Month: August 2024

Down the Songo — Summer: Still Rowing, Still Dreaming

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Does the summer feel like it’s gone by like a dream, one of those dreams where the ungainly night-plot finds its own winding path? I started this summer with a May Day suggestion to remember to write of our workday labors, and then too, I presented back then a cover song marking my teenager’s last childhood summer. And now it’s Labor Day weekend, and I’m going to present a poem that is the antithesis of paid labor, another poem from the 1894 Songs of Vagabondia  book by Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey. We’ve already heard from Carman this month, now let’s sample some Hovey.

Richard Hovey is another of those pre-Modernist era poets who wrote in the final years of the 19th century. Because his work falls before the Modernist revolution and the ascension of American poets to a preeminent place in English language literature there’s lesser interest in it, but with a figure like him I think of a bright young man living in an age that felt stirrings of desire to form its own poetic styles.

His Songs of Vagabondia  struck a carefree chord in its time. Tennyson, Longfellow, or Robert Browning would have presented a very serious life that should be attended to. The Vagabondia poems, with intent, fail the Sandburg Test I’ve proposed to assay poetry collections. If my beginning-of-Summer cover song asked the listener to indulge in “That Summer Feeling,”  these poems concur. There’s no Winter and barely an Autumn there. No work or studies either. Instead, we have flirtations and libations, the comradeship of likeminded friends, and here the open road and heart are spent without anything much in one’s purse or paycheck.

For this Hovey poem from Songs From Vagabondia  I chose to create a denser piece of music, a presumptuous rock band ensemble with two drumsets, electric bass, piano, two electric guitars, along with string synth and wind instrument parts. For a Labor Day holiday song about an aimless trip down a Maine river, I spent quite a few hours working to form this into shape. I’m not sure I produced the perfect arrangement after all that, but I enjoyed the process.

Songo River 4 pictures

These Songo river photos look like they could have been taken within a decade or so of Hovey’s poem. Looks bucolic in these, but others show passenger steamboats (one named for Maine’s poet Longfellow) plied the river too.

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The Songo in Hovey’s poem is a short river in Maine, but the Songo connects a large lake and some other bodies of water — and though I don’t think the poem mentions it, it had then (and still has!) a hand operated set of locks and a swing-away draw bridge constructed in 1830.*  Hovey’s poem makes this river sound rural and solitary, but having never been to Maine, much less the Maine of the late 19th century, I can’t say how busy it actually would be. The poem’s voice says someone is using oars for propulsion, so even if this is an aimless pleasure trip, there’s work involved just as there was in my recording the song I made of the poem. At the end of the poem there appears to be someone else in the boat, as the poem’s voice cries out “Kiss me” unexpectedly. Who is the other there? Could this be a Hendrixian excused kiss of the sky-blue-water-sky? Maybe, but a lover would be the likely (if unprepared for) guess. The unprepared suddenness of this ask seems dream-plot strange to me.

In my performance I turned the poem’s remarks about the experience being dreamlike into something of a refrain to further emphasize that element for someone who might hear this once as I perform it. I also removed one short stanza from the poem’s original text in the interest of shorter performance length. You can hear the full band performance of “Down the Songo”  with the graphical audio player you should see below. No player?  This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*This short modern video shows the continued remarkable operation of the manual lock and drawbridge. Yes, these are hand-cranked mechanisms!  So, Sandburg Test met with this post, there are necessary folks working a job on this river, even if unmentioned in Hovey’s poem.

The Mote: a 19th century SciFi prose poem

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

So, what else did our two young late-19th century North Americans Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey put in their 1894 Songs from Vagabondia  book? How about this one: a SF prose poem adrift in wine and the universe?

I’ve already mentioned that Hovey’s poetry is easy to link to the French language poets* that were a strong influence on English language Modernism that was just over the horizon in 1894, but perhaps pioneering Canadian poet Carman had obtained a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations  when it was issued just a few years before the pair’s Vagabondia book. The form of the prose poem was still fairly novel, but this experiment in that form adds another, fantastic, element too.

Vagabondia Front Piece

The front piece in Carman & Hovey’s “Songs from Vagabondia.” Here’s a link to the text of “The Mote” included in it.

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The first time I read “The Mote”  I thought it the story of a short slightly tipsy conversation between two young men in a bar. For young men with loosened tongues to talk of the universe, its unfathomable scope and mysterious connections, is a comic commonplace after all.

