music in literature and contemporary poetry

Manically reading a set work today as I have to return it on the 5th, since someone else has placed a hold on it. The book is 480 pages long and I have presently advanced just 65. So I have 415 pages left to read in 3 days, or 128 a day, or 10 an hour every hour I'm awake. I suppose I could always re-borrow it, as it were, but if there's 40 ppl in the class and all of them want to read it, that's 40 one-week loans ... uh-oh.



Having upgraded my credit card, I am amusingly credit-card less, since the bank have suspended my old card, and the new one hasn't yet arrived. (was posted on the 28th) Am looking forward to the extremely low interest rate of 9.9% afforded to me, exactly half my previous card. Only minor niggle is 0.25% cashback instead of 0.5%, but I don't care.



This is a poem by Robert Pinsky called Ginza Samba.



A monosyllabic European called Sax

Invents a horn, walla whirledy wah, a kind of twisted

Brazen clarinet, but with its column of vibrating

Air shaped not in a cylinder but in a cone

Widening ever outward and bawaah spouting

Infinitely upward through an upturned

Swollen golden bell rimmed

Like a gloxinia flowering

In Sax's Belgian imagination



And in the unfathomable matrix

Of mothers and fathers as a genius graven

Humming into the cells of the body

Or cupped in the resonating grail

Of memory changed and exchanged

As in the trading of brasses,

Pearls and ivory, calicos and slaves,

Laborers and girls, two



Cousins in a royal family

Of Niger known as the Birds or Hawks.

In Christendom one cousin's child

Becomes a "favorite negro" ennobled

By decree of the Czar and founds

A great family, a line of generals,

Dandies and courtiers including the poet

Pushkin, killed in a duel concerning

His wife's honor, while the other cousin sails



In the belly of a slaveship to the port

Of Baltimore where she is raped

And dies in childbirth, but the infant

Will marry a Seminole and in the next

Chorus of time their child fathers

A great Hawk or Bird, with many followers

Among them this great-grandchild of the Jewish

Manager of a Pushkin estate, blowing



His American breath out into the wiggly

Tune uncurling its triplets and sixteenths--the Ginza

Samba of breath and brass, the reed

Vibrating as a valve, the aether, the unimaginable

Wires and circuits of an ingenious box

Here in my room in this house built

A hundred years ago while I was elsewhere:



It is like falling in love, the atavistic

Imperative of some one

Voice or face--the skill, the copper filament,

The golden bellful of notes twirling through

Their invisible element from

Rio to Tokyo and back again gathering

Speed in the variations as they tunnel

The twin haunted labyrinths of stirrup

And anvil echoing here in the hearkening

Instrument of my skull.