The Heart Is Strange

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Reading Berryman’s early poetry is like playing a guessing game: who does he sound like now? He is Thomas here, and then he is Yeats; here he is Auden and here he is Eliot. His titles echo others; he is borrowing his syntax and vocabulary; he is a young man, taking what is good, trying out what works. It is by walking through this funhouse of mirrors and influence that he became himself, for across his career and culminating in The Dream Songs, Berryman will turn mimicry to his advantage and invent a poetics that is also an echo chamber. He will find a voice that is recognizably his own—perhaps the most distinctive voice of 20th-century American poetry—but he will find it in the voices of others. As he wrote in an early poem: The heartbreak is familiar but the heart is strange. The pieces come from elsewhere, but their density is new. A slang expression and a strange name; two characters, at least one of which is mysterious; meter jumping between iambs and trochees, and a fluid, unusual syntax. The gap in the first line appears to convert an intransitive into a transitive verb, although of course it doesn’t; rather, it only thwarts our expectation of reliable, decipherable grammar. What is Henry hiding? Or where? Perhaps he’s hiding (something) inside that space in the line. We move from past to present tense, and by the second half of the third line the pronouns have dissolved. The first single from the album, "Heaven Give Me Words", was co-written with 1980s synth-pop star Howard Jones [6] and reached the UK Top 40. The album was not as successful as A Secret Wish, only peaking at number 46 in the UK. A second single, "Only One Word", stalled at number 71 in the UK. Berlin Columbia Theater (2nd November), München Schlachthof (4th November), Frankfurt Nachtleben (5th November), Bochum Zeche (6th November), Hamburg Kent Club (8th November) Propaganda is a German synth-pop band formed in Düsseldorf in 1982. They signed a recording contract with ZTT Records as early as 1983 and released their first single "Dr Mabuse" in 1984. Followed by their debut studio album, the critically acclaimed A Secret Wish, in 1985. Two of the album's singles, " Dr. Mabuse" and " Duel", were UK Top 30 hits. A second studio album, 1234 (1990), was recorded with a markedly different line-up and released by Virgin Records to less success. [1] There have been several partial reformations of the group in the 21st century, with the original vocalists currently active as xPropaganda.

The Morning Call, 29 Mar 1986". The Morning Call. 29 March 1986. p.59 . Retrieved 23 December 2020. Before the year was out, Thein was asked to leave the band due to musical differences. With Mertens now filling the gap left by his departure, the band forged ahead with recording its follow-up single and debut album. However both of these were to be delayed as a result of the unexpectedly huge success of ZTT's most famous signing, Frankie Goes to Hollywood. [2] As the label was still in its infancy, ZTT was forced to spend all its limited resources on promoting and marketing Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and this also meant that Trevor Horn was not available to produce Propaganda's album. [2] Stephen Lipson, one of Horn's established studio engineers, took his place along with Andy Richards playing keyboards, but the delay meant that Propaganda's second single, the more pop-oriented " Duel", did not surface until April 1985. [2] Perhaps the band's most recognisable release, it was also their highest-charting single in the UK, reaching number 21. The band made its single appearance on the flagship BBC music programme Top of the Pops in June of that year. The legend of German quartet PROPAGANDA was etched into the psyche of the music cognoscenti with the 1985 release of ‘A Secret Wish’ on ZTT, a classic of the electronic era which heralded the advent of sampling and digital synthesis. They stake a claim to this territory from the outset, with The Night’s roar of synths evoking ZTT’s mid-80s glory days and its stabs of synthetic strings, not to mention Terry Edwards’ muted trumpets, surely intended to recall the tense feast that was their debut’s opener. Chasing Utopia’s simmering keyboards prolong this pleasure, too, with Lipson’s guitar another nod to earlier production styles and muttered German texts underlining the band’s Teutonic roots.Berryman has not been canonized, quite; he has not continued to receive the respect, even awe, accorded to his great contemporaries Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. This may be because he appears a little less serious than them. He is certainly funnier than they are, constantly mirthful about the process of critical celebration and literary canonization. “[L]iterature bores me, especially great literature,” complains “ Dream Song 14.”“Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes / as bad as achilles,” it continues, and the joke is only half that Henry is no Achilles. It is also in the mismatch of classical literature and teenage ennui, balanced by the voice.

