The modern kings will throttle you to greet the piping voice of artificial birds

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a new Claude McKay poem song setting, “To a Poet,”  completed as part of my concentration on his poetry this February. Somewhat of a “deep cut” in McKay’s poetry, but as sometimes happens when reading a bunch of poems, there was one set of lines that stood out as I read this pioneering Jamaican-American poet’s work. I’ll get to those lines, but first a detour about the music.

Which is something I don’t write much here. The Parlando Project started as a musical idea, though I always thought I’d want to say something about the experience of encountering the poems on the way to making the music, and so this blog. While true engagement with the blog posts here is hard to judge – something made harder by occasional bouts of what appear to be bots skimming (and reskimming) posts here since last autumn – there’s been a satisfying and unrelenting increase in visits to this blog over 10 years. Blogs may no longer be the new-hot, but the visits keep coming. Thank you, readers, and I wish that my personality and situation would allow me to be more attentive to your comments.*  I treasure anyone that spends a little time here.

But the musical pieces, the cause of this all? They get no more listens than they did only a few years into this Project when monthly readership and listening numbers were roughly equal – while presently listeners are maybe 10% of the numbers of readers. I’m realistic about the limitations of my musical expression. I’m about as far from a poptomist composer as could be imagined, and I’ve long feared that not sticking to one style of music creates what used to be called by radio programmers “button pushers” – those who hear one or two songs they strongly dislike and decide to go elsewhere. I understand, people react to music sensually, emotionally, and so a bad experience with music creates a stronger distaste than a duff blog post or the choice of a poem some don’t care for – but my music making reflects my listening, it’s eclectic. I’m committed to musical adventurousness and variety, and so by intent or missteps the music may not always be something you’d choose. I don’t believe I’d enjoy this Project if it was anything else.

But one musical constraint has always been with me: my singing voice and its take it or leave it limitations. Spoken word poetry, even with integrated music, is one thing, and I’ll do that, but some words tell me they expect to be sung, and almost always, that means the singer is me. I’m grateful for the times my long-time LYL bandmate Dave Moore has given me and my listeners a break, and there have been scattered other “guest vocalists” over the decade. Today’s song is different. I wanted to do something (however simplified, as I think simplified music retains powers) more like Art Song, the composed music that features trained singers who express strong melodic contours through skilled techniques, rather than off-the-cuff, I’ll-give-it-a-go, folk-singing.

Go ahead, scroll down and listen to today’s piece setting to music the words of Claude McKay. I’ll wait. And here’s the text of McKay’s poem that was performed with my music.

To a Poet 600

 

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OK, you’re back. Who’s the guest vocalist? The stage name is Felicia. Felicia is a virtual instrument. Readers here may recall what that is, but I think it’s important to reiterate: a VI is often a set of atomized recorded samples of a real “acoustic” instrument, a whole range of notes with articulations expressing a range of colors. Let’s not confuse two-letter-acronyms, VI is not AI as expressed by services like Suno which take an overall text description of the nature of a song and create in one fell swoop the finished melodic lines of the singer (and all their arrangement and accompaniment) by apparently recombining conventional musical materials. If I take a VI of, for example an organ, and invoke it on my computer it won’t play a toccata, early Phillip Glass, or “Rock Lobster,” or anything like those pieces, no matter how I write a run-on requesting sentence about it. It instead needs me to play my MIDI guitar or little plastic keyboard, or inscribe notes on a MIDI piano roll notation. I could (as a very limited keyboardist) invoke arpeggiators or chord and pattern generators to extend what I play or write – but it still feels like composition to me. In contrast, AI like Suno feels like I’m a royal patron asking my musicians for some conventional musical noise to underscore my cultural pretenses, caring only that it be inoffensive.

Another difference: even a despot likely paid their court musicians something. AI? Not so much. The company that sells the Felicia voice VI (Dreamtronics) claims it pays the human singers that it samples to make its products.

Still, I expect this revelation, or its implementation in this piece, will repel some listeners. The spirals inside the ear have their own Uncanny Valley, and I too feel that fearful symmetry. It sounds like a human putting artifice onto itself or an artifice taunting the qualities of human. I put up with it because I had a goal, and my voice could never sing with the VI’s technique, particularly over a longer piece. I played the vocal line on my little plastic keyboard, and typed each syllable as text that the notes would sing. Early vocal VIs were very picky about needing explicit phonetic text, but this one knows much more about the baroque tangles of English pronunciation, yet I still had to tweak some syllables. The program has a range of controls for expression variations – learning how to use them will improve results – but it presents default expressive choices that keep the monotonous spiel of old-school robot speech away.**

Felicia made it much easier to get something that wasn’t fakey bad or unintelligible as older vocal VIs I’ve tried, even as I still felt the need to do work to improve problematic passages. It took me several hours to create the vocal line realization you hear in today’s piece. A trained human singer at the mic could have done it in an hour, even including leeway for retakes and “try it this ways.”

One thing I noticed: even when I had polished up the intelligibility of the VI sung text, the meaning of the words seemed abstracted to me as a listener. Oddly, this is the same thing I sometimes hear as a listener with Art Song, where the composer’s elaborate melodies or the singer’s concentration on demonstrating virtuoso technique make the words vehicles for expressing music more than shared experience. Human vocalists singing Art Song, in their own way, produce their own unsettling Uncanny Valley.

Which may bring up the question, why not just use a real singer? Yes, that would be better. I, who am socially awkward, not able to schedule a time to do my creative work, and heading-up a non-revenue Project can say that would be an ideal, but unlikely, option. Furthermore, in the process of composition I wouldn’t be able to test my musical choices as a limited singer, so there’d likely never be a score for such a singer to follow.***

Will I use a vocal VI again here? Likely, though I don’t think I’ll use it most of the time, or even often. My voice is my voice, and I feel I should use it. Still, I was very happy that I could realize this musical piece. Through the technology of VIs I was also able to play the atomic recombinations of an oboe, a viola da gamba, and a hurdy-gurdy as part of the accompaniment.

