Month: November 2023

Lambing (Night-Born Lambs)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Over the years I’ve presented a fair number of poems by authors well-known for their prose work — James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Emily Brontë, D. H. Lawrence, and so on — but as I prepared today’s set of words for performance I thought of something I told its author, poet Kevin FitzPatrick, more than once: “If I came upon the matter of this poem, I’d probably choose to make it into a short story instead of a poem.”

That may sound like a harsh judgement. When I said this once, Kevin’s friend Ethna McKiernan once torted back at me sharply “It’s a narrative poem!”

Yes, I know that form. I may be personally more invested in the lyric poem’s momentary compression, but narrative is a perfectly valid approach. And if you look carefully at how Kevin writes, he subtly weaves into his work touches that are poetic extensions to efficient prose storytelling. I tried to explain to Ethna that I had a second part to my statement about Kevin’s poems like “Lambing,”  “…but you make it work when you make that your choice.”

This poem’s background is implied in small details within it, and Kevin FitzPatrick’s last collection strung together a series of poems portraying this part of his biography: in later middle-age Kevin’s life-partner Tina decided she wanted to run a small but diversified farm, and each weekend, Kevin would leave from his office job in the Twin Cities to this rural farm across the border in Wisconsin. Kevin was thoroughly a city boy, so many of the poems let us use his unaccustomed eyes to pay attention to the rural culture and tasks of this farm. One trait the poems often touch on: the web of interdependence and cooperation between the community of farmers and country dwellers around Tina’s farm. In “Lambing”  we meet Jim and Rose, neighbors and the former owners of Tina’s farm who are called to bring their knowledge to the incidents of the poem.

Kevin worked hard at keeping his narratives tight yet clear. Parlando alternate voice Dave Moore and I would give him notes, which Kevin was always gracious in receiving, and his solutions (not always ours) to problems we might note nearly always improved the poems.*  Unlike more elusive and allusive poetry I won’t have to act the village explainer to assist new readers to understand what’s going on in “Lambing.”

Instead, I’d like to point out that this isn’t just prose with more line-breaks. While not exactly a Robert-Frost-style blank verse poem, the Iambs with the lambs** put subtle music to this story. The sound of lines like “Their lantern lit up the shelter late” would in a lyric poem call attention to their sound, so don’t let the flow of the story overlook them if you want to pay attention to how this poem might work its way. And while not a compressed Imagist poem, the small details speak to that kind of poetic impact: Rose’s green dress shoes, the just-born lamb “like something discarded,” the nursing lambkin’s tail twirling like a gauge’s needle gone wacky.

Lambing illustration

Unintended in FitzPatrick’s spring-set poem, but this time of year I think manger/crèche.

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Kevin FitzPatrick’s final collection, titled Still Living in Town,  contains more poems about his farm experience, and other things as well. It’s a fine, fine book, and its poems are as carefully straightforward as today’s example. Here’s a link to more information on his poetry and a place to buy this book.

I performed Kevin’s “Lambing”  today with a piano, drums, and keyboard bass musical backing. At the end of the poem performance there’s a short, less than two-minute, purely instrumental piece for synthesizer and arco bass which I call “Night-Born Lambs”  that was inspired by the experience of working on the performance of this poem, and from thoughts of Kevin. You can hear this pairing with the audio player gadget you should see below. What if you don’t see that player?  This highlighted link is a backup, and it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I forget who said it, but I always remember this rule-of-thumb: when someone points out an issue with a draft you submit for notes: “They are usually correct in seeing something is a problem, but that doesn’t mean that their suggested solutions are also correct.”

**Type-nerd note: depending on what typeface you read this with, that sentence could seem a puzzling typographic tautology.

Thanksgivings

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’d hoped to have some more new musical pieces ready this month, but as I’ve reached the eve of the American Thanksgiving holiday I thought I’d mention a previous Parlando Project piece that has gotten attention this month as people on the Internet look for poetry about that holiday.