As the mote flies into the wine cup of one of the young tavern drinkers and the conversation starts, it’s easy to overlook the way Carman set the scene: the pair entering the tavern are of “august bearing, seraph tall.” Are Rudy Gobert and Karl Anthony-Towns having a post-game libation? “Seraph” isn’t the most common form of an esoteric word, “seraphim,” but it’s a name for the highest order of angels.

If one reads it again, taking that seraph literally rather than figuratively, then the mote which is called “Earth” isn’t a parable, but the plaything of two indolent angels! This ambiguity seems cleverly designed-in by Carman.

You can hear me perform Bliss Carman’s “The Mote”  with the audio player below. The guitar part was played with my Squier Jazzmaster, an affordable rendition of a once unsuccessful Fender electric guitar design. One of the knocks against the Jazzmaster was that it had too much open string-length between the tailpiece and the bridge, a fault that could generate extraneous noises when one uses the vibrato bar. Some modern players see this and figure: “Feature, not a bug!” So, in that manner, some of what I recorded here has me intentionally playing the outside noises that a Jazzmaster can make.

If you don’t see the audio player gadget, I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Here’s an odd thing: the 19th century French poets that were stretching the subject matter, outlook, and prosody in advance of their contemporaries in England took influences from American poets like Whitman and Poe. Carman and Hovey wouldn’t have needed to go across the ocean to France to read those Americans — but still, there’s a field of echoes going on in this pre-Modernist era. There’s another cosmic joke here too: Brits may have needed to hear some American-originated poetic ideas spoken in French before they could recognize their value!

The Two Bobbies: compare & contrast Robert Burns and Robert Browning. Make your answer in the form of a song.

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

When we last left off pioneering Canadian poet Bliss Carman he was audaciously publishing a collection of 100 lyrics by Sappho.  If you read that post you find that such a substantial book of Sappho required Carman to largely imagine what the ancient Greek poet wrote, since much of what survives of her poetry are fragments, often but a line or two.

One could shelve that effort next to Ouija board transcriptions, among literary frauds, or within the loose bounds of historical fiction. Still, the “Sappho” poems he published have their attractions. And there’s a greater reason to look at Carman’s work: he was writing these things in the generation between 1890 to 1915 before English language poetic Modernism fully emerged with new models and freedoms for poetry. Some younger poets then suspected that Victorian 19th century poetry was overdue to be superseded. In England, William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites had done what segments of young poets, musicians, and artists sometimes choose to do: they rejected their current and parent’s generation and looked to older models of their arts for different forms of expression.

Imitating the ancient Greeks in English was one such idea. Carman went further by treating his recreations as translations, but he may have gotten away with it when English translations of Sappho were still a bit thin on the ground. Other early Modernist poets writing in English like H. D. and Edgar Lee Masters produced original works that echoed the tone and methods of Greek lyric poetry.

Those Sappho lyrics weren’t Carman’s breakthrough however. That happened in 1894 when he and American poet Richard Hovey* published Songs of Vagabondia, the first of a series of co-written poetry collections that sought to break the Victorian mold. For a mid-20th century person like me, I sensed a rhyme in the appeal of these books as I read through them. Is it too easy for me to see them as the late 19th century equivalents to On The Road  and beatnik bohemia?

How so? Though the Vagabondia  poems have variety in subject and tone, they extol carpe diem, wine, women, and song, along with non-itinerary wandering. Sensuality and beauty are self-rewarding. Respectability, career, and money are for others.

Two Bobbies

This song is fun to sing, so let me share the fun with a simple chord-sheet to encourage you to try it.

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Carman’s “The Two Bobbies”  speaks to this literary and cultural moment. He jauntily compares the English Victorian worthy Robert Browning with the 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns. Silent on its now age-beiged page, Carman’s poem was just begging to be made into a song, so this week I came up with a simple setting for acoustic guitar and my voice of subjective quality. You can hear me hold forth with it using the audio player gadget below. No audio player?  This link is a backup that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*And what of Vagabondia’s  co-author Richard Hovey? I have plans to present some of his work here soon. Rather than looking to the ancient Greeks or to 18th century British poets, Hovey was steeped in another motherload of Modernist-influential poetry: certain French poets of the second-half of the 19th century.

O But My Delicate Lover: Canadians translate Sappho

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I regularly read and take part in a daily poetry thread on X/Twitter. Its host, Joseph Fasano, posts a theme word and an example poem reflecting a topic most mornings, and other poetry readers respond with poems that relate to that. Early this week the theme was “Longing.”

