“WHAT THEN?” SANG PLATO’S GHOST: CHRISTINE TOBIN’S SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

by Jack Foley

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,

Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.
All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

            —W.B. Yeats, “The Scholars”

To write for my own race

And the reality

            —W.B. Yeats, “The Fisherman”

On the way to Berkeley radio station KPFA and on the way home I listened to Irish, London-based jazz singer Christine Tobin singing her versions of poems by Yeats. The CD is called Sailing to Byzantium and it came out from Trail Belle Records. I think it’s not at all a CD for Yeats critics, but it is entirely a CD for lovers of Yeats’ poetry—though they have to be lovers of Yeats’ poetry who are also interested in new sounds. For such, Sailing to Byzantium is an amazing experience.

Tobin has an ear utterly fearless of dissonance but also tuned towards harmony—with free jazz flavorings. What she brings out in Yeats is the wild, reckless, utterly subversive quality of his imagination. I doubt that Yeats would have liked what she does—and, personally, I’m not sure that I “like” Tobin’s voice— but I found this CD an immensely rewarding experience.

I think you first need to know the poems in Yeats’ own terms—the way one finds them in the collections—and then to see what Tobin brings to them, what light she sheds. Even when you disagree with her emphasis—“Their hearts have not grown cold” in “The Wild Swans at Coole” is, in my view, “Their hearts have not grown cold”; “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, / The falcon cannot hear the falconer” in “The Second Coming” is not an image of chaos, as Tobin imagines it, but an image of escape—you cannot deny the immense passion Tobin brings to the poems or her brilliant recognition / re-creation of aspects of the poet that are almost entirely covered over in the immense padded mattress of the critical enterprise that has grown up around his work. “Do you think you understand Yeats?” Tobin asks. “Listen to this.” And we’re off on a wildly imaginative, utterly stunning, utterly disturbing roller coaster ride that, amazingly, brings us into the very heart of this mad, reckless, brilliant, crazy poet.

Who but a non academic, free jazz, woman singer—put an emphasis on the “non,” the “free,” and the “woman”—could possibly have achieved such a thing? You’ve never heard Yeats presented in such terms, and yet—once you’ve heard them—the terms seem utterly appropriate. It is not a desecration of his work but a revelation that drives you back into it, ready to see it anew, ready to re-experience the dangerous newness of these much-recognized, much-praised, much-memorized, much explained verses.

Oh, the chances Tobin takes! “The Song of Wandering Aengus” is one of Yeats’ most beautiful poems, and one would expect it to be set as a delicate folk tune—something to be sung by Joan Baez at her purest:

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

Instead, Tobin notices that this poem is about someone hallucinating, having a spell of madness, and the music reflects that: after a haunting, deliberately “strange” flute introduction, everything flies apart into various layers, dissonances, vocal riffs, all whirling together. Perhaps the most complexly beautiful of all the pieces is Tobin’s setting of Yeats’ wonderful “In Memory of Eva Core-Booth and Con Markievicz”:

The light of evening, Lissadell,

Great windows open to the south,

Two girls in silk kimonos, both

Beautiful, one a gazelle.

But a raving autumn shears

Blossoms from the summer’s wreath;

The older is condemned to death....

On three of the tracks, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “The Pity of Love,” and “The White Birds,” Gabriel Byrne reads the poems relatively straight. Byrne has a lovely Irish voice but the readings have a slight Poets Corner feeling. One can see why Tobin included these readings—Can’t we have someone just reading these poems?—but Byrne’s renditions do little to illuminate the work. (One remembers Yeats’ own vowel-mad  reading of one of the poems Byrne recites, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”)

It goes without saying that when a poet is welcomed into the enormous, fame-granting

academic apparatus, much is gained. Where would we be without the literally thousands of books, theses, articles, classes and websites that deal with James Joyce—who in point of fact courted such attention. (Joyce is reputed to have said during the writing of Finnegans Wake, “Wait, this passage is not yet obscure enough!”) And yet something is lost as well. What is lost is the sheer strangeness of the poetic gift, its out-of-bounds quality, the fact that it always takes us elsewhere, whether to the cottages of the peasants Yeats visited or to his séances or to the wild speculations of the immensely talented, simultaneously genuine and phony con(mystic)woman, Madame Blavatsky. Even at his most bourgeois, celebrated, or medaled, the poet remains some sort of ausländer:

            The children’s eyes

In momentary wonder stare upon

A sixty year old, smiling public man.

I dream of a Ledean body....

            (“Among School Children”)

Fifty years ago, Paul de Man took on the Yeats Industry—with little success. De Man was the only critic to determine exactly how Porphyry’s essay on the cave of the nymphs (De antro nympharum: referred to often in Yeats’ work) functions in Yeats’ poetry, and his essays remain ground-breaking, maverick explications of Yeats’ work. (Yeats critic Thomas Parkinson once told me that he was “sorry” de Man wrote about Yeats.) Christine Tobin’s work is of another order of illumination, but illumination it is.

Make no mistake about it, however: Tobin may be Irish and London-based but her vowels and consonants are thoroughly American. The work on this CD is jazz.  But it is jazz showing as clearly as in a Miles Davis solo that no one really knows where this art form can go, what its boundaries may be:

The innocent and the beautiful

Have no enemy but Time.

Arise and bid me strike a match

And strike another till Time catch.

Should the conflagration climb,

Run till all the sages know:

We the great gazebo built;

They convicted us of guilt:

                                    Bid me strike a match and blow.

____________________

Jack Foley’s radio show, Cover to Cover, is heard on Berkeley, California radio station KPFA every Wednesday at 3; his column, “Foley’s Books,” appears in the online magazine Alsop Review. He has published 11 books of poetry, 5 books of criticism, and Visions and Affiliations, a chronoencyclopedia of California poetry. In 2010 Foley was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and June 5, 2010 was proclaimed “Jack Foley Day” in Berkeley. A webfestschrift celebrating his life and work can be found in the Fall 2012, vol. 5, no. 1, Tower Journal (www.towerjournal.com; go to Archive).

Website: www.jack-adellefoley.com/ 

Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Foley_(poet)#Biography.

Jack Foley contributes regularly to this blog.