Calling it Quits -- Aimee Mann

Guest poem submitted by J. Goard:

(Poem #1871) Calling it Quits He's a serious Mister; shake his hand and he'll twist your arm. With monopoly money we'll be buying the funny farm. So I'll do flips, and get paid in chips from a diamond as big as the Ritz - then I'm calling it quits. Eyes the color of candy, lies to cover the handicap - though your slippers are ruby, you'll be led to the booby trap. And there's no prize, just a smaller size, so I'm wearing the shoe 'til it fits - then I'm calling it quits. Now he's numbering himself among the masterminds, cause he's hit upon the leverage of valentines, lifting dialogue from Judy Garland storylines where get-tough girls turn into goldmines. But oh, those polaroid babies, taking chances with rabies, happy to tear me to bits - well, I'm calling it quits, yes, I'm calling it quits. -- Aimee Mann

I've been wanting to post an Aimee Mann lyric for some time now, and what's
been holding me back has really been the choice of song.  Her list is chock
full of masterfully depressing poems, sometimes oddly spliced with jangly
pop or ultra-mellow Bacharach kinds of sounds, with an abundance of
interestingly mangled idioms that can't be anything but deliberate.  Some of
her songs ("Save Me", "Little Bombs") move me deeply.  But I finally settled
on "Calling it Quits" for being a concentrated example of her particularly
*poetic* sense: the use of sonics, the wordplay, and, most especially, the
way in which her lyrics mesh with the melodic rhythm.

This song has a particularly autobiographic basis. After leaving the band
"Til Tuesday" and releasing two solo albums on a major label, Mann was
basically on the outs with the industry, and dropped away for several years
before coming back big with her 1999 soundtrack to the film "Magnolia", and
with her independently released 2000 album "Bachelor No. 2".  Since then,
she has released two more albums independently.  While the theme of "Calling
it Quits" may not be mindblowingly original, the way in which she puts it
together reveals a truly rare lyrical talent.

The first thing you notice upon hearing a song like this, if you're me ;-),
is consistency in the rhythm of the lines, between parallel musical lines
and between verses.  Just shy of my thirtieth birthday, I risk sounding like
a fogey, but: this is just something all of the great songwriters and
songwriting duos were able to do a few generations ago, except when they had
a reason to want not to.  Compare Cole Porter and Dorothy Fields and Oscar
Hammerstein with today's rock and pop hits, and for the most part the common
denominator is that today's poetics are much crappier.  The lyrical content
might be interesting, the musical craft might be top-notch, and the song
ultimately moving, but the lyrics typically come across as a barely-edited
cocktail napkin draft, with lines of erratic lengths and rhythms basically
crammed onto the vocal melody.  Not to name names.  Moreover, the critical
establishment in popular music seems oblivious to this aspect of the craft
which is so visceral for me, such that when exceptions like Billy Joel or
Elvis Costello or Linford Detweiler (Over the Rhine) get a lot of ink, it
still misses a big part of their talents as songwriters.

Take, for example, the bridge lyrics to "Calling it Quits" ("now he's
numbering...").  The first three lines are sung in eighth notes, except for
the antepenultimate syllables which get a whole beat, and then the fourth
line is highly punctuated poetically and musically, stressed more or less
like this:

  - - - ' - - - ' - ' - * - '
  - - - ' - - - ' - - - * - '
  - - - ' - - - ' - ' - * - '
    - * * * - * - * *

And the natural linguistic cadence of the lyrics fits this scheme perfectly:
big words creating unstressed or weakly stressed syllables in the first
three lines, and chunky compounds in the fourth.

Another aspect of this song's craft is alliteration and complex internal
rhyme.  In each of the first two verses, the first four lines have a
parallel rhythm, with an AABB rhyme scheme - except that an extra syllable
connects lines 2 and 4 as well.  The effect of having all of this rhyme
expectation collide at the end of lines 4 in expressions that also serve as
punchlines of sorts, is remarkable.

Some of the alliteration is obvious (color-candy-cover-cap) or not original
(funny farm), but some is more subtle, as the abundance of sibilants in the
first line and a half.  Most interesting is the movement of consonants in
the bridge verse.  Line 1 is full of [m]s, with one [b].  Line 2 creates a
clever expression "leverage of valentines" that plays off a reversal of [l]
and [v], and then line 3 moves into a lot more [l]s.  The weighty line 4
picks up on the [g] of "Garland" and bashes us with it.  And look at how the
last half-verse, which (relative to the first two verses) is already gaining
momentum by not having the syllable at the end of line 2, keeps the [b]s
going with "bits".

Finally, there isn't just phonetic but semantic fun going on here.
"Monopoly" isn't capitalized in the online lyrics sites I checked, and I'll
run with that, since the sense of economic monopoly among music producers
relative to artists seems to be as relevant as the sense of the popular
game's fake money (many empty promises of wealth).  "Buying the farm" means
dying, of course, "funny farm" means madness, and merging the two is classic
Aimee Mann idiom mangling.  "Lies to cover the handicap" is a striking line,
drawing out double senses of "cover" and "handicap": that is to say, it can
mean "obscure the disability" or "compensate for the skill differential".
"Smaller size" evokes the pressure on female stars to be very thin while
also fitting the shoe reference.

