Setting Samuel Menashe’s poetry to music

Composer Ben Yarmolinsky is a professor of music at the Bronx Community College of the City University of New York and a founding member and director of Friends and Enemies of New Music, an organization that has been presenting concerts of contemporary music in New York since 1989. Recently he released the CD, Paradise: Songs on Poems of Samuel Menashe, and he explains how he came to set Samuel’s poetry to music.

I knew Samuel Menashe for the last seven years of his life. We were introduced in the spring of 2004, at the cocktail party following the annual awards ceremony of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Samuel did not receive an award from the Academy on that day—nor on any other day.

In the years 2005 through 2010, I set many of Samuel’s poems to music, usually for solo voice accompanied by guitar or piano. Eventually, I accumulated almost forty Menashe songs. Samuel attended every performance of these songs, and was generous in his praise of them. He wrote: “Yarmolinsky takes note of my poems. His settings make each word a note.” One of my most prized souvenirs of our friendship is a printed card of his poem “Hallelujah” underneath which he wrote “For Ben Yarmolinsky who set my poems to music, lifted me to his level. De la musique avant toute chose.”

In December of 2013, I released a CD of my settings of 37 of Samuel’s poems. Here is one of the songs from the CD, sung by baritone Randall Scarlata:



Night Music
(pizzicato)

Why am I so fond
Of the double bass
Of bull frogs
(Or do I hear the prongs
Of a tuning fork,
Not a bull fiddle)
Responding—
In perfect accord—
To one another
Across this pond
How does each frog know
He is not his brother
Which frog to follow
Who was his mother
(Or is it a jew’s harp
I hear in the dark?)

This poem presents a wonderful opportunity for text painting. In my arrangement the left hand “ribbet” motive of the piano is imitated closely by the bass notes of the cello, and echoed by the strings and percussion, so that the listener has the sense of many frogs “responding in perfect accord to one another.” I like to think of my songs as a kind of response to Samuel’s harping.

• Paradise: Songs on Poems by Samuel Menashe is available as a CD or music download from cdbaby.com, iTunes, Amazon, cdUniverse.com, or directly from the composer, at benyarmolinsky.com.
• The e-book edition of Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems is on sale for the month of April, for as low as $3.82 for Kindle, Kobo, Google Books, Nook, and iBooks (via iTunes).
• Watch “Samuel: The Concise Poet,” a three-minute episode of WNYC’s Know Your Neighbor featuring Samuel Menashe and his dilapidated West Village walk-up apartment.

Lyrics copyright © Literary Classics of the U.S., Inc. Music copyright © Ben Yarmolinsky.
All rights reserved.

Samuel Menashe (1925–2011)

In this well-known photograph by Martin Duffy,
Samuel writes one of his poems on the beach:
"Pity us / by the sea / on the sands / so briefly"

The staff and trustees of The Library of America are deeply saddened to hear of the loss of Samuel Menashe, who died yesterday evening, peacefully, in his sleep.

A veteran of the 87th Infantry Division in World War II who went on to study at the Sorbonne before returning to his native New York, Samuel was the first recipient of the Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation, bestowed in 2004. The following year The Library of America published his New and Selected Poems in the American Poets Project series.

For the past six years Samuel had been been a frequent and beloved presence at the LOA offices in New York—at one point spending several days autographing 1,200 copies of his book for subscribers to the series. Last year, in a blog post written on the occasion of his 85th birthday, we noted just a few of the many recent notices and interviews that followed nearly five decades of near-neglect by American critics and publishers. (His poetry was greeted with far more enthusiasm in England, where he published his first book in 1961, and in Ireland.)

In 2008, after the first printing of 7,000 copies of New and Selected Poems had sold out, we asked Samuel to add a few more recent poems to the second printing. Among the nine new poems he added at the end of the book was the following:

Now
There is never an end to loss, or hope
I give up the ghost for which I grope
Over and over again saying Amen
To all that does or does not happen—
The eternal event is now, not when

Poet Samuel Menashe turns 85 today: “Every word has to count”

Samuel Menashe writes concise poems. Sometimes just three or five lines, rarely more than twelve. He’s been doing this for more than fifty years. “Sometimes a poem may go through decades until I finally get the word that makes the poem.” Today is his eighty-fifth birthday.

Menashe wasn’t always a poet. As he describes it: “One night in February 1949 [he was 25], I woke up in the middle of the night and there was the first line of a poem, entirely unforeseen.” Menashe published his first poem in The Yale Review seven years later and found that, while he could get published in poetry magazines, landing an American publisher eluded him. British poets, however, immediately took to his work. No sooner had he shown his work to poet Kathleen Raine and other British poets than he had a publisher. No Jerusalem But This was published in the UK in 1961 and several other books followed.

In 2005 the Poetry Foundation honored Menashe with its first Neglected Masters Award, which came with a $50,000 prize and a book contract: Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems was published by The Library of America in its American Poets Project series in 2005.

In his introduction to New and Selected Poems editor and poet Christopher Ricks tries to find the most fitting term for the kind of poems Menashe writes:

These are short poems that are not . . . epigrams exactly, or (rather) are exactly not epigrams. A different kind of wit is at work. Or aphorisms, really. A different kind of wisdom is at work. Yet these are poems that do belong within wisdom literature, that of the Psalms, say, or of Blake’s shorter poems.

“Wisdom literature” seems apt for a poet who likes to face difficult questions in as few words as possible, as he does in “Autobiography”:

Who is mother
Of more than one
Is not the same
As the mother
Of an only son
Who never became
Anyone’s father—
Still only a son
As an old man—
What I have not done
Made me who I am.

Menashe writes his poems to be read and no one reads his poems better than Menashe. As poet Donald Davie has written:

The one and only style of reading that I know of, which forces the reader to attend to each and every syllable in what he hears, is the reading-style of Samuel Menashe.

The niche narrows
Hones one thin
Until his bones
Disclose him

Hearing Menashe read [this]—eleven words, fourteen syllables—is to understand what it means in practice for a poet to compose by the syllable. The voice is enviably rich in timbre and resonance, but what matters is that it is exactly controlled.... Hearing it read by Menashe is an experience unlike any other known to me; when the poem has been performed, one has the illusion (and perhaps it isn’t illusory after all) of having heard a very long poem indeed, and a very elaborate one.

Reviewing New and Selected Poems in Poetry Review, David Morley admired “Samuel Menashe’s integrity of perception, his self-possessed seriousness, and the precise, often playful awareness of the importance of space—space as another means for stating, imparting, whispering.” (Listen to Menashe read several of his poems. )

Last year Menashe was filmed in the Greenwich Village walkup he has lived in for the past fifty years for the NPR series, “Know Your Neighbor.”



Related LOA works: Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems