American Literary History Advance Access originally published online on February 19, 2008
American Literary History 2008 20(1-2):346-368; doi:10.1093/alh/ajm054
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Objectivist Blues: Scoring Speech in Second-Wave Modernist Poetry and Lyrics
238 If horses could but sing Bach, mother, –239 Remember how I wished it once –
240 Now I kiss you who could never sing Bach, never read Shakespeare
...
251 Assimilation is not hard,
252 And once the Faith's askew
253 I might as well look Shagetz just as much as Jew.
254 I will read their Donne as mine
255 And leopard in their spots
256 I'll do what says their Coleridge
257 Twist red hot pokers into knots.
Louis Zukofsky, "Poem beginning ‘The’"1
Since I am interested in the contrast, as well as conflict, between poetic forms, the modernist period has drawn me again and again. I find the proliferation of new styles in the first decades of the twentieth century particularly interesting in the context of the more traditional styles that also flourished. I like to think of the period as having produced an epic collage poem of innovative and traditional poetry, popular verse, newly emerging styles of song lyrics from blues to Tin Pan Alley, and the linguistically accented talk forms emerging from vaudeville.
Perhaps the best representation of this collage is American Poetry: The Twentieth Century (2000), the Library of America's two-volume anthology, which covers poets born from 1838 to 1913.2 In a dialogue, published in boundary 2, with Geoffrey O'Brien, the anthology's lead editor, I noted that one of the remarkable facets of this period is the reversal of fortune for many poetic forms and styles: "Some considered marginal and eccentric not only in their time but until relatively recently now seem the most influential, while lots of the presumed majors now look more like held-over corporals from the previous epoch. But perhaps even more intriguing is how the players with the smaller parts now look so indispensable."3
I read modernist American poetry in a comparatist frame that emphasizes technical invention. One of my persistent interests is the interplay between the vernacular, the colloquial, the ordinary, and the self-constructed syntax and vocabulary of the ideolectical, i.e., the ideological play of dialects—real and imaginary—in American poetry. One way to trace this is to take the representation of speech in Paul Laurence Dunbar's African-American and Claude McKay's early Jamaican dialect poems and run that against Oscar Hammerstein II's lyrics for Show Boat's "Ol' Man River"; DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin's more supple lyrics for Porgy and Bess's "Summertime" and "I Loves You Porgy"; James Weldon Johnson's early song lyric "Under the Bamboo Tree" and his later sermonic textualizations in God's Trombone; Fanny Brice's Yiddish schtick monologues (or Groucho Marx's Euro-ethnic ones); the virtually "objectivist" blues of Robert Johnson or Charlie Patton; or the transcriptive works of Sterling Brown; one might also contrast these with the more fluid poetic vernacular of William Carlos Williams, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes, and the rebarbative anti-assimilationism of Louis Zukofsky's "Poem Beginning ‘The’" (1926), or Melvin Tolson's much later Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator (1965). One could jump to the other side of the Atlantic and look to Tolson's and Zukofsky's immediate contemporaries Basil Bunting and Hugh MacDiarmid, both of whom wrote major works in reinvented (or synthetic) local dialects, Northumbrian and Scots, respectively. From there we might be able to consider, under the sign of sound poetry—that is, not as a matter of influence but of second-wave modernist refinement/revision—Cab Calloway's scat "Hi-De-Ho" as an ideolectical descendent of Velimir Khlebnikov's zaum, Kurt Schwitters's "Ur Sonata," and Hugo Ball's Dadaist "Karawane." My mix is certainly odd by most accounts, but there is something fascinating in considering McKay, MacDiarmid, and Groucho Marx, or Cole Porter, Patton, and Brice, not to say Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, all born in the first four years of my putative period.
I give this list not to be exhaustive, but to suggest the tensions between the oral, transcriptive, and textual, not to say popular and rebarbative, that gives so much resonance to the poetry of this period. Underlying the range of approaches is the formidable technical achievement of these literary artists, a technical achievement that needs to be read within the context of the emergence of mass literacy, the prevalence of second-language speakers of English, the new presence of sound reproduction technologies, and a generation of poets for whom poetry was as much an arena to resist cultural and linguistic assimilation as a place that marked such assimilation. In a sense, this period represents a reaccenting of English, but not by the English. Indeed, one of the primary sites of poetic invention in this period involved novel ways of alphabetically representing, or refusing, accentuated speech. In other words, identity is not so much constructed as performed.
In "Poem Beginning ‘The,’" Louis Zukofsky (born in 1904) writes of the temptation to assimilate into the English literary tradition. "Assimilation is not hard," he tells his mother, but the burden of the poem is to register both the difficulty of resisting assimilation and the unexpected and irreparable costs of not resisting. The "The" of Zukofsky's poem is Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922). Zukofsky's critique provides a very early and profound recognition of that poem as establishing a fault line for high culture that is self-defeating in its exclusion of the minor keys that Zukofsky's poem ludicly enumerates, from Bolsheviks and Broadway to Bach's horse play, from accented speech to unaccented meter. Zukofsky recognized that Eliot's poem, great as he undoubtedly thought it was, created an impasse for poetry in its wake, at least for those, talented or not, who found themselves on the outside of Eliot's brand of literary tradition.4
Nowhere are the innovations of both assimilation and disruption more compelling than among the second-wave modernists, poets and comics, lyricists and blues people, born between 1889 and 1909. The dates are somewhat less arbitrary than they might at first appear since they cover the first wave of response to many of the radical and disruptive innovations of the modernist poets and artists of the previous generation. You could call this postmodernism avant la lettre. Indeed, second-wave modernism may be the most profound critique we have of modernist art—not in theory, but in practice. One element of this critique is certainly related to ideology and politics and this is in a sense how we often receive these writers of the "30s generation," as they may sometimes be called. In contrast, I want to point to how modernist art practices were both refined and deepened, questioned and extended. The work may sometimes seem less bold than its immediate forebears, and it is often less celebrated, but I would propose that the subtle and intensely technical innovations of the period remain foundational for present work.
