I’ve been meaning to post this for quite some time. And now that I’m unemployed, I can’t claim to have more pressing business. (My apologies to my poet friend Al-Qassim, who is awaiting feedback on some poems.) I’m a born procrastinator, but once I get going, I can be difficult to stop. Not that I’m manic or anything (I don’t think). I’m just an enthusiast.
For the second time in less than a year I want to refer to my guest post on Thomas Graves’ blog, Scarriet from twelve years ago. (Again, note that the only link that isn’t defunct in my piece is the one to The Barefoot Muse.)
For those that can’t be bothered to click on the link, the gist of my piece is that the spoken word and the sung word should not be regarded as rivals, rather as bedfellows. I both recite my poems and sing the song versions, and it’s rather bewildering to me that people don’t want to have both. Not at the same time, obviously, but side by side. But people tend to choose sides. In general, the poets prefer the spoken version, and the non-poets prefer the sung version. For many poets it would seem that once a poem is sung it is no longer a poem. Because it is a song. And for many non-poets it would seem that once the lyrics of a song are recited, it is no longer a song. Because it is a poem. What poppycock! My favourite artists are Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, exactly because they are both poets and songwriters. I haven’t exactly heard Dylan recite his work, but he did win the Nobel Prize for Literature, much to the chagrin of many poets who don’t sing their stuff.
What prompted my piece was that I had a sonnet published in The Flea in March 2011 accompanied by both a recited and a sung version, and I experienced exactly this reaction. The poets hated the sung version, and the non-poets couldn’t see the point of the recited version. My view is that this tendency to pigeonhole things is really silly. But what do I know. People seem to want a standard version.
Not only is the original issue not online anymore BUT the web archive platform that editor Paul Stevens found as a back-up resource has a glitch, with the February issue appearing instead. Never mind. The recordings aren’t saved in the archive either. I have the same version in the first edition of my collection of sonnets, I Sing the Sonnet, also from 2011, online here, but I’ll paste it in here along with the original spoken and sung versions:
No Bloody Way!
for Mark and Mike, whose room it was
A crowd of students sitting round a room
one summer night in 1983.
They barely move, make little sound, assume
they’ve every right to simply wait and see.
Until the college porter comes along
to tell them that they’re threatening the peace.
It’s obvious he’s got his sums all wrong.
And what’s he going to do? Ring the police?
This memory will always ebb and flow;
a part of me has never come of age.
So when, today, I find a treble “No!”
means rattling the same old bloody cage,
I’m back in Oxford sounding out success,
the silent choir inside me shouting “Yes!”
(For the record, there’s a slight change to line three of the octet in the 2017 edition of I Sing the Sonnet.
I have reverted to the original line three in the version that appeared in Extreme Sonnets in 2020, but have changed line two of the sestet slightly.)