The post, the one people seek, presents this little marvel from Emily Dickinson:

One day is there of the series
Termed “Thanksgiving Day”
Celebrated part at table
Part in memory —
Neither Ancestor nor Urchin
I review the Play —
Seems it to my Hooded thinking
Reflex Holiday
Had There been no sharp subtraction
From the early Sum —
Not an acre or a Caption
Where was once a Room
Not a mention whose small Pebble
Wrinkled any Sea,
Unto such, were such Assembly,
‘Twere “Thanksgiving day” —

Though silent on the page, I can hear Dickinson’s voice start out examining this holiday at arm’s length. It has claims to be a historical commemoration (the landing of English colonialists in her home state of Massachusetts in 1620) but its observance, then as well as now, is basically a big meal, often with extended family in attendance. Many folks reading this today recognize or remember being in that in-between state of age at a Thanksgiving gathering, no longer a child, but not one of the family elders — neither urchin nor ancestor. Similarly, the Thanksgiving holiday in Dickinson’s time was of unclear seniority: it claimed to represent those 17th century English settlers and their harvest feast, yet the promotion of a U.S. holiday that became the one we celebrate now was a new movement of the mid-19th century.

Dickinson at first reviews it as if a pageant, and then as she starts to become a little harder to follow, with “Hooded thinking.” My guess is she’s meditating on it as if a monk or a nun wearing a habit. Her resulting take: “Reflex Holiday.” Fair — most holidays, most of the time, have elements of reflex: they are set celebrations, dates on a calendar. Sincere thanks-giving requires no excuse or appointment. If Dickinson had ended there, we’d have a poem in a predominate style of our age: a sharing of an observation from one sensibility to any and all, not unlike an Internet post.

Thanksgivings with ghosts
“Celebrated part at table/Part in memory —”

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Dickinson however also has an abstract mode where our less agile minds may not follow as rapidly as her poem jumps away in the next lines. Have we subtracted from the piety of the Pilgrim settlers? And then the most obscure set of lines in the poem: “Not an acre or a Caption/Where was once a Room.” Huh?

I may not understand those lines. I certainly didn’t when I performed the poem a few years back, but this occurs to me: talk of acres as if in a deed, and the use of the curious word “Caption,” reminds me that she was a smart woman in a family where the men were lawyers. Caption is a legal term, it means, I find out, “that part of a legal instrument such as indictment, commission etc., which shows where, when and by what authority that legal instrument is taken, found, or executed.” Understanding that usage I think it highly likely she’s saying that the holiday celebration may not be on firm legal standing. Is she just commenting on the holiday not yet being a national holiday as it eventually became in the U.S.? Or does she have — or do we, her readers today, have — a reading outside the borders and celebration of the poem drawn by a culture of colonizers whose small settlement was under the forbearance of those already there?*

Dickinson closes by saying the original Thanksgiving assembly was like the proverbial pebble that spreads ever widening ripples in the water. Yes, big circles long past the pebbles. History is an unending cycle of theft and accumulation, deliverance and conquest. Kindness and fellowship are short in comparison. Oh, so short. And so sweet. Thanks for the sweetness is what I’ll celebrate.

Here’s an audio player below to the musical piece I performed using Dickinson’s words. Don’t see it? This highlighted link is a backup.

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*A native American summary statement on this Thanksgiving matter comes to mind, considering the indigenous population brought food to that first harvest feast: “We did the giving. We got no thanks.” Could these matters have been on Dickinson’s mind? I don’t have the scholarship to support that. Should that injustice be our only thought as we celebrate our families and give thanks? No, I’m not saying that, but even as a “reflex,” a required simple thought and remembrance, that thought seems due on this day.

The Route of Evanescence

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Here’s another little mystery, a riddle inside a riddle, which makes up a new song using the words of Emily Dickinson — but first a little of me sounding like a regular blog that talks about itself.

As assured time to work on this project has largely disappeared, I’ve been turning to simpler compositions and quicker realizations of them to cope with this, but over the past few months a number of pieces have sat in limbo, waiting to be rediscovered, waiting for decisions to be finished or abandoned. In going through some of these this month and I came upon a recording session for “A Route of Evanescence”  from last August.

I recall the session. It was just me and a couple of acoustic guitars, with access to my quiet studio space. I had some advance notice, maybe a day or so, that I’d have that time. On the hurry-up, I prepared a number of compositions to record, and when the day came, I set about laying down tracks singing and playing that pair of acoustic guitars. I’m not an exact or exacting guitar player by temperament, but when I haven’t played as much, my old hands produce more imperfections. None-the-less the limited time meant that I pressed on. I think I may have recorded basic tracks for at least two or three tunes that day. It’s likely that I’ve already presented at least one of the others here, but not this one. Why?

