Month: March 2024

Singing at Dusk

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

A three-part post today — let’s see how short I can keep it, though we’re going to go far. Read on and we’ll leap from an important artistic movement whose poetry is forgotten, to the case of the odd filtering out of a woman artist from that movement, to some notes about translation and musical composition — and in the end to a remarkable trick, an April Fools’ joke of a sort I played on myself unconsciously.

Canons

It’s weird sometimes trying to figure out whose work gets remembered. It’s too much to ask for there to be some fair-minded, objective, and well-informed process of experts weighing the canon as our caissons go rolling along. Instead, quality and salience is supposed to just emerge. Emerge from what? Taken, via circular reasoning, from that memory. This sort of works, though how we know how well it’s working is hard to explain, as it may not consider those we aren’t as a culture considering. Canons have always changed — it’s ahistorical to say they haven’t, and when did we agree that history stops?

Dada poets are under-considered — or if they are, it’s as a conceptual statement more than a considered poetry. Visual arts will always include a Dada piece when discussing Modernism, literary arts are much less certain to. Dada’s evolution into Surrealism makes it almost easier to leave out Dada poetry. Dada poetry can be seen as the rough demonstration, the provocation that initiates a disruption.

My idea of presenting a Dada piece today comes out of an idea as question I had:  “What can I do for April Fools’ Day?” Dada can be seen as an April Fools’ Joke. How so? Let me invent a manifesto of Dada that no Dadaist is likely to earnestly write as it violates the concept of Dada:

Much of what we’ve been given as meaningful can be seen in the human predicament as useless, maybe even harmful. Yet, we’re constantly being fooled with the trappings of power and precedent. Arbitrary examples of meaning, truth, and rules, dressed in the right costumes, framed in the expected way, keep us susceptible. So let us show how the trick is played and laugh at its absurdity.

Art Movement — and also the structure of an April Fools’ Joke.

Therefore, Dada presented poetry — a literary form we believe must be meaningful because it’s beautiful — that was random, perverse, taking the forms and frames of meaning while eschewing that meaning. Surrealism later posited meaning — or perhaps more exactly, the experience of art including poetry — as being above and beyond logical, conventional rationalizations, but the way was cleared by Dada’s withering can(n)on-fire that made merciless sport of the idea of hierarchical poetic meaning.

Still, we’re more comfortable with the idea of looking at the urinal/fountain or bicycle handlebars above a bike seat and seeing a worthwhile experience than we are looking at a series of chaotic words uttered incongruously as poetry. The first is a gentle poke in the ribs, it can easily elicit a pleasurable “See that?” The second worries us more, how should we take this? And the connection of denotative meaning (even an elusive one) that we rely on to carry us through an assemblage of words, is it indispensable? Is reader/listener boredom a legitimate artistic response, or one we’ll long endure?

The questions in some Dada poetry are valuable. The answers, not always so.

Emmy Hennings, forgotten because she was a Dadaist and because she wasn’t a Dadaist

Earlier this week I set myself a task to look at some Dada poetry to see what I could present here. I came upon a handful of poems by a name I believed I’d never seen: Emmy Hennings. I’ve retrospectively rechecked a couple of books I’ve read on Dada/Surrealism and I found my memory faulty. Hennings’ name was  mentioned, but the context of those mentions didn’t make her seem anything like a key player. She was the partner and wife of Hugo Ball, a big macher in Dada, and consigned as a peripheral helper/muse/hanger-on. She did perform (from the very first Cabaret Voltaire performance!) but she was often characterized as a “music hall performer,” the kind of conventional entertainment that wasn’t what Dada was about. The supposition was put forward by the avant-garde that she was an interloper tempting Ball and the Cabaret away from real Dada into some kind of bourgeois, conventional performance career.

On further examination, there’s a case that she’s been underestimated.

Emma Hennings 1913

Just kids. 1913, three years before the Cabaret Voltaire, but Emmy looks to me here like this could have been taken in 1975.

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Looking over her poetry in a handful of human translations and quickie machine translations from her native German, I was immediately drawn in. It showed that essential Dada tactic as stated many years later by American Dada composer Frank Zappa: “Anything Anytime Anyplace For No Reason At All.” It also contained German Expressionist poverty-stricken darkness — and yes too, an element of erotic romanticism, though in the context that element was being set in place against the rest, implying criticism of it. Downrating her including music hall and folk song in her Cabaret Voltaire performances would seem to leave-out the case for Hennings consciously creating a Dada collage. If you put disparate things together as part of Zappa’s AAAFNRAA, those elements will talk to each other when viewed as one thing.

