A Faery Song (We who are old)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

My wife, who I suspect of having some strain of a woodland nymph in her genetic background, is going to take me to her elflin grot  this summer – well, an off-the grid cabin on the North Shore of Lake Superior – close enough. During this stay, she will take supervisory woodland hikes where she will photograph fungi and wildflowers as part of documenting that nature is working up to spec. I, one of those who are old, will stay in the cabin and read poetry, a media format that doesn’t require any wired or wireless energy other than the long sunlight of a northern summer.

I’m unsure if this cabin will be explicitly in a bee-loud glade, but such plans make me think of William Butler Yeats, and here’s an early poem of his, written by a 20-something poet amplifying his Irish heritage amid the still extant 19th century fashion for antique fantasy.

A Faery Song

A chord sheet in case you want to sing it yourself

.

Yeats provides context for his lyric poem, with the note: “Sung by the people of Faery over Diarmuid and Grania, in their bridal sleep under a Cromlech.” Is there a tale alluded to there? Yes, and it’s a major part of Ireland’s bardic Fenian saga, set in the 3rd Century reign of king Cormac. The over-riding hero of these linked tales is a warrior with supernatural powers, Finn McCool,* who is the leader of the king’s army. McCool is not the hero of the Diarmuid and Grania part of story however, but a jealous third-wheel antagonist.

The story of Diarmuid and Grania has many retellings, which vary, but the general outline is that Cormac promises his daughter Grania to the aging great hero and warrior Finn. However, before this marriage can happen, one day in court Grania spies Diarmuid, who is a major young hottie of Lancelotian proportions. Not interested in the old Finn and the entire warlord power structure, she drugs Diarmuid with some enchantment potion causing him to carry her off elopement-style.**

There’s a great deal more to the tale, with a major twist that the noble Diarmund resists letting Grania seduce him sexually because he’s warrior-loyal to his leader Finn McCool; and even though the pursuing McCool, the great warrior who commands a literal “and whose army” wants to apprehend and likely kill him, he leaves a pre-Internet breadcrumb trail in hopes that the eloping couple would be found out.

Unless you’re Robert Bly booking your hero’s journey, there’s enough there that you may be wanting to just get on with Yeats’ short poem, but there’s one more detail in Yeats’ note: what’s a “Cromlech” where the fleeing couple bed down? No, that’s not the Gaelic-transcription-name for a low-powered Google notebook used in schools. It’s an ancient tomb made from piles of stones – no gmail or Google docs available there. The faeries looking over the Eros/Thanatos couple hiding in a tomb could have sung Thomas Campion’s loose translation of Catullus if they couldn’t book Yeats.

The skip-ahead reader, without all that backstory, might hear “A Faery Song”  as a “Forever Young”   blessing of young people by their elders and by the traditions of those elders. That’s a perfectly fine sentiment – and it’s not just some sweet cliché, but one I say is too rarely expressed. It was easy to think that way about the poem as I worked on the music and its recorded performance, being an aged man whose house has several young lovers moving through it. But I think Yeats was, in this context I’ve outlined, offering that ancient  heritage, older than any living. may speak to comfort and guide the young, give them rest from the elders in power, from a world of men (gender and species). Of course, that is made from fantasy, faery fantasy. It is a dream of wishes.

I had one other reason to move this short poem up in my “maybe do this one” pile: I’ve been trying to catch up on blogs I follow after the absorption of National Poetry Month,*** and I came upon this post by a friend of this Project Lesley Wheeler where a dream was recounted:

This weekend I dreamed that my problem joints (knees, hips, an ankle that requires babying) were replaced by faery joints (in the dream, I knew faery was spelled with an e!). They looked like cloudy ice or crystal. I like the idea of being a human-faery cyborg.”

While we cannot fully dream anyone else’s dream, poets and poetry can fancy some of their substance. Reading this I figured this in addition: ever light and gossamer wings sprouting from out our backs, devices that would radiate and transfer the sciatica from too many hours sitting with books and blank pages of paper.

Yes, that’s but a dream – but we carry our bodies around to have dreams and maybe to shelter other’s dreams.

My musical performance of Yeats’ “A Faery Song”  with that “e” is available to hear with the player gadget below. Has any such player dematerialized? No, it’s the Internet, that enclouded scrying crystal that will suppress the audio player when you’re reading this blog some ways – and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

.

*All these names were originally in Gaelic, and how they are transcribed into English an inexact science. I can’t say in detail what choices went into rendering the name as “Finn McCool,” but you must admit it’s a most excellent name.

**Patriarchal gifting of daughters is historically accurate if grating. The quasi-sinister date-drugging gender reversal is hardly a clear symbol of women’s empowerment, and just exactly how sympathetically Grania is portrayed varies with the teller. In a play dramatizing this story that Yeats and George Moore later co-wrote, there was friction between the co-writers based on Yeats wanting a more sympathetic Grania. Another variation of the tale says that Diarmuid had a “love spot” on his forehead that caused any woman who looked at him desire him, and so dual-enchantment situation.

***I’m still weeks behind.

One more Sonny Rollins video clip, the one from Night Music

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Many years ago now, my friend John Brower (the man who was in the Gamelan orchestra I mentioned without naming him earlier this month)  recommended a late night TV show to me, one called somewhat generically Night Music.  John was a font of recommendations, and no ordinary human vessel could pursue everything he would suggest. Years later, years too after John had died young, I followed up on that recommendation when the series became available on YouTube.

