Here’s a poem written by a second-generation immigrant about immigrants, and about Chicago in 1916, or my present city neighborhood of immigrants, or summer, summer nights — and it’s about love and affection, and about the moon that we’re all immigrants from when we fall in love. The child of an immigrant who wrote this … Continue reading Carl Sandburg’s “Back Yard” for National Poetry Month
I wrote a short piece a few years ago, which goes like this: The Temple of Summer is guarded by two pillars: Memorial Day for those who gave up their lives in war, And Labor Day for those who gave up their lives in peacetime. This Monday is American Labor Day.* What constitutes a laborer, … Continue reading Working Girls, Happiness, and Muckers: three Carl Sandburg poems about workers
Aha! I have a plan for National Poetry Month. You might think we’d need do nothing but what we usually do — after all, we’re always celebrating poetry here. We have over 600 pieces you can find in our archives, performances that combine words (mostly poetry) with original music we compose and record ourselves. But … Continue reading Kicking off our celebration of National Poetry Month: Stars Songs Faces
It’s that time again when I present our quarterly countdown of the pieces most liked and listened to here at the Parlando Project during the past season. We’ll proceed from the 10th most popular and move up to number 1 in the next few posts. The bold-faced heading for each piece are links back to … Continue reading Fall 2021 Parlando Project Top Ten, numbers 10-8
Within the limited time I can find for it, I’ve been informally surveying what others online are doing for National Poetry Month. I’ll make one casual observation, unbacked by rigor or focused study: a great deal I’ve seen this April is aimed solely at the supply side for poetry. I’ve got nothing against urging more … Continue reading Letters to Dead Imagists and A Pact for National Poetry Month
It’s time for our every-quarter look back at what pieces you, my valued and appreciated listeners and readers listened to and liked most during the past Spring. This one turned out to be a tight bunch over the past three months, with only a little over a dozen listens and likes between the 1st and … Continue reading Spring 2021 Parlando Project Top Ten, numbers 10-8
Tonight is Jazz Night here at the Parlando Project Top 10 countdown. I’m going to ask the folks who come here for the talk about words to murmur down quietly today as I speak about the music. Funny how these quarterly counts sometimes become nice little “sets.” Both today and tomorrow’s segments as we countdown … Continue reading May Music Find a Way. Spring 2022 Parlando Top Ten numbers 7-5
This project’s subtitle Where Music and Words Meet portrays its interest in the ways words, mostly poetry, might interact with music. How that works varies. I use different kinds of poetry, and different ways to combine those words with the music written for this project. Song lyric writers, who intend their words to be sung … Continue reading Branches
It’s been quite the job of work to do daily posts with new lyric videos here this April in celebration of National Poetry Month, and I haven’t taken the time yet to see what impact those extra efforts have had. Though I was re-releasing already recorded audio pieces from the earliest years of this six-year … Continue reading Completing my National Poetry Month daily posting with two beautiful pieces
I neglected to plan ahead enough for today’s U. S. Presidents’ Day holiday. It’s an odd holiday anyway, of no great interest to the large number of readers/listeners this project has overseas. And for Americans, the title and avowed purpose of the holiday may be especially fraught in our present day. Back when I was … Continue reading from Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln: the Prairie Years
Frank Hudson 