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Home>>Lyrics>>Selected Song Lyrics

 Selected Song Lyrics (collected in The Book Of My Enemy)

Picture
This selection from the song lyrics I have written for the music of Pete Atkin adds up to less than half of the total in existence. I have left out all the love songs. (There was a time when that sentence would have started me writing another one.) Many of them I am quite proud of and I hope there is none without its turn of phrase. But they are all written within the courtly love tradition; and are thus mainly more about the loss of love than its acquisition; and so, without the music to help them sound universal, they give the exact effect of a single, lonely man crying repeatedly into his beer.
 
Other strong candidates for exclusion were those lyrics, mainly from early on, which needed too much help to get started from phrases unwittingly lent by Ronsard, Nerval, Laforgue, Apollinaire, Leopardi, Rilke, W. B. Yeats or T. S. Eliot. Some of the lyrics I have included do indeed contain literary allusions, but the allusions are not the driving force. When listened to, such anacreontic borrowings can add to the texture without insisting on separate notice. But on the page, if they come too thick and fast, they can look like a misplaced claim to erudition. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Moore, for the publication of his collected lyrics along with his poems, would unapologetically gloss his Latin and Greek borrowings with learned footnotes, to a total length that often exceeded that of the lyric itself. Still feeling obliged to prove his kinship with learned colleagues, he failed to realize that when his lyrics were sung in the salons, they silenced not only the audience but the competition. With the living laurels already his, he went on striving for the bronze simulacrum, never publishing even the slightest lyric about a shy damsel of Dublin without appending some supererogatory rigmarole about an intransigent priestess on the island of Hypnos. Today the practice would look absurd, not because the lyrical tradition is less robust but because it is much more so. If Dorothy Fields could draw a perfect lyric from what she heard on the sidewalk or in the subway, we can expect no points for flagging the help we got from Dante.
​

As for the lyrics that have been included, the first criterion was that they should have enough poetic content to be of interest when read. But they would be true poems only if they could altogether do without their common organizing principle, which was music. Deprived of that, they are something else. I hope they are not something less, but some readers might decide they can be safely skipped. Other readers, however, might be encouraged to seek them out in recorded form. If that happened, I could give myself credit for a cunning plan.

Transcriptions of the lyrics to every song can be found on the Pete Atkin website.

Lyrics

  • Dancing Master
  • Faded Mansion
  • Femme Fatale
  • Have you got a Biro I can Borrow?
  • Hill of Little Shoes
  • History & Geography
  • The Ice Cream Man
  • The Master of the Revels
  • I Have to Learn to Live Alone Again
  • I See the Joker
  • Laughing Boy
  • My Brother's Keeper
  • National Steel
  • Nothing Left to Say
  • Thirty-Year Man
  • Sessionman's Blues
  • Song For Rita
  • Stranger in Town
  • Sunlight Gate
  • The Egoist
  • The Eye of the Universe
  • Winter Spring

