Belonging To The Song: Andrew Calhoun Returns To PoemAlley With More Words, Music & Perspectives

Folk singer and poet Andrew Calhoun returns tonight after two years to regale PoemAlley and Curley’s with readings and live music from 2011’s Grapevine, a solo-performed tribute to formative influences like Martin Carthy on his life and music, featuring, respectively, restored and historically updated performances of “Oh, Susanna” and “Patrick Henry” and 2013’s Living Room (with vocal contributions by his daughter Casey). Here’s a duet performance from 2013 of Andrew’s original composition “Peach Song” below:

 Both of these titles, along with the Scottish ballad collection Telfer’s Cows (2004), Tiger Tattoo (2003) and 1993’s Hope, among many others, are available through Andrew’s artists’ cooperative Waterbug Records. Check out his own and the music of other bardic artists at the 23-year-old label here.

Broadly praised over the years by critics from the Chicago Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press-Dispatch to Performing Songwriter for his keen use of imagery and the sensitivity of his challenging, perspective-jumping performances, Andrew’s writing also embodies these attributes, collected in titles like 1989’s Twenty-Four Poems. Suffused with careful comparisons, the piece below delights in love’s paradoxical wont to leave us each unmoored in time while also honoring the personal history of the beloved, expressed in acts both gentle and dramatic:

When We Make Love

© Andrew Calhoun

It is the sweetness of raspberries growing
Full in the sunshine
Near a salt tossing ocean
Easing up and down between continents,
Pregnant with mystery

When we make love
Sunken treasure rises to the surface
Breaking free, rocking endlessly,
Blissfully disappearing,
Giving itself away

When we make love
It's the hush in the theatre
Before the curtain
The promise made and kept in the same moment
A poem composed in a dream
Remembered in a dream

When we make love
We belong to the song
Where I kiss your resistance
Through halls of childhood
Through walls of adolescence
Through trials of womanhood
And at last you know

With our bodies exploding in gentleness
With great winds whistling the treetops,
Quick as a tomahawk,
You and I
Together
In past, present and future

You know
It is you that I love
When we make love

The influence of Woody Allen and Groucho Marx comes through The Trilogy Trilogy (2012), Andrew’s first book of humor, containing numerous vignettes with intriguing and easily-relatable titles like “Because I’m Neurotic” and “Sweating the Big Stuff”.