More on: music

             And I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.                                                    —Rilke So I could be a song. But a great song? Or a bluegrass tune with a decent chorus and a shift to the minor to savor every time, and a break I can almost…

1. AUNT MORAVIA SAID that she had swallowed a glass piano. She was my father’s aunt, a stitch of an old woman. She’d come to live with us when I was seven and my brother Robbie fifteen. Mother had been bedfast for a month before the birth of my sister. In the meantime Aunt Moravia saw to…

Sydney Lea is poet laureate of Vermont. His tenth collection of poems is I Was Thinking of Beauty (2013). Recently published are his collaboration with Fleda Brown, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives (2013), and A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters and Wildlife (2013). Other recent publications include Six Sundays toward a…

He blew harmonica and he was pretty good with that, but he wanted to play guitar.                             —Son House on Robert Johnson   In November, it’s hard to know a cherry tree is a cherry tree. If it has any leaves left, they’re raw as rust. The sound the wind makes hustling through them’s a…

Like an old Victrola, its needle stuck   In the groove where the flamenco dancer Patters her firecracker feet to the floor,   Machine gun maracas, so the cicada Pays homage to its clattery muse,   She who pitied the flight of Tithonus Withering eternally through his dog days,   So the myth tells us,…

Some of the things I was not doing at the age of twenty-two: learning the Latin names of flowers (or even their English ones) living abroad recording music with the intensity & abandon you hear on every single cut of At Last! on which Riley Hampton’s orchestra’s a tame & obliging brook under storm-spew’d sheets…

Canadian singer/songwriter and human rights activist Bruce Cockburn has released twenty-eight albums over the course of a career that now spans more than four decades. His early music was contemplative, broadly spiritual, and grounded in nature, with a folk sensibility, and though he converted to Christianity in 1974, he never fit the Christian music industry…

When everything has left you, at the end, the world will come down to a few old words you will see new because you’ve chosen to. Your last breath will be like my first today. So I start here, in that extremity— or is it just simplicity I’ve earned by learning to be, the page…