Month: July 2024

Sara Teasdale Again: Advice to a Girl

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Here’s another short poem by Sara Teasdale that I’ve done the Parlando Project thing to by making it into a song. As a young woman, Teasdale won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1918, but as the century continued her poetry lost some of its literary/academic esteem for not being written in the manner of High Modernism’s Hermetic allusions.*

Teasdale grew up in the same turn-of-the-century St. Louis Missouri as High Modernism’s Chief Mage T. S. Eliot, though I’ve never been able to establish that they ever met as young people. One plausible reason why not: both were educated in gender-segregated schools for the most part. And Teasdale’s early life was like late-life Emily Dickinson in its isolation, largely confined to a room in her family’s home due to some vaguely defined illness. As a young woman she was able to break away from that confinement, moving to New York City and engaging with other literary figures there during her heyday as a poet. Like her contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay, she married a non-literary man after romances with other poets, but Teasdale’s marriage was less successful.

Teasdale’s Pulitzer-honored collection was titled Love Songs,  and that does describe her most common subject. Today’s poem, at least on face value, is one step removed from a personal experience love poem, posing itself as a poet-supplied maxim applicable to a disappointed-in-love younger woman.** I’d dispute that the poem’s advice is only useful for women — but then the specific in poetry often stands for the general. Here’s a link to the text of this short poem.

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“This truth, this hard and precious stone, lay it on your hot cheek.” Photograph by Man Ray

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Like many of the poets I feature here, Teasdale’s Wikipedia page is brief and fragmentary — but one thing it does document: her work has been set to music often, and by a wide range of composers. Early in this project I mentioned that singer-songwriter Tom Rapp’s setting of a Teasdale poem was an early inspiration for me. One could make the case that it was us composers, more than literary academics, who maintained Teasdale’s art until it could be re-engaged with.

Part of me wishes I could’ve produced a more polished performance of Teasdale’s “Advice to a Girl,”  but my current life often reduces the time I can spend on the musical pieces. I like the harmonic cadence in this song’s music, but I expressed that with just an expeditious strummed guitar part along with some acoustic bass accompaniment. Still, the idea’s there now, and an unexpressed idea easily fades and disappears. You can hear my performance with the audio player below. If you don’t see any audio player, there’s also this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*That I’d write “Hermetic” there indicates that my moods and mind are not opposed to that kind of poetry — but then I’m also not opposed to poetry that speaks of our ordinary and present human relationships, which in their complexities and footnotes exceed any grimoire’s or textbook’s breadth. Just as with music, I’m a poetry eclectic.

**This poem could easily be read as someone talking to and soothing the memory of their own younger self. Our youth may lord over us with its misapprehensions we cannot correct, and that time-separated self often benefits from our wiser selves speaking to them from later up the years.

Dooryard Roses & the death of John Mayall

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Here’s another one of these posts that is going to jump around a bit, though I’ll keep it brief, and there’s a heartbreak poem set to music that I’ll end with.

I don’t post every time some figure influential to me dies. It should be apparent to long-time readers of this that that group of influences is wide, and therefore large. Still sometimes the spirit moves me. This week a midlist musical figure, John Mayall, died. He was 90 — so not a surprise to any actuaries in my audience — but his extraordinarily long musical career (he was still regularly touring up until the last few years) might have masked the imminence of that death.

I can’t quite figure how many of you will recognize his name, and of those that do, how many will see why I’d count him as an influence. I often worry, what with the variety of the musical settings I publish here for strangers to listen to, that someone listening to one, two, or three of the Parlando musical pieces will think that I’m fixed in some musical genre. “Oh, he does folk-song-like stuff with solo acoustic guitar.” “Some kind of rough garage rock thing, isn’t it?” “Do you know you sound like Bob Dylan?” “What’s with all those orchestral instruments — and was that a sitar?” “You know, that beatnik to poetry slam kind of spoken word over spare Jazz backing stuff.”

To my mind, my aim is to vary the music, just as it’s my intent to present different sources for the words. But what’s that got to do with John Mayall who was not generally filed in any of those genre bins. If you look for Mayall’s work, he’ll be filed under “Blues.”

Blues, that great Afro-American musical approach, is (while often imperceptibly) as close as a center as I can find in my music. The other day one of the household teenager’s friends arrived when I was in another part of the house practicing guitar over an entirely not-Blues chord progression I had ginned up. I stopped, wanting not to intrude sonically on their get-together. When I met up with the young visitor (who plays guitar themselves) I apologized for the racket, and they replied, “Blues is always cool.”

