npm pmmu #12: true friendship

This month I'm posting daily Poetry-Music Match-Ups, and you're invited to join me! (See the bottom* of the post for ideas.)  When I don't have a crowd-sourced combo scheduled, I'll share one of my own many PMMUs!  If something comes to your mind, send it to me HERE.

Brenda Harsham of Friendly Fairy Tales provides today's Match-Up, which follows on from Sunday's consideration of friendship suggested by my dad.

Brenda wrote a haibun about friendship. A haibun is a Japanese form of prose followed by poetry--in this case one of many quotes about earthly friendship that caught her eye.

A friend is one to whom one may pour out all the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath of kindness blow the rest away. — Unknown

Brenda "pulled the haiku out of it, reworked them, tinkered a bit and voila"--and she sent a photo to go with it too!

True Friendship in Four Haiku || Brenda Harsham

 

alone in a crowd

everyone else seems happy

what is wrong with me

hike, chat, share

listen with support and love

friendship unfurls

I look for your face

the angle of your eyebrows

I smile inside and out

when I’m weary

you lay your cheek along mine

your warmth is my sun

She pairs these words with another classic that reaches out of my father's generation and into ours:

 Simon and Garfunkel "Bridge over Troubled Water" 1970

Listening to this again, I was surprised--I think of it as a quiet acoustic performance, but it swells and soars towards the end, giving me a very different feel than Brenda's more restrained haiku.  I especially like the third one. (Interestingly, Paul Simon's composition drew deliberately from gospel music and that same "friend indeed.")

Thanks to Brenda, and stay tuned for more on friendship and kindness later this week.

*Ways to match-up poetry and music--take your pick:

·      your own poem with music that you've realized goes with it,

·      your own music with a poem that goes with it,

·      someone else's poem with someone else's music to match, 

·      song lyrics that you find particularly poetic,

·      poems written AS song lyrics

·      poems inspired by songs,

·      songs written about poems, 

·      poems written about songs, 

·      favorite nursery rhymes (which often have tunes),

·      and any other poetry-music combinations that make sense to you.

npm pmmu #11: fanfare for *The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary*!

Tomorrow is a very special day for my dear friend Laura Shovan...it's the birthday of her debut book The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary!  Laura has worked long and hard to get to this moment with many other poetic accomplishments along the way, but I think she might say that this book--conceived, developed, written, revised, agented, acquired, edited, marketed, listed and heralded everywhere already--is a Very Big Deal.

For the Poetry-Music Match-Up series I asked busy Laura to send me one poem from this novel-in-verse that would inspire a musical match-up.  Laura made an obvious choice!  It's in the voice of fifth-grader Ben Kidwell.

PERCUSSION POEM || Laura Shovan

Ben Kidwell

Every time

I try to write a poem,

the pencil goes

scritch a scratch.

My pencils

tick a tack

drumbeats

on my desk.

My feet boom

badoom the floor

like a heartbeat

always moving.

My words

take up a rhythm

like the wind

blowing outside.

Scritch a scratch

Tick a tack

Boom badoom

Outside outside

How can I write

when everything around

makes an interesting

sound?

It's not the first time this one poem has been matched to music, I recall.  Back in February, when she was making match-ups, Tabatha Yeatts got hold of "Percussion Poem" too.  Her music choice was an orchestral piece played by a Venezuelan youth orchestra, and mine--the more obvious choice for a poet grown in the medium of Top 40 radio--has a Latin American flavor too, despite being a thoroughly American disco hit before Gloria Estefan Miamified it.

Here's Vicki Sue Robinson with her 1976 hit "Turn the Beat Around."  Pretty sure Ben Kidwell would "love to hear percussion" too!  Did this earworm creep into Laura's head when Ben was trying to write a poem in class Scritch a scratch/Tick a tack/Boom badoom?

 posted to YouTube by Sirius80s

written by Gerald Jackson and Peter Jackson

 Hope that got your day going!  Come back tomorrow to stretch your musical boundaries with something completely different.

npm pmmu #10: love unknown

My dad joins us today--rather late, I'm afraid--to share his "all-time favorite poem set to music."  A musician himself (saxophone originally, and clarinet; these days oboe and recorder more often, and he sings darn well too), Bob Mordhorst enjoys many kinds of music and has come to appreciate a much wider range of poetry in the last decade (I'll claim a little responsibility for that!).

But he is foremost a man of God, a Lutheran pastor who says, "I can’t sing [this] without getting choked up at the words 'he is my friend, my friend indeed.' There are other musical settings to it, but in my opinion this is the perfect wedding of poem and music."

Here is the full text of this hymn with words composed in 1664 and the tune my dad loves composed later, in the 20th century.  You can read more about other musical connections at its very own Wikipedia entry.

My Song Is Love Unknown || Samuel Crossman

My song is love unknown,
My Saviour’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I,
That for my sake
My Lord should take
Frail flesh and die?

He came from His blest throne
Salvation to bestow;
But men made strange, and none
The longed-for Christ would know:
But O! my Friend,
My Friend indeed,
Who at my need
His life did spend.

Sometimes they strew His way,
And His sweet praises sing;
Resounding all the day
Hosannas to their King:
Then “Crucify!”
is all their breath,
And for His death
they thirst and cry.

Why, what hath my Lord done?
What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run,
He gave the blind their sight,
Sweet injuries!
Yet they at these
Themselves displease,
and ’gainst Him rise.

