The self-designated Wily Filipino, Benito Vergara, quotes Caterina Fake citing my blog on poets’ novelists & notes that the John Zorn list has a similar discussion every year. Then he decides to turn the question around: what do poets listen to?

 

That’s an interesting question. I recall being fascinated by Ted Berrigan’s 1959 collection of 45 RPM “singles” listed as an appendix to Ron Padgett’s memoir Ted. His collection, with all of its Perry Como, Al Jolson & Tommy Dorsey, was an absolute index of the difference between our generations. 45s were just coming in when I started paying attention to music as a kid. My mom had a number of old 78s mostly by Nat “King” Cole & I recall that it wasn’t until we bought our first 45 player in 1958 that I bought my very first record, Bobby Day’s Rock-in Robin. The flip side was And Over – “and over and over and over again, I said this dance is gonna be a drag” – that I can hear with crystal clarity just by thinking about it.

 

But that was then & this is now. The truth is that, since I’ve had kids of my own, I’ve learned to appreciate silence much more than I used to. One of the main functions of music growing up was to shut the adults in my life out in order to create some psychic space for myself. I no longer need that in the same way.

 

I do buy CDs, though not all that often, & not too long ago organized the ones in my study into 13 stacks along the top of a couple of bookcases & the mantelpiece to a fireplace I’ve never used. This just makes it easier to find what I’m looking for, although my modus operandi is to take something from the bottom of a stack just so that I know I haven’t heard it in awhile. These are the stacks:

 

·         Folk music – a lot of stuff from the ‘60s, including the Harry Smith anthologies, Eric Von Schmidt, and a Mark Spoelstra CD from the Folkways series that you have to get the Smithsonian to individually burn for you – Spoelstra was the best 12-string guitarist of that generation, but failed to get famous because he was doing his “alternative service” as a conscientious objector to the military right when Dylan & Ochs & Paxton and the rest exploded – by the time Spoelstra was finished, Dylan had gone electric & that scene was already gone

·         Jazz – from the big bands to Marty Ehrlich and the Ganelin Trio; a lot of Anthony Braxton & Steve Lacy in this stack, but not enough to break out separately

·         Rova Saxophone Quartet – including other projects by its members – one of my larger stacks

·         Blues – from Robert Johnson to the Blind Boys of Alabama; you’ve never heard Muddy Waters if you haven’t heard his acoustic “plantation album”

·         World music – lots of gamelan, Balinese street music, Tuva throat singing and African pre-electronic or “tribal” music; this is probably my favorite of all these stacks, the one I play most often.

·         Rock – from Janis to Radiohead with Bruce, REM, North Mississippi All-Stars, Los Lobos, Tom Waits & even Jim Carroll. Arc, the “live” CD of nothing but guitar feedback from Neil Young & Crazy Horse is a secret treasure here.

·         Bob Dylan – not quite as tall a stack as Rova, but I have a lot of Dylan tapes floating around as well – my newest CD is the soundtrack to Masked & Anonymous – you have to hear “Like a Rolling Stone” as a rap song in Italian

·         Poetry – the category that CD stores ineptly categorize as “spoken word” if they even have it at all – from Creeley to Kenning to Ganick to cheek

·         Premodernist classical music – the shortest stack of all, these are virtually all “accidents” in terms of my collection except for some Pavarotti

·         Modernist “classical” music –i.e. Satie, Anthiel, Bowles

·         Postmodern “classical” music – Cage & after (the only tall stack of “classical”); Terry Riley, Harry Partch, Phil Glass, Lou Harrison, Tina Davidson, Annie Gosfield, Alan Hovhaness

·         Steve Reich – my preference is for the earlier work, through Drumming

·         Olivier Messiaen -- I like Myung-Whun Chung’s interpretations

I included two Dylan albums in my list of other “essential titles” yesterday, but (as a result, in fact) I tend to listen to his work less often than I do a lot of these other CDs – they overwhelm me & I can’t write poetry for a couple of days, literally.

 

Twenty years ago, there would have been a lot more rock than there is in the current collection. I went through a rap period during the time when I was only buying tapes, but was over that by the time I moved over to CDs (not all that long ago). I have a couple of cartons of LPs in the garage that I haven’t even looked at since I moved from Berkeley in ’95 – some of the older rock and earlier Rova pieces can be found in both on CD & LP.

 

Later this month I will go hear Tracy Grammer at The Point & over the summer I’ve heard Norah Jones, Gillian Welch, Steve Forbert & Lucy KIaplansky, all performers in the singer-songwriter “Americana” post-folk genre. Grammer is the only one who doesn’t write her own material, almost all of which was composed by her late partner Dave Carter. We have CDs by all of the above except Forbert, but we keep them upstairs where everyone in the family can play them. Colin has been into a heavy Dave Carter-Tracy Grammer & Beatles* rotation all year &, frankly, that’s alright by me.

 

 

 

* As Stephen Kirbach notes in the 17^th comment to my August 27^th blog, the Beatles at one point have a song in which Sir Paul yells at one point, “JOE       JOE,” yet another possible interpretation to that poem of Grenier’s.