Just a couple of posts back I said that early Carl Sandburg poetry can be just as aligned with the ideals of the Imagist school as the Trans-Atlantic poets such as the then contemporary work of Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, H.D., Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and T. E. … Continue reading Back Yard
I’m going to do something this time that I’ve done before but is rarely done. I’m going to revise someone else’s poem without their permission—which I would feel bound to obtain, but the author Orrick Johns is long dead. The last time I did this, it was Rupert Brooke’s work I used, and my excuse … Continue reading Ollendorf’s Wife
Long time readers/listeners here know I like to look for the Modernist outliers and less-remembered poets, and today we have one of those: Orrick Johns. But as a bonus, today’s piece by Johns likely influenced one of the most famous American short modernist poems. So, we’re only one remove from “poetry’s greatest hits” with “Blue … Continue reading Blue Undershirts
This April the Parlando Project will shift into a higher gear to help celebrate U. S. National Poetry Month. And what better way to start off but with a piece by Emily Dickinson, “This World Is Not Conclusion.” Subscribe or stop back often to see how the Parlando Project presents different poems with different music … Continue reading This World Is Not Conclusion
I indicated when I first presented a poem by Charlotte Mew this month that I’d talk more about her life, but what I know is so limited and sad that I’ll try to condense things. She was born into a family that had more than its share of illness and mortality. Three siblings died in … Continue reading The Trees are Down
Here’s a poem and poet with a mystery. “Red Rooster” was written in 1917. It’s an Imagist poem, a good example of how this pioneering school of poetic Modernism might present things directly, without nearly as much scholarly allusion as later Modernism was prone too. The same year this poem was written, its poet was … Continue reading Red Rooster
Like Thomas Hardy or James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence is another writer remembered more as a novelist than a poet, though he published multiple books of poetry in a variety of forms in the early 20th Century. He’s hard to place in the various “schools” of poetry of his time. He was published in Imagist … Continue reading Self-Pity
What makes for a “hit” in the small province of the Internet that is yours and mine? We started off the countdown of the most liked and listened to audio pieces here this past fall by talking about the variety of poets and writers that we use for words. Yes, we present well-known poems and … Continue reading And the most liked/listened to piece this fall was…
I can’t say what day this happened, but it was sometime in 1916 in Davenport Iowa. A well-off, Harvard-educated man in his mid-thirties named Witter Bynner was visiting a former Harvard classmate Arthur Davison Ficke in the latter’s elegant home. Besides family wealth, both men shared an interest in the arts, and both were published … Continue reading Two men walk into a hotel room, and…
The year 2018 marches on, as we pass onward past Thanksgiving toward December. I’m quite thankful for the opportunity to continue this project. Time-consuming though it is to do these pieces, it also continues to fascinate me and (one hopes) it also continues to surprise and entertain you. For me there’s considerable enjoyment in trying … Continue reading Looking for a Way to Go
