Author: Frank Hudson

Songs to Johannes 9 & 10

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Sometimes we don’t know there are heroes in our world, for adventurers don’t always move and report themselves in the most well-seen spaces. I think of Mina Loy as I write that. Early in the 20th century this London-born young woman began an odyssey that carried her from the St. John’s Wood art school, to the Munich Künstlerinnenverein, to Paris and the left-bank Montparnasse, to the Florence of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s circle, and then into the center of the Italian Futurist movement.

And she was just getting started filling up her passport leaves. Up to this point she seemed mostly working in visual art, having started as a girl as an admirer of the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris, but by her early 20s she was writing fierce Modernist poetry. She’d met Gertrude Stein while in Italy, and like the Pre-Raphaelites, the Futurists wrote as well as painting. After leaving Italy she moved to the extraordinarily vital 19-teens Modernist scene in New York City. If one was to survey those in the Western World’s avant-garde in their artistic hot spots in 1919, Mina Loy would likely be as prominent as any woman creator — but that’s one point in time, and far-flung doesn’t mean widely-known or lastingly famous.*  She was there at a lot of “theres,” a person on the scene when Modernism was being shaped, and then largely forgotten.

Loy had a complex love-life during this time, casting into alliances with several men. Involved for a time in a triangle with two Futurists principals, about which she wrote a series of poems that became her best-known/yet still under-known work, “Songs to Johannes.”  A version of it was first published in the landmark NYC based Modernist magazine Others**  in 1917, and subsequent editions of the poetic sequence were included in a couple of later book-bound collections of Loy’s work.

So, what’s the catch, why isn’t Loy as known as William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, et al? Can we chalk it down to “The Patriarchy?” Yes, that’s a factor, but until recently Loy also didn’t have the footprint of Marianne Moore or Gertrude Stein — Modernist poets to whom she was compared to in her heyday.

Jane_Heap,_Mina_Loy,_and_Ezra_Pound

The Freewheelin’ Mina Loy standing next to Ezra Pound in Paris. The woman on the far left is Jane Heap who edited The Little Review in which Pound wrote of Loy’s Others published poems “In the verse of Marianne Moore I detect traces of emotion; in that of Mina Loy I detect no emotion whatsoever.”

.

Part of it may be a smallish corpus of work. Part of it may be due to her leaving active literary circles about 100 years ago, even though she lived until 1966. Key critic Pound thought her work however skilled was cold and without emotion.*** But more importantly, there’s this factor: her work, in particular “Songs to Johannes,”  scared people. Not just the un-hip general public (which never widely considered her, unlike Stein), but other Modernists. Harriet Monroe of the influential Poetry magazine thought Loy’s work unpublishable. The “Johannes”  poem sequence subject matter and her treatment of it was problematic.

Men for ages have been prone to “kiss and tell.”  Propriety might lead them to disguise the names of the paramours, even if insiders would know. Yet women arising from the prone to write about their experience might be on shakier ground. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale were  able to do this in the 1920s with popularity and prizes, but their poems of female desire were written within conventional romantic poetic tonality. Loy? Not so much. “Songs to Johannes”  can be frankly carnal. If Modernism was to speak otherwise and often of direct treatment of the thing, of charged moments, of images depicted in all their dimensions, this wasn’t something that automatically extended to women talking about sexual relations within the fine art of poetry. Boys will be boys when they do it —  and the boys become prim fuddy-duddies when a woman adventurer writes from her perspective.

So all this. Decades passed with Loy largely forgotten.

Feminism and now the 21st century has re-opened the case of Mina Loy, and now she’s considered a rising subject for academic study and consideration. What’s my consideration? I’ve always figured if someone writes a literary poem and calls it “Song…” that the poem is challenging the Parlando Project to realize that element. I chose two short poems from the sequence to fit things to my schedule and preferences; and for instrumentation, I used an acoustic guitar challenged by some keyboard ghosts. You can hear my performance of the segments of “Songs to Johannes”   numbered IX and X with the audio player gadget below. What, has the audio player ghosted you? No, it’s just that some ways of viewing this post will suppress showing it. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*I’d suppose H.D. would be in the running in such a mooted 1919 survey too.

Curiously, Mina Loy’s Wikipedia article mentions that the delightful and highly popular classic Hollywood actress Myrna Loy may have gotten her stage name from our poet/artist Loy. Wikipedia footnotes that claim with two books I haven’t read. Mina Loy did act on the NYC stage at least once, in a Provincetown Playhouse play where she co-starred with William Carlos Williams.

**As its name implies, Others  saw as its purpose to publish outsider Modernist work, and in its short life it was troubled as many such publications are by shaky revenue and artistic factionalism. Long-time readers might remember that three traditionalist poets contemporary with Loy pranked Others  by concocting the Spectra hoax and wheedling the magazine into a special issue dedicated to the made-up Spectra movement poets who wrote parodies that they thought might pass as real Modernist poems. One of their pseudonymic poets, Anne Knish, may have been an inside dig at Loy.

***Pound’s critical blurb where he’s pairing Loy with Marianne Moore seems a strange judgement to me, though the quote I’ve seen says he meant it as at least a mixed complement. Work like Loy’s “Songs to Johannes”  seems quite charged with feelings. Reading the whole thing in one sitting — even given its Modernist fragmentation of narrative and proto-Surrealist metaphoric freedom — can exhaust one, buffeted from the range of conflicting states of emotion being depicted. You can read one version of the entire “Songs to Johannes”  sequence here.

