Five tracks from the album REALLY!, featuring Robert Creeley reading his angular and unique poetry accompanied by original music from Tom Waits collaborate Ralph Carney
Robert Creeley first received fame in 1962 from his poetry collection For Love. He rose to prominence as a Black Mountain poet, as a principle figure in the Language Poetry movement in Buffalo and New York. He won the Bollingen Prize, among others, and to hold the position of New York State Poet Laureate from 1989 until 1991.[He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.
In the mid-1980s Michael Minzer began producing poetry albums and later CDs for his label, Paris Records. Among them was the well-received CD, The Lion for Real, for which a number of composers created music to go with Allen Ginsberg’s recitation of some of his major shorter poems.
In 1988, Robert Creeley came to Dallas for a reading at the library, and was approached by Minzer to record some of his poetry during his visit. Creeley agreed and Minzer brought him into a recording studio. The result was an astounding time-slice of the essence of Creeley.
Over half of the poems Creeley reads on this album are from his 1962 book, For Love, which settled his reputation as a modern master. Other poems are from books from the 1970s and early ’80s. Subsequently, Minzer commissioned composer and recording artist Ralph Carney to create and record musical accompaniment to the poems.
Carney, best known for his long association with Tom Waits, was an American multi-instrumentalist, singer and composer. His primary instruments are various saxophones and clarinets.
Critic Robert Christgau wrote: “Creeley was a jazz-loving “New American Poet” whose readings never softened the abrupt line breaks of his economical, apolitical, intensely decent verse. A poor musical prospect, you’d think. Yet the subtle flourishes of saxophonist Ralph Carney sharpen these 1988 recordings decisively.
SONG
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p6gbIEU21M
love has no other friends than those given it as us a confusion of trust and dependence we want the world to wonder and wait for it to become one out of our simple bodies and minds
THE DEATH OF VENUS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5gwR7RVQZw
I dreamt her sensual proportions, had suffered a sea change that she was a porpoise or a sea beast rising lucid from the mist
I KNOW A MAN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6Vq3uhmdZI
as i sd to my friend because i am always talking john i said which was not his name the darkness surrounds us what can we do against it or else shall we and why not buy a god damn big car drive he said fr chrissake where you’re going
A FLOWER
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWRoqON5_8o
i think i grow tensions like flowers in wood where nobody goes each wound is perfect encloses itself in a tiny imperceptible blossom making pain. pains is a flower like this one like that one like this one
JACK’S BLUES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWl7jIpodSI
i’m going to roll up a rug and smoke it
put the car in the garage
and i’m gone like a sad old candle
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