OK, so back to Claude McKay’s poem. Like his “When I Have Passed Away”  from earlier this month, McKay’s poem here speaks of posthumous poetic legacy. In the context of this month while using a computer VI to sing his words, I was much taken with the pair of lines in his poem: “The modern kings will throttle you to greet/The piping voice of artificial birds.” Maybe 100-years-ago, a prophetic McKay knew how I’d come to try to make a song of his poem using a voice of artifice under the rule of a disordered king and assorted technological barons.

You’ve already heard that song haven’t you? What, you didn’t obey the words and stop partway for the music? You’re a rebel! An outlaw! A traitor! You have one – no, two – more chances to hear my musical setting of “To a Poet:” with the audio player you should see below, or with this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

 

 

 

*Besides mundane life-chores, these increasing problems are partly from aging, and partly secondary to the folks I share my home and life with. It’s hard for me to devote regular and predictable time to this Project, and when opportunity time comes, my nature is to work on finding new words and creating the musical pieces. For some reason (aging? self-doubt?) it’s increasingly hard for me to make the social small-talk that should be trivial and expected.

**I doubt this variation of expression is heavy duty AI either. For a long time VIs have used a pseudo-random cycle of expression variations as an option in their programs. I didn’t get a sense the VI generally knew from the denotative sense of a word or placement in a sentence or musical phrase to give it a particular kind of invocation.

***A product like this, it seems to me, would be ideal for a composer who doesn’t sing well and who would like to rough out scores before an actual performance, as it might give a better quick approximation than just playing the vocal line’s notes on a piano for instance, just as orchestral composers are increasingly roughing out arrangements on other virtual instruments.

Claude McKay’s “After the Winter”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I have no direct information, but I experienced today’s Claude McKay poem as a companion piece to the poem I performed last time, “To Winter.” “ To Winter’s” voice was somber and alone, and the sparseness of winter is welcomed within the moment of that poem. “After the Winter”  in contrast leaves a present cold weather moment quickly and turns instead to a hopeful warm weather reverie. Here’s a link to the text of today’s other winter poem.

As I’ve already mentioned in this series, McKay’s poetry often includes flowers, and so it is with this one. I casually compared McKay to Emily Dickinson in this regard – and they are two poets who studied plants scientifically but also portray their aesthetic beauty in poems – but Dickinson’s flowers can often be philosophical, creatures of a searching, perhaps existential, mind, while McKay’s blossoms are flagrantly sensuous.

Snow Creature by Heidi Randen 800

Not by clay and wattles made.

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In the poem here, like my present February in northern America,* is still in winter, and any early birds are shivering, but in the reverie, there’s a bee among the flowers, just as we might find in Dickinson. Yet, as I read this poem I thought of another poet that McKay’s poem could be in conversation with: William Butler Yeats.

Tribute, coincidence? One more thing I don’t know, but as I read “After the Winter”  I strongly felt its resonance with Yeats famous “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” **   If McKay was thinking of his homeland of Jamaica, and Yeats of Ireland, the catalog of objects in their pair of poems sing harmonies: a built cabin and a cottage; bean rows and blue bells; bee loud and droning bees in a pair of glades; lapping lake water and laughing crystal rills. One difference in McKay’s cabin vs. Yeats’? Yeats dreams of living there alone, while McKay’s poem speaks of a “we” there.

Am I charging McKay with some crime of unoriginality? Nope. If he’d read and enjoyed Yeats poem (something I think likely) there’s in my world of poetry and song no harm in adding his own verses longing for his own homeland. Poets and singers do this. No less than a Robert Frost did his own reply to a lyrical passage from one of Yeats plays. Folk singers, folk musicians make a practice of this. This thing you’re reading, the Parlando Project? I’m borrowing from poets across the ages and places, singing or performing their words in my way, sometimes altering them intentionally or otherwise. If I sing a more than 100-year-old poem written by a Black Jamaican born in the 19th century, I’m adding myself, my inhabitation to it. If a Jamaican recalling in his deep heart’s core his rural childhood home while standing in another, colder country, sings along with an Irishman standing on urban pavement in London? That’s us, that’s our shared humanity, hearing and taking in each other’s songs.

How did I inhabit McKay’s poem musically? A predominate instrument sound in my performance is a Middle-Eastern santur, the ancestor of the hammered dulcimer of Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn. And I finish the performance by indulging in an electric guitar solo played on a Telecaster: the country & western instrument designed by a one-eyed American. You can hear that with the audio player below. No audio player to be seen with either eye? Some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing it, so I offer this highlighted link that will open its own tab with an audio player.

 

 

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*I was able to replace my dead LCD screen today. If you dream about a quiet bucolic place were you can hear bees and gentle breezes rustling some botany, I would suggest not going to a Microcenter on a Sunday. On the other hand, it’s good that there is such a bazaar beside the “pavements grey” where you can find a necessary cable to go from mini display port to full-sized display port.

**Yeats’ poem is famous for its invocation of Ireland, yet I found out in researching it for a Parlando Project performance of it some years back that it was written in London.

Late February, repairs, and Claude McKay’s “To Winter”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

My winter has been impacted by things a regime of some coarsely-ground humans brewed up, but it’s been good this February to take a quick dive into the poetry of early 20th century Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay. Yesterday I was closing in on completing a new musical piece in my series combining McKay’s poems with original music in differing styles. I’d sung McKay’s “To Winter” accompanied this time by electric guitar instead of acoustic, and I had constructed some nice harmonic support from spare MIDI piano. I wanted a melodic top line though since my rough-hewn singing wasn’t doing enough to carry that role in the song. I decided to use a Mellotron virtual instrument.*  Long-timers here may recall that I love some of the sounds that cranky mechanical 1960s tape-based sampler produces. Back then they were sold because it used actual recordings of real instruments – but the results? They didn’t sound all that convincing – and all that machinery was subject to glitches and breakdowns. However, once one stops aiming for verisimilitude, its sounds have a certain character. It probably doesn’t hurt that their very cheesiness brings back memories of crackling mid-century LPs and hazy concerts.

I was able to record those Mellotron parts, but my city was filling with heavy wet snow while I did that.

Authoritarianism of a meteorological kind as it accumulated, but I had another task for Wednesday. My newly inherited 12-year-old car had a worn drive shaft that needed replacing. I was to drop it off at a mechanic’s shop in a nearby suburb, and my wife had set a time to give me a ride back. She wanted to go right away, as the roads were getting worse from the snow. Long story short, what would have normally been a 45-minute round trip turned into over two hours of slow going.

It was later Wednesday evening when I returned to mix the resulting new and old tracks for the song in my home office, and I couldn’t get my home office Mac to light up my computer screen. First thought: a normal glitch, as the Mac sometimes just forgets that it should see the screen, but a restart or a re-plug did nothing. Connecting the monitor to another computer revealed the sad tale: my 15-year-old LCD screen had chosen that night to die.**

And this was a problem. All my mixing software is installed on the computer connected to that dead screen. So, no mixing Wednesday. It occurred to me: maybe the now dark computer monitor decided to go out because it was Ash Wednesday: remember, from silicon dust you came and to silicon dust you’ll return.

Thursday morning I pulled a smaller, lower resolution monitor from my studio space and hooked it up so I could finish this piece.

To Winter

Just as I trust the mechanic to fix my drive shaft, I trust that someone out there can probably sing this song better than I can, so here’s a chord sheet.

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“To Winter”  is Claude McKay considering this very time of the year in the Northern U.S. Days are getting longer, there’s more animal activity, water, once ice, will break and flow. McKay’s poem has a complex reaction to this. He concludes he’s feeling winter inside within the moment of the poem, and finds winter outside permits that mood. Last time, with his “Tired Worker”  I found some tension between McKay’s Keats-like language and prosody and the weariness of a 20th century blue-collar laborer. This poem’s my-time-is-like-Keats’-time-may-be-like-some-later-reader’s-21st-century-time choices cause less strain.***

What a wonderous range of coincidences wove into the past few hours. I chose the Mellotron, 19th century orchestral sounds as approximated by mid-20th century technology, mixed on a modern computer whose old LCD monitor left this mortal coil on a snow swirling night at the beginning of the Abrahamic religion’s overlapping spring holy days.

The mechanic has seen to my drive, shaft (“can you dig it”) so that it no longer makes disconsonant noises. I should have a replacement high-resolution computer screen by next week. February snows can be wet and heavy, but to water and mud-luscious they will soon enough go. Crude regimes? I can’t say just myself, but perhaps Carl Sandburg’s “The People, Yes” will increasingly say. So much to repair.

I hope to have a couple more Claude McKay pieces here soon, but to hear this one today, use the audio player below. No audio player to be seen? Mais où sont les neiges d’antan – but I offer this highlighted link as an alternative which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*A virtual instrument contains the modern, much more sophisticated expression of the same idea (the various notes and timbres of a “real” instrument stored as digital recording data instead of one timbre and expression on a strip of magnetic tape for each note pulled along by clockwork springs and levers). My initial attraction to virtual instruments was reading that for only a handful of dollars one could rather precisely “fake the fakery” of the Mellotron without searching out and maintaining a finicky, costly, and increasingly antique instrument.

**The deceased was an HP Compaq LA2405wg model from back when that deleterious merger was fresh. It was a stretch for me to afford then, but in 2010 it was a rare 16:10 1920×1200 display, and I can’t even begin to calculate how many hours I’ve looked at characters and controls on that screen! Everything I’ve ever mixed, every video I’ve ever done, and a lot of writing and research for this Project were done on it.

***McKay’s poem reminds me a little of my favorite John Keats’ poem, “In the Drear-Nighted December.”

The Tired Worker

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

On the page, and probably in my recorded musical performance, this poem is an odd combination. Here’s a link to the text of Claude McKay’s “The Tired Worker.”   Its subject is altogether common: the fatigue of someone who is overtaxed by their job, and a night whose worry and weariness has paradoxically robbed them of enough rest to hope for a better tomorrow. Claude McKay, the author I’m featuring this month, knew these feelings firsthand from the jobs he’d held to support himself as a newly landed US immigrant. I dare say most who read this poem have had nights like this too. As poem subjects go, it’s likely as broadly relatable as love and desire.*   McKay doesn’t go into detail what kind of work the poem’s titular subject does – but calling them a “worker” and expressing their experience of tired hands and aching feet would indicate a manual labor or a service job.

And here’s what strikes me (and perhaps you) as odd, encountering this in my 21st century time: the poem is written in flowery, elevated, 19th century language. For a 1920’s worker to speak of their daily lot as if it’s an 1820 poem contemporary with John Keats seems anachronistic. I’m trying to think of what a current equivalent of this would be, and maybe that’s impossible in that we can’t see, as we can with history’s perspective on McKay’s poem, how out-of-place this poem’s language is with the daily language of its worker or worker-reader.**

That this poem was first printed in The Liberator,  a radical socialist publication founded and edited by Max Eastman may be one clue. I’ve spent a few hours this week paging through its early 1920’s issues published from within the Greenwich Village progressive ferment of its time.

I’ve been fascinated by this scene, partly because I had a shirttail relative Susan Glaspell who was an integral part of it, but also because it was a rich mixture. Political, sexual, and artistic radicalism were literal bedfellows. The Liberator featured a great many ads for political tracts, but also for literary books, and many of latter were low-priced reprints aimed at a bohemian’s or workingman’s budget.

Book Series Ad in Feb 1921 Liberator

Doomscrolling in the 1920s? Michael Angelo’s Sonnets, Tolstoy,  William Morris, Shaw, Voltaire, Wilde, and Nietzsche. Also socialism and the story of what Karl Marx did during the American Civil War. 10-50 cents a piece, or all 50 for $4.75. If one can’t sleep after a long  workday, such a TBR pile near your bed could reach out to you.

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And in between John Reed and Eastman’s first-hand reports from the Russian Soviet Revolution, there was much art and poetry. The art included political/social satire cartoons, illustrations/posters (often in a bold style depicting heroic workers or radicals,) and black and white art depicting nature or the human form. The latter was Modernism of a kind, though I don’t recall much full-fledged abstract works. The famous NYC Armory Modern Art show was nearly a decade past at this point. Carl Sandburg*** had won a Pulitzer in 1919 for his Imagist and free-verse poetry. From the same NYC scene as The Liberator, Others: A Magazine of the New Verse  had completed its 4-year run publishing avant garde poetry. Yet, there was much less free-verse in The Liberator  than one might expect.

