Ben Meyerson’s Book Notes poetry collection Seguiriyas is a stunning debut that explores diasporic life through the lens of flamenco music and culture.
Daniel Khalastchi wrote of the book:
“Seguiriyas sings of bringing what is lost not back but forth to be examined. Through rain and flood, through throngs of wrongs, Meyerson attunes his cadences of peril to the root of what is left. Enwrapped and ready, the music we receive is ‘difficult for the ear to forget.”
Soleá
In flamenco, the soleá is the song form by which all other forms are measured. It is the first form that students learn, and with its many melodic combinations and its encyclopedic catalogue of lyrics, it is one of the most difficult to master. The soleá is among the most fundamental of the forms associated with what Federico García Lorca and Manuel de Falla have, in a somewhat ad hoc manner, categorized as “cante jondo”: the deep song, deemed such due to its close association with the Romani performers who are the music’s primary progenitors. La Niña de los Peines and Aurelio Sellés are two of the most prominent flamenco singers from the first half of the twentieth century, and the former has been particularly influential to the music’s development over the last hundred years. La Niña de los Peines sings:
Fui piedra y perdí mi centro
y me arrojaron al mar
y a fuerza de mucho tiempo
mi centro vine a encontrar.
I was a stone and I lost my center
and they threw me into the sea,
and in the force of so much time,
I came to find my center once more.
Originally composed by a singer known as La Serneta in the nineteenth century, this lyric is a chronicle of dislocation, transit and reconstitution that plays out on both individual and communal scales. It encodes the troubled history of the Roma in Spain, alluding to the many waves of sedentarization, incarceration, forced labor, and dislocation that they suffered at the hands of the central government from the fifteenth century until the present day. Meanwhile, Sellés sings a lyric attributed to Paquirri el Guanté, another nineteenth-century singer: que a rebato toquen las campanas del olvido (how the bells of forgetting sound the alarm). These words are about extinguishing the memory of a lover, but perhaps there remains a more collective worry in them: a knowledge of how it feels to be a stone cast into the sea, a precarity that will always persist within the alarming jolt of recollection, equivocating between individual and communal attachments. It was very important for me to think about that dynamic as I wrote Seguiriyas—I wanted to understand how the memory of transit in diasporic culture can seep into everything else, subtly inflecting sensory experience, perceptions of intimacy and understandings of history. Such considerations constitute both the overarching rationale of my poetics and the foundation from which I interrogate my own Jewishness, which is another theme that runs through the book.
The Unrelenting Note
Washington Phillips and the Comtessa de Día might seem an odd pairing on the surface. Phillips was an American gospel artist who recorded all his music in the late 1920s on instruments apparently of his own invention. His sound remains distinctive to this day, featuring a delicate, chiming meshwork of dulcimer-like tones that buoy his limpid vocals and lend his compositions a kind of haunting strangeness that sets him apart both from his contemporaries and from those who have followed in his chosen genre. The Comtessa de Día, meanwhile, was likely the best known of the trobairitz (female troubadours) and was active in Provence during the second half of the twelfth century. What unites these two compositions, for me, is that within the melodic structure of their verses, they manage to find a note that cuts. In Phillips’ “Mother’s Last Word to Her Son,” the first appearance of that note is on the word “mother” at 28 seconds: its pang is in the way he holds it suspended shy of resolution and how its placement heralds the emotional content of the words. Meanwhile, in the Comtessa de Día’s “A chanter m’er de so qu’ieu non volria,” the note comes first on “volria” at 35 seconds and occurs twice in each stanza—it is a lilt that settles the first and third line of every strophe into a brief, mournful ennui and sets the tone for the entire composition as the speaker laments the pride of her prospective lover.
