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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.

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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.

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*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.

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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

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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.

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*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.

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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.

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*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.

A Sonnet of Two Letters

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

It happens to us alone, but it happens to so many it’s a trope we share. It goes like this: you have one of those bad dreams. Something terrible has gone wrong — and you, inside the dream, feeling it is real, try to fix it — but you can’t because the other people in the dream are oblivious to the terrible and are acting stubbornly in odd, irrational ways. While dreaming you’re trapped in this desperately unsolvable situation only you can clearly see and try to act rationally on, running in place, thinking in circles.

I had one of those dreams this week: felt so real, so heart-wrenching. Then the dawn comes, and you realize that experience was a dream — oh, that’s why you couldn’t fix it, that’s why everyone else in the dream was acting so wrongly!

OK, exiting satire mode, but let’s stay strange.

Early this Fall I was cleaning out something: a box, a drawer, a binder, a little used bag, I can’t remember exactly what. But in it was a clutch of papers. I glanced at the pages and recognized it was a mix of things: some works-in-progress looking for first reads from the old group of poets I used to meet with every month, and some initial drafts of a longer, multipart poem I was writing as my mother was going through her last hospitalization, the one from which she would ask to return to the home I grew up in with my father and sisters in order that she could die there. I set those sheets of paper aside.*  I figured I’d look them over later, maybe digitally scan them, or put them in my filing cabinet. At that later I’d also look to see if there were any drafts in the small stack that were unfinished pieces I could revisit.

Now here it is, we’re November and I finally got around to that sort-out. One of the pages was a college-ruled notebook sheet with a complete intermittent draft of an irregular (American) sonnet. What was this? While I remember well working on the longer poem around my mother’s last illness 20-some years ago, I had no memory of working on this sonnet. Complete blank. Moreover, the sonnet seemed to speak of someone’s story that I didn’t recognize as mine — nor anyone else’s I could recall either.** With the time-interval between discovery of the papers and my finally going over them, I can’t even be sure if this sonnet was found among the stuff from the time of my mother’s death or not. Trying to determine why I didn’t remember it, I wondered if it was even older. I recalled that scholars date Emily Dickinson manuscripts by looking at the changes in her handwriting over time, so I tried that assay. Looked to me more like my 20th century handwriting, so the poem could be older. Still, it was my handwriting, testifying I, however unremembering, wrote this poem — and “What was it about?” That intrigued me. The poem asks the reader to work obliquely, details are supplied but not all the details, something that can tantalize.

A Sonnet of Two Letters

The gardening stake metaphor used in the final section reminds the 2024-me of Robert Frosts “Pea Brush,”  a poem I didn’t know when the me I was back then wrote it

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Why did the voice in the poem not mail their first letter? What was it about the recipient’s husband that was germane to that decision? Was there an affair or appearance of one? Clearer to me was the latter part, the stuff of the second letter, a recalling of youthful aspirations and a friend who by what they said helped make them more substantial than pretensions. What an interesting yoking, I thought. The imperfect, the not said, or the thing whose saying we keep hidden — combined with the things that were said that help us realize our lives.

As you might tell from the previous paragraph, I was experiencing this poem just as I would the general run of Parlando Project poems, ones written by others in a project which has as one of its mottos “Other People’s Stories.” Its mystery and ambiguity captivated me, and so I set about making it into a Parlando song.

I did a revision of the initial handwritten draft I had found and worked on combining it with the music you’ll hear with it below this week. The music today is played as a conventional LP-era rock ensemble: there’s the usual quartet: bass, drums, chordal and “lead” guitar. Added to that are two keyboards, piano and Hammond organ. You can hear the result with the audio player gadget you should see just below. No gadget? Wake up, this highlighted link opens a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Two of those poets have since died, I re-handled those pages, ones they’d typed in and handed to me years ago, and thought tenderly of them. My part of the household is due for an austere “death cleaning,” the tossing of those things an old man keeps to extend something of the life of that-and-those who’ve passed on. I have no grave illness, but the keeper now must consider that they will pass on and that there’s no real keeping.

