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Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

La Môme et de Rouge

January 2, 2013 by Jan Herman

Date: April 26, 2012 11:43:35 AM GMT+02:00
Had a message from Marianne Faithfull . . .
. . . ‘Isn’t it time you wrote me another song?’ I said ‘What do you want it to be about?’
she said she’d been reading a book about Edith Piaf and was gripped by it.
I said I’d have a look. Attach result.
— Heathcote Williams
(to Gerard Bellaart, publisher of Cold Turkey Press)

Front cover of four-page folio.

“Lovers,” Piaf said proudly, “now go to bed with my songs,
Parisians make love to Piaf when they wish.
But since Paris is making love more than once in a night
I have to keep serving it a new musical dish!”

“Death does not exist,” she’d laugh then she’d sing,
“Because you can live forever in a song,”
And her emotional power crackled like lightning,
In a voice that never seemed to go wrong —

And with it she’d happily celebrate wrongdoers,
Like ‘Le Contrabandier,’
For to her such a smuggler was ‘a sort of poet’
And she’d often have criminals to stay.

“They pay me with warmth, I pay them with songs,
Tu vois, when I’m Piaf I’m no longer on earth,
Singing’s the way that I escape to another world
Where unloved orphans enjoy a new birth.”

[Excerpted from the 22-stanza poem. Cover design by Bellaart.]

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Filed Under: Literature, Music

Jan Herman

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.
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Several books of poems have been published in recent years by Moloko Print, Statdlichter Presse, Phantom Outlaw Editions, and Cold Turkey … [Read More...]

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