Odd, I thought. I certainly didn’t think of the idea I was working with was Blues, but then the things I was playing over it used embellishments that I learned from musicians who played within a recognizably Blues song and harmonic structure.

In an interview with the Guardian newspaper later in his career Mayall was asked to define the Blues. His answer? :

“[Blues] is about – and it’s always been about – that raw honesty with which the blues express our experiences in life, something which all comes together in this music, in the words as well. Something that is connected to us, common to our experiences. To be honest, though, I don’t think anyone really knows exactly what it is. I just can’t stop playing it.”

Read the whole interview in that link above if you want an overview of the man’s career and its variations on what you might think defines the Blues— but I admire Mayall regardless of genre borders, because his career exemplified something I call the Indie Spirit. He was a “get in the van” sustainable-costs touring musician when D. Boon was a fresh kindergarten graduate. Like Grant Hart, he did the graphic design for his band’s records from the very start. He played for small audiences in small venues through most of his career, and ballroom and converted movie theater venues were about as big a draw as he could muster at the height of his popularity. If that bothered him (it didn’t seem to) it didn’t stop him. He played his music without a thought to maximizing its commercial potential, a genial stubbornness that I admire. Furthermore, every band he put together over around 60 years of music-making had musicians that were better than he was, and he based his bandleading on letting them shine. Every obit tries to list those once bandmembers, but the list extends over the horizon because that group of boosted musicians, like the bandleader, included many individual talents that never became big stars while making fine music.*

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A song not by John Mayall: “You look to me like misty roses…” The roses from a morning walk my wife took. The picture of Mayall is on a pillar overlooking where Dave Moore plays in my studio space.

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That went on longer than I expected, but here’s a piece I just finished, with words from the American poet Sara Teasdale. Teasdale is another writer from the first third of the 20th century whose poetry I can’t resist setting with music. Much of Teasdale’s poetry is short and compressed like today’s selection “Dooryard Roses.”  And much of it expresses heartbreak, as this poem does. But like the Blues, it tries to be honest and straightforward about it, and to sing it so we can say back to the singer “Yeah, I’ve been there too. Is that what you figured about it? Well, we’re both still here, so sing it some more!”

You can read the text of Teasdale’s short poem at this link.

The music I composed for this piece, is it Blues? Maybe I don’t know, but I don’t think it is. I just can’t stop playing it. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? This highlighted link is your alternative then.

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*A personal factor in my connection to John Mayall’s music: alternative voice and frequent keyboard player in this Project, Dave Moore, is the person who introduced me to Mayall’s records. In those 20th century days when one might fruitfully evaluate a person by their record collection contents, Dave didn’t need any help there — I’d already heard his poetry — but he’s why I came to hear and follow Mayall’s music.

Rejoicing Veins

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Summer has event dates for me. Wedding anniversary for my living wife, death anniversary for my dead wife. In between, my birthday. A birthday has the same date on the calendar, but they change over the years in their nature. I can still recall the birthdays for singular digit ages, those massive markers toward becoming, achieving oneself. And then there are the rights-granting ages, 18 and 21; or certain decade mileposts, 30 and 50.

Now aged, the age number becomes hazy, defining less. A fair number of people who’d be my age aren’t, due to death. Most of my cohort have some collection of Marley’s Ghost chronic conditions, mild to significant. This is, after all, the portion of life that takes away things, slowly or all-at-once.

But it’s important to add to this calculation, life adds each day too. I’m celebrating my birthday today with my wife and a couple of friends. We’ll meet at an art museum’s restaurant. Everyone and I have not stopped breathing.

I celebrated my actual birthday by getting an ultrasound study of my aorta. My doctor suggested it since I had smoked in my twenties, and there’s some increased risk that this major artery can later swell and be at risk for a rupture, something that is in that all-at-once class of ageing events. Weird going through a test like the one when I first saw the shadow of my child, to know if I have a shadow of death inside me.*

To a degree not equaling my enjoyment of life right now with my little family and this Project, with still being able to hop on a bicycle and ride, with the ability to meet an instrument and come to an agreement on some music, I do have a sense of shadows. Multiple family members, all younger than me, have had some mild to more significant cognitive issues diagnosed this past year. Slowly or all-at-once — that’s birthdays, that’s aging. I’m enjoying the days slowly.

“Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead,/Sleeping away the unreturning time.” Go ahead Vincent, it’s OK to take a nap. It what you get done when you wake up that counts.

