Today’s post uses a very short poem about a famous doomed adventurer written by a too-little-known early modernist soldier-poet. The words’ author, T. E. Hulme, is a name I kept running into as I read about the connections between modernist American and Irish writers in England at the beginning of the 20th Century. Many of … Continue reading Raleigh In the Dark Tower
As we were going to school this morning, my son and I were listening to reports from the South by Southwest event in Austin this week. The guy on the radio was explaining that while SXSW has broadened over the years, it’s still the place to go for Alternative Music. “I wonder where you go … Continue reading In a Station of the Metro
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
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
October 4th is National Poetry Day in the U.K. this year, an event similar, though more condensed, to the National Poetry Month in April promoted out of the U.S. No one’s revealed why April for the Poetry Month, though Chaucer and T. S. Eliot may have put in their votes, and the reasons for the … Continue reading To Autumn
Increasingly, I am comprehending the miracle of Emily Dickinson. Fifty years before Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme constructed a compressed modern poetry replacing conventional imagery with fresh and direct observation, a woman in a rural town in the woods of Massachusetts had already practiced their innovations over a thousand times. Through a series of … Continue reading Crushed Before the Moth
We now come to the top half of our count-down of the most listened to and liked pieces during the past three months. But what if you’re new here, and you wonder what this Parlando Project does? In short, we take various words, mostly poetry, combine them with original music, and perform them. My intent … Continue reading Parlando Spring 2018 Top 10-Part Three
Here’s Carl Sandburg again, this time from his 1920 collection Smoke and Steel. Today’s piece “Long Guns” is a protest poem of a kind. A few decades later, around midcentury, the folk-song revival in America (which Sandburg had helped to kick-off with his pioneering American Songbag collection of folk songs) grew a wing that wrote … Continue reading Long Guns
A few posts back I dropped a performance of Walt Whitman’s “Poets to Come,” a piece where Whitman precisely states his understanding that he’s shown a new mode for poetry and allied arts, but that this new mode of expression will only be fully exploited and explored by artists in the future. And of course, … Continue reading Letters to Dead Imagists and A Pact
In my episodic way here, I’ve touched on the rise of Free Verse in Modernist poetry. Free Verse poetry may still be rhythmic and musical, but it follows no strict meter, nor does it use any rhyme scheme. Now an established tradition, it came to poetry written in English in a non-straightforward way. I think … Continue reading The Black Riders XXXIX
