He Knew All The Words

Stephanie’s vinyl copy of The River

Decades ago I took a long walk down Broadway from West 109th Street down to St. Mark’s Place on the Lower East Side. When I arrived at my friend Bill’s place, he was excited to play for me a track from Bruce Springsteen’s Live 1975–86 album. It was the title cut from The River and on it Springsteen takes a long, slow introduction to tell his story of teenage rebellion, his narrow-miss on being sucked into the hell of Vietnam, and his complicated and loving relationship with his father. All Bill said was “Listen to this” and he pressed play on the CD player. For five minutes we listened as Bruce told his tale. At the end, just before Bruce starts the song, when Bruce reveals the depths and the truth of his father’s love, Bill burst into tears.

After a long night of playing vinyl records tonight, when I finally turned to my sister’s old vinyl copy of The River, I remembered Bill’s sweet emotional reaction, and I bought the iTunes download of Live 1975–85. I jumped right to the track “The River” and listened to that long, winding tale of an intro for the first time in decades. I, too, burst into tears at the end.

And then Bruce and the band rock sweetly on with the song.

The Lane, as published in Squalorly

“The Lane” is published in issue number 7 of Squalorly. You can read the poem here or by clicking the image above.

“The Lane” is another poem from my series Aria with Thirty Variations, based on Bach’s Goldberg Variations. My sequence of poems is intended to be performed live — poetry recited along with a piano performance of Bach’s score. I’ve taken Tatiana Nikolaeva’s recording of Variation 11 and put my own vocal recording on top of hers. Click the play button below to listen:

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The Lane (Variation 11) / David Zaza, voice / Tatiana Nikolaeva, piano

Stretching, as published in Ardor Literary Magazine

I am honored to have my poem “Stretching” appear in the inaugural issue of Ardor Literary Magazine. You can see the poem directly here or by clicking the image above.

“Stretching” is from my series of poems Aria with Thirty Variations, loosely based on the structure and mood of Bach’s great keyboard work of 1742 (more commonly called the Goldberg Variations). Last year, a terrific new recording of the variations by pianist Kimiko Ishizaka was released as part of a larger project called Open Goldberg Variations. Open Goldberg is a project funded by Kickstarter, comprising Ishizaka’s recording, a free iPad app, and a new edition of Bach’s score. All of it is released into the Public Domain, using a Creative Commons Zero license, and the producers encouraged other artists to use the score and recording for their own artistic purposes.

My Goldberg series is intended to be performed live — poetry recited along with a piano performance of Bach’s score. I’ve taken Ishizaka’s recording of Variation 15, edited it to fit my poem (she took both repeats, where my poem was based on not repeating the variations’ two sections) and laid my own vocal recording on top of hers. Click the play button below to listen:

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Stretching (Variation 15) / David Zaza, voice / Kimiko Ishizaka, piano

Jack Gilbert has died. He was 87.

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The Abnormal Is Not Courage, by Jack Gilbert; read by David Zaza

…sick of the city, wanting the sea…

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Exiled, by Edna St. Vincent Millay; read by David Zaza

My friends swimming off Far Rockaway, 2012

I went to Far Rockaway this weekend, and while it wasn’t Millay’s coast of Maine, it was restorative. I protected myself from the bitchy sun, huddled under itchy towels, crabbed my way through a hangover morning by eating fish tacos with city hipsters. I shook off the salted caramel of a boardwalk Caracas, then took to a dark dive bar in the afternoon to shoot whiskey and darts at my young friends and the bar’s old firemen. I lost everything, even the one fish I thought I’d hooked with a bit of cheese bait back in the inland safety of our little island off the coast. The night was so dark I just knew I had gone blind.

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Wild Sea, by Mark Eitzel

Michael Ross Dunham by the sea, 2012

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Tonight I had the most wonderful conversation about poetry with Scott. I hope this poem will one day be as important to him as it is to me. And by important, I mean it is the best piece of poetry I have ever known. Click the play button above to hear me read it.

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

—Wallace Stevens

Rest in peace, Phoebe Snow.