Here’s a secret factor most artists remain loath to admit: the random, or even the most carefully constructed miss-matches, can generate meaningful perception in the human mind. Yet Hennings didn’t write unalloyed gibberish, though outlandish collisions were allowed. She sometimes writes in a manner I recognize from later Surrealism — although from a woman’s mind and experience, a vantage point the Surrealists were loath to admit into their boy’s clubhouse.

Reading more about Hennings, I could see a rich collage of biographic and aesthetic components to her art.* I tried to sum that up to my wife by describing my emerging conception of Hennings as “A WWI sort-of Nick Cave: dark outlook, opiate addiction but hard working, catholic mysticism encrusted, mixed with elements of power-observing romantic eroticism.”

Want to know more? A very informative summary evaluation of Emmy Hemmings I found in my reading is linked here.

Making today’s musical piece, a Dada experience

I already had a rough performance mix of the musical composition used for today’s piece before any of these Dada and April Fools’ ideas. I composed it using four new “virtual instruments”**  that were newly available to me: a viola da gamba, a hardanger fiddle, a singing voice, and something that called itself a dulcimer.

I love bowed strings, and the somewhat rare and archaic viola da gamba is one that has long interested me, an interest that was sustained by once having a co-worker who played the instrument. The VI is a bit harsher sounding than hers (she used period correct gut strings and a softer bowing attack) but I used it to play the low-end lines in today’s piece.

The hardanger fiddle is a Norwegian folk-variation that uses sympathetic drone strings to add persistent, powerful overtones to the those actually fingered on the fretboard. A musical hero of mine, guitarist Steve Tibbetts once recorded an entire album featuring the instrument. My honest summary: I love drone, I love Tibbetts, my wife would testify I must love Norwegian-Americans, but I found it hard to take the sound of the hardanger for the length of an album — my reaction is similar to how some people experience bagpipe music. I also like sour tunings and harmony, but still that was my reaction. Dada being my goal, I went against sweetness however, and there’s a brief hardanger section in the middle of the piece.

By far the predominant sound in today’s music is from the VI that calls itself a dulcimer. I play the American mountain dulcimer a little bit. It’s a gentle diatonic scale instrument associated with American British Isles immigrants who settled in rural Appalachia,  usually played by women as a quiet solo accompaniment for singing. This VI’s sound is nothing like anything I’ve played on mountain dulcimer. A demonstrator for the company that sells the VI says it sounds more like a lute. I’d expand that to say any of the oud variations or maybe even a mandolin family instrument. I treated its sound with a lot of reverb, so it’s more Coleridge’s opium dream Abyssinian maid dulcimer than some rustic American in a lone cabin.

The last thing I added to what was an otherwise vocal-less piece at this point: a high, keening VI voice. The human singing voice is something that VIs don’t yet allow easy access to. Perhaps eventually the ability for an easily available VI to sing all the components in human sung language will emerge, but for now what they do quickest is singing vowel-rich syllables. This VI went beyond the usual Oohs and Aahs with what sounded like nonsense words in no certain language. I hadn’t made the connection yet, but nonsense words are another part of Dada.***

So, on completion of the realized composition I surprised myself — I had what I then saw as a Dada piece without starting out with any such intent. That led me to seek out Dada poetry, and then to find and translate Emmy Hennings’ poetry to meld with my music.

“Singing at Dusk”  is one of the few Hennings poems that has English translations I could find, but I made my own fresh translation. I followed a priority that guides my translations: determine what the images are in the original language and construct a contemporary English language way to convey those images. Since that is my primary goal, I will take liberties with the original’s sentence structure and wording. At times (and this happens here in this translation) I’ll even change the matter of the image in search of vividness. This latter choice is a historical fault, and I feel conflicted about it, but as I continue to translate, I catch other more renowned translators, resorting to it. Because I wanted a compelling sound to match up with the rather insistent music it was to mesh with, I also (uncharacteristically for my translations) decided to impose a rhyme scheme along with some other sound elements for this translation, which further caused me to depart from Hennings’ original. That kind of mutation to serve a form or rhyme scheme is another thing I catch other translators doing. Due to these choices, the result is partway between an earnest attempt a poetic translation and an “after a poem by” variation.

