Month: April 2024

The Minstrel Boy

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

The Parlando Project’s thing: taking a literary poem and combining it with a piece of music isn’t a new thing. If poetry exists in every language, poetry combined with music exists in every language too, and such casual melding typically pre-dates the culture’s written poetry. We have just kept on doing it as a practical and immediate art.

This is National Poetry Month here in the U. S., but I don’t think I’m overly nationalist in the words I use here. Still, just as poetry and music go together, national and ethnic pride often takes poetry and song onto itself. W. H. Auden notably stated that “poetry makes nothing happen” but if we examine it the other way around, it’s unlikely that any great movement for change or nationhood ever has had no poetry and song associated with it.

As a poem “The Minstrel Boy”  was first published in 1813 as part of the author’s collection titled Irish Melodies, and its central image is a harp carried by a “warrior bard.” It’s therefore apt that Moore combined it with music forthwith, using what he named as a traditional Irish tune.*  Harps and lyres etc. are an extraordinarily large family of instruments, but Moore seems clearly to be writing of Ireland, where the Celtic harp has become a national symbol. At the time of its writing, Ireland was still under the long-standing, often cruel and exploitative, rule of England. Classmates of Moore had recently died in one of the periodic Irish rebellions.

Minstrel Boy

I asked alternate voice and keyboard player connected to this Project Dave Moore if his family has any connection to the liked named poet. None known, he tells me. Dave’s father preached for decades, and he wrote at least one literary short story that I read after he — one of the generation this month’s poetry anthologies were marketed for — had returned from WWII.  I told Dave’s dad his story reminded me of Hemingway. He replied “I don’t think I knew anything about Hemingway then, he was kind of avant-garde stuff at the time.”

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The song also became popular in America, though I’m not certain how rapidly it took root here — but in the year of its publication America was at war with Britain for the second time after its revolution. And by later in the 19th century, the song had currency among Irish-American immigrants.

Ironically, Moore received a British diplomatic post to Bermuda, and in 1803 he not only visited the United States but met President Thomas Jefferson. The tale I read online says the two did not hit it off, and that Moore was not impressed with American chattel slavery. **

Since those times the song (or sometimes just the tune associated with it) has been closely associated with the armed forces, police, and firefighters — folks whose sense of professional duty includes risk of death. I find that ironic too, for the song’s minstrel boy is the definition of an untrained irregular, possibly underage, untrained (he has to borrow a weapon), and more of a singer-songwriter than a SEAL Team professional. *** This is one of those cases where tradition overwhelms close reading.

I’m performing this song as part of my NPM series looking at poems from a pair of 1920’s anthologies of verse for children: The Girls Book of Verse  andThe Boys Book of Verse, and “The Minstrel Boy”  appears in one of this gendered pair of books. In each instance this month I’ve asked you to guess which one: Boys or Girls.  Today’s poem is a free square in that game, as one would easily guess this military service theme would be in the boy’s book — as it is. Indeed, The Boys Book of Verse  has an entire section, Songs of Peace and War dealing with poems about battles and military service. The editors, both women, would have had recent experience of WWI, and whatever their feeling about warfare, they must have felt that subject was something their readers or purchasers would want included for the boys.

I stop to think here — as I do as I consider the entirety of this pair of “the last Twenties” books — that the first audience for these books would go on to experience a much greater and deadlier world war.

I’m likely not one of the best singers to have sung this well-loved song, but I performed it with a full rough’n’ready rock-band arrangement as best as I could peel off in this month’s accelerated schedule. My inspiration for singing this song? A similarly not-ready-for-the-most skilled-singer-contest one, Joe Strummer, who also recorded this song. You can hear me tear through those chords asunder with the audio player you should see below. If no audio player sullies your screen, it’s because some ways of reading this blog won’t show it. This highlighted link is your alternative — it will open a new tab with an audio player.

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*The tune Moore selected, named as “The Moreen,”  was said to be a traditional tune. Wikipedia says that no one has independently found a source of this tune from before its pairing with “The Minstrel Boy’’ —  so it could be that it would have disappeared forever if Moore hadn’t tapped it for his poem about a doomed harper. That adds an air of mystery to the song, doesn’t it.

**The stirring final line stating the harpers fight was against slavery does and doesn’t require an explanation. Servitude in general, even government duties and tributes required from monarchs or tyrants, was often rhetorically called out as slavery, while American chattel slavery was totalitarian: humans — and with added cruelty, any families of those enslaved — owned in perpetuity like animals without rights of any kind. I read that this song was sung by both sides of the American Civil War — the “slavery” on one side rhetorical, the slavery on the other total and abject. When I started this post talking about the widespread tradition of nationalist poetry and song, take note: a corollary from Auden’s dictum may be that poetry and song prove nothing.

