The man in black is a man of verse
Paula Green can’t help moving to the rhythm of Johnny Cash’s poetry.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon has edited and introduced an edition of Johnny Cash poems, Johnny Cash: Forever Words.
Cash left behind an enormous amount of material because he didn’t ditch anything. Reputations can be damaged by publishing posthumous material, but Muldoon claims the Cash trove is first grade.
Johnny’s son, John Carter Cash, explains in the foreword that his father had many faces – poet, entertainer, scholar, asthmatic, musician – but that words mattered more than anything else. As Johnny puts it in My Song: ‘‘I was born to sing.’’
In certain moods, I will put a Cash album on the turntable so, reading the collection, I had Johnny’s voice tumbling through my head.
I started half singing the poems, because the poems felt like song in the way they use rhyme and rhythm so deftly. I was reminded of the aural beauty of some of Bill Manhire’s recent poems that also moonlight as song.
Cash’s song-poems are chiefly riffs on love; love that leads to heartbreak, loneliness, freedom, travelling, addictions, good times. Stories are told, feelings shared, musings mused. This from Body on Body:
You wonder how (where) true love goes No one can say – cause nobody knows Like rain on a rock – like a leaf in the air No way to tell but it’s going somewhere The rhyme is like a comfort stop at the end of the line, the rhythm pulls you into melody, the repetitions make your body move. I like the examples that repeat lines like little refrains or build momentum like a list poem. This vitriolic list from I Wish You a Merry Christmas: I send you best wishes too For a long migraine headache A hysterectomy on Christmas Eve And a bathroom full of snakes Some poems are not song, such as the terrific sharp and slender take on Vietnam, I Heard on the News.
The hardback book includes Johnny’s handwritten versions of some poems, a couple of photographs, and is an essential read for Johnny Cash fans.
Take the book, sit under a tree, and sing your way though: Let’s put it to music, you and me.