Author: Frank Hudson

Reopening the Scrapbook, Part Two

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

So, what’s in that scrapbook? There were a bunch of clippings from magazines or newspapers, sometimes pictures from them, sometimes articles, often about people in the entertainment business. A couple of letters. Ephemera from places, like business cards, tickets, a cocktail napkin. A few things related to Hollywood movies. A theater program. A restaurant menu. And photos, some posed “publicity shots” for musical combos or performers, some amateur snapshots. Even more than 40 years ago when I received the scrapbook, the pages these things were attached to were starting to fragment, and stuff that was likely attached to the dried-out paper was now loose inside the book, making it hard to leaf through. Alas, there were almost no captions or notations anywhere by the scrapbook’s maker. From clothing, cars, and dates on the clippings it was from the 1940s and 50s.

I think I tried when I received it in the 1980s to determine if it had a story, but I couldn’t really figure it out. Because a majority of faces in the scrapbook were Black, I thought it was safe to assume it was kept by someone who was also Black. On thinner grounds, I made another likelihood assumption: that it was made and kept by a woman. Somehow, it seemed feminine to me, and I could imagine someone fan-crazy about music collating this book. But there was a lot of miscellany to it too. One plurality thread seemed to be in the entertainers’ pictures and clips: a band that called itself The Cats and the Fiddle.

Cats and the Fiddle Collage

Stuff from the crumbling scrapbook that I’ll be examining this month.

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I’d never heard of them, and back in the pre-Internet age it wasn’t easy to find out about them. In the pictures they were an all-Black group in sharp suits. The “fiddle” was the bass fiddle — a standup bass player* was in all the pictures of the band. The rest of the small combo were playing a range of fretted stringed instruments. I could see one of the guitars had just four strings, and I knew that was a tenor guitar, an instrument that otherwise looked like the acoustic guitar I was playing with Dave in our punk folk band then. I knew that it was developed to allow 4-string tenor banjo players to transition over to the guitar as the banjo faded out as a Jazz instrument. Another would hold a regular archtop hollow-body guitar. And there as an odd instrument I could make out in some pictures: smaller than a conventional guitar, with more than 6 strings. The Cats and the Fiddle looked pre-rock’n’roll, but it didn’t look particularly like the Chicago Blues bands I knew of then, nor was it a typical modern Jazz combo that I listened to. No keyboards, no drummer.

I somehow located an LP record, a reissue collection of some of their recordings. They played hot tempo, small combo, hard swinging Jazz backing accompanying their own tightly-grouped vocal blends. This was a genre I knew only a little about. It had largely faded out as popular music by the time I was aware of music, but I had encountered something like it in acts that were reviving 40s-era genres, nationally: The Pointer Sisters, Bette Midler, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, and locally a band called Rio Nido. As a guitarist The Cats and the Fiddle were easy for me to take a liking to. Though a vocal group, the energetic short solo breaks on the guitars still sounded fresh to me, a fellow stringed instrument plucker. I’m not sure if I stole any licks, but I would have liked to have.

What is this group doing in cold Minnesota? A movie clip shows they can take to the snow!

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There was something else about the songs: many of them were lyrically about what might have been called the Jazz life: referencing the music itself, but also things connected with it: drinking, partying, hepcat slang, and those “Jazz cigarettes.” There were a handful of lovelorn ballads, but the approach more often was near-hypermania good times. No drummer, but the combo’s rhythm was solid, and that accompaniment was not mixed down low way behind the vocals.

Proof that Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn didn’t invent the behind-the-back guitar strum

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There were liner notes on the LP sleeve. Yes, they were a ‘40s group. I can’t recall if the notes mentioned where the musicians were from or what region the band worked out of, but I know I was looking for a tie to Minnesota where the scrapbook ended up, and didn’t find any. One thing the reissued LP did reveal: one of the members was Tiny Grimes. I’m not a hard-core Jazz historian, but I knew of Grimes — a contemporary, though longer-lived, of electric guitar pioneer Charlie Christian. Guitarist Grimes, like Christian, was present at the creation as Swing music morphed into Be-Bop.

I put that scrapbook away, and when I moved to my present home, it stayed on an upper shelf in my study where I work on the pieces you read here. Did I decide I had hit a dead end with the scrapbook, or was I just busy with my life then as sometime gigging member of a band? Probably a little of both. I’d sometimes look up at it, look at it looking down at me, and I’d think: I should get back to it sometime, see what more I can determine.

And this is the month I did that. More to come, as I examine the scrapbook again for Black History Month 2025.

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*Well, not always an upright bass player, as you can see in the second video clip.

Black History Month 2025: There is a house…

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

In the past few years I’ve enjoyed focusing here on Afro-American poets during the month of February. Last year, I dug in and did a bit more research on an understudied but fascinating Chicago poet Fenton Johnson, whose published work sits between the emergence and premature death of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson became easily identifiable as a Modernist before his access to extant publications dried up in the 1920s, and I suggested last year that his poetry allows us to see —albeit silently on a page until I did some musical settings — into the formative years of Afro-American Gospel and Blues music before it made it onto recordings.

Here’s something I formulated for myself early in this Project as I found myself often looking at the rise of Modernism in the 20th century: a part of why Americans became highly significant innovators in Modernism has to do with Afro-Americans. Literary-only scholars might not focus on this inside their silo, but at the same time Pound, Eliot, Frost, Moore, Stevens, Millay, Williams, H.D., Sandburg, et al were reforming poetry, Afro-Americans were spearheading a revamped approach to music. Black poets like Johnson and Langston Hughes were hip to how those two things should be viewed together from the start, and after all, Modernism took root during the last decade called The Twenties under the banner of “The Jazz Age.”

That 2024 series on Fenton Johnson let me further express the musical part of the Parlando Project: “Where Music and Words Meet” — and it should also be obvious by now to regular readers that history is one of my interests. So, this February, like the Fenton Johnson series of last year, I’m going to get into the deep weeds a bit this on some lesser-known stuff.