And in the woman-poet’s “you can’t win” department: in the post-Eliot world of High-Modernism some of Loy’s female contemporaries like Teasdale and Millay were down-rated for writing extensively about love, desire, and romance as subjects to be examined in their poetry, rather than the big-boy themes of culture and philosophy.

A Face Devoid of Love or Grace

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today is the anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s birthday. Let’s open a small present.

Her poem cataloged by its first line “A face devoid of love or grace”  transmits clearly on first reading. I hear it as describing a widespread human feeling: the disgust one might feel looking at a confidently self-satisfied face. So, a simple poem?

Simpler than some of Dickinson’s work, even though we should always consider that she can cloak unique thoughts in cottage-core embroidered-sampler language. The thing I think described is a bit of an odd emotion though. Why can we feel such disgust at sensing resolve and rest on the face of someone we dislike? Is it just our hate transferring to some visage a hate we’re sure we find behind the surfaces? Not if our judgements of the person behind the visage are valid — if what drives us to fury are the actions we know the expression covers.

A face devoid of love or grace

That’s an F Major 7, mixed in with all those minor chords. That’s been a favorite chord of mine for more than 40 years.

.

This week’s news includes the overthrow of a dictator, an event that brings obligatory photos of newly mutilated portraits of the disposed tyrant, and videos of the toppling of statues — enthusiasts performing the pre-requisite of “Ozymandias.”   While in my country, many see the calm, regularized-in-demeanor news-slug faces of our upcoming national administration while reading alongside them their announced motives and plans which horrify — the “sneer of cold command.”  There’s a disconnect there that many feel. “He looks so righteous, while your face is so changed” as yet another writer put it. So, the self-absorbed bureaucrats of disorder and disregard look unconcerned behind their hard successful faces.

In Dickinson’s verse I note a choice: she could have described the unconcerned face that stands for someone that disgusts her in a variety of ways. The one she chose, stone-like, brings along with it that idea of heroic statuary. And there’s an unexpected double-twist from her pencil at the end: that face and its metaphoric linkage with stone. Stone is rhymed* with “thrown.” It’s like stone, and like the stone that the angered would want to throw, rock against rock. And then too, something I didn’t notice until I was singing this, a possible intended pun: thrown/throne.

Am I dissecting a bog-simple nobody-frog of this short poem here? Could be. But even if this is a short birthday gift, it’s the thought that counts.

You can hear my musical performance of Dickinson’s “A face devoid of love or grace”  with the audio player below. It’ll only take 90 seconds of your time, about as much time as it takes to sing “Happy Birthday.”  No audio player to be seen? It hasn’t been blown-out and removed with frosting-feet, it’s just that some ways of viewing these posts won’t display it.  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*Speaking of rhyme: I love the off-rhyme of “ease” and “acquaintances” in this poem.

The Fade, a Rock song about aging and loss

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

So here it is, our 800th officially released audio piece from the Parlando Project. Perhaps it’s not representative: it’s not by a dead poet, and unlike almost everything else we do it may not have been written for the page without thought of it being sung. “The Fade”  was written and sung by the leading alternate voice of the Project and all-around inspiration Dave Moore. Dave and I go back to when we were leaving our teenage years. I met him then when he read two pieces in a church: one was his own poem, a cheeky number that mixed eros and agape, and the other was a reading (as if it was page poetry) of Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side.”   A decade later we started doing music together as the LYL Band, and some of what we were doing has become melded into what became the Parlando Project.

So, as I think again — is there any way to have a representative Parlando Project piece? Maybe not, and if so, by design. Variety and seeking something unexpected are founding goals.

Dave’s writing here, and our common efforts in making it the song you can hear below, strikes me as something too little done. Rock, whether it’s Rock’n’Roll, punk-rock, Alt-Rock, Indie-Rock, has tended to speak from a youthful perspective. Even the Classic-Rock acts that are still treading the boards at Dave’s or my age hew to topics that would interest those younger than they are. “The Fade”  is far from those common tropes: it’s about the diminishment of aging and particularly about the fogging and loss of memory.

Early this morning I watched an old documentary, a British South Bank Show done in the mid-1980s about the Velvet Underground, a band that was more than a decade defunct at that point, but all the principals (several dead now) were alive then, only entering into middle-age in the 80s, and of a mind to answer questions about the band’s influential work. The topic most covered as they spoke about their former joint project was what made the songs the original lineup put out of lasting importance when the idea of 20-year-old Rock songs having currency seemed novel.

Chief songwriter Lou Reed had it that he wrote about the things he saw around him rather than using the regular subjects of pop songs. True enough, but he chose subjects decidedly less ordinary in song in the times when he wrote them. He specifically wrote about things that frightened people enough that they left them out of the songs they wished to listen to: drug dependency, gay and gender issues, less-vanilla sexuality, and mental variations. And then several others, including the band’s PhD, Sterling Morrison, took pains to note that Reed presented those stories without editorial comment or stance, without sentimentality.

I’ll note now, that later in his career, past the times of that now 40-year-old documentary, Reed wrote one of the few Rock albums about aging and its disabilities: Magic and Loss.  It still stands pretty much alone. It’s also unlikely that even the adventurous readers and listeners that this Project has have heard it.

Dave and I recorded “The Fade”  this past spring. When I talked to Dave this morning we exchanged info on folks we know, folks our age or even a bit younger, who are moving into assisted living or who are suffering from dementia. I don’t know, there are probably a few songs about how sad Alzheimer’s and the like are, probably some songs that try to mitigate it with a chorus that mixes in the memories the sufferer no longer maintains. Dave’s song isn’t like those songs — if they exist — and I’m glad I helped make his song exist, and that I get to share it with you today.