The Heart is Strange’ is released by ZTT on 20th May 2022 as in CD, 2CD, vinyl LP, red vinyl LP, Bluray audio and digital formatsIn May 1985, with Frankie Goes to Hollywood becoming tax exiles in Ireland, the band effectively headlined "The Value of Entertainment", a series of showcase gigs of ZTT signings, held at the Ambassadors Theatre in London. The shows also featured Art of Noise, Anne Pigalle, Andrew Poppy and Instinct. Propaganda were joined on stage by former Simple Minds bassist Derek Forbes and ex- Japan drummer Steve Jansen. [4] 1985: A Secret Wish [ edit ] The group relocated to the United Kingdom and released the single " Dr. Mabuse", named after the fictional character made famous by filmmaker Fritz Lang. The single reached the Top 30 in the UK Singles Chart, [2] and the Top 10 in Germany. The group appeared on various TV shows in the UK, including Channel 4's The Tube. Here, as well as performing "Dr. Mabuse", the group also gave one of its few performances of a cover version of Throbbing Gristle's song " Discipline". [3] While the distinct pop approach of ‘The Heart Is Strange’ perhaps is missing the gothic industrial spike of Ralf Dörper and the classically schooled eccentricity of Michael Mertens that added some of the character to ‘A Secret Wish’, where it does not disappoint is vocally and sonically; fans of PROPAGANDA and ZTT will relish and savour this thoughtfully crafted work. The first week of July 1985 finally saw the release of the band's debut album, A Secret Wish. [2] which was written by Mertens and Dörper. After receiving considerable critical acclaim and some commercial success, it reached number 16 on the UK Albums Chart. The album was followed by another single, " p:Machinery", in August 1985, [2] which only reached number 50 in the UK, but becoming a bigger hit in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland and even being used in the hit US TV Show Miami Vice (1986 episode: The Fix). [5] The 12-inch version of this release caused controversy (even within the group) as Paul Morley thought it was a good idea to have the sleeve feature a quote by writer J. G. Ballard, praising the activities of the German extremist group Red Army Faction. Ariola, who distributed ZTT's releases in Germany, refused to carry the 12" as a result, so the quote was changed on the German release to another by Ballard, on the aesthetic perfection of German suburbs. [ citation needed] Maybe,” Freytag suggests, “Propaganda represents a different kind of 80s. It’s not what we associate with … the Duran Duran side of the 80s.”

The year 1986 started positively—the single "p:Machinery" gained the number 1 chart position in Spain (for one week)—but ended in disaster. Horn had been alerted to Propaganda by NME journalist Paul Morley, with whom he was starting a new record label, Zang Tuum Tumb. The fact that its name came from futurist artist Filippo Marinetti’s onomatopoeic description of the sound of warfare underscored its leftfield, arty approach to pop, with which Propaganda fitted perfectly. “Paul liked the music, but it was also the combination of the name, the weird Germans and the really hard beat,” says Freytag. “It was a bit mad. Paul and Trevor, they were really intrigued by the thought of what they could make with people like us: four quite experimental, strange Germans. That was also appealing for us.”

Original Propaganda vocalists return with legendary producer to gift us an album that only gets better with every listen.

Berryman’s career might be understood as a rebuke to this. In 1934, he wrote his first surviving poems: four Shakespearean sonnets, to celebrate his mother’s 40th birthday. The following year he tried to seduce a Barnard student by writing sonnets for her, and when in February 1947 he began an affair with a married woman he met in Princeton, he turned again to this form. “I wanted a familiar form in which to put the new,” he wrote in his journal. “Clearly a sonnet sequence. And this gave me also a wonderful to me sense of continuity with lovers dead.”Singles [ edit ] List of singles, with selected chart positions, showing year released and album name Produce Like A Pro (13 June 2022). "Modern Mixing for Timeless Production | Stephen Lipson Talks xPropaganda". YouTube . Retrieved 4 November 2023. Lipson says that a new manager didn’t help. “We spent a fortune doing [A Secret Wish], but it was so worth doing. The manager wouldn’t see it that way because they hadn’t lived the journey.” Sinclair, Paul (15 February 2022). "xPropaganda / The Heart Is Strange. New album available on SDE-exclusive blu-ray audio". SuperDeluxeEdition . Retrieved 4 November 2023.