I’m unable to schedule the Parlando Project work in a fully professional manner, so it’s likely you, if you follow along this month, will be going on a journey with me as I look into elements in real time. I may be revising myself before the finish, and if that gets awkward, let me say at the start that this isn’t some plotted-out documentary, I don’t know what all I’ll find. It’s likely going to be very first-drafty, so put on your reading sweater.

If this was an audio presentation, at this point there’d be one of those audio fades with reverb to suggest a passage of time now. From out of the echo my voice will be saying: “It all started in 1976 when I moved to Minnesota from New York…”

I was looking for a new start. It wasn’t entirely clear if I was going to continue intermittent attendance at college, which was both logistically and financially limited to me at the time. One advantage I had: doing nursing work in an Emergency Department was an easily transferable skill, I could go most anywhere that had a hospital, and maybe it would be good if where I moved also had a college. I settled on Minneapolis because I knew a couple living there from my Iowa college experience in The Sixties. One of that couple, Dave Moore has remained a friend (and contributor to the Parlando Project). Dave and his then wife had plotted out a plan for themselves. They were going to run a small mail-order used book business and needed a place to collect stock, store it, and run that business. They purchased (for an attractive low price) a large old house on Park Avenue in Minneapolis. Park Avenue was, in the last Gilded Age, a place where newly rich Minneapolitans built their mansions along a wide tree-lined street leading into the business center downtown. Now in 1976, this couple I knew were going in big on the sweat equity thing, rehabbing that house. The place, 3132 Park Avenue South, was built as a sort of a Junior-Grade Mansion. The 3rd floor, where the original owners had servant’s quarters would hold their stock of books which Dave was obtaining from aging bookstores that were beginning to close down or dump old stock. The other two floors would be their living space and nursery for the child they were planning to have. I could help a bit with the enterprise and rehab, and stay with them for a while.

It was a grand adventure. I had no builders skills, but mainly helped with the stripping of paint off the old woodwork and general lifting and toting. Work was already more than half done when I arrived. Dave told me that around mid-century the house had been turned into a set of small rentable spaces part-way between a rooming house and a set of apartments. Most of those changes had been removed already, and the book business part of things was more at my interests. For that, I’d go with Dave on trips to the basements of sole-proprietor bookstores, some closed, closing, or soon to close, to clean out old stock in their basements or back rooms. There was so much stuff from the 50s and the early 60s — before, you know, The Sixties.  From ruined books I collected a small batch of lurid pulpy covers on these expeditions. The packrat in me wished I’d grabbed more.

Pulp Joyce cover

It’s James Joyce’s birthday today. This cover from those ‘70s bookstore hauls was stuck up in my studio space for years. There’s no music directly for this essay today, but here a Joyce poem conveyed in the early years of this Project.

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This house on Park Avenue is just a location for the drama, a set for one of the acts I want to present haphazardly this month. The whole play is not extant. It exists only in fragments, a bad quattro. How do we raise the curtain?

Dave knew I had an interest in old Blues music, and somewhere in an interval after I was staying at 3132 Park Avenue and maybe as late as when I moved into the rented part of a duplex next door a few years later, he gave me a tattered scrapbook found when they were cleaning out those rooming house remnants. I’ve learned a lot since that scrapbook came into my possession. Let’s take a look inside as this series continues.

Sandburg’s Couples

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Time for me to get back on my Carl Sandburg soapbox. I’ll be brief — as today’s poem, now song, is as well. My point (again) is I think there’s more there in his poetry than is currently remembered or considered. Your impressions may be from two stalwarts of American poetry anthologies: the Whitmanesque “Chicago”  with those big shoulders and the quite contrasting short metaphoric poem “Fog”  with its cat’s feet. Not a lot for a poet who wrote so much, so early in the Modernist era, but it does point out a range of expression.

I’ve performed segments of Sandburg’s prolix mode here. I like Whitman well enough. Within limits, I like Sandburg doing Whitman’s mode too. He’s not quite the opera singer that Whitman aspires to be, he’s more of the folk-ballad, song-suite, kind of poet. America’s a big country, so I guess we need big, shouting, poems — and even if that’s not my favorite mode, either poet can move me as they traverse long distances with galloping catalogs and litanies. My point today is that this Sandburg, being bigger, overshadows another Sandburg, one that I particularly treasure, the one that reminds me more of Du Fu than Whitman: the forgotten, pioneering, ground-level reporting, American Imagist, Sandburg. Sandburg’s poems in the compressed style are not accidents, seeds of long poems that didn’t germinate, or little palate cleansers between his important work. His earliest collections are packed with sub-sonnet-length pieces.

On awaking this morning, I was thinking of a set of poems by a couple of the earliest American Modernists, Ezra Pound and Sandburg, where they each showed gratitude for their American forbearers. I paired their poems as one musical piece early in this Project, and here’s a link to that.  Pound, within his characteristic grumpy mode in “A Pact,”  makes peace with Whitman — and while casting a little shade on Walt for being the son of a house-carpenter, he claims his own finely crafted woodcarving is descended from the cross-cut and rip saw of Whitman.

Who does Sandburg say are his native 19th century inspirations? Whitman? Nope. Maybe Longfellow, with his civic-minded striving for uplift and justice? No. Who’s left? Poe? Hmm. Interesting thought, even if Poe is awfully rhymey for a free-verse poet. The other Fireside poets? Well, yes, Sandburg wanted a wide audience, but as the child of an immigrant couple and attendee of a non-descript Midwest school, he lacked their pedigree.

Sandburg in his “Letters to Dead Imagists”  is declaring his allegiance to that spear-point of English-language Modernism, but here he claims a couple of Americans as his predecessors: Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane.

