Are there people today still falling in love, or not falling in love together, or remembering love and almost love? Seems like a silly or rhetorical question doesn’t it. So, yes, I suspect there are, as there have been before. People fall in love on marches, at the barricades. Policemen fall in love. People fall … Continue reading The Most Popular Parlando Piece, Spring 2020
Continuing on with our countdown of the most popular pieces here this past spring, I find a few things that break the usual patterns. So let’s get on with it and see what we find that were the most liked and listened to since March 1st. The bold-face titles are links to the original post … Continue reading Spring 2020 Parlando Top Ten, numbers 4-2
For Heidi It’s been a rough series of days in the Twin Cities. Other than no great new loss of life (only fear of it) there’s not been much accomplished in my home or in my city. I have a few new pieces in various stages of completion, and ordinarily I’d be working on additional … Continue reading The Stare’s Nest at My Window revisited
A few months back I presented a series of poems about old age that turned out to be written by young poets. Here’s another one written by the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats when he was in his 20s. “When You Are Old” is generally considered to be written about Yeats’ love for Maud … Continue reading When You Are Old
As we continue our countdown toward the most popular piece of this ending winter, we come to a section coincidentally that’s all poets known by three names. You can’t plan something like that, but your listens and likes counted up that way. 4. “The Stare’s Nest at My Window” by William Butler Yeats. This poem … Continue reading Winter 2020 Parlando Top Ten, numbers 4-2
It should have been just a throw-away line in Modernist novelist Ernest Hemingway’s first novel. A character describes how he went bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.” That line, or the concept of it: gradually, then all at once, has persisted because it encapsulates something that occurs more broadly than the accumulation of debt … Continue reading Murmuration
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
I’ve done a number of William Butler Yeats poems here over the years as part of this project. We might agree that occurred because his words on the page just demand to be sounded. But there’s another side to Yeats that attracts too. He can write about political subjects with that same lyrical voice.* One … Continue reading The Stare’s Nest at My Window
Here’s the next in our occasional series “Before They Were Modernists,” a performance of “Grace Before Song” by Ezra Pound. Like F. S. Flint’s poem from last time, Pound’s poem comes from the poet’s first book, in this case: A Lume Spento created before Pound and a small group of London-based writers settled on the … Continue reading Grace Before Song
I’m going to return to an old favorite of this project, a poet who helped change modern English poetry and yet is largely forgotten: F. S. Flint. Long-time readers (or those of you that have taken a stroll through the archives here) might remember the highlights. Born in 1885 a London slum kid for whom … Continue reading A Song of Change