Night Music  as a series has some awkwardness. Looking at the series in order you get the sense that they were constantly rejiggering the presentation looking for the broadcast commercial viability they never could reach. I’d also suppose, that to some sensibilities, the attempts to render late 1980’s cool might look artificial and date-stamped – but what it was trying to do was worthwhile. The guiding hand of Hal Willner, the gifted musical eclectic was often apparent. Never more than in the video clip below.

It opens with the entire “God Bless the Child,”  a circa 1960 live performance on Jazz Casual  of Sonny Rollins and his group from the time of The Bridge  LP.  It assumes that there’s audience for that, sans any setup or context. Is that a foolish and unaware choice? Perhaps. Commercially unwise? Certainly. This is the dawn of the Alt-Rock era, and we see a group of dark-suited men on a gray screen playing a Billie Holliday ballad with no singer save for the man with the crooked brass saxophone and the balding man from accounting playing a big hollow-body guitar.

And then Leonard Cohen comes on screen. Cohen was still in his “we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good” era when his dour divine comedy was considered unsittable for release to American audiences by his own record company. And the song Cohen begins is his adaptation of the Jewish Unetanneh Tokef prayer, a meditation on death. Friday night, is it party time! or sabbath? Behind him is a large and mixed bag of great musicians, large enough that I can’t even say who all is playing. I see Robben Ford and members of the now more famous producer and record company head Don Was’ Detroit alt-soul music band Was Not Was, and they proceed to take the song to every kind of church, tabernacle, mosque, temple, ashram, and what not ever made. And the cantor isn’t necessarily Cohen, the song’s composer, whose baritone holds down the central drone of the melody, but this man Sonny Rollins, whose saxophone has become an angel he’s wrestling with in front of our eyes.

There’s about 15 minutes in this clip, completing with the roll the credits release of “I Can’t Turn You Loose”

.

Sonny Rollins would live another 35 years after that, still performing for most of those years. He was capable of doing that kind of playing on any given night on any given song, usually to a modest-sized room, rarely on mass media. When I read last night of the completion of his life, I thought of this performance as the musical expression of the meditation of death, in gratitude and tears.

To A Steam Roller: Marianne Moore comments on art and artificial intelligence?

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I had worked on setting this 1920 poem by Marianne Moore to music for a few weeks, but it wasn’t until a couple of days ago that I had a shock of recognition: the words of this poem could easily be read as a comment on our own era’s confrontation with Artificial Intelligence (“AI”).

Coincidence — or evidence of Moore’s undocumented time travel? Am I starting to sound like the tease-narration on one of those facts-sort-of/conjecture-concupiscent videos? Ring the bell, like and subscribe — wait this isn’t YouTube — instead let’s go to the text of a poem:

to a Steam Roller

And those “chips or rock,” Marianne — are they silicon chips?

.

Once thought of, that AI reaction reading seems solid. An AI picture, a machine-made one, cares not what’s depicted, it’s just an illustration of certain styles and tactics. And since its engine operates largely on probabilities, everything surprising about art is downgraded in the algorithm, crushed down to a level with “how it’s supposed to sound.” What if it got good through continued improvement — or even random error — at seeming original or insightful? That would only be a trick: the machine can’t “mean,” it has no experience felt to be conveyed. A matrix of connections is not metaphysics. Moore’s poem suggests an experiment at the end of the poem: what if a butterfly was to land on this machine? Inconceivable, in that AI is incorporeal software. Would this unlikely scene, this image, suggest a blessing or even something useful for the organically lovely, pollinating butterfly to do? No, to believe such would be vanity, perhaps of the owner, creator, or operator of the AI machine.

If Marianne Moore could travel back to the 18th century as evidenced by her oft-favored tricorn hat, then why couldn’t she go back and forth to the 21st century?

.

It is poetic to believe Moore could have foreseen AI and made her poem in response. In time-bound reality, I think she was more likely commenting on a trope in the emerging Modernism of her time. New machinery, and forces of industrial change give Moore her particular metaphor: the steam-powered road and construction machine.* Futurists contemporary with her would grab at such a thing and see beauty in dynamism, an evaluation extended even to highly destructive and deadly machines. Is there a link in the aether between times? I myself sometimes see echoes of the Italian Futurists in modern TechBros, up to and including a growing fondness for authoritarianism sprouting from libertarianism. Moore’s poem questioned that then – and so we might well estimate she would now.

Musically, this began as an exercise I set for myself to orchestrate something using percussion instruments (both physical and of the virtual instrument** variety). The idea became: what range of sounds could I put together using just that sort of instrument. I had a late friend who played in an Indonesian Gamelan orchestra, a percussion-forward grouping of instruments, though my piece is a naïve one created by someone who hasn’t studied the form. I was also thinking of one of the more unusual record albums of 1968, the sole LP of a group calling itself The United States of America. They used early electronic circuits and a variety of instruments, stretching their expected tonalities. Their eclecticism and emphasis on unconventional musical combinations was a complete market failure – even to the psychedelic and widely stoned acceptancing audiences of the late 60s. That may have had something to do with their eccentric deemphasis on the groove. Other experimentalists of their time: The Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, and even odd-time signature loving Frank Zappa may have asked for expanded ears with their recordings, but that didn’t mean they were abandoning its rhythmic core, or however outré, elements of showmanship in live performance.

You can hear my musical presentation of Marianne Moore’s “To A Steam Roller”  with the audio player below? Wait, has any such player disappeared along with a discernable Rock beat and guitars going widdley-widdley? Well, my musical piece will not be exiled to the cutout bin of some early 1970s store, next to the United States of America record with its album corner disgraced with a hole or corner clipping and a florescent under $2 price sticker. No, you can alternatively find my piece of music with this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

.

