I spend an invisible part of the iceberg in this project looking around for material that I think might work combined with music. One thing invariably happens when you look broadly at something: you find connections that you didn’t expect you’d find. Here’s something I’ve noticed this fall: around 1875 or so, in a small, … Continue reading The Young Intellectual
Do you think you know Robert Frost? You know: steadfast New England farmers, Currier and Ives snowfalls, happy roads less traveled by. We might think of Frost as the friendly Modernist, with good ol’rhymes and rhythms and narratives of American scenes of Americans bearing up to the burdens of life. Robert Frost. Wry poet of … Continue reading The Vanishing Red
As we enter the week in which we note the ending of World War One a century ago, I want to call attention to some the ways we’ve shown poets wresting with that war in their own time. It’s a longer post, but each one of these pieces presents something different for Armistice Day. I … Continue reading The Greatest Hits of World War One
Continuing on with our countdown of the most liked and listened to audio pieces during this past summer here at the Parlando Project, today we’ll look at the pieces that came in 7 through 5 as we move up the list to the most popular piece. 7. The Hunter. Maybe, with Internet audiences, it’s the … Continue reading Summer 2018 Parlando Top Ten, Part Two
This blog isn’t really a news source, even if poet Ezra Pound famously said literature (and this can be extended to art generally) is “news that stays news.” And given my age, I could make this elegies all the time, and I don’t want that. But I cannot let this horseman pass by, even though … Continue reading Aretha Franklin has died
Increasingly, I am comprehending the miracle of Emily Dickinson. Fifty years before Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme constructed a compressed modern poetry replacing conventional imagery with fresh and direct observation, a woman in a rural town in the woods of Massachusetts had already practiced their innovations over a thousand times. Through a series of … Continue reading Crushed Before the Moth
It’s now 1916—well not really—but allow me immediate mode for the time being. Some early 20th Century Modernist characters we’ve already met are about to collaborate in New York City with a largely forgotten figure whose words we’ll meet today. The Provincetown Playhouse, that CBGB’s of Modernist American theater, has moved its organization from the … Continue reading To W.C.W. M.D.
Today we return to the early 20th Century Modernists with a piece using words by Mina Loy. Last post we had a poet taking a political stand: Longfellow aligning himself with the movement to abolish slavery. Decades later, the Modernists joined political movements too. One might suppose that since Modernism sought to overthrow the old … Continue reading Pig Cupid
I’ve already mentioned in this count-down that I’m sometimes surprised at what Parlando Project pieces are the most listened to. It’s not just that it isn’t always the best-known poems, a surprise factor that I’ve already mentioned, but that it sometimes isn’t a performance that I think I pulled off well. Such is the case … Continue reading The Most Popular Parlando Project Piece for Spring 2018
As I’ve done most quarters, I like to look at the most played and liked pieces during the past season and report back here. Usually a few of the results surprise me, they aren’t always my favorite pieces or even the ones that I think came off best. I do this in classic countdown fashion, … Continue reading Parlando Spring 2018 Top 10-Part One