**I did write from personas in my writing life regularly, a bit more so in prose than poetry. I was likely imagining the “short-story” plot that I then went about expressing in the sonnet.

To Waken an Old Lady

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s National Election Day in the United States, and it’s seen as an extraordinary consequential election. Amid that great matter, I fielded a clutch of social media queries on poetry and music in the last 24 hours or so. I think I understand this seeming paradox. Though I myself will likely stay up late tonight listening to returns — as it is after voting early in the morning, I’m expecting to have only the maelstrom of worrying and hoping to spend over the rest of this national event tonight.

But since I last left my listeners at the end of October with an atypical audio piece, I thought it’d be a good day to release this performance by the LYL Band of a poem by the American early Modernist poet William Carlos Williams. That’s what we usually do here: take other folk’s literary poetry never meant to be sung and combine it with original music in differing styles.

What’s my personal history with Williams? Oddly,* my introduction to Williams was in the guise of his printed introduction of Allen Ginsburg to me (and many) in the thin City Lights paperback Howl and Other Poems.  Williams’ name was printed right on the cover of Howl,  and while in a smaller font than Ginsberg’s, it’s not fine print either. They must have thought it would help.

Howl Cover

Published November 1st, 1956. Did the choice between Eisenhower and Stevenson seem quite so existential?

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As a young man I don’t think I absorbed much of what Williams said in his short introduction. I didn’t have the experience of life to fully grasp it, and about all I knew of Williams was that he was an established, a somehow certified, real poet — and the man he was introducing, Ginsberg, was not. At that point, the younger poet had not been elected to such a post by the cultural electoral college, but WCW was vouching for him beyond the matter of a questionable Beatnik fad. As a teenager at the time, what did I know about what made a real poet? I can’t fully remember. I had some romantic ideas about vision, seeing intensely what others couldn’t sense, and some idea that that would likely put the poet in opposition to elements of society. This was not some structured critical philosophy on my part, it was more a gut feeling, a wish for something more. I look back at that kid I was and think: well, maybe I’m still no better a philosopher than he was, though I now know complications — but yeah kid-of-the-past, there’s still something to that.

Williams’ name on the Beat landmark paperback did not lead me to read Williams then. Rereading that introduction today that may have been because while it had words that Ginsberg took as validation, it was somewhat between hands-off and off-hand about Ginsberg’s poetry. He called Ginsberg “disturbed,” recalled that he didn’t think the young man would develop into a poet (or even survive). He characterizes the title poem of the collection, “Howl,”  as a howl of defeat. I adamantly heard it as a howl of survival. So, thanks old man. Glad you at least said we should pay attention, be “arrested” Williams wrote, by Ginsberg’s poetry.

It’s only been in this century that I read Williams early 20th century work. I found a lot to like in his clean spare early poems written as Modernism sought to clear out the tired excesses of decoration. Now as I re-read Williams mid-century introduction to Howl  I’m arrested by things I, an old man, resonate with. He did  see the poem’s survival testimony. He wrote this there about Ginsberg’s poetry:

He proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man,
the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith — and the art! to persist.”

And he continues in the introduction to Howl:

Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels. This poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own — and, we believe, laughs at it and has the time and effrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record that love in a well-made poem.”

It seems to me now, from my old age, that to “see with the eyes of angels” may be its own curse, and thus the angels may howl.

Is today’s small William Carlos Williams poem, one turned into a little song sung with the LYL Band, too slight to serve on a night where we look as nations move? I don’t know. I already told you, I’m not much of a philosopher. Williams’ “To Waken an Old Lady”  is a poem that yokes old age and the descent into winter. Here’s a link to the text of the poem if you’d like to follow along.

I now can often feel like the small birds he puts in this poem. In the course of life, I’m here past the days of career or work harvest. In the summer, the summer of this political campaign, I felt the cold dark winds plenty of times. The poem doesn’t say, but I suppose the poem knows spring comes. I suppose also the poem knows that death comes and preempts spring too.

“But what?” Williams interjects as the poem turns. Look: there are these broken seed husks, the ones that didn’t bloom. So what if they are not to bloom, they are sustenance for survival.