 

*Rather than 20th century Modernism, the power source here might also make Moore’s choice a late example of a 19th century style, one sometimes still revived as “Steam Punk.” As early as Dickinson and Whitman, American poets were loving steam trains.

**As I have often taken pains to explain here, virtual instruments (VI) are not AI. They are large digitally recorded sample libraries of actual instruments (or their electronic outgrowths) making their characteristic timbres, pitches, and articulations. I play a little plastic keyboard, or pluck my MIDI-interfaced guitar, call up a mark on a MIDI score, and the note produced is not a silent stroke, inaudible key press, or string vibration but the sound of a gong, clarinet, violin, grand piano, tambura, and even the cranky wire-to-wire patched oscillators and filters of an early Moog synth or the prone to warble tapes of a Mellotron.

I used a real thumb piano, a metal tongue drum, some shakers, and my size 12 foot-taps in today’s piece. The piano and the larger drums, bells, and gongs I played with VI.

The non-percussion instrument you’ll hear is also a VI: the song’s singer is a voice VI (sampled from a real – and the software company assures me – compensated, singer). I sang the notes, but then replaced the sound of my voice with the singer you’ll hear, but I had the vocal line sound an octave higher than my voice. I used the VI vocalist to sound more like the main singer in the United States of America, Dorothy Moskowitz. She’s alive, 85, still making music.

The Silver Penny

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I found this strange and deadly little poem in a collection of Walter de la Mare’s children’s poetry. It’s a literary ballad – a poem referencing that style of folk and popular song while not being explicitly designed to be sung. The subject matter of a doomed voyage was a common one in British folk song,* but de la Mare gives this trope his own touch.

You see, in the field of horror and fantasy literature, de la Mare often elided what was most horrible or fantastic. His best-known poem, “The Listeners”  has nothing but hoofbeats on gravel and a portentous silence to elicit shudders.  “The Silver Penny” is remarkably compressed. A comparable folk song dealing with doomed seafarers might well have a dozen verses, a tolling refrain, and a catalog of detail of the fateful voyage – de la Mare makes do with five stanzas. We know nothing of why the singer and his sister must hire a boat, we only sense their urgency. We know nothing of the man who agrees to take them on his boat, but we sense his motives could be nefarious. The storm that sinks their boat is sketched – though almost lingered over compared to the human characters and their motives – but the usually graceful versifier de la Mare chooses (I think it must be a choice) an uncharacteristically awkward turn of phrase “back to the shore again, sailing they will not.” My guess is that as one reads or listens to this, we are to think for a moment they’ve turned back to dry land at the onset of the storm. The refusal of even a half-rhyme between “boat” and “not” adds more to this sour prosody.**

Silver Penny

Discovering that open string G6 chord form was the genesis for the music I composed to de la Mare’s poem today.

.

The other unusual thing about the poem for modern readers, is that it was, in its time, intended for kids. Of course, the old fairy tales had many a horror and sudden death, but these were ofttimes in service of an easily discerned moral lesson or social shibboleth. Is the lesson here that children shouldn’t hire a boatman without proper vetting and assured possession of a current weather forecast? De la Mare is as subtle about any such didacticism as he is about delineating the horror. My guess is that the poem’s voice is that of the brother of sister Jenny, the owner of the silver penny, and if there’s a lesson he draws from the shipwreck, it’s more at the observation that death and fate laugh at our concerns about what precious thing to offer up to it for safe passage – certainly a dark message for children, but one old people may recognize.

I worry a little recently that I’m doing too many pieces based around acoustic guitar. The composer in me thinks that even though it’s “my instrument” and all that, I still want to include other sonic colors. A peculiar thing about all this acoustic guitar this year is that it has become the most difficult instrument for me to find opportunities to record with, and so when such an opportunity comes about I feel I must take it. I used an old and worn little 00 sized guitar to record my song using de la Mare’s words. At least for this player, when recording a piece that calls for ringing open low strings, the more common larger-bodied acoustic guitars can sound too unbalanced. The audio player to hear the recording is below. What? Do you think the player’s not there because you lack a penny? No, it’s just some ways of reading this blog suppress showing the player gadget, and for you then there’s this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

.

 

 

*One of my favorites in that folk-song genre is the song “The House Carpenter,”  also known as “The Daemon Lover,”  where a runaway wife takes off on a doomed ship only to find that the captain is evil and the ship will sink to a watery Hell. Patriarchy much? Well, in the best performances, the doomed wife’s tale can at least rise to a Faustian tragedy.

**I considered that there could be a long O regional pronunciation that is sort of “boo-t” and “Noo-t” which I could sing to make the rhyme, but my own difficulties with dialect pronunciation and the effect of the non-rhyme along with the awkward word order signaling the disaster won out.

Variations V.

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Poems as we encounter them on the page often try to attract us: “Here’s something I want to say, an idea I want to convey to you” or “I’m playing with language and I think you will enjoy playing with me.” And then there are poems that don’t make much of show of any of that.

I found this unpresupposing poem within a series of short poems by 20th century American poet Conrad Aiken called collectively “Variations.”   As the title suggests, Aiken often seems to have had musical forms in mind, and so it will not be surprising to long-time visitors here that this would attract me – but the poem’s text doesn’t go out of its way to call attention to itself. The “Variations” series repeats motifs of observations of people and of nature,* often with an autumnal cast scattered about and serving as hints of loss or impermanence in things. In this one, the fifth in the sequence, there are no learned or high-cultural allusions. There’s only a trace of heightened “poetic diction,” some light reversal of most-common sentence order along with a subtle metrical cadence and a rhyme scheme that one hardly notices until the final couplet.

