Yesterday’s Edward Thomas poem “Thaw” had an irony, he had rooks, a bird used symbolically to represent death, as messengers of Spring’s arrival. Walt Whitman ironically used early spring flowers to start his Lincoln elegy, and T. S. Eliot in “The Waste Land,” a long poem that we’ve been performing this April for National Poetry … Continue reading Millay’s Spring
Edna St. Vincent Millay was another poet who offered little to the “New Criticism” critics who largely set the canon for the 20th Century, even though her career, which covered the first half of the 20th Century, ran almost exactly through the same time as Eliot, Frost, Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens, and … Continue reading Millay’s Sonnet 43
When I look through an old anthology like Locke’s The New Negro from 1925, my eye is not just looking for the well-known work featured there, but to the ones that somehow got overlooked, and that’s how today’s piece “Escape” by lesser-known Black poet Georgia Douglas Johnson came to my attention. Unlike Countee Cullen from … Continue reading Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Escape
Well, this is sort of embarrassing. The Parlando Project is about wandering about in the universe of other people’s words that I might combine with music. I wanted to cast for a wide choice of words because that was part of the core energy of one of the project’s ideas: “Other People’s Stories” and how … Continue reading The Most Popular Parlando Piece this Past Fall Was…
It was those other Twenties, the last ones before ours. Some people are in the streets, angry and sad in every mixture, protesting lives that will taken away by force of law. Authors Katherine Anne Porter, John Dos Passos, Edna St. Vincent Millay* are among them. Mounted police are before this ragged line of protestors … Continue reading Lola Ridge’s Dream
Claude McKay led an outsiders’ life, Allen Ginsberg became a near celebrity bohemian whose outsider status changed over his life. The author of today’s poem in our Independence Day series was more well-known than Ginsberg in his day, and he was as far from being an outsider as any American poet could be. At one … Continue reading Sail on, Oh Ship of State!
Back now to our recounting of the pieces that you, our readers and listeners, most liked and listened to this past winter. Let’s jump back in as we count them down. 7. “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar. This one is remarkable in that it was released on February 24th, very late in … Continue reading Winter 2020 Parlando Top Ten, numbers 7-5
The cosmos says we need to get a leap year, and extra day, and yet we put it in February. It was a dozen degrees Fahrenheit this morning, and my bike ride back from breakfast was into an insistent north wind that explains to me that we’re in Minnesota and we’ll probably have a snowstorm … Continue reading February Twilight
Tom Rapp is a singer-songwriter whose work I love, and whose 1972 joint setting of a Shakespeare and a Sara Teasdale poem is one of the inspirations for this project. Rapp had a favorite story about the earliest days of his overlooked career: while still a child he entered a talent contest in Minnesota. The … Continue reading The Little Ghost
Here’s another poem by the lesser-known American poet Genevieve Taggard. Taggard was sometimes classed with a group of woman poets of the first part of the 20th century, all of whom suffered from the rise in the 1920s of “High Modernism” that held that longer poems with elevated metaphors referencing prior literature and art were … Continue reading Endless Circle
