Let’s pickup the countdown of the pieces that drew the most listens and likes over this past winter. Each bold-faced listing is a link to the original post on the piece in case you’d like to read what I wrote back then, and those original posts will also contain links to the full text of … Continue reading Winter ‘20-‘21 Parlando Project Top Ten, numbers 7-5
Sunday is World Poetry Day and I should do a piece about poetry and poets to mark it. The specific idea of World Poetry Day is to celebrate every nations’ poetry, something I try to do here with fresh translations sometimes, but for today I’ve decided to use works by two American poets. The United … Continue reading Medley: A High-Toned Old Christian Woman and First Fig
American poet Wallace Stevens constantly spoke in his poetry about the creation of art. This sort of “art looking at itself” move has a danger of being too self-referential and one might fear that it would sit with the reader as unresolved as being between two mirrors. I think today’s subtle poem works, despite those … Continue reading Final Soliloquy of the Internal Paramour
Nostalgia may be cheap, but none-the-less, we feel it. Perhaps by “cheap,” we mean “common,” and if so, should artists always flee that, the common experience? Interrogating the common may verge on an obligation in many answers to that question. What is it in our mundane experience that we may share with others, that we … Continue reading Small Iowa Town, after World War Two
Today we continue on with our look at the most listened to and liked pieces last spring. It’s a mixed bag, because that’s what this project has done: one 19th century poem recast, one Modernist classic, and a song by Parlando Project alternate voice Dave Moore. Music? A keyboard heavy arrangement, an LYL Band performance … Continue reading Spring 2020 Parlando Top Ten, numbers 7-5
I said last time that the Midwestern American poet Carl Sandburg is not often thought of as an Imagist when we recount the Modernist revolution in poetry. Indeed, I get the impression that his work as a whole is summarized as folksy/clumsy by academia, the efforts of a low-fi Modernist with middlebrow pretensions to real … Continue reading Gargoyle
Musically we ricochet again (as this project often does) from last-time’s acoustic South Asian ensemble to today’s rough’n’ready one-take rock band. For the words though, maybe not so great a jump, even though Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert Frost are approximately a century apart. Emerson is the prime American cultural instigator. Like many pioneers it’s … Continue reading Emerson’s Fable
Besides being National Poetry Month in America, April is also the birth month of William Shakespeare. The 23rd of April is sometimes celebrated as his birthday, though we don’t actually know that, only that his family baptized him and entered him into their church’s records on April 26th. The 23rd is also a handy date … Continue reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 152
As we continue our April celebration of National Poetry Month, here’s a poem by Wallace Stevens. Like Keats, Stevens was another poet I liked as a teenager, and like Keats I read him for his language without having a substantial grasp on what exactly he was getting at yet. “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” is however … Continue reading Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock
We’re now nearing the top of our look back at the most liked and listened to audio pieces this past fall. Yesterday we used words from a trio of women writers, and today starts off the same way. If you missed the original posts on my encounter with these texts and creating the music for … Continue reading Fall 2019 Parlando Top Ten, numbers 4-2
