Here I “interview” a poet I’ve been reading and researching for decades. Poet K. D. Balmont, a guiding light and major force in the Russian Symbolist movement, offered an encyclopedic view of his intercultural, nature-mystical development in a climactic book of 255 lyrical treasures: Sonnets of Sun, Honey, and Moon: A Song of Worlds (1917). I’ve translated these into verbal artworks in English by keeping his intricate patterns of subtle, firm rhythm and elegant rhyme.

Episode 48 – Passover Seder Hymn 

         My favorite thing about the Jewish

         TO HIM IT IS FITTING, TO HIM IT IS DUE,

         Mighty, supreme in His majesty.

         Legions may rightfully sing to You,

         Sovran alone will You ever be.

         TO HIM IT IS FITTING, TO HIM IT IS DUE.

The 8 verses contain alternate near-synonyms for “legions,”

         For musicians like me, what triumphs

Episode 47 – Wordsongs for Music

The Beloving Imaginer Episode 46

Poe in Russia, “The Bells”

You’ve heard, maybe too often, about what may be “lost in translation,” but my reading tonight is designed to show that translation may also offer huge dividends, windfall profits. That’s what happened when Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont made a Russian version of Edgar Allan Poe’s experimental poem, “The Bells,” a rendering which I, in turn, translate for you from the Russian.

Poe’s inspired design, which so attracted Balmont, was to write a four-part narrative lyric showing how the four stages in the life of a human being may be correlated with the kinds of bells that are heard in the four eras of our life.

Childhood = jingle bells. Adolescence and adulthood = wedding bells. Continuing life with its conflicts and crises = fire alarm bells. Final goodbye = funeral bells.

Balmont’s exciting expansion and extensive elaboration of the Poe idea excited Sergei Rachmaninoff, who used it as the libretto for a grand vocal symphony, an orchestral cantata with solo singers and chorus. It is one of the most memorable works of one of the world’s musical masters. Bruce Borton, conductor of the Binghamton University-Community Chorus (where I sang tenor for 15 years), which performed the Rachmaninoff Bells in Russian, asked me to do a form-faithful and accurate translation of the text to be included in the piano reduction score he was preparing for Musica Russica, a firm specializing in choral works by Russian composers. I complied gladly and my singable English rendering, included in this published book, can be conveniently used by any chorus performing Bells

The Be-loving Imaginer Episode 45

Samples from Three Books

It’s a joy to offer samples from three of my recent books of poems.

From More Four! Four Beats Four Lines, Four Stanzas: 330 Four Wordsongs I offer 4 samples: (18) Jeer, (26) Nose, (103) Psalming, and (201) Sheheḥyananu (You Who Have Kept Us Alive). They contribute to the theme of being a Jewish American.

From Asclepiadic Explorer: 99 Poems and 4 Songs I offer two kinds of asclepiads from ancient verse stanza forms. (1) Melody 1 exhibits the “Third Asclepiadic” form, as it was called, and (2) Melody 2 exhibits the “Fourth Asclepiadic.” They are so intensely musical, let’s not allow this form go so extinct!

From No Lovelier Melody Ever Was Known: A Month of 96 Poems in Amphibrachic Tetrameter Catalectic. An amphibrach is la-LA-la. A tetrameter means we’ll four of them in each line. A catalexis means a line shortened by a syllable, so instead of la-LA-la, la-LA-la, la-LA-la la-LA-la we’ll have a-ONE-and, a-TWO-and, a-THREE-and, a-FOUR. I’ll offer the first 4 poems in the book to get you going and whet your appetite.

The Be-loving Imaginer Episode 44 -

A Song for Sappho

Sappho (ca. 610 BCE to 570 BCE) is the earliest woman poet we know of in Western literature. [Moses’ sister Miriam, called a “prophet” (“neviah”), leads the liberated Jews in a song of triumph in Exodus, but the two verses that she recites cannot be proved to be her own compositions; they may have been excerpted from a psalm by her brother.]

1

In the original poem I sing here (three sections, four stanzas per section), I express my feelings about her wondrous achievement. The tune I composed is based on her trademark stanza form. I demonstrate her “rhythm chart” and then show how singable it is.

Plato is said to have uttered the judgment that Sappho should be counted as the “tenth Muse,” the newest member of that sisterhood of patrons of the arts and sciences. I mention this in my Part One.

2

Sappho is widely attested to have produced a massive output of lyrics, but only a pamphlet-size collection survives. Since I can’t read her in Greek, I try to communicate with her spirit by singing in the rhythm she invented and prized.

Will such a stratagem work? I compare my singing of her rhythm to a child’s listening to the “ocean” roar in a seashell. The child doesn’t hear the physical ocean. What it hears is the sound of the circulation of the child’s own blood in the ear, vastly amplified by the intricately shaped shell! I learned this by consulting a scientific encyclopedia years ago. What the child hears, and what you too will hear in a seashell, is the FLOW OF THE OCEAN OF BLOOD WITHIN YOU. I note this in my Part Two while I sing and hear “the Sappho within me.”

3

In my Part Three I envision a chorus joining me in Sapphic song as the currents, waves, and waterdrops combine in the seashell’s ocean.

Playful Warm-ups

(173) It’s time

(174) Continued

(175) Conclamant

(176) From Chaucer to Me

(177) Hispanic

(178) Chaucer

Varied Applications

(234) Early Memory

(235) Capriccio in Rhyme Royal

(236) Psalm 150 in Rhyme Royal

(237) What Never Wasn’t There

(238) Cup of Kindness

(245) In and Out, Give and Take

(246) Enigmatic Solitude

(247) Quarantine

(267) Joyce and Me

In this second episode from my latest book High Five! The William Shakespeare Beat is Back I’ll offer examples of what can happen when you revive the 5-beat line (and ONE, and TWO, and THREE, and FOUR, and FIVE) that the world’s greatest verse writer used in all his plays. Reviving Shakespeare, you also revive Keats, whose six great odes are mostly in iambic pentameter, as well. I wrote a half dozen original odes to emulate those of Keats, and then I wrote another 7 to prove it wasn’t just luck. Here I’ll give you samples from both groups.

First, for context, the opening stanza of Keats’ most famous poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (p. 30 of my book).

Then, the samples. From Group One:

362 (1) Ode on Weather Theater

363 (2) Ode on Verse Pedagogy

367 (6) Ode on Words New-Wrought

From Group Two:

376 (2) Ode on a Shmurah Matzah

377 (3) Ode on Dead Languages

380 (6) Ode to a Cup

Of special interest in this collection of 400 original poems in iambic pentameter is a group of 70 dialogues with Spanish folk singers. I selected them to represent the main category groupings in Love and Hate: Spanish Folk Songs (1911), translated into Russian by K. D. Balmont from the collection (1882) by Francisco Rodríguez Marín, Cantos populares españoles. These delightful micro-melodies (3, 4 or 7 lines each) each elicited from me an interpretive sonnet comment (in 5-beat lines).

Poem 78: Introduction: Art of Spanish Wordsong

79 Being in Love (6)

80 Being in Love (32)

88 Tenderness (25)

91 Envy (3)

98 Confessions (4-5)

110 Lamenting (22)

117 Hate and Scorn (5)

136 Serenade (1, 2)

146 Lullabies (12)