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STRATEGY FOR THE DAY: look at a thing all sides

I was watching a tv broadcast of Sting's concert in Tuscany (from late 2001), including interviews with him in which he shared some insights into the craft of songwriting. He has been writing for more than 20 years, knows his craft well, and has obviously thought a lot about what goes into it. He described songwriting as "pulling yourself into a state of grace... a state of receptivity." He also refers to songs as having "powerfully healing images." Interestingly, this echoes what I have been reading in Robin Skelton's book The Poet's Calling.

I think of songwriters like Sting as being today's poets; singer-songwriters have taken on the socially important role once played by the bards. Those who practice the craft of poetry today seem to have lost their relevance, and I don't think this is because readers have lost their ability to understand poetry, as many poet's would like to believe. Singer-songwriters have claimed the territory of the emotions which poets, to their detriment, have abandoned. This is why I write so much about poets and poetry even though, to be absolutely honest, I don't read a great deal of poetry. With the exception of Keats, Neruda, Anne Sexton, Rimbaud, and a couple others, I don't find much of it emotionally resonant. However, books like Skelton's The Poet's Calling or Robert Graves' Oxford Addresses On Poetry are interesting to me because so much of what they have written about poetry is applicable to contemporary songwriting!

It's interesting to note that poetry in the ancient world was ALWAYS sung to music; the notion of speaking a poem or, god forbid, reading it silently on the page was unthinkable. Ancient bards were singers and songwriters, not poets in the way that term is understood today: an individual who writes words on a page to be read in a book by another individual. The bards were storytellers, historians, entertainers, healers, message-bearers, interpreters of emotion, cultural unifiers, and more -- much closer to today's singer-songwriter than to contemporary poets. there are exceptions, of course: In the Soviet Union, poets DID play these roles but that's another diary entry! The Beats of the 1950s approached a cultural relevance we have not seen since, but they were immediately sidestreamed by being trivialized in the media. That, too, is another diary entry.

Speaking of future diary entries, last night I taped a re-broadcast of Bill Moyers' interview with Joseph Campbell in which Campbell talked about the troubadours as the source of our modern concept of romance. I'll try to transcribe some of that interview tomorrow or Friday and post it along with links to my new song, BLUE FLAME, which was influenced by troubadour song.

Gee, here I was thinking I'd have trouble coming up with stuff to write about every day!

Copyright 2002 Robin Frederick. All rights reserved.