"Birth-Dues" Album

An essay and announcement on the 137th birthday of Robinson Jeffers

Today is the 137th birthday of the great poet Robinson Jeffers. During his life (1887-1962) and after his death he has been regarded by many of his readers as a prophet. His voice remains every bit as important today as when he wrote. He had several facets of his voice which he unified into an unusually cohesive aesthetic, a corpus of work in which he frequently employed recurring things as symbols—hawks and oceans and rocks, for examples—as subjects of his expressions. For he sought a poetry rid of ephemeral symbols, which makes him unique among the poets of his era, and especially when compared to many poets of this era.

He successfully pioneered a new frontier for narrative poetry in free-verse while recovering a tradition of narrative verse; this is demonstrated in works of his such as Tamar, Roan Stallion and Cawdor. He adapted ancient tragedies, including the play Medea. He engendered and inhabited a profoundly radical environmental philosophy that de-centered humanity in relation to Earth and Cosmos. He formulated his observations about human conflict and politics in rhetorical poetry; he warned of an impending WWII. He confronted the violence and cruelty of natural things, as well as humanity, and wrote without apology about the bloody past of empires, including the American empire, and of the murderous and licentious factions of man’s soul.

Most importantly, he wrote about the heartbreaking beauty of the natural world in a vision that before he espoused it was unprecedented in American letters. He imagined a complex “inhuman” God who juxtaposed the loving God that wanted worship as many Christians imagined it. His stark vision seemed to me at first impenetrable when I started to study him deeply at twenty years old. Once I inhabited his work and learned to resonate at the level of his profundities, his poetry became a lucid sanctuary. Perhaps the impression of impenetrability can be the mark of an obsidian limpidity.

Last year, on his 136th birthday, I was finishing the last day of my Fellowship at Tor House in Carmel, California. I remember these dates of last year distinctly because, starting on the New Year, I stayed at a studio in the Carmel Highlands and was commuted to Tor House and Hawk Tower — the house and tower Jeffers built out of stone on his coastal precipice — so that I could fulfill the goal of my Fellowship, which was to compose and record a song cycle which adapted over a dozen Jeffers poems for sung, a cappella recitation, in under two weeks. This goal is one that abides by the mission of the Tor House Foundation to promote and preserve the literary and philosophical legacy of Jeffers.

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(Robinson Jeffers Association Photo Gallery, Picture of Hawk Tower)

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Up all evening by a fire stove reading Jeffers’s letters on January 9th into the morning of the 10th, I was stirred — so much excitement and inspiration extant in my mind — that in the morning of the 10th I had a long grand-mal seizure. Exhausted from that tense experience and in recovery, I proceeded to Tor House an hour later in devotion to finish recording my musical compositions on the last day I could utilize the sacrosanct stone space in solitude.

I finished the first draft and recording of the song cycle, took a shuttle to San Francisco to fly back to the East Coast and did not return to Carmel again until September 2023. I performed a recital of the Jeffers song cycle— Birth-Dues —to an audience at Tor House on the evening of September 23, an event hosted by the Tor House Foundation. Shortly after that recital, I moved to Kenya and since being in East Africa, I have composed music to two more of his poems that are incorporated into the cycle.

Today I am enthusiastic to announce that you may pre-order a digital copy of the album Birth-Dues, a tribute to Robinson Jeffers. I estimate an album of the cycle will be ready in 2025. Musically my composition for this project was most influenced by select traditions of Metal, Throat Singing and English Art-Songs.

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During my Fellowship, I used the allotted time efficiently. I usually arrived to Tor House at 9:00am in the morning and left around 16:00pm. I would spend the late afternoons and evenings in Carmel riding a borrowed street bike around those Carmelite beaches I had ventured to live upon when I was a child growing up in San Diego. I had visited Carmel infrequently enough to be left with a strong impression of an inevitable sense of home, and even had detailed plans to own an animal sanctuary called the Carmel Zoo. I would learn as I got older I inhabited an expression Jeffers gave language to when he remarked that he and his wife Una Jeffers had “found their inevitable place” when they came to Carmel from the East Coast. While reviewing what I composed earlier in the day, I observed rock formations and the compositions of sands and shells, walked through cypress and companion lichens near the rock of gulls at Point Lobos, watched the sunset fold in its pacific crease each evening from some vantage on the Carmel littorals.

I remember the first time I felt a deep sense of understanding about what Jeffers communicates in his poetry, and exactly where I was when I had this revealation. I was on a solo camping trip at Point Mugu on the Coast of California between Los Angeles and Malibu in January 2019. It was evening, and I was sitting under a tunnel on the sand wherein the waves of the pacific passed through to confiscate the sediment, and I was letting flowing tide come to where I was seated until I was doused, as I read my copy of Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems (pub. 1965), holding fragile pages marked with in-fragile words above shallow water. I received this copy from Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, the President of the Tor House Foundation. He gave me the book a few days before when I went on a tour of Tor House and for the first time played Jeffers’s piano as he listened.

It was during these few days in my life at Mugu when I remember being for the first time truly overwhelmed with how meaningless my life seemed and how meaningful the potential of it was at the same time; how significant I wanted to become despite my inalienable inadequacy. I somehow felt resolved to set some of Jeffers’s poems to music one day. I was slated to release my first album, To Gallery a Cloud Ground, in April 2019 but under the tunnel became dismayed by how insufficient the lyrics of that album were as poems in of themselves. I was developing a new premise for my poetry that necessitated that the song lyrics were powerful as poems, not just parasites to melody. Jeffers had helped catalyze that premise, which founds my work to this day. I presume I felt as lousy about my first released songs as Jeffers did about his early work, which he despised. Under the tunnel, clinging and weeping his verse, I was wet from the sea brine and the stinging salts of my own tears.

It is my hope that Birth-Dues catalyzes an interest in Robinson Jeffers and a revival of his vatic work. I aimed in this cycle to construct melodies that might be remembered by listeners, so that they too could participate in a revival of his recitation through embodiment of his poems via singing. I frequently sing these songs while working and walking. Most memorably I sang them daily last summer while constructing a stone wall in North Bennington, Vermont, a process through which I felt a deep sense of communion with Jeffers.

I know that his poetry does not need my music: I need his poetry. I have not been able to resist giving some of his poems musical interpretations. A byproduct of my inspiration is the hope that my interpretations may inspire listeners to develop their own relationships with his poetry.

It will mean a tremendous amount to me if you will support Birth-Dues by spreading the word about Of Flightless Doves, which will be the principal channel by which news about the album will be shared. Thank you for your attention.

Yours,

Ethan Koss-Smith