The poet he names first, Dickinson, will likely seem a more conventional choice to those reading this today than it was when Sandburg wrote his poem in the early 20th century. Dickinson’s eventual rise to genius status would still be early in its slope — she was more known then as an eccentric than as a model for poetic expression. The second, Stephen Crane, is more associated with prose, but he wrote a singular collection of gnomic, short free verse poems, The Black Riders,  in 1895. An inspiration for Crane’s unusual work: the new, first publication of the poetry of Emily Dickinson in 1890.

Sandburg was among the first to try to form a 20th century style combining the “mother and father” of American poetry: Dickinson and Whitman. And I happen to like it when he takes after dear old mom.

Today’s piece, Sandburg’s “Couples”  sounds a little like Crane, a little like Dickinson, and it has a characteristic early Imagist trope of close-focus specifics and vivid color by name. Here’s a link to the text of it.  If one thinks of Sandburg as being a clear-speaking poet, this poem should disabuse you that he’s always about some obvious point. Part of the delay in publishing my version of his poem is that I’m still not sure what he’s describing. There’s parallelism set up between six “women” dressed in green and six “men.” They’re described as dancing, likely haphazardly as the infamously strong liquor absinthe* is mentioned, they make a hissing laughter sound. They are somehow cheating or gaming each other. There’s a worn path of hard packed dirt said to be from the dancing feet. The poem closes with dewy weeds said to be as high as six little crosses, one for each couple.

I’m stumped. A graveyard? Then maybe the dancers are ghosts. But if so, why the specific detail of the dirt floor packed down if it’s a weedy, less-than-well-tended graveyard? A barn-dance? The weeds are described as “mourning veils.” Or are the six live couples dancing around six graves? Why, who are they to the buried, if it’s that? Perhaps instead, the dancers are green plants of some kind, their dance uncoordinated as random winds, and the wind through them is the hissing laughter, and they’re maybe even the weeds the poem closes with. Did Sandburg just choose their number to be six out of desire to be specific? But again, he spends two lines of a short poem on the packed down dirt floor under the “dancers,” and plants dancing in the wind wouldn’t compress the earth.

In summary: as obscure as any of Crane’s Black Riders  poems — but specific, like a closely-observed Emily Dickinson riddle poem. If Sandburg intended mystery, he achieved a stubborn dose of it in this poem of his, and the incantatory power of its spikey, inexplicable details may still carry us through. While it’s unlikely Sandburg’s model, if one was to translate this into French and say it was from Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat”  how would we experience it?

Carl Sandburg with guitar at mic

Glad to be at the open mic. I’m going to do “Wagon Wheel” and this Oasis song “Wonderwall” now.

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If forced to a final guess: they are  graves, and the dancers are the living as continuing life-force, not dancing on the graves as revenge, but out of the joy of continuance, and the packed dirt is the mark of our ongoing life-work and dance. The cheating? The unfaithfulness and trifling of love and desire, or they are cheating death by living and loving. The couples of the title then are not only the paired male and female dancers engendering a new generation, but the connection between the living and the dead. Why six? I don’t know.**

I performed this with just acoustic guitar, Carl Sandburg’s own instrument of choice. When assessing his guitaristic skills, Carl would sometime say he was at least one prison sentence from getting any good. You can hear my misdemeanor playing with the audio player gadget you should see below. No gadget? It was pardoned, or impounded, or deported, or took a buyout, or something. No one seems to know, because some vain fool runs things, and there’s not enough conscientious people left to make knowledge from foolishness. But I do give you this highlighted link that’ll open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Absinthe is colored green, doubling down on the use of that color in the poem.

**Rejected guesses why six couples and six crosses: six is sometimes used as the number of cardinal directions, sometimes shown as a six-armed cross, but Sandburg seems to be clearly saying six separate crosses. The Oklahoma state flag shows a First Nations (Ossage) shield with six separate crosses on it (the cross is a common indigenous American symbol) — but that flag was adopted a decade after the poem, and I can’t find any source of previous use of that distinct six crosses symbolism that the flag drew on.

Timothée Chalamet, A Complete Unknown, and a mid-winter song: Three Angels

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’m trying to decide between work on finishing a new Parlando piece combining literary poetry and original music, and seeing what I can do for a February Black History Month observance here. The first is mostly done, the latter is but ideas at this late date.

What to do? In my typical direct approach, I did something else today. This weekend I watched Timothée Chalamet appear on Saturday Night Live as the musical act on the long-lived sketch comedy television show. Chalamet is fresh off an acclaimed performance as the young Bob Dylan in the film A Complete Unknown.

I mostly liked that movie. Biopics are always dodgy things to do, as most people’s biographies when told straightforwardly do not have enough dramatic concision to make a compelling two-hour film. Which means they all have fibs in them, and they will perforce leave things and people out. It’s become an apparently unavoidable cliché to remark on this element by quoting a line from another film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: ” When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”*  This misses the point of John Ford’s great film. When that line is uttered near the very end of that movie, Ford has shown us a compelling tale of a man, played by Jimmy Stewart, who had many great things about him, a man who at the end of the film had risen to become an honored Senator, a plausible Vice President even — but Ford also told us of another man, played by John Wayne, who may have been less interesting as a biography, but whose acts are critical to the movie, and who gave up more than legendary fame when making his choices. Ford isn’t praising that “print the legend” eventuality. Ford’s film prints “the fact.” He thinks that’s more interesting.

A Complete Unknown  tries within conventional running time to tell a complex story: of a young man who’s forming himself — not so much finding himself — as he wants to be unfindable. Instead of doing a “great man” tale, it wants us to see the other folks around him, lovers attracted to and understandably frustrated by Dylan; and a pair of men: one a businessman, the other a saint of citizenship (Albert Grossman and Pete Seeger). In between these, Johnny Cash plays an imp of the perverse. That complex tale is told at a brisk pace. I was able to forgive that. Yes, there are characters undervalued, incidents re-arranged in the timeline — but in the movie’s defense I’d say it couldn’t be otherwise, there were just so many  talented and interesting people in that time and place.

