I was talking to Glen at the café I rode to for breakfast this morning. “It’s President’s Day. Did you get him anything?” Glen has a pretty quick mind, but he thought for a moment and countered “Well, it’s one of those vestigial holidays. We’ve got a tailbone, but how many million years since we’ve … Continue reading Some Presidents Day Stories
Here’s a story. You can decide for yourself if it’s a sad or happy one. It was a spring day in 1840 in a town in rural Massachusetts named Belchertown. For children you might expect that would be a fine day for play, but that’s not what this story is about, though it is about … Continue reading Angeline Palmer
Today’s piece uses words by Robert Hayden, who was a 20th Century American poet who often wrote about that essential American subject, Afro-American history. He was born just before WWI, and was writing poetry both before and after WWII, during the rise of the New Criticism, which held that the poem exists as a thing … Continue reading Frederick Douglass
Yesterday’s post ran so long that I needed to improve it by removing some things that weren’t relevant to the story of Robert Hayden choosing a school of literary criticism to place not just his work, but his life, in context. But I love the minutiae I find when I’m researching these pieces. So here … Continue reading Coincident of Douglass and Hayden
What did Emily Dickinson think about the American Civil War, that great national trauma that occurred during her most productive time as a poet? And what did she think about the great national sin that was the cause of that war, slavery? Emily Dickinson often writes puzzling poems, compressed like a set of speaker’s reminder … Continue reading The Lamp burns sure
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
Frank Hudson 