Singing at Dusk

This version is a looser translation aimed for the needs of today’s performance

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If it’s Dada, how much of this matters? It could, maybe should, be nonsense syllables, a random whatever. However, I didn’t find Hennings’ poem in the original German to be nonsense. Dedicated to her husband, Hugo Ball, it strikes me in German — and perhaps even more so in my looser translation — as a critical look at romance and marriage/partnership from a woman’s standpoint. Another element I bring out in my translation is the immigrant/exile experience. The originating Dadaists were from various countries, holed up in Switzerland, with a World War raging around them. They were writing work in German and French and a smattering of other languages, when those languages were being spoken in opposing trenches. National rootlessness was endemic in Dadaism, both as a choice and a fate.

Here’s the promised final observation: those keening nonsense words I generated from a VI played on my little plastic keyboard resolve at the end to something that I suddenly realized sounded very much like a woman singing “Jawohl.” What! They were just vocalese syllables, abstract sounds when I chose them — and they remained so for the dozens of times I’d listened to those passages, played even before I chose a German language poet to translate. Was that a trick of the ear? Here it was, the night-time, I was going to bed after a long day working on this piece. I was listening to this singing at dusk, and inside my earbuds I hear this voice loudly singing the German word for the certain and absolute “Yes.”

Will you have my experience with this musical piece? I can’t say, but you can hear it with the audio player below. No player?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Like some other Dadaists, she was a hyphenate: she wrote poetry, prose, sang, danced, made and performed with puppets, painted.

**A virtual instrument (VI) is a playable instrument made up of multiple samples (most often taken from a microphone in a recording studio placed on the “real thing”) of the various notes, ranges, and articulations of an actual instrument. One plays the VI by using a controller (a keyboard or perhaps a guitar with a MIDI pickup) that controls the notes played, or by scoring the music and selecting how that score should be played. This is a much more atomized use of sampling than the other kind of sampling that uses recorded snippets (often several bars long) of already recorded music afterward triggered to create musical beds and motifs in modern hip hop/rap music. The latter is another use of collage: thank Dada again.

Obviously, the tactile experience and idiosyncratic techniques of the real instrument cannot be brought over, but the results are increasingly convincing, at least to casual listeners. For composers without grant patronage or large exploitable friend networks, it’s a godsend. Even when the exact sound of a musician and acoustic instrument in the room isn’t produced, a musical something can be.

***The most famous Dada poem in any form known to modern English speakers is the Talking Heads song “I Zimbra.”  When he presented it during his American Utopia  theater piece, composer David Byrne explained that he adapted the vaguely foreign-sounding lyrics from a Dada nonsense-word poem by Hugo Ball, the partner of today’s poet Hennings.

Whispering Often

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Perhaps we should remind ourselves in this pre-AI age that every poem, any poem, is written by another human being. I did the math with the years, and this is a poem published and likely written about a hundred years ago by a 40-something Midwestern American.

I’m decades past that age, as was Donald Hall when Hall gave us his law that states that most poets, even prize-winning ones, will be forgotten 40 years after they die. This may sound callous, but that process is likely necessary. How many poets can we hold as a culture, as a reader? Dozens? Certainly more. Hundreds? Whatever, there’s a limit. The poet who wrote today’s piece? Who would we give up in the pantheon to let him in?

I came upon the poet who wrote today’s poem, Edwin Ford Piper, by reading a striking poem he wrote of the closing American wilderness that I’ve already presented earlier this year. I know little about him as a person.*  I almost worry to find out more, since human beings are full of all kinds of faults, deleterious opinions, vanities, and misapprehension. Did he write this poem in this time of the year, in the Spring? Who can say. Writers are full of memories, and imagination that can redress any cold or baren place, but it feels like he did. The poem’s trope of Spring’s reincarnation of driving/seeking life paired with the Christian holiday of Easter is far from unique — but the poem’s not, in feeling, much of a Sunday-dress observance — it’s luxuriously pantheistic. “Whispering Often”  was written in a past era we still call Modernism, published in a journal that put forward many of the great English Language Modernist poets, Chicago’s Poetry Magazine, and it was included in Poetry’s  founder’s anthology shortly afterward that had Modern American Poetry  imprinted on its end-boards — but I can’t call it an example of Modernism.

Whispering Often song

If you can un-embarrass yourself, you could sing this Spring poem too.

