Month: November 2024

Millay’s Thanksgiving

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

There’s a long tradition in poetry of civic poetry — poems not meant for an audience interested solely in the interior intimate experience of the poet, but speaking to larger, more public themes. I suspect modern poetry doesn’t do this mode directly much, even though some individualist poetry infers that purpose. American poetic Modernism began with an emphasis on the concrete, the thing specific: red wheelbarrow, ripples in a pool, a certain Chicago cat-fog, an exit on the Metro on a rainy day. Yet, a focused subject can still be an example that stands for more.

If the subject is small though, perhaps we poets expect our audience most often to be small too, compared to a variety of other, popular arts. But this was not always so. Longfellow and Whitman expected the nation to listen to their poems of democratic virtues. If the literary set eschew the mode, song-lyricists and non-literary poets will still assay it.

Just under four years ago, a poet Amanda Gorman who has written civic poetry, delivered a poem at the last U.S. Presidential inauguration, speaking of the nation’s fears, hopes, promises. The mode of the next Inauguration has changed. I’m not expecting poetry. Some will think, more-the-better — who wants a poet spouting off what I should think.

Why not, are they not citizens? What are the occupations that are allowed to speak?

Nearly 75 years ago. American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a long poem for the American holiday of Thanksgiving. She expected a good-sized audience: it was published in the Saturday Evening Post, a weekly general interest magazine, the one that often featured Norman Rockwell paintings on the cover, that claimed Ben Franklin as its founder.

Millay NFTG

The most often used pictures of Millay show the young romantic adventurer. I’m also fond of this one that seems less all that. The poem which I perform excerpts from today was the last one she published before she died at age 58.

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I’m sure there were specific things on Millay’s mind, geo-political, American issues. She writes five years after a war ended with two A-bombs. How long would be the peace? In 1950 there was another war going on overseas in Korea, there was a “Red Scare,” and to a large degree some deficiencies in American equality of opportunity were so far off to the side that too few even thought of them as political issues to address then. Millay didn’t cite any of that directly.

Instead, she wrote about how she thinks we, the citizenry, were feeling, assuming a general agreement that might be hard to gather today. Thanksgiving is a dual holiday occasion: it’s our harvest festival, a time to give thanks to what our work brought us, and it’s also a holiday to give thanks for what we’ve come through: it originated in a time of Civil War, and it commemorates the hardy survival of some early 17th century boat-people who landed without papers and survived on American shores. Millay’s Thanksgiving thoughts were more toward the latter than the former.

What will ring true in some American hearts this year will be her words of hopes dashed or at least deferred. Can one give thanks for having hopes that were unfulfilled? Can we at least forgive ourselves for hope? Her poem exists in that question. In the excerpts I performed today for this musically accompanied piece you can hear below, I focused on that sense, felt in my bones. “Cunning and guile persist; ferocity empowers” Millay writes. The lines that stand out for me as a Thanksgiving prayer this year are “Let us give thanks for the courage that was always ours; and pray for the wisdom which we never had.”

As civic prayer goes, that’s humble, but it has some bite in it.

You can hear my performance of portions from Millay’s “Thanksgiving…1950”  with the audio player below. The full poem’s text is at this link. No audio player gadget to be seen?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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When the Year Grows Old

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Here in Minnesota, the weather is turning, as it does at a time of its choosing in the Fall. Tomorrow morning the Fahrenheit temperature will be in the teens when I get up, and the forecast says single digits will greet me by Friday.

I began work on setting this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay last week after seeing it at the Byron’s Muse blog. Two things grabbed me when I saw it: sitting there as silent words it begs to be sung, and it’s tantalizingly ambiguous.