And then we got to the final incident, the film’s climax. Here time is suddenly allowed to expand and we are given more detail about something that lasted maybe 48 hours in real time. Some of that detail is accurate, much of it is not. Most of the inaccuracies are aimed not to expand the complexities of the relationships and times, but to simplify them and underline a simplistic point. Finally, the movie has introduced all these characters, and this is the place where the earlier parts of the film are exposition, and you can get them to fully spark and rub with their differing viewpoints. Instead, that doesn’t happen, you get instead a rock’n’roll pantomime, with caricatures shouting and everything but a pie-in-the face fight.**

This is not the fault of the performers though. The cast does a fine job, and before his actual work could be seen, Chalamet’s ability to pull off his performance as Dylan was generally doubted in online forums of musicians and music fans. He did fine, and as the movie publicity has informed us, he “did his own stunts” by learning to play guitar and harmonica and to sing live, and this led to this past weekend’s choice for him to appear as a musical act.***

Again, Chalamet exceeded expectations. His opening Dylan song, “Outlaw Blues,”  (done as a rap-chant with Jack White/Black Keys-like elements in the ensemble) was fresh and effective, including that Minnesota call-out to being “9 below zero at 3 o’clock in the afternoon.”  Even more surprising was Chalamet immediately going down-tempo with a real rarity that would have stumped all but the deepest of the deep-cut Dylan fans: “Three Angels.”   It’s a brief song from a now little regarded Dylan album New Morning.  It seemed a throw-away even in that less-celebrated collection, an off-hand narration of an urban winter scene post-Christmas. From my Parlando focus, it attracts me though. It’s got some elements of one of poet Frank O’Hara’s “walking around poems,” that paying attention to what we are not usually paying attention to mixed with a casual surrealism. Everyone in the song seems a non-sequitur somehow, and why does the truck have no wheels, why is the cop skipping? Three fellas are “crawling back to work” under the same number of angels playing silent fanfares in snow, and we may not know if those three are wise men or not, as nobody stops to ask why they are going to work. Here a link to his set of performances.

So, I admire Chalamet’s taste in Dylan songs there. Perhaps if he lives to my age he’ll also be good enough looking to play me in my biopic. But watching his performance my ego remembered that decades ago I did a cover of “Three Angels”  myself, one done early in my ability to overdub parts creating a one-man-band on a recording. Today I found the recording and made this short video to present it.

I think I did this recording on a “portastudio” cassette, or on my first computer-based recording system.

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*Here’s a good run-down of that “print the legend” trope, which takes care to get the details right.

**If you really want to know the complexities, I recommend the book which the movie bought the rights to: Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric.   I thought I knew all the details of the film’s famous climactic Newport Folk Festival scene, but I learned stuff from Wald’s reporting and extensive context on the “folk scare” American folk revival. Sure, 99.5% of the folks who watched the movie will not benefit from getting this book, but the .5% who would, need to read it.

***In the post WWII era, there were a lot of poets who in their dreams wanted to also be musical performers. Easy to see why too: poetry was a small cultural sideline, but for much of this era it was possible to become highly popular and well-paid as a “rock star.” It’s less acknowledged, but the same could be said of some actors — despite the fame, adoration, and income levels achievable in commercially successful acting being roughly equal to popular musicians. In 2025, I believe this is less often true — more and more professional musicians these days have meager incomes. But there may still be some desire to play Orpheus in real life among a sub-set of actors.

What do I think? I think poetry and music are kin, and if my thought-dreams could be seen they’d probably put my head in a guillotine. And despite the fame level of Bob Dylan, Chalamet is helping Dylan’s art by illuminating it. Good on him.

Arcadian Ewes (Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Today is Robert Burns’ birthday, which I hear is much celebrated in Scotland. While this Project has done over 800 audio pieces over the years, none of them (before today) have used Burns words. Why not? It’s a personal limitation of mine: his poetry uses a lot of Scottish words and dialect, and I have a hard time doing that.*

But, at last, I’ve finally snuck in a bit of Burns. And while it’s not as novel, I’m also using a set of words I wrote for the bulk of today’s performance, though the Parlando Project remains overwhelmingly about experiencing other people’s words. The second part of “Arcadian Ewes”  is a draft version from a work in progress: The Memory Care Sonnets.  Drafts of other poems in the series have appeared here before, but for those new to this, they tell the story of a daughter visiting and caring for a mother with increasing dementia.

While hearing the original account of a daughter and the daughter’s friend going for a weekly singing session at the memory care facility last fall, I was somehow struck at the time with the story’s Arcadian sensibility. That’s a place I know from this Project. Poetry and folk-song is rich in Arcadia: there are shepherds, flocks, meadows, love, peril, loneliness, peace, gifts, songs, a sense of time ever-present without fences, taking place over the hills and away from our actual daily lives. Here, in the sonnet, the shepherdesses go to the place, gather their flock of singers. What songs will they sing?

Even as I was writing the poem the refrain of Burns’ song that now begins the recorded performance was in my mind. I can’t quite account for why, other than the song for some reason often brings me to tears — and I can’t fully explain that either.

Ca the Yowes status Dunfries Scotland

Today’s musical piece begins with part of a Robert Burns’ song  displayed on this monument in Dumfries Scotland
(photo by: summonedbyfells via Wikipedia)

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“Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes”  was collected and reshaped by Robert Burns in the late 18th century.  He published at least two versions, and the folk process has given us other variations, including differences in how much of the Scottish accent and wordage is retained. As a text though, it generally isn’t a sad song. The song’s shepherdess, taking her ewes among the hills seems happy enough in her labor, but happier yet to find a swain in her Arcadia who promises her unending devotion and care. That story isn’t sad now, is it — unless one dotes on how love’s promises aren’t always faithful, that human lives are not unending. But as I said above, poetic Arcadian time doesn’t end, and maybe that contrast with human time is the essential sadness. Perhaps it is those elemental parts of Burns’ story, of the care for the carer, is what linked it to my resulting poem of the daughter taking care of the mother.

