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Re: "Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan : Poetry and the Popular Song."
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Will Dockery
Jul 21, 2018, 4:59:48 PM7/21/18
to
Stuart Leichter wrote:
> In article <MPG.19f407897...@news.east.earthlink.net>,
> of...@earthlink.net wrote:
>
> > bun...@bunghole.com wrote:
> > >2) Why this pathetic need to give songwriters respectability by
> > >classifying
> > >them as poets? Why can't you just let them exist on their own terms,
> > >as
> > >singer-songwriters?
>
> For one thing, it was the only way to get the good pop and folk
> songwriters past the school curriculum police. Textbook publishers were
> helpful. There are analogies as well, including movies and jazz, and their
> cultural triumphs. I'm surprised that "respectability" is still an issue
> 30-some years later.
>
> Good exchange, guys.
Bingo.
Stuart Leichter nailed it many times more often than not.
> > As a sometimes singer/songwriter and distinct poet, I entirely agree.
> > Only rarely have I successfully set poems to music, whereas I've written
> > songs independently from poetry because they are so different.
> >
> > >The answer to the latter is snobbery and idleness. Snobbery, because
> > >people
> > >who say songwriting is really poetry see poetry as a higher art with
> > >all the
> > >cachet that implies.
> >
> > To me, all art attempts to describe or envision reality through a
> > stylistic language of gestures. Poetry's gestural vocabulary is usually
> > so arcane to modern readers that it ends up being an acquired taste.
> > Many obscure songwriters with equally obscure and obtuse references
> > remain cultish precisely because they are acquired tastes demanding
> > relistening and reinterpretation. Many ancient poets understood the
> > distinctions between ornate poetry and simpler song. For one, song is
> > intended to have its language digested upon the first listening, even if
> > the listener thinks about possible interpretations of metaphors and/or
> > symbolism afterwards.
> >
> > >Idleness, because if poetry is the form that songwriting secretly
> > >aspires
> > >to, why don't they go and try to find out about the best poetry?
> > >Because
> > >they can't be bothered; the best poetry takes too much effort to read
> > >and
> > >understand. For all their relativistic bleating about self-expression,
> > >they
> > >have a vague feeling, an instinct that there's a scale of values in all
> > >art
> > >forms, but their only solution to that is to see pop music as poetry,
> > >but
> > >they're unwilling to actually explore that proposition.
> >
> > I think the proposition was indeed explored in that piece. Dylan and
> > Cohen aren't typical songwriters; they're lyrical self expressionists,
> > far more complex than the courtly troubadours who may have inspired
> > them. They are, in a sense, pretentious because they ostensibly sought
> > to be poets but never published poetry before setting it to music.
> >
> > >There's a good reason why pop music isn't poetry. It's too far from
> > >the
> > >Apollonian and too close to the Dionysian. Its mimesis takes place at
> > >that
> > >end of the scale where jouissance is found. It appeals to the heart far
> > >more
> > >than it appeals to the brain. Poetry, even oral poetry, tries to
> > >balance
> > >its appeals; pop music doesn't bother.
> >
> > I think Suzanne Vega, Randy Newman, Jonatha Brooke, Ani Difranco, David
> > Wilcox, Dar Williams and Jeff Buckley bothered.
> >
> > >All of which seems to suggest that poetry must be better than pop
> > >music.
> > >But that's something I don't agree with. Pop music is different from
> > >poetry.
> >
> > Absolutely. But I think there is popular and classical poetry, just as
> > there are popular and classical musics in many cultures. The
> > differences between them tend to be obvious. The popular is simpler,
> > less elegant, refined and indirect than the classical because its
> > communicative intend has to be more literal.
> >
> > Orlando
Good points, all... and good reading...
> In article <MPG.19f407897...@news.east.earthlink.net>,
> of...@earthlink.net wrote:
>
> > bun...@bunghole.com wrote:
> > >2) Why this pathetic need to give songwriters respectability by
> > >classifying
> > >them as poets? Why can't you just let them exist on their own terms,
> > >as
> > >singer-songwriters?
>
> For one thing, it was the only way to get the good pop and folk
> songwriters past the school curriculum police. Textbook publishers were
> helpful. There are analogies as well, including movies and jazz, and their
> cultural triumphs. I'm surprised that "respectability" is still an issue
> 30-some years later.
>
> Good exchange, guys.
Bingo.
Stuart Leichter nailed it many times more often than not.
> > As a sometimes singer/songwriter and distinct poet, I entirely agree.
> > Only rarely have I successfully set poems to music, whereas I've written
> > songs independently from poetry because they are so different.
> >
> > >The answer to the latter is snobbery and idleness. Snobbery, because
> > >people
> > >who say songwriting is really poetry see poetry as a higher art with
> > >all the
> > >cachet that implies.
> >
> > To me, all art attempts to describe or envision reality through a
> > stylistic language of gestures. Poetry's gestural vocabulary is usually
> > so arcane to modern readers that it ends up being an acquired taste.
> > Many obscure songwriters with equally obscure and obtuse references
> > remain cultish precisely because they are acquired tastes demanding
> > relistening and reinterpretation. Many ancient poets understood the
> > distinctions between ornate poetry and simpler song. For one, song is
> > intended to have its language digested upon the first listening, even if
> > the listener thinks about possible interpretations of metaphors and/or
> > symbolism afterwards.
> >
> > >Idleness, because if poetry is the form that songwriting secretly
> > >aspires
> > >to, why don't they go and try to find out about the best poetry?
> > >Because
> > >they can't be bothered; the best poetry takes too much effort to read
> > >and
> > >understand. For all their relativistic bleating about self-expression,
> > >they
> > >have a vague feeling, an instinct that there's a scale of values in all
> > >art
> > >forms, but their only solution to that is to see pop music as poetry,
> > >but
> > >they're unwilling to actually explore that proposition.
> >
> > I think the proposition was indeed explored in that piece. Dylan and
> > Cohen aren't typical songwriters; they're lyrical self expressionists,
> > far more complex than the courtly troubadours who may have inspired
> > them. They are, in a sense, pretentious because they ostensibly sought
> > to be poets but never published poetry before setting it to music.
> >
> > >There's a good reason why pop music isn't poetry. It's too far from
> > >the
> > >Apollonian and too close to the Dionysian. Its mimesis takes place at
> > >that
> > >end of the scale where jouissance is found. It appeals to the heart far
> > >more
> > >than it appeals to the brain. Poetry, even oral poetry, tries to
> > >balance
> > >its appeals; pop music doesn't bother.
> >
> > I think Suzanne Vega, Randy Newman, Jonatha Brooke, Ani Difranco, David
> > Wilcox, Dar Williams and Jeff Buckley bothered.
> >
> > >All of which seems to suggest that poetry must be better than pop
> > >music.
> > >But that's something I don't agree with. Pop music is different from
> > >poetry.
> >
> > Absolutely. But I think there is popular and classical poetry, just as
> > there are popular and classical musics in many cultures. The
> > differences between them tend to be obvious. The popular is simpler,
> > less elegant, refined and indirect than the classical because its
> > communicative intend has to be more literal.
> >
> > Orlando
Good points, all... and good reading...
Will Dockery
Jul 24, 2018, 1:48:48 PM7/24/18
to
Here you go Corey...
Read up, there will be a quiz later.
:)
Read up, there will be a quiz later.
:)
Will Dockery
Jul 24, 2018, 2:40:15 PM7/24/18
to
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
On Sunday, July 22, 2018 at 8:05:07 PM UTC-4, Will Dockery wrote:
> Michael Pendragon wrote:
> >
> > IOW: You've been pulling this "Fuck poetry -- let's all talk about Bob
> > Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen" shit for decades.
>
> We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and
> Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with
> music:
>
> https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Patti_Smith
>
> "Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946)[1] is an American
> poet, singer-songwriter, and visual artist..."
>
> https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
>
> "Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016) was
> a Canadian poet, singer-songwriter, musician, and novelist. His work often
> explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal
> relationships..."
>
> > I'm with Stuart on this one. Folk rock and poetry are entirely
> > different categories. You and your friends seem to think that excluding
> > folkies from the title of "poet" constitutes some sort of negative,
> > qualitative judgement. It is nothing of the sort. Bob Dylan is a
> > highly influential folkie. He's not a good poet. He's not a bad poet.
> > He's not a poet at all.
>
> Everywhere but you says Dylan is a poet:
>
> https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Bob_Dylan
>
> "Bob Dylan (born May 24, 1941) is an American poet, singer-songwriter,
> musician, and painter..."
>
Rule of Thumb:
If a song lyric can stand on its own, it's poetry.
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You're an English expert, Michael...
Do you know why the phrase "rule of thumb" is offensive to a great number of
people?
news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
On Sunday, July 22, 2018 at 8:05:07 PM UTC-4, Will Dockery wrote:
> Michael Pendragon wrote:
> >
> > IOW: You've been pulling this "Fuck poetry -- let's all talk about Bob
> > Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen" shit for decades.
>
> We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and
> Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with
> music:
>
> https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Patti_Smith
>
> "Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946)[1] is an American
> poet, singer-songwriter, and visual artist..."
>
> https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
>
> "Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016) was
> a Canadian poet, singer-songwriter, musician, and novelist. His work often
> explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal
> relationships..."
>
> > I'm with Stuart on this one. Folk rock and poetry are entirely
> > different categories. You and your friends seem to think that excluding
> > folkies from the title of "poet" constitutes some sort of negative,
> > qualitative judgement. It is nothing of the sort. Bob Dylan is a
> > highly influential folkie. He's not a good poet. He's not a bad poet.
> > He's not a poet at all.
>
> Everywhere but you says Dylan is a poet:
>
> https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Bob_Dylan
>
> "Bob Dylan (born May 24, 1941) is an American poet, singer-songwriter,
> musician, and painter..."
>
Rule of Thumb:
If a song lyric can stand on its own, it's poetry.
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You're an English expert, Michael...
Do you know why the phrase "rule of thumb" is offensive to a great number of
people?
Earl Browder
Jul 24, 2018, 4:27:56 PM7/24/18
to
The misunderstood 'rule of thumb'
Misconception: Many feminists for years thought the phrase "rule of thumb" referred to British common law's tolerance of wife-beating.
Sun Journal, April 17, 1998|By Stephanie Shapiro | Stephanie Shapiro,SUN STAFF
Sharon Fenick first heard the figure of speech "rule of thumb" cited as a sexist pejorative during her freshman year at Harvard seven years ago.
The phrase was invoked in a lecture as an example of domestic abuse permitted by British common law. The rule of thumb, according to the professor, was a law that allowed a man to beat his wife so long as the rod used was no thicker than his thumb. But over the centuries, the term had evolved into vernacular for an "approximate measure."