I might have blanched at releasing too many acoustic guitar tunes in a row. Despite my limitations I like what I can do with that instrument, but “like” means that I could fall into doing that over and over, and my temperament also doesn’t like doing that. I might frustrate you a little* by jumping around musical goals and genres, but a bored artist won’t interest an audience either. Or maybe I had some songs more distinctly about summer that I wanted to get out before the end of the season, and so this one was set aside?

Listening again to the raw tracks I thought it sounded pretty good. It’s harmonically different from some ruts I fall into, and the playing and singing is at a level that represents what the composition is. I may have thought I’d record some additional tracks, build out a more elaborate arrangement back then — but it stood by itself when I listened this month. Therefore, I mixed it and made it ready for distribution. **

route of evanescence

Here the chord sheet for today’s Chimera. That 2nd inversion G is a neat sound.

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And then, as I went to prepare this blog post, there was one additional surprise. I thought it was one Dickinson poem that I performed back in August, the one named in the recording files, but the song was made from two: “A Route of Evanescence”  (F. 1489) and “Ferocious as a Bee without a wing”  (F. 1492).

Why did I combine them? I don’t remember. They sound good as a combined piece, though doing so may confuse Dickinson’s intended mystery, because both appear to be riddle poems. As a poetic or sung genre, the riddle has a long tradition (folk music, going back to the Middle Ages, has a bunch of them). The lyric gives you hints that don’t exactly make sense until you figure out, or are told, what the subject or answer of the riddle is. “A Route of Evanescence’s”  answer/subject is the ruby-throated hummingbird. “Furious as a Bee without a wing’s”  may be a honeypot ant.***  The riddle poem, and Dickinson’s examples of that, are antecedents of the early-20th century Imagist poem, where the moments details are exact, but inference or the title may be necessary to interpret the details meaning. Evanescence, as in the charged moment, is part of that Imagist creed.

Both of these are later Dickinson poems, written in the late 1870s more than a decade after the vast majority of her work written in the 1860s. Dickinson by then may have been like me, writing shorter and shorter — sometimes on scraps of envelopes or the back of food packaging in her case — trying to find autumn creation in the midst of life.

To hear this Chimera song combining a hummingbird and a honey ant, use the audio player gadget you may see below. No player to be found?  This highlighted link will open a new window with an audio player.

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*Those I frustrate more than a little likely aren’t reading this. I keep thinking there are a goodly number of listeners who’ve heard one to a few of the Parlando Project audio pieces, but finding even a single ill-tasting example, leave off listening here for something elsewhere where they expect consistent rewards.

**I use an audio streaming service that is designed for podcasters, who are typically long-form talkers about their subjects. I could do a talking podcast, more or less replacing these written posts about the exploration that makes up this Project, but I don’t see the demand. So, the Parlando Project podcast is just these musical performances you see at the bottom of the blog posts. You can subscribe to or browse the last 100 or so Parlando audio pieces on most places you can get podcasts — except for Spotify, which for some reason they never shared with me, dropped the Parlando podcast distribution from their podcast section a few years back.

***A fascinating class of creatures that I knew nothing about. I’m not yet even sure if a species of it was found in Dickinson’s 19th century Massachusetts, or if Dickinson knew of this insect. This poem seems to use many similar words to another very short Dickinson poem (F. 1788) that is the penultimate poem in the Franklin listing of the complete Dickinson poems. However mysterious, it’s an image Dickinson returned to.

Van or Twenty Years After

~ Frank Hudson ~ 4 Comments

One of the interesting things about 20th century Modernism was that so much of its propagation seems to be based on a handful of pollinators who migrate from one place to another. Some of these pollinators are known but little-read today, others lesser-known, their names themselves faded from cultural memory.

I suspect Gertrude Stein fits into the first group. As a personage, often handily viewed via Picasso’s painted portrait, she remains known. Her main location, early 20th century Paris, remains revered for its scene, and her salon there filled with Modernist paintings can’t be left off the maps as Americans in Paris then gravitated to her. We can add to that notableness, that as the fluent domestic partner in a long-term relationship with another woman, she remains to this day something of a gay icon.

But is she read? I suspect her The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas  retains interest for its witness to the era. Her novels? Not sure they’re read much beyond scholars — and maybe they’re under-read even there. I gather her poetry remains controversial in this sense of the word: it’s spoken of in passing, its unusualness taken stock of — and after that its import is generally dismissed. When it was new, Stein’s poetry was often treated as a breathalyzer test. If you heard it and took it as meaningful or important you must be an intoxicated acolyte of Modernist excess. I don’t know if we’ve moved on from that stance. We may forget Hemmingway was a Modernist nowadays,* but we can never see Stein as anything more than an Modernist provocateur.

Reading Stein’s prose-poems today we still find them sounding unlike most literary poetry of the present. If we’re reminded of anything, it might be Dr. Seuss books for early readers, full of repetitions rhythmically repeated.**

Sometime in my Twenties I was curious about her work, part of my early interest in Modernism and the movements that emerged from it in the last decade to be called The Twenties. I remember plowing through one or more of her novels*** and reading what of her poetry I could find, out of consideration that as an experimentalist she might have some discoveries I could put to use in my own writing. What do I remember from doing that a half century ago? Not so much passages or particular elements, more an idea which I continue to hold for: that the way we use language to express reality and consciousness has been constrained by expectations and convention.

What remains of that interest in Stein now decades later? I enjoy her in limited doses because it still can break those expectations on the floor, and stomp on the broken fragments in time to a word-music I can enjoy.

Stein-Van Vechten-Dodge-Seuss

Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, Mabel Dodge, Dr. Seuss. First 3 pictures are photographs by Van Vechten.

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I don’t know how much of that old interest of mine my friend, poet, and bandmate in The LYL Band, Dave Moore remembers, but when we got together earlier this fall to record some new things, he broke out this Parlando-worthy selection from Stein’s prose-poetry portraits of those she had met and interacted with. I asked him what he’d want readers/listeners here to know about “Van or Twenty Years After,”  and this is what he wrote back:

To avoid Morrison conclusions, I might shift the title to Van & Stein (Iowa boy made weird) — otherwise, references to Mabel Dodge in a history of first American surrealists, found in the library free stack, made me seek out the Gertrude piece about her, which turned out to be in a collection featuring this piece referencing her friendship with Van (sheesh my brain won’t pull up his name, I’m sure it wasn’t Dyke or Heusen), from which I excerpted this section delighted the way it concluded with a joke, then when I presented it to Frank I was incapable of delivering the sound of repetitious notes I had in my head, so anything salvageable here is probably due to Frank’s remixing skills.”

So, who’s the man the Van in Stein’s piece? Carl Van Vechten. Like Stein, Vechten was another of those Modernist pollinators, and he was an early and ardent proponent of Stein’s writing. His name, his own writing? By now he’s largely fallen into the second group, as Dave’s honest stumble testifies. Myself? I knew his name from my interest in Modernism, but nothing of his biography or work until I began to run into him as I read and studied more about the Harlem Renaissance which he was intimately involved in.****   It was only then that I discovered where he was born and grew up: Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And the Mabel Dodge Dave mentions? If you were to cross-reference Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, and Mabel Dodge’s blue links in their Wikipedia articles, you wouldn’t have to make more than one Kevin-Bacon-jump to encompass the whole Modernist enterprise in Europe and the United States. Pollinators.

After all that history, some of it often forgotten, we’re left with Stein’s words. Here’s a link to the whole prose-poem portrait which Dave took his segment from. You might enjoy them as word-music not having to judge them, or risking them replacing other poetries you enjoy. I did when Dave performed them. You can hear that performance with the graphical audio player below.  See no player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with an audio player.

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*We’re likely to charge Hemmingway with a lot of other sins — most of which he committed in flagrante — while forgetting his successful revolutions. Hemmingway, the young writer forging his style, was one of those who sought out Stein in Paris.

**Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel) likely knew of Gertrude Stein from the circles he ran in. I did a quick web search and found no instant citation of any considerations of a stylistic influence there. I can’t be the only one this has occurred to.

***An admission: I’ve never been much of a novel reader. Most book and literature lovers can embarrass me by exposing my lack of chair time with novels.

****Van Vechten wasn’t just Iowan, he was white. Some early Modernists recognized elements of Black and African culture as aligned with their Modernist project, and some young Afro-American writers and artists felt the same way. Modernism was not immune to racism, but this cross-pollination brought attention and prestige to Afro-American artists and art. This connection had and has its strained and strange elements — no doubt about it — but it’s important.

Another connector here: Van Vechten was bisexual, so were some of the members of the Harlem Renaissance (though some variation of The Closet was usual then).

The Dumb Soldier

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I spent Thursday recovering from a brace of winter vaccinations. I was tired and achy enough that I even missed attending my treasured monthly Midstream Poetry reading, but besides whatever mojo the shots might give me from winter respiratory crud, it made me grateful upon waking up Friday with my usual level of old-guy energy. I took a crisp 34 degree F. bike ride for a veggie sandwich and tea at a local bakery, and then spent a good deal of the day finishing some live LYL Band recordings from last September. Only then did I recall that I should do something for Veteran’s Day — or Armistice Day as it used to be called here in the United States. Armistice Day is still the name in much of the rest of the world that experienced WWI, and perhaps because I’ve been thinking a bit more about British poets this week, I quickly settled on two poems by British authors.

The post just before this one, Housman’s “Soldier from the wars returning”  was the first poem I wanted to do, and it’s a straightforward poem of simple gratitude for a veteran’s service. The second one is a little stranger, and I made it stranger yet. Can we be sure Robert Louis Stevenson wished his poem “The Dumb Soldier”  to be read as a whimsical piece about a child’s toy? He published it in A Child’s Garden of Verses  after all.

There were no sensitivity readers for children’s books then,* but the nature of the poem’s story is not benign. It starts right out with the poem’s speaker burying a soldier, which from the text alone we don’t know yet is a toy. When we read “leaden eyes” we might get the hint that it’s a cast metal toy soldier — but if we were to hear this poem as I performed it, without context, sung by an adult, even that detail might not tell us clearly what is going on.

I leaned into that strangeness. I trimmed a couple of stanzas for better performance length and chose to truncate the final one, leaving off the reveal that this is a toy soldier that will return to the child’s shelf. This left this a more ambiguous buried soldier then unable to tell us anything about what they’ve seen.

The Dumb Soldier

Here’s the chord sheet for my version of Stevenson’s poem. To read his original text, here’s a link.

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Although written decades before the first Armistice Day in 1918, this mode of the silent war dead is clearly apt for that holiday as celebrated outside the U.S.**

It was late Friday night before I was ready to perform these two poems as songs. I had music written, and for practicalities sake, I was able to quickly use my studio space to record the pair of songs with just acoustic guitar for accompaniment. Neither of these are perfected or sophisticated performances, they are more or less what you’d hear if I was to present them off the cuff. You can hear my version of “The Dumb Soldier”  with an audio player below, unless you don’t see any such player. Some ways of reading this blog won’t display that, so I give you this highlighted link that will open a new tab with an audio player in those cases.

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*”Dumb” used as a term for someone who cannot speak is now a highly impolite term. Given the sacrifice and suffering of war, that term’s objectionableness might be a lesser concern.

**Since the U.S. had an existing holiday, Memorial Day, for remembering those who died in military service, the U. S. Armistice Day became Veteran’s Day to celebrate all who served, particularly the living. Housman’s poem, couched though it may be in the particulars of WWI, speaks to that element of the holiday. As a mid-century child, I can recall Armistice Day was still used occasionally in my youth for November 11th since veterans and others who had experienced that war were numerous.

Soldier from the wars returning

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to present a pair of poems which are more related to Armistice Day, the former name for the holiday now called Veteran’s Day in the U. S. Here’s the first one.

Earlier this month I was confessing to Lesley Wheeler that I haven’t read much of English poet A. E. Housman, a poet who I believe retains more readership in the UK than here in the States. Well, no matter how little I know of him, his poetry has qualities that attracts musical composers like myself.

Soldier from the wars

Here’s a chord sheet for today’s song. I recorded this with a capo on the 2nd fret, sounding in the key of D

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This poem, which may not have had a title as I saw it with just the first line in quotes, is clearly a poem for Armistice Day and its veterans, first published a few years after the end of WWI. I don’t find it a complicated poem, but that doesn’t hurt it when one seeks to be comprehensible in an immediate performance such as I gave it. It’s hope, contemporary with Housman and his listeners when he wrote his words, that “wars are over,” now has sort of cruel quaintness, but it was an earnest statement then. Here’s a link to Housman’s words, and then below this is an audio player gadget to hear my performance of the song I made from them.

No audio player? Clicking on this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player in that case.

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Free to Fall

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Allow me to be more internal than I usually am when presenting these pieces. Today’s piece uses my own words (we do that rarely here) and it’s here today for a peculiar reason — and peculiar is something I enjoy indulging in.

