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The Dying Bed

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I said I’d return to our encounter with the 1926 Harlem Renaissance issue of Fire!!  magazine — and here we are with another poem that was printed there. If you’ll remember from earlier this Black History Month, Fire!!  was largely organized, written, and edited by young people under the age of 25, and as such it wanted to represent a generational change from the curators of anthologies like James Weldon Johnson’s 1922 The Book of American Negro Poetry or Alain Locke’s The New Negro  of 1925. There’s more emphasis on free verse in the poetry section for example, and throughout the issue there’s less attention to propriety. Though only a year separates Fire!!  from The New Negro,  long-time readers here may recall that Locke’s book included an essay on Black music casting a suspicious eye on what the essayist cast as frivolous Jazz music — and Blues, as a vocal music depicting a lot of disreputable situations, wasn’t considered an art at all.

The cohort of Fire!!  didn’t share that outlook. If anything, they wanted to make sure they touched on unconventional thoughts and affinities. And here’s something we now think we know about the young writers in Fire!! — a substantial portion were gay or bisexual. Afro-Americans in the 1920s were coming out as full-fledged contributors to all the public arts — would that other status, fully-illegal and disrespected, muddy the waters of “racial uplift?”

Today’s piece uses a poem by a lesser-known contributor in this issue of Fire!!,  Waring Cuney. Like Helene Johnson, who you may have been introduced to earlier this February, Cuney deserves to be better-known. While not directly part of the Harlem scene, Cuney was friends with Langston Hughes, one of the chief instigators of Fire!!,  and like Hughes he was a young man who was comfortable with the language and outlook of the Blues.

William Waring Cuney

I can’t seem to find a picture of the young William Waring Cuney, but here he is later in life modeling modern vinyl hipsterism.

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Today’s set of words, Cuney’s poem “The Death Bed”  doesn’t use Blues forms directly, but I’ve already been working with some other Cuney poems that do for possible performance, so I decided that I could include some of that today. “The Death Bed”  is a poem about a dying man who doesn’t seem very interested in his family’s consolations of religion. While getting religion as death approaches is a common trope, our dying man quickly tells his relatives there’s no need for prayer. The relatives leave for another room, and instead of the purposeful theology of public prayer, our protagonist listens to the enigmatic wind. For one moment he tries to join the windsong with his own song, but finds he can find no words. If windsong is nature (likely) or the paraclete (possible), our dying man cannot form his response.

The poem ends with the dying man concerned with what the relatives in the other room are praying. Are they seeking to intercede for the non-believer? Or might they think he needs to be cleansed of some evil — maybe they are even praying to be protected from the sins this sinner personifies?

The Death Bed

Cuney’s poem as it appeared in Fire!!

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In my performance I sought to open-up intimations of another possibility via music. The Godhead or the universe may not require intercession or last-minute prayers. I made a rare choice to use a conventional musical sample* for this performance. The slide guitar you hear in the main body of “The Death Bed”   is taken from a 1927 recording “Jesus Make Up my Dying Bed”  by gospel/blues guitarist and singer Blind Willie Johnson. While many guitarists think Johnson’s sound and distinctive slide-vibrato is unmatchable, one could suppose I could have tried  to approximate it. However, I was taken with the romantic notion of combining this 1926 poem with a slice of music recorded around the same time. I then included a short coda with a sung variation of this song.** The rest of the music was made with percussion and the sound of bowed cymbals. You can play this performance of Waring Cuney’s “The Death Bed”  with a graphical player below. No player to see?  This highlighted link is a backup method to play it.

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*Portions of modern popular and art music intentionally use collaged and looped sections of existing recordings. I tend to avoid that for whatever reason, generally choosing to play or electronically “score” my instruments.

**The performers in that short coda are Fred and Annie McDowell. Fred McDowell is another master of the bottleneck slide guitar.

Reading One’s Own Poetry in Public

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

It’s one of those things that is hard to do well but is none-the-less important to do anyway. Why is it hard? Why is its realization often imperfect? What might one do or aim for when attempting to read one’s own poetry for the public? Well, before I write down some responses to those challenges, let me say that these are not the opinions of an expert or the summary judgements of some important critic, but only observations of someone who attends readings and occasionally reads my own verse aloud before a live audience.

Why is it hard? Perhaps I’d rather say it this way: there’s no good reason it should be easy. The writing of poetry, emphasis on the second word in that sentence, is not a public act. For many of us it takes extraordinary private concentration to create our poetry — and too, we often put in it things we would otherwise never share face-to-face. As a result, a great deal of poetry, particularly our present age’s poetry, derives its power from whispers to ourselves in the dark. Why should the same person who does that writing be any good at reading it aloud?

I attend at least one poetry reading every month and I’ve seen over a hundred poets read. Let me be honest about myself: I’m not a very good listener. I have a racing mind, and any spark that a reader’s words set off, has a tendency to cause my mind to follow it off into my own bonfires. And if the reader’s own tinder is damp, I as a poet myself will spend internal time noting how poorly the campfire chances are progressing. How much better (or worse?) is the average poetry reading audience member in listening? I can’t say, but I fear I’m a bit worse than the average audience member, but that doesn’t mean I don’t notice some ways poets reading may fail more than others.