However inexplicably, I believe it’s the music that makes me cry when I hear that song’s tune. Music, that same powerful class of thing that is the balm that restores a connection to the mother on one of her “bad days” of deeper withdrawal in the sonnet. The music for the performance you can hear below doesn’t hew exactly to the old song’s tune, for I don’t know if I could have stayed with the reading if it did. You can hear my performance with the audio player gadget below. Has your audio player strayed away over the hills? No, just some ways of reading this blog suppress displaying it, so I also offer this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*That lack of the ability to hear and then repeat back sounds bedevils me several ways: it’s often relied on in musical endeavors, and it’s long frustrated me in my desire to speak other languages, or even pronounce some names correctly. I suspect it’s a neurological quirk of my brain.

Inconceivably Solemn

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I suspect a majority of my readers are looking for something related to poetry when they visit here. Stats show continued high visit counts for older posts on some poems this winter, proof of Pound’s dictum that “Poetry is news that stays news.” I remain a little puzzled by the trailing interest in the audio pieces that accompany nearly all the blog posts. The analyst in me assigns that to the fleeting visits of many internet users who sometimes can’t politely play audio, or who don’t care to expend the 2 to 5 minutes most of my musical pieces would take. Maybe some think the audio player gadget will launch an all-to-typical one-hour-plus podcast with an inefficient, in-joking set of hosts rattling each-other’s funny bones? Or it could be musical tastes that diverge, including expectations of better or different musicianship and a more attractive and commercial voice than mine? If so, fair enough.

I doubt any but a few are here for politics. And this week, more so.

I had a political life, I retain an interest in politics in old age, yet even I am on a political news diet this winter.*  If it looks like I’ve been writing thinly veiled political posts lately, I’ll claim my intent is more to expiate my own emotions — and to, with whatever value, to succor those that William Carlos Williams portrayed last time as “huddled together brooding our fate.”

One of my early poetic heroes, Carl Sandburg, had both a political and literary life. I recall a story that as his early Modernist poetry was breaking out into publication, he was challenged on controversial political elements in his poems. He claimed (earnestly, or with care for his emergent career, I don’t know) that any such was incidental — that he, the author couldn’t fully compartmentalize himself. I have no career. My primary interests here are to promote other people’s poetry and to learn and enjoy myself while doing that, and so I’ll make a similar claim.

Which brings me back, as this Project often does, to Emily Dickinson. There are some things exceedingly modern about this mid-19th century American poet: the compression of her language, her freedom from lockstep prosody or conventional syntax, the explicit use of the mind’s interior as a landscape, her abrupt linkage of the prosaic ordinary and the most high-flown concepts. With all that stuff that still seems modern, folks looking to more deeply comprehend her work may need to be reminded that she is, for all her genius, a citizen of a particular place and era.

I remember a short session I had while at the Dickinson Homestead Museum some years back, when a tour docent made a comment that Dickinson wrote a good deal about the Civil War.

“Huh?” I said to myself. I could recall no such poems. In my ignorance then I assumed Dickinson was largely insulated from that, being in small-town New England, privileged, white, and female. I’ve learned a lot since then, and that’s been one of the joys of this Project.

Today’s musical piece is her poem “Inconceivably Solemn.”   In its abrupt/oblique language, landscaped with the blank horizons of those em-dashes, I can’t catch a definitive picture of what she’s observing. Metaphoric or actual, it seems to be a parade or celebration. What’s the occasion? An Independence Day? A group of newly mustered troops for that Civil War? An election? I lean to the latter two, and remind those who aren’t steeped in mid-19th century American history that those two things were linked as chattel slavery was a huge and sundering political issue for decades before breaking into war. I first thought the poem was troops going off to war from her town, and it still may be. The 1861-65 war overlapped Dickinson’s most productive years as a poet, and her Amherst sent troops which quite likely enlisted and marched out from the town.

Inconceivably Solemn

If you’re tired of politics, poet Emily Dickinson seems skeptical of the celebration here.

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On the other hand, the poem also seems at times to place the celebration/parade as being far away. Is she imagining the soldiers marching into battles at the battlefields that weren’t near her town? Or reacting to battlefield reports in publications perhaps with “mute” engravings of the troops? The poem starts and ends with clear oxymorons, with that first line’s “inconceivably solemn” that is used as the title stand-in. That “solemn” is soon “gay.” And the penultimate line has “wincing with delight.” So then: portraying great causes, assumed honor and bravery, but also suffering and death.

Allow me one moment of my pedantry, and some very uncertain speculation on my part, regarding something that only occurred to me today after working with the poem earlier this winter to prepare the music you can hear below. You see, there’s this odd line “Pierce — by the vary Press.” Dickinson is no stranger to choosing an unusual word, and that may be all “Pierce” is meant to do here.

But one of my youthful enthusiasms was history, and just today I thought, “Is she punning on Franklin Pierce?” OK, I know I’m defeating audience expectations here to ask you to be interested in poetry and vaguely-indie-folk-rock in one Project — and now there’s a history pop quiz? You see, Franklin Pierce was one of America’s worst and least-successful Presidents. He was a Democrat, though in an era where political alignments under that party differed greatly from today. He was elected President in 1852. Dickinson would have been just in her majority, though as a woman, unable to vote — but her father, Edward, was politically involved.**   In the 1830s and 40s Edward served six years in various offices as a state legislator and elsewhere with the state Governor. In 1852, the same year that Pierce was elected, Edward Dickinson was elected to the national House of Representatives. Edward Dickinson was a staunch Whig party man. Once more I’ll skip the complex details of the political alignments of this time —but during the 1850s and the run up to the Civil War the Whig party disintegrated. And Pierce? By the midterm elections of 1854 Pierce’s Democratic party was reeling as well. In 1856 Pierce became the first American President to seek and be denied the nomination for a second term — but as ineffective as he was a President, his victory in 1852 coincided with the steep decline of the Whig party of Dickinson’s father.