All in all, there is just so much craft in this song (as in so many of her
others) that could easily escape a first or twentieth listen.  But if you
get to the point of appreciating what Mann does with words, and if you
respond to this style of tightly crafted pop, it can be truly engrossing.

J. Goard

Aimee Mann official site: https://www.aimeemann.com

Consolation for Tamar -- A E Stallings

Guest poem submitted by J. Goard:

(Poem #1847) Consolation for Tamar (on the occasion of her breaking an ancient pot) You know I am no archeologist, Tamar, And that to me it is all one dust or another. Still, it must mean something to survive the weather Of the Ages-earthquake, flood, and war- Only to shatter in your very hands. Perhaps it was gravity, or maybe fated- Although I wonder if it had not waited Those years in drawers, aeons in distant lands, And in your fingers' music, just a little Was emboldened by your blood, and so forgot That it was not a rosebud, but a pot, And, trying to unfold for you, was brittle. -- A E Stallings

    I've thought in the past about bringing a Stallings poem to the
Minstrels, since I consider her among the best living (let alone young!)
poets working primarily in formal verse.  As it turns out, a blog entry
concerning Frost's "The Road Not Taken" led me to think about "Consolation
for Tamar", another poem which manages both a concise elegance and a great
despairing depth.
    For me, this is a gutwrenching love poem, asking us to consider where
value - really valuable value - might come from, how it might ever express
itself, and how anyone might ever notice.  The narrator is apparently a
cynic, known to have expressed a disinterest in that which is precious to
Tamar, and attempts a "consolation" for what, to her, feels like a profound
loss.  But it's a strange, bittersweet consolation: Tamar herself is
special, special enough to make the eternal aspire to the ephemeral,
consuming itself.  As, presumably, does the narrator in the moment of the
poem.
    I love how the initial hexameter lines (before it settles into
pentameter in line 3) have an unwieldiness that reinforces the narrator's
reputation as a jaded soul.  I love how he (as I typically imagine it to be
a man, a point I probably wouldn't even mention if the poet were male, alas)
so casually passes over gravity and fate as explanations, as if divine
providence and pure materialism were just two versions of the same
uninspired worldview.  I love the alliteration in "emboldened by your
blood", and all of the internal rhyme and other intertwined elements of the
final three lines.
    But mostly, I'm attracted by the central reflexive metaphor. The
narrator becomes the pot, and the articulation of the poem becomes a
shattering.  His budding love for Tamar has made him (perhaps briefly)
forget his natural cynicism; yet, in crafting a confession of love and a
recognition of her specialness, he has also delivered her a dreadful idea
about longing and loss.

J. Goard.

Poet's page: [broken link] http://www.geocities.com/aestallings/

The Ocean -- Dar Williams

Guest poem sent in by J. Goard ()

(Poem #1682) The Ocean When I went to your town on the wide open shore, Oh, I must confess, I was drawn, I was drawn to the ocean. I thought it spoke to me. It said, "Look at us: we're not churches, not schools, Not skating ponds, swimming pools, But we've lost people, haven't we though?" Oh, that's what the ocean can know of a body, And that's when I came back to town. This town is a song about you. You don't know how lucky you are. You don't know how much I adore you. You are a welcoming back from the ocean. I went back to the ocean today, With my books and my papers, I went to the rocks by the ocean. But the weather changed quickly. The ocean said, "What are you trying to find? I don't care, I'm not kind, I have bludgeoned your sailors, I have spat out their keepsakes. Oh, it's ashes to ashes, but always the ocean." But the ocean can't come to this town. This town is a song about you. You don't know how lucky you are. You don't know how much I adore you. You are a welcoming back from the ocean. For the ones that can know you so well Are the ones that can swallow you whole. I have a good, and I have an evil. I thought the ocean, the ocean thought nothing. You are a welcoming back from the ocean. I didn't go back today. I wanted to show you that I was more land than water. I went to pick flowers. Oh, I brought them to you – "Look at me, look at them, With their salt up the stem." But you frowned, and I smiled, as I tried to arrange them. You said, "Let me tell you the song of this town." You said, "Everything closes at five. After that, well, you've just got the bars. You don't know how precious you are, Walking around with your little shoes dangling. I am the one who lives with the ocean. It's where we came from, you know, And sometimes, I just want to go back. After a day, we'll drink till we're drowning, Walk to the ocean, wade in in our work boots, Wade in our work boots, try to finish the job. You don't know how precious you are. I am the one who lives with the ocean. You don't know how I am the one. You don't know how I am the one. -- Dar Williams

Dar Williams is a singer-songwriter whose work is typically classified as
folk-pop.  Her songs range from the simple and melodic to the richly
orchestrated to the rather "talky", but her writing presents a consistently
high standard of poetic craft.  (Some other outstanding examples of musical
poetry include "When Sal's Burned Down", "February", "The End of the
Summer", and "Southern California Wants to be Western New York".)  I have
heard second-hand that she has referred to "The Ocean" as her "only rock
song"; this assertion seems somewhat more plausible up to the time of the
song's release (her second of five albums) then it does today, but even so,
it strikes me that its consistently anapestic verse speaks to a greater
connection with folk or blues.

