Today’s piece for National Poetry Month is another Emily Dickinson: her gothic aubade “Ample make this Bed.” Word-music is subjective, but I find this one of the most poignant and lovely of her poems. As with many Dickinson poems the meaning tantalizes, at once clear on the surface and tangled beneath. The trope it’s using, … Continue reading Emily Dickinson’s “Ample make this Bed”
The last time I created and performed a fresh translation of a Rimbaud poem here, I broke from my usual practice with translation and produced a rhyming poem. I don’t usually do that. There’s too much else to try to bring over from one language to another to add that extra degree of difficulty. But … Continue reading Rimbaud’s Dawn
I saw this Whitman poem from the 1867 version of Leaves of Grass during National Poetry Month but was unable to find the time to compose the music and arrange a performance during that busy month. Still, I was so stunned by its expression that I made a note to myself to get to it … Continue reading “Oh Me! Oh Life!” Walt Whitman’s de profundis poem performed
A longish one this time. I’ll try to make it worth your while. In the places I go it has been hard to escape Joni Mitchell and the 50-year anniversary of her breakthrough record album Blue this month. Mitchell is one of those artists like Emily Dickinson* or Thelonious Monk who people contemporaneously recognized as … Continue reading Recuerdo, or we celebrate Joni Mitchell’s Blue with some Edna St. Vincent Millay
I’ve been unable to do as much as usual with this project for the past month for several reasons. One of those reasons was a trip to Massachusetts, which if this was a normal blog would have already generated posts of the travelogue sort. However, this project is about two palpable things, music and words … Continue reading Ample make this Bed
I said I would change things up last time, and by stepping back a few years, today’s piece does that. How much different is “She is Sleeping on the Boundaries of the Night” from the last few posts? First off, we’ve left off from war. This is a love poem. Death appears in it only … Continue reading She is Sleeping on the Boundaries of the Night
As I promised last month, there’s going to be a few more posts here without new audio pieces, discussing some side issues and ideas I’ve run into during the last year or so of the Parlando Project. Some of these are going to be lengthier, and they may not be as interesting to those who … Continue reading Call Any Vegetable
Frank Hudson 