"Dream of a Song Woven from the Veil"
written and read by Tom Sleigh, film by Ed Robbins
This film is part four of the "Age of Wonder: Poems from The King’s Touch" series, a video feature from Graywolf Press and Tom Sleigh
A Note on "Dream of a Song Woven from the Veil" from Tom Sleigh:
This poem is written in homage to Nat and Cannonball Adderley, famous for their embrace of bebop, funk, and R&B. When I was a kid, I loved the brothers and their music, especially Nat because he played cornet, and not the more usual trumpet. I also played cornet and Nat became my idol, such that my music teacher and I would play Nat’s solos together: he’d play a riff and expect me to copy him. As to how I came to hear of the Adderley brothers, I owe it to my older brother, Jay, who discovered jazz when he was twelve and introduced my twin brother, Tim, and me to all the great jazz artists when we were nine. Both Tim and Jay became superb jazz players, and I can’t help but think of the Adderley brothers when my own brothers play together. And since I came from a musical family, my parents had turned Jay on to Duke Ellington and Count Basie.
As to the poem’s public dimension, the off-rhymed, run-on couplets play off against the civil unrest of the last half century. The poem begins with graffiti of President Kennedy’s Cold War “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech and proceeds to Watts in 1965, Baltimore in 1968, and on up to our present day.
Over the years Kennedy’s speech—which expressed in 1963 American anti-Communist solidarity with West Berlin—has become associated with various forms of graffiti protest art painted on the Berlin Wall. “Ich bin ein Berliner” has been used to draw attention not only to who was being walled in in 1961—the West Berliners—but also to who is currently being walled out in 2021—the East Germans and immigrants excluded by West Berlin’s rampant gentrification. However, “Ich bin ein Berliner” can also mean “I am a jelly doughnut!”, since that also is a local usage of “Berliner”—as always, the political and the absurd are never far apart. The poem also takes off from W. E. B. DuBois’s ideas about “the Veil” and “double-consciousness,” and explores what might happen if you were to translate those ideas into musical forms.