Frank Hudson: Recent Episodes
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Poet William Butler Yeats had interests and a life that spanned times and poetic styles. His earliest poems whole-heartedly exhibit 19th century romanticism and prosody, but like the English Pre-Raphaelites he sought to vividly revive elements of the deeper past while doing so. His interests beyond poetry ranged as well. Last time I performed Yeats, I mentioned he had deep interests in esoteric magic, and yet the same man had a firm grounding in civic poetry while supporting an Irish cultural revival and independence from England. A poet with an already established style, he crossed paths with the American and British Modernists early in their revolution, and his later poetry shows that rather than getting his back up about their changes, he adapted some of their make-it-new approaches. Yeats employed influential American Modernist critic Ezra Pound during Modernism’s rise, and while he dipped his toes into fascist movements,* unlike Pound he seems to have drawn back from that.
Today’s piece, “Meru,” is a late poem in Yeats’ career. I find it balancing the worldly and spiritual, and on no more authority than my own necessary to come to grips to perform it, I see it as commenting on the rise of rapacious authoritarians contemporary with its composition in the 1930s.** Here’s a link to the poem as Yeats published it.
“Meru” is a sonnet, a rather regular one structurally. Though the word we use for this lyric poetry form literally means “little song,” many sonnets are hard for me to perform with music. Their length is good, and lyric poetry in this context means that they focus on a compressed scope of time and experience — but the form rarely uses refrains, a powerful, almost indispensable, tactic for song attractiveness. Seeking a good musical structure, I divided Yeats one-stanza poem into four verses, with refrains after verses two and four.
The song form I reformed Yeats’ sonnet into. Note the chords shown are what I fretted on guitar, but I used a capo on fret 3, so the piano, bass, and the song song sound in Eb.
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What do I think, as I chose to perform this, the poem conveys?
I like Yeats opening here, with its circular word-choice of “hooped,” for describing civilization’s shared beliefs. I’m unaware that this is any kind of established British Isles idiom, and the choice of this scene-setting word seems to invoke something like a key-ring or perhaps a wooden barrel or cask — and in the last image, that’s a construction that can fall apart. The opening statement continues to say civilization’s order is only an illusion, but the first three lines end by reminding us that such creations of the human mind are none-the-less great movers of reality and life. I’ll come back to that at the end today.
The second, four-line, group is remarkable in its ferocity, and I think it’s a description of mankind’s often perverse desire to gather more power, more wealth, and perhaps something they vaingloriously ascribe as rough justice while doing so. The ending line of this section serves as my first refrain: “The desolation of reality” that results from this.
Third segment, as I read it, brings in a distinct element of Yeats’ occult beliefs, starting by reminding us that the “desolation of reality” is a repeating motif of history and the fall of empires. But what’s with the two mountains introduced? Everest is Earth’s highest mountain, but it’s remoteness and location in Tibet links it with a late 19th century form of occultism: Theosophy. Theosophy is too large a subject to go into here,*** but its founder posited that certain Ascended Masters located in Tibet held onto ancient secret wisdom becoming super-human in the process. Mount Meru is more obscure to most readers I suspect: it’s a symbolic mountain, and like other symbols such as Mount Ararat, the Garden of Eden, or the entrance to the underworld, it is not an actual fixed map point, but is often referred to as being in some part of the Himalayan region. Some read the poem’s plural hermits as two hermits, one-per-mountain, and Theosophy holds to two current Ascended Masters.
I suspect these Theosophical details were in Yeats’ mind as he wrote his poem, but I don’t know if he ever wrote about the genesis of this sonnet. And luckily for most readers (and listeners today) you don’t need to know any of that. After a description of desolation of nations, I think the image of two or more hermits, ascetics living naked in snow and ice shelters in famously remote places stands as an image of the other-worldly mystic surviving with nothing but belief and the knowledge that the world’s disasters are part of some reoccurring process driven by human greed for power and wealth. Is this removed survival our fall-back in today’s world of raging authoritarians, blinded in their ravening?
And once more, I suspect the aged Yeats was thinking of his own age, of the rising of fascist authoritarians then, not just specifics of Theosophy — as a poet, one uses the images in one’s cupboard. This aged singer certainly thinks of those men and the desolation they cause as I sing Yeats poem this month. The poem ends — and I refrain on this — with a twist on the old saw: “it’s always darkest before the dawn.” Chillingly, naked in the snow, Yeats has as his dawn consolations that all tyrants (and alas, all mankind’s) glory and monuments are gone.****
Is this fate? Is this prophecy? Is this inevitable? I’m no Ascended Master — if you are, you tell me. I’m just a composer drafted by words and asked to sing them. But I promised I’d come back to the “manifold illusion” of peace, of some sustainable rule without unleashed tyranny. “Man’s life is thought” the poem said. A diverted American poet turned President once spoke of a conception, a particular manifold illusion, imagined on: “Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” If enough believe, the mage’s trick works. I’d rather it be a kind trick.
You can hear my musical performance of Yeats’ “Meru” with the audio player gadget below. Has the audio player become subject to the desolation of reality? No, just some ways of reading this blog suppress it. This highlighted link will conjure up a new tab with it’s own audio player so you can hear it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Meru.mp3.
*I’m not a Yeats scholar, and there are surely many who know more about the man and these political matters. While disappointing, I was not surprised to see he found some connections in fascistic groups, as trappings of cultural nationalism and nostalgia for some mythic past were widespread then, just as they remain in the fascistic nationalists now crowding under the aged wings of my country’s self-fancied mad king.
**Because of the later date of publication, this poem may not be in the Public Domain in the US, and this entirely non-commercial project almost always uses work in that class out of respect for author’s rights. I’m making an exception here out of a renewed commitment to civic poetry in the current world.
***Here’s more info on Theosophy if you want to wade in deeper. Having had some interest in esoteric beliefs as a young person, I carried some knowledge of it as I encountered this poem. As the Wiki article points out, Theosophy continues to influence various “New Age” ideas, but I’m not a believer.
****Some readers of the poem hold the “His” in the last line to be a godhead. I’m not sure why that would be. Could it be the then traditional capitol letter at the beginning of the poetic line leads to that reading? Or is it some element of Theosophical mythology? There’s another, non-cap, “his” in the poem, and I read that pronoun, along with its partner, to refer to elements of mankind.
It occurred to me: should I try to sing a version of Bob Dylan’s “I Pity the Poor Immigrant?” Afterall, I, without a plan, seem to be performing songs from Dylan’s 1967 LP John Wesley Harding recently, and that song is one of the more noted ones from the album. And immigrants, and immigration, are currently a preoccupation of my country’s inept and callous administration.
Dylan might have been writing of his own family’s immigrant history in this song — being second-generation from his grandparents emigration from the Russian Empire and Turkey. Furthermore, he grew up in the iron-ore mining area of Minnesota, a place full of folks with wide-ranging immigrant backgrounds. Given Dylan’s, and folk-song’s in general concern for the underdog, one might expect this to be a song of empathy for these close-in immigrants.
Yet when Dylan sang his song in 1967, still a young man,* there’s a duality in its presentation. The immigrants within it are portrayed then as poor not only in wealth, but also in spirit. For all of Dylan’s genius, the voice that sings this song largely speaks about how the immigrants, who’d be the elders of his town and family, are stunted in their outlook. Dylan may be a genius, but this could be the disappointed vision of a young person who sees the faults and failures there. That’s what many young people, even those who aren’t geniuses, do, and it’s an important task.
His singing on this 1967 version is calm, not accusatory — at moments even sounding concerned as he decries the immigrants fallen state. If the harmonicas play the skeleton keys to the song’s interior, the passionate timbre of his playing on that instrument in the song may well be saying he feels sorrowful about the situation. The performance doesn’t lay any blame on poverty, exploitation, or the hard road of feeling the need to leave one’s homeland to find succor with strangers. Dylan, whatever he’s expressing here, likely knows these factors. Perhaps he assumes we do too.
I think Dylan’s aim was to confound the expected here — to write a great song instead of a good one, some mere piece of civic songcraft.
I’m not a young man, and I would have to go back to relatives I never knew, and who therefore can’t be blamed for imperfect mentorship or spiritual poverty. And I know from my life, and in my time, what immigrants contribute to my country. Some of course are noticeable success stories, but I think too of the many who do the hardest and least-rewarded work of the nation. I’m hesitant to pick a bone with the quality of their spiritual insight while they are trudging through unglamourous work — but even more so in 2025 when they also get slammed by disreputable politicians as criminals, scofflaws, swindlers, and parasites. I’m sure there are some immigrants who are those things, but I’m also quite sure that those slathering on those broad charges include in themselves a good measure of those failings — and are so eagerly pointing at immigrants to divert focus on that.
So, this is how I came to create this new performance of Dylan’s song, one for our time and situation. I changed only a few words, but by phrasing and refocusing my aim from Dylan’s original performance, I tried to illuminate those opposing scapegoating forces to the immigrant’s lot.** I may not even have made a (downgraded) good song of it, but I got some things off my chest I felt I had to say.
I can’t identify all the sources for the pictures used here. Alas, my stock photo library was bereft of any suitable pictures.
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*When he wrote this, Dylan had only young children, ones not yet able to judge him and his generation’s failings. Has an older Dylan, now a grandfather, revisited this song? AFAIK, no. Expert Dylanologists may have more info, but Wikipedia says it was last performed during the latter legs of the Rolling Thunder tour many decades ago, and then as a bizarre rollicking up-tempo jaunt.
As I said recently when a reader/listener pointed out that I may have completely misread Blake’s “Holy Thursday,” my theories about what was behind Dylan’s creation of this song are in no way meant to be definitive. They are just what I hear in it, and feel free to think my new recasting of the song is a sacrilege. I’ll plead that one part of Dylan’s genius is that he sees fit to approach his own work in highly different ways, and I’m just doing what I learned from the master. You should feel something to sing a song, and this is what I felt. Feel different? Sing the song yourself.
Even fewer words in my plan than you’ll hear in the video, as some other different words slipped in by accident while singing. Here’s a link to the original lyric. Changing the song’s concluding couplet is the only indictable premeditated felony, and the video underlines my approach to make the sins that Dylan’s 1967 performance directed at only the immigrants as more of a dialectic. An accidental, unintended, change that I regret in this version: “Shatter like a glass” is inferior to the original “Shatter like the glass,” and looses the possible intra-album connection with the glass that has fingers pressed up against it in “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.”
Unlike its Songs of Innocence partner, William Blake’s other “Holy Thursday” poem has no plausible ambiguity in its view of childhood poverty. One reader wrote to remind me that the Songs of Innocence “Holy Thursday” poem shows a peaceful, happy scene that I misread. They could be right! Allen Ginsberg famously thought Blake appeared to him and instructed the later poet by reading “Ah, Sunflower” to him, but what instructs me to see undercurrents in the first Holy Thursday poem is reading more about what we believe we know about Blake’s beliefs. Reader Alan also reminds us the two poems’ connections should be examined — and that’s what I’ll do today, along with sharing a performance of Blake’s second song about Ascension Day.
As Blake illuminated and printed these two poems. One of the things I always admired about him: he was a self-contained, DIY, artist who learned what he needed to do to manifest his art.
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Let’s jump to the second poem, the one from Songs of Experience.* Childhood poverty is an undercurrent in the first — would Blake even expect his readers to know that the children in the first poem are charity cases (many modern readers do not) — but poverty is foreground in the second. Blake takes on the mode of a Biblical prophet in this second poem and charges against the civic and/or religious state pour down from the start of it. Holy Thursday happens in springtime, but it’s “eternal winter” here. Its final stanza is preaching that this is not the natural order, and that in a polity of mankind’s natural state, the Earth’s fecundity would provide food for all.
I’m not sure we invariably think of Blake, for whom a spiritual element is clearly present, as a writer of civic poetry, as a political creature — yet modern scholars have subsequently delved into that element of the poet. Ginsberg, a civic poet of my youth, recognized a fellow civic poet in the prophetic Blake, and to deal with that is not to deny the spiritual element. I myself am no more a fine scholar than I’m a fine musician. In both professions, I’m simply and old man who does what he can in those fields haphazardly because he cannot wait longer at this point in my life to perfect those arts.
How do I currently think the two “Holy Thursday” poems connect? I don’t want to put words into Alan’s mouth, he’s likely sharper than I can draw him, but he or others may believe that first poem is happy, innocent children in safe, supportive clerical care, uttering praise to their religious saviors/supervisors and that institution’s godhead and nation. And the second poem? Perhaps either a progression or another facet degraded from that? I’d say there’s no reason not to think that the two poems are happening at the same time in the same Britain — so, the two situations simultaneously comment on each other. The wards in the first poem may live better than the utter misery of the poor in the second, but they are part of the same civic system, the same “land of poverty.” The thunder within the ward’s song that ascends briefly to heaven in the first, is the fecund rain that feeds all in the yet to be manifested world of the second. I’d summarize that Blake thinks that poverty and its partial charitable mitigations aren’t in opposition, but rather that poverty is a civic construction like the imperfect charity schools were. What Blake sees as opposition (in both poems) would be some Rosseauian natural state as the proper order of society. Yes! I realize that’s idealistic, that’s there’s no actual political party or plan ready to implement such an Eden. You can call it a fantasy. You’ll have good arguments to do so.
In my country, in my time, we’re at one of those political moments where forces in power wish to remind us that the poor are a disreputable burden, feeding off the productive citizens, wasting our resources of freedom and pleasure. You can call that a fantasy too. You’ll have good arguments to do so. But unlike the former view, this one’s on offer, even in the process of being implemented.
I’ve “progressed” from acoustic guitar to electric guitar in today’s “Holy Thursday,” along with piano and percussion. You can hear it with the audio player below, or if that player is obscured in a field of thorns, you can get a rain check with this alternative highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Holy_Thursday_2.mp3.
*Text linked here in case the picture of Blake’s original illuminated plate is too hard to make out.
My parents had a small library, which was on a set of bookshelves in their bedroom in the house I grew up in in a little Iowa town. I’m not sure which books came from which parent, or even if some of them were passed down from their seniors, for I recall a couple of books on 19th century figures: William McKinley and Frances Willard. I think my mother’s people were Republicans, and both sides were teetotalers as far as I know. Some of the books were college textbooks. There were books relating to the Protestant ministry, which my father aimed to practice as his father had, and others connected to journalism and high school teaching, which was my mother’s line of work before marriage. I loved looking through them while laying on the chenille bedspread of their double bed.
I bring this up today because I believe I first encountered William Blake in one of those books of theirs. It wasn’t a poem of his, but rather a small note in the back of the volume dealing with other minor figures. The note reported that Blake wrote some quite fine short lyrics before descending into longer mystical tracts that might be seen as evidence of madness.
Having already gone through a short but intense Edgar Allen Poe phase when my teenage-self read that, my interest was piqued. A year or so later I learned that The Doors, a rock band headed by someone who was said to be a poet, had used a line from a Blake poem in one of their songs. Now I really was intrigued.
And yet it was maybe another year before I found and bought a small paperback containing selections from Blake’s writing. My initial reaction? The longer prophetic books puzzled me, many (but not all) of the shorter poems could come across as twee little nursery rhymes, but some of his poems that fell between those two became favorites, particularly his satiric and scathing “Proverbs of Hell.” No teenager ever since deciphering metal-band lyrics or any rapper’s flow was more happy than I was to read that rebellious page poem.
Those short lyrics? I liked more of the poems Blake printed in Songs of Experience than those in his companion volume Songs of Innocence. Simplicity can be harder to value, and Songs of Innocence is a case in point. Today’s piece is one of a pair of poems in Blake’s non-identical twin volumes using the title “Holy Thursday.” Here’s a link to the text of this one.
First off, what’s Holy Thursday, at least as it relates to Blake’s poem? I didn’t know as a kid, and I didn’t know as an adult either until this year, so late in my life. I thought it was the Thursday before Good Friday, the date commemorating the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples before his arrest, trial, and execution. And as far as some Christian denominations go, that would be correct — but not so fast! Holy Thursday is also another date,* one at the very end of the Lenten calendar: the date commemorating the resurrected Jesus ascending into heaven after being seen on earth for 40 days by the disciples. That one falls on May 29th this year — or on the following Sunday, just to make things even more confusing.
We know that Blake is referring to the later Holy Thursday because the poem of his that I perform today is reportage on an annual British Holy Thursday (Ascension Day Edition) event: a marching of a batch of orphans from charity institutions up to London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral for a special mass where they sang hymns they’d been taught.
A few years ago the Tate Museum had a big Blake celebration and had one of Blakes most famous paintings projected onto the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. I wonder what Anglican dissenter Blake would have thought of that? (photo by Alex Wojcik for the Tate)
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Blake’s tone is ambiguous in his account. One could read this poem and assume this is an act of charity being celebrated — but in the context of Blake’s beliefs one could see otherwise, as he was an ardent dissenter from the state-sanctioned Church of England. Elsewhere in Songs of Innocence, the children are free (at least at times) in some Edenic state — but these Holy Thursday children are regimented into ranks by schoolmasters (beadles) caring disciplinary canes. The song they sing is given to them by those that control their lives. What happens when they sing the song they are directed to sing? Heaven, the seat of the godhead that Jesus has risen to merge with, harmonizes in thunder that descends on the “wise guardians of the poor**” seated below the heaven and the children in this rich and mighty cathedral. In summary, I think Blake is pointing out the self-satisfied “virtue signaling” in this pomp and ceremony.
Perhaps I should have tried to create a choir or used a pipe organ for this one, but simple music today, which you can hear with the audio player gadget below. Has your audio player ascended into the Internet to sit as the right side of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress showing it. This highlighted link will launch a new tab trailing heavenly glory — or at least its own audio player to carry forth my acoustic guitar and voice of subjective quality.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Holy_Thursday_1.mp3.
*The Last Supper Thursday is also called Maundy Thursday — the other, Ascension Thursday or Day. Separate names would of course make things clearer. I grew up a Methodist, and they bungled the fix: they use all three (or is it four?) names.
**I sing this phrase as a question, which I divine is Blake’s intent.
I’ve worried a bit lately that I’ve been doing too many Parlando pieces presenting sad poems. It’s likely that mood is part of my nature despite living a life I’m grateful for — perhaps even more so because I live a life I’m grateful for, and I’m therefore aware of its temporary nature that I cannot keep. Because of this, I’ve kept a quote, a suggestion, from Kurt Vonnegut close to me:
I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”
Vonnegut wrote this in one of his last books, one that might again speak to my mood in this state of my nation and its ideals, A Man Without a Country.
At my age, it’s no longer morbid to think about death. This past weekend my wife and I went on a goth date, and visited one of the fancier local cemeteries. We mostly went for the 1910 main chapel building full of early 20th century William Morris/Pre-Raphaelite derivations which echo back to the start of the era I mine for a lot of the poetry here.* The cemetery was taking part in a special open-house event held around the Twin Cities offering more access for the public to “behind the scenes” parts of the facilities.
We walked by famous early citizen’s gravesites, some elaborate with statues and such, and then too the many small vaults with names and dates on their file-cabinet sized faces. One room’s space was maximized with rows floor to ceiling across the room — so much like a library, even up to having a rolling metal staircase that would facilitate viewing the topmost. Instead of spines one views in those tall rows names, and partner’s names, and those bookend years. Every one of them, like every book I suppose, expects that there’s someone left to see and remember them, and I paused to consider that that wasn’t always so.
In another part of our tour, another portion of my nature was stoked. Walking by the cemetery’s crematorium, I noticed this homely implement hanging on the wall. As the old prayer book has it: ashes to ashes, dust to dust — and that passage now had a corollary: and dust to pan.
Part of the main chapel: tiled mosaics, stained class, intricate motifs, capitol mottos. Crematorium: clean, professional, and an inexpensive hanging broom and plain white plastic dustpan, the same model as hangs in our home pantry.
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Oh, it was a beautiful Spring day, full of decoration, full of evidence of grief, inscriptions of loss — and to the puritan, evidence of vanity. Life is so big, or so small, we must laugh at it.
Which brings us to today’s poem I’ve performed with music: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music.” I had finished this piece earlier this Spring, but at first held it back because I feared it was too much like some other musical pieces I was working on — and then after those coincident issues expired, I started to worry that it was too much-more sadness. Revisiting it this week, I now think no, it’s not just bleak — it’s a bald-faced statement of honest feelings about death and loss. Here’s a link to the full text of the poem.
In writing music and preforming this poem, am I disrespecting the author who titled her poem “…Without Music?” I think Millay’s intent here was to speak against sentimentally decorating loss. Loss has patterns, resolutions, codas, and rests — and music too, even if it has repeat marks, has an ending measure — but music’s part of the equivalence is so often beautiful. In such ways fine poetic word-music, as well as that with express melodies, may speak over loss, interrupt it. Perhaps my rough-hewn voice with its limits and plainness, its lack of precise or elaborate lyricism, is apt for Millay’s mood here?
You can hear that musical performance of Millay’s poem with the audio player below. What if you see no player? That’s likely because some ways of reading this blog suppress showing it, but this alternative highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Dirge_Without_Music.mp3.
*A few years back here I did a series on “before they were Modernists” with early poems by some Modernist figures. More than a few had roots in those retro-hipster movements of the late 19th century, and many a free-versifier had carried around a Swinburne volume in their youth.
I’m not one to closely follow religious matters, though many poets over the ages have — the history and the weight of all that combined belief and its inconsistent practice is considerable. I did have an interval as a youthful churchman of the Protestant kind, attracted by the community bonds and social activism of the Martin Luther King era,* but it was recent reading of those fresh drafts of history that we call the news that brought the selection of a new Catholic Pope to my attention. For a moment my country was caught up in ancient offices as a break from the depravity of our domestic head of state.
So, first the death of the serving Pope, then the mourning, then the secret conclave in its smoke-emitting room, then the new Pope and the follow-up consideration of his background and concerns — extended this time by his North American origins. My BlueSky feed of wits supplied me with humorous predictions based on Bob/now Leo’s Chicago origins, but the pedant in me snorted most heartily when I read this news service summary of Leo’s biography explaining that he was a member of the Augustinian Order, monks with a call to service and piety. The wire-service, no doubt constrained by the spread-so-thin-the-bread-tears nature of modern journalism, informed its readers that the Augustinians were founded in the 13th century by Saint Augustine.
I have no idea what the titrated level of history buffery is within my treasured readership, but they were off by near a millennium — St. Augustine being a 4th century North African early church father! The medieval founders of this order of monks were looking back to late Western Roman empire times for a guiding light.
The Parlando results of my guffaws? I thought of a song that abides with me that I found on one of the first three record albums I bought as 1967 turned into 1968: “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” from Bob Dylan’s slightly undervalued LP John Wesley Harding. Dylan was on the face of it no more accurate than our news-service scribe. His apparition of St. Augustine is a troubled man, as many spiritual people are, and he briefly charges us with his preaching in the song, but Dylan’s Augustine is also specifically a martyr who was put to death, presumably by the authorities. Unlike many saints, Augustine of Hippo was not a martyr. While Augustine’s town was under siege by Vandals (the original ones, doing business as that tribal name not as members of DOGE)* he died an old man from natural causes.
Dylan’s song is brief, brevity being an unusual virtue Dylan exercised in all but one song on John Wesley Harding. And yet he was bringing history into the three verses, no choruses, no bridge song structure of his song. Within his seeming historical inaccuracy was his choice of a borrowed tune. “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” uses the melody and the structure of a 1930s song setting by Earl Robinson of a 1920s poem by Alfred Hayes** about a man put out to death in 1915: “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.” I believe Dylan clearly meant to link the two men, in the way that dreams can combine things we never see in waking hours.
This song, and Dylan’s performance of it, has always touched me — and so having the coincidence of Augustinians being in the news, and the hopes that the new Pope may preach to our current overly-gifted Kings and Queens, I went to record myself singing this song of a remarkable comparing. Since it’s a copyrighted work, I present that performance today as a YouTube video. The few-hundred views one of my videos might gather would not make even a widows mite, but it’s my understanding that any revenue gathered from those annoying YouTube ads can be claimed by the rights holders. For my video I mingle artists representations of Augustine and Hill. If you can’t tell, the photos are Joe Hill and a news photo of a memorial march for him in 1915. Our 4th century Augustine was camera-shy, and has to be represented by artists’ paintings.
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*My youth included a couple years working at a hospital still being actively managed by an order of nuns in those days.
**In search of more footnotable connections: was it coincidence that the then considered inscrutable cover of the LP has two Bengali Baals, singers in the tradition of the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize, Rabindranath Tagore. Surely the Bob Dylan of 1967 didn’t know he’d eventually be the second. Another connection: Joe Hill was a songwriter who sang for union organizing meetings and “He who sings, prays twice” is a saying attributed to Saint Augustine.
***Augustine’s writings include thoughts on The City of God that may survive the fall of empires. Shortly after Augustine’s death, the Vandals sacked his city. Stories have it that these Vandals were impressed by Augustine’s learning, and spared the library he had established there. The current ones aren’t up to that level of civilization.
**Hayes had a long writing career. Wikipedia tells me he was an uncredited screenwriter for the famous Italian film The Bicycle Thief. It also claims he wrote a script for The Twilight Zone, but IMDB doesn’t confirm that.
I went to one of the marker events of my year, the May Day Parade in South Minneapolis last Sunday. It’s a wonderful thing to return to, kids and neighbors dressing up and marching from Lake Street to an urban park, some putting on elaborate homemade puppet exoskeletons, others holding signs of local resistance, beating drums, playing instruments, and riding on contraptions ranging from customized bicycles to the mighty fire belching Southside Battletrain hauled upstreet by local Anarchists, a tribe of pierced and tattooed Sisyphus.
But more precious than all this exuberance was that I got to meet up with my old friend, poet, cartoonist, and musician Dave Moore and his partner. We did as we have for many years: we sat on the low concrete curb near the start of the street parade. The little curb, inches high, is a perfect seat for the lower children, the ones that would leap up near us on either side of the march as any promise of tossed candy delighted them. Dave and I are not children, far from it. Oh, very far. Our old bodies creak up and down when we stand to clap, call out, and cheer “Happy May Day!” as the parade passes by. The tumult covers the sound of our joints, our happy shouts outstay our grunts and groans.
And then there is the silent thing Dave does as our neighborhood starts to disperse back to their homes or other activities after the parade passes. Dave carries a bag of milkweed seeds to the parade each year. The bridge whose street side we’ve been sitting on spans the Greenway, a reclaimed railroad right of way that’s now a walking and biking trail. In its older, more overgrown times milkweed lined the tracks, and the hulking trains then whipped up their fluff from the dried pods — little vegetive boxcars unloading the slightest, near weightless freight of their commerce. And so after the parade, Dave takes handfuls of those seeds he’s brought, and tosses them to the present air. They rise like tiny albino angels, swirling into May skies with a job in their seeds: milkweed is the manna of the immigrant monarch butterflies who migrate from Mexico, whose children depend on it when they are infants bundled as caterpillars.
That, kind readers, is a holy moment. The noise, the quiet, the Spring, the joy of workers celebrating their day.
But there’s another chapter in this story. Someone Dave knows sees him and stops to chat. He’s happy enough with the parade of course, but his conversation is troubled. He’s a schoolteacher. Looking nearly as old as Dave and I, he’s still working as such, and he despairs. The children have no attention span, no lessons can adhere, he reports. No one realizes how tough it is now, he says, and I guess I’m an example of that, but I hope he’s partly wrong. I’m one of those dried seed pods now, I don’t know where the escaped fluff I release here lands, and that lofted randomness releases me.
I made a choice to not take pictures this year at the May Day Parade — but here are some older pictures: part of the Southside Battletrain, a bike-powered puppet-float, Dave with his bag of milkweed, and a milkweed pod
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I thought of this teacher and his tale alongside this poem I perform today written by the young Langston Hughes. Hughes was in his 20s when he published it, so it seems to be another of those poems about old age written surprisingly in youth. Did Hughes have a particular teacher in mind, or was he (even unknowingly) writing about an element of himself as he created this epitaph? In “Teacher” Hughes is engaging the poetic trope of the grave as a place of unending reconsideration, but as a person in their 20s he was a chrysalis where the pulpy worm may turn to wings — not a pulpy corpse under a dissolving summary. Hughes has his teacher in the poem speak as if the unvarnished holding on to virtue pinches the soul – and yet virtues are something that young people are always being told they need to develop. I don’t think such lessons are entirely wrong, but they are not the entire either. I think the star-dust that cannot penetrate the poem’s speaker is the diffuse, the random, the broad-spreading possibility. It’s a signifier of entirely unsure hope, a precious kind. Here’s a link to the text of Hughes’ poem.
You can hear my performance of Langston Hughes’ “Teacher” with the audio player below. Because I wanted a slow, long-hanging-in-the-air, timbre for the guitar here I chose to play electric guitar on this performance— appropriately my Guild Starfire guitar for this representation of star dust or milkweed fluff. No audio player to be seen? Some ways of reading this blog won’t show it, this highlighted link will germinate a new tab with its own audio player so you can hear it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Teacher.mp3.
Before we close the book on National Poetry Month and International Jazz Day, here’s a musical performance of a poem by Langston Hughes. I didn’t think I’d be able to complete it today — but the opportunity arose, and it’s more than appropriate for both observations.
Langston Hughes was one of the founders of Jazz poetry, and that style of reading poetry that interacts with a musical accompaniment (even if it’s not sung) is an influence for some of the performances you’ve heard here in this Project. I can’t say what year Hughes first performed his poetry that way, but there’s another meaning to Jazz poetry without a band: poetry that writes about the experience of Jazz music itself. And Hughes was repeatedly doing that in the early 1920s.
Decades later, a 1950s Hughes reads his 1920s poem “The Weary Blues” in front of a Jazz combo
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This, a combination that appreciated Jazz, was not a sure thing in the early 1920s. Afro-American intellectuals and cultural critics were not universally fond of Jazz and Blues music, these great Afro-American Modernist musical forms arising right under their noses. There were reasons: it was associated with drugs, drink, criminality, and sexual promiscuity — and none of that promoted Black achievement and excellence in their minds. And some young white folks were taking an interest in Jazz for those very reasons. Tut-tut voices from both racial camps were observing their young people and thinking it was all about mindless, hedonistic partying. Let me repeat myself: when the last decade to be called “The Twenties” was called “The Jazz Age,” it wasn’t meant as a compliment.
I’d suspect this isn’t widely known to many readers. Jazz, to our 21st century Twenties, might be felt as supposed-to-be-good-for-you-but-boring-art music made up of too many weird chords and snobbish old men with a fetish for instruments you blow into. If we take it too seriously, too often now, the problem in the 1920s was they didn’t think it had a serious bone in its body.
Maybe it helped that Langston Hughes was a young man, a teenager when the 1920s began. He appreciated things in Jazz and Blues that even his Afro-American elders didn’t see. He knew it could be a balm to pain and disappointment, its expression and expiation — and he could see the art in it, an art to wrap into his poetry. This small poem of his, published in 1923 in the W.E.B Du Bois/NAACP The Crisis magazine, hears something others couldn’t: he hears a Jazz band cry — or rather his poem reports a woman heard this. Here’s a link to the full text of the poem.
Even in the shortness of his poem, note the dialectic here. The band, earlier in the night, had dancers, “vulgar dancers” it says. The older cultural gatekeepers at the Crisis would agree as they accepted this poem, “I see the young poet is aware of the dangerous moral unseriousness of the Jazz hounds.”
Why could Hughes hear what others didn’t? Well, he’s a great poet, and a poet that wrote often and empathetically of other people’s experiences. There’s another possible element. Do modern ears hear the poem’s second line differently than his readers in the last Twenties? “They say a jazz-band’s gay” he wrote. “Gay” in the 1920s would have clearly meant “happy.” As far as scholarship understands this, gay=homosexual seems to have come into use a bit later, perhaps in the 1930s, and to general readers, that meaning emerged in an even later era.
Hughes’ own sexuality is not something we know a lot about. Some say he was gay, some say he was asexual. One thing I get from reading Hughes’ early poetry is that he’s hearing and telling his stories not just from a stereotypical straight masculine viewpoint. Is it his anima that’s the she who “heard the jazz-band sob” in the poem? Or is he just listening to a woman?
Well, my performance of Langston Hughes’ “Cabaret” is ready to be heard. Unlike the last piece, I made no pretense of Jazz music as it’s classically understood this time, but I do throw in some weird chord extensions. You can hear it with the audio player below. No player to be seen? The dancers have left, and some ways of reading this blog suppress the display of the audio player. If so, use this alternative, a link that will open a new tab with its own player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Langston_Hughes_Cabaret.mp3.
Today I take on one of those poetic expressions a great many poets have engaged with: the poem about the state of poetry. The title gets written in Latin to puzzle readers, and because Horace wrote in Latin back when the world had to worry about the whims of tyrannical kings and poets got their words carved in marble. We’re much more culturally advanced now. You can hear this poem anywhere in the world using the Internet. Dozens will listen with you during National Poetry Month. Dozens! Imagine the value of that if that dozens was of eggs.
I briefly hesitated to share this poem of mine publicly. Not only is this project largely about other people’s words, but my Ars Poetica poem starts off comparing some poets to assassins. That’s a metaphor, a conceit, a simile. I’ve shared other civic poems about the fate of nations this month, but I’m not a big fan of political assassination — but then I’m also not a big fan of making fun of poets, and I’m going to do that today. And it is a civic poem. On my way to comparing poets to assassins I make note of the state of mass transit in my fair-sized midwestern American city, which is: pretty bad. Not assassination bad. No! Rather my point is that it would be bad for an assassin. Or for poets trying to get to and from poetry readings.
32 bar AABA tune. Chords are F C Am G and then Cm Gm Cm Dm in the bridge, though there are some substitutions.
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Well, you don’t have to go anywhere to listen to the performance. And it’ll be doubly good to do so because the last day of National Poetry Month in April is also International Jazz Day, and I’m going to make some fake Jazz. Poets, we get a month! Jazz — like a whole world of it — gets only a day. Well, it’s an international* day, sliding across the globe’s time zones, but still…
You can hear me reading my Ars Poetica poem with a Jazz combo using the audio player below. No player? The Jazz Police haven’t come for it, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress it. There’s an alternative: this highlighted link will open its own browser tab with an audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Ars_Poetica.mp3.
*Way back in the 20th century, when we had to carry the dead weight of a constitution around all the time with laws, and due process, and so forth, a group of local improvisational comic performers used to get together and the agenda was to play bad Jazz. No, not to parody or put down Jazz, more at an honest admission that their musical skills weren’t up to that level, but the desire to have a go at it was still there. That’s me making up this Jazz quartet today. I’ve cut a corrupt deal with the composer to only write things I can play on bass and guitar, and I give the computer the chords to tickle on the piano.
Another poem for April Poetry Month. Another Emily Dickinson poem. Once more, wildflowers. Once more they’re that early spring flower, daffodils. Once more the poet is looking back because something’s missing.
Chord sheet because someone else might sing this better than I can
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Last time the voice in Dickinson’s poem was also alienated from Spring, but there was a taunting wit to that one. The mode in today’s Dickinson is more abstract, and the second, final, stanza is so gnomic here I can’t say I know fully what it’s conveying. Even the first stanza is tied in knots, tangled with those Dickinsonian dashes. Is “an April Day” the “Absent Place” — or is the April day, with present dancing-in-the-breeze daffodils, in contrast to the Absent Place? The stanza’s final line asking us to consider the viewpoint of “the Souls that snow” could be saying then the snow is more full of motion and drifting shapes than mere blossoms — or that April brings forth feelings that makes the Absent Place snow-Souls uncomfortable?
In intent or effect, it may be a shifting Tao — an all of the above in motion with each other?
But the final stanza? I assume “Drift” within is of the snow-Souls’, a self-impediment worse than snowed-in roads or walks, but the concluding two lines are harder to follow. Perhaps she’s saying that snow-Souls are the ”Him” in the last line, and their change and emotion is as strong as (“duplicate”) as the wind-moved daffodils? But “duplicate” is a strange word choice. Even within slant-rhyme it’s quite strained to rhyme with “without.” I even toyed with pronouncing the duplicate as the noun, not the verb, which would be a nice sound-pair with “but.” However, that’s syntactically sour and doesn’t follow the first stanzas ABAB rhyme scheme.
For awhile I engaged in a little fantasy extension of this brief poem while asking why daffodils, rather than another Spring flower. Poet Dickinson famously knew her plants — not just as an avid gardener — but as a woman with more education than most in her time and place (which included science, considered a presentable ladylike field). She was the maker of an impressive book of pressed flowers labeled with their scientific names. Did she know her Greek myths as well as the scientific name for the daffodil, Narcissus? The essential piece of the Greek myths of Narcissus is that the youth of that name dies because he becomes entranced by his reflection, his duplicate. Is the last line’s “Him” Narcissus or something like him?
Or is she taking another route into the roots of the word narcissus, related to narcosis, a drugged numbing? Does the final stanza mean to say that springtime joy can be as numbing as wintertime sadness?
It may be wise to consider my thoughts about the final stanza over-thinking. They’re surely speculative, but it still seems likely that the poem means to link the emotions extracted from Winter and Spring landscapes.
As April National Poetry Month winds down, I’ve fallen into a theme without designing it. Many of us are feeling crabby, dismayed, disgusted, frightened, but Spring doesn’t know that. The cold of Northern April is now behind us, and May lays out ahead with greening and warmth. Is it taunting us by being pleasant and hopeful?
For the music in the performance you can hear below, I fell into it too, as certain and mindless as Spring. The recording started with the chordal guitar part, which I played on my jangling Squier Jazzmaster instead of an acoustic guitar because I was telling myself I’ve been stuck on acoustic playing too much lately, and I hate to be predictable. In timbre and volume it was hardy enough to easily accept the drums and electric bass that I matched with it. The final part was the lead guitar line played largely on the B string of the guitar up and down the neck, in that “I’ve just heard a Ravi Shankar LP” way that was popular in The Sixties — the 1960s, not Emily’s 1860s. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below. No such gadget to be seen? The authorities haven’t shut down the psychedelic ballroom, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress showing the audio player. This highlighted link is an alternative which will open its own tab with its own audio player inside.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Absent_Place-April_Day.mp3.
Some of you made it through my summarization of the musical career of the Cats and the Fiddle Jazz combo this week, but even though I was writing about music, we didn’t add much poetry there. One little thing I found out since I wrote that summary: that eBay matchbook collector item should have tipped me off about the site of one of those young Chicago kids’ gigs — a way stop on a trip to Hollywood to try breaking into the movies. It wasn’t at the “Airplane Café Club” as Marv Goldberg had it from his research, but the “Aeroplane Café. I’ve found a postcard. Looks pretty swanky. I wonder how the Cats act went down there in 1936 — did the Denver white swing kids dig their act? Four or five years later I’d give our band of audacious teenagers better odds on that.
Well, however they were received, they were young, they had dreams of a career ahead of them.
Looking at what musical acts were playing Denver at this club and elsewhere during the ‘30s, it was mostly white bands for dancing. Black bands started appearing on the bills in the ‘40s. My research said the Aeroplane Cafe lasted until the ‘80s, hosting in its last years rockabilly bands.
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So, let’s combine some literary poetry with music, Parlando style today. The words are by Langston Hughes, one of the first poets to recognize that Blues and Jazz were poetic, suitable for praise in poems, suitable to combine with Jazz words he’d contribute. When the young Hughes wrote today’s words for publication, he called the short poem “Dreams.” I heard it as a kind of Blues, a Blues with a sorrowful side, but with an admonishment to endure. If some reading this are having a February of backlash and disappointment tempting despair, this is after all Black History Month. Afro-American poet Hughes knew that dreams may well be knocked down, ignored, belittled. Yes, I know the word “woke” is a word in present contention. I find it odd it is used by those who smirk and dismiss the word as they speak it, aiming it toward those who know very well the reasons that dreams are extinguished.
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
I’m looking at a bare and snowy landscape out my window this evening. I rode to breakfast in 10 degrees with a cold wind this morning. I read the newspaper when I got to the cafe, because I’m a man who still spills eggs and hot sauce on the news in the morning. None of the news was good.
I spent my last couple of days making the musical piece work as well as I could make it, tickling an old guitar that I played when I was young, playing piano the way I can: a finger or two on the keys, tracking the left and right hand parts separately to disguise my ham-handedness — because music may find a way. I sang Langston Hughes’ words quietly, mouth up near the microphone. I had to, it was near midnight when I sang them, and my family was asleep and I want them to keep their dreams.
I want you too to keep the sweeter of your dreams. Waking right now can script all the nightmares and anxiety dreams that need no help. When the best mysteries come under the eyelids, ones almost too good to remember, I want you to keep them, even just the sense of them.
The audio player to hear my adaptation of Hughes’ poem I call “Langston’s Blues” can be heard with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? It’s off dreaming, but you can also use this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.
I’m planning to return in a few days with more on why I wanted to work at figuring out all I could about that young Jazz combo of the 1930s and ‘40s.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Langstons_Blues_Dreams.mp3
Time for me to lay out all I know of the story of a 1930s and ‘40s Black American Jazz vocal quartet: The Cats and the Fiddle. Last time in this February series, I reminded moderns that so much in my parent’s and grandparent’s time revolved around neighborhoods. That’s going to continue today as I tell about some kids who shared a location. Previously we’ve seen the Cats and the Fiddle appearing in small-time Hollywood pictures in the Thirties, which might give you the idea that they were a well-established band with hit records and thriving career. That’s not the case. They were young, from out of town — and though they did have a few years of performing under their belts, they were likely around 20 years old. How’d they get there? Where did they go?
The Cats and the Fiddle didn’t start in Southern California. The original quartet were classmates at Wendell Phillips High School, an important school in Chicago’s Black South Side. Last February here we featured Fenton Johnson, an ambitious Black poet who graduated from Phillips decades before the Cats’ founders attended, but some other folks could have passed the band members in the hallways in their day: Nat King Cole and just possibly singer Dinah Washington. Cole was likely the same age — Washington 5-6 years younger but there was a Junior High section at the school.* Oh, let’s not totally leave off poetry — poet Gwendolyn Brooks was the same age as Cats members, and Phillips High School was one of three Chicago area high schools she attended. The thought that these teenagers, poets, singers, musicians, and songwriters, might have taken inspiration from each other, or some other, lesser known commonalties is intriguing.
While in High School the future Cats were in two different bands, the Harlem Harmony Hounds and another group which was — at least at times — performing as Four Dark Flashes. No, the first band had nothing to do with Harlem, these were Chicago kids. There’s a round-up of Cats and the Fiddle history available online put together by Marv Goldberg. He’s found a reference to the Harlem Harmony Hounds as early as summer of 1932, which says they were appearing on radio station WCFL in Chicago.**
The Four Dark Flashes appeared to have traveled some. In October 1936 they were listed as playing the Casino Theater in Toronto Canada, a 1,200-seater which would have just opened earlier that year. If they were all Barksdale’s age, they’d be 16 or so, and traveling out of the country during the school year. This would indicate that some of the Cats-to-be had dropped out of school early to pursue music. ‘36 was likely the year the Four Dark Flashes group lost a fourth, their lead singer. Harmony Hound Austin Powell singer and guitarist was the handy neighborhood replacement to join Ernie Price (tenor guitar), James Henderson (tipple), and Chuck Barksdale (bass). The whole group sang, and beside Barksdale holding down the upright bass, the fretted stringed instrument combinations of 6-string guitar, tipple, and 4-string tenor guitar might shift from song to song.
In October 1937 we get the first mention of Cats and the Fiddle as an act that Goldberg has found. The famous Chicago Black newspaper The Defender wrote that “Four Cats and a Fiddle” were booked to play the Dome Club in Bismarck, North Dakota along with a Bessie Mitchell.
OK, who’s asking “What are a bunch of teenage hep-cat Black musicians doing in Bismarck ND in 1937?” I don’t know. I can find nothing about the Dome Club there, but chances are slim that there were enough Afro-Americans in Bismarck in 1937 to support a Black entertainment establishment. Another Afro-American vocal act with guitar accompaniment, the four Mills Brothers from Ohio, had gotten on nationwide radio, and though their hit records are a smoother sweeter sound and have none of the jive talk found in the early Cats’ lyrics, it’s possible that our group of teenagers had a set-list of tunes tailored for white audiences. The Chicago Defender, when announcing the act’s road gig on its pages says the Cats had “one of the greatest floorshow acts in the game.” Promotional hype supplied by the Cats themselves? Or had they already done some show-stopping appearances in Chicago? Were upper Midwesterners plausibly ready for something like that “Killin’ Jive” hard-swinging Jazz aimed for Black audiences?
Then on November 20th the Pittsburg Courier (another Black newspaper) says The Cats and the Fiddle, consisting of the quartet of guys and a Bessie Sutton are playing at the Airplane Club Café in Denver this week. Not sure why anyone is concerned about this in Pittsburg, unless that Bessie is from there. What kind of venue was the Airplane Club Café? The only thing I can find is this picture of a matchbook once offered for sale on eBay.
The young Jazz guitar & vocal combo was going places. Lenny Kravitz’ grandma not pictured. (just checking to see if you get to the footnotes)
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That pair of odd Fall ’36 notices bill a Bessie Mitchell and a Bessie Sutton as being with the Cats. It’s unclear if they are one or two different people, and if they are full-fledged members of the band or a separate act that might use the Cats as road show accompanists.*** If neither Bismarck or Denver seem like a common tour stop for a locally-known Chicago Afro-American combo in 1936, swing Jazz had a generalized popularity that was testing racial barriers. It’s also possible that clubs expected the Mills Brothers and got something a bit wilder, or that Bessie or Bessies were the headliners.
Where can we put our Cats on the map next? On January 13th, as 1937 has begun, Goldberg finds them in another Black newspaper, the Los Angeles California Eagle. The paper names the original four schoolmates and a Willis Rogers as members and they go on to say the group will “go far in pictures.” Once more I provisionally assign PR from the group to that prediction. I wondered if the late ‘36 Bismarck and then Denver gigs were just part of a “play your way to pay your way” tour to get to the American west coast. I’m just enough of a trainspotter type to wonder about passenger train service from Chicago to Bismarck to Denver to LA.
Want to figure their transit route with me? Chicago to Bismarck to the Pacific Northwest coast. Sure, the North Coast Limited. A lower Midwest route from Chicago to Denver with connections to LA? Yes, those are options on the Union Pacific Overland Route. But Bismark to Denver? Your faithful researcher looked. You’d likely have to go back to Minneapolis from Bismarck, and then from Minneapolis to Denver before going on to Southern California from Denver. But what’s the alternative? They could have driven, though I know nothing about their family’s financial resources to buy a car, and there’s the season of that traveling: modern indie band road dogs would dread a late Fall tour itinerary from Chicago to North Dakota then off to Denver before a jaunt to LA, when if LA is your goal from Chicago, a southernly “Route 66” highway beckoned. So, if the three dates Goldberg lists are accurate, I think of these four or five ambitious young Midwestern musicians zig-zagging like water bugs on train routes aiming for Hollywood. Yes, I’m grasping here at details, hoping that like a detective they lead to solutions to greater mysteries. The mysteries remain.
You’ve seen the high points of that movie career in the earlier installments of this series. For Afro-Americans in the mid-1930s that would be low-budget all-Black cast and audience pictures, novelty appearances in B movies, and possible work as extras or as a musician for soundtracks. Seems pretty meager when I list those opportunities, but to look at it another way it wasn’t that far from what bigger Black musicians were getting in the movie industry then. Racism and segregation were still unavoidable, overt issues, but Jazz as a rising popular music was softening some barriers in that decade. And it was the Great Depression. Black unemployment was even higher than the general unemployment rate. Appearing as “native” extras on a studio backlot might be demeaning, but even that level of employment meant a paycheck.
Still, they were all about 20-years-old, and they didn’t even have a record contract— yet. And our intrepid group still seems to be traveling back to Chicago from Hollywood.
Lawrence Cohn, who wrote liner notes for a 1976 reissue of the Cats and the Fiddle recordings, tells that Cats were visiting outstanding guitarist Tampa Red’s apartment in Chicago in the spring of 1939 after their spate of 1938 movie appearances, when Red introduced them to Lester Melrose. Melrose was A&R for Bluebird, RCA Victor’s “race records” label for artists of color. In the 1930’s and ‘40s, Bluebird was making good money on a variety of Blues related vocal records, often featuring small combo accompaniment, catchy rhythms, and double-entendre lyrics. Melrose worked out of Chicago where he collected a lot of Black talent for the label.****
How well did the Cats records do? Middling at best. Their closest approach to a hit was a ballad recorded on their first studio session in the summer of ’39, “I Miss You So” — but as WWII was about to break out in Europe, no one knew yet how big the young Cats could be. Cohn compares them to the Ink Spots, a vocal combo who started having big hits on Columbia Records around this time. He tells us the Cats and the Fiddle were repped by William Morris (the same talent agency as the Ink Spots) who started booking them all around the country to see what kind of career they could have. The subsequent gigs Goldberg tracks are mostly at Black audience theaters, but they include the big ones, the ones the most successful Black stars would play.
In America, WWII was still two years away. Victor records recorded more than two-dozen songs as they toured. That maybe-kinda hit “I Miss You So” wasn’t issued until 1940, and it wasn’t representative of their typical fast-tempo jive-slang songs.
Then the war came, and the previously stable, self-contained quartet group of high-school-pals started to churn. Henderson (who wrote “I Miss You So”) died shortly after the record came out. The bass-fiddle guy Barksdale died in ‘47, but was in and out of the lineup from ’41 on. Henderson and Barksdale were replaced by ex-Harmony Hound members Herbie Miles and George Steinback. In the midst of this ’40s churn Tiny Grimes was in the group for a couple of years, even wrote a tune or two for them. Grimes would leave the Cats to play with Art Tatum and Charlie Parker, and along with Charlie Christian, he would help popularize instrumental bebop styles for the guitar. Grimes left our vocal act because by then it wasn’t paying much, and he didn’t think it was going anywhere. A musician’s recording strike and a shellac shortage greatly reduced the issuance of records during the ’40s, and the audience mix for live shows must have changed some due to the overseas war. Amidst all this, Austin Powell, the most prominent singer and songwriter in the Cats was drafted. Hank Hazlett, a guitarist originally from St. Louis, was brought in when Powell went into the armed forces. Hazlett would play with the Cats from ’43 until late 1945. Powell was de-mobbed in Spring ’46, and the somewhat tattered group was still recording and playing, but to smaller and smaller returns. In 1950 the Cats and the Fiddle disintegrated, though surviving individual ex-members continued to be involved in music.
Lawrence Cohn was a highly knowledgeable man about this era, and he worked on a number of important late 20th century reissues of classic Blues and Jazz recordings. When in 1976 RCA collected most of the Cats and the Fiddle’s recordings in a double LP, Cohn wrote the liner notes, yet he only rises to faint praise there. He thinks the songs sound too samey. He says their musicianship was mediocre at best. In the end he’s left with the idea that their humor might be viewed as a corrective to the (in his opinion) too serious and artsy Jazz around when he wrote the notes. This sour summation ends Cohn’s notes:
In general this kind of happy jazz and pop combination disappeared, along with most of the melodic kind of jazz, during the Fifties and Sixties when rock and roll replaced the earlier style of music, and when jazz became politicized. A lot of people stopped going out when this kind of music was not being presented. Perhaps this release may in some small way facilitate its return.”
So besides knocking the Cats, Cohn seems to want to take some shots at the Spiritual and Black Arts Jazz musicians contemporary with his notes. I apparently like those musicians more than he did, and I like the Cats and a Fiddle more too. As to the Cats’ musicianship, I’m of the school that says the essential is that the players did a good job putting their own songs over, and that’s what counts more than an academic skills comparison. Barksdale was good enough for Coleman Hawkins when playing outside of the Cats. Tiny Grimes could trade riffs with Charlie Parker. Austin Powell was still gigging and recording with Louis Jordan and his Tympani 5 until the end of the 1950s, apparently playing not only guitar, but sax and piano.
Decades after Cohn, Australian critic Bruce Elder got the job to write up the Cats and the Fiddle for the current music streaming service Apple Music. Writing there Elder says
If anything, the Cats & the Fiddle were ahead of their time, producing a bolder form of R&B than critics were prepared to accept at the time, such as ‘That’s All I Mean to You,’ which likely would have slotted in perfectly a decade later, but in 1940 just seemed like style-less noise with a swing beat.”
Being slammed as “Style-less noise, with a…beat.” Does that sound like a description of something else that would come around after the Cats broke up post-WWII? Self-contained combos who play their own instruments with guitars mixed to the foreground, brisk tempos, uninhibited stage performances, energetic, youthful, close-harmony singing, witty lyrics that might wink with some “the squares won’t know what we’re talking about” slang?
I’m leading you to say “Rock’n’Roll.” I suspect older readers will be the first to follow that lead with that response, as I find many listeners in middle-age (and younger) think of the later evolution of what gets called Rock — or now, Classic Rock — as a more overdriven electric guitar thing, backbeat drums with less swing laying down the beat, with lead singers often singing alone only with occasional backing vocals. I used to shake my head (and type someone’s-wrong-on-the-Internet posts) in my 20th century Usenet days when the admittedly problematic Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame would select some (usually Black) harmony vocal group for enshrinement and posters would object that’s Do Wop, or Soul, or something, but not real Rock. I’d try to remind them that Rock’n’Roll originated as a diverse mongrel genre, and that groups who approached music with an outlook, energy, and vocal blend like the Cats, were all over the first decade or so of Rock’n’Roll. These Black high-school students from the South Side of Chicago had an idea and put some audacious energy into propagating it.
About thirty years after the Cats and the Fiddle took their warning-track fly ball swing for the fences, this group of plaid suited white rubes — who looked exactly like you’d expect to find them at the Dome club in Bismarck North Dakota — got to have their moment in a low budget Hollywood movie. This is how they looked and sounded:
On discovering this band in a rural roadhouse, the film’s hero enthusiastically shouts “It isn’t boogie. It isn’t jive. And it isn’t swing. It’s kind of all of them.”
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I’m basing age estimates for the original Cats members on a military draft registration record Marv Goldberg indicates he’s seen for original member bassist Charles Barksdale, documenting that he was born January 11th, 1918. Nat King Cole and the Cats were seen again in Hollywood, as Black extras playing South American natives in the Myrna Loy/Clark Gable romcom Too Hot to Handle.* Dinah Washington was playing in Chicago with the Cats and the Fiddle as her backing band for the gig when the club owner dragged Lionel Hampton to hear her and nationwide fame for that great singer ensued.
This radio show was said to be weekly, and other references led Goldberg to think the show lasted until January 1935. WCFL’s history is interesting. Nathan Goldfried’s book WCFL, Chicago’s Voice of Labor has it that it’s “the first and longest surviving labor radio station in the nation, beginning in 1926 as a listener-supported station owned and operated by the Chicago Federation of Labor…” and that ““The station emphasized popular entertainment and labor and public affairs programing, seeking during its earlier decades to help organize workers, increase public awareness and support for the union movement, and enhance public awareness and culture.”
***Entering into wild/just plausible territory: Bessie Mitchell was the birth name of actor Roxie Roker’s mother, musician Lenny Kravitz’ grandmother, and actor Zoe Kravitz’ great-grandmother. She would have been in her mid-20s in 1937, but I have no info that she was ever in entertainment at all, or connected with the Chicago scene.
****Bluebird recording artists included Memphis Minnie, Big Bill Broonzy, Jazz Gillum, Memphis Slim, Victoria Spivey, Arthur Crudup, and LeRoy Carr. Melrose reportedly passed on Muddy Waters — Waters said Melrose was looking for a sweeter style of music than he and his post WWII generation played. One thing I wonder regarding Melrose likely having some responsibility for how big a promotional “push” might be given the Cats. Members of the Cats and the Fiddle from the start wrote most of their own material. Melrose often engaged in the pernicious practice of taking co-writer’s credit on records by acts he shepherded, cutting himself in on that element of royalty monies. At least on the Victor reissue LP I have, Melrose is never listed as having a songwriting contribution.
We left off last time in my Black History Month series this year, with a crumbling scrapbook filled with mid-20th century things someone had gathered. The scrapbook compiler was concerned with entertainment, particularly Afro-American’s in that role, and the largest number of items they’d pasted in focused on a somewhat obscure musical act: The Cats and the Fiddle. Was the compiler a fan or a musician themselves? Woah, we get ahead of ourselves. Let’s stay with the musical evidence we have for a little while longer.
Once I get out of bed in the morning, I grab a newspaper from somewhere in the vicinity of my front door and read it. This is antiquated behavior. I often linger in bed before or after sleeping reading near-instant news on a large tablet connected to the Internet before I later get to the morning paper’s headlines that were written yesterday, yet still I take comfort or distress from reading them printed on paper. This is memory/habit working. I’ve read a newspaper in the morning since shortly after I learned to read. I even delivered them door to door as a youth in my little Iowa town, a place where and when the newspaper might be the only way you’d find out about some things in any detail.
Though I compose music and operate various musical instruments constantly as part of this Project, I’m somewhat removed from the general life of a musician today though I read accounts, I observe. But all of us listen to music, experience it some way. I know of no culture anywhere that for any appreciable span of time has been without music.
In the 1940s and ‘50s world the scrapbook photos, magazine clippings, and ephemera collected would have overlapped my childhood, would have been my parent’s adulthood. I experienced music some from records, some from television or movies, and largely from radio. Music face to face? Church music once a week, and the school’s student marching brass band a few times a year. I enjoyed rock’n’roll cover bands just twice, at the Junior and Senior proms in my high school. Concerts? I once got to travel to the large auditorium at the state capitol to hear Handel’s Messiah* oratorio. But that’s a rural, small-town story within a family that had no special connection to music, played no instruments.
For other white folks in cities, and in other areas, music could have been more central, more direct. Step back a generation to my grandparents’ youth? Recordings, perhaps some, radio not yet broadcasting, movies silent. Non-commercially, there was the parlor and folk music of those whose neighbors or families played. Music at events meant musicians playing, making the entirety of the noise right there and then. Let me repeat: that era’s connection to music was almost entirely performer in the room or performance space — and so where you lived or traveled to impacted your music heavily, and overwhelmingly your connection to your music was as fully dimensional, occupying the same space at the same time with you.
Some who read this may be two full generations younger than me. Your connection to music will likely be more removed: streaming playlists, the soundtrack to video games, concerts that could be large TV screens over a distant stage of dancers and miming singers with microphones in their hands. Or it could be a sweaty basement or a club with a small stage at one side, or something you try to record on the ubiquitous computers surrounding us, to hopefully exist elsewhere momentarily on phones, like a brief, wrong-number phone call that each connected party, embarrassed, occupies briefly, and leaves. You may think: I decide how I experience music, or how I make music! Yes, you do have choice, even if you may, out the other side of your mouth, decry that most all others are dictated by culture and capital. The in-between truth is that you, musician or listener, and the musical audience and musicians in general, are still living inside a present culture that changes things. The older ones living now still remember past cultural contexts, a diversity of time.
Because Afro-American representation lagged in mainstream American culture, representation of their music in mass media was filtered out, shown behind a screen for much of America. A Black American circa 1930-1960 is going to make and experience music because of their contemporary cultural particulars, their landscape in time. How long this post would be for me to try to even outline or list those things I think I have a smidgen of understanding of: the divide of parochial cultural ignorance from non-Black folks can fill volumes, Black History Month a pitcher of a lakeful. Demeaning white superiority, colonial European cultural hierarchies, and minstrel show comic-fool stereotypes are the proscenium for Afro-American performers. Sometimes violence lurks at the meeting edges. A well-meaning paragraph in a blog post staggers to carry that weight.
So then, if a Black American was going to use music to relax, or as a balm against the absurdities of your life and times, how much easier is it going to be to find that in Black entertainers, in Black saturated places among fellow Black audience members. But also consider: your experience of music is going to be that fully-dimensional one most often. In the room. In the same time. You can smell the music, which you can’t on Spotify.
Think back to that short movie clip from the previous post in this series,“The Harlem Yodel.” The Cats and the Fiddle and the Dandridge Sisters are dressed up for the Alps in the roomful of mirrors that we’re to know to be an indoor ski meet. It’s 1938. I notice as the Cats enter our frame at one minute into the video clip, they drop a short series of sour, single string plucks. Is that a musical Dada expression saying: we know this is ridiculous, but we’re getting to be in the MGM movies, even if it’s a B minus, undercard short-subject? One of the producers of the short, Jack Chertok, would work on more than 30 shorts in 1938. By the early 60s he’d be the producer of My Favorite Martian, a half-hour TV sitcom about an undocumented extraterrestrial alien living incognito on a grey-scale Earth — not exactly Ralph Ellison, but some of the strangeness is intentional. In the movie, the audience is white.
White folks on the right: “What, we can’t even have segregation at an indoor ski jump competition?”
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In the second music clip, “Killin’ Jive,” the audience is black in the film and in the producer’s movie-house intent. It’s from one of a series of Westerns made for Black audiences, and the picture’s star (unseen in the clip) is the “Sensational Singing Cowboy” who was variously billed as Herb or Herbert Jeffries or Jeffrey. Wikipedia decided on Herb Jeffries, but I don’t know if the last name varied for carelessness or branding tweaks. His Wikipedia article goes on to write about the unsettled ethnic background of the man born Umberto Valentino, but he was clearly marketed at the time as an Afro-American. The band’s performance there is intense and uninhibited — can’t-top-this showmanship. This clip, and publicity photos, would mean that the Cats would need to do this live on club stages at some point in their sets. This song (like many in the Cat’s recorded repertoire) is by a member of the band, and “Killin’ Jive” is, full of insider Jazz/Black slang. Here’s a link to the lyrics.
Clearly, it’s a song about marijuana intoxication, and it’s performed in a let’s-get-high-and-party manner. The lyrics, which as I said are written by one of the group’s founders, Austin Powell, can be read as adding an undercurrent to that performance. A line is refrained in the song “He’s a sad man, not a bad man,” and I expect “bad man” in Thirties Jazz argot could carry the same “formidable and unrestrained” (in this case, when high) Afro-American slang meaning as well as the mainstream cultural meaning of he’s not evil, he’s just depressed. There are lines too about “darkest days” and “got no rent” (not transcribed correctly in the link) If this were a Brecht and Wiell song from say The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, we’d read these lines and expect Modernist irony. What do I expect? That Powell had a brain and a viewpoint and meant what he wrote.
CORRECTION: The “Killin Jive” song was actually performed in another Black-audience-targeting picture called The Duke is Tops. They did appear in Two Gun Man from Harlem too, I just trusted my memory more than double-checking my notes,
“All Star Negro Cast” in the film from which “Killin’ Jive” appears
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In real life and not in front of Hollywood backlot cameras? I can’t say for sure what kind of places the Cats and the Fiddle played in, but as working musicians the places they performed in would surely be physical contexts in a segregated society. Los Angeles had its own Black musical scene and audience around the Central Avenue neighborhood, and they could have played there. In a following post in the series we’ll get into what I can figure out regarding their musical career and travels from supposition, elements in the scrapbook, and some new information I was able to gather this month. More to come here soon in this series.
For a musical note, here’s a Langston Hughes poem remembering time on the other side of the tracks. There should be an audio player gadget below, but if it’s been red-lined out for you, this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Railroad_Avenue.mp3.
*Radio was more-or-less the streaming of my era, but it had the extra dimensions that you knew that others were listening to the same music you were listening to at the same time. When “your record,” the one you made, or simply the one you cared about as a listener, was played on the radio, you may have been alone in your room or your car, but you knew also you were one of some many in a simultaneous nexus. Music on television or in the movie house was most often a generation behind. I’m nowhere near a Jazz musician in skills, but I owe it to TV and movies of my youth that when I hear a Jazz take on a “Standard” I usually know the tune.
For more than 50 years, I’ve often thought of this Bob Dylan song.
Today I was learning how to use a feature in my recording software, and I needed a vocal take to use as an example. I’ve been much concerned this winter with events that seem (as Thomas Hardy once wrote) to be “in the breaking of nations.” I guess I thought that busying myself with learning might let me take a break from that dread, and when I opened up a mic to sing, this was the song that came out of my mouth. I think it asked to be here today.
Songs and poems can do that. They aren’t necessarily mystic fortune-telling omens — they’re more at waves in the air or memory that come in to rattle your bones and vibrate your vocal cords or synapses.
The story in “All Along the Watchtower’s” lyric is a repeating loop, the last verse’s approaching riders are the two foreground characters arriving to speak and open the song. So, “All Along the Watchtower’s” story doesn’t unfold — it refolds — and I chose to point that out in my version today. To illustrate this song for the video I dealt out some tarot cards. I don’t believe those cards are omniscient omens either, but the pictures can flip and spread for a receiving eye and mind. Perhaps all symbols, songs, fables, poems, pictures — all foolishness and wisdom — rotate around themselves like that.
Is this short post a break from Black History Month, so soon in this February? Well, maybe, but the song “All Along the Watchtower” is best known from a monumental version performed by Jimi Hendrix.
Here’s the video of my version:
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So, what’s in that scrapbook? There were a bunch of clippings from magazines or newspapers, sometimes pictures from them, sometimes articles, often about people in the entertainment business. A couple of letters. Ephemera from places, like business cards, tickets, a cocktail napkin. A few things related to Hollywood movies. A theater program. A restaurant menu. And photos, some posed “publicity shots” for musical combos or performers, some amateur snapshots. Even more than 40 years ago when I received the scrapbook, the pages these things were attached to were starting to fragment, and stuff that was likely attached to the dried-out paper was now loose inside the book, making it hard to leaf through. Alas, there were almost no captions or notations anywhere by the scrapbook’s maker. From clothing, cars, and dates on the clippings it was from the 1940s and 50s.
I think I tried when I received it in the 1980s to determine if it had a story, but I couldn’t really figure it out. Because a majority of faces in the scrapbook were Black, I thought it was safe to assume it was kept by someone who was also Black. On thinner grounds, I made another likelihood assumption: that it was made and kept by a woman. Somehow, it seemed feminine to me, and I could imagine someone fan-crazy about music collating this book. But there was a lot of miscellany to it too. One plurality thread seemed to be in the entertainers’ pictures and clips: a band that called itself The Cats and the Fiddle.
Stuff from the crumbling scrapbook that I’ll be examining this month.
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I’d never heard of them, and back in the pre-Internet age it wasn’t easy to find out about them. In the pictures they were an all-Black group in sharp suits. The “fiddle” was the bass fiddle — a standup bass player* was in all the pictures of the band. The rest of the small combo were playing a range of fretted stringed instruments. I could see one of the guitars had just four strings, and I knew that was a tenor guitar, an instrument that otherwise looked like the acoustic guitar I was playing with Dave in our punk folk band then. I knew that it was developed to allow 4-string tenor banjo players to transition over to the guitar as the banjo faded out as a Jazz instrument. Another would hold a regular archtop hollow-body guitar. And there as an odd instrument I could make out in some pictures: smaller than a conventional guitar, with more than 6 strings. The Cats and the Fiddle looked pre-rock’n’roll, but it didn’t look particularly like the Chicago Blues bands I knew of then, nor was it a typical modern Jazz combo that I listened to. No keyboards, no drummer.
I somehow located an LP record, a reissue collection of some of their recordings. They played hot tempo, small combo, hard swinging Jazz backing accompanying their own tightly-grouped vocal blends. This was a genre I knew only a little about. It had largely faded out as popular music by the time I was aware of music, but I had encountered something like it in acts that were reviving 40s-era genres, nationally: The Pointer Sisters, Bette Midler, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, and locally a band called Rio Nido. As a guitarist The Cats and the Fiddle were easy for me to take a liking to. Though a vocal group, the energetic short solo breaks on the guitars still sounded fresh to me, a fellow stringed instrument plucker. I’m not sure if I stole any licks, but I would have liked to have.
What is this group doing in cold Minnesota? A movie clip shows they can take to the snow!
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There was something else about the songs: many of them were lyrically about what might have been called the Jazz life: referencing the music itself, but also things connected with it: drinking, partying, hepcat slang, and those “Jazz cigarettes.” There were a handful of lovelorn ballads, but the approach more often was near-hypermania good times. No drummer, but the combo’s rhythm was solid, and that accompaniment was not mixed down low way behind the vocals.
Proof that Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn didn’t invent the behind-the-back guitar strum
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There were liner notes on the LP sleeve. Yes, they were a ‘40s group. I can’t recall if the notes mentioned where the musicians were from or what region the band worked out of, but I know I was looking for a tie to Minnesota where the scrapbook ended up, and didn’t find any. One thing the reissued LP did reveal: one of the members was Tiny Grimes. I’m not a hard-core Jazz historian, but I knew of Grimes — a contemporary, though longer-lived, of electric guitar pioneer Charlie Christian. Guitarist Grimes, like Christian, was present at the creation as Swing music morphed into Be-Bop.
I put that scrapbook away, and when I moved to my present home, it stayed on an upper shelf in my study where I work on the pieces you read here. Did I decide I had hit a dead end with the scrapbook, or was I just busy with my life then as sometime gigging member of a band? Probably a little of both. I’d sometimes look up at it, look at it looking down at me, and I’d think: I should get back to it sometime, see what more I can determine.
And this is the month I did that. More to come, as I examine the scrapbook again for Black History Month 2025.
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Well, not always an upright* bass player, as you can see in the second video clip.
In the past few years I’ve enjoyed focusing here on Afro-American poets during the month of February. Last year, I dug in and did a bit more research on an understudied but fascinating Chicago poet Fenton Johnson, whose published work sits between the emergence and premature death of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson became easily identifiable as a Modernist before his access to extant publications dried up in the 1920s, and I suggested last year that his poetry allows us to see —albeit silently on a page until I did some musical settings — into the formative years of Afro-American Gospel and Blues music before it made it onto recordings.
Here’s something I formulated for myself early in this Project as I found myself often looking at the rise of Modernism in the 20th century: a part of why Americans became highly significant innovators in Modernism has to do with Afro-Americans. Literary-only scholars might not focus on this inside their silo, but at the same time Pound, Eliot, Frost, Moore, Stevens, Millay, Williams, H.D., Sandburg, et al were reforming poetry, Afro-Americans were spearheading a revamped approach to music. Black poets like Johnson and Langston Hughes were hip to how those two things should be viewed together from the start, and after all, Modernism took root during the last decade called The Twenties under the banner of “The Jazz Age.”
That 2024 series on Fenton Johnson let me further express the musical part of the Parlando Project: “Where Music and Words Meet” — and it should also be obvious by now to regular readers that history is one of my interests. So, this February, like the Fenton Johnson series of last year, I’m going to get into the deep weeds a bit this on some lesser-known stuff.
I’m unable to schedule the Parlando Project work in a fully professional manner, so it’s likely you, if you follow along this month, will be going on a journey with me as I look into elements in real time. I may be revising myself before the finish, and if that gets awkward, let me say at the start that this isn’t some plotted-out documentary, I don’t know what all I’ll find. It’s likely going to be very first-drafty, so put on your reading sweater.
If this was an audio presentation, at this point there’d be one of those audio fades with reverb to suggest a passage of time now. From out of the echo my voice will be saying: “It all started in 1976 when I moved to Minnesota from New York…”
I was looking for a new start. It wasn’t entirely clear if I was going to continue intermittent attendance at college, which was both logistically and financially limited to me at the time. One advantage I had: doing nursing work in an Emergency Department was an easily transferable skill, I could go most anywhere that had a hospital, and maybe it would be good if where I moved also had a college. I settled on Minneapolis because I knew a couple living there from my Iowa college experience in The Sixties. One of that couple, Dave Moore has remained a friend (and contributor to the Parlando Project). Dave and his then wife had plotted out a plan for themselves. They were going to run a small mail-order used book business and needed a place to collect stock, store it, and run that business. They purchased (for an attractive low price) a large old house on Park Avenue in Minneapolis. Park Avenue was, in the last Gilded Age, a place where newly rich Minneapolitans built their mansions along a wide tree-lined street leading into the business center downtown. Now in 1976, this couple I knew were going in big on the sweat equity thing, rehabbing that house. The place, 3132 Park Avenue South, was built as a sort of a Junior-Grade Mansion. The 3rd floor, where the original owners had servant’s quarters would hold their stock of books which Dave was obtaining from aging bookstores that were beginning to close down or dump old stock. The other two floors would be their living space and nursery for the child they were planning to have. I could help a bit with the enterprise and rehab, and stay with them for a while.
It was a grand adventure. I had no builders skills, but mainly helped with the stripping of paint off the old woodwork and general lifting and toting. Work was already more than half done when I arrived. Dave told me that around mid-century the house had been turned into a set of small rentable spaces part-way between a rooming house and a set of apartments. Most of those changes had been removed already, and the book business part of things was more at my interests. For that, I’d go with Dave on trips to the basements of sole-proprietor bookstores, some closed, closing, or soon to close, to clean out old stock in their basements or back rooms. There was so much stuff from the 50s and the early 60s — before, you know, The Sixties. From ruined books I collected a small batch of lurid pulpy covers on these expeditions. The packrat in me wished I’d grabbed more.
It’s James Joyce’s birthday today. This cover from those ‘70s bookstore hauls was stuck up in my studio space for years. There’s no music directly for this essay today, but here a Joyce poem conveyed in the early years of this Project.
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This house on Park Avenue is just a location for the drama, a set for one of the acts I want to present haphazardly this month. The whole play is not extant. It exists only in fragments, a bad quattro. How do we raise the curtain?
Dave knew I had an interest in old Blues music, and somewhere in an interval after I was staying at 3132 Park Avenue and maybe as late as when I moved into the rented part of a duplex next door a few years later, he gave me a tattered scrapbook found when they were cleaning out those rooming house remnants. I’ve learned a lot since that scrapbook came into my possession. Let’s take a look inside as this series continues.
Time for me to get back on my Carl Sandburg soapbox. I’ll be brief — as today’s poem, now song, is as well. My point (again) is I think there’s more there in his poetry than is currently remembered or considered. Your impressions may be from two stalwarts of American poetry anthologies: the Whitmanesque “Chicago” with those big shoulders and the quite contrasting short metaphoric poem “Fog” with its cat’s feet. Not a lot for a poet who wrote so much, so early in the Modernist era, but it does point out a range of expression.
I’ve performed segments of Sandburg’s prolix mode here. I like Whitman well enough. Within limits, I like Sandburg doing Whitman’s mode too. He’s not quite the opera singer that Whitman aspires to be, he’s more of the folk-ballad, song-suite, kind of poet. America’s a big country, so I guess we need big, shouting, poems — and even if that’s not my favorite mode, either poet can move me as they traverse long distances with galloping catalogs and litanies. My point today is that this Sandburg, being bigger, overshadows another Sandburg, one that I particularly treasure, the one that reminds me more of Du Fu than Whitman: the forgotten, pioneering, ground-level reporting, American Imagist, Sandburg. Sandburg’s poems in the compressed style are not accidents, seeds of long poems that didn’t germinate, or little palate cleansers between his important work. His earliest collections are packed with sub-sonnet-length pieces.
On awaking this morning, I was thinking of a set of poems by a couple of the earliest American Modernists, Ezra Pound and Sandburg, where they each showed gratitude for their American forbearers. I paired their poems as one musical piece early in this Project, and here’s a link to that. Pound, within his characteristic grumpy mode in “A Pact,” makes peace with Whitman — and while casting a little shade on Walt for being the son of a house-carpenter, he claims his own finely crafted woodcarving is descended from the cross-cut and rip saw of Whitman.
Who does Sandburg say are his native 19th century inspirations? Whitman? Nope. Maybe Longfellow, with his civic-minded striving for uplift and justice? No. Who’s left? Poe? Hmm. Interesting thought, even if Poe is awfully rhymey for a free-verse poet. The other Fireside poets? Well, yes, Sandburg wanted a wide audience, but as the child of an immigrant couple and attendee of a non-descript Midwest school, he lacked their pedigree.
Sandburg in his “Letters to Dead Imagists”is declaring his allegiance to that spear-point of English-language Modernism, but here he claims a couple of Americans as his predecessors: Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane.
The poet he names first, Dickinson, will likely seem a more conventional choice to those reading this today than it was when Sandburg wrote his poem in the early 20th century. Dickinson’s eventual rise to genius status would still be early in its slope — she was more known then as an eccentric than as a model for poetic expression. The second, Stephen Crane, is more associated with prose, but he wrote a singular collection of gnomic, short free verse poems, The Black Riders, in 1895. An inspiration for Crane’s unusual work: the new, first publication of the poetry of Emily Dickinson in 1890.
Sandburg was among the first to try to form a 20th century style combining the “mother and father” of American poetry: Dickinson and Whitman. And I happen to like it when he takes after dear old mom.
Today’s piece, Sandburg’s “Couples” sounds a little like Crane, a little like Dickinson, and it has a characteristic early Imagist trope of close-focus specifics and vivid color by name. Here’s a link to the text of it. If one thinks of Sandburg as being a clear-speaking poet, this poem should disabuse you that he’s always about some obvious point. Part of the delay in publishing my version of his poem is that I’m still not sure what he’s describing. There’s parallelism set up between six “women” dressed in green and six “men.” They’re described as dancing, likely haphazardly as the infamously strong liquor absinthe* is mentioned, they make a hissing laughter sound. They are somehow cheating or gaming each other. There’s a worn path of hard packed dirt said to be from the dancing feet. The poem closes with dewy weeds said to be as high as six little crosses, one for each couple.
I’m stumped. A graveyard? Then maybe the dancers are ghosts. But if so, why the specific detail of the dirt floor packed down if it’s a weedy, less-than-well-tended graveyard? A barn-dance? The weeds are described as “mourning veils.” Or are the six live couples dancing around six graves? Why, who are they to the buried, if it’s that? Perhaps instead, the dancers are green plants of some kind, their dance uncoordinated as random winds, and the wind through them is the hissing laughter, and they’re maybe even the weeds the poem closes with. Did Sandburg just choose their number to be six out of desire to be specific? But again, he spends two lines of a short poem on the packed down dirt floor under the “dancers,” and plants dancing in the wind wouldn’t compress the earth.
In summary: as obscure as any of Crane’s Black Riders poems — but specific, like a closely-observed Emily Dickinson riddle poem. If Sandburg intended mystery, he achieved a stubborn dose of it in this poem of his, and the incantatory power of its spikey, inexplicable details may still carry us through. While it’s unlikely Sandburg’s model, if one was to translate this into French and say it was from Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat” how would we experience it?
Glad to be at the open mic. I’m going to do “Wagon Wheel” and this Oasis song “Wonderwall” now.
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If forced to a final guess: they are graves, and the dancers are the living as continuing life-force, not dancing on the graves as revenge, but out of the joy of continuance, and the packed dirt is the mark of our ongoing life-work and dance. The cheating? The unfaithfulness and trifling of love and desire, or they are cheating death by living and loving. The couples of the title then are not only the paired male and female dancers engendering a new generation, but the connection between the living and the dead. Why six? I don’t know.**
I performed this with just acoustic guitar, Carl Sandburg’s own instrument of choice. When assessing his guitaristic skills, Carl would sometime say he was at least one prison sentence from getting any good. You can hear my misdemeanor playing with the audio player gadget you should see below. No gadget? It was pardoned, or impounded, or deported, or took a buyout, or something. No one seems to know, because some vain fool runs things, and there’s not enough conscientious people left to make knowledge from foolishness. But I do give you this highlighted link that’ll open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Couples.mp3
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*Absinthe is colored green, doubling down on the use of that color in the poem.
Rejected guesses why six couples and six crosses: six is sometimes used as the number of cardinal directions, sometimes shown as a six-armed cross, but Sandburg seems to be clearly saying six separate crosses. The Oklahoma state flag shows a First Nations (Ossage) shield with six separate crosses on it (the cross is a common indigenous American symbol) — but that flag was adopted a decade after the poem, and I can’t find any source of previous use of that distinct six crosses symbolism that the flag drew on.
I’m trying to decide between work on finishing a new Parlando piece combining literary poetry and original music, and seeing what I can do for a February Black History Month observance here. The first is mostly done, the latter is but ideas at this late date.
What to do? In my typical direct approach, I did something else today. This weekend I watched Timothée Chalamet appear on Saturday Night Live as the musical act on the long-lived sketch comedy television show. Chalamet is fresh off an acclaimed performance as the young Bob Dylan in the film A Complete Unknown.
I mostly liked that movie. Biopics are always dodgy things to do, as most people’s biographies when told straightforwardly do not have enough dramatic concision to make a compelling two-hour film. Which means they all have fibs in them, and they will perforce leave things and people out. It’s become an apparently unavoidable cliché to remark on this element by quoting a line from another film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: ” When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”* This misses the point of John Ford’s great film. When that line is uttered near the very end of that movie, Ford has shown us a compelling tale of a man, played by Jimmy Stewart, who had many great things about him, a man who at the end of the film had risen to become an honored Senator, a plausible Vice President even — but Ford also told us of another man, played by John Wayne, who may have been less interesting as a biography, but whose acts are critical to the movie, and who gave up more than legendary fame when making his choices. Ford isn’t praising that “print the legend” eventuality. Ford’s film prints “the fact.” He thinks that’s more interesting.
A Complete Unknown tries within conventional running time to tell a complex story: of a young man who’s forming himself — not so much finding himself — as he wants to be unfindable. Instead of doing a “great man” tale, it wants us to see the other folks around him, lovers attracted to and understandably frustrated by Dylan; and a pair of men: one a businessman, the other a saint of citizenship (Albert Grossman and Pete Seeger). In between these, Johnny Cash plays an imp of the perverse. That complex tale is told at a brisk pace. I was able to forgive that. Yes, there are characters undervalued, incidents re-arranged in the timeline — but in the movie’s defense I’d say it couldn’t be otherwise, there were just so many talented and interesting people in that time and place.
And then we got to the final incident, the film’s climax. Here time is suddenly allowed to expand and we are given more detail about something that lasted maybe 48 hours in real time. Some of that detail is accurate, much of it is not. Most of the inaccuracies are aimed not to expand the complexities of the relationships and times, but to simplify them and underline a simplistic point. Finally, the movie has introduced all these characters, and this is the place where the earlier parts of the film are exposition, and you can get them to fully spark and rub with their differing viewpoints. Instead, that doesn’t happen, you get instead a rock’n’roll pantomime, with caricatures shouting and everything but a pie-in-the face fight.**
This is not the fault of the performers though. The cast does a fine job, and before his actual work could be seen, Chalamet’s ability to pull off his performance as Dylan was generally doubted in online forums of musicians and music fans. He did fine, and as the movie publicity has informed us, he “did his own stunts” by learning to play guitar and harmonica and to sing live, and this led to this past weekend’s choice for him to appear as a musical act.***
Again, Chalamet exceeded expectations. His opening Dylan song, “Outlaw Blues,” (done as a rap-chant with Jack White/Black Keys-like elements in the ensemble) was fresh and effective, including that Minnesota call-out to being “9 below zero at 3 o’clock in the afternoon.” Even more surprising was Chalamet immediately going down-tempo with a real rarity that would have stumped all but the deepest of the deep-cut Dylan fans: “Three Angels.” It’s a brief song from a now little regarded Dylan album New Morning. It seemed a throw-away even in that less-celebrated collection, an off-hand narration of an urban winter scene post-Christmas. From my Parlando focus, it attracts me though. It’s got some elements of one of poet Frank O’Hara’s “walking around poems,” that paying attention to what we are not usually paying attention to mixed with a casual surrealism. Everyone in the song seems a non-sequitur somehow, and why does the truck have no wheels, why is the cop skipping? Three fellas are “crawling back to work” under the same number of angels playing silent fanfares in snow, and we may not know if those three are wise men or not, as nobody stops to ask why they are going to work. Here a link to his set of performances.
So, I admire Chalamet’s taste in Dylan songs there. Perhaps if he lives to my age he’ll also be good enough looking to play me in my biopic. But watching his performance my ego remembered that decades ago I did a cover of “Three Angels” myself, one done early in my ability to overdub parts creating a one-man-band on a recording. Today I found the recording and made this short video to present it.
I think I did this recording on a “portastudio” cassette, or on my first computer-based recording system.
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*Here’s a good run-down of that “print the legend” trope, which takes care to get the details right.
If you really want to know the complexities, I recommend the book which the movie bought the rights to: Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric. I thought I knew all the details of the film’s famous climactic Newport Folk Festival scene, but I learned stuff from Wald’s reporting and extensive context on the “folk scare” American folk revival. Sure, 99.5% of the folks who watched the movie will not benefit from getting this book, but the .5% who would, need to read it.
***In the post WWII era, there were a lot of poets who in their dreams wanted to also be musical performers. Easy to see why too: poetry was a small cultural sideline, but for much of this era it was possible to become highly popular and well-paid as a “rock star.” It’s less acknowledged, but the same could be said of some actors — despite the fame, adoration, and income levels achievable in commercially successful acting being roughly equal to popular musicians. In 2025, I believe this is less often true — more and more professional musicians these days have meager incomes. But there may still be some desire to play Orpheus in real life among a sub-set of actors.
What do I think? I think poetry and music are kin, and if my thought-dreams could be seen they’d probably put my head in a guillotine. And despite the fame level of Bob Dylan, Chalamet is helping Dylan’s art by illuminating it. Good on him.
Today is Robert Burns’ birthday, which I hear is much celebrated in Scotland. While this Project has done over 800 audio pieces over the years, none of them (before today) have used Burns words. Why not? It’s a personal limitation of mine: his poetry uses a lot of Scottish words and dialect, and I have a hard time doing that.*
But, at last, I’ve finally snuck in a bit of Burns. And while it’s not as novel, I’m also using a set of words I wrote for the bulk of today’s performance, though the Parlando Project remains overwhelmingly about experiencing other people’s words. The second part of “Arcadian Ewes” is a draft version from a work in progress: The Memory Care Sonnets. Drafts of other poems in the series have appeared here before, but for those new to this, they tell the story of a daughter visiting and caring for a mother with increasing dementia.
While hearing the original account of a daughter and the daughter’s friend going for a weekly singing session at the memory care facility last fall, I was somehow struck at the time with the story’s Arcadian sensibility. That’s a place I know from this Project. Poetry and folk-song is rich in Arcadia: there are shepherds, flocks, meadows, love, peril, loneliness, peace, gifts, songs, a sense of time ever-present without fences, taking place over the hills and away from our actual daily lives. Here, in the sonnet, the shepherdesses go to the place, gather their flock of singers. What songs will they sing?
Even as I was writing the poem the refrain of Burns’ song that now begins the recorded performance was in my mind. I can’t quite account for why, other than the song for some reason often brings me to tears — and I can’t fully explain that either.
Today’s musical piece begins with part of a Robert Burns’ song displayed on this monument in Dumfries Scotland(photo by: summonedbyfells via Wikipedia)
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“Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes” was collected and reshaped by Robert Burns in the late 18th century. He published at least two versions, and the folk process has given us other variations, including differences in how much of the Scottish accent and wordage is retained. As a text though, it generally isn’t a sad song. The song’s shepherdess, taking her ewes among the hills seems happy enough in her labor, but happier yet to find a swain in her Arcadia who promises her unending devotion and care. That story isn’t sad now, is it — unless one dotes on how love’s promises aren’t always faithful, that human lives are not unending. But as I said above, poetic Arcadian time doesn’t end, and maybe that contrast with human time is the essential sadness. Perhaps it is those elemental parts of Burns’ story, of the care for the carer, is what linked it to my resulting poem of the daughter taking care of the mother.
However inexplicably, I believe it’s the music that makes me cry when I hear that song’s tune. Music, that same powerful class of thing that is the balm that restores a connection to the mother on one of her “bad days” of deeper withdrawal in the sonnet. The music for the performance you can hear below doesn’t hew exactly to the old song’s tune, for I don’t know if I could have stayed with the reading if it did. You can hear my performance with the audio player gadget below. Has your audio player strayed away over the hills? No, just some ways of reading this blog suppress displaying it, so I also offer this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Arcadian_Ewes.mp3
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*That lack of the ability to hear and then repeat back sounds bedevils me several ways: it’s often relied on in musical endeavors, and it’s long frustrated me in my desire to speak other languages, or even pronounce some names correctly. I suspect it’s a neurological quirk of my brain.
I suspect a majority of my readers are looking for something related to poetry when they visit here. Stats show continued high visit counts for older posts on some poems this winter, proof of Pound’s dictum that “Poetry is news that stays news.” I remain a little puzzled by the trailing interest in the audio pieces that accompany nearly all the blog posts. The analyst in me assigns that to the fleeting visits of many internet users who sometimes can’t politely play audio, or who don’t care to expend the 2 to 5 minutes most of my musical pieces would take. Maybe some think the audio player gadget will launch an all-to-typical one-hour-plus podcast with an inefficient, in-joking set of hosts rattling each-other’s funny bones? Or it could be musical tastes that diverge, including expectations of better or different musicianship and a more attractive and commercial voice than mine? If so, fair enough.
I doubt any but a few are here for politics. And this week, more so.
I had a political life, I retain an interest in politics in old age, yet even I am on a political news diet this winter.* If it looks like I’ve been writing thinly veiled political posts lately, I’ll claim my intent is more to expiate my own emotions — and to, with whatever value, to succor those that William Carlos Williams portrayed last time as “huddled together brooding our fate.”
One of my early poetic heroes, Carl Sandburg, had both a political and literary life. I recall a story that as his early Modernist poetry was breaking out into publication, he was challenged on controversial political elements in his poems. He claimed (earnestly, or with care for his emergent career, I don’t know) that any such was incidental — that he, the author couldn’t fully compartmentalize himself. I have no career. My primary interests here are to promote other people’s poetry and to learn and enjoy myself while doing that, and so I’ll make a similar claim.
Which brings me back, as this Project often does, to Emily Dickinson. There are some things exceedingly modern about this mid-19th century American poet: the compression of her language, her freedom from lockstep prosody or conventional syntax, the explicit use of the mind’s interior as a landscape, her abrupt linkage of the prosaic ordinary and the most high-flown concepts. With all that stuff that still seems modern, folks looking to more deeply comprehend her work may need to be reminded that she is, for all her genius, a citizen of a particular place and era.
I remember a short session I had while at the Dickinson Homestead Museum some years back, when a tour docent made a comment that Dickinson wrote a good deal about the Civil War.
“Huh?” I said to myself. I could recall no such poems. In my ignorance then I assumed Dickinson was largely insulated from that, being in small-town New England, privileged, white, and female. I’ve learned a lot since then, and that’s been one of the joys of this Project.
Today’s musical piece is her poem “Inconceivably Solemn.” In its abrupt/oblique language, landscaped with the blank horizons of those em-dashes, I can’t catch a definitive picture of what she’s observing. Metaphoric or actual, it seems to be a parade or celebration. What’s the occasion? An Independence Day? A group of newly mustered troops for that Civil War? An election? I lean to the latter two, and remind those who aren’t steeped in mid-19th century American history that those two things were linked as chattel slavery was a huge and sundering political issue for decades before breaking into war. I first thought the poem was troops going off to war from her town, and it still may be. The 1861-65 war overlapped Dickinson’s most productive years as a poet, and her Amherst sent troops which quite likely enlisted and marched out from the town.
If you’re tired of politics, poet Emily Dickinson seems skeptical of the celebration here.
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On the other hand, the poem also seems at times to place the celebration/parade as being far away. Is she imagining the soldiers marching into battles at the battlefields that weren’t near her town? Or reacting to battlefield reports in publications perhaps with “mute” engravings of the troops? The poem starts and ends with clear oxymorons, with that first line’s “inconceivably solemn” that is used as the title stand-in. That “solemn” is soon “gay.” And the penultimate line has “wincing with delight.” So then: portraying great causes, assumed honor and bravery, but also suffering and death.
Allow me one moment of my pedantry, and some very uncertain speculation on my part, regarding something that only occurred to me today after working with the poem earlier this winter to prepare the music you can hear below. You see, there’s this odd line “Pierce — by the vary Press.” Dickinson is no stranger to choosing an unusual word, and that may be all “Pierce” is meant to do here.
But one of my youthful enthusiasms was history, and just today I thought, “Is she punning on Franklin Pierce?” OK, I know I’m defeating audience expectations here to ask you to be interested in poetry and vaguely-indie-folk-rock in one Project — and now there’s a history pop quiz? You see, Franklin Pierce was one of America’s worst and least-successful Presidents. He was a Democrat, though in an era where political alignments under that party differed greatly from today. He was elected President in 1852. Dickinson would have been just in her majority, though as a woman, unable to vote — but her father, Edward, was politically involved.** In the 1830s and 40s Edward served six years in various offices as a state legislator and elsewhere with the state Governor. In 1852, the same year that Pierce was elected, Edward Dickinson was elected to the national House of Representatives. Edward Dickinson was a staunch Whig party man. Once more I’ll skip the complex details of the political alignments of this time —but during the 1850s and the run up to the Civil War the Whig party disintegrated. And Pierce? By the midterm elections of 1854 Pierce’s Democratic party was reeling as well. In 1856 Pierce became the first American President to seek and be denied the nomination for a second term — but as ineffective as he was a President, his victory in 1852 coincided with the steep decline of the Whig party of Dickinson’s father.