This manner, a suite of short observations, was common within early English-language Modernism, and to the genre that was important in its emergence, Imagism. In the years around the first World War Imagism was a short-sharp break with the worn damask and filigree of the expired 19th century. Americans were key figures in propounding it,** and I never tire of calling the remarkable confluence of American poets in England in this era “the Reverse British Invasion” – likening this group of para-WWI expatriates in England to the arrival of musical groups like The Beatles, The Animals, and The Rolling Stones to America fifty years later in the 1960s. Aikin was one of those living in England Americans, along with Pound, Frost, H.D., and Eliot. Largely staying in America, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Amy Lowell pressed Imagism’s ideas of a radical simplicity forward.

So, Aiken was in England then, knew some of this crew, and yet I believe he’s not read or considered much these days. Like Eliot, a life-long friend who he met in college, it seems Aiken moved into a more complex High Modernist style soon enough, won the high-culture awards (including a Pulitzer and the Library of Congress Poet Laureate seat), without ever gaining a wide readership or scholastic recognition as an original stylist.

But we here don’t care about all that, a poem can be performed, well-known or not – and no matter how old, it’s just as new and un-assayed as any at the moment one of our musical pieces start up with it. If we pay attention, fresh attention, to what it’s saying by seeing, what’s there?

variations v

Chord sheet provided in case you want to sing this yourself.

.

 

It’s a poem about presence, loss, and beauty, the loss from its nature but also from action, unremarkable yet made remarkable by the poet’s choice. A fountain – likely an urban fountain, for there are always people around it – sprays water which sunlight catches prismatically. Youth (children and young girls) within this sunny day are accounted. There’s one singular living thing, introduced in that final couplet: a sparrow, an unremarkable, less colorful, species of bird itself – a small creature like this poem. The sparrow, (with demi-angelic?) wings is dutifully washing its feathers, and this diverts and scatters the short-lived jeweled water drops. Everything has been eternally present until the poems final two lines – though we (and the poem’s speaker I believe) know that children, sunny days, and young girls are short spans of individual being. Only at the last does an explicit “vanishing” appear as disappear.

This poem, like many of my favorite Imagist and Early Modernist poems does not work without your attention. While it may not demand it, it won’t work without it. So, I gave it my attention, some music I made, and I offer a performance of it with my rough-hewn voice, acoustic guitar, and celesta that you can hear with the audio player below. No audio gadget? Has some wing diverted it? No, some ways of reading this blog won’t show the player, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

.

 

 

*In Aiken’s poetic series’ repeated play of shadow, light, and contrast playing on leaves, trees, water, and reflective surfaces I was personally reminded of the lo-res urban photos often featured on the Yip Abides blog, which I’ve enjoyed for years.

**F. S. Flint, a native, working-class Londoner, was also important. A key theorist, T. E. Hulme was British-born as well, but Hulme credited a stint working in Canada as helping form his poetic outlook. Irish writers were sometimes allies: Yeats, Joyce, and a personal favorite Joseph (not-the-Power-of-Myth-guy) Campbell.

Langston Hughes “Drum” for Poem In Your Pocket Day and Jazz Day

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today is the last day of U.S. National Poetry Month which has been given the additional observance of “Poem in Your Pocket Day” where poetry lovers are asked to carry and share a poem. Today is also International Jazz Day – and so I’ve chosen to share this poem by Langston Hughes, the pioneering Jazz poet. “Drum”   reminds all of us that the rhythm of life asks us to share our heartbeat, share our light, carry with our bodies the dancing words, and so with them, briefly shine.

I’ve written upwards of 20,000 words here this month, composed and recorded 13 new musical pieces presenting poets well-known and largely forgotten, all to celebrate the human sounds and experiences bound up on pages of books. Today is a day to celebrate taking a book off the shelf and giving a page within it your breath. Even if you just share it with yourself, out of loneliness, shyness, or embarrassment of pretension, I urge you to do so.

Poem In Your Pocket Day 2026

I suppose we to carry recorded Jazz in our pockets too, inside smartphones, even if a bass or a saxophone won’t fit.

.

Music too is about expression – all music is – but Jazz is about American expression, expressing our particular place, a land taken from its natives and largely peopled with others taken or driven or fleeing here. What a strange place it is – yet and beside this history, we are filled with wonders, the freedom even of theft and exile, leavened with love of the variousness of all the ourselves found here. Jazz is a music residents here invented to express this, and Langton Hughes was early and important for recognizing and recording the experience of all these things.

To express “Drum”  I created a somewhat jazzy quartet track by track, limited by my lack of deep skills in that musical form, in order to play the underlying structure of the piece. Over and over this week, I tried to add saxophone and trumpet expressing more of the human condition over this music, and each time I failed to produce anything worthwhile, perhaps because I don’t understand well enough how to articulate those instruments voices – or it could be the virtual instruments I play with MIDI guitar or my little plastic keyboard are resistant to Jazz articulations. In the end I left it with the guitar voices I had already recorded, hoping they’ll suffice. Reflecting the dual nature of today’s observances, there’s one minute of music to begin, and then one minute of my performance of Hughes’ poem.

Gratitude to Langston Hughes for giving us his expression in words we can take with us. Thanks to all the poets, musicians, readers, and listeners who stayed with me on this journey this month. Wishing you all a wonderful spring or fall depending on your planetary hemisphere or position in life, or any such afterlife.