It turns out The Liberator  founder/editor Eastman was an early opponent of literary High Modernism. ****  If the world and society needed to change, change radically, the old verities of prosody could still serve well to elevate mankind as they strove for that change.

Did Claude McKay feel the same way? I don’t know enough to say. During the early 1920s, he’s listed as an editor on The Liberator’s masthead. Its broad progressive outlook generally supported racial equality, and the NYC Harlem Renaissance and the Greenwich Village scenes overlapped.

Claude McKay and Max Eastman

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Is that why McKay wrote his worker’s poem this way? There could be more to that choice – he apparently liked the sound of 19th century British verse; and knew how to extract some word-music beauty from it, as I hope examples I’ve performed may show. Perhaps he felt he was expressing his own soul existing within that workday fatigue – he wasn’t some generalized Worker, but his own particular self, Claude McKay, a man taking pride in knowing this part of his received culture. If so, a man, an Afro-American man, could express that dull proletarian grind with the same word-sounds that once extolled Grecian urns and English nightingales.

Yet, there’s a palpable disconnect here, and I was going to perform the song. I decided to just do my best to not linger on its anachronisms, the “O….thou.…wilts” of this poem. Maybe, the combined character speaking here as I performed it in 2026 is a man living in three centuries simultaneously while speaking in the manner of one class while living in the manner of another. McKay may be not so much colonized, as a colony-creature, a siphonophore banding together more than one mind and tongue. As I wrote talking about McKay earlier this month, poets are often, in effect, immigrants or exiles by their natures, souls seeking and divided from the world and nations they find themselves in.

You can hear my musical performance of Claude McKay’s “The Tired Worker”  with the audio player you should see below. Has the graphical player gadget said screw-it and called in sick? No, some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing the player, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

 

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*Once more I’ll remind readers that I’ve encouraged something I call “The Sandburg Test.” The test is to ask, does at least one poem in any substantial collection of poetry deal with the world of work? If you’re reading a Carl Sandburg collection, the answer will be yes. Other poets? Well, read, and ask yourself.

**The closest I could come up with would be the trope of some Americana artists of adapting decades-older styles of music and lyrics to express modern problems – but most of those borrowed styles are less formal and more-or-less reflect working-class speech of the past times.

*** Socialist and free-verse Modernist Sandburg did publish at least one poem in The Liberator.  And for contrast, here’s Sandburg taking his Imagist approach to the same subject as McKay’s poem.

****Eastman is a character I don’t have room to go into today. Escaping by the skin of his teeth from the grasp of the first American Red Scare as an editor of The Liberator’s  radical forebearer The Masses  in 1917 – that magazine was shut down by the federal government and he was arrested, charged, and tried with only a final hung jury keeping him out of prison. His long life saw him continue to resist the rise of obscure Modernist literature, while moving from founding fiery left-wing magazines in the WWI era, to becoming an editor of the Readers Digest  during WWII, to contributing to the post-WWII launch of the conservative The National Review.  and to at least qualified support for the second great American Red Scare in the 1950s.

Flower of Love

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Valentine’s Day comes within Black History Month in the United States. Might be coincidence – but when it comes to diverse lyrical depictions of love, desire, heartbreak, and joy-in-connection depicted in song, this would seem appropriate. But this wasn’t always so.

Read on. We’re going to talk about poetry and flowers – well, sort of, and there’s some nasty bottleneck slide guitar at the end of this.

Choosing the poetry of Claude McKay as my Black History Month focus this year, I’d have to deal with some preconceptions of his work. One, his poetry is written in the 19th century style that the Modernist poets I often select for use were all about replacing. I admire that early Modernist outlook, but it’s not required if the older prosody and what it is conveying attracts me. A second factor is that McKay (like many poets that don’t reach the upper levels of The Canon) is only known for one or two poems – poems anthologized enough to be recognized, but also poems misrecognizing the range of his poetry. Another Afro-American example I’ve featured here is Chicago poet Fenton Johnson who is known almost entirely for one poem, the short, bleak, despairing “Tired”  that begins “I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilization.” McKay’s equivalent is the defiant sonnet of self-defense “If we must die…” which is a striking, memorable, work – and then there’s one other poem of McKay’s that retains some current readership, his complex and eloquent poem “America.”  Despite these old-school accentual syllabic rhyming verse structures and elevated literary language, either of those McKay poems could be read today, in this America, and be understood as vigorous statements about contemporary civic issues – so perhaps there’s nothing wrong with those two being McKay’s representation. They’re not valentines though.

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Reading through McKay’s 1922 Harlem Shadows  collection and his other 1920s work, I’m struck by how much of his poetry deals with his immigrant status – and then even more: how many are love poems or poems dealing with desire and eros. In the short term, this cost McKay. Long time readers here, or those familiar with American Black history in this era, may remember that the Afro-American cultural and political leadership circa 1920 were all about establishing the sober respectability of Black Americans, and erotic expression was not part of that. This wasn’t just run-of-the-mill prudishness – after all, rape was part of the crimes committed against Black Americans, and also a criminal fear used to trump up racism and violence against Black men. In either case, and beyond abuse, sexuality could be too easily seen as an “animal nature” thing not befitting a safe civic personhood.

So if we take Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues  poetry collection published four years after McKay’s Harlem Shadows  you’ll see some documentary depictions of nightlife depicted journalistically, and praise for disreputable Jazz music then associated with “loose living” – subjects that were considered edgy enough for The New Negro gatekeepers then – but you won’t see Hughes including a bunch of poems about erotic love.* Harlem Renaissance predecessor Paul Lawrence Dunbar wrote some sentimental love poetry which just might have some subtext,** but it was without the heat of desire. McKay, on the other hand, filled his 1922 book with it.