So from that plausible wordplay connection,*** and the absence of any armaments or uniforms in this poem — only flags, drums, and pageantry — I’m open to the thought that it’s one of those raucous political parades that were a big part of 19th century American politicking that’s being depicted. Improbable gay solemnity could describe such a civic event, and the poem’s side-eye to all the noise and celebration would be all the more appropriate if the Dickinson family’s party might have been on the loosing end of the campaign hurly-burly. If written with hindsight after the Civil War has broken out following the failures of Pierce and his successor, the similarly one term and terrible President Buchanan — then  the final “Drums” is reminding us in conclusion that the martial drums of a Civil War were “too near.”

OK, here’s that short musical piece. Perhaps thinking of Colin Mansfield reminding me of the early Woody Allen gag about the cellist in the marching band, I didn’t do a brass band for this, but acoustic guitar, organ, violin, and yes, cello in this song of a parade. There’s a graphical audio player below, but if you don’t see it’s mute pomp and pleading pageantry, I supply this highlighted link that will open its own tab with an audio player.

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*And Parlando contributor Dave Moore has, at least as of the time being, dropped his monthly comic published elsewhere, which often commented on political issues. He and his partner should be allowed to tell their own story, but he told me recently that he couldn’t bear to do the same comics over again as the country enters its Restoration era.

**I’ve written often here about a theory I have, that Emily picked up information, terminology, and concepts from the family business, lawyering, practiced by her grandfather, father, brother, and maybe even her later-life flame Judge Lord. I’m sure there has been, or should be, some scholar who’ll do a graduate thesis on the use of the Law in her verse. And why not the same regarding the closely allied field of politics?

***Wikipedia says that the Democrats needled the Whigs by campaigning in Pierce’s 1852 race with the slogan “We Polked (successful Presidential campaigner James Polk) in forty-four. We’ll Pierce in fifty-two.”

Libertad! Igualdad! Fraternidad!

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

We’re going to have some William Carlos Williams poetry turned into a song below. If you’ve missed that sort of thing from me, I’ve returned with time to focus on what we do here.*

I think I’ve already mentioned that I’m disappointed in my country and its follies this past year after the national election. I could take your time and patience with some personal punditry on where to apportion blame for this. The electorate? The winning vassal party and it’s red duchies? The oligarchs and emperors ever-richer and more protective of prerogatives? And then too, the losing party, who gets apportioned blame for everything else on the list as well as bearing the sting of defeat?

I’m not going to do that. A complete list opens up the vulnerability of adding one’s own self to the blame. While many personalities have strong defenses against that self-indictment, I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. By now, if you wanted any variety of that, you’ve already had your fill. Rather, if you’re on the side that lost, you might feel left alone. As we approach the new regency in a matter of hours, let me repeat something I said after the election: we can, we should, forgive ourselves for hope. It is a right-sure prediction that we’re going to need more not less hope in the next few years.

As we approach the new regency in a matter of hours, let me also repeat something I said after the election: we can, we should, forgive ourselves for hope. It is a right-sure prediction that we’re going to need more not less hope in the next few years.

Further in that feeling alone — except for the exchange of blame and shame — I’m not thinking this group are presently at risk of being visited by reporters seeking to understand their sorrow, fear, disappointment, despair. They’ve had over 60 days to file those “I must understand them” stories, but there’s a general silence on that front. Perhaps there will be some stories of the manifestations to come of what some of us fear — though if the worst fears come, those could be harder to find, and stories after injury may be less efficacious than the now-impossible to file stories that could have come beforehand.

Libertad!

I urge folks to sing these Parlando songs themselves, so here’s a chord sheet for today’s piece. Some will likely do a better job than I do, and additional voices strengthen a song.

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So, I was happy to find, write music for, and sing this short William Carlos Williams poem this winter, even though it was written back in the last decade called The Twenties. I too feel forced into the mud, and so much now depends on the stink of the ash-cart rolling toward us. You can hear it with the graphical audio player gadget that should appear below. No player? No editor looking over his shoulder at their owner-baron has spiked it. No algorithm has ruled against it in court. The audio gadget has always been impartially suppressed by some ways to view this blog — but you can use this highlighted link to open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*This isn’t the first holiday season that has caused a drop in new pieces or posts, but I’ve spent a good deal of time in this cold bilaterally looking January shopping for a replacement for my 20-year-old car. I had previously figured I’d wait until that car had reached its full majority this upcoming fall to shop for a replacement, but like some others I played the odds that new tariff taxes and repercussions would raise prices.

Journey of the Magi: or the Wise Men were following a star, not four stars

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Are blogging and social media as much about complaints as they are about praise? I can’t say for sure on that. One reason there: my personal appetite for a good rant or jeremiad has limits. But sometimes — even when the subject is something you’re fond of— within a negative review, you might see something new you never appreciated.

The Christmas season ended yesterday with Epiphany, the Christian church calendar date on which the Three Wise Men, kings or soothsayers from the East, legendarily visit the newborn infant god-head.

It’s a favored event for painters of Christian religious scenes, since it has the rich aroma of an Incarnation appearing in a rude stable, and yet at the same time it allows the depiction of exotic, wealthy, well-attired prince/priests bringing gifts to the child. The Renaissance artists often loved depth of detail, and this gives them so much to depict.

