When Poetry is Lifted from the Page by Music

“Never Ending Conversation”— a CD by Kelly Mulhollan

When I first met Kelly Mulhollan in 1997 he was offering “arrangements while you wait” at the Kerrville Folk Festival, finding unique ways to embellish singer songwriter compositions. I recognized him immediately as a Renaissance Man sitting beneath a blue tarp, bending over a single-ought 1926 Martin guitar, his dark, luxurious pre-Raphaelite hair spilling over his shoulders, occasionally tangling in his fingers as he played. On that stormy Hill Country night he gave himself to the notes he evoked on those six strings as if ecstatically channeling the collective souls of William Blake and Woody Guthrie deep into the honky tonk heart of twentieth century Texas.

With the band Still on the Hill, a four-piece “folkgrass” acoustic ensemble from Fayetteville, Arkansas, he lent his talent to the hopefuls in that dusk to dawn campfire song-circle and played some of his own compositions, or rather, eclectic accompaniments, to the poetry of Langston Hughes, William Blake, unknown Inuits and Native American shamans. The people that gathered beneath the tarp in the storm that night had never heard such music, and they'd heard a lot over the years. A different century found its way into the folk world that night, which was barely big enough to hold it. That world was introduced to the musical equivalent of an illuminated manuscript. But it wasn't until eight years later that Kelly finally produced and recorded his solo project “Never Ending Conversation ” that these poetic collaborations found final form.

Not unlike the successful maker of sonnets who finally takes the leap into the wilderness of free verse, Kelly left the more predictable and marketable confines of singer-songwriter hook lines for a freefall into his twenty-year unrequited passion of the “art song.” That impulse, to find the delicate blend of existing poetry with original, complementary music was and is Kelly's true calling.

The liner notes of the CD reveal that he'd like to see a revival of the Art Song, a now obscure art form once popular in the 19 th century relegated to musty corners of academic practice rooms. I'd never heard of Art Songs and Kelly gave me a lyrical definition: “ the composer wraps musical wings around every detail and innuendo of the poet's intent in an attempt to lift the words from the page.” In more layman's terms he emphasizes that the goal for the composer is “to stay out of the way” while doing this lifting from the page. No small task. I told him that in my world of fiction writing, I've tried to follow in the footsteps of the Russian Formalists of the 30's who dedicated themselves to the challenge of “defamiliarization,” or describing known objects as if they have no definition or reference point, to invent a kind of language that reveals rather than defines the mysteries of the perceived world. In Kelly, I found a kindred spirit.

Kelly, who laughingly refers to himself as a “wide-eyed, reckless romantic,” fled from classical training in academia at Arizona State University in Tempe when he realized he was being taught by people without passion to compose music that was increasingly unsatisfying and unnecessarily complicated. Woody Guthrie, one man with a guitar, was starting to look like the point that had been missed in the world of advanced degrees. Drawn by the simpler life and the natural world he so admired in Woody Guthrie, he returned to his native Arkansas in 1982 to find an antidote to the fast-track, modern world he had been inhabiting. There, he married and built his own post and beam house in the Ozarks and got down to the essence of the musical ideas that had been fermenting in the Sonoran desert.

One of his heroes at that time was Charles Ives, the early twentieth century composer who in one leap, forever expanded the parameters of tonality and was, incidentally, master of the “Art Song.” Other strong influences were Claudio Monteverdi, the original minimalist who defined modern tonality as we still know it, and Jean-Philippe Rameau, who simultaneously discovered “equitemperament,” a tonality we all take for granted today where the scale is divided so that any key can be played from any starting point. It's a concept that enabled the final honing and sanding down of the rustic dissonance of Renaissance tonality. The common thread in each is the visionary position each composer held in their prospective time periods, avant garde at the time. No Mozart frills. These guys were loners, brooders, seriously serious, on the dark fringes of classical music.

Like Charles Ives, Kelly began to write in isolation and toiled away in art song obscurity, a place he found himself increasingly comfortable in. He composed for the music, not for performance. But, paradoxically, at the same time that Still on the Hill was breaking ground on North American folk festival stages and performing to thousands, he was feeling most at home alone in a room where his musical ideas could run wild. This dichotomy required straddling two worlds, an acrobatic act he'd tried to get away from in Arizona. The house in the Ozarks was fast becoming a pit stop between thousands of miles driven in an ailing van with the three other band members. He soon left his house and his wife and began an intensely romantic and musical collaboration with Donna Henschel Stjerna, the fiddle player in Still on the Hill. His head must have been spinning. He'd found his live muse just when he thought she was beyond his reach. And somehow, through all the upheaval of divorce and trying to book the band, he managed to cultivate a secret garden of art songs, his hands in the rich compost of poetry where delicate, green spears of music would soon be breaking through.