When certain notes in certain contexts tug a thread in us, they elucidate something about how yearning can traverse space and time both inside and outside of the body such that it becomes something that feels as though it belongs to us and to history all at once. Both Washington Phillips and the Comtessa de Día (with the help of able interpreters Jordi Savall, Montserrat Figueras and Hespèrion XX) did that for me, and it is a feeling that I am seeking to illustrate in my poems when I explore how memories of landscapes, places, communities, bodies and buildings become repositories for a strikingly similar kind of yearning rooted in the multivalent spatiotemporal tautening of diasporic subjectivity.
Lorca
In the 1950s, Pepe Albaicín was the first flamenco singer to put the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca’s verses to music and record them. This was not a choice that was met with universal approval: for one thing, Lorca had been a well-known critic of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco (whose soldiers murdered him in 1936), and that same regime retained power in Spain until 1975. Moreover, despite Lorca’s very public fascination with flamenco, there was still a distinct social distance between the world of ‘high art’—to which Lorca’s poetry belonged—and flamenco, which was an art form performed by the lower classes and the Roma. Pepe Albaicín, who hailed from the Granada area just as Lorca did, took a risk, and the results of his experiment are undeniable. His version of “Romance de la luna luna,” which is taken from Lorca’s fantastic Romancero Gitano, is particularly outstanding, in my view. Performed as a zambra (a flamenco form that is strongly associated with Granada), he unlocks the full power of the poet’s language, restructuring the poem and then imbuing the words with cascading, momentous thunder.
Following the 1950s, the practice of putting Lorca’s poetry into the melodic and rhythmic context of flamenco proliferated. In 1996, another great flamenco singer from Granada released his own controversial album. By then, the more conservative aficionados were happy to hear flamenco interpretations of Lorca. However, they had grown anxious about the possibility that the purity of traditional flamenco might be diluted by popular music from other places. These conservative elements recoiled in horror when Enrique Morente, in the full flowering of his late-career renaissance, fused rock music with flamenco to create Omega, an LP that mixes flamenco-inflected covers of Leonard Cohen songs with flamenco-rock versions of poems taken from Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York. When Morente’s voice soars and crashes in “La Aurora de Nueva York” (“la aurora de Nueva York gime por las inmensas escaleras!”; “The New York dawn wails along the immense staircases!”), I can hear the echo of Pepe Albaicín roughly forty years earlier.
Morente’s Omega was a harbinger of things to come for flamenco. The younger generations were eager to bring other styles and genres into the music with which they’d grown up. Currently, two of the major groups on the cutting edge of such stylistic fusions in Andalusia are Califato ¾ and La Plazuela. Both bands have found different ways to use electronic beats and propulsive dance rhythms to generate infectious soundscapes. Califato ¾ are notable for their strong support of Andalusian culture, and they even spell their song titles in such a way that they reflect the Andalusian accent. “L’ambôccá” is one of their more laidback, atmospheric tracks, and yet I enjoy the way it revolves around flamenco-adjacent melodic structure and rhythmic articulation, allowing its mode of cultural identification to haunt the song’s atmosphere by way of disembodied suggestions. La Plazuela,” meanwhile, inject some new wave-influenced synthesizers into their verses before breaking out into an exuberant chorus whose melody and delivery are clearly inspired by the vocals of flamenco singers such as Camarón de la Isla, José Mercé or Capullo de Jerez: “solito me quedo yo después de la primavera…”
Feeling Time
Poetry is a literary form that plays with interval, establishing meters and rhythms, interrupting them, finding a swing between anticipation and realization. To ensure that a poem manipulates time effectively, I need to be able to feel what is being manipulated. Sometimes, I find that if I want a concrete sense of time, I need to lean on a steady groove—and that is what Robert Belfour’s “Breaking My Heart” delivers. Belfour is a master of the Mississippi hill country blues, which, unlike its cousins, often eschews the ubiquitous I-IV-V progression and instead orbits the I. This lack of harmonic change furnishes it with a drone-like quality that allows the listener to burrow deep within the rhythm, internalize it, and feel its continuous pulse.
