My teenager asked me what I’m doing, overhearing me test-shouting the text of today’s piece Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “England 1819.” Here’s a link to that text if you want to follow along. “Shelley, the perfect English Romantic Poet, might have been the most radical poet of his time. In matters of sex, religion, politics, aesthetics … Continue reading The Angry Percy Bysshe Shelley: England 1819
I’m posting a bit late in the day, but it’s International Women’s Day, and so today’s audio piece uses as a text a poem by a very international woman, Lola Ridge. Ridge’s poetry is perhaps best known for a fierce commitment to social justice and the situation of the poor in early 20th century America; … Continue reading Sonnet To Beauty — Two Women Who Wrote Poetry While Working with the Economically Desperate
In 1922, amazing Afro-American polymath James Weldon Johnson* published an audacious anthology titled The Book of American Negro Poetry. Not only did it claim that there was a tradition worth an anthology at that early date; in his preface Johnson made the observation that Afro-American music was disproportionately important in American musical culture, and furthermore … Continue reading Anne Spencer’s “Dunbar” for National Poetry Month
It’s that time again when I present our quarterly countdown of the pieces most liked and listened to here at the Parlando Project during the past season. We’ll proceed from the 10th most popular and move up to number 1 in the next few posts. The bold-faced heading for each piece are links back to … Continue reading Fall 2021 Parlando Project Top Ten, numbers 10-8
It’s February and in America it’s Black History Month.* In the past few years of this Project I’ve picked a publication that has entered into public domain status to examine.** This February I’m going to feature work from a singular 1926 publication, the first issue of what was to be a literary quarterly called Fire!! … Continue reading From the Dark Tower: “Younger Negro Artists” in 1926
Is it time to take a break from our sometimes intense presentations of poetry combined in some way with music? Well, here’s a little ditty about the lighter side of death, or rather the worship of dead rock stars. My observation is that though there are still the occasional premature music casualties in the current … Continue reading They’re Not the Grateful Dead
It’s leap year, and the last time there was one of those, Dave Moore wrote this song about the mysterious cosmologies and quantum physics of love. We’ve already met Stephen Hawking here, though in a roundabout way, as the universe may be. When Hawking died a couple of years ago, at his public memorial an … Continue reading Sadie and Stephen Hawkings
There used to be a thing, back in the Seventies when “The Sixties” were being established as a retrospective era: “The Beatles or The Stones?” The idea was that this choice, which was supposed to be somehow exclusive, was an “opener,” a what’s your (astrological) sign query that would tell the questioner who you were—or … Continue reading On the Grasshopper and the Cricket
What value is mystery and strangeness to gratitude, to a sense of thanks? Let me try an experiment with you here. American Thanksgiving still retains a degree of its nature as a harvest festival, and so when looking for a text to use today I came upon this one by highly unfashionable poet Henry Wadsworth … Continue reading Longfellow’s Harvest Moon
Today Emily Dickinson is going to show us how not to write a poem—and how to make it work anyway. This piece combines two different poems she wrote: “Forever—is composed of Nows” and “Crumbling is not an instant’s Act” in a way that I hope lets each poem reflect on each other. Both speak about … Continue reading Emily Dickinson: Forever and Crumbling
Frank Hudson 