***This might be a fair poetic description of the Irish rebels that the teenage Moore knew, those who died in an ineffective rebellion. The long fight for Irish independence seems to have had an outsized portion of “warrior bards,” folks with less military experience and tactical acumen than literary and musical bona fides.

Each in His Own Tongue and the “middlebrow” problem

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Social media likes controversy, so it’s no surprise that two things have recently mingled there in provocative assertion: poet Mary Oliver and the dread “middlebrow” epithet.*  It’s not a long bridge between the two: Oliver’s poems are put forward as all too middlebrow in this charge, and middlebrow is a sign of significant lack of ambition or achievement. I’m not a fan of the term “middlebrow,” for a hierarchy is implied and I don’t care for hierarchies much — but to speak of this I should define middlebrow poetry. A definition that works for me is: poems that remind us of something we already sorta-kinda know, but maybe couldn’t quite put into words. These poems are usually immediately understandable on first reading by a significantly literate reader.

Why’s this bad or lacking? If this is a singular mode it rules out poems that tell us multivalent things, or mysterious things that require more thought to comprehend, thought perhaps taken in stages. It rules out shocking, utterly surprising poems. And such poetry doesn’t feed our playful desire to puzzle-solve with clues we are proud to have acquired.**

My view? I think various modes of poetry (even differing modes of reading the same poem) have diverse values, and I’m more than OK with that. Poetry’s eye should be the insect’s compound eye, containing a hundred, a thousand, ommatidia. And so, if it was up to me, the best cultures wouldn’t be restricted to, or rewarding of, one poetic mode. This may be a visceral thing with me: I get bored with all one type of thing quickly. Building towers of hierarchies might be fun, and illustrative of what one can stably hold long enough to build such a tower, but in the end, the domain one will look out on will have a lot of scenery that isn’t in your tower. In the right mood, I can get pleasure out of looking at the commonplace apprehension poem and a “difficult” avant-garde one — and in the wrong mood on my part, or insufficient achievement in the poet, not a touch of pleasure in either mode. And beyond all this meaning and metaphor, there’s the oldest part of poetry, the part even young children understand, that poetry also has abstract pleasures like music has — poetry is the instrument on which the meaning plays.

A great many of the poems in our pair of 1920s children’s poetry anthologies are as middlebrow as any Mary Oliver poem brought up on charges in this controversy. This shouldn’t surprise us. A modern children’s anthologist looking to duplicate the task of those in the previous decade called The Twenties would, I think, do likewise. Some of those pressures would be commercial: what will sell to parents, libraries, teachers. Some would be practical: these children aren’t yet bored with the lessons of the world — those lessons are new and useful building-blocks for their youthful towers — and maybe a lesson of my old age (and a lesson of Mary Oliver) is that I shouldn’t have been bored with the lessons of the world either.

I think too of what happened as the first childhood readers of these poems in the 1920s progressed into the economic distress of the Great Depression, the rise of nationalist dictators, the Second World War, and the Damoclean Cold War. All through the middle of their lives how much time would they have for poetry that offered them the highbrow pleasure of gnostic meaning, of shocking new combinations and collisions?

The answer is: some would find the time, some went on and made their own verses in those modes — and many others would not. Some kept food on the table, kept bolts tightened on airplanes, tended the sick, kept fuel in NATO tanks facing east. Some had their yet young lives ended sans poetic envoi. Others desired, birthed, and raised my generation.

Highbrow, middlebrow, it is neither sophistication nor no-nonsense populism to forget either part of that cohort.

On to today’s poem, an example of a poem that earnestly intends to be a lesson: “Each in His Own Tongue”  by William Herbert Carruth. Look! Mary-Oliver-approved wild geese make their appearance in it, decades too early! I also offer this month’s puzzle challenge: the pair of 1920’s anthologies I’m drawing from were gendered: one for boys, one for girls. So as with each post this month, you’re asked to guess in which volume did the poem appear. Answer lower down.

Each in His Own Tongue

dedication to Ina Coolbrith

Here’s today’s poem as it appeared as the title poem in a book-length poetry collection by Carruth.. Marginalia picked up in the scan of  a copy of that poetry collection. Wonder who Ina Coolbrith is? Here’s a link.