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  • Home
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    • The Blaze of Obscurity
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    • Cultural Amnesia
    • Play All
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    • Flying Visits
  • Essays
    • Visions Before Midnight
    • The Crystal Bucket
    • Glued To The Box
    • The Metropolitan Critic
    • At the Pillars of Hercules
    • As of This Writing
    • The Meaning of Recognition >
      • Introduction
      • Polanski and the Pianist
      • Fantasy in the West Wing
      • Pushkin's Deadly Gift
      • Great Sopranos of Our Time
      • A Memory Called Malouf
      • Bing Crosby's Hidden Art
      • Larkin Treads the Boards
      • The Iron Capital of Bruno Schulz
      • Criticism a la Frank Kermode
      • Fast Talking Dames
      • Rough Guides to Shakespeare
      • General Election Sequence 2001
      • Primo Levi and the Painted Veil
      • A Big Boutique of Australian Essays
      • Cyrano on the Scaffold
      • A Nightclub in Bali
      • Aldous Huxley Then and Now
      • A Man Called Peter Porter
      • Philip Roth's Alternative America
      • The Miraculous Vineyard of Australian Poetry
      • Save Us From Celebrity
    • The Revolt of the Pendulum >
      • The Question of Karl Kraus
      • John Bayley's Daily Bread
      • Kingsley and the Women
      • Canetti Man of Mystery
      • Camille Paglia Burns for Poetry
      • The Guidebook Detectives
      • Zuckerman Uncorked
      • The Flight from the Destroyer
      • Saying Famous Things
      • Insult to the Language
      • The Perfectly Bad Sentence
      • Happiness Writes White
      • All Stalkers Kill
      • Best Eaten Cold
      • White Shorts of Leni Reifenstahl
      • Made in Britain, More or Less
      • Movie Criticism in America
      • Show Me the Horror
      • The Measure of A.D. Hope
      • Robert Hughes Remembers
      • Modern Australian Painting
      • On Diamond Jim McClelland
      • The Voice of John Anderson
      • Niki Lauda Wins Going Slowly
      • Damon Hill's Bravest Day
      • Jonathan James-Moore
      • Ian Adam
      • Pat Kavanagh
      • Starting with Sludge
    • Guest Writers >
      • Zoe Williams
      • Russell Davies
      • Bryan Appleyard
      • Marina Hyde
      • Bruce Beresford
      • Michael Frayn
  • Poetry
    • Poetry Collections >
      • Injury Time
      • Sentenced to Life >
        • Japanese Maple
        • Sentenced to Life
        • Procedure for Disposal
        • Leçons des ténèbres
        • Driftwood Houses
        • Event Horizon
        • Neuland
        • Echo Point
        • Change of Domicile
        • Holding Court
        • Too Much Light
        • Nature Programme
        • My Latest Fever
        • Nina Kogan's Geometrical Heaven
        • The Emperor's Last Words
        • Winter Plums
      • Nefertiti in the Flak Tower >
        • Whitman and the Moth
        • The Falcon Growing Old
      • Angels over Elsinore
      • The Book of My Enemy >
        • Recent Verse
        • Verse Letters
      • Opal Sunset
      • Other Passports >
        • Recent Verse >
          • The Book of My Enemy has been Remaindered
        • Parodies etc.
        • Earlier Verse
        • Verse Diaries
      • Fan Mail >
        • To Russell Davies: a letter from Cardiff
        • To Martin Amis: a letter from Indianapolis
        • To Pete Atkin: a letter from Paris
        • To Prue Shaw: a letter from Cambridge
        • To Tom Stoppard: a letter from London
        • To Peter Porter: a letter to Sydney
    • Epic Poems >
      • The River in the Sky
      • Gate of Lilacs
      • The Divine Comedy >
        • Hell - Cantos 1-3
        • Purgatory - Cantos 1-3
        • Heaven - Cantos 1-3
      • Poem of the Year
    • Books About Poetry >
      • Somewhere Becoming Rain
      • Poetry Notebook >
        • Listening for the Flavour
        • Five Favourite Poetry Books
        • Velvet Shackles
        • Meeting MacNiece
        • The Donaghy Negotiation
    • Poetry Readings
    • Articles on Poetry
    • Back from The Web
    • Guest Poets >
      • Daniel Brown
      • Liane Strauss
      • Les Murray
      • Peter Porter
      • Alan Jenkins
      • Stephen Edgar
      • John Stammers
      • Simon Barraclough
      • Isobel Dixon
      • Christian Wiman
      • Olivia Cole
      • Judith Beveridge
      • Peter Goldsworthy
      • Kapka Kassabova
  • Lyrics
    • My life in lyrics
    • Selected Song Lyrics >
      • Dancing Master
      • Faded Mansion
      • Have You got a Biro I can Borrow?
      • I Have to Learn to Live Alone Again
      • Hill of Little Shoes
      • History & Geography
      • I See the Joker
      • Laughing Boy
      • My Brother's Keeper
      • National Steel
      • Nothing Left to Say
      • Sessionman's Blues
      • Song for Rita
      • Stranger in Town
      • Sunlight Gate
      • The Egoist
      • The Eye of the Universe
      • The Ice Cream Man
      • Femme Fatale
      • The Master of the Revels
      • Thirty-year Man
      • Winter Spring
  • Video
    • Talking in the Library >
      • Series One
      • Series Two
      • Series Three
      • Series Four
      • Series Five
    • Postcards
    • CJ on YouTube
  • Radio
    • A Point Of View
    • Book Talk