from “A Letter to Robert Frost”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Last time in our National Poetry Month series of musical settings of poems and poets included in Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry  we heard from the poems of a leading practitioner of light verse, Ogden Nash. Today’s piece was made using some brief quotes from a much longer poem that fancies itself a step up from light verse.

In 1937 Robert Hillyer was a fresh winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and he had a professed friendship with the GOAT of all poetry Pulitzer winners, Robert Frost. That year he published a long poem in rhyming couplets, a format that in his day might make a cultured reader think of Alexander Pope – though a 21st century ear might hear in that rhyming form the philippics of Pulitzer winner Kendric Lamar. Couched as a letter to Frost, it’s a wry survey of the between-world-wars state of poetry. As an active professor of literature at Harvard, Hillyer’s in a good position to comment on and even change the nature of The Canon – that agreed upon pantheon of great poets to be taught and kept alive, even if as only as cadavers for academic dissection.

His poem from the start wants to make a point that The Canon is mutable – unlike arguments that it’s revealed truth only disputed by ignorant academic Visigoths with sub-rosa agendas. So, from the start (and the parts I chose to quote for today’s musical piece are all from the beginning of the poem) Hillyer uses himself and Frost (and meta-event! also the very anthology and anthologist that I’m drawing from for this month’s #NPM2026 series) to point out that we can change our mind and experience of poets, even long-dead ones.

His first case in point concerns Emily Dickinson. Let me do a quick attempt to summarize how that great poet – dead 50 years when Hillyer tells his tale – came to be vetted for a position in The Canon. Most of Dickinson’s best-considered work was written in the 1860s, and when she died in 1886 that work was almost entirely unknown, save for those poems she included in letters or otherwise distributed to intimates. None-the-less, in one of the cultural miracles of the ages, a large cache of hand-written fair copies of her poems were located after her death, and her surviving sister Lavinia Dickinson sought to publish them. More coincidence comes into play: Emily had corresponded with Thomas Higginson, a smart and well-connected Boston cultural figure, and two other culturally ambitious local women were willing to assist in editing these manuscripts: Emily’s sister-in-law (and now commonly assumed lover) Susan Gilbert Dickinson, and Mabel Loomis Todd, wife of a local astronomer and mistress of Emily Dickinson’s brother, the husband of Susan. No, this isn’t a season arc of Real Housewives of Amherst, that’s the mishigas/miracle that gives us one of America’s greatest poets.

Susan got first at bat with the surviving poems. She had grand plans for them, perhaps too grand. Lavinia grabbed the rights back and handed them to Mabel. Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Higginson were expeditious: they turned in a publishable manuscript quickly, doing what any responsible professional editor would do with this batch of handwritten “amateur” poems: cleaning up punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc., ordering their choice of best poems in a sequence, and adding helpful-to-the-casual-reader poem titles and subject-matter sub-sections.*

Still, the posthumous publication of a dead loved one’s poems generally produces about as much reaction as an engraved epigraph on a cemetery rock: a loving gesture with a small audience. Yet, surprisingly the Poems of Emily Dickinson sold very well, needing additional print runs only weeks after it was released. Two subsequent volumes containing more cleaned up and regularized poems quickly followed. So, at the turn of the 20th century, shortly before Modernism breaks out, this mid-19th century poet arrived.

When Untermeyer presents Emily Dickinson in his Modern American Poetry, it’s only her and Walt Whitman who are from the mid-19th century – the pair considered suitable to be considered “moderns” – but he points out that with the rise of High Modernism in the late 1920s, Dickinson’s poetry had taken a hit in critical assessment: she didn’t seem “serious” enough, and even with the Higginson-Todd edits, her prosody seemed sloppy. Untermeyer notes that the myth and mystery aspect of Dickinson’s biography, as understood then, was in danger of taking over from the verse: why did she withdraw socially, and was that part of some doomed romance?

That was still the Emily Dickinson that I read and heard about in school in the mid-20th century: a curious eccentric with a cozy-gothic-romance backstory to go with those poems of strangely polite funeral carriages. Real poets, like Frost, Stevens, and Eliot had no backstory, just texts that could support impersonal New Criticism exegesis.

But Emily Dickinson’s poetry was still to be written – or rather, printed. It was only in my lifetime that accurate and complete editions of her poetry were released. Shorn of half-measures, her language when faithfully conveyed, unleashed from conventional rules, now seemed less careless and more passionate and incisive. New readers started to see a Shakespearean width to Dickinson’s concerns, partly I suspect because there were smart women now with academic rhetorical skills who didn’t put blinders on when reading Dickinson, poems now sharper with the varnish taken off.

I took you on that little side-trip for two reasons. First, I wanted to be fair to Robert Hillyer as he recounts his and Frost reactions to Dickinson in the between-world-wars era. In the first blush of Modernism before the end of WWI, Dickinson (even if still regularized) seemed contemporary, because those early American Modernists prized concise directness and freedom from tired metaphorical tropes in poetry. Sandburg wrote a poem calling Dickinson an Imagist, the name taken for that early 20th century vanguard. And so it is too, that the young Hillyer recalls his original fondness for Dickinson, but then Hillyer’s journey as a poet and academic** taught him to value exactness in prosody: perfect rhymes, precise metrics, correct grammar arrayed in longer poems with grand themes. And what of his reporting of Frost reply to his youthful Dickinson enthusiasm: “Perhaps a genius, but mad?” Hillyer heard that judgement when Frost was teaching in Dickinson’s home town, people there still lived that knew the living Emily Dickinson, town eccentric.

I think it’s fine to (I quickly did this myself) ascribe the incident I extracted from Hillyer’s much longer poem to so much patriarchal prejudice – but the judgement of The Canon as its caissons go rolling along was for us to forget Hillyer’s verse and study Dickinson’s. The second reason I told Dickinson’s story, the greater point, and the reason I perform these few lines from Hillyer’s poem now, is to show that The Canon isn’t static, that it changes, or rather that we change it by our attention, what we find, what we take into ourselves. Because Hillyer’s long 1937 poem is likely still in copyright, I’m not able to provide a link to the full text on the Internet and I’ve chosen not to print the quotes I excerpted from it for educational purposes this National Poetry Month.

