Today’s piece brings the Parlando Project to 300 published audio pieces since we officially launched in August 2016. Is that a small or large number? Both. Certainly, a great deal of effort has gone into it, including effort to not use the same kind of poem throughout, and to vary the music that meets up … Continue reading Her Lips are Copper Wire
October 4th is National Poetry Day in the U.K. this year, an event similar, though more condensed, to the National Poetry Month in April promoted out of the U.S. No one’s revealed why April for the Poetry Month, though Chaucer and T. S. Eliot may have put in their votes, and the reasons for the … Continue reading To Autumn
Even though music takes half the time and focus of this project, I find myself talking about it hardly at all, which is probably unfair here “Where Music and Words Meet.” So, today I’m going to talk more about music. If that’s not your interest, I’m still going to ask you to keep reading, as … Continue reading Jimi Hendrix 2018
Last night I saw the London production of “The Girl from the North Country.” The play’s production illustrates well how context can change a work of art. I traveled 4,000 miles to see a play in London written by an Irishman integrating work by a Jewish iron-ranger with a British cast portraying a multi-racial rooming … Continue reading London between rain showers
OK, let’s reveal where the words from the last post, Poetry in Translation, came from and what I know about their context—but stick around, as this is going to relate back to those 20th Century theories about how poetry works. If you haven’t listened yet read and listened to Poetry in Translation, this would be … Continue reading Vegetables dream of responding to you
Here’s a list of poets and poems, along with the year they were written: OK, you probably already read the title of the post, so you know what they are. This list comes from an article I bookmarked this summer that intrigued me, and today I returned to it because I’m thinking a bit … Continue reading The Most Anthologized American Poems of the Modern Era
200 years ago this month a 21 year old surgical resident decided to give up his studies to become a doctor and to instead concentrate on the writing of poetry. An interesting decision. He had already rolled up a considerable education debt, and while it’s possible that poetry’s earnings potential might have been greater in … Continue reading In The Drear-Nighted December
It’s election day in the United States, a day of great hope and fear. Yesterday I was on the shore of a great lake and the sunrise was a perfect unbroken horizon of a bright line with pink above that, and then graduations to blue rising up over our heads as high as we wished … Continue reading Frank Eli Hudson and Rye Whiskey
I promised last time that we’d move on from Emily Dickinson’s church of the August crickets to another take on something like the same thing. Dickinson’s words are set in the afternoon, but this one, “August Moonlight” moves on to August nighttime. I knew nothing of this poem’s author, Richard Le Gallienne, before I found … Continue reading August Moonlight
Here’s a piece using an outwardly modest poem by a modest poet, Anne Spencer. It spoke so quietly to me, that at first I overlooked it when I was reading James Weldon Johnson’s seminal “The Book of American Negro Poetry” anthology, which included it. Just a few weeks later I saw a small story online … Continue reading Dunbar