"It sounded very believable to me," says the 24-year-old Fenick, now in her third year of law school at the University of Chicago. "I was having my first contact with feminist thought and [the explanation] was very impressive to me. It was one of those things I really remember that spread around. I can't remember when I found out it wasn't true."
Unlike Fenick, untold historians, feminists and legal experts are unaware that the folk etymology for "rule of thumb" is false. For them, the notion of a "rule of thumb" makes perfect sense, originating as it allegedly does from a legal system they see as misogynistic.
In January, wordsmith William Safire debunked "the rule of thumb's" false etymology in his New York Times Magazine column. The phrase had been called to his attention by the president of George Washington University, where a female student had denounced its use by an administrator remarking on budget problems in the student newspaper.
In gender- and women's-studies courses across the country, the phrase is still cited as an example of unconscious acceptance and tacit condoning of sexist policy. A computer search for the use of "rule of thumb" and "wife" in the same newspaper sentence reveals many letters to the editor in recent years from women irate about the casual appearance of the figure of speech in news articles. In a televised news analysis about domestic violence in 1994, even commentator Cokie Roberts noted the misconception.
The false etymology persists despite the Oxford English Dictionary definition: "A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical method." The OED dates the phrase's first reference to 1692.
In the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, "rule of thumb" is additionally defined as a method by which brewers once tested the temperature of a batch of beer: They dipped a thumb in the brew.
During her first year of law school, Fenick, a wordsmith herself, was determined to unravel the history of the "rule of thumb." Did the phrase stem from a specific rule? Was there such a rule? Even if there wasn't a rule, did an infamous judge's ruling establish "thumbstick" guidelines for would-be wife beaters?
She discovered that while "rule of thumb" was not accepted law, there was evidence aplenty that the British legal system and the American legal system it inspired were unkind to women. "I found out that in the 1800s [wife beating] really was a debatable proposition," she says.
Wife beating is acknowledged in Blackstone's "Commentaries," and many court rulings sanctioned the practice. But whether the "rule of thumb" was accepted as law was a separate matter.
Fenick traced the earliest possible reference to the 17th century, when one Dr. Marmaduke Coghill, an Irish judge, held that a man who had beaten his wife "with such a switch as the one he held in his hand" was within his matrimonial privilege.
In the 18th century a judge named Francis Buller, dubbed "Judge Thumb" by the famous caricaturist James Gillray, was said to have allowed that a man could beat his wife, as long as the punitive stick was no thicker than his thumb. (A witty countess was said to have asked the judge to measure her husband's thumb exactly, so that she might know the precise extent of his privilege.)
Fenick also found three 19th-century cases in America that mention the "rule of thumb," including an 1868 ruling in North Carolina that "the defendant had a right to whip his wife with a switch no larger than his thumb."
Buller's "thumbstick" opinion and the three American rulings Fenick found were intriguing -- and damning -- but did not constitute definitive proof that the rule of thumb was derived from British common law.
As Fenick, encouraged by a law professor, considered publishing her findings, she found that Henry Ansgar Kelly, a University of California English professor, had beaten her to the punch. His "Rule of Thumb and the Folklaw of the Husband's Stick" appeared in the September 1994 Journal of Legal Education.
Kelly, much to Fenick's disappointment, had covered the same territory as she. (Although she proudly observes that his article overlooked the earliest reference to "rule of thumb" by Coghill.) Three and half years later, Safire would rely entirely on Kelly's article to make his case in his column.
Fenick's efforts were not in vain, however. In response to a query from a correspondent to the alt.folkore.urban newsgroup linked to the Urban Legends Web site, Fenick posted her article where it is now part of the site's permanent archives. Since its inception, the site has expanded its mission from probing the genesis and spread of urban legends to "confirming or disproving beliefs and facts of all kinds, including origin of vernacular."
"Rule of thumb" and other figures of speech can work much the same way that urban legends do: They may appear mysteriously, spread spontaneously and contain elements of humor or horror. And, like urban legends, a figure of speech may contain a grain of emotional, if not actual, truth.
Thus it was easy at first for Fenick and others to believe that the "rule of thumb" was founded in common law. Patricia A. Turner, a University of California at Davis folklorist, well understands how a falsehood can acquire the mantle of truth.
In "I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture," Turner examines the way allegations of forced birth control, corporate collusion with the Ku Klux Klan, drug distribution targeted at urban areas and other anti-black conspiracy theories circulating in the African-American community are based on racist realities and serve as a form of resistance against white oppression.
The same theory can be applied to the rule of thumb, Turner says. A text may be proved to be inaccurate or false, but "if it reflects some deeper truth in society, it doesn't go away." The term "rule of thumb" may "not have that specific etymological origin, but men have dominated women in workplaces and in homes and in virtually every setting. It speaks to a deeper truth."
Students of women's history who want to research possibly apocryphal ideas are also at a disadvantage because they "don't have the paper trail that more mainstream areas of academic discipline have," Turner says. "Sometimes it's more difficult to get to the bottom of something."
That said, Turner acknowledges that it is "very sloppy for an academic to pass on misinformation." Once a theory such as the inaccurate history of the "rule of thumb" has been debunked, it can backfire on those promoting it, she says. "If someone has read it who knows it is false, everything gets discredited on that level. So based on one falsehood, a whole history can be challenged."
That is what concerned scholars and social critics say happened when Christina Hoff Sommers debunked the "rule of thumb" in her 1994 book, "Who Stole Feminism? How Women have Betrayed Women." Sommers finds the earliest misuse of the phrase in a 1976 National Organization for Women report and uses it to bolster her case against domestic-violence statistics.
The feminist rush to brandish the "rule of thumb" as justification for their crusade, Turner suggests, may inadvertently have provided Sommers and her sympathizers with the ideal ammunition to discredit the same cause.
As for Fenick, she received a nice letter from Kelly, who learned RTC of her research after the Safire piece ran. She has written him back, and hopes to hear soon what he thinks about her Coghill reference.
Pub Date: 4/17/98
nate
Jul 24, 2018, 6:34:16 PM7/24/18
to
On Tuesday, July 24, 2018 at 4:27:56 PM UTC-4, Earl Browder wrote:
>
> The phrase was invoked in a lecture as an example of domestic abuse permitted by British common law. The rule of thumb, according to the professor, was a law that allowed a man to beat his wife so long as the rod used was no thicker than his thumb. But over the centuries, the term had evolved into vernacular for an "approximate measure."
And then we have Mick Jagger's "Under my thumb"...hmmm.
>
> The phrase was invoked in a lecture as an example of domestic abuse permitted by British common law. The rule of thumb, according to the professor, was a law that allowed a man to beat his wife so long as the rod used was no thicker than his thumb. But over the centuries, the term had evolved into vernacular for an "approximate measure."
- nate
Will Dockery
Jul 27, 2018, 2:42:47 AM7/27/18
to
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:6675ed1c-4e80-40ba...@googlegroups.com...
No, was it on Scopes?
Will Dockery
Jul 27, 2018, 9:58:27 AM7/27/18
to
"nate" wrote in message
news:e434e3c7-25b9-4a1e...@googlegroups.com...
Great song, but my, my, such childish spit Mick had in his youth...
news:e434e3c7-25b9-4a1e...@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery
Jul 27, 2018, 10:14:06 AM7/27/18
to
"Earl Browder" wrote in message
news:4c381c37-c066-4a68...@googlegroups.com...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fascinating read, thanks, Earl.
news:4c381c37-c066-4a68...@googlegroups.com...
Fascinating read, thanks, Earl.
Will Dockery
Jul 27, 2018, 11:42:13 AM7/27/18
to
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:d30a18df-648b-4c30...@googlegroups.com...
>On Sunday, July 22, 2018 at 11:28:58 AM UTC-4, Will Dockery wrote:
> Stuart Leichter wrote:
> > In article <MPG.19f407897...@news.east.earthlink.net>,
> > of...@earthlink.net wrote:
> >
> > > bun...@bunghole.com wrote:
> > > >2) Why this pathetic need to give songwriters respectability by
> > > >classifying
> > > >them as poets? Why can't you just let them exist on their own terms,
> > > >as
> > > >singer-songwriters?
> >
> > For one thing, it was the only way to get the good pop and folk
> > songwriters past the school curriculum police. Textbook publishers were
> > helpful. There are analogies as well, including movies and jazz, and
> > their
> > cultural triumphs. I'm surprised that "respectability" is still an issue
> > 30-some years later.
>
> The more things change...
> Stuart Leichter wrote:
> > In article <MPG.19f407897...@news.east.earthlink.net>,
> > of...@earthlink.net wrote:
> >
> > > bun...@bunghole.com wrote:
> > > >2) Why this pathetic need to give songwriters respectability by
> > > >classifying
> > > >them as poets? Why can't you just let them exist on their own terms,
> > > >as
> > > >singer-songwriters?
> >
> > For one thing, it was the only way to get the good pop and folk
> > songwriters past the school curriculum police. Textbook publishers were
> > helpful. There are analogies as well, including movies and jazz, and
> > their
> > cultural triumphs. I'm surprised that "respectability" is still an issue
> > 30-some years later.
>
>
> > Good exchange, guys.
IOW: You've been pulling this "Fuck poetry -- let's all talk about Bob
Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen" shit for decades.
Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen" shit for decades.
I'm with Stuart on this one. Folk rock and poetry are entirely different
categories. You and your friends seem to think that excluding folkies from
the title of "poet" constitutes some sort of negative, qualitative
judgement. It is nothing of the sort. Bob Dylan is a highly influential
folkie. He's not a good poet. He's not a bad poet. He's not a poet at all.
He's also not a ballet dancer, but for some reason my denying him the title
categories. You and your friends seem to think that excluding folkies from
the title of "poet" constitutes some sort of negative, qualitative
judgement. It is nothing of the sort. Bob Dylan is a highly influential
folkie. He's not a good poet. He's not a bad poet. He's not a poet at all.
of "ballerina" doesn't seem to bother you.
If you admire folkies, that's fine. Go on over to the folkie groups and
sing their praises till the cows come home. But if you'r going to post in a
*poetry* group, it would be nice (not to mention courteous) if you would
limit your topics of discussion to poetry.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thing is, poets like Leonard Cohen and, tes, Bob Dylan, fuse poetry and folk
song... ask around, I'm not the first to note this.
'
':)
Will Dockery
Nov 2, 2018, 1:12:16 PM11/2/18
to
"nate" wrote in message
news:e434e3c7-25b9-4a1e...@googlegroups.com...
news:e434e3c7-25b9-4a1e...@googlegroups.com...
misogyny...
Will Dockery
Nov 23, 2018, 7:33:19 PM11/23/18
to
"nate" wrote in message
news:e434e3c7-25b9-4a1e...@googlegroups.com...
news:e434e3c7-25b9-4a1e...@googlegroups.com...
misogynist on the poetry groups recently, a timely topic.
