In the notes on “Genesis I” in Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred, he writes:
What’s of interest here isn’t the matter of the myth but the power of repetition & naming (monotony, too) to establish the presence of a situation in its entirety. This involves the acceptance (by poets & hearers) of an indefinite extension of narrative time, & the belief that language (i.e., poetry) can make-things-present by naming them. (441)
In my last post, I was thinking about the particularities of poetry read aloud (reflecting on hearing Ishion Hutchinson read his poem “The Wanderer” at the Pratt Library in Baltimore), and more specifically, the potency of the verbal enactment of repetitions, as opposed to their more latent presence on paper. When I read with Deborah Bernhardt a few weeks ago at the 45th Annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, her sense of sonic power and play was noteworthy throughout her reading, but I was particularly struck by her poem “After Stuff Smith and/or Steve Reich,” from her chapbook Driftology (New Michigan Press, 2013). This poem, read aloud, exemplified the unsettling strength of embodied repetition.
The poem begins and ends with the same stanza, a kind of “da capo” repetition of repetition:
his name followed by a cut
his name followed by a cut
his name followed by a cut
I did not watch
I’m not sure if this “da capo” (which literally means “from the head”) move is a kind of dark and oblique allusion to the poem’s horrific context, but Bernhardt’s associative and allusive aesthetic leaves the door open for the listener to make such a connection. The poem itself points the reader to Reich’s “commissioned choral / Daniel Pearl Variations,” composed by Steve Reich. (In her reading, Bernhardt prefaced the poem with this connection; Daniel Pearl, of course, was a reporter kidnapped and beheaded–on video–by terrorists in 2002.) Her repetition of “I did not watch,” speaks to the video itself, while pointing us back to aurality as our access point, as well as to potential commentary on what it means on a larger societal or political level to “look away.” Reich’s 2006 composer’s notes on “Daniel Variations” further contextualize:
The piece is in four movements using texts from the Biblical book of Daniel for the first and third movements and from the words of Daniel Pearl, the American Jewish reporter, kidnapped and murdered by Islamist extremists in Pakistan in 2002, for the second and fourth movements. The texts/movements are:
I saw a dream.
My name is Daniel Pearl (I’m a Jewish American from Encino, California)
Let the dream fall back on the dreaded
I sure hope Daniel likes my music, when the day is done.
The first text, from the book of Daniel, is spoken by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon (modern day Iraq). He is asking Daniel to interpret his dream of terror. Right now it is unfortunately possible to feel a chill of identification with these words.
The second text was spoken by Daniel Pearl while his captors video taped him. I use only the first five words in the music itself since ‘My name is Daniel Pearl’ is so emblematic of this remarkable person. In Jewish tradition, and in many others, names are indicative of character.
The third text is the Biblical Daniel’s response to Nebuchadnezzar.
The last text is a bit of a surprise and is explained by a friend of Daniel Pearl as follows:
‘Once, during a two-day bike trip up the Potomac River, his friend Tom Jennings asked about his belief in an afterlife. “I don’t know,” Danny replied. “I don’t have answers, mainly just questions.” Then he added: “But I sure hope Gabriel likes my music.”
After Danny died, Tom was going through his friend’s vinyl collection (Dvorak, Liszt, Miles Davis, REM) and stumbled across this album: Stuff Smith and the Onyx Club Orchestra. “Danny loved Stuff Smith – a great jazz violinist,” Tom says. “Here on side A, track 3, I found this: Stuff Smith playing ‘I Hope Gabriel Likes My Music.”
I have not used any of the music or lyrics of the song and have even edited the title. The addition of ‘when the day is done’ is my own. I hope Danny would approve.
Musically, Daniel Variations has two related harmonic ground plans. One for the first and third movements using four minor dominant chords a minor third apart in E mi, G mi, Bb mi and C# mi. The other harmonic plan is for the second and fourth movements using four major dominant chords in the relative major keys, G, Bb, Db and E. This gives a darker chromatic harmony to the first and third movements and a more affirmative harmonic underpinning to the second and fourth. Since Daniel Pearl was not only a reporter, but also played the fiddle – particularly jazz and blue grass – the strings take the lead melodically in the second and fourth movements, sometimes doubled by the two clarinets.
There is so much to unpack and absorb in the poem’s backstory (read more on Reich’s own process here), and there are already so many questions raised in how a poet might approach both a poem written “after” a piece of music on this scale and “after” such a sensational murder. In the case of Berhardt’s poem, the listener finds that less is more, as the poem’s spare lines allow the initial and terminal repetitions to carry their burden.
In Hugh Kenner’s “Magic and Spells,” he writes, “That naming wields power seems an immemorial intuition”; he writes, “The deeps of language are nearly inarticulate . . . Its strength draws still on the shaman’s resources: rhythm and surprise, the unnerving force of naming, the curse, the blessing, the enforced claim on attention . . . .and only triviality can pretend that by its analytic habits magic has at last been superseded.”
Read Berhardt’s poem in its entirety by purchasing Driftology.