I’ll summarize one class of failure with a general statement of an issue: not convincing me that the words the reader is sharing are important to be shared. Yes, yes, I know this is hard. Most poets don’t have the audience or objective awards and rewards to be reinforced that their stuff is any good. And those that do (or those that inflate what small elements of that they’ve received) can forget that there may be audience members who still need to be convinced. If you make that case in your manner of presentation and in any introductory speaking you do before and between poems, you’ve improved the chance of the audience paying attention.

Oddly, general posture and “stage presence” doesn’t seem to have as much effect as I might guess it would. Readers who make extensive eye contact vs. those whose heads are downcast to the page on the podium — is the former better than the latter? Probably, but I’ve seen success and failure with both. I’ve seen a few poetry readers with more extensive motion moving around the stage or reading area. This has been rare, and I’ve seen it work (for me as audience member). If I’m not otherwise compelled, it might seem off-putting or artificial. Literary poetry readings do not seem the same as general public speaking or stage performance in expectations or needs in this regard.

Beatnik Crime

Taking steps to earn the audience’s attention can pay off.

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Pacing, setting audience expectations, and “set-list structure” does seem important. Don’t read too fast or too slow. Help the audience understand what you’re going to do (even mundane things like “I’m going to read six poems today” or “This is the last poem I’m going to read tonight”). Musicians most often work out the order of pieces they will present with some thought. It may help the performer (and therefore the audience) if you start with a “greatest pop hit” that you know how to consistently perform without making any extraordinary demands on either audience or reader. Place your most emotionally or intellectually demanding piece at the end, or next-to-last.*

Because we have to get over two obstacles when reading our own poetry, I’ve suggested to poets that they consider splitting their task into two parts. First, practice by reading other poets’ work aloud, even with no audience. Pick poets whose work is meaningful or influential to your own writing style, and figure out how to make them sound their best and most compelling in your voice.**  Then, move on to your own poetry, and read it in the same voice and manner, as if it was as important and “certified” as your poetic models.  The self-doubt, the “who am I to…?” factor can possibly be tricked with this path. However, what should you do if, when you get to the second task, you choke at how it sounds? It’s possible that your models, your influences, may need to be expanded. I myself started loving romantic era 19th century poetry for example, but later wanted to develop a more conversational style in my own writing. I could try reading Keats or Blake as if they were talking to me, or I could try reading aloud some Frank O’Hara instead.

How do you know how you sound when reading other poets or your own work. You need to record yourself. Your basic smartphone or laptop will do well enough. In the Parlando Project I make efforts to make my recorded voice sound better on recordings, but that’s not important in this effort. Will you feel self-conscious listening to your own voice? Almost certainly. Get over that it won’t sound right — it will sound more like what the audience hears. Do you feel your reading voice has a weird or unappealing timbre? That’s likely of less importance, so get over it.

It’s a good idea to practice your “set” before a public reading. Highly experienced readers can skip this step,***  but inexperienced readers should not.

In summary then, most readers of their own poetry are not great readers, even those who’ve widely published or won awards — so congratulations, it’s OK to be an imperfect reader, most of us are! Yet it’s still worthwhile becoming a better public reader.

A week ago I decided to read a love poem at a rare open mic session for a longstanding local reading series. I picked a slightly revised version of a poem I presented here a few years ago “The Phones in Our Hands (are so Magical).”   The organizers’ instructions said that we should read only a single poem of our own and keep it under four minutes. I prepared for the reading by informally recording myself reading my poem about three times, to get a quick sense of if I had it down as to its presentation. On the night of the reading, I was able to present it at about 75% of what my third and best practice reading was. Where was the fall off? I read it just a bit too fast (nervousness) and I probably was less than optimum in handling some of the phrasing. I’ll give myself a middle grade in my overall presentation. I did try to set the expectations in introducing the poem, but in the end, the overall effect was less effective than it could have been for two reasons. I didn’t properly setup or convey the tonal shift in the poem, so the surprise when the poem shifts from the mysterious/playful to the experience of the separation of death from one’s partner confounded the audience. The difference between pleasurable surprise and confusion is subtle to describe, yet critical in effect. The other issue was “set-list” related. Most of the readers disregarded the one poem request and read 2-3, and as a Valentine’s Day themed reading, many of the poems were light-hearted and playful. My single poem was a “downer” and a “thinker” poem. I had considered doing two poems (still well within the four minutes) and would have led off with the Valentine’s poem I presented here last time, which is a more informal and joyous poem, even if it addresses the same issues of old love and eventual widowhood. In retrospect, that would have improved my “set” considerably. The bottom line I’ll convey from my most recent public reading: accepting imperfection is an important skill, ever more so if you are trying to do things well, and I enjoyed taking my swing at sharing my poem.

Today’s audio piece is the third take of my practice run-through of “The Phones in our Hands (are so Magical)”  with an impromptu two-handed improv over a synth pad, one track a soft grand piano and the other a more plaintive high-in-its-range violin. Apropos to the above discussion of recording your own voice, the poem coincidently mentions how odd our recorded voice seems to most of us. You can hear it with the player below or this alternative highlighted link.