The Fade

This is the sheet Dave handed me with brief scribbled chord notes on the day we recorded this. As you listen to the performance you may see that he did a masterful job of revising his typed words. I think the song gained power from the verses he left out.

.

You can hear that recording of “The Fade”  with the audio player below. I think Dave gets a bit of the VU-ara John Cale sound with the keyboards in it. I’m using feedback in it too, but not quite as the Velvet’s did. What? No player visible? No, you didn’t forget it along with where your keys are or what you came into the room for, it’s just not shown in some ways of reading this blog.  You can use this highlighted link as an alternative.

.

Records In Childhood

~ Frank Hudson ~ 5 Comments

As December begins, I’m going to be taking some time to celebrate and elaborate the roots and concepts of this long-running Parlando Project as we reach our 800th-released audio piece milestone.

For those who are new here, let me restate again what we do: we take various words, mostly literary poetry that was never intended by its authors to be performed, and combine them with music in differing styles. Sometimes the page-words are sung, sometimes they’re spoken or chanted. Sometimes the music will patently match the text, sometimes not. The latter class are some of my favorite pieces: Emily Dickinson as blues singer or psychedelic ranger, Robert Frost with EDM, Longfellow at a beatnik coffee-house, Li Bai with western orchestral instruments, Jean Toomer or John Keats as performed by an indie-folk combo. I expect long-term listeners to scratch their heads at times, though I also fear that some will sample a piece that they don’t much care for and leave off from future listening here.

No one idea or artist inspired this all, but today’s piece is about the farthest back I can recall anything that might have inspired the Parlando Project. I think this happened when I was around age 10.

I grew up in a mid-century Iowa town of 700 folks, and it wasn’t a particularly musical place. There was a small high-school marching band, a handful of children probably had piano lessons of some kind, if only in hopes there’d be someone to play piano in the three Protestant churches in town. The two best musicians in my childhood cohort played trumpet and accordion. The former was surprised to admire Louis Armstrong despite having personally absorbed dismissive racial stereotypes, the other might aspire to Myron Floren level of showpieces on the stomach-Steinway. The same little town might have over-achieved in literature though. It was named by its 19th century town-platter “Stratford,” and its streets were named for British poets and Longfellow — main street being Shakespeare Avenue. If you grew up on a street that was merely numbered, or an avenue named for some animal or geographic feature, such things never had a chance of shaping your worldview. I grew up thinking of Milton or Shakespeare as being a local possibility.

My father sang, mostly in church. My mother thought he had a good voice (“better than Perry Como” she once said) and I recall it having a very nice timbre when I was a child, but there was no piano or other instrument in the house, and he didn’t sing a cappella that I recall. We didn’t have a TV until I was 7 or 8 (and even then it was a chancy fringe-reception, rabbit-eared, used set that would send its display to snow or tumbling whenever it felt like it). There was some kind of radio, for which I’d hurry home from school to listen to the Lone Ranger on, though I can’t recall what the radio looked like. And at least some of the time there was a phonograph. I recall it was one of those that looked a bit like a portable typewriter with a luggage-finished case that could be clasped-closed. It may have been one of my parent’s from their college years. It sat in a little side room off the kitchen at home that we called “the breakfast nook.” And with it was a small cache of records. And here it gets odd — specifically odd — but applicable to the Parlando Project.

I clearly recall four 78-rpm disks, an unexpected set for a Fifties, small, rural-town-in-Iowa record collection. Two were commercial spoken word recordings, the sort of thing that was a viable genre then.** Record one: Robert Frost reading his poetry. My recollection that the featured poem was his “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” but so far I’ve found no Frost recording of that poem to refresh my memory or share here.*** The second was Vachel Lindsay reading from his “The Congo,”  which has an insistent, chanting, rhythmic flow. The fact that I can remember them would be clearly meaningful, but to be honest I have to say that I didn’t like either of them. I’m not sure what I expected from poetry that came from poets more recent than those whose names were on my streets, but Lindsay seemed overwrought to me, and even at a young age I might have been put off by the whole white-guy-doing-primitive-African vibe of his poem. And Frost? I’ve often written here that I didn’t care for him until I started to explore things musically that became this Project in the 21st century. Only then did I discover that he was a supple lyric poet — and furthermore, a much more subtle observer of humanity than I had appreciated in my youth.

The fact that I didn’t really dig these two poets didn’t keep me from playing the records. Experiencing them felt exotic then, and I liked that even if I didn’t admire what was engendering that feeling.

The third record didn’t match suit. It was a recording from the 1940s of a song called “Open the Door Richard.”   I didn’t know then, but this was an unusual “Novelty Record” piece, charting in versions by as many as five different musicians within one year, 1947. All those musicians were Black, and before it was one of their recordings it apparently was a Black Vaudeville comic number that the musicians spruced up with swinging jive-cat musical settings and choruses. The musical versions all differ in detail while sharing the chorus. Some of them are largely drunk-act comedy,**** while others are more at down-on-one’s luck frustration and focus on the riffing, musical, chorus-hook. From listens today I suspect the recording I listened to back them could have been the Count Basie Orchestra version or (best guess) this one by the Three Flames. I liked that record, though I thought it a little odd, and I probably didn’t fully understand it. If these first three records have a link, that’s it, isn’t it? I enjoyed the strangeness, the difference.

