It is a well-known story that Paul McCartney wrote "Yesterday" after the melody came to him in a dream. Law-abiding Beatle that he was, Paul vetted the tune with his contacts in the music industry to make sure that he hadn't plagiarized it from someone else. He hadn't, and an original classic was born. The moral of the story is clear: As much as we artists pride ourselves on our work, we still get to take credit for pieces that we created unconsciously. That loophole covers dreams, and also words or phrases that we misheard. Exhibit A in the poetry world this week is "Armistice," which first appeared two decades ago and arose from a line that I thought I heard Van Morrison sing. He didn't sing it, in fact, which means that I hold the rights to the mishearing. Given the agonies that sometimes come with being a writer, we can take ecstasies where we can.
The Morrison song in question is "Madame George," an impressionistic ballad from the 1968 album Astral Weeks. Many critics have interpreted the title character as being a transvestite, although Morrison has denied as much in interviews. Regardless, I was familiar with the standard reading of the song before I first heard it, and so when Morrison began the second verse with "Marching with the soldier boy behind," I initially heard it as "Magic left the soldier boy behind." If a soldier boy passes himself off as a beautiful woman, that is surely a magical transformation of some kind. For years, that was my favorite line in the song, until a lyric sheet proved me wrong. My initial disappointment was soon overridden by the realization that the line was now mine, even if Morrison (and his Belfast accent) got credit for the inspiration. Perhaps you've seen one of those "letter swap" puzzle games. My daughter recently had one as part of her homework. You start with a word and change one letter to make a new word ("life," for instance, becomes "like"), then change one letter of that word ("like" becomes "bike"), and so on until you arrive at something completely new. That Morrison line went through a similar process as I toyed with it in my notebook. "Marching with the soldier boy behind" became "Magic left the soldier boy behind," and then my conscious mind tweaked it again to "Magic left his soldier clothes behind." Three original words, three new ones. Who would leave his soldier clothes behind? In the summer of 2004, when I lived in Connecticut, I overcame a long and particularly brutal stretch of writer's block to answer that question. A general -- "the general," as he's identified in the poem -- strolls into a metropolitan city teeming with nightlife. A war has apparently ended; banners hang in the city square celebrating armistice, while refugees wear black and indulge in wine. Casinos are booming and slot machines provide the soundtrack. The general himself seems mesmerized by the vibe -- flashing the peace sign, treating strangers to drinks, seeking out a church so he can indulge in a spiritual epiphany. At the end of the poem, he vanishes, and the narrator (some anonymous person) retreats to his shabby apartment, still tingling from having witnessed the sublime. Was the general's appearance a dream? A hallucination? A ghost sighting? In the spirit of Van Morrison, who once titled a song "Why Must I Always Explain?", I'll leave that to the reader to decide. "Armistice" first appeared in Long River Run II, a staple-bound anthology from the Connecticut Poetry Society, in fall 2004. (The title is a reference to the opening words of Finnegans Wake, another enigmatic Irish classic.) It later appeared in my first full-length book, College Town, in 2010, and then stayed dormant until this week, when I submitted it to the Journal of Radical Wonder. Like "City Night," which I blogged about earlier this year, it's an early poem that I look on with fondness, even if I doubt that I would ever write one like it again. I can definitely see a thread that runs through the two poems, plus a number of other ones from that early-2000s period: I was entranced by urban nightscapes, their mystery and danger and titillating promise. College Town begins with a poem called "Night Companion" and ends with "Blues Man," in which a musician passes by the downtown lights after a show. The book opens with an epigraph from Kate Buckley: "I am tall, but not ever so tall as the city at night." Maybe it's no accident that I thought Van Morrison was warbling about magic back then. I may have willed myself to hear it.
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This is the blog of Michael Miller, a longtime journalist, poet, publisher and teacher. Check here for musings, observations, commentary and assorted bits of gratitude. Archives
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