Cujo DeSockpuppet
Nov 23, 2018, 7:35:50 PM11/23/18
to
"Will Dockery" <will_d...@outlook.com> wrote in
news:pta68d$6rt$1...@dont-email.me:
Yes, and with a douchebag, abusing commas, jealous that some can compose,
and explain, poetry.
How did you manage to sleep through so many English classes?
--
Cujo - The Official Overseer of Kooks and Trolls in dfw.*,
alt.paranormal, alt.astrology and alt.astrology.metapsych. Supreme Holy
Overlord of alt.fucknozzles. Winner of the 8/2000, 2/2003 & 4/2007 HL&S
award. July 2005 Hammer of Thor. Winning Trainer - Barbara Woodhouse
Memorial Dog Whistle - 12/2005 & 4/2008. COOSN-266-06-01895.
"I am the only HOPE of the astrological community." - Edmo misspells the
word "dope" again.
news:pta68d$6rt$1...@dont-email.me:
and explain, poetry.
How did you manage to sleep through so many English classes?
--
Cujo - The Official Overseer of Kooks and Trolls in dfw.*,
alt.paranormal, alt.astrology and alt.astrology.metapsych. Supreme Holy
Overlord of alt.fucknozzles. Winner of the 8/2000, 2/2003 & 4/2007 HL&S
award. July 2005 Hammer of Thor. Winning Trainer - Barbara Woodhouse
Memorial Dog Whistle - 12/2005 & 4/2008. COOSN-266-06-01895.
"I am the only HOPE of the astrological community." - Edmo misspells the
word "dope" again.
Will Dockery
Nov 23, 2018, 7:42:12 PM11/23/18
to
"Coco DeSockmonkey" wrote in message
news:29d3e0ee-e960-4711...@googlegroups.com...
> Moron
Says the misogynist.
:)
news:29d3e0ee-e960-4711...@googlegroups.com...
> "nate" wrote in message
> news:e434e3c7-25b9-4a1e...@googlegroups.com...
> news:e434e3c7-25b9-4a1e...@googlegroups.com...
> Earl Browder wrote:
>
> > The phrase was invoked in a lecture as an example of domestic abuse
> > permitted by British common law. The rule of thumb, according to the
> > professor, was a law that allowed a man to beat his wife so long as the
> > rod used was no thicker than his thumb. But over the centuries, the term
> > had evolved into vernacular for an "approximate measure."
http://www.debunker.com/texts/ruleofthumb.html
>
> > The phrase was invoked in a lecture as an example of domestic abuse
> > permitted by British common law. The rule of thumb, according to the
> > professor, was a law that allowed a man to beat his wife so long as the
> > rod used was no thicker than his thumb. But over the centuries, the term
> > had evolved into vernacular for an "approximate measure."
> Moron
Says the misogynist.
:)
Will Dockery
Jan 27, 2019, 10:23:00 PM1/27/19
to
"Cujo DeSockpuppet" wrote in message
news:XnsA9A3C75419867s...@208.90.168.18...
"Will Dockery" <will_d...@outlook.com> wrote in
news:pta68d$6rt$1...@dont-email.me:
> "nate" wrote in message
> news:e434e3c7-25b9-4a1e...@googlegroups.com...
>> On Tuesday, July 24, 2018 at 4:27:56 PM UTC-4, Earl Browder wrote:
>>
>>> The phrase was invoked in a lecture as an example of domestic abuse
>>> permitted by British common law. The rule of thumb, according to the
>>> professor, was a law that allowed a man to beat his wife so long as
>>> the rod used was no thicker than his thumb. But over the centuries,
>>> the term had evolved into vernacular for an "approximate measure."
>>
>> And then we have Mick Jagger's "Under my thumb"...hmmm.
>> - nate
>
> > Yes, and with a poet, Michael Pendragon, recently revealing himself as
> > a misogynist on the poetry groups recently, a timely topic.
>
> Yes
For once we agree.
news:XnsA9A3C75419867s...@208.90.168.18...
"Will Dockery" <will_d...@outlook.com> wrote in
news:pta68d$6rt$1...@dont-email.me:
> "nate" wrote in message
> news:e434e3c7-25b9-4a1e...@googlegroups.com...
>> On Tuesday, July 24, 2018 at 4:27:56 PM UTC-4, Earl Browder wrote:
>>
>>> The phrase was invoked in a lecture as an example of domestic abuse
>>> permitted by British common law. The rule of thumb, according to the
>>> professor, was a law that allowed a man to beat his wife so long as
>>> the rod used was no thicker than his thumb. But over the centuries,
>>> the term had evolved into vernacular for an "approximate measure."
>>
>> And then we have Mick Jagger's "Under my thumb"...hmmm.
>> - nate
>
> > Yes, and with a poet, Michael Pendragon, recently revealing himself as
> > a misogynist on the poetry groups recently, a timely topic.
>
> Yes
Will Dockery
Jan 27, 2019, 10:24:20 PM1/27/19
to
"Earl Browder" wrote in message
news:4c381c37-c066-4a68...@googlegroups.com...
news:4c381c37-c066-4a68...@googlegroups.com...
Interesting heads up, Earl, thanks.
Cujo DeSockpuppet
Jan 28, 2019, 10:28:34 PM1/28/19
to
"Will Dockery" <will_d...@outlook.com> wrote in
news:q2lsii$f13$1...@dont-email.me:
douchebag!)
>> Yes, and with a douchebag, talentless, abusing commas, jealous that
>> some can compose, and explain, poetry.
>>
>> How did you manage to sleep through so many English classes?
>
> For once we agree.
>>
>> How did you manage to sleep through so many English classes?
>
We sure do. Why are you so fucking stupid?
--
Cujo - The Official Overseer of Kooks and Trolls in dfw.*,
alt.paranormal, alt.astrology and alt.astrology.metapsych. Supreme Holy
Overlord of alt.fucknozzles. Winner of the 8/2000, 2/2003 & 4/2007 HL&S
award. July 2005 Hammer of Thor. Winning Trainer - Barbara Woodhouse
Memorial Dog Whistle - 12/2005 & 4/2008. COOSN-266-06-01895.
politicians who were assassinated." - Edmo really loses it.
General Zod
Feb 8, 2019, 10:54:44 PM2/8/19
to
Will Dockery
Feb 15, 2019, 1:42:05 PM2/15/19
to
"Brainiac 5" wrote in message
news:a689d633-4cf7-47c3...@googlegroups.com...
>
> "Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan : Poetry and the Popular Song."
> by Frank Davey, in Alphabet No. 17, December 1969
>
> _________________________________________________________________
>
> The close relationship between poetry and music scarcely needs to be
> argued. Both are aural modes which employ rhythm, rime, and pitch as
> major devices; to these the one adds linguistic meaning, connotation,
> and various traditional figures, and the other can add, at least in
> theory, all of these plus harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration
> techniques. In English the two are closely bound his- torically.
> Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry seems certainly to have been read or chanted
> to a harpist's accompaniment; the verb used in Beowulf for such a
> performance, the Finn episode, is singan, to sing, and the noun gyd,
> song. A major source of the lyric tradition in English poetry is the
> songs of the troubadours.
>
> The distance between the gleomannes gyd in Beowulf or "Sumer is Icumen
> In" and the songs of Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan may seem great, but is
> one of time rather than aesthetics. The Iyric poem as a literary work
> and the Iyrics of a popular song are both still essentially the same
> thing: poetry. Whether the title of the work be "Gerontion," "You
> Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog," or "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," our
> criteria for evaluating the work must remain the same.
>
> The most important prerequisite for both a significant poem and
> significant Iyrics in a popular song is that the writer be faithful to
> his own personal vision or to the vision of the poem he is writing.
> All the skill and craft generally believed necessary for writing
> poetry are indeed necessary because these are the only means by which
> a poet can preserve the integrity of this vision in the poem. Whether
> writing for the hit parade or the little magazine, a poet must not,
> either because of lack of skill or worship of a false muse-popularity,
> wealth, or critical acclaim - go outside of his own or his own
> poem's vision - on pain of writing only the derivative or the trivial.
> Historically, the writers and singers of the lyrics of popular songs
> have seemed often to be incapable of personal vision, and to have
> confused both originality and morality with a servile compliance to
> popular taste. Tiny Tim and Mrs. Miller have both been remarkable
> chiefly as unconscious caricatures of this naivety.
>
> Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen represent two highly contrasting
> directions from which the attempt to restore significance and
> integrity of vision to the popular song can be made. Bob Dylan is the
> child runaway who became a professional songwriter by deliberate hard
> work, and whose emergence as a poet of some talent seems to have been
> accidental, almost as if he had unconsciously realized that good songs
> have to contain reasonably good lyric poetry. Leonard Cohen is a
> university-educated formalistic poet who has moved in an opposite
> direction with his recent discovery that a good lyric poem could
> equally be a good song. Dylan brings to poetry a spontaneity of rhythm
> and a resourcefulness in imagery that had long been qualities of
> American folk music, as in that of Huddie Ledbetter or of Dylan's own
> idol, Woodie Guthrie. Cohen takes to the poem as popular song a
> scholarly precision of language and an obsession for extemal form.
>
> As lyricists these men stand far above the Carl Lee Perkinses, Richard
> Whitings, Irving Berlins, and George Gershwins of the past. A close
> look at either reveals a writer with individual experiences, ideas,
> imagery, and vocabulary, a writer who projects his own self and its
> circumstances rather than fabricating a persona from the offal of our
> culture. In Bob Dylan's work it is the original imagery and the
> intensely personal vision that is immediately obvious
>
>
> I saw a new born baby with wild wolves all around it,
> I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
> I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
> I saw a roomful of men with their hammers a-bleedin',
> I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
> I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
>
> I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,
> And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
> And it's a hard rain's a gonna fall.
>
> While there is a definite rhythmical naivety in this passage, it is
> nearly lost in the richness of its images. Dylan's stance here is the
> stance of the visionary, of the prophet. His images are ones out of
> our own society, but seen by his own eyes and not in any way as this
> society might wish them to be seen.
>
> There are many elements of interest in Bob Dylan's vision: his
> awareness of both the miseries and virtues of the down-trodden, his
> sense of the viciousness of the present United States society, his
> hatred of war, his personal need for independence from a materialistic
> culture's ties, and his feeling of the imminence of the apocalypse. In
> fact, Dylan's vision is essentially apocalyptic; again and again he
> tells of an evil world which is soon to be both punished and replaced
> tomorrow, perhaps, when the ship comes in.
