Month: May 2026

A Faery Song (We who are old)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

My wife, who I suspect of having some strain of a woodland nymph in her genetic background, is going to take me to her elflin grot  this summer – well, an off-the grid cabin on the North Shore of Lake Superior – close enough. During this stay, she will take supervisory woodland hikes where she will photograph fungi and wildflowers as part of documenting that nature is working up to spec. I, one of those who are old, will stay in the cabin and read poetry, a media format that doesn’t require any wired or wireless energy other than the long sunlight of a northern summer.

I’m unsure if this cabin will be explicitly in a bee-loud glade, but such plans make me think of William Butler Yeats, and here’s an early poem of his, written by a 20-something poet amplifying his Irish heritage amid the still extant 19th century fashion for antique fantasy.

A Faery Song

A chord sheet in case you want to sing it yourself

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Yeats provides context for his lyric poem, with the note: “Sung by the people of Faery over Diarmuid and Grania, in their bridal sleep under a Cromlech.” Is there a tale alluded to there? Yes, and it’s a major part of Ireland’s bardic Fenian saga, set in the 3rd Century reign of king Cormac. The over-riding hero of these linked tales is a warrior with supernatural powers, Finn McCool,* who is the leader of the king’s army. McCool is not the hero of the Diarmuid and Grania part of story however, but a jealous third-wheel antagonist.

The story of Diarmuid and Grania has many retellings, which vary, but the general outline is that Cormac promises his daughter Grania to the aging great hero and warrior Finn. However, before this marriage can happen, one day in court Grania spies Diarmuid, who is a major young hottie of Lancelotian proportions. Not interested in the old Finn and the entire warlord power structure, she drugs Diarmuid with some enchantment potion causing him to carry her off elopement-style.**

There’s a great deal more to the tale, with a major twist that the noble Diarmund resists letting Grania seduce him sexually because he’s warrior-loyal to his leader Finn McCool; and even though the pursuing McCool, the great warrior who commands a literal “and whose army” wants to apprehend and likely kill him, he leaves a pre-Internet breadcrumb trail in hopes that the eloping couple would be found out.

Unless you’re Robert Bly booking your hero’s journey, there’s enough there that you may be wanting to just get on with Yeats’ short poem, but there’s one more detail in Yeats’ note: what’s a “Cromlech” where the fleeing couple bed down? No, that’s not the Gaelic-transcription-name for a low-powered Google notebook used in schools. It’s an ancient tomb made from piles of stones – no gmail or Google docs available there. The faeries looking over the Eros/Thanatos couple hiding in a tomb could have sung Thomas Campion’s loose translation of Catullus if they couldn’t book Yeats.

The skip-ahead reader, without all that backstory, might hear “A Faery Song”  as a “Forever Young”   blessing of young people by their elders and by the traditions of those elders. That’s a perfectly fine sentiment – and it’s not just some sweet cliché, but one I say is too rarely expressed. It was easy to think that way about the poem as I worked on the music and its recorded performance, being an aged man whose house has several young lovers moving through it. But I think Yeats was, in this context I’ve outlined, offering that ancient  heritage, older than any living. may speak to comfort and guide the young, give them rest from the elders in power, from a world of men (gender and species). Of course, that is made from fantasy, faery fantasy. It is a dream of wishes.

I had one other reason to move this short poem up in my “maybe do this one” pile: I’ve been trying to catch up on blogs I follow after the absorption of National Poetry Month,*** and I came upon this post by a friend of this Project Lesley Wheeler where a dream was recounted:

This weekend I dreamed that my problem joints (knees, hips, an ankle that requires babying) were replaced by faery joints (in the dream, I knew faery was spelled with an e!). They looked like cloudy ice or crystal. I like the idea of being a human-faery cyborg.”

While we cannot fully dream anyone else’s dream, poets and poetry can fancy some of their substance. Reading this I figured this in addition: ever light and gossamer wings sprouting from out our backs, devices that would radiate and transfer the sciatica from too many hours sitting with books and blank pages of paper.