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*If next-to-last, your last poem can then be another “greatest pop hit,” a poem of clarity that seeks to leave the audience energized and feeling they’ve comprehended what you’ve presented, rather than drained or perplexed.

**Does this sound like the Parlando Project, where 90% of the time we present performances of other poet’s words? I guess it does, but the main reason that I do the Project is that spending extended time with those words and integrating them with music tricks me into listening to them in a deeper way. It gets me past those issues I have being distracted while listening to another reader. In melding their poem with my breath and music, I’m forced to inhabit it.

***A great many (not all) musicians go through an intense practice regimen while developing their skills on their instrument, but a more relaxed and informal one later. Someone who’s gigging and playing regularly (using their bank of skills deposited from their own-room practice) is often able to maintain or even sharpen those skills without the need for as much solo practice. Similarly, if you are regularly reading, there’s much less need to practice your set.

I’m Gonna Make Love to My Widow ‘fore I’m Gone

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to take a short break from our February celebration of 1926’s Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists*   to celebrate old people — really old people. The audio piece today is also not as solemn as some of the issues we’ve dealt with in other posts: it’s about love, desire, lust — and those feelings are represented as Shakespeare or many of the Afro-American Blues artists of our last decade to be called “The Twenties” might present it, as “country matters.”

There’s a long poetic lyrical tradition of mixing rural metaphors with desire. We’ve done more than one piece here over the years in the bucolic poetic tradition of lusty shepherds and comely rural maids, but it has occurred to me in my present old age that they are almost always young and single. I, on the other hand, am an old, long-married man. Not to put a damper on the prurience factor, but when I say old, I mean old enough to think about not being around to promise love forever. I’ll repeat what I’ve said here before: that at my age when offered a lifetime guarantee on a product, I’ll ask now if there’s a better deal. Yet, oddly enough, that for me makes the desire to connect with my beloved no less ardent. Carpe Diem is no longer just a trope to be trotted out.

Does today’s rambunctious piece do a good job of communicating that? I’m not sure. I presented an earlier draft of this a decade ago to a writer’s group I was participating in — and they, in the springtime of their mid-60s, thought it was a persona poem about someone wooing a rural widow, while I thought the inescapable ribald joke in the piece was that the singer wanted to, ahem, get down with it, before they died making their wife a widow. That group was often right about such lack of clarity, but I sometimes wonder if they were too young — and now that half that group has died, that they might have a different understanding of this lusty Blues poem. And it occurs to me that’s an additional joke! The audience for poetry may be small, but am I expecting the audience for this one to be made up of dead people?

Make Love to My Widow

Here’s my Blues-poem lyric. We’ll be back with other peoples’ words soon.

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I don’t know, but I wish all of the readers and listeners here, of whatever age, a happy Valentine’s Day. We may not understand love — after all, we barely understand lust — but let us fumble toward that understanding with chocolates and flowers in a cold February. You can hear me perform this Blues-poem with bottleneck-slide guitar using the graphical player gadget below, or with this alternative highlighted link.

Are you looking to further connect Black History Month with love poetry? Patricia Smith is presenting new and existing Black love poems this February via a month of curating their Poem-a-Day feature.

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*You might think, “1926, that’s old people!” but Fire!!  was organized, edited, and written by members of the famed Harlem Renaissance when they were barely out of their teens.

A Southern Road: a lesser-known poem comparable to the more famous “Strange Fruit.”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

As we continue our 2023 Black History Month encounter with the young Harlem New York based writers in the 1926 issue of Fire!!  we reach a much less familiar name: Helene Johnson. Our lead-off poet Countee Cullen was a mere 3 years older than the 20-year-old Johnson when Fire!!  was published, but Cullen had already published two books and had two more in the works. Johnson had published mostly though successful writing contest entries. In the upcoming year she’d publish a poem in Vanity Fair.  And then? Well, not much.

None-the-less, her poem in Fire!! “A Southern Road”  is as strong as any included. I’m going to try to be brief in discussing the poem’s craft — though the poem exhibits those skills — because discussions of meter and imagery against the poem’s subject seem disproportionate to my heart’s response. And let me be clear at the start of this discussion: “A Southern Road”  is a lynching poem, and in the last decade called The Twenties most Black American poets assayed a poem on the terroristic acts against Afro-Americans that were then an occurrence as common as mass shootings or questionable police killings are today.*  And like those things we experience today, lynchings and other acts of anti-Black violence were both a cause for political organizing and an ongoing hurt that the country seemed incapable of correcting. Let that sink in for cause of sorrow and information: around 100 years ago, in the lifetime of people in our lifetimes, it was considered an insolvable problem that American communities would torture, mutilate, and summarily execute fellow citizens as a public display of their power and the executed’s lack of it. Read that sentence again. Read it once more after that. This level of savagery was thought something that couldn’t be stopped, something inevitable.

