Thirty years ago every time I opened a TV Guide I was greeted by the cover from Supertramp's Breakfast in America in the Columbia House Record Club, and invariably concluded from that cover that this was not an album I would devote a fraction of my penny* too. I never actually joined the Columbia House Record Club, but in those eager planning sessions, I never circled Supertramp as I imagined how I'd deploy my cent.
A little more than twenty years ago, I began to formulate the hypothesis that whatever music was popular when you were entering high school would somehow be popular with you later in your life, even if it wasn't your music when it was everyone's music. This theory derived from finding myself singing along with Keep on Loving You, Babe, This Is It** and a hundred other songs that had been kicking around the radio waves from the mid 70s through the time I trundled off to college, secure in my accordion and my music case full of standards and mazurkas.
During a long car ride about ten years ago, I realized that a surprising number of songs that I numbered among my favorites belonged to Supertramp, not that I ever attributed the songs to that group of performers. This in itself wasn't a great surprise, as The Cars, Styx, Three Dog Night, Foreigner, Fleetwood Mac, Little River Band and so on and so on and so on had worked their way into my music collection, mostly as I acquired LPs on drastic sale as CD's became popular, then CD's as all the Sam Goody closed. But Supertramp remained out of my line of sight during the great vinyl elimination.
Every day this week, some Supertramp song seemed to be on 70s on 7 during 2 or 3 of the 75 minutes I spend in the car daily. As I had been identifying the songs to my daughters throughout the week (after recounting most of the above story on Tuesday), when the radio pumped out "intellectual, cynical" yesterday morning, they were hysterical, and I promised myself I'd put BIA on my iPod this morning. Which I did.
This brings me to a street corner a little more than a quarter-mile from my house - the corner where I typically decide whether to break my morning exercise walk off early and head home or turn the other direction and add 10 minutes to it. I had been marching in celebration to the shuffling tracks of Supertramp and as I slowed to a stop to consider my decision, a new song started down the wires of my headset. What song?
Why, "Take the Long Way Home", of course.
So what does this all have to do with poetry? Well, for starters there's the joyful notation of the moment. The ability to recognize the remarkable, but not to let it pass. Not satisfied to be aware of these moments, the poet needs to do something with them. To translate coincidence into something else. Report the moment, but not just as a purveyor of fact, but with the insight of someone aware of a great tradition of connecting this with that.
And for me in this case "this" is a thirty-year relationship with a song that popped up with a very specific message for me. My first draft has me thinking about Roger Zelazny. I'll make the connection for you another time***. Unless you can make one yourself...
* I don't know whether I should miss those days.
** The eclectic nature of my musical taste has been previously reported...
*** (HINT: The particular story I'm thinking of is in Unicorn Variations).
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