One of my interests in focusing on second-wave modernism is to trouble the distinctions made both within and between high and low culture and to focus on a key category, the in between. The literary artists of this period were witnesses to, even participants in, the movement from folk and popular culture to mass culture and the culture industry. Distinguishing between popular and mass culture encourages a scrutiny of how mass culture was forged out of—both extending and betraying—popular and folk culture, although it also needs to be acknowledged that a common concern for the vernacular, as well as immediacy of experience, cut across these lines.
| By considering transitional works of popular and folk culture in the unfamiliar context of the radical technical innovations of second-wave modernist poetry, it is possible to recognize how the diction and form of these works resist or embrace, invent or reconceptualize, assimilation[.]
|
By considering transitional works of popular and folk culture in the unfamiliar context of the radical technical innovations of second-wave modernist poetry, it is possible to recognize how the diction and form of these works resist or embrace, invent or reconceptualize, assimilation, that always vexing virtual horizon of American culture.
Let me start with a few comments on second-wave modernist Cole Porter's "You're the Top" from the 1934 show Anything Goes (Porter was born in 1891).5 In his forging of the prewar American popular song, a precursor to, but not identical with, postwar mass culture, Porter's innovations included an exquisitely effervescent use of colloquial language that never marks itself as vernacular in the literary sense but passes by means of its urban wit. At the same time, Porter engages in a range of juxtapositions that take something from the Pound–Eliot hypertactic playbook but with a distinctly anti- (or a-) canonical twist. Porter's heteronomous juxtapositions are renowned, but their charm should not detract from the marvelous, even devilish, cultural aggressiveness of their high/low conflations: an old Dutch Master with Mrs. Astor with Pepsodent, Dante with Durante, a Bendel bonnet and a Shakespeare sonnet, or, outdoing himself one more time, the National Gallery—and what could be a more explicit symbol of the canon?—with Garbo's salary, and then, in perhaps Porter's most memorable example of the nonpareil par excellence, cellophane, which he identifies, barely a beat away, as the sublime. Then again, consider the Red 1930s conflations of the political and its others in the rhyme of Mother Russia with a Roxy usher or Mahatma Gandhi with Napoleon brandy.
If Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery can be credited with the "postmodern" inclusion of popular culture in their poems, it is hard to take in the history of such poetic peregrinations without a nod to Porter, even if it turns the distinction on its head given that Porter incorporates not the low in the high but the high in the low, leveling and parodying the distinction.6 Indeed, Porter's collages of discrepant materials represent a shifting, an opening, of American social space as much as any poetry of the period, and his cosmopolitan élan might just be the medium or tone that allows this to be not polemical but intoxicating, even as it risks apolitical depolarization. On the one hand, "You're the Top" can be read as a refinement of the modernist innovators (and not only in terms of collage but also of the use of vernacular, or in a more Porteresque lingo, slang). On the other hand, the work is a form of disruptive innovation, since it brings into being a new, and ultimately dominant,7 model for popular music, affecting production, style, and distribution and exploiting the new technologies for sound reproduction, including the phonograph record, the radio, and voice amplification through the microphone. Invented just nine years before Anything Goes opened on Broadway, the microphone was used to magnificent advantage to create an intimate new sound—often with songs by Porter—by such second wavers as Fred Astaire (born in 1899), and such younger singers as Frank Sinatra (born in 1915), and Billie Holiday (also born in 1915), among many others. All were "swooners" who swerved from the style of such "crooners" as Rudy Vallee (born just two years after Astaire).
American mass culture is founded (and founders) on a streamlining, not to say mainstreaming, of vernaculars in order to forge a synthetic mass slang that is the antithesis of dialect, which remains marked by the local and unassimilated. Mass culture entails the absorption of dialect by refinement, assimilation, and ultimately standardization. The precarious distinction between popular (or folk) culture and mass culture retain force within the cultural field of mass-mediated culture even today, when bluegrass music can interpose itself as exemplary of folk or popular culture in contrast to mass culture, as, for example, in the 2002 Grammy Awards' Ralph Stanley walk-on to Britney Spears's party. The backstory of that cultural hiccup, or momentary malabsorption, would require that I introduce into evidence Harry Smith's epic Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), an Homeric project collecting and conceptualizing recordings made primarily in the late 1920s, the works of a set of singer/lyricists of a then-thriving American oral culture, almost all of whom are part of the second-wave modernist generation.
Before taking up Smith's anthology, I want to turn to a song I mentioned briefly, "Under the Bamboo Tree" (1902), composed by the first-wave modernist team of Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson (born in 1871). "Under the Bamboo Tree" was a mega-hit of the day.8 The song is notable for its setting "down in the jungles" featuring "a Zulu from Matabooloo," who every morning sings to his beloved from under a bamboo tree. For those of you who may not be familiar with the location of Matabooloo, it is just a few miles from Passaic, right by the Orientalist Mall's Bamboo Court, which has only recently been renamed Bantu Court; the Voodoo Lounge is no longer open. What drove this song up the charts before the hit parade was even a glimmer in Dick Clark's mother's eyes is the catchy, just about unshakable refrain, reprised most famously by Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). Listen to Harry MacDonough and John Bieling's version of the song, recorded on 27 February 1903 by Victor Talking Machine (for a sound clip of "Under the Bamboo Tree," go to http://writing.upenn.edu/ezurl/1):
Down in the jungles lived a maid,Of royal blood though dusky shade,
A marked impression once she made
Upon a Zulu from Matabooloo;
And ev'ry morning he would be
Down underneath the bamboo tree,
Awaiting there his love to see,
And then to her he'd sing:
If you lak-a-me, lak I lak-a-you
And we lak-a-both the same
I lak-a say, this very day,
I lak-a-change your name;
‘Cause I love-a-you and love-a-you true
And if you-a love-a-me.
One live as two, two live as one
Under the bamboo tree.9
In this song, so much the prototype of the American popular song, we get a sort of undifferentiated pan-culturalism, which nonetheless is unmistakably African and whose refrain is a be-pidginonated or perhaps nonsensicalized version of black dialect, invented, at least in part, by the author of God's Trombone (1927), perhaps the greatest translation, or transposition, of the African-American oral sermon into modernist American poetry. "Under the Bamboo Tree" is a quasi-sound/scat poem accompanied by teasing eroticism, not to say exoticized racial fantasy (though this verse does not make it to the 1903 recording):
And in this simple jungle way,He wooed the maiden ev'ry day,
By singing what he had to say;
One day he seized her and gently squeezed her. (Johnson 811–12)
"Seized" and "squeezed" is exactly the linguistic action of the poem: seizing the vernacular into Victorian song form so that it can be titillatingly squeezed—a formula that mass culture has not so much overcome as capitalized.