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Today’s musical piece is my setting of a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay. You can read the text of her poem here if you’d like at this link, and listen to my performance with the audio player below. I had a half-a-dozen beginnings/basic tracks of Parlando musical pieces sitting on my hard drive, and I selected this one mostly out of how near to being finished it seemed. Then as I set down to write today’s post — asking myself what I was thinking — I realized the poem expressed elements of my life this summer.

I remember when I presented my first Millay sonnet for this Project, years ago. I knocked her then for using too much archaic language and sentence order, an affliction her contemporary Modernists were seeking a cure for. “Rejoicing Veins”  is from later in Millay’s career, and by then the language in this one shows little of that fault. This is another poem that seems to me to speak accurately about old age, yet this was written by a 40-year-old poet. Vinny, that doesn’t seem so old to me, but you got it right!

There’s that graphical audio player now, or if you don’t see it, this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Test results? Everything looked fine. Rejoicing arteries?

Be Angry at the Sun

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I completed the off-the-cuff recording of my musical performance of this Robinson Jeffers poem a few days ago, but it’s taken me awhile to figure out what I wanted to say about my encounter with it, and secondarily how you, my valued readers and listeners, might receive it. In “Be Angry at the Sun”  Jeffers is ostensibly writing a poem, but it seems he wants to give a political speech about political speech. TL:DNR, he’s not a fan. Here’s a link to the full text of Jeffers’ poem, but since he’s writing about speech, I thought it might best be heard.

I sometimes make rock music, but like my spouse, Jeffers knew how to build with stone, constructing his own castle-like home from local seaside rocks.

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Politics and poetry mix and don’t. Politicians will quote poems. A few poets (or diverted poets) have run for, even obtained public office. Personal political engagement by poets is likely no more rare than political engagement by nurses, baristas, bookkeepers, or shopkeepers. In my foray into social media* during the past year or so, I’ve often found an expectation that any posting poet or writer should declare their stance and allegiances.

Let me admit a reluctance to do so. My reaction is internal and perhaps odd: it feels like those calls to the pulpit at a Protestant Christian tent revival or Billy Graham’s mid-20th century adaptation of them to the TV age. It’s not oversimplified to be summarized thusly: make a simple public declaration in your acceptance of Jesus as your savior, and by that simple act, your soul’s continuous existence and the worthiness of your life has been assured. There are usually sub-clauses to that declaration: you will be expected to perform acts consistent with it. How consistent must those acts be with the declaration? Empirically, it varies considerably, which to my outlook makes the insistence and importance of the declaration problematic.

Now, some who read this may be Protestant Christians. You are welcome here. Your outlook, your understanding, your lives, may find nothing troubling about that act. I believe I understand your beliefs there fairly well. Long time readers here will know that myself and two other voices you’ve heard here are “PKs” (Preacher’s Kids). We literally grew up with variations of Protestant Christianity.

I also grew up with politics. I proudly wore my Stevenson campaign button as a grade-schooler. I participated at low-levels with campaigns for office and issues quixotic and successful for decades. I’ve been to political conventions. So, to you the readership here that are politically engaged: I have some understanding of your actions there.

So why this particular Robinson Jeffers poem, and why do I find it problematic yet worthy of considering today? Long-time readers may recall one of the poetic maxims I’ve expressed here: poems aren’t just about a message, an idea the poem wishes to express — they are more about how it feels to experience that idea, the sensations of the moment.

I was attracted to the Jeffers poem because I recognized that moment, that feeling. Perhaps you do to. I’ve been living in it this week: politicians and jurists seeming to speak as political operatives have increased my disgust. And this is not because (as Jeffers, the poet I’m voicing today, might believe) that politics is essentially dirty, though Jeffers and I will agree it’s humanly imperfect. Jeffers wrote this poem in the run-up to WWII. Unsaid within the poem, he’s specifically knocking Franklin Roosevelt,** a great and consequential American President, but he’s another of those Modernists who seems to have had, if not full-fledged admiration for fascism, at least a belief that it was no worse than other existing political schemes. There’s a lesson here: those who believe that politics is exploitative, dirty, always disreputable, will be drawn to or tolerate the belief that it’s best handled by leaders who revel in that themselves — the dirty men who will handle the dirty job, while we can stay clean sweet-smelling artists. Stone, not ivory tower in Jeffers case, but the same idea.

So, as you listen to my performance of Jeffers poem about politics and political speech, know my aim is to say that if you feel pain and disgust at what you’re hearing and seeing, I feel it too. Best as I can tell, I don’t share Jeffers prescription and proscription for politics, but in the world of today’s poem and my expression of it, I’m saying if you despair: you’re likely just one person, one citizen, someone without extraordinary powers. Your choices, your actions alone didn’t cause our country and our world to be in this state. How do we turn our nation away from letting the dirty men to do dirty jobs from being left unfettered? I’m a composer and writer, I can’t say I know more than a nurse, barista, bookkeeper, or shopkeeper.