He describes, with great nostalgia, “completely blissful days” at the University of Arkansas library with a “civilian” library card. He sat on the floor with scores of books arrayed around him, searching for poetry that moved him. He looked for poetry he could hear as being married to music, a union that gave verse a voice that would not be obscured by the music. He read poems with an ear for musical potential that he could quickly improvise later with a guitar. At the end of a day of combing texts, Post- It notes fluttered like yellow plumage from the pages of the books; he Xeroxed hundreds with a mountain of dimes at the copy machine.

Back home on the farm outside Fayetteville where he now lives, he would pick up the guitar and play out the poem in the process of conceiving its melodic shape. In traditional Art Songs, voice and piano were always used, so, for Kelly, the guitar, an instrument he says is “bound to place and has limitations” became his instrument of experimentation. The challenge was not to fall into predictable patterns that chord structure can easily dictate. The trick was for the guitar to become the counterpoint, for the poem to sing itself, and, like an intricate marionette, for the strings to be rendered invisible so that the mystery would be preserved.

Kelly says he “crashed into” William Blake and couldn't get enough. The visionary 18th century poet who was most at home in mystery and created controversy in speaking out against sexual repression spoke to him and provided him his most daunting challenge. Setting “The Little Girl Lost/The Little Girl Found” from Songs of Innocence and Experience was difficult because, he says, “it was already music.” And it was Blake, more than any other poet, who influenced Kelly's own writing in the poem/song “Desert Dream,” that completes the CD.

The kind of minimalism Kelly is most drawn to reflects the rhythms of nature: waves, insects, cycles and sequences. The title song of the CD, “Never Ending Conversation,” is the most minimal, in the true sense of that word, of the eleven songs. In the Art Song, the composer is subservient to the poet as the translator of poetry must remain true to the poet's intent. Kelly gladly set himself down to work in a humbler latitude than the one required of a member of a breakthrough band on the crowded folk circuit. He would have been happy to remain in nature, looking for beauty and, as he says, “coming by it honestly,” as he found a way to render raw tonality in its darkest form. Obscurity seemed part of the territory, but his partner, Donna, wouldn't hear of it. She'd been in on a lot of the initial recording, providing harmonies and fiddle to some of the songs. The original four-piece version of Still on the Hill had recorded a few of Kelly's musical compositions to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, and Native American and Inuit chants. She knew how important his work on his Art Song project was and insisted that he bring these songs to light.

Meanwhile, Still on the Hill disbanded, though Kelly and Donna kept the name and continued on the folk trek, this time to Switzerland and Germany. What at first felt like a stripped-down version without the backbone of bass and rhythm guitar became a clearing from which he could emerge and the more delicate finger-picking style he'd developed could shine in the duo. He and Donna continued to record and tour, strengthening their own style, his musical accompaniment stretching to keep up with Donna's prolific songwriting.

The final paring down coalesced in his solo CD project. It started out as a recording of his collection of favorite poems, but he soon found that some didn't fit the mood he was trying to create. To my ear, that mood is elegiac, filled with the longing of what is fleetingly glimpsed, and to his great credit, Kelly insisted on sustaining that mood throughout. Some of the outtakes were more up-tempo, even sarcastic, saved for a future project. Kelly craved a “fluff-free” CD. He was out to break rules. Forget texture — that Nashville imperative to mix tempos. Kelly has cringed too many times in listening to CDs where a mood is established only to be blown apart by a song that strips the listener's gears. I know what he means. Maybe it takes one to know one: we brooders want to get into that mood and stay there, to ride the crest of a building wave through different but related tides. I've always been drawn to “story cycles” in fiction like James Joyce's “Dubliners” where stories are linked by character or setting or theme. The songs Kelly has chosen are clearly linked by mood. I can't help but think of an iris I once saw that was such a deep purple it was almost black, aptly named “After the Storm.” That's the hue of this mood. No pink fluff, not here.

