Composing “Discourse on peace”
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Inspiration is a life long journey that leads you down holes excavated by chronically indecisive rabbits living on a marijuana farm with a taste for poppy seeds.
Like every lyricist I am a frustrated poet and I often return to this well to sip the bohemian water.
Poets play with language like a mad god. They spin threads of fantasy into decadent tapestries that would delight Dali in his most demented delirium and then sit back and cackle crazily at their creation.
I especially admire Jacques Prevert. Born at the turn of the twentieth century he served in the First World War, lived through the Great Depression and endured NAZI occupation. Unsurprisingly, his poems don’t just dish traditional authority figures they put through them through a mincer to make subversive sausages.
“Le Cancre” (The Dunce) champions the classroom dreamer and derides the authoritarian teacher. “Je suis come jus suis” (I am as I am) claps back the idea our sexuality must adhere to narrow social norms.
Prevert’s poem “Discourse on peace” features two bankers circling each other in an endless dance of power and money. I wonder if this poem is comment on the corruption, greed and fear Prevert must have witnessed in the war and through occupation.
Like any tune that must ooze power and passion, this is a tango. I hope you enjoy!!!
