Today’s piece is a fairly well-known poem by the Spanish poet. Given that I’ve played guitar nearly for 50 years and been interested in poetry for more than that, I keep thinking I must have run into it before this year. If that’s so, why don’t I recall considering it?
My answer is going to sound more judgmental than I mean it: bad translations. No, maybe I shouldn’t use “bad” here. I don’t suspect any moral failing or lack of effort by translators of this poem. And given that I’m not all that knowledgeable about the work of Lorca and have only the most limited grasp of his native language, I should have no standing to rate other published translations of “La Guitarra.” What I do know is that native speakers find his poetry passionate and vivid, and the English versions seem to my ears and heart (those being the entry points for poetry) stilted and muffled.
I’m not going to link any of the English translations I found of “The Guitar.” None I’ve seen seem fully effective to me, though I cannot say that they might be effective for others. I’m not going to link or line-by-line dis the translations I’ve seen. I will say that the first one I saw at one of the leading poets and poetry organization’s site was representative. I didn’t find it musically compelling, and it was a jumble of abstracted images that had little sock, little immediate feeling evoked. I assume the translator had the advantages I must clearly concede I don’t have. Why might their work not succeed, at least to this reader?
Two theories. Other translators may have been too literal in carrying over Lorca’s original sentence structure, which might be natural and unaffected in his Spanish. This is poetry, so one can make a case that how it’s said is essential — but when languages order words differently, following the original sentence structure and word order too exactly damages the natural vividness of a person speaking. Secondly, Lorca to my slight knowledge connects to Surrealist expression, a style of poetry I loved as a young man and still like to connect with today. Surrealism likes the wild and incongruous image; and from its ancestor Dada, it’s often willing to take an image in a random, raw and undercooked state. This creates a problem for me when I translate Surrealist and Dada work.
You see, I view my task as a translator to primarily find the images in the work and to then portray those images in clear modern English, and secondarily give the poem a word-music in the new language that gives pleasing movement and return to the poem. What if the original intent was to mystify the reader, to present an image that was intentionally confounding? I risk, while puzzling out the text in a language I don’t know well, to over-simplify or over-determine an image. I fear embarrassment of doing that, but I think it’s the better risk because vivid images that the reader/listener grasps and gasps are compelling to me.
As to the word-music, my version of “The Guitar” rephrased Lorca somewhat, aiming to make him sound like an English speaker. While doing that I tried to make the poem musical in English. The poem was already using repetition for poetic effect in Spanish, and I added just a touch more.
As you might imagine, this poem about the expression of a musical instrument has been set to music before my attempt you can hear today. While not a Lorca expert I know that he connected too with Spanish Deep Song and the evocation in that tradition of “Duende,” a difficult to translate term that some Afro-American musicians have seen as analogous to the Blues. I played a nylon string guitar for my setting, the type of guitar associated with Spain, and the simple chord progression I used would not be foreign to that tradition. But both from my skill level and inclination what I played for this song was simple and sparsely ornamented. Though the harmony wasn’t Blues, I approached playing this as if it was American Blues. Another Blues element I introduced that wasn’t in Lorca’s poem: my version has a gendered call and response. The guitar is a her, the singer (there’s no singer in Lorca’s poem) is a he.
I think there’s a misapprehension of Carl Sandburg’s poetry: that it’s simple, prosy work: that it says what it says, hearty single-minded messages with some decorative metaphor. Tastes differ, and mine may not be a guide to anyone else, but I sometimes don’t find him so. As I continue trying different things during the summer with this multipart personal story, I’ll return to our regular stuff at the end today with an example of Sandburg mysterioso.
The finale of my June trip to Iowa City to see what I could find out about an even more under-considered Midwestern 20th century poet, Edwin Ford Piper, was planned to be a visit to Galesburg Illinois, a small city just east across the Mississippi river where Sandburg was born. Piper and Sandburg compare easily. Both born in the American Midwest a couple of decades after the Civil War, both part of early 20th Century literary movements we no longer take as much notice of. Both were attracted to a broad swath of memorized vernacular music that would be called “Folk Music.” They knew each other, even shared stage programs. Sandburg’s 1927 music collection The American Songbag established what American folk music would be for my mid-century generation,* and from examining Piper’s papers I could see his definition paralleled Sandburg’s. Piper was one of the contributors to American Songbag.**
Poet Sandburg blurbing poet Edwin Ford Piper. I also saw a note from Sandburg thanking Piper for songs used in Songbag, but don’t have a picture of that.
.
We arrived at Galesburg early for the 1 P.M.-opening of the Sandburg birthplace site. We wandered the wondering-what-it’ll-become-in-the-21st-century business district with its building facades still showing a variety of past decades abandoned styles left to fade, and browsed a charming small bookstore there. We were going to have an early lunch somewhere, and decided to just get sandwiches and go eat them in the small area behind the birthplace on benches by the Remembrance Rock there.