If he got away with it at all, it was because McKay hid his eros in poetry like that in today’s poem/now song with a hot-house language of flowers and landscapes cloaking the heavy-breathing. I had trouble when labeling my Apple podcasts posting of this song today. Should I click the warning “explicit” or stay with my usual “clean?” Do I have, as my own city’s bard once proclaimed, “A Dirty Mind” to think that this poem is written knowing that flowers are a plant’s sexual organs?*** In the end, I clicked clean, not because the poem isn’t saturated with desire, but because one must read it as a double-entendre to see that. My hope is that any kids that might find it (or its text I’ll link here) will gain research skills of some value, and I won’t go through the lines of the poem and “translate” what I think is being depicted – that’s the last thing kids want to hear an old man speaking of. IYKYK.

One other thing is striking about today’s poem, and much of McKay’s poetry of love and desire: there’s no gender in it. Accounts and accepted evidence vary somewhat, but many who want to determine McKay’s own biographical sexuality think he was bisexual. Given that his poem seems to be set in a diverse flower garden, it might resonate with a variety of ardent lovers as we approach Valentine’s Day.

Load of the Goat as per AI

When I tried to type Blake’s “lust of the goat” into a search engine to check the exact wording, I typed something that autocorrected “lust” to “load.” To my amazement AI decided to explicate goat loads of meaning from that typo.

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Music? One DEI I can’t foreswear is whatever I find myself doing musically, I’ll want to try something else if I see I’m settling into a pattern. So, back into the cases go the acoustic guitars. No spare pianos either. Glass bottleneck on the finger, Telecaster plugged in, and grindstone to the amplifier gain. The lust of the grit is the bounty of God! You can hear that with the audio player below. What, no player gadget? Joys impregnate! Sorrows bring forth! Clicking on this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player!

 

 

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*This Langston Hughes poem that I’ve performed is read as a depiction of the man’s own personal eroticism by many readers. I’m not entirely sure of that.

**I still not sure if this Paul Laurence Dunbar Valentine poem intentionally means to invoke slavery – it would be a stranger and stronger poem if it does.

***McKay came to America to go to an agricultural college, horticultural birds and bees would be a given. Flowers are often represented in his poetry, as much as in gardener-poet Emily Dickinson’s verse.

When I Have Passed Away

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Here’s another short poem by Claude McKay made into a song. In his “When I Have Passed Away”  a young poet seems to be imagining his own legacy – a prediction both restrained and hopeful. As in the first poem of this Black History Month series featuring his poetry, McKay will subtly mention two things that are potentially othering his living voice. Within the poem’s first quatrain he writes of a belief that he, the author, will likely be forgotten and uncelebrated. He posits an unmarked grave, which strikes one as a sad conclusion, but I think his second line “And no one living can recall my face” has an element of release. In this obscure future a reader will likely not know his black-skinned  face, that instant, contemporaneous, racial stereotyping will have been overthrown by a forgetting time that has discarded his particular self. And as in “The Cities Love,”   he will remind us that he’s writing this as an immigrant, who will likely die and be buried away from Jamaica, the country of his childhood, in “alien sod.”

When I have passed away

Here’s a chord sheet for today’s song. Somewhat like McKay, it’s my hope that someone else will someday choose to sing some of these Parlando Project songs

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Let me interject myself into McKay’s story here. I think many, perhaps most, American poets find themselves in a state of exile. Our dominant culture doesn’t greatly care for poetry, and it cares even less for poets than for their art. Yes, I am making a broad generalization, but McKay in his poem seems realistic in his expectations. If we become by choice or exile citizens of poetry, we will speak a different dialect with strange accents, we will be inured to different customs, we will have saints and prophets un-worshiped here. If Claude McKay can realistically expect that –  in McKay’s case, it will not be his poetic citizenship that exposes him to common and actively state-sanctioned dangers and discrimination so much as the inherent alienation bestowed upon an immigrant with dark skin.* None-the-less, I write this to point out that McKay the poet might share this smaller, ignored and unvalued, status with other poets too.

McKay’s second quatrain hopes for some distant youth and a surviving dusty volume of verse. Perhaps this youth might be an immigrant from the country of poetry and song who has found themselves a minority in our nation of casual oppression and mercantile investment.

Again, I feel I must appear again here, though I am not exactly what McKay expected. I’m entirely far from young. I read this poem in a scanned e-book – not dusty, though my touch screen had a light scrim of fingerprints over his more than 100-year-old words. When McKay writes of his page poem as a “little song” and implies it has a tune, I’m called to do the Parlando Project thing with it. Here we are then, separate: this young Black immigrant from Jamaica, and this an old white man away from his tiny Iowa town he grew up in – we meet on these simple words of his and, touch – and I find I must hum out a tune for Claude McKay whose name and some little of his life I do know.

You can hear that song with the audio player below. If you don’t see a player, if there’s no tree or stone or html gadget to mark its place, I’ll offer this highlighted link that will open a new first-edition-with-dust-cover browser tab displaying its own audio player.

 

 

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*I think here of Renee Good – killed on the broad avenue across the alley behind the window where I sit writing this – a border-crossing death in a cultural battle where immigrants are the “vermin” from “garbage countries” projected as monstrous invaders to justify thuggery and the decrees of tyrants. As a poet, as she was, no one would have asked for her papers, her hard-won college award for her poetry, even if that made her one who will try to find her way as an immigrant-of-a-sort in the land she was born in. It is also not out of the question that she was executed, at least in part, for her being gay.

The City’s Love

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

It’s Black History Month, and this year I’m planning on presenting a series of musical pieces based on poems by Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay. McKay is often associated with the early 20th century flowering of Afro-American poetry and the arts called “The Harlem Renaissance.” Like some filed under that name, he did live in New York City sometimes – but also like some, he also lived elsewhere. Born and raised in Jamaica, he spent time in Kansas, South Carolina, New Hampshire, England, France, Russia, North Africa, and Chicago.

