It’s time for our quarterly look back at the pieces here the got the most listens and likes. We start today with the numbers 10 through 8. Each bolded listing as we count down from 10 to 1 is a link to the original post where I first discussed my encounter with the text used, and those original posts will also include the text of the poem used or a link to it.

10. I Am Laughing in the Dark Underground by Frank Hudson  The Parlando Project has from the beginning aimed to put other folks words to music we compose and play. Dave and I are both writers, so I could predominantly present work we wrote the words for here — but I find the encounter with other people’s words interesting for myself, and I hope it adds variety for you the reader and listener. Therefore, it was with some hesitation that I posted this self-written piece for the blog’s 5^th Anniversary last month.

You can click on the bolded title above to read what I wrote about writing the words then, but in summary, this text came largely from my interrogating one of those vivid dreams that happen around dawn when you’re half waking and half still asleep. To hear the musical piece, you can use this highlighted hyperlink, or a player gadget that will appear below for some of you.

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9. They’re Not the Grateful Dead by Dave Moore  By chance the next piece as we count down to number 1 is by alternate Parlando Project voice and frequent keyboard-contributing musician Dave Moore, though I wrote the music, sing it, and contributed one verse.*  This one mentions a series of  dead-too-soon musicians well-to-little-known to folks around our age. Anyone remember that sacrament to saccharine paean “If There’s a Rock and Roll Heaven (you know they’ve got a hell of a band)?   Well, this is Dave taking a skeptical look at that idea.

There’s a player device that some of you will see to hear Dave’s song as I performed it, and if you don’t see that, this highlighted hyperlink is another way.

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“By Moonlight A Goose Can Be a Swan”  a late summer photo by Heidi Randen

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8. August by Helen Hunt Jackson  Speaking of deceased musicians, recent new member of the choir invisible Michael Chapman had a musical life that ran with some marvelously miscellaneous combinations. Early in his career a singer/keyboard player wanted him to join his backing band. Chapman would recount that he figured his own front-man career was launching just fine, and said no thanks. The keyboard guy? Elton John. Chapman was based out of Leeds in England then, and he wanted another electric guitar in his band. He picked up just such a fellow from Hull who had to be lured away from his band for Chapman’s. That guy’s name was Mick Ronson. Having been pried away from one band, Ronson soon left Chapman’s group for another, becoming the notable guitarist and arranger for David Bowie’s breakthrough Spiders From Mars band.

Musicians love those kind of stories, because it’s assumed that many will have “close, but missed it” tales of successful opportunities slipping from their grasp. How about writers? I give you Helen Hunt Jackson. Jackson was a grade school classmate of one Emily Dickinson. Like Dickinson she connected with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the late-period Transcendentalist critic, activist, and editor. Higginson, you may remember, later gets his knocks from history for not fully recognizing and promoting Dickinson’s unorthodox verse, though after Dickinson’s death he arranged and helped edit the publication of collections of Dickinson’s work that started Dickinson’s career posthumously.

Jackson on the other hand ardently pushed Dickinson to publish while she lived, and for that effort she got little support from the living Emily.

I first ran into Jackson around the same time I watched the often satirical Wild Nights with Emily  movie a few years ago. That mixed-bag film portrayed Higginson as a nincompoop and Jackson as a simpering all-to-Victorian fustian. I’ve read a lot of bad 19^th century verse looking for stuff to use here** so I figured it worth the risk to look at some of Jackson’s own poetry.

No, it’s not Modernist before it’s time in the same way that Dickinson’s can sometimes strike you, but it can be more vivid and effective than many of her contemporaries with higher surviving profiles, and this sonnet “August”  is a fine example of that. Here’s the highlighted hyperlink to play my performance,  and some will see a player below that can do that too.

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*Dave, a keyboard player, led off his song with Nicky Hopkins, who’s one of the lesser-knowns in the grouping. As a bass player I couldn’t let that role in the song’s “catacosmic” band go unfilled, and so I added the Jaco Pastorius verse.

**My general read on the later 19^th century was that the Modernists were correct in rejecting what poetry had come to by the beginning of the 20^th century. Stale metaphor, simple messages, perfunctory expression, hard-walled gotta make my rhyme and meter exact verse — there was good reason to make it new.