Audio player gadget below for most of you. Is your sub-caucus not seeing any player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with it’s own audio player.

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*I’ve given in and now post on short-post-format social media after eschewing it for a decade or more. It’s been good and bad. Like poetry, it lets me practice reigning in my long-windedness; and I can engage in it when distractions abound. Alas, it becomes its own distraction when I do have longer blocks of time or energy. In theory, like poetry, it could be complex while being concise. In practice, it’s mostly superficial —something one can relax with when needed —but that “just give me a momentary diversion while I scroll through my timeline” expectation stunts it.

**To those who might want to remind me of FDR’s faults and bad acts. I have long had a strong interest in history. I know of them.

As far from pity, as complaint

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

The great American poet Emily Dickinson writes about death a lot, so maybe I should pause for a moment to mention how inescapable the living’s experience of death was in her time and place, what with disease, injury, a deadly Civil War, graveyards within the city limits, and approaching death happening often at home.

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Because I lived across the street from death? When a child, Emily Dickinson’s family did not live in the Dickinson Homestead (now the Dickinson Museum), but at another house, located across the road from the town cemetery where she would later be buried. A child is born, plays, grows up, and crosses the fence.

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The poem I’ll sing below today speaks to that. If you’d like to follow along, here’s a link to the text of “As far from pity, as complaint.”   This poem is more than its message —most good poems are — but let me write down here a sentence to summarize what I read this poem as saying: rather than pity, dread, or anger toward death, a result we cannot change, we should emulate the dead themselves who demonstrate that life is not everlasting — but the predicament of dying, and the predicament of living, are everlasting.

That’s a worthwhile thought, and poems in Dickinson’s time and place were often expected to deliver a lesson. But why is this a poem, why is this an Emily Dickinson poem? An essay, a sermon, a sympathy card, a letter, a conversation all could deliver this message as well or better as 12 lines not even pentameter-long and broken with the skeleton spaces of the pervasive Dickinson dashes (as if her “trade was bone.”)

Because it sings this situation, even silently on the page. There’s a dancer’s force, a singer’s force, an instrument’s augmented force in this way of telling. If death is inevitable — as is also meter, repetition, rhyme, the flow of sound into shapes — might we be comforted by these shapes? We live. We die. The shape of life continues. Quod Erat Demonstrandum, thus it is demonstrated.

When encountering this poem earlier this summer I sensed an intra-poem image-rhyme in this poems 7th and 8th lines. A better-known Dickinson poem which attracts us with what seems like mundane charm, “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose,*”  has summer children playing from dawn — and at the end, disappearing over the horizon’s fence-line at sunset. That’s the continuing shape of our lives.

You can hear my musical performance of “As far from pity, as complaint”  with the audio player below. If your way of reading this blog is numb to that revelation, don’t complain, I offer this highlighted link as a way to open a new tab that will have its own audio player so you can hear it.

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*I love the version of that Dickinson poem sung by alternate Parlando voice Dave Moore. The LYL Band was performing the poem live, and Dave had selected a key that exceeded his vocal range — but I think the creaky breaking of his voice brings poignance to the recording.

The Guitar, after a poem by Federico García Lorca

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Today’s piece is a fairly well-known poem by the Spanish poet. Given that I’ve played guitar nearly for 50 years and been interested in poetry for more than that, I keep thinking I must have run into it before this year. If that’s so, why don’t I recall considering it?

My answer is going to sound more judgmental than I mean it: bad translations. No, maybe I shouldn’t use “bad” here. I don’t suspect any moral failing or lack of effort by translators of this poem. And given that I’m not all that knowledgeable about the work of Lorca and have only the most limited grasp of his native language, I should have no standing to rate other published translations of “La Guitarra.”   What I do know is that native speakers find his poetry passionate and vivid, and the English versions seem to my ears and heart (those being the entry points for poetry) stilted and muffled.

I’m not going to link any of the English translations I found of “The Guitar.”   None I’ve seen seem fully effective to me, though I cannot say that they might be effective for others. I’m not going to link or line-by-line dis the translations I’ve seen. I will say that the first one I saw at one of the leading poets and poetry organization’s site was representative. I didn’t find it musically compelling, and it was a jumble of abstracted images that had little sock, little immediate feeling evoked. I assume the translator had the advantages I must clearly concede I don’t have. Why might their work not succeed, at least to this reader?