Yes, that’s but a dream – but we carry our bodies around to have dreams and maybe to shelter other’s dreams.

My musical performance of Yeats’ “A Faery Song”  with that “e” is available to hear with the player gadget below. Has any such player dematerialized? No, it’s the Internet, that enclouded scrying crystal that will suppress the audio player when you’re reading this blog some ways – and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

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*All these names were originally in Gaelic, and how they are transcribed into English an inexact science. I can’t say in detail what choices went into rendering the name as “Finn McCool,” but you must admit it’s a most excellent name.

**Patriarchal gifting of daughters is historically accurate if grating. The quasi-sinister date-drugging gender reversal is hardly a clear symbol of women’s empowerment, and just exactly how sympathetically Grania is portrayed varies with the teller. In a play dramatizing this story that Yeats and George Moore later co-wrote, there was friction between the co-writers based on Yeats wanting a more sympathetic Grania. Another variation of the tale says that Diarmuid had a “love spot” on his forehead that caused any woman who looked at him desire him, and so dual-enchantment situation.

***I’m still weeks behind.

One more Sonny Rollins video clip, the one from Night Music

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Many years ago now, my friend John Brower (the man who was in the Gamelan orchestra I mentioned without naming him earlier this month)  recommended a late night TV show to me, one called somewhat generically Night Music.  John was a font of recommendations, and no ordinary human vessel could pursue everything he would suggest. Years later, years too after John had died young, I followed up on that recommendation when the series became available on YouTube.

Night Music  as a series has some awkwardness. Looking at the series in order you get the sense that they were constantly rejiggering the presentation looking for the broadcast commercial viability they never could reach. I’d also suppose, that to some sensibilities, the attempts to render late 1980’s cool might look artificial and date-stamped – but what it was trying to do was worthwhile. The guiding hand of Hal Willner, the gifted musical eclectic was often apparent. Never more than in the video clip below.

It opens with the entire “God Bless the Child,”  a circa 1960 live performance on Jazz Casual  of Sonny Rollins and his group from the time of The Bridge  LP.  It assumes that there’s audience for that, sans any setup or context. Is that a foolish and unaware choice? Perhaps. Commercially unwise? Certainly. This is the dawn of the Alt-Rock era, and we see a group of dark-suited men on a gray screen playing a Billie Holliday ballad with no singer save for the man with the crooked brass saxophone and the balding man from accounting playing a big hollow-body guitar.

And then Leonard Cohen comes on screen. Cohen was still in his “we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good” era when his dour divine comedy was considered unsittable for release to American audiences by his own record company. And the song Cohen begins is his adaptation of the Jewish Unetanneh Tokef prayer, a meditation on death. Friday night, is it party time! or sabbath? Behind him is a large and mixed bag of great musicians, large enough that I can’t even say who all is playing. I see Robben Ford and members of the now more famous producer and record company head Don Was’ Detroit alt-soul music band Was Not Was, and they proceed to take the song to every kind of church, tabernacle, mosque, temple, ashram, and what not ever made. And the cantor isn’t necessarily Cohen, the song’s composer, whose baritone holds down the central drone of the melody, but this man Sonny Rollins, whose saxophone has become an angel he’s wrestling with in front of our eyes.

There’s about 15 minutes in this clip, completing with the roll the credits release of “I Can’t Turn You Loose”

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Sonny Rollins would live another 35 years after that, still performing for most of those years. He was capable of doing that kind of playing on any given night on any given song, usually to a modest-sized room, rarely on mass media. When I read last night of the completion of his life, I thought of this performance as the musical expression of the meditation of death, in gratitude and tears.

To A Steam Roller: Marianne Moore comments on art and artificial intelligence?

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

I had worked on setting this 1920 poem by Marianne Moore to music for a few weeks, but it wasn’t until a couple of days ago that I had a shock of recognition: the words of this poem could easily be read as a comment on our own era’s confrontation with Artificial Intelligence (“AI”).