Claude McKay in 1920, shortly after he’d immigrated to the United States

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Today’s piece, “The City’s Love”  is a poem from his inaugural American poetry collection Harlem Shadows  published in 1922. It’s a poem written in the voice of an “alien guest,” a situation that McKay would often touch on in his early poems as he contrasted his Jamaican youth with his immigrant experience in the U.S. Given that my America, and in particularly my city, is currently enmeshed in vindictive federal government acts directed at immigrants, I thought this poem would be a good one to start with. Throughout my city and the state of Minnesota, immigrants from many countries are spending days frightened of summary detentions by a poorly led and oft-times violent set of armed troops. These troops seem to have been given orders to just hunt and stop anyone who appears foreign to them, citizen or not, here legally or not.*

McKay’s immigrant situation, his wonders and hopes, his fears and literal alienation, would have had their own particulars. He first landed in Jim Crow era South Carolina, but he also saw the genesis of “The New Negro” in New York City. In the moment of “The City’s Love”  his poem presents, the color-line seems bent or broken, and like the Paris of Rimbaud’s dawn, the city seems able to hold him in a love embrace. A beautiful vision, but one he also knows is “strange.”

The conciseness of McKay’s poem also recommended it to me, as I must struggle to get my poetry and music work done these days. I rapidly recorded the vocal and acoustic guitar part, banging out five quick takes of which this is the fifth. Late at night, when even the clicking of a pick on an unplugged electric guitar’s strings might disturb my household, I put on the vibraphone synth patch part and mixed in some simple, low pitched grand piano. Though I just finished mixing it this afternoon, I think this song’s rubato approach works, and you can hear it with the audio player below. No audio player? It hasn’t been detained, some ways of viewing this blog won’t naturalize its presence, so I offer this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*I have to write “seem,” though their directions seem clear thanks to citizens who have taken to following and observing them, but one of the tyrannical elements of this is that the federal leadership is dishonest or secretive in rotation about exactly what the troops orders are, and what they are doing. Early in these actions their targets were claimed to be “The Worst of the Worst” and a handful of mug sheets would be proffered by the Feds of violent criminals – on examination, many/most of whom were found to have been handed over to them at the conclusion of their prison terms by the local authorities. Since then, we cannot know exactly how many have been detained in Minnesota – though the number is in the thousands by various statements and estimates – but there is no official reporting. Outside observers and journalists are responsible for us knowing how commonly citizens and those legally present in the US are detained – but again, there is no accounting of that by this massive and secretive government force, much less any apologies or repercussion for mistaken or baseless detentions, which should shame a republic. “Illegal” status is a matter of federal legal definition with many grey-areas and transitive situations (such as application for asylum – an increasingly lengthy process) and our Mad King has acted to try to change by fiat the status of those previously “legal.”

Dolphins (Heroes)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

I live in a city where 12-string guitars are over-represented. Since I’ve only lived in Minneapolis for 50 years, I can’t say for sure why that’s so. Folk-revival pioneers Leadbelly and Pete Seeger, likely the ur-source for the instruments post WWII use, have no direct connection, but by The Sixties™ this powerful but awkward branch of the guitar family had a nexus of players here. The guitar playing other two sides of the Pythagorean Koerner, Ray, and Glover trio played 12-string. Leo Kottke made the beast a virtuoso instrument while working the small clubs and coffeehouses of the Twin Cities. John Denver had fallen in love with a Minnesota girl and played a lot of 12-string (and who can say what is the cause and effect there). By the time I arrived in the Seventies, Ann Reed, Peter Lang, and Papa John Kolstad also played 12-string in small venues. The year my ten-year-old Pontiac rolled into town, a local college student, Steve Tibbetts, was self-recording his first LP featuring 12-string landscapes pebbled with percussion over which roamed howling electric guitar wolves.

At that point I owned my J C Penny’s nylon string guitar and a weird amorphously shaped Japanese electric guitar I’d bought at a flea market and for which I couldn’t yet afford an amp.  Accommodating my new hometown, I soon felt I should get a 12-string guitar. A year or so after arriving I managed to afford a Cortez 12-string acoustic which was sold as a sideline item at the local Musicland record store. My memory was it cost $79. Designed to outwardly look like a “professional” instrument at the lowest cost, it could have been the music equivalent of costume jewelry or a stage prop. As these sorts of things go it wasn’t as bad sounding as modern forum-dwelling guitar aficionados would suspect, and mine had pretty good “action,” reasonable string height to allow easier fretting.

Later in the Seventies I added a DeArmond sound-hole pickup and I played this guitar with the LYL Band, and for the rest of the 20th century. With their double sets of strings, 12-strings sometimes warp and self-destruct under the increased string tension – but cheap and cheerful as the Cortez was, it’s held up, though the top has bellied-up over the years.

I eventually got a better 12-string, but I kept the Cortez around. A few years back I set it up to use Steve Tibbetts stringing variation where most of the octave strings are replaced with unison strings.*

Now let’s jump the month just ending, January 2026. As a writer I can’t paper over the immense mood shift this entails: from oddities about the types of guitars, to lives being mangled by intended government action.

I still feel unable to write fully about my reactions to the many injustices and atrocities that are incurring at the hands of thousands of federal agents that are roaming my city and the rest of Minnesota this winter. The first of the murders this month, the shooting of Renee Good in front of her wife happened on the street just across the alley of my home office and “Studio B.” If I hadn’t been wearing headphones and working on music for this Project I would have heard the gunshots – instead, it was my wife who rushed in to tell me. As of the end of the month, we’ve had a non-fatal shooting and one more murder by the federal agents, and a daily grind of sufferings. I won’t be the one to try to catalog all the careless to cruel things that are happening day after day. It sorrows me, and perhaps you, and at least for now, this information is available elsewhere. Nor will I offer enough praise for the ordinary people in this city who are trying to mitigate that suffering and plead for its ending. I will call out one thing many of them are doing: they’re seeking to be “Observers,” the term that has come to be used for folks who feel called to witness and record with their phones what our own government agents are doing to the people living around us. Think about this for a moment as you read this: these Observers are intending to go to where cruel things are being done by armed bullies who will use their weapons – issued along with pledges from their leadership that they will face no consequences – to rough up, to detain with and without charges, to attack with chemical and “less-lethal” munitions, to in two infamous cases, to kill them. Folks were doing this before Renee Good was killed – and after she was shot, more signed up. After the next murder of Alex Pretti pushed to the ground holding his cell phone camera: more again signed up.