The sky was the limit for recording. Kelly has his own studio dubbed “Termite Tracks” by his friend Emily Kaitz, a Fayetteville songwriter. So the only time he had to “buy” was his own, limited by being on the road or recording the CDs of friends; other deadlines always took precedent over his own. But when he finally locked the door and put on the “Do Not Disturb” sign, his entire house became his palette. All the instruments were fair game, from guitar to pump organ to kitchen utensils to percussion tapped out on a metal sign. But, he says, “eight tracks keeps you honest,” and he was forced to make musically economical decisions whereas a glut of tracks could have seduced him into overproduction. In the end, every instrument was acoustic, right down to the thunder and the spring peepers outside the window.

In homage to the spirit of the Art Song, I locked myself in a friend's cabin to immerse myself completely in listening to a preview copy of the newly-mastered CD. It was a lusciously synesthetic experience and if the goal of the Art Song is for the composer to lift the poem from the page, then the end result is for the listener to be lifted bodily from the limitation of four dimensions into a place where the senses can freely collide. I was lifted; I'm floating still.

My journey begins with “Continual Conversation with a Silent Man,” by twentieth century American poet Wallace Stevens. This track sets the tone for the entire album, establishing the cascading rhythms that link the other ten. The surreal, enigmatic images of Stevens, “The old brown hen and the old blue sky/Between the two we live and die/The broken cartwheel on the hill.” drive the haunting music that rolls beneath that broken cartwheel and the twinning of the violin and harmonica, a hallmark of Still on the Hill, echoes strongly here. Cascading might be a misnomer, there's a sense of reaching and falling back and reaching again as the voice of the silent man speaks “of never ending things.”

“The Garden of Love,” from “Songs of Innocence and Experience” by eighteenth century British poet William Blake picks up the mood in the second track and carries me forward. Although it feels more up-tempo at first, the poem provides an entrance into the world where things are not as they seem. Lost innocence, longing and limitation are the signposts in this country, where “Thou shalt not” is carved in the church door. The traveler in this country is “bound by briars” as the harmonica tries to hold the song of innocence in haunting incantation.

W.H. Auden's “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” pays homage to Ireland's greatest poet at a time when the world was turning toward the second world war and the legacy of poetic praise was overshadowed by the cacophony of treachery. With Yeats' death, the great vessel of Irish poetry lay, spilled but not broken. Auden picked up the torch and the music here carries it on. This is one of the “solo” tracks where Kelly plays all the instruments and provides his own harmonies—the essence of the Art Song—one man with the music drawing from his own longing as a method actor reaches back for the personal experience that can illuminate a character's deepest motivations. I felt my Irish roots stirred; I was weaned on Yeats and his legacy was revived in listening to this elegy to a poet and a world on the verge of war.

“God to Hungry Child,” by twentieth century African American poet Langston Hughes shifts the time period and the syntax to the modern persona poem of God in the guise of a rich man speaking to a hungry child: “I made the world for the rich/and the will-be-rich/and the have-always-been-rich/not for you, hungry child.” Darkness migrates from Europe to America and feels at home here in the continuing struggle of class, in the lie of freedom for the few. Somehow Kelly has found a way musically that embodies that arrogance in almost gentle admonition. Hubris is punishable from the heights of Mt. Olympus down to a sharecropper's hill.

“The Great Cold,” a funeral chant of the Gabon Pygmies sweeps across a vast territory of death like the first winds of winter driving the birds of the air before it. This is a kind of music comprised of cascading cycles without melodic shift. Here, the cascade reaches crescendo and Kelly uses the full palette of his house. This Great Cold is impersonal but inclusive, ultimately claiming everything that flies, swims, breathes, or dreams. The climactic culmination of the music here embodies that vast inevitability, focused on a particular mourner chanting these traditional lines: “Man eats, sleeps, he passes,/And it is the great cold/It is the great cold of the night/It is the great cold of the night.” Ending on the note of the spring creepers outside his window, Kelly brought me out of that Great Cold, back to earth, stunned to feel my feet on solid ground again.

“The Little Girl Lost/The Little Girl Found” by William Blake from “Songs of Innocence and Experience” is the true epicenter of this CD. The lilting mandolin choreographs Lyca's journey through the desert into the garden, from innocence to experience, from virginity into sensuality. While her parents try to find her, imagining her death, she is courted by a lion, and that which at first seems as if it could devour her weeps at the beauty of her sleeping form. Innocence is honored here but the experience requires a loss, a transformation, a crossing over from the world of appearance in order to behold the true essence of life as a duality containing both dark and light. This track is completely Kelly, right down to the harmonies and in the rich darkness of his voice something golden breaks through. Of all the poems, this one is literally lifted from the page, not overwhelmed by the music, but held by it; in Kelly's interpretation, Lyca has wings.