And here is a wonderful Paul Simon song that features Phoebe Snow. It’s from his Still Crazy After All These Years LP:

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One of Richard Avedon‘s most important bodies of work is his celebrity portraiture. Large-format, minimal composition in front of a seamless, black-&-white, these pictures are iconic. I’m convinced I have more than four vinyl albums that feature cover photography by Avedon, but these are all I can lay my hands on tonight. But what a great quartet! Take a look at this—

Broadway’s Fair Julie Andrews

Wow—Julie looks so young and fresh. And a bit saucy with her fingers in her mouth. I love her heavy-gauge mock turtleneck and her kinda messy little-boy hairdo. I was torn about which track from this album to offer here. I was going to put her rendition of A Little Bit in Love from Wonderful Town, but in the end I think she overplays it a bit. Her voice is too pure for Columbus, Ohio, methinks. So here’s a more classic track, I Didn’t Know What Time It Was, by the greatest of songwriting teams, Rodgers and Hart.

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Tony’s Greatest Hits Volume III

Tony’s looking suave here, with his upturned collar and him fiddling with his cuffs. A man’s man. The angle is curious—usually one would avoid a shot where the camera’s aimed upward at the subject. But it works. Not only does it give him some heightened physical stature, it reveals him as the towering figure of popular song he was at that time (make no mistake, he still is). The song from this album was an easy choice—I Wanna Be Around—a song I’ve been obsessing about lately. Oddly, I think this recording is different from the one on the I Wanna Be Around Album (which is the same as on the Ultimate Tony Bennett CD). I know that back in the day sometimes a record company would release a different take on compilations, and some artists even re-recorded tracks for their Greatest Hits comps (John Denver did this in a way I find fairly annoying). Whatever the case here, the arrangement is the same, but I can hear differences in the performance. Either way, it’s freakin’ great.

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Je m’appelle Barbra

Ah, back when she was simply Baaaahbra, with the pageboy haircut and the Egyptian eyeliner eye. Doesn’t Babs look fab here? She’s quiet. Svelte. Monochrome, with combed bangs and casual bangles. She teamed up with Michel Legrand for this album and sang a mixture of old and new songs, all from the French. Here’s a track written by the young Monsieur Legrand, with French lyrics by Eddy Marnay, with the English adaptation by none other than Johnny Mercer. Barbra’s totally controlled on this track, no histrionics, no Broadway hamming nor California excesses—just that perfect perfect voice and real emotion.

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Chér

Cher’s album Chér was released twice, first as this version, Chér, and then again as Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves, based on the success of that title’s single. She too is looking young and fresh, serious, though a bit vampy (a quality which, as we all know, would soon change to campy). Anyway, get a load of those eyelashes! And I pity the poor hair & makeup assistant who had to comb out those perfect long bangs. Everyone knows Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves, and many people know her lesser hit The Way Of Love from this album (the latter is one of my very favorite instances of a cover song which does not update the gender of its pronouns, which thereby creates an ambiguously bisexual context for Mrs. Bono’s heartbreak), but I’m going with an album track here that has some bounce and some grit, I Hate To Sleep Alone. On their Under The Blacklight album, Rilo Kiley perform an original song called Close Call which is obviously influenced by Gypsys, Tramps, & Thieves. So I was not wholly surprised to discover this Cher track which has the same kind of desperate anger that Rilo Kiley has made their own on so many songs. Jenny Lewis should mix a cover of this track into her live performances of Close Call. Anyway, like all of us, Cher hates to sleep alone.

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Bonus!
Rilo Kiley’s Close Call:

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To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Spring, by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

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Mother saw her first Robin today. It was a ghastly sight.
I Hate Spring, by Beatrice Lillie:

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As a sometime sufferer of stress-related insomnia, I’ve been enjoying the New York Times op-ed series called All-Nighters. It’s written by a host of interesting writers and artists who’ve given all kinds of weird and wonderful perspective on the inability to sleep. I was particularly taken with this illustration sequence by Christoph Niemann called Good Night and Tough Luck. But really if you flip through the whole thing you’ll see lots of fascinating entries, like Siri Hustvedt’s rumination on the metaphors of sleep, Failing to Fall.

Of course for me, the larger factor in not getting enough sleep is not insomnia, but a lack of desire to sleep, which results in staying up much later than I should, despite needing to get up much earlier than I will. Years ago I wrote a poem about that, dedicated to myself and all those like me who feel like sleep is such a waste of time, called Lullaby for Reluctant Sleepers.

Listen here:

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Elizabeth Bishop: Arrival at Santos, read by David Zaza:

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