Poetry Scores: A song about a poem about a photograph about playing darts in Newfoundland

Saturday, May 30, 2015

A song about a poem about a photograph about playing darts in Newfoundland

All the Clubs from Holyrood to Brigus #7, Avondale, Conception Bay
Scott Walden (2007)
Artist retains rights.

Like I was saying, Poetry Scores has a live premiere of a new poetry score on Saturday, May 30 at the Schlafly Tap Room in downtown St. Louis.

We are scoring "All the Clubs from Hollyrood to Brigus" by Mary Dalton, a twelve-poem sequence of "fictions, ruminations and riddles," according to its subtitle, about the taverns and social clubs that line a 16-mile stretch of one of the oldest highways in Newfoundland.

We are translating into music poetry that was itself the translation of photographs. Mary Dalton based her poetic sequence on a series of photographs taken on the road between Holyrood and Brigus, Newfoundland, between 2005 and 2007 by Scott Walden.

Only three of the twelve poems in the sequence are subtitled after a specific photograph. "Darts (villanelle)" is subtitled after the photograph "All the Clubs from Holyrood to Brigus #7, Avondale, Conception Bay," a photograph of a woman throwing a dart behind a man who has just thrown a dart into a separate dart board. Behind them are the shadows of a lounge where chairs and tables have been cleared from the floor and stacked on top of each other. Her poem opens with the most vivid image in a quiet, contemplative photograph: the flash of the woman's throwing hand.

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Darts (villanelle)
All the Clubs from Holyrood to Brigus #7

By Mary Dalton

In a flash the hand soars into flight;
here the scuffed lino’s a stage
The bar chatter’s faint from this height.

Banished from thought is the fight
that burrowed its way out of rage;
in a flash, the hand soars in flight

Y’know, the missus and buddy are tight.
That fellow stole his new gauge.
The bar chatter’s faint from this height.

Birds hover or, it might be, a kite:
the plodder’s transformed to a sage.
In a flash the hand soars in flight.

The wheel of the dartboard’s a site
where drudgery’s exiled, and age.
The bar chatter’s faint from this height.

The massed shadows now cannot quite
mew up this prey in their cage.
In a flash the hand soars in flight;
the bar chatter’s faint from this height.

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"Darts (villanelle)" includes in its title the traditional poetic form that Mary Dalton employed to write it, as does "Tommy's Lounge (triolet)." The villanelle is a tricky form. The Academy of American Poets summarizes it:

The highly structured villanelle is a nineteen-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The form is made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain. The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem’s two concluding lines. Using capitals for the refrains and lowercase letters for the rhymes, the form could be expressed as: A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2 .

Poetry Scores is setting Mary Dalton's poetic sequence to music anthology-style, with a committee of composers working on the project. Michael Martin - a veteran of many great St. Louis bands, including Three Foot Thick, Kamikaze Cowboy, and Karate Bikini - scored "Darts (villanelle)" as a folk rock song with a loose, fetching feel. Michael is a busy producer in his Broom Factory Studio, and it sounds to me like he had some fun in the studio with this tricky poem about a simple game.

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mp3

"Darts (villanelle)"
(Mary Dalton, Michael Martin)

Performed, produced and recorded by Michael Martin at the Broom Factory

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Another photo from Scott Walden's series also depicts a dart board as part of an impromptu tavern wall formal study, "All the Clubs from Holyrood to Brigus #28, Holyrood, Conception Bay" (2006).