In "Preludes for Prepared Piano," Estill Pollock takes as his inspiration Duke Ellington's album of 1957, "Such Sweet Thunder." Ellington's compositions, in turn, are his tribute to Shakespeare's works as he experienced them at the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival. Each of Ellington's pieces is a musical rendition of some Shakespearean conflict, scene, mood, or personality.
Pollock's section titles are drawn from the titles of Ellington's compositions. The first title, "Such Sweet Thunder," is quoted from "Midsummer Night's Dream," Act IV, Scene 1. Here's the relevant passage, starting at line 107:
We will, fair queen, up to the mountain's top
And mark the musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction.
Hippolyta: I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bear
With hounds of Sparta. Never did I hear
Such gallant chiding; for, besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seem'd all one mutual cry. I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.
In a sense, this passage describes an aesthetic: not the music of delicate harmonies, of balance and resolution, but the music of discord, of incongruence. The messy, unresolved music of discord could describe some forms of American jazz, but it could also describe the movement of "Preludes for Prepared Piano."
Stylistically, Pollock's poem has a lot of surface roughness—it's untidy, incongruous, unfinished in an American, Walt Whitman sort of way. It's elusive and allusive, and shows Pollock's usual flare for suggestive, even humorous, phrasing. The poem is, as Ellington's album is, a montage: Pollock plays off scenes from Shakespeare's plays, draws from personal and theatrical experience, works in a bit of jazz, combines the archaic and the techno-modern, and is playful all around.
Pollock's poem repays study. For example, in the first section, Pollock takes his cue from the hunting dogs of "Midsummer Night's Dream" and runs with them (so to speak), quoting "one mutual cry" to describe the hounds' whining, squealing, and yipping in the woods. Then the poet sees his dogs in the night sky, the greyhounds of Boötes. The last two adjectives in the section are a good example of Pollock's incongruence: the primitive combined with the techno-modern, "feral" and "hi fi."
Pollock is capable of writing tight traditional sonnets. However, in "Sonnet for Caesar" and "Sonnet for Hank Cinq" (drawn from "Julius Caesar" and "Henry V," respectively) he follows Ellington's lead in treating the sonnet in the archaic sense of "sonnetto," "little song," a synonym of the modern Italian "canzonetta." And like Ellington's pieces, Pollock's lines are long and slow, keeping to their own pace.
In "Lady Mac," Ellington describes his tribute to Lady Macbeth as a "ragtime in her soul." Pollock begins his mélange with the language of jazz, shifts to wry commentary on the play, and brings Macbeth into a present of sexual and psychological complications.
In "Sonnet in Search of a Moor," Pollock continues the complications of the previous section. He starts with the play itself, but soon shifts to "Paradise in Harlem," a 1939 crime film out of the Harlem Renaissance, combining gangsters, jazz and blues, and a passion for "Othello."
"The Telecasters" are the three "weird sisters" who telecast Macbeth's future. In this section and the following, the ever-relevant tensions and violations of time and place are reenacted through various forms of art—theatre, poetry, and, of course, music. In "Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down)"—taken from Puck's maneuvers in "Midsummer Night's Dream," Act III, Scene 2—Pollock invokes the language of the comedy with "here comes my messenger" and "foolish mortals," and reminds us of its idyllic play, good humor, and movement.
" Sonnet for Sister Kate" alludes to Katherina in "The Taming of the Shrew." In this section, as well as "Star-Crossed Lovers" and "Half the Fun" (the latter referring to Cleopatra's separation from Antony), Pollock takes up the ambivalences of love and desire, of distanced relationships and "the listening position."
Each section starts a new movement, a prelude, in which we hear multiple themes in "mutual cry." Yet, as Pollock says in "Madness in Great Ones," his riff on Hamlet, there is also a "wordless presence" in this poem.
In his final section, "Circle of Fourths" (referring to Shakespeare's four great contributions to tragedy, comedy, historical drama, and the sonnet), Pollock takes us beyond the "sacred boundaries" where everything "is outlined in black," where "the rest is silence." As long as the music lasts—"droney, modal counterpoint"—we listen to "the simultaneous telling of stories," tunes that paradoxically place us in the confusions and separations of our world, even as they suggest transcendences of time and place.
What Estill Pollock says about music could equally apply to his own preludes: "The work is an inspiration for the shape of the mouth." Like Puck's magic, Pollock charms us with his music and wakes us to mortal time.