“Night,” by e.e. cummings, that twentieth century American poet that made lower case love an altar for those of us coming of age in the 60's, marks the CD's transition from innocence to full-throated desire. Lovers meet in a forest beneath a red cloud and a full moon. I expected to hear Donna's harmonies here, but Kelly explores the musical partner within himself. This is a man alone with desire, more than physical and the consummation of that desire can only be complete with music.

Excerpts from the Book of Jeremiah and The End of the World (650 B.C.) are oddly prophetic of the new millennium. Kelly's choice of these verses reminds me that the impulse of war is ancient, that the anguish of strife is eternal, and lest the Bible be commandeered completely by Fundamentalists for conservative causes, he takes a bit of it back, restores it to the poetry that it is, and, in that beauty finds a warning: “ My anguish, Oh, the walls of my heart/I cannot keep silent/For I hear the sounding of the trumpets/The alarm of war.”

Fast forward without skipping a beat I arrive on a desolate prairie with Langston Hughes' “Crossing,” an eerie, existential journey toward the realization that one is alone and sometimes invisible in a world teeming with life. The melody here is simple and universal and provides the most song-like of all of Kelly's compositions. The music is the vessel for the crossing over the border of what seems to be a glimpse of an almost gorgeous loneliness, the undifferentiated source of infinity itself.

The last poem, “Desert Dream,” is one of Kelly's compositions. “Donna made me put that one in,” he says. He wrote it for her in the heat of limerence, that flush of headlong romantic yearning thwarted by circumstance and propriety. I would have fainted in a fiction writer's visceral swoon if such a poem had been written for me. He's self-effacing about his own lyrical agility; he doesn't want anyone to think he's trying to be in the same league as his heroes. And in keeping with the humble stature required of an interpreter, his photo is not included anywhere on the CD insert, only on the back tray card. But I have no doubt Blake would applaud the unabashed passion in the lines and might even wish he'd written, “for fate of the earth and moon/as cogs in cosmic gear/ever far and ever near/dance apart from death to birth/still the moon does love the earth.”

The official release of “Never Ending Conversation,” is slated for May 27 at Good Folk Productions at 221 N. Block St. in Fayetteville. (For reservations call 469-521-1812 or email mshirkey@sbcglobal.net .) The show begins at 8 p.m. with a one-time only performance of this work accompanied by musicians Clare Starr on upright bass, Darren Novotny providing percussion, Emily Kaitz on pump organ and Donna Stjerna on fiddle. Kelly gave them free rein for improvisation, something that initially made him lose more than a little sleep, but happily this collaboration has added color and dimension rather than obfuscation. He's thrilled with the results. Improvisation is also evident in Greg Moore's artwork for the CD, hauntingly Blake-like in its brooding simplicity, for which Kelly gave him little direction. The goal for the CD release party is not to recreate the sound of the CD but to arrive at a new perspective, and like a Tibetan sand mandala, the performance will exist for an isolated moment in time. I'll be there, anticipating each song I heard in solitude, and having had this sneak preview, I'll see what magic can be created on stage with an audience listening for the first and last time.

In the letting go of the total control he had in composition and recording, he has kept up the tradition of freefall into a form that could not have been imagined from that floor in the library. Surrounded by poetry, the music that began in his head as a cascading rhythm was not so different in the final mix from the heart's endless tide or the waning in a lover's last look, the very pull of the orphaned moon upon the earth it can only see from afar. If you listen closely, you'll hear the timeless rhythm of the ocean, subsuming the chaos and chatter of man. It's hard to miss. Nature reasserting the proper order of things, in Kelly's heart and mind.

What's next? He says it'll be free verse, most likely, or at least less strophic poetry, and he'll continue the search for fresh perspectives through ethnic poetry. Through composition he can adapt to each emotion as it arises instead of anticipating a pattern. That's what's coming. Hopefully, it won't take another twenty years. In the meantime, there's places to be and people to meet, songs to write and perform. Miles to go before he sleeps. New poets to discover. All that, and another library card, a small ticket for such an amazing ride.

Alison Moore
Email: orphantrain99@yahoo.com
Website: www.extraordinarystories.org

©2005 Alison Moore