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The brief Wikipedia stub for Carruth tells me he was “president of the Pacific Coast Conference of the Unitarian Church.” One of my preacher relatives once said of an Unitarian school he’d attended “The only time anyone would speak of ‘God’ is when someone stubbed their toe.” I read this morning a brief poetic knot of a summary of Oliver’s earnest lessons delivered by A. M. Juster who wrote that he’s “Not a big fan or a big detractor of Mary Oliver” but then sums up his impressions of her work by saying “I also think her spirit wanted to write religious poetry, but her mind wouldn’t let her.” Each in their own tongue I’d say, ungendering Carruth. Carruth wrote “His,” and his poem appeared in the Boys Book of Verse. You can hear my musical performance with the audio player gadget below. No gadget to be seen? This highlighted link is a backup which will open a new tab with an audio player.

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*Here’s a link to a well-done post on the controversy, and a refresher on Oliver’s poetry if you are not familiar with it.

*This last factor is less-often laid out as I just did, perhaps because it doesn’t seem serious when complex poetry is discussed. But let’s admit it: great portions of humanity loves puzzles and challenges in which they feel rewarded if they can progress farther than some other human.

Sea Fever

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

For National Poetry Month this year we’ve been looking a poems that were selected in 1922 and 1923 for a pair of gendered poetry anthologies: The Girls Book of Verse  and The Boys Book of Verse.  Today’s poem is another reasonably well-known selection, John Masefield’s “Sea Fever.”

I’ll not have much to write about the poem itself, it speaks so straightforwardly. I will say that I always thought of it as a poem by an older poet, and an archaic one at that in that it speaks of ocean-going sailing ships. Turns out, I read this poem with misapprehensions. Reading briefly about the poem, I found it was published by a poet only in their mid-twenties, and though the long-lived Masefield’s life overlapped mine — he was still England’s Poet Laureate during my schooldays in the United States — he indeed worked on windjammers.

The Gilcruix

The young Masefield sailed on the cargo ship Gilcruix at the end the 1800s, and yet the ship looks like it could have been from the beginning the 1800s.

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These two 1920’s poetry anthologies clearly wanted to encourage reading for the children that would grow to become the fabled Greatest Generation of the Great Depression, WWII, and the Cold War. Ironically, Wikipedia says Masefield was unhappy in school and shipped out to a life at sea “to break his addiction to reading, of which his aunt thought little.”

Masefield worked at sea and in America* for the next decade. The seagoing did not cure his reading addiction,** he continued to read on shipboard and eventually began to write himself.

While “Sea Fever”  is more in the mode of poetic memoir than our poem last time by Emily Dickinson — it’s a nice bit of parallelism that Dickinson imagined books as a replacement for sailing far away, and Masefield imagined he could sail far away as a replacement for books!

As with our other poems from this pair of gendered anthologies this month, I’m going to ask you to guess if this was in the boys or the girls poetry anthology — answer below.

Here at the Parlando Project we take words, usually literary poetry written by various poets, and set them to original music in different styles. Not for the first time, this is a poem that already has a fairly well-known “art song” setting: one by John Ireland. Ireland made a lovely song, and not an overly elaborate one melodically for that sort of thing — but it’s beyond the limits of my vocal talent. So, the setting I created and performed with just my cruder voice and acoustic guitar is what you can hear below. I don’t know if you will be able to hear the canvas slap or the wind through the rigging in this version, but I was trying for that and a hearty song feeling in this one. There’s a graphical audio player to hear it below, but if that player is not visible, this highlighted link is your backup. It will open a new tab with its own audio player. Was this song of manly company on the high seas in the girls or boys book? It was in the girl’s volume.

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*In between voyages, Masefield worked in a factory in Yonkers New York, something I did in my early 20s too. I may not have shared his nautical adventures, nor will I ever become the poet laureate of anyplace, but that tiny little happenstance made me feel kinship with Masefield 70 years apart.

**More of what is likely only coincidence: when Lou Reed’s protagonist in his song “Heroin” escapes into his drug addiction he likens it to a wish that he’d “Sailed the darkened seas on a great big clipper ship sailing from this land here to that.” If Reed had started his other song of that era “I must go down to Lexington 125, to the call of the running tide” we’d have an actual connection to go on.

There is no Frigate like a Book

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

For National Poetry Month I’ve set out on a feature where I’m examining the poems in a pair of poetry anthologies directed at children which were published roughly a century ago: The Girls Book of Verse and The Boys Book of Verse. Each collected around a hundred poems in a variety of styles, sub-categorized in broad subject areas the anthologists thought reflected childhood moods and interests.