Can I appropriately introduce an odd sort of hope into this horrendous history? Yes, the heart and head may be confused on that. Still, people, Black and white Americans, dealing with a nation that collectively thought this just had to continue, eventually made lynchings rare. There’s a long and likely necessary analysis on why this happened that would include how the same hatefulness mutates into new forms, I won’t get to that here. I’ll just say to our current, crucial, Greatest Generation (because, like the last given that name, they’ll have to be great) that pervasive “This can’t be changed. Any solution would be ineffective and worse than the disease” statements about present horrors can be reflexes not reflective of history.

A Southern Road

As the poem appeared in Fire!! The Internet has some mistranscriptions likely due to OCR errors.

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Did Johnson’s poem make this change come about? No, it’s not even well-known as a poem— not even well-known as an African-American Harlem Renaissance poem — but poetry works in each reader and listener, one-by-one. A little over a decade later Abel Meeropol’s song “Strange Fruit”  was powerfully realized by Billie Holiday, but Johnson’s earlier work was similarly skillful in giving us a portrait of evil. Even more than “Strange Fruit,” “A Southern Road”  is cast as a cold pastoral. “A Southern Road”  opens with a somewhat specific yet mysterious image: a dry yellow tongue. A metaphoric rural clay road? A parched leaf? From the poem’s generalized title we don’t know. I think the following “little tune” image developed over the next few lines is birdsong, and our dry forest pastoral ends unexpectedly with a line “Pregnant with tears.”

Johnson’s next sentence spread over four lines is part of why I think the tune, a melody that is a “streaming line of beauty” is birdsong, as there’s a nest that’s been flung down by some indifferent god/fate, before the Sabbath. We are to worship that god? We are to puzzle at a beautiful song despite loss?

The poem’s final five lines have us reassessing the poem’s portion before them. Several antique words are used here, perhaps a conscious choice to make this horror that was contemporary to her time in a way more timeless and generalized. A tree is described as a “predella,” the platform of an alter. We can next tell that the metaphoric altarpiece in this case depicts a crucifixion of a kind, a lynched person. “Sacrificial dower to raff” is near-Chaucerian in language. “Dower” is the inheritance of a dead person, raff is Middle English for rubbish, akin to the slightly less out-dated term “riff-raff.” The sacrificed body does not seem like much of an inheritance, any more that Christ on the cross seems much like a godhead, but I think Johnson is using raff/riff-raff in this line also to refer to the lynchers and their hate’s inheritance.

The poem ends with the tortured body suspended in the air, which I believe the poem compares to a plausible reader’s opinion on this matter: suspended?

There, I said I would keep my account of how we might encounter and understand this poem’s craft brief. I’ve compared “A Southern Road”  above to “Strange Fruit,”  and so I took it as my job to give Helene Johnson’s poem some further equivalence, albeit with what I could create for music and with a less masterful singer. I needed to put the music together fairly quickly again, but despite having three guitars and an electric piano over the bass and drums it worked spontaneously, as it needed to. You can hear it with the player you may see below, or with this alternative highlighted link.

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*There’s a figure easily found in web searches that more than a thousand lynchings occurred between 1900 and 1914. The later year 1919 (not included in that selection of years) was notorious for white riots and other forms of violence. US population at the time of today’s poem was roughly 1/3 of what it is today if you’d like to adjust figures. It’s plausible that numbers were not easily gathered for other years — after all, in our century there were no figures on the number of people killed in police encounters until recently. And anyway, technical arguments about collection and accuracy of numbers, like metrical scans of this poem’s lines don’t get at the overall effect of this: that people are going to terrorize and kill you and not enough are going to care about it.

From the Dark Tower: “Younger Negro Artists” in 1926

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s February and in America it’s Black History Month.*   In the past few years of this Project I’ve picked a publication that has entered into public domain status to examine.**  This February I’m going to feature work from a singular 1926 publication, the first issue of what was to be a literary quarterly called Fire!!  The cover advertised it would be “Devoted to younger Negro Artists.”

FIre!! cover

Want to read this issue of Fire!!  in part or all? Here’s a link to a high-resolution scan of it.

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It’s worth stopping and noticing that “younger” again. It’s easy to fall into a trap when considering a time so long ago to many who will be reading this in 2023 — but its contributors and instigators were in their younger 20s though some had been writing and publishing since they were teenagers. They may seem old to you by strange definition, but they were certainly young to themselves and their contemporaries.

I find that remarkable. While a range of Black American artists were coming to the fore in the last decade called “The Twenties,” I can’t think it was in any way a time friendly to them. Even artistic Modernism, which sought new sources of inspiration and often delighted in mocking old prejudices, was a mixed bag. Racism and ethnic stereotyping remained present in Modernism. Perhaps sociologists could tell us if it was greater or lesser in the world of art than in society at large then, but I’m certain it was no small factor. And yet here were these young writers who at this point thought it was time for them to unleash a record of their experiences.

It’s not so wild a theory to say that they were so audacious because they didn’t know any better. I’m not going to knock that — for this white elderly composer and amateur sorta-scholar to think I have anything to bring to their efforts is not how the smart money would bet either. And you? You’re reading a blog with poetry and a variety of non-commercial music. So clearly, we all don’t know any better.

