A poem by Paul Kelly: ‘My lyrics are often stolen from songs, poems, novels, conversations’

When I first started listening to hip-hop in the 80s I was struck by its parallels to folk music. Sampling and storytelling are at the heart of both. The first songs I learned to play were folk songs and it’s a well I’ve always drawn from, where lines, phrases, verses and melodies swim around from song to song. The tradition isn’t fixed. Like hip-hop it’s always recombining.

And so my songwriting has been a motley business, with lyrics often stolen from other sources – songs, poems, novels, conversations. If I steal a little the song stays mine, if I steal a chunk then I become a co-writer, often with people I don’t know. This is what happened with All Those Smiling Faces. Two lines from Dana Gioia’s beautiful poem, Finding a Box of Family Letters, swam into the song’s chorus. So I got in touch with Dana, sent him the song, asked his permission and made a deal.

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But Dana wasn’t the only source in this case. Two other poems hover behind the song. The Letters of the Dead, by the inimitable Wislawa Szymborska. And Heredity by Thomas Hardy, whose poetry has been a companion of mine for more than 40 years. My last verse is basically Tom’s poem recombined:

I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.

The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance – that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die

Tom’s dead now. Wislawa, too. But they’re still leaping over oblivion. My favourite story about Tom is of his wife writing a letter to a friend, saying, “Tom’s in a very good mood today. He’s just written the most melancholy poem!”

Tom liked talking to the dead, too.

All Those Smiling Faces by Paul Kelly and Dana Gioia

I’ve been talking to the dead
With this photo album here in my bed
Picnics, parties long ago
Some are strangers, many I know
All those smiling faces

Now here’s a wedding and there’s the bride
And my handsome dad smiling by her side
Just out of the frame I guess a band is playing
And I wonder what words to him she’s saying
All those smiling faces

Second row, third from the right
Young Uncle Jim who got called up to fight
Beside him Meg, his fiance
Pretty Meg waited for a never-come day

Get on the floor and dance!
You don’t have forever
Get out there and dance
Soon we’ll all be together!

There’s Auntie Pat and her two beaux
The one behind her is the one she chose
Coming out of the water, they’re all dripping wet
Oh, the jilted one doesn’t know it yet
All those smiling faces

Down the years the family face
Keeps jumping around from place to place
A look, a shape, a nose, an eye
That everlasting thing that’s never gonna die

Get on the floor and dance!
You don’t have forever
Get out there and dance
Soon we’ll all be together!

All those smiling faces
All those smiling faces

• All Those Smiling Faces appears on Paul Kelly’s new album Fever Longing Still, which will be released on 1 November

• Australian Poetry Month runs throughout August, including festivals, events, workshops and a commissioned poem of the day brought to you by Red Room Poetry. Find out more here