None other than the Ol’ Possum heself, Mr. Thomas Stearns Eliot (born in 1888) seizes and squeezes this song in his 1932 unfinished poem "Sweeney Agonistes":
SONG BY WAUCHOPE AND HORSFALLSWARTS AS TAMBO, SNOW AS BONES
Under the bamboo
Bamboo bamboo
Under the bamboo tree
Two live as one
One live as two
Two live as three
Under the bam
Under the boo
Under the bamboo tree. (81)
Rachel Blau DuPlessis discusses "Sweeney Agonistes" in terms of black and Jewish minstrelsy and vaudeville, with particular reference to Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo," in "‘HOO, HOO, HOO’: Some Episodes in the Construction of Male Whiteness."10 Her essay charts the modernist use of "hoodoo" and "voodoo" to mark racialized projections of the primitive (let's call it jungleification). Responding to Michael North's discussion, in The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (1994), of Eliot's pastiche of "Under the Bamboo Tree," DuPlessis notes that the poet "acknowledges the power of African-American popular culture in relation to other powerful theatrical traditions" (193). "Hoodoo" and "voodoo" would melt into pop in the second-wave lyrics of Johnny Mercer and Cole Porter, exemplifying the power of American popular culture during this period to subsume cultural difference. Consider Mercer's 1939 "Day In – Day Out" ("The same old hoodoo follows me about / The same old pounding in my heart / Whenever I think of you" [Gottlieb and Kimball 437]), and Porter's verbally acrobatic charm melos in his 1929 "You Do Something to Me" ("Let me live ‘neath your spell, / Do do that voodoo that you do so well" [Porter 117]). "Do do" secularizes and pragmatizes "voodoo." The charm of slang absorbs (sublimates?) the sting of dialect; the spell works. Or is it sublates, since the sharp demarcation of the discourse of master and slave seems to vanish before our ears? Porter shows perfect cultural pitch for the process: "You do something to me, / Something that simply mystifies me. / Tell me, why should it be / You have the pow'r to hypnotize me?" (Porter 117).
It's not, then, such a huge jump from this first-wave modernist era song to the second-wave modernist classics, Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern's Show Boat (1927) and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and George and Ira Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935).11 (While Kern was born in 1885, Hammerstein was born in 1895, Ira Gershwin in 1896, and George two years later.) In "Ol’ Man River," Hammerstein essentially took on the task of setting dialect vocabulary into the rhyming, metrically and tonally unified song form of a new musical genre emerging from the operettas of Victor Herbert and the American parlor songs of Paul Dresser ("On the Banks of the Wabash") and Stephen Foster before him. The setting of African-American dialect into a familiar sounding English verse prosody—into the stadium of a metrical, not to say Euclidian, acoustic space—bears a relation to the iambic pentameter (and hexameter) dialect poems of Dunbar and McKay. Hammerstein and Kern perform both a translation and transposition of this material. "Ol' Man River" is an explicitly heterogenous, not to say dysraphic, work; indeed its hybridity, uncomfortable for and even offensive to some contemporary audiences, is prominently figured in the plot. Show Boat is, after all, about racial passing, about the status of miscegenation, about a person who, like the show itself, is one-eighth black and seven-eighths white. But it is only in the soaring, projective, operatic performance by second-wave modernist and noted African-American political activist Paul Robeson (born in 1898) that the social formalism of the song is fully articulated.
Take a look at the reproduction of the facing pages on which this lyric appears in the Library of America anthology (see Figure 1). (The anthology is sequenced by author's date of birth.) The verso page, from Abraham Lincoln Gillespie's marvelous post-Joycean collection of constructed words, could not be more fortunate from my point of view, especially since I discuss Gillespie in the context of McKay's dialect poetry in "The Poetics of the Americas." The lexicon on both pages is immediately odd, unfamiliar, and estranged. In the case of Gillespie's ideolectical, nonidentitarian language, this is the intended effect. Taken by itself, Hammerstein's lyric, written as a part of a score to be sung, not as a poem to be read on its own, suffers from a fundamental paradox: the closer we get to transcribing the actual sound of speech, the odder the transcription may appear. The dialect spelling looks strained if not condescending: if it gestures at a spoken language that is unself-conscious and fluid, it presents at the same time an ethnographic distortion or slur in the very method of its means of reproduction. In performance, however, much of this strangeness, though by no means all, disappears. It is significant that the musical appears at a time when writing has been suddenly and radically replaced as a medium for reproducing and storing local speech and local song by the invention of a means of mechanical reproduction of sound—the tape recorder and the phonograph.
|
Listen to Robeson singing "Ol' Man River" in 1932, the exact same time as the recordings that Harry Smith collected were being made (for a sound clip of an excerpt from "Ol' Man River," go to http://writing.upenn.edu/ezurl/2):
Dere's an ol' man called de Mississippi'Dat's de ol' man dat I'd like to be!
What does he care if de world's got troubles?
What does he care if de land ain't free?
Ol' Man River,
Dat Ol’ Man River,
He mus' know sumpin'
But don’ say nuthin',
He jes' keeps rollin',
He keeps on rollin' along.
....
You an' me, we sweat an' strain,
Body all achin' an' racked wid pain –
Tote dat barge!
Lif' dat bale!
Git a little drunk,
An' you land in jail....
Ah gits weary
An' sick of tryin';
Ah'm tired of livin',
An' skeered of dyin'. (American Poetry 88–89)
Nowhere in Show Boat is the contrast stronger between the lexical markings of dialect and the very nonvernacular, highly enunciated singing style demanded by Kern and Hammerstein's score. The dialect is strictly in the words, not in their pronunciation, an odd but highly significant reversal given that in speech the main mark of dialect is accent not lexicon. In the 1932 studio recording, Robeson modifies Hammerstein's dialect lyrics, changing "git" to "you gets," "land in jail" to "lands in jail," "ah get" to "I gets," and "jes" to "just."12 This oscillation among dialect, standard, and new standard dialect underscores both the fluidity and the incommensurability of the social layers that are dysraphicly fused together in the birth of popular song.