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It’s not end-rhymed. It does sing on the page, despite having a meter that I can’t easily chart out. There’s a familiar iambic rise to many of the phrases, but I don’t think I can call it blank verse, a form that Piper used elsewhere. Oh, but does this rite of Spring want to sing! The title says whispering, so maybe the poet is abashed at the voice that is called forth. Not a lot of today’s poetry sings like this. Instead, we’re more often interested in a poem showing us a particular apprehension the poet has uncovered, an apprehension we are to recognize and share. We are want to pause and recognize the matter of typical 21st century poems, like a friend speaking with us. A wise friend perhaps, a little better with language than we normally are — but still, we wouldn’t want them to break out into a song over shared teacups or beer glasses. How gauche that’d be!

And so, I think of this poem now, as Spring is rebeginning here in my Midwest, as the Abrahamic religions are celebrating holidays of freedom, rebirth, and revelation — but more so as the northern half of earth is celebrating something that Abraham could have seen in a place outside Ur. In this case, a man in his 40s, a Midwestern American like myself, stopped and wrote this down.

What an odd act! If he paused to think about it, he would know that by all odds this poem will be soon forgotten. Yes, Piper was a professor of literature, but he was an adult, someone who knows the comings and goings, the correct way to behave, the agreed worth of this and that. Yet the poem will appear as something as outrageous as an unbidden public song, one with a crush of erotic desire for life. Religion can shape and seek to make that solemn — and perhaps such a transformation teaches wisdom, brings thoughtful ethics to our roots and melting eddies — but that Spring is older than wisdom.

It’s enough to make a grown man break out into song after all.

So I did. Earlier this month I hurriedly sang a bunch of pieces I had written that I feared wouldn’t have time to shape and improve into full arrangements in an interrupted life. Long-time listeners will know my voice isn’t going to be polite, though maybe it should be. You can hear that quick, short, performance with the graphical audio player below. No player? You don’t have to rush past, you can use this alternative highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*It’s not certain, but there’s a fair chance that later this year I will make another trip to pay respects to one of my poetic heroes, Carl Sandburg, and on the way tarry awhile to see if I can learn more about Edwin Ford Piper.

Cool Tombs

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

It’s been too long since I’ve presented a poem by Carl Sandburg here, and awhile since I had the time to make one of my “punk orchestral” pieces accompanying one of the poems.

Carl first.  Unlike Frost (birthday boy today, happy birthday Robert!) I appreciated Carl Sandburg as a young person. A poem like today’s “Cool Tombs”  doesn’t appear to truck with irony or express its perceptions subtly. It appears to say what it means to say. Those schoolchildren sure that poets and their literature teacher accomplices are seeking to make fools of us dense and under-lived students can rest easy with what this poem seems to be. Here’s a link to the full text of the poem, if you’d like to follow along.

I’ve made my point elsewhere in this Project that Sandburg, likely with intent, had other poetic modes. Like Frost (which Sandburg was once considered a peer to in literary merit) he’s always plain enough speaking that one can be fooled into thinking his thoughts are always straightforward. Read quickly enough, seeing only the plain-talking, “Cool Tombs”  has just one thing to establish: that our selves lose and are left-loose from our deaths. Great accomplishments, great enemies, great failures — eventually, nothing.

Where’s the ambiguity? Where’s the deep reading that great poems reward?

My answer, my reading of Sandburg here, is that is to be found in American history — that history a denser poem full of every Empsonian ambiguity — and Sandburg clearly is roping in American history here.   Are his choices incidental/accidental? Well, they do include things that disappear, even if like love they remain inescapable, returning things.

Other than American historians, few readers today will understand what a “copperhead” is referring to when Sandburg speaks of Lincoln, other than perhaps knowing it as a species of poisonous snake. That it was, and is — but in the American Civil War those in the North opposed to fighting the secessionist slave-holding rebels took to using an incised liberty head carved out of the mid-19th century American penny coin as an emblem of their sentiments. If you reach into your pocket now and note who’s on the current copper penny, you’ll see the head of Lincoln.*  Did history write some irony there?

Civil War hero and post-war President Grant suffered from corruption among businessmen in and surrounding his administration, details now lesser-known outside of historians today. The Sandburg that wrote this poem, ex-political operative and then still daily newspaperman, knew that government corruption hadn’t disappeared conceptually. Perhaps he also knew that Grant intended to — to some degree did — try to set up a fairer settlement to those newly emancipated from slavery. In the cool tombs of history, perhaps we remember Lincoln and Grant for those efforts, even if imperfect and eventually abandoned, they were.

