Playing The Poet Game
Singer/Songwriter Greg Brown might be one of the greatest poets of the common experience that I have ever encountered. He is one, big, dark eyed, eccentrically wonderful, magically voiced artist. He sings in the lowest, oddest, graveled voice accompanied by the sound of a blues guitar. It is arresting, that voice. But it is the poetry that truly captivates.
Greg Brown is a lyrical genius. the majority of his songs are about his everyday life, which was spent mostly traveling around his home state of Iowa playing in small coffee shops and bars in the surrounding area. He traveled to New York and Los Angeles early on but got tired of the “fast life” and came home to Iowa in the end.
He started life living in the country and had a Pentecostal Minister for a Dad. His family played instruments – his grandpa David played the banjo. They were a singing family. And apparently they could tell a great story around the nightly summer campfires. Greg Brown was steeped in these stories, and coined a phrase for them: “playing the poet game”. He was to follow in their footsteps.
He might have been famous in New York or L.A., but he chose to play the “poet game” and learned to listen patiently for the songs that were meant for him to hear. He is a master of observation – catching the charming little human quirks of daily life we might have missed completely. The poignant, the witty, the struggles of middle age, marriage, making a living. He has this wonderful sense of the lovely, naughty spark still shining in a middle aged marriage. He sings of the foibles of grabbing for wealth, of poverty, of the downright silliness of our choices. I picture him sitting at a table in the far corner of the coffee shop with pencil and old spiral notebook in hand watching with those big dark eyes and writing down what his particular muse shows him. Greg Brown was an inscaper of extraordinary talent.
He has written some of the most beautiful poems about the simplest things. My favorite song is a eulogy to his Grandmother Ella Mae. She was a farmer’s wife with six children – poor, getting by. But what Greg saw was beauty, goodness, love, largeness of heart. I think she would have been astonished by what her grandson saw when he looked at her with his quiet eyes all those years. This poet grandson seeing the beauty shining off of her ordinary life and adding ink to it. It is a poem that celebrates the extraordinary beauty found in the ordinary, written by a man who accepted his call to play the poet game and played it well.
Greg Brown stirs up all the good emotions. He makes us laugh at ourselves, he shows us that love is still there in the “worrisome years” of middle age, he brings us to tears and makes us laugh out loud. He is the troubadour of the ordinary life. One of my top ten poets up there with the likes of Keats, Hopkins, and Emily Dickinson. They would have loved him I am sure…. all those lovely souls dedicated to the “poet game”.