One of the responding poems was this one:

Sappho-Carson Longing

The X/Twitter poster here happens to be a relative of mine, though I’m not sure which one

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This is an English translation of a poem by the ancient Greek poet Sappho rendered by famed Canadian poet and translator Anne Carson. If we didn’t know it was a translation, if we thought of it as a poem by a modern poet, here’s one thing we might notice on the photographed page: those short lines, those white spaces, those fenced-off blanks kept apart by square brackets. Looking at the text this way, the poem on the page has a striking effect. Its incompleteness — its, well, longing — is amplified in those spaces.

In Carson’s presentation that’s an inescapable part of Sappho’s work. We have only fragments of Sappho after all, only a handful of her poems are even comprehensively within sight of being complete. Some Sappho fragments are but single words, and many, a phrase or a few lines. And we know so little of the poems’ context. What details recorded about Sappho’s life date at best from centuries after she is thought to have lived, and are inconsistent. That she was a woman in a male dominated world, and lived in an outlying area away from the centers of classical Greek culture that we most know from later surviving works adds to the mystery. That the Greeks of the Athenian Golden Age, or the later Hellenistic Greeks, misread is some way the larger corpus of Sappho still available to them as they supplied us with Sappho quotes, commentary, and biography is plausible.

As readers of modern poetry, we likely assume when reading a Sappho poem that it’s a more-or-less authentic voice of someone describing a moment in her own life. I can’t say that as being a sure thing (any more than it is for, say, Shakespeare’s sonnets). But maybe that makes little difference, especially in the absence of well-attested facts — the words have the effect they have on us, based on our own lives, our own culture, our own time.

Carson’s translations are well-regarded, but she’s not the first to translate Sappho into English — she’s not even the first Canadian to do so. The first attempts there I know of, likely the first in fact as it’s by such an early Canadian poet, were by Bliss Carman.*  In 1904 Carman published Sappho: 100 Lyrics.  Unlike Carson, who is a scholar, I don’t know if Carman was all that knowledgeable in ancient Greek, and from what I can find he’s less open in sharing translator’s notes on his methods. The preface to his book, written by a friend, says only he more-or-less imagined the poems as complete and wrote then from that imagination.

From a scholars’ standpoint this is an outrageous act. On the other hand, there’s a current in poetry of writers finding something in assumed characters, some for anonymity, some for fraudulent reasons, some to burlesque writing styles they wish to make fun of. Carman’s life was not straightforward. There were a lot of bumps and setbacks in his career — all as one might imagine at a time where the idea of a Canadian literary poet was yet to be established. So, to take a vacation from all that to the isle of Lesbos and imagine Sappho strumming her lyre within his earshot? Maybe understandable.

O But My Delicate Lover

Another green world. Here a chord sheet for today’s musical performance.

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Published in the era just before the outbreak of English-language Modernism, Carman’s version of Sappho found some readers. Ezra Pound apparently read them, and in his loose Chinese translations and elsewhere he seems to have adopted a no-hurt, no foul practice of translation as a personal recasting of the original work. Carman’s Sappho is sensual without overelaborate decoration or any “I’m so  naughty” stance. I can imagine some of those Not-Yet-Modernists who kept a well-thumbed copy of Swinburne in their back pockets circa 1900 appreciating these poems. If the tropes in these love poems are often common ones, he’s portraying Sappho who would have predated those tropes becoming commonplace, and he’s asking us to believe our moments are repetitions with a long heritage.

Many modern readers of Sappho have adapted Sappho as a pioneering Lesbian poet. In the many centuries between Sappho’s 600 B.C. E. and the present there have been a variety of renderings of Sappho’s sexuality. The text, fragmentary as it is, often shows attraction and praise for women and female gods. If we assume Sappho herself is the voice in her poems (and why not, we know so little, and nothing for sure, and Occam’s razor) this would follow. In this poem of Carman’s Sappho, the lover and object of longing is certainly female. Bliss Carman was an apparently hetero male, but his poem’s assigned author is a woman. Parsing….

Those that object to drag-time story hour at the library will have a hard time with all that. If for only that alone, I’m going to give voice to this poem from Carman’s collection of imagined Sappho translations. You can hear my musical performance of “O But My Delicate Lover,”  with the audio player below. Has the important fragment that includes an audio player disappeared for you?  This highlighted link will open a real, not imaginary, tab with its own audio player.