>
> The world of Bob Dylan is a wor]d where the unemployed Hollis Brown,
> his wife and their five children are allowed by their fellow
> countrymen to starve in a filthy cabin and "the dirty driven rain"
> ("The Ballad of Hollis Brown"), where civil rights workers are
> murdered ("Oxford Town"), where prisoners are abused by sadistic
> guards ("The Walls of Red Wing"). It is a world of embittered
> immigrants ("I Pity the Poor Tmmigrant"), of exploited tenants ("Dear
> Landlord"), of frivolous and materialistic women ("Sad-Eyed Lady of
> the Lowlands"). It is a world where white Americans systematically
> destroy entire tribes of Indians, where each warring nation and
> faction imagines smugly that God is on its side ("With God on Our
> Side"), where the "masters of war" hide in their mansions "as young
> people's blood/flows out of their bodies /and is buried in the mud"
> ("Masters of War"). The United States, to Dylan, is the country that
> enjoys watching boxer kill boxer ("Who Killed Davey Moore"), the
> country where a judge can coerce a young girl to intercourse on the
> false promise that he will save her father from hanging ("Seven
> Curses"), the country where poor whites are taught by the rich to hate
> negroes ("Only a Pawn in their Game"), and the country where mine and
> factory are opened and closed with little thought to the welfare of
> the worker ("North Country Blues"). To the young, in Dylan's eyes, the
> United States is an absurd, surrealistic place:
>
>
> Ah get born, keep warm
> Short pants, romance, learn to dance
> get dressed, get blessed
> try to be a success
> Please her, please, him, buy gifts
> Don't steal, don't lift,
> Twenty years of schoolin'
> And they put you on the day shift
> Look out kid, they keep it all hid
> Better jump down a manhole
> Light yourself a candle, don't wear sandals
> Try to avoid scandals
> Don't wanna be a bum
> You better chew gum.
>
>
> ("Subterranean Homesick Blues")
>
> Dylan himself wants neither to chew gum nor please anyone. He is
> against not only the kind of possessiveness and dominance of human
> beings that the United States practices through its foreign policy,
> its racial discrimination, its boxing syndicates, and its abuse of
> workers, but also (at least until the recent album Nashville Sky-
> line) against the possessiveness and dominance encouraged by romantic
> love. In 'Don't Think Twice it's All Right" the speaker deserts a
> woman because she required too much of him; "I gave her my heart but
> she wanted my soul." In "It Ain't Me Babe" the speaker has encountered
> a girl who wants "someone to close his eyes for" her, "someone to
> close his heart. Someone who will die for" her, "and more." Again,
> such demands, even though sanctioned by our culture, seem unreasonable
> to him. Dylan expresses his own ideas on the ideal relationship
> between people in his song "All I Really Want to Do." These ideas do
> not apply merely to the relationship between man and woman, but in the
> light of his other songs can be generalized to include the
> relationship between worker and employer, citizen and policeman,
> student and professor.
>
>
> I ain't lookin, to compete with you,
> Beat or cheat or mistreat you,.
> Simplify you, classify you,
> Deny, defy, or crucify you.
> All I really want to do
> Is Baby, be friends with you.
>
> Dylan seeks the destruction of what is to him an inhumanly
> competitive, exploitive, classifying, and confining society. Because
> his vision is apocalyptic, however, he does not foresee revolution
> occurring other than spontaneously, without apparent cause, as if by
> divine act. That our contemporary society, its institutions, and its
> values should not only be criticized and rejected but also escaped
> seems to be his major piece of advice to us all. But man's own means
> of escape are limited: one can murder one's starving wife and chil-
> dren and commit suicide oneself, like Hollis Brown, so that "some-
> where in the distance/There's seven new people born" ("Ballad of
> Hollis Brown"), or one can follow "Mr. Tambourine Man" and through
> marijuana, LSD, or hard narcotics come "to dance beneath the diamond
> sky" ("Mr. Tambourine Man"). For change that will affect everyone
> something larger must occur. A song such as "The Times They Are
> A-Changin' " contains only a hint of the coming apocalypse.
>
>
> The line is drawn
> The curse is cast
> The slow one now will
> Later be fast.
> As the present now
> Will later be past
> The order is rapidly fadin'
> And the first one now
> Will later be last
> For the times they are a-changin'.
>
> And yet it is clearly the Christian apocalypse, with its conventional
> raising of the meek and toppling of the mighty, that Dylan is
> suggesting. Songs such as "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" or "A Hard
> Rain's A Gonna Fall" present the surrealistic rush and confusion of a
> judgement day already at hand. The last scene of Bergman's The Seventh
> Seal sends men everywhere scurrying for a pennyworth of salvation,
> "The Saints are coming through,/And It's all over now, Baby Blue." In
> "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" the blessed saint himself comes down
> to earth to offer man life after destruction. In four other songs
> Dylan's vision of the all-arighting apocalypse is directly expressed.
> In "Chimes of Freedom" Dylan pictures an exhilarating scene:
>
>
> Thru the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
> The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
> That the clanging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
> Leaving only the bells of lightning and its thunder
> Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind,
> Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind
> An' the unpawned painter behind beyond his rightful time
> An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
>
> In "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" he reports:
>
>
> Struck by sounds before the sun,
> I knew the night had gone,
> The morning breeze like a bugle blew
> Against the drums of dawn.
>
> The ocean wild like an organ played
> The seaweed's wove its strands,
> The crashin waves like cymbals clashed
> Against the rocks and sands.
>
> I stood unwound beneath the skies
> And clouds unbound by laws,
> The cryin' rain like a trumpet sang
> And asked for no applause.
>
> In "The Gates of Eden" Dylan develops a clear dichotomy between what
> is possible on earth and what is possible in eternity.
>
> Meaningless noise, ownership, kingship, time, metaphysics, lawcourts,
> science, the dream of an earthly paradise - all, Dylan tells us, can
> exist only outside the gates of Eden.
>
>
> With a time rusted compass blade
> Aladdin and his lamp
> Sits with Utopian hermit monks
> Sidesaddle on the Golden Calf
> And on their promises of paradise
> You will not hear a laugh
> All except inside The Gates of Eden.
>
> And some day, after the hard rain has fallen, perhaps - Dylan leaves
> the entire physical circumstances of our society's cataclysmic
> destruction intentionally vague-after the hard radioactive rain
> following an atomic war, when indeed all is over for baby blue and
> everyone else, these gates of Eden will open, and the hour will have
> come, "the hour when the ship comes in."
>
>
> O the time will come
> When the winds will stop
> And the breeze will cease to be breathin'
> Like the stillness in the wind
> When the hurricane begins
> The hour when the ship comes in.
>
> O the sea will split
> And the ship will hit
> And the shoreline sands will be shaking
> Then the tide will sound
> and the wind will pound
> And the morning will be breaking.
>
> ("When the Ship Comes In")
>
> The corpus of Leonard Cohen's songs is nowhere as large as that of Bob
> Dylan's. The total published number to this date is twenty songs - a
> number superficially disproportionate to the notice they have received
> in the various magazines of the record trade. When we examine these
> songs, we find that unlike Dylan's they are for the most part love
> songs. But once again we find that they are raised to considerable
> significance and poetic integrity by the unique and intelligent vision
> which informs them.
>
> Cohen, however, gives little thought to any impending apocalypse. His
> songs present a threatening, devouring world and men desperate to
> delay their doom. All of his songs contain some implicit social
> criticism, although only two, "The Old Revolution" and "Stories of the
> Street," have an overt social commentary. The most nearly political of
> his songs is "Stories of the Street," which begins:
>
>
> The stories of the street are mine
> The Spanish voices laugh
> The cadillacs go creeping down
> Through the night and the poison gas
> I lean from my window sill
> In this old hotel I chose.
> Yes, one hand on my suicide
> And one hand on the rose.
>
> Cohen's vision here is of a society in imminent collapse because of
> the greed and lust of its members.
>
>
> I know you've heard it's over now
> And war must surely come,
> The cities they are broke in half
> And the middle men are gone.
> But let me ask you one more time
> O children of the dust,
> All these hunters who are shrieking now
> Do they speak for us?
>
> And where do all these highways go
> Now that we are free?
> Why are the armies marching still
> That were coming home to me?
> O lady with your legs so fine
> O stranger at your wheel
> You are locked into your suffering
> And your pleasures are the seal.
>
>
> The age of lust is giving birth
> And both the parents ask the nurse
> On both sides of the glass
> Now the infant with his cord
> Is hauled in like a kite
> And one eye filled with blueprints
> One eye filled with night.
>
> Like Dylan, Cohen would escape a world unfeelingly ordered by highway
> and blueprint, but this escape for him must be in the here and now.
> And, if he cannot feel at home in his earthly refuge-here a
> communalistic existence with other inhabitants of the natural
> world-then he will have to accept, even though innocent, the fate of
> his corrupt society.
>
>
> O come with me my little one
> And we will find that farm
> And grow us grass and apples there
> And keep the animals warm
> And if by chance I wake at night
> And I ask you who I am
> O take me to the slaughter house
> I will wait there with the lamb.
>
> Man often lives in Cohen's world like Isaac upon his father's altar.
> There is only one place for a man to be-where he is-and, if here
> corruption and death are inevitable, man must accept these as parts of
> his humanity.
>
> In his love songs Cohen is, like Dylan, consistently concerned with
> values rather than with the incessant "I want you, I need you, I love
> you" theme of the average popular songwriter. Cohen seems to have come
> to a realization that has so far escaped most of the writers for the
> popular hit parade: that to get the girl into bed is quite easy, but
> to get her there without endangering one's own integrity, or without
> drawing oneself into the "poison gas" world, is a bit more difficult.
> In "The Stranger Song" Cohen presents the cowardly lover, the lover
> who is afraid to continue on his quest but wishes to exchange his
> freedom for security, the lover "who is just some Joseph looking for a
> manger," who "wants to trade the game he plays for shelter." Cohen
> terms himself, the quester who still seeks significance, a "stranger;"
> he terms the other man, who watches "for the card/that is so high and
> wild/he'll never need to deal another," the "dealer." The "dealer,"
> the bridegroom who wishes the toil and agony of courtship over, makes
> an inadequate lover, Cohen tells us.
> I know that kind of man
> It's hard to hold the hand of anyone
> Who's reaching for the sky just to surrender.
>
> In "Winter Lady" and "Sisters of Mercy" Cohen presents the female
> counterpart to the "stranger." This counterpart also has her freedom,
> has not sold out to the easy life of guaranteed possession offered by
> marriage. Aloof, independent, choosy, this "travelling lady" gives an
> affection which Cohen feels should be far more to a man than a paper
> contract. In "Sisters of Mercy" this woman waits to refresh the
> questing stranger, ministering to his tiredness without plotting for
> his being.
>
>
> O the sisters of mercy
> They are not departed or gone
> They were waiting for me when I thought
> That I just can't go on.
>
> There is apparently no jealousy or possessiveness in his relationship
> with these sisters; he can genuinely wish that they will be able to
> aid other questing strangers like himself.