Open_the_Door_Richard_sheet_music_cover

Tortured Poets Department, but my childhood: disks containing a psalm of comfort, a song of misapprehension,. and two early 20th century Modernist American poets.

.

The final record was the one I listened to the most. It was not a commercial 78, but a recording, perhaps from a record-yourself booth (or offers like that) which provided the earliest Elvis Presley recordings. It was my father reading “Psalm 23,”  the famous psalm of David. The voice was someone in my life, no exotic stranger, but I was totally mesmerized. If no one is more mundane than one’s own parents, this everyday, ordinary person had their voice on a record!   And the text, in familiar English translation, is one of the most comforting pieces of poetry in the canon. When I’ve revisited the Psalms periodically as an adult I’m sometimes shocked at violent and authoritarian themes I find weaving in and out of Psalms’ religious rapture — but if “Psalm 23”  implies frightful things, it does so to say that they pale in comparison to a connection with a godhead.

Parents sometimes comfort their children, do so by saying “it will be all right, we’re here to protect and care for you.” My parents weren’t much like that in expression however, though by action in life they were being that with much effort. This object, this record, did that, using someone else’s words translated from a Bronze-Age king, poet, and musician.

I think I asked about the “Open the Door Richard”  record and the “Psalm 23”  record. I can’t recall what my dad said about the Psalm recording, though I wish I did. I have a vague memory that he said the “Open the Door Richard”  song was something of an in-joke between his brothers. I didn’t get, or can’t remember the full story, but one of my father’s brothers went by the name Richard (one that became a successful Protestant minister). Another brother was named David, though he never talked to Leonard Cohen about secret chords or sling trajectories.

So there you go, in summary: I had formative exposure to poetry on recordings. One case with my own father’s voice offering comfort; and another, an Afro-American tale of misapprehension. It would be years before I had any idea to do likewise, and decades before I could do something from this early experience regularly in ways that you could hear.

Longish post, but here’s a short musical piece called “Records in Childhood”  using a sonnet I wrote this year casting some of that remembering my early experience with recorded words. You can hear it with the audio player below. No player?  This highlighted link will open a new page with its own audio player

.

*There may have been other records, though it was not any kind of large stack. The fact of memory that these four are the ones I recall testifies to their impact.

**Besides poetry recitations, sermons, and even some secular speeches were released on disk — and spoken-word comedy records were often big general-interest sellers. In a previous post I talked about how vividly I experienced Hal Holbrook’s one-man stage show of Mark Twain Tonight on an LP record in a library in Iowa.

***I did find this professional recording of Frost reading some of his “greatest hits,” and was surprised to hear quiet piano backing was used in a way that could be compared with some Parlando pieces.

It’s possible that my home’s Frost recording was a separated part of a set. 78 RPM records were sometime sold in a bookbinder of page-sleeves holding multiple disks, which is the reason we still call a longer form vinyl LP, CD, or issued-together set of digital files “an album”

****Drunk act comedy goes back to at least Shakespeare’s Falstaff, and in an earlier personal history Parlando piece I found out how my teetotal great-grandfather might have perceived the sometimes brutal alcoholic folk-song “Rye Whiskey”  as stoner comedy.

One benefit of having an acquaintance with this largely forgotten song was that when I first heard the Bob Dylan Basement Tapes song “Open the Door, Homer”  I knew the reference.

Millay’s Thanksgiving

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

There’s a long tradition in poetry of civic poetry — poems not meant for an audience interested solely in the interior intimate experience of the poet, but speaking to larger, more public themes. I suspect modern poetry doesn’t do this mode directly much, even though some individualist poetry infers that purpose. American poetic Modernism began with an emphasis on the concrete, the thing specific: red wheelbarrow, ripples in a pool, a certain Chicago cat-fog, an exit on the Metro on a rainy day. Yet, a focused subject can still be an example that stands for more.

If the subject is small though, perhaps we poets expect our audience most often to be small too, compared to a variety of other, popular arts. But this was not always so. Longfellow and Whitman expected the nation to listen to their poems of democratic virtues. If the literary set eschew the mode, song-lyricists and non-literary poets will still assay it.

Just under four years ago, a poet Amanda Gorman who has written civic poetry, delivered a poem at the last U.S. Presidential inauguration, speaking of the nation’s fears, hopes, promises. The mode of the next Inauguration has changed. I’m not expecting poetry. Some will think, more-the-better — who wants a poet spouting off what I should think.

Why not, are they not citizens? What are the occupations that are allowed to speak?

Nearly 75 years ago. American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a long poem for the American holiday of Thanksgiving. She expected a good-sized audience: it was published in the Saturday Evening Post, a weekly general interest magazine, the one that often featured Norman Rockwell paintings on the cover, that claimed Ben Franklin as its founder.

Millay NFTG

The most often used pictures of Millay show the young romantic adventurer. I’m also fond of this one that seems less all that. The poem which I perform excerpts from today was the last one she published before she died at age 58.

.

I’m sure there were specific things on Millay’s mind, geo-political, American issues. She writes five years after a war ended with two A-bombs. How long would be the peace? In 1950 there was another war going on overseas in Korea, there was a “Red Scare,” and to a large degree some deficiencies in American equality of opportunity were so far off to the side that too few even thought of them as political issues to address then. Millay didn’t cite any of that directly.

