Sunday Playlist - 10/11/2020

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzrVlXh4mc1Nwl_MX3NaNTTQQk0LKPDBb

We begin with another recording from the Lomax archive and the St. James Missionary Baptist Church of Canton, singing “Wade In The Water.” Notice the children singing in the background. Where are they now?

I imagine the Arvo Pärt setting of the Beatitudes and the Coptic chant of the Psalms as a pair—quiet beside exuberance, dissonance and resolution next to bright modal unison.

Louse Glück won the Nobel Prize in literature this week. I’ve included the title poem from her collection, “The Wild Iris,” a mysterious book that sometimes seems like a conversation between a soul and God. Below, I’ve included a transcription of the poem, read in the recording by the poet. 

I had to end with Nina Simone’s performance of the Billy Taylor tune, “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free,” because it’s impossible to follow. Notice that at 3:38, she says, “The Spirit’s moving now…”

The Wild Iris

Louise Glück

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.