Duende, The

he may as well be standing at attention

as the notes whang and toggle, feeding back

hard

through the Marshalls. He's making it talk

with a vengeance. The air cavalry's "rockets'

red glare" gets warped into painterly screeches,

onomatopoeia at Mach 1:7;

"bombs bursting in air" becomes blistering

napalm cacophony, hyperincendiary payloads

arcing down into inhabited jungle-as

Beethoven

under these circumstances might have

rendered

this hijacked, underwonderful hymn to

Anacreon,

inventing outlandish contrapuntal alignments

and vertical tone combinations, most likely

hammering

away through a Fuzz Face on a Rickenbacker

twelve-string

or a Synclavier II suitably retooled by Rog

Mayer....

As "proof through the night that our flag was

still there,"

Hendrix, deadpan, interpolates George M.

Cohan's

"Over there," flashing us back to another

Great War's

gung ho vigor and shrapneled, Jim-dandy

aftermaths, then continues the martial motif

on "the land of the free and the home of the

brave"

by making the Strat trill like bagpipes.

Couple more reverb-charged chords and it's

over.

There's nothing much, really, to say. We're

agog.

"Hey, all I do is play it," Jimi Hendrix told Dick Cavett a week or so later on television: "I'm American so I played it."

The vernacular note that Hendrix hits here"Hey, I'm American so I played it"-is one I have heard often in the dark personal agon of our poetry, and it brings to mind some strong contemporary poems about music, such as Philip Levine's "The Unknowable" about Sonny Rollins practicing his sax-"woodshedding"-for hours on the Williamsburg Bridge, and Michael Harper's "Dear John, Dear Coltrane" ("Coltrane was my Orpheus," Harper once said). I hear it, too, in the crying out of Denis Johnson's The Incognito Lounge, which includes lines like these:

The center of the world is closed.

The Beehive, the 8-Ball, the Yo-Yo,

the Granite and the Lightning and the Melody.

Only the Incognito Lounge is open.

My neighbor arrives.

They have the television on.

It's a show about

My neighbor in a loneliness, a light,

walking the hour when every bed is a mouth.

Alleys of dark trash, exhaustion

shaped into residences-and what are the

dogs

so sure of that they shout like citizens

driven from their minds in a stadium?

In his fist he holds a note

in his own handwriting,

the same message everyone carries

from place to place in the secret night,

the one that nobody asks you for

when you finally arrive, and the faces

turn to you playing the national anthem

and go blank, that's

what the show is about, that message.

I suppose I am talking about a moment of desperate musical self-questioning in our poetry, a moment when a quarrel with oneself also becomes a quarrel with one's country, when a personal duende somehow collides with a national spirit and explodes with a demonic democratic energy.

Lorca himself at least partially schooled his idea of duende on the poetry that emerged from his encounter with the United States. He was shocked and exhilarated by what he found here, and his singular confrontation with America resulted in that elusive, enigmatic, mysterious, and tortured work, Poet in New York, which is a book, to borrow one of the poet's own phrases, "that can baptize in dark water all who look at it." It is a savage, exultant work. By the time he had arrived in New York City in June I929, Lorca had already made a radical break with the style of Gypsy Ballads and embarked upon what he called "my spiritualized new manner." As he confided to a friend in a letter: "Now I am going to create a poetry that will flow like blood when you cut your wrists, a poetry that has taken leave of reality with an emotion that reflects all my love for things and my joking about things. Love of dying and mockery of dying." Lorca's struggle with his own duende helps to explain not only the "black sounds" and cryptic imagery of Poet in New York but also why he considered at one point calling the book "The City" and at another "Introduction to Death." Death and the city are the twin inspiring presences of the finished work.