Pocahontas’ story, as much as can be deduced from records and oral histories, is complex, and subject from the beginning to substantial romanticization by English settlers.**  An indigenous American, she married an early English-American settler, and legends of this marriage and other friendliness of Pocahontas to the English settlers are the prime reason she became a historical character to the eventual conquerors. From the First Nations standpoint, one can easily see this story rests on a vibrating matrix of love, coercion, or treason. As her story leads into Sandburg’s voice claiming for the lovers in the concluding section, perhaps Sandburg holds primarily for the first of that trio — but he and I were not there, we cannot really tell. I also don’t know Sandburg’s intent, but the previous two situations are suffused with crimes and evil: slavery, murder, corruption, and greed. Is Pocahontas’ story contrast or continuance? The poem’s text allows either reading. Perhaps the fairest reading, the one that was in my sense as I read it, is that Pocahontas’ love was tragic given how the conquest continued with so much killing and subjugation. Note too that Sandburg says a hail-the-conquering-hero parade (perhaps to the tomb?) should be examined as a vainglorious exercise.

Lincoln, Grant, Pocahontas cool tombs

Lincoln’s tomb in Illinois, Grant’s tomb in New York, and Pocahontas’ burial site in England.

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Is all this external exegesis based on unintended things that I’m artificially assigning to a simple or at least single-minded poem? Most modern academic readers of Frost understand him to be a poet comfortable with intentionally invoking subtext. Certainly, if this were a set of incidents in a T. S. Eliot poem with reference to metaphysical poetry, with passages in Latin and Greek referencing classical history and legend, we’d know he wanted us to consider those connections.***

But Sandburg? I’d caricaturize my sense of how Sandburg’s viewed today like this: he’s written off as a superficial popularizer of unremarkable intellect and talents. He fooled some folks earlier in the 20th century into thinking there was something there, but now we have a better vantage point.

I obviously don’t see it that way. I could be mistaken — in which case it’ll be forgotten in the cool tombs.

Carl Sandburg's grave

Carl Sandburg’s grave in Illinois. Not so grand, but it also asks us to add history to the grave. There’s a little plaque on the footing bearing the legend “For it could be a place to come and remember.”

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Alas, now again I spent more time spent writing on the words, leaving less time for the music. I recently had enough energy and assured time to try to do something with a larger group of orchestral instruments. Let me be brief. I wrote this originally as a non-harmonized melody, but transformed it into a harmonized piano part via some software that extracts harmonic ideas from a monophonic line, choosing the one that interested me the most, and tweaking it from there. The piano part then became the orchestration by another translational process of placing the piano’s range of notes with various other instruments.

If I had the focused energy or assured time, this could be a movement of a larger piece with other themes, variations, contrasts in color — but that doesn’t fit my life. I’ve come to call these short pieces, often expressing a simple musical idea by whatever means I can bring to hand “punk orchestral.” You can hear the recording of my performance of Sandburg’s words with this orchestral music using the audio player gadget you see below. No player?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*That liberty head cent had been replaced with a new design just as Lincoln was elected, though still in circulation. The new 1859 design replaced the classical liberty head profile with what? An American Indian in native feathered headdress. The current Lincoln profile penny was adopted in 1909, less than a decade before Sandburg wrote his poem.

**A couple of obscure horticultural details occur in the Pocahontas section. “red haw” is a tree that produces a crab-apple in Autumn. So too is the pawpaw, a fruit widely raised and eaten by native Americans. Sandburg oddly refers to the “pawpaw in May” which would not be a sweet, edible fruiting time for the plant in North America. Is there intentional metaphor there, or a mistake?

***I don’t know if Sandburg had this poem by Thomas Campion, which in turn was a loose translation of Catullus — but the lovers getting as much as they can while tomb-wise element was brought to mind as I newly considered Sandburg’s tomb poem.

The Wind Didn’t Come from the Orchard Today

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today is World Poetry Day, and if I want to represent the United States poetically to the world, one of my first thoughts for a representative poet would be Emily Dickinson. Dickinson has many “Greatest Hits,” poems remembered, poems anthologized, poems that literary critics have generated essays from.

Today’s poem isn’t one of those, for whatever reasons. I suspect it seems too playful, even child-like. The Dickinson I was taught in my youth, when she was considered a less important poet than she is today, was at least eccentric, often gothic. But here there’s no death in a carriage, no fly-funerals — there seems no novel slant of light or truth being told. It’s just the wind, an ordinary thing — or that’s the first impression.