So from that plausible wordplay connection,*** and the absence of any armaments or uniforms in this poem — only flags, drums, and pageantry — I’m open to the thought that it’s one of those raucous political parades that were a big part of 19th century American politicking that’s being depicted. Improbable gay solemnity could describe such a civic event, and the poem’s side-eye to all the noise and celebration would be all the more appropriate if the Dickinson family’s party might have been on the loosing end of the campaign hurly-burly. If written with hindsight after the Civil War has broken out following the failures of Pierce and his successor, the similarly one term and terrible President Buchanan — then the final “Drums” is reminding us in conclusion that the martial drums of a Civil War were “too near.”
OK, here’s that short musical piece. Perhaps thinking of Colin Mansfield reminding me of the early Woody Allen gag about the cellist in the marching band, I didn’t do a brass band for this, but acoustic guitar, organ, violin, and yes, cello in this song of a parade. There’s a graphical audio player below, but if you don’t see it’s mute pomp and pleading pageantry, I supply this highlighted link that will open its own tab with an audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Inconceivably_Solemn.mp3
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*And Parlando contributor Dave Moore has, at least as of the time being, dropped his monthly comic published elsewhere, which often commented on political issues. He and his partner should be allowed to tell their own story, but he told me recently that he couldn’t bear to do the same comics over again as the country enters its Restoration era.
**I’ve written often here about a theory I have, that Emily picked up information, terminology, and concepts from the family business, lawyering, practiced by her grandfather, father, brother, and maybe even her later-life flame Judge Lord. I’m sure there has been, or should be, some scholar who’ll do a graduate thesis on the use of the Law in her verse. And why not the same regarding the closely allied field of politics?
***Wikipedia says that the Democrats needled the Whigs by campaigning in Pierce’s 1852 race with the slogan “We Polked (successful Presidential campaigner James Polk) in forty-four. We’ll Pierce in fifty-two.”
I’ve long been fond of the poetry of Kenneth Patchen — but even though an old edition of his Collected Poems has followed me about over the years, it was only today that I appreciated this poem of his. He wrote it sometime in the 1930s, but reading it this morning I felt he was speaking my thoughts as I look back from the ending of our year 2024.
Patchen’s poetic sensibility was essentially an exercise in Keats’ Negative Capability. Patchen admired human love and wrote reverently about nature and joy, but he was also disappointed and in opposition to a world manipulated by selfish and thoughtless power. He wrote some poems so sweet you might select them for a child’s bedroom wall, and others bitter in the taste of his analysis — but his life wasn’t a trajectory between those poles. Some of Patchen’s most politically radical and downbeat poems were written in his youth and some of the most hopeful pieces of bonhomie came from late in his life. And this was so despite never achieving crowning literary success, and after suffering chronic and painful health setbacks. He seems to have liked today’s poem, as it stuck with him. Looking briefly at its history tonight I see he had sent it out to be set for a choral musical performance in the 1940s, and he printed a broadside of a slightly revised version in 1967, shortly before his death. So whatever specifics he was thinking of when he first set it down, the man himself thought it more universal. Here’s a link to the version of “At the New Year”* I found on my bookshelf.
Kenneth Patchen. He wrote of his times and is timeless.
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Today I read it as if it was expressing my own thoughts this year, about this year — not some year in the 30s, 40s, or 60s. Most any decade has wars, but the cruelty of current wars and new refugees cuts freshly. And then, my country’s last national election was heartbreaking for me. I have long held faith with Lincoln’s democratic analysis of how long how many can be fooled, but at my old age I don’t know if I will be there awaiting the arc of the universe when it bends toward justice. As Patchen moves into the second half of his poem he writes of the brave talk and the mean talk, he takes in this world as full of the good and the lovely, but also a measure of the sham and hatred. When he says as the New Year’s bells are to be rung that there are other bells that he, that I, that you and I too perhaps, would ring — well I got a little misty singing those words this afternoon.**
I had to proceed rapidly to create a realized singable version of Patchen’s poem before New Year’s Eve, and so I quickly set up a broadly repeating musical cycle for the accompaniment: VI, V, i changes in musician’s shorthand, but the VI and V sometimes go minor in the quick and dirty rush to make the cycle. Since the passage of years is cyclical and won’t wait, perhaps this accidentally makes for a fitting setting. I was lucky to get accommodation this afternoon so I could open a microphone, and I ripped through the vocal you can hear below while that musical cycle did its thing.
The audio player is below for my performance of Kenneth Patchen’s “At the New Year.” What, has the ball dropped, the bells have rung, and there’s no player gadget on your screen? No need to stop time, just use this highlighted link. That’ll open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/At_the_New_Year.mp3.
*I make a quick search to see if I could find this once-planned 1940s choral setting, but came up empty,
The bells motif at the end of Patchen’s poem recalls Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s holiday poem “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” that I wrote about and performed a few years back. Long after Longfellow, and some years after the death of Patchen, Leonard Cohen did his own New Year’s “Anthem” with bells that contains one of that poet’s more remembered passages: “Ring the bells that still can ring,/forget your perfect offering,/there is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in.” Cohen’s poem echoes Patchen’s sentiments, and Cohen’s poem and song may have been in conversation with those earlier poets’ work.
However similar if amorphous shapes, everyone’s ghosts are private spirits, and I have a new musical piece with words by Emily Dickinson testifying to that — but let me slide over to a couple of personal things first, as if I was a regular blogger externalizing their internal story.
I’ve had a couple of weeks when I’ve needed to come back to the Parlando Project stuff from other things. I had a colonoscopy with unremarkable results. Huzzah. That’s some prime blogger internal dialog! But before that, I searched around my crowded little bedroom/office to find old cassette tapes. The oldest are from The Sixties when I had one of those small battery powered monaural cassette recorders with a slide-out chrome handle, a single speaker on the top, and a chorded plastic microphone with a start-stop slider button on its side. Others were from the 1970’s-2000 era when I recorded musical things, first on the stereo tape decks of the late 20th century home hi-fi era until I was able to afford one of the legendary Portastudio models designed for musicians, using the same humble cassette tapes, but able to record 4 distinct tracks. My task: to make digital copies that I can store in no appreciable physical space and are independent of an obsolete format.* More than 30 years of this stuff, much of it of only private interest, though you may hear some of it eventually.
Some of the cassette tapes.
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The ubiquitousness of inexpensive video is fairly recent, but assuming no catastrophic events, many born in the past 15-20 years will likely have color video with sound of their childhoods and young adulthood that could follow them the rest of their lives.** Is that a good thing, something they welcome? I don’t know. Before this some folks had diaries and journals, or kept letters, so some level of self-documentation is not entirely novel. Still, for me, a person whose Project lives in music and sound, whose favored form of literature began in sound before writing was invented — retaining an element of the sound of the words, and their sequence, and echoes — my particular audio time-capsules have a special tang. And fears.
Most of the tapes are not just me, in a few I’m just the man holding the microphone, though I’m there as the shadow that chose to start the recorder. They hold our imperfections: things before we knew, before we learned — and then too the persistent faux pas that we still commit: there, and committed to a recording. Given that most can record now anytime with the tap of screen, how many will simply erase to save future embarrassment?
So back to Emily Dickinson and this poem about ourselves and what we think we fear — which may not be what we actually fear, or should fear. “One need not be a chamber — to be haunted” is a poem about that self we either can’t lose or can’t consider. In five stanzas Dickinson lays out some conventional gothic scenery (some of which she herself will erect in other poems) haunted houses, undead ghosts, church graveyards, and finally an assassin laying in wait for us.*** Dickinson points out that the self may be making or amplifying those fears, and perhaps that self, making scary movies in our imaginations, may be doing it to displace us from seeing the real fear source, our mind’s-self. “Ourself — behind Ourself — Concealed — Should startle — most” Dickinson’s poem concludes. You can read the text of Dickinson’s poem at this link. And yes, you might note I sang “alley” by mistake instead of “abbey” messing up Dickinson’s graveyard implication.
So, is that our choice? To ignore ourselves, out of fear of what we’ll find, or to disappear into a copious kingdom of solitary solipsistic self, many of us with the digital equivalent of Krapp’s Last Tape clanking and dangling from them like Marley’s ghost? Socrates decried the unexamined life. Memoir can be an honorable genre. Despite my taking the time this month with the old tapes, I think of this Scylla and Charybdis, and in the end there’s ultimately no keeping of this life and self, though sometimes there is sharing.
Today’s musical ensemble is a Rock-band of some kind: drums, bass, piano, 12-string acoustic guitar, and two electric guitars, one of which is run through enough effects to mask its guitaristic nature. No need to rewind, you can hear it with the audio player below. No player? No need to untangle that with a pencil in the reel-hole — this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/One_need_not_be_a_chamber_to_be_haunted.mp3.
*Many years ago, I was on a committee working on the technical design for a radio network’s archives (most of which were still on audio tape then) which involved long-term storage and public accessibility elements. The online “New Media” folks had their ideas about what formats to use for listeners to stream over the Internet, the audio engineers had concerns about what would give the longest life and best fidelity, and the computer IT folks had thoughts about what media would have the capacity to hold something that might climb into the then hard to imagine “terabytes” of digital storage. The three groups weren’t always in agreement, and a grizzled consultant from some outside large, already in existence, archive was brought in to meet with us. Should we use digital tape, hard drives, optical disks? What file-system format on which? What audio file format should be used on that media? Is some of this going to die from “bit rot” on the media in how many years? We had lots of questions and wanted the wizard to arbitrate our concerns. He listened for a while as we cross-talked.
Then he answered. “It doesn’t make much difference what you choose. You’re going to have to convert to other media, file-systems, and audio formats in the future, and every few years going forward. Plan for that.”
**Many of my mid-century generation have photos from their youth. I had a “baby book” that lasts into my grade-school years in black and white. A few families had movie cameras (though no one I knew did) but many of those shot silent film. The cost of film and developing that film constrained the amount of pictures and home movies made. Lots of birthday parties, weddings, holidays. Parts of life yes, but selected shorts.
***I was working on this in the wake of the news of a planned, lay-in-wait killing of an insurance company CEO, which will be followed in the American drama by the killing of a teacher and a teenage student in a school reported by a 2nd grader who called 911. The first was caught on ubiquitous digital video, and the emergency call of the second perhaps made on one of those smaller than a fat postal-letter things we call phones even when we aren’t making phone calls. More than social embarrassment may haunt our digital archives as we live going forward.
I also note that final stanza of this poem’s “revolver” is another example to go with “My life has stood — a loaded gun” of Dickinson poetry citing a firearm being held as the high card in some kind of deadly personal dispute.
Sometimes we don’t know there are heroes in our world, for adventurers don’t always move and report themselves in the most well-seen spaces. I think of Mina Loy as I write that. Early in the 20th century this London-born young woman began an odyssey that carried her from the St. John’s Wood art school, to the Munich Künstlerinnenverein, to Paris and the left-bank Montparnasse, to the Florence of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s circle, and then into the center of the Italian Futurist movement.
And she was just getting started filling up her passport leaves. Up to this point she seemed mostly working in visual art, having started as a girl as an admirer of the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris, but by her early 20s she was writing fierce Modernist poetry. She’d met Gertrude Stein while in Italy, and like the Pre-Raphaelites, the Futurists wrote as well as painting. After leaving Italy she moved to the extraordinarily vital 19-teens Modernist scene in New York City. If one was to survey those in the Western World’s avant-garde in their artistic hot spots in 1919, Mina Loy would likely be as prominent as any woman creator — but that’s one point in time, and far-flung doesn’t mean widely-known or lastingly famous.* She was there at a lot of “theres,” a person on the scene when Modernism was being shaped, and then largely forgotten.
Loy had a complex love-life during this time, casting into alliances with several men. Involved for a time in a triangle with two Futurists principals, about which she wrote a series of poems that became her best-known/yet still under-known work, “Songs to Johannes.” A version of it was first published in the landmark NYC based Modernist magazine Others** in 1917, and subsequent editions of the poetic sequence were included in a couple of later book-bound collections of Loy’s work.
So, what’s the catch, why isn’t Loy as known as William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, et al? Can we chalk it down to “The Patriarchy?” Yes, that’s a factor, but until recently Loy also didn’t have the footprint of Marianne Moore or Gertrude Stein — Modernist poets to whom she was compared to in her heyday.
The Freewheelin’ Mina Loy standing next to Ezra Pound in Paris. The woman on the far left is Jane Heap who edited The Little Review in which Pound wrote of Loy’s Others published poems “In the verse of Marianne Moore I detect traces of emotion; in that of Mina Loy I detect no emotion whatsoever.”
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Part of it may be a smallish corpus of work. Part of it may be due to her leaving active literary circles about 100 years ago, even though she lived until 1966. Key critic Pound thought her work however skilled was cold and without emotion. But more importantly, there’s this factor: her work, in particular “Songs to Johannes,” scared people. Not just the un-hip general public (which never widely considered her, unlike Stein), but other Modernists. Harriet Monroe of the influential Poetry magazine thought Loy’s work unpublishable. The “Johannes”* poem sequencesubject matter and her treatment of it was problematic.
Men for ages have been prone to “kiss and tell.” Propriety might lead them to disguise the names of the paramours, even if insiders would know. Yet women arising from the prone to write about their experience might be on shakier ground. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale were able to do this in the 1920s with popularity and prizes, but their poems of female desire were written within conventional romantic poetic tonality. Loy? Not so much. “Songs to Johannes” can be frankly carnal. If Modernism was to speak otherwise and often of direct treatment of the thing, of charged moments, of images depicted in all their dimensions, this wasn’t something that automatically extended to women talking about sexual relations within the fine art of poetry. Boys will be boys when they do it — and the boys become prim fuddy-duddies when a woman adventurer writes from her perspective.
So all this. Decades passed with Loy largely forgotten.
Feminism and now the 21st century has re-opened the case of Mina Loy, and now she’s considered a rising subject for academic study and consideration. What’s my consideration? I’ve always figured if someone writes a literary poem and calls it “Song…” that the poem is challenging the Parlando Project to realize that element. I chose two short poems from the sequence to fit things to my schedule and preferences; and for instrumentation, I used an acoustic guitar challenged by some keyboard ghosts. You can hear my performance of the segments of “Songs to Johannes” numbered IX and X with the audio player gadget below. What, has the audio player ghosted you? No, it’s just that some ways of viewing this post will suppress showing it. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Songs_to_Johannes_9-10.mp3.
*I’d suppose H.D. would be in the running in such a mooted 1919 survey too.
Curiously, Mina Loy’s Wikipedia article mentions that the delightful and highly popular classic Hollywood actress Myrna Loy may have gotten her stage name from our poet/artist Loy. Wikipedia footnotes that claim with two books I haven’t read. Mina Loy did act on the NYC stage at least once, in a Provincetown Playhouse play where she co-starred with William Carlos Williams.
As its name implies, Others saw as its purpose to publish outsider Modernist work, and in its short life it was troubled as many such publications are by shaky revenue and artistic factionalism. Long-time readers might remember that three traditionalist poets contemporary with Loy pranked Others by concocting the Spectra hoax and wheedling the magazine into a special issue dedicated to the made-up Spectra movement poets who wrote parodies that they thought might pass as real Modernist poems. One of their pseudonymic poets, Anne Knish, may have been an inside dig at Loy.
Pound’s critical blurb where he’s pairing Loy with Marianne Moore seems a strange judgement to me, though the quote I’ve seen says he meant it as at least a mixed complement. Work like Loy’s “Songs to Johannes” seems quite charged with feelings. Reading the whole thing in one sitting — even given its Modernist fragmentation of narrative and proto-Surrealist metaphoric freedom — can exhaust one, buffeted from the range of conflicting states of emotion being depicted. You can read one version of the entire “Songs to Johannes”* sequence here.
And in the woman-poet’s “you can’t win” department: in the post-Eliot world of High-Modernism some of Loy’s female contemporaries like Teasdale and Millay were down-rated for writing extensively about love, desire, and romance as subjects to be examined in their poetry, rather than the big-boy themes of culture and philosophy.
Today is the anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s birthday. Let’s open a small present.
Her poem cataloged by its first line “A face devoid of love or grace” transmits clearly on first reading. I hear it as describing a widespread human feeling: the disgust one might feel looking at a confidently self-satisfied face. So, a simple poem?
Simpler than some of Dickinson’s work, even though we should always consider that she can cloak unique thoughts in cottage-core embroidered-sampler language. The thing I think described is a bit of an odd emotion though. Why can we feel such disgust at sensing resolve and rest on the face of someone we dislike? Is it just our hate transferring to some visage a hate we’re sure we find behind the surfaces? Not if our judgements of the person behind the visage are valid — if what drives us to fury are the actions we know the expression covers.
That’s an F Major 7, mixed in with all those minor chords. That’s been a favorite chord of mine for more than 40 years.
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This week’s news includes the overthrow of a dictator, an event that brings obligatory photos of newly mutilated portraits of the disposed tyrant, and videos of the toppling of statues — enthusiasts performing the pre-requisite of “Ozymandias.” While in my country, many see the calm, regularized-in-demeanor news-slug faces of our upcoming national administration while reading alongside them their announced motives and plans which horrify — the “sneer of cold command.” There’s a disconnect there that many feel. “He looks so righteous, while your face is so changed” as yet another writer put it. So, the self-absorbed bureaucrats of disorder and disregard look unconcerned behind their hard successful faces.
In Dickinson’s verse I note a choice: she could have described the unconcerned face that stands for someone that disgusts her in a variety of ways. The one she chose, stone-like, brings along with it that idea of heroic statuary. And there’s an unexpected double-twist from her pencil at the end: that face and its metaphoric linkage with stone. Stone is rhymed* with “thrown.” It’s like stone, and like the stone that the angered would want to throw, rock against rock. And then too, something I didn’t notice until I was singing this, a possible intended pun: thrown/throne.
Am I dissecting a bog-simple nobody-frog of this short poem here? Could be. But even if this is a short birthday gift, it’s the thought that counts.
You can hear my musical performance of Dickinson’s “A face devoid of love or grace” with the audio player below. It’ll only take 90 seconds of your time, about as much time as it takes to sing “Happy Birthday.” No audio player to be seen? It hasn’t been blown-out and removed with frosting-feet, it’s just that some ways of viewing these posts won’t display it. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/A_Face_Devoid_of_Love_or_Grace.mp3.
*Speaking of rhyme: I love the off-rhyme of “ease” and “acquaintances” in this poem.
So here it is, our 800th officially released audio piece from the Parlando Project. Perhaps it’s not representative: it’s not by a dead poet, and unlike almost everything else we do it may not have been written for the page without thought of it being sung. “The Fade” was written and sung by the leading alternate voice of the Project and all-around inspiration Dave Moore. Dave and I go back to when we were leaving our teenage years. I met him then when he read two pieces in a church: one was his own poem, a cheeky number that mixed eros and agape, and the other was a reading (as if it was page poetry) of Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side.” A decade later we started doing music together as the LYL Band, and some of what we were doing has become melded into what became the Parlando Project.
So, as I think again — is there any way to have a representative Parlando Project piece? Maybe not, and if so, by design. Variety and seeking something unexpected are founding goals.
Dave’s writing here, and our common efforts in making it the song you can hear below, strikes me as something too little done. Rock, whether it’s Rock’n’Roll, punk-rock, Alt-Rock, Indie-Rock, has tended to speak from a youthful perspective. Even the Classic-Rock acts that are still treading the boards at Dave’s or my age hew to topics that would interest those younger than they are. “The Fade” is far from those common tropes: it’s about the diminishment of aging and particularly about the fogging and loss of memory.
Early this morning I watched an old documentary, a British South Bank Show done in the mid-1980s about the Velvet Underground, a band that was more than a decade defunct at that point, but all the principals (several dead now) were alive then, only entering into middle-age in the 80s, and of a mind to answer questions about the band’s influential work. The topic most covered as they spoke about their former joint project was what made the songs the original lineup put out of lasting importance when the idea of 20-year-old Rock songs having currency seemed novel.
Chief songwriter Lou Reed had it that he wrote about the things he saw around him rather than using the regular subjects of pop songs. True enough, but he chose subjects decidedly less ordinary in song in the times when he wrote them. He specifically wrote about things that frightened people enough that they left them out of the songs they wished to listen to: drug dependency, gay and gender issues, less-vanilla sexuality, and mental variations. And then several others, including the band’s PhD, Sterling Morrison, took pains to note that Reed presented those stories without editorial comment or stance, without sentimentality.
I’ll note now, that later in his career, past the times of that now 40-year-old documentary, Reed wrote one of the few Rock albums about aging and its disabilities: Magic and Loss. It still stands pretty much alone. It’s also unlikely that even the adventurous readers and listeners that this Project has have heard it.
Dave and I recorded “The Fade” this past spring. When I talked to Dave this morning we exchanged info on folks we know, folks our age or even a bit younger, who are moving into assisted living or who are suffering from dementia. I don’t know, there are probably a few songs about how sad Alzheimer’s and the like are, probably some songs that try to mitigate it with a chorus that mixes in the memories the sufferer no longer maintains. Dave’s song isn’t like those songs — if they exist — and I’m glad I helped make his song exist, and that I get to share it with you today.
This is the sheet Dave handed me with brief scribbled chord notes on the day we recorded this. As you listen to the performance you may see that he did a masterful job of revising his typed words. I think the song gained power from the verses he left out.
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You can hear that recording of “The Fade” with the audio player below. I think Dave gets a bit of the VU-ara John Cale sound with the keyboards in it. I’m using feedback in it too, but not quite as the Velvet’s did. What? No player visible? No, you didn’t forget it along with where your keys are or what you came into the room for, it’s just not shown in some ways of reading this blog. You can use this highlighted link as an alternative.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Fade.mp3.
As December begins, I’m going to be taking some time to celebrate and elaborate the roots and concepts of this long-running Parlando Project as we reach our 800th-released audio piece milestone.
For those who are new here, let me restate again what we do: we take various words, mostly literary poetry that was never intended by its authors to be performed, and combine them with music in differing styles. Sometimes the page-words are sung, sometimes they’re spoken or chanted. Sometimes the music will patently match the text, sometimes not. The latter class are some of my favorite pieces: Emily Dickinson as blues singer or psychedelic ranger, Robert Frost with EDM, Longfellow at a beatnik coffee-house, Li Bai with western orchestral instruments, Jean Toomer or John Keats as performed by an indie-folk combo. I expect long-term listeners to scratch their heads at times, though I also fear that some will sample a piece that they don’t much care for and leave off from future listening here.
No one idea or artist inspired this all, but today’s piece is about the farthest back I can recall anything that might have inspired the Parlando Project. I think this happened when I was around age 10.
I grew up in a mid-century Iowa town of 700 folks, and it wasn’t a particularly musical place. There was a small high-school marching band, a handful of children probably had piano lessons of some kind, if only in hopes there’d be someone to play piano in the three Protestant churches in town. The two best musicians in my childhood cohort played trumpet and accordion. The former was surprised to admire Louis Armstrong despite having personally absorbed dismissive racial stereotypes, the other might aspire to Myron Floren level of showpieces on the stomach-Steinway. The same little town might have over-achieved in literature though. It was named by its 19th century town-platter “Stratford,” and its streets were named for British poets and Longfellow — main street being Shakespeare Avenue. If you grew up on a street that was merely numbered, or an avenue named for some animal or geographic feature, such things never had a chance of shaping your worldview. I grew up thinking of Milton or Shakespeare as being a local possibility.
My father sang, mostly in church. My mother thought he had a good voice (“better than Perry Como” she once said) and I recall it having a very nice timbre when I was a child, but there was no piano or other instrument in the house, and he didn’t sing a cappella that I recall. We didn’t have a TV until I was 7 or 8 (and even then it was a chancy fringe-reception, rabbit-eared, used set that would send its display to snow or tumbling whenever it felt like it). There was some kind of radio, for which I’d hurry home from school to listen to the Lone Ranger on, though I can’t recall what the radio looked like. And at least some of the time there was a phonograph. I recall it was one of those that looked a bit like a portable typewriter with a luggage-finished case that could be clasped-closed. It may have been one of my parent’s from their college years. It sat in a little side room off the kitchen at home that we called “the breakfast nook.” And with it was a small cache of records. And here it gets odd — specifically odd — but applicable to the Parlando Project.
I clearly recall four 78-rpm disks, an unexpected set for a Fifties, small, rural-town-in-Iowa record collection. Two were commercial spoken word recordings, the sort of thing that was a viable genre then. Record one: Robert Frost reading his poetry. My recollection that the featured poem was his “Two Tramps in Mud Time,”* but so far I’ve found no Frost recording of that poem to refresh my memory or share here. The second was Vachel Lindsay reading from his “The Congo,” which has an insistent, chanting, rhythmic flow. The fact that I can remember them would be clearly meaningful, but to be honest I have to say that I didn’t like either of them. I’m not sure what I expected from poetry that came from poets more recent than those whose names were on my streets, but Lindsay seemed overwrought to me, and even at a young age I might have been put off by the whole white-guy-doing-primitive-African vibe of his poem. And Frost? I’ve often written here that I didn’t care for him until I started to explore things musically that became this Project in the 21st century. Only then did I discover that he was a supple lyric poet — and furthermore, a much more subtle observer of humanity than I had appreciated in my youth.
The fact that I didn’t really dig these two poets didn’t keep me from playing the records. Experiencing them felt exotic then, and I liked that even if I didn’t admire what was engendering that feeling.
The third record didn’t match suit. It was a recording from the 1940s of a song called “Open the Door Richard.” I didn’t know then, but this was an unusual “Novelty Record” piece, charting in versions by as many as five different musicians within one year, 1947. All those musicians were Black, and before it was one of their recordings it apparently was a Black Vaudeville comic number that the musicians spruced up with swinging jive-cat musical settings and choruses. The musical versions all differ in detail while sharing the chorus. Some of them are largely drunk-act comedy,**** while others are more at down-on-one’s luck frustration and focus on the riffing, musical, chorus-hook. From listens today I suspect the recording I listened to back them could have been the Count Basie Orchestra version or (best guess) this one by the Three Flames. I liked that record, though I thought it a little odd, and I probably didn’t fully understand it. If these first three records have a link, that’s it, isn’t it? I enjoyed the strangeness, the difference.
Tortured Poets Department, but my childhood: disks containing a psalm of comfort, a song of misapprehension,. and two early 20th century Modernist American poets.
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The final record was the one I listened to the most. It was not a commercial 78, but a recording, perhaps from a record-yourself booth (or offers like that) which provided the earliest Elvis Presley recordings. It was my father reading “Psalm 23,” the famous psalm of David. The voice was someone in my life, no exotic stranger, but I was totally mesmerized. If no one is more mundane than one’s own parents, this everyday, ordinary person had their voice on a record! And the text, in familiar English translation, is one of the most comforting pieces of poetry in the canon. When I’ve revisited the Psalms periodically as an adult I’m sometimes shocked at violent and authoritarian themes I find weaving in and out of Psalms’ religious rapture — but if “Psalm 23” implies frightful things, it does so to say that they pale in comparison to a connection with a godhead.
Parents sometimes comfort their children, do so by saying “it will be all right, we’re here to protect and care for you.” My parents weren’t much like that in expression however, though by action in life they were being that with much effort. This object, this record, did that, using someone else’s words translated from a Bronze-Age king, poet, and musician.
I think I asked about the “Open the Door Richard” record and the “Psalm 23” record. I can’t recall what my dad said about the Psalm recording, though I wish I did. I have a vague memory that he said the “Open the Door Richard” song was something of an in-joke between his brothers. I didn’t get, or can’t remember the full story, but one of my father’s brothers went by the name Richard (one that became a successful Protestant minister). Another brother was named David, though he never talked to Leonard Cohen about secret chords or sling trajectories.
So there you go, in summary: I had formative exposure to poetry on recordings. One case with my own father’s voice offering comfort; and another, an Afro-American tale of misapprehension. It would be years before I had any idea to do likewise, and decades before I could do something from this early experience regularly in ways that you could hear.
Longish post, but here’s a short musical piece called “Records in Childhood” using a sonnet I wrote this year casting some of that remembering my early experience with recorded words. You can hear it with the audio player below. No player? This highlighted link will open a new page with its own audio player
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Records_In_Childhood.mp3.
*There may have been other records, though it was not any kind of large stack. The fact of memory that these four are the ones I recall testifies to their impact.
**Besides poetry recitations, sermons, and even some secular speeches were released on disk — and spoken-word comedy records were often big general-interest sellers. In a previous post I talked about how vividly I experienced Hal Holbrook’s one-man stage show of Mark Twain Tonight on an LP record in a library in Iowa.
***I did find this professional recording of Frost reading some of his “greatest hits,” and was surprised to hear quiet piano backing was used in a way that could be compared with some Parlando pieces.
It’s possible that my home’s Frost recording was a separated part of a set. 78 RPM records were sometime sold in a bookbinder of page-sleeves holding multiple disks, which is the reason we still call a longer form vinyl LP, CD, or issued-together set of digital files “an album”
****Drunk act comedy goes back to at least Shakespeare’s Falstaff, and in an earlier personal history Parlando piece I found out how my teetotal great-grandfather might have perceived the sometimes brutal alcoholic folk-song “Rye Whiskey” as stoner comedy.
One benefit of having an acquaintance with this largely forgotten song was that when I first heard the Bob Dylan Basement Tapes song “Open the Door, Homer” I knew the reference.
There’s a long tradition in poetry of civic poetry — poems not meant for an audience interested solely in the interior intimate experience of the poet, but speaking to larger, more public themes. I suspect modern poetry doesn’t do this mode directly much, even though some individualist poetry infers that purpose. American poetic Modernism began with an emphasis on the concrete, the thing specific: red wheelbarrow, ripples in a pool, a certain Chicago cat-fog, an exit on the Metro on a rainy day. Yet, a focused subject can still be an example that stands for more.
If the subject is small though, perhaps we poets expect our audience most often to be small too, compared to a variety of other, popular arts. But this was not always so. Longfellow and Whitman expected the nation to listen to their poems of democratic virtues. If the literary set eschew the mode, song-lyricists and non-literary poets will still assay it.
Just under four years ago, a poet Amanda Gorman who has written civic poetry, delivered a poem at the last U.S. Presidential inauguration, speaking of the nation’s fears, hopes, promises. The mode of the next Inauguration has changed. I’m not expecting poetry. Some will think, more-the-better — who wants a poet spouting off what I should think.
Why not, are they not citizens? What are the occupations that are allowed to speak?
Nearly 75 years ago. American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a long poem for the American holiday of Thanksgiving. She expected a good-sized audience: it was published in the Saturday Evening Post, a weekly general interest magazine, the one that often featured Norman Rockwell paintings on the cover, that claimed Ben Franklin as its founder.
The most often used pictures of Millay show the young romantic adventurer. I’m also fond of this one that seems less all that. The poem which I perform excerpts from today was the last one she published before she died at age 58.
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I’m sure there were specific things on Millay’s mind, geo-political, American issues. She writes five years after a war ended with two A-bombs. How long would be the peace? In 1950 there was another war going on overseas in Korea, there was a “Red Scare,” and to a large degree some deficiencies in American equality of opportunity were so far off to the side that too few even thought of them as political issues to address then. Millay didn’t cite any of that directly.
Instead, she wrote about how she thinks we, the citizenry, were feeling, assuming a general agreement that might be hard to gather today. Thanksgiving is a dual holiday occasion: it’s our harvest festival, a time to give thanks to what our work brought us, and it’s also a holiday to give thanks for what we’ve come through: it originated in a time of Civil War, and it commemorates the hardy survival of some early 17th century boat-people who landed without papers and survived on American shores. Millay’s Thanksgiving thoughts were more toward the latter than the former.
What will ring true in some American hearts this year will be her words of hopes dashed or at least deferred. Can one give thanks for having hopes that were unfulfilled? Can we at least forgive ourselves for hope? Her poem exists in that question. In the excerpts I performed today for this musically accompanied piece you can hear below, I focused on that sense, felt in my bones. “Cunning and guile persist; ferocity empowers” Millay writes. The lines that stand out for me as a Thanksgiving prayer this year are “Let us give thanks for the courage that was always ours; and pray for the wisdom which we never had.”
As civic prayer goes, that’s humble, but it has some bite in it.
You can hear my performance of portions from Millay’s “Thanksgiving…1950” with the audio player below. The full poem’s text is at this link. No audio player gadget to be seen? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Millays_Thanksgiving.mp3.
Here in Minnesota, the weather is turning, as it does at a time of its choosing in the Fall. Tomorrow morning the Fahrenheit temperature will be in the teens when I get up, and the forecast says single digits will greet me by Friday.
I began work on setting this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay last week after seeing it at the Byron’s Muse blog. Two things grabbed me when I saw it: sitting there as silent words it begs to be sung, and it’s tantalizingly ambiguous.
This poem was from Millay’s first collection, published (1917) as Modernism was starting to find an audience in America. Americans in the last decade to be called The Twenties saw Millay as a Modern, though her prosody wasn’t like the free-versifiers, and her lyric’s narratives weren’t fragmented word-Cubism. So, a more comfortable Modernist to those whose expectations of poetry still flowed from the 19th century? Somewhat. Still, though not so much in her first book, but soon, Millay began to stand for The New Woman, a character that took up the prerogatives of independent thought, act, and agency in love and desire. A William Carlos Williams might have absorbed radical Modernist visions in Modern Art into prosody. A Carl Sandburg may have taken his Imagist eye and cast it toward workers and immigrants in his poems. But soon after this poem, Millay was using somewhat traditional verse to speak about female independence in life and desire. Cubism and Socialism were controversial, sure, but the kind of change Millay was covering in her poems was large in scope. Man Ray or Monet, Debs or Debussy, Pound or Reverdy — change was in the air — but as far as art such as poetry was concerned, the charge for change from women (and Afro-American artists) in the Last Twenties is a big deal, not something to shelve off as some sideline.
OK, so what does this early poem have to do with that? I’m not entirely certain. Yes, the overall scene of the poem is clear to any Northerner — but even as the poem starts the seemingly simple language has faceted surfaces. The poem is titled “When the Year Grows Old,” but I’d suspect you might mistakenly remember it as “When the Year Grows Cold.” It’s not just the rhyme, the poem is clearly about the weather getting colder, all the images intensify that. Intensities of anything old are not there directly at all. And then, I can’t say how idiomatic the opening statement (refrained at the end,) “I cannot but remember,” would be in 1917 — but it’s easy to read it (out loud, or in understanding) more than one way: “I will reflexively remember,” “I have only memory of this,” or even “I can’t do this, but I am forced to remember.”
And who’s the “she” in this poem? I had a thought in early-days with the poem it might be a pet, likely a housecat. Beside a generalized factor of love for warmth, cat owners might recognize the bird watching vocalizations — that, and a reference to “the warmth of fur” led me to that consideration. One reader’s reaction I read online this week thought “she” was a mother. I’m not sure of Millay’s mother’s (if that would be the mother here) characteristic feelings for tending a fire or even the specific kitchen task of making tea. My cursory non-scholarly thoughts are: not likely her happy place. Still, I could imagine that a general poetry reader in 1917 (like the Internet contemporary I came upon this week) could think that, or that the “she” is a friend of the poem’s speaker (which we might expect to be Millay), and so find this poem Millay’s predecessor to something like the young old Bob Dylan writing “Bob Dylan’s Dream*” about his remembering lost friends who’d once gather around a wood stove.
Simple chords for today’s piece, presented here as chord sheet in case you’d like to sing it too.
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Living with this poem as I set it to music and performed it, I came to think of it more at “Girl from the North Country” — a song about a lover who is longingly thought of lovingly, but who is now separated. By the time of the performance that you can hear below, that was how I was singing it. Why did I think that?
Partly from reading later Millay poetry, partly in biographic clues of Millay’s sexuality. There’s a definite undercurrent in the poem of the “she” feeling ambivalent: the sighing look at the flying birds, the melancholy chimney wind, and most directly in the abrupt “look of a scared thing/sitting in a net!” And what follows that line feels lustily sensual to me: those rubbing “bare boughs,” that fur by the fire verse.
That reading also answers the why the year being “old” is the title, not “cold,” other than just seeking variety. A once passionate attachment has been reconsidered by the other party, has grown old/cold.
Millay could have made other meanings (“cat lady,” “dear old mom.” etc,) clear with no commercial readership risks, but following my understanding, this presentation is coded so those who know will see that, and others will see a vaguer poem while recognizing late autumn weather. If I’ve misread it, or if Millay ever explained what she was intending — well, it wouldn’t be the first time — but it worked for me to find an experiential place to inhabit the poem.
You can hear my performance of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “When the Year Grows Old” with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? It’s nothing personal, just that some ways of viewing this blog suppress that. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/When_the_Year_Grows_Old.mp3.
As poetic testimony: tender as Robert Hayden’s well-loved poem “Those Winter Sundays”* is, it’s not a story of a parent finding happy beauty in loading up a household’s fire box.
This month my teenager, who I don’t write about much out of the belief that they should tell their own story, ceased being a teenager. They’re working full-time hours now, hoping to save enough to move to their own place, sharing hopes and connection with others who are likewise migrating across the border of growing up.
Late this summer, while on one of my bicycle rides down an urban residential street I saw an odd sight: a line of young ducks in their proverbial row waddling across the street. They seemed unconcerned with the intermittent traffic, and there was no mother duck leading the line. I could guess they thought an aged man on a bicycle was not an instinctual, usual threat — but it was grade-school pick-up time and the school buses were rumbling on their routes accumulating backpacked kids. Yet these young ducks, in their new adult colors, just waddled across anyway, as if their orderly line and intent were protection, as if it still was that some parental watch had checked the way clear.
Here’s a chord sheet for the song made from the sonnet I wrote.
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I jotted down a draft of a sonnet soon afterward, and this month as my child becomes less my child and more the cohort of others on their own, I produced a new draft, deciding to set it to music and sing it here. Longtime readers will know that one of The Parlando Project’s mottos is “Other People’s Stories” — my statement that I’ve chosen to not use this place to promote my own poetry, but rather to inhabit other’s words (usually words from literary poetry) and to write about my encounters with those words and what it feels like to sing them.
Maybe today’s piece is a symptom of my age, but I barely think of this poem as my own in the greater context of learning to think of my child as less my own. I anticipate a separated hope and worry, an elsewhere joy and adventure, when they move off as if we’ve taught them enough.
Which we never have.
You can hear the song made from the sonnet with the audio player below. No player? Don’t call home, it’s likely just the way you view this blog, some of which ways suppress showing the player gadget. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player for you.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Ducks_as_if_Teenagers.mp3
I seem to have the kind of mind that, unbidden, sees connections. Probably drives some acquaintances around the bend, but regular readers here will have become accustomed to this. After all, this Project is about making a connection — likely unintended connection — between literary, page poetry and musical performance. Still, even though it relates to a mental reflex of mine, there’s “making,” work, involved in that combining.
So it was, that this month I went consciously looking for a connection, one I thought I might find between our American election results and the fear and despair around that event with the early 20th century era which I often look for to find free-to-reuse word to set and sing.
Where and what to look for in the era if trolling for such a connection? I wanted a short poem to leap out at me, one that I’d immediately flash on, in hopes it would attract even the casual listener here with a sense of recognition. I started paging through my Sandburg, who remains one of my personal models, but found no strong candidates I haven’t already performed. I next moved on to a 1930’s volume A New Anthology of Modern Poetry* edited by Selden Rodman. Rodman is one of those little-remembered figures I enjoy encountering in the Project, a litterateur and socialist activist who admired American Modernists — so connections right there.
The selections in Rodman’s volume look like an index of this Project’s authors, I counted 37 poets whose texts I’ve used in the nearly 800 published Parlando Project pieces.** His lively introduction promised what I was looking for, connecting the artistic discontent with old literary modes and tactics with social change and discontent.
Eagerly, I read on, looking for that flash of connection with the way folks I know are feeling this month. I read some fine poems, some I might even use someday here, but nothing came out of that quick skim and read that hit me with my sought property: “This sounds like it could have been written today.” Why not? When those poets wrote of their social injustices and feared outcomes the details of their times didn’t match closely enough to the details of our times.* “It’s just details, what about the essence?” you might think. I thought that too, but I wanted listeners to feel it from the poem I was looking for. Details usually aren’t ephemeral in poetry, they are often the source of its emotional power.
If I’d left it there you wouldn’t have a musical piece to listen to today. But then I recalled Edwin Ford Piper, a man whose work I discovered earlier this year. Piper’s family settled in frontier Nebraska just after the American Civil War. He grew up there, knowing similar rural settlers, ranch-hands, and farmers at the turn of the century. To keep this a reasonable length, here’s a link to some of what I wrote about this deserving of more current attention poet earlier this year.
Here’s Piper’s poem I performed today as it was published in his collection Barb Wire
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Piper’s poem “Ten Cents a Bushel” is about a small farmer. I doubt I have any readers who commercially harvest corn by hand, though some may have experienced something close enough. There are still agricultural workers, but modern field workers are usually employees, not caught in the exact resident small-farmer serfdom that is the center of Piper’s poem.**** I went with this poem anyway. In doing so, I accepted failure on my goal — at least so far — I didn’t find the brilliant connection between eras I was seeking. But if the poem’s details are off-target to today’s burdens, they are still powerful details. Piper’s poem lets us feel those details in our muscles and smell them with our noses, and the essence of the poem’s world, the repetitive stress of its rural Sisyphus’ burden, is something I expect some tired people can feel this month.
Today’s music? I prefer to call myself a composer, not a musician, even though I operate numerous real and virtual instruments in making these pieces. Modern digital recording allows me to maximize my inconsistent skills and to do with guile and planning what fingers and breath couldn’t accomplish. Be assured: “composer” sounds like a pompous title to me too, while “musician” retains the nobility of the worker. But there’s an element of my personality that sometimes tells the composer-me to back off with the theory and a build-the-musical-piece-with-ideas workflow, and barks “I just want to play!” Weeks like these, or times when I can plug into a loud amp and welcome that power vibrating in a room brings that energy forward. Today’s piece started with two inexpensive electric guitars and a bass playing loud in a room. The lead guitar I played is a Squier Jazzmaster, a model that wasn’t designed for loud, sustained-note playing, but can be forced to do it under volume by an elderly guitarist who can’t rip out rapid flurries of notes. You can hear that performance, my speaking Piper’s account of this November farmer’s harvest while playing more my mood than worked-out musical ideas using the audio player below. No player? The bank hasn’t foreclosed, some ways of viewing this blog suppress the audio player gadget. This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with just an audio player of its own.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Ten_Cents_a_Bushel.mp3.
*I’m not disenchanted with Carl Sandburg. My results in this browse through his work may be because he doesn’t really do fear and despair as a predominant emotional frame much. This may still be a good attitude to assay in these times, but not what I was specifically seeking. If you want Sandburg for this moment, perhaps this previous Parlando Project performance will serve you well.
**One blind spot: Rodman (who had considerable interest in Black Caribbean culture and history) didn’t include any of the Harlem Renaissance generation of Afro-Americans. I must resort to an academic meta-cultural term of art when I consider that: WTF.
***I did think this week about how to compare the injustice and fears which I naively thought I could measure between the 1930s and our time. I’m certain the levels of injustice were massively greater then. The fears? Even given their Great Depression, fascist governments, genocide factories, and a coming World War — I can’t say our fears are lesser.
****I started to write a conclusion here that would need to spin out more than a thousand words to do it justice. Such an epic would point out that those early 20th century rural farmers caught in an economic squeeze by powerful business forces up the supply chain from their crops, founded radical, effective, and practical political movements: The Farmer Labor Party, the Non-Partisan League. In the same parts of the land that today wave the red flag and the red hat, a very different rural political force was electorally successful. What’s with the same fields bearing different fruits in these two eras? That’s more than a blog post, something for someone with skills beyond mine. One naive half-formed theory: was there something about the largely immigrant-or-child-of-one, practical farmer or small-town-dweller of a century ago that saw through urban sharpies and charlatans, and focused on specific economic remedies?
Elinor Wylie once was a reasonably successful poet, back in the last decade that was called The Twenties. I informally group her with some other American women poets of that time: Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, each of whom wrote often about the complexities of love and relationships. Though none of this group had careers of extended success,* Wylie’s poetry career arc was exceptionally short, contained entirely within the 1920s — though it was preceded by a few years of being a gossip item for a series of romantic elopements and divorces. I wrote a bit about that element of her life a few years back, but it seems that Wylie was playing at the Kardashian-family level of tempestuous celebritydom in her time. Read my link if you want a summary of the tea.
Elinor Wylie. Runaway socialite and 1920s poet.
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So how good was her poetry? Clearly better than the usual celebrity with a book of poetry. She’s highly musical and concise, an irresistible draw to my Project, and while ranking art is a foolish game, her best work stands up well against the trio I associated her with. Today’s piece uses a poem that was called one of her best works when I first read it as poets.org’s Poem-a-Day a year ago. Here’s a link to the poem’s text if you’d like to read along. I myself wouldn’t rank it that high if I somehow needed to rank her poems, though the musicality alone compelled me to set it with music this week. Why do I prefer, for example, her “Velvet Shoes?” “Let No Charitable Hope” is a bit abstract, despite the eagle and antelope that are cited in passing and the woman trying to get substance from a stone, while “Velvet Shoes” is as sensuous an experience in imagery as in sound. But as a complaint, “Let No Charitable Hope” probably still connects. Many of us, maybe more for those women reading, are familiar with being misapprehended, of having a hard enough time maintaining one’s own hopes, and to then be asked to try to match the hopes of others. What does Wylie mean by her ending smile in the poem? Is she smiling at how mistaken the apprehension was, or is she allowing herself to smile at her own small lofting of her own hopes?
You can hear my musical performance of Wylie’s poem with the audio player below. I went all-out on the weird chords for this one, so it may not be to all tastes. Is your screen so woozy from fear of odd voicings that it’s obscured any such audio player? No, some ways of reading this blog suppress that player gadget, so I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Let_No_Charitable_Hope.mp3.
*Like Wylie, Teasdale died young. Parker and Millay’s political commitment damaged their later careers. The New Morning of the The New Woman of the 1920s had its backlash as well — but this isn’t simple. It’s hard to maintain an artistic career in general, Parker suffered from writerly alcoholism, and some who shared Milay’s politics didn’t think her later work was as good as literature.
**One more concrete image occurs in the poem: masks. The line “Masks outrageous and austere” was sonorous enough for Tennessee Williams to cop it later on. As if sometimes does for me, I thought of masking as in autism, though the syntax of the poem’s last stanza seems to have masking being applied to the years, not the poem’s speaker’s smiling face. Still, I’d expect some ASD readers would see the disconnect of the “charitable hopes” of others viewing them verses their own internal reservoirs of hope and intent.
A post today for a holiday with complications. In the UK, Canada, and the former Commonwealth, today is Remembrance Sunday and tomorrow is Remembrance Day. In my United States tomorrow is Veteran’s Day. Remembrance Sunday/Day is a bigger deal. Here in the U.S., it’s one of two holidays set aside to honor the armed forces,* and the Spring Memorial Day gets more observance. America moves it around as a Monday workday holiday, so it now rarely occurs on November 11th, the day it was originally meant to commemorate, Armistice Day, the day that WWI ended. In the American observance, the day and the moment being observed are no longer there as they happen to be this year.
But then, all the events of WWI have now passed out of the living’s remembrance, and WWII is entering the time of that leaving — while in England the wound and loss are still felt by a generation that themselves only recall the generations that personally experienced it.**
Historically, poets suffer, fight, and die in wars. Presently in the U.S. this may be less true than was traditionally so, our soldiering ranks now coming from a different cohort than those with MFA and workshop attendance. That too is complicated, and I’ll choose to honor your time today by not going into all of that. Yet I’ll maintain that the experiences of service to country, of organized protection and organized death, of comradeship and loneliness — these words of history aren’t so far away if we only open ourselves to listen to them.
Here are five poems for this complicated holiday that this Project has presented over the years. In honor of the UK preservation of the original reason for the holiday, four of them will be British to one American.
Gone, Gone Again (Blenheim Oranges)British poet Edward Thomas is too little considered in the United States, but in the run-up to WWI this overworked and underpaid freelance writer started to expend his writing efforts to the least commercial of literary forms, poetry of individual honesty — urged in that endeavor by his expatriate American friend, Robert Frost. Frost left England for America as the war began and he asked his friend to follow him and emigrate to the United States.
Thomas didn’t accept his offer. In Britain Thomas is remembered as a War Poet, as one of the casualties of The Great War, but his poetry doesn’t speak of his trenchside times in the conflict — instead it sings with lovely precision and concision of the British countryside as he is making his decision to take the road well-traveled to enlist to the front. “Gone, Gone Again” is one of his masterful poetic verse-essays on this time of decision, as he observes an England depopulated of its workmen. Why did he go to the front? He explained it mostly as being unable to shake his patriotic connection to the very soil and experience of Britain that his poetry sings of, but I said today’s post would be about complications. Thomas was also a troubled soul, looking for meaning in his life not captured by certainty, and some have speculated that a soldier’s pay was a better economic offer for his family than his Grub Street freelancing. He packs every bit of that into this short poem.
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Shadwell StairWilfred Owen is another Brit who took up poetry in the context of serving in The Great War. He’s known for his scathing anti-war poems, which to Britain’s credit doesn’t keep him from being honored nationally as a War Poet. But here’s a lonely poem written on the banks of the river Thames, likely during the time he was back from the front being treated for what was then called “shell-shock.” Folks today can experience the poem in a context pointed out later, that the Shadwell Stair location was a gay cruising spot at that time. Historically, there’s a blindness in some eyes to see that not just that poets and artists serve, but that they aren’t all straight.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Shadwell_Stair.mp3.
On the Troop Ship to GallipoliRupert Brooke was a rising young poet before WWI started, and even at his young age, great things were predicted for him. Unlike Owen, his war poetry is conventionally heroic, conventionally patriotic. Unlike Thomas, he was under no economic pressure when he enlisted. Would that tone have continued, could he have written glorious battlefield odes, or would the war have turned him into a skeptical Modernist? In an irony that only the Fates could have woven, he was detailed to be part of the disastrous attempt to land at Gallipoli. While on the troop ship steaming there, he fell sick from what I’ve read was an infected insect bite, and died before reaching the deadly front.
I took a fragment Brooke composed on that fatal voyage, and audaciously decided to take a Modernist blue pencil to trim and rephrase it the way an Imagist might. That was a complicated act, one that I’m not sure I can justify, other than to say that I wanted Brooke’s moment on that troopship to stand out more vividly, riding roughshod over his verse to honor that.
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The CenotaphI don’t believe there are any women on WWI War Poet plaques in Britain, but of course they were asked to and worked with the war effort, and were there to tend, mend, and mourn the casualties during and afterward. Here’s a complicated poem of mourning, written as the original Cenotaph*** was erected in London. Its author Charlotte Mew is another British poet little-known in America. From what I’ve read she was seen as eccentric by other artists of her time, and her poetry doesn’t fit easily into any movement or style. Every Remembrance observance in Britain to this day has a ceremony at the London Cenotaph where the current government pays solemn homage to the soldiers’ sacrifice. If I read Mew right, she’s the ghost-at-the-feast here, and has some particular wailing to do.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Cenotaph.mp3.
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GrassLastly, for Remembrance Day, here’s the American — and non-more American than the child of immigrants Carl Sandburg. I would post his poem “Grass” every Memorial Day, every Veteran’s Day — and yes, even every Remembrance Day. Yet, this is a poem that sings about forgetting. Is forgetting wars, forgetting soldier’s service and sacrifice, a callous thing? Is forgetting the follies and cruelties of war dangerous ignorance? Is it better to forget wars than to suffer them forever in endless horror? Is forgetting just the way things are eventually, an erasing sigh that fades into new present days — as what humans do that humans can never fully comprehend?
Look, I said it was complicated.
http://traffic.libsyn.com/parlando/Grass.mp3.
*In the US, there’s fine print sometimes invoked to separate the two: Memorial Day for those who died in service, and Veteran’s Day to honor all that served. The UK Remembrance Day is more like American Memorial Day focused on wartime losses and sacrifice.
**Proportionate to population, the US casualties in WWI were much lower. And England’s cities suffered under bombs during WWII. I was going to write too about the World Wars and their effect on the British Empire and colonialism, and America sliding in as a replacement, but that subject is too big for any footnote.
***So great were the WWI deaths that logistics couldn’t see to repatriating all the bodies of British war dead back home, and unidentified dead and missing in action mysteries clouded the situation too. Regional cenotaph memorials, including a great one in the national capitol, would serve as a consolidated gravesite to lay flowers and visit in remembrance.
It happens to us alone, but it happens to so many it’s a trope we share. It goes like this: you have one of those bad dreams. Something terrible has gone wrong — and you, inside the dream, feeling it is real, try to fix it — but you can’t because the other people in the dream are oblivious to the terrible and are acting stubbornly in odd, irrational ways. While dreaming you’re trapped in this desperately unsolvable situation only you can clearly see and try to act rationally on, running in place, thinking in circles.
I had one of those dreams this week: felt so real, so heart-wrenching. Then the dawn comes, and you realize that experience was a dream — oh, that’s why you couldn’t fix it, that’s why everyone else in the dream was acting so wrongly!
OK, exiting satire mode, but let’s stay strange.
Early this Fall I was cleaning out something: a box, a drawer, a binder, a little used bag, I can’t remember exactly what. But in it was a clutch of papers. I glanced at the pages and recognized it was a mix of things: some works-in-progress looking for first reads from the old group of poets I used to meet with every month, and some initial drafts of a longer, multipart poem I was writing as my mother was going through her last hospitalization, the one from which she would ask to return to the home I grew up in with my father and sisters in order that she could die there. I set those sheets of paper aside.* I figured I’d look them over later, maybe digitally scan them, or put them in my filing cabinet. At that later I’d also look to see if there were any drafts in the small stack that were unfinished pieces I could revisit.
Now here it is, we’re November and I finally got around to that sort-out. One of the pages was a college-ruled notebook sheet with a complete intermittent draft of an irregular (American) sonnet. What was this? While I remember well working on the longer poem around my mother’s last illness 20-some years ago, I had no memory of working on this sonnet. Complete blank. Moreover, the sonnet seemed to speak of someone’s story that I didn’t recognize as mine — nor anyone else’s I could recall either.** With the time-interval between discovery of the papers and my finally going over them, I can’t even be sure if this sonnet was found among the stuff from the time of my mother’s death or not. Trying to determine why I didn’t remember it, I wondered if it was even older. I recalled that scholars date Emily Dickinson manuscripts by looking at the changes in her handwriting over time, so I tried that assay. Looked to me more like my 20th century handwriting, so the poem could be older. Still, it was my handwriting, testifying I, however unremembering, wrote this poem — and “What was it about?” That intrigued me. The poem asks the reader to work obliquely, details are supplied but not all the details, something that can tantalize.
The gardening stake metaphor used in the final section reminds the 2024-me of Robert Frosts “Pea Brush,” a poem I didn’t know when the me I was back then wrote it
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Why did the voice in the poem not mail their first letter? What was it about the recipient’s husband that was germane to that decision? Was there an affair or appearance of one? Clearer to me was the latter part, the stuff of the second letter, a recalling of youthful aspirations and a friend who by what they said helped make them more substantial than pretensions. What an interesting yoking, I thought. The imperfect, the not said, or the thing whose saying we keep hidden — combined with the things that were said that help us realize our lives.
As you might tell from the previous paragraph, I was experiencing this poem just as I would the general run of Parlando Project poems, ones written by others in a project which has as one of its mottos “Other People’s Stories.” Its mystery and ambiguity captivated me, and so I set about making it into a Parlando song.
I did a revision of the initial handwritten draft I had found and worked on combining it with the music you’ll hear with it below this week. The music today is played as a conventional LP-era rock ensemble: there’s the usual quartet: bass, drums, chordal and “lead” guitar. Added to that are two keyboards, piano and Hammond organ. You can hear the result with the audio player gadget you should see just below. No gadget? Wake up, this highlighted link opens a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/A_Sonnet_of_Two_Letters.mp3.
*Two of those poets have since died, I re-handled those pages, ones they’d typed in and handed to me years ago, and thought tenderly of them. My part of the household is due for an austere “death cleaning,” the tossing of those things an old man keeps to extend something of the life of that-and-those who’ve passed on. I have no grave illness, but the keeper now must consider that they will pass on and that there’s no real keeping.
**I did write from personas in my writing life regularly, a bit more so in prose than poetry. I was likely imagining the “short-story” plot that I then went about expressing in the sonnet.
It’s National Election Day in the United States, and it’s seen as an extraordinary consequential election. Amid that great matter, I fielded a clutch of social media queries on poetry and music in the last 24 hours or so. I think I understand this seeming paradox. Though I myself will likely stay up late tonight listening to returns — as it is after voting early in the morning, I’m expecting to have only the maelstrom of worrying and hoping to spend over the rest of this national event tonight.
But since I last left my listeners at the end of October with an atypical audio piece, I thought it’d be a good day to release this performance by the LYL Band of a poem by the American early Modernist poet William Carlos Williams. That’s what we usually do here: take other folk’s literary poetry never meant to be sung and combine it with original music in differing styles.
What’s my personal history with Williams? Oddly, my introduction to Williams was in the guise of his printed introduction of Allen Ginsburg to me (and many) in the thin City Lights paperback Howl and Other Poems. Williams’ name was printed right on the cover of Howl,* and while in a smaller font than Ginsberg’s, it’s not fine print either. They must have thought it would help.
Published November 1st, 1956. Did the choice between Eisenhower and Stevenson seem quite so existential?
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As a young man I don’t think I absorbed much of what Williams said in his short introduction. I didn’t have the experience of life to fully grasp it, and about all I knew of Williams was that he was an established, a somehow certified, real poet — and the man he was introducing, Ginsberg, was not. At that point, the younger poet had not been elected to such a post by the cultural electoral college, but WCW was vouching for him beyond the matter of a questionable Beatnik fad. As a teenager at the time, what did I know about what made a real poet? I can’t fully remember. I had some romantic ideas about vision, seeing intensely what others couldn’t sense, and some idea that that would likely put the poet in opposition to elements of society. This was not some structured critical philosophy on my part, it was more a gut feeling, a wish for something more. I look back at that kid I was and think: well, maybe I’m still no better a philosopher than he was, though I now know complications — but yeah kid-of-the-past, there’s still something to that.
Williams’ name on the Beat landmark paperback did not lead me to read Williams then. Rereading that introduction today that may have been because while it had words that Ginsberg took as validation, it was somewhat between hands-off and off-hand about Ginsberg’s poetry. He called Ginsberg “disturbed,” recalled that he didn’t think the young man would develop into a poet (or even survive). He characterizes the title poem of the collection, “Howl,” as a howl of defeat. I adamantly heard it as a howl of survival. So, thanks old man. Glad you at least said we should pay attention, be “arrested” Williams wrote, by Ginsberg’s poetry.
It’s only been in this century that I read Williams early 20th century work. I found a lot to like in his clean spare early poems written as Modernism sought to clear out the tired excesses of decoration. Now as I re-read Williams mid-century introduction to Howl I’m arrested by things I, an old man, resonate with. He did see the poem’s survival testimony. He wrote this there about Ginsberg’s poetry:
He proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man,
the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith — and the art! to persist.”
And he continues in the introduction to Howl:
Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels. This poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own — and, we believe, laughs at it and has the time and effrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record that love in a well-made poem.”
It seems to me now, from my old age, that to “see with the eyes of angels” may be its own curse, and thus the angels may howl.
Is today’s small William Carlos Williams poem, one turned into a little song sung with the LYL Band, too slight to serve on a night where we look as nations move? I don’t know. I already told you, I’m not much of a philosopher. Williams’ “To Waken an Old Lady” is a poem that yokes old age and the descent into winter. Here’s a link to the text of the poem if you’d like to follow along.
I now can often feel like the small birds he puts in this poem. In the course of life, I’m here past the days of career or work harvest. In the summer, the summer of this political campaign, I felt the cold dark winds plenty of times. The poem doesn’t say, but I suppose the poem knows spring comes. I suppose also the poem knows that death comes and preempts spring too.
“But what?” Williams interjects as the poem turns. Look: there are these broken seed husks, the ones that didn’t bloom. So what if they are not to bloom, they are sustenance for survival.
You can hear the LYL Band performance of “To Waken an Old Lady” with the audio player below. Are the returns of an audio player yet to come in? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/To_Waken_an_Old_Lady.mp3.
*Well maybe not odd for me. If you’ve read many of these posts, you may have recognized that I love the odd connection.
I indicated last time that I had another piece I wanted to present before Halloween by Walter de la Mare, that British master of the subtle supernatural. It took a bunch of concentrated effort to produce something of a realization of it, but it’s as ready as I can make it in time. How’d it come about, and why was I not sure I could promise it?
I use the Internet Archive often as part of this “not just non-profit — it’s non-revenue” Project. One of the things the IA has is a large library of scanned public domain literary works,* which affords me a handy way to look through “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.” In the run up to Halloween I made a note to see if there was some Walter de la Mare work I could use for my Parlando Project purposes.
This Project lets me not only explore the well-known writer’s and musical composer’s habit of procrastination, but also the reader’s and researcher’s branch of that foible too. I put that book search in my I’ll-do-that-tomorrow bin for about a week. “I’ll get around to it” I told myself.
And then in mid-October some numbskulls hacked the Internet Archive causing it to go largely offline for more than a week. When the scanned book section returned to availability, I was already into making other new work for this year’s Halloween series, but a few days ago I was finally able to access some additional collections of de la Mare’s work from the IA. In looking through those, I found that Walter de la Mare wasn’t only a poet. He also wrote short stories, which like his poetry, exhibit his dry sense of the strange. “The Three Friends” is one of his shortest published stories — short enough to work into one of my short-format audio pieces.
When Walter de la Mare worked the mic, he had a whole radio network to support him.
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“The Three Friends” is dialog-centric, and in less than a day I was able to jury-rig up a three-person play out of it — but who’d be my voice-acting ensemble? It was less than 72 hours until Halloween. I’d have loved to have used Dave Moore’s voice, but my production schedule is catch-as-catch-can, and I didn’t know if I could corral him in time. My wife agreed to play the part of Lacey, the tavern keeper member of the three friends, assuming she wasn’t completely worn-out from her work and the rest of her life. Last night she stepped up to the mic and recorded that part in a quick pass. I made a logistical compromise and recorded the other two parts with my own voice, also working quickly.** By about 9 PM last night I had the dialog recorded.
Between then and about 3 PM this afternoon I worked on the audio production of the recordings, selecting a bit of instrumental music (from my last-weekend exploration of a new audio software feature) to serve as a plausible theme music for “The Parlando Project Theatre of the Air.” The 19 hours from first opening up the microphones to an audio play ready to upload weren’t all Project work: I did go to sleep after midnight, I got up at dawn and did a bicycle ride to breakfast, and early this afternoon I made another bike trip to the grocery store — but there was a lot of production work trying to meet the needs of this format that isn’t what the Project normally does. “Radio play” music production isn’t the same as recording and mixing a 3-minute song, and I had to learn how to apply my computer audio tools in a slightly different way. If you haven’t done audio production, it’s a heap of tasks even to get a half-way polished result: finding environmental sound effects, balancing levels, fixing the most egregious dialog glitches, deciding if any pauses are too long or too short, and so on. The result of this experiment is good enough to present, though I note things that I would have liked to do better.
So, what’s the story our actors are presenting for your ears today? Two friends are casually talking about a problem bedeviling one of them. That troubled man, Eaves, has been having reoccurring dreams or visions. His friend Sully tries to make light of it, but in the course of their evening they meet up with the third friend who works in a tavern, Miss Lacey. They talk over Eaves’ problem: you see Eaves thinks he has pierced the Samhain veil. Has Eaves seen, will he tell of, “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns?”
Well, it’s de la Mare. Most writers would break out the purple pen to write such visions, de la Mare wants to make a more subtle (and human) observation. The orchestra (well, the piano trio) has started to sound. Take your seats and listen to the short, 10-minute world-premiere performance of the audio play “The Three Friends” by using the audio player below. What, has someone tall with a large hat sat in front of your audio player gadget? I provide this alternative, a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Three_Friends.mp3.
*The Internet Archive has also taken an aggressive stance to works that are not clearly in the Public Domain. That activity is controversial and has had some legal judgements handed down for rights-holders. I won’t take your time to go into all that, but its scanned PD literary archive is a treasure for readers and researchers.
**Oh, if only I was one of those skilled voice actors who can call up entirely different vocal timbres to create distinctive sounding character voices! I tried to mitigate the lack of distinction between Eaves’ and Sully’s voices both being portrayed by mine by using stereo separation on today’s audio
Last time in our Halloween series I reported that Edgar Allan Poe had movies made from some of his poems — well, sort of. Today’s poet Walter de la Mare’s poetry, in title and under his name, wouldn’t have served for such, because so much of what de la Mare does is understated and inferred. He’s one of those poets that when read casually seems to not be doing as much as he’s actually doing. There may be no fireworks going off when you read a de la Mare poem of the supernatural— until after reading it once and remembering the poem later, you may sense the flash-bang-backs of what’s there and evoked.
Today’s Walter de la Mare piece “The Song of Finis” is an example. It seems simple enough to be children’s poetry, and indeed his publisher bound selections of de la Mare’s more whimsical short poems to market them as children’s books. “The Song of Finis” presents an eerie short scene and situation, supplying only the barest of details still rich in specificity, and wraps it all in some fine word-music that urged me to make a song of this proclaimed song.
I present these chord sheets so that you can sing these songs yourself.
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We have a knight, but one out of his time, yet still errant. The once shining armor is rusted.* When he lifts his helmet visor, we see yet “skin and bone,” a choice that lets us imagine a gaunt face suggesting the skull beneath. He’s alone somewhere warm and windless (warm enough to summon the tea-time image of steeping).
There are but two lonely sounds of dialog recorded. His horse whinnies knowing something’s up, and the knight calls out “Lone for an end!” The latter is a bit poetic-dictiony, but I’ll allow it to depict the out-of-time knight, and I suspect de la Mare wants us to hear “lone” as double-sounding for “long.”
What happens in the poem’s conclusion? Does the knight and horse charge off some cliff to end his anachronism? Or is he challenging that empty place he finds himself in with that single cry that has no answer? My thought, it’s sort of both, the song of “Finis” is about endless endings, and the desire for one last adventure.
In de la Mare’s poem there are no angels
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You can hear my song setting of Walter de la Mare’s “The Song of Finis” with the audio player gadget below. It’s not finis is you can’t see that audio player, as I supply this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player. Not finis for me either this year, for my plans are to return soon with at least one more de la Mare fantasy piece before this Halloween charges into memory.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Song_of_Finis.mp3As a fan of the 20th century Rock group Procul Harum, I wondered if the band’s lyricist Keith Reid read de la Mare’s poem once and remembered it in his song “Conquistador*.”
Let’s continue our series of fantasy and supernatural poems with a musical performance of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe — a poet that might be expected to appear in any such series. Before we go to that poem and my performance, let me take a quick jaunt back to my mid-century youth.
Poe sat in a unusual place in literature back then (and probably still does now). His writing, including his poetry, remained in circulation. Unlike Longfellow, it wasn’t likely because it was deemed worthy lessons for young people — Poe’s writing kept its place for its gothic sensation into the 20th century. Without Poe or his sensibility, would there have been then a Vampira, EC horror comics, pedantic pulp detectives, Lovecraftian horror, a great deal of Heavy Metal lyrical content, or a post mid-life movie career for Vincent Price? And that’s not even broaching the topic of Poe’s influence on the French Symbolists, who took elements of his strange and abnormal on an emigration journey from the asylum to the academy.
For a year or so around middle school age, I went on a Poe jag, reading a great many of his stories in collections that also included his poetry. It was a short-lived enthusiasm, and I’m not sure what remains of it. Did I start there with my love for an unreliable narrator? Was the on-the-spectrum “Aha” moment attractive to me neurologically anyway before this reading? Since I can’t say, let’s get on with an example of Poe being the inevitable poet that a Halloween series calls forth when the boundary-line between the dead and the living becomes permeable.
The scenery about the ghosts in “The Haunted Palace” is something of a poetic trope. Poetry loves a ruin, and poets being the unacknowledged back-benchers in the world of political power, there’s a draw to poems about the death of kings — and so we have poets writing “Ozymandias” or “Jade Flower Palace.”
Poe though is drawn almost entirely to the sensuousness of the decay here. There’s no lesson about unwise or tyrannical rulers in the poem. There’s no tragedy — if we can even guess the kingdom’s tragic flaw it might be that it was all too beautiful. On one hand I find the poem a hallow poem of hollowness — but intended by the author or not, that hollowness is a statement about great kingdoms and their lovely riches. And the ending’s invocation of always* escaping — and therefore not escaping — unsmiling ghosts of hideous laughter completes the poem with a powerful rhetorical burst.
Take a sideways jump to the genius of SCTV
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Perhaps because of the simple harmonic structure of my musical setting, I worked some hours unproductively this week on additional musical decoration. I made two attempts at twin bowed-string lead lines for this, and abandoned both those ruins to our mutual benefit. After that wrong turn, I decided that the piece’s feature is more its swaying, understated groove which I left to stand for its value. Mid-century ghosts visiting this music are welcome to do The Frug or The Jerk while listening, but those on any side of the Samhain borders can visit “The Haunted Palace” with the audio player gadget below. Has such a gadget disappeared within a fetid mist? Oh, no matter, you can hear it with this highlighted link then, as that will open a pale-doored new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Haunted_Palace.mp3.
*Poe wrote that the death of beauty was the ultimate poetic theme — the gothic manifesto in short. I’d note in that an undercurrent there that many (most) artists feel: that they create all their beauties, only for them to become abandoned ruins with rare and uncommon audiences. As Frank O’Hara’s fraternal twin brother Count Floyd said: Pretty scary, huh, boys and girls!
As our Halloween series continues, let me advocate today for an element of the fantastical: the goblin. Some fantasy creatures are, by definition, not fully alive: your vampires, zombies, golem, all animated undead meat; your ghosts “spirited” in some way, but incorporeal. The goblin, like all the variations in the fairy realm, seems akin to the human, but not in the beautified, glammed-up way that many fairies are depicted; and also, like the human, goblins seem subject to motivations and whims, not driven by some designed in need.
Puca is a goblin name of uncertain etymology, and specifics of their appearance and nature are like the word’s origin, broad-ranging. That non-specific appearance is baked into many accounts: they are shapeshifters. Some accounts link them to taking on animal forms: rabbits, red-eyed horses, and so on. Today’s puca is related in a poem by Irish poet Joseph Campbell.* While Campbell is attuned to shapeshifters, his puca doesn’t change species or form in his poem: he starts and remains a hairy creature of the forest, human-enough to mirror human behavior, which becomes the signal incident in the poem.
Shapes of pucas. I don’t know the artists for the two on the sides, but the sculptor in the middle is Aidian Harte and his mid-transformation depiction caused a commotion in the Irish town it was to be displayed in.
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If goblins are unpredictable, portrayed as helpful and troublesome, this puca does in a way transform. In my reading of the poem, I sensed it describes something of a turn-about: rather than a human encountering a magical creature and then by elfin spell or trickery the human is changed, Campbell describes the opposite: a shy creature emerges, is observed laughing, dancing, poetry on his lips. And then a stanza later, his mood is sad, distressed, bitter. What causes this change?
The poem doesn’t say, but another creature, the poem’s voice is observing the puca. Let us assume he’s human, even that he may be the poet himself. The unhappy puca is said to have become “the double of distress.” Does “double” just mean equal to the happiness of the second stanza? Or does it mean the puca has taken on, mirrored, the human who has revealed that he envies the puca’s “sunny mood” in the happy verse before?
The poem ends by telling us this human/goblin encounter has caused the puca to retreat back into its cave, hiding itself. The puca may have been enchanted by the human’s sadness, and thus fled from the human’s thrall.
Unsaid in the poem, but I’ll ask: is the human changed by this encounter? While the puca instinctively flees the dissatisfied human, it’s the poet that’s telling us this story, and I think they’ve concisely explained that their bitterness has an effect, causing the happy fantastic to leave. Did the poet learn something from this?
I’ll add this biographic note on the author: Campbell’s involvement with the Irish Civil War that followed independence broke him. He was imprisoned, faced at least some danger of execution — and once released, he fled the Ireland whose culture had fed his art. His literary efforts tailed off sharply and the “gall and bitterness” that the puca demonstrates was Campbell’s lot in the last part of his life.
But this is a poem of Campbell’s early career, first published in 1913. Mute on the page, it set out a spell for me to set it to music. I think “The Puca” shows one of Campbell’s strengths: concision. A great many literary balladeers want to write epics. While I admire those that can vivify a 10-minute ballad in performance, I also observe that that endurance is beyond me — and Campbell, fresh from rubbing shoulders with the concise Imagists, has packed a charged moment in time into four stanzas — and if my reading is valid, more is evoked in the incident described than might be explicated in extra verses.
I tried for the eerie in the music I composed and recorded here: a certain wildness in the keyboard line’s contour and oddness in their timbre. You can hear my performance with the graphical audio player below. What? Such player has crept away into a cave or twilight glen? This highlighted link is an alternative, as it will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Puca.mp3.
Articles on the puca I read this month relate this creature to the Easter Bunny and the invisible friend in Harvey,* generally benign creatures — but then, the red-eyed horse is said to offer rides home to the inebriated, the acceptance of which will lead to a wild, bucking, bramble-scratched ride, ending with the rider being bucked off in a field far from home. Unmentioned in the pieces I read would be the animated cartoon character of Bugs Bunny, the gender-fluid trickster that I’d see as in this tradition too.
**Obligatory footnote every time I bring Joseph Campbell up — no, not the Power of Myth guy. This Campbell is a deserving-of-more-interest writer of the turn of the century Irish cultural revival. Like many others of his generation, he was caught up in the Irish independence struggle, used Celtic folklore material, and dabbled in writing for performance (plays and song-lyrics) — but he was also connected with the Imagists and early English language poetic Modernism that emerged in London before WWI.
Halloween is a chance for us to note our fears.
I first wrote “celebrate” in that sentence, but revised it to ”note,” with musical pun intended.* I don’t think we actually celebrate fear on Halloween, but rather we play with it: pretend we don’t have it, pretend we can sport with it — though perhaps some connoisseurs roll the sense of it around on their tongue to absorb fear’s full body and taste. But in any of those ways, however obliquely, we are acknowledging it.
How close are we to our fears the rest of the year? I suppose that varies. Can we name them? Do we bother? Do our friends, our intimates, know them? Do we even speak of them to ourselves?
Today’s piece is based on a hard to explain poem by one of the most loved British “War Poets” who wrote of their experience of WWI, Wilfred Owen. Certainly that war’s trench warfare, mixing squalid contemplation and carnage, would offer enough horror to write about, and Owen’s WWI poetry is loved while not flinching from that horror or buffering it in patriotic bunting.
But then there’s this poem. It is not set on the front lines. If it mentions the war at all, it must be implied from knowing his biography.
Shadwell Stair is on the banks of the Thames River in urban London. In Owen’s early 20th century it was apparently a noisy, smelly industrial area. This blog post has numerous pictures, some history of the Stair, and the delicious trivia that it’s next to “Labour in Vain Street.”
As treasured as Owen’s bleak poetry is, Shadwell Stair isn’t one of his best-known “Greatest Hits.” Its effective condensed portrait of the locale isn’t the most-read poem of that time and place in metaphor, being eclipsed by “The Waste Land’s” bankside sections written by an American, T. S. Eliot. Those portions of Eliot’s poem are alienated, partly by the recent Great War, and partly by his own sense of an educated visitor weighing England’s and Europe’s history and culture against the grimy realities of the London he had settled in. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” doesn’t actually name the fears in the center of it, but it conveys them in vivid and varied silhouettes. Arguably, Owen’s poem is more coy — if only by being brief — but let me make a case for it. Here’s a link to the text of Owen’s poem.
The first stanza introduces lovely word-music that the poem carries on throughout. It claims to be in the voice of a ghost. We may (I did) anticipate a classic Halloween poem. If we know Owen’s biography, we might think the slaughter-house there is a reference to the war. It may be, but I think the second stanza gives us a different context.
It’s a fleshy context. I can almost feel the goosebumps on the skin, and the speaker’s eyes are lit up in what? Fear? Anticipation? Heightened vigilance? If this be a ghost, it’s an embodied one.
The third stanza is almost all scene-setting, lit by snapping arc lamps evoked between interrupting night noises — those streetlights had a sensual, buzzing, almost reptilian sound that younger readers now may not have had the experience to hear. Of our mysterious speaker, it only says of themselves here that they are watching. OK, watching for what?
Later readers have given an understanding to the mystery here: Owen’s sexuality had a homoerotic element. In this reading, the speaker (presumably Owen) is cruising for a hookup, and it’s said that the disreputable docks and titular Stair were known sites to London’s homosexual demimonde. As with the harsh arc-lights, this context illuminates the poem. I see vividness in this reading, and no reason not to give it credence. Let’s consider then the situation evoked: here is a man, likely on leave from the immense horror of a war that was grinding men up with ineffective tactics in the face of modern lethality. Many Halloween readers here with holiday ease to play with fears would likely have no gauge to measure that — but what has his flesh firming, his skin puckered with cold plucked-chicken skin, his pupils dilated out round as the gems of Rilke’s absorbing cat from last time? Answer: the anticipation of sensual, carnal, sexual contact — intensified by a fear of police trolling for arrests, complicated in the doubts of attraction or rejection with disgust that strangers meeting in the night would encounter.
If so, the enigma of this poem has a specific — if unspoken — core, and the last stanza is an aubade of something even more transitory than the average parting of lovers at dawn. We started being told this is a ghost poem, and the ghost here meets another ghost. The ghosts here are metaphor for spirits that could barely speak of the eros of their lives. A silencing louder than bombs.
Here’s Owen’s poem in work-in-progress form, He seems struggling most with the 3rd stanza yet at this point.
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Today’s music had two challenges for me. The setting I devised might benefit from a “real singer,” someone who could carry a melody with confidence and a beautiful timbre. I’m not that. I decided I could do no better than I can do. And then too, while I was pleased at what I could come up with feeding parts into my orchestra instrument arranger, and particularly with the high trumpet part that comes in near the end, I was never satisfied that I could get the best trumpet Virtual Instrument I own to have the correct envelope I wanted. There I just surrendered. No one with a “no-revenue” independent musical enterprise could expect to be able to present the full richness of the actual instrument. Those who can, will know I fell short — but the rest will, I hope, accept my approximation. You can hear my musical setting of Wilfred Owen’s “Shadwell Stair” with the audio player gadget below. Not even a ghost of such a player visible? This highlighted link is an alternate way which will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Shadwell_Stair.mp3.
*”Note…fears?” See that final paragraph today.
If Halloween is about shadows, ghosts, the dead and un-dead etc etc, it comes in the month I celebrate the birthday of my friend, the living Dave Moore, an occasional alternate voice here at the Parlando Project. Dave’s a poet, songwriter, cartoonist, and my longtime musical partner in the LYL Band. Back in the 1970s his lyrics were frequently used by “The Greatest Original Music Band Minneapolis Ever Forgot,” Fine Art.
I wrote about Dave and Fine Art a few years back. TL:DNR summary: Fine Art were a Rock band that emerged in 1978, issuing a self-produced, self-titled, vinyl LP, and then performing often in what few Twin Cities locations that were open to the handful of original music bands. “Punk” was still the sticky label used for young bands that performed non-conformist new material then, but it was not a homogeneous scene of Ramones and Sex Pistols cadre three-chord-shouting-in-leather-jackets-and-frayed-cotton.* Television, Patti Smith, Pere Ubu, Talking Heads — all these were formative bands in the Seventies, present at the beginning. Yet, oddly enough, labels like New Wave, and Post-Punk were generated to try to describe those that didn’t follow the stance of regimented simplicity for concentrated force and/or skill-set necessity. Fine Art were one of those from that non-traditional tradition.
As the famous Minneapolis First Ave club moved to presenting young original music bands, Fine Art played there regularly in the early Eighties, both in the small side-room the 7th Street Entry and in the big main room. When someone reprints a poster of that fabled club’s scheduled acts from that era to highlight Husker Du, The Replacements, Soul Asylum, or even Prince, you’ll often see the Fine Art band name playing the week before or after.
When this era is covered in overview, even by locals who want to concentrate on “the scene” not just the national acts that emerged, Fine Art barely makes the footnotes. That’s not exceptional, history-is-written-by-the-winners and all that. But here’s the thing: Fine Art’s material was all original (they never performed a cover), and it was very very good. The band two guitarists were excellent: Ken Carlson’s driving chordal center on rhythm guitar and Colin Mansfield the genius lead guitarist who could do song hooks or Free Jazz, sometimes in the same song. The two women lead singers format was unusual then as now, and the original pair Kay (Carol) Maxwell and Terry Paul, and later Kay and Jennifer Holt were effective. But it’s the songs, those constructions that were passing sounds on a club stage and remain only on the barely surviving and out-of-print records that shock me to revisit. They’re still unconventional — and as such, they still sound fresh 40 years later. Dave’s lyrics are part of that, even if he wasn’t the only lyricist in the band.
Vampires. Coffins. Fear of being suffocated. A song with a Dave Moore lyric from Fine Art’s LP issued at the start of the band’s existence in 1978.
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Fine Art didn’t survive past the Eighties, but the LYL Band still gets together. You still can hear songs Dave wrote and ones he contributes to here sometimes. I do my best trying to be musically adventurous to support Dave’s words.
In one’s youth you are told you should think of the future.
Generally, you don’t.
In one’s old age you are said to think too much of the past. I generally don’t. A smaller future is the treasure I consider, the treasure I want to spend. Playing with and knowing Dave is part of the treasure.
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*I think this surprises some younger indie musicians or fans today. In the Twin Cities in the Seventies, if you wanted to play in public in a band you were expected to perform songs people knew, which meant cover songs. If you wanted to buck that trend, there were in 1978 maybe 2-3 places that would let you try it. When you hear of The Replacements doing one of their live piss-take cover song tangents, there’s likely just a bit of residual anger at that constraint behind it.
In retrospect, many assume an amoeba, fish, surfacing amphibian, stooped monkey, biped man with club picture of how indie evolved from punk. But the earliest CBGBs bands were a very mixed lot. The Ramones stood out because of their fast, faster, and fastest strumming rock minimalism in that scene. And Ur-source band The Velvet Underground mixed simple and complex, pop ambition and alienation noise with abandon. New Wave and Post-Punk existed from the beginning — or before the beginning. Fine Art may have produced fewer hard core adjacent songs as the band evolved, but they were always composing fresh, heterodox musical concepts.
Is today’s piece the Parlando Project’s surrender to the Internet’s pervasive cat fancies? No, this is a very serious piece of cultural distribution — and it’s Halloween fans, that grave and gothic lot, that we’re serving with content this month.
I do fresh translations into English as part of this Project semi-regularly. Translations bring benefits, important ones that would fulfill that serious…cultural claim. Since poetry exists in nearly every society* no matter the language spoken, translation allows us to casually absorb more outlooks as readers. And as proud as English speakers can be about the home-team’s innings in verse, a great many poets have taken tactics, forms, and inspiration from writers that wrote in other languages. Adding to the corpus of translations then, is a service to readers and poets.
A couple of the poets I’ve translated here have almost nothing available online in English, a few more, little. Rilke, who wrote today’s piece in German is not such a case. He’s a favorite poet of many English-speaking readers, and has had many well-known translations. But even so, adding another Rilke translation is like adding another human perception of a piece of his writing. All translation comes with a viewpoint and a path taken by the translator to the point of translation. My viewpoint is not particularly learned. I’m not an expert in German literature, and I don’t speak German beyond a few phrases. While I happen to like my approach to writing or performing poetry (most poets get little love for their verse other than self-love, so we’d better have that regard to do the work) that’s about all I bring in qualifications to translating.
My translation approach is primarily image-centered. I want to try to absorb what the poet is seeing, and feeling and transfer that portrayal of sensation into contemporary English. I usually don’t try to convey the parallel sensation of the poems word-music in its original language, but I will give some weight to a sequence of the images as they convey the poem’s argument, the thing I call “the music of thought.” I do like there to be some English word-music in the end result, but as with my original poetry in English the images shouldn’t suffer much just to make some formal lock-step.
Which brings me to the other benefit of translating, the reason I recommend translation to every poet, to every creative-writing class: translating forces you to consider choices made by the original poet intimately, and to make subsequent English-language choices that are not dictated at origin by your desire to tell your life-story or outlook. This separation allows you to practice, in separation, the craft of poetry.**
I took on Rilke’s “Black Cat” because it seems like an apt Halloween poem — after all, it does start out with the cat being described as an apparition of mysterious supernatural powers.* As I dug into the poem there was one mystery I didn’t solve: how much is Rilke joking with us? Is this cat a dark vision, a domestic cosmic black hole with a gravity that absorbs light? A real Rilke scholar might have a learned opinion on this, but I am not that person. The Rilke poems I know, and famous Letters to a Young Poet essays seem utterly serious — I’d say almost to a fault as weighed by my own tastes. There’s a certain kind of Rilke fan, like a certain kind of Robert Bly fan, that makes me wary of the seriousness with which they take their precepts and scriptures.
The Internet was designed so that scientists, the military, and government could exchange ideas. And cat pictures like this one I found there. Well, the cat pictures came later, but I’m sure it was in the design. Now, who’s my dark little existential vision of non-being that meets my gaze…
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But as I translate Rilke I occasionally find images that seem to fall into slapstick. Did Rilke intend this, or is that my own path, my outlook, reflecting off the surfaces of poems? Seriousness is indispensable to slapstick after all. My favorite part of this poem is when the frustrated viewer of the black cat resorts to enraged stomping about. Last time we had a poem about the pathos of black & grey ghosts seeming to manifest in a dark house. Is this dark cat a solemn symbol of ever-so-serious human-condition dread — or an excuse to burlesque the frustration of life we cannot fully control, things we cannot perceive clearly, yet are stuck trying to figure out anyway?
This is what I came up with for today’s performance
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It may not be what we’d wish, but as Rilke gets to his last line, I smile. We try to see in the darkness, we might try to command capricious cats, but in the end we’ll all be extinct as prehistoric insects captured in amber crystals — but at least by translating Rilke (or other poets) we can see our gaze in their gaze.
To hear my spoken word performance of my fresh translation of Rilke’s “Black Cat” you can use the audio player below. What, has a black cat crossed your screen and obscured any such audio player gadget? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Black_Cat.mp3.
*Do historians and anthropologists know of any documented society that didn’t have a form of poetry? I’m neither — but I don’t know of one. If so, this seems a strange fact in the face of poetry’s peripheral place in modern American culture. Is poetry just an archaic skill, like how to make a stone knife or knowing which fungi are safe or sacred to eat?
**Current online language translators (Google’s seems particularly good) are generally adequate at giving you an English-language gloss to start with. For key words conveying images in a poem, online foreign language dictionaries can drill down into further insight. The translator’s job isn’t just turning some decoder ring though: the job is to find effective English language poetry to hold the poem you’re translating.
***Admitting my lack of portfolio to do so, there’s a third reason to do my own translations: I want to avoid — even for my “absolutely-no-profit” Project — taking other writer’s work that isn’t free for reuse. Rilke’s work is in the public domain in the U.S. — but this isn’t true of most English translations of it.
This Emily Dickinson poem tracks like many others of hers: a vivid set of images, so unexpected in its choices and details finished with a gnomic conclusion that puzzles as well as tantalizes. Last time we had her famous “My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun.” Today’s lesser-known poem is just as weaponized. I find it as strong as “Loaded Gun” — Dickinson, powerful enough as a writer to bring the proverbial knife to a gun fight. Here’s a link to the poem “She dealt her pretty words like Blades” in case you’d like to follow along.
I maintained last time that in “Loaded Gun” Dickinson created a tragic character out of an inanimate object. Today she’s describing some other personage who uses “words like blades.” I didn’t think she was the gun in the last poem, only its playwright. Is the blade-wielder here Dickinson? I can’t say for sure. Is she “othering” herself to examine something she does with her verse? Poets will do this, but at first I was unconvinced. Dickinson has elements of satire and calling out foolishness in her poetry, sure, but I’ve never seen her as the kind of devastating wit that boldly impales the subjects and pins them to the bloody page. Did she think she could do that, or that some thin-skinned reader thought she did that? Possible, but we must consider the theory is that she may be writing of another writer.
Who? I don’t know. Our knife-wielder is gendered female, and in Dickinson’s 19th century circle that doesn’t leave us with many candidates. The woman-poets we know she read: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Brontë, or her classmate Helen Hunt Jackson don’t immediately jump out, saber in hand. Of the three, Brontë with her Gondal fantasy world poems is the strongest “could be” here. If we stretch it, I could add to the suspect line-up the “terrible swift sword” Julia Ward Howe of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” fame. These are all wild guesses, so let’s leave that off, posit it doesn’t really matter to the poem, and return to read it again.
Rereading the poem, I began to sense less of a swashbuckler and more of a butcher’s tale here. Aha! Now we see something that I can associate with Dickinson’s life. In the household domestic tasks the two Dickinson daughters had to carry out, Emily took to the cooking and the gardening from all accounts. Did she butcher meat, or prepare cooking cuts from carcasses? The wantoned, without concern for the former life of the meat, carving to the bone is in that work. She does say the blade is being used on “Creatures” in her images too. If we want to return and take this poem’s “she” as Emily Dickinson, then here we may have the dissecting poet* we read in her work metaphorically describing something of her process!
This striking image shows an installation by artist Kim Simonsson at the American Swedish Institute some years ago.
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I can’t give you a clear reading of the poems final four lines either, I only see the images, not where they are to lead us. Pain, human pain, is indeed not polite. The film upon the eye is the dead eye on the carcass. What though is the locking up in the last line? That we abstract (lock out) ourselves from the former living creature now the meat? Did she butcher for cold storage in a meat locker? These biographic details — again, perhaps beside the point. In experiencing the poem, those things are dispensable. Is this a household butcher or a fearless ninja-writer? She wants the effect of both for the listener, and perhaps Dickinson is happy that the final part’s summary is just as mysterious as a blade-wielder leaping out from her packet of poems.
I’m always amenable to mystery in the music I present here. Here I used my 12-string acoustic guitar and a viola with the undercurrent of the South Asian tanpura beneath them. What’s the tanpura doing there with these occidental instruments? Oh, it just mysteriously appeared, drawn to the drone of the lowest strings on the guitar You can hear my performance of “She dealt her pretty words like Blades” with the audio player gadget below. No player to be seen? Maybe one will appear like that tanpura within a new tab called up by this highlighted link.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Words_like_Blades.mp3.
*It quite possible that she dissected animals as part of her schooling. Another biographic theory.
The achievement of Emily Dickinson’s poetry is unusual, but the poem I set to music and perform today stands out even amid the rest of her work. This uniqueness has led to varied interpretations of what the poem is getting at: sometimes esoteric readings of the poem’s matter, written by folks plausibly smarter and more knowledgeable about Dickinson than I.
And so, if I was stopped before approaching this poem to make a song from it, I would have replied with a vague recall of what I’ve read: that it’s about something singularly, perhaps secretly, important about Dickinson herself — a striking, summary image of a rage or force she felt. Well, maybe it is. I’m not proposing that I have any authority to change any charge this poem has given you. I’ve often found myself ignorant or obtuse. Still, I found a rather different poem than I expected as I tried to arrange how I’d express the poem while singing it.
Here’s a chord sheet for today’s song. One intent in providing this is to hope other will sing it, perhaps better than I can.
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The poem I read anew had Dickinson’s poetic voice playing a dramatic role, and the play is a tragedy whose protagonist is a sentient non-animal object, a gun. The gun’s relationship to humans, or particularly to its owner, is subservient and not rage-filled. It self-portrays itself as if it was a loyal dog: happy that it’s been selected like a pup from the pound, happy with a woodland walk in the company of its owner, proud of its sharp echoing bark. The stanza-scene where the gun is snozzled up to its owner’s pillow in bed, as if a sleeping pet, would make the most ardent gun-enthusiast contentedly smile.
Some readings have over-weighed the “stood” in the first line, as a Chekhovian gun frozen in the first act — all unrealized potential violence, a symbol of a quiet hurt or rage.