Robert Hillyer

Robert Hillyer. I don’t know if he ever got to revise his learned opinion of Emily Dickinson’s poetry once again.

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I also present this piece as evidence of the music in differing styles precept of this Project.*** I am a naïve composer with limited musician skills. I suspect nearly all composers compose on an instrument, and that most inform their trial-and-error exploration with more adequate skills on an instrument buttressed with more knowledge of musical theory that I have. My mitigations, which I hope to hide from listeners partway, it to use anything I can do  with my instruments and voice in my compositions, and avoid those things I can’t. If I learn some new musical theory or tactic, I’ll turn it into a composition while remaining ignorant of the panorama of musical structural theory – and when I work with orchestral instruments, as I do today, I’m closer to the Lego school of musical construction, using arpeggiators, MIDI editing, and lots of trial and error to make something that may be worthwhile. Today’s piece is therefore limited – from its composition through to its recording you can hear below – by the composer/performer’s limits to realize it. I believe that it will still work for some listeners – perhaps you. The audio player to hear this short piece with quotes from Robert Hillyer’s “A Letter to Robert Frost”  is below. No player seen? Some ways of viewing this blog won’t let audio player gadgets into the canon, but I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*Modern critics and scholars generally decry their work. Todd in particular is often taken to task today for suppressing anything in the poems related to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, and both are accused of making the genius of Emily Dickinson all too conventional with their edits. But, if they had not done their work, not gotten Emily published, not done the commercial “clean-up” that made her immediately approachable to general readers in print, we likely wouldn’t have an Emily Dickinson to be concerned with.

**Hillyer seems more remembered today as an important teacher at Harvard than as a poet.

***Beside my own listening to orchestral music and art song (amidst a broad palette of other musical expressions) two pieces by trained composers likely influenced this work. Many years ago I was able to hear a locally-based composer, Dominick Argento’s Letters from Composers  performed, and much more recently I was delighted to hear the premier performance of young composer Patricia Wallinga’s The Sisters,  a one-act opera featuring singers portraying Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Amy Lowell together on stage singing about their poetic careers. I’d almost consider my little work today to be a modest response to The Sisters  from the male side, as three of Wallinga’s quartet of women poets are observed in the Hillyer excerpt I performed. Where’s Amy Lowell? “Our friend at Sevenells” mentioned in Hillyer’s poetic letter to Frost is a reference to Amy Lowell’s home. Wallinga’s less-than-an-hour opera performance is available to be seen and heard at that hyperlink on YouTube.

You might notice that those composer/performer particulars I mention above limit the sophistication of my two-minute piece compared to these of course, my saving grace is the hope that my piece retains some value. I’ve taken to calling my efforts in this vein “punk orchestral” to make my case.

Adventures of Isabel, or weighing light verse

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Three things mark Louis Untermeyer’s taste in his between-the-world-wars Modern American Poetry:  comfort with elements of the Modernist avant garde, appreciation of the fantasy/gothic (Poe) strain in American poetry, and the inclusion of humorous verse in a “serious” anthology. We’re only partway into our National Poetry Month series featuring selections from that book, but we’ve seen H.D. and Maxwell Bodenheim’s Imagist poems, and Elizabeth Coatsworth’s subtle visitation of fantasy. Now we have a poem that combines elements of the last two – one written by a poet that many mid-century readers would have been as familiar with as with Frost, Eliot, or Millay: Ogden Nash, the at least once well-known 20th century practitioner of “light verse.*”

How much has Nash’s fame persisted into the 21st century? I suspect a small portion. That his verse includes humor might be a factor in that. Humor’s subjective and subject to fashion, but unlike the subjectivity regarding serious literary modes, few take the effort to make allowances for superficial mutations in its particulars or a joke not making a direct hit on our sense of humor. A solemn, carefully crafted poem about weighty subjects promotes itself for a balanced appreciation – so, even if we find it imperfect, we feel propriety requires we give it its due. In the age where much poetry presents memoir, “personal truth,” and exposition of experiences intimate, harrowing, or non-denominationally spiritual, this must be yet more so.

Even when present, humor may be deemphasized or missed in our poetic literary cannon. Many modern appreciators might be shocked to learn that Auden’s “Stop All the Clocks”  elegy was not intended to be fulsomely solemn. Most readers miss the sly Robert Frost tweaking indecision about decisiveness in “The Road Not Taken.”  Frank O’Hara’s beautiful humor can’t be denied, but it can still be deemphasized. Early readers of Emily Dickinson saw elements of what could be called light verse in her work, and that once hurt her standing in the literary canon. 21st century readers now are asked to see the signifiers of trauma and suppression in her poems, which there may well be, but some of the most sharply funny people have grown accustomed to injuries in the dark.

2026 National Poetry Month Poster 600

No chord sheet today, but this gives me a chance to say how much I love the Arthur Sze quote used on this year’s poster that speaks to what this Project hopes it’s doing.

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Now, is Ogden Nash as essential as those poets? I’m not making that claim, but he can still be a whole lot of fun. What I have said, and still fervently believe, is that we harm poetry by worrying too much about “not-great poetry.” Because literary poetry now has a historically low presence in American culture, we may feel obligated to guard against a Gresham’s Law defacing its value. I question that tactic. I think vibrant arts are happy with all kinds of expression, and even if one’s aesthetic has constructed a defensible hierarchy, there’s room for vin ordinaire.**

Here’s a link to the text of today’s poem by Ogden Nash if you’d like to read along.