I think of the incredible bravery of the American Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th century, and this is like unto that. But here’s something else I think concerning that role, something I don’t recall being written much about yet. There’s a chance that these observers are going to see armed agents of our government kill someone in front of them, and they’ll be tasked with recording that. The infamous murders of the Sixties’ Civil Rights movement happened in darkness and rural separation, though the corporal brutality of clubs, dogs, and firehoses was done in public and was sometimes filmed.

Along with bravery, that’s an additional heavy burden to take on. And some are now carrying that specific burden. We have memorials to Alex Pretti and Renee Good, but I want to stop and think of those that witnessed their killings, and what they must be carrying in their minds. My mind is once removed, however close to me these things happened, and yet it’s filled with conflicting and intense reactions – but they were there, in that instant as this happened. Dozens of people in my city, some intentional observers, some protesters, some just bystanders, are carrying that as I write this.

So, the name that most often arises in my heart this month after the many insults to justice and mercy isn’t one of the detained or murdered, but is instead, Rebecca Good, Renee Good’s spouse, who was apparently observing ICE action on the broad avenue near her house and mine. When the federal agents came up to their car and began to hassle Renee, Rebecca tries to draw their attention away from her partner. In that moment, I read her actions as saying: detain me, let Renee get away, throw me down onto the ice and snow and get a few punches or sprays of mace into the eyes while you strap cuffs on me. Rebecca can’t get in as Renee puts the car in drive, the doors are locked. On one of the videos you can hear her say “Drive babe,” allowing herself to be left behind with the agents. And then the shots.

You hear her voice in another video, moments later, sitting on the side of that broad road just behind my house, saying that they’ve killed her spouse, and moaning that she was the one that suggested they move to Minneapolis. I should transcribe her exact words, but I can’t bear to watch that video again just for journalist precision tonight.

Another jarring transition I can’t engineer now. In between Renee Good’s murder and Alex Pretti’s, and thinking of Rebecca and other survivors, and of the witnesses, observers, I somehow fell to thinking of a song written by another 12-string guitar player of The Sixties,™ Fred Neil, “The Dolphins.”   Neil’s songwriting was a mixture of earnest and off-hand, an unusual combination. “The Dolphins”  is a somber wail about the cruelty of the world compared to the swimming pods of the famously playful aquatic mammals, and it’s just a handful of words.** Neil’s career was one of those “better known to other musicians” ones, and his song was covered by others back then, particularly those who played the 12-string guitar. Now if we move onto the Seventies – that off-brand extension of The Sixties™ – I’ve always thought that when another songwriter who played a lot of 12-string guitar in The Sixties, David Bowie, had to have been thinking of Neil’s song when, in the midst of his Cold-War-Berlin masterpiece “Heroes,”  he has one of the lovers kissing next to the armed guards around that inland city’s border wall think of dolphins again.

Fred Neil had a rich baritone voice, and David Bowie was a talented singer. I, alas, am mostly singing things here myself, yet I wanted to make a realization of those two songs while thinking of Rebecca Good, and others I didn’t (and still don’t) know how to number and name in this time. That would mean no first-rate vocalist, and I also decided to go primitive on the 12-string guitar, using that old Cortez 12-string. As the song progresses I strummed that 50-year-old box loudly, and I didn’t necessarily want a pretty 12-string with a rich sound.

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*One of the features of the Cortez is a “zero-fret,” a still unusual feature that brings two benefits: it insures optimum string height in the “cowboy chord” first position area for easy playing and allows greater freedom in using different gauge strings at the player’s whim. Conventional 12-strings use a thinner string tuned an octave above the regular string for the low E, A, D, and G strings. Steve Tibbetts (like Leadbelly) instead uses two regular gauge, unison not octave tuned, strings for some of the courses. My Cortez 12-string has unison D and G strings.

**Neil’s choice of the dolphins, however casual it seems in his song, was a serious one. He drifted out of the music business in the Seventies and spent the rest of his life working on a dolphin support/conservation project.

A Minor Bird

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

The recording of this musical version of a short Robert Frost poem somehow was able to slip itself in-between standing watch, comforting, and grieving this month in Minnesota. Increasingly people outside our area are expressing admiration for our fortitude, but inside our local theater of atrocities, I’d say our thoughts and feelings are still a jumble. My aged body has its limits, but I’m trying to support others during this time. Things you might see here? I still find it difficult to integrate these events into the long-ongoing Project.* There’s a great deal of news coverage and analysis being done elsewhere, but during this time you have been spared hundreds of words I’ve written and then not posted, longish things where I sought to add to that. My audience isn’t that large; my remaining skills in prose I’d self-assay as not unique enough to be required. My Parlando Project creative time is constrained both internally by aging and my acute reactions to the present crisis, and externally by limited times when I can use some musical and recording tools.

Yet, somehow, this piece is here today. Does it address the events here this January?** I think it does, at least partially, but first here’s a short account of how it was made.

I’ll skip the details, but the present recording logistics here limits the ways I can record guitars, though guitar is the instrument which I have the most facility with. Electric bass, my “second instrument” is easier. Recording an electric bass by directly plugging into a jack in an audio mixer or interface has long been a best practice for everyone from home recordists to pro studios, and since there are no amp speakers in the chain and a generally inert plank of wood holding the plucked strings, this is near silent in the room and it eliminates microphones capturing unwanted noise. Electric guitar can be recorded the same way, but for some stylistic choices you want the guitar to react to sound coming out of a speaker – and furthermore (for me, anyway) I express things differently when I’m moving air loudly in a room when playing electric guitar. This doesn’t factor into playing bass. So “A Minor Bird”  started out with me working out a computer drum pattern and playing a bass line. I created a chord cycle based on the bass line (the reverse of how I often do it) and used a computer piano to create a MIDI piano roll expressing those chords.*** I then edited that MIDI score to get a part that pleased me. I next hacked playing a Hammond B3 organ part myself with my little plastic keyboard, though mercifully, all you will hear are the best bits. The next track was my singing Robert Frost’s words. Each of these steps could be done in the odd hours I could grab, so the song took form in dribs and drabs over a few days. I had intended to overdub an electric guitar solo in the middle, but that time wasn’t there, which leaves the drums/bass/piano trio grooving alone, which might even be addition by subtraction.

