James Taylor Is One Of My Fall Jams – Day 12

James Taylor. 1969 . Henry Diltz Photography (via pinterest)

I wrote about James Taylor years ago on this blog, James Taylor is in the House , and how James was my autumn music listening choice. It’s still very similar, though this year, I can’t find my cd (I have yet to mp3 it) and I just haven’t had the time to put it on.

I think there are just some artists that have a propensity for certain times of th eyear. Why is Carole King’s “Tapestry” a hot summer album? Maybe it’s only to me that I feel that. Simon and Garfunkel are definitely fall. Melancholy? Maybe that’s why. Some of the songs of Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, and defintely Celtic music, tend to be much more melancholy and that apeals to a more autumnal listening soundtrack.

I haven’t turned on Art Garfunkel’s Breakaway album either and that is fall to me. But as time goes on, and my listening tastes change or are added to, I find that folk music and jazz fill up my more seasonal listening style. Right now is more of a time for Gregory Allen Isokov and Mumford & Sons. Maybe throw in the Lumineers. Bob Dylan. They all have a lyricism that is more poetry and autum inclined. Maybe it’s just my tastes have changed.

That being said, I think I ought to find James Taylor’s Greatest Hits and put it on. Some Walking Man needs to be in my life. Or the song below because well, it speaks to me.

Kate

Dabbling…In and Highlighting NOPW

Writer’s Digest and the Poem a Day (PAD) started and we are here on day 15 with hardly anything to show for it. I started feeling a bit guilty that I wasn’t following along and cranking out a poem for every prompt. Till I got to the halfway point and said, fine, I don’t care. I stopped worrying about it because I knew I wouldn’t be able to play catch up.

Ironically, I was able to crank out 4 poems in 45 minutes the other day with my writing group. Granted, they aren’t that great, though three have promise if I clean them up. I still probably won’t accomplish PAD, but I might be able to dabble in a few more. Sometimes it takes me a while to get back to finding a poem in a simple prompt. This coming from someone that can usually come up with something with just about anything. Give me a picture, let me stare at it for a few minutes, and I can usually start off on the start of a story, or idea. Maybe not a poem, but definitely something.

For some reason though, this time around, the prompts have left me, well, hanging. Maybe it’s me. Today’s prompt is a Two for Tuesday is a Life or Death poem. Honestly, this one hits close to home as I have a friend who’s wife at 30 had a stroke then found out she had cancer. Talk about being hit by a wall.  Talk about a subject that triggers all kinds of things.

But a good segue to bring up something.  For those interested, there is a GoFundMe for my friend and his wife here at, Lift For Lainee, and I also want to bring attention to National Orange Popsicle Week or NOPW which brings awareness to those who have had a stroke at a young age. As they say “We consider a young stroke survivor to have had their stroke under the age of 45 because most statistics show that 45 is considered young for having a stroke. 20-to-64-year-olds make up 31 percent of all strokes.”  Who knew it was kind of rare? I didn’t. And talk about a life changing thing to have to relearn how to walk, or move, or speak, or, well, do just about anything we take for granted. I urge anyone to take a look at NOPW which has a rather cool story as to the name….  You can also check out their Facebook page here NOPW-FB.

Do you know of someone that has suffered a stroke at a young age? Maybe you would be interested in the site and organization.

Also, you can see why life and death have been on my mind, not to mention another dear friend who has had to go back in for another round of chemo. How does one even rationalize death or the word ‘cancer’ and not think of death?  Despite being a believer and knowing where I end up when I die, death still is something I struggle with. Surprisingly, I haven’t experienced much death in my life other than two great- grandparents, one at an early age. It hasn’t been one of those things where I even remember it much. So as friends age, or get sick, it comes to my mind.

I am reminded of Dylan Thomas’ poem do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (which I may or may not have mentioned in a recent post about Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas….)

Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas, 1914 – 1953

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

SO good friends who read this blog….. Do not go gentle into that good night….

Kate

Listening To Bob Dylan

American folk and rock singer Bob Dylan, who was born on the 24th of may in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. — Image by © 91040/dpa/Corbis

Recently I have taken to liking Bob Dylan and his music. Not all of it, but a select few. I find it funny since I used to inwardly scoff at his music. Possibly because he was popular during the Vietnam War. Why that should make any difference at all doesn’t make any sense since I particularly like music from the 60s and 70s. Maybe it’s because I can actually appreciate the story being told in one of his many songs, whereas before, I was more interested in the beat. I didn’t know how connected to stories in songs I would get over the years of writing.

The first song I remember being introduced to was ‘Lay, Lady, Lay‘, and at the time I didn’t even know it was Dylan. But I fell in love with it. Over the years I’ve slowly added to my small collection of his songs. The stories in all of them are magical and as a writer, I can appreciate the condensed tale told.  I actually wonder if contemporary folk music appeals to the writer in us due to the story being told? I can honestly say that country music that has a story, I do have to quantify it, appeals to me. I like songs without a story, in fact, most of what I listen to wouldn’t qualify as much of a story and more of a ‘feeling’.  But if I start really thinking about songs that grab and hold me, they tell a story.