This poem was from Millay’s first collection, published (1917) as Modernism was starting to find an audience in America. Americans in the last decade to be called The Twenties saw Millay as a Modern, though her prosody wasn’t like the free-versifiers, and her lyric’s narratives weren’t fragmented word-Cubism. So, a more comfortable Modernist to those whose expectations of poetry still flowed from the 19th century? Somewhat. Still, though not so much in her first book, but soon, Millay began to stand for The New Woman, a character that took up the prerogatives of independent thought, act, and agency in love and desire. A William Carlos Williams might have absorbed radical Modernist visions in Modern Art into prosody. A Carl Sandburg may have taken his Imagist eye and cast it toward workers and immigrants in his poems. But soon after this poem, Millay was using somewhat traditional verse to speak about female independence in life and desire. Cubism and Socialism were controversial, sure, but the kind of change Millay was covering in her poems was large in scope. Man Ray or Monet, Debs or Debussy, Pound or Reverdy — change was in the air — but as far as art such as poetry was concerned, the charge for change from women (and Afro-American artists) in the Last Twenties is a big deal, not something to shelve off as some sideline.

OK, so what does this early poem have to do with that? I’m not entirely certain. Yes, the overall scene of the poem is clear to any Northerner — but even as the poem starts the seemingly simple language has faceted surfaces. The poem is titled “When the Year Grows Old,”  but I’d suspect you might mistakenly remember it as “When the Year Grows Cold.”  It’s not just the rhyme, the poem is clearly about the weather getting colder, all the images intensify that. Intensities of anything old are not there directly at all. And then, I can’t say how idiomatic the opening statement (refrained at the end,) “I cannot but remember,” would be in 1917 — but it’s easy to read it (out loud, or in understanding) more than one way: “I will reflexively remember,” “I have only memory of this,” or even “I can’t do this, but I am forced to remember.”

And who’s the “she” in this poem? I had a thought in early-days with the poem it might be a pet, likely a housecat. Beside a generalized factor of love for warmth, cat owners might recognize the bird watching vocalizations — that, and a reference to “the warmth of fur” led me to that consideration. One reader’s reaction I read online this week thought “she” was a mother. I’m not sure of Millay’s mother’s (if that would be the mother here) characteristic feelings for tending a fire or even the specific kitchen task of making tea. My cursory non-scholarly thoughts are: not likely her happy place.*  Still, I could imagine that a general poetry reader in 1917 (like the Internet contemporary I came upon this week) could think that, or that the “she” is a friend of the poem’s speaker (which we might expect to be Millay), and so find this poem Millay’s predecessor to something like the young old Bob Dylan writing “Bob Dylan’s Dream”  about his remembering lost friends who’d once gather around a wood stove.

When the Year Grows Old

Simple chords for today’s piece, presented here as chord sheet  in case you’d like to sing it too.

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Living with this poem as I set it to music and performed it, I came to think of it more at “Girl from the North Country” — a song about a lover who is longingly thought of lovingly, but who is now separated. By the time of the performance that you can hear below, that was how I was singing it. Why did I think that?

Partly from reading later Millay poetry, partly in biographic clues of Millay’s sexuality. There’s a definite undercurrent in the poem of the “she” feeling ambivalent: the sighing look at the flying birds, the melancholy chimney wind, and most directly in the abrupt “look of a scared thing/sitting in a net!” And what follows that line feels lustily sensual to me: those rubbing “bare boughs,” that fur by the fire verse.

That reading also answers the why the year being “old” is the title, not “cold,” other than just seeking variety. A once passionate attachment has been reconsidered by the other party, has grown old/cold.

Millay could have made other meanings (“cat lady,” “dear old mom.” etc,) clear with no commercial readership risks, but following my understanding, this presentation is coded so those who know will see that, and others will see a vaguer poem while recognizing late autumn weather. If I’ve misread it, or if Millay ever explained what she was intending — well, it wouldn’t be the first time — but it worked for me to find an experiential place to inhabit the poem.

You can hear my performance of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “When the Year Grows Old”  with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? It’s nothing personal, just that some ways of viewing this blog suppress that. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*As poetic testimony: tender as Robert Hayden’s well-loved poem “Those Winter Sundays”  is, it’s not a story of a parent finding happy beauty in loading up a household’s fire box.

Ducks, as if Teenagers

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

This month my teenager, who I don’t write about much out of the belief that they should tell their own story, ceased being a teenager. They’re working full-time hours now, hoping to save enough to move to their own place, sharing hopes and connection with others who are likewise migrating across the border of growing up.

