Tangled
February 16, 2007 | permalink

One of the things that I like best about people is their amazing capacity to create new things from the works that have come before them, re-imagining or re-interpreting an idea in such a way as to simultaneously create something wholly new and pay homage to their source of inspiration. Painters, musicians, and poets have been doing this practically forever, and when I see it done well it never fails to move me.

One of my favorite examples of the form is a good cover song. I'm not talking about note for note renditions; any competent musician can do that. I'm talking about genre-busting, re-arranged, re-interpretations that blow your mind, and make you wonder how the artist ever extracted that from the original version. My music library is full of them. The Gourds' bluegrass version of Snoop Dogg's Gin and Juice, Cat Powers' stripped down rendition of The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction, Johnny Cash's slow and soulful delivery of Trent Reznor's Hurt. If you aren't familiar, you really should listen to them. Really.

But music is of course not the only place that you see this circle of inspiration and re-interpretation, and sometimes the results can be very surprising. Way back in the day of High School English, one of my favorite poems was William Blake's The Tyger. Surely you remember:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

It's a fantastic piece of literary work, and certainly worthy of tribute. I came across an amazing variation of The Tyger, listening to the webcast of The Cowboy Cultural Society a couple of years ago, and that god-awful panther mirror reminded me of it. This is an excerpt from the 1st runner up of the 20th Annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, held in Elko, Nevada, in January of 2004. Sadly, I cannot find the poet's name, but here it is:

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forest of the night,
how'd you get to cowboy plains
and what is it you're stalking?

Have you come to feed on me,
or is it the peyote talking?

Sheer genius, Gentle Readers, sheer genius.

Posted in Musings & Random
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