oh the lyric, she don't die...

Very much in accord with Jenn's comment- all the good creative answers to the "lyric question" seem to center around the question of "when is the I not the I". Two strong recent examples for me are the second part of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, with its expaned sense of both I and "yous", and Sean's "clerestory" (or at least the last draft I saw of it), where "my lover the Irish tenor" so quickly becomes a multitudinous character, "my lover the war correspondent", such that I can't help but think the speaker enjoys similar schizophrenia. Again, I wish I could wrangle Charles Legere into talking about his Oakland project here, because I think he accomplishes similar feats.

But that's enough lit-theory lite for this morning. Thinking my uncompleted chap book on dead jazz drummers is going to morph into something more global in scope, but likely still short. Want to call it Debts, as that was kind of the impetus of the dead jazz drummer poems- all the the work I'm indebted to every time I sit down to do my own. But instead of listing acknowledgments, want to harken back to the older form of elegy. One model for me is this great speech William James delivered on the centeniary (is that the right word?) of Ralph Waldo Emerson's birth. Something about that entire act of eulogizing totally gets to me. So: Oakland poems, elegies, text and music for dance piece, music and arrangements for solo album...


get crackin'