Late this summer, while on one of my bicycle rides down an urban residential street I saw an odd sight: a line of young ducks in their proverbial row waddling across the street. They seemed unconcerned with the intermittent traffic, and there was no mother duck leading the line. I could guess they thought an aged man on a bicycle was not an instinctual, usual threat — but it was grade-school pick-up time and the school buses were rumbling on their routes accumulating backpacked kids. Yet these young ducks, in their new adult colors, just waddled across anyway, as if their orderly line and intent were protection, as if it still was that some parental watch had checked the way clear.

Ducks as if teenagers

Here’s a chord sheet for the song made from the sonnet I wrote.

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I jotted down a draft of a sonnet soon afterward, and this month as my child becomes less my child and more the cohort of others on their own, I produced a new draft, deciding to set it to music and sing it here. Longtime readers will know that one of The Parlando Project’s mottos is “Other People’s Stories” — my statement that I’ve chosen to not use this place to promote my own poetry, but rather to inhabit other’s words (usually words from literary poetry) and to write about my encounters with those words and what it feels like to sing them.

Maybe today’s piece is a symptom of my age, but I barely think of this poem as my own in the greater context of learning to think of my child as less my own. I anticipate a separated hope and worry, an elsewhere joy and adventure, when they move off as if we’ve taught them enough.

Which we never have.

You can hear the song made from the sonnet with the audio player below. No player? Don’t call home, it’s likely just the way you view this blog, some of which ways suppress showing the player gadget.  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player for you.

Ten Cents a Bushel

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I seem to have the kind of mind that, unbidden, sees connections. Probably drives some acquaintances around the bend, but regular readers here will have become accustomed to this. After all, this Project is about making a connection — likely unintended connection — between literary, page poetry and musical performance. Still, even though it relates to a mental reflex of mine, there’s “making,” work, involved in that combining.

So it was, that this month I went consciously looking for a connection, one I thought I might find between our American election results and the fear and despair around that event with the early 20th century era which I often look for to find free-to-reuse words to set and sing.

Where and what to look for in the era if trolling for such a connection? I wanted a short poem to leap out at me, one that I’d immediately flash on, in hopes it would attract even the casual listener here with a sense of recognition. I started paging through my Sandburg, who remains one of my personal models, but found no strong candidates I haven’t already performed.*  I next moved on to a 1930’s volume A New Anthology of Modern Poetry  edited by Selden Rodman. Rodman is one of those little-remembered figures I enjoy encountering in the Project, a litterateur and socialist activist who admired American Modernists — so connections right there.

The selections in Rodman’s volume look like an index of this Project’s authors, I counted 37 poets whose texts I’ve used in the nearly 800 published Parlando Project pieces.** His lively introduction promised what I was looking for, connecting the artistic discontent with old literary modes and tactics with social change and discontent.

Eagerly, I read on, looking for that flash of connection with the way folks I know are feeling this month. I read some fine poems, some I might even use someday here, but nothing came out of that quick skim and read that hit me with my sought property: “This sounds like it could have been written today.” Why not? When those poets wrote of their social injustices and feared outcomes the details of their times didn’t match closely enough to the details of our times.***   “It’s just details, what about the essence?” you might think. I thought that too, but I wanted listeners to feel it  from the poem I was looking for. Details usually aren’t ephemeral in poetry, they are often the source of its emotional power.

If I’d left it there you wouldn’t have a musical piece to listen to today. But then I recalled Edwin Ford Piper, a man whose work I discovered earlier this year. Piper’s family settled in frontier Nebraska just after the American Civil War. He grew up there, knowing rural settlers, ranch-hands, and farmers at the turn of the century. To keep this a reasonable length, here’s a link to some of what I wrote about this deserving of more current attention poet earlier this year.