The other immediate impression the poem might give is from its sound. This is Dickinson’s prosody at its most exuberant. No stern march of iambs here, and the use of unpredictable rhyme, end and internal, near, imperfect, and perfect. I love the loosening of rhyme personally, though I know there are others for whom imperfect rhyme grates. But this poem is so rich with the rhyme and pararhyme:  today, hay, hat, very; bur, door, fir, where, declare, ever, there; odors, clovers, ours, mowers, hours; pebble, stubble, steeple; hay, day, say, stay.

The Wind Didn't Come

A chord sheet in case you want to celebrate World Poetry Day by singing it yourself. For performance I broke-apart Dickinson’s text, which is all one stanza —  indeed, a single onrushing sentence!

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America is a big country, a big culture. We certainly have our perfect formalists. But we have artists, like Dickinson, for whom form, and perfection in duplicating the form, is but an armature on which to improvise variations. While I’m one small ear compared to American Culture, I’ll take Dickinson’s side and place this poem in evidence.

Another thing to love in this one: the asides, set off with famous Dickinson dashes. “He’s a transitive fellow — very — rely on that” for example.

OK, so is this a musical slight-and-light poem about a playful wind we might meet in Spring?

Maybe.

Note that the poem starts off with a difference. The wind doesn’t come from the fruitful orchard.*  It’s from somewhere distant. When I performed the poem, I began with the sense this must be an important fact to lead the poem off with it, but I didn’t know more. A playful breeze is mentioned, but again in the negative,  this wind is too much in a hurry, that “transitive fellow — very,” and we can rely only on its capriciousness.

The sound of the “fir/where/declare” is so delightful, but what has happened here? Is the fir tree gone, uprooted, now out of place? Or is it just branches and seed-cones carried away from the location of the tree?

The sound of the mowers section is also delightful — and the work of hand mowing is so poetic one could create a whole suite of poems mentioning that kind of work — but it’s also the decapitation of anything above a height, and that’s always been part of the metaphor.

The final segment of the poem suggests a fiercer wind. An unremarkable wind might raise a little sand, but pebbles are being flung.**  A playful March wind might dislodge a hat, but here it’s a steeple that has toppled off its head and the thing is like a run-away carriage.

In my Midwest, tornadoes are a common and feared storm with extraordinarily intense, though localized, winds. Dickinson’s New England has few of these. However, in the fall of 1861 during Dickinson’s most active years as a poet, two hurricanes, storms that can have high winds spread over a larger area, hit New England. Detailed contemporary meteorological measurements for that sort of thing don’t seem to exist, but sustained 60 mph winds are estimated. Ships were damaged, a ship was lost only a mile from the Boston harbor light, there were storm-driven high tides, and so forth. How far inland to Dickinson’s Amherst and at what force level it reached there I can’t say, but Dickinson could have been writing from regional news reports.***

In the many decades since Dickinson wrote her poem, we might not at first be able to hear the runaway roar of storm winds when we brush up against this poem — just the rush and song of Dickinson. So today, I will prod you to sense the mystery of the weather and the wind which we do not control.

For those of you who may have noticed a bit of a break in posts this month, it was not due to anything bad, more at a lot of effort toward new composing and recording. For the first time since last fall, The LYL Band reconvened last week, and you can hear their full folk-rock band performance of my song made from Dickinson’s poem with the audio player below. Has that audio player gadget seemingly blown away? Some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing it, so I provide this highlighted link as a backup.

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*The Dickinson household was engaged in raising some of its own food, with Emily and her mother being known as experts in that field. The landscaping has changed at the Dickinson Homestead, but I understand that fruit trees were part of their domestic garden in Emily’s time.

**An incident from my own life. After a tornado at a branch radio network studio a few decades ago, I got a box containing the studio’s Macintosh tower audio computer to see what could be done for it. I took the computer out of its carton, and opened it to see what I could see, and the interior was packed with pea-sized landscaping gravel that had surrounded the building that housed our branch.

***I first read about the hurricane here.  More about the pair of two Fall 1861 storms and how they impacted Civil War operations at this New York Times story.

The Drunken Singer

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Even though the Parlando Project is about presenting other people’s words,* I sometimes remind myself that I still write poetry and lyrics. Every so often I’ll think of a song, sometimes one I wrote years ago, maybe one that never got a presentable recorded version, and I’ll wonder if I could record it like a regular Parlando Project piece.