Early this autumn I was looking for a musical piece that represented the season, and I recalled this poem of mine that I had written music for. When? I probably wrote the poem early this century, and from a file I found, I was able to determine I wrote the music in 2007. Sometime after writing the music, I recorded what I recall was a pretty good version of it, likely with Dave Moore playing keys.

“Maybe I made this one of the early Parlando Project pieces” I thought. At the beginning of this Project as I was figuring out how to compose and record our combinations of original music with literary poetry, I had used several recordings of that vintage. Having some already completed pieces gave me time to get a handle on other tasks while getting this thing going.

But, what, I didn’t know? Well, I’ve put up over 700 publicly accessible pieces in this Project’s lifetime since 2016 — and that doesn’t count the ones that just didn’t work or didn’t fit the concept. One might like to think I keep my eye on every sparrow — but with that amount of catalog, it’s not fully accessible in my head. So, I looked. Here. For my own work.

Nope. I hadn’t presented it. It might not have made the cut because I wrote the words, and the Parlando Project is about other people’s words. Where else might it be? I looked in my somewhat disorganized collection of sessions and finished non-public pieces. Nope, not found there either.

My solution then was to re-record it. Recording time has been hard to come by lately, but I remembered this poem-which-became-song as being effective, so I tried to have it ready when I could open my microphone and record.

The piece is called “Free To Fall.”  As I wrote at the start of this inward story, I said I remembered it as being an interesting variation on the poetic perennial of autumn. In the first verse I already hit the falling leaves motif (can that one be escaped?) and I think the “every tree grows tall” was me referencing the British folk song “The Trees They Do Grow High.”   I continued to try to bring some longstanding tropes into this brief song: my own restatement of François Villon’s “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan*” starts off the second verse. I think the lines “Old men carry winters/in which the children play” are my own, but like my memory of where I put this song’s older recording, who knows if I just don’t recall some inspiration or reference.

The third verse’s reversion to summer memories and grief may be influenced by what I consider to be one of the great autumn songs, one found in every fakebook: Joseph Kosma/Jacques Prévert/Johnny Mercer’s “Autumn Leaves.**”  That song too begins with falling leaves, but references a summer lover now gone. Having lost my late wife in August might have made sure I made that step back in memory in the song.

Free to Fall Illustration 800

“Everything is free to fall”

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The originality of this compressed catalog of autumn thought comes in the refrained pair of lines “I grew up believing/everything was free to fall.” What was my intent there? I’m not sure if I’m articulate enough to do as brief a job as the poet me did in writing the poem. Yes, I knew many readers/listeners would think of things like free will and predestination, shibboleths of theology — but in the lines’ first statement I wanted the connotation that autumn’s falling leaves are freed from their work in photosynthesis and now can flutter and drift. The fourth verse refrain may (or may not) put this in a different context. Is this a compressed statement of “free will,” the doctrine that humankind has the choice of choosing good or evil, which also carries a connected thought that this is what makes good, good, not just an inherent trait? I was likely aware of that when I wrote it, but in performing it this fall I took another plausible memory: that there are those who believe in an afterlife, or a rising or rebirth of the souls of the dead, but that the song’s singer believes that however temporary or final autumn’s dying off is, that there’s a freeing element in it, like that leaf that has been loosed at the start. That’s a bittersweet freedom I wanted to convey.

Free to Fall

Here’s a chord sheet so that other singers can extend or improve my performance

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This poem/song works for me. Maybe it has some worth to you. In summary, the way I think it works is from the ability of compressed verse and song to collect things in a small memorable chunk of words, a portable experience. I’m glad I remembered this 16-year-old song and that I was able to record a new version to share with you. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below if you see that. No gadget? Some ways of viewing this blog won’t show them, but this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*“Where are the snows of yesteryear” is the concluding line of his “Ballade des dames du temps jadis”  published in 1533. Yup, those snows are definitely gone.

**One of the abandoned Parlando Project songs you won’t hear came from my idea to do a fresh translation of Surrealist-associated poet/lyricist Prévert’s French “Autumn Leaves” lyrics. I got a hold of those lyrics in French, and found that Johnny Mercer’s English lyrics are a freer, looser sort of translation. Prévert’s lyric is longer and more miserable, while Mercer’s cuts right to the nub of the situation without wasted elaboration. I found there was nothing I could do with Prévert’s French that would even approach the recasting that Mercer had already done.