Musical Influences

I read recently that it is now twenty-five years since Emmylou Harris best album (arguably) was released – the Wrecking Ball album.

I won’t speak about Harris so much here, other than to say that I was introduced to her work in about 1975 or 1976 and have not wandered in my belief that she is the purest interpreter of other people’s songs, and a superb songwriter to boot. My choice for best Emmylou Harris song harks back to that era, and is Boulder to Birmingham.

Now that is a love song!

She has consistently, my favoured and favourite artist over all those years, and I incorporated my admiration for her as an artist in the poem titled and again in the Walk Away Silver Heart collection, the first part of my A Love Poetry Trilogy.

 

How does music inspire? Meet me at the Wrecking Ball . . .

Wrecking Ball, when it was released, came as a mood shift and a mindset change. A resonant confrontation with feeling and emotion.

The year twenty-twenty is a time made for such confrontation. Truly, no cuckoos, no sycamores. No Harlan to go back to at all, really. We seem to be living through such grim times that it is hard to find good reasons that are strong enough to dominate their counterparts.

Of the songs – stories, in truth – on that Emmylou Harris album, one of them in particular swirled in my mind and became a driving force in a writing project that I did not know I was undertaking (in 2018) until it was almost completed.

Neil Young wrote the title track with great poignancy, and at a time when I – who consider myself to be a private person – was striving for publicity and recognition in order to establish myself as a poet with a public persona and some credibility, the incongruousness and irreconcilable nature of the undertaking resolved as lines in my head, playing over and over:

My life’s an open book
You read it on the radio

Interview after interview, publicity post after publicity post. Public reading after public reading. And, eventually, in poem after poem to invoke an opening mood that ran consistently through each poem, and across an entire collection.

Writing fantasy for the first time

I had an opportunity during 2018 to contribute a poem to an anthology based on the dual themes of rain forest and fantasy, which eventually was oublished as  Short Stories of Forest and Fantasy, by OzTales. I’d never deliberately written fantasy prior to this opportunity and set to with enthusiasm, eventually contributing a post-apocalyptic, dystopian themed piece called blue dog.

I kept writing.

The poetry traversed simple fantasy within a forest to encompass life on a mining asteroid, and fighting a war while mounted on the back of a dragonfly named Isosceles. Many miles swept up in dreams of alternative experience, escape from the mundane, explanations for the inexplicable, all driven by the lines from Wrecking Ball that I held in my mind as a guide through the wilds of my imagination.

What happened to the fantasy collection?

Where is that collection, now? Well, the only answer I have for that is to say that it is waiting. It has a name or, more true to say, several names. I have called it Od Ovo and other stories, after a teenaged character who’s name is drawn from a place that is so constraining it can only be that inferior location ‘from here/from this’, even if here is on another place in the cosmos.

It has also been named ‘abacus the stars’ to reflect the limits of calculation, and the pull of home on a journey across the universe. 

In truth, though, I don’t know what it may be called, in the end. I’ll publish it one day, whenever its turn comes. Until then, it remains as a small beacon shining in my mind, entwined with the songs of the Wrecking Ball album and Emmylou Harris. A warm place to stumble across from time to time.

A sample from the unpublished fantasy collection

I haven’t published any of the poems from the fantasy collection, to date. They bide quietly. Today, though I thought it might be right to share a poem from that set with you.

storm and the sea (bubbles of foam)

I called to joe
I said

there’s a boat
trying to fly
right out of the water

the wind
had taken a breath
and it was
blowing

even as I spoke
I saw a wave
lift up that vessel

then
crash it down
like a fragile toy
built poor
by some clumsy child

there is no light
to speak of
when you’re staring
at the heart
of the storm

grey-black cloud
green water

the white
maybe
of salt

even a man
is just a pale thing

a dark shape

a nothing at all
but the brilliant
shrieking song

of a wild wind

joe took me
by the arm

said

nothing here

nothing left

there is only
the sea

not even a board
from the decking
made it to shore

not a cry
that didn’t hail
from the wind of hell itself

nothing left
but storm
and the sea

some bubbles
of foam

~