Poetry Postcard 36: Singing the Blues

One of the most important things I have learned from the Poetry Postcard Project is that I love research.

The postcards have taken me to new places (City of Rocks, New Mexico; Fort McClellan, Alabama) and introduced me to fascinating lives (Vera Ellen, Debra Paget, Sarah Bernhardt).

Postcard 36 came from the book, Women Who Dared. I’d heard of blues great Bessie Smith (on the cover), but didn’t know anything about her.

Step 1: Listen to Bessie Smith recordings on YouTube.

I’ve only written one intentionally blues-influenced poem. It is a tribute to Etta James, who died last year. You can read the found poem, taken from a Women In Jazz interview with James, at the SPARK website. Several artists used the poem, “Feel What I'm Singing,” as an inspiration piece. Check out the cool art!

Step 2: Read some online biographies.

I thought I might write about Janis Joplin’s obsession with Smith, which led Joplin to buy a gravestone for the singer. But I abandoned that idea. I wanted the poem to focus on Smith.

Instead, I ended up using lyrics from several of Smith’s songs to structure a new poem, inspired by the hat she holds in the photograph. (Another feathered hat appeared in postcard poem 33.)

The Day You Quit Me

I got a hat made of feathers,

put it on and men start to cry.

I got a hat made of feathers

and someday they’re gonna fly.

If you ever quit me, honey,

they’re gonna lift me to the sky.

I’ll put on a red dress,
I’ll put on my hat,
I’ll sing like a robin
if you’ll just stay

where you’re at.

I got this hat made of feathers
bluer than the empty sky.

The day you quit me, honey,

is the day I’m gonna die.

Laura Shovan

The person who received this postcard suggested setting the poem to music. What do you think?

Here's another intersection between postcards and music, sent to me by poet Allan Roy Andrews:

Violinist Hilary Hahn's online "Postcards From the Road."

Hahn started the project fifteen years ago as a way to communicate with a group of third graders. Her project includes photographs from her travels accompanied by postcard-length reports and musings.

Allan suggests great listening if you track Hahn’s performances on YouTube. Here, Hilary Hahn performs Ernest Chausson "Poeme" Op. 25 in October of 2012.

Postcard Information:

WOMEN WHO DARED

Bessie Smith (American, 1894-1937) made her first recording in 1923 (“Downhearted Blues”), and it quickly established her as the most successful black recording artist of her day. Her personal and musical power as a blues and jazz singer pushed out the boundaries of both female and African-American expression for a new mass audience.

Prints and Photographs Division

©Library of Congress

Pomegranate, Box 6099, Rohnert Park, CA 94927

Links for Bessie Smith:

Biography: http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/smit-besx.htm

Biography: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/jarvis6.html

Inspiration Lyrics, "Downhearted Blues": http://www.lyricstime.com/bessie-smith-downhearted-blues-lyrics.html

Poetry Postcard 27: Save the Drama

Before the Divine Miss M,

www.bigandme.com

there was the Divine Sarah--

Fiery Women

Available from Amazon

actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923). What made Bernhardt one of the Women Who Dared in my Pomegranate postcard book?

The postcard is a photograph from the Library
of Congress collection, about 1878?

Pretty much everything about her. Poem first, details after.

To Be or Sarah Bernhardt

Her real  name was Rosine.
The records of her birth
lost in a fire. So
she invented new details:
a mother named
for Judith of the Bible,
a father who was said to be
a lawyer, naval man
or sometimes an
accountant called Edouard.
She was a Jewish girl
in an Augustine convent,
not yet a star at the Conservatoire
and Comedie Francaise,
where she slapped another girl
while celebrating the birthday
of Moliere. These are some
of the costumes she wore.
In photographs, they seem
to grow heavier on her skin--
more silk ruffles
pressed against her throat,
a longer train,
a complicated crown.

Laura Shovan

I relied on Wikipedia and other sources while writing this poem. The only fact I tweaked slightly was her religion. Bernhardt was baptized a Catholic, but was of Jewish descent.

What a remarkable person. Bernhardt started, owned, ran and starred in her own theater company. She famously portrayed Hamlet (thus, my title), but I had never heard before that she rewrote Shakespeare's script for the production. That's chutzpah.

As Hamlet, 1900.  BBC  News.

One amazing fact I could not work into the poem: Sarah Bernhardt lost a leg to gangrene (first injured during a performance in 1905, amputated around 1915). For many years, she wore and performed with a prosthetic leg.

But what I found most fascinating about Bernhardt was that she seemed to view herself as a scripted character. Her own history was something to be revised, rewritten, made more interesting. A photograph taken in her youth shows the actress clothed in a simple sheet of fabric.

By Carol Ockman

As she grew older, the costumes appear weightier. They are jeweled and embroidered. I wonder how much it cost her to be that Sarah Bernhardt.

Painting by Louise Abbema, rumored to be Bernhardt's lover.
Abbema would also make a great subject for a poem.