That child audience became our ancestors. The early readers of the first edition would have been the oft-praised Greatest Generation which grew up in the Great Depression and served in the titanic national struggles of WWII and the Cold War. It’s likely that childhood has changed since then, but did these books in any way equip the young minds for the panorama of their future?

One of the pair of anthologies used this well-known poem by Emily Dickinson as a lead-off poem placed even before the table of contents. How many libraries had, maybe still have, this poem on the wall of their children’s section? I can’t say, but I recall seeing it in more than one in my post-WWII childhood.

Some of the words, if laid plain on the page, might risk being obscure to a 1920 or 2020’s child. Dickinson and the anthologists seemingly had little fear of that. A frigate is a class of fast war ship. Do children still have youthful romance with sea-ships? Born in a landlocked Midwestern state, I did — reading of and knowing all the classifications of ships, famous naval battles, famous captains, that sort of thing. Modern youthful D&D fantasists of the earth-like realms seem kind of land-bound to me, perhaps because Tolkien seems to have left his sea-faring tales to the long unpublished Silmarillion. Current SciFi readers might still have all the trappings of sea-battles recast in airless space, but that is less the exact particulars of historic ships.

FRIGATE

Bookplate, warship. Did you know the warship was largely saved from rot and disposal by a poem?

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Coursers too is not a word in most modern children’s vocabularies, and I have my doubts for a 1920s child. It’s a term for a fast-pursuing horse, and by extension those that ride them. With frigates just preceding it, I always heard and misremembered the word here as corsairs, a term for pirates or privateers, and it’s possible Dickinson thought she was punning there.

Dickinson’s second stanza makes reference to funds, and by extension class, in its metaphor. Rather than the appeal to straightaway imagination in the more remembered first stanza, here she makes the case that it doesn’t take much money to read. Dickinson’s family seems to have been roughly middle class, despite some challenges in her family’s finances during her childhood. Extensive world travel might have been outside their means or attitudes, but books wouldn’t have been. Oddly though, she says the “poorest” can have this book-led adventure. Does she simply not know of that level of poverty, or is this just “poetic license?”

I’m grateful to my parents and librarians for extending limited means to afford books as a child. My mother, an avid reader, knew how to use library extension services to order nearly any book, and I can still recall my joy when she’d open a substantial cardboard box from a letter-placed order which would include several books picked by some far-off librarian to be about sailing and historic sea battles for me to read. My father would let me ride in the empty well of his bread truck to be let off at the county seat which had a beautiful and bountiful library for me to wander in.

Here’s a standing question for this month’s pieces from the two gendered anthologies: do you think it was the for boys or for girls book that lead off with this Dickinson poem? Answer below.

A note about how today’s musical setting of Dickinson’s poem came about. At around 10 PM, which ought to be bed-thinking time, I was still thinking about more recording opportunity to bank musical pieces for this Project. Like last-time’s Blake piper, today’s poem’s book-with-far-flung-words seems to invoke not only poetry, but this Project itself — so I thought I should do this one sooner rather than later. My wife, who’s sometimes bothered trying to sleep if I strum an unplugged electric guitar in the next room was out house-sitting for a friend. I need a tune! I grabbed an old plastic acoustic guitar with a large crack in its top that I bought in a second-hand shop decades ago and now keep out in the dry, wood-cracking-weather of my home office. The chord progression I settled on was simple. My melody, like many of mine, is doomed to be served by my voice, and so is utilitarian. After finding that music in the nighttime, I decided to record a short demo then and there. It was after midnight. I rigged up some way to record the cracked plastic guitar — a brittle and unappealing pickup as there’s no room for a mic on its body like I would use in my studio space — and set one down.

No Frigate

Simple guitar chord sheet in case you’d like to sing this song yourself.

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The next morning I listened to the demo and thought it aspired to be presentable. To disguise the crinkly sound of the guitar I did my best to sweeten it with EQ and reverb — but more elaborately, I composed one of my simple string trio parts to further cover the guitar sound up. You can hear that night sound Tolless-Traverse with the audio player below. No player?  This highlighted link is a backup way, as it opens a new tab with its own audio player. Was our poem, written by a woman hunting on fast, pursuing ships in her imagination, in the girls or the boys verse anthology? It was the boy’s book.

