Liner Notes

Featuring contemporary songs inspired by the poetry of Robert Burns, Robert Browning, Countee Cullen, e.e. cummings, John Donne, T.S. Eliot, Alan Ginsberg, Wilfred Owen, Edgar Allan Poe, Wallace Stevens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, and W.B. Yeats.

In the preface to his translation of Ovid’s Epistles, John Dryden divides translation into three possible types: metaphrase is word-for-word, paraphrase is “translation with latitude,” and imitation contains “hints from the original.” If one conceives of turning a poem into a song as a sort of translation, this categorization is useful: the degree of “inspiration” ranges from a “word-for-word” translation that adds a purely musical interpretation to using a “hint” – a single line or image -- as a springboard to go in an entirely different direction and create a completely new but still pertinent work of art. Perhaps the most interesting are those artists who find a middle ground, keeping what they judge to be the central idea and/or weaving in relevant lines but modernizing, personalizing, or otherwise altering it in order to to make it their own.

Taken collectively, in any case, the songs make a bold assertion: both the diversity and the sheer quantity (and this is presumably only a fraction of the material available, since even within the relatively narrow band of songs that I know, I still had to cut Joni Mitchell, Sinéad O’Connor, David LaMotte, Anaïs Mitchell, and Diane Zeigler) of these songs speak to the continuing relevance of this poetry outside of elite academic circles.

Without Margaret Youngberg, ENGL331, Kris Delmhorst’s “Strange Conversation,” and the SIBL Project, this collection wosuld be decidedly inferior. Thanks.

Songs Inspired by Poetry

1. “Tread Softly” by Eileen Laverty
      Inspired by W.B. Yeats (“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”)
2.“Light of the Light” by Kris Delmhorst
      Inspired by Walt Whitman (“A Passage to India”)
3. “Left Me a Fool” by Indigo Girls
      Inspired by Alfred Lord Tennyson (“The Lady of Shallot”)
4. “Fenario” by Richard Shindell
      Inspired by John Donne (“Break of Day”)
5. “The Stolen Child” by Jared and Harper Denhard
     Inspired by W.B. Yeats (“The Stolen Child”)
6. “Galuppi Baldessare” by Kris Delmhorst
      Inspired by Robert Browning (“A Toccata of Galuppi's”)
7. “The Fire & The Rose” by The Kennedys
      Inspired by T.S. Eliot (“Little Gidding”)
8. “Snowman” by The Nields
      Inspired by Wallace Stevens (“The Snow Man”)
9. “Red (Elegy)” by Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer
      Robert Burns (“A Red, Red Rose”)
10. “The Latin One” by 10,000 Maniacs
      Wilfred Owen (“Dulce et Decorum Est”)
11. “Annabel Lee” by Full Frontal Folk
      Edgar Allan Poe (“Annabel Lee”)
12. “Wasteland” by Dan Bern
      Alan Ginsberg (“Howl”) and T.S. Eliot (“The Waste Land”)
13. “Pretty How Town” by Kris Delmhorst
      e.e. cummings (“anyone lived in a pretty how town”)
14. “Who's So Scared” by disappear fear
      Countee Cullen (“Incident”)
15. “Hunger” by Ana Porter
      T.S. Eliot (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”)
16. “Florida” by Michael Berkowitz
      The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
17. “Sweet Afton” by Nickel Creek
      Robert Burns (“Sweet Afton”)

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