In the previous year’s Black History Month series here we’ve noted that some forms of new expression that would be featured in Fire!!  were not without opposition even from the existing Black Intelligentsia. Jazz and Blues musics were considered problematic. Literary examinations of the sequalae of poverty rather than stories of uplift were controversial. Even if the 1920s were the decade that free verse became more widespread, some of these young poets looked more to Shelley and Keats than Carl Sandburg or Langston Hughes.

From the Dark Tower

Here’s Cullen’s sonnet as it appeared handsomely set in Fire!! It’s also the first poem in the poetry section of this issue, a section titled “Flame From the Dark Tower.”

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Our lead-off poet is one such example. Countee Cullen was not a Modernist poet. Unlike other metrical/rhyming poets like Frost, and sometimes Yeats or Millay, he’s not even Modernist in outlook. While he’s 23 years old when this was published, he writes as if he was looking back to his  last decade to be called the 20s, which would be the 1820s. None the less, “From the Dark Tower”  is an impassioned account of the harms of white supremacy — and it is very well written within that style. If the premiere Afro-American poet Phyllis Wheatley was out to prove that she could write 18th century poetry as well as any white poet, Cullen demonstrates that he could do the same for the 19th century. Sure, there’s the matter that he was writing in the 20th century, and we are reading him in the 21st, but that’s likely a lesser sin now when there’s no fresh battle to be joined over free verse, Jazz rhythms, or Blues speech. It’s not unlikely that we read other older poems written in this poem’s style, and Cullen is in 2023 one of those old poets.

And then there’s this — this huge thing. I was trying to quickly get down an acceptable take of my simple acoustic guitar version of my song-setting of Cullen’s poem from Fire!!  yesterday. Across my country, at the same time, in a city famed for its American music, so significantly Afro-American music, there was a funeral for yet another Black person killed by our official representatives in a manner that seems clearly to be an affront to civilization. Should we, musicians who’ve inherited that tradition, merely “beguile…with mellow flute?” To sing Cullen’s line, couched in careful rhyme and meter: “We were not made eternally to weep” — can I wish that situation would seem old-fashioned, out of date, a curiosity of the obsolete?

To hear that performance you can use a player gadget that should appear below. No player? This highlighted link is an alternative.

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*Not to cast shade on this worthy endeavor, but Black History Month has been in my observation largely an Afro-American  History month. There’s nothing inherently wrong with concentrating on that subject. I’ll just acknowledge that in the past century or so there’s been a counter-colonialist reassessment of African continental history — and while it has not risen to the level that this American has been aware of it (beyond some UK and other former English-speaking Commonwealth country reading) there may be worthwhile study and information coming forth on the wider African story.

**Because reusing, adapting, even performing, work not in the public domain is a legal gray area, this project shies away from using more modern work. Luckily as this nearing 7-year-long project has continued, more and more “Harlem Renaissance” work has entered PD status. Specific thanks is due to the Yale University Library for making Fire!!  available digitally.

Modes of Emily Dickinson: I Am Afraid to Own a Body

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Let us return to the genius of Emily Dickinson, as we have regularly here at this Project. As I look to her work over the years, I find that Dickinson has several modes. In one mode, her approach is charming, a just-between-slightly-weird-friends sharing of concrete observations of people and the physical world. Even when that Emily speaks of death and eternity, it takes as its conveyance and destination a horse-drawn fate and a well-made bed/grave. Another mode, not as well represented in her “greatest hits,” can be puzzlingly condensed and abstract, as if shorthand notes taken from her own mind of states of thought or insight that come upon her.

One aspect of genius is that it can get away with things that us more craft-assigned poets cannot. To be abstract and nearly impenetrable at any length tires out readers even as her other poems draw us in. If one reads Dickinson as an entire collection, these modes are interspersed. We might think, “Oh, there’s our friend Emily in one of her private moments we cannot join — moments we accept with partial-at-best understanding because we’ve come to love the other parts of her poetry.”

Today’s short Emily Dickinson poem bridges those two modes. It opens as arrestingly as any poem could with the striking statement “I am afraid to own a body.” As I did with our last Dickinson performance here, I wonder at that line and immediately relate it to body dysphoria, something that portions of our current society experiences and is more free to express.

The poem then moves on to an allied and contrasting statement nearly as striking: “I am afraid to own a soul.” The soul is by definition incorporeal, but by linking it with the body in the first line we may palpate it none-the-less. As the quatrain finishes these two connected things, body and soul, are described as valuable, and despite our fears, inescapably present. The poem might be too short if it ended there, but I’d recognize it as a complete koan of enlightenment — but it doesn’t end.

I am afraid

1st stanza draws us in. 2nd one confounds. You & I may not be able to get away with such writing, but let us trust in the genius of Emily Dickinson.

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In the second quatrain we are off in the abstract Emily. I often seek to remind readers here that Emily lived in a house devoted to law with a father, grandfather, and brother who practiced law.*  I think there’s passion and emotion in this second and final stanza, but if we are to follow it we must think as if we’re reading a contract or one of those user agreements we so often click “accept” on without reading. This stanza as saying that both body and soul are willed to us, like a “conditions attached” bequest in a will — and then after the stanza’s second em-dash, what? Who’s the “Duke?” Since rural mid-19th century Massachusetts was not supplied with titled nobility, I suspect this is connected to something Dickinson read. I’m going to take a flying leap of wild assumption here, one that you shouldn’t “take to the bank” any more than my “what if?” wondering that the mouldering man who died for truth in this other Dickinson poem could be John Brown, and a link much less certain than the idea that the kept in quotes “hope” bird was a reference to Emily  Brontë. Could this poem’s Duke be Robert Browning’s monologuing one who speaks of “My Last Duchess?”  I know Dickinson read Elizabeth Barrett Browning, so it’s not an impossible leap to think she read EBB’s spouse too.

