Drunken Pianos in Crisis

—Poetry by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA
—Public Domain Photos

HONEYBOURNE VODKA

Through it all I endured… accumulating impressions
for future service to my art…
            —Composer Arnold Bax, in Farewell, My Youth


Not a bottle, not a brand, a pianist.
British pianist Duncan Honeybourne here,
safe at home, introducing pieces
he passes round, like small aquavit
flasks for imbibing on FaceBook.
Today, spirits from 1915
(a very good year for British music):

Arnold Bax’s “In a Vodka Shop.” Written
as early as 1910? Young Bax has run
off from County Connemara
to Russia and Ukraine, so in love
with Natalya Skarzhinski,
he’s left sister Evelyn Bax to cadge
return fare from Ireland, purse empty.

Natalya doesn’t see love or life quite Bax’s way.
So early in the pianist-composer’s career,
is this where the drinking urge took earliest hold?
In Kiev? Moscow? St. Petersburg? Lubny?
While “Natalie” consorts with a new beau,
or gives herself to the chattering, chaos-minded
creatives in her Lubny homestead,
lovelorn Arnold departs by rail for Kiev
just to rent a Bösendorfer upright
(a good one) so, seated there, he can
set his heart singing to his heart.

Somewhere, too, there are vodka shops,
noisy ones, comforting souls who have nothing
but summer night stars, Gogol, and liquid
consolations. Too songful a boy to hear
only noise, though he does, in the sickle-fisted
“droves” of peasant Ukrainian farmwomen;
hears only their “howling,” so like
the howling in Bax’s own head is it.
Uncanny the wallbanging brio from Duncan
Honeybourne’s piano: Bax, despondent,
albeit the comedic note-clangor clangs on, in denial.

Honeybourne’s piano, sequestered at home
like its master, could use a retuning,
especially right around treble-clef C,
D, and E, so ill-suited to Chopin, so right
for vodka shops, for vodka drinkers,
for drunken pianos the world over
in crisis, whatever nonchalant bluff
the blustering bass notes may put up. 

 Duncan Honeybourne (www.duncanhoneybourne.com)

“DANCE IN THE SUN” (ARNOLD BAX)
from Four Orchestral Pieces (1912-1913)

Biographer Lewis Foreman thinks the rhythm
could be that of Bax’s bicycle wheels.
Something too of Ireland’s native dance:
glances at step-dance, or the clog dance.
But, whether from shuttling feet or shining spokes,
what fun! whatever clever deceptions, ear-traps:
Even the melody, at its beginning, charts
first downbeat sixteenths as odd “pickup” notes,
as wheelspins forward may look like backwards floats.
Then rhythmic carriage-return with its bell-ring,
pranked with comedic downward-flurried strings.

Then there’s that tip-o’-the-wink sly offset cadence,
one more of the “adopted Irishman’s” hemiolas.
It ends with a lightsome stomp or stamp. Displaced,
the accent. To a poet, it’s a trochee.
Trying saying some trochees now. Repeat after me:
“Hef-ty, Hef-ty, Hef-ty.” That’s the idea.
Note: foot-light, that same downbeat accent’s shifted,
pitch-shifted, first-note E to upbeat F.
What’s trochee’d hefty hefty comes disguised
as anacreusis (“pickup” to you and me)
as laughing, we collapse, wrong-footed. Hef-TY!
Elfin and “Irish,” that mischievous young man, Bax. 

IN MEMORY OF THOMAS REGNIER, JD, LLD,
PAST PRESIDENT, SHAKESPEARE OXFORD FELLOWSHIP,
LOST TO COVID-19, 2020

Great scholar of our “William Shake-Speare”: Love
For that exemplar of the Renaissance,
Bone-deep, drove all you spoke and wrote, above
Mere orthodox Bard-worship, skill and nuance
Your touchstones. Antique curiosities
Led you toward him by traces; yours the will
To pursue down trails where only the keenest sees.
There you met De Vere on even terms; your fill
Absorbed (his darks, his lights), you yet explored.
Our thanks; a Price of Denmark his desires,
His motives, you could decrypt, you did record:
How Hamlet’s griefs and grievances require
Their answer, in English law. Now rise, report
Where earls and all meet equal, in utmost Inns of Court. 

Dorothea Tanning (poets.org/poet/dorothea-tanning)

THE TANNING PRIZE
(First named the Tanning Prize for Poetry, now the Wallace Stevens Award)

Good thing Dorothea’s a famous artist
In paint, her poet status wrenched from her
Strong grasp. Her life-pursuit, with almost Chartist
Intensity, spilling so signally into verse,
They named a poet’s prize with her name, Tanning.
By what conniving Old-Boys-Network curse,
Is honor remanded? Rebranded, Wallace Stevens.
Yes, history doles out prizes by unevens:
Strokes ever the male ego, in no need of it.
Ah, po-biz…hope, Dorothea, through the greed of it
You see, from wherever you sit. Well I’m for banning
The “Stevens” title (superfluous praise!), unmanning
That moniker. Spin those tumblers back to Tanning. 

Today’s LittleNip (with free shot of vodka):
 
UPSIDE DOWN
—Caschwa, Sacramento, CA

(reconfiguring the marching band
from Tom Goff’s "Cover Design",
Medusa’s Kitchen, June 17, 2020)


OK, listen up! We’re going to take conventional
score order and flip it over backwards, putting
percussion (including a battery of cannons) right
on top, followed by low brass, cornets, and then,

while your heels are clicking and ears are still
ringing from those cannons, a vast meadow of
woodwinds producing high atmosphere tones
among a treasure trove of trills and tremolos.

So now, instead of having just one big vibrating
column of air, we have the whole set of Doric,
Ionic, and Corinthian columns, plus the Five
Pillars of Islam all strutting their stuff together.

________________________

—Medusa, with thanks to Tom Goff for his musical poetry this morning, and to Carl Schwartz for his saucy LittleNip!

 Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.

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