. Here she is reading 'Lochnagar' on the Scottish news a couple of nights back.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-scotland-62882171

[Padraig]

These last few days I've detected a sense up in these parts that Scots feel that if the Queen was going to die, she chose the right place to do it; in Deeside, in Scotland. Scotland's Makar, the ever excellent Kathleen Jamie, reflected this with the poem she composed on the death of Elizabeth, a poem in celebration of their shared love of the Scottish landscape. The Makar chose to write it in an old fashioned rhyming form. Here she is reading 'Lochnagar' on the Scottish news a couple of nights back.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-scotland-62882171

Fitting,John.

[JasonPalmer]

Have read many a poem and bought many a book from second hand bookshops and at poetry readings, used to be a regular at the poetry cafe in Covent Garden and even produced a few words and music events. Pity the cafe has not opened since covid.

Read many a poem up to and including Dylan Thomas who inspired bob Dylan who found adding music make it more marketable.