Ten Cents a Bushel

Here’s Piper’s poem I performed today as it was published in his collection Barb Wire

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Piper’s poem “Ten Cents a Bushel”  is about a small farmer. I doubt I have any readers who commercially harvest corn by hand, though some may have experienced something close enough. There are still agricultural workers, but modern field workers are usually employees, not caught in the exact resident small-farmer serfdom that is the center of Piper’s poem.****  I went with this poem anyway. In doing so, I accepted failure on my goal — at least so far — I didn’t find the brilliant connection between eras I was seeking. But if the poem’s details are off-target to today’s burdens, they are still powerful details. Piper’s poem lets us feel those details in our muscles and smell them with our noses, and the essence of the poem’s world, the repetitive stress of its rural Sisyphus’ burden, is something I expect some tired people can feel this month.

Today’s music? I prefer to call myself a composer, not a musician, even though I operate numerous real and virtual instruments in making these pieces. Modern digital recording allows me to maximize my inconsistent skills and to do with guile and planning what fingers and breath couldn’t accomplish. Be assured: “composer” sounds like a pompous title to me too, while “musician” retains the nobility of the worker. But there’s an element of my personality that sometimes tells the composer-me to back off with the theory and a build-the-musical-piece-with-ideas workflow, and barks “I just want to play!” Weeks like these, or times when I can plug into a loud amp and welcome that power vibrating in a room brings that energy forward. Today’s piece started with two inexpensive electric guitars and a bass playing loud in a room. The lead guitar I played is a Squier Jazzmaster, a model that wasn’t designed for loud, sustained-note playing, but can be forced to do it under volume by an elderly guitarist who can’t rip out rapid flurries of notes. You can hear that performance, my speaking Piper’s account of this November farmer’s harvest while playing more my mood than worked-out musical ideas by using the audio player below. No player? The bank hasn’t foreclosed, some ways of viewing this blog suppress the audio player gadget. This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with just an audio player of its own.

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*I’m not disenchanted with Carl Sandburg. My results in this browse through his work may be because he doesn’t really do fear and despair as a predominant emotional frame. This may still be a good attitude to assay in these times, but not what I was specifically seeking. If you want Sandburg for this moment, perhaps this previous Parlando Project performance will serve you well.

**One blind spot: Rodman (who had considerable interest in Black Caribbean culture and history) didn’t include any of the Harlem Renaissance generation of Afro-Americans. I must resort to an academic meta-cultural term of art when I consider that: WTF.

***I did think this week about how to compare the injustice and fears which I naively thought I could measure between the 1930s and our time. I’m certain the levels of injustice were massively greater then. The fears? Even given their Great Depression, fascist governments, genocide factories, and a coming World War — I can’t say our fears are lesser.

****I started to write a conclusion here that would need to spin out more than a thousand words to do it justice. Such an epic would point out that those early 20th century rural farmers caught in an economic squeeze by powerful business forces up the supply chain from their crops, founded radical, effective, and practical political movements: The Farmer Labor Party, the Non-Partisan League. In the same parts of the land that today wave the red flag and the red hat, a very different rural political force was electorally successful. What’s with the same fields bearing different fruits in these two eras? That’s more than a blog post, something for someone with skills beyond mine. One naive half-formed theory: was there something about the largely immigrant-or-child-of-one, practical farmer or small-town-dweller of a century ago that saw through urban sharpies and charlatans, and focused on specific economic remedies?

Let No Charitable Hope

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Elinor Wylie once was a reasonably successful poet, back in the last decade that was called The Twenties. I informally group her with some other American women poets of that time: Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, each of whom wrote often about the complexities of love and relationships. Though none of this group had careers of extended success,* Wylie’s poetry career arc was exceptionally short, contained entirely within the 1920s — though it was preceded by a few years of being a gossip item for a series of romantic elopements and divorces. I wrote a bit about that element of her life a few years back, but it seems that Wylie was playing at the Kardashian-family level of tempestuous celebritydom in her time. Read my link if you want a summary of the tea.

Young Elinor Wylie

Elinor Wylie. Runaway socialite and 1920s poet.

