Three songs to one prose poem about a "Secret Jew"

Yesterday I posted up a little how-to note on constructing a poetry score, with one example drawn from our score to Go South for Animal Index by Stefene Russell. Here is another example, drawn from our score to Blind Cat Black.

Blind Cat Black - written in Turkish by Ece Ayhan and translated into English by Murat Nemet-Nejat - is a sequence of prose poems. I want to look at the multiple uses we made of the language in one of the prose poems in the sequence, "The Secret Jew".

Here is the text, in Murat's marvelous translation:

"The Secret Jew"

Lidless, one of the devils, he is pulling out with my streetcar money. From time to time, going downtown like this, I feel sad and shaky. In the hotel I sleep in his (my Corpse's) bed. When his hair keeps growing jet black like that what is it that my live body begrudges and I try to give to him. With my large beefy hands. A sharp spur. Odor of sulphur. A scarred copper-branded ass. In the sewers of my veins, there, a rat. It nibbles at the town and the hanging tree in me. Crazies, rats, male rats, share (you must share, children) a charred corpse. In the cellar. There were no little words of loving him, these keys on his belt (warden, lover!) couldn't be little cooing words of loving him. I ran away, scared, not to meet the porcelain doll. To meet him. That would be my going back to the Lexicon of Torture. The widow plant of the idiot forests eating up joy, the poppy hatred of seven years, the silk hand with cowhide gloves doling out inheritance. He doesn't want to be buried, he says. He is cold. On the back platform of the streetcar the young devil on fire disappearing. I am picking out my spectacles from the swamps of my envy. After the arsonist’s fire the brother of my Ex-Mistress (my Corpse) who disappeared. He can be recognized by the delicate insect-eyed family mask covering his coarse face. That guy. Why should I sob anyway. He loves easily, passes his hand below the belt of my vault, forgets easily what a secret Jew I am.
- By Ece Ayhan
- Translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat

We scored what I thought was the entire piece as spoken word over musical bed, and titled that piece after the poem itself, "The secret Jew”. The reader here is Pops Farrar, delivering the lines live as a trio of musicians at an abandoned hippe commune in Middle Tennessee improvised over a musical theme familiar to them.

If you listen to the song with the poem in front of you, however, you will see that Pops misses the last four sentences of the poem.

It was an honest mistake. There is a page break precisely at the end of a sentence near the end - "After the arsonist’s fire the brother of my Ex-Mistress (my Corpse) who disappeared." - that ends in the phrase "who disappeared," which sure sounds like an ending to me. It apparently sounded like an ending to Pops - and to the musicians, whose improvisation trails away on this phrase. It disappears.

It's all so definitive sounding, in fact, that for years I unwittingly left the last four lines of the piece untouched, unscored. It was only in the final mastering phase with Adam Long that I decided to do what rock & rollers call an "idiot check" and compare the entire score to the text of the poem. And that is when I realized we had done nothing at all musically with these lines:

He can be recognized by the delicate insect-eyed family mask covering his coarse face. That guy. Why should I sob anyway. He loves easily, passes his hand below the belt of my vault, forgets easily what a secret Jew I am.

That is a cardinal violation of rule one of a poetry score! Above all, you are supposed to score all of the language in the poem and only the language in the poem, in the order it is written!

Pops had died by then, so there was no rounding him up to read these abandoned lines, and I had long since lost touch with the musicians at the abandoned hippie commune in Middle Tennessee. So a completely different solution was needed.

I tend to carry around a portabe archive of musical fragments recorded for (or donated to) Poetry Scores, and I turned to these while Adam moved onto other mastering needs. Rummaging through my six-pack box of CDrs, I came upon some National steel guitar fragments Tom Hall had recorded for us. We had intended to use this stuff on the score to Leo Connellan's Crossing America, but never found a home for it there. One very tiny piece, I thought, would work for these four lines.

Who would read it? Years before, I had recorded the translator, who lives in Hoboken, Ne Jersey, reading the entire poetic sequence. We had made strategic use of a few of his readings, but his phrasing and tonality didn't work for these lines against Tom Hall's guitar part.

I could hear our friend the poet Stefene Russell's voice reading these wonderfully strange lines. I got her on the phone, she agreed, and we recorded her over the phone. The warbly, crackly character of her voice coming out of my cellphone added a desirable element of distance and fragmentation. Our rules required titling the piece after a verbatim piece of language, and I immediately liked “That guy” for the title.

Pops' performance of "The Secret Jew" at Flatrock was actually the first piece of this score we recorded, so I didn't need to do anything else with any of those lines he had read - they were covered. But our rules for scoring poems do allow for reuse of choice lines, typically as a hook within a song. But, in this case, I wanted to go back and get some of the lines Pop had read that I thought would be fun to sing, and write a song.

In the sewers of my veins,
There, a rat.
It nibbles at the town
And the hanging tree in me.
Crazies, rats, male rats,
Share (you must share, children)
A charred corpse. In the cellar.

If you listen to the song I wrote based on these lines, “In the sewers of my veins”, you will hear that within the song we also re-reused some of the choice lines to create a hook and an outro. By the way, that is the one and only Fred Friction you hear singing along with me; for who else to sing about sewers of veins or charred corpses in cellars?

We stopped there - three songs, from one proise poem - but now I wonder why. Check out this language covered in Pops' reading. How could I have resisted setting this to music as sung text?

The Lexicon of Torture.
The widow plant of the idiot
Forests eating up joy
The poppy hatred of seven years
The silk hand with cowhide gloves
Doling out inheritance.

How great would that work for a power pop punk rock lyric? Man, I love this Poetry Scores thing! The possibilities are just endless!

Free mp3s

"The secret Jew”

(Ece Ayhan, Flatrock, Murat Nemet-Nejat)

Pops Farrar, Flatrock

“That guy”

(Ece Ayhan, Tom Hall, Murat Nemet-Nejat)

Tom Hall, Stefene Russell

“In the sewers of my veins”
(Ece Ayhan, Chris King, Murat Nemet-Nejat)
Fred Friction, Three Fried Men

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The image is a detail from Chris Dingwell's painting The Secret Jew, which he made in reponse to this poem for 2006 Poetry Scores Art Invitational devoted to Blind Cat Black.