The rock is an unremarkable bolder, utterly plain and unshaped as a design choice.*** Sandburg and his beloved wife and partner’s ashes are buried under it. The lawn it sits on behind the house is circled by bushes and a few trees, and rather than any sense of a park, it reminded me of the backyard of the house where I grew up in Iowa. One thing the photos I have seen of the rock didn’t show: a ring of irregular, small, flat, stones that circle it, each engraved with a line from a Sandburg poem. If one wished, one could ceremoniously walk from flat grounded rock to rock stepping with your foot-soles on his words, which it seemed to me to be what one of Sandburg’s models Whitman has commanded — and so I did. There’s a nice bust of Sandburg on a stand there too, but to my sense of the place, walking his words was more meaningful. I’d told my wife that Sandburg’s father was a railroad blacksmith, and she figured that the neighborhood might have been handy for rail workers. After our lunch, she took a little stroll while I waited, and she came back to report that just over a rise a block away was the railroad line.
…but then all the birds know is to poop on poetry-engraved rocks, same as any other.
.
One of the site’s staff members arrived ahead of opening time to do a little yard work, and when that time arrived, he changed tasks to welcoming and serving as a guide for about 30 older folks in an adult learning program who arrived from Peoria in two small busses. Beside the birthplace (our host preferred to not call it a house, but a railroad worker’s hut) there was another small, somewhat rundown house next door that served as the site’s offices and a small room of memorabilia backed with an illustrated wall timeline of Sandburg’s life. Behind the two houses was a garage that has been turned into a cozy theater space where they host musical acts in homage to that part of Sandburg’s heritage.
My wife and I plus the 30 others overwhelmed the birthplace site’s capacity. Resourcefully the staff divided the group into two, and after watching a short video on Sandburg our half got to walk through the birthplace hut or house. If you are familiar with the modern tiny house movement, the floorplan and the maximal utilization of it would strike a resonance. Outhouse, no plumbing or running water, it’s decorated in late 19th century Swedish immigrant homey style, but a couple, a young child, and a baby would have been a tight fit, much less our troop of visitors. I recall visiting a reconstructed Lincoln birthplace cabin as a child, and though the Sandburg birthplace is wood-frame construction, not a log cabin, the square footage and amenities might have struck Lincoln biographer Sandburg as similar.
Sandburg’s birthplace: house, hut, cabin. This side shows the smallness best I think.
.
Perhaps because of the touring group’s visit, there was a special performance by a singer-guitarist whose name I didn’t catch, who did a short re-creation of Sandburg singing and talking about his life. I enjoyed that effort. Before leaving, I asked one of the leaders of the visiting group, an old professor, who had some years on your old guy reporter here, what Sandburg biography he’d recommend. He cited Penelope Niven’s bio, and I bought it at the site’s store.
No one hides the fact Carl Sandburg might not have much direct memory of the birthplace as his family moved to another Galesburg house while he was only a toddler**** But the link to his parents and the choice of it for a burial place (which was I believe his doing) speaks to the meaning to him. Unlike the larger house and goat farm where Sandburg spent his post-WWII life until he died that is a National Parks Service site, the birthplace is run by the State of Illinois and some local spirit and volunteerism. Sandburg retained throughout his life a fondness for Galesburg, never hid his roots there, and Galesburg was also the place where he attended college after his stint in the Army, though he never completed a degree.
Which brings me to today’s new musical piece, a setting of a Sandburg poem about someone who apparently left town wiping the dust off their shoes at the city limits. In his collections Sandburg called the poem “Gone,” but the main character’s name sticks in some memories, so it also gets called by the first line, or by the character’s name that appears in that line: “Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town.” Here’s a link to the text of the poem.
I promised mystery in this one. There are things left out, and various implications some of which complicate, some of which conflict, are left open. Can we even take that opening statement at face value? Not now, certainly not in 1916 could it be said that we all love “a wild girl” with a dream “she wants.” Some might, many would not. Wildness and dream-holding create envy, often a lot of it.
Is Chick Lorimer someone that everyone in town has marked as special, marked for greater things — someone so preeminent in their youth where that envy would be tamped down? If so, why the sudden leaving, with no one knowing where or why? Does a recognized prodigy, much loved, leave a place without saying goodbye? That would be a rare story.
Perhaps the “everyone” is a casual overstatement, referring only to a small group of friends who shared ideas? Later the poem seems to refer to larger numbers however.