So, I’m for intervals of fun, and “Adventures of Isobel”  is fun, and I’d suspect even the toddler depicted in Nash’s mock epic might enjoy it once they become self-conscious – but there’s more: in our current times isn’t it good to revisit the stubborn “it’s not for me” or “you don’t scare me” bravado of the poem’s heroine? Those Americans recently pictured, standing up at streetside in their bathrobes (adult jammies, missing the bunny rabbits and shooting stars) as flack-jacketed masked federal troops are arrayed about them could be reviving that spirit. I often wonder about conscious intents and purposes that I speculate are found implied in poems I write about here. I can hear other intelligent readers – even the poets who wrote them – laughing at what I see under the poems. I may be subject to seeing shapes in clouds and tricks in the shadows, but were Nash and his muses just writing a funny poem with some jokes and outrageous rhymes to momentarily amuse a reader in 1936?***  Or did something compel him to prophesize: “You’ll be called the Greatest Generation. What’s fearful now will be yet more so. Look at how your kid takes on that which disgusts her, or demands that she mix fear with respect. You know that stuff is actually scary – but you’re going to need that.”

Alternate voice, and frequent keyboardist here, Dave Moore took a crack at Nash’s poem as a song to his music a few years ago with the LYL Band. I quite liked his take on it, and for today’s presentation I remixed the recording of that performance fixing a couple of things he and I thought didn’t work. You can hear it with the audio player below. Has the audio player fled, pursued by a bear? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress showing it. There is  a bear, but it won’t mind if you use this highlighted link to open a new tab with its own audio player to hear the song.

 

 

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*Untermeyer also includes work in his anthology by Nash’s contemporary in between-wars light verse, F.P.A., as well as his own parodies of other poets, one of which I’ve performed here for the Parlando Project. I loved this Untermeyer loving parody of Walter De La Mare!

**There could be an argument against my stance based on overwhelming oversaturation. I worry that’s the case with music today. We have made its creation and distribution so trivially easy (something that happened even before the onset of AI) that we now have a market were new music qua music has a tough time finding traction. Visual capital (youthful good looks, sexual attractiveness, elaborate stage shows and video) becomes a requirement – not just an advantage – to bring forward a substantial audience. I don’t believe this is the case with poetry. With the exception of song lyrics in their ears, the modern literate person is likely to go for extended intervals without encountering any poetry whatsoever. And did Nash, F.P.A., or Untermeyer’s japes waylay readers from reading the canonical “great poets” of the 20th century?

***This year indicates that today’s poem is not clearly in the public domain. I normally refrain from using non-PD work. I plead good intentions toward keeping Ogden Nash’s work in mind and the Parlando Projects educational and entirely non-revenue practices.

Maxwell Bodenheim’s “Old Age”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

“I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’
I heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
I heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley”
-Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”

 

How much did the young Bob Dylan learn about Greenwich Village history that might have been known to long-timers when he arrived early in The Sixties?™ His early “Song to Woody”  testifies that the young man who traveled from the Midwest to New York idolized some lefty-aligned folkies who came before him. Residents like his early NYC mentor Dave Von Ronk (“The Mayor of MacDougal Street”) could’ve further instructed him, and Dylan himself might have studied the Greenwich Village culture as a cross-country immigrant seeking to fit in. If so, here’s one example* he might have heard of: there was a between the wars Village fixture who eventually became a starving poet, and who more-or-less died in the gutter: the bold self-styled “King of the Village Bohemians:” Maxwell Bodenheim. Bodenheim’s sordid death happened less than seven years before Dylan’s NYC arrival – though the peak of his fame was in the 1920s, that’s still only 30-40 years before the young Midwesterner rolled into town,** well within the memory of living adults.

Now I have to say no one has schooled me on Bodenheim, though as a non-playable character, he’s strolled across research and reading I have done. My limited impression is that he tried a bit too hard to underline his bohemian cred, and that as a literary force his brief candle was snuffed out even before his inglorious end. So, I hadn’t read any of his poetry, even if he published in the right American Modernist journals and had several book length poetry collections printed during the last decade to be called The Twenties. As such, Louis Untermeyer’s attempt at an objective survey in his between-world-wars anthology I’m using to supply this April’s poems includes him – but in introducing Bodenheim’s poems there he throws some pretty sharp elbows:

In 1918 his first volume appeared and even those who were puzzled or repelled by Bodenheim’s complex idiom were forced to recognize its individuality…. Sometimes he packs his metaphors so close that they become inextricably confused. Sometimes he spins his fantasies so thin that the cord of coherence snaps and the poem frays into unpatterned ravelings.

The communication [in his later 1920s work] is more involved than ever: the expression of an acrobatic mind that juggles a dozen mixed metaphors, balancing itself meanwhile upon the knives of emotion with a mordant grimace…. He has something to say which the reader, provoked though he may be by the author’s supercilious disdain, might listen to with profit. It is, never the less, still true that Bodenheim too often writes in the role of literary ring-master, cracking his savage whip over cowering adjectives and recalcitrant adverbs, compelling them to leap in unwilling pairs over the fantastically piled barriers of his imagination.”

I chose to perform Bodenheim’s “Old Age.”  Here’s a link to the text of the poem.  Just as with George Dillon writing about Lake Superior the poem has already sold itself to me partway with its title – I’m an old man, and I think about that state a fair amount of the time, whether I want to or not. For this poem I’m not sure what in it is metaphor and what is memory. The poem sets out the scene of a village or neighborhood from an era before motorized trucks. While there are details, it’s a generalized enough portrait that I can’t say where this village is located. This poem was first published in 1918 – it could have been a NYC neighborhood, perhaps the immigrant section that would come to be known as the East Village. Or it could have been parts of Chicago where Bodenheim lived before New York. I even get a sense it could be a European town. Bodenheim was the son of German/French immigrants, and if he was to think of old men, his grandparent’s generation, in his bloodline if not first-hand experience, that would be their locale.

Still, this may not be some early 20th century “Penny Lane.”  I take seriously the line “The old men are my thoughts.” Is he a careless writer who meant to write “are in my thoughts?” I like the poem better if I take him at his word. His thoughts, his consciousness, would then be portrayed as this semi-autonomous set of people, with their customs and cross-purposes that he has become accustomed to so that he views his inner psyche like an old man who’s seen them all many a time, is comfortable that he’s seeing that flow of things again; and who will choose casting his inner self as the old men talking, or the gamboling children, or the young strong men, or the shopkeepers, or the women with some tinkling part in the multicurrent flow inside his head.