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So how good was her poetry? Clearly better than the usual celebrity with a book of poetry. She’s highly musical and concise, an irresistible draw to my Project, and while ranking art is a foolish game, her best work stands up well against the trio I associated her with. Today’s piece uses a poem that was called one of her best works when I first read it as poets.org’s Poem-a-Day a year ago. Here’s a link to the poem’s text if you’d like to read along. I myself wouldn’t rank it that high if I somehow needed to rank her poems, though the musicality alone compelled me to set it with music this week. Why do I prefer, for example, her “Velvet Shoes?”  “Let No Charitable Hope”  is a bit abstract, despite the eagle and antelope that are cited in passing and the woman trying to get substance from a stone,** while “Velvet Shoes”  is as sensuous an experience in imagery as in sound. But as a complaint, “Let No Charitable Hope”  probably still connects. Many of us, maybe more for those women reading, are familiar with being misapprehended, of having a hard enough time maintaining one’s own hopes, and to then be asked to try to match the hopes of others. What does Wylie mean by her ending smile in the poem? Is she smiling at how mistaken the apprehension was, or is she allowing herself to smile at her own small lofting of her own hopes?

You can hear my musical performance of Wylie’s poem with the audio player below. I went all-out on the weird chords for this one, so it may not be to all tastes. Is your screen so woozy from fear of odd voicings that it’s obscured any such audio player? No, some ways of reading this blog suppress that player gadget, so I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Like Wylie, Teasdale died young. Parker and Millay’s political commitment damaged their later careers. The New Morning of the The New Woman of the 1920s had its backlash as well — but this isn’t simple. It’s hard to maintain an artistic career in general, Parker suffered from writerly alcoholism, and some who shared Milay’s politics didn’t think her later work was as good as literature.

**One more concrete image occurs in the poem: masks. The line “Masks outrageous and austere” was sonorous enough for Tennessee Williams to cop it later on. As if sometimes does for me, I thought of masking as in autism, though the syntax of the poem’s last stanza seems to have masking being applied to the years, not the poem’s speaker’s smiling face. Still, I’d expect some ASD readers would see the disconnect of the “charitable hopes” of others viewing them verses their own internal reservoirs of hope and intent.

Let Me Call It Remembrance Day

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

A post today for a holiday with complications. In the UK, Canada, and the former Commonwealth, today is Remembrance Sunday and tomorrow is Remembrance Day. In my United States tomorrow is Veteran’s Day. Remembrance Sunday/Day is a bigger deal. Here in the U.S., it’s one of two holidays set aside to honor the armed forces,*  and the Spring Memorial Day gets more observance. America moves it around as a Monday workday holiday, so it now rarely occurs on November 11th, the day it was originally meant to commemorate, Armistice Day, the day that WWI ended. In the American observance, the day and the moment being observed are no longer there as they happen to be this year.

But then, all the events of WWI have now passed out of the living’s remembrance, and WWII is entering the time of that leaving — while in England the wound and loss are still felt by a generation that themselves only recall the generations that personally experienced it.**

Historically, poets suffer, fight, and die in wars. Presently in the U.S. this may be less true than was traditionally so, our soldiering ranks now coming from a different cohort than those with MFA and workshop attendance. That too is complicated, and I’ll choose to honor your time today by not going into all of that. Yet I’ll maintain that the experiences of service to country, of organized protection and organized death, of comradeship and loneliness — these words of history aren’t so far away if we only open ourselves to listen to them.

Here are five poems for this complicated holiday that this Project has presented over the years. In honor of the UK preservation of the original reason for the holiday, four of them will be British to one American.

Gone, Gone Again (Blenheim Oranges)

British poet Edward Thomas is too little considered in the United States, but in the run-up to WWI this overworked and underpaid freelance writer started to expend his writing efforts to the least commercial of literary forms, poetry of individual honesty — urged in that endeavor by his expatriate American friend, Robert Frost. Frost left England for America as the war began and he asked his friend to follow him and emigrate to the United States.