Two theories. Other translators may have been too literal in carrying over Lorca’s original sentence structure, which might be natural and unaffected in his Spanish. This is poetry, so one can make a case that how it’s said is essential — but when languages order words differently, following the original sentence structure and word order too exactly damages the natural vividness of a person speaking. Secondly, Lorca to my slight knowledge connects to Surrealist expression, a style of poetry I loved as a young man and still like to connect with today. Surrealism likes the wild and incongruous image; and from its ancestor Dada, it’s often willing to take an image in a random, raw and undercooked state. This creates a problem for me when I translate Surrealist and Dada work.

You see, I view my task as a translator to primarily find the images in the work and to then portray those images in clear modern English, and secondarily give the poem a word-music in the new language that gives pleasing movement and return to the poem. What if the original intent was to mystify the reader, to present an image that was intentionally confounding? I risk, while puzzling out the text in a language I don’t know well, to over-simplify or over-determine an image. I fear embarrassment of doing that, but I think it’s the better risk because vivid images that the reader/listener grasps and gasps are compelling to me.

As to the word-music, my version of “The Guitar”  rephrased Lorca somewhat, aiming to make him sound like an English speaker. While doing that I tried to make the poem musical in English. The poem was already using repetition for poetic effect in Spanish, and I added just a touch more.

The Guitar - Lorca

A chord sheet as I urge you to sing this yourself. Here’s a link to Lorca’s poem in its original Spanish.

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As you might imagine, this poem about the expression of a musical instrument has been set to music before my attempt you can hear today. While not a Lorca expert I know that he connected too with Spanish Deep Song and the evocation in that tradition of “Duende,” a difficult to translate term that some Afro-American musicians have seen as analogous to the Blues. I played a nylon string guitar for my setting, the type of guitar associated with Spain, and the simple chord progression I used would not be foreign to that tradition. But both from my skill level and inclination what I played for this song was simple and sparsely ornamented. Though the harmony wasn’t Blues, I approached playing this as if it was American Blues. Another Blues element I introduced that wasn’t in Lorca’s poem: my version has a gendered call and response. The guitar is a her, the singer (there’s no singer in Lorca’s poem) is a he.

You can hear a performance of my translation after this poem by Lorca with the audio player below. No player? No problem, this link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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Paying the Piper: Epilog

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Those following my June series on my trip to investigate the life of a largely forgotten poet, folk-song collector, and teacher Edwin Ford Piper may wonder why I titled it “Paying the Piper.”  There were a couple of reasons I knew as I started writing the series after returning home after the trip.

The first: I’d be paying attention to Piper when nearly no one else was. That may be a strange choice, though it’s one I’m largely comfortable with. I enjoy looking at places others aren’t, and I love stories that connect seemingly unlike things. So, Piper’s settler family moving to the frontier of Nebraska just after The Civil War, raising a poet-son who educated himself on the plains amid those who stayed, and those who passed through. I being a guitarist who grew up in the folk song revival, I appreciated that he collected the songs that entertained those people, songs that I could run into decades later because of the work of collectors like Piper. Even my search on that elusive question I couldn’t solve had it’s rewards: what of the pervasive Workshop and MFA culture of poetry of the last 70 years arose, perhaps unwittingly, from Piper’s own methods.*

The reason we call it paying  attention implies it has a cost. I could have done more new musical pieces here, ones featuring poets there is more general interest in. The longer posts in June took a lot of work for a small audience. I chose to pay that cost. If you come here for the more known poets and for the musical performances, some of those are already in progress this week.

My wife and I returned home in the evening after my sojourn to the University library in Iowa City. I had a lot of notes, and pages captured but not yet analyzed, and I had ordered a couple of books to help that would arrive in the upcoming week. It was good to have gone on this trip. It was good to be home. Now the second paying.

What was the one thing I was most looking forward to at dawn the next day? Getting on one of my bicycles and moving my old body briskly through the cool morning air. I would ride to a café and have a frittata and a big glass of iced tea, read the newspaper, and think about poetry or music tasks for the upcoming day.

I walked out that next morning to the garage access door, and I found it slightly ajar, unlocked. I opened it. Sometime during my Iowa trip, my family’s bicycles had been stolen.**

I could write a thousand words here on the stolen bikes if I thought there was a readership for that. I lost my old original generation mountain bike. It was the first bike I bought to ride through Minnesota winters back in the early 1980s instead of buying a car. I rode it in snow as planned, and over rough trails in woods — and in a couple of returning trips, in the river valley hills and gravel roads of Iowa where I grew up, With less knobby-tires it worked well to ride around the city too. Over a decade ago it was the bike I attached a trailer bike to, to take my young child for rides. In the last few years it had become my rain bike since it had full length fenders, and it was the one I rode when the place I’d need to lock up was a little more risky. I’d figured, scratched up and faded, outdated in every regard, it didn’t look like anything to steal. But, it was gone, though I tell myself the memories aren’t stolen.