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Piping Down the Valleys Wild

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

From my Parlando outlook, this is a fine choice to start off a look at our twin girls and boys 1920’s poetry anthologies for National Poetry Month. Today it’s a poem by William Blake, a poet still known and rated today, and a poem that includes a child and praise for music inside of it. It’ll make a natural beginning I figured.

After I made that decision, I started to notice a couple of things. The poem began to seem stranger than it somewhat straightforward first reading might suggest. The odd thing I noticed first was the amount of insistent repetition in it. Lyric poetry, and even more so poetry meant to be sung. will often refrain lines, repeat entire verses or sections — look at many a modern charting pop song and you’ll see hooks as repetitious as today’s poem — but it still struck me as odd. The child continues to ask for song. The piper plays it. Immediately, the child asks for the song again. Parents experienced with young children may relate here — insert your own bête noire kids-song ear worm and insatiable toddler — those requests can be cute and dulling at the same time. Blake’s child is laughing at the time of the first request, weeping at the second, Why? Best guess: because the song is over, and they must hear it again. But then the child asks for a third song — perhaps the same one, perhaps not — and they are asking for it without the piper playing the pipe. Since most pipes are wind instruments it’s likely the piper in the poem hasn’t been singing the first two times.*

Combining the child’s responses after the first two requests which the piper has immediately fulfilled (laughing, weeping) the child “wept with joy” after the third go-round.

The picture I get here is joy in repetition, and woe at ending. The child makes one more request: the piper should cease the singing and write this music down. The piper MacGyvers up a pen and ink and gets to scoring.

Piping Down

Simple guitar chords on the chord sheet this time.

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Then we’re told the child vanishes. This shouldn’t surprise us. If we were paying attention, this child appeared to the piper “on a cloud.” This child wasn’t a flesh and blood child — wasn’t one of the potential readers or listeners to the anthology’s contents — it’s a spiritual emanation of childhood.

OK, that’s a little weird, but Blake was a self-confessed visionary, and literary inspiration stories can be peculiar. Just another day at the poetic office for Blake. And as the piper makes his own pen and ink, I thought of one of the things that I found most inspirational in Blake’s life: that despite literary poverty he mastered the means of creating his own poetry, art, and engraved books.

Just after completing my musical version of this, another area of concern came to me. Just how strange did this seem to the children in the 1920s or to their parents who might read this to them if they were younger children?

I was a young child in post-WWII America, and in my time and place, I would have been puzzled. About the only piper I’d have any reference to was The Pied Piper, a page-bound storybook character. Yes, various kinds of musical pipes were extant then, as there would have been in the 1920s, but nothing I would expect in my time to see being played in wild valleys. Blake’s poem was over a century old when the 1920s anthology was made—  maybe late 18th century England had itinerant rural pipers?

As they grew up, the child reader, then or now, would likely understand this is fantasy, even if exactly what Blake was getting at with his fable might be missed. Its value would remain as a set of word-music that speaks to the joy found in music and the arts.

Is anyone trying to guess if this was in the girls’ or boys’ anthology? Male author. The cloud/child is male, the piper is not gendered. Is joy in music a gender role thing? Not really.

wild valley piper 3

Wilderness cumulous-carried spirit children are not a reliable compositional prompt.

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It’s from the introductory section of the “for girls” book. My music is a simple folk music setting: acoustic guitar and bass, and eventually an Irish tin-whistle for piping. The tin-whistle is a played VI.** Two other instruments make a subtle entry in this recording. There’s a quiet electric piano in the piece, played and mixed so low it almost sounds like an overtone of the guitar, and another VI of a small obscure 1940s keyboard instrument, the Solovox that comes in for the next-to-last verse.

The Solovox was an FDR-era monophonic analog keyboard synthesizer, with glowing tubes and a wood-veneer case like a large table radio of the time. I used it for two reasons. If this song floats in fairy-tale time with children appearing and disappearing out of clouds, I thought the piper’s sound could change from the tin whistle to something more mid-20th century as a marker of how the children the anthologies were written for grew and changed. But also, I’ve seen, even briefly played, a particular real Solovox. The mother of alternative voice and keyboard player in this Project Dave Moore had one, and when he was young his mother would play piano and deftly slip one hand over to play melody lines on a Solovox. Dave now has his mother’s example of this old instrument, and has had it fixed so it plays, though with some glitches.

To hear “Piping Down the Valley’s Wild”  you can use the graphical audio player you should see below. Player vanished?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with an audio player. I plan more poems, adapted musical pieces, and observations from The Girls/The Boys Book of Verse  coming up soon.