Coincidence — or evidence of Moore’s undocumented time travel? Am I starting to sound like the tease-narration on one of those facts-sort-of/conjecture-concupiscent videos? Ring the bell, like and subscribe — wait this isn’t YouTube — instead let’s go to the text of a poem:

to a Steam Roller

And those “chips or rock,” Marianne — are they silicon chips?

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Once thought of, that AI reaction reading seems solid. An AI picture, a machine-made one, cares not what’s depicted, it’s just an illustration of certain styles and tactics. And since its engine operates largely on probabilities, everything surprising about art is downgraded in the algorithm, crushed down to a level with “how it’s supposed to sound.” What if it got good through continued improvement — or even random error — at seeming original or insightful? That would only be a trick: the machine can’t “mean,” it has no experience felt to be conveyed. A matrix of connections is not metaphysics. Moore’s poem suggests an experiment at the end of the poem: what if a butterfly was to land on this machine? Inconceivable, in that AI is incorporeal software. Would this unlikely scene, this image, suggest a blessing or even something useful for the organically lovely, pollinating butterfly to do? No, to believe such would be vanity, perhaps of the owner, creator, or operator of the AI machine.

If Marianne Moore could travel back to the 18th century as evidenced by her oft-favored tricorn hat, then why couldn’t she go back and forth to the 21st century?

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It is poetic to believe Moore could have foreseen AI and made her poem in response. In time-bound reality, I think she was more likely commenting on a trope in the emerging Modernism of her time. New machinery, and forces of industrial change give Moore her particular metaphor: the steam-powered road and construction machine.* Futurists contemporary with her would grab at such a thing and see beauty in dynamism, an evaluation extended even to highly destructive and deadly machines. Is there a link in the aether between times? I myself sometimes see echoes of the Italian Futurists in modern TechBros, up to and including a growing fondness for authoritarianism sprouting from libertarianism. Moore’s poem questioned that then – and so we might well estimate she would now.

Musically, this began as an exercise I set for myself to orchestrate something using percussion instruments (both physical and of the virtual instrument** variety). The idea became: what range of sounds could I put together using just that sort of instrument. I had a late friend who played in an Indonesian Gamelan orchestra, a percussion-forward grouping of instruments, though my piece is a naïve one created by someone who hasn’t studied the form. I was also thinking of one of the more unusual record albums of 1968, the sole LP of a group calling itself The United States of America. They used early electronic circuits and a variety of instruments, stretching their expected tonalities. Their eclecticism and emphasis on unconventional musical combinations was a complete market failure – even to the psychedelic and widely stoned acceptancing audiences of the late 60s. That may have had something to do with their eccentric deemphasis on the groove. Other experimentalists of their time: The Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, and even odd-time signature loving Frank Zappa may have asked for expanded ears with their recordings, but that didn’t mean they were abandoning its rhythmic core, or however outré, elements of showmanship in live performance.

You can hear my musical presentation of Marianne Moore’s “To A Steam Roller”  with the audio player below? Wait, has any such player disappeared along with a discernable Rock beat and guitars going widdley-widdley? Well, my musical piece will not be exiled to the cutout bin of some early 1970s store, next to the United States of America record with its album corner disgraced with a hole or corner clipping and a florescent under $2 price sticker. No, you can alternatively find my piece of music with this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*Rather than 20th century Modernism, the power source here might also make Moore’s choice a late example of a 19th century style, one sometimes still revived as “Steam Punk.” As early as Dickinson and Whitman, American poets were loving steam trains.

**As I have often taken pains to explain here, virtual instruments (VI) are not AI. They are large digitally recorded sample libraries of actual instruments (or their electronic outgrowths) making their characteristic timbres, pitches, and articulations. I play a little plastic keyboard, or pluck my MIDI-interfaced guitar, call up a mark on a MIDI score, and the note produced is not a silent stroke, inaudible key press, or string vibration but the sound of a gong, clarinet, violin, grand piano, tambura, and even the cranky wire-to-wire patched oscillators and filters of an early Moog synth or the prone to warble tapes of a Mellotron.

