While Enlightenment verse reached an almost-rococo focus on metrical perfection, that came at the cost of emotion and energy, producing work that was smart but somewhat bloodless. It's not until the Romantic period that we see a truly unbridled emotional poetry emerge, and not surprisingly, the name that they gave this verse was often "song."
Perhaps the finest early example of this are William Blake's companion volumes Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. You've almost certainly encountered these works before in your academic careers — if nothing else, then "The Lamb" and "The Tiger" — but we're going to consider these works in a different fashion, namely through a record released by Allen Ginsberg in 1970, Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake, Tuned by Allen Ginsberg. Featuring musical settings of 21 poems by Ginsberg and performed by an all-star group of jazz and folk musicians including Don Cherry, Elvin Jones and Bob Dorough, this album was recorded before a live audience in December 1969. We've put together a page for the record at PennSound, where the individual tracks are accompanied by links to lithographs at the Blake Archives so you can read along as you listen.
While the Ginsberg/Blake album will be our main focus, I'd like to take a look at a few more examples of poets working in a more traditional fashion with song and balladry, starting with Kenneth Koch and Allen Ginsberg's "Popeye and William Blake Fight to the Death," a live improvisation at the St. Mark's Poetry Project on May 9, 1979 [MP3] (n.b. Koch's instructions to Ginsberg regarding the proper metrics of the ballad at the beginning of the track).
Finally, we have San Francisco's marvelous and mystical Helen Adam, who's perhaps best known for her wonderfully eccentric lyric opera, San Francisco's Burning, first performed on stage and then memorably produced by Charles Ruas for WBAI-FM's "The Audio-Experimental Theater" in 1977. We'll take a look at two pieces by Adam with audio accompaniment: "The Fair Young Wife" [MP3] and "Cheerless Junkie's Song":
Finally, we have San Francisco's marvelous and mystical Helen Adam, who's perhaps best known for her wonderfully eccentric lyric opera, San Francisco's Burning, first performed on stage and then memorably produced by Charles Ruas for WBAI-FM's "The Audio-Experimental Theater" in 1977. We'll take a look at two pieces by Adam with audio accompaniment: "The Fair Young Wife" [MP3] and "Cheerless Junkie's Song":
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