I’d had enough of the Metal from the digital jukebox
Late at night, in the mostly empty bar
I walked over and put on Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s C’est la Vie
Lush, strings and flute trills, accordion, ringing picked acoustic guitar steel strings
Overwhelming choral background harmonies swell amid Greg Lake’s
Melodic clear voice and echoed cavernous in the bar and the waitress’ incredulity
Of kick-drum rolls thunder, growl and hollering stomp stark jarred shock
C’est la Vie’s lyrical echo labeled me through the subsequent months
Until COVID shut us down and there was no more bar or incredulous waitress
Funny, that the song bored me in the Detroit arena when I first heard it at 18
While Keith Emerson strolled in front of a set depicting lamplit French streets
Playing an accordion to a restless, chattering crowd, my last year of high school
And they got away with C’est la Vie and the Motor City packed Cobo Hall—
Home of Ted Nugent and Alice Cooper—in fact, had the crowd on their feet,
And a Billboard article called them Heavy Metal with Keith Emerson’s orchestral
Piano Concerto no. 1 on the vinyl album featuring C’est la Vie and Aaron Copeland.
I don’t know how they got away with it. I couldn’t get away with it that evening
But there was Yes, then, and Ian Anderson invented rock flute and Death Metal
Hadn’t arrived yet like in the incredulous bar I played echoing C’est la Vie
Keith Emerson had enough of us that concert and played Nutrocker twice in a row
—A rocked-out version he didn’t write of Tchaikovsky’s March of the Toy Soldiers
“Did you like it?” Keith taunted, “Would you like to hear it again?”
And played it again note for note and the crowd cheered a second time
I wondered if a girl in my high school named Marca liked Emerson, Lake & Palmer
I asked her and she said, “I like Nutrocker.” Despite those packed concert arenas,
Keith Emerson never got the validation from Aaron Copeland that he wanted
Writing Poetry after Youth
02 Jan 2021 2 Comments
in Uncategorized Tags: alteration, art, criticism, essay, inspiration, maturity, poetry, style, T. S. Eliot, youth
Any poet, if he is to survive as a writer beyond his twenty-fifth year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express. This is disconcerting to that public which likes a poet to spin his whole work out of the feelings of his youth;–T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry
T. S. Eliot wrote this insightful comment when he was 29. He had written The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but had not yet written The Waste Land. It is a remarkable comment, since Eliot, himself, hadn’t “altered.” His own style was still developing and his arguably best work was yet to come. From my own personal experience, I think that there is something in this observation of Eliot’s.
Some time in my early 30’s my passion for poetry had dried up. Those strong feelings of youth were being replaced by different motivations. As Eliot writes, after 25, the poet “will have different emotions to express.” It is fair to say that in early adulthood/late youth, emotions ruled my life. But as I aged, deliberation and understanding the large question of how the world works and the still larger question of how the map of living unfolds became increasingly important. So the verbal filigree of young passion yielded to more contemplative works.
However, just beginning to tackle different life issues, expression proved a fresh start on language. So my output was inferior during this period. I remember a friend who liked my earlier poetry once exclaim to me, “You’ve lost it!” And I had. I had mostly lost youth.
But as time progressed, I became accustomed to the challenges that life throws at adults and my writing began to mature, too. I was aware of the loss of my muse in my early 30’s. I knew that I wasn’t writing very well. I knew that my friend was right, for then. In fact, I had almost quit writing altogether; I did precipitously stop writing for long spells. But I couldn’t stop writing. A new style developed for the new person I was since youth. Of the poems I’ve published, ¾ are “post-30’s” poems;–that is, poetry I wrote after the age of 30. That which was lost was found!
Eliot’s style underwent quite an alteration as he aged, as well. As a literature major once told me, “The jury’s still out on Four Quartets” (1936-1942—when Eliot was aged 48-52). But the jury returned a verdict on The Cocktail Party (premiered 1949); utter failure. The difference in Eliot’s later work, compared with that of his earlier work, though, is not only a matter of Eliot’s age. He had also undergone a religious conversion and meant to express it in his work. This is a major “alteration!” And even if Eliot’s artistry matched his new spirituality, the critical reception would have been skewed by the counter-religious zeitgeist of the modern age.