Instead, she wrote about how she thinks we, the citizenry, were feeling, assuming a general agreement that might be hard to gather today. Thanksgiving is a dual holiday occasion: it’s our harvest festival, a time to give thanks to what our work brought us, and it’s also a holiday to give thanks for what we’ve come through: it originated in a time of Civil War, and it commemorates the hardy survival of some early 17th century boat-people who landed without papers and survived on American shores. Millay’s Thanksgiving thoughts were more toward the latter than the former.

What will ring true in some American hearts this year will be her words of hopes dashed or at least deferred. Can one give thanks for having hopes that were unfulfilled? Can we at least forgive ourselves for hope? Her poem exists in that question. In the excerpts I performed today for this musically accompanied piece you can hear below, I focused on that sense, felt in my bones. “Cunning and guile persist; ferocity empowers” Millay writes. The lines that stand out for me as a Thanksgiving prayer this year are “Let us give thanks for the courage that was always ours; and pray for the wisdom which we never had.”

As civic prayer goes, that’s humble, but it has some bite in it.

You can hear my performance of portions from Millay’s “Thanksgiving…1950”  with the audio player below. The full poem’s text is at this link. No audio player gadget to be seen?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

.

When the Year Grows Old

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Here in Minnesota, the weather is turning, as it does at a time of its choosing in the Fall. Tomorrow morning the Fahrenheit temperature will be in the teens when I get up, and the forecast says single digits will greet me by Friday.

I began work on setting this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay last week after seeing it at the Byron’s Muse blog. Two things grabbed me when I saw it: sitting there as silent words it begs to be sung, and it’s tantalizingly ambiguous.

This poem was from Millay’s first collection, published (1917) as Modernism was starting to find an audience in America. Americans in the last decade to be called The Twenties saw Millay as a Modern, though her prosody wasn’t like the free-versifiers, and her lyric’s narratives weren’t fragmented word-Cubism. So, a more comfortable Modernist to those whose expectations of poetry still flowed from the 19th century? Somewhat. Still, though not so much in her first book, but soon, Millay began to stand for The New Woman, a character that took up the prerogatives of independent thought, act, and agency in love and desire. A William Carlos Williams might have absorbed radical Modernist visions in Modern Art into prosody. A Carl Sandburg may have taken his Imagist eye and cast it toward workers and immigrants in his poems. But soon after this poem, Millay was using somewhat traditional verse to speak about female independence in life and desire. Cubism and Socialism were controversial, sure, but the kind of change Millay was covering in her poems was large in scope. Man Ray or Monet, Debs or Debussy, Pound or Reverdy — change was in the air — but as far as art such as poetry was concerned, the charge for change from women (and Afro-American artists) in the Last Twenties is a big deal, not something to shelve off as some sideline.

OK, so what does this early poem have to do with that? I’m not entirely certain. Yes, the overall scene of the poem is clear to any Northerner — but even as the poem starts the seemingly simple language has faceted surfaces. The poem is titled “When the Year Grows Old,”  but I’d suspect you might mistakenly remember it as “When the Year Grows Cold.”  It’s not just the rhyme, the poem is clearly about the weather getting colder, all the images intensify that. Intensities of anything old are not there directly at all. And then, I can’t say how idiomatic the opening statement (refrained at the end,) “I cannot but remember,” would be in 1917 — but it’s easy to read it (out loud, or in understanding) more than one way: “I will reflexively remember,” “I have only memory of this,” or even “I can’t do this, but I am forced to remember.”

And who’s the “she” in this poem? I had a thought in early-days with the poem it might be a pet, likely a housecat. Beside a generalized factor of love for warmth, cat owners might recognize the bird watching vocalizations — that, and a reference to “the warmth of fur” led me to that consideration. One reader’s reaction I read online this week thought “she” was a mother. I’m not sure of Millay’s mother’s (if that would be the mother here) characteristic feelings for tending a fire or even the specific kitchen task of making tea. My cursory non-scholarly thoughts are: not likely her happy place.*  Still, I could imagine that a general poetry reader in 1917 (like the Internet contemporary I came upon this week) could think that, or that the “she” is a friend of the poem’s speaker (which we might expect to be Millay), and so find this poem Millay’s predecessor to something like the young old Bob Dylan writing “Bob Dylan’s Dream”  about his remembering lost friends who’d once gather around a wood stove.

When the Year Grows Old

Simple chords for today’s piece, presented here as chord sheet  in case you’d like to sing it too.

.

Living with this poem as I set it to music and performed it, I came to think of it more at “Girl from the North Country” — a song about a lover who is longingly thought of lovingly, but who is now separated. By the time of the performance that you can hear below, that was how I was singing it. Why did I think that?

Partly from reading later Millay poetry, partly in biographic clues of Millay’s sexuality. There’s a definite undercurrent in the poem of the “she” feeling ambivalent: the sighing look at the flying birds, the melancholy chimney wind, and most directly in the abrupt “look of a scared thing/sitting in a net!” And what follows that line feels lustily sensual to me: those rubbing “bare boughs,” that fur by the fire verse.

That reading also answers the why the year being “old” is the title, not “cold,” other than just seeking variety. A once passionate attachment has been reconsidered by the other party, has grown old/cold.

Millay could have made other meanings (“cat lady,” “dear old mom.” etc,) clear with no commercial readership risks, but following my understanding, this presentation is coded so those who know will see that, and others will see a vaguer poem while recognizing late autumn weather. If I’ve misread it, or if Millay ever explained what she was intending — well, it wouldn’t be the first time — but it worked for me to find an experiential place to inhabit the poem.