Is she not actually loved by much of the town, and “loved” in a narrow, sexual, sense by many men? The “Dancer, singer, and laughing passionate lover” line could give testimony to that thought. That line is followed by two specific but puzzling lines, and their very specificity says we should pay attention to them. “Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick?” “Hunting” is a word choice, though we do say we hunt for the lost all the time without thinking of hunting as in wild game. Why the specific range, “ten or a hundred?” If this noteworthy young person is gone, no other info, that’s a missing person. Have they come to harm, are they being hunted for something they’re suspected of doing wrong? Why can’t they say, between 10 and 100 for the number of hunters? This hunt seems secretive from that wide range: 10 might be a small matter, 100 a greater one — but even 100 would be small if this is a universally beloved light of a town, unless it’s a very small town. It seems significant that the poem’s speaker can’t give a better estimate. And that’s followed by another stat: “five men or fifty with aching hearts.” The numbers are still widely separated, but they’re also halved from the number of hunters.
To perform this, I felt I had to have some plot in mind as I sang it. In my mind, Chick is a free-spirited libertine, and to a large degree that “loved” means no-strings sex. Chick likely left because she wanted something more, or because the disapproval of her “loving” everybody was getting intolerable. The maybe just five “aching heart” men thought they were, or could be, her significant partner.*****
How bohemian was poet Sandburg’s experience early in the 20th century? When he first moved to Chicago he lived in what was in effect a free-thinkers commune run by a strange guy, Parker Sercombe. From my reading, “Free Love” was just as much a topic in bohemian culture in the early 1900s as it was in the 1960s.
But maybe I’m wrong, and maybe your reading is different. It could be that Chick is like “Chuck” Sandburg (the name he used then) wanting to see the world, wanting to follow their dream. Sandburg had bicycled around Illinois, rode trains legally and illegally to other parts of the US, and he’d already been to Puerto Rico in the Army by the time he wrote this. Chick could be his anima. Sandburg never felt entirely alienated from his hometown or family however. He came back through town, wrote letters to his family, and so on. And if you want to see his beginnings and his decided final place to remember him, one goes to Galesburg.
To hear my performance of “Gone” AKA “Chick Lorimer” you can use the audio player below. Do you feel nobody knows where the audio player has gone? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
.
*If you never cared about the post WWII folk revival for whatever reason, I will point out that Rock’n’Roll became self-aware artistic and literary-flavored “Rock Music” in the later 60s because folk revival musicians transferred their backgrounds into bands with electric instruments after The Beatles, electric Blues bands, and “Dylan goes electric” emerged to take over college and post-graduate audiences in the US. Over in the UK, the folk revival to Rock pipeline was supplied by “Skiffle” — an American jug-band folk revival style that swept UK youth in the 50s, merging with a peculiar British Trad Jazz revival that often featured the Blues element of pre-WWII Jazz.
**Piper’s wife, in her own papers collection at the University of Iowa library, claims that Piper’s contributions were greater than Sandburg credits in Songbag. Possible, I suppose, though the nature of Piper’s song collecting revealed by my examination of his papers shows a collaborative effort with collectors sharing with each other freely. Piper’s unpublished collection, like Sandburg’s published one, wasn’t done with a sense of ownership of songs.
****The family didn’t get sudden wealth, it supplemented the railroad wages by renting out rooms in the succeeding houses, and the children worked to add to the family income as they grew older.
*****For a fuller story fleshed out from the short poem’s details, there’s this 50 minute early 1960s TV episode from the Route 66 series which uses the poem idea as its central motif and title, with the leading man reciting Sandburg’s poem 2/3 of the way in. This linked version has hokey colorization of the series fine B&W photography, but it is easily viewable.
Here’s another example of a short Emily Dickinson poem that seems in some facets simple, and yet when examined more closely still shows her uniqueness. On first reading it reminded me of a saying attributed to Benjamin Franklin* “Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged at dawn.”
One might read this poem from the start as a restatement of that Franklin quote — except, Dickinson may be saying this isn’t someone’s last day, she wants to set down the situation someone’s next-to-last day. In the first stanza, it is sunrise, and the poem says that the doomed person has delight. Why? Because there is one more day before their death at the dawn.
Chord sheet in case you’d like to sing this one yourself.
.
This idea is clearer in the second stanza, where again, death is clearly due — but tomorrow. There the doomed man is listening for the bird that will likely sing at the next dawn. Perhaps he’s listening to the Meadow bird in the day-before dawn more intently, knowing the next time he hears that song it will be his execution, and this is his last day to hear it in the more generally hopeful context of introducing a day, not an execution. He might choose this — after all, if he knows he’s to die tomorrow, he can be somewhat assured he will not die in that present day as the bird sings the day to begin.
The final stanza may be the oddest, but indicates that this is so. It twice tells us the mood is joyful, which would indicate that the condemned does feel assured of, and is in love with, this day — the full day before. There’s a somewhat ambiguous word-choice in the last line: “ought.” The word can be a stand-in for zero, for nothing, but it’s primary meaning is more at obligated. If we take the zero/ought meaning, or the obligated meaning, Dickinson’s poem is saying the poems doomed subject is joyful though the next-to-last morning Meadow bird has a duty to sing nothing but elegy, because the poem’s subject will accept the day with joy.