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*There are methods to do that, where a singer alternates using their breath to sound the instrument and to sing lines of song. And there are bagpipes and the like where the wind comes from a bellows. But the child has asked the piper to drop their pipe and sing, so it stands to reason this is a request for the piper to sing a song with words after playing instrumentally for two renditions. The song then progresses from melody, to sung words, to finally written words — a plausible metaphor for the writing of a poem.

**I explained VI/Virtual Instrument technology last time, but in short it’s playable software that tries to contain all the sounds an actual instrument makes, often by capturing all conceivable notes and many articulations of those notes with a microphone it makers placed on the real instrument.

National Poetry Month 2024

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Earlier this Spring I had an idea for a Parlando Project feature for this year’s National Poetry Month. It was based on something I read in the blog “My Life 100 Years Ago,*”  as blogger Mary Grace McGeehan turned some of her attention to children’s literature. As those interests crossed over for her, I learned there were a paired set of poetry anthologies from a century ago, one first published in 1922, The Girl’s Book of Verse, and the other the following year, The Boy’s Book of Verse.

A reason I’m drawn to poetry is that poets often examine and see things many others would miss. I read of those two titles and was intrigued. Lots of things to examine. One, the books are gendered — unsurprisingly, they only saw to market two volumes then — and being published in the early 1920s they might say a lot about how the anthologists viewed childhood and gender roles at the time that Modernism was starting to become a substantial part of literature in America. And for those targeted boys and girls (and their parents) the world was changing in areas well beyond poetry, music, and the arts. Adult women had just been given the right to vote, and there was increasing belief in expanding women’s roles. Fathers had in some cases returned from America’s first extra-continental wars.**

And there was another reason, I had recently come to see appealing elements in some of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetry aimed at children as I revisited it. It’s long been a cultural commonplace that Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll are children’s books with layers of understanding, not just fantastical adventures. And in our present culture a great deal of our marketplace is taken up by young-adult books and genres that often have roots in youthful reading: Fantasy and Speculative Fiction for example.

So, what if we step back a century and see what’s there? I found a number of interesting poems in the two books, and my plan was to step up the posting tempo of this blog to at least double time. There’d be writing on what I observed in the books, and the Parlando Project’s combining of literary poetry with original music in various ways and styles would top that off. I started stockpiling some compositions, even recorded initial tracks for a couple. I was realistically readying myself for more activity here than usual to celebrate NPM 2024.

NPM 2024 poster 720

I didn’t know this would be the poster for this year when I started out. Seems appropriate for my plan.

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Great plan.

Great plan, meet life.

I’d already figured what would be the first two pieces of this series. Monday I was going to complete recording the music I had set for the first one. My old-man energy didn’t hold out, and mid-morning recording expectations turned more into an early afternoon plan. Monday afternoon, I grabbed my music to go record, and..

The music stayed on the table. More family distress came home. I haven’t found a way to write about this that feels appropriate to me — and I’ve felt so blessed the past eight years of this Project to have so much time to do the extensive work it entails that I don’t want to be disproportionate in measuring my little change of plans this week against the reasons for distress. Today’s concluding summary: this is an introduction of my original intent, and a public statement that I still have hope for some variation of the plan still coming off for this April Poetry Month here.

My appreciated long-time readers will know to wait — and new visitors: there’s a lot here for those interested in poetry and the various ways it can be combined with music. You might want to search for a poem or poet and see if we’ve already presented it. Over 700 pieces, there’s a lot here — but it’s all over but the footnotes today — and those footnotes are something else this blog picked up from Mary Grace.

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*Her blog started out with a pledge to only read material from 1918, but it has transitioned to an occasional look through stuff that was contemporary a century ago. Lots of considerations of what women in this dynamic time were presented with, often through magazines of the day. This stuff fascinates me. It’s the mundane and commercial mirror to the era when a lot of the poetry I’ve presented was created.

**How about other historically significant issues in this last decade that called itself The Twenties? Social inequality was certainly on some adults’ minds then, but that generally goes unreflected in these middle-class oriented poetry anthologies. I may take a second scan, but the issues of America’s racial caste system are largely ignored, though there is a bizarre Longfellow poem I hope to at least mention in the series (even if I might never figure out how I could perform it). Another thing to think about as we consider these century-old books: the children’s audience here would be inside that Greatest Generation who experienced the Great Depression, the global rise of nationalistic fascism, and eventually an even greater world war and its aftermath. Is there anything here in these poetry books which the authors suggested their mothers should be handing them that helped them through that?