You can hear my performance of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “When the Year Grows Old”  with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? It’s nothing personal, just that some ways of viewing this blog suppress that. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*As poetic testimony: tender as Robert Hayden’s well-loved poem “Those Winter Sundays”  is, it’s not a story of a parent finding happy beauty in loading up a household’s fire box.

Ducks, as if Teenagers

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

This month my teenager, who I don’t write about much out of the belief that they should tell their own story, ceased being a teenager. They’re working full-time hours now, hoping to save enough to move to their own place, sharing hopes and connection with others who are likewise migrating across the border of growing up.

Late this summer, while on one of my bicycle rides down an urban residential street I saw an odd sight: a line of young ducks in their proverbial row waddling across the street. They seemed unconcerned with the intermittent traffic, and there was no mother duck leading the line. I could guess they thought an aged man on a bicycle was not an instinctual, usual threat — but it was grade-school pick-up time and the school buses were rumbling on their routes accumulating backpacked kids. Yet these young ducks, in their new adult colors, just waddled across anyway, as if their orderly line and intent were protection, as if it still was that some parental watch had checked the way clear.

Ducks as if teenagers

Here’s a chord sheet for the song made from the sonnet I wrote.

.

I jotted down a draft of a sonnet soon afterward, and this month as my child becomes less my child and more the cohort of others on their own, I produced a new draft, deciding to set it to music and sing it here. Longtime readers will know that one of The Parlando Project’s mottos is “Other People’s Stories” — my statement that I’ve chosen to not use this place to promote my own poetry, but rather to inhabit other’s words (usually words from literary poetry) and to write about my encounters with those words and what it feels like to sing them.

Maybe today’s piece is a symptom of my age, but I barely think of this poem as my own in the greater context of learning to think of my child as less my own. I anticipate a separated hope and worry, an elsewhere joy and adventure, when they move off as if we’ve taught them enough.

Which we never have.

You can hear the song made from the sonnet with the audio player below. No player? Don’t call home, it’s likely just the way you view this blog, some of which ways suppress showing the player gadget.  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player for you.

Ten Cents a Bushel

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I seem to have the kind of mind that, unbidden, sees connections. Probably drives some acquaintances around the bend, but regular readers here will have become accustomed to this. After all, this Project is about making a connection — likely unintended connection — between literary, page poetry and musical performance. Still, even though it relates to a mental reflex of mine, there’s “making,” work, involved in that combining.

So it was, that this month I went consciously looking for a connection, one I thought I might find between our American election results and the fear and despair around that event with the early 20th century era which I often look for to find free-to-reuse words to set and sing.

Where and what to look for in the era if trolling for such a connection? I wanted a short poem to leap out at me, one that I’d immediately flash on, in hopes it would attract even the casual listener here with a sense of recognition. I started paging through my Sandburg, who remains one of my personal models, but found no strong candidates I haven’t already performed.*  I next moved on to a 1930’s volume A New Anthology of Modern Poetry  edited by Selden Rodman. Rodman is one of those little-remembered figures I enjoy encountering in the Project, a litterateur and socialist activist who admired American Modernists — so connections right there.

The selections in Rodman’s volume look like an index of this Project’s authors, I counted 37 poets whose texts I’ve used in the nearly 800 published Parlando Project pieces.** His lively introduction promised what I was looking for, connecting the artistic discontent with old literary modes and tactics with social change and discontent.

Eagerly, I read on, looking for that flash of connection with the way folks I know are feeling this month. I read some fine poems, some I might even use someday here, but nothing came out of that quick skim and read that hit me with my sought property: “This sounds like it could have been written today.” Why not? When those poets wrote of their social injustices and feared outcomes the details of their times didn’t match closely enough to the details of our times.***   “It’s just details, what about the essence?” you might think. I thought that too, but I wanted listeners to feel it  from the poem I was looking for. Details usually aren’t ephemeral in poetry, they are often the source of its emotional power.

If I’d left it there you wouldn’t have a musical piece to listen to today. But then I recalled Edwin Ford Piper, a man whose work I discovered earlier this year. Piper’s family settled in frontier Nebraska just after the American Civil War. He grew up there, knowing rural settlers, ranch-hands, and farmers at the turn of the century. To keep this a reasonable length, here’s a link to some of what I wrote about this deserving of more current attention poet earlier this year.

Ten Cents a Bushel

Here’s Piper’s poem I performed today as it was published in his collection Barb Wire

.

Piper’s poem “Ten Cents a Bushel”  is about a small farmer. I doubt I have any readers who commercially harvest corn by hand, though some may have experienced something close enough. There are still agricultural workers, but modern field workers are usually employees, not caught in the exact resident small-farmer serfdom that is the center of Piper’s poem.****  I went with this poem anyway. In doing so, I accepted failure on my goal — at least so far — I didn’t find the brilliant connection between eras I was seeking. But if the poem’s details are off-target to today’s burdens, they are still powerful details. Piper’s poem lets us feel those details in our muscles and smell them with our noses, and the essence of the poem’s world, the repetitive stress of its rural Sisyphus’ burden, is something I expect some tired people can feel this month.