To hear my recording of “Drum,”  use the audio player most of you will see below. No player?  This highlighted link is an alternative which will open a new tab in your web browser with its own audio player.

.

Lonesome Water

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I hope you’ve been enjoying the bountiful crop of new musical pieces presented here this National Poetry Month.* Each of the dozen I’ve presented were based on poems found in Louis Untermeyer’s between-the-wars literary anthology Modern American Poetry.  Here’s another of the poets that Untermeyer noted then, but that time has forgotten: a Pennsylvania school-teacher named Roy Helton.**

This won’t be a long post today: there’s not much easily accessible information about Helton. Combining Untermeyer’s modest introduction of him in his anthology and the absence of much else surviving online even makes me wonder how Helton came to be included in the anthology. Others in the “haven’t heard of” class I’ve already presented this month seemed to be substantial poets in their era – prize winners or prominent in other ways – but Helton has only a handful of collections to be noted, and there’s a passing mention that he had things published in Atlantic Monthly magazine.***

One “dog that hasn’t barked” I see is that he attended the University of Pennsylvania and graduated there in 1908. He may well then have overlapped the early-20th century presence there of poets H.D., William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and maybe even Ezra Pound. Did one of them recommend Helton? Another possible vector: while I have no information on Helton’s politics, there’s the possibility that he may have had lefty connections in circles that overlapped Untermeyer or someone else.

What’s remarkable about the small amount of his poetry that I’ve seen? Today’s piece “Lonesome Water”  impresses me when seen on the pages of Untermeyer’s anthology as a folk-song lyric. Again, no evidence, but it’s difficult to take in the words of it and not imagine that Helton didn’t sing it.**** Assuming one is OK with the dialect, it’s an attractive piece melding herb-doctor mysticism with plaintive rural hermitage. Untermeyer says Helton spent time in Kentucky and North Carolina, but given that he seems to have been based occupationally in Philadelphia the choice of writing in Appalachian mountain dialect seems to be a poetic diction (or folklorist) choice as deliberate as Hart Crane’s King James Version portrait from last time.

Lonesome Water

Some dialect vocabulary here challenges me. “Sang” is ginseng. Is “cliv” a regional pronunciation of cliff?

.

Well, we don’t know if Helton sang, but the recording below says I sang it, best I could, to some music I had to supply to make that happen. I usually have trouble performing accents and dialect, but this one caused me fewer issues – maybe the spirit of Tennessee ancestor Susan Partain helped me out? Besides guitar, the other instrument I played on this track is the distinctive Appalachian regional instrument, the mountain dulcimer. You should be able to hear my performance with the audio player gadget below. Huh? Wasn’t some plant-enchantment hasn’t made that audio player invisible, you’re just are reading this in a manner that won’t show it. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

.

 

*I also worry I may have oversaturated even the huge and avid market for rough-voiced singers doing presentations of literary poetry. It could have been even more bountiful, or overwhelming here, but #NPM2026 is coming to a close and I think I’ll only get one more musical presentation of a literary poem out by tomorrow – but I hope that’ll be a good one: a lesser-known Langston Hughes poem for Poem in Your Pocket Day. Three or four other pieces from Untermeyer’s anthology remain in various states of completion, and they may appear later this year.

**Helton taught at the Pennsylvania Friends Central School, a K-12 institution. I don’t have info on what he taught at that school. Imagist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) attended this school, but that would have been before Helton’s time as a teacher.

***I can find nothing online searching at the Atlantic’s site, or generally, as to what kinds of things Helton published in that magazine. One short piece of light verse is quoted redundantly in the stub-entries that turn up in most web searches, something which may have been printed in the Atlantic: “Oaks are the true conservatives;/They hold old leaves till summer gives/A green exchange.”

****In case you wonder, the folk-song collector/singer/poet was a thing by the between-world-wars era. Carl Sandburg blazed that trail. Foundational creative writing professor and poet Edwin Ford Piper was another (and he supplied testimony that Robert Frost could be coaxed into singing a rowdy sea-shanty).

A note in the unreleased “talk” section of Helton’s Wikipedia stub says that he played Walt Whitman on stage in 1927, so one cite of performing.

Of course, the “literary ballad” has a long page-poetry tradition too. When the dialect or setting is some misty British Isles locale, Celtic fairyland, or ancient days it’s easier to accept its high culture bonafides. Helton’s narrator is an American lower-class contemporary and lacks any such exotic cache. Myself, I find poetry in this poem, but in American academic culture it must have been a harder lift to romanticize a speaker sounding like Pa Kettle or Jed Clampett.

Hart Crane’s “Hurricane”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

One of the things I liked about the early English language Modernists when I began to examine their pioneering works was their clean unshowy language. While they sometimes slipped into colloquialisms (Sandburg, Langston Hughes) their time and place was close enough to my own that I never felt they were trying to talk over my head and state of learning, even if the things they were portraying were extraordinary or profound, and even if they might choose to use inflection and inference to portray a great deal “off screen” from the frame of their poem. Poetry tends to remind itself to do something like that every so often. I can still remember reading Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and agreeing quite readily with his charge to poets of his time to write using the language of ordinary people.

But then too, Poets are always falling back into “poetic diction,” that uncontemporary and artificial language that signals what is being written is a poem,  you know, real art  asking you to pay special attention. The reasons for this are several. First, of it’s fun to play dress up – fun to wear crowns, put on capes and formal ball gowns, or try on suits of shining armor. We already have slipped from the pitch and timbre of ordinary speech when we are moved to sing, and when words want to dance, we don’t ask them to settle down and walk straight. Those are innocent, even childlike, reasons, but of course there are others that can be in the mix for those choices. One could make the choice as a poet hoping for an eternal audience, believing that one must speak in the language of many ages and epochs to help stake out that claim. Or there can be elements of simple insecurity: these words, that antique cast of phrase, will show that I’m not ordinary and my works are not either.