“The Drunken Singer”  is one of those songs. It’s well over a decade old, predating the Parlando Project altogether. A couple of coincidental things made it come to mind. At another place online that I participate in, there was a recent thread on another older song, one by the extraordinary singer-songwriter Richard Thompson called “God Loves a Drunk.”   I love Richard Thompson’s work, but his fans sometimes feel called to warn potential listeners that he can be very dark. Like the British Isles folk music that influenced him, he can produce songs of death and misadventure — but he’ll also go another step further and produce songs of even greater bleakness. “God Loves a Drunk”  is one of those.

Early in this Project I told the story of my misapprehension of a folk song of alcoholic abandon “Rye Whiskey.”   I had wondered how my teetotaler great-grandfather could have been fond of it. In the process of working with this Project I discovered it was an oft-performed set-piece for the popular “Cowboy Singer” Tex Ritter, who played the song for laughter by imitating a drunken fool while he sang it. Thompson’s drunk song has no plausible laughter, though it does point out something ironic: that inside their degradation, the alcoholic touches on elemental things about the limits of the human condition.

Thompson’s song, and his performance of it, are skilled and intricate as are the many details he uses in it. None-the-less, it reminded me of this song of mine. “The Drunken Singer”  uses only three sketchily presented incidents, a less-is-more approach that I often favor when writing lyrics or other poetry.**

The Drunken Singer

A part of the inspiration for writing this song: despite my being in the cold-water army, my voice often produces sounds that too are not proper or correct.

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The second reason “The Drunken Singer”  came to mind was that I found myself working this month on a handful of possible songs I could set from poems that referenced singers, and you just heard one of them last post: “The Late Singer”  by William Carlos Williams.

So, these are my reasons for inserting this, my own song, into the Project today. You can hear my new recording of “The Drunken Singer”  with the player gadget you should see below. If there’s no gadget (some ways of viewing this blog suppress it) you can use this highlighted link that will open its own tab with an audio player.

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*New here? The Parlando Project takes those words, usually literary poetry intended for the page, and combines them with music we compose and perform. Because I almost always use poetry in the public domain, I often use poems from the most recent period that has clearly moved into that status: the early 20th century, the era when Modernism emerged. But I don’t keep to the early Modernists only, as an examination of the more than 700 audio pieces available here since we started eight years ago will demonstrate.

**As to the “Are song lyrics poetry?” question, my summary answer is “They are a kind  of poetry.” Do lyricists and literary poets focus on, or stress different things, or work with different expectations? Yes — but the range of what is canonically literary poetry shows those things vary widely within literary poetry too.

This Project knows there’s a tension there between page poetry and songs. I just think it’s fun to work within that tension, to push: to pull, to refer and to connect.

The Late Singer, a song for Spring

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

A short post and a short off-the-cuff audio piece today. I keep trying to fit this Project into my life, and this William Carlos Williams’ Spring poem reminds us that it’s never too late to sing.

I had to cancel a more pristine time in my recording space this week. I lost sleep the night before as I prepared fresh material to record, and then woke up early the following morning, anxious to see what I could do performing this new material. Then just as dawn and others woke up, I heard that a mild illness would cancel my plans. Disappointing, but, oh well. If life wasn’t bigger than this Project, what would there be to sing about?

Later that same afternoon I decided that I should do something, anything, with what had been put off. It occurred to me that by the time I’d have an occasion to reschedule I might forget the musical material I had only in my mind, since at this point the songs only existed on simple paper chord sheets, like this one.

The Late Singer

Simple chords for this one, which you can take as an invitation for you to sing this one yourself. The most obscure part of this poem is the “moth-flowers.” I’m not sure what WCW is going for there. Maple trees do have small Spring flowers. I read today that their different flower colors are actually sexually differentiated.  There’s also a moth WCW might have known that is attracted to maple trees.

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Here’s one catch of my recording space: while ramshackle, and having a remarkable sound capturable in the room, is not acoustically isolated. Since outside sound leaks in, recording quieter acoustic instruments requires planning and scheduling. I decided, no matter if it wasn’t quiet there, I should record short, demo versions of the seven songs I was planning to work up. I figured I could do that in an hour or so, and I could afford that time.

I sat down in the space, background noise accepted, and used my Telecaster electric guitar* instead of an acoustic guitar, and ran through the seven songs one after the other. A couple of takes each, a third only if I had a major stumble. Time was so compressed that the first take was largely my own test of my “so far, only in my head” plans for the song.

During that hour I produced this quick & dirty version of William Carlos Williams’ “The Late Singer”  that you can hear below with the audio player you should see. No player?  This highlighted link then.  It occurs to me that Spring itself has its way of being quick and dirty, and we find charm in that.