You can hear the LYL Band performance of “To Waken an Old Lady”  with the audio player below. Are the returns of an audio player yet to come in?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Well maybe not odd for me. If you’ve read many of these posts, you may have recognized that I love the odd connection.

The Three Friends: an audio play adaptation of a Walter de la Mare short story

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I indicated last time that I had another piece I wanted to present before Halloween by Walter de la Mare, that British master of the subtle supernatural. It took a bunch of concentrated effort to produce something of a realization of it, but it’s as ready as I can make it in time. How’d it come about, and why was I not sure I could promise it?

I use the Internet Archive often as part of this “not just non-profit — it’s non-revenue” Project. One of the things the IA has is a large library of scanned public domain literary works,* which affords me a handy way to look through “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.” In the run up to Halloween I made a note to see if there was some Walter de la Mare work I could use for my Parlando Project purposes.

This Project lets me not only explore the well-known writer’s and musical composer’s habit of procrastination, but also the reader’s and researcher’s branch of that foible too. I put that book search in my I’ll-do-that-tomorrow bin for about a week. “I’ll get around to it” I told myself.

And then in mid-October some numbskulls hacked the Internet Archive causing it to go largely offline for more than a week. When the scanned book section returned to availability, I was already into making other new work for this year’s Halloween series, but a few days ago I was finally able to access some additional collections of de la Mare’s work from the IA. In looking through those, I found that Walter de la Mare wasn’t only a poet. He also wrote short stories, which like his poetry, exhibit his dry sense of the strange. “The Three Friends”  is one of his shortest published stories — short enough to work into one of my short-format audio pieces.

Walter de la Mare in front of a microphone

When Walter de la Mare worked the mic, he had a whole radio network to support him.

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“The Three Friends”  is dialog-centric, and in less than a day I was able to jury-rig up a three-person play out of it — but who’d be my voice-acting ensemble? It was less than 72 hours until Halloween. I’d have loved to have used Dave Moore’s voice, but my production schedule is catch-as-catch-can, and I didn’t know if I could corral him in time. My wife agreed to play the part of Lacey, the tavern keeper member of the three friends, assuming she wasn’t completely worn-out from her work and the rest of her life. Last night she stepped up to the mic and recorded that part in a quick pass. I made a logistical compromise and recorded the other two parts with my own voice, also working quickly.**  By about 9 PM last night I had the dialog recorded.

Between then and about 3 PM this afternoon I worked on the audio production of the recordings, selecting a bit of instrumental music (from my last-weekend exploration of a new audio software feature) to serve as a plausible theme music for “The Parlando Project Theatre of the Air.” The 19 hours from first opening up the microphones to an audio play ready to upload weren’t all Project work: I did go to sleep after midnight, I got up at dawn and did a bicycle ride to breakfast, and early this afternoon I made another bike trip to the grocery store — but there was a lot of production work trying to meet the needs of this format that isn’t what the Project normally does. “Radio play” music production isn’t the same as recording and mixing a 3-minute song, and I had to learn how to apply my computer audio tools in a slightly different way. If you haven’t done audio production, it’s a heap of tasks even to get a half-way polished result: finding environmental sound effects, balancing levels, fixing the most egregious dialog glitches, deciding if any pauses are too long or too short, and so on. The result of this experiment is good enough to present, though I note things that I would have liked to do better.

So, what’s the story our actors are presenting for your ears today? Two friends are casually talking about a problem bedeviling one of them. That troubled man, Eaves, has been having reoccurring dreams or visions. His friend Sully tries to make light of it, but in the course of their evening they meet up with the third friend who works in a tavern, Miss Lacey. They talk over Eaves’ problem: you see Eaves thinks he has pierced the Samhain veil. Has Eaves seen, will he tell of, “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns?”

Well, it’s de la Mare. Most writers would break out the purple pen to write such visions, de la Mare wants to make a more subtle (and human) observation. The orchestra (well, the piano trio) has started to sound. Take your seats and listen to the short, 10-minute world-premiere performance of the audio play “The Three Friends”  by using the audio player below. What, has someone tall with a large hat sat in front of your audio player gadget? I provide this alternative, a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*The Internet Archive has also taken an aggressive stance to works that are not clearly in the Public Domain. That activity is controversial and has had some legal judgements handed down for rights-holders. I won’t take your time to go into all that, but its scanned PD literary archive is a treasure for readers and researchers.

