It's Hard to be Hydrocephalic
Last week, New Jersey as an Impossible Object taped Graham Stowe singing his Patersong "The Skeleton of Peter the Dwarf" based off material from Books I and IV (pp. 10 and 192 respectively). The music is by Jonathan Sircy. More of their songs based on Paterson can be found on archive.org. Graham is a doctoral candidate here at the University of South Carolina, and is embarking on a dissertation about Williams' Paterson and Olson's Maximus Poems. Along with Kenneth Camacho, he's kept a blog, The Paterson Project, which documents their use of Paterson as raw material for new poems and songs.
The Skeleton of Peter the Dwarf
It’s hard to be a hydrocephalic.
54 inches, head to toe
(27 from my chin to scalp alone;
That makes me a marvel.)
Washington came to see me
(the man, not the city; or, maybe, the city is the man).
He looked at me; marveled at me;
I answered with inactivity.
I floated along, day to day,
endlessly rocking,
loving Jesus and preacher’s conversation,
swelling with pride at the show I could provide.
It was hard for me to move,
my head being so huge,
but I got by without going out;
keeping to the cerebral.
my head's got its own box now,
it's lost all its water!
and now they say my skull is a marvel!
but they say nothing of the parts of me everyone's had.
What I never told in my time
was that, more than theology or phrenology,
all I ever wanted out of life
was to not shit in my cradle.
A tiny outhouse with plenty of headroom,
straps to hold me up and a stand
from which I could read
my Bible or a dirty magazine.
Oh that would be marvelous.
“A marvel indeed,” they would say,
as they tied me in and
sang of my tenacity.
It’s hard to be a hydrocephalic.
54 inches, head to toe
(27 from my chin to scalp alone;
That makes me a marvel.)
Washington came to see me
(the man, not the city; or, maybe, the city is the man).
He looked at me; marveled at me;
I answered with inactivity.
I floated along, day to day,
endlessly rocking,
loving Jesus and preacher’s conversation,
swelling with pride at the show I could provide.
It was hard for me to move,
my head being so huge,
but I got by without going out;
keeping to the cerebral.
my head's got its own box now,
it's lost all its water!
and now they say my skull is a marvel!
but they say nothing of the parts of me everyone's had.
What I never told in my time
was that, more than theology or phrenology,
all I ever wanted out of life
was to not shit in my cradle.
A tiny outhouse with plenty of headroom,
straps to hold me up and a stand
from which I could read
my Bible or a dirty magazine.
Oh that would be marvelous.
“A marvel indeed,” they would say,
as they tied me in and
sang of my tenacity.
Labels: audio, Book I, Book IV, Charles Olson, Graham Stowe, Jonathan Sircy, Peter the Dwarf, song, video
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