To the Teachers of Poetry
Or...something you can dance to.
As you know, I’m new to substack, and I hope to vary the nature of the material here so that everything isn’t a long rumination on what steep incline my decline might be navigating. My favorite writer on this platform is Heather Cox Richardson, who writes about history in a way where you feel she is constantly turning over unexpected stones to reveal hidden worlds. But she also, on occasion, posts single photographs. I love these photos, as they serve as peaceful juxtaposition with the turmoil she frequently documents. I figured I would do the same, but with music! You know, something you can tap your foot to while sipping that tea or coffee.
One of my areas of academic specialty is American poetry. This of course leads to the usual bright-light interrogation: Who reads poetry anymore? What do you get out of studying it? How do you get “kids these days” to read it? All I can say is, a lot really does depend upon a red wheelbarrow.
Poetry is what I call “good weird,” like telling it slant. Thus I like trying weird, new projects. One of these projects involves setting canonical poetry to contemporary club music (long story). So today, instead of lengthy musings, I offer you a club-mix interpretation of Lucille Clifton’s “Homage to My Hips.” I’ve largely been using AI-generated voices for these creations, but Clifton’s real voice—from a live reading—was simply too good not to use.