**Oh, if only I was one of those skilled voice actors who can call up entirely different vocal timbres to create distinctive sounding character voices! I tried to mitigate the lack of distinction between Eaves’ and Sully’s voices both being portrayed by mine by using stereo separation on today’s audio

The Song of Finis

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Last time in our Halloween series I reported that Edgar Allan Poe had movies made from some of his poems — well, sort of.  Today’s poet Walter de la Mare’s poetry, in title and under his name, wouldn’t have served for such, because so much of what de la Mare does is understated and inferred. He’s one of those poets that when read casually seems to not be doing as much as he’s actually doing. There may be no fireworks going off when you read a de la Mare poem of the supernatural— until after reading it once and remembering the poem later, you may sense the flash-bang-backs of what’s there and evoked.

Today’s Walter de la Mare piece “The Song of Finis”  is an example. It seems simple enough to be children’s poetry, and indeed his publisher bound selections of de la Mare’s more whimsical short poems to market them as children’s books. “The Song of Finis”  presents an eerie short scene and situation, supplying only the barest of details still rich in specificity, and wraps it all in some fine word-music that urged me to make a song of this proclaimed song.

The Song of Finis

I present these chord sheets so that you can sing these songs yourself.

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We have a knight, but one out of his time, yet still errant. The once shining armor is rusted.*  When he lifts his helmet visor, we see yet “skin and bone,” a choice that lets us imagine a gaunt face suggesting the skull beneath. He’s alone somewhere warm and windless (warm enough to summon the tea-time image of steeping).

There are but two lonely sounds of dialog recorded. His horse whinnies knowing something’s up, and the knight calls out “Lone for an end!” The latter is a bit poetic-dictiony, but I’ll allow it to depict the out-of-time knight, and I suspect de la Mare wants us to hear “lone” as double-sounding for “long.”

What happens in the poem’s conclusion? Does the knight and horse charge off some cliff to end his anachronism? Or is he challenging that empty place he finds himself in with that single cry that has no answer? My thought, it’s sort of both, the song of “Finis” is about endless endings, and the desire for one last adventure.

knight with angels 600

In de la Mare’s poem there are no angels

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You can hear my song setting of Walter de la Mare’s “The Song of Finis”  with the audio player gadget below. It’s not finis is you can’t see that audio player, as I supply this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player. Not finis for me either this year, for my plans are to return soon with at least one more de la Mare fantasy piece before this Halloween charges into memory.

*As a fan of the 20th century Rock group Procul Harum, I wondered if the band’s lyricist Keith Reid read de la Mare’s poem once and remembered it in his song “Conquistador.”

The Puca

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

As our Halloween series continues, let me advocate today for an element of the fantastical: the goblin. Some fantasy creatures are, by definition, not fully alive: your vampires, zombies, golem, all animated undead meat; your ghosts “spirited” in some way, but incorporeal. The goblin, like all the variations in the fairy realm, seems akin to the human, but not in the beautified, glammed-up way that many fairies are depicted; and also, like the human, goblins seem subject to motivations and whims, not driven by some designed in need.

Puca is a goblin name of uncertain etymology, and specifics of their appearance and nature are like the word’s origin, broad-ranging. That non-specific appearance is baked into many accounts: they are shapeshifters. Some accounts link them to taking on animal forms: rabbits, red-eyed horses, and so on.*  Today’s puca is related in a poem by Irish poet Joseph Campbell.**  While Campbell is attuned to shapeshifters, his puca doesn’t change species or form in his poem: he starts and remains a hairy creature of the forest, human-enough to mirror human behavior, which becomes the signal incident in the poem.

Puca drawing

Shapes of pucas. I don’t know the artists for the two on the sides, but the sculptor in the middle is Aidian Harte and his mid-transformation depiction caused a commotion in the Irish town it was to be displayed in.