So, this is goth-mode Emily with death certain, but this is also certainly the day before the last day.
Musically I had to throw this one together quickly, but it came out OK. Though in a minor key it’s somewhat jaunty. You can hear it with the graphical player below, or if the Meadow bird’s audio player isn’t visible, you can use this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
.
*There’s a similar quote attributed to Samuel Johnson, and there’s this later extension authored by Terry Pratchett “They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged.”
Something about the Spring I noticed this year — oddly, this year as an old man who has had a full lifetime of Springs — is the intensity of natural sounds in my city. There’s a tendency, demonstrated in many poetic tropes, to make nature a portrait or a silent movie, putting nature in contrast to the noise of our civilization’s hum and bark.
I ride my bicycle nearly every day off to a café to have a breakfast, sometimes early enough to feel like the single soul on the street, but by the return trip certainly part of the city waking and doing: kids on their school bus stops, sometimes with a parent, sometimes waiting with their own cohort only, folks holding coffee flasks unlocking their car doors to go to work, a few other bicyclists, including those on big front basket bakfiets or long-tail rear-seat-shelf bikes holding small kids, this observant cargo watching whatever in the morning beneath their pastel helmets. The human noise is slight and clicking. In such mornings we are more like crickets rubbing their wings.
But the birds! When most of those humans are making only accidental noise this early, and the kids waiting for the yellow bus aren’t always talking, perhaps practicing quiet for the ordered schoolroom, the birds are singing at the tops of their voices in the morning. Like miniature feathered fiddles, their song cuts through larger sounds, it insists on being heard. “Ladies, I got your genetic material here!” “This is my and my kind’s tree!” “Whatever this is, this Spring, I am here, and I’ll use my breath to say it!”
Like us bipeds lacking much fur, other mammals aren’t sounding much. Yard bunnies are suspicious and quiet. The squirrels don’t chirp, and their little feet make quiet footfalls. The dogs on leashes: all nose-leading in an alternate sensory dimension. But the frogs and toads are singing out too — whole amazing choirs of them, all wanting to contest Emily Dickinson’s Nobody with a harrumph and high whistle of who they are.
So, it is this Project’s nature to add sound to page poetry. Today’s audio piece is just me alone with a Telecaster electric guitar during a hurried session early this Spring to put down some musical ideas. In the poem that I’m combining with my music, “The Birds,” William Carlos Williams follows Imagist principles, melding a moment into concrete images. Given that we’ve just had a set of rainy days throughout the long holiday weekend in my city, I resonate as Williams poetically paints the bird-morning wet as undried paint.
Is the world not “wholly insufflated” as he says at the start? The bird song is breathing into our world — nature is not silence, but poetry aloud.
My wife found these* stapled to poles around our neighborhood on Sunday.
.
You can hear my performance of Williams’ “The Birds” with the player gadget below. No gadget to be seen? This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player. Want to follow along with the text of the poem? Here’s a link to that.
.
*This bird couple’s heads are superimposed over a human pair of heads from the cover of The Magnetic Fields Holiday album. The quatrain quoted below is from a song found there “Strange Powers.” Despite being a substantial Magnetic Fields admirer myself, I had never seen this album cover.
Today’s musical piece uses another very short Spring poem by Emily Dickinson “A little Madness in the Spring.” I was reminded of this poem when I attended the May Midstream Poetry Reading Series this month where Thomas R. Smith opened a set of his own poems by reading this one of Dickinson’s. If you’d like to follow along, here’s a link to the text of that poem. Spring madness is not an unique poetic subject, but there’s an odd character we meet in this 6-line poem: a clown. Smith told us that “Clown” in his mind is best illuminated by understanding that the word emerged from a character that would have been understood as a country bumpkin. Checking on this, I confirmed that. The silent, white-makeup, big-shoed, red-nosed presentation that likely arises in your mind when you read “Clown” has not yet come into its full form when Dickinson wrote her poem, but the rural clod stock character reached back through commedia dell’arte to the works of Latin and Greek comedic playwrights.
I can’t say how Dickinson visualized clowns in her mid-19th century. I don’t know her access to whatever comic drama or the opera bouffe, but she might have run into clown characters in books or periodical reviews too. One thing that occurs to me: an American form that uses stock buffoons that was popular in Dickinson’s time and place was the minstrel show. Minstrelsy is infamous for using largely white actors playing black slaves acting foolishly, a context which cannot be disengaged from the larger social evils of slavery and white supremacy. It’s not to excuse our parochial evils to note that these character tropes existed outside of the peculiarities of America and white blackface.
When I had seen “A little Madness in the Spring” with its “Madness,” “King” and “Clown” before I heard Smith read it, I casually thought the poem referenced Shakespeare’s King Lear. Looking at that today, I can’t find evidence for it. The Fool in Lear is always The Fool, the word clown is never used. Nor is Springtime evoked in the play.
“As if it were his own…”
.