If our Duke is exhibiting his deathless painting of his now dead (likely on his own orders) “last Duchess,” Dickinson is perhaps (in a very obscure and condensed way) mentioning drawbacks to our existence as a body** and as a questing soul.***  What then to make of the final line? I’m not sure. Is God the bequeather of the soul and body in the bargain our speaker is afraid of? Is God as cruel and exacting as Browning’s Duke? What’s the closing “Frontier?” The course of our lifetimes not yet mapped out? A “light out for the territory” escape? I’m not sure.

I’ll be honest, I recorded my performance of this second stanza not having figured out even these potentially wrong readings of it. What did I rely on then? There is some worthwhile word-music — and poetry using that tactic can give pleasure and connection before understanding. I trusted the mystery of the words might convey some mystery to the listener even if I had not opened the packet containing their meaning. My hope: that I could be, however imperfect and limited, one who carries Emily Dickinson’s genius to you.

You can hear my performance of Emily Dickinson’s “I Am Afraid to Own a Body”  with the player gadget below. If you don’t see the player, there’s this highlighted link that will play it too. Speaking of links, there are other hyperlinks in the post above to some other Parlando Project Dickinson pieces that you might want to read.

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*Have other better-known and credentialed scholars made much of Emily Dickinson’s connection to the law? I think the last time I searched I didn’t find much of anything. There’s a thesis topic for some young reincarnation of Wallace Stevens.

**Not much of a leap to a feminist reading of a female  body here.

***One of my observations on reading my first full-length biography of Dickinson many decades ago was how remarkably determined she was to resist the pull of declaring herself as “saved” during her time and place’s Christian religious revival. Schoolmates, family, and community all declared, and she steadfastly refused.

Yeats’ “A Fairy Song”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

A person I know as a poet told me at a reading that he was playing with his Jazz combo on Sunday, assuming (rightly) that there would be some interest on my part. I told him I wasn’t sure if I could attend, since I live in a household with two distressed persons. They nodded as if they understood.

If you’ve noticed that this Project has been more intermittent, that’s much of the reason. The typical post here starts with looking for interesting texts, researching a bit about their context, composing, playing and recording the music, and then finally these blog entries about my encounters with the poems and the process of presenting them. The order of these events isn’t set in stone, occasionally there are gaps between steps, but it’s also common for each step to take an open-ended block of concentration. My desires to support those I love, their needs for quiet, and frankly, my unease held in common with theirs, has made that kind of focus rare for several months, wearing down what storehouse of steps I have for new pieces of work.

In place of that, I’ve taken up two things that more easily fill the odd-lots moments of time that come to me. I’ve increased Twitter promotion of the over 650 pieces in our Parlando Project archives found here.*  I’m doing that enough that I’m probably seen by some as an ignorable nag by now, and the results so far in drawing traffic are only slightly better than my attempts on Twitter made during last National Poetry Month. Still this substitute effort to promote the various ways that music and words can combine makes me feel like I’m not abandoning this Project’s goals.

The other activity is reading, which of course has always been part of the Project, but I speak of reading that isn’t directly tied to finding a new piece or understanding its contexts. I’m mostly reading books about musicians, music, or poets for pleasure and as a reset from life stress.

But enough about me and troubles that aren’t yours. This post is getting tardy in getting to today’s work by William Butler Yeats. His “A Fairy Song”  comes from a fairy story told in a verse play from early in Yeats career. Most recently we’ve presented a later Yeats poem “A Coat”   in which Yeats is looking askance at this sort of earlier work and at those who chose to copy his early style. “A Fairy Song” is  very pretty, and you could enjoy it just as fantasy word-music — decoration not declaration or anything much. I enjoyed the poem from first reading on that basis. In times of trouble, why not some dancing fantasy?

A Fairy Song

Easy chords & simple arrangement, and like many of my Parlando Project pieces, offered here in case other singers want to sing it.

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However, after waking in the middle of the night last night I read the play The Land of Hearts Desire  that this poem appears in twice, introduced inside the play by a fairy child. Let me quickly summarize the plot: a young bride is beguiled to take in a beautiful child who comes upon their rural poor Irish cottage at night. She gives the child food and warmth, and in return the child reminds her that her loving marriage means bondage to grinding tasks of life and family duties that will have no release until death — but if the young bride comes away with the beautiful child to the otherland of the faery, they will have nothing but carefree joy.

It’s a commonplace that fairy stories have psychological depth, and so to my mind in the middle of my night, I was ready to take this one in beyond idle fantasy. I hold for the loving marriage. I hold for duty. Ever the freedom and fate for breakage, ever the poverty or wealth of what we can give and bring — beside and knowing that — I’m for that above music and magic. And readers, I love music and poetry a great deal.