In "The Ocean", we are presented with a narrator and an interlocutor (most
likely a lover but possibly a close friend or relative); the narrator's
perspective is developed until the third full verse, in which a presumably
taciturn interlocutor is moved to challenge this perspective as highly
presumptuous.  In general terms, the narrator is revealed as an artsy or
intellectual type ("my books and my papers"; "little shoes dangling") with
volatile emotions, while the interlocutor is more of a stolid, reliable
worker.

Irony abounds in this work.  Take, for example, the contrast between the
narrator's plea, "I wanted to show you that I was more land than water", and
her revealed preference for drawing attention to "the salt up the stem",
i.e., the visible effects of the ocean.  Similarly, the insistence that "the
ocean can't come to this town" is belied by the actions of the very person
who asserts it, in essence bringing the ocean into the town by incessantly
expressing her despair.

Yet we can pursue this analysis a step further: an analogy seems warranted
between the distressing effect of the ocean on the narrator, and the effect
of the narrator on people close to her.  From this vantage point, the song
takes on a more sinister tone.  (Do you like my mixed metaphor? :-> )  Given
the narrator's clear identification with the ocean in the first verse, and
her revealed condescension ("You don't know how lucky you are...") and
carelessness toward a loved one, the frightening description of the ocean in
the second verse might be seen as a (wholly unaware) self- description of a
person with sociopathic tendencies, who believes that she is uniquely
attuned to despair and angst, and who has a generally draining effect on
others.

"The Ocean" is among Williams' most profound work, and likely her most
intricate.  In its literary structure, my first comparisons would be to the
dramatic monologues of Robert Browning ("My Last Duchess"; "Soliloquy of the
Spanish Cloister"), and to Nabokov novels such as "Lolita" and "Pale Fire",
with disturbed and delusional narrators bouncing their heavily filtered
worldviews against much more balanced, sympathetic, and curious characters.

One final point: punctuation of the final line (okay, the final two
identical lines) is difficult, and any choice risks misleading.  The rhythm
of this line, as with the earlier "You don't know how..." lines, has the
expected two-syllable pause in its anapestic rhythm ( ' - - ' / ' - - ' ),
so that it could be interpreted either as two sentences (i.e., "You don't
know how to live with the ocean.  I am the one who knows.") or as one (i.e,
"You're not aware of the fact that (or the way that) I live with the
ocean.")  I personally prefer the latter sense, but it's probably even
better that there's a lasting ambiguity.

J Goard

[Links]

There's an official Dar Williams site at http://www.darwilliams.com/

In Time of War, XII -- W H Auden

Guest poem submitted by J. Goard:

(Poem #913) In Time of War, XII And the age ended, and the last deliverer died. In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe: The sudden shadow of the giant's enormous calf Would fall no more at dusk across the lawn outside. They slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt A sterile dragon lingered to a natural death, But in a year the spoor had vanished from the heath; The kobold's knocking in the mountain petered out. Only the sculptors and the poets were half sad, And the pert retinue from the magician's house Grumbled and went elsewhere. The vanished powers were glad To be invisible and free: without remorse Struck down the sons who strayed their course, And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad. -- W H Auden

The relevance of this poem to today's climate hardly needs mention, although
I suspect that, depending upon one's own viewpoint, it could be interpreted
in different ways.  This is the final sonnet from "In Time of War", looking
forward to an extended period of peace in Europe after WWII, not with
celebration but with warning.  The metaphor of ancient mythical monsters
reinforces our feeling that this cycle has been going since the beginning of
time.

The alexandrine (iambic hexameter) isn't used very often these days, and in
fact it's even difficult to find decent examples from the past.  As Auden's
sonnet shows, however, the alexadrine isn't merely a curiosity, but a
vibrant form.  In my opinion, very few lines of pentameter flow as smoothly
and somberly as the second quatrain does here.  Most interesting is the
unexpected shift in the final two lines, to tetrameter and pentameter. When
I read this out loud, my feeling is a swift violence in line 13 and then,
reinforcing the theme, a feeling that the pace of life has changed. About as
good an example as you'll find of form matching content.

--JG--

[Minstrels Links]

W. H. Auden:
Poem #50, In Memory of W. B. Yeats
Poem #68, Musee des Beaux Arts
Poem #256, Funeral Blues
Poem #307, Lay your sleeping head, my love
Poem #371, O What Is That Sound
Poem #386, The Unknown Citizen
Poem #427, The Two
Poem #491, Roman Wall Blues
Poem #494, The Fall of Rome
Poem #618, The More Loving One
Poem #677, Villanelle
Poem #708, Five Songs - II
Poem #728, from The Dog Beneath the Skin
Poem #762, Miranda
Poem #868, Partition
Poem #889, September 1, 1939
Poem #895, August 1968