>
>
> When I left they were sleeping
> I hope you run into them soon.
> Don't turn on the lights,
> You can read their address by the moon;
>
> And you won't make me jealous
> If I hear that they've sweetened your night
> We weren't lovers like that
> And besides it would still be all right
>
> There is merely a community of love where any may help any in his or
> her quest for life's fulfillment.
>
> Casual love between man and woman is,in Cohen's songs, a desirable
> escape from the ordeal of existence. Domestic love is merely part of
> the ordeal. In "So Long, Marianne" this contradiction which Cohen sees
> between domesticity and personal freedom is explored at length. He
> thought himself "some kind of gypsy boy," he tells Marianne, before he
> let her take him home. Now, he says, "You make me forget so very
> much/I forget to pray for the angel/ And then the angels forget to
> pray for us." Here the woman desperately attempts to bind him: "your
> fine spider web/Is fastening my ankle to a stone." She heretically
> clings to him as if he were a substitute for the divine, holding him,
> he says, "like I was a crucifix/ As we went kneeling through the
> dark." In this song Cohen wavers, tempted by sentimentality as he
> remembers their love "deep in the green lilac park" but is
> fortuitously set free by her own possessive- ness, this time for
> another man.
>
>
> O you are really such a pretty one
> I see youive gone and changed your name again
> And just when I climbed this whole mountainside
> To wash my eyelids in the rain.
>
> "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong" is Cohen's ironic story of a pos- sessive
> lover, both sadistic in his attempting to dominate the woman, and
> masochistic in his yearning to be in turn dominated by her. The song
> begins:
>
>
> I lit a thin green candle
> To make you jealous of me,
>
> Then I took the dust of a long sleepless night
> I put it in your little shoe.
> And then I confess'd that I tortured the dress
> That you wore for the world to look through.
>
> The lover seeks the advice of a doctor who proves as frail as he,
> locking "himself in a library shelf" with the details of their honey-
> moon. He then visits a saint who teaches "that the duty of lovers is
> to tarnish the golden rule," but the saint too proves frail. Reports
> the lover,
>
> And just when I was sure
> That his teachings were pure
> He drowned himself in the pool,
> His body is gone, but back here on the lawn
> His spirit continues to drool.
>
> Nevertheless, our poor lover cannot learn by these sordid, possessive,
> lascivious, and self-destroying examples and remains as blindly
> masochistic as ever, as the last stanza demonstrates.
>
> An Eskimo showed me a movie
> He'd recently taken of you
> The poor man could hardly stop shivering,
> His lips and his fingers were blue.
> I suppose that he froze
> When the wind took your clothes
> And I guess he just never got warm
> But you stand there so nice
> In your blizzard of ice
> O please let me come into the storm.
>
> The thing that all lovers must learn in Cohen's songs is how to say
> goodbye, not because parting is good for its own sake but because ties
> seem to Cohen to keep people from fulfilling their eesential manhood
> or womanhood. Change is imperative for fulfillment in Cohen's
> precarious world, and ties inhibit change, as is indicated by the song
> "That's No Way to Say Goodbye."
>
>
> I'm not looking for another
> As I wander in my time,
> Walk me to the corner
> Our steps will always rhyme,
> You know my love goes with you
> As your love stays with me,
> It's just the way it changes
> Like the shoreline and the sea.
>
> Cohen's most energetic condemnation of possessiveness in love is found
> in "Master Song," a song about the poet's old sweetheart, who is
> perhaps a personification of poetry herself, who has now come under
> the control of an autocratic master. This new master is associated
> throughout the song with images of violence and oppression: he is a
> man "who had just come back from the war," who has given the woman "a
> German shepherd to walk / With a collar of Ieather and nails," who
> flies an aeroplane "without any hands," who "killed the lights in a
> lonely lane" and made love to the woman in the guise of "an ape with
> angel glands" to "the music of rubber bands." And in turn the woman
> keeps the poet himself prisoner, not ever bringing herself to him, not
> even bringing to him a sacramental surrogate of "wine and bread." This
> song is one of intense disappointment and frustration, and is filled
> with images of sterility and despair.
>
> However, love does remain in the songs of Leonard Cohen the major
> remedy to the callous possessiveness of our society. Cohen's song
> "Suzanne" seems on one level to be another escape-through- drugs song
> such as Dylan's "Mr Tambourine Man" or the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky
> with Diamonds." But, as in this latter song, the escape is
> ambivalently both female and hallucinogenic, and the speaker's entry
> into the escape is clearly an entry into a love experience, so that
> the song tells us simultaneously both that to turn on is to love and
> that love is a turn-on. Even on first meeting the exotic Suzanne,
> Cohen tells us, you will know
>
> That you've always been her lover
> And you want to travel with her
> And you want to trave! blind
> And you think maybe you'll trust her
> For you've touched her perfect body with your mind.
>
> As your experience with Suzanne deepens, he continues, you will want
> not only to travel blind with her but also to walk upon the water with
> the dead Jesus. By the end of the poem Suzanne has raised all the
> various contradictory realities of this would-"the garbage and the
> flowers"-to beauty, and has even through love brought ourselves to
> perfection-"for she's touched your perfect body with her mind." A
> further noteworthy aspect of Suzanne is that she can be approached or
> abandoned at will-"you can spend the night beside her" (my italics);
> both as an hallucinogenic and as a woman she acts only as a "sister of
> mercy" and never as the grasping spouse.
>
> The Cohen song where love serves most obviously as a panacea for
> society's demand that one control, discipline, and enslave one's
> environment and fellow man is the difficult and unpublished song,
> "Love Tries to Call You by Your Name." Cohen's basic assumption in
> this song is that in surrender to the materialism and generalism of
> society one also surrenders one's personal identity. Only love, as the
> title states, "tries to call you by your name." The song opens with
> the speaker slowly losing himself in something much larger and less
> real than he himself is.
>
>
> I thought it would never happen
> To all the people that I became
> My body lost in these legends
> And the beast so very tame
> But here, right here
> Between the birthmark and the stain
> Between the ocean and the rain
> Between the snowman and the rain
> Once again and again
> Love tries to call you by your name.
>
> From the wholeness and integrity of the ocean to the fragmentary
> realities of the drops of rain, from the monolithic existence of the
> snowman to the destructive rain which fragments that snowman, from the
> birthmark which, when positively interpreted symbolises one's unique
> being, to the birthmark pejoratively interpreted which now represents
> a stain or blemish on the norm of general humanity, the speaker finds
> himself pulled, while the "beast" of his individuality grows tamer and
> love weakly calls on him to return.
>
> Succeeding verses amplify Cohen's image of the man who is drawn into
> self-annihilation and away from self-realization, a man much like the
> "dealer" of "The Stranger Song." Such a man claws at "the halls of
> fame," lives for "the age" rather than "the hour," for "the plain"
> rather than "the sundial," and prefers the banality of the commonplace
> to the demanding particularity of genuine love.
>
>
> I leave the lady meditating on the very love
> Which I do not wish to claim
> I journey down these hundred steps
> The street is still the same.
>
> He abandons real lovers, real heroes, to follow society's broad high-
> way to mediocrity, vulgarity, self-indulgence, and anonymity.
> Especially here in this song it is self-indulgence which betrays the
> indi- vidual away from the difficulties of one's own fulfillment and
> into the easy chains of conformity.
>
>
> Where are you Judy, where are you Ann
> Where are all the paths all your heroes came
> Wondering out loud as the bandage pulls away
> Was I only limping or
> Was I really lame;
> O here, come over here
> Between the windmill and the grain
> Between the traitor and her pain
> Between the sundial and the plain
> Between the newsreel and your tiny pain
> Between the snowmen and the rain
> Once again and again
> Love tries to call you by your name.
>
> The world that Cohen perceives in his songs is consistently
> materialistic, sordid, and corrupting. Saints become lechers, lovers
> become masochists, Cadillacs spread poison gas. Love can become "some
> dust in an old man's cuff" ("Master Song"). Priests can trample the
> grass of the shrines which they sene ("Priests"). God himself says to
> man:
>
>
> Sometimes I need you naked
> Sometimes I need you wild
> I need you to carry my children in
> I need you to kill a child.
>
> ("You Know Who I Am")
>
> Cohen shows man in this world clinging to whatever solace the moment
> offers. The cowardly grasp one thing forever; the bolder move from
> narcotic to narcotic, from woman to woman. And in "The Old Revolution"
> Cohen shows everyone surrendering to this "furnace" that is life.
>
>
> You who are broken by power
> You who are absent all day
> You who are kings for the sake of your children's story
> The hand of your beggar is burdened down with money
> The hand of your lover is clay
> Into this furnace I ask you now to venture
> You whom I cannot betray.
>
> Cohen's is indeed a black world, illumined only by random loves, the
> mystery of Suzanne, and the harsh light of the existential furnace.
> Cohen has elsewhere been termed a "black romantic"-one who accepts the
> evil and sordidness of this world and seeks revelation through
> immersion in these. Such an interpretation of his work is certainly
> supported by his songs. Dylan can be similarly interpreted,
> particularly in view of his materialism's self-destruction, in such
> songs as "A Hard Rain," as a gateway to Eden. Neither is an activist;
> neither believes that utopia can be achieved through human action. And
> both are thoroughly disinterested in purveying the old and simplistic
> romantic lies whch so many of today's pop artists Donovan, the Bee
> Gees, the Fifth Dimension, the Association consistently peddle. Both
> instead try to do the poet's job present the world as the world
> appears in the words and images which their separate visions demand.
>
> Frank Davey, in Alphabet No. 17, December 1969
> Leonard Cohen was a poet of great magnitude up near my way, Bill and Susie
> had his albums...… and Lou Reed...…….
Agreed on all counts there, Zod.
news:a689d633-4cf7-47c3...@googlegroups.com...
>
> "Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan : Poetry and the Popular Song."
> by Frank Davey, in Alphabet No. 17, December 1969
>
> _________________________________________________________________
>
> The close relationship between poetry and music scarcely needs to be
> argued. Both are aural modes which employ rhythm, rime, and pitch as
> major devices; to these the one adds linguistic meaning, connotation,
> and various traditional figures, and the other can add, at least in
> theory, all of these plus harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration
> techniques. In English the two are closely bound his- torically.
> Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry seems certainly to have been read or chanted
> to a harpist's accompaniment; the verb used in Beowulf for such a
> performance, the Finn episode, is singan, to sing, and the noun gyd,
> song. A major source of the lyric tradition in English poetry is the
> songs of the troubadours.
>
> The distance between the gleomannes gyd in Beowulf or "Sumer is Icumen
> In" and the songs of Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan may seem great, but is
> one of time rather than aesthetics. The Iyric poem as a literary work
> and the Iyrics of a popular song are both still essentially the same
> thing: poetry. Whether the title of the work be "Gerontion," "You
> Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog," or "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," our
> criteria for evaluating the work must remain the same.