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If goblins are unpredictable, portrayed as helpful and troublesome, this puca does in a way transform. In my reading of the poem, I sensed it describes something of a turn-about: rather than a human encountering a magical creature and then by elfin spell or trickery the human is changed, Campbell describes the opposite: a shy creature emerges, is observed laughing, dancing, poetry on his lips. And then a stanza later, his mood is sad, distressed, bitter. What causes this change?

The poem doesn’t say, but another creature, the poem’s voice is observing the puca. Let us assume he’s human, even that he may be the poet himself. The unhappy puca is said to have become “the double of distress.” Does “double” just mean equal to the happiness of the second stanza? Or does it mean the puca has taken on, mirrored, the human who has revealed that he envies the puca’s “sunny mood” in the happy verse before?

The poem ends by telling us this human/goblin encounter has caused the puca to retreat back into its cave, hiding itself. The puca may have been enchanted by the human’s sadness, and thus fled from the human’s thrall.

Unsaid in the poem, but I’ll ask: is the human changed by this encounter? While the puca instinctively flees the dissatisfied human, it’s the poet that’s telling us this story, and I think they’ve concisely explained that their bitterness has an effect, causing the happy fantastic to leave. Did the poet learn something from this?

I’ll add this biographic note on the author: Campbell’s involvement with the Irish Civil War that followed independence broke him. He was imprisoned, faced at least some danger of execution — and once released, he fled the Ireland whose culture had fed his art. His literary efforts tailed off sharply and the “gall and bitterness” that the puca demonstrates was Campbell’s lot in the last part of his life.

But this is a poem of Campbell’s early career, first published in 1913. Mute on the page, it set out a spell for me to set it to music. I think “The Puca” shows one of Campbell’s strengths: concision. A great many literary balladeers want to write epics. While I admire those that can vivify a 10-minute ballad in performance, I also observe that that endurance is beyond me — and Campbell, fresh from rubbing shoulders with the concise Imagists, has packed a charged moment in time into four stanzas — and if my reading is valid, more is evoked in the incident described than might be explicated in extra verses.

I tried for the eerie in the music I composed and recorded here: a certain wildness in the keyboard line’s contour and oddness in their timbre. You can hear my performance with the graphical audio player below. What? Such player has crept away into a cave or twilight glen?  This highlighted link is an alternative, as it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Articles on the puca I read this month relate this creature to the Easter Bunny and the invisible friend in Harvey,  generally benign creatures — but then, the red-eyed horse is said to offer rides home to the inebriated, the acceptance of which will lead to a wild, bucking, bramble-scratched ride, ending with the rider being bucked off in a field far from home. Unmentioned in the pieces I read would be the animated cartoon character of Bugs Bunny, the gender-fluid trickster that I’d see as in this tradition too.

**Obligatory footnote every time I bring Joseph Campbell up — no, not the Power of Myth guy. This Campbell is a deserving-of-more-interest writer of the turn of the century Irish cultural revival. Like many others of his generation, he was caught up in the Irish independence struggle, used Celtic folklore material, and dabbled in writing for performance (plays and song-lyrics) — but he was also connected with the Imagists and early English language poetic Modernism that emerged in London before WWI.

Shadwell Stair

~ Frank Hudson ~ 6 Comments

Halloween is a chance for us to note our fears.

I first wrote “celebrate” in that sentence, but revised it to ”note,” with musical pun intended.* I don’t think we actually celebrate fear on Halloween, but rather we play with it: pretend we don’t have it, pretend we can sport with it — though perhaps some connoisseurs roll the sense of it around on their tongue to absorb fear’s full body and taste. But in any of those ways, however obliquely, we are acknowledging it.

How close are we to our fears the rest of the year? I suppose that varies. Can we name them? Do we bother? Do our friends, our intimates, know them? Do we even speak of them to ourselves?

Today’s piece is based on a hard to explain poem by one of the most loved British “War Poets” who wrote of their experience of WWI, Wilfred Owen. Certainly that war’s trench warfare, mixing squalid contemplation and carnage, would offer enough horror to write about, and Owen’s WWI poetry is loved while not flinching from that horror or buffering it in patriotic bunting.

