Rain in Our Door: Duets with Robert Johnson
AUTHOR
Diann Blakely
TRANSLATOR
Greil Marcus
In a series of “call and responses” whose various narrators engage in what might be called duets with Robert Johnson. With the refreshing and uncanny empathy for which she is admired and respected as a critic and poet, Blakely offers a fresh attention to Johnson’s music (her poems take their titles from his extraordinary compositions) in relation to her own abiding concerns with what she once called, in an essay about Eleanor Ross Taylor, “oh, dear God, let us outgrow those terms of race, class, and gender, but for now they’re what we’ve got―the hand life deals us.”
Reviews
“Caviare―the kind made from blackeyed peas, of course―to the general, these poems!” ―Richard Howard “[In these duets,] I feel a fearlessness, a nakedness, at once breathtaking and courageous. In that may lie the secret, should there be one: to discover, to pursue, that which compels us, galvanizes, obsesses.” ―Herbert Morris “With the refreshing and uncanny empathy for which she is admired and respected as a critic and poet, Blakely offers a fresh attention to Johnson’s music (her poems take their titles from his extraordinary compositions), . . . allowing the various, often contradictory cries of mothers, fathers, sons, daughters―across time, race, art form, and culture―to erupt through her own.”
―Lisa Russ Spaar, “Arts & Academe,” Chronicle of Higher Education
“For years, Blakely has written what she calls ‘duets’ with Robert Johnson: her poems visiting his songs, his songs breathing in her poems. [In “Dead Shrimp Blues,” with comment by Spaar], she has Tennessee Williams and Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof cross paths with the blues singer in Clarksdale, Mississippi, so she can address him directly, circling around the imagery in one of at least two Johnson songs built around a metaphor for impotence. She writes like a window-peeper: ‘I’ll undress / Down to my humid white-girl slip.’ Spaar follows the way Blakely’s words curl around Johnson’s until it can seem as if Johnson’s are curling around hers; she rescues the phrase ‘posted out’ from the murk of Johnson’s song so you can hear it crack in Blakely’s.”
―Greil Marcus
“Real Life Rock Top Ten,”
—The Believer
"She believed in le mot juste, in measure and music, was a master of the sonnet and villanelle, but also experimented with a longer, wilder line and worked for many years on a still unpublished book, Rain in Our Door: Duets with Robert Johnson, which may well prove the ultimate white southerner’s poem that attempts to cross the great racial divide, join the chamber band to the blues ensemble, and, in a direct political sense, enact an aesthetic and cultural unity."
―Rodney Jones
Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a broader framework of culture and politics.
Diann Blakely was an American poet, essayist, editor, and critic. She taught at Belmont University, Harvard University, Vanderbilt University, led workshops at two Vermont College residencies, and served as senior instructor and the first poet-in-residence at the Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, Tennessee.