But then the turn, the volta. In the penultimate stanza the gun’s self-portrayal takes on another aspect: it’s like a gangland capo here, a deadly enforcer. Is it proud of its efficacy and efficiency in killing that it recounts? There’s no clear moralizing, but there is a contrast between that stanza and the sleeping master and gun. They will stir, and awake, while any foe the gun has shot will not “stir the second time.” The final stanza will tip our speaker-gun’s judgement on this.
Am I not diving deep enough into the wreck here? Am I stuck on the surface symbolism and not cognizant of the deeper meaning of what is being symbolized about Emily Dickinson, the middle-class, likely non-violent, non-weapon-toting woman? Could be, but as a singer of subjective quality, as a poor strutting player in this tragedy of the loyal gun, I might be able to convey that deeper stuff by playing the images well.
What was Dickinson’s self-knowledge of what she’s doing here? Was she the gun any more than Shakespeare was Macbeth or that Bob Dylan secretly sees himself as an Early Roman King? Deception and hidden meanings are a Dickinsonian trope, and the final verse clearly intends to be a hermetic riddle. I solve the riddle by thinking that the gun muses that as a non-living durable object it could outlive its human owner — but that in a better, wished-for world, the master would destroy it.
You can hear my performance of “My Life has stood — a Loaded Gun” with the graphical audio player below. No player seen? There’s one more bullet in your chamber — this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/My_Life_had_stood_a_Loaded_Gun.mp3.
Is there a name for a poetic form made of two quatrains? Emily Dickinson wrote a good number of these 8-liners — brief, but a bit longer than one-stanza forms such as the haiku or the cinquain. One advantage of short forms is that they are easy to hold in memory, allowing them to be shaped and revised while one’s hands are busy with other daily tasks. We know Dickinson sometimes jotted down short pieces on household paper scraps, but maybe even those had earlier drafts before she could grab a pencil.
What can she put in such a container?
This one implies a short narrative. Someone (we’ll just say Dickinson for simplicity’s sake) is waiting at her house for something to arrive. She’s ready to tie on her bonnet (her outdoor hat) and on the waited arrival she’ll be going outside her home. In the second quatrain she says she’s awaiting “his…step.” The something is revealed as a male someone. Where are they going? Dickinson writes of a “journey to the Day.” Is this an odd way to say she expects a day-long journey? Perhaps, but she did capitalize “Day” as if it’s a particular concept rather than a 24-hour interval, and the poem ends with mention of a similarly capitalized “Dark.” Dickinson was fond of circular intervals standing for a lifetime, with a day’s sunset or nightfall standing for death. I suspect that’s what she’s getting at here.
I was captured by this poem, given my musical interests, by its citing of singing in each stanza. Examined carefully, the first line says something distinctive. “I sing to use the Waiting.” What a striking statement to a musician — or to music’s sister art poetry and poets. Life is time, that’s its waiting. What counts its meter and shapes the air in-between? I think of composer Frank Zappa’s quote “Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.” Poets and musicians sing to use that waiting.
In the ending sentence Dickinson says both she and the awaited are singing to “Keep the Dark away.” Does music — does poetry — hold off, or prevent, death? Well, it may not be that death=dark exactly. Dark may be the unknowable aspect of death, the frightening nature of the threshold we cannot see beyond.
A thought occurred to me as I was living with this poem over the past couple of days: it would seem to pair well with — as a prequel of sorts — to one of Emily Dickinson’s most famous poems: “Because I could not stop for Death.” In “I sing to use the Waiting” she’s awaiting that other poem’s he, Death, to bring around a carriage for her. If that’s so, we might expect that on the ensuing carriage ride the two, Death and Emily, are singing as they ride past the playground and the cemetery toward eternity.
I’m OK with all the night-time transparent carriage traffic, but I wish they’d stop singing so loud. Still from The Phantom Carriage (1921)**
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I had immediate ideas for the musical sounds for today’s Dickinson poem setting, which helped me get a rapid start of the process of composing and tracking it. I was aiming for mysterious, but when I went to mix the various tracks it began to sound odder than I had thought it would be. I explored different options at that point, but in the end I decided there was no going back from strange. I should more often remind listeners here that I go exploring a lot of different musical ideas, so don’t take any one piece you hear here as representative of what you might hear in the next piece, or the one after that.
You can hear my musical performance of Dickinson’s “I sing to use the Waiting” with the audio player gadget below. Awaiting a gadget that never shows up? This highlighted link is an alternative.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/I_Sing_to_Use_the_Waiting.mp3.
Next week I’m going to be attending a number of events online that are part of the Emily Dickinson Museum’s annual “Tell It Slant” festival.* While I’m not sure how this will change my production schedule for new pieces here, I’m hoping to present a series of Emily Dickinson musical settings before September ends.
The first of these pieces is Dickinson’s “The Day undressed Herself” — and what a charming poem it is. As my reading of Dickinson has expanded, I’ve become aware that some Dickinson poems are so compressed and abstract that extracting a clear meaning is very difficult, but despite this poem’s use of an un-introduced conceit throughout, it’s clearly a poem depicting a sunset. If something of a riddle, the subject is one most readers will “get” easily.
But poetry isn’t just plot and foreground. I don’t mean to replace the direct evidence of hearing the words sung in my performance, but the sounds here are so lovely, and the poet here is clearly choosing words for sound, starting right off with the fabric swish of the poem’s first line and continuing in the 1st verse with the now antique word “Dimities” (which are undergarments.) And Dickinson’s metaphoric details aren’t just sounds, they set this sunset, this emblem world and its cosmic time, in an intimate female universe.
The window next to me as I write this faces west too, but it’s only an urban alley. Here’s a sunset a few blocks east, the heron doesn’t seem to know they’re in a city.
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It starts with a woman undressing, where in art a long tradition of erotic gaze comes with that choice. If that’s so here, it’s a deep and unstated undercurrent. Is she just readying for bed, for dreams perhaps? Or something else? By accounts, Dickinson wrote often at night. I don’t know if she wrote after a change into her bedclothes or not, but this possibility: the sunset’s heralding of an opening to the looser dress of imagination may be in Dickinson’s mind.
The 2nd stanza expands from Earth’s sunset, to let us know, as scientifically educated Dickinson did, that the Sun is but a single star — and if I read her right, that stars are being born daily in the universe.
Another trope that comes with the sunset: day’s end meaning life’s end. The poem’s 3rd verse indicates this is considered and taken as a side issue of this sunset — sunset’s ars longa isn’t so concerned with that — and as it happened, Dickinson’s night-scribed poetry became more than a lifetime-lived. In some mythologies, the sky gods are male —in this one, our western, setting sun is a “Lady of the Occident,” female.
The final stanza starts with a line: “Her Candle so expire” which if considered more fully isn’t just sunset extinguishing the last light before bed. My ear may be over-pun-sensitive, but I hear the rhyming word “fire” in “expire,” and once more the cosmologist is saying in that line that stars themselves have lifetimes.
Someone has been sailing on frigate-books in the closing two lines. I’m surprised at her knowledge of the truck in a sailing ship’s rigging, a ball where the halyard’s pass. It’s an unusual word, no-doubt chosen to consonante with Bosporus, the water separating Europe and Asia next to Constantinople/Istanbul. The dome in the final line is then the Hagia Sophia (“holy wisdom”) church in that city. And the final words, “Window Pane.” What’s this definitive, capitalized pane of glass? Dickinson’s bedroom faced west, her little writing table at a western window.
Here’s a rough chord-sheet of today’s musical Dickinson.
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I wanted to do something featuring a lush sounding steel-string acoustic guitar for this one. With luck I was able to just squeeze in the final take you can hear below as my studio space time so expire. You can hear that performance with the audio player gadget below. No player seen? This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Day_Undressed_Herself.mp3.
*This Festival features a multi-day round-robin reading of all of Dickinson’s 1789 poems, and each time I go through that experience I’m reminded that it is as impossible to comprehend all of Dickinson’s poetry as to remember all the stars in the night sky. Each time through, “new poems” seem to have been inserted — which are in reality ones I had heard in previous years but wasn’t ready to feel until now. Just sitting through a small portion of the readers’ reading — an hour or even a half-hour — can change your appreciation of what Dickinson offers. Busy people might want to choose only one of the reading sessions that has a convenient time for them, and maybe do some hand mending, cooking, or housework as the variety of readers speak the poems in turn. Let the poems that you are ready to feel come to you in your household, as their author composed them in hers.
There are also a variety of programs discussing other aspects on this year’s schedule. It’s all free to attend, but you should sign up at this link.
If we think of poetry as more than a barren art, we might think of things we read in poems as things that occurred to another person, somewhere, sometime. Oh it may be a mistake to automatically read poems as memoir — invention has always been one of those occurrences — but the more universal the poem’s account, the more we may think: this decorated thing I’m reading came from the senses of someone feeling an experience.
If we do that, we can think today that somewhere in China, sometime in the 8th century, an adventurer turned poet in middle-age awoke at night. What kind of bed, what kind of bedroom? The poem tells us nothing posh, despite its brevity: the poet’s expectation in the shining he sees around his bed is that it’s frost. It might be a lean-to, or even a bedroll on some improvised pallet out in the open. At best it might be an unheated room.
But still he’s awakened to something shining. He soon re-adjusts. No, this brightness that has occurred is moonlight not the frost of a more northern climate. Commentaries I read on classic Chinese poetry note that “bright” is something of a favorite poetic ideogram in those poems. A good symbol for immanence and essence? That light from the now open eyes of our poet must be seen. Oh, it’s the moonlight, likely a full moon on a clear night, he figures out. But that realization says something about near and far. The moon is more than 200,000 miles away. Yes, the moonlight is near, he could touch it but feel nothing.
What can he touch? He can put his head back down on the bed and think, perhaps to think himself into dreams of his home. Feel that now with him as the side of face and scalp touch back down. How far, that home? Moon far?
The 8th century poet who wrote this, Li Bai (also known as Li Po), was an itinerant for much of his life. Choice? Consequences of other choices? Exile? The traditions seem to indicate a mixture of all that.
This is a well-known poem in Chinese, taught as an early lesson in poetry to children like Sandburg’s “Fog.” In my translation I did something I don’t normally do: imposing an English meter & some rhyme.
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Now another man, in another bed. I can tell you with more exactness where and when: September 18th, 1970 comes in within a night in London, England. The man has been out to nightclubs, “sitting in,” playing music with others, something that consistently energizes him. For much of his life music has possessed him like that. He’s been blessed or cursed with the compulsion to make it. It’s just a couple days past the harvest moon in this room, the moon as far away as Li Bai’s moon.
He’s with a woman whose role is somewhere between girlfriend and convenient stranger, but this is not strange to him. He barely knew his mother, his father’s time was taken with drink, low wages, and a skin color that marked him as an outsider, and so he could rarely care for him. This had often been. As a child, taken in by other women, neighbors, and relations — and as he left home, others in the various valences between girlfriends and strangers.
Do non-performers understand how hard it can be to transition to sleep after the active interaction of live performance? Performers likely have tried it all: sex, boring TV, cannabis, food, and even more alcohol than they drank to take the edge off self-consciousness before performing — enough to move them from the level of self- to un-consciousness. And yes indeed, other drugs.
This man had moved from at least some of the above to the other drugs: his companion’s sleeping pills. A foreign formulary, they were much stronger than he anticipated.
September 18th, 1970, Jimi Hendrix, the man in London, quiet night thoughts. Did he awaken in that night as Li Bai did in his poem? Accounts differ from that London night. Let me think that at least his consciousness tried to return — in his head the sparkling currents like the magnetic waves when electric guitar strings are strummed. Did he think of home as the great Chinese poet did? If so, what would be home? Did he think of America? He was doubly American in a fierce way: some of his ancestors had been kidnapped and sold to enslavement there, and some of his ancestors had had their before-it-was-named-America taken too, a trail of tears. Did he think of his parents, even more so because of their relative absence in his life? Others who had episodically cared for him? He might have. Maybe too his night thoughts were of music, of songs. We can still hear him sing about dreaming on recordings, so he could have dreamt of singing a new and elusive verse. Did he open his mouth to say it, and there was nothing? No air. No breathing. No life.
You can hear my performance of Li Bai’s “Quiet Night Thoughts” (for Jimi Hendrix) with the audio player below. See just a pool of moonlight at the end here, no audio player? This bright link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Quiet_Night_Thoughts.mp3.
I sometimes think I’m working against gathering a larger audience for this.
Twice in the past month or so I’ve had an opportunity to speak in passing with poets about what I do with the Parlando Project. I’ve got my elevator pitch carved out: “I combine poetry, usually literary poetry not intended to be performed, with original music in different styles.” Both poets came back with this replying question: “What kind of music?”
Maybe I should start hitting that word “different” with hard emphasis — but Midwesterners know that kind of spoken underline could be parsed in our regional argot as cloaked disparagement. If I was to say:
“I’ve written a piece for a string quartet in which the instruments are placed on the floor and filled with nuts and seed. A herd of squirrels is then unboxed and will proceed to chew through strings and tonewood for the course of the musical evening.“
The Midwesterner is bound to reply “Oh, that sounds different.”
For Friday the 13th: presenting the unexpected, not gnawful, just “different,” the Squirrel String Quartet.
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Now, I believe both of those poets this past month are perceptive, I read it in their admirable poetry. If they miss the word “different” it’s because many people have strong feelings about the music they care about.* Long before reaching the age of those poets most listeners have strong affinities for some music and equally strong dislikes for the sounds that they don’t wish to put in their ears. The idea of combining poetry with music is attractive, but what kind of music is an unavoidable point in describing the Parlando Project, and I can’t encapsulate that. Elevator pitch? If I tried, I’d be out of breath and walking up flights of stairs. To both poets I was reduced to trying to start my response with “That’s my problem: it varies.”
Readership of the blog posts here continues to increase through the years, while listenership to the audio pieces has been for the last half of this Project’s life flat to somewhat lower. This bothers me, and I have theories, but one that seems particularly plausible is that the variety itself turns off listeners. One day acoustic guitar folk-scare strumming, the next day some kind of synthesizer sound, a garage-rock quality electric combo, something like Jazz, small orchestral ensembles, Blues slide-guitar, or alt tunings in a matrix somewhere between John Fahey, Joni Mitchell, and Sonic Youth. And then on the third day, a combination of one or more of the above.**
How well do I (who much of the time needs to play or score all the parts) present that variety? I think my own judgement approximate, but it goes like this: on good days I think I do it well enough, on bad days I feel embarrassed by the faults in execution and conception I hear. So, my limitations are a factor here, but even if I was a master of all these forms, I think the problem would remain. In this theory it takes only one or two “bad fit” musical pieces for a new listener’s taste to judge the work has no value, and no further listening occurs.
What will I do about this? I don’t know. I can’t help the eclecticism — it’s been in me since my youth*** and I don’t think I want to try to scrub it out.
Today’s musical piece comes from that “We’re a garage band, We come from Garageland” mode — looser still in that like most of the LYL Band pieces presented here over the years it’s spontaneous, not the execution of parts each instrument is supposed to play. As keyboardist Dave Moore says at the end, the words are “a personal experience story,” an exception in the Other People’s Stories texts the Parlando Project finds, experiences, and presents. Just over a year ago a storm with 60 mph winds and golf-ball sized hail struck Minneapolis. Overall, it caused 1.1 billion dollars in damages. On my roof, my shingles were totaled (the classic hail-storm result), windows were shattered, and there were plenty of cracks in the siding from the wind-driven hail. As “Heaven and Hail” tells it, it took months, well into the winter, for overwhelmed builder crews to get all the home damage repairs completed in my neighborhood.
Last year at this time work started on fixing the damage at my place. One experience amid the hammers, ladders, and supply pallets: hearing one of the crew’s boomboxes playing a record of garage rock classics all sung in Spanish. Another Rosetta Stone moment, like reading those cereal boxes in French.
To hear this short account of the storm and aftermath you can use the audio player gadget below. No player? This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Heaven_and_Hail.mp3.
*Neither asked me —and few people ask me — “What kind of poetry?” With non-poets, I ascribe that to the lesser interest in poetry as an art and therefore a lack of strong likes and dislikes.
**This leaves out the subjective qualities of my voice, something which I recognize is of overwhelming importance to most listeners.
***”Top Forty” rock’n’roll radio was extraordinarily broad in “The Sixties” and I was listening to the classical music station and a country-western station along with that format. Hootenanny was on TV, folkie music was part of church camp. Other than the occasional cross-over hit I’d hear on the radio, the Jazz waited a bit to creep in late in my youth. Eventually the smart programmers figured out that a pop music station that played a “button pusher” record would cause the listener to switch to a competitor. I’m the odd-duck that when I hear a record I don’t like, right after one I do like, I want to hear the third and maybe fourth or fifth record played, particularly if any of the small sample (liked or not-liked) is something I don’t think I’ve heard before.
We’re going to travel to one of the best short poems that late 19th century American poet Richard Hovey ever wrote, a strange poem about approaching death, a place far or near, with no trusty mileposts. As I like to do, we’re going in a round-about way. Let’s start with a blue lake.
I can remember what a wonder it was. My father and his youngest brother loved to fish on lakes, and in search of ever more pure sport-fishing beyond the sky-blue waters of northern Minnesota, they took to traveling up further into Ontario Canada. I was maybe 10 or 11, still at an age when I was open to whatever my parents led me toward. We stayed at a family-owned fishing lodge at the end of a gravel road outside of Reddit. A few small, well-kept cabins, a couple of outhouses, and a lake-dock — which was all the two brothers needed, as the day was mostly spent out fishing.
As I said, I was accepting of this. I gamely came along, earnestly operating a rod and reel, waiting, sensing for any piscatorial tugs on the line, listening to the two men occasionally talking about what fishing tactics were most promising. My youngest uncle, maybe 18 or 19, had been about my age when their father died, and my father now served as his younger brother’s father-figure. I was unaware then that more than lures and casting targets was in their talk.
I was never bored. I had a vast imagination when young, and could sit quietly daydreaming stories and ideas in my head for hours. I suspect a good poet would have been more observing of the boundless nature around me; and while I watched and listened to my dad and uncle some, they were too commonplace for me to treasure.
Instead, here is what I recall being fascinated by: I was in another country, Canada, subject to its laws, and a Queen, a governmental oddity that seemed a little out of time to me. A gallon wasn’t even the same gallon there, nor a dollar exactly a dollar! The lodge owning family and everyone we met in Canada spoke English of course, but since my imaginative and book-minded mind lived in words, I was amazed that all the groceries we picked up in Kenora on our way up had bilingual labels including French.
I was as if I had found the Rosetta stone all by myself. As a native Iowan, I already had a passing place-name experience with French from my state’s then 160 year past life as a French possession, but here in Canada a box of Wheaties or a carton of milk could be held inside other words. So, later in high school and in my truncated college studies, I selected French as my foreign language.
I was terrible at it as a school subject. I did OK (not outstanding) in basic vocabulary. I was passable in recalling the tenses and such. I accepted the arbitrary gendering of nouns. But my mouth stumbled entirely in the speaking of French, so obtusely bad at speaking it that I strongly suspect it is something in my neurological wiring. That I persisted with French as I entered college was at least in part because I was learning that French poetry had been so interactive with English language poetry, particularly in the formation of Modernism.*
After my formal education ended, I continued translating French poetry, not by any right of fluency, as I’ve confessed above, but because I wanted to bask in the secret sauce that helped form Modernism.
Richard Hovey seems to have been greatly enamored of what was modern French poetry to him. His published work includes translations of Verlaine, Maeterlinck, and Mallarmé. While going through his published work this summer I came upon this sonnet “Au Seuil,” in French, dated as having been written in 1898. When I translated it, I found this graceful consideration of dying and some possible judgement and afterlife which I present to you in English today. As an old person, dying no longer requires any heroic situation, acute illness, or grandiose gothic stance to make such consideration apt for me. It’s a matter of petty logistics now.**
The poem as published posthumously in a collection by the Vagabondia co-author titled “To the End of the Trail.”
My translation, presented here as a chord sheet for the musical performance you can hear below. In performance I refrained the final line of the sonnet as shown here.
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Was today’s poem written by an old man, or a young man staring down a deadly disease? No, Hovey was 34 years old, likely in vigorous health. Still, in less than two years he’d be dead, dying during a routine operation for something as unromantic as a varicocele. One can only wonder how he would have coped with the upcoming English poetic Modernism that would be sparked in part by French writers he admired.
Though subject to my language limitations, today’s poem to song turned out to be a relatively straightforward and faithful translation — with one exception. My usual poetry translation tactic is to primarily find the images in the poem and work at carrying them over vividly to English. I strive to have a non-creaky, natural syntax and word choice in the target language, and to make from that a poem in modern English word-music rather than trying to mimic the prosody of the poem’s native language. What was that one exception? In the poem’s 13th line, “ Qui nous benira de ses grands yeux bleus,” there’s an image I think. It could be that Hovey intends a witty little aside about a Nordic male god-in-heaven sitting on a throne of judgement, the cliché being then his point. As I worked on this line I wanted the possibility, however unexpected and wishful, of something universally marvelous. I dropped the andromorphic gendered pronoun as more than unnecessary, and then perhaps unconsciously recalling the poetry of the first-nations name for my current home-state of Minnesota, made the apprehending eyes more than humanly large.*
You can hear my musical performance of what is now an English language poem with the audio player gadget below. No player seen? This highlighted link is the alternative, and it’ll open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/At_the_Threshold.mp3*Oddly it wasn’t Spanish poetry. In England we can assign this to not forgiving the Armada and all that — but large portions of the United States had been Spanish possessions after all. And while Canada’s French is spoken regionally, Spanish is the predominate language across our equally large southern border and in the American commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
**For example: when I replaced two bicycles stolen early this summer, ones I’d ridden for 20 and 40 years, I wondered at the return-on-investment of spending like-amounts in current market prices to replace them. My favorite old-person’s joke is that when someone offers me a lifetime guarantee, I ask if there’s a better offer.
***Literal: “Who will bless us with his big blue eyes.”
****Lakota compound word for the place of sky-reflecting-waters. And there I have returned to that boat with my father and his youngest brother, as Hovey wrote in a different language: “we know this hidden way/as one knows the ghost of a dead friend.”
I enjoy the part of this Project that gives me cause to examine the lesser-known and forgotten poets and poems. Even the most famous literary poetry principally exists in quiet books, but give me a book now largely unread and my interest is perked.
Today’s poem is by Richard Hovey, one of the co-authors of a remarkable yet forgotten three-book series that began with Songs from Vagabondia published in 1894. Who was Hovey?
He was the son of a Civil War general who privately published his first book of poems in 1880 when he was a teenager. He attended Dartmouth College, graduated with honors in 1885, and was highly active in literary activities there, coming to write what remains the official school song. After college he seems to have considered various paths. He studied for a while in New York’s General Theological Seminary, taught briefly at Barnard College and Columbia University. In 1887 he met his Vagabondia co-author Bliss Carman, and true to their eventual series title, they spent some time tramping around New England. Hovey wrote that he decided to dedicate himself to writing on New Year’s Day of 1889 while viewing a solar eclipse, which seems somewhat magical for an epiphany, but yes, there was* an eclipse on that date. In 1891 he began publishing a planned lengthy series of verse plays based on King Arthur’s court, and he seemed to have traveled to Europe around this time where he met writer Maurice Maeterlinck and took on the job of translating Maeterlinck’s work into English. Hovey was also enamored with the French Symbolist poets and did English translations of their work.
Let me set the literary stage for this young poet as he began his career: Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé were still alive. So was Walt Whitman. So was Mark Twain. The first and just-posthumous volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry was still in process. Ezra Pound was a toddler in Idaho. While Hovey was a college student, Oscar Wilde toured America giving lectures on Aestheticism.** Hovey and Carman, with their on-the-road poems of beauty and poetry, of wit over dour seriousness, seemed to have resonated.
Richard Hovey around the time of the Vagabondia books. The woman here is his mother Harriet, not his “older-woman” wife Henrietta. A cousin who knew the young Hovey wrote that he “was so strikingly good-looking that I have seen people turn in the street to look after him.”
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I learned one other possibly salient fact about the time Hovey and Carman were putting together the first Vagabondia book. In 1893 there was a sudden economic depression in the United States. Vagabonds were not always free-thinking college boys yet to establish their literary careers. Was there a sub-rosa political/economic point at the start of this series? There’s little I’ve found in the Vagabondia books that tip me to Hovey’s political stance, if he had formulated one.
I chose Hovey’s poem “Isabel” from Songs from Vagabondia partly because it was short and naturally suggested being set to music on first read. Given that I was also trying to get a grasp on Hovey’s life, I wondered who this Isabel might be. I didn’t find out. There’s no Arthurian Isabel, and I haven’t found any prominent Isabel characters in the works of Hovey’s literary heroes. I believe it was a somewhat common name in this era.***
Despite Vagabondia’s praise for male comradeship, I’m not (as yet) catching any homoerotic overtones there. Where eros does appear, it seems directed at women. The only romantic relationship I know for Hovey was a married woman who he had a child with and later married after her divorce. If you want to wonder at Hovey’s sexuality from afar, clouded in a sexually repressed time and with the small amount of information, I can only offer this tidbit: his lover and eventual wife was said to be “old enough to be his mother.”
Indeed, after all this search for biographic info, today’s poem might seem a tad insignificant. As a short love poem “Isabel” reminds me of Robert Herrick more than any of Hovey’s contemporaries, and she might be only a device to let Hovey write that sort of poem. In straightlaced society I suppose the poem’s breast-pillow line could have seemed 1894-era hot stuff, but I’m immune to that level of “I’m so naughty” eroticism — likely why Swinburne (also still alive in Hovey’s time) always seems laughable to me.
But Aestheticism holds that a poem doesn’t have to have great wisdom or weight as long as it’s beautiful, so I spent more than my usual amount of time with this 6-line poem’s music to justify asking for your attention to it. “Isabel” uses some of my favorite odd chords and flavors, and you can hear it with the audio player below. No player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Isabel.mp3.
*Father Charles Hovey was the President of what is now Illinois State University in its early days, and organized the 33rd Illinois Regiment (known as “the Teacher’s Regiment”) at the outbreak of the American Civil War, serving the Union as a Brigadier General.
The fact of Oscar Wilde’s tour I first learned about from an episode of the TV Western *Have Gun Will Travel.* Those who knew him remember a young Hovey who seems to have taken Wilde for a model, dressing like him with colorful topcoats, long hair in a center-parted style, and dyed carnation corsages.
I wondered about writers with that name Hovey could have read. The only hit in that search was the marvelous early 19th century folk poet, folk singer, and tavern keeper Isabel Pagan. Pagan’s poem “Ca’ the Ewes to the Knowes” was popularly set to music by Robert Burns, a poet who Bliss Carman extolled earlier in this series. I did read that Hovey either knew or took classes with Francis Child, of the famous Child Ballads collection. That the Vagabondia series calls itself “Songs”* is evidence that folk song, at least of the literary variety, is one its elements.
The most famous poetic Isabel remains Ogdon Nash’s from 25 years later.
Does the summer feel like it’s gone by like a dream, one of those dreams where the ungainly night-plot finds its own winding path? I started this summer with a May Day suggestion to remember to write of our workday labors, and then too, I presented back then a cover song marking my teenager’s last childhood summer. And now it’s Labor Day weekend, and I’m going to present a poem that is the antithesis of paid labor, another poem from the 1894 Songs of Vagabondia book by Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey. We’ve already heard from Carman this month, now let’s sample some Hovey.
Richard Hovey is another of those pre-Modernist era poets who wrote in the final years of the 19th century. Because his work falls before the Modernist revolution and the ascension of American poets to a preeminent place in English language literature there’s lesser interest in it, but with a figure like him I think of a bright young man living in an age that felt stirrings of desire to form its own poetic styles.
His Songs of Vagabondia struck a carefree chord in its time. Tennyson, Longfellow, or Robert Browning would have presented a very serious life that should be attended to. The Vagabondia poems, with intent, fail the Sandburg Test I’ve proposed to assay poetry collections. If my beginning-of-Summer cover song asked the listener to indulge in “That Summer Feeling,” these poems concur. There’s no Winter and barely an Autumn there. No work or studies either. Instead, we have flirtations and libations, the comradeship of likeminded friends, and here the open road and heart are spent without anything much in one’s purse or paycheck.
For this Hovey poem from Songs From Vagabondia I chose to create a denser piece of music, a presumptuous rock band ensemble with two drumsets, electric bass, piano, two electric guitars, along with string synth and wind instrument parts. For a Labor Day holiday song about an aimless trip down a Maine river, I spent quite a few hours working to form this into shape. I’m not sure I produced the perfect arrangement after all that, but I enjoyed the process.
These Songo river photos look like they could have been taken within a decade or so of Hovey’s poem. Looks bucolic in these, but others show passenger steamboats (one named for Maine’s poet Longfellow) plied the river too.
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The Songo in Hovey’s poem is a short river in Maine, but the Songo connects a large lake and some other bodies of water — and though I don’t think the poem mentions it, it had then (and still has!) a hand operated set of locks and a swing-away draw bridge constructed in 1830.* Hovey’s poem makes this river sound rural and solitary, but having never been to Maine, much less the Maine of the late 19th century, I can’t say how busy it actually would be. The poem’s voice says someone is using oars for propulsion, so even if this is an aimless pleasure trip, there’s work involved just as there was in my recording the song I made of the poem. At the end of the poem there appears to be someone else in the boat, as the poem’s voice cries out “Kiss me” unexpectedly. Who is the other there? Could this be a Hendrixian excused kiss of the sky-blue-water-sky? Maybe, but a lover would be the likely (if unprepared for) guess. The unprepared suddenness of this ask seems dream-plot strange to me.
In my performance I turned the poem’s remarks about the experience being dreamlike into something of a refrain to further emphasize that element for someone who might hear this once as I perform it. I also removed one short stanza from the poem’s original text in the interest of shorter performance length. You can hear the full band performance of “Down the Songo” with the graphical audio player you should see below. No player? This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Down_the_Songo.mp3.
This short modern video shows the continued remarkable operation of the manual lock and drawbridge. Yes, these are hand-cranked mechanisms!* So, Sandburg Test met with this post, there are necessary folks working a job on this river, even if unmentioned in Hovey’s poem.
So, what else did our two young late-19th century North Americans Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey put in their 1894 Songs from Vagabondia book? How about this one: a SF prose poem adrift in wine and the universe?
I’ve already mentioned that Hovey’s poetry is easy to link to the French language poets that were a strong influence on English language Modernism that was just over the horizon in 1894, but perhaps pioneering Canadian poet Carman had obtained a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations when it was issued just a few years before the pair’s Vagabondia* book. The form of the prose poem was still fairly novel, but this experiment in that form adds another, fantastic, element too.
The front piece in Carman & Hovey’s “Songs from Vagabondia.” Here’s a link to the text of “The Mote” included in it.
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The first time I read “The Mote” I thought it the story of a short slightly tipsy conversation between two young men in a bar. For young men with loosened tongues to talk of the universe, its unfathomable scope and mysterious connections, is a comic commonplace after all.
As the mote flies into the wine cup of one of the young tavern drinkers and the conversation starts, it’s easy to overlook the way Carman set the scene: the pair entering the tavern are of “august bearing, seraph tall.” Are Rudy Gobert and Karl Anthony-Towns having a post-game libation? “Seraph” isn’t the most common form of an esoteric word, “seraphim,” but it’s a name for the highest order of angels.
If one reads it again, taking that seraph literally rather than figuratively, then the mote which is called “Earth” isn’t a parable, but the plaything of two indolent angels! This ambiguity seems cleverly designed-in by Carman.
You can hear me perform Bliss Carman’s “The Mote” with the audio player below. The guitar part was played with my Squier Jazzmaster, an affordable rendition of a once unsuccessful Fender electric guitar design. One of the knocks against the Jazzmaster was that it had too much open string-length between the tailpiece and the bridge, a fault that could generate extraneous noises when one uses the vibrato bar. Some modern players see this and figure: “Feature, not a bug!” So, in that manner, some of what I recorded here has me intentionally playing the outside noises that a Jazzmaster can make.
If you don’t see the audio player gadget, I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Mote.mp3.
*Here’s an odd thing: the 19th century French poets that were stretching the subject matter, outlook, and prosody in advance of their contemporaries in England took influences from American poets like Whitman and Poe. Carman and Hovey wouldn’t have needed to go across the ocean to France to read those Americans — but still, there’s a field of echoes going on in this pre-Modernist era. There’s another cosmic joke here too: Brits may have needed to hear some American-originated poetic ideas spoken in French before they could recognize their value!
When we last left off pioneering Canadian poet Bliss Carman he was audaciously publishing a collection of 100 lyrics by Sappho. If you read that post you find that such a substantial book of Sappho required Carman to largely imagine what the ancient Greek poet wrote, since much of what survives of her poetry are fragments, often but a line or two.
One could shelve that effort next to Ouija board transcriptions, among literary frauds, or within the loose bounds of historical fiction. Still, the “Sappho” poems he published have their attractions. And there’s a greater reason to look at Carman’s work: he was writing these things in the generation between 1890 to 1915 before English language poetic Modernism fully emerged with new models and freedoms for poetry. Some younger poets then suspected that Victorian 19th century poetry was overdue to be superseded. In England, William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites had done what segments of young poets, musicians, and artists sometimes choose to do: they rejected their current and parent’s generation and looked to older models of their arts for different forms of expression.
Imitating the ancient Greeks in English was one such idea. Carman went further by treating his recreations as translations, but he may have gotten away with it when English translations of Sappho were still a bit thin on the ground. Other early Modernist poets writing in English like H. D. and Edgar Lee Masters produced original works that echoed the tone and methods of Greek lyric poetry.
Those Sappho lyrics weren’t Carman’s breakthrough however. That happened in 1894 when he and American poet Richard Hovey published Songs of Vagabondia, the first of a series of co-written poetry collections that sought to break the Victorian mold. For a mid-20th century person like me, I sensed a rhyme in the appeal of these books as I read through them. Is it too easy for me to see them as the late 19th century equivalents to On The Road* and beatnik bohemia?
How so? Though the Vagabondia poems have variety in subject and tone, they extol carpe diem, wine, women, and song, along with non-itinerary wandering. Sensuality and beauty are self-rewarding. Respectability, career, and money are for others.
This song is fun to sing, so let me share the fun with a simple chord-sheet to encourage you to try it.
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Carman’s “The Two Bobbies” speaks to this literary and cultural moment. He jauntily compares the English Victorian worthy Robert Browning with the 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns. Silent on its now age-beiged page, Carman’s poem was just begging to be made into a song, so this week I came up with a simple setting for acoustic guitar and my voice of subjective quality. You can hear me hold forth with it using the audio player gadget below. No audio player? This link is a backup that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Two_Bobbies.mp3.
And what of Vagabondia’s* co-author Richard Hovey? I have plans to present some of his work here soon. Rather than looking to the ancient Greeks or to 18th century British poets, Hovey was steeped in another motherload of Modernist-influential poetry: certain French poets of the second-half of the 19th century.
I regularly read and take part in a daily poetry thread on X/Twitter. Its host, Joseph Fasano, posts a theme word and an example poem reflecting a topic most mornings, and other poetry readers respond with poems that relate to that. Early this week the theme was “Longing.”
One of the responding poems was this one:
The X/Twitter poster here happens to be a relative of mine, though I’m not sure which one
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This is an English translation of a poem by the ancient Greek poet Sappho rendered by famed Canadian poet and translator Anne Carson. If we didn’t know it was a translation, if we thought of it as a poem by a modern poet, here’s one thing we might notice on the photographed page: those short lines, those white spaces, those fenced-off blanks kept apart by square brackets. Looking at the text this way, the poem on the page has a striking effect. Its incompleteness — its, well, longing — is amplified in those spaces.
In Carson’s presentation that’s an inescapable part of Sappho’s work. We have only fragments of Sappho after all, only a handful of her poems are even comprehensively within sight of being complete. Some Sappho fragments are but single words, and many, a phrase or a few lines. And we know so little of the poems’ context. What details recorded about Sappho’s life date at best from centuries after she is thought to have lived, and are inconsistent. That she was a woman in a male dominated world, and lived in an outlying area away from the centers of classical Greek culture that we most know from later surviving works adds to the mystery. That the Greeks of the Athenian Golden Age, or the later Hellenistic Greeks, misread is some way the larger corpus of Sappho still available to them as they supplied us with Sappho quotes, commentary, and biography is plausible.
As readers of modern poetry, we likely assume when reading a Sappho poem that it’s a more-or-less authentic voice of someone describing a moment in her own life. I can’t say that as being a sure thing (any more than it is for, say, Shakespeare’s sonnets). But maybe that makes little difference, especially in the absence of well-attested facts — the words have the effect they have on us, based on our own lives, our own culture, our own time.
Carson’s translations are well-regarded, but she’s not the first to translate Sappho into English — she’s not even the first Canadian to do so. The first attempts there I know of, likely the first in fact as it’s by such an early Canadian poet, were by Bliss Carman. In 1904 Carman published Sappho: 100 Lyrics.* Unlike Carson, who is a scholar, I don’t know if Carman was all that knowledgeable in ancient Greek, and from what I can find he’s less open in sharing translator’s notes on his methods. The preface to his book, written by a friend, says only he more-or-less imagined the poems as complete and wrote then from that imagination.
From a scholars’ standpoint this is an outrageous act. On the other hand, there’s a current in poetry of writers finding something in assumed characters, some for anonymity, some for fraudulent reasons, some to burlesque writing styles they wish to make fun of. Carmen’s life was not straightforward. There were a lot of bumps and setbacks in his career — all as one might imagine at a time where the idea of a Canadian literary poet was yet to be established. So, to take a vacation from all that to the isle of Lesbos and imagine Sappho strumming her lyre within his earshot? Maybe understandable.
Another green world. Here a chord sheet for today’s musical performance.
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Published in the era just before the outbreak of English-language Modernism, Carman’s version of Sappho found some readers. Ezra Pound apparently read them, and in his loose Chinese translations and elsewhere he seems to have adopted a no-hurt, no foul practice of translation as a personal recasting of the original work. Carman’s Sappho is sensual without overelaborate decoration or any “I’m so naughty” stance. I can imagine some of those Not-Yet-Modernists who kept a well-thumbed copy of Swinburne in their back pockets circa 1900 appreciating these poems. If the tropes in these love poems are often common ones, he’s portraying Sappho who would have predated those tropes becoming commonplace, and he’s asking us to believe our moments are repetitions with a long heritage.
Many modern readers of Sappho have adapted Sappho as a pioneering Lesbian poet. In the many centuries between Sappho’s 600 B.C. and the present there have been a variety of renderings of Sappho’s sexuality. The text, fragmentary as it is, often shows attraction and praise for women and female gods. If we assume Sappho herself is the voice in her poems (and why not, we know so little, and nothing for sure, and Occam’s razor) this would follow. In this poem of Carman’s Sappho, the lover and object of longing is certainly female. Bliss Carman was an apparently hetero male, but his poem’s assigned author is a woman. Parsing….
Those that object to drag-time story hour at the library will have a hard time with all that. If for only that alone, I’m going to give voice to this poem from Carmen’s collection of imagined Sappho translations. You can hear my musical performance of “O But My Delicate Lover,” with the audio player below. Has the important fragment that includes an audio player disappeared for you? This highlighted link will open a real, not imaginary, tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/O_But_My_Delicate_Lover.mp3.
*Carmen’s 1904 work may also be the first American translation of Sappho, as it predates the top hit in a web search that shows Mary Barnard’s 1958 volume as the first from the U.S.A. Coincidently, Ezra Pound is attributed as someone who encouraged Barnard to do her book of Sappho translations.
Carmen studied in the U.S. and was distantly related to Ralph Waldo Emerson. His ancestors emigrated to Canada as Tories escaping after the U.S. Revolutionary War.
This August 6th is the 8th anniversary of the Parlando Project — but it’s also the 23rd anniversary of my late wife’s death and Hiroshima Day. This isn’t the first time I’ve linked these three observations with a single post and musical piece.
Given two-thirds of this anniversary, it’s not surprising that “I Dream I Am Falling” is about grief and remembrance. It is a departure from the Parlando Project’s focus in that this freshly completed song uses a poem I wrote rather than our regular use of others’ words.
I continue to write poetry, though less often as I’ve aged. I think sometimes about prize-winning poet Donald Hall revealing in old age that he’d given up writing poetry. I don’t recall if he knew why he stopped writing poetry, or if he revealed the reasons for stopping if he knew them. For myself, there are elements of regular life interfering, but throughout my life the writing of poetry was the easiest art to interleave with other busyness. I would compose stanzas in my head, trusting memory retention as a good test of their value until they could be transcribed. Or like William Carlos Williams, I might jot down first drafts on prescription pads in slow worknight moments in the Emergency Department of a hospital.
Remembering that, I think writing poetry is unlike musical composition and recording, which for me is constrained by my life’s current contexts. Looking back I recall that as a younger person I was eager to write down observations from life which seemed to me to be important and unique. Now, in my older age, when I see similar things they seem less unique, and my expression of them less apt, for I sense that life I was once observing has all along been watching me too — watching me as the hunter does.
Still, the reason I set the official launch of this Project on my late wife’s death anniversary was to counter that. Life, the actuary, knows something, but I can sing in the meantime. The reason I sing others’ words in my unkempt voice is that the writers here are already dead, and I can stick my thumb in death’s eye by making their words current. Given that death’s eye socket is empty, that there’s no sensitive eyeball there, this does not stop Death — but it feels good to do it anyway.
Partway into this Project’s course I started to include Hiroshima Day, the anniversary of the first use of atomic weapons, in my August 6th observances. Death of one’s specific partner has an intimacy that sears because it’s so personal, but it’s not unique nor fully shareable. The death of thousands in a way that still threatens us by the millions or more — well, shouldn’t we share that?
Let me take then a tiny digression to this presentation of today’s musical piece. This summer I’ve been watching a 10-hour multi-episode documentary on Netflix titled Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. I’m only about ¾ done with it, and maybe there’s something at the end that I should have waited to observe before writing about it, but I’ve found it so good I want to mention it today. For something of this length, its storytelling is compelling, and it often takes the sophisticated choice of leaping out of time’s lockstep to connect things. OK, it is 10 hours, but also roughly equivalent to a graduate-level course on the Cold War and atomic weapons strategy in the breadth of its concerns and detail.
This is an American Sonnet, following my longstanding practice of breaking up the 14 lines in different ways.
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Now, returning to the new song. I hope it speaks for itself. Many of you, my treasured audience, will have their own experience of grief to resonate with what it sings. I was able to compose and realize it without access to a studio space where I could use acoustic instruments and sensitive microphones. Only the vocal, through a less-sensitive microphone recorded sounds vibrating in the air as I played the block chords appearing in the left-channel that established the song’s harmonic structure on my little plastic MIDI keyboard. You can hear “I Dream I Am Falling” with the graphical audio player below. No player seen? This highlighted link* is an alternative.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/I_Dream_I_Am_Falling.mp3.
*ElectroVoice RE-20. Worth considering for anyone needing to record vocals in a space that is not acoustically proper for recording, where low-level unwanted sounds would otherwise end up on the recording. For my budget level, expensive, but it’s been an important tool for me. No, it’s not magic — louder sounds will still intrude — but the sensitive condenser microphones I use to record with acoustic guitar in my studio-space hear everything: HVAC sounds, louder computer fans, outside traffic, even sometimes footsteps on another floor of the building. In my converted bedroom home office where this was recorded, the studio-space condensers would be highly problematic.
Here’s another short poem by Sara Teasdale that I’ve done the Parlando Project thing to by making it into a song. As a young woman, Teasdale won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1918, but as the century continued her poetry lost some of its literary/academic esteem for not being written in the manner of High Modernism’s Hermetic allusions.*
Teasdale grew up in the same turn-of-the-century St. Louis Missouri as High Modernism’s Chief Mage T. S. Eliot, though I’ve never been able to establish that they ever met as young people. One plausible reason why not: both were educated in gender-segregated schools for the most part. And Teasdale’s early life was like late-life Emily Dickinson in its isolation, largely confined to a room in her family’s home due to some vaguely defined illness. As a young woman she was able to break away from that confinement, moving to New York City and engaging with other literary figures there during her heyday as a poet. Like her contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay, she married a non-literary man after romances with other poets, but Teasdale’s marriage was less successful.
Teasdale’s Pulitzer-honored collection was titled Love Songs, and that does describe her most common subject. Today’s poem, at least on face value, is one step removed from a personal experience love poem, posing itself as a poet-supplied maxim applicable to a disappointed-in-love younger woman.** I’d dispute that the poem’s advice is only useful for women — but then the specific in poetry often stands for the general. Here’s a link to the text of this short poem.
“This truth, this hard and precious stone, lay it on your hot cheek.” Photograph by Man Ray
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Like many of the poets I feature here, Teasdale’s Wikipedia page is brief and fragmentary — but one thing it does document: her work has been set to music often, and by a wide range of composers. Early in this project I mentioned that singer-songwriter Tom Rapp’s setting of a Teasdale poem was an early inspiration for me. One could make the case that it was us composers, more than literary academics, who maintained Teasdale’s art until it could be re-engaged with.
Part of me wishes I could’ve produced a more polished performance of Teasdale’s “Advice to a Girl,” but my current life often reduces the time I can spend on the musical pieces. I like the harmonic cadence in this song’s music, but I expressed that with just an expeditious strummed guitar part along with some acoustic bass accompaniment. Still, the idea’s there now, and an unexpressed idea easily fades and disappears. You can hear my performance with the audio player below. If you don’t see any audio player, there’s also this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Advice_To_a_Girl.mp3.
*That I’d write “Hermetic” there indicates that my moods and mind are not opposed to that kind of poetry — but then I’m also not opposed to poetry that speaks of our ordinary and present human relationships, which in their complexities and footnotes exceed any grimoire’s or textbook’s breadth. Just as with music, I’m a poetry eclectic.
**This poem could easily be read as someone talking to and soothing the memory of their own younger self. Our youth may lord over us with its misapprehensions we cannot correct, and that time-separated self often benefits from our wiser selves speaking to them from later up the years.
Here’s another one of these posts that is going to jump around a bit, though I’ll keep it brief, and there’s a heartbreak poem set to music that I’ll end with.
I don’t post every time some figure influential to me dies. It should be apparent to long-time readers of this that that group of influences is wide, and therefore large. Still sometimes the spirit moves me. This week a middling famous musical figure, John Mayall, died. He was 90 — so not a surprise to any actuaries in my audience — but his extraordinarily long musical career (he was still regularly touring up until the last few years) might have masked the imminence of that death.
I can’t quite figure how many of you will recognize his name, and of those that do, how many will see why I’d count him as an influence. I often worry, what with the variety of the musical settings I publish here for strangers to listen to, that someone listening to one, two, or three of the Parlando musical pieces will think that I’m fixed in some musical genre. “Oh, he does folk-song-like stuff with solo acoustic guitar.” “Some kind of rough garage rock thing, isn’t it?” “Do you know you sound like Bob Dylan?” “What’s with all those orchestral instruments — and what, was that a sitar?” “You know, that beatnik to poetry slam kind of spoken word over spare Jazz backing stuff.”
To my mind, my aim is to vary the music, just as it’s my intent to present different sources for the words. But what’s that got to do with John Mayall who was not generally filed in any of those genre bins. If you look for Mayall’s work, he’ll be filed under “Blues.”
Blues, that great Afro-American musical approach, is (while often imperceptibly) as close as a center as I can find in my music. The other day one of the household teenager’s friends arrived when I was in another part of the house practicing guitar over an entirely not-Blues chord progression I had ginned up. I stopped, wanting not to intrude sonically on their get-together. When I met up with the young visitor (who plays guitar themselves) I apologized for the racket, and they replied, “Blues is always cool.”
Odd, I thought. I certainly didn’t think of the idea I was working with was Blues, but then the things I was playing over it used embellishments that I learned from musicians who played within a recognizably Blues song and harmonic structure.
In an interview with the Guardian newspaper later in his career Mayall was asked to define the Blues. His answer? :
“[Blues] is about – and it’s always been about – that raw honesty with which the blues express our experiences in life, something which all comes together in this music, in the words as well. Something that is connected to us, common to our experiences. To be honest, though, I don’t think anyone really knows exactly what it is. I just can’t stop playing it.”
Read the whole interview in that link above if you want an overview of the man’s career and its variations on what you might think defines the Blues— but I admire Mayall regardless of genre borders, because his career exemplified something I call the Indie Spirit. He was a “get in the van” sustainable-costs touring musician when D. Boon was a fresh kindergarten graduate. Like Grant Hart, he did the graphic design for his band’s records from the very start. He played for small audiences in small venues through most of his career, and ballroom and converted movie theater venues were about as big a draw as he could muster at the height of his popularity. If that bothered him (it didn’t seem to) it didn’t stop him. He played his music without a thought to maximizing its commercial potential, a genial stubbornness that I admire. Furthermore, every band he put together over around 60 years of music-making had musicians that were better than he was, and he based his bandleading on letting them shine. Every obit tries to list those once bandmembers, but the list extends over the horizon because that group of boosted musicians, like the bandleader, included many individual talents that never became big stars while making fine music.*
A song not by John Mayall: “You look to me like misty roses…” The roses from a morning walk my wife took. The picture of Mayall is on a pillar overlooking where Dave Moore plays in my studio space.
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That went on longer than I expected, but here’s a piece I just finished, with words from the American poet Sara Teasdale. Teasdale is another writer from the first third of the 20th century whose poetry I can’t resist setting with music. Much of Teasdale’s poetry is short and compressed like today’s selection “Dooryard Roses.” And much of it expresses heartbreak, as this poem does. But like the Blues, it tries to be honest and straightforward about it, and to sing it so we can say back to the singer “Yeah, I’ve been there too. Is that what you figured about it? Well, we’re both still here, so sing it some more!”
You can read the text of Teasdale’s short poem at this link.
The music I composed for this piece, is it Blues? Maybe I don’t know, but I don’t think it is. I just can’t stop playing it. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? This highlighted link is your alternative then.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Dooryard_Roses.mp3.
*A personal factor in my connection to John Mayall’s music: alternative voice and frequent keyboard player in this Project, Dave Moore, is the person who introduced me to Mayall’s records. In those 20th century days when one might fruitfully evaluate a person by their record collection contents, Dave didn’t need any help there, I’d already heard his poetry — but he’s why I came to hear and follow Mayall’s music.
Summer has event dates for me. Wedding anniversary for my living wife, death anniversary for my dead wife. In between, my birthday. A birthday has the same date on the calendar, but they change over the years in their nature. I can still recall the birthdays for singular digit ages, those massive markers toward becoming, achieving oneself. And then there are the rights-granting ages, 18 and 21; or certain decade mileposts, 30 and 50.
Now aged, the age number becomes hazy, defining less. A fair number of people who’d be my age aren’t, due to death. Most of my cohort have some collection of Marley’s Ghost chronic conditions, mild to significant. This is, after all, the portion of life that takes away things, slowly or all-at-once.
But it’s important to add to this calculation, life adds each day too. I’m celebrating my birthday today with my wife and a couple of friends. We’ll meet at an art museum’s restaurant. Everyone and I have not stopped breathing.
I celebrated my actual birthday by getting an ultrasound study of my aorta. My doctor suggested it since I had smoked in my twenties, and there’s some increased risk that this major artery can later swell and be at risk for a rupture, something that is in that all-at-once class of ageing events. Weird going through a test like the one when I first saw the shadow of my child, to know if I have a shadow of death inside me.*
To a degree not equaling my enjoyment of life right now with my little family and this Project, with still being able to hop on a bicycle and ride, with the ability to meet an instrument and come to an agreement on some music, I do have a sense of shadows. Multiple family members, all younger than me, have had some mild to more significant cognitive issues diagnosed this past year. Slowly or all-at-once — that’s birthdays, that’s aging. I’m enjoying the days slowly.
“Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead,/Sleeping away the unreturning time.” Go ahead Vincent, it’s OK to take a nap. It what you get done when you wake up that counts.
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Today’s musical piece is my setting of a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay. You can read the text of her poem here if you’d like at this link, and listen to my performance with the audio player below. I had a half-a-dozen beginnings/basic tracks of Parlando musical pieces sitting on my hard drive, and I selected this one mostly out of how near to being finished it seemed. Then as I set down to write today’s post — asking myself what I was thinking — I realized the poem expressed elements of my life this summer.
I remember when I presented my first Millay sonnet for this Project, years ago. I knocked her then for using too much archaic language and sentence order, an affliction her contemporary Modernists were seeking a cure for. “Rejoicing Veins” is from later in Millay’s career, and by then the language in this one shows little of that fault. This is another poem that seems to me to speak accurately about old age, yet this was written by a 40-year-old poet. Vinny, that doesn’t seem so old to me, but you got it right!
There’s that graphical audio player now, or if you don’t see it, this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Rejoicing_Veins.mp3.
*Test results? Everything looked fine. Rejoicing arteries?
I completed the off-the-cuff recording of my musical performance of this Robinson Jeffers poem a few days ago, but it’s taken me awhile to figure out what I wanted to say about my encounter with it, and secondarily how you, my valued readers and listeners, might receive it. In “Be Angry at the Sun” Jeffers is ostensibly writing a poem, but it seems he wants to give a political speech about political speech. TL:DNR, he’s not a fan. Here’s a link to the full text of Jeffers’ poem, but since he’s writing about speech, I thought it might best be heard.
I sometimes make rock music, but like my spouse, Jeffers knew how to build with stone, constructing his own castle-like home from local seaside rocks.
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Politics and poetry mix and don’t. Politicians will quote poems. A few poets (or diverted poets) have run for, even obtained public office. Personal political engagement by poets is likely no more rare than political engagement by nurses, baristas, bookkeepers, or shopkeepers. In my foray into social media* during the past year or so, I’ve often found an expectation that any posting poet or writer should declare their stance and allegiances.
Let me admit a reluctance to do so. My reaction is internal and perhaps odd: it feels like those calls to the pulpit at a Protestant Christian tent revival or Billy Graham’s mid-20th century adaptation of them to the TV age. It’s not oversimplified to be summarized thusly: make a simple public declaration in your acceptance of Jesus as your savior, and by that simple act, your soul’s continuous existence and the worthiness of your life has been assured. There are usually sub-clauses to that declaration: you will be expected to perform acts consistent with it. How consistent must those acts be with the declaration? Empirically, it varies considerably, which to my outlook makes the insistence and importance of the declaration problematic.
Now, some who read this may be Protestant Christians. You are welcome here. Your outlook, your understanding, your lives, may find nothing troubling about that act. I believe I understand your beliefs there fairly well. Long time readers here will know that myself and two other voices you’ve heard here are “PKs” (Preacher’s Kids). We literally grew up with variations of Protestant Christianity.
I also grew up with politics. I proudly wore my Stevenson campaign button as a grade-schooler. I participated at low-levels with campaigns for office and issues quixotic and successful for decades. I’ve been to political conventions. So, to you the readership here that are politically engaged: I have some understanding of your actions there.
So why this particular Robinson Jeffers poem, and why do I find it problematic yet worthy of considering today? Long-time readers may recall one of the poetic maxims I’ve expressed here: poems aren’t just about a message, an idea the poem wishes to express — they are more about how it feels to experience that idea, the sensations of the moment.
I was attracted to the Jeffers poem because I recognized that moment, that feeling. Perhaps you do to. I’ve been living in it this week: politicians and jurists seeming to speak as political operatives have increased my disgust. And this is not because (as Jeffers, the poet I’m voicing today, might believe) that politics is essentially dirty, though Jeffers and I will agree it’s humanly imperfect. Jeffers wrote this poem in the run-up to WWII. Unsaid within the poem, he’s specifically knocking Franklin Roosevelt,** a great and consequential American President, but he’s another of those Modernists who seems to have had, if not full-fledged admiration for fascism, at least a belief that it was no worse than other existing political schemes. There’s a lesson here: those who believe that politics is exploitative, dirty, always disreputable, will be drawn to or tolerate the belief that it’s best handled by leaders who revel in that themselves — the dirty men who will handle the dirty job, while we can stay clean sweet-smelling artists. Stone, not ivory tower in Jeffers case, but the same idea.
So, as you listen to my performance of Jeffers poem about politics and political speech, know my aim is to say that if you feel pain and disgust at what you’re hearing and seeing, I feel it too. Best as I can tell, I don’t share Jeffers prescription and proscription for politics, but in the world of today’s poem and my expression of it, I’m saying if you despair: you’re likely just one person, one citizen, someone without extraordinary powers. Your choices, your actions alone didn’t cause our country and our world to be in this state. How do we turn our nation away from letting the dirty men to do dirty jobs from being left unfettered? I’m a composer and writer, I can’t say I know more than a nurse, barista, bookkeeper, or shopkeeper.
Audio player gadget below for most of you. Is your sub-caucus not seeing any player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with it’s own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Be_Angry_at_the_Sun.mp3.
*I’ve given in and now post on short-post-format social media after eschewing it for a decade or more. It’s been good and bad. Like poetry, it lets me practice reigning in my long-windedness; and I can engage in it when distractions abound. Alas, it becomes its own distraction when I do have longer blocks of time or energy. In theory, like poetry, it could be complex while being concise. In practice, it’s mostly superficial —something one can relax with when needed —but that “just give me a momentary diversion while I scroll through my timeline” expectation stunts it.
**To those who might want to remind me of FDR’s faults and bad acts. I have long had a strong interest in history. I know of them.
The great American poet Emily Dickinson writes about death a lot, so maybe I should pause for a moment to mention how inescapable the living’s experience of death was in her time and place, what with disease, injury, a deadly Civil War, graveyards within the city limits, and approaching death happening often at home.
Because I lived across the street from death? When a child, Emily Dickinson’s family did not live in the Dickinson Homestead (now the Dickinson Museum), but at another house, located across the road from the town cemetery where she would later be buried. A child is born, plays, grows up, and crosses the fence.
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The poem I’ll sing below today speaks to that. If you’d like to follow along, here’s a link to the text of “As far from pity, as complaint.” This poem is more than its message —most good poems are — but let me write down here a sentence to summarize what I read this poem as saying: rather than pity, dread, or anger toward death, a result we cannot change, we should emulate the dead themselves who demonstrate that life is not everlasting — but the predicament of dying, and the predicament of living, are everlasting.
That’s a worthwhile thought, and poems in Dickinson’s time and place were often expected to deliver a lesson. But why is this a poem, why is this an Emily Dickinson poem? An essay, a sermon, a sympathy card, a letter, a conversation all could deliver this message as well or better as 12 lines not even pentameter-long and broken with the skeleton spaces of the pervasive Dickinson dashes (as if her “trade was bone.”)
Because it sings this situation, even silently on the page. There’s a dancer’s force, a singer’s force, an instrument’s augmented force in this way of telling. If death is inevitable — as is also meter, repetition, rhyme, the flow of sound into shapes — might we be comforted by these shapes? We live. We die. The shape of life continues. Quod Erat Demonstrandum, thus it is demonstrated.
When encountering this poem earlier this summer I sensed an intra-poem image-rhyme in this poems 7th and 8th lines. A better-known Dickinson poem which attracts us with what seems like mundane charm, “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose,”* has summer children playing from dawn — and at the end, disappearing over the horizon’s fence-line at sunset. That’s the continuing shape of our lives.
You can hear my musical performance of “As far from pity, as complaint” with the audio player below. If your way of reading this blog is numb to that revelation, don’t complain, I offer this highlighted link as a way to open a new tab that will have its own audio player so you can hear it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/As_far_from_pity.mp3.
*I love the version of that Dickinson poem sung by alternate Parlando voice Dave Moore. The LYL Band was performing the poem live, and Dave had selected a key that exceeded his vocal range — but I think the creaky breaking of his voice brings poignance to the recording.
Today’s piece is a fairly well-known poem by the Spanish poet. Given that I’ve played guitar nearly for 50 years and been interested in poetry for more than that, I keep thinking I must have run into it before this year. If that’s so, why don’t I recall considering it?
My answer is going to sound more judgmental than I mean it: bad translations. No, maybe I shouldn’t use “bad” here. I don’t suspect any moral failing or lack of effort by translators of this poem. And given that I’m not all that knowledgeable about the work of Lorca and have only the most limited grasp of his native language, I should have no standing to rate other published translations of “La Guitarra.” What I do know is that native speakers find his poetry passionate and vivid, and the English versions seem to my ears and heart (those being the entry points for poetry) stilted and muffled.
I’m not going to link any of the English translations I found of “The Guitar.” None I’ve seen seem fully effective to me, though I cannot say that they might be effective for others. I’m not going to link or line-by-line dis the translations I’ve seen. I will say that the first one I saw at one of the leading poets and poetry organization’s site was representative. I didn’t find it musically compelling, and it was a jumble of abstracted images that had little sock, little immediate feeling evoked. I assume the translator had the advantages I must clearly concede I don’t have. Why might their work not succeed, at least to this reader?
Two theories. Other translators may have been too literal in carrying over Lorca’s original sentence structure, which might be natural and unaffected in his Spanish. This is poetry, so one can make a case that how it’s said is essential — but when languages order words differently, following the original sentence structure and word order too exactly damages the natural vividness of a person speaking. Secondly, Lorca to my slight knowledge connects to Surrealist expression, a style of poetry I loved as a young man and still like to connect with today. Surrealism likes the wild and incongruous image; and from its ancestor Dada, it’s often willing to take an image in a random, raw and undercooked state. This creates a problem for me when I translate Surrealist and Dada work.
You see, I view my task as a translator to primarily find the images in the work and to then portray those images in clear modern English, and secondarily give the poem a word-music in the new language that gives pleasing movement and return to the poem. What if the original intent was to mystify the reader, to present an image that was intentionally confounding? I risk, while puzzling out the text in a language I don’t know well, to over-simplify or over-determine an image. I fear embarrassment of doing that, but I think it’s the better risk because vivid images that the reader/listener grasps and gasps are compelling to me.
As to the word-music, my version of “The Guitar” rephrased Lorca somewhat, aiming to make him sound like an English speaker. While doing that I tried to make the poem musical in English. The poem was already using repetition for poetic effect in Spanish, and I added just a touch more.
A chord sheet as I urge you to sing this yourself. Here’s a link to Lorca’s poem in its original Spanish.
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As you might imagine, this poem about the expression of a musical instrument has been set to music before my attempt you can hear today. While not a Lorca expert I know that he connected too with Spanish Deep Song and the evocation in that tradition of “Duende,” a difficult to translate term that some Afro-American musicians have seen as analogous to the Blues. I played a nylon string guitar for my setting, the type of guitar associated with Spain, and the simple chord progression I used would not be foreign to that tradition. But both from my skill level and inclination what I played for this song was simple and sparsely ornamented. Though the harmony wasn’t Blues, I approached playing this as if it was American Blues. Another Blues element I introduced that wasn’t in Lorca’s poem: my version has a gendered call and response. The guitar is a her, the singer (there’s no singer in Lorca’s poem) is a he.
You can hear a performance of my translation after this poem by Lorca with the audio player below. No player? No problem, this link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Guitar.mp3.
Those following my June series on my trip to investigate the life of a largely forgotten poet, folk-song collector, and teacher Edwin Ford Piper may wonder why I titled it “Paying the Piper.” There were a couple of reasons I knew as I started writing the series after returning home after the trip.
The first: I’d be paying attention to Piper when nearly no one else was. That may be a strange choice, though it’s one I’m largely comfortable with. I enjoy looking at places others aren’t, and I love stories that connect seemingly unlike things. So, Piper’s settler family moving to the frontier of Nebraska just after The Civil War, raising a poet-son who educated himself on the plains amid those who stayed, and those who passed through. I being a guitarist who grew up in the folk song revival, I appreciated that he collected the songs that entertained those people, songs that I could run into decades later because of the work of collectors like Piper. Even my search on that elusive question I couldn’t solve had it’s rewards: what of the pervasive Workshop and MFA culture of poetry of the last 70 years arose, perhaps unwittingly, from Piper’s own methods.*
The reason we call it paying attention implies it has a cost. I could have done more new musical pieces here, ones featuring poets there is more general interest in. The longer posts in June took a lot of work for a small audience. I chose to pay that cost. If you come here for the more known poets and for the musical performances, some of those are already in progress this week.
My wife and I returned home in the evening after my sojourn to the University library in Iowa City. I had a lot of notes, and pages captured but not yet analyzed, and I had ordered a couple of books to help that would arrive in the upcoming week. It was good to have gone on this trip. It was good to be home. Now the second paying.
What was the one thing I was most looking forward to at dawn the next day? Getting on one of my bicycles and moving my old body briskly through the cool morning air. I would ride to a café and have a frittata and a big glass of iced tea, read the newspaper, and think about poetry or music tasks for the upcoming day.
I walked out that next morning to the garage access door, and I found it slightly ajar, unlocked. I opened it. Sometime during my Iowa trip, my family’s bicycles had been stolen.**
I could write a thousand words here on the stolen bikes if I thought there was a readership for that. I lost my old original generation mountain bike. It was the first bike I bought to ride through Minnesota winters back in the early 1980s instead of buying a car. I rode it in snow as planned, and over rough trails in woods — and in a couple of returning trips, in the river valley hills and gravel roads of Iowa where I grew up, With less knobby-tires it worked well to ride around the city too. Over a decade ago it was the bike I attached a trailer bike to, to take my young child for rides. In the last few years it had become my rain bike since it had full length fenders, and it was the one I rode when the place I’d need to lock up was a little more risky. I’d figured, scratched up and faded, outdated in every regard, it didn’t look like anything to steal. But, it was gone, though I tell myself the memories aren’t stolen.
Picture of the OG mountain bike taken a bit over 10 years ago, when it still had the trailer-bike hitch on it.
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20 years ago I decided to replace it, and bought what was then a modern “Hybrid Bike.” It was an aluminum Trek, not the fanciest in their line then, but it had indexed gear shifting and the ability to run thin high-pressure tires that I thought would make the bike nimbler. However, the bike and I just didn’t bond. It never was a joy to ride, even with the 28mm narrow tires that were expected to make it faster and easier rolling. Aluminum frame bikes, particularly the ones from that generation, are known for having a harsh ride, maybe that was it I told myself — but whatever, it just wasn’t any fun. Then a couple of years ago I obtained a set of new wide 50mm tires that didn’t fit the bike they were bought for. I’m not sure why, but I mounted them on the aluminum Trek along with a Brooks Flyer leather saddle (that’s the one with springs). The bike was transformed. The extra tire air volume and the saddle not only made the bike more pleasant to ride, those tires made the bike feel more nimble (and more tolerant of bad street surfaces). In the past year it had become the bike I rode more than any other. It had been some mice and a pumpkin, then a splendid carriage and horses — and now, poof, it was gone.
The bike I was looking forward to ride that morning? A purple REI Randonnee that my wife and I had bought used with the idea that she might want to try longer bike rides at some point. It too was probably 20 years old like the Trek, but it had a smooth riding double-butted steel frame. That touring idea never worked out, but I had modified it over the years with a better set of handlebars, a tweaked stem height, some used “brifters” for indexed shifting (my wife never cared for the bar-end shifters it came with). I ended up riding it on longer rides. It was comfortable, responsive, and I miss it.
Also lost, both my wife’s and my winter “Fat Tire” bikes.
Just inanimate things, but I ride my bikes almost every day for joy and utility, the loss was something like loosing a pet.
All lost as I was in a library studying the life and times of a largely forgotten poet and singer of songs people kept.***
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*I might write more on that Workshop/MFA issue for poets and writers later this summer, but one of the folks who helped guide me on my search S. L. Huang wrote a thoughtful article on the dangers of this paradigm for many writers which I’ll link here.
**I won’t go into the details of how/why the garage was unlocked, though I likely know.
***Besides the thing-grief of these oft-used tools for joy being gone, and the work of trying to nail down details with the Edwin and Janet Piper stories, a large part of my June was taken up replacing the stolen bikes. You’ll meet the replacement bikes later, likely in use.
After my rewarding visit to the Carl Sandburg birthplace, our plan was to return to Iowa City and leave early the next morning to return home. I felt I knew more about the lesser-known early 20th century poet I’d come to find out about, Edwin Ford Piper, and I had had the experience of seeing something of Sandburg’s roots. My wife had gotten to explore several habitats. And I was pleased to find out my old body could still get around walking while carrying a 10 pound bag — even as a shade of the young student I once was.
Every trip is like this for me: enjoyment at the new place, appreciation of the new things experienced — but once the final day arrives, I’m ready and looking forward to returning home. But that evening as we were getting ready for bed, I was making a quick check of Internet things and saw that I’d received a response from S. L. Huang, a writer who had initiated my interest in the idea that Piper had been foundational in the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop method of teaching creative writing students.
Why would I (and plausibly you) care about that? The Iowa Writers’ Workshop was the origin-point of some things that have become pervasive in creative writing: the MFA degree, the workshop method of developing writers and critiquing work in progress, and the practice of literary writers being brought in and paid to be instructors in such programs.
Little I’d read in the Edwin Ford Piper papers before the Sandburg finale had addressed that element of his life directly, but Huang’s reply said there was more info on this in his widow Janet Piper’s papers which the University special collections also had. I mentioned this to my wife — she was agreeable to leaving at noon instead of dawn for the long drive home, and she would find one more landscape to explore while I made the walk back to the library for a half-day looking at Piper’s wife’s papers.*
By now I already knew the routine in the special collections reading room. The tough part would be that Janet Piper’s collection was larger than her husband’s, and only generally cataloged. I had gone into the husband’s papers knowing at least a few things about him, but all I knew about Janet Piper were references that she thought “politics” had led to her husband’s early and sudden death in 1939 just as the Workshop was getting underway.
A small portion of Janet Piper’s papers in the University of Iowa collection, but my best guess at what might answer my questions about the beginnings of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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It’s taken me until the first day of July to read and comprehend what I captured for later perusal in those few last hours at the reading room. Later in June I also read Stephen Wilbers’ 1980 book The Iowa Writers’ Workshop which aimed to show how that noted program came to be. Wilbers corresponded with Janet Piper while researching his book, duplicating a slightly earlier attempt by Janet W. Wylder to get information from Edwin Ford Piper’s widow. Wylder was attempting a similar book on the Writers’ Workshop that was never completed.**
Janet Piper’s papers include correspondence from these two with her, and a more than 100-page, response that seems to have gone through several revisions and titles, eventually being called “Edwin Ford Piper and the Iowa Workshop: a prehistory.” It’s likely the best we have on the later adult life of Edwin Piper, who taught at Iowa for more than a generation and encouraged student creative writing throughout that time — right up until his sudden death just as the official Writers’ Workshop was launched. But spoiler alert: his wife’s account doesn’t live up to that promising title.
Since Janet Piper is even lesser-known than her husband, here’s a capsule bio extracted mostly from what I read in her papers and some web research:
Born (family last name: Pressley) in 1902 in Des Moines Iowa. May have moved to eastern Nebraska sometime in her childhood, and eventually attended college there and completed a Masters. She knew other young literary people in Nebraska and was already a poet who had won a couple of awards for her poetry while in that state. Began advanced degree work at the University of Iowa in Iowa City in the 1920s. Her academic work was interrupted by her 1927 marriage to Edwin Ford Piper, one of her professors, and by the following birth of their only child Edwin Ford Piper II in 1928.*** She writes little about the day to day of her marriage other than asides to the considerable duties of motherhood and being a faculty wife. She seems to admire and support her husband in his work and notes increasing change, stress, and conflict at the University then. She had resumed her academic work toward a PhD by the later 1930s — and then in 1939, her husband dies suddenly. She describes completing her final thesis defense in the midst of new widowhood in a disassociated state, flying on under auto-pilot. Various statements, some as corroboration, say this is likely the first PhD granted for a thesis consisting of creative writing.
She leaves Iowa in 1940 and within a couple of years takes up a teaching position at Sam Houston State in Texas, where she taught until retirement. In 1949 she made a suicide attempt by pills and was committed by her 21-year-old son to a facility in Texas, where she later writes she received the kind of coerced treatment, including electro-shock, that was common then. There’s some heartbreaking but formally-stated correspondence in her papers with her son from the early 1950s when they are estranged. She blames him for that mental facility commitment, and she says that he blames her for expecting too much of him as a child and not giving him appropriate attention.**** At her retirement in 1972 it’s written that she has continued to write poetry. She lives until 1997.
The Iowa Writers’ Workshop in their official histories started in 1936 — or it started in 1939 in other accountings. Edwin Piper had been encouraging students creative writing for decades, but the administration was now committed to allowing these efforts to be given academic credit and to become substantive toward degrees, a new concept for American academia. From Wilbers’ book and Janet Piper’s account, Edwin had some level of prominence in the mid-1930s in this now officially academic writers’ program — Wilbers writes it was more over the poetry sub-section while Janet Piper portrays her husband as being increasingly marginalized by the department’s administration, making the department head Norman Foerster a particular villain in the matter.
Yet, in a 1976 letter Wilbers includes in a footnote, a fascinating (but secondary to our story) figure Wilber Schramm recounts that he took over as director in 1939, being drafted into the job because of a pressing need occasioned by Piper’s death. In the Workshop’s official history, Schramm was the first director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but Schramm doesn’t tell it that way.
Alas, from what I’ve been able to find out so far, there’s no solid information about how central Edwin Ford Piper was to instigating those Iowa Writers’ Workshop changes to how literary writing and writers live and work in our century. His career shows he’d long favored working with young writers, but Janet Piper portrays that she and her husband didn’t like some of the leaders making Iowa a pioneer in granting degrees, or their matter of going about it. There’s a cryptic report from the 1930s that Edwin didn’t like how the Workshop was turning into a promotional effort which I cannot completely evaluate. I was at first skeptical at Janet Piper’s constant reference to the malign forces of something she calls “New Humanism” ruining her life, her husband’s life, and literature in general. I knew nothing of that term, but a little research confirms that that was overtly the flag that her chief villain Norman Foerster and some of his allies were flying.*
For a person like me who likes to know how directional changes happened, to see what turned us from one path to another, it was engrossing to try to chase this down, even if the crossroads turned out to be shrouded in fog. I’ll close by saying I’d like to thank Edwin and Janet Piper. Though they are dead, and they likely never concerned themselves exactly with my questions being formed in the 21st century, their papers gave me a window into their times and challenges. I’d like to thank the folks at the University of Iowa Special Collection section who were always helpful to this old and informal scholar. And thanks to you, rare and curious readers, who granted attention to this 1930s couple caught up in the changes in American literature and this 2020s couple celebrating their anniversary with their particular interests.
Watching my time carefully, just a few minutes before noon I packed up in the library, went down to the street, and swung into the car as my wife pulled up at the entrance curb. We were leaving for home.
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*Coincidence: as I went looking into the beginnings of the Iowa Workshop, she visited the Devonian Fossil Gorge which I later read famed Workshop Director Paul Engle also liked to examine while still a student.
**This double pump seemed to frustrate Janet Piper. She at first thanked Wylder for rekindling her memories of her dead husband and her time with young writers at Iowa. Piper’s response appears to be a version of the around 100-page memoir which includes a long side-discussion of New Humanism. In her following correspondence with Wilbers she’s upset that Wylder had in effect ghosted her, and she wonders why Wilbers doesn’t have the material she sent Wylder. Moderns, remember: this is the era when producing 100 pages meant typing that singular ms. entirely and inhaling correction fluid, not just cutting/pasting and pressing send, or dumping pictures off your phone’s camera roll.
***More notes for Moderns: I can hear the ick factor bursting in your minds. This sort of thing was quite common, even into the years of my youth. Their contemporaries wouldn’t necessarily think this scandalous — or even unusual — though the age difference (56 to 25) here is broader than many of these male prof/female student marriages. That said, everything you object to was still possible despite different mores. Janet Piper’s papers give no indication it wasn’t a happy marriage.
****Whatever led Janet Piper to her suicide attempt isn’t spelled out in what I’ve read. The number of stressors and level of endurance it would take to be a single mom, a widow, a rare woman/academic in an era when that was even tougher than today, and while society is in the transition from the Great Depression to a World War — all that might batter anyone’s defenses. Similarly, I can only imagine a 21-year-old son having their only parent, their mother, trying to kill herself and being put in a position to try to decide what to do about that. I don’t know the particulars of Texas law at that time, but authorities themselves might be pressing for civil commitment. I’m not suited to be a novelist, but reading in Janet Piper’s papers on this matter I thought “There’s a novel.”
*Let me resist trying to give an outline of New Humanism. Like a number of Fugitives, New Criticism proponents, and neo-Thomists that followed this movement and somewhat evolved from it, they tended toward political conservatism, and in the 1930s many were, at the least, permissive of fascist authoritarians, which some (including JP) might lay to them being already authoritarian in aesthetics. Janet Piper speaks distressingly of fascist Iowa professors in that era, even names some. Janet Piper’s papers that I’ve read don’t tell me exactly what Edwin Piper thought of this. Though a Chaucer specialist carrying that interest into a project completed at the end of his life, Edwin’s papers don’t demonstrate a pervasive appeal to timeless classical truths, and his folksong fascination would likely oppose a tight highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow outlook. I can’t say for sure what Edwin Piper’s politics were, but his widow seems left/liberal in the 1970s and makes no mention that they disagreed on politics back in the 30s. Janet Piper’s summary that “politics” led to her husband’s early death leads to the question: what level of politics? In her mind it appears university politics and civic politics were indivisible.
When asked about this era in the 1970s. Janet Piper continually wants to talk about what she views as more than a cultural tendency or scheme, and more at an active, effective, powerful conspiracy originated by New Humanism. At times she’s detailed and footnoted with her charges, at other times vague and implying great harms in a broader and fuzzier way. More than once in her papers she refers to Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Conrad Aiken as the heads of a secret cabal advancing evil work — and I can’t quite “read” if I should take those expressions as satiric exaggerations. In a letter from Robert Hillyer, he agrees with her that she’s not a crank, using that word as if it had been applied to Janet. In what I read she spends less time than my curiosity would like expounding what she prefers in literary or cultural theory rather than what she damns.
It would take more study and knowledge to fully understand or evaluate that element in Janet Piper’s later writing. This element, often present in what I read, shows a life of great reading and learning exceeding my own, evidence of great energy for a person roughly my age — and likely at times I can’t quite measure, effective moments of literary criticism and insight.
I think there’s a misapprehension of Carl Sandburg’s poetry: that it’s simple, prosy work. That it says what it says, hearty single-minded messages with some decorative metaphor. Tastes differ, and mine may not be a guide to anyone else, but I sometimes don’t find him so. As I continue trying different things during the summer with this multipart personal story, I’ll return to our regular stuff at the end today with an example of Sandburg mysterioso.
The finale of my June trip to Iowa City to see what I could find out about an even more under-considered Midwestern 20th century poet, Edwin Ford Piper, was planned to be a visit to Galesburg Illinois, a small city just east across the Mississippi river where Sandburg was born. Piper and Sandburg pair up easily. Both born in the American Midwest a couple of decades after the Civil War, both part of early 20th Century literary movements we no longer take as much notice of. Both were attracted to a broad swath of memorized vernacular music that would be called “Folk Music.” They knew each other, even shared stage programs. Sandburg’s 1927 music collection The American Songbag established what American folk music would be for my mid-century generation, and from examining Piper’s papers I could see his definition paralleled Sandburg’s. Piper was one of the contributors to American Songbag.***
Poet Sandburg blurbing poet Edwin Ford Piper. I also saw a note from Sandburg thanking Piper for songs used in Songbag, but don’t have a picture of that.
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We arrived at Galesburg early for the 1 A.M.-opening of the Sandburg birthplace site. We wandered the wondering-what-it’ll-become-in-the-21st-century business district with its building facades still showing a variety of past decades abandoned styles left to fade, and browsed a charming small bookstore there. We were going to have an early lunch somewhere, and decided to just get sandwiches and go eat them in the small area behind the birthplace on benches by the Remembrance Rock there.
The rock is an unremarkable bolder, utterly plain and unshaped as a design choice.*** Sandburg and his beloved wife and partner’s ashes are buried under it. The lawn it sits on behind the house is circled by bushes and a few trees, and rather than any sense of a park, it reminded me of the backyard of the house where I grew up in Iowa. One thing the photos I have seen of the rock didn’t show: a ring of irregular, small flat, stones that circle it, each engraved with a line from a Sandburg poem. If one wished, one could ceremoniously walk from flat grounded rock to rock stepping with your foot-soles on his words, which it seemed to me to be what one of Sandburg’s models Whitman has commanded — and so I did. There’s a nice bust of Sandburg on a stand there too, but to my sense of the place, walking his words was more meaningful. I’d told my wife that Sandburg’s father was a railroad blacksmith, and she figured that the neighborhood might have been handy for rail workers. After our lunch, she took a little stroll while I waited, and she came back to report that just over a rise a block away was the railroad line.
…but then all the birds know is to poop on poetry-engraved rocks, same as any other.
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One of the site’s staff members arrived ahead of opening time to do a little yard work, and when that time arrived, he changed tasks to welcoming and serving as a guide for about 30 older folks in an adult learning program who arrived from Peoria in two small busses. Beside the birthplace (our host preferred to not call it a house, but a railroad worker’s hut) there was another small, somewhat rundown house next door that served as the site’s offices and a small room of memorabilia backed with an illustrated wall timeline of Sandburg’s life. Behind the two houses was a garage that has been turned into a cozy theater space where they host musical acts in homage to that part of Sandburg’s heritage.
My wife and I plus the 30 others overwhelmed the birthplace site’s capacity. Resourcefully the staff divided the group into two, and after watching a short video on Sandburg our half got to walk through the birthplace hut or house. If you are familiar with the modern tiny house movement, the floorplan and the maximal utilization of it would strike a resonance. Outhouse, no plumbing or running water, it’s decorated in late 19th century Swedish immigrant homey style, but a couple, a young child, and a baby would have been a tight fit, much less our troop of visitors. I recall visiting a reconstructed Lincoln birthplace cabin as a child, and though the Sandburg birthplace is wood-frame construction, not a log cabin, the square footage and amenities might have struck Lincoln biographer Sandburg as similar.
Sandburg’s birthplace: house, hut, cabin. This side shows the smallness best I think.
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Perhaps because of the touring group’s visit, there was a special performance by a singer-guitarist whose name I didn’t catch, who did a short re-creation of Sandburg singing and talking about his life. I enjoyed that effort. Before leaving, I asked one of the leaders of the visiting group, an old professor, who had some years on your old guy reporter here, what Sandburg biography he’d recommend. He cited Penelope Niven’s bio, and I bought it at the site’s store.
No one hides the fact Carl Sandburg might not have much direct memory of the birthplace as his family moved to another Galesburg house while only a toddler**** But the choice of it for a burial place, and the link to his parents was I believe his doing. Unlike the larger house and goat farm where Sandburg spent his post-WWII life until he died that is a National Parks Service site, the birthplace is run by the State of Illinois and some local spirit and volunteerism. Sandburg retained throughout his life a fondness for Galesburg, never hid his roots there, and Galesburg was also the place where he attended college after his stint in the Army, though he never completed a degree.
Which brings me to today’s new musical piece, a setting of a Sandburg poem about someone who apparently left town wiping the dust off their shoes at the city limits. In his collections Sandburg called the poem “Gone,” but the main character’s name sticks in some memories, so it also gets called by the first line, or by the character’s name that appears in that line: “Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town.” Here’s a link to the text of the poem.
I promised mystery in this one. There are things left out, and various implications some of which complicate, some of which conflict, are left open. Can we even take that opening statement at face value? Not now, certainly not in 1916 could it be said that we all love “a wild girl” with a dream “she wants.” Some might, many would not. Wildness and dream-holding create envy, often a lot of it. Is Chick Lorimer someone that everyone in town has marked as special, marked for greater things — someone so preeminent in their youth where that envy would be tamped down? If so, why the sudden leaving, with no one knowing where or why? Does a recognized prodigy, much loved, leave a place without saying goodbye? That would be a rare story.
Perhaps the “everyone” is a casual overstatement, referring only to a small group of friends who shared ideas? Later the poem seems to refer to larger numbers however.
Is she not actually loved by much of the town, and “loved” in a narrow, sexual, sense by many men? The “Dancer, singer, and laughing passionate lover” line could give testimony to that thought. That line is followed by two specific but puzzling lines, and their very specificity says we should pay attention to them. “Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick?” “Hunting” is a word choice, though we do say we hunt for the lost all the time without thinking of hunting as in wild game. Why the specific range, “ten or a hundred?” If this noteworthy young person is gone, no other info, that’s a missing person. Have they come to harm, are they being hunted for something they’re suspected of doing wrong? Why can’t they say, between 10 and 100 for the number of hunters? This hunt seems secretive from that wide range: 10 might be a small matter, 100 a greater one — but even then 100 would be small if this is a universally beloved light of a town, unless it’s a very small town. It seems significant that the poem’s speaker can’t give a better estimate. And that’s followed by another stat: “five men or fifty with aching hearts.” The numbers are still widely separated, but they’re also halved from the number of hunters.
To perform this, I felt I had to have some plot in mind as I sang it. In my mind, Chick is a free-spirited libertine, and to a large degree that “loved” means no-strings sex. Chick likely left because she wanted something more, or because the disapproval of her “loving” everybody was getting intolerable. The maybe just five “aching heart” men thought they were, or could be, her significant partner.*
How bohemian was poet Sandburg’s experience early in the 20th century? When he first moved to Chicago he lived in what was in effect a free-thinkers commune run by a strange guy, Parker Sercombe. From my reading, “Free Love” was just as much a topic in bohemian culture in the early 1900s as it was in the 1960s.
But maybe I’m wrong, and maybe your reading is different. It could be that Chick is like “Chuck” Sandburg (the name he used then) wanting to see the world, wanting to follow their dream. Sandburg had bicycled around Illinois, rode trains legally and illegally to other parts of the US, and he’d already been to Puerto Rico in the Army by the time he wrote this. Chick could be his anima. Sandburg never felt entirely alienated from his hometown or family however. He came back through town, wrote letters to his family, and so on. And if you want to see his beginnings and his decided final place to remember him, one goes to Galesburg.
To hear my performance of “Gone” AKA “Chick Lorimer” you can use the audio player below. Do you feel nobody knows where the audio player has gone? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Gone.mp3*If you never cared about the post WWII folk revival for whatever reason, I will point out that Rock’n’Roll became self-aware artistic and literary-flavored “Rock Music” in the later 60s because folk revival musicians transferred their backgrounds into bands with electric instruments after The Beatles, electric Blues bands, and “Dylan goes electric” emerged to take over college and post-graduate audiences in the US. Over in the UK, the folk revival to Rock pipeline was supplied by “Skiffle” — an American jug-band folk revival style that swept UK youth in the 50s, merging with a peculiar British Trad Jazz revival that often featured the Blues element of pre-WWII Jazz.
**Piper’s wife, in her collection at the University of Iowa library, claims that Piper’s contributions were greater than Sandburg credits in Songbag. Possible, I suppose, though the nature of Piper’s song collecting revealed by my examination of his papers shows a collaborative effort with collectors sharing with each other freely. Piper’s unpublished collection, like Sandburg’s published one, wasn’t done with a sense of ownership of songs.
****The family didn’t get sudden wealth, it supplemented the railroad wages by renting out rooms in the succeeding houses, and the children worked to add to the family income as they grew older.
*For a fuller story fleshed out from the short poem’s details, there’s this 50 minute early 1960s TV episode from the Route 66 series which uses the poem idea as its central motif and title, with the leading man reciting Sandburg’s poem 2/3 of the way in. This linked version has hokey colorization of the series fine B&W photography, but it is easily viewable.
Today is Juneteenth, a holiday coming into greater recognition as a celebration of the ending of America’s race-based chattel slavery. Why this date? I repeatedly warned you that I can’t tell a story simply and briefly, but for this holiday I have an excuse.
Slavery began in the American British colonies somewhat haphazardly, but by the time we became an independent country we had lots of laws, customs, and beliefs to entrench it. As it often is with the mechanics of oppression, the structures to hold it up took work to maintain, and by the 1850s there was great worry between slaveholders that it would collapse. In the 1860 election, Lincoln won, and even though he’d stated a politician’s compromise middle ground on the slavery issue, his party included enough abolitionists that most powerful slave-holders were ready to press their states to rebel and set up their own government. Civil war ensued.
Which didn’t free the slaves — at least not yet.
Of course the enslaved had been freeing themselves, when they could, all along. Armed rebellions hadn’t worked for more than moments, but the brave, lucky, and skilled might successfully flee at least from the slave-holding states if not to Canada where US law couldn’t touch them.* But it wasn’t easy traveling all that far.
Once the war started in 1861, some enslaved people recognized they could try a shorter route: just make it to the Union troop’s camps, and a good many did just that, which created an awkward situation. You see: nothing had ended slavery’s legal framework, Lincoln still maintained he wasn’t doing that (if only because a few slave-holding states and slaveholders remained on the Union side). He just wanted to put down the rebellion.** Law still said the slaves were property.
Someone on the Union side came up with a peculiar idea. If the enslaved were legally property, they could be confiscated during wartime like a cannon, horse, ship or other enemy property could be. Dehumanizing language? Sure, but escaping past the Union lines meant an increasing chance that they wouldn’t be taken back.
Eventually, Lincoln supersized that freedom, by declaring that all the enslaved in the states in rebellion were free. This, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued at the beginning of 1863. American slaves elsewhere? Nope, not in the Proclamation. Slave owners in places under Confederate rebel control? Not gonna listen to Lincoln’s order. In April of 1865 Robert E. Lee surrendered the bulk of Confederate troops, but that still didn’t mean all enslaved were free, and the legal matter wasn’t consolidated until December of that year with the adaptation of the 13th Amendment.
A couple chapters back I talked about how slow by modern standards communication could be in the mid-19th and early 20th century. Well, it was slower yet when not everyone was on-board with the news. Juneteenth, with an absurdity that is so often a part of America’s racial history, celebrates when Union troops got over to Texas in June of 1865 to announce that the war had been over for over a month and the enslaved in Confederate Texas were no longer legally slaves.
When I left off I was (more or less) talking about folk songs and the songs collected in the American Midwest before WWI by poet Edwin Ford Piper. I’ve also already mentioned that folk songs aren’t unchanging, and aren’t pure. While going through the yellowing paper in Piper’s archives, I came upon this song, handwritten in his own handwriting. He has the title as “The Little Octoroon.” Things aren’t going to get simple here readers. I can’t be simple.
The song as Edwin Ford Piper heard it from his mother
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Octoroon is a largely obsolete word, derived from a lot of rigmarole regarding how Black someone was. It means 1/8th (octo=8) Afro-American. In general, the mumbo-jumbo legal biochemistry in American history regularly said it didn’t make much difference. Half, quarter, sixteenth — hell, for those who had trouble with fractions it was sometimes written down as: 1% Black, you’re legally Black.
An octoroon may not look Black. I can still recall when I was 14 or so, and having grown up in a tiny rural Iowa town. An Afro-American man who was a civil-rights activist was to visit my church camp. He arrives. Wait — that man’s Black? I remember in my naivete looking at his summer hands and forearms. The man had freckles people!
So why does this song, which is clearly a song from the Union and Abolitionist side make some point about the child being an octoroon? This will get weird: it was possible to be an abolitionist and a white supremacist thinking Afro-American’s inferior. Yes, you could be smart and ignorant at the same time! If you’re trying to end chattel slavery, and you’re counting votes or troops, you might not care to make a sticking point about this, ugly as it is. Those with pseudo-scientific beliefs such as an octoroon is “nearly a white person” might have stirrings of respect. (Ugh!) And then at the unconscious, illogical level, there’s the factor of that person looking much like me, so maybe they should have rights like me. Even if it’s a song (something with no visual element) those factors may have entered into its composition.***
While there are no notes I saw in the archive that Piper knew this, this song does have a composer: George F. Root. Root didn’t quite reach Stephen Foster or Dan Emmett level of 19th century American songwriter fame, but he had his “hits” such as they were in the pre-recording era. During the Civil War period and based out of Chicago, he specialized in songs for the Union side.
The sheet music from George F. Root’s music publishing firm. When Piper remembers his mother singing this tune, it would have been only 10-years-old.
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Did Piper’s mother learn this from someone else? Was there sheet music in a piano bench for this, unknown to the 5-year-old Piper? In the quiet library archive, I visualized two white people, a mother and child, in rural frontier Nebraska sharing this song. The differences in the printed song from the one Piper wrote down from his mother’s singing say this isn’t likely a handwritten copy from sheet music.****
Here’s my conclusion, which I hope I’ve demonstrated even though I’ve trimmed parts of this piece back: Juneteenth is the most complicated American legal holiday. The only simple thing about the holiday is that it stands for freedom and the lifting of oppression. Taken at its whole, though messy and with calculated delay, that makes it a favorite of a person like me, who still cries and wonders at how simple truths and rights take so long to be established. The song I’m performing today, its path and turning into a folk song, isn’t that complicated — but yes, the path of American freedom is.