So, I think Dickinson may have a generic King and Clown in her little poem. The meaning I’d extract is: It’s fine to be irrational in Spring, even if one has powerful responsibilities, but even more so we should note the foolish notion of the innocent peasant or farmer clown who observes all this new growth of spring, the “whole Experiment of Green” and believes it is their property. One fine point I’ll put onto that last part: even an unschooled farmer — and avid gardener Dickinson too — would know the work and craft that goes into starting a garden, crop field, or orchard. A King might puff himself up and portray that husbandry as “his own,” but the man or woman dealing with the exact logistics and labor knows well their part, regardless of who owns the crop or the field.
Is Dickinson winking at that difference in her comparison of the King and Clown? But neither labor nor legal papers and titles make the Earth and Springtime fully our own. We sing it, but the music comes from elsewhere.
You can hear my musical performance of Dickinson’s “A little Madness in the Spring” with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
For a cluster of reasons, it’s been increasingly difficult to create new audio pieces for this Project. For one thing, having done over 750 of these pieces during the past 8 years, a lot of musical ideas, poets, and poems have been explored already. For another, my increasing age and high-mileage body have decreased my stores of reliable energy and dexterity. But one other reason is that I no longer have a predictable and luxurious access to times when I can record something that involves a microphone. Oh, I still get such time — but I don’t always know when it’s coming — and so an opportunity may arise, and I’m committed to something else, or it comes about and I’m weary and spend it napping or resting my aching old frame, or it opens up, and I have nothing prepared to record.
This frustrates me even as I realize that what I do have to bring to the Parlando Project in terms of resources and time is something to be grateful for.
Yesterday I had foreknowledge of one of those recording times coming. I collected two things I wanted to do something with: a well-known poem by Emily Dickinson and another musical piece that I wanted to record just for my own personal enjoyment. As I sat down in my studio space to record my musical performance of the better-known Dickinson poem, I noticed on my music stand a chord sheet for a lesser-known Dickinson poem I had done the music for early this spring: “Sexton! My Master’s sleeping here. ” “Sexton!” hadn’t been recorded, even though it was ready — I didn’t have the time in early Spring as I rushed to do all the pieces on the children’s verse theme I had chosen for National Poetry Month.
Dickinson’s “Sexton!” is an early Spring poem, a season that arrives at different times in different climes, but I figured that I needed to record it right away if I was going to keep it at all timely. I grabbed a dreadnaught guitar (a larger, more powerful sounding guitar than my usual instrument) and quickly refreshed myself on how I had intended to perform “Sexton!”
I was so eager to record on this occasion when the restrictions to making a sound had fallen away that I ripped into the piece at a reckless tempo. A choice or a mood? Moot point, I had to get on with it. Thinking about that tempo today I also wondered if my teenager’s hardcore punk listening had seeped into my mental metronome. But then “Sexton!” does start with an exclamation point, and the whole poem is that: an exclamation of Spring.
Of course this is Goth Emily — so even if her poem and performance are as short as a cut by the so-rapid punk bards of San Pedro The Minutemen, there’s context crammed into 90 seconds. Here’s a link to Dickinson’s poem if you want to follow along. What do we find in those words?
This is what you come to the Parlando Project for: stuff that’s stuck on each other like cockleburs.
.
A sexton* takes care of church grounds, typically including a graveyard. The sleeping Master’s bed chamber is therefore likely a grave. Spring has come with flowers and birds expecting new life.**
Spring isn’t stopping to reflect on this, like the tempo of the song it’s got work to do. Dickinson is in a churchyard, but it’s full of death departed and life arriving, not dogma. What replaces that dogma, sermon, homily? Bird-troubadours, secular Spring-song: its shortness, its insistence. You can hear my performance of Emily Dickinson’s “Sexton!” with the graphical audio gadget you should see below. No gadget? This highlighted link is a backup that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
.
*By anachronistic coincidence, the poem’s sexton made me think of Anne Sexton, a 20th century American poet. Poetry is like a cocklebur: its tropes and metaphors will stick to anything.
**More coincidental connections: in considering Dickinson’s poem in the context of a song I thought of this Earl Sykes song, best-known from a Ralph Stanley bluegrass version, called “A Robin Built a Nest on Daddy’s Grave.” I wonder if Sykes knew Dickinson’s poem, or if there’s some third source that both the poet and the songwriter tapped for this springtime combination. My Dickinson poem-now-song would make a good medley with Sykes’ song —and good bluegrass high vocals and harmony would certainly spruce up my rough-hewn singing performance.
There are more things than well-made that a poem can be — but as someone who’s worked to make their own poems work, I can use that experience to admire what Robert Frost does in today’s piece.
