Larkins Blues: Jazz, Popular Music, and Poetry

Larkin's Jazz, Proper Records

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It is indeed astonishing to witness the Oxford Professor of Poetry and Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton write with such care and at such length about rock music, which is not usually considered as intellectually respectable at school and university level, which probably made it all the more attractive as a subject for a poem. Wills II. Muldoon measures out his life not in coffee spoons but in rock albums, beginning with his childhood in a small town in Northern Ireland, moving on to his life as a student and then radio producer in Belfast, his first marriage and its chaotic break-up, and finally his starting a new life and a new family in America.

Despite the autobiographical nature of the poem, the music is not, any more than it is in the case of Hugo Williams, a mere pretext for Muldoon to write about himself.

The poet blends or rather muddles autobiography, but also sheer poetic invention, with references to the record which lends its title to each section. In fact, the poem reveals a highly creative use of rock. These allusions bring the voice of the singer into the poem.

The three poets in question here—Muldoon himself, Thomas, Yeats—all share the Celtic and therefore perhaps bardic identity. But what about Morrison? Like Muldoon, Morrison is a great name-dropper. First of all, how does the poem relate to the record on which it purports to be a sleeve note?

With a pun perhaps on the sequence title, the poem begins by commenting on the cover, with its Southern house and leaning tower of a palm tree dwarfing the musician. The idea of the house leaning rather than the tree is perhaps a way of saying that appearances can be deceptive. Through the open shutters his music, scatty, skewed, skids and skites from the neck of a bottle that might turn on him, might turn and sever an artery, the big one that runs through his wrist.

Handy and Robert Johnson, the broken-off neck of a bottle. Sliding this up and down the fretboard gives this style of guitar playing its characteristic sound, which Muldoon attempts in the first two lines of the second stanza to evoke. The poem begins cheekily, once again, by foregrounding not Zevon, but two Clapton albums.

The last three lines show Muldoon reflecting, albeit lightheartedly, on his volume Quoof. Poetically, at least three things are striking here. Perhaps Muldoon is suggesting that, to his mind, a Cohen song is not just a song but actually more of a poem than one which is merely printed.

Numéros en texte intégral

In this strange tale, Muldoon journeys through France, guided by a she-goat. They caught the mood of their time, were articulate and accessible, and huge numbers of people listened to them. Also, they doubtless appeal to Muldoon.

He perceives the rock music he likes best as being as rich in aesthetic quality as poetry, if not richer. One rarely hears this view expressed, especially by intellectuals of the status and calibre of Muldoon. First, popular music of the kind these poems celebrate is not as unserious as is sometimes suggested: it is often as structured and as calculated in its effects as any poem.

Second, the music celebrated in the Larkin and Williams poems, and in nearly all of the Muldoon ones, is American.

Philip Larkin: Various Artists: Larkin's Jazz

This raises questions about both the poetry itself and the voice, in terms of accent for example. The poems discussed above are not simply poems about music. As suggested at the beginning, they are poems about what the poet has felt when listening to the music being written about, and attempts therefore to evoke not just the music in itself but also the feelings it arouses in him and which he hopes to recreate in the reader. In this respect a poem about music would be no different to a poem about a painting. Or would it? A piece of music acts on the memory in a specific way.

When I discussed poetry and music with Larkin in , I realised that he had reservations about his poems being set to music at all. As a result I decided to use the spoken voice with the minimum of musical background for the actual poems and then use the speaker who is also a singer as part of the instrumental ensemble. On either side of each of the poems there are purely musical commentaries elaborating the situations the poems expose. I took these down from the recordings so that I could work with them in detail.

Each movement is related to one of the tunes and sometimes both. The offstage trumpet at the start comes from Larkin's first poem and the offstage saxophone soprano at the end quotes Riverside Blues. Larkin's Jazz, which - lacking improvisation - is not jazz, plays without a break: 1. Prelude to Reasons for Attendance 2. Reasons for Attendance reading 3.

After Reasons for Attendance 4. But above all there was happiness: people listening to jazz were on good terms with themselves.

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About Philip Larkin. Philip Larkin. He spent his working life as a university librarian and was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman, but declined the post.

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