Robeson went on to use "Ol' Man River," over the following decades, as a theme for his radical racial and social politics, but not without turning the lyric on its head in a collaboration involuntaire with Hammerstein. In a 1952 performance at a civil rights meeting in Chicago (and also at other concerts), Robeson sings just the initial four-line stanza and the 24-line refrain, expeditiously eliding the reference to "Colored folks" that starts the next stanza. In the quatrain, he blows away Hammerstein's spirituals inflected, let's-forget-our-troubles-and-watch-the-river-flow-there's-a-better-world-on-the-other-side-of-the-River-Jordan fatalism by negating the identification with the river in the second line—"Dat's de ol' man dat I'd like to be!"–and singing, in its place, "That's the ol' man I don't like to be!," while at the same time standardizing the pronunciation of the definite article in the final two lines of the stanza, singing "the" not "de."13 In place of one of the troubling stereotypes in the lyric, "Git a little drunk / An’ you land in jail," Robeson sings, "You show a little grit / An' you lands in jail." He completes his call to action by replacing "Ah git weary / An' sick of trying" with,
But I keeps laughin'Instead of cryin’
I must keep fightin'
Until I'm dyin'.14
... and that old person river... well, it just keeps roiling along...
In his concert programs, as they evolved over his career, Robeson lifted his material up and out of its initial context, creating a pan-ethnic and multinational—in short, internationalist—frame for the many folk and popular songs he performed. For Robeson, the operatic voice, with its deep bass resonances, is the vehicle of internationalism, while the local accents of individual songs are—in Ezra Pound's sense—luminous details. Enormous respect—not to say affection—is given to the particulars, and yet the transcending grandeur of Robeson's voice marks something beyond the particulars, something utopic. Robeson performs spirituals not as a re-creation of the direct, heart-rending expression of an enslaved group but as art songs, as a classically trained singer might perform Schubert lieder. This is why his singing is so inspirational, but at the same time unsentimental. In a late concert, Robeson can segue directly from a Russian folk song ("The Song of Volga Boatman") to a spiritual ("Deep River") to "St. Louis Blues" to "Kaddish" to Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" to a Chinese children's song to an American folk song ("John Henry") to a militant labor anthem ("Joe Hill") to a Broadway standard to a recitation from Shakespeare's Othello.15 The result is a virtually Poundian montage, but with a popular front ideology: discrepant particulars—radically mixing high, folk, and popular culture—are connected both through the medium of Robeson's elegiac voice and through his strongly articulated aesthetics of musical relationships through contrast and conflict. Robeson's concerts construct a utopian space in which solidarity and struggle move us closer to imagining a just world. Such struggle begins with an abiding, unbreachable commitment to "historical and contemporary particulars," to use a phrase of Zukofsky's.16
The act of rearticulating—translation through performance and transmission through resounding and replaying—is fundamental to the process initiated in Robeson's performance as well as in the work of a number of jazz musicians and vocalists in their performances of versions of "standards" (as they are still called) with lyrics by Hammerstein, Gershwin, Porter, and other Tin Pan Alley writers. Consider, for example, Nina Simone's signature performance of "I Loves You Porgy," in which she restandardizes the lyric to "I Love You, Porgy," as indeed Billie Holiday does in her own performance of the song. Consider too that the Gershwins refined themselves by Anglicizing their names, which in their school days were Jacob and Israel Gershvin, an assimilationist practice that was common at the time. The translation of Jake and Izzy to George and Ira certainly make for a fascinating rhythm. But youse certoinly cain't get vehry far on duh greht vite vay with ah noime like dat. Indeed, many of the songs we call jazz standards are reinscriptions, though translation and improvisation, of songs by Hammerstein and Gershwin and Porter, not the least of which are the re-versionings of Porter's "Night and Day" (1934), with its opening spondaic verse simply cut out by Billie Holiday in one recording:
Like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom When the jungle shadows fall. (Gottlieb and Kimball 118)
Just how far this second-wave lyric is from the crude but mold-breaking first-wave jungleification of Vachel Lindsay's 1914 "The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race" is the measure of Porter's exquisite assimilationist aesthetic of cultural absorption.17
The American songbook "standards" of second-wave modernism have the peculiar history of rearticulations (a.k.a. covers) across the political and aesthetic spectrum, from bebop to Mantovani. (The British conductor Annunzio Mantovani, whose rigorous practice of taking out the highs and lows of lowbrow and highbrow music alike to create a smooth and sedating sonic wash that is the ultimate symbol of Cold War middlebrow culture, was himself a second waver, born in Italy in 1905.) Unlike language standards that are models of correct articulation, the American standard songs are open invitations to radical stylistic otherings. They are virtual tokens of Emersonian moral perfectionism, a constellation of interchanging variations that together suggest the unfinishable possibilities of community.
But now it is time to return to St. Louis, or at least to the "St. Louis Blues" by W. C. Handy (born 1873), which is often considered to be the first blues song. The song was published in 1914, the same year as Lindsay's "Congo." I want to contrast Handy's foundational first-wave modernist song, and especially his performance of it, with Charlie Patton's paradigmatic second-wave modernist work, "High Water Everywhere," which, like Robeson's performance and Smith's recordings, were recorded in the late 1920s. In Handy's performance of his "St. Louis Blues," he incorporates many of the harmonizing elements of the Victorian parlor song: voice is projected over the melody; melody exists as separate from the lyric rather than as an extension of the lyric; tone, melody, and lyric are harmonized, subordinated to one another. The figure of the words is set off against the ground of the music. In the Library of America anthology, the lyrics look like this (for a sound clip of "St. Louis Blues," go to http://writing.upenn.edu/ezurl/3):
I hate to see de ev'nin' sun go down,Hate to see de ev'nin' sun go down,
‘Cause ma baby, he done lef dis town,
Feelin’ tomorrow lak ah feel today,
Feel tomorrow lak ah feel today,
I'll pack my trunk make ma gitaway. (2: 89)
"St. Louis Blues" creates a song form that is unified, prosodically consistent, and sonorous. It creates a Euclidian or proscenium space that is projective in its centripetal force. The setting is formal and reproducible. Handy sings in a melodic falsetto that is projective in the way of trained singers. (Robeson's performance of "St. Louis Blues" is structurally similar to Handy's, but Robeson is even more operatic than Handy.) The metrical structure exists independently of the performance, suggesting a continuum with the setting of dialect or vernacular within a received metrical structure in Dunbar, McKay, Johnson, and Hammerstein.