>
> The most important prerequisite for both a significant poem and
> significant Iyrics in a popular song is that the writer be faithful to
> his own personal vision or to the vision of the poem he is writing.
> All the skill and craft generally believed necessary for writing
> poetry are indeed necessary because these are the only means by which
> a poet can preserve the integrity of this vision in the poem. Whether
> writing for the hit parade or the little magazine, a poet must not,
> either because of lack of skill or worship of a false muse-popularity,
> wealth, or critical acclaim - go outside of his own or his own
> poem's vision - on pain of writing only the derivative or the trivial.
> Historically, the writers and singers of the lyrics of popular songs
> have seemed often to be incapable of personal vision, and to have
> confused both originality and morality with a servile compliance to
> popular taste. Tiny Tim and Mrs. Miller have both been remarkable
> chiefly as unconscious caricatures of this naivety.
>
> Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen represent two highly contrasting
> directions from which the attempt to restore significance and
> integrity of vision to the popular song can be made. Bob Dylan is the
> child runaway who became a professional songwriter by deliberate hard
> work, and whose emergence as a poet of some talent seems to have been
> accidental, almost as if he had unconsciously realized that good songs
> have to contain reasonably good lyric poetry. Leonard Cohen is a
> university-educated formalistic poet who has moved in an opposite
> direction with his recent discovery that a good lyric poem could
> equally be a good song. Dylan brings to poetry a spontaneity of rhythm
> and a resourcefulness in imagery that had long been qualities of
> American folk music, as in that of Huddie Ledbetter or of Dylan's own
> idol, Woodie Guthrie. Cohen takes to the poem as popular song a
> scholarly precision of language and an obsession for extemal form.
>
> As lyricists these men stand far above the Carl Lee Perkinses, Richard
> Whitings, Irving Berlins, and George Gershwins of the past. A close
> look at either reveals a writer with individual experiences, ideas,
> imagery, and vocabulary, a writer who projects his own self and its
> circumstances rather than fabricating a persona from the offal of our
> culture. In Bob Dylan's work it is the original imagery and the
> intensely personal vision that is immediately obvious
>
>
> I saw a new born baby with wild wolves all around it,
> I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
> I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
> I saw a roomful of men with their hammers a-bleedin',
> I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
> I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
>
> I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,
> And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
> And it's a hard rain's a gonna fall.
>
> While there is a definite rhythmical naivety in this passage, it is
> nearly lost in the richness of its images. Dylan's stance here is the
> stance of the visionary, of the prophet. His images are ones out of
> our own society, but seen by his own eyes and not in any way as this
> society might wish them to be seen.
>
> There are many elements of interest in Bob Dylan's vision: his
> awareness of both the miseries and virtues of the down-trodden, his
> sense of the viciousness of the present United States society, his
> hatred of war, his personal need for independence from a materialistic
> culture's ties, and his feeling of the imminence of the apocalypse. In
> fact, Dylan's vision is essentially apocalyptic; again and again he
> tells of an evil world which is soon to be both punished and replaced
> tomorrow, perhaps, when the ship comes in.
>
> The world of Bob Dylan is a wor]d where the unemployed Hollis Brown,
> his wife and their five children are allowed by their fellow
> countrymen to starve in a filthy cabin and "the dirty driven rain"
> ("The Ballad of Hollis Brown"), where civil rights workers are
> murdered ("Oxford Town"), where prisoners are abused by sadistic
> guards ("The Walls of Red Wing"). It is a world of embittered
> immigrants ("I Pity the Poor Tmmigrant"), of exploited tenants ("Dear
> Landlord"), of frivolous and materialistic women ("Sad-Eyed Lady of
> the Lowlands"). It is a world where white Americans systematically
> destroy entire tribes of Indians, where each warring nation and
> faction imagines smugly that God is on its side ("With God on Our
> Side"), where the "masters of war" hide in their mansions "as young
> people's blood/flows out of their bodies /and is buried in the mud"
> ("Masters of War"). The United States, to Dylan, is the country that
> enjoys watching boxer kill boxer ("Who Killed Davey Moore"), the
> country where a judge can coerce a young girl to intercourse on the
> false promise that he will save her father from hanging ("Seven
> Curses"), the country where poor whites are taught by the rich to hate
> negroes ("Only a Pawn in their Game"), and the country where mine and
> factory are opened and closed with little thought to the welfare of
> the worker ("North Country Blues"). To the young, in Dylan's eyes, the
> United States is an absurd, surrealistic place:
>
>
> Ah get born, keep warm
> Short pants, romance, learn to dance
> get dressed, get blessed
> try to be a success
> Please her, please, him, buy gifts
> Don't steal, don't lift,
> Twenty years of schoolin'
> And they put you on the day shift
> Look out kid, they keep it all hid
> Better jump down a manhole
> Light yourself a candle, don't wear sandals
> Try to avoid scandals
> Don't wanna be a bum
> You better chew gum.
>
>
> ("Subterranean Homesick Blues")
>
> Dylan himself wants neither to chew gum nor please anyone. He is
> against not only the kind of possessiveness and dominance of human
> beings that the United States practices through its foreign policy,
> its racial discrimination, its boxing syndicates, and its abuse of
> workers, but also (at least until the recent album Nashville Sky-
> line) against the possessiveness and dominance encouraged by romantic
> love. In 'Don't Think Twice it's All Right" the speaker deserts a
> woman because she required too much of him; "I gave her my heart but
> she wanted my soul." In "It Ain't Me Babe" the speaker has encountered
> a girl who wants "someone to close his eyes for" her, "someone to
> close his heart. Someone who will die for" her, "and more." Again,
> such demands, even though sanctioned by our culture, seem unreasonable
> to him. Dylan expresses his own ideas on the ideal relationship
> between people in his song "All I Really Want to Do." These ideas do
> not apply merely to the relationship between man and woman, but in the
> light of his other songs can be generalized to include the
> relationship between worker and employer, citizen and policeman,
> student and professor.
>
>
> I ain't lookin, to compete with you,
> Beat or cheat or mistreat you,.
> Simplify you, classify you,
> Deny, defy, or crucify you.
> All I really want to do
> Is Baby, be friends with you.
>
> Dylan seeks the destruction of what is to him an inhumanly
> competitive, exploitive, classifying, and confining society. Because
> his vision is apocalyptic, however, he does not foresee revolution
> occurring other than spontaneously, without apparent cause, as if by
> divine act. That our contemporary society, its institutions, and its
> values should not only be criticized and rejected but also escaped
> seems to be his major piece of advice to us all. But man's own means
> of escape are limited: one can murder one's starving wife and chil-
> dren and commit suicide oneself, like Hollis Brown, so that "some-
> where in the distance/There's seven new people born" ("Ballad of
> Hollis Brown"), or one can follow "Mr. Tambourine Man" and through
> marijuana, LSD, or hard narcotics come "to dance beneath the diamond
> sky" ("Mr. Tambourine Man"). For change that will affect everyone
> something larger must occur. A song such as "The Times They Are
> A-Changin' " contains only a hint of the coming apocalypse.
>
>
> The line is drawn
> The curse is cast
> The slow one now will
> Later be fast.
> As the present now
> Will later be past
> The order is rapidly fadin'
> And the first one now
> Will later be last
> For the times they are a-changin'.
>
> And yet it is clearly the Christian apocalypse, with its conventional
> raising of the meek and toppling of the mighty, that Dylan is
> suggesting. Songs such as "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" or "A Hard
> Rain's A Gonna Fall" present the surrealistic rush and confusion of a
> judgement day already at hand. The last scene of Bergman's The Seventh
> Seal sends men everywhere scurrying for a pennyworth of salvation,
> "The Saints are coming through,/And It's all over now, Baby Blue." In
> "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" the blessed saint himself comes down
> to earth to offer man life after destruction. In four other songs
> Dylan's vision of the all-arighting apocalypse is directly expressed.
> In "Chimes of Freedom" Dylan pictures an exhilarating scene:
>
>
> Thru the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
> The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
> That the clanging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
> Leaving only the bells of lightning and its thunder
> Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind,
> Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind
> An' the unpawned painter behind beyond his rightful time
> An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
>
> In "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" he reports:
>
>
> Struck by sounds before the sun,
> I knew the night had gone,
> The morning breeze like a bugle blew
> Against the drums of dawn.
>
> The ocean wild like an organ played
> The seaweed's wove its strands,
> The crashin waves like cymbals clashed
> Against the rocks and sands.
>
> I stood unwound beneath the skies
> And clouds unbound by laws,
> The cryin' rain like a trumpet sang
> And asked for no applause.
>
> In "The Gates of Eden" Dylan develops a clear dichotomy between what
> is possible on earth and what is possible in eternity.
>
> Meaningless noise, ownership, kingship, time, metaphysics, lawcourts,
> science, the dream of an earthly paradise - all, Dylan tells us, can
> exist only outside the gates of Eden.
>
>
> With a time rusted compass blade
> Aladdin and his lamp
> Sits with Utopian hermit monks
> Sidesaddle on the Golden Calf
> And on their promises of paradise
> You will not hear a laugh
> All except inside The Gates of Eden.
>
> And some day, after the hard rain has fallen, perhaps - Dylan leaves
> the entire physical circumstances of our society's cataclysmic
> destruction intentionally vague-after the hard radioactive rain
> following an atomic war, when indeed all is over for baby blue and
> everyone else, these gates of Eden will open, and the hour will have
> come, "the hour when the ship comes in."
>
>
> O the time will come
> When the winds will stop
> And the breeze will cease to be breathin'
> Like the stillness in the wind
> When the hurricane begins
> The hour when the ship comes in.
>
> O the sea will split
> And the ship will hit
> And the shoreline sands will be shaking
> Then the tide will sound
> and the wind will pound
> And the morning will be breaking.
>
> ("When the Ship Comes In")
>
> The corpus of Leonard Cohen's songs is nowhere as large as that of Bob
> Dylan's. The total published number to this date is twenty songs - a
> number superficially disproportionate to the notice they have received
> in the various magazines of the record trade. When we examine these
> songs, we find that unlike Dylan's they are for the most part love
> songs. But once again we find that they are raised to considerable
> significance and poetic integrity by the unique and intelligent vision
> which informs them.
>
> Cohen, however, gives little thought to any impending apocalypse. His
> songs present a threatening, devouring world and men desperate to
> delay their doom. All of his songs contain some implicit social
> criticism, although only two, "The Old Revolution" and "Stories of the
> Street," have an overt social commentary. The most nearly political of
> his songs is "Stories of the Street," which begins:
>
>
> The stories of the street are mine
> The Spanish voices laugh
> The cadillacs go creeping down
> Through the night and the poison gas
> I lean from my window sill
> In this old hotel I chose.