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*Carman’s 1904 work may also be the first American translation of Sappho, as it predates the top hit in a web search that shows Mary Barnard’s 1958 volume as the first from the U.S.A.  Coincidently, Ezra Pound is attributed as someone who encouraged Barnard to do her book of Sappho translations.

Carman studied in the U.S. and was distantly related to Ralph Waldo Emerson. His ancestors emigrated to Canada as Tories escaping after the U.S. Revolutionary War.

I Dream I Am Falling

~ Frank Hudson ~ 4 Comments

This August 6th is the 8th anniversary of the Parlando Project — but it’s also the 23rd anniversary of my late wife’s death and Hiroshima Day. This isn’t the first time I’ve linked these three observations with a single post and musical piece.

Given two-thirds of this anniversary, it’s not surprising that “I Dream I Am Falling”  is about grief and remembrance. It is a departure from the Parlando Project’s focus in that this freshly completed song uses a poem I wrote rather than our regular use of others’ words.

I continue to write poetry, though less often as I’ve aged. I think sometimes about prize-winning poet Donald Hall revealing in old age that he’d given up writing poetry. I don’t recall if he knew why he stopped writing poetry, or if he revealed the reasons for stopping if he knew them. For myself, there are elements of regular life interfering, but throughout my life the writing of poetry was the easiest art to interleave with other busyness. I would compose stanzas in my head, trusting memory retention as a good test of their value until they could be transcribed. Or like William Carlos Williams, I might jot down first drafts on prescription pads in slow worknight moments in the Emergency Department of a hospital.

Remembering that, I think writing poetry is unlike musical composition and recording, which for me is constrained by my life’s current contexts. Looking back I recall that as a younger person I was eager to write down observations from life which seemed to me to be important and unique. Now, in my older age, when I see similar things they seem less unique, and my expression of them less apt, for I sense that life I was once observing has all along been watching me too — watching me as the hunter does.

Still, the reason I set the official launch of this Project on my late wife’s death anniversary was to counter that. Life, the actuary, knows something, but I can sing in the meantime. The reason I sing others’ words in my unkempt voice is that the writers here are already dead, and I can stick my thumb in death’s eye by making their words current. Given that death’s eye socket is empty, that there’s no sensitive eyeball there, this does not stop Death — but it feels good to do it anyway.

Partway into this Project’s course I started to include Hiroshima Day, the anniversary of the first use of atomic weapons, in my August 6th observances. Death of one’s specific partner has an intimacy that sears because it’s so personal, but it’s not unique nor fully shareable. The death of thousands in a way that still threatens us by the millions or more — well, shouldn’t we share that?

Let me take then a tiny digression to this presentation of today’s musical piece. This summer I’ve been watching a 10-hour multi-episode documentary on Netflix titled Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. I’m only about ¾ done with it, and maybe there’s something at the end that I should have waited to observe before writing about it, but I’ve found it so good I want to mention it today. For something of this length, its storytelling is compelling, and it often takes the sophisticated choice of leaping out of time’s lockstep to connect things. OK, it is 10 hours, but also roughly equivalent to a graduate-level course on the Cold War and atomic weapons strategy in the breadth of its concerns and detail.

I Dream I Am Falling

This is an American Sonnet, following my longstanding practice of breaking up the 14 lines in different ways.

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Now, returning to the new song. I hope it speaks for itself. Many of you, my treasured audience, will have their own experience of grief to resonate with what it sings. I was able to compose and realize it without access to a studio space where I could use acoustic instruments and sensitive microphones. Only the vocal, through a less-sensitive microphone* recorded sounds vibrating in the air as I played the block chords appearing in the left-channel that established the song’s harmonic structure on my little plastic MIDI keyboard. You can hear “I Dream I Am Falling”  with the graphical audio player below. No player seen? This highlighted link is an alternative.

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*ElectroVoice RE-20. Worth considering for anyone needing to record vocals in a space that is not acoustically proper for recording, where low-level unwanted sounds would otherwise end up on the recording. For my budget level, expensive, but it’s been an important tool for me. No, it’s not magic — louder sounds will still intrude — but the sensitive condenser microphones I use to record with acoustic guitar in my studio-space hear everything: HVAC sounds, louder computer fans, outside traffic, even sometimes footsteps on another floor of the building. In my converted bedroom home office where this was recorded, the studio-space condensers would be highly problematic.