In contrast, the work of second-wave modernist Charlie Patton (1891[?]–1934) breaks drastically from almost all of these features, in ways that make his songs, such as "High Water Everywhere," resonant with radical developments among other second-wave modernists. His sound is not separable from his words but emerges from them and returns to them. The timbre or grain of voice is foregrounded over both the tune and enunciation of the words. Patton actively works to collapse the separation between figure and ground, between lyric and melody, between song and singer, and between voice and projection. The acoustic equivalent of perspective is thwarted. The effect is of a radical acoustic flattening—a feature sometimes noted as "muddiness" (for a sound clip of "High Water Everywhere," go to http://writing.upenn.edu/ezurl/4). During his second recording session in October 1929, Patton literally inscribed his song by means of a needle writing directly onto a wax master, singing into a 60-cm wide, 8-ft.-long plywood horn that was attached to the needle.18
The song is not projected by convex force into the Euclidian or three-dimensional space of the proscenium theater but resonates within the body; it is almost as if the sound shape is two-dimensional or concave. Body and voice are one, or, to put it in more formal terms, Patton plays the body as an instrument—typically against the grain, emphasizing the artifice of noise over the fluidity of voice. The song has no inner or outer; it starts in the middle and stays there. The singing is inwardly directed in constructing the song out of its vocal materials, and as such it is nonprojective or introjective. The melody is not detachable from the words, does not accompany the words, but rather comes out of the words. Its musical shape is created primarily by rhythm, making the work, formally, as close to sound poetry as to the emerging styles of popular and folk song. At the same time, its rhythmic base also marks the origins of this style in African-American field shouts, work songs, and chants of the nineteenth century, with their rhythmically intoned vocables serving as acute temporal markings. Patton's words also oscillate into vocables, which is to say become indecipherable, as he plays the signal-to-noise ratio almost as one would play an instrument. Indeed, there is a kind of sonic Fauvism or brutism emerging here.
Patton's nonprojective singing is not a matter of reduced volume as it is, for example, in the emergent informal and intimate singing made possible by the introduction of microphone amplification in 1925. Patton's volume can be substantial, but the vocalization emanates from the body and is not separated out into a vocal stream; the sound is contained and suffused. Patton's guttural soundings are by now highly influential. He sings in and through his throat and not, as with a conventionally trained voice, up from his diaphragm and out from his mouth. Like Robert Johnson, he overlays his singing with various noise effects that interrupt any continuous melodic production: talking, grunts, inhalations, interjections, improvisatory rather than formulaic repetitions, variations, extensions, and rephrasings, and incommensurable switches of tempo, pitch, volume, and tone.
In his foundational study of Patton's work, Charley Patton (1970), John Fahey notes a stunningly innovative use of disjunctive, recombinant lyric patterning in which Patton improvisationally samples and recombines phrases and lines without apparent reference to conventional narrative or grammatic continuity or coherence. Such nonlinear, or serial, lyric composition bears a close resemblance to the collage technique of radical modernist poetry, creating a body of work as inventive in its ludicly inchoate, disruptive force as any of its poetic counterparts.
No metrical structure exists external to the song's unfolding. The rhythm and acoustic patterning is dominant but also irregular from the point of view of conventional prosody, emerging from the poiesis, from the materialization of the song, out of the active, inventive wording process in a practice of errant wandering and acoustic probes. The music does not take the words on a flight of sound but rather brings the words home, back to themselves, to ourselves. Here I see an affinity between this work and Zukofsky's poetics, particularly his conception of sincerity and objectification, articulated for the first time in an essay published within a couple of years of the recording of "High Water Everywhere": sincerity—song as an extension of its poesis of self-making; and objectification—structural solidity of the singer/song intertwined into a single figure.
To transpose my account of Zukofsky's poetics, "objectification" marks an insistence on "the detail, not mirage" of hearing; the desire is to represent not the appearance of nature but its conditions—autonomy, completeness, self-sufficiency, and particularity. "Sincerity" is not an affect but the truth in the materials: "thinking"—and here singing—"with things as they exist," where things are not only objects but also persons. Sincerity and objectification are means of grappling with the structures and conditions through which things come into perception and by means of which we come into contact with them and live alongside them.19
"High Water Everywhere," then, is a form of sprung or informalist, if not to say objectivist, verse. Patton's vernacular is not something set to music but infused with it, far from what James Merrill has praised as the felicitous iambic pentameter of Handy's "St. Louis Blues."20 I use the term "informalism" advisedly, thinking of Bruce Andrews's extension of Adorno's idea of "constructivist noise or athematic ‘informal music’" (73).
In "The Education of the Poet," Merrill takes on the ideolectical/free verse issue directly by contrasting Handy's pentameter to the "new measure" of Pound, Williams, Ashbery, and Allen Ginsberg: "The pentameter – so went the argument – wasn't a truly American line. I had to wonder if these patriots had ever heard the blues. ‘I hate to see the evening sun go down’ – wasn't that an effortless and purely native music?" (qtd in Patterson 191). Handy, in his own account of the origin of this song in the recording, is at great pains to show the effort and resistance embedded in the song, and specifically those lines which evoke the pain of a homeless man facing another cold night on the streets. But Merrill is certainly right to associate Handy with that aspect of African-American poetry that wedded itself to the pentameter, from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Claude McKay's early Jamaican poems to Countee Cullen.21 This, though, is only one part of the blues, and surely one of the bluest parts. It is as if one associated jazz with swing rather than "free" jazz or Dadaist noise music. In poetry, in the broadest terms, the contrast is Dunbar and Cullen versus Sterling Brown, on the one hand, and Jean Toomer or Langston Hughes, on the other. In political terms, it is Booker T. Washington versus W.E.B. Du Bois. In any case, what is native to America is always synthetic, not to say syncretic. The pentameter is always a device and its meaning has to be not read, but heard socially, in terms of its aesthetic motivation.