For the holiday season at the end of 1921, T. S. Eliot wrote a poem for this last day of the 12-days of Christmas. In his “Journey of the Magi”  he exercises one of his youthful talents: flavorful disjointed poetic dialog expressive of different human aspects infused with sound and high and low cultural references. His poem is a poetic monolog by one of the Wise Men — but it omits the moment in the paintings: the worshipful giving of gifts to the baby Jesus. You can read the full text of the poem at this link if you’d like to follow along.

Instead, the poem opens with a bad review of the travel to Bethlehem. To paraphrase, the first stanza: look, we had it good in our temperate-zone palaces, servants bringing us cool sherbet treats, and now we’re out here where it’s either too hot or too cold, in a place no one knows how important we are.

In the poem’s second stanza we do get in words some of the matter of those Renaissance paintings — you could see the brush-hand of a Bruegel in it. We smell the landscape, there’s a little stream, a water-mill, a singular white horse, a tavern with the (later post-mortem) pieces of silver being gambled for, drinker’s feet tripping over wine-skins, There should be a saint, and angel, or the Holy Family in this painting too, resplendent in the foreground — but our speaker leaves any of that out. I love the Yelp review that ends this stanza: not the max-stars that everyone is urged to leave: “(you may say) satisfactory.”

In the last stanza Eliot’s monologist gets to hint at the piety that would later take over that poet’s outlook. After all, the Three Priests or Kings or Sages that have traveled so far are not believers in the story, only esoteric knowers. Their testimony is that they know the Christian incarnation is important, but they don’t know or believe why. Our speaker says, recalling the trip on the sore camel’s back across the desert, moor, and mountains, just that he has some sense that his former comforts, his kingdom, his belief, his place in things, his magic, has been changed some way. What comes next after the death of his homeplace belief? He doesn’t know, but somehow he senses it’ll be better.

That’s often a good story isn’t it — that kings are just a convention, a shared or temporarily-enforced belief?

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Speaking of Bruegel, here’s a painting of the Adoration of the Magi by him. Looking at the king in crimson on the left: from the expression on that face, I think we can imagine he’s the speaker in Eliot’s poem.

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Even though today’s poem is written of events remembered in the past, I’m late with this piece. I performed it yesterday, on the suitable date, but it was nearing the stroke of midnight when I laid down the last track. This morning after breakfast and grocery shopping I mixed the version you can hear below. I thought about putting in caroling bells or angelic voices in the arrangement, but as I worked with Eliot’s words I figured it might be better to decorate it with some Silk Road instruments, ones that might have been heard in the better stops on the Three Kings’ journey: the oud an the santoor. But there’s also a drum set, a piano, and an electric bass — and I can’t figure out how a camel could carry those! You can hear my performance of “The Journey of the Magi”  with the audio player below. No player seen? You’re not too late, it’s just the way some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing that, so I offer this shining star, or rather highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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At the New Year

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

I’ve long been fond of the poetry of Kenneth Patchen — but even though an old edition of his Collected Poems has followed me about over the years, it was only today that I appreciated this poem of his. He wrote it sometime in the 1930s, but reading it this morning I felt he was speaking my thoughts as I look back from the ending of our year 2024.

Patchen’s poetic sensibility was essentially an exercise in Keats’ Negative Capability. Patchen admired human love and wrote reverently about nature and joy, but he was also disappointed and in opposition to a world manipulated by selfish and thoughtless power. He wrote some poems so sweet you might select them for a child’s bedroom wall, and others bitter in the taste of his analysis — but his life wasn’t a trajectory between those poles. Some of Patchen’s most politically radical and downbeat poems were written in his youth and some of the most hopeful pieces of bonhomie came from late in his life. And this was so despite never achieving crowning literary success, and after suffering chronic and painful health setbacks. He seems to have liked today’s poem, as it stuck with him. Looking briefly at its history tonight I see he had sent it out to be set for a choral musical performance in the 1940s,* and he printed a broadside of a slightly revised version in 1967, shortly before his death. So whatever specifics he was thinking of when he first set it down, the man himself thought it more universal. Here’s a link to the version of “At the New Year”   I found on my bookshelf.

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Kenneth Patchen. He wrote of his times and is timeless.

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Today I read it as if it was expressing my own thoughts this year, about this  year — not some year in the 30s, 40s, or 60s. Most any decade has wars, but the cruelty of current wars and new refugees cuts freshly. And then, my country’s last national election was heartbreaking for me. I have long held faith with Lincoln’s democratic analysis of how long how many can be fooled, but at my old age I don’t know if I will be there awaiting the arc of the universe when it bends toward justice. As Patchen moves into the second half of his poem he writes of the brave talk and the mean talk, he takes in this world as full of the good and the lovely, but also a measure of the sham and hatred. When he says as the New Year’s bells are to be rung that there are other bells that he, that I, that you and I too perhaps, would ring — well I got a little misty singing those words this afternoon.**

I had to proceed rapidly to create a realized singable version of Patchen’s poem before New Year’s Eve, and so I quickly set up a broadly repeating musical cycle for the accompaniment: VI, V, i changes in musician’s shorthand, but the VI and V sometimes go minor in the quick and dirty rush to make the cycle. Since the passage of years is cyclical and won’t wait, perhaps this accidentally makes for a fitting setting. I was lucky to get accommodation this afternoon so I could open a microphone, and I ripped through the vocal you can hear below while that musical cycle did its thing.

The audio player is below for my performance of Kenneth Patchen’s “At the New Year.”   What, has the ball dropped, the bells have rung, and there’s no player gadget on your screen? No need to stop time, just use this highlighted link.  That’ll open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I make a quick search to see if I could find this once-planned 1940s choral setting, but came up empty,

**The bells motif at the end of Patchen’s poem recalls Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s holiday poem “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”  that I wrote about and performed a few years back. Long after Longfellow, and some years after the death of Patchen, Leonard Cohen did his own New Year’s “Anthem”  with bells that contains one of that poet’s more remembered passages: “Ring the bells that still can ring,/forget your perfect offering,/there is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in.” Cohen’s poem echoes Patchen’s sentiments, and Cohen’s poem and song may have been in conversation with those earlier poets’ work.