They rise and needs will have
My dear Lord made away;
A murderer they save,
The Prince of life they slay,
Yet cheerful He
to suffering goes,
That He His foes
from thence might free.

In life no house, no home,
My Lord on earth might have;
In death no friendly tomb,
But what a stranger gave.
What may I say?
Heav'n was his home;
But mine the tomb
Wherein he lay.

Here might I stay and sing,
No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King!
Never was grief like Thine.
This is my Friend,
in Whose sweet praise
I all my days
could gladly spend.

Thanks for participating, Dad, and for bringing the grandeur of the organ and the gift to my juicy little universe.

npm pmmu #8: ol' blue eyes

from The Alchemist's Kitchen

This month I'm posting daily Poetry-Music Match-Ups, and you're invited to join me! (See the bottom of the post  for ideas.)  When I don't have a crowd-sourced combo scheduled, I'll share one of my own many, many PMMUs!  If something comes to your mind, send it to me HERE.

Today Diane Mayr of Random Noodling is matching us up crooner-style.  She writes,"I love Frank Sinatra.  His interpretations of songs changed over his long career.  A good example of this is "East of the Sun and West of the Moon.""

From 1940 with the Jimmy Dorsey Band

and from 1960

Diane says, "I prefer the simpler, more innocent, 1940s version.  I wonder about how he might have sung it, though, in 1998 before he died?"

"Undone Song at Neap Tide" by Kathryn Starbuck (2005), strikes me as a look at a relationship that's gone beyond the "we'll share a dream of love, Dear," and has come out somewhere on the other side.

Undone Song at Neap Tide || Kathryn Starbuck

When the sun and moon were in quadrature, when   

the garden had become a wilderness and the clock refused to strike

When the old year died and the sand walked into

the sea with the neap tide

When you had been too long away and your old snowblue footprints

clotted and hesitated in the clay

When the worry of this undone song unsung so long

so loud my head I went inside and under to let the flood run free

*********************
From the bit of information Diane found about the poet, she appears to have come out grieving the death of her husband, but she also thinks the poem is about coming out into a life formerly unexplored. With Diane, I am "totally enchanted by the sound of the last stanza, and the meaning of the poem is almost irrelevant!"

Thank you, Diane--I know a lot of music, but Frank Sinatra's oeuvre is not in my musical file cabinet!  This is why I'd love to have you, Dear Reader, send me your own match-up--we all need to broaden our horizons, poetic and otherwise!

In case you've missed the rest of this week's Poetry-Music Match-ups and have some time to explore, scroll down or click the links.

April
1 Introduction and "Paul Simon reunion" with Violet Nesdoly
2 "When You Are Old" and "When I'm Sixty-Four" with Harry Yeatts
3 The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science and "She Blinded Me with Science"
4 "Martin Luther King Day" and "Pride (in the Name of Love)"
5 "I Lived" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" with Petrina Hollingsworth
6 "What Do You Believe a Poem Shd Do?" and "Cold Water"
7 "Color Feel" and "Roy G. Biv" with Mitch Friedman

Laura Putrid I mean Purdie Salas is our host today at Writing the World for Kids.  Wallow in the wonder of Poetry Friday!

Again, you are welcome to suggest a match-up--take your pick and send it to me!

·      your own poem with music that you've realized goes with it,

·      your own music with a poem that goes with it,

·      someone else's poem with someone else's music to match, 

·      song lyrics that you find particularly poetic,

·      poems written AS song lyrics

·      poems inspired by songs,

·      songs written about poems, 

·      poems written about songs, 

·      favorite nursery rhymes (which often have tunes),

·      and any other poetry-music combinations that make sense to you.

npm pmmu #7: colorful

This month I'm posting daily Poetry-Music Match-Ups, and you're invited to join me! (See the bottom of the post  for ideas.)  When I don't have a crowd-sourced combo scheduled, I'll share one of my own many, many PMMUs!  If something comes to your mind, send it to me HERE.


So, long ago I made the acquaintance of one Mitch Friedman, who has spent his life putting words and music together in the best handmade way.  I asked him to send me a match-up and he obliged with a favorite lyric from his children's album (beloved by our family during the goldfish-littered-minivan era) and someone else's song.

Color Feel || Mitch Friedman

Green gets me green with envy
blue makes me blue
red and I'm more than ready
to be like you

yellow and all my fellow senses warm up
aquamarine is sunscreen to make them stop

See the best I get is a color feel
and colors feel alright
yeah the best I get is a color feel
and colors feel out of sight!

Now I know that the world is not so
black and white for real
'cause the colors
oh the colors
yeah the colors,
how good they feel, oh . . .

Pink if a tulip and a tool looked the same?
Orange you glad an orange looks like its name?
Brown and I'm bround to groan and feel like dirt
purple's purplexing and makes me want to blurt

If the best you get is a color feel
well colors feel alright
yeah the best I get is a color feel
and colors feel out of sight!

 ******************

Mitch matches his lyric with this song from They Might Be Giants' album Here Comes Science (2009).

But I have to include Mitch's song too, which is whimsical and beautiful and, appropriately, full of emotions, including a wistful sadness, because Purple Burt is both invisible and color blind.  Read to the bottom of that linked page for interesting musician information!

I could listen to this a thousand times, really.  Words are all fine and good, said the poet, but words PLUS music?  What a really great idea, early humans!