This Frost poem is not one of his better-known ones, though published in his 1923 collection New Hampshire, the book that won his initial Pulitzer Prize. The first thing that struck me about it is how modest and unassuming it is: four couplets long, no exotic words, a vignette with two characters: a bird and the poet/speaker. I would almost say that there is no prerequisite reading or coursework needed to understand the poem, but my next thought was that the situation here, poet and a single bird, might be in conversation with other poetry. One could think of other romantic poems of a poet and birdsong – Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”  for example – but if I was to think of a single poem that Frost is writing his in conversation with, it would be Poe’s “The Raven.”   Both poems are set in the context of the faceted emotions of grief/melancholy/depression. Both have the poet wanting the bird to leave, but despite the shortness and plain language of Frost’s poem, there’s room in his short poem for a volta, a turn of thought. Frost never names the species of bird, but by calling it “a minor bird” in his small poem, he’s also explicitly casting the bird’s song as being in a (sad) minor key. The poem’s conclusion is that the calling of grief and sadness should be included in our consciousness.

vigil 1-24-26

Saturday, after the latest killing of one of the observers who was filming the actions of the Federal troops elsewhere in Minneapolis, other observers in our neighborhood and their families gathered in the below-zero dark on our streetcorner, each of us carrying a candle from our houses.

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The doorknob where I write this has a lanyard with a whistle. It’s to grab, to take outside in the winter cold and to make our minor sound at anything from the incursion into our city that calls us to flock witnesses too. This state in this country, and this composer and plain singer of Frost’s words, have had their griefs this month. We have chosen not to shoo them away – despite the raptor dread encircling our minor birds, we have not silenced the song.

To hear the performance of Robert Frost’s “A Minor Bird”  use the audio player below. No player? Nothing has caused it to withdraw, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog won’t display the player. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*Perhaps I’m an odd duck, but to release art about these events worries part of me that some portion of the artist is seeking to use these largely selfless and unsigned acts of resistance as a platform to promote their work.

I’m not saying you should feel that way! And yes, I am quite aware that conversely some artists and their work have been down-rated, suppressed, and punished due to their art for causes.

My feeling is more akin to the idea that in either case, the thoughts of pros and cons of careerism must be humbled by the everyday bravery and service Minnesotans have shown this month.

My one art-for-cause step so far has been to release alternative Parlando Project voice Dave Moore’s re-casting of Wendell Phillips cry about fighting injustice, “I’m On Fire”  from 2014. Thanks largely to some folks reposting it on BlueSky it’s garnered more than usual listenership.

**Under what name will this month’s resistance be recorded under? “The Battle of Minneapolis” has already been used for a 20th century labor action. I’m fond of wordplay, but “The Mother Whistlers” is too humorous. “The Minnesota Witnessers?” “The ICE Breakers?” “The iPhone Militia Movement?”

***MIDI notation makes-do for this naïve composer who tried to learn musical notation decades ago, but largely passed it by. Something in me loves it is the computer adaptation of the paper piano rolls such as my grandmother’s player piano or maverick composer Conlon Nancarrow used.

I repeat myself when I’m under stress. I repeat myself when I’m under stress.

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

It’s been tough to plan and work around poetry or music this month in Minneapolis.

Every time I write a sentence like that one, I start to compose what I think will be a concise account of why that is – and I find I can’t do that well enough, partly because there so much to say. To try to put down all the things I’m feeling and thinking in this time of daily governmental offenses and stalwart self-less resistance? Impossible – I go the whole gamut, and these instances and reactions don’t wait their turn, queue up to go one at a time: all the emotional and thought-mode flavor combinations rush to be present.

I’m going to assume some of you already have some sense of the constant lying, the retributive violence, the self-congratulatory joy in inflicting pain, and even the sloppy indifference to a lack of competence or good administration.* This operation is like someone took one of our mad and mentally diminished king’s speeches and sought to make them a battle plan: and so the incursion goes on and on, jumping from half-truth to 100, no 200, no 500 percent less truth, never really making a point or achieving an objective, becoming instead an example of how one can, without any checks or accountability, say or do anything (however stupid, cruel, or shameful).

“I must be powerful,” thinks our mad despot and his dukes and vassals – “for I can do something so badly, with so little care, crowing with pride about hurting my own countrymen!”

Those who don’t know this? You’ll need to find out more elsewhere. I urge you to do so. Those that are sure I’m the deluded one? Why are you still reading today? I will be getting back to literary poetry soon if you come here for that.

Yes, I’m tentatively trying to get back into finishing new musical pieces, though events may continue to make that difficult. I do have this for today: another version of the definitely not a topical song “I’m on Fire (and I’ve got mountains of ice to melt)” composed by Parlando alternative voice Dave Moore using some words borrowed from speeches by 19th century American abolitionist Wendell Phillips – but this time instead of Dave’s own voice and piano it’s a solo performance recorded on a cell phone back in 2014, accompanying myself on acoustic guitar. Between these two versions, I gave preference to Dave’s, not just for the justice of having him sing it, but because back when both versions were new, most listeners thought that my performance repeated the chorus too often. Thinking of that now, I’ll adapt William Blake: maybe the only way to know when we’ve said that line about melting mountains of ice enough is to say it too much.

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*What a lousy sentence that is! People being shot, even killed, families separated, reverse Raptured cars with vacated driver’s seats. Doors busted down with battering rams without a warrant. Supreme Court nod-and-a-wink approved detainments where folks are grabbed, thrown down in the snow, handcuffed, taken to a makeshift jail for a day or so, only to be released with no charges or immigration regulations violations. Tear gas, pepper spray, and “less-lethal” weapons used more likely for sport and revenge than necessity – and I still have the officiousness to end my sentence by objecting to these agents poor organization and the incapacity of their leadership to make a detailed, defensible, consistent case for the necessity of their actions.