Traveling Sprinkler Read Online Free

I want to amass ragged armfuls of lucid confusion that make you keel over.
    I want to write songs. Not poems anymore—songs. In fact, I made up another song in the car yesterday. It’s a protest song. This is how it goes: “I’m eating a burrito, and I’m not killing anyone. / I’m eating a burrito, and I’m not killing anyone. / I’m eating a burrito, baby, and I’m not killing anyone.” The tune has a little of the Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” in it.
    The most useful thing I learned when I was in music school was not the augmented sixth chord, or how to write a canon at the half step, or how to scrape a certain part of the reed to make the high D easier in the bassoon solo in
The Rite of Spring
. The most useful thing I learned, I learned in orchestration class. The teacher said, “Here’s the first thing you need to know: The orchestra doesn’t play in tune. That’s what makes it sound like an orchestra. It can’t be perfectly in tune. If it was perfectly in tune, it would have an entirely different sound. It’s a collective musical instrument that is always slightly out of tune with itself.”
    Which is also true, in a different way, of the piano. The piano is tuned to be slightly out of tune—that’s part of what gives it its character. The mis-tuning is called “equal temperament.” Also, wood is a complicated, tissuey substance, with columns of water in it, and sound travels from the piano wires through these long cellusonic resonators, and when it flares out into the auditorium, it’s messed up slightly. It’s been batted around—and now it’s warmer, with a mist of imprecision over it. The timber has fogged the timbre, thereby creating the necessary out-of-tuneness, the naturalness, the untrue trueness of piano sound, or orchestral sound. That’s what music relies on: the singularity of every utterance.
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    I T TURNED OUT the Kickstarter couple weren’t very interested in the shortbread cookies. They’d brought a video camera and lights, and they wanted to interview me about the history of rhyme. I said that part of what happened to rhyme in the twentieth century was that there was so much brilliant recorded lyricizing by Cole Porter, by Leiber and Stoller, by Mann and Weil, by Lennon and McCartney, and etcetera, that by the sixties and seventies the old Ella Wheeler Wilcox approach, the Sara Teasdale approach, the A. E. Housman approach, the Robert Frost approach, didn’t make sense anymore, and the poets had to figure out what they could do that was artier and more elevated. And what they did was to ditch the badminton net—they ditched rhyme altogether.
    As I was talking, it occurred to me that what was so appealing about song lyrics was that the music fogs over the consonants and dissolves them. “All you need is the same vowel sound and you’ve got a rhyme,” I heard myself saying. “It’s very liberating.” I got my speakers and played the videomakers a song I like by Stephen Fearing, “Black Silk Gown.” Stephen Fearing sings, “The night is shot with diamonds, above these dark New England towns, / And the highway drawn beneath me like a black silk gown.” If it was a printed poem, the rhyme of “towns” and “gown” wouldn’t sound quite right, but with the music going, it’s perfect. In the studio, Fearing installs a tiny microphone inside his acoustic guitar, and the sounds he plucks from it are very big. He’s a monkey-fingered madman guitar player.
    After they packed up their video equipment and left, I drove to Planet Fitness and used the machines there, watching the newscasters move their mouths on the bank of television screens and listening to Donovan sing “Universal Soldier.” It is a good protest song, written by Buffy Sainte-Marie. Then I got in the car