Young poets are prone to the latter, sometimes thinking their verse must sound like some old poem anachronistically written to sound like a poem and nothing else, to demonstrate that they have risen to poetry. Old poets can sometimes speak extraordinarily plainly. Perhaps they’ve worn all the costumes, engaged in all the playtimes, and have no future to gain with pretense.

Today’s poem, as are all of the poems this month, is from the pages of Louis Untermeyer’s between-the-wars “Modern American Poetry”  anthology, and is by a poet that never got to be an old poet, Hart Crane, who died at age 32.* A man who spent time in the tropics, Crane writes here about one of that region’s storms, where winds whip waves and rain until the two are one, blowing down and inundating nature and man’s constructions. Here’s a link to the full text of “The Hurricane.”  Or, here’s the text of the poem and an interesting discussion of it and Hart Crane by Allen Ginsberg.

Hart Crane's Death reported in the NYT

Things modern will soon seem quaint. As terrible as the news conveyed in this circumspect newspaper report reads to me today, with it’s sea voyage delays, creaky “wireless,” and a “Captain Blackadder,” it seems of another age. The father mentioned had disowned Hart Crane, and that family wealth involved was based on a type of candy: the round hole-in-the-middle Lifesavers.

.

Had he witnessed one or more hurricanes in his young life in the early 20th century? I don’t know any details, but he doesn’t write his poem as if he’s seeing Model T Fords floating down streets as asphalt shingles are scaled off roofs and telephone and power wires play double-Dutch in flooded ditches. Nope. Crane’s poem is written in language made up of parts Anglo-Saxon epithets and alliteration, parts Marlowvian bombast. Why? I don’t know, but his poem is fun to read, even when my vocabulary’s pride is bruised by “levin-lathered” and “gambade.”*

I performed Hart’s “The Hurricane”   as spoken word backed by a rock quintet, two cross-current electric guitars, pelting piano chords with the drum sets levin-gambade, and an electric bass undertow. You can hear that performance with the audio player gadget below. No audio player? It hasn’t been erased by a storm, it’s just that some ways of reading this poem won’t show the player, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

.

*Reading about Crane’s life this week I’m both sad and exasperated, and this Monday is the 94th anniversary of his throwing himself off a boat sailing from Mexico. There’s plenty of reasons for his inability to find his place in the world: a dysfunctional family, society’s lack of acceptance of his sexuality, likely bipolar depression, the innate difficulty of establishing a writing career, alcoholism; but reading accounts from folks who tried to help him he seems quite a handful. I’m probably being uncharitable – the storms inside Hart Crane would take more than this poem to describe.

**Levin is a word for lightning, something I didn’t know. I assumed gambade might be a variation of gambol, which is pretty much correct, a leap – and like Parlando, I think I might have run into it as description of a musical articulation, as used here describing thunder.