But then there’s this poem. It is not set on the front lines. If it mentions the war at all, it must be implied from knowing his biography.

Shadwell Stair is on the banks of the Thames River in urban London. In Owen’s early 20th century it was apparently a noisy, smelly industrial area. This blog post has numerous pictures, some history of the Stair, and the delicious trivia that it’s next to “Labour in Vain Street.”

As treasured as Owen’s bleak poetry is, Shadwell Stair  isn’t one of his best-known “Greatest Hits.” Its effective condensed portrait of the locale isn’t the most-read poem of that time and place in metaphor, being eclipsed by “The Waste Land’s”  bankside sections written by an American, T. S. Eliot. Those portions of Eliot’s poem are alienated, partly by the recent Great War, and partly by his own sense of an educated visitor weighing England’s and Europe’s history and culture against the grimy realities of the London he had settled in. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”  doesn’t actually name the fears in the center of it, but it conveys them in vivid and varied silhouettes. Arguably, Owen’s poem is more coy — if only by being brief — but let me make a case for it. Here’s a link to the text of Owen’s poem.

The first stanza introduces lovely word-music that the poem carries on throughout. It claims to be in the voice of a ghost. We may (I did) anticipate a classic Halloween poem. If we know Owen’s biography, we might think the slaughter-house there is a reference to the war. It may be, but I think the second stanza gives us a different context.

It’s a fleshy context. I can almost feel the goosebumps on the skin, and the speaker’s eyes are lit up in what? Fear? Anticipation? Heightened vigilance? If this be a ghost, it’s an embodied one.

The third stanza is almost all scene-setting, lit by snapping arc lamps evoked between interrupting night noises — those streetlights had a sensual, buzzing, almost reptilian sound that younger readers now may not have had the experience to hear. Of our mysterious speaker, it only says of themselves here that they are watching. OK, watching for what?

Later readers have given an understanding to the mystery here: Owen’s sexuality had a homoerotic element. In this reading, the speaker (presumably Owen) is cruising for a hookup, and it’s said that the disreputable docks and titular Stair were known sites to London’s homosexual demimonde. As with the harsh arc-lights, this context illuminates the poem. I see vividness in this reading, and no reason not to give it credence. Let’s consider then the situation evoked: here is a man, likely on leave from the immense horror of a war that was grinding men up with ineffective tactics in the face of modern lethality. Many Halloween readers here with holiday ease to play with fears would likely have no gauge to measure that — but what has his flesh firming, his skin puckered with cold plucked-chicken skin, his pupils dilated out round as the gems of Rilke’s absorbing cat from last time? Answer: the anticipation of sensual, carnal, sexual contact — intensified by a fear of police trolling for arrests, complicated in the doubts of attraction or rejection with disgust that strangers meeting in the night would encounter.

If so, the enigma of this poem has a specific — if unspoken — core, and the last stanza is an aubade of something even more transitory than the average parting of lovers at dawn. We started being told this is a ghost poem, and the ghost here meets another ghost. The ghosts here are metaphor for spirits that could barely speak of the eros of their lives. A silencing louder than bombs.

shadwell stair MS1

Here’s Owen’s poem in work-in-progress form, He seems struggling most with the 3rd stanza yet at this point.

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Today’s music had two challenges for me. The setting I devised might benefit from a “real singer,” someone who could carry a melody with confidence and a beautiful timbre. I’m not that. I decided I could do no better than I can do. And then too, while I was pleased at what I could come up with feeding parts into my orchestra instrument arranger, and particularly with the high trumpet part that comes in near the end, I was never satisfied that I could get the best trumpet Virtual Instrument I own to have the correct envelope I wanted. There I just surrendered. No one with a “no-revenue” independent musical enterprise could expect to be able to present the full richness of the actual instrument. Those who can, will know I fell short — but the rest will, I hope, accept my approximation. You can hear my musical setting of Wilfred Owen’s “Shadwell Stair” with the audio player gadget below. Not even a ghost of such a player visible?  This highlighted link is an alternate way which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*”Note…fears?” See that final paragraph today.