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Picture of the OG mountain bike taken a bit over 10 years ago, when it still had the trailer-bike hitch on it.

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20 years ago I decided to replace it, and bought what was then a modern “Hybrid Bike.” It was an aluminum Trek, not the fanciest in their line then, but it had indexed gear shifting and the ability to run thin high-pressure tires that I thought would make the bike nimbler. However, the bike and I just didn’t bond. It never was a joy to ride, even with the 28mm narrow tires that were expected to make it faster and easier rolling. Aluminum frame bikes, particularly the ones from that generation, are known for having a harsh ride, maybe that was it I told myself — but whatever, it just wasn’t any fun. Then a couple of years ago I obtained a set of new wide 50mm tires that didn’t fit the bike they were bought for. I’m not sure why, but I mounted them on the aluminum Trek along with a Brooks Flyer leather saddle (that’s the one with springs). The bike was transformed. The extra tire air volume and the saddle not only made the bike more pleasant to ride, those tires made the bike feel more nimble (and more tolerant of bad street surfaces). In the past year it had become the bike I rode more than any other. It had been some mice and a pumpkin, then a splendid carriage and horses — and now, poof, it was gone.

The bike I was looking forward to ride that morning? A purple REI Randonnee that my wife and I had bought used with the idea that she might want to try longer bike rides at some point. It too was probably 20 years old like the Trek, but it had a smooth riding double-butted steel frame. That touring idea never worked out, but I had modified it over the years with a better set of handlebars, a tweaked stem height, some used “brifters” for indexed shifting (my wife never cared for the bar-end shifters it came with). I ended up riding it on longer rides. It was comfortable, responsive, and I miss it.

Also lost, both my wife’s and my winter “Fat Tire” bikes.

Just inanimate things, but I ride my bikes almost every day for joy and utility, the loss was something like loosing a pet.

All lost as I was in a library studying the life and times of a largely forgotten poet and singer of songs people kept.***

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*I might write more on that Workshop/MFA issue for poets and writers later this summer, but one of the folks who helped guide me on my search S. L. Huang wrote a thoughtful article on the dangers of this paradigm for many writers which I’ll link here.

**I won’t go into the details of how/why the garage was unlocked, though I likely know.

***Besides the thing-grief of these oft-used tools for joy being gone, and the work of trying to nail down details with the Edwin and Janet Piper stories, a large part of my June was taken up replacing the stolen bikes. You’ll meet the replacement bikes later, likely in use.

Paying the Piper chapter 6: bonus library time & the widow Piper has some formidable opinions

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

After my rewarding visit to the Carl Sandburg birthplace, our plan was to return to Iowa City and leave early the next morning to return home. I felt I knew more about the lesser-known early 20th century poet I’d come to find out about, Edwin Ford Piper, and I had had the experience of seeing something of Sandburg’s roots. My wife had gotten to explore several habitats. And I was pleased to find out my old body could still get around walking while carrying a 10 pound bag — even as a shade of the young student I once was.

Every trip is like this for me: enjoyment at the new place, appreciation of the new things experienced — but once the final day arrives, I’m ready and looking forward to returning home. But that evening as we were getting ready for bed, I was making a quick check of Internet things and saw that I’d received a response from S. L. Huang, a writer who had initiated my interest in the idea that Piper had been foundational in the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop method of teaching creative writing students.

Why would I (and plausibly you) care about that? The Iowa Writers’ Workshop was the origin-point of some things that have become pervasive in creative writing: the MFA degree, the workshop method of developing writers and critiquing work in progress, and the practice of literary writers being brought in and paid to be instructors in such programs.

Little I’d read in the Edwin Ford Piper papers before the Sandburg finale had addressed that element of his life directly, but Huang’s reply said there was more info on this in his widow Janet Piper’s papers which the University special collections also had. I mentioned this to my wife — she was agreeable to leaving at noon instead of dawn for the long drive home, and she would find one more landscape to explore while I made the walk back to the library for a half-day looking at Piper’s wife’s papers.*

By now I already knew the routine in the special collections reading room. The tough part would be that Janet Piper’s collection was larger than her husband’s, and only generally cataloged. I had gone into the husband’s papers knowing at least a few things about him, but all I knew about Janet Piper were references that she thought “politics” had led to her husband’s early and sudden death in 1939 just as the Workshop was getting underway.