In looking at the Patton lyrics in the Library of America anthology, it is important to note that the text is not Patton's creation; his inscription was with a needle on a wax master not a pen on a blank page. Patton is a pioneer of the new age of phonographic reproduction. The Library of America creates a place marker in its collection, its transcription uses the alphabet, an earlier form of language reproduction technology that is clearly not up to the task at hand. The significance of its inclusion in the anthology is in part to mark that writing has been superceded in its function of scoring speech. Indeed, this is not a script to be performed, but a transcription after the fact of a performance. It is documentation that supports the primary work, which is not the lost "live" performance but the fabricated acoustic recording.
Cole Porter's "How strange the change from major to minor" could be the theme song of second-wave modernism, where minor keys struck major chords.22 If Porter, in his songs, included the high in the low, then Danny Kaye's and second waver Louis Armstrong's rollicking version of the African-American spiritual "When the Saints Go Marching In" in the 1959 movie, The Five Pennies, is the ultimate anthem of such cultural miscegenation, here brought to a crescendo by the Jewish Kaye singing side-by-side with Armstrong, the icon of African-American classical music. (Kaye, born David Daniel Kaminsky in 1913, is four years too young to be a full-fledged second waver.) At one point, the younger Tin Pan Alley crooner impersonates the classic jazz singer (including the famous handkerchief-on-mouth), to which Armstrong remarks, in an aside, "Is this cat digging me, face and all?" (see Figure 2). In this (Levinasian?) moment, Kaye dialogically redefines by refining—yet without redeeming—Al Jolson's blackface "Jazz Singer." Armstrong and Kaye riff on popular figures of European classical music—"Chopin – solid man ... Mozart – with the symphonies and operas and all that jazz ... Rimsky – of coursikov ... Ravel and Gustav Mahler – but don't forget Fats Waller ... put Liszt on that list ... Haydn [pronounced Hidin' ]– well let him come out! ... Khachaturian – gesundheit"—ending the performance with an ecstatic dose of ideolectical, a.k.a. scat, mayhem.
|
"Who's gonna play on the day when the saints go marching in?" Armstrong sings, envisioning a messianic, not to say apocalyptic, moment of judgment and redemption in which Western high culture marches into paradise side-by-side with jazz and Broadway. "I want to be in that number": elect, but more profoundly, company. Being in the number does not elevate the "other" but rather democratizes the "high," brings the "high" and "low" (sacred and profane, standard and aberrant) into the space of the people (demos), the commons. Amidst the final scat, the singers exclaim to each other, "Oh too high! Oh too low!," meaning the notes but also the cultural referents. It is an exuberant moment not so much for popular culture (in terms of which this is nothing special), but for high culture.
Cultural miscegenation (the mixing of types) is in dialectical relation to assimilation. Miscegenation, insofar as it is marked by difference, resists assimilation. But miscegenation is also assimilation by means of absorption—call it the syncretic. Conceptualized as a function, assimilation has as its utopian upper limit Emersonian moral perfectionism, whose horizon is the new or invented, in the sense of emergent or not yet realized (possibly not realizable). The dystopian lower limit is absorption into the dominant culture without a trace of the constituent parts, the fantasy of the total dissolution of otherness into the mirage of the preexisting—call it the final solution by other means.
CodaI knew
About the split identity
Of the People's Poet—
The bifacial nature of his poetry:
The racial ballad in the public domain
And the private poem in the modern vein.
Melvin Tolson, Harlem Gallery23
The social trauma inscribed by accent and assimilation is resolved, in American poetry, only at the cost of repression, a repression that manifests itself in both a celebration of identity and a despair at identity's loss. This remains a fundamental condition for American poetry, one which finds its signature moment in Langston Hughes's identification with and distance from the singer of "The Weary Blues." Code switching, from vernacular to standard, from slang to formal, is a part of American life as common as having clothes from the Gap and Brooks Brothers in the same closet. But poetry takes nothing for granted when it sacrifices the ease of the given on the hooks of the difficult. The title poem of D. S. Marriott's Incognegro (2006) offers both demonstration and instruction in such difficulties. In and around 1990, Marriott published a few startling chapbooks that, while identifiable with a kind of Cambridge (UK) style, seemed to eviscerate the very grounds of their own expression. As some of these works resurface in Incognegro, their lyric abjection and loneliness swell into unsung song. These poems, revised and collected, become palimpsests, overlaying personal anguish with the social terror of racism and the historical trauma of slavery. Marriott teaches in Santa Cruz, grew up in England, and has parents from Jamaica. "Incognegro" offers a startling alternation, line by line, of marked black dialect against its lexically standard lyric twin, each line reciprocally mirroring the pain of the other's deformance. The poem internalizes the alternation of dialect and standard in Dunbar, making a moebius strip of the either/or dynamic of mastering form/deforming mastery that is at the heart of Houston Baker's Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1989):
Back-a-yard is wey de fuss is,and the moon bright in the scuffed mirror.
Me nuh see wha a gwan,
but the glass reflects what is real and what is not.
Dem sey dem feel involve
even though pity is missing from the gaze,
a lapse, a density, as the bizzies armlock him,
so him put up nuh fuss, an dem candemn im to damnashan, –
the thought of calling her mobile
for our own peace of mind, only.
Wi look like wi headin back to de grave,
but the soul is so unlikely a captive,
dem nieda see nor do dem feel
the smoke above the ash trees, the banks of fog,
de time incognegro an nat a dyam ting
but silence at the other end of the line.
Im sit wid us in the dark, de man nuh respec us,
the fault is in the cold night air,
in the grim, deep and unsettling form of the mirror.
Di pathos an disenchantment, undastan, lass beyan rekonin. (Marriott 29)
Incognegro is a fiercely formal study of the poetics of subjection, assimilation, lyric authority, and historical double-consciousness. The particular closed poetic economies of Derek Walcott and J. H. Prynne form just part of the background against which Marriott weaves his cries—not just of the heart but of history. Incognegro does not permit any settling into a single mode in its unforgiving demonstration of the disguises of voiced voicelessness. The result is both incendiary fire and cold logic.
