By Todd Lavoie
Guys, commence with the stroking your beards in thoughtful poses! Girls, grab your journals and set yourselves a-scrawling! April is National Poetry Month, so now’s the time to start looking deep and sensitive and positively brimming over with penetrating insight. Spring is in the air – the flowers are blooming and birds are chirping – so why not summon your muse and whip up an ode or a sonnet to celebrate all this marvelous rebirth? No way, you say? OK, how about a haiku, then? A limerick? Something cribbed from a restroom wall, perhaps?
If putting words to paper isn’t your thing, or if reading poetry doesn’t float your boat, either, fret not. All hope is not lost for giving April the rune-and-rhyme lovin’ it deserves. How about a little poetry-in-song, then? Sure, I suppose you could say most songs are poetry, in a sense – I mean, you don’t need an MFA to take the average pop song and dissect it into meter, rhyme, verse structure, and all of its other little bits ‘n’ pieces – but strip away the music and much of the power of the argument is lost.
Put it this way: if you simply read aloud the lyrics of most songs, unaccompanied, they’d sound like pretty weak excuses for poetry. Embarrassing, even. And no, I’m not hatin’ – I’m just sayin’, that’s all. Nah, you won’t catch any poetry snobbery from me – hell, I adore Marc Bolan, but you won’t sneak me passing off any T. Rex ditties as shining examples of poetic form. Still, I’ve always been fascinated with intersections of poetry and song; I did a little scraping around in my thought-box and here are a few successful experiments of music/poem collisions which came to mind:
Ken Nordine, Colors (The Nordine Group/Asphodel)
“Word Jazz”, he called it – in fact, the rumbling, rich-baritoned radio/television voiceover maestro liked the phrase so much that he used it as the title of his 1957 debut. Over the course of a series of inventive, parameter-pushing Word Jazz recordings made in the ’50s and ’60s, Nordine married loose, free-association musings to bongo-friendly bohemian-jazz – yep, very Beat Generation, daddy-o.