I can resonate with that, what with the variety I seek to keep up with this Project. I am happy in this village of choices of poetry and music I choose to experience and work with, each of which seems native to me, even if outwardly they seem so differing. And I’m hustling like the line in the poem that brings an urgent cartload of supplies to the village with pale flowers in its square, because I know the poem’s last line, “Some evening I shall not return to my people,” intimately.

young Max Bodenheim

Maxwell Bodenheim. No chord sheet this time, but today’s music is a 2-chord vamp: CMaj7 & Bm7. I wrote this post during the afternoon of April 7th, and I’m grateful the my country’s mad king didn’t make me think even more of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall today.”

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Before I leave off and ask you to listen to my performance of Bodenheim’s poem, I have one more observation to make: this is yet another poem by a young person about being old. Bodenheim was 25 when this was published. Some years back I even did a series here of such poems: poets under 40 who wrote of the experience of old age. That there’s a goodly number of such poems, some examples among the ones most cherished by older readers, surprises me. I don’t recall in my 20s spending a great deal of time thinking of how I’d experience old age. Oddly, at my current age I find myself thinking of my future time much like I did as a child – then I knew that in 10-12 years I’d be this other creature with other concerns, an adult. Now, I know in that interval (or less, oh yes, the chance of less) I’ll likely be dead or significantly incapacitated. These two similar considerations over the horizon line were (for me) a feature of childhood and being much older than young adulthood or middle age.

Full-on spoken word this time, and the electric Telecaster guitar returns in full voice for today’s musical performance. Spring allergies or a late season cold hampered my voice, but I have several more poems from Untermeyer’s anthology I want to get done, and so this one needed to unload its creaking cart. You can hear that performance of Maxwell Bodenheim’s “Old Age”  with the audio player below. Has that player crossed the rainbow bridge? Send no flowers, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog hide the player, so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*The other NYC name that has made me have similar thoughts: Sweet Marie Ganz was a local political activist who was imprisoned around the time Bodenheim published today’s poem. Ganz was pretty pissed-off by the mutual-aid failure of other socialist-anarchist figures to support, or even visit her when she was behind bars. Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie”  with its up-the-river penitentiary and anarchist motto “to live outside the law you must be honest” has me making wild speculations that someone like Von Ronk told him tales of the young woman who stood in front of John D. Rockefeller’s NYC townhouse and told an angry crowd protesting there that she herself was so mad that if she had a gun she’d shoot the oligarch. Then someone in the crowd handed Sweet Marie a gun. Damn that’s a good story, but one for another day.

**Early part of the 20th century had plenty of Midwesterners making big noise without going through the East-Coast Ivy League gateway and finishing school: Floyd Dell, Don Marquis, Carl Sandburg, Carl Van Vechten, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and my relative Susan Glaspell. Bodenheim was another. He started his literary efforts in Chicago where he paled-up with Dell and Ben Hecht before decamping to New York.

A Lady Comes to an Inn

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

We first meet any poem as a stranger. And in going through Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry  for this year’s National Poetry Month series, I often met on its pages poets I knew nothing about. Elizabeth Coatsworth was one. This poem of hers, “A Lady Comes to an Inn”  is emblematic of that – starting with strangeness, ending with wonder.

The poem begins when a quartet of strangers comes to an inn. Two of them are described as men of color, a third gets even less description, but he has a wife – the “lady” of the title.

The rest of the poem is observations of that lady. Normal expectations and timeworn poetic tropes may blind us as she is first described. First, we’re told her hair is pale and somewhat transparent. Is she just blonde or perhaps white haired? Well, twice we’re given images of translucency: champagne and ale. Perhaps that’s a trick of the light, but even if the number and pigment of hair strands change with age, they’re still opaque. Perhaps the poem’s descriptive inventory of a lighter hair color, creamy complexion, and a rosy mouth hew so closely to many a poem and folk-song’s conventions we’ll be lulled into this opening as so much boilerplate.*

A Lady Comes to an Inn

Likely not intended, but I was reminded by the title of this poem of the old ethnic-joke form that starts with a group of nationalities or religions who walk into a bar and….

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Things start to slip by the third verse: she speaks a language “nobody knows.” Does she speak this unknown tongue only some of the time, perhaps with her three companions, or is that unknown language her only one? The poem’s not clear on this, or even what the speech of the three men is like – they’re silent for all we know. This third verse has the two lines that “sold” the poem to me on first reading: “But sometimes she’d scream like a cockatoo/And swear wonderful oaths that nobody knew.”

Now we’re fully in strangeness. The cockatoo screech must have been startling, though no startling of those who have met these strangers is noted, and the oaths that may be understood as curses only from their musical tenor or other context, are said to be “wonderful.”

I get a sense of beguilement by the strangers, and the fourth verse may be to indicate that: the poem’s observer is gawking down the woman’s décolletage to read her tattoos. And what’s with those “bronze slippers?” Poetically fancified way to say brown shoes? Or are they really metal shoes. Weird. And no one can obtain the lady’s name. Language barrier? Beguilement? Since the other three in the quartet of strangers are unremarked on after the first stanza, the lady is holding everyone’s attention. Nobody knows where the lady and the others have come from, though it’s surmised it’s “marvelous.”

And then the poem and its strangers skip town, and the poem is the sum of the inn’s countrysider’s remembrance.

Let me be honest. On first reading I was picturing a quasi-Romani/”gypsy” encounter, and I even thought the poem might be seen as vaguely racist in an exoticist manner. Rather, I believe we’re supposed to get that sense – but the poem doesn’t say Roma explicitly, and easily could. That’s a misdirect. I think the countrysiders may even think the travelers are Romani at first. Taken more carefully, with a little more attention, I can see an unwritten final verse where a gray and time-jumping Rod Serling steps out from behind the inn to give us a benediction about being hospitable to strange travelers.

Did Coatsworth intend extraterrestrials? Modern readers might see that in the spaces between what she outlines in her poem: the thin extended limbs, pale skin, the indecipherable language, the metal shoes – ET, your inclusion in an important Modernist poetry anthology has come through. But in the early 1920s when Coatsworth published this poem, I think were more at fairy folk in her intent.