Radical formal innovation in modernist and contemporary art has, at times, been seen as undermining the aesthetic, but it is more accurate to say that such work reinvents the aesthetic for new readers and new contexts. We have to reinvent constantly our forms and vocabularies so that we do not lose touch with ourselves and the world we live in. The need for change in art is prompted by changes in the social and economic environment. The responses of the past are not always able to grapple with the present. Second-wave modernism may be understood in this context as part of a continuing struggle to reinvent modernism for present times and present conditions, often in specific response to challenges posed by first-wave modernists. Its technical innovations are an ongoing witness and adjustment to the social dislocation and relocations of contemporaneity, the pressure of reality.24
 |
Notes |
|---|
 TOP Notes Works Cited |
|---|
Charles Bernstein is Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Girly Man and My Way: Speeches and Poems.
2 The Advisory Board for the anthology consisted of Robert Hass, John Hollander, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey, and Marjorie Perloff. Geoffrey O'Brien, the editor-in-chief of Library of America, coordinated the editorial team. The first volume goes from Henry Adams (born 1838) to Ezra Pound (born 1885) to T. S. Eliot (born 1888) to Dorothy Parker (born 1893); the second volume goes from e.e. cummings (born 1894) to May Swenson (born 1913). 
3 The full text of the conversation is available at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/essays/obrien-b2.html (accessed 10/10/07).
4 I discuss "A foin lass bodders," Zukofsky's 1940 translation of Guido Cavalcanti's 13th-century poem "Donna mi Prega" into Brooklynese (not to say Yiddish dialect), in "Hearing Voices," which will be published in a forthcoming collection of essays from the University of Chicago Press, ed. Marjorie Perloff, based on presentations from the 2006 MLA Annual Convention. In his dialect version, Zukofsky is responding to Ezra Pound's two translations of "Donna mi Prega." "A foin lass bodders" is included in Zukofsky's Selected Poems, ed. Charles Bernstein (2006).
5 The Library of America anthology, vol. 1, includes three Porter lyrics—"I Get a Kick Out of You," "Anything Goes," and "Just One of Those Things." "You're the Top" is included in Reading Lyrics, ed. Robert Gottlieb and Roger Kimball (2000).
6 This also makes Porter a precursor for pop art. And with Porter's double entendres, the "homotextual" dimensions of his work are as startling and revelatory as his fellow second waver, Hart Crane (1899–1932); both Porter and Crane lead, after a fashion, to Ashbery and O'Hara. "Love for Sale" is only the most emblematic of Porter's charting of "Love that's only slightly soiled"—"the wayward ways of this wayward town":
Let the poets pipe of loveThe song is from the 1930 show The New Yorkers. According to Roger Kimball's The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter (1983), Porter at one point said "Love for Sale" was "his favorite Porter song." Kimball also reports that to get around objections to the song's propriety, the setting was changed from outside a white nightclub to Harlem's Cotton Club and a black singer was substituted for a white singer (145). That singer, second waver Elisabeth Welch (born in 1904), was the child of a Scots mother and a father of "African and Native American" descent, according to the African American Registry: http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/2268/She_could_Do_It_All_Elisabeth_Welch (accessed 8/8/07). One of the most recent covers of the song intensifies, more than any other I know, the foreignness at its heart; perhaps it is not that surprising that the Brazilian musician and vocalist Caetano Veloso would bring out just how haunting and desolate "Love for Sale" is. Veloso includes the song on his album of American standards, A Foreign Sound, a 2004 Nonesuch release. Veloso knows just how to make the familiar strange.in their childish way,
I know ev'ry type of love
Better far than they. (Gottlieb and Kimball 117)
7 The sexual image of a top and a bottom might also be thought of in terms of the newly emergent dominance of mass culture (one of Porter's tops is the tower of Babel). At the same time, Porter's works suggest that the major and minor, dominant and submissive, master and slave are as much a psycho-social erotic continuum as terms of positive valuation. In his "parody" version, collected in the Complete Lyrics, Porter is nothing if not explicit in his rhymes for top: King Kong's penis, self-abuse, the starch in a groom's erection, in contrast to the bottom as "a eunuch / who has just been through an op" (171).
8 See Thomas L. Morgan, "Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson" at Jass.Com: http://www.jass.com/c&j.html (accessed 11/25/06). The 1902 recording was made by Arthur Collins.
9 The lyric is included in the 2004 Library of America edition of James Weldon Johnson's Writings, 811–12; note that there is a typographical error in this printing: "One [not once] day he seized her" is correct. A web site, John Kendrick's Musicals 101, provides an image of the cover page of the sheet music (as published by Stern, New York in 1902), as well as a transcription of the lyrics: http://www.musicals101.com/lybambootree.htm (accessed 8/17/07). However, Kendrick misreads the attribution "By Cole and Johnson Bros" to mean Bob Cole and J. Rosamund Johnson rather than the Johnson brothers J. Rosamund and James Weldon.
10 In "Wandering Jews: Melting Pots and Mongrel Thoughts," a chapter from Gender, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry (2001), DuPlessis discusses the passage of Zukofsky's "Poem Beginning ‘The’" cited above. Cultural mongrelization and miscegenation is a keynote of second-wave modernism; DuPlessis adeptly sets the stage in a discussion of first-wave modernist Mina Loy's anti-seminal poem "Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose" (1923–1925).
11 A smaller jump from "Under the Bamboo Tree" would be to a contemporary song, "Under the Matzos Tree: A Ghetto Love Song" (1907) by Alexander Carr and Fred Fisher, which was reissued on Jewface, a CD of comic, sometimes self-deprecating songs and schtick by Jewish performers from 1905 to 1924. Perhaps the most famous song on the album is Irving Berlin's 1916 "Cohen Owes Me 97 Dollars." Many of these songs used Yiddish dialect, or, if this is difference that makes a difference in the context of dialect comedy, travesties of it. The 1906 "When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band" includes its own scat/vocable refrain: "Oy, oy, oy, oy / Mazel tov!"