On other occasions, though, I need something that adjusts my perception of time and forces me to find pockets in the flow of its discontinuities rather than sink into the depth of a steady pulse. The song “Ai Tchere Bele,” a standout from the Malian band Songhoy Blues’ debut record, has been important to me in that regard. The way the drums and the guitars seem to clash at first before their disparate time signatures settle into a hypnotic, composite groove shows me that time can inhere in the gaps between multiple temporalities: meters can impinge on one another in poetry just as they do in music, and, indeed, histories can do the very same thing. Time is a polyrhythm.
Thinking along with these songs has helped me to stumble on ways to manipulate time in my poems. Seeing the guitarist Yerai Cortés play with the expectations of the percussionists accompanying him and find the ‘backbeat’ of flamenco rhythmic patterns (there are no official recordings on Spotify, unfortunately: https://youtu.be/wmQlxHyTj6s?si=g3tj80PJbf48QNa2) has benefitted me for much the same reason: when I see others generating anticipation and then breaking unevenly with it, I learn that we discover time both by feeling at one with it and by feeling wholly other from it. As I argue in Seguiriyas, this truth applies to historical memory, too: however broken, the awareness of ancestrality wells up to ensure that the individual is at once bound to and distinguished from the community.
Soundscapes
One thing about music production technologies is that they can imbue a song’s progress through time with an indefinitely repeatable spatiality such that we as listeners are left with an expanse that we can travel over and over again. Soundscapes and landscapes are proximate phenomena. Can the memory of transit through a song be rendered commensurate with a people’s cultural memory of transit, migration or expulsion? I do not necessarily think so, but I do believe that a musical soundscape can provide certain textures, flavors or echoes that call to mind the dynamics by which such a memory might linger. By immersing myself in evocative soundscapes, I came away with a template for how I might incorporate nudgings and tantalizing strains of diasporic experience at key moments throughout the poems that populate Seguiriyas.
In Charles Mingus’ “Track C-Group Dancers,” which is taken from his album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, there is a sense of itinerancy that is immediately evident: the music journeys between generic influences, adding dashes of flamenco-inspired guitar, a motif repeated by the full band that sounds like a purposefully kitschy Western imitation of Islamic music, stately piano chords, and wrenching horns that furnish the track with its hard bop backbone. In listening to this piece, I allow myself to take its eclecticism as literally as possible, imagining a people’s accreted exposure to multiple musical traditions and then its assimilation of those sonic palettes into a newly emergent expressive idiom.
Alice Coltrane’s “Turiya & Ramakrishna,” meanwhile, is about the journey inward. Throughout the eight-minute track, Coltrane’s piano moves between insistent, repetitive figures and transcendent, chiming swells, always with its tassels trailing along the sparse, telluric procession of Ben Riley’s drums and Ron Carter’s bass. With this song, I think a lot about what it is like to be located firmly, ineluctably inside the body, and to feel the movement of time and space as it occurs somewhere outside of the self, a drone and whirl against which the internal core seems to remain constant. Of course, it is this very internal constancy that allows for the sensation of spatiotemporal movement as a force that carries what is inside the self along with the progress of all that is on the outside. In affirming itself as that which is rooted on the inside, the self negates its own putative constancy and, at the same time, gives way to the cosmic movement exterior to it. Coltrane, then, teaches me that transit produces a situation in which individual interiority both maintains and annihilates itself, and that if I want to grasp such a phenomenon on an aesthetic level, I must be willing to engage in apophatic thinking from time to time.
Lily Henley’s “Porke Yorach Blanka Ninya” is taken from her 2022 album Oras Dezaoradas, which is a series of old Sephardic Ladino songs reimagined in a register that is deeply inspired by the American folk tradition. This very project bespeaks a journey: Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, is the language that many Sephardic Jews continued speaking even after their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Along with the language, they carried songs—some of which correspond with folk verses that also survived in Spain among the Christians—and came up with new material that matched the reality of the lives they led elsewhere (Salonika, for instance, was a major center of Sephardic Jewish life until the Nazis wiped out or displaced the majority of the community during the Second World War), all with the awareness that Spain had once been home. In her soaring, atmospheric rendition of “Porke Yorach Blanka Ninya,” Henley conveys the full force of that history, her elongated, melismatic delivery allowing the lyrics to take on a double meaning: the girl depicted in the song, weeping at her abandonment, echoes the cultural memory of leaving and being left, the accreting anxiety that over time, even the recollection of the former home might desert the people who have been made to leave.