I spent an afternoon today reading more about Coatsworth’s interesting life and other literary work. Untermeyer makes much of her world-traveler resume in his anthology’s introduction of Coatsworth, and from further study it does look to be remarkable. As a young woman in the early 20th century she rode horseback across the Philippines and traveled widely in China and elsewhere in Asia – as well as the more common European “Grand Tour” stuff.** Though starting off as a poet for three book-length collections, she was a prolific writer in a variety of genres, including children’s literature and fantasy. Her most remembered work is an early Newbery Medal winner, The Cat Who Went to Heaven,  a children’s book with unusual subject matter melding extensive dharma talk with a Charlotte’s Web plot published in 1930. One of the highlights in today’s research was reading a couple of accounts by Coatsworth’s daughter, poet Kate Barnes, who writes about what her mother was like and the life she eventually led in rural Maine.

I wanted a contrast with the slower, sparer music I have used for the first two episodes; and when I had an hour in my studio space Friday, I quickly recorded three energetic takes of the music I wrote for “A Lady Comes to an Inn.”  Kate Barnes writes her mother wrote quickly,*** and that rhymes with my usual recording necessities these days: the first thought had to be a good enough thought. When I went to mix the resulting tracks, I realized I had a problem. I had played my jumbo 12-string guitar, and that beast when I pick it at a rapid tempo produces a lot of clashing harmonic content. It took a few tries using some mixing magic to temper that issue with the recording you can hear below using the audio player gadget. Has the audio gadget left for fairy land or Aldebaran? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog glamor the display of such a player, and so I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with an audio player.

 

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*The lady’s elongated thinness also described may not stop the reader at first either, but the young maples in my yard would also say otherworldly if their branches would describe a humanoid limb.

**Her travels included “off the beaten path” journeys, and I theorize that she would have likely experienced herself, as a woman, being the exotic, mysterious, traveler at times.

***Coatsworth’s spouse, writer Henry Beston, was the opposite, a much slower writer who needed solitude to work. Mother/housewife Coatsworth might have needed that work-fast-with-inconstant-time-available outlook for external reasons, but daughter Barnes thinks it was intrinsic to her nature. Coatsworth published around 100 books and told her daughter that she had published the most poems of any poet of her era if you excluded the para-literary sorts like Edgar Guest

Lethe

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Continuing my April National Poetry Month observance with another poem from Louis Untermeyer’s between-world-wars anthology Modern American Poetry.  This one’s from a better-known poet than last time.

NPM starts with April Fools Day, an outdated holiday since we already had President’s Day in February, and can-you-believe-it outrages are somehow less funny this year. Yet, it’s also the day my late wife and I got married back in the 1980s. Not exactly a golden age back then either, and my wife would explain the decision to get married as a statement of the stubborn optimism of loving fools.

The poet who I’ll sing today published under the name H.D. – a nom de plume that still has a modern vibe for a pioneering Modernist. Maybe someone in our digital screen age will pay tribute by calling a project extending her work “QHD?” Something else that I’d expect might still sound modern is how she came to be a part of the Modernist vanguard that formed in England among a group including Americans living abroad. Hilda Doolittle was a young woman who had a college sweetheart. It appears they planned to get married. That other, a he in the pair, moved to England to meet up with the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats. His name was Ezra Pound. Young Hilda eventually traveled to London to reconnect with Pound.

Somewhere in the passages of boats and time the romance between the two died, for there’s no guarantee that optimistic fools will continue to share the foolish accords of love. Pound was a talker, a planner, a promoter of the kind of modern American poetry Untermeyer would start to collect a few years later in his anthology with that name. Meeting Hilda in London, Ezra hatches a plan for H.D. that’s not marriage.

Looking at a bunch of poems that Hilda had brought with her to England, Pound pronounced them delightful and perfectly modern, an unbidden expression of the new poetry movement he and his little group were promoting. Pound, ever sure of himself (a trait that is dangerous in politicians, but often advantageous in artists*) scribbled at the bottom of Hilda’s poems “H.D. Imagiste.” Later on the Frenchie “e” got dropped and the new English language poetry Modernists were Imagists.

Now, I wasn’t there – chronistically excluded – but if there was a function like social media then I can Imagist a whole lot of takes on this. Manipulating the poor girl! Way to change the subject EP. Patronizing, much?

Well, here’s the unexpected part: H.D.’s poetry was  striking. Still is. She could write very compressed short poems, nothing wasted: no dallying narrative story-telling or clearly identified speakers, but the images inside these enigmas so clear and evocative.

In his introduction to H.D. Imagiste in his anthology Untermeyer wrote:

She was the only one who steadfastly held to the letter as well as the spirit of its credo. She was, in fact, the only true Imagist. Her poems are like a set of Tanagra figurines….The effect is chilling – beauty seems held in a frozen gesture. But it is in this very fixation of light, color and emotion that she achieves intensity. What at first seemed static becomes fluent; the arrested moment glows with a quivering tension…. A freely declared passion radiates from lines which are at once ecstatic and austere.

The poem I selected from Untermeyer’s selection is the one called “Lethe,”  and it’s a good example of this effect. She leaves interpretive space in this poem: one could read it as a curse or an elegy. Is she decrying the separated lover, wishing upon them even more separation from nature, comforts, and others? Or is she with chilling remorse stating the plain facts of the dead: that they are separated – and we the living, separated too, but able to feel and sing that. Her poem is a sensuous litany of what the dead’s senses will not feel.

Lethe

Today’s “thimbleberries.” I didn’t know what “whin” mentioned in the poem was. The Internet’s department of tautology department tells me its a variety of the gorse plant.

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I chose the latter when I performed it – thinking on a day for fools, of marrying to share each other’s foolishness. You can hear that performance of H.D.’s “Lethe” with the audio player gadget below. What, you can’t hear the no wailing of reed-bird to waken you? Some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing the audio player, so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*Ezra Pound’s confidence did extend to politics. Alas – to say the least.

