I have a fairly limited experience with opera. My growing years were mostly jazz with a few helpings of blues, a handful of Broadway musicals, and of course full servings of R&B and Soul as my teens beckoned. But there were also recordings of Handel’s “Messiah,” “Amahl and the Night Visitors” and of course, “Porgy and Bess” with Dorothy Dandridge, who I wanted to look like, and Harry Belafonte, who I wanted to marry, on the album cover. I sang along plaintively, if in a flat voice, “I love you Porgy don’t let him take me…” and also laughingly learned every verse of “It ain’t necessarily so,” and softly crooned to my babies when they fretted, “Summertime.” But opera was never really on my personal playlist. Hearing the mastery of voice, of note, of tone held by the erect posture and the proper shaping of the lips, placement of the tongue moves my brain, but I am enthralled by the expertise no less or no more than observing ballet on point, the ballerina’s lambs-wool wrapped toes deformed by the wooden blocks on which they perch to help the dancer stand that much higher, to create the proper line.
“Ee
Tongue thinned
slightly risen
to palate
Soft jaw
Raised curtain of lip
To teeth
Such movement
perfumes each cheek
burnishes bone”
Kevin Simmonds from Bel Canto – The Monster I Am Today
I have enjoyed Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” on film, first “Carmen Jones,” the black and white movie with Belafonte and Dandridge and later a full color film with flamenco dancing that held my interest. Once while driving on some California freeway, I was spinning my car radio dial seeking some music to help me roll on home when “Ave Maria” came out with a voice so pure, a tone so compelling it swam into my heart and I paused to listen to the whole aria, later hearing that it was indeed Marian Anderson, as I had suspected. I remember smiling and letting the station stay through the radio host’s announcements until he put on someone else, and my interest waned. I was hearing perfectly cut, sharply faceted diamonds valued for their splay of colors, but for me, lacking in the glory of amber, or the warmth of indigenous carved turquoise, or the spirit of cowrie shells strung and dangling.
“Opera has a particular density-every syllable of every word sung,
assigned rhythm, pitch, duration and volume. Perhaps the most fastidious
melodrama, it’s essentially sport-bloodless, but sport, nonetheless…”
Kevin Simmonds from Postlude – The Monster I Am Today
I have viewed opera live, televised and in film, (Even gained an appreciation of Chinese opera while viewing Raise the Red Lantern), but my heart and belly were not seduced by the sound, all of which is to say I didn’t buy Kevin Simmonds newest poetry collection THE MONSTER I AM TODAY
Leontyne Price and a Life in Verse because of any devotion to opera or Leontyne Price, although I had and now have even more of the utmost respect for her and her mastery of her art. It was because at the book launch which was presented by the Northwestern University Press with a chorus of voices, of people Kevin brought in to make the book heard as what it is, a symphony of voices, approaches, considerations, ideas, and because of the sweetness of the operatic offering , while not compelling my soul were luxurious in their sound and heart, and because, full disclosure Kevin is a friend of mine whose work I have always felt was worth hearing and worth reading more than once. When I began to read the book it unfolded, like a garden of prayer plants opening each dawn and folding on to themselves in silent duets at dusk. I became immersed in Kevin’s poems and thoughts on his own story, Leontyne Price’s story, of the ways they overlapped and crossed.
She with her dark sound-
“Listening to Price’s early recordings (keeping in mind that her
teacher Florence Page Kimball said that she’d arrived at Julliard
already possessing a “dark molasses sound”), I wonder how much of her
definitive dark sound had been encouraged and groomed in New York.”
Kevin Simmonds from Overture – The Monster I Am Today
and he with his
“Like Price, my teachers, family and community had nestled me inside
a tangible Black continuum. I lived close to the materials, the source,
I felt it.
When I left New Orleans and arrived at Vanderbilt, the major forms
and figures of the source immediately became minor or absent. But Ms.
Seals and Mr. Baptiste had warned me:
Don’t let them change your voice. It’s a naturally dark sound.
Like Price.”
Kevin Simmonds from Overture – The Monster I Am Today
Written in three sections, Overture, Performance and Postlude with an informative section of Notes at the end, this book is poetry memoir and biography, history and memory, and song. Baldwin, Dandridge, and Anderson find voice on some pages along David Garvey her accompanist from 1955 until his death some forty years later, and many others including, of course, Price herself, as well as FBI files that never were but could have been. It is a poetic on opera and race, exclusion and triumph. It is thoughtful, provocative, eloquent, funny and true.
“If NASA were serious
they’d beam Lee’s voice through space
to make contact
The Martians would arrive
cure for cancer in and
proofs on every theorem
if they could simply stand
in her vibration”
Kevin Simmonds from Performance – The Monster I Am Today
It is a book which is also about repression and resistance, glory and capitulation, pain and perseverance, regret and survival. And it is a volume steeped in love. Read it slowly, hear it as notes flowing from a controlled diaphragm replete with passion and skill, distilled by an artist born Black and gay and talented. There you will find truth, resonant, sharp, sinister and radiant.
“Artists must be in conflict with something. Black people are in conflict
with the white world. And Black Americans war against the mythic
deceptions of “unalienable rights…Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness
“Bruises surface where these stingers sting.”
Kevin Simmonds from Postlude – The Monster I Am Today