That poet who plays saxophone in his jazz combo? I waited until an hour before the show started, things were clear, I went off and saw them play. I was worried: jazz plus poetry is a formula that might each reduce the additive audience, but an appreciative 50 or so showed up scattered about the theater. A stranger a couple of seats over thought the keyboard player sang like Chet Baker — and yes he did. The playing was fine, and at my age I might have danced, but the fixed theater seat aisles would have kept a dancing ring from forming.

The next day I had what turned out to be a bit over an hour to find music from “The wind that blows out the gates of the day.”** I did so and quickly recorded this simple setting with acoustic guitar of Yeats’ “A Fairy Song.”   You can hear it with the player gadget below. No gadget seen? This highlighted link will play it too.

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*If you’re following the Elon-Musk-takes-Twitter farce of Internet doors opening and closing amid much bumbling, you may be curious about my take on this. No time today. There are some interesting people there, including a small poetry community — that size like all poetry communities. Twitter’s design, which long predates Musk, is conducive to folks like me with unknown blocks of time from a few minutes to sleepless doomscrolling hours. I personally find it impossible to keep up with WordPress on my phone, even though I treasure the blogs I follow when I can find time at a larger computer screen.

**If you’re interested in a deep dive into the Irish faery mythology that Yeats was using in his play and poem, this web page will give you quite a bit to go on.

The Birmingham Vulcan (for MLK)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

The Holiday

Monday is Martin Luther King Day in the United States, which I take as an occasion to honor the man but also to honor the American promise that changes for the better can be achieved, albeit via earnest efforts and personal costs.

At my age King and the mid-century struggle for what was then called “Civil Rights” were not history — they were current events. I can tell you that despite the somewhat anodyne holiday we celebrate this year, these things were in King’s time as fractious and deadly as any issues today. Some of the immediate issues in the struggle were things we might now assume are self-evident, equivalent civic rights for Black Americans: the rights to vote, to travel, to sit in a restaurant, to speak for change. I assure you these things were controversial, and that it was easy to find short and long arguments as to why they were impossible or contraindicated by the inherent and/or empirical nature of Black or white America. Those things, or so it was widely said, were impossible, impractical, ill advised, a poor use of resources, against human nature.

Are any of my readers thinking that the consideration of history including so many instances of injustices is depressing? Or what of the fears that this will cause inordinate shame? Let me then point out on this holiday: societies can advance, costs borne in the struggle for those advances will be honored. On July 4th we celebrate the improbable founding of our country as “A republic if we can keep it.” On Memorial Day we celebrate great losses to preserve that country. On your choice of Labor’s Day we say our nation takes broad-based work. On Martin Luther King Day we can see all those things too. while being reminded that King was not a President or General, but a man who represented and gained his power from us, American citizens, asking adamant with the effectiveness of soul-force, for our country to stop doing what harms us, to start doing better. Isn’t that a fine thing to celebrate?

The Birmingham Vulcan Illustration

The 56-foot-tall Birmingham Vulcan exhibited before installation overlooking the city. How the iron man looked around the time MLK was in Birmingham. How it looks today atop it’s base and observation tower. African ancestor: Ptah. The MLK memorial statue.

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The Song

Are any readers still reading who feel what I wrote above is jejune? If you’re still here, thank you for your patience, but I’m about to try your patience some more. “The Birmingham Vulcan (for MLK)”  has never found an audience, and there are times when I can see why. I have an unreasonable love for unusual connections — things that in my mind connect but to most seem trivial. You’d think poetry might allow some license in such things, but that’s not so. When I showed this to my former group of poets when we were all alive together a few years ago, this piece was to them confusing and without a shred of emotional connection. My takeaway? I had portrayed nothing of the wide-ranging connections to them then. It’s gone through a couple of revisions since, likely improving things, but the core problem is that this piece requires a somewhat unique combination of knowledge to make sense.

So, let me take the usually foolish step of providing a brief decoder ring to the mythological story “The Birmingham Vulcan”  tells. Poets and songwriters: you should know this is a bad idea. “The Waste Land”  and “American Pie*”  aside, few readers like the impression that the poem knows something they don’t.

My poet group first-readers stopped right off at the second word. “Who’s this Solon?” Short answer, he’s a big macher for classical Greek Athens and it’s system of government. “What’s he doing in Africa?” Plato told a story in one of his Symposiums that Solon went to Egypt, and the learned priests there told him that he had no idea about the history of his region. Now this is an interesting story choice in that the Greeks were famous for thinking they were exceptional, and here are these foreign Africans telling them they knew more about history than they did.

“OK, so who’s this iron man?” He’s Hephaestus to the Greeks, but to the Egyptians he was Ptah,** and to the Romans he was Vulcan. All three of these ancient gods were makers and metalworkers. Hephaestus has some additional particulars: he was segregated from the other Olympians, was described as deformed or ugly, and in a connection that will come up later, he was also the patron of weavers.