I used a real thumb piano, a metal tongue drum, some shakers, and my size 12 foot-taps in today’s piece. The piano and the larger drums, bells, and gongs I played with VI.

The non-percussion instrument you’ll hear is also a VI: the song’s singer is a voice VI (sampled from a real – and the software company assures me – compensated, singer). I sang the notes, but then replaced the sound of my voice with the singer you’ll hear, but I had the vocal line sound an octave higher than my voice. I used the VI vocalist to sound more like the main singer in the United States of America, Dorothy Moskowitz. She’s alive, 85, still making music.

The Silver Penny

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I found this strange and deadly little poem in a collection of Walter de la Mare’s children’s poetry. It’s a literary ballad – a poem referencing that style of folk and popular song while not being explicitly designed to be sung. The subject matter of a doomed voyage was a common one in British folk song,* but de la Mare gives this trope his own touch.

You see, in the field of horror and fantasy literature, de la Mare often elided what was most horrible or fantastic. His best-known poem, “The Listeners”  has nothing but hoofbeats on gravel and a portentous silence to elicit shudders.  “The Silver Penny” is remarkably compressed. A comparable folk song dealing with doomed seafarers might well have a dozen verses, a tolling refrain, and a catalog of detail of the fateful voyage – de la Mare makes do with five stanzas. We know nothing of why the singer and his sister must hire a boat, we only sense their urgency. We know nothing of the man who agrees to take them on his boat, but we sense his motives could be nefarious. The storm that sinks their boat is sketched – though almost lingered over compared to the human characters and their motives – but the usually graceful versifier de la Mare chooses (I think it must be a choice) an uncharacteristically awkward turn of phrase “back to the shore again, sailing they will not.” My guess is that as one reads or listens to this, we are to think for a moment they’ve turned back to dry land at the onset of the storm. The refusal of even a half-rhyme between “boat” and “not” adds more to this sour prosody.**

Silver Penny

Discovering that open string G6 chord form was the genesis for the music I composed to de la Mare’s poem today.

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The other unusual thing about the poem for modern readers, is that it was, in its time, intended for kids. Of course, the old fairy tales had many a horror and sudden death, but these were ofttimes in service of an easily discerned moral lesson or social shibboleth. Is the lesson here that children shouldn’t hire a boatman without proper vetting and assured possession of a current weather forecast? De la Mare is as subtle about any such didacticism as he is about delineating the horror. My guess is that the poem’s voice is that of the brother of sister Jenny, the owner of the silver penny, and if there’s a lesson he draws from the shipwreck, it’s more at the observation that death and fate laugh at our concerns about what precious thing to offer up to it for safe passage – certainly a dark message for children, but one old people may recognize.

I worry a little recently that I’m doing too many pieces based around acoustic guitar. The composer in me thinks that even though it’s “my instrument” and all that, I still want to include other sonic colors. A peculiar thing about all this acoustic guitar this year is that it has become the most difficult instrument for me to find opportunities to record with, and so when such an opportunity comes about I feel I must take it. I used an old and worn little 00 sized guitar to record my song using de la Mare’s words. At least for this player, when recording a piece that calls for ringing open low strings, the more common larger-bodied acoustic guitars can sound too unbalanced. The audio player to hear the recording is below. What? Do you think the player’s not there because you lack a penny? No, it’s just some ways of reading this blog suppress showing the player gadget, and for you then there’s this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*One of my favorites in that folk-song genre is the song “The House Carpenter,”  also known as “The Daemon Lover,”  where a runaway wife takes off on a doomed ship only to find that the captain is evil and the ship will sink to a watery Hell. Patriarchy much? Well, in the best performances, the doomed wife’s tale can at least rise to a Faustian tragedy.

**I considered that there could be a long O regional pronunciation that is sort of “boo-t” and “Noo-t” which I could sing to make the rhyme, but my own difficulties with dialect pronunciation and the effect of the non-rhyme along with the awkward word order signaling the disaster won out.