“Pea Brush” is a rhymed iambic poem, based on four-foot lines, but it throws in enough variation that it never seems like it’s limping along in its gait. The rhymes aren’t fancy, and at least for me, they quietly chime along in the background without calling attention to themselves. This is prosody that isn’t bragging or showing off. It was easy to sing in my rough-hewn manner for the most part,* but if I was to reformat it into blocks as if it was prose, it wouldn’t seem all that strange either. Indeed, as I performed it, I wanted to stress its conversational quality.
I myself haven’t had a garden in decades, but one friend of the blog Paul Deaton covers their kitchen garden regularly at his blog, and alternative Parlando voice and keyboardist Dave Moore has a garden that we talk about sometimes. I could imagine reading the first-layer plot of this poem as a post Paul might make. “I’ve arranged with a neighbor to use the small limbs from some birch trees he’s clearing as poles for some of my climbing garden plants. When I went to pick them up on Sunday, I noticed bent-over wildflowers** blooming under the brush pile. My reuse of the felled branches will help my pea vines and give the wildflowers room to grow.”
Besides this clear plot line, there are fine clear images in the poem’s story: the smell of sap still in the air from the just-cut trees, the pause in the frog’s song, the near-like to a baby’s grip of an adult’s finger to the tendrils of a climbing plant on garden stakes.
Wishing good luck to all the gardeners reading this.
.
Below this surface, what is the poem trying to convey? The poem’s speaker (as a character perhaps a more prosaic farmer than the poet and indifferent farmer that Frost was) just notes the practicality of the arrangement — free garden stakes — while letting us in on the blooming of May flowers and the promise of harvest aided by this arrangement. Frost the poet has written this well-made play, painted this scenery, blocked and directed its performance. The play portrays the give and take of humankind in nature. We’ll grow (and consume) the peas with their infant tendrils. Neighbor John has amputated the treescape for his own agricultural designs. These are planned acts of life and death. The episode of the frogs has them portraying those things outside our plans, their Sunday-service silence to hide from a two-footed demigod that might come to capture them to a final silence.
I’ll note too the poem’s ending “had to come” interjection breaking the meter to make a final statement of the budding wildflowers that couldn’t wait for humans to make their plans.
I had to make do with a single hour to get this musical performance down today, and I chose to grab an acoustic guitar to get this accomplished. The results felt right enough to produce this new piece that you can hear with the graphical audio player below. No player? This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
.
*The line “The same as you seize cat’s-cradle strings” is a bit of a tongue-twister. And while I get Frost’s image clearly in that line’s stanza, the syntax is a little disordered I think.
**Frost names his wildflowers as trillium. I don’t know if Frost was the exact botanist that his friend Edward Thomas or his great New England predecessor Emily Dickinson were. Neither am I, but I’m often open to researching specifics like this in poems. I find that one of the species of trillium that grows in Frost’s New England is the Nodding Trillium, a variation that grows crooked stems naturally, not because a brush pile has altered its growth.
John Sinclair lived an eventful life. He’s likely still most well-known for his “10 years for two joints” marijuana sentence, and secondarily for his connection with Midwestern 1960s high-energy rock music as a manager and promoter. Maybe you know too of his founding of a White Panther Party, the quixotic attempt to translate the charismatic radicalism of the Black Panthers to young white hippies.
He was a provocative guy, and he seems to have had a promotional streak to go with that. As I often say about folks like Sinclair: no sane person can likely agree with everything he said and did. Feel free to feel about him however you did before you read this, but there’s a particular reason for a piece using his words today.
This is the last day of (U.S.) National Poetry Month, but it’s also International Jazz Day. The connection of poetry with Jazz seems to have gone back to the very beginnings of Jazz. While Jazz is a predominantly instrumental music, it grew out of a sung Afro-American music that got called Blues. Besides accompanying Blues singers, Jazz musicians often used instruments to evoke the vocal parts of Blues even when the singers weren’t present. And just as Jazz music can use abstract sounds to stand for speech, a lot of Jazz musicians infuse music into the way they talk about their life or their art. The formula of music + words is the formula of poetry.
Long time readers here may recall that I’ve made a point that lyrics in the Blues tradition are Afro-American Modernist verse, and that we can choose to frame them as such — but it’s not so novel for cultural historians to note Afro-American Jazz as an important part of Modernism in music.
Given these connections, it should be no surprise that Jazz Poetry is a long-standing flavor of American verse. Carl Sandburg and Langston Hughes wrote it early in their careers. Sandburg even sang Blues-adjacent songs. Beats adored Jazz, often thought it a literary model, and the mid-century commonplace of bohemians intoning poetry beside a Jazz combo is a influence on this Project that shouldn’t be hard to see. The Black Arts movement welded itself to Jazz too, its poetry often spoke of that music’s artists while Jazz music played.
It turns out that alongside the other things John Sinclair was, he was also a Jazz fan particularly intrigued by Jazz’s rebels. He wrote Jazz criticism, and Jazz poetry before doing anything else he was remembered for, and he kept writing that Jazz poetry throughout his life. When I read that Sinclair had died during the first week of this April’s National Poetry Month, I sought out some of that poetry of his.
