Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Tom Merrill's avatar

It's a nicely sketched autobiographic moment. And it has an engagingly honest ring to it, which softens my heart to it.

A number of songs from that music era had some emotional power, both folk and rock--Simon and Garfunkel's songs, for one of the topmost examples, were exquisite and could stir up feeling. I couldn't help wondering which song it was that wrung some tears from the poem's author. The only clue is 1969, when it "last left the charts." No idea if that would rule out Orbison, whose "Only The Lonely" I've always had a feeling for. Am now asking myself if Simon and G's recordings first came out in the 60s or 70s.

Baez, Nelson, well, too many to mention. A lot of the music from those couple decades was strong.

Enjoyed the poem, no hardship at all to read. Didn't need to force my way through it. It carried me.

Expand full comment
Bartelby's avatar

For most of us, maybe all of us, a melody, or even the briefest melodic fragment, can strike like lightning. Popular music has pride of place in such events because we paid so much attention to it in our youth. As Mr. Gioia so beautifully invokes in this piece, it can resurrect a long-forgotten past, not a memory exactly, but the upwelling of an emotional complex, of yearnings that belonged to another time, and to someone else entirely, the person we once were. These elusive moments arriving as if out of the blue, as Proust so famously describes, are accompanied by both exultation and sorrow. Sorrow for what we've lost, and the startling realization of the persistence (insistence) of a past that is never entirely past. How present, indeed, is our past. Many thanks, Mr. Gioia!

Expand full comment
6 more comments...

No posts