Poet's Choice By Edward Hirsch

blues falling down like hail

And the days keep on 'minding me

there's a hellhound on my trail

hellhound on my trail

hellhound on my trail

Johnson had a wonderfully lonesome, high, tragic voice, an aching sound, a dramatic falsetto that could turn into a lost and broken howl. When he starts in here, the words "got to keep moving" disrupt the blues form, displace the harmony and weirdly twist the modulations awry. The notes really do seem to be raining down and assaulting the singer "like hail." The rhythm is fateful, the mood frightened, even desperate. If only the singer could get away. His voice sounds mortally wounded, chased, infernally dogged by a hellhound that is ruthlessly tracking him down, that will never let him escape. These savagely delivered lines reverberate through the song like a series of shock waves. We have come to the tragic end -- the emotional apex -- of a country tradition.

Many of the finest poems gathered here take the form, the feeling and the flamboyant imagery of the traditional blues as a starting point. They owe a rhythmic and spiritual debt to the blues without following them in a literal way. That's the case with Sterling Brown's "Ma Rainey," Al Young's "The Blues Don't Change" ("And I was born with you, wasn't I, Blues?"), Charles Wright's "Poem Almost Wholly in My Own Manner" ("Music the distant thunder chord/ that shudders our lives") and W. H. Auden's "Funeral Blues," which has a mournful cadence and beauty, a grief-stricken dignity.

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,

Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the