Janet Piper files 800

A small portion of Janet Piper’s papers in the University of Iowa collection, but my best guess at what might answer my questions about the beginnings of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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It’s taken me until the first day of July to read and comprehend what I captured for later perusal in those few last hours at the reading room. Later in June I also read Stephen Wilbers’ 1980 book The Iowa Writers’ Workshop  which aimed to show how that noted program came to be. Wilbers corresponded with Janet Piper while researching his book, duplicating a slightly earlier attempt by Janet W. Wylder to get information from Edwin Ford Piper’s widow. Wylder was attempting a similar book on the Writers’ Workshop that was never completed.**

Janet Piper’s papers include correspondence from these two with her, and a more than 100-page, response that seems to have gone through several revisions and titles, eventually being called “Edwin Ford Piper and the Iowa Workshop: a prehistory.”   It’s likely the best we have on the later adult life of Edwin Piper, who taught at Iowa for more than a generation and encouraged student creative writing throughout that time — right up until his sudden death just as the official Writers’ Workshop was launched. But spoiler alert: his wife’s account doesn’t live up to that promising title.

Since Janet Piper is even lesser-known than her husband, here’s a capsule bio extracted mostly from what I read in her papers and some web research:

Born (family last name: Pressley) in 1902 in Des Moines Iowa. May have moved to eastern Nebraska sometime in her childhood, and eventually attended college there and completed a Masters. She knew other young literary people in Nebraska and was already a poet who had won a couple of awards for her poetry while in that state. Began advanced degree work at the University of Iowa in Iowa City in the 1920s. Her academic work was interrupted by her 1927 marriage to Edwin Ford Piper, one of her professors, and by the following birth of their only child Edwin Ford Piper II in 1928.***  She writes little about the day to day of her marriage other than asides to the considerable duties of motherhood and being a faculty wife. She seems to admire and support her husband in his work and notes increasing change, stress, and conflict at the University then. She had resumed her academic work toward a PhD by the later 1930s — and then in 1939, her husband dies suddenly. She describes completing her final thesis defense in the midst of new widowhood in a disassociated state, flying on under auto-pilot. Various statements, some as corroboration, say this is likely the first PhD granted for a thesis consisting of creative writing.

She leaves Iowa in 1940 and within a couple of years takes up a teaching position at Sam Houston State in Texas, where she taught until retirement. In 1949 she made a suicide attempt by pills and was committed by her 21-year-old son to a facility in Texas, where she later writes she received the kind of coerced treatment, including electro-shock, that was common then. There’s some heartbreaking but formally-stated correspondence in her papers with her son from the early 1950s when they are estranged. She blames him for that mental facility commitment, and she says that he blames her for expecting too much of him as a child and not giving him appropriate attention.**** At her retirement in 1972 it’s written that she has continued to write poetry. She lives until 1997.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop in their official histories started in 1936 — or it started in 1939 in other accountings. Edwin Piper had been encouraging students creative writing for decades, but the administration was now committed to allowing these efforts to be given academic credit and to become substantive toward degrees, a new concept for American academia. From Wilbers’ book and Janet Piper’s account, Edwin had some level of prominence in the mid-1930s in this now officially academic writers’ program — Wilbers writes it was more over the poetry sub-section while Janet Piper portrays her husband as being increasingly marginalized by the department’s administration, making the department head Norman Foerster a particular villain in the matter.

Yet, in a 1976 letter Wilbers includes in a footnote, a fascinating (but secondary to our story) figure Wilber Schramm recounts that he took over as director in 1939, being drafted into the job because of a pressing need occasioned by Piper’s death. In the Workshop’s official history, Schramm was the first director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but Schramm doesn’t tell it that way.

Alas, from what I’ve been able to find out so far, there’s no solid information about how central Edwin Ford Piper was to instigating those Iowa Writers’ Workshop changes to how literary writing and writers live and work in our century. His career shows he’d long favored working with young writers, but Janet Piper portrays that she and her husband didn’t like some of the leaders making Iowa a pioneer in granting degrees, or their matter of going about it. There’s a cryptic report from the 1930s that Edwin didn’t like how the Workshop was turning into a promotional effort which I cannot completely evaluate. I was at first skeptical at Janet Piper’s constant reference to the malign forces of something she calls “New Humanism” ruining her life, her husband’s life, and literature in general. I knew nothing of that term, but a little research confirms that that was overtly the flag that her chief villain Norman Foerster and some of his allies were flying.*****

For a person like me who likes to know how directional changes happened, to see what turned us from one path to another, it was engrossing to try to chase this down, even if the crossroads turned out to be shrouded in fog. I’ll close by saying I’d like to thank Edwin and Janet Piper. Though they are dead, and they likely never concerned themselves exactly with my questions being formed in the 21st century, their papers gave me a window into their times and challenges. I’d like to thank the folks at the University of Iowa Special Collection section who were always helpful to this old and informal scholar. And thanks to you, rare and curious readers, who granted attention to this 1930s couple caught up in the changes in American literature and this 2020s couple celebrating their anniversary with their particular interests.

