Poetry, musical speech, is so associated with symbols that it may be impossible to imagine it without metaphor as a rhetorical device. This both bugs and pleases readers and listeners. Symbols can add richness, a sense of novel connections, or they may vex the reader, taunting them with needs for esoteric knowledge or psychic investigations … Continue reading Like a White Stone
World War I entered the worlds of both of our last two poems, and that war’s poetry was one theme we visited over the early years of this Project that coincided with the centennial of that conflict. The interaction between that war and the arts was complex, but here’s a simple question: did WWI cause … Continue reading The Death of Guillaume Apollinaire for National Poetry Month
I said last time that the Midwestern American poet Carl Sandburg is not often thought of as an Imagist when we recount the Modernist revolution in poetry. Indeed, I get the impression that his work as a whole is summarized as folksy/clumsy by academia, the efforts of a low-fi Modernist with middlebrow pretensions to real … Continue reading Gargoyle
Poetry as an immediate witness to momentous history is not a common thing. Poems of events tend to autobiography, deaths, love, births, personal injuries and triumphs. Today’s piece has both elements—memorable on both counts. Guillaume Apollinaire is a major figure in Modernism with an influence across the arts as a critic and theorist. He popularized … Continue reading The Little Car
Man Ray was sort of Man Ray’s real name. His family immigrated to the U. S. in the 19th Century and like many families they changed their name along with their country, and so Radnitzky became Ray. His birth first-name was Emmanuel, which would be conventionally shortened to Manny, and with just a bit more … Continue reading 3D Blues
As we enter the week in which we note the ending of World War One a century ago, I want to call attention to some the ways we’ve shown poets wresting with that war in their own time. It’s a longer post, but each one of these pieces presents something different for Armistice Day. I … Continue reading The Greatest Hits of World War One
I promise you, we will end up today very close to the love song of the last episode, though we will travel a ways before we get there. I’ve not featured any French writers yet with the Parlando Project, but as this summer has used the words of many 20th Century English poets, we may … Continue reading L’Amoureuse
I’m going to ask you to not read these notes yet. Listen to today’s audio piece first at least once. It’s short, two minutes long, it won’t take long. The audio player is at the bottom of this post. OK, now you’re back and you’ve listened to the piece at least once. Do you think … Continue reading How to Make Speeches
This is an elegy, not a love poem, but then an elegy is a love poem that replaces the focus masking the complexity of love with the common mystery of death. Even the images and incidents can have an eerie similarity, as an absence may be at the center of either. The author of today’s … Continue reading The Death of Apollinaire
Frank Hudson 