“Much conversation is as good as having a home,” Ezra Pound writes in “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” evoking the thirst poets have for intoxicating get-togethers with their peers. “Out with it, tell it to me, all of it, from the beginning,/ I guzzle with outstretched ears.”

Sensing this lust for community—a desire which has burgeoned during the enforced solitudes of the pandemic—poet and bluesman Al Basile has launched a webcast called “Poems On.” The format is simple but ingenious. More reminiscent of a good radio show than late-night TV, the video opens with Al, a gifted and enthusiastic host, introducing his two guests for the evening.

Each of the three reads a poem on a topic Al’s previously chosen, and the three discuss the poem and conversationally riff of it. As the evening rolls on, the poets take turns reading poems of theirs they’ve chosen beforehand or pluck out on the spot in response to a poem one of the others has read. It’s very much like a poetic jam session, a free-flowing variation on the typical poetry reading. Bonhomie reigns supreme and, judging by the episodes up until now, it works great on Zoom.

It was my great good fortune to take part in the second episode of Basile’s blasts along with A.E. Stallings, a poet possessed of as fine an ear as any American poet writing today, on March 18, and I urge you to take a gander at the show on YOUTUBE. (The first episode featured the poets Rhina Espaillat and Alred Nicol.)

Speaking of Pound, both Al and Alicia are poets whose work is deeply subsumed in melopoeia, Old Ez’s term for the musical qualities of poetic language. Thus they (and, I hope, me) were well prepared for the topic of the show: poems about music.

Most appropriately, Alicia launched the proceedings with her well-known “Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther.” A delightful eight-line hornpipe of a poem, it was sent out as a postcard promotion by Poetry magazine, where it first appeared. It begins:

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?

The poem promptly spurred speculation about the role of the Devil in poetry and sympathy for his creative ministrations and the sad judgments against him, as were famously detailed by The Rolling Stones. For my part, I recalled William Blake’s analysis of John Milton’s unconscious motives in the latter’s composition of Paradise Lost. In Blake’s prophetic book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake wrote: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.”

Picking up on the earlier theme of the hellish side of music, Al read a poem of his called “Blues Primeval,” which details a backstage encounter he had with Howlin’ Wolf. (The poem’s directly below.) Basile is an adept yarn spinner, who possesses the distinct advantage that many of his tales may be true. There are at least two extraordinary phrases that I would draw your attention to as you listen: “burned down body banked back to a stillness,” and “Lizards of flame flashed up into his eyes.” But the poet’s Wolf imitation as Al reads the poem’s last line is well, spine-tingling.

Devilishly chuffed with my newly elevated status of grandfatherhood (my first grandchild had been born just one day shy of three months before), I decided to follow up with my poem “Lullaby” from In Praise of Manhattan. (You can read the poem directly below Al’s poem.) My poem describes a time in the long ago when I was walking the floor with my infant son on my shoulder in an attempt to get him to sleep in the wee small hours of the morning, just as he’s doing these days with his infant son on his shoulder.

Another item in the poem’s favor for this particular evening was that the song I was singing as I was walking was “Moon River,” penned by my all-time favorite song lyricist, the Savannah, Georgia-based lyricist, Johnny Mercer. I was betting that the song and the writer would appeal to Alicia, a native of Decatur, Ga., and I believe I was right. (Fun fact: Moon River is a real river in Savannah. Mercer’s childhood home overlooked a river known as The Back River, which was renamed Moon River in honor of the song.)

And so it went, with the themes of music and poetry deepening and widening as we swapped poems and memories. Pull up a chair, click here, and guzzle.

*

Al Basile

Blues Primeval

New Year's Eve, 2017

His mother threw him out when he was ten.
She sold her own hand-written gospel songs
for pennies on the street, would not abide
his wanting to sing blues, the devil's music.

“Ain't no love like your mother's love,” he'd say
later in life, “I missed a lot.” Just days
before he died, he asked his wife to call
long distance to his mother. If he ever
needed her, he said, the time was now.
His mother heard her only son's request.
She put down the phone and walked away.

A year before that end, we opened for
Wolf and his band in Burlington, Vermont.
His kidneys had been damaged in a crash,
and he had shrunk down sixty pounds or so
from the three hundred that he'd bragged about.
The every-other-day dialysis
at VA hospitals along his tour
routes got him through to every other night.

He'd only do six songs, but he still crawled
on hands and knees, and lolled the mike
between his legs, and cooed and howled, ever
the Wolf, an elemental force of nature.

I saw him sitting by himself backstage
after his set, and felt the need to talk.
At rest for now, he was approachable,
burned down body banked back to a stillness,
voice thinned to a thread, unthreatening.

I asked him about Aberdeen, where he'd
been born, and did he ever go back there?
“That's my home,” he said, as though that was
an answer. “Well, with all you have to go
through every day to keep this up,” I said,
“you must love to play.” His great gray head
turned toward me then. Lizards of flame flashed up
into his eyes, his face. “I'LL DIE ON STAGE!”

*

David M. Katz

Lullaby

I sing “Moon River,” comforting our hearts
Temporarily. Out of the night
The three beats of the whippoorwill have come
To tear me from my sleep. They are your cry.
Shattered, we pace the cold linoleum,
Settling in, holding on for life.
We will go forth upon the placid river,
I start to dream. Two huckleberry friends,
Paddles pulled up in our patchwork boat,
At peace beneath the Mississippi moon.
We’re no longer on the lam: you from your wet
And lonely crib, me from the muddy shore
Of my new fatherhood. The riverboat
Gambler with the thin moustache is free
To rule the night; we’re free to float out west
Unimpeded, unobserved, complete,
Until we get to where the past began,
Until the dawn. Our walk is shortening.
Our breath is slowing to a halt, a hush,
And you relax into a heaviness
On my neck. I wonder if it’s time
To walk you back into your room, to lay
You down with all the silence, all
The absence I can muster, let you go
Into your wide and sleepy river, tip-
Toe out, and shut the door. I wonder if
It is too soon for that, if as I turn
To leave you in the dark, you will awake
And refuse to let me go. We stop. And then
I start to hum the song, and we both expand,
Two drifters sleeping where we stand,
Not yet divided, at the rainbow’s end.