Writing poetry is a dance between grasping language, grasping life, and grasping art. All this is likely to undergo revision and rewrites with the stages of living one will experience here, and perhaps, hereafter.
VIVALDI’S FOUR SEASONS IN 1974
01 Jan 2021 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Auden, Beethoven, Bernstein, commercials, Four Seasons, free verse, Halleluiah Chorus, Handel, poem, poetry, Rolling Stones, Stevens, Superman, Vivaldi
It’s not like I’ve seen it all before
When I was 20, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was all the rage and it was 1974
That was when I first discovered it and bought a vinyl album
I was discovering it all and everything was new to me
I was carrying it out of my suitcase, which would have warped it
In the Detroit Greyhound Station and was talking with a girl, a music student
On her way to Oberlin College in Ohio and a young black man came up,
He sang some notes, and asked, “Is that how The Four Seasons goes?”
Everything was all new to me, like how different Toledo, Ohio is from
Livonia, Michigan, I thought, gazing absently around in the cavernous
Toledo Amtrak Station, the winter wind moaning though cracks in the doors
As I waited to ride the train’s sway and rhythmic clacks across America
East to Boston, also different from Livonia and the family I grew up in,
Discovering the big city. I’ve heard The Four Seasons in three movies.
In my mid-40’s, I discovered the Heiliger Dankgesang an die Gottheit
In Beethoven’s A-Minor String Quartet, which I also heard in a movie.
Way back I’d asked Jimmy, a jazz sax player, about Beethoven’s string quartets
When I didn’t know much about things, and was hungry to discover it all
And was figuring things out. Jimmy and I disagreed about Mozart;
He said Mozart was a real entertainer, but to me Mozart was all tights,
Powdered wigs, silk slippers, gilt palaces and effeminate, effete nobles
I’ve since discovered Mozart’s startling harmonies and I’m with Jimmy, now
And bought a Compact Disk Recording box set of Mozart’s “Hayden Quartets”
And heard the orchestra play the Hayden Quartets at the exec’s party in Die Hard
Or was it The Four Seasons, or both—I haven’t seen Die Hard again for a while
In Thor, the orchestra played The Four Seasons at that Embassy ball Loki crashed
I wonder why no one else has noticed that John Williams’ Superman music sounds
Exactly like Strauss’ Tod und Verklärung or Bernstein’s “There’s a Time for Us”
In West Side Story is the Adagio movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 5
Which they both studied either in conservatories or in later professional life
My eyes welled up with tears which I blinked away in the public concert hall
That evening I heard the whole Messiah for the first time and I didn’t know why
Everybody stood up when the choir sang The Halleluiah Chorus to conclude
Part II of the whole Oratorio, not just the soundtrack to so many commercials
It’s not like I’ve seen it all before. I poke around in Auden and Stevens, authors
I don’t know, and play The Rolling Stones on my keyboard and learn about rock,
Entertain myself with Thomas Wolfe and even Shakespeare, sometimes, and
Not really watch TV. It isn’t that I keep learning, nor like I’ve seen it all before.