You can hear my performance of Root’s “The Little Octoroon” with the audio player below. No player? This highlighted link is an alternate.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Little_Octoroon.mp3.
*In 1850 a Fugitive Slave Act was passed that required northern state governments, not just the federal government to return enslaved people who reached northern states. Some cities and states wouldn’t comply (there’s this Minnesota case for one example).
Piper’s mother was in Canada near the US border in this era. It’s possible that fugitive slaves might have crossed over into her region. I also note that Piper says she was singing it in 1876, perhaps because that’s the border of Edwin Ford Piper’s memory, but I read the date and think about it being the year Reconstruction largely ended and new de-jure laws and customs greatly restricted Afro-American citizenship.
**No, Nicki Haley, slavery was the cause of the Civil War, even though many liked to parse Lincoln’s compromise and coalition statements of this time to make it sound like it wasn’t. The flaw in that framing? Lincoln didn’t start the war, the South did, and they were explicit in proclaiming why they did it.
*There’s another song using this terminology that this Project has already presented: Longfellow’s scathing pre-Civil War poem “The Quadroon Girl.” In Longfellow’s poem the situation leading to that poem’s mixed-race child is laid out: feudal concubinage and/or rape by slaveholders. For making a speech implying the same, Longfellow’s friend, US Senator Charles Sumner was beaten to within an inch of his life on the floor of congress.
**The biggest difference: the printed song’s title calls out the chorus — it’s officially “Glory, Glory, The Little Octoroon.” I only sang the martial chorus twice in my performance because I was more drawn to the bravery and sacrifice told in the verses. We have two holidays that say soldiers made us free, but it’s not only soldiers.
I followed Piper’s transcription for the words, not the printed lyrics, honoring the chain of transmission to me rather than accuracy. I also modified Root’s tune and chords to suit my tastes and tendencies. I could not help but think of these things as I sang this: first, the mother, her family heritage caught in that sexual exploitation making the choice to stay and face the slave hunters and their dogs to assure her child’s escape. We never find out if she and the daughter will be reunited, or even if she survives. Then next I think of those pursuers who to the degree they are portrayed in the song would be gaslight villains — but in history they would be real people doing great evil, who could be thinking they were serving justice. And then lastly, the final-verse gunner who cares for the child, though he’s more the Horatio of the story, with the mother being the tragic hero. I ask you not to skip over the villain characters. It’s fine if you empathize with the gunner, but some great dangers in one’s life (and often to other lives) are those middle souls, like the slavecatcher pursuers, who have a system that tells them they are arduously, justly, doing right.
While researching my questions about Edwin Ford Piper in his archives at the University of Iowa Special Collections Library, did other things occur to me? Yes, a few things did. I’ve warned you, I never seem to be able to tell stories simply.
I tapped this thought on my laptop computer during the first day with the yellowing paper newspaper clippings, cursive correspondence, and paperclipped notes on scraps of paper surrounding me: “Paper or Song?”
I hoped that would be enough to remind me of what occurred off to the side as I worked my way through this somewhat random archive containing the folk songs Piper had collected around the American Midwest early in the 20th century, often from rural settings.
Given the high cost of the more or less instant communication in my rural youth, I easily recognized Piper’s world of correspondence, little journals, and newspapers of the region. If my mid-20th Century had long-distance phone calls, or I suppose telegrams (I never sent the latter, but a couple appear in Piper’s files), long-distance calls were an expensive thing, something you saved for emergencies or life events for the most part. As in Piper’s days, tasks like exchanging folk songs or literary networking was something you might engage in with pen in hand like some medieval monk or courtier.
We’ll bring in Carl Sandburg, and Carl’s birthplace where I saw this blurbed edition of his landmark folk song collection later.
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That information’s travel was slow: what one found in one small town might appear days later in the mailbox of another town, but it had persistence. It opened the possibility of staying around longer than the electronic instants we exchange now on little glowing rectangles. This document I’m entering into a computer gets saved to a solid-state device, and backed up to another — but who would care after I’m gone or know how to access if they did? This blog, widely public as it is today, exists more or less at the mercy of my monthly payment from my no-profit enterprise.
In summary: slow communication in Piper’s time, but a chance it’s kept long. Fast, facile communication now wizzes past in a flying timeline and disappears.
How much did Piper save? I can’t tell, we only have what we have, not what we don’t. In my last day at the Special Collections I read an in-passing comment from his wife written decades after Piper’s sudden death, telling which professor took over his position and classes and of the two of them going to Edwin Piper’s office and cleaning out the stuff there for his successor. Piper was not Robert Frost or Carl Sandburg then or now, but someone saved some things that could be held in hand so I could go on my time travel trip into the boxes in the library Special Collections.
Still, there’s nothing about paper that assures eternal. Beyond paper, Piper seems to have done good work, good things for others. As a professor there’s the legacy of his students and perhaps their students, and so on outward. The unarchived of us will have that too, with no library boxes, indexes, or perhaps even attribution.
But then this occurred to me, there’s something else, an archival format with a potential longer shelf life: songs. It was partly a folk song archive I had come to look at, and I’ve had an interest in folk song since I was a teenager. Therefore, I already knew many of the songs I came upon in Piper’s archive, at least in a version I could recognize were related to his. I’ve heard them sung, sung them myself. Some of them are old, some of them had Child folk song collection numbers since they were British Isles songs that had emigrated to North America and remained to be passed from one singer to another through time. Ford wanted to write them down, but at least at first it was said he just wanted to learn of them to sing them. Singing — that’s an instant, ephemeral communication — but at least for some songs, sometimes, there’s a lasting component that persists.
A folk song for this post? Here’s a song better known from the 1960s folk revival where its haunting supernatural elements started attracting singers in the British Isles, “Reynardine.” While there are older songs with a like-named character, the version we know today descends from a song collected or recast in the first decade of the 20th century in northern Ireland around the time Piper was collecting his songs in the American Midwest. You can read more about this at this earlier post, but here it is simply as a song to pass through your ears via the audio player below, or this backup link.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Reynardine.mp3.
The walk across town to the University of Iowa main library turned out to be no problem, even in the heat. I walked into the modern lobby of the facility decked out with LCD screen-signage, a set of computer carrels, and airy windows. I used handy lockers with touch-screen set-your-own-combination lock panels there to store my bag and hat.* The library is one of those amended buildings, representing different eras in décor as it was added to over time or remodeled — so it was almost a theme-park-ride effect as I walked further into the main entryway to reach an old elevator with a flickering florescent fixture that took me up to the third floor with dark wood trim that reminded me of the libraries of my mid-century youth.
The special collections staff set me up on a placard-numbered plain table in the reading room. It took only a few minutes for my selected boxes from the Edwin Ford Piper collection to be delivered by cart. Looking around the reading room as I waited, there were filled bookshelves, a globe, a couple of busts, and a few framed posters. Curiously, there were life-sized carboard standups of 20th Century Star Trek actors in their character costumes in a couple of corners. Why? Generalized nerd culture? LaVar Burton’s following enlistment in Reading Rainbow? I momentarily thought, at the commencement of my time-travel by library collections, that the original Roddenberry Star Trek concept was travel to “seek out new life and new civilizations.” They called it Star Trek, not the second-word choice of the later movie franchise Star Wars, nor something referencing a technology-based science fiction premise. Pitching to SF resistant TV programmers, Roddenberry famously described his show it “Wagon Train in space.”
Transporter or time machine: archive boxes in the University of Iowa Special Collections Reading Room.
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I don’t know how Piper’s parents came to rural Nebraska. His mother’s family (Ford) emigrated from Ireland first to Canada around 1810. The Ford brothers who emigrated were stone masons. His father’s line had settled in Massachusetts from 17th century, near-Pilgrim times. Piper’s mother was born in rural south-west Ontario and his parents were married there in Zorra township in 1848. The parents moved to Auburn Nebraska in 1869 where Piper was born in 1871. The 1869 date means it was likely by wagon, as that date predates railroads there.
I know no particulars about why the Ford brothers emigrated to Canada. 1810 preceded the infamous Irish famine years a generation later. My guess (by inference) is that the Fords were Anglo-Irish protestants. I don’t know why Piper’s father was in a non-descript rural area of Canada either.***
It’s hard for me to judge his parent’s economic status. Piper speaks briefly in papers in the archive about his father being a rancher who raised livestock and that the barb wire that titled Edwin’s poetry collection came to Nebraska with homesteading post-Civil War farmers who tended crop-fields cordoned off with that fencing, causing his father to move his livestock grazing farther west to Alma Nebraska (southwest of Kearney) and then Box Elder, which is more than halfway to Colorado. In a short biographic note Piper prepared and found in the archives he says he “rode in the movers wagon.” In the same note he says he had “broken sod and raised corn to sell at ten cents a bushel; I have paid three percent a month interest.” Since he went to Omaha and university there when he came of age and was an academic the rest of his life, this would indicate that his family wasn’t exclusively a cattleman or other livestock operation.
In talking about places and names I found in the archives, I get ahead of myself, it’s just clear that the young Piper was a traveling man coming from a traveling heritage. When we speak nowadays about the Midwest as “the heartland” or casually assign it as a homogenous place in stasis we miss that it was (even its rural areas) just as much an immigration site as the tenements of New York City — there was just more space between farms or towns.
In effect I was another immigrant in the library archives. I was eagerly opening the contents brought to the table from first box and on, lifting out folders from inside them and examining the mix of handwritten letters and notes, typewritten pages, fragile yellow newsprint clippings, and occasional whole publications. The libraries abstract of the contents, and the Piper collection’s mixed filing, meant that I never knew what I’d find “over the next hill.” I had been concerned if I could keep my focus on this task for a full workday. I could. Easily. I was back in the era which The Parlando Project so often refers to, the first quarter of the 20th century when Modernism emerged. I’ll look at Modernism later in this series, but the folk songs are things the travelers carried with them from the past. Same quarter-century, Janus like, looking forward and backward.
As the collection abstract promised, the folk music collection materials were considerable. Many of them have marginal notes or material showing either they came from other collectors or that they had appeared in versions in other contemporary published collections. Some of these notes are from a 1934 run through of Piper’s folk song materials by a graduate student who cataloged and categorized the material while Piper was still alive, though his organization is not reflected in the current filing in the archive boxes. That student, Harold Daniel Peterson, no doubt using Piper as an informant, says that Piper first collected the songs to sing himself, that WWI interrupted Piper’s personal collecting, and that post-WWI, his students at Iowa contributed songs their families and locals knew. Correspondence and marginal notes with associated names show that Piper seems to have assembled or participated in an informal network of other folk song collectors. Piper also mentions the Journal of American Folklore multiple times, and that publication and society started in 1888.
There’s a number of files dealing with hobo songs (some with notes presumably by Piper about the particular hobo who shared the song) and articles about hobo culture, Hobos were migratory workers who often hopped trains to move from place to place.
Coincidences can move me, even if I realize I’m the one making chance meaningful. The very last folder in the last box I went through in my days examining the Piper archive folk song collection contained a version of “Jack of Diamonds” a traditional song with a variant that also goes by the name of a commonly included verse: “Rye Whiskey.” Long-time readers here may recall that I was told by uncles that “Rye Whiskey” was a favorite song of my great-grandfather, after whom I am named. In my time travel during this June trip I wasn’t just traveling to the time of Modernism’s emergence, I remembered at that moment opening that folder that I was traveling back to that man’s, a common laborer’s, time too. When investigating something else years back, I was taught that folk culture isn’t uncomplicatedly pure, always the result of children learning songs from the old folks on the porch of an isolated cabin. I recorded a performance with music of a plausible theory of how my great-grandfather might have come to fancy and appreciate that song. You can hear that performance with the audio player below, or with this highlighted link if that player isn’t visible to you.
To be continued…
http://traffic.libsyn.com/parlando/Frank_Eli_Hudson_and_Rye_Whiskey.mp3.
*As is now common in special collections, there are rules about what you can bring into the reading rooms. Alas, theft has been a problem in such places, so bags (much less spill-risk food or drink) are not allowed. I noted the University’s rules also restricted paper notebooks and outside writing instruments.
**Of who? I never left my focus to find out, but the human form amputated to a head and shoulders is already concentrating on the life of the mind. The Piper Archive papers mesmerized me, time passed rapidly as I tried to take in as much as I could. The first day I had packed a bagel in my shoulder bag, necessarily left in the downstairs library locker in case I needed to take a lunch break outside of the Special Collections Reading Room. I ate that bagel in the evening back at my room.
***This basic genealogical detail is from a typewritten sheet titled “Notes on Family History” with some pencil annotations in Piper’s handwriting in the archives. It also says that he was “the tenth child in a family of eleven children” and gives the date of Edwin Ford Piper’s own later marriage to Janet Pressley in Iowa City as 1927.
Very often I find myself unable to tell a story simply. While I find internal joy in expanding complexity there is a painful element too. Even when under the spell of things I’ve experienced and learned, I retain enough self-awareness to see what effect my expression has on others, the burden of strangeness. Then the reach between the teller and the listener becomes haphazard, unstable — pile it too high and it tiresomely topples — and so in some break for breath partway in, I realize I’ve dumped a cluttered mass of thought debris on a listener, long past any interest.
Perhaps this is why I’m attracted to lyric poetry, constrained as it is to moments, often held tight within the stiff glass bottles of forms.
Here’s a personal story that’ll go many places coming from the place I find myself in this June. It starts, I’ll guess, earlier this year when I came upon a poem, “The Last Antelope,” a striking, empathetic account of the end of an animal’s life and wildness after settlers captured it. Edwin Ford Piper was the author, and there were only scattered bits of information to be found about him. Scattered and bits do not constrain my curiosity — if the bits were great distances apart, the space between them could hold a lot of things: born 1871 in rural Nebraska, parents part of early European-origin settlement there. Largely self-educated in a land of necessary child-farmhand-so-never-more-than-half-year schools, still goes on to university in Omaha studying literature with a specialization in Chaucer, and then to the University of Iowa where as a professor he helped establish the idea of teaching and granting degrees in creative writing.
The modern convention of a university as patronage for artists, and the rise of the credentialed MFA-holding poet is not without controversy — but isn’t it odd, this man who taught himself in a small town on the fluid boundary between the 19th Century Wild West and the 20th Century staid Midwest took that journey.
In the middle of this, the same man had a compulsion to collect songs ordinary people brought with them while journeying, the words and music carried in the light baggage of memory. He wrote down songs his relatives and townsfolk knew by heart. He asked others to send him more by mail. He paid particular attention to the songs of those on the move: hobos, cowboys, and other traveling workers. Did this connect with his literary poetry? There are no recordings of Piper reading his poetry, but accounts say he declaimed it with a musical lilt — perhaps like the surviving recordings of Yeats, or maybe like the more bombastic Vachel Lindsay — and at times he would break into full song. His students took to calling him “The Singing Professor.”
Since this Project is “Where Music and Words Meet” you can see why I’d be attracted. And I’m a small-Midwestern-town boy, though without degrees. But did that seem strange then, to mesh high culture and the songs remembered by old women and rude mechanicals?
Piper was born just west of the Missouri River in Nebraska — and in Illinois, just to the east of the Mississippi River and less than a decade later, Carl Sandburg was born to an immigrant railway blacksmith who signed his name with an X. Iowa, the state where I was born in the middle of the next century, and Minnesota, the state where I’ve lived the longest, sit in a delta between those two tremendous rivers. Sandburg too mixed the latest in Modernist poetry with folk songs he collected and sang. Did Piper influence Sandburg? Did Sandburg influence Piper? Or are they the same genus of plant, raised in the same climate, but in separate plots? Questions.
Answers fork like river systems. Even with little information being readily available on Piper, I was already in flood stage. And here’s how much my wife loves me: for our 20th anniversary she agreed to go on a road trip with me to Iowa City and Sandburg’s home-town of Galesburg. My scenery in Iowa City? An archive of Piper’s papers* held in the university library there. Our grand museum of the arts of poetry and song to visit on the trip: a railway worker’s shack in a small rust-belt city, a town worn-out but still running like a paint-shedding Oldsmobile.
Two considerations worried me as I thought about this trip, one for my wife and one for myself. For my wife, I worried if there’d be something rewarding for her to do while I enthused at the library. She was able to solve that one easily, locating nature reserves, parks, and trails within an hour’s drive. I often tell her that she’s a nymph, and I complement her on how seriously she takes her job to supervise the plants and animals when she returns with soggy hiking boots from her hikes with pictures of landscapes, mushrooms, wildflowers, birds, and other critters. I love her pictures and stories on return (her stories briefer and better organized) — but my old joints ache just thinking about hiking for hours.
For myself I worried about my old-ager endurance. The library was two-thirds of a mile from where we’d stay. I’d need to hoof it with my laptop bag back and forth, which would have been a trifle in my youth, but nowadays longer term standing and walking is troublesome. I considered taking a bicycle with me, which would have made the library to-and-from easy, but a lot of hotel/AirBnB places don’t have any good places to lock up overnight, and on further consideration I thought that a bike would just be one more thing to worry about, taking my focus away from the trip’s main goals. And then I worried too about spending full days at the library’s special collections reading room. Because my time was limited, and to minimize the walking, I planned no break for lunch. I’d need to keep my focus and energy up, something that I have not been consistently able to do this year even with all the comforts of home.
On average I bike at least once every day in my normal routine, often in the morning. In the past two years I’ve not been a longer distance bicyclist, but 30-50 miles a week easily exceeds those 150 minutes exercise recommendations, and it lets me get to a café for morning breakfast and handle a lot of routine shopping and other trips. I ride year-round. In 2016 I bought my first 21st Century winter bike with studded tires; and in 2019 I upgraded the winter season bicycle to a Fat Bike with monstrous 4.5-inch-wide tires that handled ice and snow with the challenging ice ruts and potholes that my city’s current “We’ll get to all the streets in 3 days after the snow stops” plowing regime supplies. My overall stamina for the walk wasn’t my worry so much as how well my joints and stiff back would take the more load-bearing walk.** And to make it through the day I’d planned, there’d be no old-man’s afternoon nap either.
Piper, once a “poet of considerable distinction.” A later version of his collection Barb Wire. My Iowa City view, and yes the guitar got some use. Example breakfast.***
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The first day we arrived at Iowa city was hot and very humid, so I put on my best hot weather clothing. Spouse-nymph headed off at dawn for her day’s supervisory encounter with nature, and I planned a big breakfast fuel-up. I’m a “eat little meat” kind of guy, but for good or ill I take the lacto-ovo part of my lesser meat diet seriously, so I’m a big frittata, omelet, hash, scrambler kind of guy most mornings. I note that I eat like an old-time farmer, despite never farming, but the good thing about this higher fat/protein kind of meal is that it can hold me until supper, and that was my plan.
I put on my best hot weather clothes, slung my bag over my shoulder, and headed for the university’s main library building for my encounter with poet-professor Piper’s papers.
Thus ends Chapter One.
Here’s a musical performance I put together in March of Piper’s “The Last Antelope.” You can play it with the audio player you should see below. No player? This highlighted link is another way to hear it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Last_Antelope.mp3.
*When I arrived at the library archives will-call desk, I asked them to pick Piper’s Papers. The librarian suggested puckishly that I was nearly reconstructing the old tongue-twister folk-rhyme, Roud Folk Song index 19745.
**Local papers/forums are full of folks who bemoan bike lanes in my city, often remarking that “not everyone is young and fit.” Despite that, most bicyclists I meet and see on my city’s streets aren’t of the MAMIL (Middle-Aged Man in Lycra) variety — and I’m maybe 1.5 letters of that acronym. I joke with my wife that as my joints get older, a bicycle is becoming a “fore-and-aft wheelchair” for me, allowing me increased mobility and beneficial low-impact movement for the old joints.
***That’s a St. Paul Sandwich: egg foo young on sourdough with lettuce, tomato slices and mayo. Near as anyone knows, my Twin City of St. Paul has no tradition regarding it, and no restaurant there serves it now. Its origin is something of mystery.
It’s been an eventful June so far for me, and I plan to be writing like a real blogger about what I’ve experienced in the last couple of weeks shortly. Then too, just this week I started working on a few further Parlando audio pieces. At least one may make the cut to appear here in the next few days.
This weekend is Father’s Day, and a new musical piece that I thought I’d present for that turned out too rough, even for my tastes. So, here’s a well-loved poem by Kevin FitzPatrick that alternate Parlando Project voice Dave Moore performed with The LYL Band a couple of years ago. It seems apropos. Kevin’s books of poetry are available from this website: kevinfitzpatrickpoetry.com Today’s poem appears in his 1987 collection Down on the Corner.
“Bicycle Spring” was first presented here in 2022, but for today’s post I remastered it and made this little video for it. Here it is:
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Wishing my versatile readers and listeners a happy Summer.
Here’s another example of a short Emily Dickinson poem that seems in some facets simple, and yet when examined more closely still shows her uniqueness. On first reading it reminded me of a saying attributed to Benjamin Franklin* “Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged at dawn.”
One might read this poem from the start as a restatement of that Franklin quote — except, Dickinson may be saying this isn’t someone’s last day, she wants to set down the situation someone’s next-to-last day. In the first stanza, it is sunrise, and the poem says that the doomed person has delight. Why? Because there is one more day before their death at the dawn.
Chord sheet in case you’d like to sing this one yourself.
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This idea is clearer in the second stanza, where again, death is clearly due — but tomorrow. There the doomed man is listening for the bird that will likely sing at the next dawn. Perhaps he’s listening to the Meadow bird in the day-before dawn more intently, knowing the next time he hears that song it will be his execution, and this is his last day to hear it in the more generally hopeful context of introducing a day, not an execution. He might choose this — after all, if he knows he’s to die tomorrow, he can be somewhat assured he will not die in that present day as the bird sings the day to begin.
The final stanza may be the oddest, but indicates that this is so. It twice tells us the mood is joyful, which would indicate that the condemned does feel assured of, and is in love with, this day — the full day before. There’s a somewhat ambiguous word-choice in the last line: “ought.” The word can be a stand-in for zero, for nothing, but it’s primary meaning is more at obligated. If we take the zero/ought meaning, or the obligated meaning, Dickinson’s poem is saying the poems doomed subject is joyful though the next-to-last morning Meadow bird has a duty to sing nothing but elegy, because the poem’s subject will accept the day with joy.
So, this is goth-mode Emily with death certain, but this is also certainly the day before the last day.
Musically I had to throw this one together quickly, but it came out OK. Though in a minor key it’s somewhat jaunty. You can hear it with the graphical player below, or if the Meadow bird’s audio player isn’t visible, you can use this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Doomed_regard_the_Sunrise.mp3.
*There’s a similar quote attributed to Samuel Johnson, and there’s this later extension authored by Terry Pratchett “They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged.”
I spent much of today reading through Carl Sandburg’s landmark 1927 folk song collection American Songbag, all 500-plus-pages of it. It’s not the first time I’ve looked into the book, and indeed I’ve paged through it or jumped to songs I was interested in before. But next month I’m planning a trip to Sandburg’s boyhood home in Illinois and to Iowa City where I will be taking a look at some papers relating to early 20th century poet and professor Edwin Ford Piper who was one of the sources of folk song material used in Sanburg’s anthology.* So, looking at the book in full seemed a good grounding for this trip.
I’ve made the case before here, such as this post from a year ago, that besides being a somewhat deemphasized Modernist poet these days, Sandburg is a primary model for the American Folk Music Revival, which eventually produced in the second half of the 20th century several genres of popular and semi-popular music.** Here’s the matrix that Sandburg built in the 1920s, a hundred years ago:
- American folk music can be appreciated like art music
- It will be associated with literary poetry
- It expresses, or can be adapted to express or accompany, progressive/left-wing causes
- It’s multi-ethnic, and the contribution of Afro-Americans will be substantially acknowledged
- Humor and funny stories will be part of its presentation
Sandburg was including segments of folk music performance as part of poetry readings before American Songbag. AFAIK we don’t have any transcripts or recordings from that era, but all these things are demonstrated for the record in the 1927 book. Sandburg is not the only American doing any of these things a hundred years ago, but he’s doing all of them at once, and he’s doing it with a degree of fame and cultural acclaim that was significant.
I was aided in my rapid march through American Songbag by already knowing many of the songs it contains, and as I encountered them I remembered hearing them in my half of the 20th century performed by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and many of those other “folk singers” that surrounded them.* The Sing Out magazine and Jerry Silverman folk songbooks of the Sixties that are my foundation, are successors to Sandburg’s work, right down to the touch of using vintage B&W line drawings as interspersed decorations.
Sandburg often includes little stories about the collector (Piper was one of a group who collected the songs “in the field” for Songbag) and for those he collected himself he says a few words about how, where, and with whom he first heard the song. Here’s one of the most engaging of those stories I came upon today in the book:
Once when the night was wild without and the wintry winds piled snowdrifts around the traffic signals on Cottage Grove Avenue, Chicago, we sat with Robert Frost and Padraic Colum. The Gael had favored with Irish ballads of murder, robbery, passion. And Frost offered a sailorman song he learned as a boy on the wharves of San Francisco.
The song Frost sang for Colum and Sandburg? A subtle wry ballad of farming? A nuanced lyric of nature cooly observed? No, it was this one. Some will know it from its latter association with the Assassin’s Creed video game franchise:
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Besides the folks songs Piper contributes, Sandburg even quotes a part of a poem from his contemporary Piper’s Barb Wire poetry collection in Songbag.*
**Besides the Folk Scare of the 50s and 60s, the American “Rock Music” that extended Rock’n’Roll to FM radio, college campuses, and rock critics was generally formed from folks who had connections with the just preceding folk revival. Modern Americana and roots music links to the same strains and connections that Sandburg was personifying 100 years ago.
Guthrie composed music for Sanburg poems later. Ruth Crawford Seeger (Pete’s step-mom, Mike and Peggy Seeger’s birth mother) was one of the composers who created harmonized music for the folk songs in Songbag, and she also set Sandburg’s page poems to music. When the young Bob Dylan started to expand the poeticism of his song lyrics, he decided to pay a visit to Sandburg, briefly meeting him unannounced in North Carolina at Sandburg’s farm. Other folk luminaries connected? At least a couple songs collected from Leadbelly by John Lomax are included in Songbag. Lomax is credited, but Leadbelly isn’t, though Leadbelly’s more general public career hadn’t yet started. Let me just say that Lomax’s relationship with Leadbelly is complicated. Just this month I was reading a recollection of a performance by Spider John Koerner (who first performed in the mid-century Minneapolis folk music scene along with Dylan) where he told a humorous story about a farmer who fed his pig by lifting him up to the branches of an apple tree. That’s a story Sandburg also told. I’ll also note that when I came upon several songs in Songbag,* the rendition I recalled from the Folk Scare of the mid-century was by Dave Van Ronk, a wonderful performer and a mentor to Dylan when he arrived in New York.
Something about the Spring I noticed this year — oddly, this year as an old man who has had a full lifetime of Springs — is the intensity of natural sounds in my city. There’s a tendency, demonstrated in many poetic tropes, to make nature a portrait or a silent movie, putting nature in contrast to the noise of our civilization’s hum and bark.
I ride my bicycle nearly every day off to a café to have a breakfast, sometimes early enough to feel like the single soul on the street, but by the return trip certainly part of the city waking and doing: kids on their school bus stops, sometimes with a parent, sometimes waiting with their own cohort only. Folks holding coffee flasks unlocking their car doors to go to work, a few other bicyclists, including those on big front basket bakfiets or long-tail rear-seat-shelf bikes holding small kids, this observant cargo watching whatever in the morning beneath their pastel helmets. The human noise is slight and clicking. In such mornings we are more like crickets rubbing their wings.
But the birds! When most of those humans are making only accidental noise this early, and the kids waiting for the yellow bus aren’t always talking, perhaps practicing quiet for the ordered schoolroom, the birds are singing at the tops of their voices in the morning. Like miniature feathered fiddles, their song cuts through larger sounds, it insists on being heard. “Ladies, I got your genetic material here!” “This is my and my kind’s tree!” “Whatever this is, this Spring, I am here, and I’ll use my breath to say it!”
Like us bipeds lacking much fur, other mammals aren’t sounding much. Yard bunnies are suspicious and quiet. The squirrels don’t chirp, and their little feet make quiet footfalls. The dogs on leashes: all nose-leading in an alternate sensory dimension. But the frogs and toads are singing out too — whole amazing choirs of them, all wanting to contest Emily Dickinson’s Nobody with a harrumph and high whistle of who they are.
So, it is this Project’s nature to add sound to page poetry. Today’s audio piece is just me alone with a Telecaster electric guitar during a hurried session early this Spring to put down some musical ideas. In the poem that I’m combining with my music, “The Birds,” William Carlos Williams follows Imagist principles, melding a moment into concrete images. Given that we’ve just had a set of rainy days throughout the long holiday weekend in my city, I resonate as Williams poetically paints the bird-morning wet as undried paint.
Is the world not “wholly insufflated” as he says at the start? The bird song is breathing into our world — nature is not silence, but poetry aloud.
My wife found these stapled to poles around our neighborhood on Sunday.*
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You can hear my performance of Williams’ “The Birds” with the player gadget below. No gadget to be seen? This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player. Want to follow along with the text of the poem? Here’s a link to that.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Birds.mp3.
This bird couple’s heads are superimposed over a human pair of heads from the cover of The Magnetic Fields Holiday album. The quatrain quoted below is from a song found there “Strange Powers.”* Despite being a substantial Magnetic Fields admirer myself, I had never seen this album cover.
I could, maybe should, write about a number of things this weekend. The end of May brings Memorial Day, one of the United States’ two holidays celebrating those who served in the armed forces, the spring version being more focused on those who died in wartime duty. It also brings to mind the anniversary of the drawn-out, agonizing death of George Floyd a few blocks from where I’m writing this. I think of that little group of South Minneapolis people, ordinary citizens of my neighborhood, who witnessed it, who pleaded with the police officers to cease their officiousness. I think of the new policemen in that squad, earnestly following the lead of their trainer who’d arrived, the man with his knee on Floyd’s neck. Duty.
Duty is a small word, but one that we have two holidays to honor. We generally respect it, and in small and large ways we carry duties through our days. My wife does in her workdays what I did for a couple of decades, taking on the duty of helping the sick. In between workdays she takes on the obligations to her mother suffering from increasing Alzheimer’s in a care home.
I’ve written about all those things here. I could write at length about them here tonight. In doing so I could say I am following my obligations to humanity, to those who suffer, to those who’ve lost. We use poetry often to decorate those tasks, more often perhaps than we use the more capricious song to do so. Thus I could write, and you might view it as your duty to read that.
Instead, I’ve been filled this month with the realization that this is my teenager’s last summer as a teenager. They’ve concluded an indifferent year of post-secondary education, and now have taken their first job. As to next Fall plans: they are thinking of stopping with school, saving money from the job, and moving out. Studying seems like a duty — their work-a-day job does too, but maybe it’s a more novel duty, or at least one that has a biweekly award of a paycheck.
Music is a key to memory, particularly emotional memory to me. During these feelings this May, I came upon a performance of a song by Jonathan Richman. Richman has an utterly strange career. He’s one of those you might see called a cult artist, which means those who “get” him sometimes puzzle those who don’t, but also it means that many who read this won’t know his work at all. As a teenager Richman became something of a Velvet Underground* superfan, and his early work shows direct influence of Lou Reed’s songwriting. In the early 70s he and his band The Modern Lovers recorded more than a dozen tunes that prefigured a lot of what was to come in Punk and Indie rock a few years later, but the recordings were not issued when they were made. Then in 1976, when the first stirrings of Punk were drawing attention, they came out along with newer recordings.
Here’s complexity to that odd: the old, early 70s songs and recordings were unvarnished, and they followed Reed’s model of being emotionally honest, but their timbres and approach would be in tune with some of the vanguard of what was called Punk at that time. The newer songs were even more childlike, though no longer being written by a teenager or recent teenage time-emigrant, and the sonics were quieter, even more stripped back. As his career continued, Richman generally proceeded down that path, writing ever more childlike songs focused on everyday wonderment. If his early singing called on some of Lou Reed’s snarl and assertion, the later work took on elements of 50s Do-Wop teenage innocent sweetness.** Richman in a sense started out before his time, had a recording career launch when his early work seemed of the moment, and then continued until the present day as a singer-songwriter presenting the impression of coming from a place that was younger and younger.
The song I heard while thinking of my teenager at the borderline, “That Summer Feeling,” was sung by a 40 something Richman a couple of decades into that career. On Richman’s record the Do-Wop influence is apparent, backing harmonies and call and response from additional voices. Compared to the version you can hear below, there are more verses, more detail of youthful specifics. Blind to the career history I’ve summed up above, you might easily think someone about 19 or 20 recorded it, fresh with passing through that borderland.
Here’s the intuitive choice I made when I decided to quickly work up a cover of “That Summer Feeling:” to record it more in the style of the early 70s The Modern Lovers recordings than the “mature” Jonathan Richman. If I had more time, I would have overdubbed a garage rock guitar solo at the end or maybe some combo rock’n’roll organ as those records sometimes had. Following my taste, I preferred the songs less specific but most summer-set verses. This musical change and the way I sang the lyrics also brings out more of the undercurrent in this song, a complexity that a casual listen to a more smoothly produced recording might let one overlook. The singer isn’t just doing a let’s remember our youth story here. He warns in slightly mutating refrains that that youth will haunt you, and then he pleads with the (presumably teenage) listener to not wait until they’re older to, what — it’s not entirely clear — somehow integrate that duty-free time’s outlook fully into oneself or it won’t just haunt you, it’ll taunt you, and finally it will hurt* you “the rest of your life.”
Would any kid ever listen to that message? Doubtful. My fatherhood duty knows limits, even counterproductive effects, of advice. Still, I wanted to sing it anyway.
After the jumps of this Memorial Day post, I won’t make the proforma Memorial Day holiday wishes. Some will be decorating graves. Some will be thinking of how life was disregarded. Some are caring for the sick and infirm. Some will be having cookouts or taking a little vacation trip away from work. Black joy, worker’s rest, flopping down in the grass without any duty, playing or listening to music. We honor duty. Let us also honor some respite from it.
Here’s my performance of Richman’s song.
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*As many writers do, I must reiterate the Eno quote about how only a few thousand bought the first Velvet Underground record — but that everyone who did went out and started a band. Historians have determined that the record actually had decent sales, but Richman is one of the early examples of direct VU influence. The early Modern Lovers band included folks who would go on to being in The Talking Heads and The Cars.
**The small vocal ensemble 1950 style of urban teenage music that got called Do-Wop was often written by teenagers or near teenagers — and like the Punk, Rap or Indie music that followed later, it was inexpensive and approachable to create for the kids who made it. Arch cultural critics and satirists-in-song Lou Reed and Frank Zappa both appreciated it, thought it honest in its innocence. Punk founders Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye met because Smith loved an appreciation of Do-Wop that Kaye had published. I on the other hand have vocal limitations that keep me from indulging in the style.
***I am struck by the specific the song takes in one verse where it goes from singing swimming ponds and cool lawns to a traffic stop. I don’t think Richman meant to make that an existential moment, even if our modern gun-soaked life might make it seem so now.
Today’s musical piece uses another very short Spring poem by Emily Dickinson “A little Madness in the Spring.” I was reminded of this poem when I attended the May Midstream Poetry Reading Series this month where Thomas R. Smith opened a set of his own poems by reading this one of Dickinson’s. If you’d like to follow along, here’s a link to the text of that poem. Spring madness is not an unique poetic subject, but there’s an odd character we meet in this 6-line poem: a clown. Smith told us that “Clown” in his mind is best illuminated by understanding that the word emerged from a character that would have been understood as a country bumpkin. Checking on this, I confirmed that. The silent, white-makeup, big-shoed, red-nosed presentation that likely arises in your mind when you read “Clown” has not yet come into its full form when Dickinson wrote her poem, but the rural clod stock character reached back through commedia dell’arte to the works of Latin and Greek comedic playwrights.
I can’t say how Dickinson visualized clowns in her mid-19th century. I don’t know her access to whatever comic drama or the opera bouffe, but she might have run into clown characters in books or periodical reviews too. One thing that occurs to me: an American form that uses stock buffoons that was popular in Dickinson’s time and place was the minstrel show. Minstrelsy is infamous for using largely white actors playing black slaves acting foolishly, a context which cannot be disengaged from the larger social evils of slavery and white supremacy. It’s not to excuse our parochial evils to note that these character tropes existed outside of the peculiarities of America and white blackface.
When I had seen “A little Madness in the Spring” with its “Madness,” “King” and “Clown” before I heard Smith read it, I casually thought the poem referenced Shakespeare’s King Lear. Looking at that today, I can’t find evidence for it. The Fool in Lear is always The Fool, the word clown is never used. Nor is Springtime evoked in the play.
“As if it were his own…”
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So, I think Dickinson may have a generic King and Clown in her little poem. The meaning I’d extract is: It’s fine to be irrational in Spring, even if one has powerful responsibilities, but even more so we should note the foolish notion of the innocent peasant or farmer clown who observes all this new growth of spring, the “whole Experiment of Green” and believes it is their property. One fine point I’ll put onto that last part: even an unschooled farmer — and avid gardener Dickinson too — would know the work and craft that goes into starting a garden, crop field, or orchard. A King might puff himself up and portray that husbandry as “his own,” but the man or woman dealing with the exact logistics and labor knows well their part, regardless of who owns the crop or the field.
Is Dickinson winking at that difference in her comparison of the King and Clown? But neither labor nor legal papers and titles make the Earth and Springtime fully our own. We sing it, but the music comes from elsewhere.
You can hear my musical performance of Dickinson’s “A little Madness in the Spring” with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/A_Little_Madness_in_the_Spring.mp3.
For a cluster of reasons, it’s been increasingly difficult to create new audio pieces for this Project. For one thing, having done over 750 of these pieces during the past 8 years, a lot of musical ideas, poets, and poems have been explored already. For another, my increasing age and high-mileage body have decreased my stores of reliable energy and dexterity. But one other reason is that I no longer have a predictable and luxurious access to times when I can record something that involves a microphone. Oh, I still get such time — but I don’t always know when it’s coming — and so an opportunity may arise, and I’m committed to something else, or it comes about and I’m weary and spend it napping or resting my aching old frame, or it opens up, and I have nothing prepared to record.
This frustrates me even as I realize that what I do have to bring to the Parlando Project in terms of resources and time is something to be grateful for.
Yesterday I had foreknowledge of one of those recording times coming. I collected two things I wanted to do something with: a well-known poem by Emily Dickinson and another musical piece that I wanted to record just for my own personal enjoyment. As I sat down in my studio space to record my musical performance of the better-known Dickinson poem, I noticed on my music stand a chord sheet for a lesser-known Dickinson poem I had done the music for early this spring: “Sexton! My Master’s sleeping here. ” “Sexton!” hadn’t been recorded, even though it was ready — I didn’t have the time in early Spring as I rushed to do all the pieces on the children’s verse theme I had chosen for National Poetry Month.
Dickinson’s “Sexton!” is an early Spring poem, a season that arrives at different times in different climes, but I figured that I needed to record it right away if I was going to keep it at all timely. I grabbed a dreadnaught guitar (a larger, more powerful sounding guitar than my usual instrument) and quickly refreshed myself on how I had intended to perform “Sexton!”
I was so eager to record on this occasion when the restrictions to making a sound had fallen away that I ripped into the piece at a reckless tempo. A choice or a mood? Moot point, I had to get on with it. Thinking about that tempo today I also wondered if my teenager’s hardcore punk listening had seeped into my mental metronome. But then “Sexton!” does start with an exclamation point, and the whole poem is that: an exclamation of Spring.
Of course this is Goth Emily — so even if her poem and performance are as short as a cut by the so-rapid punk bards of San Pedro The Minutemen, there’s context crammed into 90 seconds. Here’s a link to Dickinson’s poem if you want to follow along. What do we find in those words?
This is what you come to the Parlando Project for: stuff that’s stuck on each other like cockleburs.
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A sexton takes care of church grounds, typically including a graveyard. The sleeping Master’s bed chamber is therefore likely a grave. Spring has come with flowers and birds expecting new life.*
Spring isn’t stopping to reflect on this, like the tempo of the song it’s got work to do. Dickinson is in a churchyard, but it’s full of death departed and life arriving, not dogma. What replaces that dogma, sermon, homily? Bird-troubadours, secular Spring-song: its shortness, its insistence. You can hear my performance of Emily Dickinson’s “Sexton!” with the graphical audio gadget you should see below. No gadget? This highlighted link is a backup that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Sexton.mp3.
*By anachronistic coincidence, the poem’s sexton made me think of Anne Sexton, a 20th century American poet. Poetry is like a cocklebur: its tropes and metaphors will stick to anything.
More coincidental connections: in considering Dickinson’s poem in the context of a song I thought of this Earl Sykes song, best-known from a Ralph Stanley bluegrass version, called “A Robin Built a Nest on Daddy’s Grave.” I wonder if Sykes knew Dickinson’s poem, or if there’s some third source that both the poet and the songwriter tapped for this springtime combination. My Dickinson poem-now-song would make a good medley with Sykes’ song —and good bluegrass high vocals and harmony would certainly spruce up my rough-hewn singing performance.
There are more things than well-made that a poem can be — but as someone who’s worked to make their own poems work, I can use that experience to admire what Robert Frost does in today’s piece.
“Pea Brush” is a rhymed iambic poem, based on four-foot lines, but it throws in enough variation that it never seems like it’s limping along in its gait. The rhymes aren’t fancy, and at least for me, they quietly chime along in the background without calling attention to themselves. This is prosody that isn’t bragging or showing off. It was easy to sing in my rough-hewn manner for the most part,* but if I was to reformat it into blocks as if it was prose, it wouldn’t seem all that strange either. Indeed, as I performed it, I wanted to stress its conversational quality.
If you’d like to follow along, here’s a link to the text of Frost’s poem used for my performance.
I myself haven’t had a garden in decades, but one friend of the blog Paul Deaton covers their kitchen garden regularly at his blog, and alternative Parlando voice and keyboardist Dave Moore has a garden that we talk about sometimes. I could imagine reading the first-layer plot of this poem as a post Paul might make. “I’ve arranged with a neighbor to use the small limbs from some birch trees he’s clearing as poles for some of my climbing garden plants. When I went to pick them up on Sunday, I noticed bent-over wildflowers** blooming under the brush pile. My reuse of the felled branches will help my pea vines and give the wildflowers room to grow.”
Besides this clear plot line, there are fine clear images in the poem’s story: the smell of sap still in the air from the just-cut trees, the pause in the frog’s song, the near-like to a baby’s grip of an adult’s finger to the tendrils of a climbing plant on garden stakes.
Wishing good luck to all the gardeners reading this.
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Below this surface, what is the poem trying to convey? The poem’s speaker (as a character perhaps a more prosaic farmer than the poet and indifferent farmer that Frost was) just notes the practicality of the arrangement — free garden stakes — while letting us in on the blooming of May flowers and the promise of harvest aided by this arrangement. Frost the poet has written this well-made play, painted this scenery, blocked and directed its performance. The play portrays the give and take of humankind in nature. We’ll grow (and consume) the peas with their infant tendrils. Neighbor John has amputated the treescape for his own agricultural designs. These are planned acts of life and death. The episode of the frogs has them portraying those things outside our plans, their Sunday-service silence to hide from a two-footed demigod that might come to capture them to a final silence.
I’ll note too the poem’s ending “had to come” interjection breaking the meter to make a final statement of the budding wildflowers that couldn’t wait for humans to make their plans.
I had to make do with a single hour to get this musical performance down today, and I chose to grab an acoustic guitar to get this accomplished. The results felt right enough to produce this new piece that you can hear with the graphical audio player below. No player? This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Pea_Brush.mp3.
*The line “The same as you seize cat’s-cradle strings” is a bit of a tongue-twister. And while I get Frost’s image clearly in that line’s stanza, the syntax is a little disordered I think.
**Frost names his wildflowers as trillium. I don’t know if Frost was the exact botanist that his friend Edward Thomas or his great New England predecessor Emily Dickinson were. Neither am I, but I’m often open to researching specifics like this in poems. I find that one of the species of trillium that grows in Frost’s New England is the Nodding Trillium, a variation that grows crooked stems naturally, not because a brush pile has altered its growth.
It was quite the April for me, and I’m resting up today before getting on with a bunch of tasks I’ve put off while working on the accelerated posting schedule for National Poetry Month. Readership was up substantially, busiest month ever for visitors at this blog, and page views blew past the old record by over a thousand. I should be better at replying to your comments and encouragement, but besides being focused on the work I have a mental Catch 22 where I often can’t decide the best way to respond, and in that indecision put off responding.
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I didn’t put anything new for International Workers Day today, but I’ll repost this piece with Carl Sandburg’s words from his longer poem “The Windy City” that I created for last autumn’s U. S. Labor Day. In posting it last year I suggested something I had bounced off my old compatriots in The Lake Street Writer’s Group, something I call “The Sandburg Test.”
Let me suggest a rough analog of the Bechtel Test. Let me call it The Sandburg Test. To be clear, it’s not my suggestion that every poem has to be about work, about the things we do for our daily bread. But, if we are viewing an anthology or substantial poetry collection from a poet, to pass The Sandburg Test it has to have poems that deal with work in some substantial way. How does the speaker or characters in the poem relate to work? What are they doing that work for? What is it in presenting them that portrays something about life? What are the mysteries, sensations, and systems of that work?
Here’s that musical performance of Sandburg’s words from “The Windy City” accessible with the graphical audio player you should see below. No player to been seen? This highlighted link is an alternative.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Windy_City.mp3.
John Sinclair lived an eventful life. He’s likely still most well-known for his “10 years for two joints” marijuana sentence, and secondarily for his connection with Midwestern 1960s high-energy rock music as a manager and promoter. Maybe you know too of his founding of a White Panther Party, the quixotic attempt to translate the charismatic radicalism of the Black Panthers to young white hippies.
He was a provocative guy, and he seems to have had a promotional streak to go with that. As I often say about folks like Sinclair: no sane person can likely agree with everything he said and did. Feel free to feel about him however you did before you read this, but there’s a particular reason for a piece using his words today.
This is the last day of (U.S.) National Poetry Month, but it’s also International Jazz Day. The connection of poetry with Jazz seems to have gone back to the very beginnings of Jazz. While Jazz is a predominantly instrumental music, it grew out of a sung Afro-American music that got called Blues. Besides accompanying Blues singers, Jazz musicians often used instruments to evoke the vocal parts of Blues even when the singers weren’t present. And just as Jazz music can use abstract sounds to stand for speech, a lot of Jazz musicians infuse music into the way they talk about their life or their art. The formula of music + words is the formula of poetry.
Long time readers here may recall that I’ve made a point that lyrics in the Blues tradition are Afro-American Modernist verse, and that we can choose to frame them as such — but it’s not so novel for cultural historians to note Afro-American Jazz as an important part of Modernism in music.
Given these connections, it should be no surprise that Jazz Poetry is a long-standing flavor of American verse. Carl Sandburg and Langston Hughes wrote it early in their careers. Sandburg even sang Blues-adjacent songs. Beats adored Jazz, often thought it a literary model, and the mid-century commonplace of bohemians intoning poetry beside a Jazz combo is a influence on this Project that shouldn’t be hard to see. The Black Arts movement welded itself to Jazz too, its poetry often spoke of that music’s artists while Jazz music played.
It turns out that alongside the other things John Sinclair was, he was also a Jazz fan particularly intrigued by Jazz’s rebels. He wrote Jazz criticism, and Jazz poetry before doing anything else he was remembered for, and he kept writing that Jazz poetry throughout his life. When I read that Sinclair had died during the first week of this April’s National Poetry Month, I sought out some of that poetry of his.
The examples you can hear today may surprise you. They did me. For all Sinclair’s association with high-energy music and radical politics I expected some rantings of a passionate sort, strong declamations. He may have written some of that, but these two you can hear me perform were the ones that intrigued me the most. They might seem too casual to be poetry or even public speech, save for his intent to frame them so. They don’t even contain his own words for the most part. Instead, they are statements attributed to Jazz pianist/composer/bandleader Thelonious Monk.
Monk’s a unique creature, even in the highly individualized world of creative Jazz musicians. He was present at the creation of Bebop in NYC in the 1940s, but unlike many of that style’s pioneers there was puzzlement at his skills. To not put too fine a point on it, many connoisseurs weren’t sure he was a good musician. His piano technique was unorthodox, his note choices seemed odd-to-wrong even within the extension of harmonic language that Bebop was proposing. Was that a misunderstanding by (largely white) outside authorities? There’s more: Monk confounded other skilled Jazz musicians who thought he was erratic, not always a steadfast partner in their musical combos that could give the other soloists a predictable foundation to solo over. And on stage he would sometimes extend his eccentricities by leaving the keyboard to sort of dance and wander about the stage.
A remarkable thing happened over a decade or so of this limbo. His compositions became more and more accepted by other musicians, and with wider repetition what once seemed peculiar now seemed irresistibly catchy. Eventually they were deemed masterpieces. Other players started to understand Monk’s unique off-kilter phrasing and rhythm sense. And those odd stage antics became lovable, even if they also could have been worrying. As they would say today, Monk wasn’t neurotypical — and there’s been posthumous talk of schizophrenia-like psychosis. For a Black man working on the fringes of an increasingly marginalized art form in a mid-century America, that Monk eventually achieved so much is a monumental achievement.
Sinclair knew all this. I suspect he trusted you might know this too, and that’s why I’m taking your time to give you this capsule history of Monk. What Sinclair does collect and write down of what Monk says about his art and being an artist seems so modest — both for the poet and the musician. In the first poem, “recollections for allen ginsberg” Monk claims in effect that he’s discovered the pluperfect American music as just being in this America, ready to be gathered and heard. And the lack of esteem and appreciation he’d received by fans, esteemed critics, and other musicians? The second poem Sinclair gathers (gathers like the Jazz that’s everywhere) and titles “worry later – san francisco holiday – for my mother” says he intends to persevere trusting himself, eschewing worry about the lack of understanding. Why does he think that, how does he go on making art? The making itself: “my playing seems to work!” he says. Is he saying that he himself understands the achievement of his own work based on his goals, and so is glad he made it — or is he saying that the concreteness of making something that integrates into a something that didn’t exist before is the best therapy for a life that could otherwise be consumed with worry and doubt? My understanding is that he’s saying both.
A lyric video of today’s piece
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The Valerie Wilmer that Sinclair credits for the Monk quote in the second poem made a series of invaluable photographs of Afro-American Jazz musicians toiling on in the creative fringes of music after their music became even more marginalized than it was in Monk’s time. Her book As Serious as Your Life is a document of making that work and the musical artists it depicts.
My performance of Sinclair’s two poems features my best attempt at realizing a Monk-ish composition to accompany it. There are two unfinished drafts of this post where I tried to come to confessional terms with my feelings about that process of realizing the piece and my audacity to present myself in the context of real musicians with lives devoted to their craft. I decided to spare you all the breast-beating since I came to see that as boring. As a composer, I guess I could conclude with a variation of that Monk quote “I’ll tell you one thing: my composition seems to work.” You likely saw the video link above, but if you prefer just the audio, there’s a graphical audio player below, and this backup highlighted link for those who don’t see the player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/John_Sinclair_Writes_2_Poems_of_Thelonious_Monk.mp3.
We’re coming to the end of my month-long look at a pair of poetry anthologies for children: 1922’s The Girls Book of Verse and the follow-up 1923 Boys Book of Verse. I’ve had a little fun with the decision to make two volumes, asking you to guess which poems the editors chose for each gender. So, before we get to a poem from them and its corresponding musical piece, let me do a quick final summary of how they divvied poetry up by gender audience.
The boys book has four sections: Outdoor Poems, Poems of Peace and War, Story Poems, Songs of Life. The first three are self-explanatory, the fourth consists of poems meant to teach stalwart virtues and honorable life. I’d hoped to include at least one poem from this section to demonstrate that flavor — a leading candidate was William Henley’s “Invictus” — but I maxed out my capacity to produce increased posts this National Poetry Month and it didn’t make the cut.
The girls book has four sections too: Melody, The Pipes of Pan, Enchantment, and Stories. Melody is more-or-less a poetic catchall, with a slight preference for poems explicitly invoking song or music. The Pipes of Pan is the girls version of the boys Outdoor Poems. Stories obviously corresponds to the narrative Story Poems in the other volume. Enchantment? It’s fairy poetry.
So, here’s our divergence: boys get war and stern life-coaching. Girls get fairies. Most of these are fairy whimsey, only a few touch on anything truly mysterious or an outland* where humans have no dominion.
Today’s piece is made from one of the whimsical fairy poems, written by Rose Fyleman. Fyleman was making book on fairies in the run up to these American children’s verse anthologies. During WWI she submitted a fairy poem to England’s Punch magazine and it was so well liked that a number of books of fairy poems for children authored by Fyleman followed. I know no further details, but two things stand out from this career story: Fyleman was 40, a somewhat late start for a writer, and she was the daughter of an immigrant from Germany, a nation that England was at war with as she was submitting her poetry of the “Oh, nothing — just fairies pretending not to be imaginary” kind. Given the war losses in Britain then, the market for light fantasy might have been a desirable diversion.
A frontpiece from the book-length collection that included today’s poem, Fairies and Chimneys. The illustration is for another poem in Fyleman’s book that starts “The child next door has a wreath on her hat./Her afternoon frock sticks out like that,/ All soft and frilly;/She doesn’t believe in fairies at all /(She told me over the garden wall)—/She thinks they’re silly.”
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“The Fairies Have Never a Penny to Spend” isn’t “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” or “Tam Lin,” but it is fun, and after the sober Arnold, a darkly satiric Browning, and a month of much work to bring these pieces to you, we can enjoy a little of that. The music is a rock’n’roll trio, so go to the graphical audio player below and bop to the fairy beat. What? The fairies have stolen your graphical audio player? This highlighted link is a backup that will open a new tab with its own player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Fairies_Have_Never_a_Penny_to_Spend.mp3.
*Consider this gendered choice in the context of later years when Tolkien and all the extensions of his imagined worlds and demi-humans became a considerable sub-culture among boys and young men. While Fyleman was writing her fairy poetry, Tolkien was stuck in the battle of the Somme.
There is another Walter De La Mare fairy poem that I planned to perform — and it might still sneak in some following day because it’s too good not to present. And this girls book section included Yeats’ “Faries Song,” a similar case to “Pippa Passes” from a couple of days ago. Both seem innocuous as stand-alone poems, but each was part of a play which provides dread context. You can read about Yeats’ play and hear my performance of the song from it here.
This April I’ve been looking at a pair of volumes of poetry for children published in 1922/23 The Girls and The Boys Book of Verse. One of the things I think about as I read the poems and consider the editor’s selections is what’s ahead for the kids that will read these books. Depending on your age, this is your parents generation, or your grandparents, or even in some cases great-grandparents. Those then-children are highly likely to now be dead, but their grownup results may be in the boundaries of our memory.
Here in a children’s book for them is this dead solemn poem. Its mood, however earnest and perceptive is downbeat. That it was written on the occasion of Matthew Arnold’s honeymoon* makes the poem’s downcast directed look at the sea as the emblem of erosive time and wear even more outlandish. Arnold wrote this in 1851, and I’d assay that the futures for a middle-class English cultural critics and civil servants like Arnold were not extraordinarily dire.
Honeymoon material? Want to discuss Sophocles in the original Greek? Do you think the editors put this poem in the girls or the boys volume of their gendered pair of anthologies? Answer below.
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What would we say for our Greatest Generation’s future, the kids for whom this poem was selected by the editors? Let me narrow that audience in a bit — acknowledging that there will be dear exceptions — a white middle-class or better audience of American tweens to younger teens would be these books most likely readers. Most of their families will have the means to not make the Great Depression a test of survival. WWII will deeply change four years of their lives, ending some, swerving others. The Cold War years afterward are held in memory as a complex mix of unconnected simplicities — particularly the first two post war decades. When the rich landlord’s son talks about the Great America to be Againing, there’s where he thinks we want to live.
I’m not a young man on a honeymoon, the sea is calm tonight, and I live in this moment in gratitude to be able to exercise my “art or sullen craft.” My mind has learned to question any unalloyed mood, but I’ve written here a few years back that the current young generation may need to be a greater Greatest Generation to face the challenges I read out my window.
Will Arnold’s poem help them. Is that likely for any poetry? I doubt I’m wise enough to say. I will say this, the music in this poem of dread carries it through, a strange energy of words forming into antiphons. Its concluding naming the fears, singing the fears, in the poem’s powerful ending: that world not committed to joy, love, light, certitude, peace, a solace for pain placed amidst a personal choice to closely realize those things.** Is that enough? I don’t know, but I can put it to music.
You can hear my musical performance of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” with the audio player below. What — has such a player retreated like the Sea of Faith? Draw back and fling your click to this highlighted link which will open a new tab with an audio player for my tremulous cadences.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Dover_Beach.mp3.
Anthony Hecht’s “Dover Bitch”* remains the incisive dis poem to Arnold’s.
Just this month I’ve been reminded again of The Fugs, an anarchic and utterly sex-positive band of poets that should be considered as pioneers alongside The Mothers of Invention and The Velvet Underground instead of being memory-holed by musos for being musically shambolic. The Fugs performed “Dover Beach” by only refraining the final section, and I’d suppose in the depth of The Sixties, just as today, we are ready to sing where ignorant armies are clashing by night. Gender fun-quiz answer: Arnold’s mansplaining honeymoon ode was published in The Girls Book of Verse.
One never knows where strangeness will arise in this Project. Take today’s piece, which I thought was the most routine little poem in a pair of 1920s anthologies of children’s verse I’ve been exploring this National Poetry Month. I wrote down Robert Browning’s “Song from Pippa Passes” as a candidate early in this process. It’s short. It claims in its title to be singable. It contains a well-known line that’s so often repeated we may have forgotten it came from a poem. Those are all good things for a Parlando Project piece. In the context of my planned series, I figured this innocuous poem could stand for the elements of the innocence of childhood portrayed in The Girls andThe Boys Book of Verse.
Here’s the childhood context known and unknown for the editors of these books in 1922. There was much change afoot:
- The United States had emerged from a pair of overseas wars — the second, WWI, broader and more deadly.
- World maps had been redrawn. Kings deposed and monarchies ended.
- American women had just gained the right to vote.
- In the arts Modernism was breaking through, music and poetry took on forms that seemed formless.
Children are born into a world they know is new only by definition, but their parents, the ones who’d purchase such books must have sensed these changes. Is this poem a way to rest from all that change?
And then there’s what we know, but the editors would need to be prophets to foretell to those children starting to read or be read to:
- The world would soon be plunged into a widespread economic depression.
- Totalitarian dictators as cruel as any evil historical monarch would arise with popular backing.
- A greater and more widespread world war was to come as these children reached young adulthood.
- That great war would end with a fearsome weapon’s deployment and a cold war standoff between two global alliances.
Could they repeat this poem later in a breadline, bomb shelter, or landing craft?
So far this month we’ve learned that the editors would include poems of blood, murder, war, and strife. These weren’t considered off-limits for children. They would almost completely ignore Modernist poetry however (save for our special child prodigy exception). There would be some poems of adventure in the girls volume, but more poems in the realm of imagination, and no notice of women at work (though there’s little about men at work in the boys volume either). The boys volume would have sections of poems on war and battles, and another section devoted to “words to live by” poems of virtue. The girls were not given a similar section of poetic instruction. *
A thorough introduction? It does show that the editors had knowledge there was a context to this short poem. Now read the rest of this post.
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And Browning’s little poem? Well at least I won’t have to do any research for it. It’s just a poem of Springtime childhood safety and innocence. I think I ran into the poem in schoolbooks in my youth, and it was never explained as anything other than that. Well, I have to write something about it now. Let me check.
OMG, in heaven or otherwise.
Turns out the verse drama the song comes from is a nasty little piece of work. Smutty adultery, political assassination, trickery, dirty deeds done with wills and waifs. I read the first act, the part that includes this well-known poem. It portrays a scene between two adulterous lovers fondling each other and panting about their ardor. We learn this bodice-ripping ceremony celebrates that they’ve just killed off the third-wheel husband. The Pippa in “Pippa Passes” wanders by singing our 8-line ditty, and without an ounce of explanation on the part of Browning, the adulterous man kills the new widow and himself out of guilt for — well, it’s complicated — guilt for being seduced by the hot wife, not thanking the dead husband enough, and maybe a little for the murdering part, though obviously the song has occasioned him being up for some more murdering.
TL:DNR summary: more “Double Indemnity” than “Mr. Rogers.”
My reading? Browning’s intent, however ham-handed, was to draw bitter contrast between humankind’s fallen state and Pippa — a poor, innocent, factory girl, who’s passing by these scenes of mayhem on the only day-off she gets in a year. To give Browning the best I can give him: the total incongruity of this tiny song that ends “God’s in his heaven — all’s right with the world” moving the plot to some new if not exactly benign resolution is Brechtian a century before Brecht.
Now here’s what’s strangest. How the hell did this become a popular short poem all on its own as just a piece about Springtime happiness? What’s the path here? Was there a shortage of happy short spring poems? Did someone misunderstand it and promote it as such? My musical performance is left with just trying to make this set of happiness words seem vaguely strange. I’m writing this in a world with manifest suffering and dutiful cruelty explained by “You don’t understand, we have reasons and rules that prescribe that suffering.” We are slow as snails on that thorn. So, I had help.
The audio player to play my performance of Robert Browning’s “Song from Pippa Passes” is below. No player? This highlighted link will open a tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Pippa_Passes.mp3.
*My wife galsplained this: “Girls were supposed to be just naturally good and virtuous.” If you’re wondering why I didn’t prompt you to guess if the poem was from the girls or the boys volume of these poetry anthologies today, this is another one that was in both books.
Today’s piece from the two volumes of The Girls and The Boys Book of Verse pair is by a poet I’ve begun to revisit during the past year, Robert Louis Stevenson. Taken just as verse, Stevenson will impress the ears of adults and children alike as charming, but as I revisit his children’s poetry I’m finding additional resonances. So, let’s look very briefly at his “The Wind” today.
A chord sheet so you can sing this one yourself if you’d like. As you look at Stevenson’s poem here you can also participate by guessing if it was placed in the boys or the girls volume of the pair of 1920’s poetry anthologies I’ve been looking at all month. Answer below.
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The two things the poem wants to establish about its title subject is the wind’s presence and its mysteriousness. It’s felt as a body pushing force, heard as gentle sound of fabric on grass. But its first-mover, its purpose, the meaning we are to derive from it, is expressed as unknown. The wind here is a symbol of motion. Those easily teleological or mythological might reduce this to a matter of God or gods. That might be Stevenson’s intent, and is likely some reader’s experience.
I prefer to find the poem restricted to what I see on the page, and there I find it as a poem of the growth and going of childhood. Stevenson chimes on that elsewhere in his children’s verse.
Do children feel that, that wind of their growth, or is it so merely there as to be unthought of? I, an old man on a bicycle this Spring, certainly think of it, wind in its expression of gusts. I huff and puff in it, mine a much weaker blowing back!
I’ve said this before but let me reiterate in this month when I’m examining a sample of the literature my parents might have experienced in childhood: a lot of good children’s literature speaks to the adult and the child with the same words, the same images — words heard, images seen, from two sides. I think that’s what Stevenson is doing here. The child will find the familiar feeling reflected on the page sensuously. The adult gets the mystery, the passingness.
In the final five days of this National Poetry Month, I’m going to try to move to completion a number of audio pieces I’ve got in various stages. The posts may come — will have to come if I do this — in rapid succession. I’m grateful for your attention, and I apologize if I will press or exceed it. The music for today’s piece is back to electric folk-rock combo mode: Telecaster guitar, drums and electric bass. You can hear my performance of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Wind” with the graphical audio player gadget below. Has that gadget blown away? No, you’re just reading this blog in one of the ways that suppresses showing that. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player so that you can hear my performance. And your answer to which of the two gendered poetry anthologies this poem appeared in: girls.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Wind.mp3.
I’m continuing with my examination of a pair of 1920s poetry anthologies aimed at children: 1922’s The Girls Book of Verse and the following 1923 The Boys Book of Verse. Since you’re getting so much of me this month, you may welcome a short break from my singing voice today. In its place, you’ll get the voice and guitar of a singer-songwriter from The Sixties: Phil Ochs.
Despite its 18th century setting, Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman” wasn’t all that old a poem when the anthologist chose it for one of our pair of books. It was first published in 1906. As I write a bit more about the poem, and give you this link to the full text of it, you may choose to play along with the little game I’ve been suggesting as we look at this set of gendered poetry books: was this poem in the girls or the boys volume? The answer is below.
The poem is a highly romantic though tragic tale of a mysterious but altogether gentlemanly armed robber and his devoted landlord’s-daughter sweetheart. I’m unread in modern romance fiction for young adults, but the general characterization there strikes me as surviving into the present day in such genre novels. I’ll also say that I don’t know how many current young adult novels deal in deaths of the main characters, particularly violent deaths with a strong overtone of chosen death. I knew this poem as a mid-century child, and loved its rush of alliterative language, but I’d suspect that modern American sensibilities might find it’s death-wish problematic for younger readers. “The Highwayman” seems to have retained some general esteem in Great Britain at least through the end of the 20th century when it placed 15th in a 1995 survey of that nation’s favorite poems. One other late 20th century piece of evidence: a favorite singer-songwriter of mine, Richard Thompson, wrote a somewhat analogous death-of-a-romantic-robber narrative into one of his best-loved songs: “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” which was released in 1991 and is an obligatory part of his performances to this day.*
Speaking of death wishes, guitarists who hear Thompson play may be tempted to self-harm.
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Roughly midway between our anthology of children’s verse and Thompson’s song, American Phil Ochs set Noyes’ poem as a song he’d accompany with only his acoustic guitar. Ochs had made his way to the East Coast scene during the Cold War “Folk Scare” where he made his specialty the topical song. As one of the “sons of Pete Seeger” then, Ochs’ songs often commented on social issues and expressed left-wing viewpoints, and a good case can be made that Ochs was the purest expression of that. Yet, it was just such a summary that eventually would stunt his continuing reputation. His compatriot Bob Dylan could write songs like “Oxford Town” or “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” that overlap with the kind of songs that Ochs was writing at the same time — but alongside his advantages of untouchable charisma, Dylan had a knack for writing more abstract songs with a longer shelf-life, even early on.
Ochs did work on developing other modes of his songwriting. Near the end of his active recording career he demonstrated some achievements there — but The Seventies, that decade that took Americans from Nixon to Reagan, troubled Ochs greatly and made is New Frontier persona seem yesterday’s papers. The endgame of Phil Ochs is as tragic a story as “The Highwayman,” but the details aren’t ballad material, and they are everything but romantic.
But if I step back to 1964, I’d guess that Ochs recording Noyes poem was a way for him to buffer his branding as just a topical lefty songwriter. The rest of the LP it appeared on, “I Ain’t Marching Any More,” otherwise showcases those strengths that would be seen as limitations later.** I remember hearing that record in The Sixties, and I’m sure I filed the tactic it demonstrated — that you could set literary poems to music with only an acoustic guitar — away to later become an influence on this Project.
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OK, you’ve either heard Ochs sing Noyes or read the poem — maybe both, and it’s time to finalize your guesses: girls or boys book? Today’s answer: boys. I think this shows one marked difference between Noyes’ 1906, the anthologists’ 1923, and even Ochs’ 1964, Are young American boys or teens connected with anything like this level of romantic outlook today? That’s a honest question — I can’t say I’d know — but I suspect the answer is almost never. I can’t assay what’s good or bad about that change, it that’s so, without adding a thousand words to this post. Consider it amongst yourselves.
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*This is of course a side-point regarding a cracking good song, but has Thompson ever said (or has anyone ever asked) about Noyes’ poem (or Ochs setting of Noyes’ poem) as an inspiration for this song? As a mid-century-born British songwriter, Noyes might have been known to Thompson — and his original UK band’s USP was (at first) performing works by the North American singer-songwriters of Ochs generation.
**Other reasons Ochs might have chosen Noyes’ poem? Noyes was a life-long antiwar man, and in 1940 he even wrote a science fiction book with a prescient trope of a weapon that could — and did in the story — wipe out nearly all humankind, leaving only a handful who were under the surface to survive.
It’s 1914. A single mother is listening to her 4-year-old talk to her imaginary playmate. Has this always happened? Did children in pharaonic Egypt or ancient Ur exercise their fresh language skills and nascent social skills with such fancies while being buckled into their camel child-seats? There was no Mesopotamian Facebook — the only way we’d know this would be if someone wrote it down. No such accounts survive.
This mother was a professor of English at Smith College, associated with artists: visual artists, writers, musicians. She wrote poetry, and I’ve read she knew Robert Frost and Walter De La Mare. She chose, as an artist might do, as a mother might do, to write down some of the things that her child was saying.
At some later point, the daughter was asked if she knew what her mother was doing. “No, she was always scribbling” the daughter replied, she made nothing of it. Eventually, her mother revealed that she was writing down what the child was saying as poetry. What the child invented and spoke — at first to her imaginary friend, and now to her mother — was transcribed by the mother into lines and stanzas. The mother’s name was Grace Conkling, her child/poet was Hilda Conkling.
Short, compressed, Modernist free-verse was becoming a thing in America. Ezra Pound’s first Imagist anthology and Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems were published in 1914. Edgar Lee Masters’ The Spoon River Anthology was released on New Years Day in 1915. The child’s mother was savvy enough to know that a few lines with fresh, direct imagery could be a poem even without strict meter or rhyme.
Over the next few years the mother and child produced poetry this way: the child speaking it, the mother writing it down. Some of the poems were sent to magazines by the mother, and they were published. In 1920, a book-length volume of the poetry, Poems of a Little Girl,* was published. It was successful enough that two other Hilda Conkling collections soon followed. Amy Lowell wrote a preface to the first Conkling book. I read this week that Louis Untermeyer called Hilda “the most gifted of all” child geniuses. Rimbaud, dead for 30 years, couldn’t complain. When the editors of our pair of 1922/1923 poetry anthologies for kids made their choices, they included four of Hilda Conkling’s poems, an unusually high number. Only Wordsworth and De La Mare had five selections in the volume that included Conkling — Shakespeare or Robert Louis Stevenson only warranted 3 each.
As I revealed earlier this month, Conkling’s poems are the only Modernist poetry in the Girls and Boys Book of Verse.** That may somewhat account for that level of representation. The first two sentences in that book’s foreword say:
“Because real lovers of poetry know that time and place are of little importance, the poems in this book are brought together with no sense of the period in which they were written. From “The Song of Solomon” to Hilda Conkling’s “Spring Song” they are here because they are beautiful, with a beauty that neither years nor events can change.”
So, Conkling is there to represent the here and now, a representative not only for being the most recently published, but because she still hadn’t reached the age of 12 when those words were written — she wasn’t just content for an audience of boys or girls, she was still a young girl, plausibly a future as much as a present.
Verse for children? I’m children, and a Modernist too!
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Those who’ve been reading along this month know that since our anthologists decided to produce a gendered pair of books, The Girls Book of Verse and The Boys Book of Verse, I’m asking readers here this National Poetry Month to guess which book included the poem of this little girl. Answer below.
Hilda Conkling is now largely forgotten. When one looks at the published poems today, they still have their charms. When I’ve tired of reading so much derivative and rote late 19th century poetry and those 20th century poets who didn’t even try to “make it new” Conkling’s poems can be refreshingly free of the dead hand of influence or fears of being scored on exacting verse-craft. There are still effective lines in many of them. Unpretentious but striking images pop out. Professor/mother Grace Conkling was adamant that she didn’t edit the poems, that as their process developed she would read the transcribed poems to Hilda and that she would always obey Hilda’s corrections of anything she got wrong. What’s unsaid is how much selection or excision Grace did, what poems never were transcribed as unremarkable or if any lines were never transferred from scribbled notes to manuscript. Young Hilda Conkling wouldn’t be the first artist whose work was magnified by a sharp blue pencil and a shortening scissor wielded by a skilled editor.
Somewhere around the time the Hilda Conkling books were published, mother Grace, perhaps wanting Hilda to try her wings as a now literate adolescent, suggested that Hilda start writing down her poems herself. This seemed to break the spell. Some of Hilda’s published poems show a clear desire to not only emulate her mother, but to please her in doing so, so a motivation might have been stilled. Another factor: Grace may not have realized that like a “cold reader” charlatan can fake mind reading by picking up subtle clues from someone as they try to construct a convincing tale of reading the thoughts of a mark, that the very act of being the transcriptionist and first audience for Hilda’s poems might be part of their authorship.***
As far as anyone knows, Hilda stopped creating poems just as she became a teenager. If there were any later-life discarded drafts from adult revisiting of her childhood inspirations, they are unknown. She lived with her mother Grace until Grace died, and made her living working in bookstores in Boston, two things indicating that Hilda could have continued to connect with literary culture if she’d wanted to. Hilda’s story, her poetry, once held as so remarkable, became a literary curiosity that only attracts folks like me who want to think about art and Modernism thoroughly.****
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I haven’t read anyone claiming that Hilda wrote her poems because she remembered past lives, because she was an “old soul” — but then or now, that sort of woo thing might have come up. Today, as I was finishing this post, days after completing the musical arrangement I used for her poem “Hills” that you can hear below, I wondered how to explain the musical choices I made for that original music. The music is sorta-kinda South Asian, based slightly on my appreciation for those World Pacific Ravi Shankar LPs that entranced me as a young man and the Indian physicians I worked with in New York in the 70s. Specifically though, it’s more at the cod-raga experiments that many Western folk/rock musicians took to in the 60s. I always liked that stuff, and it’s more approachable with my musicianship than the real thing. Was something asking me to musically express a reincarnation theory?
To hear my musical performance of the 8-year-old Hilda Conkling’s poem “Hills” use the graphical audio player below. No player manifesting? The skepticism of your way of reading this post may be blocking the ectoplasm! Knocking on this highlighted spirit-table link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Hills.mp3.
Poetry Magazine published Conkling’s poems alongside a great many of the formative Modernist poets. But she also appeared in Good Housekeeping.*
**As a fan of early Modernist poetry, I tell myself that I could have easily found a dozen or more suitable Modernist poems published before 1922 to include in their books.
***I’m also reminded of the curious case of acclaimed poet James Merrill and his partner David Jackson using a Ouija board in the creation of poems in the 1970s.
****I think of the work of New York School poet Kenneth Koch, who in the 1970’s started teaching poetry and creative writing to grade school children by reading them Modernist poetry (including poems that our 1920s anthologist overlooked) and then prompting them to create their own poems. A short web search revealed nothing so far, but the brief phenomenon of Hilda Conkling might easily have come up alongside Koch’s teaching ideas.
I have some hopes of finding the energy and audacity to write about a new attempt this year by a contemporary poet to inspire children to write poetry, but only time will tell on that one. Girls or boys book of verse for this poem of genderless camel-hills bearing the world on their backs? Girls.
It’s Poem in Your Pocket Day in the midst of U. S. National Poetry Month. This lily gilding observance aims to integrate poetry more completely with ordinary life. A great way to do that would be to bring poetry and our workdays together, something we rarely do.
For National Poetry Month I have been selecting and performing poems from a pair of poetry anthologies published in the 1920s for children: The Boys and The Girls Book of Verse. There’s little in the two books about ordinary work life. You might explain that as “Well, those books were for kids after all” — but the same could be said about many a poetry collection or anthology, then or now.
Our last piece, a famous poem by Wordsworth, touches on the weariness of work, speaking of the getting and spending part of life. Other than military service, there is little else in these children’s books about working for a living, so today’s piece stands out. “The Coromandel Fishers” sounds, even on the page, like a folk song, a work song, something that might be sung in the tedium and effort of daily labor. It’s author, Sarojini Naidu, published it in a section of her poetry that she called “Folk Songs,” so it really does ask to be sung, which you’ll see below I’ve done.
A reminder of the casual game I’m playing here with this pair of gendered anthologies: was this in the girls or boys book of verse? Answer below.
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Naidu is little known in America but led a fascinating and significant life. She was born in an India ruled by Great Britain as a colonial possession, was educated in England, and during that education touched bases with literary figures there. William Butler Yeats’ father, an artist, sketched her as a young student, and while a young poet she was called “The Yeats of India.” Despite that start, she more-or-less left poetry for a life of political activism. Upon her return to India she became a key lieutenant of Gandhi, marched and strategized with him, was imprisoned twice by the British for her activism, and after Indian independence served in the new Indian government.
The young Naidu while studying in England as sketched by W. B. Yeats’ father, and during the famous Salt March with Gandhi. Gandhi thought the Salt March would be to arduous for women, Naidu thought otherwise.
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I happen to have had a few more hours to work on music this past week as my teenager has started their first job. I, an old man, think often about my decades of paid labor. I recall the dailiness — yes, sometimes the weariness — of that. But here’s what I think of more often: the coworkers — A fair feld, ful of folk, fond I there bytwene, of alle manere of men, the mene and the pore, worchyng and wandryng as this world asketh. I recall the thereness of these, my colleagues for the majority of my life’s waking hours, working in common cause. I’d often have a poem in my pocket in those years, a draft of my own, or a song of another on those days after days. Another thought: not often enough was the poem in my pocket about them, about the world of work we shared. Wordsworth said in his poem I sang last time that “The world is too much with us” — and we poets too often, too completely, stop at that phrase. I tried to outline in response: Wordsworth’s poem is more complex than we think it is, that his poem says everything* is out of tune. Naidu’s fishermen, like the political activism she joined after writing this poem, says that we may sing to align us with the world.
Here’s an anecdote I read about Naidu. At the end of her life, she was weary from the wear-and-tear of political administration. Doctors said she must stop at whatever place she found herself, but she was restless, she could not rest. Finally, she asked a nurse to sing to her, and she fell asleep. In that night she died.
A couple unrelated last notes, and then you’ll have the opportunity to hear my performance of the song I made from Sarojini Naidu’s poem. She seems to have been the only person of color to have a poem in the two 1920s children’s anthologies, and just as Wordsworth’s from last time, her poem of a world that’s with us, late and soon, ends up invoking the god of the sea. The audio player to hear me sing Naidu is below. No player? It’s not washed overboard, some ways of reading this blog hide it, so you can use this link as an alternative**.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Coromandel_Fishers.mp3.
*Autocorrect didn’t have a stroke — can’t you read English? It’s a passage from the medieval poem Piers Plowman:
A fair field full of folk · found I in between,
Of all manner of men · the rich and the poor,
Working and wandering · as the world asketh.
**A fault I wouldn’t expect in any modern anthology for children, there are just too many good choices that are well-known and published now. It wouldn’t have hurt them to include a poem by American Paul Laurence Dunbar, or one of the translations from Chinese or Japanese by Arthur Walley — though the latter were new on the bookshelves at the time. I’ll allow them an excuse on a case near enough to the one for these 1922-1923 anthologies’ almost complete exclusion of Modernist poetry.
Are you taking part in this month’s quiz on which gendered book of verse Naidu’s poem appeared in. It was in The Boys Book of Verse.
This sonnet is one of William Wordsworth’s most well-known short poems. As can be the case with commonly known poems, I can’t remember when I first read or heard it, and so it might seem like it’s always existed, that it’s just there, ordinary in its presence. I’ve been thinking today that the poem’s familiarity hides some strangeness. Let’s look at some of that.
For National Poetry Month this year I’ve been examining poems included in a pair of 1920’s anthologies for children: The Girls and The Boys Book of Verse. Let’s start by examining context for this poem appearing there. This is not a poem of childhood experience. “The World Is Too Much With Us*” starts off speaking in an adult’s voice of the weariness of “getting and spending.” I’d say that inside the pair of anthologies I’ve been looking at this month, this is more intended as a poem a parent would read to their child. Other poems in these books live and report from the world of imagination, a splendid world, which though it may also not be physically “with us” as children, exists in the same way as the thoughts and emotions of the actual world do.
Chords in case you’d like to sing this poem yourself. Another form of participation: As the two 1920s poetry anthologies were gendered, I’m asking my audience to guess if each poem I present this month was in the boys or girls volume. Answer below.
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Do we ever think of Wordsworth’s opening phrase as odd: “The world is too much with us?” Volumes and volumes of poetry are filled with nature poetry telling, seeing, hearing, approaching tasting or smelling, the world. We expect poetry to give us that world-muchness. We’ll get to nature eventually in the second quatrain — though it may not be the nature we’d expect — but this is an example of a leading phrase that should shock or intrigue us: “What do you mean WW? I’m so busy with my adulthood I hardly see the world beyond nearsighted bills and paycheck!” Perhaps familiarity keeps us from feeling any shock at the opening.
There’s an odd idiom to finish off that first line: “late and soon.” Was this a common phrase in Wordsworth’s time, or is it just a make-rhyme? While its variation “sooner or later” is something that everyone still says, in this exact saying it seems to be making the present moment a wider aperture: saying that recently and in my next future this is the way things are — though it’s also expressing the deadlines that press our getting and spending, all that ASAP and overdue.
In reading poetry I’m immediately attracted by the musical impetus prosody brings to the words, but another part of my mind should (eventually, after the word-music has struck me first) trace the actuality of the images. The poem’s second quatrain brings the nature images, one almost conventional, the following one, extraordinary. This poem is so commonplace with us that we think little of this quatrain. “This sea that bares her bosom to the moon” may be an all-to-conventional readymade now, but Wordsworth wants us to see there an offer of vulnerability; and with the other well-worn trope of the moon’s tides, a sense that we will, even if we are “out of tune,” resonate with the pulls of nature. And then the unusual image: this nature is not a slow, predictable rising of a consonant chord. If we think we remember this poem, do we forget the “winds that will be howling at all hours” that are now enclosed inside the petals of “sleeping flowers.” This is Wordsworth’s Blakean heaven in a wildflower. I cannot say what the poem’s composer’s conscious intent was — but as a deep image, the flowers containing the plant’s reproductive features could illuminate that desire and sexuality are a riveting but unreined nature.**
And within the later specific context of this poem appearing in an anthology that might be bought by parents to read to young children, this remarkable — yet little remarked on — image may speak to the howling winds of parenthood.
So, the world of human commerce is too much with us — but nature too may be too much with us — it may rack us beyond our control. Do we overlook that Wordsworth says for everything we are out of tune, something he writes after a quatrain on the commercial world of work and a quatrain on nature.
The sestet that concludes Wordsworth’s sonnet to my reading is not a grand summation or synthesis, some glorious wish. I read it as saying some rickety, obsolete, altogether false mythology might seem a preferable refuge from this world — its nature and its business. Proteus and Triton there are not the speaker exalting in neo-paganism. They are “outworn,” and a thing that the poem can only see as plausibly not as bad as the elongated moment the poem has presented. In such a fancy — if bound between covers, the imagination of a childhood book of Greek myths that our anthologists might also offer — we could have powers and a way to shape the world that elude the poem. Over on a bookshelf near me is such a book from my wife’s childhood. In childhood, our imaginations, our fancies, are our superpowers. Us obsolete children, outworn, cannot call on those powers and inveigh them with this world.
I hope I brought out some of those inferences with my musical performance in a poem that is perhaps too well-known to be known today. It was rewarding to take out my nylon-string guitar to record it, the kind of guitar I started on in my 20s. You can hear my performance of “The World Is Too Much With Us” with the audio player below. No audio player? Is it inside a sleeping flower? No, some ways of reading this blog hide it. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_World_Is_Too_Much_With_Us.mp3.
- One of Wordsworth’s best long poems, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, is the author’s own brief supporting this division.
Wordsworth’s romantic life and parenthood has complexities that early biographers excised, including a second family in France, a country England was at war with. One can also summarize that women helped make the poetry his name alone is on, including another famous short Wordsworth poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Here’s one condensed account of Wordsworth and those matters. If you’d like to hear this Project perform his famous April daffodils poem, and read what I wrote about it, that’s linked here.
The answers to your gender quiz game today. “The World Is Too Much With Us” appears in both the girls and the boys 1920s anthologies. Relax busy adults, no one loses points today. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is also in both books.
I keep meaning to write some things in general about the two anthologies aimed at children I’m featuring during this U.S. National Poetry Month: “A Girls Book of Verse” (1922) and “A Boys Book of Verse” (1923). NPM implies an American focus in its name — and these 1920s anthologies were published by an American publisher (Frederick A Stokes) with American editors (Mary Gould Davis & Helen Dean Fish) and they remained in print until at least the WWII years.
Long-time readers here will know that I have an affinity for the first quarter of the 20th century as a literary era. It’s the time of Modernism’s emergence and triumph in the arts, and English language literary poetry was transformed largely by a group of Americans: Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, H. D., William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell et al.
How much of this is reflected in our two 1920’s anthologies?
Close to zero, zilch, nada, nothing,
There’s a single poem by Amy Lowell, “A Little Garden,” a metered and rhymed poem that barely reflects her influence on a branch of Imagism, that indispensable early Modernist poetic movement. There is one Modernist with several poems included in the two anthologies — an American not in the above list, one that I’ll reveal later this month — but most of you won’t know that poet’s name.
This is not because the anthologists wanted to include only older poems from before America was in the game. Most of those published postdate America’s Whitman/Dickinson/Longfellow and the “Fireside poets” poetic emergence. Many of the poems are from the young 20th century or the final years of the old century. OK, let’s quantify how many poems by U. S. poets are in this set of English language poetry from just about a century ago.*
I did a quick and dirty count of American’s poems in these two anthologies’ tables of contents. Remember, Americans are making these two books, and while they might have been sold overseas, I suspect American parents, libraries, and children were the intended audience. Are they going to be flying the red, white and blue from the library ramparts? Cheering the home team?
Apologies for the cursory numbers to follow. Even if I’m reasonably knowledgeable about poets of this era, there are a lot of unknown authors in these two books 237 poems. Stopping to search Pamela Tennant, Jean Ingelow, Cecil Roberts, Alice Meynell, and Young E. Allison, and the like would have delayed this post.**
Here’s the rough count: 42 poems with known U.S. authors. 150 written by known non-U. S. authors (almost all British Isles residents). The poems by unknowns (which still included those in the footnote below when I did the tally) counted as 42. Given the over 3-1 breakdown in the knowns, and the revealed makeup of the short sample of the unknowns, I expect the unknowns would break similar to the knowns.
So, there you have it: about a hundred years ago — within our parents’ and grandparents’ childhoods for many readers of this post — they easily could have gotten the idea that poetry was still largely a British thing. I was surprised at this lopsidedness. I’d also say that before reading through the anthologies this year I expected at least a smattering of the Modernists, though I’m not surprised by the overwhelming rhymed/syllabic metric poetry .
And then I remembered how poetry was taught to me as an American student. Modernism was acknowledged, though things seemed to stop at Frost and Yeats. The art started with Chaucer and Beowulf, quickly moved to the Tudor poets, and spend a fair amount of time on the 19th century worthies that were included in these 1920s books.
However de-emphasized poetry may be in today’s America, I doubt we’d see such a disproportionate mix now. But before I end off today, I’ll reiterate what I wrote last time: I’m not that much of a literary nationalist, and so I’ll leave you with two non-American authors from this gendered pair of books of verse for children, two poems that speak of longing for their home nations. Both were written when the poets were no longer living in their birth countries, intensifying their poetic expressions. As I’m doing throughout this series, I’m asking you to guess if the poems appeared in the girls or boys book of verse.
The first is one of the most famous and best-loved poems to appear in the pair of books: William Butler Yeats “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” I was at a poetry reading here in America this past Thursday night, and not just one, but two of the reading poets said that one of their own poems was inspired by this poem of Yeats. It’s such an Irish poem that it’s printed on the Irish passport. Yet the poem was written in London, by a man whose father had moved his family to England when the poet was only two. I performed this as part of this Project in 2019, and you can hear it here with this audio player — or if you don’t see the player, with this link.
http://traffic.libsyn.com/parlando/Lake_Isle_of_Innisfree.mp3Can you guess if it’s in the girls or boys book?
The second one, is by Robert Browning, who’d eloped off to Italy with his poetic life-partner Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He called his poem “Home Thoughts from Abroad” and I recast it for singing and call my version “In England Now.” My aim in my recasting was to make the dislocation from an ideal England seem less a matter of geography and more a matter of time and change. You can hear that version with the next audio player gadget, or with this link.
Was this floral longing poem in the girls or boys book?***
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/In_England_Now.mp3.
Here at NPM2024 Field the British side has shown up to face the Modernist American 9. The Brits advantages: fine woolens, bats that could also be used in a pizza oven. Americans? Plenty of sharp Latin-American players, closer, more aerodynamic beard trims. Read the post for the score.
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In case you’re wondering, I think the only translations from a non-English poet are a pair of William Cullen Bryant translations of Homer, and a KJV Song of Songs* excerpt.
**Anyone who knows me, knows that just typing this excuse makes me want to indeed do a web search for at least this quintet. I did. Results: only Allison is an American.
*Yeats’ poem of his bee-loud Mojo Dojo Casa Dream House was the leadoff poem in the “Girls Book of Verse.” Browning’s poem of an April unaware for those who simply live in it was in both the boys and the girls volumes. So, if you’re keeping score, you guessed this second one correctly.
The Parlando Project’s thing: taking a literary poem and combining it with a piece of music isn’t a new thing. If poetry exists in every language, poetry combined with music exists in every language too, and such casual melding typically pre-dates the culture’s written poetry. We have just kept on doing it as a practical and immediate art.
This is National Poetry Month here in the U. S., but I don’t think I’m overly nationalist in the words I use here. Still, just as poetry and music go together, national and ethnic pride often takes poetry and song onto itself. W. H. Auden notably stated that “poetry makes nothing happen” but if we examine it the other way around, it’s unlikely that any great movement for change or nationhood ever has had no poetry and song associated with it.
As a poem “The Minstrel Boy” was first published in 1813 as part of the author’s collection titled Irish Melodies, and its central image is a harp carried by a “warrior bard.” It’s therefore apt that Moore combined it with music forthwith, using what he named as a traditional Irish tune.* Harps and lyres etc. are an extraordinarily large family of instruments, but Moore seems clearly to be writing of Ireland, where the Celtic harp has become a national symbol. At the time of its writing, Ireland was still under the long-standing, often cruel and exploitative, rule of England. Classmates of Moore had recently died in one of the periodic Irish rebellions.
I asked alternate voice and keyboard player connected to this Project Dave Moore if his family has any connection to the liked named poet. None known, he tells me. Dave’s father preached for decades, and he wrote at least one literary short story that I read after he — one of the generation this month’s poetry anthologies were marketed for — had returned from WWII. I told Dave’s dad his story reminded me of Hemingway. He replied “I don’t think I knew anything about Hemingway then, he was kind of avant-garde stuff at the time.”
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The song also became popular in America, though I’m not certain how rapidly it took root here — but in the year of its publication America was at war with Britain for the second time after its revolution. And by later in the 19th century, the song had currency among Irish-American immigrants.
Ironically, Moore received a British diplomatic post to Bermuda, and in 1803 he not only visited the United States but met President Thomas Jefferson. The tale I read online says the two did not hit it off, and that Moore was not impressed with American chattel slavery. **
Since those times the song (or sometimes just the tune associated with it) has been closely associated with the armed forces, police, and firefighters — folks whose sense of professional duty includes risk of death. I find that ironic too, for the song’s minstrel boy is the definition of an untrained irregular, possibly underage, untrained (he has to borrow a weapon), and more of a singer-songwriter than a SEAL Team professional. *** This is one of those cases where tradition overwhelms close reading.
I’m performing this song as part of my NPM series looking at poems from a pair of 1920’s anthologies of verse for children: The Girls Book of Verse andThe Boys Book of Verse, and “The Minstrel Boy” appears in one of this gendered pair of books. In each instance this month I’ve asked you to guess which one: Boys or Girls. Today’s poem is a free square in that game, as one would easily guess this military service theme would be in the boy’s book — as it is. Indeed, The Boys Book of Verse has an entire section, Songs of Peace and War dealing with poems about battles and military service. The editors, both women, would have had recent experience of WWI, and whatever their feeling about warfare, they must have felt that subject was something their readers or purchasers would want included for the boys.
I stop to think here — as I do as I consider the entirety of this pair of “the last Twenties” books — that the first audience for these books would go on to experience a much greater and deadlier world war.
I’m likely not one of the best singers to have sung this well-loved song, but I performed it with a full rough’n’ready rock-band arrangement as best as I could peel off in this month’s accelerated schedule. My inspiration for singing this song? A similarly not-ready-for-the-most skilled-singer-contest one, Joe Strummer, who also recorded this song. You can hear me tear through those chords asunder with the audio player you should see below. If no audio player sullies your screen, it’s because some ways of reading this blog won’t show it. This highlighted link is your alternative — it will open a new tab with an audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Minstrel_Boy.mp3.