Memory of Lake Superior vs. Donald Hall’s Law

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

April is U.S. National Poetry Month, and this year I’m going to focus on poems found within an in-between-the-World-Wars anthology titled Modern American Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer. It’s a book that might have been assigned when my parents were in college, filled largely with poets that were born in the vicinity of the turn of the 20th century. I don’t know enough to comment on Untermeyer’s taste in selecting his early 20th century poets, but he seems to have interests in some areas that overlap my own: early Modernism,* humor, and poetry with proletarian and gothic themes. I assume there’s at least a trace of literary log-rolling in the selection of some of the less-well-known poets in the book, but in the short essays that he writes to introduce each poet Untermeyer often finds room for sharp critical comments – this to me is evidence of a fair-minded attempt to get his time’s consensus consideration of American poetry since Whitman and Dickinson.

My plan (to the degree that my life allows plans, which is arguable) is to present around 10 poems from the hundreds in Untermeyer’s thick book. I expect one or two will be “poetry’s greatest hits” that I haven’t otherwise gotten around to, and others will be unknown poems by little-known poets. Long time readers may recall a statement I’ve taken to calling Donald Hall’s Law. That poet, a prize-winner, once wrote: “Most poets, even prize-winning ones, will be forgotten 40 years after they die.”  Modern American Poetry  went through 6 editions between 1919 and 1942, and from a quick look, the last of the included authors died in the 1980s, and so are subject and evidence to that law. Will my efforts and your attention amend Donald Hall’s Law? Slim chance, but I enjoy sporting with its iron rule. Once some pressman ran these pages through their oily machinery, they pressed a democracy between the boards – and so, next to your Wallace Stevens and Robert Frosts, there’s the someone elses who led a life, observed it, did their best to craft some poem to convey that.

And here’s the first of those: George Dillon. Know the name? Know their poetry? This isn’t a test – I didn’t. Some reading this are likely living poets,** and you might have careerist moments in some early AM hours once the muse has worn off. Are you submitting enough, and to the right places? Did you do enough to promote your collection? Are you behind in your social media or correspondence? And while you never think this one yourself, you might still think someone else is thinking “Who do I have to sleep with to gain some traction?”

I’ve reached a age. I look at Donald Hall’s Law and am strangely comforted. I don’t need to be encouraged in dream-stoking stories about poets who achieved lasting fame. I seek out instead stories that say someone else was once here, wrote a little, and I can find them, find some pleasure in a poem or two, and say: that’s enough, or better than some other human clap trap we had no choice in hearing.

And so we have George Dillon. He made it into Untermeyer’s anthology, slotted between Robert Penn Warren and Kenneth Patchen. He was an editor at Poetry Magazine for over a decade! He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1931 poetry collection! He and Edna St. Vincent Millay were lovers!

Memory of Lake Superior

Chord sheets like this one might encourage you to sing this poem too.

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I said Untermeyer could be toughly critical even of those he included. Here’s the end of his introduction to the selections of Dillon’s poetry in the anthology:

His defect is his fluency; he is sure of his craftsmanship, a little too sure. The subject-matter is conventional to the point of being stereotyped and the tone in the sonnets is a shade too pompous. Yet the verse is unusually flexible and few will question his gift of song.”

Fair enough. When I look through a collection seeking something to use here “gift of song” is going to attract me. And there’s another factor. The title of the poem I set to music is “Memory of Lake Superior.”   My late wife lived in Duluth for a while; we both loved the north shore of that Greatest Lake. My living wife too hikes there even as I’ve become too old for long walks. Besides the “words that want to break into a song” effect, Dillon’s poem is well observed: the famous red-brown sandstone, the fungal debris on the forest floors. My wife tells me*** that the thimbleberries there that Dillon mentions “have larger flowers than razzberries.” It’s National  Poetry Month, sure, but I thought leading off with a Spring poem with home field advantage would be appropriate.

Thimbleberries by Heidi Randen

Thimbleberries, their flower, their berry.

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You can hear Dillon’s “Memory of Lake Superior”  with the audio player below. Are you asking, “Has Donald Hall hidden the player to enforce his law?” No, just some ways of viewing the blog won’t show the player gadget, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

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National Poetry Month 2026 logo

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*My initial interest in the early American Modernist era was fed by having a relative (Susan Glaspell) who was part of it, but the practical aspect of having work from 1930 back being in public domain and free for unrestrained reuse makes this era primary for poetic texts to combine with music here. Though the bulk of Untermeyer’s anthology republishes work from before 1930, I am using a later edition, and it’s possible a few of the works may be borderline: e.g. Dillon’s poem is obscure enough to not have an easily findable date of first publication.

**Dead poets reading here have damnably low engagement scores, and Ouija board planchettes never click links or hit “like.”

***Again, living wife – though a ghostly partner who whispers woodland lore to me from the undiscovered country would have a certain gothic charm.

The Sun – just touched the Morning, or Emily Dickinson’s No Kings

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I’ve told some folks that I’m working on Emily Dickinson’s “No Kings” piece this week. Now, that’s hardly true. There is a king in this poem and he doesn’t come off so well in its telling; but there’s a naïve maiden too, and Emily’s going to paint her as much a fool as the pompous potentate.

If much has been made about the use of hymn meter in Dickinson’s verse and connections there to her skeptical view of conventional religion, plot-wise this poem takes its tale from an extremely common folk and folk-broadside trope: the foolish maiden. In countless variations some man of high-degree dallies with a young woman of the common folk, and it usually doesn’t turn out well for the girl.*  In the best of it, he’s a cad and leaves her; in the worst, there’s murder most foul in the offing. Many folk songs, including those in this grouping, open with it being a Spring morning. Springtime promises, it seems, aren’t to be trusted the voice of folk music says.

I’m not scholar enough to tell how many such songs Emily Dickinson knew, but they were highly common in her time, and I suspect she was using that folk-music plot here to make her point about what life promises us, and about trusting kings.

Sun just touched the Morning

Here’s a chord sheet to assist if you’d like to sing this in your parlor. I like the sound of 9th chords, but they were chosen here to ease my fingering on guitar and can likely be simplified if that suits other players.