Today’s music? I prefer to call myself a composer, not a musician, even though I operate numerous real and virtual instruments in making these pieces. Modern digital recording allows me to maximize my inconsistent skills and to do with guile and planning what fingers and breath couldn’t accomplish. Be assured: “composer” sounds like a pompous title to me too, while “musician” retains the nobility of the worker. But there’s an element of my personality that sometimes tells the composer-me to back off with the theory and a build-the-musical-piece-with-ideas workflow, and barks “I just want to play!” Weeks like these, or times when I can plug into a loud amp and welcome that power vibrating in a room brings that energy forward. Today’s piece started with two inexpensive electric guitars and a bass playing loud in a room. The lead guitar I played is a Squier Jazzmaster, a model that wasn’t designed for loud, sustained-note playing, but can be forced to do it under volume by an elderly guitarist who can’t rip out rapid flurries of notes. You can hear that performance, my speaking Piper’s account of this November farmer’s harvest while playing more my mood than worked-out musical ideas by using the audio player below. No player? The bank hasn’t foreclosed, some ways of viewing this blog suppress the audio player gadget. This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with just an audio player of its own.

.

*I’m not disenchanted with Carl Sandburg. My results in this browse through his work may be because he doesn’t really do fear and despair as a predominant emotional frame. This may still be a good attitude to assay in these times, but not what I was specifically seeking. If you want Sandburg for this moment, perhaps this previous Parlando Project performance will serve you well.

**One blind spot: Rodman (who had considerable interest in Black Caribbean culture and history) didn’t include any of the Harlem Renaissance generation of Afro-Americans. I must resort to an academic meta-cultural term of art when I consider that: WTF.

***I did think this week about how to compare the injustice and fears which I naively thought I could measure between the 1930s and our time. I’m certain the levels of injustice were massively greater then. The fears? Even given their Great Depression, fascist governments, genocide factories, and a coming World War — I can’t say our fears are lesser.

****I started to write a conclusion here that would need to spin out more than a thousand words to do it justice. Such an epic would point out that those early 20th century rural farmers caught in an economic squeeze by powerful business forces up the supply chain from their crops, founded radical, effective, and practical political movements: The Farmer Labor Party, the Non-Partisan League. In the same parts of the land that today wave the red flag and the red hat, a very different rural political force was electorally successful. What’s with the same fields bearing different fruits in these two eras? That’s more than a blog post, something for someone with skills beyond mine. One naive half-formed theory: was there something about the largely immigrant-or-child-of-one, practical farmer or small-town-dweller of a century ago that saw through urban sharpies and charlatans, and focused on specific economic remedies?

Let No Charitable Hope

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Elinor Wylie once was a reasonably successful poet, back in the last decade that was called The Twenties. I informally group her with some other American women poets of that time: Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, each of whom wrote often about the complexities of love and relationships. Though none of this group had careers of extended success,* Wylie’s poetry career arc was exceptionally short, contained entirely within the 1920s — though it was preceded by a few years of being a gossip item for a series of romantic elopements and divorces. I wrote a bit about that element of her life a few years back, but it seems that Wylie was playing at the Kardashian-family level of tempestuous celebritydom in her time. Read my link if you want a summary of the tea.

Young Elinor Wylie

Elinor Wylie. Runaway socialite and 1920s poet.

.

So how good was her poetry? Clearly better than the usual celebrity with a book of poetry. She’s highly musical and concise, an irresistible draw to my Project, and while ranking art is a foolish game, her best work stands up well against the trio I associated her with. Today’s piece uses a poem that was called one of her best works when I first read it as poets.org’s Poem-a-Day a year ago. Here’s a link to the poem’s text if you’d like to read along. I myself wouldn’t rank it that high if I somehow needed to rank her poems, though the musicality alone compelled me to set it with music this week. Why do I prefer, for example, her “Velvet Shoes?”  “Let No Charitable Hope”  is a bit abstract, despite the eagle and antelope that are cited in passing and the woman trying to get substance from a stone,** while “Velvet Shoes”  is as sensuous an experience in imagery as in sound. But as a complaint, “Let No Charitable Hope”  probably still connects. Many of us, maybe more for those women reading, are familiar with being misapprehended, of having a hard enough time maintaining one’s own hopes, and to then be asked to try to match the hopes of others. What does Wylie mean by her ending smile in the poem? Is she smiling at how mistaken the apprehension was, or is she allowing herself to smile at her own small lofting of her own hopes?

You can hear my musical performance of Wylie’s poem with the audio player below. I went all-out on the weird chords for this one, so it may not be to all tastes. Is your screen so woozy from fear of odd voicings that it’s obscured any such audio player? No, some ways of reading this blog suppress that player gadget, so I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*Like Wylie, Teasdale died young. Parker and Millay’s political commitment damaged their later careers. The New Morning of the The New Woman of the 1920s had its backlash as well — but this isn’t simple. It’s hard to maintain an artistic career in general, Parker suffered from writerly alcoholism, and some who shared Milay’s politics didn’t think her later work was as good as literature.

**One more concrete image occurs in the poem: masks. The line “Masks outrageous and austere” was sonorous enough for Tennessee Williams to cop it later on. As if sometimes does for me, I thought of masking as in autism, though the syntax of the poem’s last stanza seems to have masking being applied to the years, not the poem’s speaker’s smiling face. Still, I’d expect some ASD readers would see the disconnect of the “charitable hopes” of others viewing them verses their own internal reservoirs of hope and intent.

Let Me Call It Remembrance Day

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

A post today for a holiday with complications. In the UK, Canada, and the former Commonwealth, today is Remembrance Sunday and tomorrow is Remembrance Day. In my United States tomorrow is Veteran’s Day. Remembrance Sunday/Day is a bigger deal. Here in the U.S., it’s one of two holidays set aside to honor the armed forces,*  and the Spring Memorial Day gets more observance. America moves it around as a Monday workday holiday, so it now rarely occurs on November 11th, the day it was originally meant to commemorate, Armistice Day, the day that WWI ended. In the American observance, the day and the moment being observed are no longer there as they happen to be this year.