The tune Moore selected, named as “The Moreen,” was said to be a traditional tune. Wikipedia says that no one has independently found a source of this tune from before its pairing with “The Minstrel Boy’’ —* so it could be that it would have disappeared forever if Moore hadn’t tapped it for his poem about a doomed harper. That adds an air of mystery to the song, doesn’t it.
**The stirring final line stating the harpers fight was against slavery does and doesn’t require an explanation. Servitude in general, even government duties and tributes required from monarchs or tyrants, was often rhetorically called out as slavery, while American chattel slavery was totalitarian: humans — and with added cruelty, any families of those enslaved — owned in perpetuity like animals without rights of any kind. I read that this song was sung by both sides of the American Civil War — the “slavery” on one side rhetorical, the slavery on the other total and abject. When I started this post talking about the widespread tradition of nationalist poetry and song, take note: a corollary from Auden’s dictum may be that poetry and song prove nothing.
***This might be a fair poetic description of the Irish rebels that the teenage Moore knew, those who died in an ineffective rebellion. The long fight for Irish independence seems to have had an outsized portion of “warrior bards,” folks with less military experience and tactical acumen than literary and musical bona fides.
Social media likes controversy, so it’s no surprise that two things have recently mingled there in provocative assertion: poet Mary Oliver and the dread “middlebrow” epithet.* It’s not a long bridge between the two: Oliver’s poems are put forward as all too middlebrow in this charge, and middlebrow is a sign of significant lack of ambition or achievement. I’m not a fan of the term “middlebrow,” for a hierarchy is implied and I don’t care for hierarchies much — but to speak of this I should define middlebrow poetry. A definition that works for me is: poems that remind us of something we already sorta-kinda know, but maybe couldn’t quite put into words. These poems are usually immediately understandable on first reading by a significantly literate reader.
Why’s this bad or lacking? If this is a singular mode it rules out poems that tell us multivalent things, or mysterious things that require more thought to comprehend, thought perhaps taken in stages. It rules out shocking, utterly surprising poems. And such poetry doesn’t feed our playful desire to puzzle-solve with clues we are proud to have acquired.**
My view? I think various modes of poetry (even differing modes of reading the same poem) have diverse values, and I’m more than OK with that. Poetry’s eye should be the insect’s compound eye, containing a hundred, a thousand, ommatidia. And so, if it was up to me, the best cultures wouldn’t be restricted to, or rewarding of, one poetic mode. This may be a visceral thing with me: I get bored with all one type of thing quickly. Building towers of hierarchies might be fun, and illustrative of what one can stably hold long enough to build such a tower, but in the end, the domain one will look out on will have a lot of scenery that isn’t in your tower. In the right mood, I can get pleasure out of looking at the commonplace apprehension poem and a “difficult” avant-garde one — and in the wrong mood on my part, or insufficient achievement in the poet, not a touch of pleasure in either mode. And beyond all this meaning and metaphor, there’s the oldest part of poetry, the part even young children understand, that poetry also has abstract pleasures like music has — poetry is the instrument on which the meaning plays.
A great many of the poems in our pair of 1920s children’s poetry anthologies are as middlebrow as any Mary Oliver poem brought up on charges in this controversy. This shouldn’t surprise us. A modern children’s anthologist looking to duplicate the task of those in the previous decade called The Twenties would, I think, do likewise. Some of those pressures would be commercial: what will sell to parents, libraries, teachers. Some would be practical: these children aren’t yet bored with the lessons of the world — those lessons are new and useful building-blocks for their youthful towers — and maybe a lesson of my old age (and a lesson of Mary Oliver) is that I shouldn’t have been bored with the lessons of the world either.
I think too of what happened as the first childhood readers of these poems in the 1920s progressed into the economic distress of the Great Depression, the rise of nationalist dictators, the Second World War, and the Damoclean Cold War. All through the middle of their lives how much time would they have for poetry that offered them the highbrow pleasure of gnostic meaning, of shocking new combinations and collisions?
The answer is: some would find the time, some went on and made their own verses in those modes — and many others would not. Some kept food on the table, kept bolts tightened on airplanes, tended the sick, kept fuel in NATO tanks facing east. Some had their yet young lives ended sans poetic envoi. Others desired, birthed, and raised my generation.
Highbrow, middlebrow, it is neither sophistication nor no-nonsense populism to forget either part of that cohort.
On to today’s poem, an example of a poem that earnestly intends to be a lesson: “Each in His Own Tongue” by William Herbert Carruth. Look! Mary-Oliver-approved wild geese make their appearance in it, decades too early! I also offer this month’s puzzle challenge: the pair of 1920’s anthologies I’m drawing from were gendered: one for boys, one for girls. So as with each post this month, you’re asked to guess in which volume did the poem appear. Answer lower down.
Here’s today’s poem as it appeared as the title poem in a book-length poetry collection by Carruth.. Marginalia picked up in the scan of a copy of that poetry collection. Wonder who Ina Coolbrith is? Here’s a link.
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The brief Wikipedia stub for Carruth tells me he was “president of the Pacific Coast Conference of the Unitarian Church.” One of my preacher relatives once said of an Unitarian school he’d attended “The only time anyone would speak of ‘God’ is when someone stubbed their toe.” I read this morning a brief poetic knot of a summary of Oliver’s earnest lessons delivered by A. M. Juster who wrote that he’s “Not a big fan or a big detractor of Mary Oliver” but then sums up his impressions of her work by saying “I also think her spirit wanted to write religious poetry, but her mind wouldn’t let her.” Each in their own tongue I’d say, ungendering Carruth. Carruth wrote “His,” and his poem appeared in the Boys Book of Verse. You can hear my musical performance with the audio player gadget below. No gadget to be seen? This highlighted link is a backup which will open a new tab with an audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Each_in_His_Own_Tongue.mp3.
*Here’s a link to a well-done post on the controversy, and a refresher on Oliver’s poetry if you are not familiar with it.
*This last factor is less-often laid out as I just did, perhaps because it doesn’t seem serious when complex poetry is discussed. But let’s admit it: great portions of humanity loves puzzles and challenges in which they feel rewarded if they can progress farther than some other human.
For National Poetry Month this year we’ve been looking a poems that were selected in 1922 and 1923 for a pair of gendered poetry anthologies: The Girls Book of Verse and The Boys Book of Verse. Today’s poem is another reasonably well-known selection, John Masefield’s “Sea Fever.”
I’ll not have much to write about the poem itself, it speaks so straightforwardly. I will say that I always thought of it as a poem by an older poet, and an archaic one at that in that it speaks of ocean-going sailing ships. Turns out, I read this poem with misapprehensions. Reading briefly about the poem, I found it was published by a poet only in their mid-twenties, and though the long-lived Masefield’s life overlapped mine — he was still England’s Poet Laureate during my schooldays in the United States — he indeed worked on windjammers.
The young Masefield sailed on the cargo ship Gilcruix at the end the 1800s, and yet the ship looks like it could have been from the beginning the 1800s.
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These two 1920’s poetry anthologies clearly wanted to encourage reading for the children that would grow to become the fabled Greatest Generation of the Great Depression, WWII, and the Cold War. Ironically, Wikipedia says Masefield was unhappy in school and shipped out to a life at sea “to break his addiction to reading, of which his aunt thought little.”
Masefield worked at sea and in America for the next decade. The seagoing did not cure his reading addiction,* he continued to read on shipboard and eventually began to write himself.
While “Sea Fever” is more in the mode of poetic memoir than our poem last time by Emily Dickinson — it’s a nice bit of parallelism that Dickinson imagined books as a replacement for sailing far away, and Masefield imagined he could sail far away as a replacement for books!
As with our other poems from this pair of gendered anthologies this month, I’m going to ask you to guess if this was in the boys or the girls poetry anthology — answer below.
Here at the Parlando Project we take words, usually literary poetry written by various poets, and set them to original music in different styles. Not for the first time, this is a poem that already has a fairly well-known “art song” setting: one by John Ireland. Ireland made a lovely song, and not an overly elaborate one melodically for that sort of thing — but it’s beyond the limits of my vocal talent. So, the setting I created and performed with just my cruder voice and acoustic guitar is what you can hear below. I don’t know if you will be able to hear the canvas slap or the wind through the rigging in this version, but I was trying for that and a hearty song feeling in this one. There’s a graphical audio player to hear it below, but if that player is not visible, this highlighted link is your backup. It will open a new tab with its own audio player. Was this song of manly company on the high seas in the girls or boys book? It was in the girl’s volume.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Sea_Fever.mp3.
*In between voyages, Masefield worked in a factory in Yonkers New York, something I did in my early 20s too. I may not have shared his nautical adventures, nor will I ever become the poet laureate of anyplace, but that tiny little happenstance made me feel kinship with Masefield 70 years apart.
More of what is likely only coincidence: when Lou Reed’s protagonist in his song “Heroin” escapes into his drug addiction he likens it to a wish that he’d “Sailed the darkened seas on a great big clipper ship sailing from this land here to that.” If Reed had started his other song of that era “I must go down to Lexington 125, to the call of the running tide” we’d have an actual connection to go on.
Later this month I’m hoping to attend remote online sessions of the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival run by the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, perhaps as many as I did last year. Something they do that I enjoyed was listening to all the sessions where a range of readers read all of Dickinson’s 1789 poems.
Now was I sitting in rapt, solitary devotion for every hour of that multi-day marathon? No, though I was paying some attention throughout. I restrung some guitars, reduced the clutter in my office and studio space, put away laundry, and tended to the dishes. If I gardened or cooked, I could pretend I was work-a-day Emily herself.
What makes the marathon meaningful, even if one does it only in part? The multiple voices for one thing. A group of several people read the poems in rotation each session, so there was no careful preparation from foreknowledge of which poems exactly each reader would read. A prepared reading might be powerful — having trained actors or voice artists read the whole corpus would bring something to it. This is not that, yet worthwhile.
I’ve heard a lot of folks read poetry over the years. Several of the readers struck me as better than most, even given that they might be reading the poems that came up in rotation for their turn essentially cold.* Of course, every so often one of the readers in their turn would get one of ED’s greatest hits, and all of us: the reader, the other readers, and the attendant listeners would perk up. If one pays attention to this, that happenstance, it “dazzles gradually.”
But then too the ordinary readers, the times when someone stumbled on a word, the lesser-known poems, the small ones that might be no more than a quatrain or two — they two are part of the fullness of Emily Dickinson. She may have been a genius, but she produced these hundreds of poems among a more-or-less ordinary life, infusing them with worthwhile attention. With this many poems it’s unlikely anyone (certainly not I) can really hold all of Emily Dickinson’s work in memory. And so it is, in such a complete reading, that some poems will spark with my attention as if they were just written and never before read or heard. With the smaller poems especially, it may be not much more than a glimpse we share in real-time with Dickinson’s ability to see and think differently. Yet, those small visions add up over the hours, grander from their numbers of unique takes.
Which are the poems she drafted while baking, head full of the hymnal meter, hands dusted with flour? Which while in the garden? Which while caring for her sick mother?
Virtual attendance is planned for many of the Tell It Slant sessions that run from September 25th through October 1st. You can sign up for them at no cost at this link. No one’s taking attendance — see or not see any of the sessions as they fit into your life or level of interest. Given the uncertainties in my life, I’m not sure how many I will be able to fit in.
One game I played during the readings — where I eventually jumped into the chat window with exclamations — was whenever the poem cycle came upon a bee. Dickinson closely observes many plants and animals, but she seems to have had a particular affinity for the bee. Is it a symbol of the Puritan work ethic? A chunkier, easier to observe bug? A symbol of fertility? A flying rose with sweetness and a sting? A coworker the knowledgeable horticulturalist knows is essential to pollination?
Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington aside, sometimes the muse takes the bee train,
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Here’s one of her short bee poems, particularly extravagant in its imagination. And here’s a link to what I believe to be the authoritative text. That opening image alone should astound. Bees as a railroad train, with the plush flowers as directive as train-tracks —yet soft, not iron.* “A jar” in the second line is ambiguous. A jar as in a container for the pollen it collects? Possibly, but I’m suspecting more at ajar’s meaning as apart or out of harmony. Bees as locomotives and their train of cars makes them outsized from reality’s proportions. They may move the petals on close examination, their industry is harder and heavier than the plants.
In the second stanza, the metaphor shifts. Now the bee is a knight, the flower a fortress or castle they assault. The bee-knight seems a strangely chivalrous marauder, if inconstant and ready to move off to the next bloom.
As an Imagist poem, this then can be apprehended as simply a picture, an observation of a charged moment of attention. How strange to see the tiny bee as a train or even a knight — but yes, it must travel in appointed commerce on its compelled track, and yes, like a wandering knight-errant it must move on.
But this bee could be a muse too, couldn’t it? It knows its schedule, even if we don’t. It arrives, shakes us like a passing train, assails our walls, then bids a courtly adieu and passes on to another artist, writer, musician.
You can hear my musical performance of this short Emily Dickinson poem “Like trains of cars on tracks of plush” below with the audio player gadget you should see there. No player? This highlighted link is another way to hear it, as it will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Like_trains_of_cars_on_tracks_of_plush.mp3.
*I once worked for a radio network. Watching the on-air folks, I was reminded that the ability to cold read text is a skill. It sounds easy to do — when it’s done right.
**There’s a twice as long version out there which I think is derived from the 19th century Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas W. Higginson posthumous collections. These were straightened up for easier public assimilation and were given, by the editors, their ideas of meaningful titles. Did they append two fragments thinking them connected? My apologies for not researching this issue further.
***As striking as Dickinson’s image is here, railroads were as essential to 19th century American commerce as bees are. Towns grew and shrunk based on their routes. Another plausible reason for the train image: one of Dickinson’s father’s commercial achievements for Amherst was assuring that it’d get a railroad line.
When I used a Robert Louis Stevenson poem last July I wasn’t expecting to follow it up with another. When introducing his “Bed in Summer” then I mentioned that writing poetry for children, as Stevenson was doing in his A Childs Garden of Verses, seemed to reduce some of the fustian of a lot of Victorian verse.
So, when I happened upon this other example from that collection I was even more struck by the sensibility of this one. Though I had no reason to believe Stevenson was intending visionary poetry, today’s piece could almost fit inside of Blake’s Songs of Innocence — though it was written a half-a-century after Blake’s death.
Here’s one illustrated edition of the book and the original text with Stevenson’s title “To Any Reader”
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What was the author’s intent? I first read it as Stevenson making a pitch that even if the poems in his book might someday seem quaint and old-fashioned, they could still relate to like-experiences of some future another child. Was this canny foresight on Stevenson’s part? Stevenson was only 35 when he published this book, so his own childhood memories should not have been all that outdated as he wrote the material. On the other hand, his childhood nurse (to whom the book is dedicated) raised him on John Bunyan, stories from the Bible, and tales of 17th century Scottish Covenanters. That may have made him aware from a young age that tales from past times could be transmitted to young minds.
I do recall encountering A Child’s Garden of Verses as a young child in the mid-20th century, though I can’t say for sure where. Did someone read it to me in my pre-literate days? Was it a book from my parents’ library, perhaps a keepsake from their childhoods? Did I run into it while exhausting my tiny Iowa town’s small library children’s section?
I would not have minded if it was old-fashioned, for I was from a young age fascinated with the past. It could have seemed juvenile unless I came upon it very early in my reading years, but most editions were illustrated, and illustrations excited the ekphrastic in this young reader. Yet my recall on this is not that specific, I just remember that I had seen it. I have more recall of reading Stevenson’s Treasure Island and enjoying that.
Oddly, when I finally looked this week, this is not the lead-off, introductory poem in the book. Instead, it’s the final poem — not the place to make the case to continue reading “To Any Reader” who just happened onto the book. Instead, in this place, it’s a ghostly envoi, a reminder to the child (or to the adult reading to them) that they, their childhoods, will obsolete themselves.
As I did with Claude McKay a couple of pieces ago, I decided to adapt Stevenson’s words slightly for singing. Some changes were to make it less awkward to separate things into a series of sung verses. A couple of changes just fit better to my non-agile tongue. Most significantly, I devised a repeating coda to drive home a final summary to the listener. One subtle thing I did was a covert attempt to speak to my own child’s specific journey to young adulthood.
Here’s my version. Since I want to emphasize that other child of air, I also retitled the poem.
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An uncomplicated folk-song style setting seemed appropriate. The chords today are simple for the guitarist, though the alt-tuning I used changes the sound of this simple chord progression slightly. You can hear my performance with the graphical audio player below. If you can’t see any player, I also provide this highlighted link which will open a new tab window with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Another_Child.mp3
This Monday, Labor Day in the U. S., is a legal holiday which arose from the idea of a day to celebrate workers. Some see this holiday as being in conflict with May 1st, International Workers Day, but I myself have no beef with having two days to celebrate work and those that do it.
Poets and poetry are not, as a rule, oversaturated with attention to labor. Creative work such as writing is, in itself, labor — but the wages are so scant for poetry that it’s hard to see it as allied with such. Currently television and movie writers are on strike, but poets have little in the way of wages and rights to negotiate. If the weekend and the 8-hour workday were obtained through labor struggle, it’s hard to imagine poets picketing for a full honorarium for the 12-line sonnet, or chapbooks for sale on every bookstore shelf that stocks James Patterson books.
What I find less forgivable is that poets don’t write about labor as much as I think is due. Poetry’s Greatest Hits will tell us about mystery, death, love, war, dreams, desire, loneliness, family, friendships, every facet of our non-commercial relationship with nature, all the panoply of pain and joy. What poetry won’t speak of much is the third or so of our lives spent making or getting a paycheck.* And I don’t think the situation for the subject of labor is getting better. Farm work, even if romanticized into shepherd tropes or the like, supplies many of the poems in the canon that speak of work. As the percentage of Americans engaged in, or even living among others engaged in that line of work decreases, we see fewer of those poems.
Around Labor Day or May Day, I often find myself dipping into the work of Carl Sandburg. Despite his less than illustrious education, not of the Ivy League but more a Row-Crop League college with hobo semesters, and attendance in The Front Page era of journalism, rather than sessions abroad and drawing room soirees. Sandburg was by intent a thoroughgoing Modernist artist, making it new as much as any of the early 20th century Americans, but his Modernist solutions and prosody get little respect currently. Maybe they’re right, though I find Sandburg can be effective for my purposes. Judge those things as you might, he does pay attention to labor and laborers as colleagues. He can portray all kinds of struggle in doing so, but also endurance, achievement, and harbored joy.
Before I get on to the piece I found in Sandburg to celebrate Labor Day, let me suggest a rough analog of the Bechtel Test. Let me call it the Sandburg Test. To be clear, it’s not my suggestion that every poem has to be about work, about the things we do for our daily bread. But, if we are viewing an anthology or substantial poetry collection from a poet, to pass the Sandburg Test it has to have poems that deal with work in some substantial way. How does the speaker or characters in the poem relate to work? What are they doing that work for? What is it presenting them that portrays something about life? What are the mysteries, sensations, and systems of that work?
What Sandburg poem did I choose? I picked a selection from the 6th part of a longer, multipart poem, “The Windy City.” This one is sort of an extended revisiting of Sandburg’s Greatest Hit “Chicago,” sometimes remembered as a boosterish paean to the great Midwestern American city, which it’s not — “Chicago” is a poem about a city and a workforce in struggle. “The Windy City” on the other hand is more mystic, and the section I chose is essentially a labor hymn. Physicists tell us that the things we see about us, solid things apparently, are in fact full of moving atoms and vibrating particles, their close motion making solidity. Sandburg’s windy city is such. The labor we celebrate on Monday, and do most every other Monday, is the gusty current that makes our world.
Looks solid enough, but it’s made of something as transitory as work. Carl Sandburg looks out on mid-century Chicago.
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My music for today’s piece is in my punk orchestral mode: simple musical structures making use of orchestra instruments and a few interlopers. You can hear it along with Sandburg’s words with a player gadget below. No gadget? Here’s a highlighted link, that’ll open even on Labor Day to present you with an alternative audio player. Want to read more of from the poem from which I selected today’s passage? Here’s a link to that.
Thank you for reading and listening. Thank you for the work you do when you’re not doing that. Yes, you may be paid for that, well or not, but our lives and communities are made out of that work. How can that not be mystical?
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Windy_City.mp3.
*My diagnosis of this avoidance is that poets may still feel an expectation that they should either be full-time poets earning a living from their poems, or if not that, rich enough to not need a “day job.” Their day jobs then are not poetic, and so don’t appear in their poems. Poets with academic jobs are a considerable middle case however. I suspect administrative policies and faculty politics still don’t seem poetic. Perhaps office-based work in bureaucracies is harder to press into non-humorous verse than the village smithy or a steel-drivin’ man?
A lot of the poetry I combine with music here was published around 100 years ago, making it clearly in the public domain for reuse. Given my age, some of the poetry from the Previous Twenties doesn’t seem all that old — after all, many of the poets’ lives overlapped mine — but some poets and poems look back, as I do now from my 2020s, to older styles of poetic expression, ones from an additional 100 years before the 1920s poet. That may be too much for some younger audiences I think.
Since poetry is at least partly about how something is said, it’s not out of line for style to be substantial when we choose to read or listen to poetry — but, sometimes we might choose to “translate” poetry for performance to make it more immediate.
Here’s an example. I came upon this 1922 poem by Claude McKay while looking for summer poems. I’ve presented McKay a few times already here. A figure stored away in the Tupperware container labeled The Harlem Renaissance, McKay’s poetry is still preserved and sometimes read — often the portion of his poems that speak eloquently about racism and the double alienation of being a Black Caribbean emigrant to the United States. Since these things are still factors in the 2020s, that supplies relevance to continue to consider them. A poem like his 1919 sonnet “If We Must Die,”however formal in prosody, presents clear reasons to our current ears.
But McKay is also a passionate love poet.* Now, to say the least, love is still a contemporary experience, so one might think his love poetry would also get more contemporary exposure. My casual estimate says this hasn’t happened. Yet.
Why not? This poem is significantly old-fashioned, 19th-century-like. Its sentences are poetic in an outdated style, they don’t flow casually in a spoken way. This is a style we might forgive in 19th-century verse if written back then, particularly if the poem is a Hall-of-Fame, “Poetry’s Greatest Hits,” poem — but not so much for a 20th century poet’s less honored selection.
Don’t make the mistake when reading old poetry to think that the poets must be old too. McKay was just 30 when he first published this poem.
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This poem also makes a mistake writers can fall into. McKay seems to think that leaving a surprise for the ending will strengthen the poem — that when the reader finally sees that surprise they will be happy to have waited for the poem’s context.
There are poems that work that way.** To me, this one doesn’t. Coming upon it, one may not read through the facile but not necessarily compelling nature poem that makes up more than ¾ of the text. Therefore, in my “translation” for today’s performance, I’ve decided to create a refrain out of the poem’s final line, spoiling the surprise but urging the listener to consider the nature and weather report portions of this poem as reports of human desire and inner weather. You’ll hear how it works in the musical performance you can hear below.
Taking liberties like this is one reason I use public domain work: it’s now free for one to do with it what one wants. If you want to read McKay’s work as he intended it, here’s a link to the 1922 version. That link includes its own link to an even earlier published version by McKay, evidence that the poem’s author himself was trying to improve his poem’s impact.
Writers: if you are ever writing a surprise-ending piece, if you ever are withholding something from your reader or listener because you think it’ll be a grand or witty “Aha!” moment at the end, consider the alternative. The alternative here, the bringing out the key context that the poem’s speaker is viewing his summer night and morning “Blind with hunger for your love,” strengthens listener engagement I think, and it lets the listener see that the speaker/singer is just as attracted to the early rain-storm, sleepless-night portion of the weather, as the “miracle” of the subsequent sunny morning which is so incongruent with their present feelings. I’ve doubled down on that revision by making the newly refrained line the title too. ”Summer Morn in New Hampshire,” as McKay titled it, is too specific yet generic in my hindsight judgement.
I did my best with the musical performance of this as a song. I enjoyed playing my big, heavy, 20-plus-year-old 12-string Guild guitar and weaving in the rest of a quartet of ringing and raining instruments. It’s not a humble-brag, but a statement of the song’s potential to say that this piece would benefit from a higher-skilled singer than I am. Perhaps my voice’s approximations can be heard as bringing an imperfect human immediacy to the words? You can hear the performance with a graphic audio player below (if you see that). No player? This is a hyperlink that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/I_Was_Blind_with_Hunger_for_Your_Love.mp3.
*Let me leave this final point to a footnote. Best as can be determined, Claude McKay’s erotic connections seem to have been with men. Given the homophobia of his time — or perhaps from artistic choice — McKay has written this poem, as he has many of his love poems, in an entirely genderless manner.
**This poem isn’t a sonnet, but it is “sonnet-ish,” and the popular English/Shakespearean sonnet conventionally expects a somewhat surprising summation in its final couplet.
The usual remit of this Project is to take words — somebody else’s words, words that were intended as literary poetry — and to combine them with original music in some way. Every so often, I’ll use my own poetry, but the journey there is similar, not like most songwriting where the songwriter will as … Continue reading Come August, September
All too often there is someone dying that interrupts the summer. In my neighborhood, a musician* named August — even doubling the metaphors, named August Golden — was shot and killed last week. His friends speak highly of his kindness and good heart, and we don’t know exactly why he was killed when someone shot … Continue reading Langston Hughes “Summer Night”
I released the 700th Parlando Project audio piece earlier this month. I consider this an extraordinary achievement. I’m unaware that anyone has ever done anything like this* at this scale. Sometime around 2015 I had an idea: that while poetry and music had long been combined, the ways you could do that hadn’t been fully … Continue reading 700
This is a modest little piece — a small number of words, a simple musical setting — so it may seem odd to choose it as the 700th audio piece from this Parlando Project. Well, this whole project is odd, isn’t it? You, for reading this and listening to the audio pieces are unusual. I’d … Continue reading Warm Summer Sun, the 700th Parlando Project piece
Death is a funny thing, mainly because dying is treated so damn serious. Have you ever asked yourself this: are you afraid of death or are you afraid of dying? If you answer, “Well I’m afraid of death.” I ask you to further question yourself. Non-existence is easy, a gimmie, a non-task. Dying on the … Continue reading Lightly, from Aldus Huxley’s novel “Island”
One of my favorite Indie rock band names is Yo La Tengo. The name comes from a convention that was formulated decades ago as talented non-English speaking players began appearing in North American baseball teams. “Yo la tengo!” means “I’ve got it!” – a useful term as two or more fielders with their eyes fixed … Continue reading William Carlos Williams’ Summer Song
Scrolling news and social media is how I misspend a lot of my time now, since the larger blocks when I can really bare down on artistic work are scarcer and less predictable in my life. Every so often someone famous in the 20th century will start to pop up unexpectedly in news article headings … Continue reading Sinéad O’Connor has died
Today’s text was written as a children’s poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. What it notices about the enticing longer days and late sunsets of summer is not limited to children however. I suspect many adults too find it harder to wind down when it’s still light and pleasant out. They say I’m supposed to go … Continue reading Bed In Summer
I can’t help it — actually I do try to help it, but sometimes I can’t. I was in a movie with my wife, the polemical Emily Dickinson biopic Wild Nights with Emily,* and they introduced Thomas W. Higginson as this nincompoop who couldn’t discern the poetic genius of Dickinson compared to the kind of … Continue reading Helen Hunt Jackson’s “July”
My Project says it’s about where music and words meet, yet I’m still surprised and gratified when I encounter literary poets whose connection to music is significant. Most poets enjoy music — hell, most people do. And the arts of poetry and music have long been siblings. Who can count how many poems have the … Continue reading A poet, Joseph Fasano, has a music recording, and he barely let’s you know about it.
You might know this pedant’s complaint: something can’t be “more unique” — because the word unique means the only, singular. If so, what the Parlando Project does then is quasi-unique. I well know that setting literary poems to music isn’t unprecedented, but the way I do it is a smaller grouping. For reasons (some practical) … Continue reading Four people doing something like what the Parlando Project does
The route today’s musical composition took to existence was almost comically round-about. I added a new virtual instrument (VI)* drum set this week, one with a drier, more retro sound. I decided I should try it out. I grabbed an acoustic guitar track I’d recorded weeks ago, but not used for anything, and went to … Continue reading All These Wild Geese Poems – and how one of my music pieces migrates
Like many days recently with this Project, I have been thrashing about looking for time to find an inspiration for a new audio piece, and some inspiration to spend that time. This weekend I found one sliver of inspiration in musical memory, and then yesterday, I found an Independence Day piece so monumental that I … Continue reading Almost Independence Day
It’d be possible to do something like this Project using only the poetry of the great American poet Emily Dickinson. While we’re approaching publishing our 700th piece of original music combined with various words (mostly literary poetry) — there are nearly 1800 poems that Dickinson wrote. That’s a lot of material. The Parlando Project has … Continue reading Those cattle smaller than a Bee
- 110 years ago. Two people met in England and called each other poets. One of them you might know: Robert Frost. He was almost 40 and hadn’t been making a calling as a poet in America. The other was a British man four years younger who wrote prose furiously as a freelancer for pay, … Continue reading Edward Thomas’ “Song”
If you’ve noticed I’ve been gone for a while, I have as well. The last few weeks have had a lot of other things to attend to. Mostly happy things: travel, and work around the teenager’s graduation from high school. Still, I found myself picking up a book from my teetering “plan to read” pile … Continue reading Thomas Hardy’s “Transformations”
It’s been said of poets that they go out into a perfectly good morning only to think of glum existential thoughts. When I read something like that and look at the pieces this Project does, reflection is called forth. That certainly calls out a lot of subject matter I deal with here. There’s a rebuttal, … Continue reading Emily Dickinson’s Mushroom
While visiting western North Carolina this month I toured two houses built in the 19th century, each high on hilltops overlooking the mountains surrounding them. My mind likes to link things, I couldn’t help but look at them as a pair.
The first house was named Connemara by an owner that lived there in between the man who had it built and the man whose shade I’d come to visit. The man who had it built was Christopher Memminger who had enslaved workers to build it. Memminger eventually became the Confederacy’s Secretary of the Treasury, so he must have known something about money and the slavery that helped accumulate it.* The later owner was a poet and writer who somehow found his own words remunerative enough to afford it, Carl Sandburg. Sandburg was said to have found the place a bit baronial for a socialist poet, at least on first sight — but his beloved wife wanted temperate pastureland for her dairy goat herd, and this place had that. She’d helped and stood by Carl through his unlikely rise from hoboing between short-lived work, to being an aide to a mayor of Milwaukee, to daily journalism in Chicago, to becoming a prize-winning poet and multi-volume biographer of Lincoln.
The second house is Biltmore, built for George Vanderbilt II. If you know your Gilded Age, the Vanderbilts were likely the first great fortune family of enormous wealth in 19th century America. Brief accounts I’ve read of him don’t make him sound like someone all that interested in business or growing wealth. He was bookish, a bit shy — but also very rich and looking to use that wealth to put his mark on things, to enclose his life in the best as he saw it. If one wonders at the two socialist second-generation immigrants living in the large farmhouse of Connemara, Vanderbilt’s house makes that place look like an outbuilding. Biltmore’s not just bigger, it’s thought to be the biggest residence ever built in the United States, with around 4 acres of floor space beneath huge high-vaulted common rooms. The estate surrounding it was over 100,000 acres, and Vanderbilt had it landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted, the man who had worked on a much smaller canvas with the 800 acres of New York City’s Central Park.
The mix of manicured and wild seeming landscape is beautiful in the Olmsted manner. We biked along a trail through 8 miles of it, past lagoons and along the banks of the French Broad river —and as we rolled over a wood-rimed rise down past a pasture I was delighted to see three hawks at tree-top level swooping over us, so low that the shadows of one passed over me rolling beneath them.
The two houses have similarities, if not in scale. Both Carl and George were packrats, though at the wealth level of a Vanderbilt, it’s called being an art collector. The Sandburg house was donated to the US government just after Carl’s death. His wife and two live-in adult children packed up as if going on vacation and left the house for residence in Asheville. The Park Service has maintained it ever since in Marie Celeste ghost-ship-shape. One of Carl’s cigar butts sits in an ashtray on the set-for-a-meal dinner table. Piles of books and magazines cover many surfaces as if they were just set down this week. Sandburg has thousands of books in bookcases everywhere around the house, and there are busts of Carl and his long-term subject Lincoln, art photographs by his wife’s brother Edward Steichen, and scattered knickknacks. Vanderbilt had even more thousands of books, all stored in a large floor-to-two-story-high ceiling library room, all arranged with leather and gilt bindings a-plenty. Life-size John Singer Sargent portraits abound and above giant elaborately surrounded fireplaces. Hallways are hung their entire length with framed etchings. Large Flemish tapestries showing Biblical virtues completely cover walls of a big room. Servants kept it all clean and ordered then, and that’s how it’s displayed now.
Vanderbilt Biltmore Library and a Sandburg bookshelf. Some Sandburg clutter.
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The mood of the two places, as I sensed it, was very different however. Biltmore seemed dark, and though some of that was likely due to preservation of valued pieces from bright lights, both my wife and I had simultaneous Citizen Kane thoughts by the large tables and giant fireplaces. She nudged me and asked if I’d like to put together a jigsaw puzzle. In contrast, the Sandburg house seemed domestic in a familiar way to me. The metal handles on the hand-touch-patinaed Sandburg kitchen cabinets — chrome ones fluted like a Pontiac’s hood — were the same that were in my childhood’s kitchen. The clutter there, like my clutter.
The Sandburg house kitchen
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In the lengthy tour of the Vanderbilt house, the highlight was when we detoured outside onto a long stone veranda with splendid views of the Blue Ridge Mountains. We sat on deck chairs, as we might sit on our own home’s rickety screen-porch, and gazed not at a multicultural Midwestern neighborhood, but on the far hazy peaks as swallows darted to and fro just over the railing as they likely did when the Cherokee could not dream of steamboat millionaires or multi-volume biographies.
There’s a wicker chair out on a large flat granite rock, yards from the Sandburg house. It too offers a view of the tree-covered mountains, but with no roof over one’s head or seats for others. Carl Sandburg would go to that chair and sit to write first drafts. That unkempt shock of white hair of his would blow like leaves in the breeze, and the sun would remind him how blank the new page was.
Sandburg lived at his hilltop house bought with the proceeds from his own literary labors for two decades. Though George Vanderbilt was rich the day he was born, he had only about the same number of years to enjoy the extraordinary elaborate one he had built to his desires. Some of us still read Sandburg’s work in our homes — only tourists will now see Vanderbilt’s commissioned magnum opus.
I told you I like to connect things — and these two houses around Asheville are a natural pair — but I also look for the more tenuous connections. Last time I said that Sandburg’s most lasting influence, obscured by time and the others influenced by him, was being an original “roots” or “Americana” popularizer, the man with poems, a guitar, and songs from all corners and sub-cultures of America. What is perhaps the greatest lasting fruit of the extended Vanderbilt family tree? Not steamboats. Not gilded age mansions. Not art collections. Maybe not even philanthropic donations to long-lasting institutions. In 1910, Emily Vanderbilt Sloane, descended matrilineally from the Vanderbilts, gave birth to John H. Hammond. There’s no room to tell you all John Hammond gave us, so here his Wikipedia entry is linked. Why would you want to click that link? Here are names you’ll see linked to John Hammond there: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Benny Goodman, Robert Johnson, Harry James, Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, Big Joe Turner, Pete Seeger, Babatunde Olatunji, Aretha Franklin, George Benson, Freddie Green, Leonard Cohen, Arthur Russell, Jim Copp, Asha Puthli, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mike Bloomfield, and John H. Hammond’s own son John P. Hammond.
Today’s post is dedicated to my life partner of two decades today, Heidi. For a musical piece here’s one of Sandburg’s chief influences whose birthday also happens to fall today, Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.” In his song Whitman reminds us of our labors, and as the son of a house carpenter, he knew directly who built the houses. Graphical audio player below for some,backup link here if you don’t see it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/I_Hear_America_Singing.mp3..
Carl Sandburg, Lincoln biographer, was not a Confederate, and was a proud “Civil Rights” supporter. When the tour guide noted the incongruence of this, I put on my village explainer hat and told the tour group that poet Longfellow, he of patriot poems like “The Ride of Paul Revere,”* lived in a house built by a Tory who fled the American Revolution.
I’m in Asheville North Carolina this weekend, and I visited the Carl Sandburg home national site not far from here. Longtime readers will know that Sandburg is a touchstone for me and this project, and so I thought it’d be worthwhile to put down a few observations and questions that have arisen from my visit in consideration of Sandburg.
I think Sandburg has suffered from succeeding in doing something we no longer expect poets to do. He achieved a certain level of fame during his lifetime — and that alone is problematic. If poetry has lost sufficient cultural interest, as some critics and some poets believe, then a poet too famous has presented a case that they aren’t really writing true poetry. It doesn’t help that Sandburg wasn’t known as a critic himself, and didn’t present an explicit theory of how poetry works. This led to an assumption that there’s no depth, originality, or vision in his work. From this perceived lack, his fame — and one might assume his influence — died off quickly with the celebrity poet character he became in his long lifetime.
Yet there’s one line of influence that I say is underappreciated, one that flows from his writings and public persona, a path of influence that mixed with others who had complementary urges. That line of influence runs through Sandburg’s work with American folk music. He seems to have been working roughly contemporaneously with John Lomax and Charles Seeger* in popularizing folk music at a time early enough that one couldn’t yet term their actions a revival. And he was mixing these folk tunes collected from various subcultures in America’s regions and mixing them within a project that included outreach of high culture poetry and a lefty political slant from the presenter, as if it was all one thing. There was no natural reason these things were required to be combined, and so a successful poet and author combining them, as Sandburg did, helped set the format for the progress of the folk music revival from the WWI era through to the eventual “folk scare” of the Fifties which launched Bob Dylan and many others who would be called song poets.
Sandburg singing with his grandkids. Note the classical guitar position, a way of holding acoustic guitars I adopted too. Guitar and piano currently in the Sandburg home. I couldn’t get an angle to read the headstock. Anyone got knowledge or a guess what make and model is is?
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Critical intermediaries in this half-century progression were Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and I’m often struck by how similar their presentations were to Sandburg’s. If you mix Sandburg and Will Rogers into a cloning machine you wouldn’t get an exact Woody Guthrie, but you’d likely get something like him. Guthrie familiarly called Sandburg’s pioneering 1927 folk song collection The American Songbag “Carl Songbird’s American Sandbag.” And like this project, Guthrie played and composed music to accompany Sandburg poems for public performance. Pete Seeger’s Chautauqua-ish concerts presented to and aligned with a Sandburgian “The People, Yes” outlook. Seeger’s breakout group The Weavers made much of this blurb given them by Sandburg “When I hear America Singing, I hear the Weavers.” Before that, when he was beginning, Pete claimed he got ahold of American Songbag when it came out. Again, like Woody, Pete was Pete. They added themselves.
I admire Langston Hughes, and while not single-handedly, he’s seminal in the development of Afro-American poetry. In reading his early work, some of which remains in the forefront of his legacy, I hear strong echoes of Sandburg’s word-music. Are they both hearing Walt Whitman in their ears? Likely, but the concision of many of Sandburg’s early poems is not Whitmanesque, and Hughes’ poetry likewise could be concise. Langston Hughes was too, himself, but a poet like Sandburg at least ran interference for his work.
Hughes was an early proponent of Jazz Poetry, yet Sandburg’s “Jazz Fantasia” was there to serve as an example when Hughes’ first poems were published. Later on, I was often hearing elements of Langston Hughes in Gil Scott Heron, and if we continue that line, perhaps there are reflected elements of Sandburg is some down-tempo, socially conscious rap.
One of the things a tour of Sandburg’s home offers is the ability to peak at his many bookshelves and scattered magazines. They show a man with wide interests in politics and human rights alongside poetry. Here’s one little something I didn’t expect to find, wedged in between The Roots of American Communism on its left and McCarthy: The Man, The Senator, The Ism on the right: a copy of a science fiction magazine. Did Sandburg read or at least casually follow mid-century SF? Has anyone even asked this question? Is there any way to answer it? Was this one issue or are there many in the house?
The magazine is right next to the McCarthy study. Hard to read the spine, but it may be this issue.
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Here’s an oddity that I thought of while sitting in Asheville thinking also of the Black Mountain College that existed nearby. From 1945 when Sandburg moved to North Carolina until the college closed in 1957, it existed in the same part of the Blue Ridge mountains with Sandburg. In the 1950s it became the locus of a group of poets* who eventually were called The Black Mountain Poets after the school. You might wonder (well, I did) did any of them seek out Sandburg, or did Sandburg make any note of them? So far, I can find not a trace of an answer to that question. Was Sandburg either too busy or too retired to mix with them? Was he considered too mainstream and successful to be of interest to insurgent “post modernists?” Many Black Mountain Poets admired and communicated with William Carlos Williams, Sandburg’s contemporary — but Sandburg too had championed a more American and less European-culture-centric style of free verse continued by the Black Mountain Poets. There’s a dog not barking there.
In the end, I suspect Sandburg might be comfortable with his diminished reputation in the 21st century — even if I’m not. Sandburg often spoke of the work of the people as being continuous, of that factor being part of the peoples’ power. In that way he might be satisfied. Things he helped build, put in motion, continue to move forward, change, and develop.
For an audio piece today, here’s a short poem by one of the foundational Black Mountain Poets Charles Olson titled “These Days.” I performed it acapella this morning, recording this very short piece on my phone in a less than quiet room I’m staying at. It speaks of something Olson and Sandburg might have agreed on. You can hear it with the audio player below, or if you don’t see that, with this backup link.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/These_Days.mp3.
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*Father of Pete, Mike, and Peggy Seeger. Husband of Ruth Crawford Seeger.
**Will Rogers arose in a very similar time-frame to Sandburg. The amateur guitar player/author/speaker Mark Twain had died just a few years previous. The clever yet folksy artist observing the entire range human behavior from a loving/skeptical non-East-coast/high-culture place was a needed character in American life, and while Sandburg isn’t a Twain clone, the role he played was somewhat successive.
***The list of other famous students and teachers of Black Mountain College included Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Charles Olson, Walter Gropius, Joseph Albers, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan.
A great many countries have holidays honoring their nation’s soldiers, often with an emphasis on memorializing the dead of past wars. The United States has two such holidays, a Veteran’s Day on the date of the WWI Armistice and the one that arrives this weekend, Memorial Day.
Long time readers here will know I’ve presented a lot of soldier’s poems in this Project, and poems otherwise about wars. This is fitting, war as a poetic subject matter goes back to Homer and further.
Many soldiers’ poems are at least ambiguous about the worth of war, some are outright harrowing. But that’s poets. Outside of poetry, many in the US have developed a particular carefulness in speaking of our wars, a hesitancy to speak honestly about those ambiguities mixed with a deadened obligatory reverence for veterans — a reverence with no other required obligation or attention. Yet we have these two holidays.
Well, do we have such an obligation to remember the horrors of war and the hard-won realities the warriors helped enforce? Asked this way the answer is suggested: yes, we do. For this year’s Memorial Day, I’m going to present two poems that suggest something else in addition.
The first one is by poet Kevin FitzPatrick, who I’ve been memorializing since his death in late 2021. Kevin was not a vet, but he helped with the arrangements that led to his father Bernard FitzPatrick’s memoir, A Hike Into the Sun, about his WWII experience as a prisoner of war in the Bataan Death March. Let me briefly summarize that, for those for whom this is ancient or foreign history: In the early days after Japan declared war on the US, the Philippines came under attack. The fighting was fierce, with Americans and Filipinos resisting without anything like sufficient logistical support to hold out very long.
After they surrendered the near 70 mile march began, with brutal mistreatment and wanton execution of captives adding to the suffering of the weakened and injured soldiers. Forced labor for the duration of the war followed for those who survived the early days. Death counts vary, ranging from 5600 to over 10,000, continental American soldiers and their Filipino comrades. WWII had many accounts of human depravity. This was one of them.
Kevin’s father survived the march, survived the years as a POW doing forced labor, and then wrote his book about it in the 1990s. That’s only background, this isn’t what today’s poem is about. “Survivor” is about his son Kevin visiting his dad in the 21st century while the infirm father in his late 80s was in a care home. How much can someone like myself know about Bernard FitzPatrick’s experience?
It just happens that one of the Parlando Project’s mottos is “Other Peoples’ Stories.” That motto also admits, understands that I (and you) can only partially understand others’ experiences, even if poems and performances might inform us somewhat.
I’m not going to spoil the ending of the poem, you’ll need to listen to my performance in order to hear it. Without spoilers I can say that when I first heard Kevin’s poem, when he read it in draft form, his tale of a chair transfer reminded me of my time working in nursing homes and like Ray was performing those kinds of tasks, but the ending took it another place I didn’t expect the poem to go. You can hear my performance with the audio player below. If you don’t see that player (some ways of reading this blog hide it), this highlighted link will open a new tab to play it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Survivor.mp3.
Knowing how Filipinos and US troops suffered in the hands of the Japanese, what does the ending say? There’s no secret right answer, this isn’t a pop quiz. Instead of defining a clear answer, let me supply another poem in a performance I shared here many years ago before some of you followed this Project. I think of it as a great Memorial Day poem because for it to achieve its greatness you need to think about it, think about what it implies in the compressed story it tells. The poem is Carl Sandburg’s “Grass.” Coincidentally, Sandburg was a veteran of the Spanish-American war, the conflict that made the Philippines an American Commonwealth up until independence just after the ending of WWII around 50 years later. Sandburg as a soldier wore Civil War era heavy woolen uniforms while stationed in tropical Puerto Rico, and his commander was a Civil War officer. That’s how close his time was to the bloody American Civil war whose battles are mentioned. “Grass” was written when the bloody battles of WWI, also mentioned, were contemporary events.
Kevin FitzPatrick and Carl Sandburg. A couple of poets imply some things you’re not likely to hear elsewhere this Memorial Day
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Sandburg’s poem in its short duration reminds of the costs of war — but what does his ending mean? Does it mean it will be best all-tolled when we have the option to forget their sacrifice? Does it simply observe that time passes, and we will forget, eventually? Is he saying that more wars, more bloody battles, obscure the dead of past wars? Chances are you won’t hear any of those statements in any Memorial Day commentary or post — but you will hear about Memorial Day discount savings, and rote uncomplicated praise for service.
Here’s the audio player for The LYL Band performing Carl Sandburg’s poem “Grass” live several years back. And here’s the backup link for it.
http://traffic.libsyn.com/parlando/Grass.mp3.
More of Kevin FitzPatrick’s poetry is available at this link. His father Bernard’s book is linked here.
I’m going to share a musical performance of an Emily Dickinson poem, but before I get to that, I’m going to continue my memoir-of-influences series on things that formed the idea of the Parlando Project earlier in my life. I’m going to try to keep it short, which will force some amputations, but I feel embarrassed spending much time on the small events of my single life. Those in a hurry, or only interested in the new audio piece and what I have to say about that, can skip down to the second section of this post.
At the end of the last post I had moved to Newburgh, a town on the Hudson river about 60 miles north of New York City. I don’t know if the town knew what to do with The Seventies, it seemed between eras; and in some larger sense I might not have known what to do either, but like the town I had a daily job to do, and kept doing it. Can we say that had some value?
I liked many of the people I worked and lived with during my five years there. I still think of some of them from time to time, and they were often kind to me. The folks who worked with me at St. Luke’s Hospital, particularly those in the Emergency Department, worked hard under significant limitations trying to do things that we could only address partway. I could say much of that under-addressed were systematic issues — and I’d be right — and the levers of those systems were outside our direct grasp. Another part of those limitations were closer to us, internal. I said I’d try to be brief. I said there would be amputations. Newburgh had a racism problem. The town, the region, was populated by stratums of immigrants, with the original European WASP colonials to Irish, Italian, and Puerto Rican waves following on. Mixed in there were Afro-Americans who were there, as they were everywhere in the United States. I don’t know the exact demographic details, and I said I’d try to keep this concise, but I’d guess the Black Americans were first in the region from servant and slavery times, and then there was some low-paid and otherwise undesirable work that still may have seemed better than some parts of America for Black folks. Few poor people ever emigrate for marginal gains from acceptable situations.
That work had shriveled over the years, and what jobs there were, those other immigrant waves got some of the employment from the white folks who did the hiring. Again, I’m no expert, I may have some of this wrong, but when I think of the Irish and Italian Americans who can recount the derogatory tropes employed against their ancestors,* I still suspect that even within the cruel othering they received, they sometimes got, in practice, hiring preferences over Afro-Americans.
This led to the town, in the time I was there, with an underclass of underemployed Black folks viewed by too many of the white population as shiftless, ungrateful and unenterprising wards of the state. Think I’m amputating too much to say this was a prominent white attitude? Ten years before I arrived there was a controversy that was called “The Battle of Newburgh.” I didn’t know much of this specific history in 1971, but the attitudes were still easy to hear and feel while I lived there. Here’s a link to a 30 minute podcast on the 1971 controversy. Wonder what happened later? Here’s an article that updates things to 2015.
Back in my Emergency Room, The Seventies, we were the place anyone came when things broke down. Folks needing medical care that couldn’t pay. Victims of violence. Stressed out or addicted people. Worn-out old workers and beneath the working-class people. I worked the 3-11 shift, the busiest one in the ER. We’d typically get 50-70 such situations every shift. What could we do for them, right now, in our imminent place? Patch’em up. Give them a preliminary diagnosis and maybe a shot or some pills. Hand off a referral card to a medical system already fragmenting and requiring insurance levels of payment from various payers. Witness their deaths.
So those folks I worked with, who did this, were they racists? I’m not saying that. I can’t see into the hearts of them — not then, and not with any level of magnification now. I know we were frustrated with the people in and around the treatment beds at times, thinking that what’s close and in front of us was the most significant thing in what was going on. No, no, we’d no doubt say, that thought wasn’t from the color of their skin, that was what they did, or were doing, or weren’t doing. From what some of my coworkers said talking among our tired selves, I could hear racism, hear pat rationalizations. I’d be hearing this from folks on a modest paycheck given the responsibility of a past that isn’t even the past as Faulkner put it. Our actions were mostly care — yes I saw kindness too, even when our philosophies and capacities could not fully appreciate the lives of our patients and their families. Perhaps it was good that we were too busy to think about that incongruity. Would our care have been better if we — speaking now of the whole group of us, including myself — were less ignorant and more broadly empathetic? That’s certain. But such wiser folks weren’t there then, we were. Imperfection trying to heal what could be treated directly.
A couple of years before this, a songwriter was 40 miles to the north of me, goofing off with his Canadian R&B band buddies in a big pink house. Sing heavenly muse, he sang these lines:
Remember when you’re out there
Tryin’ to heal the sick
That you must always
First forgive them.”
To this day, when someone, almost always a white person, concludes some confession to me with a variety of the phrase “You might think I’m a racist because I said that.” I reply “You said it, and you might well be to some degree. So, what are you going to do about that, and about the situation that is before us?” Ignorance and prejudice may not guide us well in trying to solve things, to remedy faulty systems — so what efforts can reduce that so we can see more clearly? But beyond that, even though our thoughts and prejudices can make us work blindly or in the wrong direction, the injured and endangered may be more in need of helpful actions than faultless inner wisdom.
Is writing and performing poetry a helpful action? Well, it’s not clearly so as is binding wounds or performing CPR. Poetry is in the calling-attention business, including part I normally celebrate here as “Other People’s Stories.” With that focus, I feel conflicted in writing so much within this series which touches on individual and sometimes trivial things in my life. What good will calling those things to attention do? Perhaps it helps make you aware of the “unimportant” things in your life, or the dependencies we have in others who have broadened or deadened what we’ve seen and felt. It can be someone else’s story that helps you see the contours of your own story.
And then too, poetry is full of little, trivial things that poets write down to stand for the ineffable larger things. Can our lives stand for the larger things? They do I believe, or they can, in ways we never fully know.
Once more a chord sheet if you’d like to sing this too.
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The Emily Dickinson PoemEmily Dickinson has many poems where the small things stand for larger, and then she has others using more philosophical language — yet I was still struck by the first line of today’s Emily Dickinson poem. Poems sometime seek to grab your attention right at the beginning, and this one does that with a trinity: “Color — Caste — Denomination.” These things rule so much of our lives. We may think we don’t let them rule us, but then we see the next person is using them to guide them — or perhaps guide them in how they view us. How can that not affect us. How many next persons can there be without us sometimes being one of those next persons, or yielding to the next person in our lives?
A couple of short notes on things to mention in the poem since we’re running too long. Who’s a “Circassian?” It’s a Middle-Eastern Muslim-believing ethnic group largely exiled from their homeland by the old Russian Empire. “Caste” is a word given by Portuguese colonialists to a hereditary hierarchy they found in South Asia, but it has taken on new usage in modern America to describe the intertwined prejudices and discriminations based on skin color, ethnic background, religion, and economic class. Both terms show a breath in Dickinson’s reading and education. Even though Dickinson’s America was approaching or undergoing a war around race-based chattel slavery when this poem was written, Dickinson seems to give religious prejudice equal or greater weight in the “minuter intuitions” her poem holds that we use to obscure our common humanity. Some scholars have pointed to this poem as a comment on Irish-Catholic immigration in Dickinson’s region at this time which led to a substantial reaction from the existing Protestant settlers.**
My musical setting for it is simple, just guitar and voice, as I’m somewhat rushed for time — and then wanting to use what gifted time I find available when I can record acoustic guitar with open microphones that would otherwise pickup other noise. Though that may have been a practical reason, I think the simplicity works for this hymn from Dickinson’s alternative hymnal. You can hear my performance with the audio player below, or with this alternative, a highlighted link that will open a new tab with an audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Color-Caste-Denomination.mp3.
*Not doubting those stories — see the next note as we see that connect to Emily Dickinson. And I haven’t mentioned anti-Semitism in its Jewish and Muslim varieties. Or the ugly anti-Chinese laws and hate. Oh, and First Nations? I could go on. And that’s just America. I know I have an international readership. Other countries have their own varieties of this, as we’ll see too in Dickinson’s poem. We had all kinds of supposed levels of intelligence and moral fitness that bedeviled us then and now.
As I mentioned in one of my favorite posts on the roots of Emily Dickinson, her mid-19th century Amherst Massachusetts region had Afro-Americans, mostly in her time in servant class jobs. As she grew into adulthood, the Irish immigrant wave started to displace them, and anti-Irish sentiment ran high. Emily’s brother Austin, who she was close to, at least dabbled with the notorious anti-immigrant Know-Nothings. When young Austin was assigned to teach Irish immigrant kids in Boston, he found the job stressful. There’s a letter from his sister Emily where she jokes that it sounds so bad for him that he ought just as well to go and kill some of them, referencing in the same letter a notorious Boston murder case with anti-Catholic connections. Generously, I sense Emily the satirist there, but this kind of edge-lord humor, then as now, can just be “just joking” license as well. I think: Dickinson, for all her independence of mind, was part of systems, just as you and I are. Even Transcendentalism, the time’s new thought movement that sought to open up cultural enquiry, was not without racism and prejudice. Emerson’s “American Civilization” which I presented part of earlier here, and which is contemporary with this poem, contained portions with racist ethnography.
The most remarkable thing I can think of regarding Emily Dickinson and Irish-Catholic prejudice is that she ended up working elbow to elbow with Irish maids on her rural homestead that retained elements of its former farmhouse work-load carried with other poor first generation Irish immigrants as the hired help. The longest serving maid, Margaret “Maggie” Maher — did she recall Irish poetic bards and song? When Emily’s precious packets of her remarkable poems, overran a portion of a bureau drawer, Maggie offered up her immigrant’s trunk, in which she’d carried her all to America. When the Dickinsons decided they didn’t like the likeness in the oft-seen daguerreotype of Emily we rely on now, they tossed it out, and Maggie rescued it and kept it. Maggie worked beside Emily as she cared for her invalid mother during her prolonged illness, and she then cared for Emily as she lay dying. She was a loyal worker, but it’s said Emily told her to burn the poems. Then, she didn’t obey. When Mabel Loomis Todd was given the task of arranging the poems for posthumous publication, I read that Maggie did housework for Todd to free up her time for the editorial efforts.
And here’s the final thing, as final as death’s equivalence that today’s poem recounts. When Emily Dickinson died, she, this descendant of one of the town old-guard WASP leaders, asked that her coffin be carried by the Irish workers of her homestead. Aren’t you glad you read footnotes, patient reader? You can read a summary account I relied on for much of this in this academic paper available via JSTOR. It’s author Aife Murray expanded her research into this book, which I read a few years back.
I have a new audio piece today, combined with a continuation of my Parlando Project influences-as-episodic-memoir series. The audio piece uses text from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons — worthy in itself — but what suggested it was a question that reading about Stein brought to my mind during The Seventies when I started to look into her life and work a bit.
Despite being nothing like an expert on Stein, I could fill this post with stuff about what she did and how she went about doing it. I’m going to make a summary of that a footnote, though that’s worth reading if you know even less about her than I do.* There’s one detail from Stein’s life that hooks into my story as I entered The Seventies. I’ll come back to that. Watch for it.
In the last post I’d left college in 1970, disconnected in the aftermath of the political activism post Kent State and my failure as a young editor of my college’s student newspaper. I wrote of some musical and poetry experiences in the early Seventies there. Another thing was both continuous and changed at this point: I needed to find a job. This was continuous because I’d most always worked from my middle teens. I’d had paper routes, did odd jobs for the local bank, and besides my work in my second year with the school paper, I’d been what was called a “work-study” student working most days in the college cafeteria. Although it didn’t occur to me then, I suspect the more well-off students may have noticed that I was doing kitchen work while they were only concerned with regular college life, but this continuousness of work was ever more complete from the time I was 20 until I was past the age of 65. Another way to say that was that I worked full-time hours all those year with no more of a break than a worker’s vacation. After leaving college I worked frying hamburgers at a fast-food restaurant and on a factory floor making vertical blinds, but in 1971 I was back in my small Iowa college town looking for work. I went to a nursing home in the town, thinking they might have kitchen work. Instead, they asked if I wanted to work as an orderly/nurses aide.** I took that job.
So, if work was continuous for me, what was changed? In some expectations one is supposed to find one’s career in their 20s. I had decided earlier that I wanted to write. In some other lifetimes perhaps I would have found an entry-level writing job, in another I might have wandered into something with politics. I’m not sure however if those alternative livelihoods would have suited me, for reasons I may discuss later in this series.
My job in the nursing home was in the Extended Care Facility, the wing for those patients who needed more-or-less complete bodily care for the rest of their lives. Many were completely bedridden, and many of that portion also unable to communicate. I worked the overnight 11-7 shift with one RN. I’m guessing we had around 20 patients in the unit. Our night work was turning the incapacitated every four hours to prevent bed sores, to clean up the incontinent and their bed linen, and to occasionally minister to those who awakened, often with some level of anxiety and agitation. It was hard physical work, and I will confess that I let the physical work deaden me somewhat at first to the Sisyphean nature of their lives and my tasks with them.
If one has a lot of triangles to move from Iowa to New York…
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I moved to New York state to stay after a few months of that, carrying everything my wife and I owned in the bed of a rusty 1960 Chevy pickup truck that I’d purchased for $200 from my wages. The truck was so rusty that I could see the tires through holes in its floorboard, but other than a hydraulic clutch that would reengage itself if depressed too long, it ran OK in its rattly way. Back in New York I was living in a poor, mostly Black section of Westchester, renting a room from an elderly Mrs. Whitted who had a framed life-time membership certificate to the NAACP on her living room wall. I worked there first in another nursing home, a much fancier one in upscale Westchester, on the day shift this time. There were more staff there, but some elements of the care bothered me.*** Being low on the care system org chart I chose not to try to remedy that, and left for a job working on a med-surg floor at a Catholic hospital on the overnight shift again. The regular charge nurse on my floor was Miss Watson, a young highly competent Black Anglo-Jamaican with an impeccable English accent that would match a Sidney Poitier. We worked along with an LPN and at least one female aid (usually one of several Afro-Americans with a Great Migration southern-American accent) to complement my coverage of the male side of the patient census. I fully enjoyed working with Miss Watson. The most peculiar absurdity of her life that I got to observe was when patient relatives came in around the change to the morning shift after talking on the phone with Miss Watson. They’d assumed a starched-white Englishwoman, and so the recognition scenes when they arrived and saw her dark black skin always had me stifling a laugh. How much humor Miss Watson could consistently find in this might be another matter.
These orderly/nurse’s aide jobs paid a dime or so over minimum wage. The work was physically hard and even at its most basic levels it involved deep responsibilities all out of proportion to what it paid. Around this time, I came to embrace this necessary and underpaid work. It provided an inescapable, palpable, meaning to my life, something that struggling over a poem or prose draft could not demonstrate objectively. It allowed me access to all kinds of people in a wide range of economic classes and backgrounds. Occasionally, I thought of the members of my generation who served in the military, some drafted, and I told myself this was my service.
Eventually I moved up to Newburgh, New York, which will need to be another post. I worked my last overnight shift at the hospital and then I hitchhiked up to Newburgh at the end of my shift. I’d already gotten a job at St. Luke’s Hospital there in the Emergency Room. I’d work the 3-11 shift there the next day.
Are you waiting for Gertrude Stein to return? Here’s the connection. I can remember reading about the little Paris apartment she and her partner, edibles pioneer Alice B. Toklas, shared with Stein’s brother and a wall-smothering collection of Modernist art bought directly from artists that she knew, and the world would know later. It was there Stein lived from 1903 after leaving Johns Hopkins Medical School short of a medical degree.
As a time-travel destination that place is five-star. Artists, writers, critics, composers who once needed only to travel geographically to go there, wrote of it in their memoirs. A famous place.
Gertrude Stein in front of some of the Modernist paintings collected in her Paris apartment.
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You know what I thought reading of that apartment? Yes, there was wonder. How did they figure which artists to collect? He, she, they, all of them were there, people before the pronouns. So and so met so and so there? Hemmingway finding part of his prose style in this small apartment — and from a woman? But my most nagging thought? Something else, another question: “Who paid the rent?”****
Many (most?) writers have the ability to be motivated by that experience, though in reading I can tell some are, and others are not. I myself am inconsistent. I have written and performed poems here that the richest and most comfortable person in my time might have written or could easily relate to. And then again, I may overselect poems whose speakers are in extremis.
Some take a commercial-first approach to their art, making sure it earns the rent money. My nursing work from age 20 to nearly 40 illustrated a variety of life to me, but it also allowed me (with worries) to pay the rent.* Others take a cause-first approach, advocating with their art resolutely for remedies to what they see. Could my nursing work have reduced that aspect of my writing? That has just occurred to me. I’m not sure, though looking back I’m more at glad I didn’t have to point to my writing, and later my music, as what justified my life. And “Other People’s Stories?” Each day in the Emergency Room you’d meet up with other people’s stories. If your own were limited, or intractable, you could move their stories forward.
I had found a job that in those days allowed one to pay the rent. Inside that conceptual room, paid for by working with the sick and injured, I worked on the writing. And those years of unbroken work, of clock-in every working day, and rotating shifts? I suspect a habit retained as this Project approaches 700 pieces this year.
Today’s audio piece is from Gertrude Stein’s still controversial, still avant-garde, collection of “Cubist poems” Tender Buttons. That book is divided up into three sections: People, Objects, and Rooms. I performed the opening to the final section, Rooms today. Tender Buttons remains gnomic. Though the words themselves are plainspoken, a straightforward meaning is most often hard to make out. My performer’s working theory during the recording was that she’s making a statement about Modern Art and Cubism. Rather than a center and conventional panorama, Stein holds for more perspectives at once. She seems to be advocating for something not just decorative or the easy dessert of sentiment (“silver and sweet”). She sounds a “Life is real, Life is earnest” almost Longfellowean note when she says “A preparation is given to the ones preparing.” She perhaps compares a conventional painting with a center and a border to an empty dress, flat on a hanger. The final paragraph/stanza moves, synesthesia-wise, to music where the flowing facets of a Cubist painting may show a sequence of time.
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Though printed as prose, the musical rhythm and rhyme of this poem arises with any earnest effort to read it aloud. If one was to modify it to conventional lineation, parts might almost pass as Emily Dickinson, albeit the more obscure and compressed Dickinson.
You can hear my performance with a drums, bass, piano, and electric guitar quartet with the player gadget below. No graphical gadget? This highlighted link is an alternative way to hear it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Opening_To_Rooms.mp3.
These footnotes are going to be long, and are for the more curious. They’re not necessary to enjoy the audio piece.* Stein is easily classifiable as equal to Apollinaire and Ezra Pound (both of which she knew and interacted with) for influence on the emerging Modernist movement in the first quarter of the 20th century. Her influence on English language Modernist writing is not consistently admitted or admired, but her influence also extends to Modernist music — and along with her brother Leo, she’s absolutely central to the development and appreciation of Modern art.
The most amazing thing about her pre-Paris youth is that in a 19th century when women’s education and careers were constrained, she attended Radcliff (meeting, being mentored by, and admired by, William James) and then sought to become a medical doctor through graduate work at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Her center of interest was how the mind and its perceptions work, something she was studying at a time when Sigmund Freud had just started publishing. She dropped out of Johns Hopkins before graduating however.
**Job titles and even jobs listings were routinely gendered in 1970. Orderly was a male job, nurses’ aide the woman’s. Training for either was generally informal and on the job. Later in the Seventies I barely started an academic RN program, but affording the classes and especially the time and automotive costs of traveling to the nursing school put the brakes on that. Since I worked in teaching hospitals for over a decade after this as an aide hand-in-hand with nurses, interns, residents, and staff doctors, I learned a great deal of practical knowledge along the way. Administering medicine was not legally allowed, but I eventually did much of everything else the LPNs and RNs did. Afterwards, I always called what I did nursing, as it was a better description of my role for most of that decade-plus. In the middle 70s I helped in a small way to train early EMTs and given how much I liked the pace and variety of work in Emergency Rooms, I might have gotten into that line of work if I had come along a few years later.
The gendered job titles may have faded out as the Seventies progressed, but some of the work remained gendered. Despite having a poet’s level of athleticism and large muscle development, I was often called on to move or lift heavier patients, or to help restrain out-of-control people. Given how many stories there have been in recent years of people killed while being restrained (one in the news this month) I have wondered retrospectively if a different fate could have involved me in such a case. As things worked out, I never injured anyone while restraining them, though besides wear and tear I got a couple of minor injuries.
***I suspected a co-worker of patient abuse. I was new — they’d been there for some time. I had nothing concrete, and other longer-tenured coworkers thought they’d seen more, and that was part of my unease. A better person would have tried to organize a complaint and urge an investigation.
****Did you go to this footnote to find the answer? I’m not enough of a scholar to know all the details. Paris was dirt cheap then, there was some Stein family wealth, and the idea of artistically curious Americans of some means being gifted with broadening time abroad was common. Another Stein sibling, Michael, who also lived in Paris, has been cited as the man who handled the family finances there. The Stein bought-cheap-then paintings eventually became capital gains. At one later point someone noted a missing painting from the crowded apartment walls and Stein explained “We are eating the Cézanne.”
*I’m no economist, but it’s my understanding that rent and housing costs have risen compared to the wages that of job earns now. It’s not my intent to engage in a walk-uphill-both-ways misery Olympics, just to explain some things that led to making this Project. Has any economist explained how jobs like the ones I held then, which are physically hard, unpleasant in some elements, demanding of all-shifts work, are at least mildly dangerous, have a chronic shortage of workers (much less good ones), and can have a life-and-death level of need and responsibility, yet pay less than much easier jobs for which there is a surplus of applicants? In my last few years of hospital work I moved to being a ward-clerk: typing, paperwork, general workflow organization and support (all of which I did as a nurses aide, as well as patient care) —and I then got a small raise.
There’s a saying, oft shared with a wink among my post-WWII generation, “If you remember The Sixties, you weren’t there.” In many cases I think this misses its mark. The forgotten decade should be The Seventies. And this is not true just of that generation’s personal stories — while objectively the Seventies has just as many years and minutes as the preceding decade, there’s much less romance to it.
Earlier this spring I indulged in writing in a condensed yet round-about way about some influences that led me into creating the Parlando Project. To remind readers, I’d decided as a teenager that there was something attractive, even exalted, about poetry and this was entwined with an eclectic appreciation for music as a listener. Let me also be clear in summary about this: this was instinctive on my part, mysterious in that no one encouraged these interests.
Now more than 50 years later, these things are still somewhat beyond my understanding. I believe I have some ability to create phrases that seem a good shape and use for language, but I did not understand poetry all that well. Nor was I particularly well read. Even now, if one goes beyond poetry to novels, nearly everyone interested in literature has read more than I have. And poetry? My reading of contemporary poets was not extensive. My observation was that this was not so unusual in my generation of young aspirational poets then. Sure, we knew the greatest hits in the anthologies. A City Lights Ferlinghetti or Ginsberg might be on our shelf of books, maybe an e. e. cummings or a selected or collected here and there.* But at least among the non-upper echelon college creative writing students I crossed paths with, there was less reading of our contemporaries than I believe one would find currently.
Yet, on these small bits of evidence, I had decided that I was a poet.
Music? Note that I said “listening” above. Despite that single song I wrote on a borrowed guitar late in The Sixties, as I entered The Seventies I neither owned nor played an instrument. I was a howlingly bad singer, even more problematic than I am now. Therefore, my connection to music was as a listener.
As my story now enters The Seventies, what had changed there? Rock music in the Sixties and The Seventies shared many overlapping musical stars, and for those of my age, a likely compiled survey of greatest records would roughly balance in numbers between the two decades. But, somewhere around 1973 something had changed in the music scene —and it wasn’t merely the “27 Club” deaths. My own summary analysis, informed by reading a great many first-hand accounts written by others, was there was a change in drug usage. Heroin addiction wasn’t even the worst of it. Cocaine seems to have inflated egos and tasked musicians with a need to accumulate working capital to keep being famous and high. **
So much framing to start my Seventies condensed memoir —and yet incidents of my life to extract to explain the eventual Parlando Project from the early Seventies are slim! After the post-Kent State flame-out of my short college career and the associated failed college paper editorship, I ended up moving to New York. I hung out at colleges with my peers sometimes, though college for credit was an Eden I was exiled from. I got married, another story too complex, and too peripheral to the eventual idea of the Parlando Project. Still, I can think of three things in the first half of The Seventies that connect somehow to the Project.
I hung out for a season with a college radio station at Westchester Community College. Though the “radio” part was limited to wired connections to audio speakers on the grounds, the students worked to do their best to portray the newly expanded playlists on FM radio. New promotional records came in constantly, expanding what music I would have been able to afford to hear. One young host I hung out with had an informed interest in and programmed contemporary Jazz records. Other students taught the student DJs how to slip cue vinyl LPs on the turntables, which I found fascinating. The hosts worked their own basic but serviceable board to mix in the records or their mics. I gained appreciation for the perfect segue or flow in a set of cuts. Once in a while since, I’ve thought of an alternative, hip-hop or club DJ infused life I might have developed. Didn’t happen, though I later got to watch radio on another level.
Here’s the second story: when I had enough money free, I enrolled in an American literature class at SUNY New Paltz and lucked into the classroom of H. R. Stoneback. I recall one class were Stoneback asked us what relationship music, and folk poetry and music, might have with literary poetry, the very question I deal with in this Project now. He continued examining some points while playing an acoustic guitar. He was also the person who first informed me that many Emily Dickinson poems could be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
This last one is a more peripheral story, but it connects. At another non-enrolled college situation I was ghostwriting a column and stories in the school newspaper ostensibly under the name of the woman I would marry, who was an enrolled student there. Now I’m not sure if the student newspaper editor was enthralled by the writing or his more carnal desires to sleep with the young woman, which he eventually did. He also edited the school’s student literary annual. I got the wild idea to see how many poems I could publish in it. I grabbed my portfolio of poems I had written at this point, retyped up some of those poems on a variety of typewriters attributing them to various assumed names, and submitted them. As I still do, I wrote in several styles, further establishing the numerous poets as plausibly different people. When the annual came out, I was around a third of the issues’ selected poems, and one was singled out for an award by an English department professor. He couldn’t find the student. “Did anyone know him?” he asked around.
That last story in itself, like many a good poem, has several facets to gleam or blind you. I could explore those — but perhaps I, the author of the scheme and the telling, has a distorted or glare-obscured view. What is it I draw from that tale, that might apply to this Project? I enjoy variety. I enjoy not being myself, and I often am most accepted when I am not myself.
I recall writing this sitting in a old college classroom building, not sure what it was to be about, but knowing the poor condition of the brick tuck pointing. 7 years later in the ‘70s,, I made it into the song the title says it could be.
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I’ll continue later here with another post on how The Seventies developed for me — but let’s honor this Project with a musical piece. Today is the anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s death, so maybe I should honor her and Professor Stoneback? Shame, not enough time after so much writing about myself. How about an example of one of the kinds of poems I was writing then? I looked through old recordings digitized from cassette tapes, and found this one from the 1990s which is an example of one type of poem I wrote near the end of The Sixties and set to music in the later Seventies. It’s a different gothic sensibility from Dickinson, and I may have been starting to show an interest in French Symbolists, though I don’t recall reading them until later in The Seventies. It’s called “Branched Song.” Graphical player for many below. No player? This is an alternative link to open a tab with a player in it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Branched_Song_2023_Remaster.mp3.
*Note these poets, while alive during The Sixties, were obviously much older than my cohort, but they were also for the most part post the textbox canon inclusion line. Frost, Eliot, Sandburg, Wallace Stevens made it under the wire for the tail-end of the canon in the Sixties, though all but Stevens were still living in The Sixties. Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, were special cases, maybe there or not, though I recall seeing them first in textbooks in that decade. I did read, as did some others of my generation, Richard Brautigan and Leonard Cohen, who like the Beats were not considered canonical then. But both of those “young” poets were born in The Thirties. I also read poets in the New York School, particularly Frank O’Hara (born in The Twenties!). Black Arts and Afro-American poets came into my ken later in The Seventies. Note also, how scarce-to-none were the women. Not even Millay, who my father knew and read.
**”Rock” was a tag that started to be used in later Sixties to separate “serious” popular music from what was felt then to be the merely commercial and only incidentally and accidently artistic “Rock’n’Roll.” This transition is a complex subject, and it can’t be reduced to a footnote. Rock was open to a variety of influences then, but it was also far whiter and therefore less American than Rock’n’Roll.
And here’s a question that could be debated at length. Would the music changes have happened without then-illegal drugs? And even if something like the Rock transition happened, would it have been as wide-ranging and open to altering expectations? But beyond the Sixties’ evidence on those questions, the Seventies says there’s a rat-train of pipers to be paid. Another imaginary question: if everyone magically went into rehab in 1972, how much better would later Seventies music and what followed on have been?
This month, as I wondered what poem to explore through setting it with music, a voice — my voice from a portion of myself — often spoke up. “You still have sheets of poems by Kevin FitzPatrick that you typed-up after he died, ones you thought you might perform.”
This week I finally listened to myself.
In my studio space I have a short stack of those sheets, printed out when I thought I might perform them around a year ago. I picked this one up. I had scribbled some chords on it, and I now tried to recall what melody I’d planned over those chords on a day last spring when Dave Moore and I performed things we recalled of Kevin and Kevin’s poetry. That spring day, I had reordered and reduced that stack as the two of us alternated suggesting musical pieces. This one was shuffled to the bottom then. Had I not felt I had finished the composition? Could be. More likely? From what I could see on the page, it had more chord changes than things which work best when I hand them to Dave and he has to try to follow my eccentric phrasing in real-time.
I picked up a guitar and started running through the chords, trying to discover, or rediscover, a likely tune. In doing so I made a few alterations and after an hour or so of that, I sat at my acoustic guitar recording location in my studio space and performed the guitar and voice tracks of the song you can hear below. As I played, I was thinking of Kevin and some full measure of retirement, that as it turned out, he didn’t get.
But then, none of us know what we’ll get. Part of the reason I have had a rapid release schedule over the years with the Parlando Project — its get-it-down-and-move-on-to-the-next pace — is that factor. Not only do I skip over additional steps toward perfection, the amount of things released probably wears some listeners out. Though somewhat more talented, my fellow studio-rat Prince used to get pushback from his record company that he should trim back his output, that it was too much, bad for his career and their business. Well, should he have waited? Did he get enough time?
More playing with Adobe Firefly, the AI art generator that claims to not use uncompensated artists’ work.
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Like most of Kevin’s poetry, his poem “Thinning Shade” doesn’t call out for my extemporaneous insights to direct the attention of readers. But while going through the process of composing the music and going over the performance, the poem did get deeper for me as it repeated in my ear. I see myself as his sparrows and that “fattening squirrel,” “pouncing on seeds…in fussy haste.…”
Extending Robert Hunter: Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills/One squirrel gathers what the fussy bird spills. Great analysis of the song “St. Stephen” linked here.
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You can hear my performance of Kevin FitzPatrick’s poem as a song with the link below. As the poem reaches it’s volta, I decided to slow down and add a string sextet to my guitar accompaniment. You can hear it with the player gadget below. No player you can see? You haven’t missed your chance at gathering the seeds, there’s this backup link that will open an alternative player in a new tab.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Thinning_Shade.mp3.
Interested in reading more of Kevin FitzPatrick’s poetry? His books are available at this site, KevinFitzPatrickPoetry.com that I’ll link here.
What I’ll write about today’s piece might be needlessly complex. I’ll try not to take too much of your time so you can get to the simple performance of the poem below and you can decide.
The usual job of a critical essay on a poem or other work of art is to explain how something works and doesn’t work, usually making use of, or in the context of, criteria for artistic value. Within these efforts, the spread of essays praising or condemning a poet, poem, or poems is maintained. There’s no contradiction here. How can there be good art if we don’t have bad art? Judgments, pointing out good and bad, are equally creative, just as when we are writing and revising ourselves.
Is this a critical essay? I’m not sure it is. Instead, I think of these pieces of prose as short notes about my experiences with the texts, nearly always literary poems, as I combine them with music and perform them. And in the case of today’s audio piece using Kenneth Patchen’s “Instructions for Angels” my experience so contradicts what criteria I believe I have that it calls into question that I have them or really believe in them.
What do I think are the things I look for in a successful poem? First, I think poetry is musical speech. “Instructions for Angels” is free verse, something formalists take as problematic. I doubt I’m a formalist. I admit the effects of rhyme and meter, but my musical sense admits also that the amount of symmetry and regularity can and should vary. There’s some underlying da DUM da DUM iambic back-beat feel here in Patchen’s poem, that King James version 17th century English thing that can itself now feel overused or overfamiliar. But familiarity is not always bad, no more than regularity in structure. “Instructions for Angels” does clearly use one musical feature: the refrain. Perhaps this is what drew me to it when skimming through a book-length selected poems looking for what would be good to set with music. I’m not alone in choosing this poem. I’ve found several other musical settings online.
Today’s piece is easy enough to play on guitar, so guitarists have at it.
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I do think we too often confuse imagery with poetry’s essence, praising coded word-play rather than word-music. But imagery is a more abstract version of word music isn’t it? That this-is-like-that, or things arrayed in an as-above-so-below manner is an intellectual harmony. The intervals and combinations are pleasing as audible music is. “Instructions for Angels” is plainsong in this regard. Yes, I suppose angels and God have a certain majesty, but as a recent coronation reminds us, tired pomp can bore quickly. The rest of the poem is full of threadbare, generalized counters isn’t it? “pretty girl,” “red mouth,” “baby,” “beautiful,” “rain,” “snow,” “flowers,” “trees,” “winds,” and “fields.” If one looks for fresh and arresting imagery this poem doesn’t seem to have it. If I was revising this poem or it was being workshopped, it would be easy to imagine changing a few of those general terms to more specific ones. I can see someone asking “But Ken, what flower exactly do you like? Give us the name so we can see it.”
How about a poem’s message? Shouldn’t that count for something? Yes, I think it should, yet over the ages critics can worry that worthy messages are too common, too cheap — or that art for art’s sake has judged any meaning as secondary. Writing in the 1930s Patchen was often reacting to a Modernism that was too inhuman, too concerned with form, and too unconcerned with the fates of its readers. I sense the present pendulum has once more swung and we are now again asking poems to tell us worthy things, and for the poets to be worthy people. I should be happy, yet I’m not always happy with poems on the right side of the issues. I wouldn’t like it if that was all the poetry I read and sing. Am I just cursed with contrariness? Should I note here that Patchen’s pacifism continued throughout WWII? That was a contrary position and not helpful to his poetic career at the time.
If a poem’s message is important, shouldn’t it be as clear as prose about saying it? How obscure can or should poetry be? Again, poems and critics differ on this, but there’s a consensus that a poem shouldn’t be harder to understand than it has to be.
That “has to be” is a broad thing however. Proponents of exciting and fresh images and language will say beauty and skill allows indirection, ambiguity is true to life, a little, even a lot, of mystery can compel, and that irony combats blandness and tiresome cliché. The greatest benefit of workshopping poems, or at least second readers, is for a poet to find out they are sometimes unintentionally obscure.
One could say that “Instructions for Angels” is clear. But on first and later readings, even into my performance, there was one small thing that was less than clear and more at odd. We don’t have to wait long for it: the first sentence says “Take the usual events/For your tall.” “The usual events” is clear, it’s a statement of purpose for the everyday and common that Patchen will praise as the poem continues. But “tall?” It looks like a typo. I could make more immediate sense if it was “tale,” “tail,” “toll” or “tell.” Is Patchen saying “Angels pass this info up (way up,* like to heaven) the chain?” A phrase soon to come, “Blue weather,” is fine, and there is some nice ambiguity there: blues or blue skies? Patchen returns and expands that image with “The weather in the highest soul” indicating he intends that ambiguity.
So where does that leave me, all this applying of what I think and have been taught to understand might constitute a “good poem?” In my present, poems have two states: ones that interest me, often because I can see performing them; and then, the ones I skip over. It may not be the fault of the poet or their poem that I skip them — that poem just doesn’t exist with me in my moment. I’m not totally without criteria, some things I can predict, but this poem is an example of a poem that met me emotionally in my moment, the place where some poems live while others are undressed tombstones. Is Patchen’s poem technically perfect? Unlikely, but there’s a ruined recording take were I just started crying a bit as I tried to sing.
I don’t believe every poem needs to do that. Pleasure in the words, images, and music of some other poems will make them live for me. Amazement at virtuosities can compel at times. If every poem in the world was like “Instructions for Angels,” I’d be a rebel angel, and crawl into a John Ashbery volume and never come out. As it is, I’d instruct the angels to not poop on my head and to pass it up the line that I’m grateful for Kenneth Patchen.
You can hear my performance of “Instructions for Angels” with the graphical player below. No player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with one.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Insructions_for_Angels.mp3.
I have a scanned pdf of the published collection presumably OK’d by Patchen, but the typo theory remains possible. Patchen was recorded reading some of his poems, sometimes with music. That would answer this doubt, but as far as search goes I haven’t found him reading this* poem.
It’s usually of little use for an artist to apologize for their work, and this is so even though most have self-doubts. Perhaps more so, women artists will speak about “imposter syndrome,” but I’d guess that many/most male artists have the same feelings, they just don’t talk about it. The plain fact is that we’re all pretending to be what we want to be, to go to the place we want to go to. We maybe get there, we maybe don’t — but we’re all traveling, and we all get lost sometimes.
I even have trouble with the word “pretentious.” I say that, though I know the problem that word is describing: the embarrassing failure where something doesn’t achieve what it clearly wants to achieve. It’s just that most good, and nearly all great art, starts out with exactly that urge: to make something better, to make it new, to stretch and extend the maker’s talents, to make something over the horizon from what the artist knows. Since the same urge produces success and failure, it’s not the urge or the hubris that’s the problem. Don’t beat yourself up over that urge, don’t beat your breast over the failures. Reflexive humble-brag is exceedingly boring. If you must, get through any of that quickly. One of my animating maxims is “All Artists Fail.” As I’ve written about that maxim extensively here, that paradoxically comforts me.
I’m not an expert on Kenneth Patchen, but the general impression I get from him is like a 20th century American William Blake, that he self-invented himself and his credentials, and that’s easy for me to admire. I spent much of this week looking for a poem, a text, that would inspire me, and shake me out of some creative doldrums; and after striking out both swinging and looking during several at bats inside several books, I came upon this one. Since the text of this Kenneth Patchen poem doesn’t appear to be available to link, here it is:
One can think on the statement that “death is something which poems must be about.” That’s sort of true, and I laugh at it.
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It doesn’t appear to have a title in the early Selected Poems volume I found it in, but the first line was used as such when Patchen was recorded reading it. The poem is read unaccompanied, but Patchen predated the Beats in doing the mid-century poetry with music thing that’s an inspiration to me. He reads it slowly, precisely. I hear it silent on the page as more anguished in its effect, and in trying to record a performance of it this week I first tried almost shouting out parts of it. After trying that I decided that wasn’t working, and tried a more understated take — only to find that my voice was horse from the earlier takes. I did my best in the time I had, and that’s the performance you can hear today.
“She had concealed him” seems to be using something of a collage of voices. Not so directly as a Patchen favorite of mine “Do the Dead Know What Time It Is,”but the opening seems like the start of a fairy tale, then there are bits of realistic daily speech, and then the fantastic metaphor of the poems final lines. As so often in Patchen poems, there’s a sense not so much that God is love, but that Love is god.
The music today makes use of some concepts of mine that are, to convention and many listeners, wrong. I like the rub of outside notes and grotesque melodic contours.* Rather than having a straightforward harmonic foundation below a singular or a mathematically related set of melody notes, I’m fond of twined melodic lines that respond or contrast in turns with each other. And as an electric guitar player accompanying singers or poetic readers, I clearly don’t know when to shut up and not play my guitar. This last one I might change, perhaps should change, but in the immediacy of the playing moment I’m believing that strong words, read with force, are able to stand toe-to-toe with electric guitar.
Frankly, I worry that the resulting musical performance may have too much of all of the above. Is that from a failure of nerve, or a failure of execution? Am I reflexively using old habits, not stretching out to something else? Well, I meant what I played, meant my reading performance of Patchen** — but meaning and intent didn’t allay my doubts. Yesterday I made four completed attempts to mix this. With my self-expected release schedule and time conflicts, it’s rare to go beyond two alternate mixes. I still decided to let the music continue for a bit more than an extra minute past the reading, because I liked the echoing musical conversation in the deep dark cave.
And there’s this perspective: all that is just one musical mode here. I have other pieces that are less cluttered, more accessible, and less contrary to expectations.
Returning to the thoughts of the opening of this post: the middle parts of what I write today are parenthetical and not something I want to take more of your time with. Non-paralyzing self-analysis is likely uninteresting to readers or listeners, but it can be effective as part of the journey of making art. I’m done trying to make this piece any better. I think the best moments that I hear in it and what Patchen wrote may be worth your time. My job with this Project is to move onto the next piece, to see what I can find and do with that. Thank you for reading and listening. The player gadget to hear the musical performance of Kenneth Patchen’s “She had concealed him” is below for many, and this highlighted link is there for the others.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/She_had_concealed_him.mp3.
More than once, what I play has been characterized as out of tune or dissonant. Some of that is timbral, and some of it is wide vibrato, but often it is* note choice and sequence. I don’t always hear it that way. I think harmony has rules, that can be broken or bent, but there’s propriety there. But melody? Melody is free. Yes, I’ll acknowledge that certain melodic contours generally cause admirable effects, but I myself am easily bored with stock moves. Two bands I admire, Television and the Velvet Underground, were each said to have banned playing Blues riffs that were part of the expected electric guitar vocabulary. I on the other hand, and in today’s piece for example, am playing Blues expression (stinky, funky notes and wide vibrato) without the expected sequence.
I think the opening electric guitar chord today was likely a subconscious attempt to refer to the chord at the opening of Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac version of his “Black Magic Woman,” and Green’s Fleetwood Mac was another band like the combo I constructed for today’s piece that tried to find room for an overplus three-electric-guitar frontline. That band’s Live at the Boston Tea Party set is foundational to me.
**I felt my earlier more histrionic reading was less effective and my more resigned reading better and more true to the poem, not a retreat.
I asked the teenager if they had any ideas for a poem I could use for May Day, the international labor day. She thought for a minute and then said, “Well there’s one, but it’s from a video game.”
Have I intrigued you? Perhaps only the unusual folks who follow this project might be. May Day. Video game? Poem? Maybe even: teenager? Every one of those things are keywords that might drop readers. Add that your author is an old guy, one not very hip to video games, and I don’t know how many are still reading by this paragraph.
Still here. Good — because the poem is excellent, and we’ll get to it in a moment. First, a short summary of the context it came from. The video game is titled Night in the Woods.It’s now around 5 years old, and it seems to this outsider to have an unusual premise: it revolves around teenagers and their peer relationships in a declining industrial town of Possum Springs. There’s a mystery to be solved, at least after a fashion, but the richness of the characters and their milieu makes it more a novelistic experience than a puzzle escape room or series of mini to macro baddies to battle. Oh, and did I mention that the characters are anthropomorphic animals?
Sound cute? Well, here we go with opposites again. Mental illness and violence are part of the world. Nancy Drew Case-Of… or PBS Kids style animal parables this isn’t. Our main characters are teenagers, and yet the weight of this world is on them — and the world, despite the fantastic elements, is our world, set in the declining rural America inhabited not by animated animal-faced kids but by a gig economy and our new-fangled robber barons.
The poem is spoken in the game by a minor character — in the nomenclature of game mechanics, a non-playable character — a spear-carrier in this small-town opera. I’m told she appears in various episodes as the game proceeds, speaking funny little poems while the foreground, playable characters, deal with weightier things. As she starts to read this, it’s not clear from the opening words that this poem isn’t just another little sideways humorous piece of verse.
It’s not. Yes, the people in it, the working class this May Day is ostensibly for, are counted as small, but the poem builds in its litany of smallness increasing, of inequality compounding. At the end the poet-character finishes stating her dream of justice. In that night dream, she’s alone, and that’s why it’s a dream — and will always be a dream on those terms. A century ago when the Wobbly songwriter Alfred Hayes dreamed he saw the dead Joe Hill, Joe Hill tells him to organize. When Martin Luther King said “I have a dream” he was standing in front of thousands who’d say it with him. That’s why we have a May Day.
Here’s the poem presented as the chord sheet that I performed it from today, credited to the fictional character in the game. Best as we can figure, the actual authors of the game’s dialog and therefore this poem are Bethany Hockenberry and Scott Benson.* The chords listed show the chords I was fingering on guitar, but I had a capo on the first fret in this recording, so they sound a half-step higher. The main reason I’ve been presenting these chord sheets is that while I do my best in my rapid production schedule on these pieces, I figure others out there might do a better job with this. One person singing a song is a performance. The second is a cover version. More than that, and it might be a folk song!
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To hear my performance there’s an audio player below. Player not there? Then this highlighted hyperlink will open a new tab with its own audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Theres_No_Reception.mp3.
*They have no connection with this performance, other than the eloquence of the words impressing my daughter and then myself. Apologies in that I hurried to do this for May Day and haven’t contacted them.
The end of U. S. National Poetry Month is approaching and there are things I meant to get done (and didn’t) this year, but the last day of April is also International Jazz Day, and I can’t let that go by without a piece to celebrate. Poetry Month and Jazz Day — shouldn’t that be a piece of Jazz Poetry read in front of a Jazz combo?
I looked around the house and didn’t find one. Not the Jazz poem, it was easy for me to think of Langston Hughes, one of the originators of the form, and find a poem of his, “Jazzonia” that I didn’t perform when I celebrated his book The Weary Blues a couple of years ago.
No, it’s the Jazz combo that’s missing. Not in the garage, not in my studio space, not under the table in my office amidst that messy pile of stuff. Not in my phone’s contacts list. None marching down the street in my city too northern and cold for Mardi Gras. Oh sure, there are a couple of Jazz clubs in town, and local musicians who can play Jazz, but I don’t know them. I’ve handed out Parlando demos to a couple over the past few years, and heard nothing, which may indicate politeness around my audacious use of my limited skill-set — and that would be right. I can sort-of hang with a Jazz feel on a good day with guitar as long as I’m under control of the context,* but Jazz isn’t about tightly controlling the context. It’s about surprise, about flexible chops that fit with a multitude of things.
So, I went about doing my best with what I had at home. I have a little device I use to practice instead of a metronome. It lets one play-in a set of chords in rhythm, and then generating from the form you play a drum and bass track following the harmonic material in tempo you’ve given it. It’s a fine quick practice tool, but I’ve only used it a couple of times here for public Parlando Project pieces.