Thinking about Bob Dylan always reminds me of something I read in Poemcrazy where Susan Wooldridge was talking about him carrying around an armload of words. Turns out, it wasn’t Bob Dylan she was talking about, but Dylan Thomas, the poet. While I have a book of his poetry, I’m not as familiar with his works, so somehow I thought it was  Bob Dylan. While I had the person wrong, I still picture Bob Dylan carrying around armloads of words, racing to get to his black typewriter, up winding stairs in a small garret at an Irish inn on dreary, wet Irish days.

The actual quote about Dylan Thomas from Poemcrazy is as follows:

Dylan Thomas loved the words he heard and saw around him in Wales. “When I experience anything,” he once said, “I experience it as a thing and a word at the same time, both equally amazing.” Writing one ballad, he said, was like carrying around an armload of words to a table upstairs and wondering if he’d get there in time.

My image is certainly fanciful at best in regards to Bob Dylan. Who knows if he used a typewriter or wrote his music in Ireland.  I know I’m probably completely wrong, but if you listen to his words you feel the lyrical quality, and I can’t help but imagine the songwriter is this way. In Ireland. Go figure.

I carry boatloads of words in my head constantly. I have lost countless poems or starts of poems by not having paper at hand when I need it. I have a small pocket journal I have just for this reason, but like my camera when I don’t have it I need it and when I do have it I don’t need it, my writing is the same way. I never write when I have paper at hand. I write when I am scrambling frantically for any scrap piece of paper at hand. Netflix flyers, bill envelopes, receipts, margins of something and various other odd places. I have a folder/envelope of scraps of paper with the starts of poems. I have been meaning to transcribe them onto a document, or into one notebook, but I have yet to sit down and do anything with it. The question of, ‘Will I ever really use that and do I need to compile it all down?’ frequently hits my mind.

There is a panic that starts when I can’t find paper. I try to repeat the lines over and over in my head in the hopes that I will remember it for the next five minutes till I find paper, but inevitably I am asked a question, interrupted or just don’t have a moment to grab a paper and pencil.  It’s aggravating like that itch you can’t scratch. Knowing that the lines were just there. If only there was a way to scoop all those words up in a bucket that holds onto them until you can come back to collect them.

I try to make sure I keep a notebook, journal or index card with me whenever I go out. Of course, because I have that ready, I rarely write out in public.

In no particular order, Bob Dylan songs I currently love are, Lay, Lady, Lay, The Girl From The North Country, Mr. Tamborine Man, To Fall in Love With You, and Shelter From The Storm.

My one Dylan Thomas poem I currently keep rereading due to a friend’s young wife having cancer and is recovering from a stroke, is Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.

 

Imagining Opening Shots to Music

In Poemcrazy, Susan talks about seeing things and having them be ‘opening shots’, like in films where you have that first opening scene.  While I don’t pay attention always to opening scenes, I make up my own in my head when I hear music that I like. Recently the song used for the Behr paint has been stuck in my head.  The song, “Imagine Color” by Kasper Ramone makes think of New York in the 1940s and you see this panorama of buildings in greys panning to an artist swirling paint over canvas and you start sing the city come alive with different color.

I have been thinking a lot of opening scenes as I listen to music.  Or closing shots sometimes. Like that end of the movie where everything figures itself out okay?  There is a song by Jesse Malin, “Downliner”, and I feel like this is one of those songs where you see people getting out of a car on the sidewalk overlooking a bay on a bright, sunny, windy day, at the end when everyone is coming together and the story is done.

It’s funny how music always creates a story in my head.  “Lay, Lady, Lay” by Bob Dylan has a very 70s western vibe to me and I imagine scenes from Once Upon a Time in the West, or something risque from the 70s.  It fits with the Janet Dailey books I read; romance novels that are, as one person mentioned at my writing group, candy books.  You read candy novels for fun and nothing specific other than you enjoy a bit of fluff.  I figure you could get a toothache if you read too many of those.  (I’ve read enough and my PC Kindle is filled with a few too many.)

I create stories for most of the music I listen to, or I insert it into a story I’m writing, or the song itself is a story. I think I wrote about that years ago when I mentioned the song “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” I like a song that has a story behind it.  Probably why I like a lot of folk music. I can see the story.  It’s also the reason I like certain music videos that have a definite story in them, or something that seems to need to be written about.   Maybe this is why I like flash fiction.  It’s a little blip of a story in three and a half minutes; music videos, that is.

Does anyone else ever hear a song and it brings a scene to mind?  Or a story in a music video?  I’d love to know some of your favorites.

Kate