Variations V.

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Poems as we encounter them on the page often try to attract us: “Here’s something I want to say, an idea I want to convey to you” or “I’m playing with language and I think you will enjoy playing with me.” And then there are poems that don’t make much of show of any of that.

I found this unpresupposing poem within a series of short poems by 20th century American poet Conrad Aiken called collectively “Variations.”   As the title suggests, Aiken often seems to have had musical forms in mind, and so it will not be surprising to long-time visitors here that this would attract me – but the poem’s text doesn’t go out of its way to call attention to itself. The “Variations” series repeats motifs of observations of people and of nature,* often with an autumnal cast scattered about and serving as hints of loss or impermanence in things. In this one, the fifth in the sequence, there are no learned or high-cultural allusions. There’s only a trace of heightened “poetic diction,” some light reversal of most-common sentence order along with a subtle metrical cadence and a rhyme scheme that one hardly notices until the final couplet.

This manner, a suite of short observations, was common within early English-language Modernism, and to the genre that was important in its emergence, Imagism. In the years around the first World War Imagism was a short-sharp break with the worn damask and filigree of the expired 19th century. Americans were key figures in propounding it,** and I never tire of calling the remarkable confluence of American poets in England in this era “the Reverse British Invasion” – likening this group of para-WWI expatriates in England to the arrival of musical groups like The Beatles, The Animals, and The Rolling Stones to America fifty years later in the 1960s. Aikin was one of those living in England Americans, along with Pound, Frost, H.D., and Eliot. Largely staying in America, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Amy Lowell pressed Imagism’s ideas of a radical simplicity forward.

So, Aiken was in England then, knew some of this crew, and yet I believe he’s not read or considered much these days. Like Eliot, a life-long friend who he met in college, it seems Aiken moved into a more complex High Modernist style soon enough, won the high-culture awards (including a Pulitzer and the Library of Congress Poet Laureate seat), without ever gaining a wide readership or scholastic recognition as an original stylist.

But we here don’t care about all that, a poem can be performed, well-known or not – and no matter how old, it’s just as new and un-assayed as any at the moment one of our musical pieces start up with it. If we pay attention, fresh attention, to what it’s saying by seeing, what’s there?

variations v

Chord sheet provided in case you want to sing this yourself.

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It’s a poem about presence, loss, and beauty, the loss from its nature but also from action, unremarkable yet made remarkable by the poet’s choice. A fountain – likely an urban fountain, for there are always people around it – sprays water which sunlight catches prismatically. Youth (children and young girls) within this sunny day are accounted. There’s one singular living thing, introduced in that final couplet: a sparrow, an unremarkable, less colorful, species of bird itself – a small creature like this poem. The sparrow, (with demi-angelic?) wings is dutifully washing its feathers, and this diverts and scatters the short-lived jeweled water drops. Everything has been eternally present until the poems final two lines – though we (and the poem’s speaker I believe) know that children, sunny days, and young girls are short spans of individual being. Only at the last does an explicit “vanishing” appear as disappear.

This poem, like many of my favorite Imagist and Early Modernist poems does not work without your attention. While it may not demand it, it won’t work without it. So, I gave it my attention, some music I made, and I offer a performance of it with my rough-hewn voice, acoustic guitar, and celesta that you can hear with the audio player below. No audio gadget? Has some wing diverted it? No, some ways of reading this blog won’t show the player, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*In Aiken’s poetic series’ repeated play of shadow, light, and contrast playing on leaves, trees, water, and reflective surfaces I was personally reminded of the lo-res urban photos often featured on the Yip Abides blog, which I’ve enjoyed for years.

**F. S. Flint, a native, working-class Londoner, was also important. A key theorist, T. E. Hulme was British-born as well, but Hulme credited a stint working in Canada as helping form his poetic outlook. Irish writers were sometimes allies: Yeats, Joyce, and a personal favorite Joseph (not-the-Power-of-Myth-guy) Campbell.