> Yes, one hand on my suicide
> And one hand on the rose.
>
> Cohen's vision here is of a society in imminent collapse because of
> the greed and lust of its members.
>
>
> I know you've heard it's over now
> And war must surely come,
> The cities they are broke in half
> And the middle men are gone.
> But let me ask you one more time
> O children of the dust,
> All these hunters who are shrieking now
> Do they speak for us?
>
> And where do all these highways go
> Now that we are free?
> Why are the armies marching still
> That were coming home to me?
> O lady with your legs so fine
> O stranger at your wheel
> You are locked into your suffering
> And your pleasures are the seal.
>
>
> The age of lust is giving birth
> And both the parents ask the nurse
> On both sides of the glass
> Now the infant with his cord
> Is hauled in like a kite
> And one eye filled with blueprints
> One eye filled with night.
>
> Like Dylan, Cohen would escape a world unfeelingly ordered by highway
> and blueprint, but this escape for him must be in the here and now.
> And, if he cannot feel at home in his earthly refuge-here a
> communalistic existence with other inhabitants of the natural
> world-then he will have to accept, even though innocent, the fate of
> his corrupt society.
>
>
> O come with me my little one
> And we will find that farm
> And grow us grass and apples there
> And keep the animals warm
> And if by chance I wake at night
> And I ask you who I am
> O take me to the slaughter house
> I will wait there with the lamb.
>
> Man often lives in Cohen's world like Isaac upon his father's altar.
> There is only one place for a man to be-where he is-and, if here
> corruption and death are inevitable, man must accept these as parts of
> his humanity.
>
> In his love songs Cohen is, like Dylan, consistently concerned with
> values rather than with the incessant "I want you, I need you, I love
> you" theme of the average popular songwriter. Cohen seems to have come
> to a realization that has so far escaped most of the writers for the
> popular hit parade: that to get the girl into bed is quite easy, but
> to get her there without endangering one's own integrity, or without
> drawing oneself into the "poison gas" world, is a bit more difficult.
> In "The Stranger Song" Cohen presents the cowardly lover, the lover
> who is afraid to continue on his quest but wishes to exchange his
> freedom for security, the lover "who is just some Joseph looking for a
> manger," who "wants to trade the game he plays for shelter." Cohen
> terms himself, the quester who still seeks significance, a "stranger;"
> he terms the other man, who watches "for the card/that is so high and
> wild/he'll never need to deal another," the "dealer." The "dealer,"
> the bridegroom who wishes the toil and agony of courtship over, makes
> an inadequate lover, Cohen tells us.
> I know that kind of man
> It's hard to hold the hand of anyone
> Who's reaching for the sky just to surrender.
>
> In "Winter Lady" and "Sisters of Mercy" Cohen presents the female
> counterpart to the "stranger." This counterpart also has her freedom,
> has not sold out to the easy life of guaranteed possession offered by
> marriage. Aloof, independent, choosy, this "travelling lady" gives an
> affection which Cohen feels should be far more to a man than a paper
> contract. In "Sisters of Mercy" this woman waits to refresh the
> questing stranger, ministering to his tiredness without plotting for
> his being.
>
>
> O the sisters of mercy
> They are not departed or gone
> They were waiting for me when I thought
> That I just can't go on.
>
> There is apparently no jealousy or possessiveness in his relationship
> with these sisters; he can genuinely wish that they will be able to
> aid other questing strangers like himself.
>
>
> When I left they were sleeping
> I hope you run into them soon.
> Don't turn on the lights,
> You can read their address by the moon;
>
> And you won't make me jealous
> If I hear that they've sweetened your night
> We weren't lovers like that
> And besides it would still be all right
>
> There is merely a community of love where any may help any in his or
> her quest for life's fulfillment.
>
> Casual love between man and woman is,in Cohen's songs, a desirable
> escape from the ordeal of existence. Domestic love is merely part of
> the ordeal. In "So Long, Marianne" this contradiction which Cohen sees
> between domesticity and personal freedom is explored at length. He
> thought himself "some kind of gypsy boy," he tells Marianne, before he
> let her take him home. Now, he says, "You make me forget so very
> much/I forget to pray for the angel/ And then the angels forget to
> pray for us." Here the woman desperately attempts to bind him: "your
> fine spider web/Is fastening my ankle to a stone." She heretically
> clings to him as if he were a substitute for the divine, holding him,
> he says, "like I was a crucifix/ As we went kneeling through the
> dark." In this song Cohen wavers, tempted by sentimentality as he
> remembers their love "deep in the green lilac park" but is
> fortuitously set free by her own possessive- ness, this time for
> another man.
>
>
> O you are really such a pretty one
> I see youive gone and changed your name again
> And just when I climbed this whole mountainside
> To wash my eyelids in the rain.
>
> "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong" is Cohen's ironic story of a pos- sessive
> lover, both sadistic in his attempting to dominate the woman, and
> masochistic in his yearning to be in turn dominated by her. The song
> begins:
>
>
> I lit a thin green candle
> To make you jealous of me,
>
> Then I took the dust of a long sleepless night
> I put it in your little shoe.
> And then I confess'd that I tortured the dress
> That you wore for the world to look through.
>
> The lover seeks the advice of a doctor who proves as frail as he,
> locking "himself in a library shelf" with the details of their honey-
> moon. He then visits a saint who teaches "that the duty of lovers is
> to tarnish the golden rule," but the saint too proves frail. Reports
> the lover,
>
> And just when I was sure
> That his teachings were pure
> He drowned himself in the pool,
> His body is gone, but back here on the lawn
> His spirit continues to drool.
>
> Nevertheless, our poor lover cannot learn by these sordid, possessive,
> lascivious, and self-destroying examples and remains as blindly
> masochistic as ever, as the last stanza demonstrates.
>
> An Eskimo showed me a movie
> He'd recently taken of you
> The poor man could hardly stop shivering,
> His lips and his fingers were blue.
> I suppose that he froze
> When the wind took your clothes
> And I guess he just never got warm
> But you stand there so nice
> In your blizzard of ice
> O please let me come into the storm.
>
> The thing that all lovers must learn in Cohen's songs is how to say
> goodbye, not because parting is good for its own sake but because ties
> seem to Cohen to keep people from fulfilling their eesential manhood
> or womanhood. Change is imperative for fulfillment in Cohen's
> precarious world, and ties inhibit change, as is indicated by the song
> "That's No Way to Say Goodbye."
>
>
> I'm not looking for another
> As I wander in my time,
> Walk me to the corner
> Our steps will always rhyme,
> You know my love goes with you
> As your love stays with me,
> It's just the way it changes
> Like the shoreline and the sea.
>
> Cohen's most energetic condemnation of possessiveness in love is found
> in "Master Song," a song about the poet's old sweetheart, who is
> perhaps a personification of poetry herself, who has now come under
> the control of an autocratic master. This new master is associated
> throughout the song with images of violence and oppression: he is a
> man "who had just come back from the war," who has given the woman "a
> German shepherd to walk / With a collar of Ieather and nails," who
> flies an aeroplane "without any hands," who "killed the lights in a
> lonely lane" and made love to the woman in the guise of "an ape with
> angel glands" to "the music of rubber bands." And in turn the woman
> keeps the poet himself prisoner, not ever bringing herself to him, not
> even bringing to him a sacramental surrogate of "wine and bread." This
> song is one of intense disappointment and frustration, and is filled
> with images of sterility and despair.
>
> However, love does remain in the songs of Leonard Cohen the major
> remedy to the callous possessiveness of our society. Cohen's song
> "Suzanne" seems on one level to be another escape-through- drugs song
> such as Dylan's "Mr Tambourine Man" or the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky
> with Diamonds." But, as in this latter song, the escape is
> ambivalently both female and hallucinogenic, and the speaker's entry
> into the escape is clearly an entry into a love experience, so that
> the song tells us simultaneously both that to turn on is to love and
> that love is a turn-on. Even on first meeting the exotic Suzanne,
> Cohen tells us, you will know
>
> That you've always been her lover
> And you want to travel with her
> And you want to trave! blind
> And you think maybe you'll trust her
> For you've touched her perfect body with your mind.
>
> As your experience with Suzanne deepens, he continues, you will want
> not only to travel blind with her but also to walk upon the water with
> the dead Jesus. By the end of the poem Suzanne has raised all the
> various contradictory realities of this would-"the garbage and the
> flowers"-to beauty, and has even through love brought ourselves to
> perfection-"for she's touched your perfect body with her mind." A
> further noteworthy aspect of Suzanne is that she can be approached or
> abandoned at will-"you can spend the night beside her" (my italics);
> both as an hallucinogenic and as a woman she acts only as a "sister of
> mercy" and never as the grasping spouse.
>
> The Cohen song where love serves most obviously as a panacea for
> society's demand that one control, discipline, and enslave one's
> environment and fellow man is the difficult and unpublished song,
> "Love Tries to Call You by Your Name." Cohen's basic assumption in
> this song is that in surrender to the materialism and generalism of
> society one also surrenders one's personal identity. Only love, as the
> title states, "tries to call you by your name." The song opens with
> the speaker slowly losing himself in something much larger and less
> real than he himself is.
>
>
> I thought it would never happen
> To all the people that I became
> My body lost in these legends
> And the beast so very tame
> But here, right here
> Between the birthmark and the stain
> Between the ocean and the rain
> Between the snowman and the rain
> Once again and again
> Love tries to call you by your name.
>
> From the wholeness and integrity of the ocean to the fragmentary
> realities of the drops of rain, from the monolithic existence of the
> snowman to the destructive rain which fragments that snowman, from the
> birthmark which, when positively interpreted symbolises one's unique
> being, to the birthmark pejoratively interpreted which now represents
> a stain or blemish on the norm of general humanity, the speaker finds
> himself pulled, while the "beast" of his individuality grows tamer and
> love weakly calls on him to return.
>
> Succeeding verses amplify Cohen's image of the man who is drawn into
> self-annihilation and away from self-realization, a man much like the
> "dealer" of "The Stranger Song." Such a man claws at "the halls of
> fame," lives for "the age" rather than "the hour," for "the plain"
> rather than "the sundial," and prefers the banality of the commonplace
> to the demanding particularity of genuine love.
>
>
> I leave the lady meditating on the very love
> Which I do not wish to claim
> I journey down these hundred steps
> The street is still the same.
>
> He abandons real lovers, real heroes, to follow society's broad high-
> way to mediocrity, vulgarity, self-indulgence, and anonymity.
> Especially here in this song it is self-indulgence which betrays the
> indi- vidual away from the difficulties of one's own fulfillment and
> into the easy chains of conformity.
