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
Before we continue with our count-down of the most liked and listened to audio pieces this past spring, let me remind newcomers what the Parlando Project does. We take words (mostly other people’s, usually poetry) and perform them along with original music in various styles and sounds. I really try to honor that intent for … Continue reading The Parlando Spring 2019 Top Ten Part 2
Last time we had a young man, an American walking in Paris in 1913 who came upon his poem leaving the Metro. Today, another young man, an Irishman in London in 1890, is walking too. He comes to a shop window, drawn by the sound there of water splashing. Looking in, he saw a fountain … Continue reading The Lake Isle of Innisfree
Here’s a romantic poem by William Butler Yeats, in both senses of that word. “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” is Romantic in the literary and artistic sense in that it seeks to reconcile personal emotional experience with some sublime otherness through imagination, and it’s romantic in the sense that the poem takes a … Continue reading He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
“If music be the food of love, then play on…” So said Shakespeare and Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. Here at the Parlando Project we explore music and words (mostly poetry) crushing on each other, and some of our most listened-to audio pieces feature aspects of love. So, for Valentine’s Day here’s a countdown of our … Continue reading Love’s Greatest Hits
One thing I loved doing to stretch my culture and entertainment dollar back in the 20th century was to go to a used record shop and look for unusual records. The more disorganized and undiscerning the shop, the better for my purposes then—since the lowest price was important, and whatever the time spent, it was … Continue reading Memo from (W. J.) Turner ‘There Came a Lion into the Capitol’
Complaints about the size of the audience for poetry are far from new. So too, complaints about the quality of its audience. Throughout the course of the 20th Century, one increasingly common theory was to assume that a quality audience for poetry is likely incompatible with a quantity audience for the art. We’ve just about … Continue reading The Fisherman