I prefer to put in work on the digital drum tracks, adding hand percussion, even playing a real ride cymbal I collected from a neighbor a few years ago, editing the hits and beats on drum patterns — but I let that go this time. The machine had supplied a serviceable walking bass part, I let that stand as well. I played the guitar part in a single pass after warming up. I had to duck out a couple of egregious clams, but it represents one of my good guitar days.
In the whirling cabaret, guided robots and human jazzers play for Poetry Month and Jazz’s Day.
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Looking at Hughes’ poem (full text here) I see that he specifies there’s six Jazz players in his poem’s combo. If I count my reading at the mic as a player, that got me up to four, including the two robots on bass and drums. So, I next checked out my naïve piano skills. I was pleased with a couple of little motifs I came up with. My repetition with under-elaboration of those motifs marks this piece as more of the simplified “Soul Jazz” emanation*** than a hardcore blowing session. That’s OK with me, I liked those records. For the sixth and final musician, I played some vibraphone over MIDI from my little plastic keyboard.
The above account may have convinced too many readers to not listen to the result, but for a one-day-wonder I think it came out pretty well. It’s a little longer than most pieces I present, but that lets its relaxed celebration grow on you if you’re receptive. The audio player gadget to hear it is below for many, and this backup highlighted link is for those that don’t see that.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Jazzonia.mp3.
*One thing my town once had, and I now miss, was the May Day parade that happened each year in my neighborhood. Elaborate giant puppets, kids on decorated bicycles, dancing troops, folks on stilts or riding on fantastic creations, and usually more than one amateur shambling marching band with a touch of second -line New Orleans flavor. Alas, lack of funds and what seems to be a case of sectarian infighting has stopped this annual event. I did some videos of this while it was still a going thing. You can see some here, here, and here.
**Jazz guitar is much about chord chops, something I’m embarrassingly bad at. Similarly, advanced Jazz harmony will confuse me quickly if I try to understand it in real time. Luckily, with this Project I usually get to be the composer and bandleader, so I work with myself the player to do what I can accomplish.
*You’re still here reading the footnotes? Good, this probably should have been the main thing in this post. Langston Hughes’ long life and immediate and lasting appreciation for Jazz meant that he could write about and be influenced by early Jazz when Dixieland was fresh, and then he continued to dig it, incorporate it, and perform his poetry with Jazz musicians in the post-WWII years. So even though Hughes wrote “Jazzonia” about 1920’s Jazz, he lived long enough that he could have performed it more in the mid-century bag I experienced then and sought to manifest today.
What’s extra cool about how Hughes presented the still emerging Jazz of the 1920s in “Jazzonia” is that he sees it already as part of a continuum from the African Garden of Eden, and then via Cleopatra, and through Harlem Renaissance — so it’s no surprise his Jazz, and Jazz itself, can keep on reformatting itself into new ways of expression. The honesty I shared regarding this audio piece above? It’s part of living the Musician’s and Composer’s Prayer: “May music find a way.”
We mentioned Emily Dickinson in our last post, and it’s time to return to this essential American poet during this National Poetry Month. I saw this charming poem of hers earlier this week and thought I might be able to do something with it.
Over the years here I’ve delved into some of the more cryptic Dickinson poems, but her poem beginning “The things we thought that we should do” is reasonably clear on first reading, at least until you get to the end. Here’s a link to the poem’s text if you’d like to read along. This three-stanza poem uses exactly one rhyme, which helps its flow stick together, appropriate for a poem about how our lives sometimes seem to take us down one track that we never get around to changing. Our inability to shape our lives to what we think we should do is the first stanza’s statement. The second puts the untaken should-path and compares it to travel, or rather not traveling. Dickinson was often portrayed as homebound — though an examination of her life says she traveled more than many women of her time — but I think this is more metaphor than memoir. This stanza ends with the idea that one may then pass on the untaken task of some travel to a “son.” This may be legal language sneaking into Dickinson again,* but I also wonder if she’s punning on “sun,” since she has elsewhere used the day as a miniature measure of a lifetime. If so, she’s saying we think we’ll do these should-things tomorrow, or in the sense of generations following us, in another lifetime.
Poetry? Law? Poetry? Law? Screw it! I’m going to go outside and putter in my garden.
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The last stanza is the response, the turn, the summing up. It starts out: If we haven’t been disciplined enough to do our shoulds, we likely won’t get our restful reward in heaven. And then the last line “But possibly the one —” Ah, the Dickinson dash, that little transition — but wait, there’s no more text. It ends on the dash!
This is ambiguous, and her syntax is jumbled. Did she not complete the poem, is this an unfinished draft? Or did she want the thoughtful reader to come up with the resolution that’s not stated, but derivable from the situation: that there’s a heaven even for those not doing all the shoulds, all the time? When she writes “possibly the one” is she saying that there’s only possibly one heaven, but she’s not certain — or even, that the heaven one finds outside the shoulds is plausibly the one?
I was able to bring together the music and performance for this one quickly, which was necessary since I’ve spent the past two days taking care of a computer failure over on my spouse’s desk. But I should — no, it’s not a should, it’s a desire — get another piece posted this April. So, acoustic guitar, piano, standup bass, and just a taste of celesta were called into play to realize the music that unusually is made up of mostly major 7th chords. You can hear it with the graphical player gadget below, or if that’s not there, with this backup, a highlighted link that will open a new tab with an audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Things_We_Thought.mp3.
*I’m increasingly noticing that Emily Dickinson, growing up in a multigenerational family of lawyers, seems to have picked up a fair amount of legalese. As a woman in her time, she couldn’t take up the family trade, but her mind enjoys playing around with the concepts such as ceding a should obligation to another as if in a treaty or a property transfer.
When reading this poem, I also think of psychiatrist Karen Horney’s “Tyranny of the Shoulds” — and in this manuscript version linked here, it looks like Dickinson had considered “tyranny” in place of the version we have with “discipline.”
The early 20th century American Modernist poets I often feature in this project were born in the 19th century. What American poets could they look to as their influences while they developed the poetry that rapidly re-shaped English language poetry? The answer/list for American American-Modernist influences is surprisingly short, and as a result these poets looked to writers from outside the United States. A summary list would include the early 19th century British Romantic poets and those still emulating that style in the UK. French writers got attention (even those French writers who had been influenced by American writers). Classical poets were still part of the British influenced education system, so like Shakespeare the turn of the century Americans might have gotten “some Latin and little Greek” in school.
What are we left with for home-team poets? Poe, that formative poète maudit? Not much — even though his influence on some of the French writers was there second-hand. Dickinson? Less than some now may imagine in our age where she is considered a giant of American poetry. Dickinson was not significantly published in the mid-19th century, and so she was, at least on the printed page (beginning in the 1890s) a near contemporary of the Modernists. So, for our early Modernists at the beginning of the 20th century, Dickinson was considered more often as a new, interesting oddity than as the canonical mainstream. Longfellow, the massively successful American poet whose own roots lay in recasting European language poetic forms to American English? It is to laugh. Did even Vachel Lindsay or Carl Sandburg, the most populist and public minded of early Modernist era American poets ever dare to tip their hats to him? I haven’t seen it if they did, as Longfellow was already beneath contempt. Sandburg and the Black American Modernists like Fenton Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Bennett did look to Afro-American Spirituals, Blues, Jazz lyrics and forms, but like Dickinson this influence would become greater later in the 20th century than it was in the first part. That leaves us with Whitman, who “broke the new wood,” as Ezra Pound put it, with his free verse, his hardly subtext eroticism, his ostensibly personal I-am-the-one-who-wrote-these-lines voice, and his poetry of mystical optimism.
Today I’m going to perform a poem by the only poet whose pioneering interests and corresponding influence are plausibly greater than Whitman — and not just because he was a direct influence on Whitman and Dickinson: Ralph Waldo Emerson. You can trace Emerson’s spirit in 20th century (and 21st century) American poetry not by his poetic tactics (he was often a mediocre-to-awkward poet) but by his underlying world-view, one that helped form a widely influential New Thought movement in the United States called Transcendentalism.
What did Transcendentalism give American poetry?*
- Individualism and equality of office. Every person’s soul has an equal potential to receive important revelations and insights. From the start this included women and eventually it included all ethnic backgrounds and races.
- The Book of Nature is the scripture. Nature isn’t just a decorative metaphor — it’s the revelation of all that is.
- The job of poetry is not just to be beautiful, it’s to instruct. Transcendentalists didn’t do irony that much and they almost never took to the poète maudit stance. That is not to say that it didn’t have stoic threads* in its weave, or that its optimism was unbounded.
- America is not only, maybe not even primarily, an Atlantic continent. It’s also a Pacific one. We should be open to China, India, Japan, et al as artistic and philosophic influences.
That last one is shown distinctly in today’s piece, a poem of Emerson’s from 1856 that shows he’s been deep into the Hindu Mahābhārata** — something I haven’t been. Reading Emerson’s poem to prepare for composing my music and performing it, I’m as lost as an ordinary someone listening to a Tolkien adept, or as a father listening to my daughter talk anime or Homestuck. My research says that many of the stories in this Hindu scriptural epic deal with wars and wars between gods — and that behind it all, though not usually as an active part, is Brahma, the maker of the universe, who, as Emerson’s poem tells us, is above and beyond such struggles. The poem final line, “Find me, and turn thy back on heaven” then says that all else, even some heavenly reward or alliance, is illusion — that nature, the all that is, Brahma’s abode, is the highest revelation.
Influencer. “Hey, @Fuller, @Thoreau, and @Alcott — this easel thing is a great lifehack for reading Indian sacred literature.
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My musical performance is available below with a graphical audio player. The acoustic guitar composition here is within another Asian and Afro-American influenced musical style, one that its founder called “American Primitive.” I’m not fond of that label, but John Fahey meant it in the sense that it looks to show a direct experience in the music, not that it was unsophisticated or ham-handed. In my case the pork-fingers are a risk, but it fits Emerson’s text (linked here) well. No player visible? This highlighted link is your alternative way to hear my performance.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Brahma.mp3.
*Note to readers: I am not a scholar of American literary history, just a curious visitor who writes about my exploration. I’m not an expert on Transcendentalism either. I could be wrong in details or significance in today’s post, or with many others here. All this is offered as “It seems to me (sometimes).”
**Dickinson, who may have been a Transcendentalist, and certainly was familiar with its precepts, does have access to a side-eyed, darkly humorous at times, irony.
***Robert Frost, the stoic, seems to have a deep and dark reading of the Book of Nature which he shared with his British friend Edward Thomas.
**By later in the century, we began to take for granted that South Asian and Japanese religion, philosophy, and art are available for American poetry, while Emerson was there at the beginning. I’d expect the non-Asians, however well-meaning, to misunderstand some of it, even as they appropriate it — but then I’d assume some Asians misunderstand, or differ in their understandings, too. Yankee Emerson was one of the first here, and I have no standing to discuss what he got egregiously wrong or surprisingly right. Let me also note since this is cruel April, that T. S. Eliot, a half-century after this Emerson poem was published, took to studying Indian religion in college, dropping his own samples from Hindu and Buddhist scripture into the Modernist landmark “The Waste Land” while still an expatriate American.
I’m taking a break today from telling some stories of discovering my own influences, and through them the possibility of this project combining words (mostly poetry) with original music. Instead, let’s return to one of this Project’s themes “Other People’s Stories.” Today’s piece is by William Carlos Williams, and it tells a story of a morning for a 30-something young father. The mood this poem is coming from is ambiguous on the page: it could be read as joyful, even if gently self-mocking, or it could be seen as an earnest Whitmanesque celebration. Since the poems here are performed — and more so, performed in the emotional environment of music — I had to make a choice of mood. I think it’s wistful, and I took that choice largely from the short song the poem tells us the poem’s speaker sings in the midst of it.
Parenthood, particularly first parenthood, is often a very significant life event. The urge to have a child, to reproduce in the emotionless language of biology, can be partly an expression of the parents seeking to extend and duplicate themselves. The reality of the child and child-rearing, conversely, is to reign in one’s autonomous self. Depending on one’s personality and role in the household, it may mean to act as a caretaker to the helpless and needy infant, or to find much of the home’s attention is now on the newcomer. The romance of the ideal baby can be immanently real some moments, and the endless labor and new roles just as real other times.
If the mood is ambiguous, the story Williams’ “Danse Russe” tells is told directly. It’s morning, the rest of the household is still asleep. Three others are mentioned as the sleepers: “my” wife, “the” baby, and someone named Kathleen, who has been identified biographically as a nanny the Williams’ family employed. Let’s be honest about the slight tells of the “my” and “the.” My is possessive, the isn’t. Kathleen’s named presence means there’s one other caretaker here. However privileged we may view what was, in biographic fact, the presence of child-care, I’ll note that the speaker, the father, is plausibly then even more separated from the* child. He is obligated and estranged in mixed degrees.
As the poem opens, he’s inside, physically in the household, but not with the others, and the house in his image has a sense of the outside world in morning mists and a cosmic sun. What does he do in this quiet early-morning time?
“To dance beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free.” Yes Bob ‘n’ Bill, but then the baby wakes up.**
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He dances and sings, though one hopes it is a large house and he’s sotto voice and light on his feet. We’re told he’s naked and before a mirror. He indulges in a short Whitman’s sampler catalog of his unencumbered body,*** fully himself, able to bask in himself. Is he having a full-on Robert Bly drum circle moment here? Maybe. Let’s give Bly the poet his due here, he was often able to see a layer below the simple image — and Williams has chosen to show us this, even if we don’t know for sure why he makes this choice, and he doesn’t direct us to all his feelings, save for one, the one the dancer sings: loneliness. He concludes from the song that it’s best to be lonely, it’s his fate from birth (for being male?) From Williams’ own life I can assay he was certainly willing to be lonely, proudly stubborn in his self, but his story here, his image, is not without wistfulness mixed with self-justification. He, the poet, can help us see this. Who knows how much he, or we, can do with that knowledge? I tried to emphasize in performance that there’s a small refrained phrase in this short poem. Do you notice it when you read the text, linked here, or listen to the performance below? Three times the poem begins “If I….” What do we know of the I? What shall the I be?
Williams ends with his own “who knows?” Is he self-evidently, or by his own claim, “The happy genius of my household?” “Genius” here I think is meant in the mode of creator and progenitor, not in the IQ test sense.
I choose to think this is not a rhetorical question, that it’s truly at issue. He’s asking to cheer himself on: I’ve made the purchase of this house, I am the father of this child, I’m half the choice of its life — even if I’m also separated from this household and baby, and I feel that separation as loneliness. So many first-time parents feel in thought, bound and estranged, in all their variety of roles, partners, resources, and situations: “Am I happy?” And their best answers are “Halfway.” And then, “Shouldn’t it be all the way?” Who shall say? Well, William Carlos Williams dances and sings, and he says the distance from halfway is loneliness.
Today’s musical portion to go with Williams’ words I jokingly told my wife this morning is “shoegaze,” the genre named not just for the lack of audience eye-contact but for the number of floor-stationed effects pedals to be employed. You can hear that performance of “Danse Russe” while waving your shirt in the air with the graphical audio player below. What, there’s no player to be seen? Now you’ve got to rebutton that shirt? No, you can use this highlighted alternative link that will open a new tab with an audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Danse_Russe.mp3.
*Live-in childcare was more common at unexceptional levels of income in the early 20th century. A substantial number of young immigrant women worked in this role.
**I slightly modified this image generated from a text prompt using the test version of a new Adobe product, Firefly. Adobe promises that it uses only licensed art from it’s stock library to “train” the algorithm. Much controversy these days about AI, but of course poets have been using words to invoke images for some time.
***The contrast here between childbirth and breastfeeding roles and their intimate demonstration of bodily connectiveness strikes me. Did Williams intend this? I don’t know, but it’s there for me to sense. As a family physician, Williams would have certainly known intellectually of those differences.
A break in the influences as memoir series here, that theme that I’ve fallen into doing for National Poetry Month? Maybe. I’m going to present a new performance of a Carl Sandburg poem — but before that I’m going to talk about another writer, Rod Serling. Serling wrote a variety of things, but he’s best known for creating and hosting, often presenting his own scripts, the mid-century TV show The Twilight Zone.
I’m doubtful young people watch the old gray half-hour Twilight Zone episodes anymore, though they are still available in various ways — but people younger than me certainly did, and to some degree still do. That generation between today’s youth and my old age has sought to revive it under its original title or in spirit, and they still talk between themselves about the original episodes and their hard to reproduce sensibility. I remember being in a creative writing class back in The Seventies, with folks maybe five years younger than me, and I was surprised at how often they might refer to some TZ episode instead of a Greek myth or some piece of literary poetry. SF/Fantasy fandom has grown a hundredfold since, it’s the backbone of popular narrative culture now. The SF/Fantasy memory-hole village that was Twilight Zone’s once, has become a crowded inner-ring suburb, neither new-hot nor charmingly old-fashioned.
One episode of that series, one that came early in the show’s 156 episode run from 1959 to 1964, appears on some of the middle-generation’s “best of” lists, though I think there’s a strangeness that it does. Titled “Walking Distance” it’s tied very clearly to Serling’s own Greatest Generation memories, not as much to my generation who might have watched it on its first run, and I’d expect not-at-all to those younger than me. To summarize the plot without spoilers I’ll say the story is that an overworked and worried 1960 advertising man ends up walking in the countryside and enters his old hometown, the allegorically named “Homewood,” where he grew up before he left for New York City. He finds it not the present town in 1960, but the town of the 1920s.Given the number of time-fantasy stories written since then, not that unique a setup.*
Well, is a poem about a poet hearing a bird sing, or mourning a dead intimate, or finding themselves awash in desire all that unique? “Walking Distance” works, if it works, on performance and from the strength of the slightly wordy** but emotionally resonant script. A feeling of nostalgia — more than that, the feeling of wanting to be able to walk one’s childhood places in dimensions more palpable than memory is something easy to evoke in us. Serling’s script wants to draw a bit more than just all the feels in this situation — but let’s face it, all the feels, the range of edges soft and sharp of them, is the powerful engine here. That engine is strong and universal enough that I can feel the lost 1920s that Serling evokes, even if I never lived them.
Which brings me to Carl Sandburg and today’s poem for performance, “Band Concert.” Published in 1918, it presents itself in a poetic collection of contemporary portraits of American places and people that Sandburg has observed in his travels. The night of the band concert in this poem — while in Nebraska instead of upstate New York — is closely contemporary to Serling’s Homewood. Poet Sandburg is roughly 40, so while the scene in his poem is set in the now, the poem views the kids half his age re-enacting things that are already past for our storyteller.
If one knows the history of American music, Sandburg can be decoded as knowing that the Nebraska city is a few decades behind Chicago or New York. The band seems to be playing rags, the craze of the turn of the century, not of 1918. A small-town kid who had long left for the biggest cities in America, Sandburg can compare the giggles of the kids to the “Livery Stable Blues,” a landmark early Jazz recording where white musicians produced outrageous instrumental sounds imitating farm animals. “Livery Stable Blues” was released in 1917, and Sandburg was an early Jazz-bug — but he’s not knocking the Nebraskans for their music. He’s celebrating it, and them. And after all, cowboy rags and Negro*** rags, would be in the repertoire of Carl Sandburg the folk musician who would be including a set of guitar-accompanied songs in his poetry readings.
Homewood’s park and our 1960 visitor, dressed much as script writer & host Serling would be. Town square park and bandstand from my grandmother’s town. Bandstands in towns were common enough in my Midwest, so I forgot this elegant one, but I did remember the alligator.
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In time-space, I’ve never visited Serling’s Homewood, nor the Nebraska place Sandburg is reporting from. Those are my grandparents’ times. In my own midcentury I’ve been to their outskirts close enough to see the band pavilion in the park or square, the full summer dresses, farm boys when that was a common occupation rather than employees of feed lots, and I’ve walked the sidewalks past the lattice shadows decorating porches. I can translate some from their writing. Serling, Sandburg, my grandparents, they know “more of the story.” Which is us — time, space, placental barriers away.
You can hear me perform Carl Sandburg’s “Band Concert” with a rock quintet which has no tubas nor cornets in this concert. Audio player gadget below, alternative link here for those who don’t see a graphical gadget.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Sandburgs_Band_Concert.mp3.
Twilight Zone itself did another well-loved episode later with a very similar setup: “Next Stop Willoughby.”*
**As if poets have standing to complain about the use of words to portray things, rather than filming a chase, fight scenes, or calling in a CGI render farm.
***Those who go to the original text linked here will note that Sandburg uses the n-word in this poem as he does elsewhere in his early poetry. I’ve “translated” it. Sandburg also uses the general range of derogatory ethnic names of an era where “white” by the conventions of today wasn’t then a monolithic block, but instead was segmented into many othered creatures to be devalued with rude names and determinatory stereotypes. I’m not a Sandburg expert, nor am I the one to rule on what’s racist and what’s documentary, but what I’ve read of Sandburg says to me that he was intentionally anti-racist.
OK, it’s time for my Frank Zappa story. I’ve told this story a few times, but it’s appropriate that I tell it here as part of this series where I discuss the ways the Parlando Project’s meshing of poetry and music became an idea, and an idea I could implement. This post will be exactly as short as I can make it in order to move the story from Francis Poulenc to Frank Zappa.
Last time in this series you met Dave Moore and Jim Scanlon. During the year the three of us were all at this small college south of Des Moines in Iowa, we worked on an “underground newspaper” called The Gadfly that Dave and his partner ran. The content consisted of a mix of things, often with a strong satirical streak, commenting on politics, culture, and music. The capsule overview younger people of later generations get of The Sixties is that every white young American was a hippie, everyone had long hair, and we all lived in bohemian haze coincidentally stoned and angry at political situations and injustices. The reality, as I saw it in Iowa then, was that 1968 was not that different from 1961. One common complaint reflected in The Gadfly* was that the problem wasn’t just The Establishment, it was also our own cohort (at least the ones we were living among) who seemed mired in apathy. We thought new ideas and some ridicule of the old order might change that. Were we, and others like us elsewhere, slowly changing things? Observations differ.
Then came the spring of 1970, when for a brief moment the political activism spirit seemed to change in the matter of a couple of days.
My friends Dave Moore and Jim Scanlon had left for another college in the fall of 1969, Beloit in Wisconsin, where they hoped they would get a better education and find a more responsive group of students. I remained at the small college in Iowa where I had become the editor of the official school newspaper at a premature age. Over the school year, that responsibility slowly spiraled out of my control. I had no idea how to lead a group of people (still don’t). My working theory was to let them exercise their talents and see what happens.
Here’s what often happens under that scheme: many people will valorize what they think is their talent, then not actually exercise it. What will some conclude from that? That they must be restricted yet, somehow — that the actuality that they can’t deliver must be due to outside forces. For those, any extra degree of freedom doesn’t free them, it exposes them.
If you’re considering that carefully, you may wonder, is that what I was suffering from as well? I’d been given this opportunity/responsibility after all. Was I ducking it? Was I not taking advantage of it? I will say this: I wasn’t blaming outside forces, I was blaming myself. The romantic me wanted to see others blossom. The romantic me thought that blossoming was a natural process. Like an inconstant gardener, I was looking at a lot of failed plantings.
Then the spring of 1970 arrived, and with it the shootings at Kent State University, shortly followed by further deaths at Jackson State in the context of the now official expansion of the Vietnam war into neighboring countries. This led to an extraordinary expansion of activism on college campuses around the country. I was frankly surprised at the speed and the rapid spread of the college student response, even after the shootings. There had been for at least a couple of years an eminent fear among the young men regarding the draft risk, which while it had helped fuel the anti-Vietnam War efforts, it hadn’t engendered this level of response. Tens of thousands of Americans, many our generational contemporaries, had died in the combat, and that’s just considering “our side.” Activists being shot or killed wasn’t new either. Activists knew all this. I knew this. What had I discounted was that the Kent State shootings were at a very ordinary midwestern university, that dead included non-activists who just happened to be between classes, and that the dead included women.* Across the country hundreds of colleges were shut down by a fast-rising wave of student activism, including my little Iowa college.
As quickly as the tide of activism rose up, the wave subsided. The college-based headquarters and its plans for increasing political pressure to end the war depopulated as students returned to home or summer jobs. Eventually it was a few people in an apartment on the town square, lieutenants without any troops.**** I left for New York in an adventure I don’t have time to recount today.
Returning that fall, I was living in a sort-of-commune in the college town, without any funds to attend college, trying to figure out what I should do. Not only didn’t I know that, I didn’t have any idea how I would know that. That’s when I heard that Frank Zappa was going to play at Beloit, at the college my friends had left for over a year before.
I probably heard this news by reading it in a letter. Yes, younger readers today, there was no other way. There was no Internet. There wasn’t even that much timely press coverage of national tour dates, everything being done through local promoters and short-lived rock concert halls. Phone calls beyond your city were “long distance,” charged by the minute and too costly to use for entertainment gossip. I found out in 1970 the same way as someone would have exchanged this information in 1870.
My interest in Zappa had grown over the two years since I’d first heard Zappa’s Mothers of Invention on recordings. I didn’t realize it fully, but wider music listening and observing Don Williams’ ability to construct music on the fly was mixed with another rare thing my small college supplied me. This little college 20 miles south of Des Moines, with enrollment of barely a thousand students, had a burgeoning opera program. Opera of course is — what does it say up at the top of this blog? — a place where music and words meet. The opera curriculum would grow over the years, but at this time the program was still emerging. The theater used for performances (also the site of some of my classes) was a small old building, with seating for a few hundred. I’ll summarize one part of my experience in this: to see opera sung in a grand opera hall, with elaborate sets and pricey tickets, with a complete orchestra, is a very, well, operatic way to view the realization of that art. All art is artifice, sure, but the human connection to me in those situations is stilted. Not so, opera sitting a few yards away from another person singing it, perhaps even a person your own young age who you might see in your classes or on campus. That’s another experience, far rarer.
You have not likely seen that impact reflected on my ongoing adult life, or on the Parlando Project that you know here. For one thing, my voice is not operatic, it’s barely a singing voice. Yet I can write this today, that I remember seeing for one exact example, a performance of Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, and being carried away about what performed music, voice, and words could do in that small space. It may have helped that this opera makes an extensive use of recitative.
Listening to Rock music in my daily life then in The Sixties, it occurred to me, who in Rock could bring something to opera? Besides the differences in the use of the voice, or the nature of projecting character as opposed to ones seemingly authentic personal voice, there was the problem of extending the instrumental colors. My thought-answers then? Jim Morrison, who had performed a bit of Brecht/Weill on the first Doors album, and Frank Zappa, who claimed the ability to be “a composer,” and was even allowed to demonstrate that he could compose for larger ensembles including orchestral instruments.*
That I could consider that was consistent with Zappa’s brand then. In those early, heady days of Rock Criticism, it was a given that Zappa was a genius. He wasn’t the sort of musical act that many people actually listened to with addictive, ear-worm pleasure, sure, but still a genius. Well, there were those smutty lyrics, and an assumed swimming pool of contributory drugs, but still a genius. It was The Sixties, we assumed impossible things could happen, but we still felt genius was rare and worthy of note.
So, a chance to see this genius in a live concert, this artist whose recordings had opened up other considerations for me, couldn’t be missed. I drove there, 300 miles, with other share-the-gas people in a Fiat 1100D.
Cost of the concert? $3. An amount similar to my portion of the share-the-gas cost too.
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The concert? Not life-changing. The acoustics in the fieldhouse hall were atrocious, and our seats were in the galleries far from the stage. The music was good, but with the sound bouncing around and the typical poor vocal PA of the time, the result was a mixed pleasure.
We got back in the little car to head back to Iowa. Finding our way through the unfamiliar streets we saw another car occupied with hair as long as ours inside. That car contained some young women. For some reason they wanted to share with the fellow freaky-looking folks that they knew the hotel where Frank Zappa was staying and that they’d been invited to visit him.
Of course we believed them. Of course we followed them. What did we assume was to happen there? Some sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll orgy? I’d just turned 20. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, or how I’d figure that out. So, what did I worry about might happen for the rest of some single night in October?
When we arrived, the bunch of us from the two cars, maybe 8 or 9 people, spread out around the non-descript motel room. A couple members of the band were checking in with Zappa. There was a short discussion at the doorway between Zappa and George Duke about what Duke had played at the concert, which got approval from Zappa. The band that night, though billed as the Mothers, was new, containing vocalists who had once been part of the pop band The Turtles, now billed as “Flo and Eddie.” One of the young women from the other car bounced on one of the beds. Most of us seemed like me, passive, waiting for something to happen. Zappa turned his attention to us, asked us what we’d thought about the concert. There was some short discussion. I think I may have mentioned that a lot of the material seemed new. Best as I can remember, that was accurate. Zappa replied that they were doing some of the old stuff too. Memories fail, but I believe “Concentration Moon” was replied as one of the veteran numbers. The male part of the room had some hard-core Zappa fans, who started to geekout on questions about the band’s history. I recall one asking about Doug Moon who had played with early versions of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band. Were they trying to impress the genius with their knowledge, even in the midwest, of the places Zappa had come from? Zappa replied Doug was some guy who’d worked at a gas station. Zappa was patient about the questions, however trivial. At one point he took out a movie camera and filmed us in the room. I remember he moved in close to my face as I was missing one bow on my eyeglasses after that part had broken, and I had no funds to fix or replace the frames yet.
Here’s a few things Zappa conveyed to us in the roughly hour that I, and maybe others in the room, didn’t know before meeting him:
When asked about his doo-wop music parodies, including the Cruising with Rueben and the Jets LP, he corrected us that he liked that music. He spoke about Fifties R&B records he was inspired by. Since the lyrics in those songs were satiric, I’d assumed the music was also something he held in contempt. Far from it, he lit up talking about this. In The Sixties there was a widespread critical assumption that good music was “progressive,” meaning that we were to drive our plows over the bones of the dead, so this was news to us.
He nonchalantly corrected any impression that he was inspired by drugs. How he did this without sounding like a “Listen kids…” PSA I can’t exactly recall.
He seemed genuinely interested in us, and what we thought about the music — though at times, such as when he wielded the camera, the idea that we were natives and Zappa was an anthropologist occurred.
For me, the important thing happened near the end of our time in the room with this “…But, a genius” guy. I asked him how much of the show was improvised and how much was composed. He went over to the side of the room and picked up an oversized portfolio. Opening it, he showed it to me. Multiple staves of music, a rather full score as I recall. Dialogue written out, seemingly informal and back and forth, as if the band members were speaking off the cuff. In retrospect, I believe I was looking at scores for 200 Motels which would be filmed a few months later with a full orchestra. As he showed me this, he talked briefly about the effort he put into this, which the score showed. I was immediately impressed with the formality of the effort to achieve what seemed like chance informality. There must have been some serious seat-time in getting that done. The intent of it!
Imagine instead if I had somehow visited the hotel room of Jim Morrison in 1970. Perhaps my romantic notions of the creation of art would have gathered more poète maudit forces. Did something in my subconscious connect what Frank Zappa conveyed that night with William Blake, who when not out talking with the visions of angels, was innovating printmaking techniques and making books with his own skills?
After that significant side-trip, we left the room and returned to Iowa. If you’d asked me that day, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life — not a whit more — but what I did have was a piece of information, and an outlook. From that night I could remember that doing was a large part of doing something with your life.
This is already a double-length post, so enough for today. To tip my hat to Mr. Zappa, here’s the LYL Band roughly approximating one of his later tunes in a we’ll-give-it-a-go live performance.
We flattened Zappa’s music and arrangement here, but as the video points out, if Zappa were performing this song today he’d be sure to include more screens than just TV.
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*This oversimplification is more accurate about youth in The Seventies than the Sixties, even the final three years of The Sixties. In terms of clothes and hair, look at a range of contemporary photographs and film from the actual Sixties. Beards and long hair will be sparse on the young men, not movie wardrobe department common. Yes, use of marijuana and other drugs increased during the last half of The Sixties from a very in-group secrecy thing to a sizable minority, but in doing so it lost a bit of its bohemian rhapsodic connotations and became just another illegal high like drinking alcohol before the age of 21 had previously been. Real “counter-culture” bohemianism in an artistic sense had grown from the beatnik Fifties — maybe even doubled or tripled — but was still something a single digit percentage of people engaged in with any seriousness.
**In reality, this regional expansion of the conflict had been going on by proxy and by secrecy for a long time — but in the run up to the Kent State shootings it had become stated policy, driving hard-to-escape fears that there were now going to be additional para-Vietnam Wars.
***This is a complex point, one I need to leave off too briefly. Women of course were involved in anti-war activity before Kent State, but it occurs to me that this small factor may have been more important than recognized in adding to the explosion of activism in the spring of 1970. In case you’re wondering: yes, the anti-Vietnam war organizations, like the counter-culture, weren’t significantly less patriarchal than the rest of Sixties society — and though it may rankle some, I’ll add this as well: the victims at Kent State were also white.
****Any reading this who participated in Occupy Wall Street or the Black Lives Matter activism of this century my have a moment of recognition here. The emotional high of sensing that something is finally being said loud enough, that mass pressure is finally being brought by an unprecedented number of people is shared from this time. The emotions following, when such movements crest and seem to dissipate, need to be considered too. Here’s one piece of wisdom from someone else from this time worth listening to.
*Will some Classic Rock oldster reading this think “Well, Rock Opera, what about the Who’s Tommy?” Tommy had yet to be released.
As National Poetry Month continues, let me take a brief break from the personal history of Parlando inspirations to again do in the present what this Project does: explore a poem as I combine it with new music. A few weeks ago I found an early poetry collection by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. Before looking into this collection Vallejo was just a name to me, a poet who is best known as being a favorite of other poets whose work I had read.
If I had time to write more tonight I could go into his troubled life, but I do not. Suffice to say he grew up poor in rural Peru, and by paths he traveled to Lima and studied some in Peruvian universities, but poverty and trouble with the authorities seems to have always followed him. He fled to Europe and had down-and-out adventures there, but eventually died there 85 years ago this April. In a brief interchange with another poet on Twitter this spring we agreed that from what we know Vallejo seemed to always be an expatriate, an exile — and unhappy from that. If so, unhappiness for a man, but poetry deals with diaspora often and well — perhaps because even when we are dealing with our native language, the dialect we spoke from childhood, we are seeking in poetry to find its real home. So often poets stand in the midst of other native speakers of their language and find this so.
My adventure with a poem in a foreign language forces by nature a greater travel. Even if I have another English translation, I try to find it in the original and start again with the awkward literalness of a machine translation of that. Other translators likely have smoothed over the troubles of a literal with their chosen solutions, and out of some pride and a desire to not appropriate the work of other living writers, I then try to make a vivid poem in English out of it. Besides recreating the poem’s images and music of thought* in English, I often drill down into individual words by looking at foreign language dictionaries and examples of usage to see what plausible other English words might convey the author’s intentions. Though I feel conflicted about this, the process of collaborating with a dead author engages me as if I am writing my own poem, and from that arises a danger that I may be tempted to extend the poem or add variations on the original’s theme. In this Vallejo poem, my translation has a couple of gray areas, which I’ll note for accuracy’s sake.
Here’s my translation of “Bajo Los Alamos” into “Beneath the Poplars:”
Jose Garrido was another young Peruvian writer that Vallejo knew before exile.
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A few notes on my translation. In the first line “bardos” might well be translated into poets or bards. I made an eccentric choice, “scriptores,” trying to make the image more clear and mysterious at the same time. I thought of the poplars branches swayed over in the pasture wind would be like monks hunched and copying manuscripts, and that would be consistent with a poem that I feel is about labor and respite. I believe poets labor, but as a word poet doesn’t suggest it directly enough.
The 11th line was difficult for me, and I can’t right now recall all the struggles I went through to arrive at the line in my version. Given that the poem is about an old shepherd falling asleep in autumn, a clear image of the falling leaves being like sheared wool may have attracted me more strongly than a literal line translation.
I think the 12th line describes a sunset — and while Vallejo didn’t say sky, I decided to clarify the sense of “azul” here as the blue sky, as we mean it when we say “out of the blue.”
Lastly, did you notice that this poem mentions Easter, but is set in autumn? Peru is south of the equator and April is autumn there. All those easy connections we northerners feel about Easter and spring as a resurrection metaphor fall apart in the global south.
A gorgeous poem of work and rest, and I hope my rustic music helps set the mood for it. Given Vallejo’s life it seems he’s writing here of his locus solus, his essential place that he’s exiled from. Here’s how you can hear my performance of it: there’s an audio player displayed below for many of you. No player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with an alternate audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Beneath_the_Poplars.mp3.
*I give priority to transmitting what I think are the poet’s images to our eyes through our words. The word-music, such as rhymes and meter where present, I generally take as what is unfortunately lost in translation, though I like the resulting poem to have an attractive sound in English. The “music of thought” is my own term for the order and manner of repetitions in the presentation of the poem’s substance by its images and statements. This has its own musical structure and can more easily be transferred into a different language.
Here’s more of my condensed history of what showed me ways the Parlando Project could be done. I’m continuing, though I’m needing to disregard some fear or wisdom (can we ever tell which is which?) that I’m talking too much about myself, a person of little consequence. What keeps me going? While I write this expecting that what I’m trying to talk about is of interest to only a few, I continue in the hope that for those few it’ll be of value. While I love some music loved by millions, that’s not all of musics to me. And poetry, the supplier of the words used here, is a strange art: omnipresent yet under-considered. Combining literary poetry with non-commercial music is not the way to millions of Internet clicks. I’m hoping for individual interest — yours, valued readers and listeners, and I appreciate that attention.
There are democratic and utilitarian reasons to care about majorities, but most majorities upon a closer look are made up of smaller groups. And too, few majorities are born that way, they start and accumulate smaller groups. “I contain multitudes” said Whitman — multitudes of smaller groups, inconsequential taken to themselves. He called his book Leaves of Grass, not The Biggest Damn Lawn You’ve Ever Seen. If we’re lucky in life we will have found small places, families, affinities, constrained spaces we can contain and explore. In some of those places people will make art, that encapsulated way we exchange our inward handful-grasps of the outward world.
So, I was talking about the end of my teenage years, as I was off to what would be a shortened not quite 2-year experience of college in The Sixties. I’m going to next write about three artists of that time that I was introduced to while still in Iowa, each of which left seeds of what years later would make up the Parlando Project.
In my very first day at college, I was walking in the center of the little campus when I happened to strike up a conversation with a stocky man in a cape. I’m not talking a Superman or Batman cape. No, this cape had a full collar and could be buttoned at the top. It was more of a 19th century woolen military cape, or like the green cape that musician David Crosby liked to sport around the same time, though Crosby and his scene wasn’t anywhere near the two of us in Iowa. This caped crusader had an interesting conversation starter: “Do you know who the Fugs are?” he asked.
Here’s what I knew: I seen a mention of them as an outrageous act in the New York City area, with unprintable lyrics that could only be cited by their suggestive titles. “They’re a dirty rock’n’roll group” I replied. I was better or worse then for capsule descriptions.
“Do you know who the Mothers of Invention are?”
“They’re another one.” This was nervous inarticulateness on my part. Though I had not heard a note of their music, I had read their leader’s insightful essay in a Life magazine round-up of what was starting to be called “Rock,” the “’n’Roll” having just been significantly dropped by doughy critical burghers due to a new appreciation of the all-protein counter culture. Zappa’s essay perceptively pointed out that culture is always present, always countered of fitness and absurdity in some mix.
This minimal performance on my part must have encouraged the caped one. We immediately conspired to get our dorm room assignments switched around to share a room. I think he may have had a preliminary dorm assignment secondary to being a football player. Later I would see that both his legs had simitar scars from knee operations secondary to his high school football career.
The caped guy’s name was Jimmy Scanlon, he was from Chicago. He’d seen those groups perform, had their records. His plastic record player was a little fancier than mine, and had two small speakers that swung out from each side, a stereo. I soon got to hear all those two group’s records.
Let me write first about The Fugs because they are by far the least known and admired of the three artists I’m going to write about, and that’s odd since they were pioneers who I believe directly influenced other artists we now remember as the pioneers. Richie Unterberger, a man from a later generation who looks back at this time calls them “Arguably the first underground rock group.” That’s something I’d say too, even though the core of the Fugs were not musicians in any functional way. They were instead anarchist/beatnik/poets from New York City who just on guts decided that they could get together and sing in 1964. In this instinct they were directly influenced by the short-lived jug band fad that emerged in the folk music revival. The idea of the folkie jug band was this: rather than relying on the individual stage presence of a single performer at the mic (underrecognized: that’s difficult!) you could get up with a bunch of vaguely related instruments and make a somewhat coordinated noise. But the Fugs were distinct from that fad in these ways: their material was politically and socially outrageous, clearly making no play for commercial markets, they soon added musicians who played electric instruments, and they couldn’t sing. Am I being too blunt about that last part? Call me experienced here: this is a pot calling that kettle. They were pitch challenged, they didn’t have, nor did they attempt, pleasing vocal timbres, and they recorded anyway.*
Does this sound indie AF? Does this sound akin to what earliest rappers did with what they had a few years later in NYC? Does this sound like punk rock to you? It should. A decade before CBGBs that is what this was. And they performed a lot in the city. The Velvet Underground had to be aware of them as they were both forming within blocks of each other simultaneously. Did Bob Dylan think of them when creating the most ribald and playful Basement Tapes songs? No matter how fully formed Frank Zappa’s ideas were, did he at least see his Mothers as competing in the same atmosphere when they both had extended runs in rented theaters in NYC?
Does this sound indie AF? Does this sound akin to what earliest rappers did with what they had a few years later in NYC? Does this sound like punk rock to you? It should.
Those things happened from going on guts. From believing the things you are apprehending have value. It’s too limiting to call this competition, or rivalry, it’s the mutual demonstration of possibility.
Before I leave The Fugs, here’s a very Parlando Project thing about the Fugs. They were poets themselves, and yet they formed a band. They performed other poets work regularly.** When Dave Moore and I started performing ten years later I (we?) described what we were aiming for as the Fugs performing with the Yardbirds.
The Fugs repertoire was political, satiric, scabrous and — well, very sex-positive. But they could carpe that diem with the poets too. Here’s my rendition of a Tuli Kupferberg song “The Garden is Open” that I performed a few years back.
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Since I wasn’t in New York or connected directly with any of this, here are a couple of accounts of the Fugs from those who where there. One by Fugs founder Ed Sanders. One about Tuli Kupferberg’s life. And this account of how the musical scene including the Fugs interacted with the general poetry and art scene in NYC.
What about the Mothers of Invention and Frank Zappa? Wait. Though Jimmy Scanlan and that same year Dave Moore too, introduced me to these two groups almost as a pair, you’ll need to wait for my Frank Zappa story. And there’s a third artist that I was discovering in my late teens that helped me formulate this Project. We’ll get to him too.
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*I’ve had long suffering partners in my life, what with the kinds of music I am too well drawn too. Most of them couldn’t stand more than a few minutes of the caterwauling of The Fugs. I wouldn’t blame you either — but I’m reminded of Bob Dylan’s parable about what a beautiful singer, Sam Cooke, said about this: “Voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth.” I love music. I love the beauty it can manifest, even without words. If I had to choose a world with only beautiful singers or only truthful singers, I’d take the latter.
**Ted Berrigan, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Burroughs, Charles Olson, and of course band founders Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg were poets themselves.
As we celebrate National Poetry Month this spring, let’s continue with my condensed memoir with footnotes of how and why the Parlando Project came to be. Last time I was leaving home for college in The Sixties.
I was an undistinguished student, able to connect with some teachers and subjects and unable to connect with others. I think I went on to college because I still had curiosity and desire to learn about some things and because I had no other firm idea of what I wanted to do other than write poetry. Even the naïve teenager in me knew that poetry was an exalted vocation but a dreadful-paying job. The fool in me thought that if I was good enough with poetry, things would take care of themselves. Is there a word for a fool that stumbles upon wisdom for other reasons than their own? There should be. That was me.
Is there a word for a fool that stumbles upon wisdom for other reasons than their own? There should be. That was me.
There was another reason to attend college in The Sixties if you were male. There was a military draft. Depending on where you lived (draft bards were local, county-sized, units and their quotas and pool of 18-26 year olds to fill them varied) most of the most eligible would be drafted to serve 2 years in the armed forces. The “most eligible” part was the trick of the inequality of this system. Those married with kids or students were put in a “deferred” level. With the rising deployments in the Vietnam war in The Sixties, concerns about the common inconvenience of military service were escalated into a fear that “I’ll be drafted, sent to Vietnam, and I’ll be killed.” *
Because my experience with school was in a small town, small school, I went to a small college of just about 1000 students, one still in Iowa, Simpson College. Road not taken thoughts could wonder: what if I had been more adventuresome? The English Literature department was largely younger professors who taught the smallish classes directly. One of those younger teachers was a quiet but scholarly type who loved St. Thomas Aquinas and Gerard Manley Hopkins. I’m no Thomist but he did introduce me to Hopkins. Another had a full John Berryman beard and curl-dangle cigarette ash while he talked on. He loved Norman Mailer and encouraged unconventional thought. I picked up the idea that French poets were important in the emergence of modern English poetry, so I tried to take French for my language requirement. As remains the case to this day, I found myself entirely unable to form the correct sounds to pronounce the words. My young French teaching professor had a great story though. She’d taken the position at Simpson, located in Indianola Iowa. That summer she went to Indianapolis Indiana ready to start her professorship, and upon arriving asked for directions to Simpson.
Here are two people near my own age who I met at Simpson who changed me and eventually the Parlando Project.
One was Dave Moore, who readers and listeners here already know. How’d we meet? I met Dave in my first year at Simpson when he led an unconventional service at the school’s chapel. He read the words to Dylan’s “With God on Our Side” and made them vivid even as unaccompanied spoken word and then he read a poem of his own. I had to get to know him — and did — because here was another poet. Dave’s influence on the Parlando Project is impossible to understate, but in this era, Dave left Simpson for another school to further his education at the end of my first year. He’ll necessarily return often as this memoir continues.
In my second year at Simpson I took an inexpensive catalog-store acoustic guitar with me to college for just a few weeks at the beginning of the school term. It was an instrument that belonged in common with my siblings. In an act of cargo-cult magic one day, I remember walking around the little campus with it hanging by a strap across my back, like I was on some cover of a folk music magazine. I ran into this skinny guy wearing a Levis jean-jacket who said he played guitar too, and he invited me to his dorm room.
When we got there did I notice then that his guitar was likely better than my family’s shared plywood egg-slicer string-action guitar? No, I didn’t know anything about that then, but it was no-doubt a quality instrument. When he took it out of its case (his guitar had a case!) he tuned it up quickly and started to play a bit of this or that, and then launched into a piece he informed me was called “Vaseline Machine Gun.”
One or two of you may startle as I say the name of that guitar piece. It appeared later at the very end of The Sixties on a record by its composer Leo Kottke with the it-can-afford-its-understatement title of “6 and 12-String Guitar.” Within the smallish world of steel-string acoustic guitar instrumental music that record is a landmark. The album’s energetic playing in an original style, the polyphonic lines going on all at once from a single instrument was impressive — still are, though players have had decades since to try to work at that level. The record’s showpiece, the cut that was meant to make your jaw drop the farthest is “Vaseline Machine Gun.” So, you one-or-two know what I felt sitting a couple of feet away from someone playing it live in a small Iowa college dorm room in The Sixties. Here’s a 2-minute live version of the young Kottke playing it for the rest of you.
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OK, you’re back. That skinny kid, a year younger than me, nodded at me with my plywood catalog-store guitar, one that I’d figured out three or four reliable chords on to be rung up with vigorous strums. His manner was hip, cool. “What do you play?”
One could write a whole chapter on that moment, that interchange. I write poems and attempt-to-be-short blog posts. I said, “I don’t really play.”
The skinny guitar player kid’s name was Don Williams. Like Dave Moore, there are other Don Williams, some of them better known than others. With that common a name, I’ve never been able to find him later in life. He was from the Minneapolis area, where Kottke was based and where he could have heard him in local coffee houses. His family had money enough to afford him the better instrument. He had the funds and inclination for lessons in that city, and the wherewithal to absorb them. He dropped the names of Twin Cities guitarists Dean Granros and Dean Magraw, who I suspect he may have taken those lessons from. I hung out with him some, heard him play more. He had an amp and a Howard Roberts model Gibson electric guitar too. If I was to meet him again, all these years later, I’d thank him for initially imprinting me with the broad possibilities of the guitar, acoustic and electric, and in particularly with bottleneck slide.
I went back to my dorm room. Sometime that fall before I had to return the guitar to the family home, I took a short poem by another Simpson student I knew, Keith Hill, and using that and those few chords played with some make’em pay up strums, I wrote what I will later call the first Parlando Project song, decades before there would be a Parlando Project. The poem was called “Eat At Joes” and Keith Hill was aiming for a gently satiric mood. I adapted or misconstrued it as an indictment of go-along acceptance. More than 40 years later I still remembered it well enough to attempt it with Dave Moore and the LYL Band. You can hear that remembered version with this highlighted link, or with the graphical music player below.
What happened next? Why did I stick with the idea of literary poetry combined with music?
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Eat_At_Joes.mp3.
*There were other deferments. Some professions were still deferred as I recall. Homosexuality along with mental illness was considered a no-go, though as throughout history, gay people served. Medical deferments were issued, and for those in the know during the era there was a saying “No one is too healthy to not have a reason for medical deferment.” If the proponents of conscription debate that it promotes an equality of service and sacrifice, the reality of the system manifestly reflected racial and class-based castes. I wasn’t analyzing this at 17, but it wasn’t subtle people!
**Like a lot of historical remembrances, this is accurate in terms of the believed myth and inaccurate in terms of the reality. In generational talk of “Boomers had it easy compared to…,” this level of existential risk for teenagers seems somewhat forgotten. Still, not only did most Boomers not get drafted — due to that range of deferments and the size of the pool — most draftees never went to combat even during the height of the war. None-the-less, this perception of a real risk is an under-acknowledged motivation for the growth in the antiwar movement then. I don’t know if anyone has written of this, but it seems to me that this was also one substantial reason that college enrollments increased even above the demographic bulge, which then helped set the expectation that college was a pre-requisite for many more jobs. Racial and class-based caste systems again.
While continuing my observance of National Poetry Month, I must apologize for resorting to regular blogging form and writing about myself today. That sort of thing works for many, but I tend to run on a bit when I do it. It must take a long time to bore myself.
Why, when, did I decide to do the Parlando Project, this odd little idea to combine words, mostly literary poetry, with not-exactly commercial music? It wasn’t something I toddled off to grade school knowing I wanted to do. I had no great early childhood connection to poetry. I was exposed to the children’s poetry in my mid-west, mid-century tastes: Longfellow appeared, illustrated. The D. Seuss of my time then was Dr. Seuss, not Diane. My interest in music was greater, despite having no discernible musical talent or outlet. The wife of my little town’s school superintendent taught a music class, which was mostly music appreciation, little samplings from records of the orchestral repertoire. My peers found this impenetrable and boring. Since I was something of an outcast I decided to listen to what was so outré in their just-teenage world. Around the time I myself entered teenagerhood I got a gift of the mid-century handheld device, the transistor radio. I would bike around my town and outskirts with its faux leather case strap wrapped around my bicycle handle-grips, twisting the little plastic radio’s orientation with my fingers so that the stations from far-off towns aligned with its antenna. Was I listening to rock’n’roll, that mid-century strain? No. At first I was listening to an AM station that was one of the pioneers of what later became public radio, and this station programmed classical music.
Rock’n’roll was the music of those that distained that music appreciation teacher and distained me. If many then and now read the sneer or assertion in rock’n’roll as the music of when-in-the-course-of-human-events independence and freedom, I heard it as the music of those that didn’t care much for me. But I eventually relented. I wanted to look at the music the rest of the teenage world was hearing, thinking it might be a window into their interiors. Maybe it was a bit of survivor’s reconnaissance.
I found some of what the Top 40 station played interesting. This was in the era which the American pop music histories sum up as post-Elvis, pre-Beatles, describing it as dire and worthless. Were the teenagers of that Ike to Kennedy time, even if subconsciously, wanting more, wanting better? I dunno. For myself, I didn’t know any better. It was a mix of Brill Building girl groups, Black R&B, folk music/country and western crossovers, late period crooners, and novelty records that would shame a modern TikTok sensation in their silly sensationalism.* Unlike my peers who were closed-off to me, there were voices there speaking secrets, their moods and moments.
Want to know why the Parlando Project musical pieces are all over the map in terms of musical flavor? This is the child-is-the-father-of-the-man reason.
Poetry? I admire the knowledge and deep interests of academics, while somehow worrying that poetry is seen as having an academic requirement for reading or writing it. You didn’t need to go to school to listen to the radio. There was no MFA for the Brill Building, Motown, or Slim Harpo, at least not then. Still, I have to be honest, like many who continue to read poetry that they won’t be graded on, it was a teacher again, Terry Brennan, a recent St. John’s of Collegeville grad, who taught an English literature class in my little 100-person high school who introduced me to poetry as possibility. Did I understand poetry? Does one need to understand what one is drawn too? I don’t think so — a little mystery may even help. Much of it was beautifully inarticulate to me, phrases that said with inevitability, descriptions that were exotic, situations that I hadn’t lived, or lived in any understanding whatsoever. I loved Keats and Blake. I found out Blake was the original DIY Indie, who wrote, illustrated, engraved, and published his work, mastering what technical, logistical, and creative work was needed to realize his art. I loved a capsule description of Blake I found in the back of one of my parents’ old textbooks that they had saved. It went something like this: “He wrote early charming lyrics showing real talent, but later descended into incomprehensible writing suggestive of madness.” Writing without limits! I was ready to sign up.
On the day after Christmas, riding in a Dodge station wagon filled with my sisters and parents, rolling between Minnesota and Iowa, I wrote my first poem. I was 16. I thought it rather marvelous that I could write such a magical thing. A year later, the last Christmas I was to spend in my childhood home, I got enough money to buy a cheap record player and three LPs. These inscribed, foot-square, vinyl circles were the adult music, the things that could contain the igneous something that was starting to get called “rock.” Rock as a name seemed solid, monumental, permanent. I suppose in much of my cohort it still is — childhood transition music sticks with you. These are the three LPs I bought with the leftover money: The Doors “The Doors,” Bob Dylan “John Wesley Harding,” and The Rolling Stones “Their Satanic Majesties Request.” In reverse order they imprinted me with love for Mellotron and ramshackle pretension, spare acoustic guitar arrangements and one-room songs without bridges or choruses, and poets who wanted to front a rock band that had listened to some Jazz and Blues records.
Of those 3 LPs, maybe only the Dylan retains current esteem, yet all were considered significant in their time. Blake & Keats? Well, it’s poetry, so the answer is complicated, particularly in the United States.
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Music, various, and words, mostly poetry, exploring other people’s stories — yes, I can still see the damage there. While we’re not to the Parlando Project yet, this is enough for one post. Let me leave you with a Parlando Project audio piece, words from another poet recalling that era, Ethna McKeirnan’s poem of “Stones” that seemed permanent as she moved through her life. Player below for most, backup link for the others. McKiernan’s final new & selected collection including this poem is available here.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Stones.mp3.
*Little known fact: C&W and folk music were often thought of as the same or aligned genres then. The 21st century Americana thing was how things were considered circa 1960 as well.
Look up “Ahab the Arab” for one such example. Can I call it transgressive? Can you call it cultural appropriation? Fatima has less agency in this tale than Clyde (the girl-group Brill Building songwriters might have made her the main character.) If you’re on the borderline of acceptance, I’ll tell you that Jimmy Saville had the UK cover-version hit with this.
In the nearing 7 years since the Parlando Project launched we’ve normally celebrated the US National Poetry Month with increased activity. This year that celebration is conflicting with some other factors which are keeping me from a focused plan for NPM. That said, one goal of the #NationalPoetryMonth activity here has been to draw new readers and listeners to what we do. So, it’s probably a good idea to let new eyeballs and ears onto what to expect if they visit our archives of over 650 audio pieces released, pieces featured and expanded on with the nearly 900 posts since we kicked things off in 2016.
You see one motto up in the header of this blog and elsewhere: “The Place Where Music and Words Meet.” I take words — usually not my words, but words their authors likely intended as literary poetry — and combine them with various original music — music that I generally compose, and increasingly often play myself in one-man-band ways.
Sometimes what we mean takes time to discover. How do we relate to something else, the differences, the things similar? That’s a metaphor. Make the metaphor musical, however you do it, and that’s poetry.
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A few readers may figure — perhaps even a listener of a stray Parlando piece they see linked somewhere — that there’s a convention, a style I follow when I do this. I hope they’re mistaken. I’ve always intended to not do that. The people that have influenced, or unintentionally given me permission to do what I do, made music and word combinations in different ways.* I try to use all those ways, and hope to stumble on some others. I will sing the words, but just as often chant them, talk-sing them, or resort to a freer, spoken word cadence — thus the origin of my Project’s name.
I try to keep the audio pieces short, almost always less than 5 minutes. I try to keep these blog posts shortish too, less than 1,000 words — and though I sometime fail in keeping those goals, I try to keep my failures in check. And not all the realizations of the words with my music and performance work for everyone, or most, or perhaps anyone. Some of them are even embarrassing to me, but I leave them up in our archives you can see separated into months to the right of this post.
Why do I do this? Manyfold reasons. Some of them? I like the challenge, the variety of verse, the variety of music. I think poetry is musical speech, and making even more of the musical component offers a different way to enter the words for the listener. Consider how you might enter into a song you grow close to, over listens, over time. At first it might be a phrase, riff, or refrain that catches you, or a general tone you feel, but then some new nuance may come to the fore. Or how a song you thought an abstract construction of words can from new experiences, experiences inside or outside of the song, somehow become more realized and concrete.**
This is how poetry lives, it’s the only poetry. Poetry does not live on reputations or silent copies printed, it lives inside you, a single reader or listener, as sound that may eventually saunter up closer in sense. This is what I celebrate all year, and some more so during National Poetry Month.
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*Perhaps I’ll write more about, and thank more, those possibility creators this month? To name some of the models for Parlando: Beat poets and their immediate predecessors Rexroth and Patchen reading to music, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, The Fugs, those English lute composers like Campion and Dowland, Tom Rapp, whatever William Butler Yeats planned to do with his bespoke psaltery, Rabindranath Tagore, what alternative hymnal Emily Dickinson was internalizing when she played her Homestead piano, Frank Zappa, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, the American blues poets from Charlie Patton to Gil Scott Heron, Anne Sexton and her rock band, Laurie Anderson and her expansion of Ken Nordine and his “word jazz.” I’m also aware of “art song” — and appreciate both the achievements and the limitations for my purposes of that long established form of combining literary poetry with complex musical settings and melodies using orchestral instruments.
One of the reasons I trust that you may find these experiences when the poem is carried to you inside a musical environment, and buffered there, is that I very often have had that experience composing and recording the Parlando musical pieces. I start out not sure what a lyric means or thinking I know something of what it means, only to find that there’s an entire other something or somethings there the 5th, 10th, or 20th time through it. The very act of putting the poems words into my mouth illuminates things, the exact question of how to utter them throws light from out of my dark throat.
I’ll admit I rushed to complete today’s audio piece because I wanted to make note of a birthday anniversary of an important contributor to the American wing of the Modernist movement of the early 20th century. I’m going to get to it in a roundabout way. Have patience, valued reader, I think this abbreviated story is worth your time if you care about the everyday accidents and personal connections that you might find scattered about behind what become large changes.
This story starts with two 19th century American immigrant families. I know a few details, and though I probably don’t know a lot more, but I think I know enough for a story. One family’s breadwinner was a laborer from Sweden. I read today he signed his name with an X, and he worked at various jobs including blacksmith’s assistant in Illinois after arriving. His wife was resourceful and was able to keep the underfunded household going. The other was described as a “peasant family” from the tiny country of Luxembourg. “Peasant” sounds so Bruegel, I don’t know if things were that feudal in Luxembourg in the middle of the 19th century, but that second family emigrated to the midwestern United States like the first one. The husband started out working in a mine until ill health forced him out. Luckily his wife found some income working as a milliner.
What’s important about these two families? Well, so far, nothing — though they raised families, that’s something. The second family already had kids when they arrived, the first one soon had seven kids. We’re going to concentrate on some of the kids. Our first family was the Sandburgs, the second the Steichens. One of the Sandburg children in Illinois called himself Charlie, and over at the Steichens in Wisconsin we had Edward and Lillian who were born in Luxembourg but were now growing up in the US. Charlie, the son of the man who signed his name with an X was passionate about writing. Edward, the son of the miner, was interested in art.
Charlie, our writer, had to leave school to help earn money for the struggling family at age 13. Eventually he volunteered for the army and served in the Spanish American War. Edward worked at the commercial end of art while having ambitions to move into the fine art world. Given those ambitions he took a wild chance by moving over to photography, which in the late 19th century wasn’t yet considered a fine art. How could that acceptance happen?
Edward started taking pictures and working on various ways the composition, lighting and film developing process could alter the images in artistic ways. One of his models for the photographs as he worked on his craft was his younger sister Lillian (see below).
Charlie got a break after the short-run war he was in. A local college gave him a scholarship as a returning war veteran, and one of his sisters, Mary, was big on education and helped support him. Charlie rushed into doing everything writing he could do there — and while he didn’t graduate, when he left it was to pursue writing and to give talks on the midwestern Chautauqua circuit. Looking to network, he found himself in Wisconsin attending a Socialist party meeting.* It’s there that he met Lillian Steichen. Bam! Charlie fell hard and fast for Lillian. Lillian was perhaps a bit more careful. Charlie told her he was a poet, an artist, and he asked for her address (she was visiting her family, but was teaching in another state). She obliged. That was it, one accidental meeting.
For the next six months Charlie Sandburg wooed Lillian Steichen with letters. Lots of letters. Letters with poetry. Lillian’s letters easily showed her intelligence and wide interests, and she may have felt freer to discuss those things with native-born Charlie in writing because English was her second language and she may not have been as fluent in it speaking casually. And despite Charlie not being a good provider catch, the two fell deeply in sealed-with-a-kiss love. How much did Lillian rev Charlie Sandburg’s poetry engine? We’ll see at the end of this story today.
What about Lillian’s big brother Edward? His art photographs were getting some interest, and he had crossed paths with Alfred Stieglitz, another man who was interested in the Modernist movement to make photography into art. In 1905 the two go in to showing not just their fine art photographs but all kinds of Modernist art in New York City. Edward’s photographs filled Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work. A gallery they set up, the 291 Gallery, shows much new modern art work — not just photographs— and this work is often shown there publicly for the first time in America. How important and primary were Stieglitz and Edward Steichen in Modern art? Even a person who’s not primarily interested in visual arts like me has heard of the famous 1913 Armory Show in NYC, often considered the pioneering event in America’s exposure to Modernism. Well, Stieglitz and Steichen were showing that kind of work and laying the groundwork for that show for a decade before.
Back to Lillian Steichen and Charlie Sandburg. They married in 1908, job prospects for free-verse poets not overly concerning them. Charlie started to go by his birth name Carl, which he’d previously ditched because it seemed too ethnic. He worked for awhile as the PR/Press Secretary for the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee.*** And then he moves on to daily journalism as his day gig in Chicago. Carl, Lillian, and the brother-in-law exchange Modernisms. Carl’s poetry becomes more tightly visual, more show not tell. Later, if by extension photography can be an art, how about movies? Carl Sandburg’s daily journalism includes becoming an early movie critic.
Edward & Lillian Steichen. “My Younger Sister with a Rose Covered Hat.” Carl and Lillian Sandburg. “My Little Sister.” All photos by Edward Steichen. Check out the hats. Was it another happy accident that Steichen’s mom was a milliner?
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In 1918, ten years after he married Lillian, Sandburg issued his first collection, Chicago Poems. It wins the Pulitzer prize, helping to bring Modernist poetry to the attention of the public in America. He dedicates the book to “My wife and pal, Lillian Steichen Sandburg.” If you want to read more on Lillian, the couple’s courtship and their life-long marriage, here’s a link to start with. If you want to know more about how Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz’s the 291 Gallery was a beachhead for Modernism in America, you can start here.****
On the anniversary of Edward Steichen’s birth, here’s one of Carl Sandburg’s poems wooing Lillian Steichen, “A Dream Girl,” performed as a song. You can think of it as Sandburg’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit.” But knowing the art-photography Steichen side, consider the poems final line when you listen below, or read it here. I recorded the song quickly, with just my voice and an acoustic guitar, something that Carl Sandburg would have had handy to him, because Carl Sandburg was also a pioneering folksong revivalist, often dropping a set of acoustic guitar songs into his readings at a time when Pete Seeger wasn’t out of diapers. Oh, and Bob Dylan? Did you know that when Dylan’s poetic songwriting was just taking off that he took it upon himself to seek out Carl Sandburg? Oh, so many stories, let’s get onto the song. Graphical player below, and an alternative highlighted link for those that can’t see that player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/A_Dream_Girl.mp3.
*Charlie, Mary, or someone must have talked Charlie up a bit. Colleges, even then, didn’t usually admit folks who hadn’t attended high school.
**By the turn of the century, democratic socialism was an emergent movement in the US. Despite its suppression in the WWI years there was some chance that it could have developed into a European style mass political party. Even with the Palmer raids and fears of a Soviet style revolution after WWI, US Socialists were able to win governorships, congressional seats, and mayoral races in places in the American Midwest in the first half of the 20th century.
***The history of Milwaukee’s Socialist mayors is fascinating and too-little-known. They were the good-government party in that city, noted for reliably delivering civic improvement and services. How did poet Carl find working in the municipal front lines of progressive politics? See this post from earlier in this Project.
**My own dedication: I found out about the 291 Gallery in a book Strange Bedfellows about the intertangled networks of American Modernism that was given to me by Dave Moore and Linnea Hadaway. Thanks!
While looking for material to combine with music and perform for the Project this week I came upon a specific but little-known connection between two great early 20th century poets. I’ll go into the details of that in a bit, but before I write about that, let me set the scene by mentioning something about one of those poets, Robert Frost.
In the past mid-century, when I was growing up, Robert Frost was a poetic institution. He’d won four Pulitzer prizes, his work was as well known as any living American poet, ordinary readers might have familiarity with some of his best-known poems, and a few phrases from those poems had entered general usage. It was not uncommon for the schoolbook poetry anthologies that I’d encounter back then to end with Robert Frost. If he wasn’t the end of poetry, he was as good a symbol as any of the end of poetry as it was consumed up until that mid-century time, where literary poets wrote verse that was assumed to have a chance at general readership and could have evident value to them. He wasn’t Tennyson or Longfellow exactly (Frost’s sound was more like common American speech) but you could see him as a proprietor in the same trade as the 19th century giants.
He was enough of an institution that schoolboy-me was having as little to do with him as I could. Sure, he was living, but that was no help, because he was old. Many dead poets left young corpses, paintings, engravings, or photographs of dashing writers, heads cocked with their thumbs and index fingers up against their visionary brains. Keats or William Blake, now there were my comrades, not Frost. I plead youthful ignorance and concerns, and Frost’s poetry stuck around to eventually inform me in my foolishness.
So, it surprised me to eventually learn that for nearly half his life Robert Frost couldn’t get arrested as a poet in America, and he wasn’t doing all that well in finishing college or finding a steady day gig. Frost may have been trying, but he wasn’t trying very long in any one place — inevitably either they or he wasn’t for having him stick around. Nearing 40 years old, Robert Frost did something next in his unstable life: he went to England. What was this guy, that by my time was the quintessential American-scene poet, thinking?
I’m not enough of a scholar to know for sure, though reading a few Frost bios would probably inform me. One good theory: nature poetry and poetry about rural subjects was having something of a bloomlet in England. If England had led the way in industrialization and empire building, an in-reaction interest for literature about the countryside and country living was arising.
Within a couple of years of arrival Frost connected in England as he’d never been able to do in New England. He published his first two collections of poetry. He formed a close friendship with British critic Edward Thomas (and in return convinced Thomas to write poetry). He ran into another American ex-pat, Ezra Pound, and the younger Pound trumpeted the now 40-year-old Frost’s poetry back to America as part of the coming new thing.
Imagism in action Ezra Pound, acting as a Georgian-era GPS, drew this map to show Frost how to get to Yeats place in London.
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And there may have been another factor, a hoped-for connection with another poet: William Butler Yeats. Yeats wrote of the rural Irish countryside of course, and I had never associated Frost with the Celtic revival at all. Just in preparing for this post today, I took note for the first time that Frost’s mother was a Scottish immigrant. Why did I start to look into that kind of connection?
I started re-reading Frosts first English-published collection, A Boy’s Will, where I came upon this poem with a generalized title: “Love and a Question.” That poem stood out at first glance because I could easily see how it could be fit to a folk-ballad style musical accompaniment. It even included a close variation of a floating verse line used in several folk songs “Her heart in a case of gold/and pinned with a silver pin.” But then there’s a second line too: the woman by a country hearth with thoughts of “the heart’s desire.” Here’s a link to the full text of Frost’s poem.
That second line would have been unremarkable except for the accident of performing a Yeats poem from an early verse play of his The Land of Heart’s Desire this past winter. I link to my post on this if you are new or have forgotten, but this play sets up a nearly identical situation to Frost’s “Love and a Question.” A newly married couple are in a remote cottage on a stormy night. A knock at the door, and we are introduced to a stranger who asks for some comfort — but who is, it’s inferred, a fairy who wishes to enchant the new bride.
How well did Frost know this piece by Yeats? In research this week I found out that while in one of his short-lived teaching jobs before leaving for England he’d directed Yeats play with a company of his students. Cites I can find online mention him putting on this play,* but nothing I found mentions that he also wrote this poem rather directly dealing with the play’s same story.
What does Frost bring to Yeats’ material? While his poem is understandably more condensed than even a one-act play, Frost obscured the situation considerably over Yeats well-told fantasy tale. The few attempts to write about Frost’s poem I found online catch nothing of the fantasy element because Frost makes that so unclear. Yeats’ stranger at the door is portrayed as odd and troubling soon after the character’s arrival, yet other than the continued borrowings from Yeats plot, the only thing in Frost’s text that suggests that the stranger is not a mortal is the peculiar detail of the stranger carrying a ”green-white stick” which if read in the context of Yeats’ tale may be interpreted as a wand or wizard’s staff. The stranger in Yeats is an active character, throwing themselves into the newlyweds’ relationship rapidly. Frost’s stranger is but spoken to and doesn’t act or speak other than the knocking entrance. The bride in Yeats has some action and agency in her own thoughts. The bride in Frost is a single tableau by the fire. The fears of the bridegroom are expressed in both the verse play and the poem, but in Frost’s poem he seems to be talking almost to himself. Endings? Spoiler alert: in Yeats’ play the bride dies, and it may be guessed that her soul-spirit has been taken by the fairy-stranger. Frost’s ending is vaguer. The bridegroom seems to say he understands the protocols of regular alms-seeking, but he can’t understand why someone would be so rude as to interrupt a new wedded couple on their honeymoon. Yeats’ bridegroom is anxious, but wary as he tries to win the occult battle, even though he fails. Frost’s bridegroom seems, well, puzzled.** Is Frost satirizing Yeats tragic Irish tale, suggesting that a real rural bridegroom wouldn’t figure out what was going on? I might be missing something, but does the poem feel like a satire? For the bridegroom to be a fool wouldn’t surprise a Frost reader. Many kinds of human foolishness, misunderstandings and limitations are portrayed in Frost poems.
This brings up another factor. This early Frost poem isn’t very Frostian. The story, such as it is, isn’t clearly laid out, and the language and prosody — this seems impolite to say about this master — is awkward. I thought this poem would be easy to sing. It wasn’t, and I think that goes beyond my limitations and the brief time I could obtain to work on recording this. The poem strains natural, clear syntax and order at times to make the rhyme, and it doesn’t show well Frost’s famed use of metered verse that sounds like natural 20th century American speech. I don’t know if being so confusing adds to the weird tale, though as an aficionado of handed-down folk music there are times when the stuff that falls out through worm-holes or is forgotten in the folk process does add power by mystery. No one really knows for sure what “Smokestack lightning” is, or what it has to do with the rest of what Howlin’ Wolf sang about, and most don’t know what the hell a cambric shirt is either. We know only that something strange is going on. The listener here may be like Frost’s bridegroom: with some passion though puzzled.
So now you know that Robert Frost wrote a poem after a verse-play by Yeats, and you can hear me work to bring that Frost poem to music with the graphic player below. If that player doesn’t show up at your door, wave your magic pointer and strike this highlighted link to open an alternative audio player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Love_and_a_Question.mp3.
Introduction to a Frost anthology The Road Not Taken by L. U. (I’m thinking, Louis Untermeyer), Yeats and American Poetry by Terence Diggory, and Robert Frost: A Life* by Jay Parini. The latter quotes Frost writing that Yeats was able to “make the sense of beauty ache.”
**The ballad tradition includes tales of ordinary folks who by luck, pluck, or guile beat the occult challenger. I don’t know how well Frost knew his Child ballads, but he did know the golden heart box with a silver pin. Still, I can’t think of one offhand where the mortal wins just by being a bit dense about what is going on.
British poet Edward Thomas, who deserves to be better-known in the U. S., is one of the best nature poets I’m aware of. And today’s ode to the beginnings of spring shows one reason why. Like many a good nature poet, Thomas’ landscape, animals, and plants are infused not only with his region’s specifics, but with his own understanding of the order and significance of life. What takes his poetic observation to a next level? In this poem, it’s, well — bird poop.
Here’s a link to the text of “But These Things Also.” This is a grey poem about and often grey time, despite all the odes to the greenness and new-found warmth cataloged in other spring poems. In the reduced contrast of this poem’s palette, white splashes against grey make up its color field. Thomas (who didn’t make it past middle age,* but who could have been myopic) sees plausible flowers emerging. It’s not. It’s bird droppings. Here, nature instructs, changes his poem from an otherwise competent one to a better one. The later appearance of starlings, the British bird of indifferent song and nuisance potential, are foreshadowed (foreshite?) — and we might know (as Thomas certainly would have) that the starlings flocks are startling in their amazing patterned flights. Life and spring may well get on with amazement after first meagre overtures.
“In splashes of the purest white” vs. “Continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the milky way” Thomas vs. Wordsworth in a springtime faeces & flowers battle
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You can hear my rock-band setting of Edward Thomas’ “But These Things Also” below, but before I leave off writing about his poem, let me speak a bit about what I note about the poem’s use of rhyme. Like another great nature poet, Emily Dickinson, Thomas here is not over-determined by his need to make perfect rhymes, and the ABCB scheme starts right off with a sight rhyme of “grass” with “was.” Let’s not mark him down a grade, because the poem has a great deal of near rhyme, an effect that I find often more effective than ding-dong perfect rhymes. The pair of adjacent words “earliest” and “violets” are as strong to me as violet’s eventual end-rhyme with “debts.” And “debts” still hears the echo of the preceding “dung” and following “mist.” You may hear other consonance, assonance, and pararhymes in Thomas’ word choices.
It’s these sorts of things that make me resistant to some poetic formalists. While perfect regularity can reinforce a sense of fate (or to be honest about my own response, boredom) — irregular rhyme appearances, and variations to and from perfect rhyme, can evoke surprise and discovery.
OK, enough dancing about architecture. Let’s get onto the audio piece, the performance. Graphical player below for some of you, and if not, this highlighted link that’ll open an audio player. This is one of those pieces where I wish there was a better singer than myself handy, but it was still fun to move from chair to chair to create this one-man-band recording. I recorded this close enough together with our last piece, Anna Akhmatova’s “Like a White Stone,” that I’m thinking if this was a polished prog-rock album that I’d fade the two pieces into a 7-minute medley.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/But_These_Things_Also.mp3.
*I decided to insert into Thomas’ ode my own aged vision issues, by making “man” in his text, “old man” in my performance.
Poetry, musical speech, is so associated with symbols that it may be impossible to imagine it without metaphor as a rhetorical device. This both bugs and pleases readers and listeners. Symbols can add richness, a sense of novel connections, or they may vex the reader, taunting them with needs for esoteric knowledge or psychic investigations of the author’s mind.
For me at least, poems can work when they are clear as any condensed speech would be on first reading — and when they are nearly incomprehensible as anything other than collections of energetic words. So, along that continuum, a poem may succeed (or fail) — but it must compel. After all, we have so many other words that waft over us written, spoken, recorded, some enriched with music, video, some from those already near and dear to us. As a young person I was drawn more to the richness of images and cared less for the clarity of expression. Other poets tried to convince me that clarity showed respect for the readers busy lives, that incomprehensibility wasn’t a requirement for good poetry. I eventually listened to them and somewhat changed what I wrote and admired. In my newer but still ambiguous stance toward poetic obscurity, I believed that a poem needs to be no more complex that it has to be, and no fancier in its conceits than it needs to be to draw a reader’s or listener’s attention. I may have a bit more to say on these issues in another post, but let’s move on to a new musical piece today.
I’m largely unfamiliar with the poet whose words I’ll use for today’s audio piece, Anna Akhmatova. She became known to me several years back when the unique American roots singer-songwriter Iris DeMent recorded an album of heartfelt intuitive settings of Akhmatova’s poems, “The Trackless Woods.”* This record was released in 2015, around the time that I was formulating some ideas of how to do what became this Parlando Project. Many of my ideas were already set down, even some of the pieces you’ve heard here had already been recorded, but I felt then that DeMent’s record reinforced my intents to do this Project at a time of decision.
Now this month I saw Akhmatova’s poem “Like a White Stone” featured in poets.org’s Poem A Day — and it did that “compel” thing with me as I read it in the middle of an otherwise occupied day. I eventually set upon creating a musical setting for it, one which you’ll be able to hear below.
Revisiting some interviews DeMent did around the release of her Akhmatova album I found out it was the same Akhmatova poem that compelled her. In a 2015 interview with the Poetry Foundation, she said:
This whole project is so mysterious to me…. It’s just this weird thing that happened instantaneously upon the first reading of the very first poem of hers I ever read which was “Like a White Stone”. In that period of time, within an hour or so I’d set three or four of them to music.”
I also found out, after composing and recording my performance of “Like a White Stone,” that Akhmatova was associated with a movement called Acmeism which reacted against the French Symbolists, a group of French poets that attracted me in my youth. The Symbolists were all about the effusive, exotic and elusive image. The Acmeists, in reaction, all about precision and clarity. The Symbolists were admired by Dada, Surrealism, and the hermetic strains of modern poetry in English. Acmeism could easily be related to other modern poets who want clarity and the power of easily discerned emotional messages.
“Someone looking closely into my eyes would see it” Anna Akhmatova
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Knowing that, how does “Like a White Stone” stack up on the continuum from clear and direct to wild and elusive? Here’s a link to the poem’s text. I’m working from this translation (by Babette Deutsch and Avaham Yarmolinsky) and I know, as one who’s translated poems myself, that there are risks that I may be grabbing onto details that are the translator’s solution not the author’s own design in the original language. My judgement overall is that this poem is in the middle somewhere, even if closer to the clear and direct pole. The opening image, the one that first grabs the reader, is both clear and elusive for me, a combination that often works to compel. A “white stone**” deep in a well, yet it’s also “hard and clear.” It somehow doesn’t put us off that this is contradictory. How much might we be able to see anything clearly, even a light-colored stone, deep in a well? Yet the poem says we know it’s there, we know its hardness sensuously — it’s not only some indistinct imagination. Is it likely we know the stone, its color, its feel in the hand, because we’ve tossed it there? And the poem then launches into an extended consideration of memory, its dichotomy, how it’s both present and by definition, absent. It’s easy to explicate this poem as something addressed to a false, absent, exiled, or discarded lover, yet it refuses to choose details or say that directly. In the poem’s conclusion, the white stone deep in the well is an image like unto a human turned into a rock or statue, unable to move from or toward exile, as permanent as ended — a memory.
Would this poem be more powerful if it just straightforwardly told us the details? Would it be more artful if it was more elaborate and fanciful in its images? Well, some poem otherwise might be — but this poem compelled both Iris DeMent and me, and maybe it’ll compel you to listen too.
My performance isn’t like DeMent’s at all. I hadn’t even recalled that this poem was one that she had performed when I worked on it this month. Although DeMent uses the same translation as I used, she phrases it differently, and while I’m no stranger to some American roots style musical flavors my choice today was more toward electronic synth sounds. Hers has a Protestant hymn flavor, mine aims at the surging dance of the floating memory mind. You can hear my performance of Anna Akhmatova’s “Like a White Stone” with the player gadget below, or if you don’t see that player, with this alternative highlighted link.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Like_a_White_Stone.mp3.
*My ignorance isn’t Akhmatova’s fault. Although her work was suppressed by the Soviet Union’s cultural czars, and some of her associates killed, exiled, or imprisoned, she’s now generally recognized as an important 20th century Russian language poet.
**The white stone image, the specificity of which depends on translators’ choice, might possibly connect with another translator’s choice, in the Bible’s Revelations verse about a white stone. But remember, these are two translators, one going from Russian and the other from Greek to our English, each deciding exact words that we put in with our own connotations. Did this white stone have some connotation of translucency, perhaps even a diamond? Intuitively to me it’s a lover’s token, but I could be wrong.
It occurs to me that it may have been a while since I’ve reminded new readers what the Parlando Project is, has done, and tries to do. It started as an idea around 2015 to focus on something I’d done off and on for decades: to combine other people’s words, usually literary poetry designed to be seen on silent pages, with a variety of original music.
I did this not only because I think it’s fun, but because the process allows me to more deeply absorb some sense of what the poets are trying to convey. At least for me, I can read a poem with my eyes and sense that there’s something wonderful there — but then to read it aloud, perhaps even to sing it, allows me to inhabit it, to visit the environment inside it, as if one is deep inside some forest, awash at a water-brink, or walking down its street or inside some meaningful building.
Reading a poem silently is like looking at a picture. Performing it aloud is painting the picture with the words still wet.
Early in the Project many of these performances were with others, most often my long-time musical partner Dave Moore. For a number of reasons those opportunities have decreased. These days the typical musical setting here is composed, and all the parts played or scored, by myself. I’ve done a handful of pieces in the Project without instruments, but that’s unusual. I think that even though they are played by a one-man-band I want the words to have companions. Even the loneliest poems can have these here.
I do these pieces myself, not because I have great confidence or a high appraisal of my musicianship. Far from it. I compose and play the parts because I’m available. I’m an amiable contractor to myself, I enjoy playing different instruments, and I’m unafraid to dive into a variety of musical environments. My estimate is that most musicians who hear what I produce for the Parlando Project are unimpressed by this work, in that I almost never get responses from them when they are exposed to it.* My guess is that is because I use simple ideas, and my realization of even these basic conceptions via my own playing has imperfections. My musical “thing” is more at participatory folk music or the punk/indie ethos — and though I try to produce good work here, and I’ve put effort into that, I don’t consider many of the Parlando Project pieces the best realization they could have. When I’ve taken to putting up chord sheets of some of the simpler acoustic guitar pieces here in the past year, I’m thinking that a better singer or player might take them to a better musical place.
Imaginary band gets down in beatnik cellar. Illustration shows my younger self & spouse in the center. W. H. Auden taps his cig on the ashtray in the foreground. Behind the drummer, Gertrude Stein considers Virgil Thomson.
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Now let’s get on to a brief rundown of the Parlando pieces that were most liked and listened to this past winter. I do this countdown style, from 10 to the most popular. The highlighted titles are links in case you’d like to see what I wrote about the pieces when I first presented it.
10. All Souls Night by Hortense Flexner. Long-time readers here will know I like to go beyond “Poetry’s Greatest Hits” here, and this spooky piece by a little-remembered author from the time of WWI continued to be listened to long after Halloween.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/All_Souls_Night.mp3.
9. “Uncle Sam Says” by Waring Cuney. This one, jumping forward to the WWII era, is almost cheating, as Cuney, a friend of Langston Hughes, engaged here in straight-out songwriting with bluesman Josh White. I’ve been playing a bit more bottleneck slide guitar this winter, and that’s what I used to accompany this message song about a segregated military.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Uncle_Sam_Says.mp3.
8. “Now Winter Nights Enlarge” by Thomas Campion. Speaking of songwriters: poet, musician, and Elizabethan-age physician Campion also intended this to be sung — although, as with “Uncle Sam Says,” I didn’t use the original music for my performance.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Now_Winter_Nights_Enlarge.mp3.
7. “The House of Hospitalities” by Thomas Hardy. A poet who spanned significant chunks of the 19th and 20th centuries, Hardy was well-versed in poems of rich remembrances, as in this Christmas season memory of holiday celebrations past and gone.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_House_of_Hospitalities.mp3.
6. “I’m Sorry for the Dead Today” by Emily Dickinson. One of three appearances by this crucial American genius, this one a jolly remembrance of a cooperative harvest time in Amherst.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Im_Sorry_for_the_Dead_Today.mp3.
5. “I’m Afraid to Own a Body” by Emily Dickinson. An opening line or two in a poem can grab even the most inattentive reader sometimes, and this poem’s opening pair of lines certainly did so for me this winter.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/I_Am_Afraid_to_Own_a_Body.mp3.
4. “Fairy Song” by William Butler Yeats. Like many a Yeats poem, this one beguiles you and me with its lovely word music. Then I read the play whereupon the poem appears and discovered that its context is exactly that for the song’s singing fairy: a beguiling away of a distressed person from their heart, hearth, and home. That wind that opens this poem is chilling once you know.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Yeats_Fairy_Song.mp3.
3. “I felt my life with both my hands” by Emily Dickinson. I cannot say authoritatively what Dickinson intended the context of this poem to be, but I read it as an examination of body dysphoria, though I’m unsure if anyone else has “read” her poem that way. As I have sometimes done, I’ve performed this with what I call an “Inline Epigraph,” quoting a line from a Lou Reed’s song “Candy Says” before the concluding section of Dickinson’s text in my performance. I often think of poems as being in conversation with each other.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/I_felt_my_life_with_both_my_hands.mp3.
2. Railroad Avenue by Langston Hughes. I spent an enjoyable but inconclusive time searching for the “real” Railroad Avenue, thinking it could be like Van Morrison’s Cyprus Avenue or a NYC address in a Frank O’Hara poem. Couldn’t find it. May be it’s only mapped in Hughes’ imagination, a construction for the purposes of the poem. Long-time reader rmichaelroman reminded us in comments that America’s separations often are lined by being right in one’s memories from the “wrong side of the tracks.”
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Railroad_Avenue.mp3.
1. “I’m Gonna Make Love to my Widow ‘fore I’m Gone” by Frank Hudson. Another bottleneck guitar piece that readers and listeners liked a lot this winter. Well — a self-penned piece about good old-fashioned winter randiness made it to the top of the Top Ten. Go figure. They’re talking single digit wind-chills and a March snowstorm as this week ends up here in Minnesota. Codger cuddling is carbon-free heating people!
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Im_Gonna_Make_Love_to_My_Widow_fore_Im_Gone.mp3.
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*I ascribe this to politeness on their part. I tell myself that I overvalue the audacity and aims of what I do, when simple competence with simple ideas might be preferable.
Something in me says there should be more new pieces here since the last post, as I have several partially completed things, but the distress of folks around me pulls me several ways away from that. The distress hints that this music and poetry stuff should yield to more pressing problems, and then the unpredictability of the distress primes a sense of anxious alertness mixed with weariness. Though I’m at home, I feel like I’m in a medical waiting room, perhaps outside an Emergency Department, waiting for what it is that will be, in some not predictable soon, be said. As waiting people do, I read and do random things, anything having nothing to do with the matters at hand. Nothing too absorbing, for I don’t know when I will need to put it down.
But I’ll also say this, poetry has managed to stick itself into this state nonetheless. Poems can be as small as house mice, there’s always some place they can sift or scrunch their way in. And so it was early this morning when I saw this poem by Frank O’Hara “Now that I am in Madrid and I can think.” I found it could be fit to an already composed musical piece I had done late last month, and so I put them together this afternoon. If you’d like to read the text of this poem, here’s a link to that.
This is a love poem, and more specifically a poem about separation from the beloved, and O’Hara’s language is as beautifully askew and full of charming scatteration as any of his more well-known poems. If I had time and an inclined mood, I could write at length about his musical language here and his turns of phrase: “The slender heart you are sharing my share of, “See (sea) a vast bridge stretching,” and “The lungs I have felt sonorously, subside, slowly.” There’s this intimacy interrupted, the separation of bodies and their encased lives. The title says the speaker in the poem can now think. Well, they have constructed a fine thing, something that takes some smarts, some wit, but what they have constructed is a set of feelings outweighing any thoughtful aesthetic pleasures of travel.
The exciting places in Madrid Frank O’Hara is ignoring to think of his beloved. Oh— this is Madrid, Iowa! Iowans can tell out-of-staters by how they can’t get the French pronunciation of Des Moines right, and then they’ll see if they’ll correctly say this town’s name as “Mad-Rid.”
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Perhaps this is why this poem snuck in between the trivia and my nervous time-passers. Here the illustrious culture of Spain is obscured by the distress and longing of separation. The poem finishes with one of O’Hara’s fine last lines. Do I want the empty world, the world without art? Yes, sometimes, but only by the choices of joined desire.
From the times I’ve listened to recordings of Frank O’Hara reading, I suspect he’d be more off-hand and playful in reading his poem than I was, but my reading reflects my current mood. The music for today’s performance is dense and urgent, I will not dance much about its architecture right now, but you can hear it with the player gadget below — or if that’s not visible as you read this, with this alternative highlighted link.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Now_that_I_am_in_Madrid_and_I_can_think.mp3.
I just spent a half-hour watching this video recommended to me by a stranger elsewhere online. I knew. and still know nothing, about the man who talks here, despite a documentary being made about him a few years back.
Why did it hold my attention, even though it’s partly about that documentary and a career I don’t know? Well, he’s an engaging talker, and the interviewer here too is excellent, but that wouldn’t be determinative. One of this project’s mottos is “Other People’s Stories,” but obviously in a world of current billions and more than a millennium of poetry to consider, I’m going to ignore or pass by most people’s stories. Maybe it’s his age and his obvious engagement with art, while being old enough to be my father? I’m old. I’m still engaged in this Project. Old people still facing that situation may be the link that connected me.
As someone who currently rarely performs live in a room of listeners, the subject of “stage fright” isn’t a pressing issue for me. The early parts of this interview do speak to that issue, reminding us that it is not a unique, shameful, issue — but one that is rather common among performers. No, it’s not so much stage fright that I myself am most interested in. Rather, I’ve been increasingly promotional with the more than 650 audio pieces and accompanying posts that have accumulated here over the past six years. I frankly feel a mix of unseemly self-interest and objective self-delusion as I do that. These acts of promotion are still novel enough for me that I can, for now, press on past those feelings. And since it’s been harder to create more pieces, or as complete a realization in them of what this Project tries to do, this task — which embarrasses me — allows me to think I’d doing something in place of that.
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What I find is the deeper message then of this man’s account is that there is an element in art — subject, yes, to the clouding of our egos and neurotic urges — that is beyond ourselves. More than 20 minutes in, in what becomes the conclusion of the interview’s story arc — the thing everything before has been building to — Seymour Bernstein articulates that place.*
Can we visit that place consciously, acknowledge that we want to abide there at least a little while?
For an audio piece, here’s one of the early pieces of this project I’m most proud of, another older man of music speaking about that art. Weston Noble, spoke this about music at his retirement, and I wove his words into some original music. You can hear it with the player gadget below, or with this highlighted link.
http://traffic.libsyn.com/parlando/The_Garden_Of_Trust.mp3.
*So, should I give it to you in pull quote form, a TL:DNR assistance to the harried reader who doesn’t have time for the half-hour interview? I debated this, but decided that no, it would lack impact without the build of the story telling itself by the method of it’s telling. I decided, you might be too likely to shrug, and the precept would roll off your consciousness. And earlier in the interview Bernstein makes another recommendation that may be valuable to writers and composers: that a balance of re-creation and creation is helpful.
Yesterday was some kind of day to celebrate Wales, and I asked the teenager in the house what they did to celebrate since they have an interest in languages and had recently been studying Welsh language online.
“You mean for St. David’s Day?” They replied. I was surprised they knew — but then they’re often surprising. “What are you supposed to do?”
“I dunno. Maybe make a point to use W as a vowel?”
What did I do? I worked, using some increasingly rare time recently, on a new piece here that you may see later this month with words by Welsh poet Edward Thomas. But that’s not today. Today is my catching up with a piece that has been in the works for a couple of weeks at least, remaining unfinished as other concerns remand me to only hot takes and short contributions on Twitter.
Those I follow in the British Isles are sharing pictures of buds and first wildflowers. Not here.
