A Secret About What a Poem Can Do to Us

I am returning to Antonio Machado’s poem, “Last Night As I Was Sleeping,” because I found yet another interpretation of the poem. In this case, not a different translation but a kind of collaboration with the poem to create something new. Michelle Bloom, a singer songwriter, has taken the poem and transformed it into a song. She’s used Robert Bly’s translation, but then twice, between stanzas, she’s inserted a chorus that she herself has written.

She introduces her song this way:

Inspired by the idea of making a moment, a “We” out of the quiet, internal act of reading a poem, this song seemed to come out of a dusty road in the Spanish countryside that Machado walked with the children he taught in a one-room schoolhouse. In the chorus I imagined Machado or The Poet, Universal, to suddenly interrupt the poem and turn toward the reader, eager to tell us a secret about what a poem can do to us, how it becomes not words on a page, but a living moment, embodied.

I love this idea of an imagined interruption.  She imagines Machado or a Poet interrupting.  At the same time, it’s she herself interrupting and offering us something new.

How lovely is that.  She’s taken the “quiet, internal act of reading a poem” and used this to add another layer to the poem.  That secret hinted at—what a poem can do—if we begin to sing it ourselves, and feel it.

See also:
Last Night As I Was Sleeping

The audio and lyrics for her song are no longer available. The photo is from her her old site, All Things Bloom.

She does have an album on Spotify.