50 Thoughts on 900 Parlando Project Audio Pieces

~ Frank Hudson ~ 6 Comments
  1. I never imagined I’d complete this many pieces. My original thought was I’d do some impressive number – like maybe, oh, I don’t know, A Hundred!
  2. Before the first piece was published, I had around 10 or 20 Parlando Project candidate pieces already recorded that I thought I’d keep on hand for any dry spells as I worked on new ones. Most of them eventually got posted, a few didn’t – usually because of poor recording, performance quality, or flagrant copyright concerns.
  3. After the initial few months, I could see myself really getting into a groove with making these audio pieces, and I figured I could give myself a stretch goal, like maybe Two Hundred!
  4. As things progressed there were periods over the early years when I was doing a steady at-least-two pieces a week. That meant that I was essentially researching, composing, recording, and writing the blog posts about the pieces full time.
  5. I had ample quiet time for thinking and recording. My child was in school, my wife worked full-time or nearly so. I miss those years. If I blew off a day and played hooky from thinking about composing or recording, I knew there’d be a certain day, real soon, when I could pick it up again.
  6. Working at that level of production had me feeling like someone who learns they can run marathons or ride a bicycle century – I didn’t know I could do that, and then suddenly from doing it: knowing that I can do that!
  7. Does rapid production reduce quality? Yes, it can, but not necessarily as much as you might think. My honest guess is that unless I had musicians on call, professional audio production equipment, and experienced audio engineers, that the best of what I produced in a few days turn-around was as good as what I could have done with a few weeks work (or more) on one piece.
  8. On the other hand, some pieces failed, but I wasn’t able to realize how badly they’d failed until after I’d released them. So far, I’ve kept everything available anyway.
  9. And can one have a third hand? There are pieces that I thought were just marginally good enough to release that I now think are some of my best.
  10. Are there a lot of never released pieces? Not as many as one might think. Some just never work when I try to think of how to present them in performance, others fail manifestly at the recording stage when my limitations can’t be mitigated.
  11. Earlier in the run of the Project the LYL Band with Dave Moore as the alternative composer, voice and keyboardist, was recording at least every month, sometimes every week. LYL has always worked rough and quick – lots of first takes, hang on for the ride – producing some outright musical trainwrecks. I used some of the better takes, but not most. My thinking back then: the LYL material was most often songs, and the lyrics weren’t “literary poetry” enough.
  12. One of the LYL Band’s biggest influences was The Fugs, a band of East Village NYC poets who decided to form a band despite not having sweet voices or any musical pedigree whatsoever. Besides their own poetry repurposed as song lyrics, they frequently performed other poets’ work. Warning, the Fugs lyrics are often flagrantly sex-positive and Not-Work-Safe.
  13. Dave Moore and I have both written poetry since we were teenagers, and songs with our own lyrics since the Seventies. Dave’s lyrics were used extensively by a pioneering Twin Cities new wave/punk/indie band Fine Art. We don’t use other people’s words out of desperation, but out of a desire to illuminate other poets.
  14. Do I start with the words or the music? As one might well think, it almost always starts with the words, but I like changing that up. I always have a few musical pieces that stand by waiting for me to see or seek out a set of words to use with them.
  15. My solo recording focus, lasting for around a decade before the Parlando Project, was instrumental music with no words at all. I like music without vocals as a listener quite a bit, and since I realized my voice was not attractive to many listeners, not having vocals in the music I made public removed that worry for me.
  16. The Parlando Project eventually led me to use my singing voice more. I still worry about my lack of skill offending listeners, but I feel my singing has moved from mostly terrible to mostly just not very good. Really, there’s a palpable improvement there.
  17. I’m always puzzled by the question “What sort of music do you like?” Am I supposed to have an answer? Is everyone supposed to like one type of music?
  18. The Parlando Project has made me much more appreciative of poets whose words seem to ask to be sung: shorter Frost poems, Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale, William Butler Yeats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Joseph Campbell.
  19. Every time I mention Irish poet Joseph Campbell I feel I have to add “Not the Power of Myth guy.” That’s tiring.
  20. Some might assume that “Free Verse” makes things harder to set to music. I haven’t found that so. Instead, my experience has been that Carl Sandburg, Fenton Johnson, T. S. Eliot, or Langston Hughes are easier to combine with music than many metrical/rhyming poets. Some poets are musical, and others just aren’t. It has less to do with how regularly it scans.
  21. I can’t think of myself as a musician, because I think a musician has to have at least a minimal set of largely repeatable skills. I don’t. I’ve played guitar for decades and yet there are very basic skills on that instrument that I don’t think I could day to day assure someone I could demonstrate.
  22. Every time I pick up an instrument to play it, or record a part, I’m thinking “How can I fake what a real musician would do in order to make a sound that works here.” I don’t recommend that approach, but it’s what I do.
  23. Sometimes I fail to imitate something a real musician would play. Those can be some of my favorite tracks – or also, things you can be glad I didn’t make public.
  24. When I first was considering the Parlando Project I thought it’d be good to have various musicians contribute to the recordings. As it turned out, this rarely happened, other than Dave Moore’s crucial contributions. Whenever I ask myself if I can change things to allow that, I wonder how many musicians would want to record parts for this Project without pay, with little rehearsal – and now, how difficult it would be to reliably arrange times and studio space to allow those contributions.
  25. From my youth, one of my models was poet and artist William Blake. Blake was also a trained pressman and engraver, and so was able to produce his illuminated books from thoughts and visions to poems and drawings to pages through his own stubborn and dedicated efforts. I remind myself of Blake whenever I consider the different roles I need to play as composer, arranger, musician, producer, engineer, essayist, promoter. There’s also this: there are accounts Blake sang his poems – and the Fugs, Patti Smith, and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg have all recorded Blake poems, as has the LYL Band and the Parlando Project.
  26. I continue to try to make plain that I call myself a naïve composer. Alas, “composer” sounds grander than musician, and many composers are widely knowledgeable in music theory, score notation, and the historic repertoire, while I’m not. I still think it’s the best description of what I do. If I’m “faking” playing string parts or an oboe with my MIDI guitar, or triggering chords or arpeggios with my little plastic keyboard, I’m just doing the best I can to realize the musical aims in my head. That I edit on a MIDI piano roll instead of a musical staff is personal expediency.
  27. I worry that as a lower-talent, knowledge, and skills musician and composer I might do more than embarrass myself in front of those that are beyond that level, and that my persistence in doing what I do will be seen as ignorant pretense or perhaps a case of “stolen valor.” The only thing I can say to them is that it’s not ignorance on my part, I’m fully aware of what they have worked to be able to do, compared to what I do. That I have that knowledge could make what I do even worse to them, but still, I’m driven to do it.