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Is Sara Teasdale’s “Winter Stars” late then? In my upper Midwest, absolutely not. Monday it snowed, my bicycle which I’ve ridden all winter, is behind a shed door whose jam is frozen completely shut by an icy enchantment after melt/refreeze — and 15 degrees F. this morning certainly won’t let it go. Yet, there’s one other time displacement to account for in this poem, for this is another of Teasdale’s poems about WWI. Particularly in Great Britain, when “War Poets” are mentioned, male citizen-soldiers are typically meant, and few now recall that American poet Teasdale wrote poems about the war. One of those poems is likely her best-known poem (or at least poem title, since Ray Bradbury borrowed it) “There Will Come Soft Rains.” So lovely and complete is that dystopian vision within itself that I suspect it never occurs to readers today that she was writing it in the context of WWI.
“Winter Stars” has the same strengths of not seeming to be stuck in time or current events. Indeed, folks have written about the poem and thought the blood flowing and wars mentioned within its lines are metaphoric tropes. Alas, as I considered this poem during this past February, the anniversary of the still ongoing invasion of Ukraine provided a corresponding all-too-actual simile. Here’s a link to the full text of Teasdale’s poem.
Teasdale’s night stars are then, like the sure-to-come soft rains of her other poem, a meditation on what endures when suffering, violence, and human vanity can change everything else. I was particularly taken with the next to last quatrain in Teasdale’s poem, remembering as I read it her guarded and constrained by illness childhood looking out a bedroom window at the immortal stars and the mighty Orion, the hunter, who could change and master things.
In the poem, it turns out that Orion doesn’t change things, rather that desire to change things is the constant. Teasdale would leave her sick-room childhood in St. Louis, find some brief success in New York. That older Teasdale is the writer of this lyric. Armies can march, hunting changeable borders to be drawn in blood. Teasdale seems to somehow fatalistically know that Orion and winter never leave, they only blink, they’re always there, the hunter and the prey.
The player gadget to hear my performance of Sara Teasdale’s “Winter Stars” is below for many of you. No player to be found? This highlighted link will open a new tab window with a player so you can hear it too.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Winter_Stars.mp3.
I hope some of you enjoyed this Black History Month look at the premier 1926 issue of Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists. This landmark of the Harlem Renaissance announced a new generation of young Black writers, many just out their teens — artists who not only filled its pages, but organized and edited the publication. Today I’m going to tie up some loose ends and tuck in the laces on the Fire!! story and give you a few links in case you want to do your own exploring.
Here’s a fine website done recently by a group of young people who present the entire magazine itself and some of their own encounters with the meaning of the work inside.
It was there I found a link to this completely scientific and accurate Buzzfeed quiz from 2018 “Which Fire!! Magazine Author Are You Most Similar To?”
The quiz says I’m Gwendolyn Bennett. My wife’s results: Richard Bruce (Nugent). Richard Bruce too for longtime keyboard playing and alternate voice contributor to this Project Dave Moore. Dave’s artist partner joined me in the Gwendolyn Bennett result.
So, we looked at the first issue of Fire!! this month. What about the next issue, other issues? There wasn’t one. The magazine, founded by young artists, was not well funded, and selling and distributing didn’t go well. The gatekeepers were at least privately aghast at some of the content, so their advice and word of mouth was to disparage and discourage this effort. I’ve already mentioned when presenting two of the four poets I selected for musical performance that publication in Fire!! did not guarantee lasting readership or note for these young people. So, Fire!! folded, and in a lead-eared note of irony, the mostly unsold print run was destroyed in a storeroom fire. John Keats epitaph says his name was writ in water. Fire!! and some of its writer’s names were writ in fire, and it all died down.
I often suspect many folks who find these blog posts are looking for homework help or teaching resources. To what I (an old person) can understand, being a teacher or a student covers wider territories than in my days, but there are still skirmishes at the borders and difficult areas under the control of different warlords. Fire!! magazine sought to cross those borders then — and if one is to study it and its contributors in any depth, it still does. Not only did Fire!! bring forward new young writers — many committed to Modernist art and radical politics — it purposefully sought to express elements of life that the older generation of gatekeepers wanted to suppress or keep only within the tribe. One of those things was sexuality. So teachers and students, here we have a group of young creators in 1926 writing on race, injustice, and sexual expression that isn’t in committed relationships or straight. On what authority did these audacious writers take to break through those barriers? Not only were the instigators and contributors of Fire!! young, gifted and Black, they also were often somewhere on the spectrum we could label today as queer.*
A drawing by Richard Bruce Nugent from Fire!!
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So, to teach or discuss Fire!! and its creators beyond a surface is to go to places where teaching and learning is still constrained. I’d say to learners (a class that includes nearly all teachers) you may choose to go there even if traveling alone. Literature, music, the arts are the forged identity papers that let you cross borders. Though the writers of Fire!! are all dead, they won’t mind speaking with you.
In the spirit of gratitude to Afro-Americans and their vital contribution to American culture let me repost my Buzzfeed Fire!! contributor-like Gwendolyn Bennett’s summary in poetic “Song.” Graphical player below, or a backup player will open in a new tab link here.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Bennetts_Song.mp3.
Here’s one web post by someone who taught school, doing a better job than I can today of discussing the queer aspects woven into the Harlem Renaissance. There is also this low-budget indie movie Brother to Brother made nearly a decade ago centering on Richard Bruce Nugent, Wallace Thurman, and the non-straight circle that organized Fire!!* The film has some PG13 level sex scenes and self-violence. I found it available for rental from the usual online sources like Apple TV or Amazon Prime.
Returning to the poems published in the 1926 issue of Fire!! magazine which proclaimed it was “Devoted to Younger Negro Artists,” we get this simple seeming, yet mysterious poem by one of Fire’s most famous contributors and organizers: the then 25-year-old Langston Hughes.
“Railroad Avenue” looks like a simple free-verse street-scene vignette. Here’s a link to the text of the poem if you’d like to follow along. Yet the more I looked to understand it, the deeper the mystery of it became.
Here are a few things that seem quite clear: it’s evening. There’s a street, likely named by the poem’s title. A few things are seen or heard: lights in two businesses, a boxcar, a record player, a player piano, a boy and a girl, laughter. Largely unremarkable things, so there’s some specific character given to them.
The record player is a Victrola, a short-lived brand from the early 20th century — for example, the ones with the big conical horn as in the original RCA Victor logo. The businesses are a pool hall and a restaurant serving fish. The boy is at leisure, comfortable. The girl has a dark face that is powdered. In what may be internal monologue the poem’s narrator gives us the winning number in the day’s policy game.*
So, are we clearly visualizing the place being described? At first I thought I could. I figured without evidence that this was a crowded urban nightlife street, the two other people only examples of many, the sounds and things part of what could have been a larger catalog. Is that reading possible? Two things mentioned that are likely heard not seen: the player piano (reasonably loud) and the Victrola, which would not be. Victrolas were not electric record players. The records turned via clockwork, the sound was produced acoustically from the grooves in the records. So, it’s not blaring out a window over robust street sounds. If the statement on the winning daily number 942 is audible rather than the interior thoughts of our narrator, it too would likely be at a conversational level (given no indication that the speaker/thinker won).
And then there’s that boxcar. Mentioned twice, Hughes really wants us to see that there’s this boxcar there, yet says nothing about it other than also saying twice that it’s forgotten. What’s that mean? A boxcar is a freight train car. This is not an urban light rail or passenger train line being invoked. Who forgets a boxcar? Is it just one piece of rolling stock left off somewhere as a spare or scrap? While the poem doesn’t say this, I began seeing it as part of a train on a grade-level street crossing, with the boxcar’s location blocking the road, a location so that it has to be mentioned, can’t be ignored. Did Hughes see this clearly in his mind and forgot to make it plain in his poem, or am I imagining things?
This vision invoked in me of a small town to small city location where the freight train line runs on grade-level, not on bridges over the roads or in tunnels under them, let me begin to see this as a much sleepier street. This isn’t the busy streetlight and neon Harlem of Hughes’ Harlem Renaissance. The dusk is “dark,” the street quiet enough to hear things distinctly as the evening begins. As the poem reaches a crescendo portion, it’s laughter we hear. It’s “sudden,” indicating that it startles the relative quiet and is not muffled by it. Hughes metaphorically amplifies that laughter with repetition — stating that this laughter with its transport from the ordinary and unenergetic street is able to shake the shop lights and move billiard balls.
This is a poem published by a 25-year-old, but I get a sense this may well be a memory of an even more youthful time with daylight ending, with sounds and a scattered glow from remembered lit windows. Dusk is a marking time for many young people, between the era when it says “time to go home” spanning to the age of “time to first go out and explore your nighttime world of romance and adult recreation.” I wondered, would the poem have more context if I knew where the poem’s titular Railroad Avenue is? America has lots of Railroad Avenues and streets, so the name alone tells us little, other than this isn’t a boxcar dropped off miles from a rail line.
A Google Streetview showing the intersection of a main Joplin MO street now renamed for Langston Hughes with Railroad Ave. Google’s camera vehicles didn’t drive & record down the gravel path that is Railroad Avenue right beside the train tracks.
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I spent half a day trying to figure out where such a street might be in the places the young Hughes was known to have lived. I’ll summarize the candidates as briefly as I can. He was born in Joplin Missouri, and there’s a very good Railroad Avenue there, with everything you might want for this less-populated scene — though the Afro-American population at the time Hughes’ family lived there was low. But Hughes and his parents left Joplin when Hughes was around 1-2 years old, and there’s nothing I could find saying anyone went back. And was Joplin even big enough and ethnic enough for a numbers game? Hughes spent his grade-school years in Lawrence Kansas being raised by his grandmother. Yes, there were some Black neighborhoods,*** but no likely Railroad Avenue. He spent time at Howard University in Washington D. C. There’s a Railroad Avenue in that city, but it’s far from Howard, and seems to be (and likely was) a non-descript industrial area. Afro-American Howard students might spend evenings on U street circa 1920, but like Harlem in that era, it’d be lit and busy, and no likely boxcars there. Hughes attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and once more I thought I might have a chance. Not as urban circa 1920 — but then no Railroad Avenue, not even a railroad line for more than 15 miles that I could find. And even if he’s a famous figure from the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes’ Harlem is as unlikely for a sleepy dark dusk with a grade-level railroad line as Washington D. C.
Is Railroad Avenue just something Hughes made up? Is it someone else’s story, something he absorbed from a friend, or his mother or grandmother? Did he go back and visit his birthplace Joplin before 1926 and observe a relaxed scene somewhere on that gravel-surface Railroad Avenue? I’ll probably never know.
But what’s up with that boxcar? Why is it so important, and so specifically forgotten? As a short, Modernist free verse poem, we can think: “So much depends/upon/the boxcar/serenaded by a/Victrola/beside a purple/powdered girl.” One theory: the boxcar is a plausible hobo-ride escape out of the town, but our narrator either doesn’t want to leave, or doesn’t know if the train-car is soon going his way. Within a year Hughes published another poem “Homesick Blues” written more in Southern Black dialect about someone looking to hobo back south.**** Another theory? If, as I imagined without direct evidence, the train has stopped and the boxcar is blocking the road, it’s a symbol of systematic blockage of the people in the scene. Whoever owns/controls the boxcar doesn’t even need to care about this (it’s “forgotten”) — and meanwhile the laughter of the folks in the scene mitigates their lives as they deal with this unfair, indifferent, hindrance.
I’ll conclude by admitting I composed the music and performed Langston Hughes’ “Railroad Avenue” without knowing exactly what the poem was about. I did have my supposed internal vision while doing so: it’s a small non-urban place, like some in Hughes’ youth. A boy or young man is watching the grownups, thinking without even thinking much, about where he might go, what he might do as he grows up. He knows somehow this, and he, will go away — but this evening he’s there. That personal, practical, vision of mine is, as Hughes has it, “Neither truth nor lie.”
You can hear my performance with the player below, or lacking that, with this highlighted link.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Railroad_Avenue.mp3.
*This line is the only one that specifically calls out the racial caste situation in the poem. Powders to lighten the skin tone of darker skinned Afro-Americans were a common cosmetic in Hughes’ time.
**Number or Policy lottery games were present in cities by the time of this poem. The illegal gambling game was usually a daily low-cost bet, winners determined by some coincidental trio of numbers that could be found published daily in newspapers. While associated with Afro-Americans, it was played by other ethnicities too. I don’t know much about its plausible presence in smaller cities and towns before 1926, though Wikipedia says such games go back to Civil War times.
***During the mid-19th century violence of the “Bloody Kansas” struggle to decide if Kansas would be admitted to the union as a slave or free state the pro-slavery forces sacked and destroyed Lawrence more than once. John Brown became a leader of guerilla anti-slavery forces in Kansas, and Hughes’ grandmother, who largely raised him, had a first husband who was killed with Brown at Harper’s Ferry.
****Example that Hughes was comfortable writing either as a collective noun or in the voices of personas.
Here’s another lyric of Waring Cuney’s used on Josh White’s 1941 record Southern Exposure. Before I get on with presenting the song, let me briefly review who White and Cuney are.
Josh White was a Black American singer and guitarist who usually performed in the Afro-American Blues style. The Blues was a popular musical genre among Black Americans during the first half or so of the 20th century. During that century, some of the musical ideas and a great deal of the outlook and performance style of Blues were gradually absorbed into general American musical culture. As another Blues lyricist, Willie Dixon put it: “The Blues had a baby, and they called it Rock’n’Roll.” And so, when I was a young man, there were numerous young acts seeking to call attention to the centrality of Blues music to Rock music. However, most of these then young musical artists, like the majority of their audiences, were white. Unluckily, Josh White’s relationship to the Blues and it’s audiences was essentially premature — he was a man before his time.
Though White was a fine guitarist, singer, and performer who could have scuffled on the segregated Black performance circuit, for a complex set of reasons he became associated with the American political left and its largely white “Folk Music” performers. There’s a fascinating story on how that came to be that I can’t fit into a short blog post, but the shortest summary I can make of this is that equal rights for Afro-Americans was taken up as a left-wing cause, even more specifically as an American Communist cause, after the Lincoln-Grant Republican party became estranged from energetic advocacy for those rights. In the 1930s-50s era White performed for mixed, largely white audiences associated with the Left, while his contemporary Black Blues artists performed to overwhelmingly Black audiences. Want to know more? Here’s a link to an excellent blog post by Elijah Wald that explains how this premature Blues cross-over complicated White’s career. TL:DNR? Because he crossed-over before the Sixties, he was somehow considered inauthentic.
A later re-issue of the White-Cuney Southern Exposure record
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Waring Cuney, as this month’s readers of this blog know, was associated with other young artists of the “Harlem Renaissance” even though his name became lesser-known than his colleagues. Always musically interested, he lent his poetic skills to White’s 1941 Southern Exposure album. Today’s selection, where I perform one of his lyrics from that with my own music, deals with a specific area of equal-rights advocacy for Afro-Americans: military service. In 1941, the American military was segregated, and like America in general in this era, the dictum “separate but equal” was largely an absurd charade, easily tied to pervasive white supremacy and ideas of Black inferiority. Ugly stuff — but in the era just before America entered into WWII, also stupid and counterproductive.
I’m going to oversimplify and compress again, but during the Civil War and in WWI segregated American Black soldier companies had proven their abilities as fighting units, but in the between-the-wars era the US Military had reduced itself to something reflective of the plantation South or the servant-class North. Roles for Afro-American military personnel were limited. Cuney’s “Uncle Sam Says” is a prophetic smart missile aimed at that situation. How so?
It’s a four-verse song, but let’s get on to how Cuney is able to foresee or encourage three things that became current events in the months around when White recorded his singing version of Cuney’s words.
Verse one: Black folks can’t fly combat airplanes. That takes a skilled knight of the air in the mind of the prejudiced. In the same 1941, an Air Corps unit was formed that became known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Yes, it was a segregated all-Black unit, but by 1943 they started proving their mettle.
Verse two: this one is almost eerie. American involvement in WWII combat began with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Aboard the battleship West Virginia there was a messman’s mate named Doris Miller who just before the enemy warplanes arrived was serving breakfast — as Cuney’s lyric says “Keep your apron son.” Miller was a big guy, fullback on his Texas high school team. He was deputized to help carry wounded out of fire and to aid stations on the ship while it was under attack, which he did, including being called on to carry the dying commander of the battleship to treatment. In the midst of this someone directed him to an unmanned machine gun. Miller had no machine gun training — remember, subservient roles in this Jim Crow military — but he’d hunted squirrels, and taking charge of the gun it’s said that he downed between 2 and 6 of the attacking aircraft.
Verse three: while the US hadn’t entered WWII when Cuney wrote his lyrics or when White sang them, the lyric’s prophetic claim that “when the trouble starts, we’ll all be in that same big fight” isn’t as specific as the opening two verses’ charges. Still, it’s a good point. Also note: when blindered folks maintain that the struggle for Afro-American civic equality is all about “privileges,” that it has also historically been a struggle for access to civic responsibilities too.
The last verse issues the call to action and wraps up this effective “message song.” I performed it —that’s a regular part of my encounters with the words this project explores — but if you’d like to hear Josh White’s original version here’s the link to his. The player gadget for my version is below, and if you don’t see that, here’s a link to my version. I have one more example yet from the young Black poets who published Fire!! planned if situations allow me this month, so follow this blog or check back for that.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Uncle_Sam_Says.mp3
Last time here, as we examined the young “Harlem Renaissance” writers who created the 1926 issue of Fire!!, we met one of its lesser-known contributors, Waring Cuney. Today I present an example of something that Cuney did later in his career. But let’s start by going backwards. Cuney was contributing to Fire!! around the time he had won a poetry contest prize as a 19-year-old, but he was originally intending to become a musician. His Wikipedia entry says he changed his mind because he thought he had a poor singing voice.
Already you can see why I, with my inconstant voice and a project that uses the subtitle “The Place Where Music and Words Meet,” might take a liking to him. His family’s music and civil-rights connection may be deep and as strange as America could offer. While I can’t confirm this as I write today, he appears to have been the grandson or other descendant of Norris Wright Cuney (Waring’s father was named Norris Wright Cuney II) who was an important figure in Reconstruction era Texas politics and therefore also related to Norris’ daughter Maude Cuney Hare. Even a glance at the Wikipedia summaries for Norris Wright Cuney and Maude Cuney Hare might tell you how rich and fascinating American Black History can be.*
So, what strangeness made Cuney consider poetry? Here’s the story I found: one day Cuney was riding on a bus reading a newspaper when he saw in it a picture of another young black man his age who had just published a book of poetry. He looked up, and there was that same guy, riding on the same bus, Langston Hughes. The two became friends.
If Hughes’ poetry was early in concerning itself with Black musical expression, Cuney was alongside him with that same inclination. Later on, Hughes would occasionally read his poetry with jazz accompaniment. Cuney went Hughes one better, collaborating with Josh White on a remarkable dawn-of-WWII record of Blues songs about racial injustice called, like the lyric I perform today, “Southern Exposure.”
The 1941 record where Cuney’s lyric was first performed
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This song lyric is nothing fancy, but it’s a compressed portrait of the forces that led large numbers of southern Afro-Americans to move North. What moved them? In short: industrial or domestic/pink color work seemed preferable to the feudal system of southern agriculture enforced with outright de jure racial segregation and restrictions. I could step back a bit and say that like Joseph Campbell’s highly compressed portrait of Irish rural poverty and emigration, “Southern Exposure’s” small cabinet of modest imagery is in the service of describing big things.
I didn’t use Josh White’s music or arrangement for my musical performance of Cuney’s “Southern Exposure,” preferring to rig up my own. I’m singing with acoustic guitar, the adopted Blues instrument White used, but about halfway in the rustic guitar is joined by a cello, a concert-hall instrument. You can hear my rendering of “Southern Exposure” with a graphic player if you see that, or with this backup highlighted link that will open a new tab with a music player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Southern_Exposure.mp3.
*When I read the current controversies being utilized for political leverage regarding American Black History, may I introduce one point that I think gets missed as folks try to maximize white fears about this subject. Yes, horrible things occurred — and they weren’t accidents or fate, they were inflicted with intention. But strange and brave things occurred too. I’d argue that studying evils inflicted with intention is a vital subject for humanity — but also that the second, however bittersweet at times, is marvelous and intensely interesting.
I said I’d return to our encounter with the 1926 Harlem Renaissance issue of Fire!! magazine — and here we are with another poem that was printed there. If you’ll remember from earlier this Black History Month, Fire!! was largely organized, written, and edited by young people under the age of 25, and as such it wanted to represent something of a generational change from the curators of anthologies like James Weldon Johnson’s 1922 The Book of American Negro Poetry or Alain Locke’s The New Negro of 1925. There’s more emphasis on free verse in the poetry section for example, and throughout the issue there’s less attention to propriety. Though only a year separates Fire!! from The New Negro, long-time readers here may recall that Locke’s book included an essay on Black music casting a suspicious eye on what the essayist cast as frivolous Jazz music — and Blues, as a vocal music depicting a lot of disreputable situations, wasn’t considered an art at all.
The cohort of Fire!! didn’t share that outlook. If anything, they wanted to make sure they touched on unconventional thoughts and affinities. And here’s something we now think we know about the young writers in Fire!! — a substantial portion were gay or bisexual. Afro-Americans in the 1920s were coming out as full-fledged contributors to all the public arts — would that other status, fully-illegal and disrespected, muddy the waters of “racial uplift?”
Today’s piece uses a poem by a lesser-known contributor in this issue of Fire!!, Waring Cuney. Like Helene Johnson, who you may have been introduced to earlier this February, Cuney deserves to be better-known. While not directly part of the Harlem scene, Cuney was friends with Langston Hughes, one of the chief instigators of Fire!!, and like Hughes he was a young man who was comfortable with the language and outlook of the Blues.
I can’t seem to find a picture of the young William Waring Cuney, but here he is later in life modeling modern vinyl hipsterism.
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Today’s set of words, Cuney’s poem “The Death Bed” doesn’t use Blues forms directly, but I’ve already been working with some other Cuney poems that do for possible performance, so I decided that I could include some of that today. “The Death Bed” is a poem about a dying man who doesn’t seem very interested in his family’s consolations of religion. While getting religion as death approaches is a common trope, our dying man quickly tells his relatives there’s no need for prayer. The relatives leave for another room, and instead of the purposeful theology of public prayer, our protagonist listens to the enigmatic wind. For one moment he tries to join the windsong with his own song, but finds he can find no words. If windsong is nature (likely) or the paraclete (possible), our dying man cannot form his response.
The poem ends with the dying man concerned with what the relatives in the other room are praying. Are they seeking to intercede for the non-believer? Or might they think he needs to be cleansed of some evil — maybe they are even praying to be protected from the sins this sinner personifies?
Cuney’s poem as it appeared in Fire!!
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In my performance I sought to open-up intimations of another possibility via music. The Godhead or the universe may not require intercession or last-minute prayers. I made a rare choice to use a conventional musical sample for this performance. The slide guitar you hear in the main body of “The Death Bed” is taken from a 1927 recording “Jesus Make Up my Dying Bed” by gospel/blues guitarist and singer Blind Willie Johnson. While many guitarists think Johnson’s sound and distinctive slide-vibrato is unmatchable, one could suppose I could have tried to approximate it. However, I was taken with the romantic notion of combining this 1926 poem with a slice of music recorded around the same time. I then included a short coda with a sung variation of this song. The rest of the music was made with percussion and the sound of bowed cymbals. You can play this performance of Waring Cuney’s “The Death Bed” with a graphical player below. No player to see? This highlighted link is a backup method to play it*.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Dying_Bed.mp3.
*Portions of modern popular and art music intentionally use collaged and looped sections of existing recordings. I tend to avoid that for whatever reason, generally choosing to play or electronically “score” my instruments.
**The performers in that short coda are Fred and Annie McDowell. Fred McDowell is another master of the bottleneck slide guitar.
It’s one of those things that is hard to do well but is none-the-less important to do anyway. Why is it hard? Why is its realization often imperfect? What might one do or aim for when attempting to read one’s own poetry for the public? Well, before I write down some responses to those challenges, let me say that these are not the opinions of an expert or the summary judgements of some important critic, but only observations of someone who attends readings and occasionally reads my own verse aloud before a live audience.
Why is it hard? Perhaps I’d rather say it this way: there’s no good reason it should be easy. The writing of poetry, emphasis on the second word in that sentence, is not a public act. For many of us it takes extraordinary private concentration to create our poetry — and too, we often put in it things we would otherwise never share face-to-face. As a result, a great deal of poetry, particularly our present age’s poetry, derives its power from whispers to ourselves in the dark. Why should the same person who does that writing be any good at reading it aloud?
I attend at least one poetry reading every month and I’ve seen over a hundred poets read. Let me be honest about myself: I’m not a very good listener. I have a racing mind, and any spark that a reader’s words set off, has a tendency to cause my mind to follow it off into my own bonfires. And if the reader’s own tinder is damp, I as a poet myself will spend internal time noting how poorly the campfire chances are progressing. How much better (or worse?) is the average poetry reading audience member in listening? I can’t say, but I fear I’m a bit worse than the average audience member, but that doesn’t mean I don’t notice some ways poets reading may fail more than others.
I’ll summarize one class of failure with a general statement of an issue: not convincing me that the words the reader is sharing are important to be shared. Yes, yes, I know this is hard. Most poets don’t have the audience or objective awards and rewards to be reinforced that their stuff is any good. And those that do (or those that inflate what small elements of that they’ve received) can forget that there may be audience members who still need to be convinced. If you make that case in your manner of presentation and in any introductory speaking you do before and between poems, you’ve improved the chance of the audience paying attention.
Oddly, general posture and “stage presence” doesn’t seem to have as much effect as I might guess it would. Readers who make extensive eye contact vs. those whose heads are downcast to the page on the podium — is the former better than the latter? Probably, but I’ve seen success and failure with both. I’ve seen a few poetry readers with more extensive motion moving around the stage or reading area. This has been rare, and I’ve seen it work (for me as audience member). If I’m not otherwise compelled, it might seem off-putting or artificial. Literary poetry readings do not seem the same as general public speaking or stage performance in expectations or needs in this regard.
Taking steps to earn the audience’s attention can pay off.
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Pacing, setting audience expectations, and “set-list structure” does seem important. Don’t read too fast or too slow. Help the audience understand what you’re going to do (even mundane things like “I’m going to read six poems today” or “This is the last poem I’m going to read tonight”). Musicians most often work out the order of pieces they will present with some thought. It may help the performer (and therefore the audience) if you start with a “greatest pop hit” that you know how to consistently perform without making any extraordinary demands on either audience or reader. Place your most emotionally or intellectually demanding piece at the end, or next-to-last.*
Because we have to get over two obstacles when reading our own poetry, I’ve suggested to poets that they consider splitting their task into two parts. First, practice by reading other poets’ work aloud, even with no audience. Pick poets whose work is meaningful or influential to your own writing style, and figure out how to make them sound their best and most compelling in your voice. Then, move on to your own poetry, and read it in the same voice and manner, as if it was as important and “certified” as your poetic models. The self-doubt, the “who am I to…?” factor can possibly be tricked with this path. However, what should you do if, when you get to the second task, you choke at how it sounds? It’s possible that your models, your influences, may need to be expanded. I myself started loving romantic era 19th century poetry for example, but later wanted to develop a more conversational style in my own writing. I could try reading Keats or Blake as if they were talking to me, or I could try reading aloud some Frank O’Hara instead.
How do you know how you sound when reading other poets or your own work. You need to record yourself. Your basic smartphone or laptop will do well enough. In the Parlando Project I make efforts to make my recorded voice sound better on recordings, but that’s not important in this effort. Will you feel self-conscious listening to your own voice? Almost certainly. Get over that it won’t sound right — it will sound more like what the audience hears. Do you feel your reading voice has a weird or unappealing timbre? That’s likely of less importance, so get over it.
It’s a good idea to practice your “set” before a public reading. Highly experienced readers can skip this step,*** but inexperienced readers should not.
In summary then, most readers of their own poetry are not great readers, even those who’ve widely published or won awards — so congratulations, it’s OK to be an imperfect reader, most of us are! Yet it’s still worthwhile becoming a better public reader.
A week ago I decided to read a love poem at a rare open mic session for a longstanding local reading series. I picked a slightly revised version of a poem I presented here a few years ago “The Phones in Our Hands (are so Magical).” The organizers’ instructions said that we should read only a single poem of our own and keep it under four minutes. I prepared for the reading by informally recording myself reading my poem about three times, to get a quick sense of if I had it down as to its presentation. On the night of the reading, I was able to present it at about 75% of what my third and best practice reading was. Where was the fall off? I read it just a bit too fast (nervousness) and I probably was less than optimum in handling some of the phrasing. I’ll give myself a middle grade in my overall presentation. I did try to set the expectations in introducing the poem, but in the end, the overall effect was less effective than it could have been for two reasons. I didn’t properly setup or convey the tonal shift in the poem, so the surprise when the poem shifts from the mysterious/playful to the experience of the separation of death from one’s partner confounded the audience. The difference between pleasurable surprise and confusion is subtle to describe, yet critical in effect. The other issue was “set-list” related. Most of the readers disregarded the one poem request and read 2-3, and as a Valentine’s Day themed reading, many of the poems were light-hearted and playful. My single poem was a “downer” and a “thinker” poem. I had considered doing two poems (still well within the four minutes) and would have led off with the Valentine’s poem I presented here last time, which is a more informal and joyous poem, even if it addresses the same issues of old love and eventual widowhood. In retrospect, that would have improved my “set” considerably. The bottom line I’ll convey from my most recent public reading: accepting imperfection is an important skill, ever more so if you are trying to do things well, and I enjoyed taking my swing at sharing my poem.
Today’s audio piece is the third take of my practice run-through of “The Phones in our Hands (are so Magical)” with an impromptu two-handed improv over a synth pad, one track a soft grand piano and the other a more plaintive high-in-its-range violin. Apropos to the above discussion of recording your own voice, the poem coincidently mentions how odd our recorded voice seems to most of us. You can hear it with the player below or this alternative highlighted link.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Phones_in_Our_Hands.mp3.
*If next-to-last, your last poem can then be another “greatest pop hit,” a poem of clarity that seeks to leave the audience energized and feeling they’ve comprehended what you’ve presented, rather than drained or perplexed.
**Does this sound like the Parlando Project, where 90% of the time we present performances of other poet’s words? I guess it does, but the main reason that I do the Project is that spending extended time with those words and integrating them with music tricks me into listening to them in a deeper way. It gets me past those issues I have being distracted while listening to another reader. In melding their poem with my breath and music, I’m forced to inhabit it.
***A great many (not all) musicians go through an intense practice regimen while developing their skills on their instrument, but a more relaxed and informal one later. Someone who’s gigging and playing regularly (using their bank of skills deposited from their own-room practice) is often able to maintain or even sharpen those skills without the need for as much solo practice. Similarly, if you are regularly reading, there’s much less need to practice your set.
I’m going to take a short break from our February celebration of 1926’s Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists* to celebrate old people — really old people. The audio piece today is also not as solemn as some of the issues we’ve dealt with in other posts: it’s about love, desire, lust — and those feelings are represented as Shakespeare or many of the Afro-American Blues artists of our last decade to be called “The Twenties” might present it, as “country matters.”
There’s a long poetic lyrical tradition of mixing rural metaphors with desire. We’ve done more than one piece here over the years in the bucolic poetic tradition of lusty shepherds and comely rural maids, but it has occurred to me in my present old age that they are almost always young and single. I, on the other hand, am an old, long-married man. Not to put a damper on the prurience factor, but when I say old, I mean old enough to think about not being around to promise love forever. I’ll repeat what I’ve said here before: that at my age when offered a lifetime guarantee on a product, I’ll ask now if there’s a better deal. Yet, oddly enough, that for me makes the desire to connect with my beloved no less ardent. Carpe Diem is no longer just a trope to be trotted out.
Does today’s rambunctious piece do a good job of communicating that? I’m not sure. I presented an earlier draft of this a decade ago to a writer’s group I was participating in — and they, in the springtime of their mid-60s, thought it was a persona poem about someone wooing a rural widow, while I thought the inescapable ribald joke in the piece was that the singer wanted to, ahem, get down with it, before they died making their wife a widow. That group was often right about such lack of clarity, but I sometimes wonder if they were too young — and now that half that group has died, that they might have a different understanding of this lusty Blues poem. And it occurs to me that’s an additional joke! The audience for poetry may be small, but am I expecting the audience for this one to be made up of dead people?
Here’s my Blues-poem lyric. We’ll be back with other peoples’ words soon.
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I don’t know, but I wish all of the readers and listeners here, of whatever age, a happy Valentine’s Day. We may not understand love — after all, we barely understand lust — but let us fumble toward that understanding with chocolates and flowers in a cold February. You can hear me perform this Blues-poem with bottleneck-slide guitar using the graphical player gadget below, or with this alternative highlighted link.
Are you looking to further connect Black History Month with love poetry? Patricia Smith is presenting new and existing Black love poems this February via a month of curating their Poem-a-Day feature.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Im_Gonna_Make_Love_to_My_Widow_fore_Im_Gone.mp3.
You might think, “1926, that’s old people!” but Fire!!* was organized, edited, and written by members of the famed Harlem Renaissance when they were barely out of their teens.
As we continue our 2023 Black History Month encounter with the young Harlem New York based writers in the 1926 issue of Fire!! we reach a much less familiar name: Helene Johnson. Our lead-off poet Countee Cullen was a mere 3 years older than the 20-year-old Johnson when Fire!! was published, but Cullen had already published two books and had two more in the works. Johnson had published mostly though successful writing contest entries. In the upcoming year she’d publish a poem in Vanity Fair. And then? Well, not much.
None-the-less, her poem in Fire!! “A Southern Road” is as strong as any included. I’m going to try to be brief in discussing the poem’s craft — though the poem exhibits those skills — because discussions of meter and imagery against the poem’s subject seem disproportionate to my heart’s response. And let me be clear at the start of this discussion: “A Southern Road” is a lynching poem, and in the last decade called The Twenties most Black American poets assayed a poem on the terroristic acts against Afro-Americans that were then an occurrence as common as mass shootings or questionable police killings are today.* And like those things we experience today, lynchings and other acts of anti-Black violence were both a cause for political organizing and an ongoing hurt that the country seemed incapable of correcting. Let that sink in for cause of sorrow and information: around 100 years ago, in the lifetime of people in our lifetimes, it was considered an insolvable problem that American communities would torture, mutilate, and summarily execute fellow citizens as a public display of their power and the executed’s lack of it. Read that sentence again. Read it once more after that. This level of savagery was thought something that couldn’t be stopped, something inevitable.
Can I appropriately introduce an odd sort of hope into this horrendous history? Yes, the heart and head may be confused on that. Still, people, Black and white Americans, dealing with a nation that collectively thought this just had to continue, eventually made lynchings rare. There’s a long and likely necessary analysis on why this happened that would include how the same hatefulness mutates into new forms, I won’t get to that here. I’ll just say to our current, crucial, Greatest Generation (because, like the last given that name, they’ll have to be great) that pervasive “This can’t be changed. Any solution would be ineffective and worse than the disease” statements about present horrors can be reflexes not reflective of history.
As the poem appeared in Fire!! The Internet has some mistranscriptions likely due to OCR errors.
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Did Johnson’s poem make this change come about? No, it’s not even well-known as a poem— not even well-known as an African-American Harlem Renaissance poem — but poetry works in each reader and listener, one-by-one. A little over a decade later Abel Meeropol’s song “Strange Fruit” was powerfully realized by Billie Holiday, but Johnson’s earlier work was similarly skillful in giving us a portrait of evil. Even more than “Strange Fruit,” “A Southern Road” is cast as a cold pastoral. “A Southern Road” opens with a somewhat specific yet mysterious image: a dry yellow tongue. A metaphoric rural clay road? A parched leaf? From the poem’s generalized title we don’t know. I think the following “little tune” image developed over the next few lines is birdsong, and our dry forest pastoral ends unexpectedly with a line “Pregnant with tears.”
Johnson’s next sentence spread over four lines is part of why I think the tune, a melody that is a “streaming line of beauty” is birdsong, as there’s a nest that’s been flung down by some indifferent god/fate, before the Sabbath. We are to worship that god? We are to puzzle at a beautiful song despite loss?
The poem’s final five lines have us reassessing the poem’s portion before them. Several antique words are used here, perhaps a conscious choice to make this horror that was contemporary to her time in a way more timeless and generalized. A tree is described as a “predella,” the platform of an alter. We can next tell that the metaphoric altarpiece in this case depicts a crucifixion of a kind, a lynched person. “Sacrificial dower to raff” is near-Chaucerian in language. “Dower” is the inheritance of a dead person, raff is Middle English for rubbish, akin to the slightly less out-dated term “riff-raff.” The sacrificed body does not seem like much of an inheritance, any more that Christ on the cross seems much like a godhead, but I think Johnson is using raff/riff-raff in this line also to refer to the lynchers and their hate’s inheritance.
The poem ends with the tortured body suspended in the air, which I believe the poem compares to a plausible reader’s opinion on this matter: suspended?
There, I said I would keep my account of how we might encounter and understand this poem’s craft brief. I’ve compared “A Southern Road” above to “Strange Fruit,” and so I took it as my job to give Helene Johnson’s poem some further equivalence, albeit with what I could create for music and with a less masterful singer. I needed to put the music together fairly quickly again, but despite having three guitars and an electric piano over the bass and drums it worked spontaneously, as it needed to. You can hear it with the player you may see below, or with this alternative highlighted link.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/A_Southern_Road.mp3.
*There’s a figure easily found in web searches that more than a thousand lynchings occurred between 1900 and 1914. The later year 1919 (not included in that selection of years) was notorious for white riots and other forms of violence. US population at the time of today’s poem was roughly 1/3 of what it is today if you’d like to adjust figures. It’s plausible that numbers were not easily gathered for other years — after all, in our century there were no figures on the number of people killed in police encounters until recently. And anyway, technical arguments about collection and accuracy of numbers, like metrical scans of this poem’s lines don’t get at the overall effect of this: that people are going to terrorize and kill you and not enough are going to care about it.
It’s February and in America it’s Black History Month. In the past few years of this Project I’ve picked a publication that has entered into public domain status to examine. This February I’m going to feature work from a singular 1926 publication, the first issue of what was to be a literary quarterly called Fire!!* The cover advertised it would be “Devoted to younger Negro Artists.”
Want to read this issue of Fire!! in part or all? Here’s a link to a high-resolution scan of it.
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It’s worth stopping and noticing that “younger” again. It’s easy to fall into a trap when considering a time so long ago to many who will be reading this in 2023 — but its contributors and instigators were in their younger 20s though some had been writing and publishing since they were teenagers. They may seem old to you by strange definition, but they were certainly young to themselves and their contemporaries.
I find that remarkable. While a range of Black American artists were coming to the fore in the last decade called “The Twenties,” I can’t think it was in any way a time friendly to them. Even artistic Modernism, which sought new sources of inspiration and often delighted in mocking old prejudices, was a mixed bag. Racism and ethnic stereotyping remained present in Modernism. Perhaps sociologists could tell us if it was greater or lesser in the world of art than in society at large then, but I’m certain it was no small factor. And yet here were these young writers who at this point thought it was time for them to unleash a record of their experiences.
It’s not so wild a theory to say that they were so audacious because they didn’t know any better. I’m not going to knock that — for this white elderly composer and amateur sorta-scholar to think I have anything to bring to their efforts is not how the smart money would bet either. And you? You’re reading a blog with poetry and a variety of non-commercial music. So clearly, we all don’t know any better.
In the previous year’s Black History Month series here we’ve noted that some forms of new expression that would be featured in Fire!! were not without opposition even from the existing Black Intelligentsia. Jazz and Blues musics were considered problematic. Literary examinations of the sequalae of poverty rather than stories of uplift were controversial. Even if the 1920s were the decade that free verse became more widespread, some of these young poets looked more to Shelley and Keats than Carl Sandburg or Langston Hughes.
Here’s Cullen’s sonnet as it appeared handsomely set in Fire!! It’s also the first poem in the poetry section of this issue, a section titled “Flame From the Dark Tower.”
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Our lead-off poet is one such example. Countee Cullen was not a Modernist poet. Unlike other metrical/rhyming poets like Frost, and sometimes Yeats or Millay, he’s not even Modernist in outlook. While he’s 23 years old when this was published, he writes as if he was looking back to his last decade to be called the 20s, which would be the 1820s. None the less, “From the Dark Tower” is an impassioned account of the harms of white supremacy — and it is very well written within that style. If the premiere Afro-American poet Phyllis Wheatley was out to prove that she could write 18th century poetry as well as any white poet, Cullen demonstrates that he could do the same for the 19th century. Sure, there’s the matter that he was writing in the 20th century, and we are reading him in the 21st, but that’s likely a lesser sin now when there’s no fresh battle to be joined over free verse, Jazz rhythms, or Blues speech. It’s not unlikely that we read other older poems written in this poem’s style, and Cullen is in 2023 one of those old poets.
And then there’s this — this huge thing. I was trying to quickly get down an acceptable take of my simple acoustic guitar version of my song-setting of Cullen’s poem from Fire!! yesterday. Across my country, at the same time, in a city famed for its American music, so significantly Afro-American music, there was a funeral for yet another Black person killed by our official representatives in a manner that seems clearly to be an affront to civilization. Should we, musicians who’ve inherited that tradition, merely “beguile…with mellow flute?” To sing Cullen’s line, couched in careful rhyme and meter: “We were not made eternally to weep” — can I wish that situation would seem old-fashioned, out of date, a curiosity of the obsolete?
To hear that performance you can use a player gadget that should appear below. No player? This highlighted link is an alternative.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/From_the_Dark_Tower.mp3.
Not to cast shade on this worthy endeavor, but Black History Month has been in my observation largely an Afro-American* History month. There’s nothing inherently wrong with concentrating on that subject. I’ll just acknowledge that in the past century or so there’s been a counter-colonialist reassessment of African continental history — and while it has not risen to the level that this American has been aware of it (beyond some UK and other former English-speaking Commonwealth country reading) there may be worthwhile study and information coming forth on the wider African story.
Because reusing, adapting, even performing, work not in the public domain is a legal gray area, this project shies away from using more modern work. Luckily as this nearing 7-year-long project has continued, more and more “Harlem Renaissance” work has entered PD status. Specific thanks is due to the Yale University Library for making Fire!! available digitally.
Let us return to the genius of Emily Dickinson, as we have regularly here at this Project. As I look to her work over the years, I find that Dickinson has several modes. In one mode, her approach is charming, a just-between-slightly-weird-friends sharing of concrete observations of people and the physical world. Even when that Emily speaks of death and eternity, it takes as its conveyance and destination a horse-drawn fate and a well-made bed/grave. Another mode, not as well represented in her “greatest hits,” can be puzzlingly condensed and abstract, as if shorthand notes taken from her own mind of states of thought or insight that come upon her.
One aspect of genius is that it can get away with things that us more craft-assigned poets cannot. To be abstract and nearly impenetrable at any length tires out readers even as her other poems draw us in. If one reads Dickinson as an entire collection, these modes are interspersed. We might think, “Oh, there’s our friend Emily in one of her private moments we cannot join — moments we accept with partial-at-best understanding because we’ve come to love the other parts of her poetry.”
Today’s short Emily Dickinson poem bridges those two modes. It opens as arrestingly as any poem could with the striking statement “I am afraid to own a body.” As I did with our last Dickinson performance here, I wonder at that line and immediately relate it to body dysphoria, something that portions of our current society experiences and is more free to express.
The poem then moves on to an allied and contrasting statement nearly as striking: “I am afraid to own a soul.” The soul is by definition incorporeal, but by linking it with the body in the first line we may palpate it none-the-less. As the quatrain finishes these two connected things, body and soul, are described as valuable, and despite our fears, inescapably present. The poem might be too short if it ended there, but I’d recognize it as a complete koan of enlightenment — but it doesn’t end.
1st stanza draws us in. 2nd one confounds. You & I may not be able to get away with such writing, but let us trust in the genius of Emily Dickinson.
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In the second quatrain we are off in the abstract Emily. I often seek to remind readers here that Emily lived in a house devoted to law with a father, grandfather, and brother who practiced law. I think there’s passion and emotion in this second and final stanza, but if we are to follow it we must think as if we’re reading a contract or one of those user agreements we so often click “accept” on without reading. This stanza as saying that both body and soul are willed to us, like a “conditions attached” bequest in a will — and then after the stanza’s second em-dash, what? Who’s the “Duke?” Since rural mid-19th century Massachusetts was not supplied with titled nobility, I suspect this is connected to something Dickinson read. I’m going to take a flying leap of wild assumption here, one that you shouldn’t “take to the bank” any more than my “what if?” wondering that the mouldering man who died for truth in this other Dickinson poem could be John Brown, and a link much less certain than the idea that the kept in quotes “hope” bird was a reference to Emily Brontë. Could this poem’s Duke be Robert Browning’s monologuing one who speaks of “My Last Duchess?”* I know Dickinson read Elizabeth Barrett Browning, so it’s not an impossible leap to think she read EBB’s spouse too.
If our Duke is exhibiting his deathless painting of his now dead (likely on his own orders) “last Duchess,” Dickinson is perhaps (in a very obscure and condensed way) mentioning drawbacks to our existence as a body and as a questing soul.* What then to make of the final line? I’m not sure. Is God the bequeather of the soul and body in the bargain our speaker is afraid of? Is God as cruel and exacting as Browning’s Duke? What’s the closing “Frontier?” The course of our lifetimes not yet mapped out? A “light out for the territory” escape? I’m not sure.
I’ll be honest, I recorded my performance of this second stanza not having figured out even these potentially wrong readings of it. What did I rely on then? There is some worthwhile word-music — and poetry using that tactic can give pleasure and connection before understanding. I trusted the mystery of the words might convey some mystery to the listener even if I had not opened the packet containing their meaning. My hope: that I could be, however imperfect and limited, one who carries Emily Dickinson’s genius to you.
You can hear my performance of Emily Dickinson’s “I Am Afraid to Own a Body” with the player gadget below. If you don’t see the player, there’s this highlighted link that will play it too. Speaking of links, there are other hyperlinks in the post above to some other Parlando Project Dickinson pieces that you might want to read.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/I_Am_Afraid_to_Own_a_Body.mp3.
*Have other better-known and credentialed scholars made much of Emily Dickinson’s connection to the law? I think the last time I searched I didn’t find much of anything. There’s a thesis topic for some young reincarnation of Wallace Stevens.
Not much of a leap to a feminist reading of a female body here.
***One of my observations on reading my first full-length biography of Dickinson many decades ago was how remarkably determined she was to resist the pull of declaring herself as “saved” during her time and place’s Christian religious revival. Schoolmates, family, and community all declared, and she steadfastly refused.
A person I know as a poet told me at a reading that he was playing with his Jazz combo on Sunday, assuming (rightly) that there would be some interest on my part. I told him I wasn’t sure if I could attend, since I live in a household with two distressed persons. They nodded as if they understood.
If you’ve noticed that this Project has been more intermittent, that’s much of the reason. The typical post here starts with looking for interesting texts, researching a bit about their context, composing, playing and recording the music, and then finally these blog entries about my encounters with the poems and the process of presenting them. The order of these events isn’t set in stone, occasionally there are gaps between steps, but it’s also common for each step to take an open-ended block of concentration. My desires to support those I love, their needs for quiet, and frankly, my unease held in common with theirs, has made that kind of focus rare for several months, wearing down what storehouse of steps I have for new pieces of work.
In place of that, I’ve taken up two things that more easily fill the odd-lots moments of time that come to me. I’ve increased Twitter promotion of the over 650 pieces in our Parlando Project archives found here.* I’m doing that enough that I’m probably seen by some as an ignorable nag by now, and the results so far in drawing traffic are only slightly better than my attempts on Twitter made during last National Poetry Month. Still this substitute effort to promote the various ways that music and words can combine makes me feel like I’m not abandoning this Project’s goals.
The other activity is reading, which of course has always been part of the Project, but I speak of reading that isn’t directly tied to finding a new piece or understanding its contexts. I’m mostly reading books about musicians, music, or poets for pleasure and as a reset from life stress.
But enough about me and troubles that aren’t yours. This post is getting tardy in getting to today’s work by William Butler Yeats. His “A Fairy Song” comes from a fairy story told in a verse play from early in Yeats career. Most recently we’ve presented a later Yeats poem “A Coat”in which Yeats is looking askance at this sort of earlier work and at those who chose to copy his early style. “A Fairy Song” is very pretty, and you could enjoy it just as fantasy word-music — decoration not declaration or anything much. I enjoyed the poem from first reading on that basis. In times of trouble, why not some dancing fantasy?
Easy chords & simple arrangement, and like many of my Parlando Project pieces, offered here in case other singers want to sing it.
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However, after waking in the middle of the night last night I read the play The Land of Hearts Desire that this poem appears in twice, introduced inside the play by a fairy child. Let me quickly summarize the plot: a young bride is beguiled to take in a beautiful child who comes upon their rural poor Irish cottage at night. She gives the child food and warmth, and in return the child reminds her that her loving marriage means bondage to grinding tasks of life and family duties that will have no release until death — but if the young bride comes away with the beautiful child to the otherland of the faery, they will have nothing but carefree joy.
It’s a commonplace that fairy stories have psychological depth, and so to my mind in the middle of my night, I was ready to take this one in beyond idle fantasy. I hold for the loving marriage. I hold for duty. Ever the freedom and fate for breakage, ever the poverty or wealth of what we can give and bring — beside and knowing that — I’m for that above music and magic. And readers, I love music and poetry a great deal.
That poet who plays saxophone in his jazz combo? I waited until an hour before the show started, things were clear, I went off and saw them play. I was worried: jazz plus poetry is a formula that might each reduce the additive audience, but an appreciative 50 or so showed up scattered about the theater. A stranger a couple of seats over thought the keyboard player sang like Chet Baker — and yes he did. The playing was fine, and at my age I might have danced, but the fixed theater seat aisles would have kept a dancing ring from forming.
The next day I had what turned out to be a bit over an hour to find music from “The wind that blows out the gates of the day.” I did so and quickly recorded this simple setting with acoustic guitar of Yeats’ “A Fairy Song.” You can hear it with the player gadget below. No gadget seen? This highlighted link** will play it too.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Yeats_Fairy_Song.mp3.
*If you’re following the Elon-Musk-takes-Twitter farce of Internet doors opening and closing amid much bumbling, you may be curious about my take on this. No time today. There are some interesting people there, including a small poetry community — that size like all poetry communities. Twitter’s design, which long predates Musk, is conducive to folks like me with unknown blocks of time from a few minutes to sleepless doomscrolling hours. I personally find it impossible to keep up with WordPress on my phone, even though I treasure the blogs I follow when I can find time at a larger computer screen.
**If you’re interested in a deep dive into the Irish faery mythology that Yeats was using in his play and poem, this web page will give you quite a bit to go on.
The HolidayMonday is Martin Luther King Day in the United States, which I take as an occasion to honor the man but also to honor the American promise that changes for the better can be achieved, albeit via earnest efforts and personal costs.
At my age King and the mid-century struggle for what was then called “Civil Rights” were not history — they were current events. I can tell you that despite the somewhat anodyne holiday we celebrate this year, these things were in King’s time as fractious and deadly as any issues today. Some of the immediate issues in the struggle were things we might now assume are self-evident, equivalent civic rights for Black Americans: the rights to vote, to travel, to sit in a restaurant, to speak for change. I assure you these things were controversial, and that it was easy to find short and long arguments as to why they were impossible or contraindicated by the inherent and/or empirical nature of Black or white America. Those things, or so it was widely said, were impossible, impractical, ill advised, a poor use of resources, against human nature.
Are any of my readers thinking that the consideration of history including so many instances of injustices is depressing? Or what of the fears that this will cause inordinate shame? Let me then point out on this holiday: societies can advance, costs borne in the struggle for those advances will be honored. On July 4th we celebrate the improbable founding of our country as “A republic if we can keep it.” On Memorial Day we celebrate great losses to preserve that country. On your choice of Labor’s Day we say our nation takes broad-based work. On Martin Luther King Day we can see all those things too. while being reminded that King was not a President or General, but a man who represented and gained his power from us, American citizens, asking adamant with the effectiveness of soul-force, for our country to stop doing what harms us, to start doing better. Isn’t that a fine thing to celebrate?
The 56-foot-tall Birmingham Vulcan exhibited before installation overlooking the city. How the iron man looked around the time MLK was in Birmingham. How it looks today atop it’s base and observation tower. African ancestor: Ptah. The MLK memorial statue.
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The SongAre any readers still reading who feel what I wrote above is jejune? If you’re still here, thank you for your patience, but I’m about to try your patience some more. “The Birmingham Vulcan (for MLK)” has never found an audience, and there are times when I can see why. I have an unreasonable love for unusual connections — things that in my mind connect but to most seem trivial. You’d think poetry might allow some license in such things, but that’s not so. When I showed this to my former group of poets when we were all alive together a few years ago, this piece was to them confusing and without a shred of emotional connection. My takeaway? I had portrayed nothing of the wide-ranging connections to them then. It’s gone through a couple of revisions since, likely improving things, but the core problem is that this piece requires a somewhat unique combination of knowledge to make sense.
So, let me take the usually foolish step of providing a brief decoder ring to the mythological story “The Birmingham Vulcan” tells. Poets and songwriters: you should know this is a bad idea. “The Waste Land” and “American Pie”* aside, few readers like the impression that the poem knows something they don’t.
My poet group first-readers stopped right off at the second word. “Who’s this Solon?” Short answer, he’s a big macher for classical Greek Athens and it’s system of government. “What’s he doing in Africa?” Plato told a story in one of his Symposiums that Solon went to Egypt, and the learned priests there told him that he had no idea about the history of his region. Now this is an interesting story choice in that the Greeks were famous for thinking they were exceptional, and here are these foreign Africans telling them they knew more about history than they did.
“OK, so who’s this iron man?” He’s Hephaestus to the Greeks, but to the Egyptians he was Ptah,** and to the Romans he was Vulcan. All three of these ancient gods were makers and metalworkers. Hephaestus has some additional particulars: he was segregated from the other Olympians, was described as deformed or ugly, and in a connection that will come up later, he was also the patron of weavers.
Birmingham arrives in the second stanza. When I said this was connected to MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that rang a bell, but what’s lesser known is the reason the southern American city that jail was in was called Birmingham. They wanted to be an industrial city dealing with iron, steel, and metalwork, like unto Birmingham England. And yes, they actually erected a giant statue of Hephaestus/Vulcan at his forge to overlook their town early in the 20th century.
Did the statue’s maker make him clearly Afro-American? Nope, I don’t think the city fathers*** would have paid for any such depiction of Vulcan. But sometime between the World Wars they painted this iron statue brown, either to hide the corrosion or to make the connection to iron more plain.
Third stanza: segregation and regulation to lower paid jobs. One of the “Well, you don’t understand, it just works better that way” situations that King went to Birmingham to oppose.
Fourth stanza: King arrives. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is as wide-ranging as an Emerson essay in terms of references, but I loved this little noted connection: King was in a city of foundries and chose as an example of soul-force civil disobedience the men from the biblical book of Daniel thrown into a fiery furnace for disobeying the ruler.
Fifth stanza: “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is not written to dispute overt racists or the segregationists. Rather it was addressed to ostensible supporters who raised objections to getting on with stopping what was hurting the country and offending justice. The non-segregationist position was to object on a wide range of fronts to that civil rights movement — some with practical, strategic or logistical concerns, some seeking to assuage those whose “culture” and “traditions” might be offended. And of course, many too were silent on those issues out of fear, ignorance, or distaste for struggle. King spoke to those too in his letter.
The original version of this piece was called “The Cord of Life,” a phrase mysteriously used in King’s letter, and one I loved for its connection to Hephaestus, and so it remains in this stanza.
I trimmed some stanzas as the poem went through revision that directly referred to the infamous Birmingham Sunday terrorist bombing of a church during the civil rights struggle in Birmingham. A great many poems and songs have already sung of this and of the four schoolchildren killed going to Sunday School, so I hope it’s still remembered. That act was so offensive that the terrible sacrifice helped move public opinion. The sixth stanza is all that remains of that matter, and I still feel the song is a bit long, but I left this one in so that there’s some motivation for the Vulcan statue to magically speak in the concluding stanza.
The last stanza as the silent statue finally speaks has been worked over several times. I still hope it has some power on this day. You can hear my sung version of “The Birmingham Vulcan (for MLK)” with the player below, or for those who don’t see the player, with this highlighted link.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Birmingham_Vulcan_for_MLK.mp3.
*I admire the former and am generally uninterested in the latter. So even for the exceptions this doesn’t always work.
Ptah, venerated particularly in Memphis. As in the delightful Talking Heads lyric “Cities” got away with it: “Memphis, home of Elvis and the Ancient Greeks.” That song, like mine, is briefly referring to the “African origin” theory/myth that assuming that Western culture started with the Greeks ignores that African cultures may have informed the Greeks.
***The writer’s group, poets of good taste, disliked my play on words “foundering men.”
Here’s a well-worn trope you’ll see somewhere as the year 2022 ends. Someone will write or say:
“2022 — would it ever end? Glad to see that sorry year done.”
Troubling and bad things happened this past year. I know. I’m a grateful and privileged person, but still this year has had stressful and even frightening things in my family. And if we are to look fully at our nations and the world? Distress might seem a slighting word there.
Here’s another trope, one portrayed in many a cartoon around the New Years, one old enough to be old when I was a child: an aged man with a 2022 sash around his stooped body, and a young smiling toddler just able to stand and show the New Year 2023 banner arrayed across its torso. When I was a child, even a younger adult, I always looked fondly at that baby with the New Year’s sash. What wonders, what new things will the upcoming year bring? What burdens will be set down with the expiration of the old year? Even if I didn’t know how the balance of the forthcoming year would settle with the debts of the passing one, I was looking forward, closer in age to that toddler than to that geriatric December 31st.
Now that I’m an old man, that expiring year is closer to me than that tiny child — and it’s not just years that expire or stoop with age. Since last winter, long time alternative Parlando Project voice and LYL Band-mate Dave Moore and I did our part to say goodbye to some colleagues in poetry, and we both have had some family deaths. No wonder that there’s been a good number of elegies presented by this Project lately.
I’ve had the rough tracks of today’s elegy since last spring, the best of which was a vocal track that Dave laid down as part of a session we did in memory of poet Kevin FitzPatrick. It was only this December as the year was coming to a close that I found an idea of what to do with Dave’s song. His words in “Don’t Have To” are all about the routine troubles, tasks, and stresses of life mixed with the aspirations we poets dream to grasp. Kevin, who wrote about work and labor, and who labored and worked at his writing, had all of that.
This was Dave Moore’s own corrected manuscript I worked from to complete today’s piece.
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It struck me that this is a great life-lot of things, a glorious jumble — Kevin’s poetry that I was privileged to experience, the care and responsibility that his family, friends, colleagues, and clients were sheltered by. If the First Noble Truth of the Buddha is that life is dukkha sacca, then noticing a cessation of dukkha* is apprehending the punching out of the timeclock of a lifetime too. Might it be worthwhile for us on New Year’s Eve to notice, or even thank, the aged 2022 of our families, friends, colleagues, and ourselves for their labors however strained and imperfect they were? When we, like the year 2022, are gone, others will take up that imperfect and sometimes thwarted work.
That thought arose as I took Dave’s vocals from last spring and using the modern tools of audio editing, I sped up their tempo to increase urgency. For music I started with a rollicking piano part which I triggered on my little plastic keyboard but made sound impossibly knuckle-busting by invoking an arpeggiator that kept the sixteenth notes flying. After establishing that tempo, I had to give my fingers a workout on the bass to lay down a bass track, and frankly I was running to catch up the whole length of the song. I added a little vibraphone and guitar to add some visiting outside timbres to the dominant piano and that completed the unusual elegy “Don’t Have To (Now You’re Done)” you can hear with the player below. Don’t see any player? This highlighted link is an alternative way to hear it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Dont_Have_To.mp3.
*A complicated term to translate, though the simple translation of “life is suffering” is common. Properly, it includes the sense of stress, unease, and dissatisfaction as well.
It’s Christmas morning, and besides spending time with my little family, I spent Christmas Eve wrapping a little present to myself and to you, reader and listener. It’s a poem by British poet Thomas Hardy, who has supplied several texts for pieces by this Project. “The House of Hospitalities” is wistful, even melancholy, but I think its heart is in memories — which after all, each Christmas gives and becomes. That’s what we seek out, make, and gift wrap: memories of each other, of each other’s gifts and presents.
Hardy writes using some older words and phrases, a few seeking the rhyme here, and the nostalgic sentiment in his poem might remind us that he lived, and lived past, the Victorian age in Great Britain when some of the Christmas traditions that are still part of observances of this day emerged. There’s hearth, food, company, and music in this Christmas memory, but like a good 20th Century Modernist Hardy tells this story in things, not labels. Note the absence of words naming emotions in this old man’s poem. Oh, “tired” appears in Hardy’s second stanza — but I can testify as a fellow old man that tired is not a verb or adjective, it becomes a very noun in later life. His word-music is graceful, but careful readers of Hardy’s text* that I sing here will notice that I modified it a bit to fit the song music I made and sang this with.
Music as a gift: later today I’ll be going out to hear the Midwestern Jazz combo The Bad Plus, a present from my wife.
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While other members of my little household baked cookies, I worked on composing that music for “The House of Hospitalities.” It’s a simple tune, but Hardy’s words and my sensibilities didn’t ask for more than that. I played it on an electric guitar as I sang — electric oddly, so that I could keep the sound lower and separate from the household’s other holiday tasks, for Hardy’s poem is solitary save for memories. Then late on Christmas Eve I worked on adding the bowed strings Hardy mentions in the viol that is now home to wood-worms, some treated electric piano, and the tiny lead instrument of the piece you can hear: glockenspiel. I finished after midnight’s noon, Christmas having entered in the dark.
This morning I give it to you to unwrap. You can play it with the graphical player below that most will see. Don’t see that? No problem, here’s an alternative highlighted link that will play my performance.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_House_of_Hospitalities.mp3.
*I need to thank the Fourteen Lines blog who introduced me to this poem of Hardy’s this month. Lots of variety in the poems they share there. Here’s a link to their presentation of it with Hardy’s original text.
Still not able to find time or the skills and concentration to produce as many new pieces, but I thought it was time to finally realize a Parlando version of Thomas Campion’s Winter Solstice poem “Now Winter Nights Enlarge.” I’d first thought about doing it back in 2017 when this Project was a little more than a year old, but for some reason I never wrote music for it, so it was time to set that one right.
Using an unplugged electric guitar so as not to disturb my household, I composed a good tune with an attractive set of chords that were more at a chord-melody approach, with moving notes inside the chord forms than is my usual style. Unplugged, with me mumbling the words to myself, it sounded quite promising.
Earlier this week I had a couple of hours in which to try to record it. I grabbed an electric guitar to play the music I’d conceived, plugged it in, and…
I couldn’t play the more complex chord voicings and keep any sort of appealing groove and vocal performance. I’ve never been a good, or even part-way good, comping or rhythm guitarist, so this shouldn’t have surprised me — but it disappointed me. I tried just laying down the chords with the idea that concentrating on that and leaving the vocal to a secondary, overdubbed, take might fix things. No, it didn’t. A little better, but still not nearly good enough. I thought of all the not-extraordinary guitarists in the world who could have done a passable job of playing what I’d written with some verve, but none of them were in the room with me.
So, I appealed to the composer — who being me, myself, listened with concern and quickly rewrote the tune with a simpler chord progression while the microphone waited. I put the electric guitar back on its rack and figured that Campion (who wrote music for his poems) had probably composed his music on the lute. I grabbed a small bodied acoustic guitar strung with some European silk and steel wrapped strings.* In short order I figured out a cross-picked part for the new music, but my time was getting short. I quickly ripped off three or four takes of the new tune with the acoustic guitar, and I thought the last one just might be worth sharing.
Too many chords old man. What do you think this is, Jazz?
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Overnight last night I stayed up recording the piano and cello parts you can hear below. As is common for me, I played the piano left-hand and right-hand parts in separate passes on my little plastic keyboard. I wanted to play a viola part for the bowed-string track, but I don’t have a good solo viola virtual instrument, and so I used a cello VI I did have. This morning I mixed the results, and there it is.
Campion’s words do well to try to convince one of the cheer of long nights and cold temps, and this December we’re to have our fill of both of them this week along with wind and blizzard snows predicted. Is that the message play the Minnesota Theater of the Seasons is putting on? That our lives and loves may be but toys, but playing with the unwrapped toys in dark December** is never an elderly joy, but something always new and discoverable.
Want to read Campion’s words silently in the enlarged night? Here’s a link to them. The player gadget to play my compromise Solstice song is below for many of you. Nothing that looks like a graphical player below your tree? This highlighted link will open its own player so you can hear it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Now_Winter_Nights_Enlarge.mp3.
*The strings are the Plectrum set from Thomastik-Infeld. They are extraordinarily low tension and smooth, but must be played with a very light touch. Rather than the bright zingy tone that the common steel-string acoustic guitar produces, the resulting timbre is somewhat like gut or nylon strings.
**If your top falls and doesn’t always give you גאַנץ, may it at least fall on האַלב.
The occasion for today’s post and audio piece is Emily Dickinson’s birthday, but I chose this poem of hers to set to music for other reasons. It’s been quite the year since spring for my little family, and this past month has had some additional things to deal with. I keep meaning to find a way to write about those things, but despite the large presence of I-own-my-part-of-the-story writing on the Internet and elsewhere, I can’t feel comfortable writing for the public about personal journeys of others I love and are close to me.
I’ve read through various collections of Emily Dickinson’s poetry over the years, and I even attended online a reading this past September of all 1,789 of her poems from one ascribed complete edition. Here’s one thing I notice about reading or listening to Dickinson: while I’m always ready to wave my hands in the air for her greatest hits, each time you dive into that alternate hymnal of hers some poem will seem new to you, will grab you with a fresh surprising turn of phrase or thought.
And so, it was a few weeks ago when someone shared today’s poem on the Internet. I wished I’d taken notes, as I have that person to thank. Even before I finished reading “I felt my life with both my hands” I said to myself “Is Dickinson talking about what I think she’s talking about — and if she isn’t, has she written a poem that accidentally speaks to certain things we think of as modern concerns?” I think the question comes around to if this is a spiritual poem about immortal souls, or if it’s a body image poem — and then, if we must necessarily divide those things, if Dickinson wanted us to. On the outward level this poem speaks of our inner spirit, of consciousness of selfhood, but the metaphors are often physical things one can touch and see, and since Dickinson has shown in other poems that she is comfortable writing in incorporeal abstracts, I can easily believe this imagery is a choice here.* In short, before I finished that singular reading of this poem this fall, I thought “Dickinson is writing a poem about body dysmorphia, or plausibly gender dysphoria.”
Both of those things weren’t named until after Dickinson’s death, and discussion and understandings about gender dysphoria are still somewhat new in our century, so it’s a leap to say that our mid-19th century poet means to write about those things. So let me go through the poem and try to extract a gloss of what Dickinson wrote.
I added an “inline epigraph” to the text of Dickinson’s poem. It appears in quotes above.
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The first stanza refers to an antiquated test for life, holding a mirror up to a subject’s nose and mouth to see if it mists over from respiration — but she’s also portraying by association looking in a mirror. Of course in our day the glass we hold up to our faces is likely the screen of a smartphone with a selfie camera, but the image retains.
I don’t think one needs to insert much into the second stanza to see body dysmorphia. Sure, she could be reaching for a rhyme for “round” when she uses “pound.” I’m not knowledgeable enough to know what weight ideals were for Dickinson’s time and place, but what’s clear here imagistically is that the poem’s speaker is examining their body and feeling like they are not that body. Is it because they, their self, are philosophically a soul — or because that body doesn’t agree with their soul?
Third stanza. More body examination. “Jarred my hair” is a particular image. Is this some kind of pomade or other cosmetic? I think Dickinson has chosen jarred to pun on “jarring” here. The dimples image would again speak perhaps of weight concerns/dysmorphia.
The last four lines, Dickinson’s final stanza, indicates again the spirit or soul as essential self. Having left off with knowledge that the self/spirit and the body are not the same, the new place, the new home, the poem’s speaker finds themselves in is Heaven.
Nowadays speculations learned and affinititory about Dickinson’s sexuality have become common, yet I don’t see any first page search hits on her and gender dysphoria. The case for that here in this poem may well be accidental, if none-the-less striking, as the narratives of folks experiencing gender dysphoria might well fit into these poetic lines: the separation of the spirit and the body, the disconnection of the body from the authentic self, the feelings of relief when expressing outwardly their inner conviction. The third stanza’s jarring of hair and pushing in dimples takes another vivid incarnation if viewed in that frame.
Now those with the patience to read this far may still be interested in what I did with this experience of the poem — though if you’re a patient reader who is muttering “Balderdash” as you read the above, you are excused to go do something worthwhile. My impression from my encounter led me to alter Dickinson’s text with a sort of in-line epigraph from the song “Candy Says,” written by Lou Reed for the opening track on the LP eponymously called The Velvet Underground.* * The unpredictability and distress of the past couple of weeks has, I fear, given forth a less than ideal performance — but perhaps it’s imperfection has a certain authenticity to the times it was composed and recorded in. You can hear it with the player gadget below (where seen) or with this backup highlighted link.
May you find your joy and help others find theirs too. Production of new pieces and new blog posts here may be erratic, or they may be therapeutic, in unpredictable proportions, but there are the over 650 pieces in our archives here.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/I_felt_my_life_with_both_my_hands.mp3.
*Another choice is her use of “both my hands” in the first line. It’s not like the body would slip out of one’s grasp if you didn’t grab it with two hands. I think this is a choice to highlight duality.
**This song from 1969 opens with a clear dysphoria statement: “Candy says, I’ve come to hate my body, and all that it requires in this world.” I’m sure there are clever thinkers among spiritual people who can consolidate the idea of an inner soul which is not the physical body with a disbelief in gender dysphoria.
Last episode here we had Jean Toomer’s poem of alienation from labor. In Toomer’s “Beehive” the poem’s voice is portrayed as just another drone bee, only able to fantasize of escaping work or receiving any benefit from it. Today’s piece is by Emily Dickinson, and while there can often be a touch of irony in … Continue reading I’m Sorry for the Dead Today
Here’s a short post presenting a short poem,performed now here as a short song. The poem is “Beehive” from Jean Toomer. If you meet the poem, as I did, first as a series of words on a screen, you might be drawn into it as a pretty lyric poem which leans into a poetic tactic: … Continue reading Beehive
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the United States, a harvest festival with elements of a more general event for gratitude. Those who wish to emphasize the gratitude aspect will often decry that Thanksgiving has become too connected with the Christmas shopping season. Their criticism would be: how inappropriate that a day to count our blessings is … Continue reading Wabasha and 5th, 1949
There’s a story that a poet once read a poem to a small group. There were a few murmurs in that small audience, that kind of appreciation — the kind that a not-uncommon everyday poet might expect at a public reading. It’s a sound that says “That certainly sounded like something. Might be good, but … Continue reading Ghosts
Back in 1916 American Poet Robert Frost published this short poem about what we’d today call Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). SAD is that syndrome where the increased darkness and other autumn changes set off depression in some individuals. Like many early Frost poems, it’s a beautiful, graceful poem with effective yet unaffected rhyme and meter … Continue reading My November Guest
It’s been sometime since I’ve posted here. Having fewer blocks of uninterrupted time to compose and record the audio pieces for this Project, I’ve spent time instead with that proudly designed to be a time-waster Twitter in the past week or so. Twitter* has its own news stories this week — but that’s not my … Continue reading The Absent Poetry of World War II
Where’s the gore? Where’s the grisly fright? My Halloween series has been featuring atmospheric fantasy poems so far, a mode I personally like, but I suspect there are some in my audience that want things more corpse than incorporeal ghosts. Well, I’ve been saving this one up for you, wanting to work out a full … Continue reading Dead Man’s Hate
Is it even possible to mention Stonehenge without risking the unbidden memories of the feet-to-inches comic debacle from Spinal Tap? Well, that’s one reason I’m a little hesitant to introduce today’s piece in our Halloween Series this year. But still, I’ve been talking and singing about ghosts, ancestors, spirits, and their home fires a good … Continue reading Avebury Song #2
English poet Walter de la Mare does a very particular kind of fantasy or horror poem. If one is looking for body horror or jump-scare monsters, de la Mare is not your guy. His spooks and slitherers are usually off-camera — instead, he describes discretely the atmosphere and effect of a haunting, visitation, or some … Continue reading Song of Shadows, and the Poet’s Diaspora
Our Halloween series continues with the voice, music, and words of Dave Moore today as I present his piece “Sam and the Ghosts.” And as bonus autumn content, this one takes place in a garden just past harvest time. I haven’t kept a garden in decades, but Dave and long-time friend of this blog Paul … Continue reading Sam and the Ghosts
Today’s words are from a poet who’s been forgotten, but this one poem seems to have outlived all her other work largely because it’s a fine short ghost poem with a definite shiver from an ambiguous ending. The poem was called “All Souls’ Night, 1917,” and it was first published in 1920 in the author … Continue reading All Souls’ Night
I risked taking the charm and playfulness out of Emily Dickinson’s ghost poem last time by trying to puzzle out exactly what she saw. I won’t risk that today. This next poem in our Halloween series was written by a poet, Sara Teasdale, who wrote some complex adult love poems — but with this one … Continue reading Dusk in Autumn
Here, as promised, is the start of a series of Halloween-themed posts. Today’s audio piece uses words from 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson, and as usual for her it’s titled using the poem’s first line: “The only Ghost I ever saw.” Dickinson is no stranger to the gothic, but she often approaches it playfully … Continue reading The only Ghost I ever saw
I’ve seen some takes celebrating the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s Modernist landmark poem “The Waste Land” this month. To the smallish degree that Twitter recognizes poetry, there have been several threads there — and general arts and literature sections of publications and websites have taken notice as well. I think this notice is … Continue reading Five Ways of Looking at “The Waste Land”
Let me briefly slip, Wordsworth-like, into reverie, and note that “Oft, when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood…” I turn to the vast daffodilian array of scanned material available from a brief Internet search. I’d been thinking about Irish poets after reading this exchange between poets Ann Grá and Sean … Continue reading Yeats’ Coat
Some things others wrote this week brought to my mind an early post on this blog that has had thousands of web visits over the years: my presentation of William Butler Yeats’ “To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing.” Back in 2017 when I performed that Yeats’ poem I couldn’t help but wonder: … Continue reading Write Me Down
I first encountered Leonard Cohen in one of those so serious Sunday arts, religion, and culture shows that broadcast TV felt required to provide around the past mid-century. As he was consistently able to do throughout his life, Cohen was able to articulately weave a good deal of provocative thought into an interview. I was … Continue reading Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox
Somewhere in the early 16th century, a member of the English royal court Thomas Wyatt wrote a love poem, or rather a poem of lost love. Like Shakespeare’s sonnets, no one knows if it’s autobiographical, but ever since I first read it as a teenager I’ve thought it feels real. Maybe after this many centuries … Continue reading They Flee From Me
I said, when I was listening to the Tell It Slant Festival’s marathon reading of all of Emily Dickinson’s poems, that I was jotting down lesser-known Dickinson numbers which I might perform in the Parlando Project manner. Well, here’s one of them. If you’ve followed my various Dickinson performances over the years you may have … Continue reading A Murmur in the Trees
Since I’ve spent hours this week soaking up all the Emily Dickinson spirit I can absorb, it’s time to see if I can let some of that experience overflow here today. Maybe someday I’ll count which poets’ words I’ve used the most in the Parlando Project, but since this is an ongoing thing we’d only … Continue reading A sampling of some of the Emily Dickinson performances the Parlando Project has done over the years
I wrote a short piece a few years ago, which goes like this: The Temple of Summer is guarded by two pillars: Memorial Day for those who gave up their lives in war, And Labor Day for those who gave up their lives in peacetime. This Monday is American Labor Day.* What constitutes a laborer, … Continue reading Working Girls, Happiness, and Muckers: three Carl Sandburg poems about workers
How much did Emily Dickinson want her poetry to be understood? I can’t be sure, but I suspect she wanted it to be both puzzling and understood.* While she didn’t publish to any extent in her lifetime, she did send by mail or otherwise share poems with friends. The conventions of Dickinson’s 19th century America … Continue reading From Us She Wandered now a Year
100,000. Compared to some things on the Internet, a small number. Yet it would have seemed impossibly large to me when I started this Project. Today I checked stats and I see that it now looks like we’ll reach 100,000 listens for the Parlando Project audio pieces this week. I won’t have time to write … Continue reading Parlando Project audio listen count set to reach 100,000
I hear that today is something called National Radio Day. I read that on social media, which I suspect in turn will be a strange artifact to be explained to unformed young people of some yet undisclosed future. After all, as I write tonight I have doubts I’ll be able to convince any current young … Continue reading Arthur Hoehn: A Radio Romance
Here’s a little story, about a one-eyed man named Leonidas, who you might think at first is not worthy of telling here at a place that talks about poetry and music. Was Leonidas an artist? Well, he started off an accountant. That’s important. Alas, the Great Depression happened, and even accountants were made redundant. Next, … Continue reading Stratocaster, a story
Here’s a second part of my short series marking August 6th, Hiroshima Day, the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on that city, killing tens of thousands.* Did the previous post’s intentionally odd linkage of personal grief with the deaths of thousands seem thoughtlessly, even offensively, narcissistic? Or did that consideration never occur to … Continue reading Let Us Be Midwives!
Today’s post is part of observing three anniversaries this week: this blog’s launch six years ago, Atomic Bomb Day (noting the anniversaries of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and my late wife’s death in 2001. An odd combination? Well, yes, but they coincide. Odd? Personal loss has an odd size. If one holds one’s … Continue reading Palingenesis — three anniversaries noted
I shared with my wife, who has many concerns bearing down on her this summer, recent video clips of Freya, a celebrity lady walrus who’s lately been hanging out in Oslo Norway’s harbor. Freya is a young 1300-pound mermaid who spends around 20 hours a day sleeping while carelessly lounging on marina boats, sinking a … Continue reading From Cocoon forth a Butterfly – Emily Dickinson’s summer consideration
Are you new here? If so, this is what the Parlando Project does: we take words (other people’s, mostly poetry) and combine them with a variety of music we compose, create, and perform. I find this fun, and I also find that even more than reading another person’s poem — even reading it aloud — … Continue reading Yellow Air (Heat)
It appears that no one reads or is concerned with American Modernist poet John Gould Fletcher these days. I came upon him in a passing mention that he was associated with Imagism, a pioneering English-language Modernist style that I find worthy of sustaining. Turns out this was only the half of it: in Fletcher’s “associated … Continue reading John Gould Fletcher’s weird “America”
One unusual thing I did this spring to celebrate National Poetry Month was to re-release 31 pieces from the early years of this project. This was a way, despite reduced time and opportunities to create new pieces, to still celebrate and demonstrate the various poems and music combinations of the Parlando Project. That April batch … Continue reading The most popular Parlando Project piece for spring 2022
Sometime before The Police made it an album title, this project’s alternate voice and keyboard player Dave Moore took to using the term synchronicity to explain some things that going forward cause significant effects where there was no pre-existing reason or even connection. Maybe me seeing Dave read a poem in a church while we … Continue reading Synchronicity: Spring 2022 Parlando Top Ten numbers 4-2
Tonight is Jazz Night here at the Parlando Project Top 10 countdown. I’m going to ask the folks who come here for the talk about words to murmur down quietly today as I speak about the music. Funny how these quarterly counts sometimes become nice little “sets.” Both today and tomorrow’s segments as we countdown … Continue reading May Music Find a Way. Spring 2022 Parlando Top Ten numbers 7-5
It’s time to look back at the last quarter and see what pieces were the most liked and listened to during those months. I released (or re-released) 51 pieces since March 1st here, more than enough to return to our regular multi-post Top Ten countdown format, so let’s present numbers 10 through 8 today as … Continue reading Spring 2022 Parlando Top Ten numbers 10-8
I have no new musical piece for today’s American celebration of freedom’s restoration, Juneteenth. I made moves toward one, but things didn’t move fast enough. In my wayward search I’ve been spending more time thinking about the Mid-20th century period 1940-65 that I wrote about a few posts back. During that period the Afro-American art … Continue reading Thoughts on Juneteenth: Jazz was born free, and everywhere is exchanged
I won’t take much time today in presenting another short 90-second musical piece I composed. I also wrote the text for today’s composition, which isn’t the normal thing here. One of our principles is “Other People’s Stories” — we try to emphasize the value of a variety of poetic expression and what it’s like to … Continue reading Generations, and Poetry’s Possible Worlds
Let me write today about two possibly useful incidents in this project’s working process. Let’s start with the process of translation or adaptation of 8th century master Chinese poet Li Bai’s words. Long-time readers here will know I rely on English language glosses. Here’s the one I used to start work on today’s piece: High … Continue reading my adaptation of Li Bai’s “Staying the Night at a Mountain Temple.”
This project spends a lot of time in the first quarter of the 20th century where the public domain diamonds are scattered free for recutting and reuse — but If I was able to expand this, I’d probably skip the Thirties and delve into the 1940-1965 mid-century quarter, the era I personally remember through youthful-eyed … Continue reading The Dick & the Dame, or Dave Moore goes Pulp Noir
Elegies are a funny business. Your job is to say something about the missing person — the missing and the person — in some combination. I’m personally committed to the short lyric poem, which asks furthermore that one finds short, immediate, and melodious things to stand for a life and loss. Proportions like that risk … Continue reading Burying the Poet’s Typewriter
I’ve mentioned previously that our poetic colleague Kevin FitzPatrick, who died last autumn, often wrote poems about work. Here’s one of them from his final collection Still Living In Town. Kevin titled his poem “To Whom It May Concern,” and in performance I took a line from the poem and recast it as a refrain, … Continue reading To Whom It May Concern (Carry Them Away)
I mentioned earlier this spring, that master classical Chinese poet Du Fu wrote in a troubled era that also troubled his life. Both he and his contemporary poet Li Po were exiled or forced to flee at times, and while I know no details of this poem, I get an exile sense from it somehow. … Continue reading Enjoying Flowers Walking Alone
Originally posted on Frank Hudson:
It’s taken me a few days to write this post after learning of the death of Minnesota poet Kevin FitzPatrick. After someone dies, someone you know at some level, there’s an emptiness. While it’s impossible to feel emptiness, it may be the first obligation of grief to hold that sense…
If I didn’t read the news, it would still be spring. I’ve mentioned it’s been hard to produce new pieces here recently. While there’s a variety of reasons for this, here’s one: I’d planned a little series on May flowers. I was inspired by my wife’s love for our native northland wildflowers and some gorgeous … Continue reading Dickinson’s “Bloom”
Early this week, Poet Jose Hernandez Diaz on Twitter put out a call for people to respond with their go-to poets in our troubled times. I’m always uneasy when being put on the spot for short-lists, because I’m by nature a person of various moods and needs. The poet I need today is not always … Continue reading Rain on a Spring Night (after Du Fu)
It seemed a long time since I last had a new performance to share. I checked, and found it’d only been a week, but since then the moon has had a red eclipse, and in my country there’s been a couple of mass shootings motivated by ignorant ethnic hatreds. Willful ignorance combined with violence is … Continue reading William Blake’s “The Tyger”
The world of this poem is scribed with the understanding that when you’re on a lake’s surface you are at the boundary level of two worlds. Like unto angels in Medieval drawings, those fishing are pulling the fish from the aqueous world into the sky world, and I often felt I could sense the hooked … Continue reading It’s been hard to complete new work recently, so “Anglers” for Minnesota’s Sport Fishing Opener day.
A lot of these performances begin somewhat randomly. Oh, Edward Thomas isn’t random, I’ve enjoyed exploring this British writer with you since I first ran into his connection with Robert Frost in the years just before WWI. Was I looking for a poem considering a particular subject or event? One could see today’s piece, “Cock-Crow” … Continue reading Edward Thomas’ “Cock-Crow” cleaves the wood of thoughts that grows by night
This is going to be a sort of catch-all post following up on a variety of things. And speaking of catch-all, it’s Willie Mays’ birthday today,* and at the end there’s a recording of an early LYL Band performance of a Dave Moore song celebrating the great center-fielder. I want to start off by saying … Continue reading Willie Mays, and my April poetry adventure
I saw this Whitman poem from the 1867 version of Leaves of Grass during National Poetry Month but was unable to find the time to compose the music and arrange a performance during that busy month. Still, I was so stunned by its expression that I made a note to myself to get to it … Continue reading “Oh Me! Oh Life!” Walt Whitman’s de profundis poem performed
It’s been quite the job of work to do daily posts with new lyric videos here this April in celebration of National Poetry Month, and I haven’t taken the time yet to see what impact those extra efforts have had. Though I was re-releasing already recorded audio pieces from the earliest years of this six-year … Continue reading Completing my National Poetry Month daily posting with two beautiful pieces
Americans know little of English poet Charlotte Mew, who wrote today’s poem during “the last Twenties,” but her poetry shows some unusual qualities, particularly for her time.* For example, this poem starts off off-hand and rises at its end to hearing an angel — so beginning like a reserved Frank O’Hara and ending as if … Continue reading She’s so unusual: "The Trees are Down” for National Poetry Month
Yesterday I said poetry isn’t just beauty and wonder. Well, sometimes it is. Like this recasting of an Emily Dickinson poem into outright 1960’s wonderment. I carried around a copy of the original text of “May-Flower” today for Poem in Your Pocket Day, but alas I wasn’t assertive about it. Should I have been? The … Continue reading See Emily (Dickinson) Play — I recast her poem “May-Flower” for National Poetry Month
As we continue into the last week of National Poetry Month I’m going to remind casual readers here that poetry is not only beauty or amazement, even if during this month we often emphasize those qualities. Yesterday’s piece by Chicago’s Carl Sandburg was about a lovely evening, about a generalized bonhomie with love, music, and … Continue reading Fenton Johnson’s “Tired” for National Poetry Month
Here’s a poem written by a second-generation immigrant about immigrants, and about Chicago in 1916, or my present city neighborhood of immigrants, or summer, summer nights — and it’s about love and affection, and about the moon that we’re all immigrants from when we fall in love. The child of an immigrant who wrote this … Continue reading Carl Sandburg’s “Back Yard” for National Poetry Month
Today’s piece for National Poetry Month is another Emily Dickinson: her gothic aubade “Ample make this Bed.” Word-music is subjective, but I find this one of the most poignant and lovely of her poems. As with many Dickinson poems the meaning tantalizes, at once clear on the surface and tangled beneath. The trope it’s using, … Continue reading Emily Dickinson’s “Ample make this Bed”
Let me start out by saying I think that today’s poem is a fine piece of writing capable of making its listener think anew. “The Wall Around Heaven” is satire. Satire has two dangers: that one will take its audaciousness as a literal program or doctrine, or that one will laugh simply at the outrageousness without thought. Satire often believes laughter can be the germ of thought even if you laugh before you know what that thought could be.
This project’s usual thing is to present poetry old enough to be freely reused, and then performing it with original music. If one was to note that the poetry wasn’t meant to be performed with music, or that there is a danger that our understanding of the poet’s intent is incomplete, I reply that’s part the point. We want to think anew about the works, some of which are revered poems, some of which are poems that are lesser-known or rated.
In this case we have the poet themselves performing the piece, longtime Parlando contributor Dave Moore. When I asked Dave if he wanted to add some background on “The Wall Around Heaven’s” intent, here’s what he wrote:
At this point I don’t even remember when Larry died. As you know he lived right around the corner from you, drove a cab, and identified as a folk poet. Not to mention, tho I’m sure you will, sharing a name with a musician. He also vocally retired from poetry, tho a lot I heard from him seemed spontaneous (I’m missing a word here). When I wrote this of course I was thinking about Trump’s cruel & ridiculous buzzpoint (missing another word, must be too early in the day for me).
Anyway I was thinking in Larry’s voice when I drafted the piece.”
Who’s that Larry Williams that Dave speaks of? Nope, not that guy. Our Larry was also someone who attended the Lake Street Writer’s Group along with Dave and myself, and the two poets who died this winter that we’ve been introducing you to: Ethna McKiernan and Kevin FitzPatrick. So, in that way, Dave’s poem inspired by our Larry Williams is of a piece with those matters, even if it uses different tactics than the poems by Ethna or Kevin.
I don’t want to say a lot about Dave’s “The Wall Around Heaven.” I think it’s best encountered as one listens to its satiric fable, its parable, without my commentary. I’ll add only this: this month I went the long way around to see the roadshow production of the folk opera Hadestown. Hadestown’s first act closes with what may be the most heard song from this opera, a rousing act-closer “Why We Build the Wall.”I think that song was written nearly 10 years ago, but by the time Hadestown evolved into its current staged version, the song was seen — as Dave also recalls about the genesis of his own piece — as commentary on a certain U.S. presidential campaign’s idée fixe: an impenetrable border-long wall on the country’s southern border.
The set for the production of the folk-opera Hadestown I saw last week.
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To this listener “The Wall Around Heaven” is something much more than that. In some part it’s a satire on a long-time Christian theological question. But what if you’re not a Christian? Well, one doesn’t need to be an acolyte of classic Greek polytheism to enjoy Hadestown.* The Larry Williams I knew would often speak, poetically or otherwise, about social injustice and elite indifference. I suspect that the muses were whispering those shades into Dave’s ear as he wrote this — but the concept of a wall around paradise and the capricious human understanding of the rules to gain entry is broader and richer than even that.
This one is a bit longer than many pieces here, but it’s well worth a listen. The player gadget is below for many of you. Can’t gain entry to that? This highlighted link is the other way to hear it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Wall_Around_Heaven.mp3 .
Here’s my summary review of Hadestown: I enjoyed, appreciated, and was moved by it. Having heard a few of the songs by the original Broadway cast, and having a modest grasp of some of the mythological tales, I was still glad that I encountered it as a discrete story-telling experience whole for the first time. I discovered, as with Dave’s parable, Hadestown adds an undercurrent of social inequality to its mythopoetic story. External to Hadestown itself, the story’s impact was amplified by sitting next to someone just out of hospitalization for suicidal ideation during this performance. Orpheus in Hadestown* makes a point that he entered the underworld of the dead “the long way.”
That’s the way I wish for you to get to heaven or hell — the long way.
Today let’s examine the place of hands and humor in poetry and music. Let’s start with hands, before we turn to the subject of humor and a poem about farming.*
You just heard alternate Parlando Project voice Dave Moore last time here, but besides letting you get a break from my vocals, Dave has played keyboards with me since the late 1970s as the core of The LYL Band. That’s a long piece of work, particularly in that I’ve needed him more than he’s needed me with this. Here are the basics of that: I’m a poor rhythm guitarist. I like to add color and decoration whether the song is fast and loud or quiet and moody. Groove, beat, a solid march of chords to carry you along? Not in my wheelhouse. The LYL Band has had other guitarists over the years to handle some of that, but most of the time it’s been down to Dave for the chords and groove. Back in the earliest days of recording us, when four tracks were a fresh luxury, I’d put Dave’s keys on the same track as a drum machine, sure that he’d be solid as the machine.
Now we’ve both got some mileage on our hands, and Dave has encountered some issues with both of his arms and hands. He tells me that the fingers just won’t do what he asks them to do some of the time. He’s become more like me now as a musician: able to do some things, some days, within limits. My own hands have had problems too, which currently are no worse, and many days a little better. Oddly, writing and composing can let my hands weaken. To wrangle a guitar as I often like to takes not just flexibility but also finger strength which is best approached by regular use with a gentle uptake, not a two-hour live session where I need them to work right off after weeks of musing on poetry and tapping out a sonnet. I’ve been trying to carve out more time to “just play” in order to keep my digits loose and strong.
So, when Dave and I got together this month to honor our friends who’ve recently died, I assessed that my hands were ready to rumble by current standards; but Dave, while game, wasn’t sure. During the session, he did all right, even if he wasn’t nearly as strong as he was in our little band for years.
Now on to humor. Kevin FitzPatrick was a poet we got together to honor. We both knew him for decades, and Kevin even played a little blues harmonica with us a few times in the early days. One thing that Kevin’s poetry often used was his dry sense of humor. If his poems “had other people in them” the interaction between those characters was often humorous. Humor is like that, isn’t it? With poetry one can easily fill a chapbook with solitary musings, singing philosophies, and hermit’s prayers, but humor generally requires other people, our rubs, our missed and kissed connections.
Kevin’s final collection Still Living in Town has several characters, but the central ones were his own persona, a city-living office employee and his life partner, Tina, a woman who had decided she wanted the rural life — and not a Walden cabin in the woods, but a farm growing a variety of produce and sheep.** Kevin was in his 60s, but he was a big fit guy (he boxed and taught martial arts in his youth) and however urban his life had been, his character pitched in with the farm labor.