The examples you can hear today may surprise you. They did me. For all Sinclair’s association with high-energy music and radical politics I expected some rantings of a passionate sort, strong declamations. He may have written some of that, but these two you can hear me perform were the ones that intrigued me the most. They might seem too casual to be poetry or even public speech, save for his intent to frame them so. They don’t even contain his own words for the most part. Instead, they are statements attributed to Jazz pianist/composer/bandleader Thelonious Monk.
Monk’s a unique creature, even in the highly individualized world of creative Jazz musicians. He was present at the creation of Bebop in NYC in the 1940s, but unlike many of that style’s pioneers there was puzzlement at his skills. To not put too fine a point on it, many connoisseurs weren’t sure he was a good musician. His piano technique was unorthodox, his note choices seemed odd-to-wrong even within the extension of harmonic language that Bebop was proposing. Was that a misunderstanding by (largely white) outside authorities? There’s more: Monk confounded other skilled Jazz musicians who thought he was erratic, not always a steadfast partner in their musical combos that could give the other soloists a predictable foundation to solo over. And on stage he would sometimes extend his eccentricities by leaving the keyboard to sort of dance and wander about the stage.
A remarkable thing happened over a decade or so of this limbo. His compositions became more and more accepted by other musicians, and with wider repetition what once seemed peculiar now seemed irresistibly catchy. Eventually they were deemed masterpieces. Other players started to understand Monk’s unique off-kilter phrasing and rhythm sense. And those odd stage antics became lovable, even if they also could have been worrying. As they would say today, Monk wasn’t neurotypical — and there’s been posthumous talk of schizophrenia-like psychosis. For a Black man working on the fringes of an increasingly marginalized art form in a mid-century America, that Monk eventually achieved so much is a monumental achievement.
Sinclair knew all this. I suspect he trusted you might know this too, and that’s why I’m taking your time to give you this capsule history of Monk. What Sinclair does collect and write down of what Monk says about his art and being an artist seems so modest — both for the poet and the musician. In the first poem, “recollections for allen ginsberg” Monk claims in effect that he’s discovered the pluperfect American music as just being in this America, ready to be gathered and heard. And the lack of esteem and appreciation he’d received by fans, esteemed critics, and other musicians? The second poem Sinclair gathers (gathers like the Jazz that’s everywhere) and titles “worry later – san francisco holiday – for my mother” says he intends to persevere trusting himself, eschewing worry about the lack of understanding. Why does he think that, how does he go on making art? The making itself: “my playing seems to work!” he says. Is he saying that he himself understands the achievement of his own work based on his goals, and so is glad he made it — or is he saying that the concreteness of making something that integrates into a something that didn’t exist before is the best therapy for a life that could otherwise be consumed with worry and doubt? My understanding is that he’s saying both.
My performance of Sinclair’s two poems features my best attempt at realizing a Monk-ish composition to accompany it. There are two unfinished drafts of this post where I tried to come to confessional terms with my feelings about that process of realizing the piece and my audacity to present myself in the context of real musicians with lives devoted to their craft. I decided to spare you all the breast-beating since I came to see that as boring. As a composer, I guess I could conclude with a variation of that Monk quote “I’ll tell you one thing: my composition seems to work.” You likely saw the video link above, but if you prefer just the audio, there’s a graphical audio player below, and this backup highlighted link for those who don’t see the player.
We’re coming to the end of my month-long look at a pair of poetry anthologies for children: 1922’s The Girls Book of Verse and the follow-up 1923 Boys Book of Verse. I’ve had a little fun with the decision to make two volumes, asking you to guess which poems the editors chose for each gender. So, before we get to a poem from them and its corresponding musical piece, let me do a quick final summary of how they divvied poetry up by gender audience.
The boys book has four sections: Outdoor Poems, Poems of Peace and War, Story Poems, Songs of Life. The first three are self-explanatory, the fourth consists of poems meant to teach stalwart virtues and honorable life. I’d hoped to include at least one poem from this section to demonstrate that flavor — a leading candidate was William Henley’s “Invictus” — but I maxed out my capacity to produce increased posts this National Poetry Month and it didn’t make the cut.
The girls book has four sections too: Melody, The Pipes of Pan, Enchantment, and Stories. Melody is more-or-less a poetic catchall, with a slight preference for poems explicitly invoking song or music. The Pipes of Pan is the girls version of the boys Outdoor Poems. Stories obviously corresponds to the narrative Story Poems in the other volume. Enchantment? It’s fairy poetry.
So, here’s our divergence: boys get war and stern life-coaching. Girls get fairies.* Most of these are fairy whimsey, only a few touch on anything truly mysterious or an outland** where humans have no dominion.