  28. Even when it was contemporary, a great many people thought beatniks reading poetry while some vague sense of Jazz wafted around in the background was corny and affected. Who am I to say, but I kind of like it.
  29. Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s a professional voice talent from Chicago, Ken Nordine, made LPs reading his own free-associative spoken word pieces with cocktail Jazz backing – he called it “Word Jazz.” A few people thought that cool. I was one of them. Did it help that he was a practiced voice talent? Did it hurt that the Jazz was often a little too polite?
  30. More than a decade later an expatriate Chicagoan Laurie Anderson Zen-deadpanned in front of music of her own device. A few people thought that was cool. I was one of them. I would sometimes get a strange sense of déjà vu when I’d hear one of her performances, and then in an interview she eventually let on that Ken Nordine (alongside William Burroughs and eventual husband Lou Reed) was one of her influences – and Laurie Anderson is one of mine.
  31. Patti Smith’s first LP, Horses, is rightfully listed as a landmark. Oddly, there are few attempts at using and expanding that record’s style. I’ve always wished I could do that, and sometimes I try. Worth trying.
  32. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always been distrustful somehow of Slam Poetry. Maybe, however much it is “just for grins,” I distrust the audience competition aspect of it? I’ll just leave it by saying I also distrust my distrust.
  33. I’m also not entirely sure why I avoid overtly rapping to the beat. I was elated when the first hip-hop records were released. Somewhere on a cassette tape there’s evidence of me rapping in the early ‘80s. Yes, there are the issues of cultural appropriation, and then too of the associations (however narrow-focused and ignorant of the form’s range and reasons) with violence, bling, and misogyny – it’s also likely that I’m just bad at it. The hip-hop rapid flow thing is quite the skill, though I don’t value it nearly as much as others, and that’s my sour grapes on that. I should probably listen to more down-tempo variations though.
  34. Gil Scott-Heron is widely noted as a progenitor of hip hop. I always admired his records and used some of his and Brian Jackson’s ideas from those records to guide me.
  35. Do you ever think that you need to hold back ideas until they can get their best realization? Or that if you use an idea, your store of ideas is depleted by one, and so your larder will soon be empty? Doing this Project seems to say (that at least for me) you instead get more ideas when you use one, and that held-back ideas more often get lost unused than saved for the best time.
  36. A problem I haven’t figured out what to do about: if you release too much stuff too fast there’s a high risk of wearing-out whatever audience you have or develop.
  37. A problem I think I’m dealing with: I’m an old man, and I can’t say when my body will disable me in some crucial way, or the date Emily Dickinson’s carriage driver will take me away in my tulle PJs. So, if I’m going to get out what I want to express, there’s no waiting for a better time, or choosing a more deliberative release schedule. My apologies to my audience if I weary them.
  38. The more I work at this Project, the less I listen to music. After spending some hours composing, recording, mixing; listening to music is not how I usually wind down. This troubles me, as listening to music was, for much of my life, one of my chief pleasures. Perhaps I will have a “retirement” interval from this Project when I’ll listen again to music often after not having the energy or need to be constantly making it myself. Then, it’s also possible the end of my life will be more abrupt, or that listening to others making music, when I cannot, will vex my future self.
  39. I’m less constrained (other than by the limits of waking hours in a day) from reading poetry outside of the texts I work with on this Project, though I wouldn’t call myself exceptionally well-read in poetry.
  40. Because my Project prefers to keep on the good side of clear public domain status for the words it uses, my poetry reading has been focused on the decade or two just over the line into U.S. public domain status. I find I enjoy this. A friend of the blog wrote her own blog for some years called “My Life 100 Years Ago.” While working, I often feel like I’m vacationing in the last decade to be called “The Twenties.”
  41. I sometimes wish for a longer-life because I’d like to delve more deeply into the 1930s-1950 era. Alas, that’s not a realistic expectation.
  42. I’ve started to bend a little on PD status, telling myself that I’m totally non-revenue and educative. “Fair use” is a fuzzy legal conception, but I assume I have a case for exception there.
  43. For much of the early years of this Project I wrote my posts here using my child as the imagined audience. This means that in the earliest years I would be writing for their soon-to-be future-self, but in the middle years of the project, I wrote for a curious middle-schooler, and then for a high-school student.
  44. As far as I know, they’ve never read any of this Project. I know they’ve written music and poetry themselves. They’ve never shared it with me, and I haven’t asked to hear it. I think they’d feel awkward doing that.
  45. I’ve always expected a small audience for the Parlando Project. Literary poetry is a tiny part of contemporary American culture; and independently made and distributed music with a singer whose qualities are decidedly of a subjective value is a minority interest as well. Combining these two things may decrease rather than increase the potential audience.
  46. I’m always wishing for a larger smaller audience. Every day hundreds reach out to hit one of the posts here and dozens listen to the audio pieces. By Internet standards this is miniscule for popular music or successful blog topics, but likely far from the bottom if one puts it in the context of poetry or non-commercial music offerings online. But because of the considerable (if joyfully entered into) effort involved on my part, I keep hoping for more.
  47. I don’t do enough self-promotion, and I don’t especially care to do the self-generated promotion I eventually do. I worry that I’m bothering people, even driving them away when I do it. I expect that others in poetry or indie music that are self-promoting may feel similarly, yet I sometimes turn away from rampant self-promotion when done by others – who , like me, have no choice but to attempt it dutifully. The only respite I have from this feeling is when I remember: for the most part I’m promoting other folks’ words and trying to explore the experience of a variety of poetry.
  48. Lately, I often include simple chord sheets for the Parlando Project musical settings. I took this idea from mid-century “folk scare” publications like Sing Out and Broadside which encouraged reading guitarists and banjo pickers to perform the songs themselves that those magazines printed in each issue. Given the limits of my skills, it’s my hope that others could perform one or more of those songs and do better with them than I could.
  49. I’ve considered collecting some of my better Parlando Project recordings as one or more albums that would appear on streaming services or through digital distribution (such as Bandcamp). I wouldn’t expect them to find a wide audience, but they might find a few more ears in such places. One problem with doing that: there doesn’t seem to be a way to do this without “risking” revenue, which however small would add the overhead of running a small business, something that I personally cannot bear to undertake.
  50. I’m currently expecting to continue to produce new Parlando Project pieces more-or-less in the same way I have for ten years here. Having reached 900, the obvious next objective is an even 1,000. That might take upwards of two years, and so that assumes good health and opportunity that are not a given. For those that read what I write today or other days, or listen to the Parlando Project musical pieces: I hope you’ve enjoyed some of them, and have maybe found a new poet, poem, or form of musical expression to consider. I am so grateful for your time and attention.

 

Here’s something else I may do more of: video content. While that adds work and another needed skill-set, it might help in creating that “larger small” audience.

 

.