More a matter of why it doesn’t feel like everything is new to me
BRONTOSAURUS HEAD
27 Dec 2020 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Albertasaurus, Apatosaurus, art, Brontosaurus, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Frost, muse, oil, painting, paleontologist, poem, Stevens, syntax, Tyrannosaurus, Tyrrell Museum
The head of the Brontosaurus erupted in debate spewing money
Sufficient to make some paleontologists’ living for a generation
Disputes between Diplodocus and Apatosaurus founded careers
Like echoing museums and marble floors endowed at great expense
By Foundation money dug up from trusts held of bones in marble mausoleums
Bequeathing Jurassic skeletons cast in plaster (priceless petrified bones coffered)
Camarasaurs and Albertasaurs petrified along with zooplankton and algae’s
Fossilized extract fueling the Canadian economy in that same province holding
The Tyrrell Museum’s complete Tyrannosaurus skeleton with its detached head
Heavy as unintelligible words detached from syntax and evacuated of the themes
Wallace Stevens faulted Robert Frost’s poetry for—poetry made neither a living—
Who spilled words on paper like colors on an abstract painting’s canvass evacuated
Of recognizable content, more art history than paleontology, also palaeontology—
Unrecognized by spellcheck as an extinct word dug up and displayed in a muse
MEDIA CHRISTIANS AND CHRISTMAS EVE
24 Dec 2020 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Buddhists, Christians, Christmas Eve, Evangelicals, harmony, Hindus, Jesus, Jews, love, media, Muslims, peace, Swedenborgians
Today is Christmas Eve. Christians celebrate Christmas. I don’t wish to impose my holy day on the rest of the world, but it seems like that’s the way things are going, these days. Nevertheless, I am grateful to live in a free society that allows me to celebrate according to my religious tradition, as I think all religions should. I called tech support for my computer a while back and got a tech in India. He turned down the volume on his end to dampen the background noise from the Durga-Puja festival which was going on in his neighborhood. He and I had a wonderful conversation about Hinduism, which I had studied in grad school. I even have a statuette of Sarasvati on my desk—the Goddess of learning, music, and poetry.
I self-identify as a Christian. A Christian of the Swedenborgian Denomination. Let’s establish that from the get-go. Also, I am a Christian pastor. But what does that mean? What does that mean to you? What does that mean to me? It may very well be that what it means to me is not what it means to you. The operative question is who gets to define what Christians are?
Unfortunately, I believe that the media get to define what Christians are. News media tell stories about Christians—often in relation to politics. And I think that a lot of people get their ideas about what Christians are from new stories. However, we need to understand that the media are profit-driven enterprises. Their reporting has to sell. I’ve spoken with journalists who say that anger and outrage are good “hooks” to draw in viewers or readers. If that is true, then the Christians we will encounter in media may well be Christians who generate outrage, are outrageous. I hope that, as a Christian, I do not generate outrage. At least I try not to.
Then there are Evangelicals. I have issues with evangelism, itself. I’m sure that Evangelicals are as sincere in their faith as am I, but I tend to resent people trying to make me think as they do. I am a student of religions. So I have a keen interest in others’ understandings of ultimate reality. But I prefer to learn about others by inquiry, not by their imposition upon my free thought. You can see Evangelicals on street corners yelling at people and shoving tracts at you. Since this kind of Christian is loud and prominent, many define Christians by them. My frustration with this is probably evident. Also, there are televangelists. Anybody can turn on their television and watch a program featuring a Christian preacher. Often, perhaps usually, televangelists tend to be Evangelicals, which I am not. I have a friend who owns a multi-million-dollar cigar company. He always tells me that I should become a televangelist. He says that that is where all the money is. He also dated an Evangelical Christian for a while, and keeps telling me what he thinks Christians believe, though he is not a believer in any faith that I know of. But I don’t hold to a lot of the tenets his former girlfriend held to, and I didn’t go into Christian ministry to make a lot of money. My Christianity has little in common with televangelists.
For me, Christianity means living by Jesus’ teachings about love. And I understand that to mean love for people inside and outside one’s own belief system. The Good Samaritan was a Samaritan—a race despised by the Jewish Orthodoxy of which Jesus was a member, but not a strict follower. This tells me that Jesus promoted religions other than His own, even religions despised by members of His own Jewish Orthodoxy. So for me, Christian love extends to all peoples of good-will: Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Jews, atheists, and peoples of good-will whom I haven’t mentioned. And love seeks to establish friendships, and to promote good-will. When I say that I am a Christian, sometimes I worry that people will understand that to mean I am a media Christian, who seem to get all the press, or an Evangelical. Practicing Christianity for me means seeking to find good in every situation and to be an agent for that good. But I practice quietly, privately, and some might even say in stealth mode. My Muslim friends, my Jewish friends, my Zoroastrian friends, and my Hindu friends enjoy my company, I think, and I their company. That kind of harmony is how I understand Christian love, is the kind of Christian I try to be. I am a definition of Christianity as much as are televangelists, Evangelicals, Catholics, or media Christians. Maybe that kind of Christian, and there are lots like me, doesn’t make for good news stories. Any more than the moderate peace-loving Muslims I know make for good news stories. But that’s no reason for me to stop calling myself Christian.