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In “The Sun – just touched the Morning”  we have the morning herself playing the foolish maiden and the sun is the sun king who likely believes that when you’re a king they just let you grab it. The sun, as we might guess, soon has to be moving on doing important stuff like making dew into a passing mock-up of glittering jewels, but Morning thinks she is to be his queen. Dickinson reports Morning trying to act like the imperial Sun, crowned with a dew-drop diadem: “She felt herself supremer – A Raised – Ethereal Thing!”

Dickinson knows how this comes out: there’s no crown on offer, no coronation. Some divine right will not tell us who is right, honorable, reciprocal, or trustworthy – that will be up to our “unanointed foreheads.”

So it is: hymns generally tell us how to live right, how to praise a beyond-human perspective, while folk songs take on the task of telling us not to be a fool.

As I composed this, I tried to use a 19th century popular song kind of feel, but ended up being enticed by rock quartet instrumentation with a chiming electric guitar element. If I was to do another version, I might lean more into parlor instruments – but this’ll have to do for now, for we have present business with kings we refuse to allow.

You can hear this song version of Emily Dickinson’s “The Sun – just touched the Morning”  with the audio player below. What? Has the king refused to fund any such audio player? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog won’t show the player, and I offer this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player so you can hear it.

 

 

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*There are exceptions. Every so often the young woman susses out or tells off the cad; and though told in a different plot-order, in one of my favorite British Isles folk-songs “Willie of Winsbury”  the young girl’s suspicious father is the fool.

Sonnet III: Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

This Saturday in Minnesota was marvelous. We already go a little crazy when the temps reach 50 degrees Fahrenheit – there are always folks out in shorts and short sleaves as soon at the bulb’s red rise tips over 49 degrees, but Saturday my thermometer read 79 degrees  by the afternoon, and everyone that could was outside. Walkers were everywhere, and if they had dogs, they had a shared happiness. The smaller crew of hardy bicyclists I see within Winter were joined by a fresh multitude of carefree riders in summer attire coursing through the city. I myself rode to a place a block or so away from my wife’s apartment when we were courting, and there I had a double scoop of ice cream which I ate sitting on a bench outside soaking up the sun.

I’m feeling my age as more than just an additional year in 2026, but to be old or young or anywhere in-between in such a Minnesota day induces a feeling of specialness. Perhaps for the young the coming spring and summer can have an interval long enough to induce boredom, a sense of regular expectable warmth, and a dispensable ease of adventure – but to be old is to know the shortness of things.

Sunday returned to gray skies and an ordinary chilliness. Saturday seemed like a dream. Spring and Summer are still promises, more sure than many human promises in this corrupted world, but promises still.

All that dilly-dallying with ice cream delayed me completing making a song from this Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet. Earlier this month I was saying Millay wrote complex love poems. Well, she wrote complex Spring poems too. The sonnet I was working with is one of the Spring ones, but like her apostrophe poem from earlier this month speaking to mankind, this time it’s an apostrophe to the season. It’s an intimate dialog with elements of greetings to Spring, but as that season arrives, the poem tells us it also knows it will depart.

I’ve found that Millay’s poems often improve with performance. While not exactly a slam poet with planned-in applause lines, Millay’s language (even with its touch of archaic poetic diction) has a pleasing sound, and near rhyme and rhyme add a sensuous chime to the lines. It really is one of those poems that ask to be sung. That said, I found myself modifying Millay’s line breaks as I set it to music. The chord sheet version I provide today can be compared to this link of the printed text to see how I adapted it. I also added a refrain again.

Sonnet III

Some less common chords in this one, but I offer these chord sheets in hopes that other singers will try these songs out.

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One last thing developed from the poem as I did this work: the poem, ostensibly addressing Spring, may be speaking also to the passing youth of the poet, and the line I chose to refrain is repeated to bring forward that which I felt on that extraordinary warm Saturday when I performed Millay’s poem, that we can cherish (and be considered) being more than young and sweet and fair. We all live as promises.

To hear that performance of Millay’s sonnet you can use the audio player gadget below. No audio player seen? That throat isn’t gone on departed wing, it’s just some ways of reading this blog suppress showing it, and so I also offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

William Butler Yeats’ “Politics”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Are we through with Irish poets? No. Is there going to be less politics this time. Well, sort of.  This Project’s goals were not to provide political commentary – the Internet has plenty of that in all varieties – but I’m beginning to have some appreciation for what a hero of mine Carl Sandburg said when asked about his radical politics while already at risk because of his is-this-really-poetry free verse, he answered that politics must find its way into his poetry, in that it was part of him, surrounding him and his times.

So, here’s a poem by Irish poet William Butler Yeats about being weary of politics – yet, he couldn’t avoid it, it was part of him and part of his times too. This poem’s weariness elicits a short catalog of international political issues that he thought of while exclaiming he’s not wishing to think of them. It’s also an old man’s poem, written near the end of Yeats’ life, when he was in his seventies. I’m older than Yeats was when he wrote this, but I too can see what old men do with the weapons of political power so discordant from the Spring that still exists and says we are not here to be the last ones living, but to be as the first ones. Here’s a link to the text of Yeats’ poem, “Politics,”  and it’s an interesting link for more than just a reference to the text.

Let me delay you just a bit from listening to the song I made from Yeats’ verse to speak a little about its making. My household this year has become a haven for a small group of young people going through living as if they’re the first ones. Mostly, I try to stay out of their way, but their hustle and bustle in this house complicates the process of creating these pieces you read and listen to here. In these days, I remind myself of the musicians and composers’ prayer: “May music find a way.”

Unable to use one of my good acoustic guitars in my studio space, which I would normally record with a sensitive microphone, I decided to realize the song I had made using a guitar I keep in my home office. It’s an Ovation Applause, a battered old thing, designed as an experiment in making a cheap instrument out of materials thought unmusical.*  The body is plastic with plywood, and the neck doesn’t seem to be made from wood (other than the fretboard facing).**   Before I bought it used decades ago, my Ovation suffered from a fall or other accident as a lower edge has shattered and there’s a spiderweb of fine cracks extending from the site of that blow. For the past few years this guitar has been stuck in a rack out in the open in my home office because there’s little or nothing in it that could be damaged by the dry winter air there.

