Steven Taylor

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

October 2, 2017

moderator: Joseph Donica

William Blake (1757-1827) is recognized as an important Romantic poet and visual artist, but in his own time he was recognized for neither his poetry nor his pictures. He was a revolutionary, a Christian mystic, a prophet, a madman, a cosmologist, a shopkeeper’s son. There are as many Blakes as there are Blakeans.

This presentation will focus on Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1789-94). I will sing a sampling of the songs and show the corresponding illustrated pages that William and Catherine Blake produced in their home workshop, and will address the context in which the book appeared.

It is surprising how much of the literature on Blake’s songs neglects to mention that Blake sang, since we have it from diarists of the period that Blake sang his songs at literary gatherings, that he had a fine voice, and that his melodies were moving enough to have been noted by professor musicians present. Unfortunately those notes are lost.

In 1968, while travelling to his upstate N.Y. farm from Chicago where he’d witnessed the “bare skull of police state violence” outside the Democratic National Convention, Allen Ginsberg heard a voice singing a line of Blake – “vain the sword and vain the bow they never shall work war’s overthrow.” He sat down at the farmhouse pump organ and wrote continuously 48 hours, setting Blake’s songs to music. This is about that.

Steven Taylor holds the PhD in ethnomusicology from Brown University. He was formerly Associate Professor in the Department of Writing and Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder Colorado. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in various anthologies and magazines. His book False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2003. He teaches in the MA program of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University. He is a member of the seminal poetry-rock group the Fugs. In 2014, his musical score for “Aubade” by Douglas Dunn and Dancers was nominated for a Bessie Award for best sound design for dance/performance.  This Fall at BCC he is teaching ENG 110 and ENG 150.