But then, all the events of WWI have now passed out of the living’s remembrance, and WWII is entering the time of that leaving — while in England the wound and loss are still felt by a generation that themselves only recall the generations that personally experienced it.**

Historically, poets suffer, fight, and die in wars. Presently in the U.S. this may be less true than was traditionally so, our soldiering ranks now coming from a different cohort than those with MFA and workshop attendance. That too is complicated, and I’ll choose to honor your time today by not going into all of that. Yet I’ll maintain that the experiences of service to country, of organized protection and organized death, of comradeship and loneliness — these words of history aren’t so far away if we only open ourselves to listen to them.

Here are five poems for this complicated holiday that this Project has presented over the years. In honor of the UK preservation of the original reason for the holiday, four of them will be British to one American.

Gone, Gone Again (Blenheim Oranges)

British poet Edward Thomas is too little considered in the United States, but in the run-up to WWI this overworked and underpaid freelance writer started to expend his writing efforts to the least commercial of literary forms, poetry of individual honesty — urged in that endeavor by his expatriate American friend, Robert Frost. Frost left England for America as the war began and he asked his friend to follow him and emigrate to the United States.

Thomas didn’t accept his offer. In Britain Thomas is remembered as a War Poet, as one of the casualties of The Great War, but his poetry doesn’t speak of his trenchside times in the conflict — instead it sings with lovely precision and concision of the British countryside as he is making his decision to take the road well-traveled to enlist to the front. “Gone, Gone Again”  is one of his masterful poetic verse-essays on this time of decision, as he observes an England depopulated of its workmen. Why did he go to the front? He explained it mostly as being unable to shake his patriotic connection to the very soil and experience of Britain that his poetry sings of, but I said today’s post would be about complications. Thomas was also a troubled soul, looking for meaning in his life not captured by certainty, and some have speculated that a soldier’s pay was a better economic offer for his family than his Grub Street freelancing. He packs every bit of that into this short poem.

.

Shadwell Stair

Wilfred Owen is another Brit who took up poetry in the context of serving in The Great War. He’s known for his scathing anti-war poems, which to Britain’s credit doesn’t keep him from being honored nationally as a War Poet. But here’s a lonely poem written on the banks of the river Thames, likely during the time he was back from the front being treated for what was then called “shell-shock.” Folks today can experience the poem in a context pointed out later, that the Shadwell Stair location was a gay cruising spot at that time. Historically, there’s a blindness in some eyes to see that not just that poets and artists serve, but that they aren’t all straight.

.

On the Troop Ship to Gallipoli

Rupert Brooke was a rising young poet before WWI started, and even at his young age, great things were predicted for him. Unlike Owen, his war poetry is conventionally heroic, conventionally patriotic. Unlike Thomas, he was under no economic pressure when he enlisted. Would that tone have continued, could he have written glorious battlefield odes, or would the war have turned him into a skeptical Modernist? In an irony that only the Fates could have woven, he was detailed to be part of the disastrous attempt to land at Gallipoli. While on the troop ship steaming there, he fell sick from what I’ve read was an infected insect bite, and died before reaching the deadly front.

I took a fragment Brooke composed on that fatal voyage, and audaciously decided to take a Modernist blue pencil to trim and rephrase it the way an Imagist might. That was a complicated act, one that I’m not sure I can justify, other than to say that I wanted Brooke’s moment on that troopship to stand out more vividly, riding roughshod over his verse to honor that.

.

The Cenotaph

I don’t believe there are any women on WWI War Poet plaques in Britain, but of course they were asked to and worked with the war effort, and were there to tend, mend, and mourn the casualties during and afterward. Here’s a complicated poem of mourning, written as the original Cenotaph*** was erected in London. Its author Charlotte Mew is another British poet little-known in America. From what I’ve read she was seen as eccentric by other artists of her time, and her poetry doesn’t fit easily into any movement or style. Every Remembrance observance in Britain to this day has a ceremony at the London Cenotaph where the current government pays solemn homage to the soldiers’ sacrifice. If I read Mew right, she’s the ghost-at-the-feast here, and has some particular wailing to do.

.

.

Grass

Lastly, for Remembrance Day, here’s the American — and non-more American than the child of immigrants Carl Sandburg. I would post his poem “Grass” every Memorial Day, every Veteran’s Day — and yes, even every Remembrance Day. Yet, this is a poem that sings about forgetting. Is forgetting wars, forgetting soldier’s service and sacrifice, a callous thing? Is forgetting the follies and cruelties of war dangerous ignorance? Is it better to forget wars than to suffer them forever in endless horror? Is forgetting just the way things are eventually, an erasing sigh that fades into new present days — as what humans do that humans can never fully comprehend?

Look, I said it was complicated.

.

*In the US, there’s fine print sometimes invoked to separate the two: Memorial Day for those who died in service, and Veteran’s Day to honor all that served. The UK Remembrance Day is more like American Memorial Day focused on wartime losses and sacrifice.

**Proportionate to population, the US casualties in WWI were much lower. And England’s cities suffered under bombs during WWII. I was going to write too about the World Wars and their effect on the British Empire and colonialism, and America sliding in as a replacement, but that subject is too big for any footnote.

***So great were the WWI deaths that logistics couldn’t see to repatriating all the bodies of British war dead back home, and unidentified dead and missing in action mysteries clouded the situation too. Regional cenotaph memorials, including a great one in the national capitol, would serve as a consolidated gravesite to lay flowers and visit in remembrance.