12 There are a number of recordings of Robeson singing "Ol' Man River," and innumerable versions by a vast array of singers, from Ray Charles to Rosemary Clooney to Frank Sinatra, most of whom modify the dialect. The first recording of the song was by Bing Crosby with the Paul Whiteman orchestra in 1928; Crosby, in his thin and jaunty version, averts Hammerstein's dialect.
13 According to Robeson's son, Paul Robeson, Jr., Robeson began altering the lyrics "during the civil rights struggle of the 1940s." See Robeson, Jr.'s liner notes in The Odyssey of Paul Robeson, a CD compilation he edited that includes a recording of his father's 1952 Chicago version of "Ol' Man River." Martin Duberman, in his biography of Robeson, dates the first changes to 1935, the time of the film version of Show Boat, and attributes them in part to the suggestion of his lifelong friend, leftist Freda Diamond (604–605).
14 Duberman documents Robeson's introduction of this change at a concert in support of the anti-fascist Spanish Republicans at Albert Hall (in London) in December 1936 (213–14). He quotes Hammerstein's 1949 response: "As the author of these words, I have no intention of changing them or permitting anyone else to change them. I further suggest that Paul write his own songs and leave mine alone" (604).
15 Speaking of the segues in one of his concerts of the late 1950s, Robeson notes "the likeness of the music of various peoples" (Odyssey, track 23), echoing comments he made starting as early as 1929 (Duberman 121). The next track on The Odyssey of Paul Robeson (1992) (track 24) introduces Robeson's lamentation of Jewish oppression, Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev's "Hasidic Chant," an eighteenth-century rearticulation of "Kaddish" that is also known as "Din Toyre mit Got" ("The Lawsuit with God"). Robeson says that it is "very much like the sermons in the Negro church." Robeson's pancultural commitment to folk songs was in full evidence by 1934 (Duberman 176–78). Robeson's 1958 Carnegie Hall concerts are the best-known example of his late style concert organization, which can usefully be contrasted to Harry Smith's folk anthology of the same period. For a discussion of "Hassidic Chant," as well as of Robeson's concert programs, see Jonathan D. Karp's "Performing Black-Jewish Symbiosis: The ‘Hassidic Chant’ of Paul Robeson," American Jewish History 91.1 (2003): 53–81.
16 Zukofsky uses this phrase in "An Objective," collected in Prepositions, 12.
17 PennSound has made available a recording of Lindsay reading "Congo": http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lindsay.html
18 Keith Briggs and Alex Van Der Tuuk describe the session in the booklet that accompanies The Definitive Charley Patton (2001). (Patton's name is frequently given as "Charley.") A transcript of the improvised lyric is included in volume 1 of the Library of America anthology. The visceral subject of "High Water Everywhere" is the catastrophic Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
19 This passage is adapted from my foreword to Zukofsky's collection of essays, Prepositions. See "An Objective" and its 1932 source, "Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff."
20 Merrill's "Education of the Poet" is cited in Raymond R. Patterson, "The Blues," An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, ed. Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes (2002), 191.
21 I outline this in "The Poetics of the Americas," which explores the issue in detail.
22 "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye," Complete Lyrics, 362.
23 Tolson, 335. The Curator, a central character of Tolson's poem, is speaking of the poem's poet, the Cab Calloway namesake Hideho Heights. In a 1965 radio interview, Tolson comments: "The Curator is of Afroirishjewish ancestry. He is an octoroon, who is a Negro in New York and a white man in Mississippi. Like Walter White, the late executive of the NAACP, and the author of A Man Called White, the Curator is ... Negro. Hundreds of thousands of Octoroons like him have vanished into the Caucasian race—never to return. This is a great joke among Negroes. So Negroes ask the rhetorical question, ‘What man is white?’" (qtd in Flasch 100). Harlem Gallery was first published in 1965, but was probably started in the 1930s and then put aside for a couple of decades.
24 Williams Carlos Williams (born in 1883), ends "To Elsie," from Spring and All, "No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car" (217–18). In "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," Wallace Stevens (born in 1879) writes of "the pressure of reality" (643–45).
|
Works Cited |
|---|
|
TOPNotesWorks Cited |
|---|
-
American Poetry: The Twentieth Century (2000) 2 vols. New York: Library of America.
Andrews Bruce. Informalism. In: Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word.—Bernstein Charles, ed. (1998) New York: Oxford UP.
Bernstein Charles. The Poetics of the Americas. In: My Way: Speeches and Poems. (1999) Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Duberman Martin. Paul Robeson. (1988) New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
DuPlessis Rachel Blau. Gender, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry. (2001) New York: Oxford UP.
Eliot T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950. (1971) New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World.
The Five Pennies (1959) Paramount: Dir. Melville Shavelson.
Flasch Joy. Melvin B. Tolson. (1972) New York: Twayne.
Gottlieb Robert, Roger Kimball eds. Reading Lyrics. (2000) New York: Pantheon.
Johnson James Weldon. Writings. (2004) New York: Library of America.
Marriott D. S. Incognegro. (2006) Cambridge: Salt Publishing.
O'Brien Geoffrey, Charles Bernstein. A Conversation. boundary 2 (2001) 28(2).
Porter Cole. The Complete Lyrics—Kimball Roger, ed. (1992) Cambridge: Da Capo.
Robeson Paul. The Odyssey of Paul Robeson—Soloman Seymour, Paul Robeson Jr, eds. (1992) Omega Classics. Audio CD. Produced by OCD 3007.
Rosen Jody, curator. Jewface (2006) Audio CD. Reboot Stereophonic, RSR 006.
Stevens Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. (1997) New York: Library of America.
Tolson Melvin B. "Harlem Gallery" and Other Poems.—Nelson Raymond, ed. (1999) Charlottesville: UP of Virginia.
Williams William Carlos. The Collected Poems, Vol.1, 1909–1939.—MacGowan Christopher, ed. (2001) Princeton: Princeton UP.
Zukofsky Louis. Prepositions. (2001) Wesleyan, CT: Wesleyan UP.
Zukofsky Louis. Poem beginning ‘The. In: Selected Poems—Bernstein Charles, ed. (2006) New York: Library of America.
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||