Many serious acoustic guitar players make something of a fetish around the woods and construction details of their instruments. It’s not just rosewood, it’s Brazilian rosewood. Sapele isn’t really mahogany, and don’t let them tell you otherwise. Spruce, sure, but from what forest region? Did they use old-school hide glue to assemble it and nitro lacquer to finish it?

This guitar is in opposition to all that: certainly the familiar of a heretic.

So, how’s it sound? Let’s give the witchfinder their due – not to put to fine a point on it, it sounds like crap. If you want richness of sound, this is poverty. There might be some value in its current role: a tool to compose on. That mystery neck has stayed stable all these years, it’s still easy to fret. And its sparce sound would keep one from being to enamored of a something that sounds pretty without having anything beyond its timbre to recommend it – but I’m not sure I’d go that far: it was even more inexpensive being used and damaged, I have it, it’s a hardy thing, and its small size makes it easier to play sitting in an office chair.

Ovation

It’s looks legitimate & peaceful sitting there, but what might it summon with its tinny horn?

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And one night this month, I had an inconvenient time to record a realization of a fine poem by the famous Irish poet Yeats. Yeats got a Nobel literature prize. Yeats became a Senator when his country achieved independence. Yeats is so honored in Ireland, a poem of his is on their passports. Yet, I played my song version of Yeats on an old battered guitar, its cheapness designed in.

And you know, I appreciate a good sounding acoustic guitar. Those folks in thrall to the details aren’t imagining things. But then my singing voice isn’t a finely crafted instrument either, and I’m asserting I can express something of the essence of Yeats’ poem anyway. You can hear it with the audio player below. No player? Has that old wizard Yeats summoned the devil to fly from the shuttered Ovation Connecticut factory with Hartford’s Mark Twain and Wallace Stevens riding with his hoard to take that audio player from you? No, it’s likely just a matter of some ways of reading this blog choosing to not show the player gadget.  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*The Ovation brand still exists, a shadow of itself, having been haunted through a series of owners. The plastic bowl-shaped back – though often paired with much better sounding other components than my low-end example – is still controversial. In its glory days, Ovation was well-known for pioneering under-saddle acoustic guitar pickups. They were so preeminent there, that in the last quarter of the 20th century if you were to see a popular guitarist in concert in any sort of larger venue playing acoustic guitar, you’d be more than likely to see them playing an Ovation guitar that looks remarkably like my more lowly example.

Eventually other manufacturers caught up with their own acoustic guitar pickup systems, eclipsing Ovation’s USP. Come the 21st century, the New Hartford Connecticut Ovation headquarters and factory, home to these innovations, was closed.

**At least some early Applause models used aluminum necks. I can’t say for sure what’s under the black paint of mine, but it sure isn’t wood.

Ethna McKiernan’s “The Day My Mother Gave Me Away to the Tinkers”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a poem that I’ve turned into a song for my second post honoring two Irish-American poets who led a St. Patrick’s Day poetry reading in Minnesota for several years before their death. Of the two, Ethna McKiernan had more direct ties to Ireland, having spent some time living in Dublin, and then in Minnesota running an Irish book and music arts store in the Twin Cities for many years.

For a part of those years I was acquainted with Ethna through the Lake Street Writer’s Group,* where a small group of poets shared works in progress and discussed on the side our lives and outlooks. When I look back on those years, I miss those writers, but I also fear I was inappropriate in critiquing their work, particularly Ethna. My style in that sort of thing tended to be highly detailed (picky might be a word), and even if I would lengthen my responses to their work in progress with “you could consider this or that alternative” because I believed in an honest “test reader” response without claiming to having some reliable recipe for a successful poem, or authority to ask them to change anything. That claim, that belief, should have opened me up to considering “so why then bother them (or myself) with these suggestions or reactions?” I have no academic training in poetry (Ethna did) and in my late twenties I gave up working at submitting for publication. Ethna did publish. She and Kevin each had several book-length collections as well as the usual small-press acceptances. All this would testify that whatever I thought about poetry’s workings, those ideas were unlikely to be commercially helpful.

Well, you can’t apologize to the dead. They either know better or not at all. I meant well, and I could be amazed by Ethna’s best poems. So, here’s to letting you know about their work here, which I hope is a pleasure for you. And if you would like more of that pleasure, Ethna’s last book, a new and selected collection finished as she was in her final illness, is available here from her Irish publisher.

I think I heard Ethna read today’s poem selection, “The Day My Mother Gave Me Away to the Tinkers,” more than once, including at one of those annual St. Patrick’s Day public readings, where it’s an apt choice, what with its Dublin setting. Before reading it, Ethna would instruct the listeners that, just as with many people of our shared generation,** her mother had issued the threat inside the poem’s title in jest, at worst during momentary frustration; and that the subject of her poem was but her teenage mind thinking in response “Well, I’ll take her up and that, and then she’ll be sorry.”

What else do I want you to know before you hear my song performance of this poem? First, for practicalities sake, there’s a man singing this mother-daughter poem. That might be a detriment. Otherwise? I made a mistake singing the name of a baker mentioned in the poem, Johnston Mooney and O’Brien. I dropped the “Johnston,” but at first figured no one would care, that it must be just some immaterial tiny particular bakery – but it turns out that firm is a famous and long-standing Irish baking concern, Oh well. I hope you enjoy the song anyway.

Johnston Mooney and O'Brien Nutty Doorsteps

Forgot the “Johnston?” Never darken (or spread jam on) my doorsteps again!

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You can hear it with the audio player gadget below. Has any such audio player disappeared? No, the gadget’s mother hasn’t given it away, it’s just that some ways of viewing the blog must want the audio player to not be seen (or heard) – and so I offer this highlighted link that’ll open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*Alternative voice here Dave Moore, and our other St. Patrick’s Day poet Kevin FitzPatrick, were principals of the Lake Street Writers Group.

**My own mid-century mother had her variation of this “give you away” phrase, and but seven kids to test her patience.