Watching my time carefully, just a few minutes before noon I packed up in the library, went down to the street, and swung into the car as my wife pulled up at the entrance curb. We were leaving for home.

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*Coincidence: as I went looking into the beginnings of the Iowa Workshop, she visited the Devonian Fossil Gorge which I later read famed Workshop Director Paul Engle also liked to examine while still a student.

**This double pump seemed to frustrate Janet Piper. She at first thanked Wylder for rekindling her memories of her dead husband and her time with young writers at Iowa. Piper’s response appears to be a version of the around 100-page memoir which includes a long side-discussion of New Humanism. In her following correspondence with Wilbers she’s upset that Wylder had in effect ghosted her, and she wonders why Wilbers doesn’t have the material she sent Wylder. Moderns, remember: this is the era when producing 100 pages meant typing that singular ms. entirely and inhaling correction fluid, not just cutting/pasting and pressing send, or dumping pictures off your phone’s camera roll.

***More notes for Moderns: I can hear the ick factor bursting in your minds. This sort of thing was quite common, even into the years of my youth. Their contemporaries wouldn’t necessarily think this scandalous — or even unusual — though the age difference (56 to 25) here is broader than many of these male prof/female student marriages. That said, everything you object to was still possible despite different mores. Janet Piper’s papers give no indication it wasn’t a happy marriage.

****Whatever led Janet Piper to her suicide attempt isn’t spelled out in what I’ve read. The number of stressors and level of endurance it would take to be a single mom, a widow, a rare woman/academic in an era when that was even tougher than today, and while society is in the transition from the Great Depression to a World War — all that might batter anyone’s defenses. Similarly, I can only imagine a 21-year-old son having their only parent, their mother, trying to kill herself and being put in a position to try to decide what to do about that. I don’t know the particulars of Texas law at that time, but authorities themselves might be pressing for civil commitment. I’m not suited to be a novelist, but reading in Janet Piper’s papers on this matter I thought “There’s a novel.”

*****Let me resist trying to give an outline of New Humanism. Like a number of Fugitives, New Criticism proponents, and neo-Thomists that followed this movement and somewhat evolved from it, they tended toward political conservatism, and in the 1930s many were, at the least, permissive of fascist authoritarians, which some (including JP) might lay to them being already authoritarian in aesthetics. Janet Piper speaks distressingly of fascist Iowa professors in that era, even names some. Janet Piper’s papers that I’ve read don’t tell me exactly what Edwin Piper thought of this. Though a Chaucer specialist carrying that interest into a project completed at the end of his life, Edwin’s papers don’t demonstrate a pervasive appeal to timeless classical truths, and his folksong fascination would likely oppose a tight highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow outlook. I can’t say for sure what Edwin Piper’s politics were, but his widow seems left/liberal in the 1970s and makes no mention that they disagreed on politics back in the 30s. Janet Piper’s summary that “politics” led to her husband’s early death leads to the question: what level of politics? In her mind it appears university politics and civic politics were indivisible.

When asked about this era in the 1970s. Janet Piper continually wants to talk about what she views as more than a cultural tendency or scheme, and more at an active, effective, powerful conspiracy originated by New Humanism. At times she’s detailed and footnoted with her charges, at other times vague and implying great harms in a broader and fuzzier way. More than once in her papers she refers to Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Conrad Aiken as the heads of a secret cabal advancing evil work — and I can’t quite “read” if I should take those expressions as satiric exaggerations. In a letter from Robert Hillyer, he agrees with her that she’s not a crank, using that word as if it had been applied to Janet. In what I read she spends less time than my curiosity would like expounding what she prefers in literary or cultural theory rather than what she damns.

It would take more study and knowledge to fully understand or evaluate that element in Janet Piper’s later writing. This element, often present in what I read, shows a life of great reading and learning exceeding my own, evidence of great energy for a person roughly my age — and likely at times I can’t quite measure, effective moments of literary criticism and insight.