Thomas didn’t accept his offer. In Britain Thomas is remembered as a War Poet, as one of the casualties of The Great War, but his poetry doesn’t speak of his trenchside times in the conflict — instead it sings with lovely precision and concision of the British countryside as he is making his decision to take the road well-traveled to enlist to the front. “Gone, Gone Again”  is one of his masterful poetic verse-essays on this time of decision, as he observes an England depopulated of its workmen. Why did he go to the front? He explained it mostly as being unable to shake his patriotic connection to the very soil and experience of Britain that his poetry sings of, but I said today’s post would be about complications. Thomas was also a troubled soul, looking for meaning in his life not captured by certainty, and some have speculated that a soldier’s pay was a better economic offer for his family than his Grub Street freelancing. He packs every bit of that into this short poem.

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Shadwell Stair

Wilfred Owen is another Brit who took up poetry in the context of serving in The Great War. He’s known for his scathing anti-war poems, which to Britain’s credit doesn’t keep him from being honored nationally as a War Poet. But here’s a lonely poem written on the banks of the river Thames, likely during the time he was back from the front being treated for what was then called “shell-shock.” Folks today can experience the poem in a context pointed out later, that the Shadwell Stair location was a gay cruising spot at that time. Historically, there’s a blindness in some eyes to see that not just that poets and artists serve, but that they aren’t all straight.

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On the Troop Ship to Gallipoli

Rupert Brooke was a rising young poet before WWI started, and even at his young age, great things were predicted for him. Unlike Owen, his war poetry is conventionally heroic, conventionally patriotic. Unlike Thomas, he was under no economic pressure when he enlisted. Would that tone have continued, could he have written glorious battlefield odes, or would the war have turned him into a skeptical Modernist? In an irony that only the Fates could have woven, he was detailed to be part of the disastrous attempt to land at Gallipoli. While on the troop ship steaming there, he fell sick from what I’ve read was an infected insect bite, and died before reaching the deadly front.

I took a fragment Brooke composed on that fatal voyage, and audaciously decided to take a Modernist blue pencil to trim and rephrase it the way an Imagist might. That was a complicated act, one that I’m not sure I can justify, other than to say that I wanted Brooke’s moment on that troopship to stand out more vividly, riding roughshod over his verse to honor that.

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The Cenotaph

I don’t believe there are any women on WWI War Poet plaques in Britain, but of course they were asked to and worked with the war effort, and were there to tend, mend, and mourn the casualties during and afterward. Here’s a complicated poem of mourning, written as the original Cenotaph*** was erected in London. Its author Charlotte Mew is another British poet little-known in America. From what I’ve read she was seen as eccentric by other artists of her time, and her poetry doesn’t fit easily into any movement or style. Every Remembrance observance in Britain to this day has a ceremony at the London Cenotaph where the current government pays solemn homage to the soldiers’ sacrifice. If I read Mew right, she’s the ghost-at-the-feast here, and has some particular wailing to do.

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Grass

Lastly, for Remembrance Day, here’s the American — and non-more American than the child of immigrants Carl Sandburg. I would post his poem “Grass” every Memorial Day, every Veteran’s Day — and yes, even every Remembrance Day. Yet, this is a poem that sings about forgetting. Is forgetting wars, forgetting soldier’s service and sacrifice, a callous thing? Is forgetting the follies and cruelties of war dangerous ignorance? Is it better to forget wars than to suffer them forever in endless horror? Is forgetting just the way things are eventually, an erasing sigh that fades into new present days — as what humans do that humans can never fully comprehend?

Look, I said it was complicated.

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*In the US, there’s fine print sometimes invoked to separate the two: Memorial Day for those who died in service, and Veteran’s Day to honor all that served. The UK Remembrance Day is more like American Memorial Day focused on wartime losses and sacrifice.

**Proportionate to population, the US casualties in WWI were much lower. And England’s cities suffered under bombs during WWII. I was going to write too about the World Wars and their effect on the British Empire and colonialism, and America sliding in as a replacement, but that subject is too big for any footnote.

***So great were the WWI deaths that logistics couldn’t see to repatriating all the bodies of British war dead back home, and unidentified dead and missing in action mysteries clouded the situation too. Regional cenotaph memorials, including a great one in the national capitol, would serve as a consolidated gravesite to lay flowers and visit in remembrance.

