The Bucolics Project

My new album drops this Friday. The Bucolics Project is a collaboration with Kentucky poet Maurice Manning that I have been working for close to a decade: bringing it to fruition has been an immense project, and it is amazing to now be setting it free into the world. I should say that what happens this week—a digital release of music we recorded in November and March this past winter—is the first step in the project. The next steps include printing a limited run of hand-sewn letter-pressed books that contain the original poems and Maurice’s translations along with essays on the project from both of us and then creating a performance piece based on this music that incorporates spoken word, crankies, and ASL interpretation.

Since part of my idea of this substack is having a space to explore longer form ideas, I thought I would share the essay I will be contributing to the book. It should give you a lot of context about the project.

If you are able and interested, please join us online for a listening party Wednesday, Oct 1 at 8 pm eastern. If you can’t make that, the album will be live on Friday at my bandcamp page.

Here’s a teaser.

Brendan’s Essay

I first encountered Bucolics, Maurice Manning’s 2007 collection of poems, at the recommendation of a friend. I still remember the chair I was in when I sat down to read, transfixed by this singularly compelling piece of work. It remains, in a lifetime of books, the only collection of poetry that I have read in one sitting, in order, from cover to cover. Bucolics is a conversation between a field hand and a divine being known only as Boss—and by conversation, I mean a series of questions from the field hand that range from the naive to the profound, perched on the knife’s edge between faith and doubt. In this it echoes, eerily, my own spiritual experience. Often I have felt that these poems must have been written especially for me.

I was not raised in a faith tradition. My father grew up in Ireland, where his experience as a child with the Christian Brothers, a lay order well-known for their brutality, made him detest the church. Once in America, he declared himself the pope of his own religion, which revolved primarily around blasphemy and of which my brother and I were the only adherents. Instead of a catechism, we had Marx’s belief that religion is the opiate of the masses.

At 17, I went to Deep Springs College, an experimental school in the California desert that blended physical labor with academics and self governance. We worked 30 hours a week on a cattle ranch: milking cows by hand, tending a large garden, and often breaking the equipment we sought to fix. We wrestled with big ideas. The founder, L.L. Nunn, had grown wealthy as a hydroelectric pioneer and then became an educational philanthropist. Inspired by the Transcendalists, he wanted to create an institution that would educate the whole person and train us to live lives of service, the definition of which was often in vigorous debate. I spent a lot of time outside. I slept on the lawn as often as I slept in a bed, looking up at a thick field of stars bending down to meet the mountains. After a year in the valley, Marx was no longer a big enough vessel to contain the miracle of alpenglow on the flanks of the White Mountains or of freshly emerged seedlings in the garden.

This is also when I became curious about Quaker practice and the belief that everybody has an intrinsic connection to the divine. Too isolated to attend an established meeting, a friend and I decided to create our own. For most of the year, we would sit for an hour in silence by the lower reservoir, the water teeming with birds and dragonflies, the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada visible through the pass. When it was too cold, we would meet in the hayloft above the horse stalls. It makes sense to me now that I opened to spiritual experience in the shadow of high mountains and when my hands were, for the first time, involved in the work of planting and harvest.

One of the most compelling things for me in Bucolics is its consistent ability to hold seeming opposites to be simultaneously true—there is both faith and doubt, both this sky and another, both hawk and crow. Most importantly there is both presence and absence, this last the tension I have always felt most keenly in my life. The earliest parts of the Hebrew Bible describe hell as the state of being outside the presence of God. Conversely, we can understand grace as a state of connection and awareness, both of the world around us and to the divine. As per the final poem in the collection:

I like it when you hold

me back I like it when you jerk

the reins I know the gee or haw

if either comes will come from you

but when you let the reins go slack

now that’s a different story Boss

I don’t like that moment when

you turn me out alone to graze

¶¶¶

As a choral composer, the spine of my work is using melody, text, and harmony as elements to create something new. In this, I have always mixed and matched liberally, combining stanzas from different poems by the same author or writing filler text when the original wasn’t quite long enough. I knew early on that I wanted to create songs based on the poems in Bucolics, but I worried that my normal approach would unfairly influence the meaning of the text.

