life is too short not to sing straight from the solar plexus

Soon after I started writing poems and stories it was drilled into me: no sentimentality, no clichés. They were the hallmarks of kitsch. Fair enough. But after years of fanatically heeding that good advice, I felt weary of always detouring around certain registers of emotion and around straightforward, demotic expressions of same. Over the years, I'd often glanced longingly in the direction of song and reflected that many of my favourites - great songs, great poetry, like Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Coming Down" (1970) and John Prine's "Hello in There" (1971) - are sentimental by the standards of literary modernism. And how many times have we all happily sung along with an excellent song that revives and rehabilitates a cliché? "I'm Your Man," "Dancing in the Dark," "Coming in From the Cold," etc. Musical accompaniment can do that: elevate the sentimental (if not the maudlin) into authentic, redemptive emotion. Defibrillate the commonplace.

As I sank deeper into my 50s, I felt a longing to transcend Upper Canadian reticence and costive over-control, to quit writing in a kind of stoical code. I wanted to get up on stage, figuratively speaking, and belt out a torch song. Why not? Life is too short not to sing straight from the solar plexus, at least some of the time. True, I'd always been trying to do that in poetry, and maybe the lack of musical accompaniment put a useful pressure on the poems to make their own music, but somehow that was no longer enough. As Prine sang, "your heart gets bored with your mind, and it changes you."

 

- Steven Heighton, discussing his return to writing and recording music, with Alyda Faber in the Fall 2022 issue of The Dalhousie Review.