A Sonnet of Two Letters

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

It happens to us alone, but it happens to so many it’s a trope we share. It goes like this: you have one of those bad dreams. Something terrible has gone wrong — and you, inside the dream, feeling it is real, try to fix it — but you can’t because the other people in the dream are oblivious to the terrible and are acting stubbornly in odd, irrational ways. While dreaming you’re trapped in this desperately unsolvable situation only you can clearly see and try to act rationally on, running in place, thinking in circles.

I had one of those dreams this week: felt so real, so heart-wrenching. Then the dawn comes, and you realize that experience was a dream — oh, that’s why you couldn’t fix it, that’s why everyone else in the dream was acting so wrongly!

OK, exiting satire mode, but let’s stay strange.

Early this Fall I was cleaning out something: a box, a drawer, a binder, a little used bag, I can’t remember exactly what. But in it was a clutch of papers. I glanced at the pages and recognized it was a mix of things: some works-in-progress looking for first reads from the old group of poets I used to meet with every month, and some initial drafts of a longer, multipart poem I was writing as my mother was going through her last hospitalization, the one from which she would ask to return to the home I grew up in with my father and sisters in order that she could die there. I set those sheets of paper aside.*  I figured I’d look them over later, maybe digitally scan them, or put them in my filing cabinet. At that later I’d also look to see if there were any drafts in the small stack that were unfinished pieces I could revisit.

Now here it is, we’re November and I finally got around to that sort-out. One of the pages was a college-ruled notebook sheet with a complete intermittent draft of an irregular (American) sonnet. What was this? While I remember well working on the longer poem around my mother’s last illness 20-some years ago, I had no memory of working on this sonnet. Complete blank. Moreover, the sonnet seemed to speak of someone’s story that I didn’t recognize as mine — nor anyone else’s I could recall either.** With the time-interval between discovery of the papers and my finally going over them, I can’t even be sure if this sonnet was found among the stuff from the time of my mother’s death or not. Trying to determine why I didn’t remember it, I wondered if it was even older. I recalled that scholars date Emily Dickinson manuscripts by looking at the changes in her handwriting over time, so I tried that assay. Looked to me more like my 20th century handwriting, so the poem could be older. Still, it was my handwriting, testifying I, however unremembering, wrote this poem — and “What was it about?” That intrigued me. The poem asks the reader to work obliquely, details are supplied but not all the details, something that can tantalize.

A Sonnet of Two Letters

The gardening stake metaphor used in the final section reminds the 2024-me of Robert Frosts “Pea Brush,”  a poem I didn’t know when the me I was back then wrote it

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Why did the voice in the poem not mail their first letter? What was it about the recipient’s husband that was germane to that decision? Was there an affair or appearance of one? Clearer to me was the latter part, the stuff of the second letter, a recalling of youthful aspirations and a friend who by what they said helped make them more substantial than pretensions. What an interesting yoking, I thought. The imperfect, the not said, or the thing whose saying we keep hidden — combined with the things that were said that help us realize our lives.

As you might tell from the previous paragraph, I was experiencing this poem just as I would the general run of Parlando Project poems, ones written by others in a project which has as one of its mottos “Other People’s Stories.” Its mystery and ambiguity captivated me, and so I set about making it into a Parlando song.

I did a revision of the initial handwritten draft I had found and worked on combining it with the music you’ll hear with it below this week. The music today is played as a conventional LP-era rock ensemble: there’s the usual quartet: bass, drums, chordal and “lead” guitar. Added to that are two keyboards, piano and Hammond organ. You can hear the result with the audio player gadget you should see just below. No gadget? Wake up, this highlighted link opens a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Two of those poets have since died, I re-handled those pages, ones they’d typed in and handed to me years ago, and thought tenderly of them. My part of the household is due for an austere “death cleaning,” the tossing of those things an old man keeps to extend something of the life of that-and-those who’ve passed on. I have no grave illness, but the keeper now must consider that they will pass on and that there’s no real keeping.

**I did write from personas in my writing life regularly, a bit more so in prose than poetry. I was likely imagining the “short-story” plot that I then went about expressing in the sonnet.