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*Electric guitar masks much of the leaked noise compared to the sensitive microphones used for acoustic guitar. Some of the leakage into the vocal mic I found I could minimize with software that does a good job of “ducking” that noise. Solo electric guitar with a single singer is not a common musical format. Jazz has some examples, ones using more chops than I have. Some early Blues makes it powerful, but that format was soon superseded by full bands. Jeff Buckley’s outrageously good “Live at Sin-é”  makes me want to put my voice inside a box in a closet and hide it. Billy Bragg, a man more of my utilitarian approach, busked and recorded with just his own electric guitar backing.

The Last Antelope

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Nothing excites me more while doing this project than coming across a little-known poet that I had never heard of. Some of these poets have perhaps a single poem worthy of interest; others, whole bodies of work which have slipped off the page, fallen to the floor, and have then been lost in the cracks.

Just how interesting is Edwin Ford Piper? I don’t know yet — and that’s fascinating! I’ve picked up a few things about him. He grew up during the closing act of the American frontier in the vicinity of the small town of Auburn Nebraska near where Nebraska’s southeastern border meets up with Missouri and Iowa. Despite a typical rural childhood of his era, with schooltime being “Sometimes two months a year, sometimes none,” he largely educated himself as a child by reading, graduated from the University of Nebraska, and he then became a long-time college professor of English Literature at the University of Iowa until he died in 1939.*

But here’s what’s intriguing me so far: unlike a great many of his contemporaries, it appears he takes as his subject the local culture of the Midwest in his time, including the ordinary working-class and underclass. At least at first glance he’s a Modernist of a sort. Some of the first poems I’ve read look like a melding of Sandburg** and a Midwestern, not New England, Frost — but with his own vision and sound.

I’ve been long-winded lately trying to share as much as I’ve been able to find out about another lesser-known Midwestern poet of this time, Fenton Johnson. So, let me rest your eyes from the historical matters of Piper so far, and share a performance of the first poem of his I came across: “The Last Antelope.”

In its deep cross-species empathy the poem reminds me of Kenneth Rexroth, who’s a generation later. Piper tells its story using some Modernist tactics, including abrupt time-shifts and changes in point of view, always chasing the most vivid perspective. It’s in an unfussy iambic pentameter, but like Frost, the language and word-music seem so natural you don’t hear the pentameter, just feel the rhythm without noting it. If  you’d like to read the poem along with my performance of it available below, you can find the text of it here.

Edwin Ford Piper

Like Fenton Johnson, there’s not a lot of pictures of Piper to be found online. How little-known is Piper? Not even a stub Wikipedia page!

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A few pieces of detail about the pronghorn antelope that might serve as background for this poem: it’s the fastest land animal in North America (55 mph top speed!), and unlike some other speedsters world-wide, it can keep up significant speed over a long time and distance. The method of hunting implied in Piper’s poem is similar to what Indigenous tribes used, but with guns improving on bow and arrow: large groups of hunters driving the antelope into a natural or constructed dead-end pen where it can’t use its speed to escape.

Why did it become extinct in the Iowa/Nebraska area in Piper’s childhood era? He concisely notes the reasons in the midst of the chase the poem takes us on: they are skittish prairie creatures who want the lookouts of high ground and long free spaces to run. Early attempts to conserve them in fenced ranges failed, they refused to thrive where they couldn’t run. Barb-wire, a famous marker of the closing of the American frontier, was particularly dangerous: the pronghorn generally don’t leap over fences, they prefer to kneel and crawl under them. The barb-wire then tore at them, their crown of thorns.

Simple music for this closing of the frontier story — just acoustic guitar — but I hope I can tell well the story Edwin Ford Piper wrote. You can hear it with the audio player below this. No player? This highlighted link is an alternative way to get an audio player for it.

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*Coincidences: for a few years late in the 20th century the University of Iowa’s Iowa Poetry Prize was named the Edwin Ford Piper Poetry Award, but for whatever reason, this name was abandoned. While it had this name, Missouri-to-Minnesota poet Phil Dacey, who I treasure for his early kind words and influence to me, won that prize.

**Like Sandburg (actually “with,” as he submitted collected songs to Sandburg’s landmark American Songbag  that helped kick off the American Folksong Revival) Piper was known to break into song when reciting poetry. He got called “The Singing Professor” for this, and that makes him a natural Parlando Project interest.