The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Music

On the Poems in The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Music"They couple words and music as surely as Schubert and Irving Berlin. But Goldensohn's poems aren't song lyrics; rather, they are intense reflections on music as experienced, by ear and by mind. The essence of listening is his key topic. For the Bach cello suites, it's the inviting conundrum of one voice being several. For Schumann's Dichterliebe it's the clarity and purity of the piano in contest with the "groping," "searching," "laboring," "huffing" voice. Broader issues matter, too: Don Giovanni's "comic murderous lust" and its absurd end, he and his "phallus errant cursing through the trap door and stage flames." The people making the music enrich the experience: "The first violinist, all of him, follows his arm... The cellist grinds his teeth, clenches his face in spasms of control." Blues and jazz are there with the classics: we hear Bessie Smith, "with the whole world's sorrow in her voice" and see Thelonius Monk "doing a march time heavy footed non-dance dance." Eros is often up front: "the girls forget themselves, skirts / above their breasts as they flash their white unsunned asses and the house is all meat, / shrieks and hair." Mainly, we are led to open our ears wider and to abandon the filters that steer our hearing by custom. Immediacy is Goldensohn's great gift in this brilliant collection."Lewis Spratlan, composer, Pulitzer Prize for his opera Life is a Dream