To Waken an Old Lady

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s National Election Day in the United States, and it’s seen as an extraordinary consequential election. Amid that great matter, I fielded a clutch of social media queries on poetry and music in the last 24 hours or so. I think I understand this seeming paradox. Though I myself will likely stay up late tonight listening to returns — as it is after voting early in the morning, I’m expecting to have only the maelstrom of worrying and hoping to spend over the rest of this national event tonight.

But since I last left my listeners at the end of October with an atypical audio piece, I thought it’d be a good day to release this performance by the LYL Band of a poem by the American early Modernist poet William Carlos Williams. That’s what we usually do here: take other folk’s literary poetry never meant to be sung and combine it with original music in differing styles.

What’s my personal history with Williams? Oddly,* my introduction to Williams was in the guise of his printed introduction of Allen Ginsburg to me (and many) in the thin City Lights paperback Howl and Other Poems.  Williams’ name was printed right on the cover of Howl,  and while in a smaller font than Ginsberg’s, it’s not fine print either. They must have thought it would help.

Howl Cover

Published November 1st, 1956. Did the choice between Eisenhower and Stevenson seem quite so existential?

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As a young man I don’t think I absorbed much of what Williams said in his short introduction. I didn’t have the experience of life to fully grasp it, and about all I knew of Williams was that he was an established, a somehow certified, real poet — and the man he was introducing, Ginsberg, was not. At that point, the younger poet had not been elected to such a post by the cultural electoral college, but WCW was vouching for him beyond the matter of a questionable Beatnik fad. As a teenager at the time, what did I know about what made a real poet? I can’t fully remember. I had some romantic ideas about vision, seeing intensely what others couldn’t sense, and some idea that that would likely put the poet in opposition to elements of society. This was not some structured critical philosophy on my part, it was more a gut feeling, a wish for something more. I look back at that kid I was and think: well, maybe I’m still no better a philosopher than he was, though I now know complications — but yeah kid-of-the-past, there’s still something to that.

Williams’ name on the Beat landmark paperback did not lead me to read Williams then. Rereading that introduction today that may have been because while it had words that Ginsberg took as validation, it was somewhat between hands-off and off-hand about Ginsberg’s poetry. He called Ginsberg “disturbed,” recalled that he didn’t think the young man would develop into a poet (or even survive). He characterizes the title poem of the collection, “Howl,”  as a howl of defeat. I adamantly heard it as a howl of survival. So, thanks old man. Glad you at least said we should pay attention, be “arrested” Williams wrote, by Ginsberg’s poetry.

It’s only been in this century that I read Williams early 20th century work. I found a lot to like in his clean spare early poems written as Modernism sought to clear out the tired excesses of decoration. Now as I re-read Williams mid-century introduction to Howl  I’m arrested by things I, an old man, resonate with. He did  see the poem’s survival testimony. He wrote this there about Ginsberg’s poetry:

He proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man,
the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith — and the art! to persist.”

And he continues in the introduction to Howl:

Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels. This poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own — and, we believe, laughs at it and has the time and effrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record that love in a well-made poem.”

It seems to me now, from my old age, that to “see with the eyes of angels” may be its own curse, and thus the angels may howl.

Is today’s small William Carlos Williams poem, one turned into a little song sung with the LYL Band, too slight to serve on a night where we look as nations move? I don’t know. I already told you, I’m not much of a philosopher. Williams’ “To Waken an Old Lady”  is a poem that yokes old age and the descent into winter. Here’s a link to the text of the poem if you’d like to follow along.

I now can often feel like the small birds he puts in this poem. In the course of life, I’m here past the days of career or work harvest. In the summer, the summer of this political campaign, I felt the cold dark winds plenty of times. The poem doesn’t say, but I suppose the poem knows spring comes. I suppose also the poem knows that death comes and preempts spring too.

“But what?” Williams interjects as the poem turns. Look: there are these broken seed husks, the ones that didn’t bloom. So what if they are not to bloom, they are sustenance for survival.

You can hear the LYL Band performance of “To Waken an Old Lady”  with the audio player below. Are the returns of an audio player yet to come in?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Well maybe not odd for me. If you’ve read many of these posts, you may have recognized that I love the odd connection.