Today’s piece is made from one of the whimsical fairy poems, written by Rose Fyleman. Fyleman was making book on fairies in the run up to these American children’s verse anthologies. During WWI she submitted a fairy poem to England’s Punch magazine and it was so well liked that a number of books of fairy poems for children authored by Fyleman followed. I know no further details, but two things stand out from this career story: Fyleman was 40, a somewhat late start for a writer, and she was the daughter of an immigrant from Germany, a nation that England was at war with as she was submitting her poetry of the “Oh, nothing — just fairies pretending not to be imaginary” kind. Given the war losses in Britain then, the market for light fantasy might have been a desirable diversion.
A frontpiece from the book-length collection that included today’s poem, Fairies and Chimneys. The illustration is for another poem in Fyleman’s book that starts “The child next door has a wreath on her hat./Her afternoon frock sticks out like that,/ All soft and frilly;/She doesn’t believe in fairies at all /(She told me over the garden wall)—/She thinks they’re silly.”
.
“The Fairies Have Never a Penny to Spend” isn’t “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” or “Tam Lin,” but it is fun, and after the sober Arnold, a darkly satiric Browning, and a month of much work to bring these pieces to you, we can enjoy a little of that. The music is a rock’n’roll trio, so go to the graphical audio player below and bop to the fairy beat. What? The fairies have stolen your graphical audio player? This highlighted link is a backup that will open a new tab with its own player.
.
*Consider this gendered choice in the context of later years when Tolkien and all the extensions of his imagined worlds and demi-humans became a considerable sub-culture among boys and young men. While Fyleman was writing her fairy poetry, Tolkien was stuck in the battle of the Somme.
**There is another Walter De La Mare fairy poem that I planned to perform — and it might still sneak in some following day because it’s too good not to present. And this girls book section included Yeats’ “Faries Song,” a similar case to “Pippa Passes” from a couple of days ago. Both seem innocuous as stand-alone poems, but each was part of a play which provides dread context. You can read about Yeats’ play and hear my performance of the song from it here.
This April I’ve been looking at a pair of volumes of poetry for children published in 1922/23 The Girls and The Boys Book of Verse. One of the things I think about as I read the poems and consider the editor’s selections is what’s ahead for the kids that will read these books. Depending on your age, this is your parents generation, or your grandparents, or even in some cases great-grandparents. Those then-children are highly likely to now be dead, but their grownup results may be in the boundaries of our memory.
Here in a children’s book for them is this dead solemn poem. Its mood, however earnest and perceptive is downbeat. That it was written on the occasion of Matthew Arnold’s honeymoon* makes the poem’s downcast directed look at the sea as the emblem of erosive time and wear even more outlandish. Arnold wrote this in 1851, and I’d assay that the futures for a middle-class English cultural critics and civil servants like Arnold were not extraordinarily dire.
Honeymoon material? Want to discuss Sophocles in the original Greek? Do you think the editors put this poem in the girls or the boys volume of their gendered pair of anthologies? Answer below.
.
What would we say for our Greatest Generation’s future, the kids for whom this poem was selected by the editors? Let me narrow that audience in a bit — acknowledging that there will be dear exceptions — a white middle-class or better audience of American tweens to younger teens would be these books most likely readers. Most of their families will have the means to not make the Great Depression a test of survival. WWII will deeply change four years of their lives, ending some, swerving others. The Cold War years afterward are held in memory as a complex mix of unconnected simplicities — particularly the first two post war decades. When the rich landlord’s son talks about the Great America to be Againing, there’s where he thinks we want to live.
I’m not a young man on a honeymoon, the sea is calm tonight, and I live in this moment in gratitude to be able to exercise my “art or sullen craft.” My mind has learned to question any unalloyed mood, but I’ve written here a few years back that the current young generation may need to be a greater Greatest Generation to face the challenges I read out my window.
Will Arnold’s poem help them. Is that likely for any poetry? I doubt I’m wise enough to say. I will say this, the music in this poem of dread carries it through, a strange energy of words forming into antiphons. Its concluding naming the fears, singing the fears, in the poem’s powerful ending: that world not committed to joy, love, light, certitude, peace, a solace for pain placed amidst a personal choice to closely realize those things.** Is that enough? I don’t know, but I can put it to music.
You can hear my musical performance of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” with the audio player below. What — has such a player retreated like the Sea of Faith? Draw back and fling your click to this highlighted link which will open a new tab with an audio player for my tremulous cadences.
**Just this month I’ve been reminded again of The Fugs, an anarchic and utterly sex-positive band of poets that should be considered as pioneers alongside The Mothers of Invention and The Velvet Underground instead of being memory-holed by musos for being musically shambolic. The Fugs performed “Dover Beach” by only refraining the final section, and I’d suppose in the depth of The Sixties, just as today, we are ready to sing where ignorant armies are clashing by night. Gender fun-quiz answer: Arnold’s mansplaining honeymoon ode was published in The Girls Book of Verse.
Frank Hudson 