>
>
> Where are you Judy, where are you Ann
> Where are all the paths all your heroes came
> Wondering out loud as the bandage pulls away
> Was I only limping or
> Was I really lame;
> O here, come over here
> Between the windmill and the grain
> Between the traitor and her pain
> Between the sundial and the plain
> Between the newsreel and your tiny pain
> Between the snowmen and the rain
> Once again and again
> Love tries to call you by your name.
>
> The world that Cohen perceives in his songs is consistently
> materialistic, sordid, and corrupting. Saints become lechers, lovers
> become masochists, Cadillacs spread poison gas. Love can become "some
> dust in an old man's cuff" ("Master Song"). Priests can trample the
> grass of the shrines which they sene ("Priests"). God himself says to
> man:
>
>
> Sometimes I need you naked
> Sometimes I need you wild
> I need you to carry my children in
> I need you to kill a child.
>
> ("You Know Who I Am")
>
> Cohen shows man in this world clinging to whatever solace the moment
> offers. The cowardly grasp one thing forever; the bolder move from
> narcotic to narcotic, from woman to woman. And in "The Old Revolution"
> Cohen shows everyone surrendering to this "furnace" that is life.
>
>
> You who are broken by power
> You who are absent all day
> You who are kings for the sake of your children's story
> The hand of your beggar is burdened down with money
> The hand of your lover is clay
> Into this furnace I ask you now to venture
> You whom I cannot betray.
>
> Cohen's is indeed a black world, illumined only by random loves, the
> mystery of Suzanne, and the harsh light of the existential furnace.
> Cohen has elsewhere been termed a "black romantic"-one who accepts the
> evil and sordidness of this world and seeks revelation through
> immersion in these. Such an interpretation of his work is certainly
> supported by his songs. Dylan can be similarly interpreted,
> particularly in view of his materialism's self-destruction, in such
> songs as "A Hard Rain," as a gateway to Eden. Neither is an activist;
> neither believes that utopia can be achieved through human action. And
> both are thoroughly disinterested in purveying the old and simplistic
> romantic lies whch so many of today's pop artists Donovan, the Bee
> Gees, the Fifth Dimension, the Association consistently peddle. Both
> instead try to do the poet's job present the world as the world
> appears in the words and images which their separate visions demand.
>
> Frank Davey, in Alphabet No. 17, December 1969
> Leonard Cohen was a poet of great magnitude up near my way, Bill and Susie
> had his albums...… and Lou Reed...…….
Agreed on all counts there, Zod.
Will Dockery
Jul 17, 2019, 3:14:42 AM7/17/19
to
"Earl Browder" wrote in message
news:4c381c37-c066-4a68...@googlegroups.com...
news:4c381c37-c066-4a68...@googlegroups.com...
Found in my drafts file, worth archiving.
Will Dockery
Jul 29, 2019, 8:38:19 PM7/29/19
to
Will Dockery
Jul 30, 2019, 9:42:57 AM7/30/19
to
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
>
news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
>
> If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
If it is sickly sweet and sappy... it is probably a Pat Boone song.
:)
W.Dockery
Jul 27, 2022, 5:30:38 PM7/27/22
to
"Earl Browder" wrote in message
> news:4c381c37-c066-4a68...@googlegroups.com...
> news:4c381c37-c066-4a68...@googlegroups.com...
> Will Dockery wrote:
>> "Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
>> news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
>>
>> Will Dockery wrote:
>> > Michael Pendragon wrote:
>> "Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
>> news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
>>
>> Will Dockery wrote:
>> > >
>> > > Let's all talk about Bob
>> > > Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen".
>> >
>> > We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and
>> > Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with
>> > music:
So, Michael Pendragon and his ignorance about Leonard Cohen is long standing, one error of his that seems as uncorrectable as Jim Senetto and his apostrophe disability.
>> > We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and
>> > Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with
>> > music:
And so it goes.
W-Dockery
Jul 28, 2022, 7:50:18 AM7/28/22
to
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
> news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
>>
>> If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
Like I've said before, if it is sickly sweet and sappy... it is probably a Pat Boone song.
> news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
>>
>> If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
HTH and HAND.
🙂
General-Zod
Jul 28, 2022, 6:25:15 PM7/28/22
to
My drawing of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg...
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10159616377009363&set=g.629438503762910
W.Dockery
Jul 29, 2022, 6:50:59 PM7/29/22
to
W.Dockery
Aug 1, 2022, 3:55:16 AM8/1/22
to
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
> news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
> news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
> Will Dockery wrote:
>
>> We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and
>> Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with
>> music:
>>
>> https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Patti_Smith
>>
>> "Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946)[1] is an American
>> poet, singer-songwriter, and visual artist..."
>>
>> https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
>>
>> "Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016) was
>> a Canadian poet, singer-songwriter, musician, and novelist. His work often
>> explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal
>> relationships..."
>>
>
>> We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and
>> Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with
>> music:
>>
>> https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Patti_Smith
>>
>> "Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946)[1] is an American
>> poet, singer-songwriter, and visual artist..."
>>
>> https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
>>
>> "Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016) was
>> a Canadian poet, singer-songwriter, musician, and novelist. His work often
>> explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal
>> relationships..."
>>
>> > Bob Dylan is a
>> > highly influential folkie
>>
>> > highly influential folkie
>>
>> Everywhere but you says Dylan is a poet:
>
> https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Bob_Dylan
>>
>> "Bob Dylan (born May 24, 1941) is an American poet, singer-songwriter,
>> musician, and painter..."
>
> Rule of Thumb:
>
> If a song lyric can stand on its own, it's poetry
That's true, as do the lyrics of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, to name two obvious examples.
>
> https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Bob_Dylan
>>
>> "Bob Dylan (born May 24, 1941) is an American poet, singer-songwriter,
>> musician, and painter..."
>
> Rule of Thumb:
>
> If a song lyric can stand on its own, it's poetry
HTH and HAND.
Victor H.
Aug 3, 2022, 7:20:59 PM8/3/22
to
Zod
Aug 5, 2022, 3:17:08 PM8/5/22
to
W-Dockery
Aug 6, 2022, 9:09:43 AM8/6/22
to
W-Dockery
Aug 7, 2022, 4:53:07 PM8/7/22
to
Victor H.
Aug 10, 2022, 5:50:18 PM8/10/22
to
W.Dockery wrote:
> "Earl Browder" wrote in message
>> news:4c381c37-c066-4a68...@googlegroups.com...
>> Will Dockery wrote:
>>> "Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
>>> news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
>>>
>>> Will Dockery wrote:
>>> > Michael Pendragon wrote:
>>> > >
>>> > > Let's all talk about Bob
>>> > > Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen".
>>> >
>>> > We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and
>>> > Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with
>>> > music:
> So, Michael Pendragon and his ignorance about Leonard Cohen is long standing, one error of his that seems as uncorrectable as Jim Senetto and his apostrophe disability.
I still haven't looked up Pat Boone's 1975 hit record...
> "Earl Browder" wrote in message
>> news:4c381c37-c066-4a68...@googlegroups.com...
>> Will Dockery wrote:
>>> "Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
>>> news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
>>>
>>> Will Dockery wrote:
>>> > Michael Pendragon wrote:
>>> > >
>>> > > Let's all talk about Bob
>>> > > Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen".
>>> >
>>> > We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and
>>> > Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with
>>> > music:
> So, Michael Pendragon and his ignorance about Leonard Cohen is long standing, one error of his that seems as uncorrectable as Jim Senetto and his apostrophe disability.
W-Dockery
Aug 12, 2022, 6:50:14 AM8/12/22
to
Zod wrote:
> Will Dockery wrote:
>> "Earl Browder" wrote in message
>>> news:4c381c37-c066-4a68...@googlegroups.com...
>>> Will Dockery wrote:
>>>> "Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
>>>> news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
>>>>
>>>> Will Dockery wrote:
>>>> > Michael Pendragon wrote:
>>>> > >
>>>> > > Let's all talk about Bob
>>>> > > Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen".
>>>> >
>>>> > We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and
>>>> > Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with
>>>> > music:
>> So, Michael Pendragon and his ignorance about Leonard Cohen is long standing, one error of his that seems as uncorrectable as Jim Senetto and his apostrophe disability.
> I still haven't looked up Pat Boone's 1975 hit record...
"Indiana Girl", a pretty good song, actually.
> Will Dockery wrote:
>> "Earl Browder" wrote in message
>>> news:4c381c37-c066-4a68...@googlegroups.com...
>>> Will Dockery wrote:
>>>> "Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
>>>> news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
>>>>
>>>> Will Dockery wrote:
>>>> > Michael Pendragon wrote:
>>>> > >
>>>> > > Let's all talk about Bob
>>>> > > Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen".
>>>> >
>>>> > We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and
>>>> > Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with
>>>> > music:
>> So, Michael Pendragon and his ignorance about Leonard Cohen is long standing, one error of his that seems as uncorrectable as Jim Senetto and his apostrophe disability.
> I still haven't looked up Pat Boone's 1975 hit record...
General-Zod
Aug 14, 2022, 5:13:23 PM8/14/22
to
W-Dockery
Aug 16, 2022, 12:05:14 PM8/16/22
to
General-Zod
Aug 30, 2022, 9:50:27 PM8/30/22
to
W.Dockery wrote:
> "Earl Browder" wrote in message
>> news:4c381c37-c066-4a68...@googlegroups.com...
>> Will Dockery wrote:
>>> "Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
>>> news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
>>>
>>> Will Dockery wrote:
>>> > Michael Pendragon wrote:
>>> > >
>>> > > Let's all talk about Bob
>>> > > Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen".
>>> >
>>> > We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and
>>> > Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with
>>> > music:
> So, Michael Pendragon and his ignorance about Leonard Cohen is long standing, one error of his that seems as uncorrectable as Jim Senetto and his apostrophe disability.
A shame Pen has to be so blatant in his insincerity.....
> "Earl Browder" wrote in message
>> news:4c381c37-c066-4a68...@googlegroups.com...
>> Will Dockery wrote:
>>> "Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
>>> news:4e279b72-7458-4417...@googlegroups.com...
>>>
>>> Will Dockery wrote:
>>> > Michael Pendragon wrote:
>>> > >
>>> > > Let's all talk about Bob
>>> > > Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen".
>>> >
>>> > We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and
>>> > Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with
>>> > music:
> So, Michael Pendragon and his ignorance about Leonard Cohen is long standing, one error of his that seems as uncorrectable as Jim Senetto and his apostrophe disability.
>> Found in my drafts file, worth archiving.
*************************************************************
Rocky Stoneberg
Oct 3, 2022, 7:29:57 PM10/3/22
to
I love this one from P.B.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSpj3l-_MQY
W-Dockery
Oct 30, 2022, 3:13:59 AM10/30/22
to
🙂
General-Zod
Dec 7, 2023, 5:15:18 PM12/7/23
to
0 new messages