I want to do a poem called “Traveling Music”, but I haven’t quite figured out how to approach it.
Specific music can take me out of wherever I am when I hear it and send me to a memory associated with that music. It is like the sensory illusions I get, but milder. They still make me sit and stare while I am lost in them.
Mostly at this point, I just have a list. Solsbury Hill is the road trip with Patrick in Iowa cornfields at sunset. Joy To The World (both the Christmas song, and the Jeremiah was a bullfrog version) sends me to my parent’s kitchen on a Christmas morning, singing with Mom and Elizabeth. Black Velvet is Suzanne, being brave enough to sing in front of anyone. Sixteen Tons and Cow Patty are my Dad, in an old pickup truck and at his shop, respectively. Mercedes Benz and Bobby Magee are the acoustic stairwell in the Music Department at UAF with Erica. One Thing is Tom and I singing together the first day we met. Placido E’il Mar is…well, many really. Standing on a stage by myself singing to an empty theater. Kinkaid Park with Jenny, Newly, and Patrick in spring so early that the trails were still snow-covered. Singing in a bike path tube to hear the echoes.
I’m actually seeing a pattern in the list. In general the songs take me to some of my favorite people.
This may be another one that has to rattle around in my brain for a while before it comes together.
Neat.
[and then later]
“Solsbury Hill is the road trip with Patrick in Iowa cornfields at sunset.”
This reminds me of the song Coming Up Close that Aimee Mann wrote back in the 1980s as part of the band ‘Til Tuesday. (You can find in on You Tube, and you’ll probably recognize it if you don’t know it already.)
I think Ms. Mann has captured in words the kind of experience that you’re trying to capture, that certain things stimulate memories of people and experiences with them that are worth remembering and reliving, even if they’re happy or painful or whatever. In the song she actually references listening to Bob Dylan.
So, I think you’ll be able to express yourself in the way you need to do, and that it will come to fruition when it happens. When we saw Stevie Nicks in concert last year, she sang a song that she said she started writing in 1974, and that had that je ne sais quoi about it that she couldn’t let go. So that she just kept letting it gestate, revisiting it every few months in her journals, and sometimes adding to it. It wasn’t until 2011 that the song was finally born. And it was a really neat song! So, sometimes you just need to let things cook a while.
Thank you for the encouragement. I wrote in a journal entry a long time ago about music being transportive for me, but haven’t gone much further with it, yet. More song memories have been added since then. It, as you say, will come when it is ready.
Some of the poems do seem to need more time than others. Progression had been writing itself since about December, but To A Child Never Born started just with the word “Keiyah” in my notebook several weeks ago as a reminder to write about her at some point. Then, on the day that I posted it, it came into my head pretty much finished as I was driving home from work. I sat in the car writing it down when I got to the apartment, so I wouldn’t lose it.
I’m finding the differences in how these come about just as interesting as the writing itself.