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are times especially for me to relax and let love be, to let myself be an agent of love, and to remember and renew old friendships, to enjoy family. As a Christian in this world, it is a time for me to reflect on Jesus’ friendship with Pharisees, tax collectors, prostitutes, rabbis, Samaritans, and Lebanese. In a broken and fragmented world, Jesus yet has a message of healing and unity for Christians and/or others of good-will.
A DIALOGUE OF UNITED STATES HISTORY
23 Dec 2020 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: criminals, Europe, First Nations, Jefferson, Pilgrims, poem, poetry, Protestants, slavery, Spanish Catholic, treaties, United States
I told the French tourist I met in a bar that he had it all wrong
He said that the United States was founded by criminals kicked out of Europe
Later, I read about forced labor in Virginia imposed on British criminals
Deported British criminals condemned to indentured servitude in the United States
Who bought land and settled upon serving out their sentence
I told the French tourist that it was Pilgrims seeking freedom in the New World
He didn’t know that America was a Protestant colony
That began in the east and conquered the west
Despite all those Spanish Catholic city names already in the west when they got there
The settled land, missions, and mansions confiscated upon their arrival
Colonists defined the Indigenous Peoples in categories deported from European philosophy,
The Pilgrims’ descendants wrote peace contracts with fraudulent intent
Breach of contract, broken word, and the deported First Nations are defined as criminals
Forts, armies fighting to keep the broken peace treaties on the warpath
And yet each year we fondle the Thanksgiving story about Pilgrims and benevolent Indians
British Protestants founded the new colonies in the name of African blood
And enslaved African human beings laid the bricks of Jefferson’s Monticello
Who, in turn, wrote them out of his Declaration of Independence
While European criminals stole, sold, bought human lives and established these United States:
Conceived in slavery and dedicated to the proposition of disparity: of, by, and for criminals
PLOUGHMEN DIG NOT FOR ME
22 Dec 2020 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: art, dreams, making, material, money, music, poem, real, reality
Businessmen do not drink my wine
The man in the suit has not bought a new car
From any profit he made off my dreams
Though dreams I have, have dreamed, dream
I’ve imbibed conventional wisdom’s grasp on the vitality of dreams
That dreams make a life out of otherwise existence
Aethereal dreams awaken into materiality, matter’s reality;–all real
Nobody can doubt the reality of a dream and live
One doesn’t dream in terms written by dollars and status
Defined in the lexicon legislated by ledger books
Businessmen withdraw from intangibles that weigh golden hopes
Dream reality resists materialism and yet materializes
Whole symphonies deconstruct as ones and zeros in a cloud somewhere
And Bach’s C-Moll Passacaglia is pulses of air
But digital scans and air differentials don’t explain to ears
The mystery that is a melody—even if construed through standing wave proportions
Sometimes my pen dreams in ink dots materializing on a musical staff
The keys on my piano reverberate beats my heart feels
Manifesting the immaterial into the physical world
While air waves question what they, themselves, are doing
At other times, words grow out of my consciousness
Planted in ink and tree pulp tending to a poem’s making
My pen glides across the blank, white sheet in dark lines
To become a dream of some distant reader in my mind: a virtual reality
Nobody pays me for my dreams. No.
