It seemed a long time since I last had a new performance to share. I checked, and found it’d only been a week, but since then the moon has had a red eclipse, and in my country there’s been a couple of mass shootings motivated by ignorant ethnic hatreds. Willful ignorance combined with violence is … Continue reading William Blake’s “The Tyger”
It appears that no one reads or is concerned with American Modernist poet John Gould Fletcher these days. I came upon him in a passing mention that he was associated with Imagism, a pioneering English-language Modernist style that I find worthy of sustaining. Turns out this was only the half of it: in Fletcher’s “associated … Continue reading John Gould Fletcher’s weird “America”
If you’ve followed this Top Ten countdown series of the most liked and listened to audio pieces this summer at the Parlando Project you’ve taken a bit of a journey, and I thank you for coming along. The kind of music I create and present here varies, and lately I’ve been doing some louder stuff … Continue reading The Most Popular Parlando Piece for Summer 2021
Today’s audio piece is another simple arrangement, just acoustic guitar and voice, but the simplicity allowed me to move quickly from composition, to arrangement, and finally to recording an acceptable performance. I only decided to record this text, by the English mystic, poet, and artist William Blake early this morning. This week was already scheduled … Continue reading A Cradle Song
Today was a not-too-old, but widely observed American holiday. Yesterday was Thanksgiving, a holiday initiated by some indigenous Americans and some illegal immigrants who celebrated a military alliance and an autumn harvest together in the 17th century. As one native wit put it: we did the giving, we got no thanks. Invasion and conquest, colonial … Continue reading A Verb or a Title
Our Halloween series continues with the voice, music, and words of Dave Moore today as I present his piece “Sam and the Ghosts.” And as bonus autumn content, this one takes place in a garden just past harvest time. I haven’t kept a garden in decades, but Dave and long-time friend of this blog Paul … Continue reading Sam and the Ghosts
Let’s return today to the English mystic and poet William Blake, but continue on a thought that is inherent with the last two pieces, one by Yeats and the other by a long-winded guy who writes this. Poetry, just like other writing can, within its levels, do any number of things. One can seek to … Continue reading from The Book of Urizen, Chapter 9
It’s time to wrap up our National Poetry Month celebration, and once more I’m going to present a piece where I wrote the words as well as the music, a piece in celebration of the unpredictability of poetic genius. In the “Song of Myself” section I presented a few days back, Whitman proclaims that America … Continue reading Confucian Ode on Blake, Dickinson, and Whitman
Perhaps today’s audio piece and what I came to write about it has an interesting path. In words it’s a medium-length journey—so I beg your patience—but the places it goes are vast. Eventually, we’ll answer a question you may not have asking: who’s buried in William Blake’s tomb? It started with an illustration drawn by … Continue reading Obviously Five Believers (Thoreau, McClure, Whitman, Blake, Ginsberg)
It’s usually of little use for an artist to apologize for their work, and this is so even though most have self-doubts. Perhaps more so, women artists will speak about “imposter syndrome,” but I’d guess that many/most male artists have the same feelings, they just don’t talk about it. The plain fact is that we’re … Continue reading She had concealed him in a deep dark cave…
Frank Hudson 