Chris Mason: Old Timey+Ancient=Brand New

 

                         Chris Mason at Normals Books & Records in Baltimore. Photo by T. Winch

Baltimore is a wondrous place whose praises I have sung, literally ("In Praise of the City of Baltimore"). It is the home of the American Visionary Art Museum, my favorite place for outsider art. My old friend David Franks, who practically invented performance poetry, was active there as a poet and performer until his death in 2010. The late Michael Ball ran the legendary i.e. reading series, bringing the work of a wide range of poets to intimate and homey spaces. The indefatigable Stephen Reichert and Clare Banks edit the impressive literary journal Smartish Pace. Along with the Ivy Bookshop, Stephen and Clare also organize The Hot L Baltimore reading series. And my dear friends David Beaudouin and Don Berger add tremendous depth to Baltimore’s poetry community. Finally, I can’t leave out the eminent Rupert Wondolowski, the poet who presides over the amazing and completely misnamed Normals Books and Records. Everything is cheap in Baltimore. The drinks are all doubles, the waitresses all tough, half the population still smokes.

Chris Mason, Stephen Reichert, Terence Winch, Don Berger

And Chris Mason, cofounder of The Tinklers and the driving force behind Old Songs, is among its citizens. I met Chris in the mid 1970s in D.C. and was immediately impressed with his friendly unpretentiousness as a person and poet. He settled permanently in Baltimore in the late ’70s, forming The Tinklers with Charles Brohawn soon thereafter. The Tinklers, who don’t perform very often these days, make music that is a sure antidote to all that is slick and glib in the music world. It’s as though the Holy Modal Rounders hired William Blake as their lyricist. The musicianship is rudimentary but somehow perfectly suited to the childlike, naïve, funny, wise songs. 

Then came Old Songs. Some twenty-plus years ago, long after Chris left DC, the estimable writer/critic Mark Wallace invited him to bring his then-new musical project, called Old Songs, to an art gallery in Dupont Circle for a performance. I went, not really sure what to expect, and I was captivated almost immediately. In 2002, Chris, along with Mark Jickling and Liz Downing, started translating ancient Greek poets, setting their translations to music they composed in what is essentially an old-time string band tradition. Everyone in that gallery that night felt exhilarated at the way in which the three performers brought these Old Songs back to life again. Chris says he taught himself Greek “as an escape from this modern world.” In putting the songs together he goes by the sound of the Greek, thinking of the poem “as it was when it was a song, because Sappho, Alcman, and those guys back then, they sung their poems, and that’s why it’s called lyric poetry, because they used a lyre.” 

The group has recorded a number of home-made CDs of ancient Greek poems translated and set to music, ten of which are available at Penn Sound. And Chris published an essay in the Antioch Review beautifully describing the group’s compositional process. “Sappho,” Chris writes, “shines her poetic light on us, as she has on so many others, across a distance of twenty-six centuries, but it’s the same moonlight.”

[One footnote: Chris invited me to play the button accordion on a few Old Songs tracks. Here is their version of "Long Nerve" from the Callimachus recording in which I was able to adapt a well-known fling called "The Keel Row"as part of the instrumental framework.] 

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I have focused here on Chris Mason’s work as a composer and performer. But he has an equal reputation as a poet of singular vision. He has published a score of unique works, not only in content but in design and production as well. One of his masterworks is Hum Who Hiccup, which came out from Narrow House in 2011. Chris asked me to comment on the book, and what I wrote remains as true today as it was back then:

All of creation begins to appear thrillingly familiar under Chris Mason's literary microscope. That's one aspect of his genius. Chris Mason sees what others don't. He communes with the ancients. He understands the inner lives of animals and humans. His poems are funny, scientific, musical, inventive, direct, and weirdly profound. He gives new shapes to the language, opens our eyes and minds, lets us bask in the aura of his creative benevolence.

An earlier version of this post ran on the Best American Poetry blog on July 8, 2009.

©Terence Winch  
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