Lenny Solomon – Under My Hat (Album Review as Poetry)

Solomon Cento

Passing night, calm and still in the land of the whippoorwill,
spring’s again upon us, snow’s melting high above.
Whose words are these? I just don’t know.

I’ve been making cars for almost 20 years:
in Susquehanna County we work our fingers to the bone —
it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.

I’ve played my songs in many old towns,
but it was fate I was waiting by your front gate.
(The cat in the hat had a lover’s look complete with bedroom eyes.)

Here’s the story about Jane and Hal:
She’s the leader of the choir, a teacher at the school.
His grandpa hit the beach on D-Day, his father fought in Vietnam.

Dan was a corporation, an overnight sensation,
trembling desperation in every word he spoke.
The prisoner was in shackles and not the iron kind.

[This poem contains the first line in each of the 15 songs on Under My Hat. All lyrics by Lenny Solomon.]

Clerihew for Lenny

Lenny Solomon
is certainly no hollow man.
He sings against fracking
and his guitar licks are never lacking.

Under My Hat available for purchase.

Bio:
Lenny Solomon began his career in the late 1960s. A fixture at the now defunct Idler Coffeehouse in Harvard Square, Cambridge, he regularly performed there on Friday nights for over eight years. The Idler was a training ground for such music luminaries as Geoff Bartley, Paul Rishell, Spider John Koerner, and Ric Ocasek. During these years as a solo performer he shared bills with many name performers including Chris Smither, Carolyn Hester, Bonnie Raitt, and Spider John. For many years music lay in the background of his life.

From the 1980s through the mid-1990s, Solomon continued to write songs, but rarely performed in public. He chose rather to raise his family and work in environmental research at Harvard University. From 1978 though 2009 he managed a research program that investigated ozone depletion in the stratosphere and more general climate change issues. In 1997 Solomon got back into performing and formed a folk/country band appropriately enough called Solomon. Performing his original material, Solomon has released four CDs.

Clerihew – A light verse quatrain of two couplets rhyming aabb, invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). The form parodies both the limerick and the eulogy.

Cento – From the Latin word for “patchwork,” the cento (or collage poem) is a poetic form made up of lines from poems by other poets. Though poets often borrow lines from other writers and mix them in with their own, a true cento is composed entirely of lines from other sources. Early examples can be found in the works of Homer and Virgil.