The next six songs—Odetta Hartman’s “Widow’s Peak,” Anaïs Mitchell’s “Young Man In America,” The Tallest Man On Earth’s “This Wind,” The Tragically Hip’s “Escape Is At Hand For The Travellin’ Man,” Hiss Golden Messenger’s “As The Crow Flies,” and Guy Clark’s “Dublin Blues”—are all about journeys of various sorts and add dimensions to my sense of how bodies and minds traverse or experience distance. Hartman’s track captures the pain of unfulfilled traversal as the speaker’s lover is unable to complete the journey to where she finds herself; Mitchell details the destructive and corrupting sojourn of maturation that produces the American performance of masculinity; as The Tallest Man On Earth, Kristian Matsson describes how the wind’s progress through the world and into the depths of the body reveals a vibrant natural milieu whose activity reflects the most surreal and disquieting elements of our own inner lives; The Tragically Hip, Hiss Golden Messenger and Guy Clark all relate the travails of life on the road, expressing the toll that time and distance can take on the mind and on one’s relationships.
Seguiriyas
Like the soleá, the seguiriya is among flamenco’s primary palos (song forms), and it is especially notable for the effort and physical exertion that it demands of the singers who truly rise to the challenge that it poses. Antonio Nuñez Montoya ‘El Chocolate’ and Manuel de los Santos Pastor ‘El Agujetas’ are two of the twentieth century’s greatest singers por seguiriyas. Their voices—El Chocolate’s with more high-end shimmer, and Manuel Agujetas’ featuring an eked-out, attenuated quaver that rakes at the gut in the afterlife of each melodic passage—along with those of their peers are the well from which my book was drawn. Rather than attempt to reformulate my thoughts on this matter, I will share an excerpt from my author’s note:
[…]the name “seguiriyas” (rendered alternately as “siguiriyas,” or “seguidilla gitana”) is a corruption of the word “seguidilla,” which is a relatively unrelated Castilian and Andalusian folk dance. Both terms contain the verb “seguir” as their root: “to follow.”[…] Though the vast majority of flamenco’s oldest lyrics within palos such as the seguiriya and the soleá can only be dated back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they often showcase an awareness of events in Andalusia that occurred centuries prior, detailing aestheticized interactions with Muslims and Moriscos, who were formally expelled from Spain in 1609, making reference to the historical presence of Jews, who were expelled in 1492, and alluding to the heavily discriminatory policies that the central authorities imposed against the Gitano [Roma] population between 1499 and 1783, which led to waves of incarceration and the forcible conscription of many Gitano men as rowers in the galleys that carried out the state’s imperial affairs. As a concept, then, “seguiriyas” presents a recombinant space in which a variegated history wells up and asserts itself on multiple strata of experience: as memory, as a textured voice expressing its grievance, as a body in song, as a lurching melisma that restructures the cadenced impact of sensory stimuli, and as an attenuated tone whose extension reinterprets the arrangement of spatiotemporal spans as they elapse in us. It offers up a form according to which we might internalize, embody and excavate solidarity on an ontological scale: when the voice strains and latches open, we might follow one another through the rupture, together even as we never cease to reside in our own particularity, and time might return to us.
Ben Meyerson is the author of four poetry chapbooks: In a Past Life, Holcocene, An Ecology of the Void, and Near Enough. He holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and an MA in philosophy from the Universidad de Sevilla. He is currently a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Toronto and splits his time between Canada and Spain. His poems, translations and essays have appeared in several journals, including Interim, PANK, Long Poem Magazine, El Mundo Obrero, Great River Review, The Inflectionist Review, Rust+Moth, and Pidgeonholes.