The poems in Bucolics are intricately structured, a bit thorny, and eschew easy exposition. Not wanting to do a disservice to these poems, I asked Maurice if he would be game to rewrite some of them to be used as song lyrics. To my surprise and delight, he was willing and we agreed on a first poem. Time passed. I hadn’t heard anything from him, and I thought that maybe this had all been just a lovely notion. But I sent an email just to check and was delighted to receive this response:

“Things have been busy, almost overwhelming, on my end. My wife, Amanda, and I are expecting a baby any day now and we’ve been jumping trying to get ready for that big excitement. We’ve also been out of our normal house while we’re having major work done. The last few months have been a little crazy. And on top of that my father has been very ill and ailing.”

“So, it’s been a balm to have your note and send me to work. I’ve translated Bucolic XL into 4/3 meter and abab rhyme. I hope this is what you were looking for. Amazingly, I think the basic spirit of the original version remains intact, although we seem to have lost a rabbit along the way.”

Now here’s the thing—that rabbit was one of my favorite moments in the whole book. I mean:

what reason can you give me now

for filling half of every thing

with honey just to leave the half

remaining torn from even hope

for sweetness like a rabbit’s lip

That, friends, is some poem. That is craft of the highest order. But by sacrificing the best image, Maurice preserved the sense of the whole. As the project has evolved, we have come to speak of the poem behind the poem. But what is a poem if not the words from which it is built? Before, I would have argued that a poem is defined by specifics—these words, in this order—but I have come to believe that a poem must also be defined by what it seeks to describe. Just as a home is more than the timbers that define its structure, a poem is more than its words. There is some essence that can be captured and recast to new purpose, in this case as songs.

In addition to speaking about the poem behind the poem, we have come to speak of Maurice’s work in this project as translation. But where translation gets a bad rap in academic circles—it’s distinctly lower than original authorship or even analysis—I think the work Maurice has done here elevates translation to a high art. Included in this book are both the original poems and their translations. I encourage you to spend time with those pairings to better understand the work Maurice has done in making this project possible.

¶¶¶

Each song in this project is based on a source recording from the Appalachian Sound Archives, housed at Berea College, where I had the good fortune to be a research fellow in 2017. These are recordings, made from the 1930s to the ‘70s, of singers, fiddlers, and pickers on their porches and in their kitchens. In the background, you can hear birds and burbling streams and family bickering. These are melodies that have been handed down through generations and that were recorded in an effort to preserve this heritage, lest it be lost to modernization. The process for each of the songs in our project begins with me pairing a poem with a source recording. Maurice then translates the original to match the metrical structure of the source. I tweak the music, searching for the song that sounds like a cousin, and not a copy, of the source recording. Often this involves living with it for a time, singing Maurice’s new words over and over until something interesting emerges.

Traditional music is many things to many people. It is a source of identity and pride, heritage and history. It is communal and participatory, bringing people together to pick and sing. It is a treasure trove and a deep magic. One oft repeated image likens traditional songs to river stones, rounded and rubbed as they are passed downstream from one singer to the next and to the next, words misremembered or forgotten, the rough corners worn off. I believe we can also think of traditional music as an act of continual translation. Each singer will inhabit a song in a different way, reinterpreting the source material. Sometimes the singer loses a rabbit, and yet the essence stays the same. Which is to say—there is a song behind the song.

In Irish folklore there is the belief that there is another world parallel to our own, known variously as The Other World, the Island of Joy, or Tir Na Nog. This other world exists outside of time: it is the home of the faeries; it is where the bees go to sleep at night; it is the source of art and knowledge, not to mention the springs of the most important rivers. Before he died, my friend Jon told me he believed that when you draw the bow on your fiddle, you step into a stream of music that has been flowing since before you were born and will run long after you are gone. I love this image, but I would like to amend it because I think describing it in terms of a linear time doesn’t do it justice. I believe it to be more like the super positions of a quantum particle, which exists in multiple locations simultaneously. We are now and we are then. We are singing the song and Addie Graham is singing and some unknown shepherd is singing and on and on.

This other world is with us throughout Bucolics, where there is always another tree, another sky.

you boss the face of everything, to cleave it clean in two

so both halves joining then can sing to cleave themselves to you

Now let us sing.