One need not be a chamber to be haunted. You could be a cassette tape.

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

However similar if amorphous shapes, everyone’s ghosts are private spirits, and I have a new musical piece with words by Emily Dickinson testifying to that — but let me slide over to a couple of personal things first, as if I was a regular blogger externalizing their internal story.

I’ve had a couple of weeks when I’ve needed to come back to the Parlando Project stuff from other things. I had a colonoscopy with unremarkable results. Huzzah. That’s some prime blogger internal dialog! But before that, I searched around my crowded little bedroom/office to find old cassette tapes. The oldest are from The Sixties when I had one of those small battery powered monaural cassette recorders with a slide-out chrome handle, a single speaker on the top, and a chorded plastic microphone with a start-stop slider button on its side. Others were from the 1970’s-2000 era when I recorded musical things, first on the stereo tape decks of the late 20th century home hi-fi era until I was able to afford one of the legendary Portastudio models designed for musicians, using the same humble cassette tapes, but able to record 4 distinct tracks. My task: to make digital copies that I can store in no appreciable physical space and are independent of an obsolete format.*  More than 30 years of this stuff, much of it of only private interest, though you may hear some of it eventually.

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Some of the cassette tapes.

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The ubiquitousness of inexpensive video is fairly recent, but assuming no catastrophic events, many born in the past 15-20 years will likely have color video with sound of their childhoods and young adulthood that could follow them the rest of their lives.**  Is that a good thing, something they welcome? I don’t know. Before this some folks had diaries and journals, or kept letters, so some level of self-documentation is not entirely novel. Still, for me, a person whose Project lives in music and sound, whose favored form of literature began in sound before writing was invented — retaining an element of the sound of the words, and their sequence, and echoes — my particular audio time-capsules have a special tang. And fears.

Most of the tapes are not just me, in a few I’m just the man holding the microphone, though I’m there as the shadow that chose to start the recorder. They hold our imperfections: things before we knew, before we learned — and then too the persistent faux pas that we still commit: there, and committed to a recording. Given that most can record now anytime with the tap of screen, how many will simply erase to save future embarrassment?

So back to Emily Dickinson and this poem about ourselves and what we think we fear — which may not be what we actually fear, or should fear. “One need not be a chamber — to be haunted”  is a poem about that self we either can’t lose or can’t consider. In five stanzas Dickinson lays out some conventional gothic scenery (some of which she herself will erect in other poems) haunted houses, undead ghosts, church graveyards, and finally an assassin laying in wait for us.***  Dickinson points out that the self may be making or amplifying those fears, and perhaps that self, making scary movies in our imaginations, may be doing it to displace us from seeing the real fear source, our mind’s-self. “Ourself — behind Ourself — Concealed — Should startle — most” Dickinson’s poem concludes. You can read the text of Dickinson’s poem at this link. And yes, you might note I sang “alley” by mistake instead of “abbey” messing up Dickinson’s graveyard implication.

So, is that our choice? To ignore ourselves, out of fear of what we’ll find, or to disappear into a copious kingdom of solitary solipsistic self, many of us with the digital equivalent of Krapp’s Last Tape  clanking and dangling from them like Marley’s ghost? Socrates decried the unexamined life. Memoir can be an honorable genre. Despite my taking the time this month with the old tapes, I think of this Scylla and Charybdis, and in the end there’s ultimately no keeping of this life and self, though sometimes there is sharing.

Today’s musical ensemble is a Rock-band of some kind: drums, bass, piano, 12-string acoustic guitar, and two electric guitars, one of which is run through enough effects to mask its guitaristic nature. No need to rewind, you can hear it with the audio player below. No player? No need to untangle that with a pencil in the reel-hole — this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Many years ago, I was on a committee working on the technical design for a radio network’s archives (most of which were still on audio tape then) which involved long-term storage and public accessibility elements. The online “New Media” folks had their ideas about what formats to use for listeners to stream over the Internet, the audio engineers had concerns about what would give the longest life and best fidelity, and the computer IT folks had thoughts about what media would have the capacity to hold something that might climb into the then hard to imagine “terabytes” of digital storage. The three groups weren’t always in agreement, and a grizzled consultant from some outside large, already in existence, archive was brought in to meet with us. Should we use digital tape, hard drives, optical disks? What file-system format on which? What audio file format should be used on that media? Is some of this going to die from “bit rot” on the media in how many years? We had lots of questions and wanted the wizard to arbitrate our concerns. He listened for a while as we cross-talked.

Then he answered. “It doesn’t make much difference what you choose. You’re going to have to convert to other media, file-systems, and audio formats in the future, and every few years going forward. Plan for that.”

**Many of my mid-century generation have photos from their youth. I had a “baby book” that lasts into my grade-school years in black and white. A few families had movie cameras (though no one I knew did) but many of those shot silent film. The cost of film and developing that film constrained the amount of pictures and home movies made. Lots of birthday parties, weddings, holidays. Parts of life yes, but selected shorts.

***I was working on this in the wake of the news of a planned, lay-in-wait killing of an insurance company CEO, which will be followed in the American drama by the killing of a teacher and a teenage student in a school reported by a 2nd grader who called 911. The first was caught on ubiquitous digital video, and the emergency call of the second perhaps made on one of those smaller than a fat postal-letter things we call phones even when we aren’t making phone calls. More than social embarrassment may haunt our digital archives as we live going forward.

I also note that final stanza of this poem’s “revolver” is another example to go with “My life has stood — a loaded gun”  of Dickinson poetry citing a firearm being held as the high card in some kind of deadly personal dispute.