I grunt and sweat under a heavy timeclock on my back
No ploughman digs earth for me
I’ve dug my own footings on which the whole world is built for me
My grandmother told me I wasn’t very good at making money
When I was an impoverished grad student
Even now, I don’t make much money, nor have creditable prospects
Yet I’m good at making, dreaming, making dreams live
Making for me is as making money for businessmen
I’m good at living without much money, without much interest in making money
Dreams pay me more than dollars, when I have money
I lack really for nothing but dreams fulfill
THE MYSTICISM OF US
21 Dec 2020 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: heaven, love, poem, rhyme, time, timeless
It’s a strange mysticism, about you
Sometimes it’s like you’re not another person
We’re so close, I’m you and you’re me, too
One current into which two streams run
There was a time before you, which was no time
Time began the time of our lives blending
The ordinary world became sublime
And moments, days, and years have no ending
That space in which the clock’s hands cease to move
Is when I’m with you; then time is our own
And we make heaven of our faith and love
In a kingdom bounded by our union
I got by before you, you before me
But time was meaningless; moments absent
Looking back, I see my life as empty
Successes seemed so unimportant
All that changed when you dawned like the sun
On the darkest morning of the year
And our two lives intertwined into one
Each in each other makes our heaven here
WINTER INDOORS
17 Dec 2020 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: autumn, candle, Christmas, COVID, flame, indoors, language, poem, poetry, Solstice, winter
Outside, the snow witnesses the cold
Early on the clock, darkness falls
This, the Solstice, the year’s darkest day
When we anticipate the coming of Light
The light of a small candle flame
Set before a Sarasvati statuette, Goddess
For students, musicians, poets; for me
In my indoors, today, I contemplate poetry
Made not of special poetic language only
Or a language obfuscated out of meaning
Rather, rhetoric coalesced around meaning
Truth in perfect words
Musings shining in my small Christmas tree’s lights
Every cloth gnome, owl, snowman, and mouse on it a gift
A cup of tea on the end-table next me
A pad of paper, my favorite pen, and ink on the page
Settling into a season I’m reluctant to accept
Seeing it coming in the early autumn sunset
On an outdoor patio of a favorite coffee shop
Thinking, then, about the candle, cup of tea, Christmas lights
Just as well, I don’t have any money
And COVID has closed most businesses
Locked us down, mandated us homebound
I take refreshment in the piercing candle flame
COFFEE HOUSE
15 Dec 2020 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Coffee House, Dylan, E. Power Biggs, electric, folk, fugue, Jethro Tull, mambo, poem, poetry, reflection, rock concerts, Simon and Garfunkel, techno, time
Way back, I went to one Coffee House
Folk music, acoustic guitar, harpsichord
Hot chocolate, and coffee; dim lights
The only Coffee House I ever went to
they don’t have them, now
Simon and Garfunkel; Peter, Paul, and Mary
And there was Dylan—Coffee Houses and folk music
Poetic, political, sensitive, intellectual, gently passionate
Or so I hear, but for the one I experienced
passing away as I came of age
I knew rock concerts in stadia, electric, loud
I went to them when they were underground
(Jethro Tull barely filled the cement floor with folding chairs)
Now rock concerts, rock-stars are mainstream industry
underground surfacing into pop-culture dominance
Music calling to my youthful intentions heavy and I followed
Bore down on scales, arpeggios, mambos, and fugues
Theory filled my interests; I practiced hours daily in late youth
Until two roads diverged; I divested my passion of full-time art work
conscious submerging into secret recesses, private
In maturity I must modulate my practice time
Rest and build up piano-specific muscles otherwise unused
Not unlike the arthritis in the great E. Power Biggs’ Bach fingers
My wrists, shoulder, hurt, ribs stiffen
to replay scales, chords, changes
Modulation of effort’s tonality
Depressing keys, depressing decrepitude
Making music’s exercise caution
Within all this beauty, this duet of body and keystroke
we all call music in our cultural forms’ venues
I recently checked out a new club
I couldn’t follow any pattern to the loud bass tones
A woman wrapped herself in a flag while singing
A song I couldn’t pick out any real melody: only notes
looks like things are going that way now
I went in and out of a club
Lights flashing, beats oscillating
I think they call it Techno
Bodies bumping into shots dancing
Looks like things are going that way now
David Fekete 