Paul Muldoon Things Coming Round Again

Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Muldoon is this month'due south feature. We're delighted to present his essay about the differences betwixt writing song lyrics and poems, "Between Rails-End and Rail-End," as well as the lyrics to his song, "Most of the Fourth dimension." Both the essay and the vocal appear in The Music Issue (Leap/Summertime 2007).

Also: Download "Nigh of the Fourth dimension" to hear Muldoon's three-car garage band, Rackett. (Depending on the speed of your connectedness the file may have several minutes to download, but it's well worth the wait.)

Download "Virtually of the Time."

Between Rail-End and Rail-End

I've been asked a lot recently about the difference between writing poems and writing song lyrics and have disappointed a few people, including myself, by reminding them that there may non be all that much in the way of difference. I myself come from a culture, especially that part of my civilisation associated with the Gaelic tradition, in which poems are quite indistinguishable from songs. This was the tradition which so greatly influenced Irish gaelic writers in English from Thomas Moore to Van Morrison, a tradition of songwriters thinking of themselves equally poets and vice versa.

My own view is that the very all-time gimmicky songwriters are every bit every bit good as, if not much better than, many of those who think of themselves primarily as poets. That list includes Bono, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, and the belatedly Warren Zevon. In 2002 or thereabouts I wrote a fan letter to Warren Zevon stating as much and was delighted to hear back from him. We met, and he asked me to write a song with him for his side by side anthology, an album featuring collaborations with a number of writers including Hunter S. Thompson and Carl Hiassen. He already had a title for a song— "My Ride's Hither"—a phrase he'd used at a concert one night when the sound of an ambulance siren coincided with his leaving the stage.

I wrote the beginning verse in most the fourth dimension it takes to speak or sing it, "in time" every bit Stephen Sondheim calls information technology, pointing to what may truly be i of several distinctions betwixt some vocal lyrics and some poems which I'll try to outline here. That'southward to say, they accept to be pretty much immediatelyaccessible to the listener. There's no opportunity to go back and reread that phrase one might not take grasped commencement time through. This is non to say, of course, that the opportunity to hear over again might non deepen one'southward sense of the meaning, peculiarly if 1'due south non familiar with a Yiddish word similar mazuma, pregnant "coin," or withthe fact that John Wayne's real name was Marion or that 3:10 to Yuma is the title of a Western film.

Paradoxically, another stardom betwixt many poems and many song lyrics is that once the template of that first verse, say, is established it'southward difficult to break from it in successive verses. One must follow through on pretty much the same syllable count, if not the same prosody, every bit is established at the outset. This was a characteristic of songwriting I but didn't understand, which is why the second poesy of "My Ride'due south Here" was the virtually difficult towrite. I worked at information technology for days while a patient Zevon looked over my shoulder.

He'd already written the music for the rest of the song, and therein lies another distinction between many poems and many song lyrics of which I'd simply been unaware. That's to say, song lyrics in their entirety tend to be of a shortish elapsing, often making a shape in the globe which, in the case of blues structures like "Price" or "Twice on Clay," is predetermined in means in which poems simply are not, unless they're pantoums or sestinas or such. So Warren Zevon knew something which I, in my innocence, did not. He knew that this song would fall into the archetype AABA construction, with ii verses and choruses (AA) followed past a span or centre eight (B) followed by a final verse and chorus (A).

This was a shape that figured often in the songs of the masters to whom, subsequently Warren Zevon's untimely death, I would apprentice myself. I'm thinking of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and, above all, Ira Gershwin, whose work influences a piece like "Near of the Time." For the moment, Warren Zevon knew that possibly the main difficulty for those who write words before music is the figuring in, insofar as ane's able, of the mis-sing element which music will to some extent fill out. One's instinct as a poet is to enclose, to connect, then the main difficulty I continue to have with writing song lyrics is to allow them to be looser, to judge the gap between rail-cease and railend which volition allow for their contracting and expanding in deepest winter or loftier summer, which will let the iii:x to Yuma to roll smoothly down the tracks.

Nigh of the Time

Nearly of the time I don't become information technology
In one case in a while I do
It seems everything's encoded
I just don't accept a clue
I wandered through the labyrinth
That goes by NYU
At Broadway and I gauge Thirteenth
I asked the manner of you lot

Y'all said about of the fourth dimension I don't get it
Once in a while I exercise

Most of the time I don't get it
Once in a while I do
I said she's a cardboard cut-out
An Acrid Queen Mark Two
You said they've built the Thunderdome
Just off Third Avenue
Where in some godawful dormroom
I'd accept my manner with y'all

I thought most of the fourth dimension I don't get it
Once in a while I do I'thou trying to retrieve why

Tina left Ike
With simply xxx-six cents and a Mobil credit carte
And Auntie Entity under her hood
I'm trying to remember why y'all took a hike
The sequence of events that led from Queen'southward Boulevard
Through the 1990s to Englewood

Nigh of the time I don't get it
Once in a while I do
Your customs is gated
All the night guys are new
The patron saint of lost causes
Ihud…Yep correct…Like Jude
Mel Gibson has turned to Jesus
I've establish my manner in you

And if nigh of the fourth dimension I don't become information technology
Once in a while I exercise

Paul Muldoon is the author of nine books of poesy, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Moy Sand and Gravel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). He teaches at Princeton University and, between 1999 and 2004, was professor of verse at Oxford University.

The songs presented in this issue are from General Admission, a collection of fifty-v song lyrics by Paul Muldoon, published by the Gallery Press at world wide web.gallerypress.com.

"Between Rails-End and Rail-Finish" and "Most of the Time" appear in the Spring-Summertime 2007 (v2.n1) consequence of Poetry Northwest

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Source: https://www.poetrynw.org/paul-muldoon-between-rail-end-and-rail-end/

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