Kevin’s farm poems are and aren’t like Robert Frost’s to compare them to a famous example. That Kevin could approach a blank verse feel in some poems would connect them — but Frost, urban-born and professionally an itinerant teacher, liked to cast his persona in his farming poems as knowledgeable and in place with farming, while Kevin portrayed himself with beginner’s mind on the farm. Given that fewer living readers have any connection with farm work, Still Living in Town invites us into that milieu wonderfully.
The poem of Kevin’s I used for today’s piece is looser metrically, but while it’s set in like weather to this current March (wheeling rain and snow and thaw) it most wants us to hear a little story about the two characters, the labor of farming, and yes, the humor in hands and their stubbornness.
Jazzmasters! From the upper left: Jimi Hendrix without a Strat; Pete Townsend about to decrease the supply of used guitars; some guy named Jimmy James (wonder what became of him?); Frank Zappa, who didn’t say “The Jazzmaster isn’t dead, it just smells funny;” my Jazzmaster painted the homeopathic color Sonic Blue; Tom Verlaine, vanguard of the alternative nation which latched onto the bargain unwanted Jazzmaster in the 1970s.
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A few notes on the music. I sometimes create the drum tracks for my compositions before the live session begins. And since I’m usually needed in the guitarist role, I sometimes lay down the bass parts with those tracks ahead of time too. That’s how this piece was. On the day of the session, I sang and played the wailing lead guitar*** and recorded the reading of Kevin’s words live with Dave playing a baaing/buzzing synth part live. Dave’s part, subject to his current hands, didn’t fulfill all the groove chop I thought the piece needed. So I added a second guitar part doing my best at rhythm guitar on my Telecaster, but a lot of the final groove you hear is an electric piano part that I laid down trying to imitate my friend and partner Dave’s playing as I recall it from the past.
By now I hope you’re ready to hear the musical story of Kevin FitzPatrick’s farm poem “Coyotes.” The player gadget is below for many of you. Don’t see that? This highlighted link is provided as an alternative so you can hear it that way too.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Coyotes.mp3 .
*I have to repeat this one, which I read in a comment thread this month regarding the upcoming Hollywood Oscar awards event: “The only Oscars I care about are Peterson and Wilde.” In the context of Dave Moore, even the young Dave wasn’t likely to stand toe to toe (finger to finger?) with Oscar Peterson on piano. On the other hand, I’ll hop on top of Oscar Wilde’s tea table in my slush-muddy Minnesota shoes and declare Dave’s poetic wit with Wilde’s.
**Other reoccurring characters weave in and out in the farm poems too — and while four-legged, the couple’s farm dog, the incongruous poodle named Katie, makes a cameo appearance in this one and others.
*The lead guitar part is played on a Jazzmaster, a famous failure in Fender’s otherwise wildly successful line of mid-century electric guitars. A couple of decades into its Edsel-hood of “what were they thinking” failure, unwanted used Jazzmasters became an affordable choice pragmatically chosen by some punk and alternative musicians. Even so, few think of a Jazzmaster for this kind of wailing lead guitar with a bit of funk flavor. As long as one is able to address the Jazzmaster’s bridge design issues, it can do that sort of thing.
Given the everything I’d rate between losses, troubles, and mere distractions I’ve gone through since late last autumn, I’m not in a mood this week to do the traditional Parlando Top Ten list for the past season. These are the same issues in repertory that have reduced the number of new pieces I was able to present here during that time. You, the audience for this Project, have stayed with this: readership to this blog is growing, overall listenership to the audio pieces is slightly up. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. There’s more than three of you — I mean to thank all of you three times.
I know some of you do like these quarterly Top Tens, and I enjoy them myself — if only just to see what pieces from the variety presented here got the most response. That said, let’s rush through the numbers 10 up to 6 for the record:
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Song to the Dark Virgin by Langston Hughes
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Winter Solstice Consolations by Frank Hudson
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I died for Beauty — but was scarce by Emily Dickinson
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Oh, Maria by Ethna McKiernan
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Letting Go the Wolves by Ethna McKiernan
You can see in those five pieces two from my memorial observance for the Irish-American poet McKiernan who I had the privilege to know and examine poetry with, and one from my February Black History Month celebration of Langston Hughes’ first poetry collection The Weary Blues. There in the middle, there’s one by long-time Parlando Project favorite Emily Dickinson. And my own piece in that group talks about the loss of Ethna and also my March memorial subject who Dave Moore and I also knew and worked with: Kevin FitzPatrick. If you missed any of these, each of that above list is a link to my original blog posting and the audio performance of it, just as the following ones bolded titles are.
We join the countdown to the most listened to and liked piece then at number 5.
Spring, a rebuttal.
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5. Velvet Shoes by Elinor Wylie. A lovely, graceful winter poem by a too-often-overlooked poet from “The Last Twenties” in our previous century. I like the music and performance I created for this one just as much as I did when I created it back around the beginning of 2022.
One would think I’d be through with snow experiences this far into spring, but my morning bike ride today was in big wet flakes and a cold enough north wind. Wylie’s velvet snow is more the dry January sort, but then appreciating snow for its beauty qualities may be best done in past-tense. If so, you may enjoy listening to this one in what I hope is a pleasant spring.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Velvet_Shoes.mp3 .
4. Lenox Avenue: Midnight by Langston Hughes. “The rhythm of life is a Jazz rhythm” says the first line of Hughes’ poem. I did my best to honor that injunction from one of the first Afro-American poets to unabashedly celebrate that musical form. Although I’m a vary unskilled keyboard player I was able to compose a satisfying two-handed part using MIDI as a scoring tool. I wanted a saxophone solo too, which you can hear a bit of in this performance, but I just couldn’t score or execute enough articulation to “make it.” The piece’s final horn section flourish is one of my rare surrenders to using a sampled musical phrase.
Of course, motif sampling is now an oft honored tactic in the ongoing Afro-American musical tradition, so perhaps I shouldn’t view it as a failure on my part. On the audacity front: I decided to extend Hughes’ lyric which ended with “And the Gods are laughing at us” with a newly written affirmation from after the poem’s time of 1926, one that says that the young art of Jazz and of young writer Langston Hughes’ has answered those gods.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Lenox_Avenue_Midnight.mp3 .
3. Sonny Rollins, The Bridge 1959. Staying with Jazz for this one, though with my own words straight through. There are beliefs — some sincere, some insincere — that Afro-American history is but a sorrowful tale, a grievance and a pandering response. If you can heartily do so, I ask you to improvise your own expletive response to the call of that fearful theory, one with as much eloquence and melodic force as you can deliver. Now our response may not be Sonny Rollins level improvisation. That’s not a reason not to — after all, Sonny Rollins wasn’t sure his improvisations were Sonny Rollins’ level improvisations. That’s the story in this piece.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Sonny_Rollins_The_Bridge_1959.mp3 .
2. After Apple Picking by Robert Frost. I made my pitch that Robert Frost was verging on being a bluesman elsewhere this winter, but that piece didn’t make the Top Ten as this one did. His Black American contemporary Langston Hughes called his first book and a featured poem in it The Weary Blues, but this poem of Frost’s could have that name too. Both Hughes’ Weary Blues and Frost’s end in sleep.
I seem to lack the concentration, or the assured concentration of blocks of time, to do arrangements as full as the one I created for Frost’s poem right now. But you can still enjoy this one.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/After_Apple_Picking.mp3 .
1. Stones by Ethna McKiernan. One answer to lack of compositional time is to write solo instrument pieces, which for me usually means acoustic guitar. Of the several pieces I did to introduce more of you to McKiernan’s range of poetry, this was the one that by far got the most listens this winter — in fact, more listens than any piece has received for more than a year during its first season after posting.
Before I leave you to listen to it, I want to say that beyond soothing my grief at Ethna’s death, that performing those pieces which used her words this winter made her seem closer than our too casual life connection sometimes had us. Wherever we voyage, the same waves lap the same sounds on the walls of our boats.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Stones.mp3 .
Let’s celebrate our arrived spring with this LYL Band performance of another Kevin FitzPatrick poem. Here’s a link to the full text of Kevin’s poem that we used — a link which also serves as a reminder that Garrison Keillor’s old Writer’s Almanac program used this poem once too.
Not a satellite image of Antarctica, but a representation of how ice is fading and green emerging in Minnesota.
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Like most all of Kevin’s poems this one yields a straightforward meaning to many readers or listeners without need of study or re-reading. As I mentioned last time, that was one of Kevin’s aims. You may also notice the care he takes with the word-music in this piece. In our little poet’s group, Kevin’s suggestions would often be metrical improvements, and isn’t the sound of this poem’s opening line: “Windy, sunny, and Sunday” a fine springboard into this spring poem!
If one expects, requires, or prefers a more allusive and elusive poetry, you could shrug at this poem on the page. The poem’s overall metaphor — that learning to ride a bicycle in childhood is representative of a parent and child’s task of independence and departure — is likely apparent before you complete the poem. Myself? I found the poem charming. I can come to like a poem that doesn’t charm me at first — but how many poems survive to be understood when we initially stand coldly next to them? Oh, some poems taunt you with mystery. Some ask you to be impressed with verbal richness. Some present unknown worlds you may choose to explore. “Bicycle Spring” seems simple. So, is it less good, or good only for lesser pleasures and less respect?
I’ve been writing, reading, and performing poetry for decades. I suppose I should have a valuable opinion on that matter. Sorry to disappoint, but I do not. Readers often tell me that my own poems and lyrics are too obscure and mannered. I personally prize originality in outlook and images highly, even at the risk of asking my readers/listeners to drop expectations and habitual/familiar ways of understanding a piece. Is that the best way, or do I even execute that way very well?
Way back in the 20th century I was taking a seminar class with poet Michael Dennis Browne, and in talking to the group he suggested that most of us students were writing poems that were more obscure than the ones he was writing. He asked, or at least strongly implied, that we should ask if that obscurity was necessary. I now ask you — as I continue to ask myself — to ask that. One thing should be key to your analysis: obscurity may be a way to cover up bad writing, insufficient intention, and fear — yes fear — of being understood.
Kevin FitzPatrick’s poetry was one poet’s answer to those questions. He truly wanted to speak to a broad audience, and yet at his death had achieved only a small (if appreciative) one. Dave and I are trying to enlarge that audience a little bit with this series,* as well as to memorialize our feelings after the death of our colleague.
Before I leave you with Dave Moore’s performance of Kevin FitzPatrick’s poem “Bicycle Spring,” let me point out that there are often little figures on the horizon or in the background that can add depth to the first hearing or reading of one of Kevin’s poems. In our first example this month “Blackberries,” I should have given you a link to the Seamus Heaney poem “Blackberry Picking” that serves as the distant core of FitzPatrick’s poem. FitzPatrick’s “Blackberries” is homey, humorous, even practical. Heaney’s “Blackberry Picking” is fatalistic, mildly tragic, haunted by waste. Kevin admired one poem, wrote another, and says so in “Blackberries.” To know the tragic and to choose the comic is a complex choice isn’t it? And in “Bicycle Spring” the background is there too, those concluding “blocks where he/has forbidden you to walk.” The father’s job is in part to help himself disappear.
The graphical player to hear the LYL Band’s performance of FitzPatrick’s “Bicycle Spring” is below for many. If you don’t see that, here’s a highlighted hyperlink to hear it too.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Bicycle_Spring.mp3 .
Kevin’s poetry collections were published by Midwest Villages & Voices, and are not available through easily linked online booksellers or AFAIK, even directly from the publisher. “Bicycle Spring” is in his 1987 collection Down on the Corner* which is ISBN 978-0935697025 and this information may help you get a copy via your library or local bookseller.
Here’s a performance of a poem in time for St. Patrick’s Day to start Dave and my celebration of the poetry of Kevin FitzPatrick. Longtime readers here may remember me speaking of Kevin late last year when he became seriously ill and then died. I even published a post then that discussed some things that FitzPatrick’s poetry did that my own poetry, or much other contemporary poetry, didn’t make enough use off. Despite that earlier post, I’m going to say a few more words about the value of his poetry you may not hear at first — even though most of his poems are clear, plain spoken, and easy enough to understand for most readers.
Right there is a first potential problem. Some readers have an “Is that all there is?” response to many of Kevin’s poems. To the degree that I knew Kevin’s internal processes I don’t think he was troubled with that “problem.” He wanted his poetry to communicate to audiences not inured to modern poetry which might communicate in a non-linear way or with great reliance on esoteric imagery. But just because FitzPatrick doesn’t “come in hot” with arresting first lines, occult mysteries, and outlandish similes or settings, doesn’t mean it can’t have some other values. In the series this post initiates, I hope to show some of those strengths.
This is the picture that seems most “Like Kevin” to me.
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Today’s piece uses the poem that led off FitzPatrick’s final collection, Still Living In Town. And for St. Patrick’s Day? Besides Kevin’s own Irish heritage, this one is about taking a fresh look at Ireland’s Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney. Like Heaney, FitzPatrick liked to take a sly look at his subjects.
There’s a player below to hear The LYL Band’s performance of this poem by our friend and fellow poet. In our celebration of Kevin earlier this month we performed all the pieces live, one after the other, without rehearsals or preliminary run-throughs. This leaves some rough spots, sure, but perhaps we can take them as evidence of life for us left to sing against the taking from us?
There’s a fairly long intro before the words begin today, which documents how our recording session began: with Dave coming from the stairs into the studio as I am already commencing my musical part. He then needs to start almost without thought.
Oh, what if you don’t see the graphical player below? This highlighted hyperlink is another way to hear that same performance.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Blackberries.mp3 .
I started this inconstant month calling it “Unrequited March” — and I had this desire: to pay a more complete tribute to a recently departed poet I knew: Kevin FitzPatrick. In that task I wanted to see if I could rejoin with another voice and poet you’ve heard here: my friend Dave Moore.
Dave’s had some reduction in his ability to play keyboards, and he wasn’t sure how well his voice would hold up, but he was able to join me late last week as we took our usual “live in the studio” approach to doing some new pieces together, including a number of ones using FitzPatrick’s words. This requitement was doubly appropriate because Dave knew Kevin even longer than I did. Dave and I managed fine, and had a good time.
In the normal course of things those pieces would get worked on in the following week, but life has interrupted our singing back at death.
We are all racing forward and melting.
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How? Even if one of this Project’s mottos is “Other People’s Stories,” I have qualms about telling other living persons’ events, so I don’t feel right discussing more details here today, but there have been hospitals involved, and some pretty long hours in the last two days in those places.
The outlook, best as I can predict it now, is that beyond my concerns with these other matters, my ability to work on audio pieces will be restricted for a while. If time allows, you might still hear some of the Kevin FitzPatrick related stuff yet this week.
Does it seem odd to work on art and our experience of it, even when other things must take precedence? That occurred to me too. Well, when I visited our newly hospitalized patient, they had two needs: music and Jacques Derrida. Go figure.
I’m posting a bit late in the day, but it’s International Women’s Day, and so today’s audio piece uses as a text a poem by a very international woman, Lola Ridge. Ridge’s poetry is perhaps best known for a fierce commitment to social justice and the situation of the poor in early 20th century America; but she was born in Ireland, left with her parents for New Zealand as a child, emigrated from there to Australia to attend college, and then to America, eventually New York City, where she mixed with most of the political and artistic radicals of the early Modernist era, including on the arts side: Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, and William Carlos Williams and the rest of the circle around the NYC Modernist magazine The Others. Over at the Midwestern anchor of Modernist American poetry, it’s editor/founder Harriet Monroe was said to have called Ridge a genius, and she won awards and some favorable reviews in the years between the two World Wars.
Late in the 1930’s she apparently fell from the scene politically and artistically, and when she died in 1941 she was as poor as the people she wrote about, and then seemingly the subject of a rapid and rather complete forgetting for the rest of the 20th century.
Luckily our 21st century has become interested in reassessing the women who were on the scene a century ago along with the male Modernists, and there’s now a revival in considering her work.
Unlike some of Ridge’s poetry, today’s piece is not formally Modernist. It’s not only a sonnet, it attempts to present a passionate if conventional poetic argument regarding the abstract ideal of artistic beauty. Taken by itself it’s more Percy Bysshe Shelley than William Carlos Williams, but if we look just a little beyond its surface we can be reminded that Shelley was a thoroughgoing political and social radical as well as a Romantic era poet. Here’s a link to the text of Ridge’s “Sonnet to Beauty,” from a blog that does a great job of presenting sonnets and similar shorter poems, FourteenLines.blog.
Ridge’s poem starts by worshiping beauty almost as an awed acolyte unable to face the godhead. But in the midst of the poem, something strange starts to manifest itself: a buzzard (an ugly, carrion-eating bird) appears gussied up by “The wizardry of light” to appear “All but lovely as the swan.” I read this as Ridge saying that artists and society can fail, can deceive, can fake beauty.
A musical metaphor follows this that says despite the diversity of artistic endeavor — including false beauties or injustice like unto our buzzard — that beyond the dissonance and the harmonic stress of this dialectic, that the chords can resolve. The poem ends avowing that true beauty can still chime through ugliness, falsehood, and strife.
Beyond sonnets, I will now make a turn in this post before giving you a chance to hear my performance of Ridge’s poem. Let me quickly summarize the event I attended this past Sunday remembering Irish-American poet Ethna McKiernan. There may be more than coincidence that Lola Ridge started this off.
Ethna McKiernan reading, with lipstick, and Lola Ridge, I’m not sure.
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Minnesota weather and continued Covid-19 concerns might have conspired to reduce attendance, as the side streets were still full of sloppy snow from Saturday’s snowfall.* I arrived early and helped the bookstore staff setup chairs. They seemed to be expecting maybe a couple of dozen, which may be par for a Twin Cities local-writer poetry reading, but both the event organizer and myself the bystander suspected we’d need to maximize the amount of chairs the space could hold. I think we were able to get nearly 40 folding chairs into the designated space, but as the crowd started to assemble, extra chairs needed to be rounded up and put in the various aisles between the bookstore shelves to handle those that kept coming in, and we had a few standees who fit in where they could.
More than typical bookstore poetry readings, I suspect most of the crowd knew Ethna for a long time. And that may have given a boost to the eight poets who read poems of Ethna’s, a smattering of their own, and gave short thoughts about her as a writer and a person. So less a usual public reading where some poets might be nervously trying to consider how they would come off presenting their work to an audience which might not know it, and more like an experienced and informal poetry group of long-time colleagues.
Several of the readers were members of other periodically-meeting writer’s groups that included Ethna, like unto the Lake Street Writer’s group that Dave Moore, Kevin FitzPatrick, Ethna, and I were decades-long members of. I’m sure that if Kevin had lived, he would have been a valued part of this event, as Ethna often credited Kevin as an influence on her writing — but he died a few weeks ahead of Ethna. I tried to make myself useful by playing stagehand and raising and lowering the mic stand for the variety of readers.
Many of the readers spoke of Ethna’s work with homeless outreach, and read some of her poems that dealt with that work, something that echoes today’s poet Ridge. Though the audience was entirely masked, a few noted that Ethna was a stickler for always putting on lipstick when out in public. For all anyone knew, what with our Covid era masks, we all were wearing lipstick! Who could see — but I believe all of us were remembering Ethna.
Covid-era ambiguity: “Lipstick? We were supposed to wear lipstick?” A portion of the crowd at the “Remembering Ethna” event last Sunday.
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So, as I speak of a woman who promoted culture, wrote beautiful poetry, and was committed to helping the economically desperate, I will now leave you with a piece using the words of another woman who a century before us did the same. You can hear Lola Ridge’s “Sonnet to Beauty” with a graphical player below if you see that, or if you don’t, with this highlighted link.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Sonnet_to_Beauty.mp3
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*My friend and participant here in the Parlando Project Dave Moore was unable to attend due to concerns with the street conditions. I’ve attended two other book-launch poetry readings given by Ethna herself, and this Sunday’s was the smallest crowd of the three. Consider though that most of those who knew Ethna are “senior citizens,” and some are frail as well.
I know this Project has an international reach, with listeners and readers in many countries. This is natural, because interest in poetry and music is borderless — but this month many areas of our world are also following the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops. There’s no shortage of news, opinions, and analysis of that matter available anywhere where such things are allowed to be freely discussed, and I’ll not be adding personally to that here today. Some of you may be saying “Well, you must speak out! The situation is clear!” I agree that the situation seems clear to me too. I don’t believe I need to be an expert on the matter to have my villain and my set-upon victims, and my mere words in this Project’s small but valued audience won’t add that much.
But one of the Parlando Project’s mottos is “Other People’s Stories.” This lets me call in others’ words to bear on this. Neither of the poems I’ll use excerpts from today were writing about the current invasion, but they weren’t writing about things unconnected to it either. I won’t explicate their words here in any length, I’ll let those words speak for themselves today.
In place of that, let me give you a short description of how I came to create this piece which I call by the names of the two poems I used parts of: “Babi Yar – Testament.”
In the news this month I read that some ordinance in the invasion has landed on the site of Babi Yar, which is the hallowed memorial site of the execution of 33,000 people, mostly Jews, during the German invasion of Ukraine in WWII. The primary reason I know of that horrific event was from a poem I first heard as a teenager, named as the place was: “Babi Yar.” “Babi Yar” was written by a young Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and the event of this poem was extraordinarily noteworthy in 1961 when it was published. First it was a poem read internationally by a Russian citizen that included criticism of the Soviet government and some elements of Russian history. Those of my age may know how unique that seemed at that time. After all, even the term dissident hadn’t really escaped from the Soviet regime back then.
And the poet? He was young, good looking, and a powerful reader of his poetry. Yevtushenko was seven years younger than Allen Ginsberg, and roughly as famous for a time after this young Russian was put on the cover of mass-market American magazines.
The whole thing was strange enough that some folks even thought there was a double-game being played, usually around the idea that Yevtushenko was the Soviet equivalent of the Black employee who is given the desk by the door to demonstrate that the firm they worked for didn’t discriminate on color. “See we’ve got our bright rebellious youth too, and there’s really no suppression of speech much less imprisonment for literature in the USSR.” One Yevtushenko, it was supposed, allowed the suppression of a multitude of others.
Let’s leave it at that, because the important thing I want to mention, is that the main reason I knew of the site of Babi Yar was from the man’s poem, the utter empathy it expressed for the victims who died there, and the statement that his native country hadn’t properly memorialized that spot. I often go into the background of poems here, but the poem had a power outside of that.
It’s been around 60 years since I heard or read that poem (I’m not sure which came first) and I wanted to revisit it. I was so bad at remembering the correct spelling of Yevtushenko’s last name that my first web search for some Scrabble rack of a bad guess with “poet” added in the search window brought up another poet instead: Taras Shevchenko.
I don’t know why I read that link to Shevchenko’s Wikipedia page, but that 19th century man has been called the bard of Ukraine. I knew nothing of him, though his wiki entry is long and detailed. An accidental cross-link had now occurred: I read of an attack during the current Russian Ukraine invasion, yet thought of a Russian poem and poet — and in searching for that, came upon a much-honored Ukrainian poet!
Today’s audio piece uses part of Shevchenko’s poem “Zapovit” translated as “Testament” read by myself, mixed with several sections of “Babi Yar” read by Yevgeny Yevtushenko himself.*
This is the video showing the full performance of “Babi Yar” that I excerpted for my mashup.
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The piece you can listen to below may seem like the sort of thing I used to do when I recorded with other musicians, but it has elements of remarkable accident too. The drums and bass parts were generated by a little box that I normally use only to practice with.*** I played a chord progression in rhythm into this box and it then generates a drum pattern in time with that and a bass line to follow the chords I played. Next recording pass, I played my reverse Stratocaster to add a guitar part to that bass/drums rhythm section, mostly using that very characteristic Strat “quack” two-pickup setting. Thinking that I might want a different option sonically, I played another take using an Epiphone semi-hollow-body guitar. This left me with two takes of guitar over the same beat. I figured I’d listen to one, then the other, and decide which sounded better later. Not an unusual tactic in these days of digital multi-track recording that.
When I first pulled up the tracks later that same day, I forgot to mute one of the two different electric guitar parts, and instead I heard the two tracks simultaneously. They seemed to weave with each other, even engaging in what sounded like responses — as if two guitarists were standing toe-to-toe and playing at each other. Without planning to, I’d played each part differently against the beat in a way that coincidentally complimented the other part. I decided that was the perfect accident for my Russian/Ukrainian poetry mashup.
I next moved to weave in the parts of “Babi Yar” as read by Yevtushenko and my own reading from Shevchenko’s “Testament.” The final addition was to play some layered synth. The completed piece has Yevtushenko, his poem, and the Stratocaster in the left channel and my reading of an English translation of Shevchenko’s “Testament” in the right. My aim was for it to sound something like a live jam, but I’ve tipped my hand today as to the artifice creating that impression.
Even with those parts separated in the stereo field, and two writers from two now combatant countries, it’s not really a dialectic. By a widely scattered coincidence both poets seem to reference the socialist anthem “The Internationale.” In the translation I used, “Testament” speaks of “Arise, sundering your chains,” while “Babi Yar” wishes for “The Internationale” to “thunder when the last antisemite on earth is buried for ever.” Each poem speaks of graves and outrage. Yevtushenko’s poem and expressive reading focus on the suffering of Jews, long persecuted in Europe even outside of the enormous atrocity of The Holocaust, and he audaciously claims to take on that suffering as a non-Jew.**** Comparing atrocities and suffering — oh, I cannot bear to do that tonight — but each suffering victim is their own suffering, each death their own death. Amid the current bombs and guns I won’t put that on a scale.
To hear my mashup of parts of “Babi Yar” and “Testament,” you can use a player gadget below where you can see it, or this highlighted hyperlink is an alternative way where you don’t have access to the player. The full text of “Babi Yar” is here, and the full text of “Testament” is part of Shevchenko’s Wiki page.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Babi_Yar_-_Testament.mp3
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*Wikipedia credits Vera Rich for the translation I used. The use of the translation on the Wikipedia page may well indicate it’s free for reuse.
**In this case, I haven’t obtained express rights to use these parts of Yevtushenko’s performance. I normally would not do this here, but it’s such a powerful statement that speaks to feelings that I and some others have with the current crisis, so I went ahead and used it for this non-revenue Project today. If any rights holder objects, I’ll promptly remove it.
***The box is the Digitech Trio. I think I’ve used it once or twice here before in this Project’s over 600 audio pieces. I thought I might play my own bass line, but I couldn’t “untangle” the drum parts from the bass, and leakage into the guitar mics of the backing parts would have been another problem— and then generally, some of the issues I’m dealing with are a reduction in my time to record, or to record with others, or even my own body at my age being up for playing.
**I don’t recall anyone objecting to Yevtushenko’s poem’s statements back in the early ‘60s that “I seem to be Anne Frank,” “I am each old man here shot dead,” or his concluding statement that he has “no Jewish blood” yet he must he hated “now as a Jew.” Yes, I hear earnest empathy there, even risk in his time and place as well — but I could see some saying now, or even then, “You’re a fine, famous poet Yevgeny, so good words, but what do you really know of living that?”
As I navigate the Parlando Project and one of its goals, “Other People’s Stories,” I try to recognize similar things. My current working theory is that I’d rather get it half-right than not try at all, and I don’t feel any level of prominence that lets me stand in front of and obscure others who want to tell their stories particular to their lives.
Here’s a sonnet of my own about the oncoming spring. I live in Minnesota, and here that season’s arrival is something of a lottery ticket. Oh, it’s likely that by sometime in February a Minnesotan is tired of winter, and we know that somewhere around May Day we’ll not have snow or cold to deal with for a few months, but when today’s high got to 40 F, we know no more than that. When I moved here, I was told that on days like today we might see folks wearing T-shirts outside — and yes that’s so. We are so in a hurry for spring that what would be a 5-degree Celsius winter day in more temperate regions seems time to ditch the jacket. Yet we are still likely to have more cold, and even more likely to get substantial snowfall, particularly in March.
So it is, from late February to late April is a two-month season of “what d’ya got” in our state. That’s what my poem performed today deals with.
Things are still snow-covered around here, but it’s not fluffy, Christmas-card snow— more at rugged crusts. I still ride a bicycle nearly every day year-round, and so winter means that I pay special attention to the surface conditions of the side-streets that I most often ride. You know the old factoid that Inuit peoples have a multitude of words for snow in their vocabulary? A day or two after a snow what’s often found is compressed and polished snow with some patches of white glaze where tires’ friction has buffed a gloss.* A few days later there will be areas where that surface further abrades and patches of dull-brown porridge-like snow aggregates are scattered on the roadway. I call the later “brown-sugar,” and the earlier hard white surface looks to me like the smooth inside of a shell.
Spring-time bike rides in Minnesota aren’t necessarily what you think.
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Low-pressure studded bike tires work pretty well on the hard shiny stuff, and large knobby treads are the thing for the loose brown sugar. My deep-winter bike’s tires are a pair of Venn diagram hoops circling both.
That’s a poet’s bike ride for you: metaphors per hour.
The meter’s a bit loose, yet not loose enough to cry “Kings X — Free Verse!” either.
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Does any of this help “translate” my poem for those without my climate? That’s my hope anyway. Though the title of my poem is “Unrequited March,” my wish for you, curious or stalwart reader/listener, is that spring will love you back this year. The player gadget to hear about the uncertainty of that is below for many readers, and for those whose way of reading this blog won’t show that graphical player, this highlighted hyperlink will open a new tab to play the performance just as well.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Unrequited_March.mp3
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*The large, knobby, low-pressure tires are also capable of riding on fresh snow before cars get to it. Un-rutted light and granular cold-weather snow is kind of fun to ride in. The wetter and clumpy snow that will likely come in any heavy storms for the rest of the season is much less joyful. That stuff is like riding in deep mud. The tires’ knobs will get traction — it’s not the tires, it’s an old out-of-shape guy like myself who’ll get tired quick riding through that.
This winter readers of this blog got to follow my own celebration of the work of Irish-American poet Ethna McKiernan. That was my memorial to her fine work, by which some of you now can know her. I realize that the Parlando Project has a world-wide readership, but for those of you that are in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area there’ll be a live event to celebrate her and her work featuring a number of her Twin Cities area poetic peers.
Here’s a link to the event listing.
This will be a bittersweet occasion for me and some others, as Ethna and Kevin FitzPatrick used to do a poetry reading around every St. Patrick’s Day in March, and now of course both of them have died., turning them into memories and their words.
I assume McKiernan’s selected poems collection Light Rolling Slowly Backwards will be available at the event. If you’re not local, here’s the publisher’s listing.
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Here’s one of those pieces I did this winter with Ethna’s words and my music. Player gadget below for some ways you may be reading this, or this alternative highlighted hyperlink if you don’t see that graphical player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Stones.mp3
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Today’s piece, “Poem” from Langston Hughes 1926 poetry collection, The Weary Blues, is one of the shortest poems in that book. Here’s a link to the text, all of it, if you’d like to read along. Those who’ve followed this Project as it has looked at early English language Modernist verse may recall that very short poems, even poems that seem bereft of obvious metaphor, were something that many of those early Modernists liked to present. Such tiny poems are pointed darts at the pomposity and long-windedness of the poetry they were seeking to replace.
The sense I get from today’s example is that by using the generic if exalted name of “Poem” as the title, when what follows is so spare and simply stated, is meant to draw attention to the provocation that this is worth consideration as a complete lyric.
It may be me and my current situation, but when I read “Poem” I immediately thought it was a memorial poem, a five-line-with-one-refrained-line statement of the essence of loss intended to put itself up against something like the book-length “In Memoriam A.H.H.” by Alfred Tennyson. I still find nothing in the text that forbids that reading.
But death isn’t the only loss in life. Some, particularly those looking for obscured clues to Langston Hughes’ erotic orientation see this a coded statement of a romantic or erotic breakup with a “He.” Like Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence and Tennyson’s long poem, the poem has a dedication to a set of initials: “F. S.” in “Poem’s” case. Some articles one can find in a web search identify this dedicatee as Ferdinand Smith, who was in the merchant marine — as was young Hughes before he published The Weary Blues. Hughes did know Smith, but I haven’t seen a full explanation of how this putative identification was made. Oddly, if this poem of complete separation was written about Smith, Hughes and Smith kept in touch until Smith’s death in 1961. In Real Life there was no utter break between the two — but that’s biographical information, nothing in the text forbids the abandoned love reading either.
Frederick Smith, who’s been identified by some as the mysterious F.S.
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And then too the poet Hughes of The Weary Blues and elsewhere is very broad in his use of the pronoun I. Not only does Hughes not identify F. S. and what exactly was the nature of the love relationship, Hughes is fully capable of using “I” as a collective or representational singular. Think of Hughes most famous early poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” — its litany of I’s is not a Quantum Leap confession that this certain 20th century poet worked on the Pyramids or rafted the Mississippi with Abe Lincoln.
But “Poem” does feel like a personal expression, even if Hughes may frustrate us if we prefer poems as memoir filled with explicit self-expression. Yet maybe this is of little importance to the essence the poem wants to express. Grief from loss of a lover who leaves and lives, or loss of a friend who has died — does the heart assay any difference?
Musically today I demonstrated fidelity of a different kind, playing a cheap 40-year-old 12-string guitar that I bought shortly after coming to Minnesota, and a bass that once belonged to Dean Seal, who played in the LYL Band in the early 80s. I have newer better* instruments, but it seemed like a good way to reset and get back to making some new Parlando Project musical pieces after February presented other matters that needed to be done.
You can hear my performance of Langston Hughes’ “Poem” with the player gadget below — or if you don’t see that, with this highlighted link.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Langston_Hughes_Poem.mp3
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*My newer guitars are better in that they don’t have parts that won’t exactly work anymore or intonation issues I need to work around, but besides old-times-sake I think there’s some character remaining in these funky instruments sound.
I was talking to Glen at the café I rode to for breakfast this morning. “It’s President’s Day. Did you get him anything?”
Glen has a pretty quick mind, but he thought for a moment and countered “Well, it’s one of those vestigial holidays. We’ve got a tailbone, but how many million years since we’ve needed it? It’s on the calendar and that’s about it.”
I think he’s right. It used to be more at Washington’s Birthday, and in some states Lincoln’s Birthday was also celebrated this month. And then one of the reasons February is Black History Month is that this short month also includes the date celebrated as Fredrick Douglass’ Birthday.
No sub-text here: 19th century celebrating heavenly Presidential bromance
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My celebration, my observance was taken up with the ubiquitous modern American civic act this weekend, watching things on a screen alone — which is kind of sad, but the others in my family have more proximate concerns nearer to them than my fiddly interest in musty histories and art.
I started by watching Lincoln’s Dilemma, a four-part, four-hour documentary mini-series produced by a number of Afro-Americans that is available on Apple TV+ now. It covers the time from Lincoln’s entry into state politics until his burial, focusing on his evolving and politically and war charged relationship with American chattel slavery and the Afro-American’s subjected to that. I was a teenager during the centennial of the American Civil War who read avidly about it, and between that and my interest in American Black history there was a lot that was only refrain and time-line refreshment for me, but like any well-done extensive overview there’s a power in putting things together and linking this and that.
Two things discussed fairly early in the documentary were stories I hadn’t known. One deals with the Christiana Incident, something I’d heard nothing about. It’s easily as gripping as my own city’s Eliza Winston story, or the Emily Dickinson adjacent stories of Angeline Palmer or Dickinson’s “Preceptor” Thomas Higginson’s armed assault on a Boston jail. The other was its accounts from the under-covered period between Lincoln’s election, his subsequent spring-time inauguration, and the firing on Fort Sumter that started the Civil War. I would eagerly see entire documentaries or “based on a true story” depictions of either. For example, did you know (I didn’t) that during this period, as a last-ditch effort to placate southern states that were issuing their declarations of succession based on the Federal Government and its soon to be leader’s insufficient devotion to slavery, that a proposed 13th amendment that would constitutionally prohibit the ending of slavery was put forward? It passed the House and Senate with the required 2/3 majorities. Although the Civil War would soon be raging, five! states ratified it.
If this sort of thing sounds interesting to you, and you have access to it, I easily recommend Lincoln’s Dilemma.
I took a break halfway in on Lincoln’s Dilemma to watch John Ford’s 1939 Young Lincoln staring a startlingly well-made-up Henry Fonda as Lincoln. For good and ill this well-made film hits all the John Ford tropes and is very inconstant in a “print the myth” way regarding historical accuracy. I suspect Young Lincoln’s* emotional content no longer communicates, and more the same, it’s earnest civic lessons would be lost to most audiences today too. But it’s Ford, so we’re left with mise en scene and striking tableau frames that contemporary film makers might still copy. For humor’s sake I could try to hype its contemporary value as “The story of the trial of a pair of accused cop killers who are surprisingly defended by a lawyer reverently devoted to the law.”
Before I leave you, let me touch on George Washington, the man who posthumously gave up his birthday for President’s Day. The story of the Civil War and the end of slavery is but one example of a dictum often taken as absolute by revolutionaries: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” And of course, as the leader of an armed revolution, Washington would seem to be an example** of demand backed by guns. But the singular greatest fact about Washington, a thing we should be grateful for beyond other things, is that after the American state got independence and he became its leader, he willingly, and without demand or struggle, gave up power. That’s rare.
Love of the thing one is struggling for, not for personal power, or opportunity, or mere revenge and expiation, is a hard thing to find — perhaps even more so in those who win some part of their struggles. So, let me leave off this Presidents Day not with a piece about a President, but about the man who stated that revolutionary’s dictum above, Frederick Douglass. Written by poet Robert Hayden, with my music and performance, you’ll can hear it with a graphical player below if you see that — or if you don’t, with *this highlighted link. If you want to read Hayden’s sonnet about Douglass as you listen, you can find the text here. Back with new pieces soon.
http://traffic.libsyn.com/parlando/Frederick_Douglass.mp3
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Although I’m reasonably familiar with why Ford is viewed as an important foundational cinema artist, I actually haven’t seen all his best-regarded films. Only last year I saw his The Searchers for the first time. As to that film: I found it highly compelling, significantly because it’s a film about racism made largely by men that could be fairly judged as patriarchal racists, and yet it’s not Triumph of the Will*, some sharply focused mirror of evil, either. Somehow, Ford and fate made it multivalent.
**Combining slavery and Washington is a natural combination alas, since Washington was a considerable slaveholder. Rather than the myths of cherry trees, I like this story of Washington and how he crossed paths with an Afro-American boy freed as the spoils of war.
* Thanks to the publisher for permission to perform this. “Frederick Douglass” is Copyright © 1966 by Robert Hayden. From COLLECTED POEMS OF ROBERT HAYDEN by Robert Hayden edited by Frederick Glaysher. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Company
As I mentioned as January ended, this February has been challenging for me to keep up with this Project and it’s associated tasks. I still hope to have new pieces soon. In place of a new encounter and performance with a poem or other text, let me do one of those posts where I pretend this is a normal blog
I know nothing other than what I read in the news about the situation in Ukraine — and that news with Ukraine now is, in short, mostly about what is feared to be an imminent invasion. I’m sure this Internet is full of folks with takes and information and policy positions if you feel the need for that, but instead I’m going to tell you a little story from my youth.
Back in the 1970s I was working the overnight shift in an urban hospital’s Emergency Department. Overnight, those 11 PM to 7 AM shifts, are probably not good for one’s health or social life, but I rather liked them. Staffing is much lower, and there was in my day almost no administrative or support presence. No crowd of attending MDs looking for proper deference to their priorities, no administrators to set or enforce policy in between meetings. Therefore, hierarchies were radically flattened at night, and I got to see and participate in a lot of different medical things.
My ED then was staffed with myself, a registered nurse (RN), a clerk who typed in information to print up a chart and the handy labels that would be pasted on lab requests/samples, and a family practice resident Just down the hall from our suite of four treatment rooms was a door with a buzzer where anyone from the ambulance patients we’d expect after incoming radio calls, to those who’d called their doctor and clinic and were told to drive to the hospital for further evaluation that couldn’t wait until morning would appear. And then too, the walk in.*
I worked nearly 20 years in hospitals, most often in Emergency Rooms. This stock photo looks about the right vintage.
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On the night I remember, the buzzer rang and there was an older man at the door. He had apparently walked up alone, and I usually was the one who went to the door to see what was the matter. And that was the issue from the start: he was speaking some foreign language, and he seemed to have only a scattered understanding of English and almost no English words to reply with. He looked to be in his seventies, had no obvious injuries, no severe distress. He moved slowly, but was walking.
Our door had a big lit-up Emergency Room sign, we could only assume he’d come in for treatment, but for what? You might assume that any 1970s urban hospital would have multiple language interpreters on hand, but that was not the case in ours then. And frankly, we wouldn’t even know what interpreter to call because we couldn’t figure out what language the man was speaking. Some words sounded a bit like German to me, so we called up a nurse working that night who spoke some German to come down. The RN and I hooked our mystery man up to the cardiac monitor, and the resident MD did a quick exam to see if we could figure out why this man had come to us. I think I may have even done an EKG on him, with no obvious issues found.
We looked for an ID in his clothes once we’d put him in a hospital gown and on a stretcher. There was none.
The nurse who spoke some German arrived. She got to her first preliminary question, which might have been “What is your name?” “Or why are you here?” and the mystery man exploded. At least some of the reply was in German. And our volunteer nurse interpreter said his angry words were that Germans had killed his family. How much German did he know? Made no difference, he wasn’t going to answer questions when asked in German.
I next got a bright idea. One of that class of residents was a young doctor who had a great facility in European languages, speaking at least a half-a-dozen of them. He wasn’t on call, and it was 4 AM, but I thought we should call him in. Given the infamous hours that residents worked in those days (maybe still do) that was asking a substantial favor, but he agreed to come in early. I was busy with something when our multilingual resident MD arrived. At one point he thought maybe Russian, and tried that. Later, I heard that once again the mystery patient became angry. Our resident didn’t know the man’s native language, but he got back something that was similar to our German speaking nurse — Russian was not a welcome language to our mystery patient.
Our multilingual resident was a smart guy though. One of the old-guard attending doctors on the hospital’s staff was Ukrainian American and had written a book dealing with Ukrainian culture in Ukrainian, a copy of which was on the shelf in the hospital’s medical library. Our resident showed that book to our mystery patient he later told us, and there was a quick realization that that was his language. After the regular day got underway, the older Ukrainian American doctor found that the man was one of his patients who was somewhat confused and had wandered to the hospital thinking that his doctor might just be there in the middle of the night.
So, as I said at the start, I know nothing about Ukraine — but I do think of that man who appeared in the night at the door of my Emergency Department and demonstrated how little I knew of him and what his country had been through.
Long guns, a poetic example.
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What to bring forward for a musical piece today? How about this one about war and violence that combines a line or two of language expression from Afro-American singer Howlin’ Wolf with second generation Swedish immigrant Carl Sandburg’s poem about countries that pack those long guns. Player gadget below for some of you to play it, or you can use this highlighted link otherwise.
http://traffic.libsyn.com/parlando/Long_Guns.mp3
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*Family Practice was the improved modern evolution of the old school “General Practitioner,” and the program that our hospital had treated that generalism like any other specialist residency to give the doctors who went through it a great deal of practical experience in things they would encounter. Almost every one of the residents I worked with there and then were fine people, who would come in some degree of unsure in the Emergency Room and leave after three years as the kind of doctor that I would want for myself or my family. Doctors and regular medical educators ran that program, but experienced nurses were so important in that too. Each June brought in new residents who really needed the steady hand of nurses at night to guide them in practical medical logistics and solutions.
**There was an indoor hockey rink across the street that had a fairly full set of bookings that ran until midnight. Yes, we needed to keep a lot of suture kits in stock.
I’ll promise you a love song at the end of this, but let’s look briefly at some other stuff that surrounds that song.
As I look in the Langston Hughes poetry collection I’m featuring this Black History Month for a Valentine’s Day piece, there is less to pick from than one might imagine. Even though his The Weary Blues is a first book by a young man, and it includes some of the Afro-American poet’s best-known poems — poems of love or passionate desire are conspicuous in their absence.
Even for 1926, the year The Weary Blues was published, this is somewhat unusual. You might think roughly a century ago the down and dirty lunge of love might be automatically missing, and to some degrees of physical explicitness you’d be correct, but poems on the emotional variety of love and desire were if anything the very fashion for the last decade called The Twenties. Popular and esteemed poets of that era Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, and others were quite ready to talk frankly about desire. Nor were Afro-Americans silent on this subject. Jean Toomer wrote what I think is flat-out one of the best surrealist love poems of all time. Claude McKay wrote beautiful and passionate love sonnets, and the Blues singers performing and recording then were quite willing to serve in the lust and fond department of art.*
We’ve already said that Hughes was a pioneer in valuing those very Blues and Jazz singers. Early this month we performed Hughes’ “To Midnight Nan at Leroy’s,” a Blues poem presenting just such a singer and a condensed late-night view of a hook up. Was the man in this poem Hughes himself? Possible, but I think the preponderance of the evidence says not. I think he’s an observer of the tryst, and even given the value he puts on short poems in his collection, he somewhat stints on the details.
No, Langston Hughes, for all his night-life settings and ash-can-school observations in The Weary Blues is almost prudish about sex and love. If he feels desire himself, he’s loath to talk about it — while all around him poets and singers were talking and talking about that.
I’m not a scholar, just a person who actively seeks out poetry encounters and then gathers some information that helps me grasp what the poem may be on about. Hughes was guarded about his sexuality. I gather this was true for his entire life. Some believe he was gay or bi, but then other poets of his time were and that didn’t stop them from writing about desire even if their readers didn’t necessarily understand the gender object of their affections.** I read at least one piece that concluded Hughes was asexual. Frankly no one seems to know, and if you’re looking to date Langston Hughes, he’s dead, so it may not matter.
Today’s piece uses Hughes’ “Song to the Dark Virgin.” It does show passion, and if not as Surrealist as Toomer’s great poem, it dips into almost a Robert Herrick style 17th century set of conceits* Hughes’ use of the archaic pronoun “Thou” and a few other less current words in common speech show him code-switching to something a bit like the Bible’s “Song of Songs” in the King James translation.
And speaking of “Song of Songs,” it’s not even clear if this love poem is to some anonymous person or if in some sense it’s to Black people in general, just as “Song of Songs” melds what seem like individual lovers into Judaism. If you read this poem as Black is Beautiful breaking out 40 years before it’s more publicized instances, you could make a good case. The Weary Blues includes poems set in the various ports Hughes landed at around the world during his stint as a merchant sailor before assembling the book, and his father was living in Mexico. From this I wondered if the ”Dark Virgin” is a reference to the Black Madonna paintings and figures he might have encountered overseas. A possible clue to this not just being a young person’s love poem is that it’s titled “to the Dark Virgin” not “to a.”
A Greek Orthodox icon, one of the examples of the Black Madonna found in Eurasia and Latin America.
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But Valentines Day is here, so let’s perform this as a romantic love song. In Robert Herrick style, just calling out a love object as a virgin isn’t unusual. In such a reading or performance this is how the poem may be described: the poem opens with the idea of being a scattered and shattered love offering to the beloved in Part I. Part II gets a little more intimate: the speaker wants to be the layer of clothes next to the beloved skin. Kinky, but Herrick and for that matter “If I Was Your Girlfriend” Prince would approve. Part III gets closer to consummation of desire as in the trope of consummation as consumed by fire. Yes, it’s a little bit of archaic dress up, but who knows, maybe a love whisper of “I want to annihilate your body” is still a working bedroom line?
The above are guitar chords as I fingered them, but the recording uses a capo on the 3rd fret, so it’s heard in the key of Bb today. Interesting progression, there’s no V chord in it!
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If you follow the progress of the imagery Part I starts out with shining light, then the more obscured light inside folds of clothing, and finally in Part III it’s out in blazes of leaping flame.
I ardently performed this one today with guitar, chorused fretless bass, and a warped low string section. I let those bowed strings play what an electric bass would play so that the actual electric bass could do other things. Many of you can hear it with a graphical player below, but those whose way of reading this won’t show the player can use this highlighted link to play it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Song_for_the_Dark_Virgin.mp3
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*She’s not Black, but Genevieve Taggart wrote one of the most pointed and poignant of love poems about love on the poor side of town during the last Twenties too.
**Today’s poem never uses a gendered pronoun or name.
***No, not meaning he’s vain — it’s a poetic term for a metaphor that’s not afraid to be elaborately weird or fanciful.
Back to “Song of Songs,” get to the 5th verse and you get “I am black, but comely” in the KJV. Or as “Ecclesiastics” had it: “Nothing new under the sun.”
This month I’ve been doing a series of pieces based on poems from Langston Hughes’ first book-length collection The Weary Blues of 1926 — but maybe it’s time to mention that I have already presented two early pieces that were included in that book.
Here’s Hughes “Dream Variation” which also offered its title to a section of the 1926 book. “Dream Variation” is an example of Hughes offering a quickly understandable surface message with a plausible deeper intent beneath that surface. The surface reading will connect easily with anyone stuck in a February northern location winter: “To fling my arms wide / In some place of the sun” is something most of us in Minnesota would be ready for, but are only dreaming of right now. Many here like to talk about our enjoyment of the outdoors even in our cold climate, and yes there was some sun when I rode out at 16 degrees F this morning on my bike. I was happy to get the exercise and to watch the crows big as black chickens and the binary oblivious to flurious* squirrels — but I’m tired by now of pulling on leggings and making sure my hands have enough covering to keep my fingers from the cold stiff numbness.
I talked about my encounter with the poem and it’s sometimes discussed deeper connotations here. You can hear the audio piece with guitar and piano clustering around a three-months-into-winter drone with either a graphic audio player that some of you will see, or this highlighted link.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Dream_Variation.mp3 .
I was quite taken by this photo of Roy DeCarava’s “Graduation 1949” when I saw it this winter.
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The Weary Blues has another section that takes its title from one of Hughes’ best known poems “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” I was talking about this poem this morning to a fellow I sometimes meet in a café I ride to. I was saying this is a remarkable poem written by a 17 year old, one who literally crossed and looked at America’s Mississippi River on his way to New York City in furtherance of a compromise with his father on college education.** Maybe this won’t seem remarkable to you, if you’re here already reading this far down about a poet who died in the last century, who wrote it generations back.
Hughes might have written about the exact details of his current life. He could have written about how he felt, what with the bargain he’d been forced to strike with his father. He was 17, and forming his own autonomous self is the task of any young person. His father probably didn’t know what the rest of the 20th century would be like for Langston, much less what we’d think of things now in the 21st. What would young Mr. Hughes have known? More, or less?
I was recently reading some jokes observing what are considered the perennial follies of youth. One of the zingers was “It’s best to hire young graduates while they still know everything.” Queue the laugh track.
I don’t know if 17-year-old Langston Hughes thought he knew everything. I didn’t think so at that age myself. But as we consider why we might want to read or listen to poetry by long-dead poets, we might want to consider what Hughes’ poem asks us to consider: that we are the accumulations and results of our ancestors and neighbor’s ancestors. That doesn’t mean we are them, we are the sum on one side of the equals sign from a lot of figures to the left of it; and so the possible extensions, solutions, fulfillment and remediations of them.
That’s what’s remarkable about the young Mr. Hughes’ poem, its approachable impersonality and insistence on the distances yet salience of the past. It’s not “A Negro…” even, but “The Negro….” In it, the current of the past is longer than any history of oppression, injustice, or any stories of conquest. Endurance yes, but beauty too. So, despite age-related-stereotypes, at 17 Mr. Hughes may not, and doesn’t have to, know everything — but it helps to know some things that came before you. Rivers flow. Rivers move. Langston Hughes wrote this moving to New York City — the place where he eventually lived most of his life, but not before changing what he did on the banks of another river.
That’s why we have Black History Month,*** and why I’m talking here to what I suspect is substantially a white audience about Hughes and that observance. Some of you may be nodding off by now, whatever color — “We know all this.” you may be muttering. Facts are not the soul, but poetry and music can speak of that.
I’ve always rather liked my electric guitar performance on my setting of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” that you can hear with the player gadget where seen below, or with this highlighted link.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Negro_Speaks_of_Rivers.mp3 .
*Yes, there wasn’t a word “flurious” until now. You are present at the creation!
**My original post on this poem has a longer summary of Langston Hughes’ family situation at the time he wrote this poem. In short, his father was adamant that instead of literature that Langston study engineering. Langston agreed, but then after trying to go along with his father’s wishes, he dropped out, shipped out to sea on merchant ships, and on return to the U. S. worked various lower-end jobs. I think of John Keats’ decision a hundred years before Langston Hughes’. Engineering and medical field students: I’m not suggesting poetry instead. Really, I’m not. Perhaps rather an and instead of or is best.
***It may not be coincidental, but one of the jobs Langston Hughes eventually had was a stint working with Carter Woodson, who first suggested an annual observance of Black history. So, all the more reason to focus on his work this February.
Here’s another early Langston Hughes poem from The Weary Blues, his collection which I’ve chosen to focus on during this Black History Month. Given Hughes’ esteemed position as part of the Harlem Renaissance and the long career that followed, it may be hard to remember that this is a poem by a young man, less than 25 years old. Of course, as I reminded myself as I tried to write the best poetry I could as a young person: famous British poet John Keats died at 25 — so there’s no reason for our Afro-American poet to wait to write either.*
Though it was Langston Hughes’ first book, The Weary Blues doesn’t make much of a point of his youth. While the perennial youthful topics of wine, love, and song make their appearances in this collection’s poems, there’s little if anything I can recall that makes explicit pleading that the author is of a new generation with new perceptions. The way Hughes did signal that was in the way he deals with the “song” part of that triumvirate: Jazz and Blues were still considered disreputable musics of little substance. The decade of the last Twenties may have been called “The Jazz Age,” but that then novel music was mostly the music to dance, drink, and swive to.
So, when Hughes claims right from the start that “The rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm” he’s making a fresh claim in 1926, that it’s not just some musical fad that’s passing through, a speeded-up frivolity. Even if white musicians and dancers were quick to latch onto the jaunty high-BPM rush of Jazz, Hughes is ready to claim that broken desires and pain were in there too.
Does he mean lovesick blues, or the Afro-American experience here when he makes that claim? Both I think. That’s a hella-reason why Afro-American forms pervade American music to this day: Americans as a whole have a long and strong dissatisfied streak. Plenty of musics sourced from around the world are good for dancing and signaling your erotic availability. Same for songs of utter sadness. But Afro-Americans figured out how to make sublime musics out of a combination of the oppressions and absurdities of life.
In his poem, Hughes twice makes the claim “The gods are laughing at us” — and despite the repetition of that line, he is ambiguous about what we should think of that. Are the gods the society that ignores, belittles, and oppresses? Or are the gods the wise eternals who know that we humans live short lives approaching half-knowledge, an absurdity that leaves laughing as wisdom?
I think at midnight — perhaps after some youthful partying that’s implied as preceding this poem — it’s a vibrating mixture of both. Overtones, undertones, Hughes says.
Overtones, undertones….Jazz in Hughes’ 1926 was still thought of as a way to shake your groove thing.
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I often mention that my experience of the poems I use for texts here often changes in the process of making them into Parlando Project pieces. With this one, as I began to understand and express Hughes’ words I wanted to reply to the laughing gods in the original poem. So, I extended the original words with my own couplet: “Let them hear the laugh I return. / Let them understand the laugh I return.” Is that laugh and desire to the wise gods or the careless and oppressing system? Both. I’m far from 25, and that’s what I think reading and performing the young Hughes’ poem today.
Music in this piece is about as close as I can get to Jazz, though more of the Jazz of my youth than that of Hughes’ time. Yes, that fad was still going concern 40 years after Langston Hughes wrote his poem. I spent most of my time creating the piano part, which unlike a real pianist I have to compose by playing and selecting parts for each hand, but modern “virtual instruments” let me do stuff that Conlon Nancarrow had to hand-punch into player piano rolls to realize. I wanted a saxophone part too, but as I’ve already mentioned this winter, I can’t really get the articulations a good Jazz sax player relies on. My sax part sounded like an early student playing the most dismal society dance band number, and so I made the compromise I normally avoid and put in a short Gil Evans-ish horn section sample to enclose my sax part effectively.
You can hear Langston Hughes’ “Lenox Avenue: Midnight” and my extension to it with the player gadget below, if you see one — or this highlighted link which will open a new tab to play it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Lenox_Avenue_Midnight.mp3 .
*Lesser-known early 20th century Afro-American poet Anne Spencer made the same point eulogizing Paul Lawrence Dunbar with her short poem.
This will be a short post. The last day here has not been a good day for thinking of this project and my planned series from Langston Hughes’ first book The Weary Blues. I’d intended to do a version of that book’s title poem, I’d even begun to collect some ideas in my head: different sections, different instrumentation for those sections — a fancier, fuller arrangement than I’ve had time to do this year.
Wednesday morning a young man got killed in a police raid in my town, never a good thing, but something that frankly has a lot of possible contexts. Since then we still don’t know everything, maybe not even enough yet — and yet here I am tempted to write something about that: that it’s a horrible act, stinking of systematic issues that existed long before that 7 A.M. no-knock raid, things that go beyond the specifics of the Black man killed; and a (likely white) cop shooter whose job it was to go, for us, inside a stranger’s door, apparently looking for a murderer and ending in a new killing.
If you’re not in our local area, you probably haven’t even heard of this. Apparently, this is an aberration that isn’t shocking or novel enough now. This is not a public policy or political information project, others will serve you if you feel in need of that.
Cover of the original 1926 edition of The Weary Blues
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Still, I’m deeply ambivalent today about my chosen project. When Langston Hughes wrote “The Weary Blues” in the last Twenties, almost a hundred years ago, racism, ignorance, prejudice, injustice, class-caste system — all were old enough to be blues one could be weary of. So now so, more weary so — and we’re alive to feel’em. Perhaps I’ll write more this weekend, but I was feeling our current hurt today, and less any release of joy or the blessings of overcoming.
Instead of fully realized version of Hughes’ “The Weary Blues,” what I’ll offer today is more like a quick demo: a beat, a guitar playing simple chords. When I finished laying it down, and with no more than a couple of minutes until I had to get off mic in my studio space, I started to riff on a variation adapted from another song, and I left a couple of lines of that in the fade out. That secondary song takes off from “I’d Rather Go Blind,” a song about love gone bad, where the heartbroken singer declares they wish they were blind so they wouldn’t see their unfaithful lover. In my variation, we ourselves must ask, heartbroken at things we don’t want to see: do we want to go blind? Is that what we want, would prefer? To just not see the hurt?
Player gadget below for some to hear my sketchy demo of Langston Hughes’ “The Weary Blues”, or this highlighted link for those who can’t see that.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Weary_Blues_demo_version.mp3 .
It’s Black History Month, and I’m planning on presenting a series focusing on Langston Hughes’ first poetry collection: The Weary Blues — butbefore we get to today’s new Hughes’ piece, let me briefly set down a few reasons for why Langston Hughes.
This project presents early Modernist poets most often. From the American predecessors of Modernism (Whitman, Dickinson) we often jump to those of the 1905-1926 era who sought in various ways to “make it new.” While I continue to read and have interest in post-1926 work, less of that can be reused freely for this project. This reduces the Afro-American sources free to use, as the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance have moved into Public Domain slowly, year by year, since this project began in 2016. My earlier Hughes’ pieces, even if they were eventually included in The Weary Blues, were published earlier and so had already moved into PD. It’s only on January 2022 that the whole book’s contents moved to public domain.
Our February focus: Langston Hughes’ first book.
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A second reason: look at the title of Hughes’ first book, it includes “Blues.” As we celebrate Afro-American contributions and experience this month there’s an important parallel here. Americans, some of whom set up shop in England and France before WWI, are hugely important in establishing the Modernist break with the shopworn 19th century writing styles. At the same time, Afro-Americans were crucial in doing the same job for music. As I tried to briefly explain last Black History Month, a great deal of the American Black intelligentsia was caught flat-footed by this musical revolution happening around and by them.*
Let’s cut them some slack on that: cultural change is hard to understand while it’s happening, and the quick white adaptation of Afro-American musical ideas in The Jazz Age of the previous Twenties reflected back to the Black community some rough or even derogatory approximations of what was really going on.
Hughes was a young man when he wrote today’s poem. He’d crossed paths with Black intellectuals by then, but he wasn’t fully one of them. His father had cut a bargain for him to go to Columbia to become a professional. Langston skipped out, worked as a cook and at other restaurant jobs; and took to sea working on merchant ships. Hughes came quickly to an understanding of this new music, it’s complexities and its reflections.
Lastly, here’s one of the things I’ve come to understand about the beginning of Modernist poetry in English: there were substantial elements there that sought to strip back poetry, to simplify it to its essence, to make it immediate to an open heart and mind without pre-requisites. This mode was eventually superseded by a more academic and allusive poetry to the degree that some of the best of this early poetic Modernism was set aside or down-rated as simplistic and insufficient.
Over the years you’ve heard me sing the praises of Carl Sandburg, who seems to have been eventually excused away as cornball. But Sandburg was still vital to the young Langston Hughes in the 1920s, and Hughes took Sandburg’s Midwestern American Modernism and applied it to his own heritage and experience. The mainstream of Afro-American poetry retained more of the vitality and working-class connection that Sandburg expressed. Thank you, Afro-Americans.
Let’s move onto the poem I used as today’s text for the performance you’ll be able to hear below. “To Midnight Nan at Leroy’s” is not one of Hughes’ best-known works, though it deserves more attention. Here’s a link to the text. You could skim through it on the page and see the Blues connection, even if it’s not a Blues stanza as printed — though it could be refitted as one — but more importantly, it’s got a Blues sensibility. My reading of the poem says there may be a little playing going on, a little con and double consciousness which the whole of the work will show up. This will let the hip listener say on hearing it “Yeah, you and I know what that’s like.” That’s Blues sensibility.
I think the poem is a dialog. Nan of the title is performing at a club, and she’s expressing some eroticism in her performance. I think the poem’s other voice is hitting on Nan. The opening stanza is that other voice, the un-named man, who’s starts out teasingly acknowledging that he’s getting what she’s putting down.
The second stanza could be either voice. I performed it neutral, even as if it might be a narrator, a third voice. Note the loaded word “jungle” in it, one of the “primitive” adjectives used to describe this new Afro-American art. Primitive isn’t totally a derogatory or diminutive to the Modernists, who remember wanted to remove the cruft of a worn-out culture and get back to an essence; but in the context of a white-supremacist-soaked society it could surely slide over to being that. Black artists with intact self-respect did use labels such as “Jungle” in the 1920s, so it’s not simply an external white appellation, but it sure sounds like they’re partially reflecting with the white culture when they do. Pause at the last line: I hear Hughes’ “And the moon was white” with intent.
The third stanza is the man cheering on the singer/performer Nan, and I think also he’s suggesting that if “lovin’” is her object, he’s ready.
Fourth? Yes, the two get together. I perform this as Nan’s voice. Note Nan’s use of the diminutive “boy” for the man in this part of our dialog. He may have been acting the player in his earlier stanzas, but I think this is an intentional reveal that the male character is less than a fully actualized man. The white moon image returns, and their moments of Black joy contrast against it. One could write a moving essay on this poems white moon image, but I’ve already gone long.** You write it.
The poem concludes by refraining the entire first stanza. I perform in the man’s voice, now sour-grapes-ing the couples’ night. Who put one over on the other in this one-night? Maybe some of both, and maybe external social forces are part of the fate-mix too. Hughes chose to dedicate the poem to Nan, so I suspect his sympathies lie more with her. Another question: is Langston Hughes the unnamed male voice? Hughes’ sexuality is mysterious, and while that’s possible, my estimate is that he’s observing, not writing a poem as memoir here.
I performed “To Midnight Nan at Leroy’s” with my own one-man-band providing the trio accompaniment, and I hope your speakers can handle the bass part. Some of you will see a graphical player gadget below, but other ways of reading this blog won’t show it, so here too is a highlighted hyperlink to play it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Midnight_Nan_at_Leorys.mp3 .
Last years Black History Month book was 1925’s The New Negro ,* which included an essay worrying about the dilution of Black uplift and culture from the diversion of frivolous Jazz. Read my post on that essay here.
**As with Sandburg’s short poems, with Langston Hughes here it may help to imagine that you are translating this from Tang dynasty Chinese. The plain English words here could mislead us to think this a mere rote moon/June thing and that Hughes had nothing complex to say.
I’ve got reasons for kicking off Black History Month a few days early: my February is going to be appointment-filled, something that’s likely to reduce new work for this project, and I want to participate in this observance of American history.
Why was I so determined to do this? Well, note this project’s subtitle: “Where Music and Words Meet.” I’m an American composer, and American music is disproportionally Afro-American music. Yeah, it’s a big country, and many musicians with heritages from every continent* have contributed, but if you compose or play American music, a lot of the notes are Black. So let’s get to today’s piece through three short, linked, tales.
The First Story: Who’s this Sonny Rollins, and what bridge is he selling us back in the Fifties of all decades? It’s easy writing about poetry as I do here most often, to get used to a constrained fame; but I suspect more of the general Internet audience will know Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, or T. S. Eliot than know this man’s name and work. Mid 20th Century Americans, most often Black Americans, made a consolidated point of becoming masters of improvisation on the saxophone. Afterwards artistic accountants rank art and artists — and even if you think that’s wrong-headed, I’ll cite those who expend sincere effort in doing that and say that lists of great improvising saxophone players likely include Sonny Rollins.
But, just saying Rollins was good at it, a skilled musician, reduces him. For one thing, he had a dedication to the art of his craft, a need to expand the expression. So much so he famously spent a couple of years or so just dropping out of what was then still a viable commercial niche of jazz gigs and recording when he was considered to be one of the best and brightest on his instrument. To do what? To get better.
Insiders later learned some particulars of what he did. He went to a near deserted deck of a busy urban bridge and just played. And played. For months. For hours a day. In all kinds of weather. No, he wasn’t busking for spare change. Few noticed him. One of his records before this time was called Saxophone Colossus. This wasn’t ironic as a title, or laughable, or a piece of hopeless self-promotion. Once likened to a metal giant who could stride rivers, Rollins on the bridge was small and alone and unnoticed, one man in a wind-gap of a city’s gusts. Practicing there he was no more than a flea on the back of a colossus.
After around two years of this, he figured he found some of his new/better. If you’re writing a screenplay you know how the final scene plays out. Our hero walks off the bridge and into a recording studio. A selection of ominous natterers remind us of the stakes in quick cuts: “Was he kicking drugs, or failing to kick? Is he washed up?” “You know folks like it sweet and tropical, he should try to play bossa nova.” The next voice says, “Funky jazz is the thing.” And another says, “How can you be even more free than ‘free jazz?”
And you know the next beat in your screenplay: he emerges with a record or a concert or both — and all of a sudden everyone realizes that he’s found it, something great, unique, ground-breaking, resplendent and recognized.
Wait, you don’t know who Sonny Rollins is — or maybe you do, but you know the person next to you on the Internet doesn’t. The record that Rollins did make was called The Bridge in honor of the solitary workshopping he did over the East River. It was not a cultural event. Throw out your screenplay, the elevator doesn’t want your pitch. Even the experts then, the artistic accountants and grim critic-coroners were underwhelmed. Paging the Joseph Campbell who isn’t an under-recognized Irish poet, this is The Hero’s Journey that ends with a shrug.**
The Second Story. Back in my youth you paid for music ala carte. Every bit you could access at will was on a material disk you had to pay for. A person like myself with more time and adventure than money might scrounge. One thing I liked to do was to go into charity and second-hand shops and look for used records that attracted me. I can’t recall the exact cost of a new LP then, but I think it was around $3 to $4 or so. Records in these dingy shops might be a dime or 25 cents. Those within cardboard covers gave you extra material to judge if it was worth your widow’s mite — but at those places and time, the most forlorn records were just bare black disks scuffing against each other in a bin, and sometimes those got an additional price break. Whenever I recall those naked disks, I think of those who cleaned up after someone died or skipped rent and town, who just shoveled it all off to Goodwill or the Salvation Army in whatever, Warholian, cardboard boxes.
That’s where I found Sonny Rollins’ The Bridge. I may have heard a bit about Rollins, how he was a particularly good improvisor because his improvisations had the logic of more considered compositions while retaining the flow of fresh idea after fresh idea.
Three things struck me about the record upon listening to it over and over and under its scratches and surface noise: that it mixed moods more than most jazz records. It wasn’t just a fast blowing session with a change of pace ballad or two, but that it was both angular and spare and hauntingly beautiful in both sorrow and joy. That the guitar player, Jim Hall, on the record didn’t sound like “jazz guitar” as I had heard it then.* Instead, Hall added unusual harmonic colors that Rollins would then carve from. Eventually I realized something else unusual about the record as I compared it to more jazz records: there was no piano or other keyboard instrument. I eventually learned that this was something Rollins’ made a practice of. Yes, Hall was giving pieces some harmonic framework, and bass players in non free Jazz contexts are often asked to, and then, play “the changes” indicating the chords; but keyboard players, even if it’s not their session, often dominate the harmonic and rhythmic structure of a track. Here there was none of that.
Poetry in Gray. I know this is a long post, and I value your time, but here’s 30 minutes of the same group that recorded The Bridge playing live with a short interview with the 32 year old Rollins.
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The Third Story
I read this week an article by John Fordham in the Guardian that reminded me that Sonny Rollins went into the studio to start recording The Bridge on January 30th in 1962 — so, 60 years ago. Fordham remarked on the legend of Rollins’ time on the Williamsburg Bridge along with a new interview he did with Rollins.
Unlike almost every one of his mid-century saxophone contemporaries, Rollins is still alive. He’s 91 years old now, and I last saw him play when he was around 80. Rollins was performing in a trio on that night with just bass and drums, and for about an hour he tore it up covering so much sonic space with his monophonic but powerful instrument. I marveled then, and now that I’m approaching his age at that gig, my amazement increases. Rollins developed lung disease and can no longer play, but he seems to have retained his composer as improvisor ability to see the patterns and connections.
This month I’ve been trying to build up a little strength and chops on guitar again. Nothing like Rollins’ multiple hours each day on a bridge level of woodshedding, but enough so that I can play that instrument that requires some physicality to realize its sounds.
In the midst of this, in the middle of the night, I awoke with some thoughts I had been growing about Rollins and the task of being an American and Afro-American artist. I wrote a complete first draft of today’s text in that middle night awaking. Not quite a Kubla Khan dream, but still complete and formed enough to count today’s text as an improvisation. Wednesday, I came up with the song’s harmonic structure equally quickly. Yesterday I recorded it. Given that I’ve no access to other musicians — and I hardly make count-one-musician unless I beg the composer (who’s me, so I listen) to make things I can play — I had to play a track at a time. Today’s recording is a trio: drums and two guitar parts. I first recorded the chordal guitar part on a big archtop guitar (DeArmond X-155) along with the vocal. I’m no Jim Hall, but like Rollins’ The Bridge I let that instrument set the harmonic framework. I confess (though listeners have already convicted me) I’m not good at Jazz comping, a key guitarist’s skill in that genre. I pardoned myself and proceeded. I then did the drums, trying very hard to get them to play off the guitar’s rhythm feel. And then finally as my studio-space time was coming to a close, I got to “blow” with guitar for the lead part.* I did four passes, and the third was the best, and there you are. No, it doesn’t sound like The Bridge LP, but then the point of The Bridge* wasn’t to sound like what went before either. The player gadget to hear it is below. No gadget? This highlighted hyperlink will also play it**.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Sonny_Rollins_The_Bridge_1959.mp3 .
*I must pedantically interrupt in footnote form to note that the continent of Antarctica has done little for American musical culture! It may be because our human species only visits there? One man, one guitarist at that, stands (sinks?) as the submariner of Antarctic-American guitar: Henry Kaiser. Here’s a 90 minute example. Yes, that’s him playing guitar, and doing the under-ice diving too.
Joy? “Without a Song. ” Sorrow? “God Bless the Child.” Angular? The title cut’s cascade of heterodox melodic ideas. Or the stubborn “John S.” I used to share a workspace with a 20-something guy who liked his progressive metal. He was perfectly tolerant of my King Crimson live tour ‘70s tapes. But the opening riff of “Jon S.” would drive him right around the bend to a burlesqued old-person-like rant about “take off that noise.”
*Jazz guitar at that time was represented to me by John McLaughlin in his Mahavishnu Orchestra years and others exploring that bag. Those guitarists were loud and very in your melted-face with their expression. Even quieter, older generation jazz guitarists often played more notes in one song than Jim Hall played on the entire The Bridge LP. Magazines would have “best of” polls back then for musicians, and I’d always vote for Jim Hall, who’d end up in the fine print of “those also receiving votes.” Then strangely enough as the 20th century started to end, Jim Hall became the model for a number of other guitarists who came up later, for example: Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell.
The Bridge itself has come to be recognized as more vital in retrospect. Oh, not necessarily to the raters who will need to get numbers down for Kind of Blue, A Love Supreme, The Shape of Jazz to Come first, but to those who seek to learn new pleasures listening to music whose time has passed but whose timelessness remains. You may not like all of it if you just taste test it. Looking today, about eight times more Spotify listeners pleasantly listen to “God Bless the Child” than dig “John S.” By the way, the version on Spotify seems to be remastered, and to my memory Jim Hall’s parts are mixed up higher than they were in my vinyl memories.
****Should it have been saxophone? Yes, but I have a hard time wrangling any of my saxophone MIDI virtual instruments to get good expression, and Rollins is a master of saxophone expression. I stuck with my primary instrument for the lead instead. By the way, it’s the same jumbo DeArmond archtop that chopped the chords, but my little combo amp is turned up.
I’ve promised one more piece using texts taken from Irish-American poet Ethna McKiernan, and here it is. There are a couple of reasons why I left this one to the end of this series memorializing her work. The first reason: the poem’s persona seems to speak of her approaching death. The second reason: I don’t know if McKiernan actually liked or rated it as highly as I do. Let me make this plain at the start: I think this is a great poem, and I’ll go into why in just a bit.
I believe I encountered “Wolves” at the same writer’s group where I heard other work Ethna was working on in draft form. These things make my performance today particularly fraught with issues. I only take this step of releasing this performance today because of my admiration for the poem, and my feeling that some out there in the rare and appreciated audience for this Project will welcome it. “Wolves”* has what poetry often hopes for: it is beautiful and yet harrowing, and its experience is vivid while not guarded inside defined borders.
I hear the snow crust crack
into spider-fine antenna lines
with every thudded footbeat. It is so still
that their light scratch of nails on ice
rasps the air like flakes of metal filings.
Let’s grab this text as it grabbed me, even on first hearing, with the opening statement: “I hear the snow crust crack / into spider-fine antenna lines…” The meter has a lope of accents that appeals, the internal rhyme of “fine” and “lines” separated by the chime of the assonant “antenna.” The three strong accents together in “snow crust crack” which allow “crust” to not get the full stress it would normally get appeals and announces. “…with every thudded footbeat. It is so still / that their light scratch of nails on ice / rasps the air like flakes of metal filings.” follows — and if you’re not captured yet by this poem’s story, I can’t think of what language can do to do that.
This opening almost registers as synesthesia, as the sense invoking words rush in. “Snow-crust crack” is visual and auditory together — and for a winter clime resident, you feel that texture in your own feet too. Besides the word-music the visual of “spider-fine antenna lines” has the sense of the spreading broadcast of the wolves’ approach. The ordinary snow-surface footfall of a “thudded footbeat” made by the furry pads of the wolf would be only present in an unnatural silence — and then the quiet but more plausibly audible sound of talons on ice. The shivers of it, nails on blackboard-like, invokes the winter.
Listen carefully for those claws on the ice.
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I could go on, but I think any listener who is pulled in by this opening will sense equally strong lines and images as McKiernan’s poem proceeds. The creative writers in my audience may benefit from analyzing for themselves why they work their attraction on us. There’s an overall effect of intimacy with nature in the midst of this poem: not a passive, uncomplicated, and easily beautiful nature, but one close enough to be (prematurely) incorporated with the poem’s speaker.
The cave mentioned in the poem means that this is almost certainly a persona poem. The voice we hear telling this story is not the literal biography of a modern Irish-American woman who normally lived in cities, yet the astonishingly vivid images lets us doubt this just enough to not judge that outright. Even the most personal and revealing poetry can benefit from real and fantastical lies.
I’ll not explicate the ending outright, for I want you to experience it in the course of the poem’s story. I’ll only say that it could possibly be why McKiernan did not select this poem for wider distribution while she lived. “Twist endings” can cloy or leave a reader/listener feeling tricked, but my judgement says this one only enriches what’s sensed as the description of the poem’s scene has unfolded. Like many a good ending of a great short poem, it may make us want to read/listen to it again immediately.
Before I direct you to my performance of Ethna McKIernan’s masterful “Wolves,” I’ll leave you with one thought the context of this poem leaves with me beyond the poem’s own effects: what might your art do that you don’t necessarily realize that it can do? For it’s a mystery to me why this wasn’t in a final selected poems. The poem seems to me to be fearless and exact, but the self-editor may have been frightened or dissatisfied.**
A player gadget to play this performance appears below in some ways this blog is read. Others will need to use this highlighted hyperlink to hear it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Ethnas_Wolves.mp3 .
Just before I published this post I thought to do a final string-search for the opening lines of this poem — and found that it had indeed been published in The Poetry Ireland Review* of January 1984! This published version uses exactly the text used for this performance, and you can find that text via this online link. That publication date is much earlier than I would have expected it to be. Did I somehow run across it — not as a draft as I recalled inside the Lake Street Writer’s Group — but in a publication that might have been shared with the group?
On publication it was titled “Letting Go the Wolves.” I had recorded the performance you can hear above a decade ago thinking the title was only “Wolves.”
Did McKiernan feel it was too immature a work when making final judgements for her final “New &Selected” collection Light Rolling Slowly Backwardscompiled a few months before her death? I don’t judge it so.
**Another, if unlikely, possibility: Ethna may not have secured rights to secondary publication, though the grant of such is traditional within small-press poetry. As much as the wolves in the poem, I may be clambering on top of thin ice in presenting this poem, even though I only want to point out its value. If I haven’t made it clear recently: The Parlando Project is not even a non-profit organization — it’s a no-profit organization.
Here’s my performance of another poem from Irish-American poet Ethna McKiernan’s final collection Light Rolling Slowly Backwards. In McKiernan’s later years of life she did social work with people who were homeless, and she dedicated Light Rolling Slowly Backwards to “the hundreds of homeless clients I’ve worked with through the years — to their resilience, courage and care for each other.” Given that Ethna was somewhat frail even before her final illness, I marveled at her strength in taking that work on.
I recommend this collection, a fine summation of McKiernan’s poetry and its range. Here’s that link again to the Irish publisher of this book.
Why this one to start reading McKiernan? She herself created this “New & Selected Poems” book before she died late last year.
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When I first encountered “Oh, Maria” in draft form as a member of the Lake Street Writers’ Group I couldn’t help but flashback to my time working in Emergency Departments as a young man. As one side-point Ethna’s poem tries to convey the feeling of being next to someone experiencing a sudden, and unexpected death. I’d summarize those memories of mine as being full of intense experience, intent action, and if stabilization isn’t achieved, a solemn ceasing. Ethna’s account adds poignancy because it’s missing that middle part. I ached with her both as she feels guilt for not immediately recognizing the mortal nature of Maria’s incident — and then comes the line as she considers if she should have performed CPR: “If I remembered, God help me, how.”
I probably did my usual awkwardness in responding to that first hearing, perhaps mentioning how it reminded me of my experiences — something which was likely no help in her revision process. I think I did express that her missing the initial diagnosis of what was happening was not only forgivable, but par for the course. Could that have been worthwhile?
Indeed, my experience was that most people, even people who are otherwise medically trained, are likely to get this wrong in some way. Although my experience is now decades ago, I’ve seen CPR being performed on breathing people with a pulse — which is not a good thing. And effective CPR requires a degree of skill and frankly cold intent that is hard to practice outside of repeated actual events. Given that I last worked in an Emergency Department more than 30 years ago, and last went through the practice-with-dummies certification around a dozen years ago, I myself would likely not be the best person to be next to you if you were to experience a cardiac arrest.
If you ever take, or have taken CPR training, pay attention to that first step of assessment. It’s important.*
So, besides the imperfectly empathic personal reaction I had, this poem’s core matter is Ethna’s continued sharing of the experience of those without homes, which exceeds even my old ER experience with our un or underhoused “regulars.” Notice the subtle point Ethna weaves into this poem: she expects that Maria is severely intoxicated when she collapses, and then she concludes her memories of this person dealing with complex problems imperfectly in the telling line “I laughed at your antics weekly.” What were the antics? Maria might have had a sense of humor, that could be part of it. It’s also possible, even probable, that Maria’s human attempts to deal with the difficult state of homelessness and its context were at times comically imperfect or ineffective.** Ethna knows this from her intimacy with Maria, just as you know it with those you have in your lives. Intimacy isn’t just the experience of joyous connection, it’s the experience of our misapprehensions too.
Same with poetry. We write it imperfectly, read it imperfectly. That is part of our human experience of it.
To hear my performance of Ethna McKiernan’s “Oh, Maria” you can use a player gadget if you see it below, or this highlighted hyperlink which will work if you don’t see the player.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Oh_Maria.mp3 .
Several decades ago a book called The House of God by Samuel Shem was written that was like unto a modern Machiavelli’s The Prince,* only about practical hospital medical training instead of statecraft. In Shem’s book there is a list of “laws,” one of which is “At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse.”
**Dealing with homelessness either as one who has reached that state or, as McKiernan did, as someone trying to mitigate it, is much more difficult than dealing with cardiac arrest. In my couple of decades in Emergency Rooms, I’ll admit that in the course of a shift or two dealing with intractable problems and complexly impossible situations, the “break” of dealing with a crash-cart severe trauma case or a cardiac arrest with their steps of immediate choose/act instants was, strange as it might seem, a relief.
I’m going to write here a bit, but if you’re in a hurry, I urge you to do two things. The first is to simply listen to today’s audio piece. I think that will reward you. You’ll find a way to play that near the bottom of this post along with my second suggestion.
To a large extent this project adapts other people’s poetry in the process of combining it with music I write and record. Occasionally when I mention this, or when the more general topic of a difference between poetry and song lyrics comes up, there will be objections or distinctions brought forward: those two things (poetry found on the page and words designed to be combined with music) aren’t the same, they’re different.
I’ve written about this here in the past. My conclusions in summary: the thing we call poetry includes a great deal of unlike expressions,* and many are comfortable with that. Why chop off “song lyrics” as an appendix of non-poetry or not-quite-good-enough poetry? Well, if we do that are we forgetting that poetry across multiple cultures began as an oral presentation almost certainly combined with music? Why would that precedent not mean that literary poetry, however prized and skilled, has failed to sing or express its music explicitly?
So, if I move past those differences between poetry meant for the page and poetry meant for performance with music, and seek to test literary poetry in that context, what do I find? Well, a number of things that seem like problems with musical performance of Modernist page poetry are often less difficult than they seem. Poem doesn’t rhyme? That doesn’t help one memorize for unaided performance, but it’s not really a big deal. Uneven meter or line lengths? Modern musical expression has long slipped the bonds of straight beats or fixed length of melodic lines. One can even up shorter lines with musical elements too.
What is challenging? There are auditory challenges. Texts designed for performance often take into account pronunciation obstacles and allow space for breath. At least for myself there is a general difference in attention between words heard and words read in terms of attention. If a word or image requires one to pause for consideration on the silent page, there is an automatic “pause button” in our consciousness, and this is not so in the ear. The richest literary poetry may overwhelm us when listened to, though performance itself may also illuminate things we would never hear on the page, even after multiple readings.
In the context of today’s piece, let me speak of another issue. Work for performance, such a song lyrics, thrives on repetition, or refrains. Rhyme itself is one of those matters of repetition, even if it’s not required. Refrain draws our attention as it combines with the rest of the performed text, allows us to more fully absorb one part of what is expressed, and combines naturally with musical motifs that also repeat.
When I look through a poetry collection looking for Parlando candidates, the poems that use repetition will often be the ones that seem most suitable for performance — but that said, many pieces I’ve performed here have no refrain, no repeating chorus. Particularly with shorter texts this can still work, but piece after piece of poetry performed without repeating elements seems too much of avoiding that useful thing.
More than 50 years ago, a pioneering rock critic Richard Goldstein, published a book, The Poetry of Rock, examining the possibility that rock lyrics of that era could be considered as poetry. Despite the title, the book did not wholesale advocate for the conclusion that they were simply poetry. Instead Goldstein noted, as I’ll admit, that these two ways of encountering words lend themselves to different experiences.** One tactic Goldstein decided on when dealing with song refrains in his printed examples to be experienced as literary poetry was to not completely transcribe the refrains in his versions of the lyrics. Instead he might just put them once at the end of the set of words. Making them the final statement on the page gave them emphasis, as repetition in a chorus would, without overwhelming the expression of the verses.
Working the other way, as I will do today, one can reverse this tactic. One can simply repeat a stanza, perhaps the first one, as a chorus, or at the end. Or one can take a line and make it a refrain, as I did with Sheng-Yu’s “Lament” this fall.
The Poetry of Rock? A Celtic representation of the ouroboros. This is a mystical symbol beloved by Jung and alchemists that is often used in graveyards. What does it mean? Thoughts differ, so may I offer one: Death can go kiss its own ass.
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Did you skip to here? That’s fine. OK, let’s get to the good stuff: this poem “Stones” appears in the new poems section of Ethna McKiernan’s Light Rolling Slowly Backwards. It’s a fine poem on the page, and I highly encourage you to experience more of McKiernan’s work there by buying her book or seeking it out via a library. Here’s the publisher’s link. That’s the other “ask” I have for you today. But “Stones” is also a poem of lyric experiences, it calls out to be performed with the context of its implied emotions shared in your ear.
And this I did. Besides presuming unilaterally to do that, I made one other adaptation in the piece for performance’s sake: I took a line in the final stanza and made it a refrain. Because that line is repeated now six extra times, I’m bringing it forward for you to make sure you notice it and its possible meanings. I could throw in some more paragraphs about what I considered those possible meanings to be as I performed this beautiful poem, but I’ll not do that today. May your ear link to your heart, and listen with the player gadget below —if your way of viewing this blog shows that — *or this highlighted hyperlink otherwise.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Stones.mp3 .
”Paradise Lost,” “Tyger,” “We grow accustomed to the dark,” and “The Red Wheelbarrow”* are all worthy poems we might agree. Are they less different from each other than some random literary poem is from some song lyric?
**I may be repeating myself to say this here in a footnote — but that’s part of why I do the Parlando Project: because I expect you’ll experience the texts differently when you hear them performed with music.
***Did Ethna intend that line, now a refrain, to reflect itself in those meanings? I can’t say, but perhaps not. I, who performed it, intend for those extra meanings to come forward. I completely subverted William Butler Yeats intended meaning in one of his poems this fall. Judge me as you will.
Late last year I promised you’d get to hear some pieces based on the poetry of Ethna McKiernan. I thought about which one to start off with, and decided I’d perform this one for you first. Why? Because it may make you smile.
Regular readers here recently will have caught up with my connection with Ethna: how I heard her read work in progress in a small group of other writers who cycled through each other’s homes each month to do that. You’ll also know that the rest of the group was usually men in its later years.
When we met in Ethna’s our meeting would always start in her little kitchen. We’d stand near her sink and stove and brew up some tea and talk a bit about what happened since we last met, until our remaining writer’s group members accumulated. On one side of that room was the clipping and photo-decorated refrigerator door, a generalized cultural artifact, and on the other side a small table and chair. Her house was a modest South Minneapolis bungalow probably built in the last Twenties, a couple of blocks off of East Lake Street. Comfortable and reasonably roomy with the usual shelves of books in its main-floor rooms and a couple of wandering cats as one might find in a poet’s house. I never saw more than the main floor, but there was a second story up a wooden staircase, and as we shall shortly hear, a basement below. That all said, it seems Ethna wrote and revised mostly in that small kitchen.
Kitchens are a physical metaphor, the site of drudgery and giving, sustenance and routine. If I may gender a floorplan: the most female part of most houses.
Approximately how some of us feel on winter days. If only there was some help…
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I remember hearing “The Men in the Basement” at one of those meetings. Everyone enjoyed it, got it, right off the bat, which was far from a universal reaction to the work we shared. I heard her read it at least once at a public reading, and since it was included in her New and Selected collection* published just before her death late last year, we can be sure that Ethna herself liked this poem and expected audiences to do so too.
Do women understand this poem more than men do? How the hell should I know, though I suppose some raise themselves to opinions on such matters. I myself found it easy enough for my anima to perform it, though maybe some listeners will find that strange. Again, how the hell should I know? Anyway, given that we all bruise, want, wonder, live together and alone — and sorry, buzzkill for this entertainingly arch poem, we all sicken and die — I don’t find it worthwhile to predict or expect right now.
Musically I made this one an assortment of sounds, and I even worried that I may have over-egged it with the variety, but I’ll limit my predictions to that you’ll enjoy meeting Ethna’s text today. There’s a player gadget below for many of you, but you can also use this highlighted hyperlink where the player isn’t shown to hear it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/The_Men_in_the_Basement.mp3 .
That book, Light Rolling Slowly Backwards: New and Selected Poems* is a great summary of McKiernan’s poetry. Here’s a link to the publisher’s listing.
I’ve got a gorgeous song for you today, despite a difficult week for new work. I’ll try to get to it shortly, with only a little throat-clearing first.
It was 18 degrees F below zero* this morning. Oh, there was probably some wind chill too, but let’s not put too fine a point on temps like that — Minnesota January winter certainly doesn’t.
Our winter, to speak broadly, isn’t just cold. There’s also ice, snow, and winter cancellations and rescheduling. If that sounds grim, well, somedays it is — but then there’s a little something else about this sort of winter when you run across others out in it. Early this morning I saw another bicyclist with full face mask and goggles sawing their bike over the packed snow pavement. Before that, a woman walking her dog, each of them concentrating on getting such business done. In other duties, some school kids were walking to school. Every one of those fellow citizens are dealing with this shared winter too, and despite not being able to see much of their faces, you can likely feel something of a common cause.
But winter can also be experienced without even such scattered crowds. I used to commute around midnight on a bicycle, and the urban streets on rough winter nights would be the same as some new nowhere, like unto a SciFi paperback cover of the astronaut gazing through alien ruins. My wife sometimes runs just before dawn to a park that has no others but her and the existential animals.
Today’s piece is a winter poem by American poet Elinor Wylie, who wrote absolutely lovely short lyrical poems around 100 years ago. Hers is a slightly different winter. First, she’s walking with someone else. She doesn’t mention the temperature, but I doubt it quite as bitter-brittle as my morning. Hers is explicitly windless, but there is snow, the kind of loose powder that tends to fall when it’s colder than the soggy wet flakes.
Here’s a link to the text of Wylie’s Velvet Shoes, in case you’d like to follow along.
Wylie’s reputation dropped fairly rapidly after her premature death in 1928. One knock against her pretty poems was that they were that and nothing else but attractive pictures drawn in word music. Well of course music itself doesn’t task itself with more than to be attractive, and visual art doesn’t need to support a philosophical argument or insight explicitly.
Sure it’s a pretty line: “I shall go shod in silk,” but damn it, open the door, it’s seriously winter out here!
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I rather like this poem’s picture, because it’s something of a white-space void with just scant details coming out of the snow, like a Whistler painting. But it’s not even visual clues for the most part — the details are textures, feel images: veils, silk, wool and fleece, feathers and down, and then the velvet of the title. There is testimony that there is no noise, much less talk. Indeed, her partner in the walk is near-totally obscured, and this choice —conscious or unconscious — seems striking to me. Is she alienated from them, or so close that there’s no novelty in mentioning? The sensuality of the imagery may give undercurrents of erotic love, but the obscuring of the partner makes that reading stranger.
I seem to be specializing recently in taking leaps at alternate readings that even I don’t think likely, though not impossible either, like my wild-ass guess that Truth’s body moldering in the grave next to Emily Dickinson’s Died for Beauty could plausibly be John Brown. Don’t bet your grade on that one, students! But I thought of the woman walking her dog this cold and snow-covered morning. No reason to talk there, nor was the dog taking time out for a barking address. Wasn’t that dog wearing a wool sweater? Less romantic a poem, but not impossible.
Though it’s freshly done, I’m fond of the music I came up with for Wylie’s poem. Maybe you’ll like the little song they make together when I performed it this morning. The player gadget is below for some of you, and if you don’t have that, you have this highlighted hyperlink that will also play it.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/parlando/Velvet_Shoes.mp3 .
That’s minus 28 C. Minus.*