Birmingham arrives in the second stanza. When I said this was connected to MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”  that rang a bell, but what’s lesser known is the reason the southern American city that jail was in was called Birmingham. They wanted to be an industrial city dealing with iron, steel, and metalwork, like unto Birmingham England. And yes, they actually erected a giant statue of Hephaestus/Vulcan at his forge to overlook their town early in the 20th century.

Did the statue’s maker make him clearly Afro-American? Nope, I don’t think the city fathers*** would have paid for any such depiction of Vulcan. But sometime between the World Wars they painted this iron statue brown, either to hide the corrosion or to make the connection to iron more plain.

Third stanza: segregation and regulation to lower paid jobs. One of the “Well, you don’t understand, it just works better that way” situations that King went to Birmingham to oppose.

Fourth stanza: King arrives. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”  is as wide-ranging as an Emerson essay in terms of references, but I loved this little noted connection: King was in a city of foundries and chose as an example of soul-force civil disobedience the men from the biblical book of Daniel thrown into a fiery furnace for disobeying the ruler.

Fifth stanza: “Letter from Birmingham Jail”  is not written to dispute overt racists or the segregationists. Rather it was addressed to ostensible supporters who raised objections to getting on with stopping what was hurting the country and offending justice. The non-segregationist position was to object on a wide range of fronts to that civil rights movement — some with practical, strategic or logistical concerns, some seeking to assuage those whose “culture” and “traditions” might be offended. And of course, many too were silent on those issues out of fear, ignorance, or distaste for struggle. King spoke to those too in his letter.

The original version of this piece was called “The Cord of Life,”  a phrase mysteriously used in King’s letter, and one I loved for its connection to Hephaestus, and so it remains in this stanza.

I trimmed some stanzas as the poem went through revision that directly referred to the infamous Birmingham Sunday terrorist bombing of a church during the civil rights struggle in Birmingham. A great many poems and songs have already sung of this and of the four schoolchildren killed going to Sunday School, so I hope it’s still remembered. That act was so offensive that the terrible sacrifice helped move public opinion. The sixth stanza is all that remains of that matter, and I still feel the song is a bit long, but I left this one in so that there’s some motivation for the Vulcan statue to magically speak in the concluding stanza.

The last stanza as the silent statue finally speaks has been worked over several times. I still hope it has some power on this day. You can hear my sung version of “The Birmingham Vulcan (for MLK)”  with the player below, or for those who don’t see the player, with this highlighted link.

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*I admire the former and am generally uninterested in the latter. So even for the exceptions this doesn’t always work.

**Ptah, venerated particularly in Memphis. As in the delightful Talking Heads lyric “Cities”  got away with it: “Memphis, home of Elvis and the Ancient Greeks.” That song, like mine, is briefly referring to the “African origin” theory/myth that assuming that Western culture started with the Greeks ignores that African cultures may have informed the Greeks.

***The writer’s group, poets of good taste, disliked my play on words “foundering men.”

Don’t Have To (Now You’re Done)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Here’s a well-worn trope you’ll see somewhere as the year 2022 ends. Someone will write or say:

“2022 — would it ever end? Glad to see that sorry year done.”

Troubling and bad things happened this past year. I know. I’m a grateful and privileged person, but still this year has had stressful and even frightening things in my family. And if we are to look fully at our nations and the world? Distress might seem a slighting word there.

Here’s another trope, one portrayed in many a cartoon around the New Years, one old enough to be old when I was a child: an aged man with a 2022 sash around his stooped body, and a young smiling toddler just able to stand and show the New Year 2023 banner arrayed across its torso. When I was a child, even a younger adult, I always looked fondly at that baby with the New Year’s sash. What wonders, what new things will the upcoming year bring? What burdens will be set down with the expiration of the old year? Even if I didn’t know how the balance of the forthcoming year would settle with the debts of the passing one, I was looking forward, closer in age to that toddler than to that geriatric December 31st.

Now that I’m an old man, that expiring year is closer to me than that tiny child — and it’s not just years that expire or stoop with age. Since last winter, long time alternative Parlando Project voice and LYL Band-mate Dave Moore and I did our part to say goodbye to some colleagues in poetry, and we both have had some family deaths. No wonder that there’s been a good number of elegies presented by this Project lately.

I’ve had the rough tracks of today’s elegy since last spring, the best of which was a vocal track that Dave laid down as part of a session we did in memory of poet Kevin FitzPatrick. It was only this December as the year was coming to a close that I found an idea of what to do with Dave’s song. His words in “Don’t Have To”  are all about the routine troubles, tasks, and stresses of life mixed with the aspirations we poets dream to grasp. Kevin, who wrote about work and labor, and who labored and worked at his writing, had all of that.

Don't Have Too

This was Dave Moore’s own corrected manuscript I worked from to complete today’s piece.

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It struck me that this is a great life-lot of things, a glorious jumble — Kevin’s poetry that I was privileged to experience, the care and responsibility that his family, friends, colleagues, and clients were sheltered by. If the First Noble Truth of the Buddha is that life is dukkha sacca,*  then noticing a cessation of dukkha  is apprehending the punching out of the timeclock of a lifetime too. Might it be worthwhile for us on New Year’s Eve to notice, or even thank, the aged 2022 of our families, friends, colleagues, and ourselves for their labors however strained and imperfect they were? When we, like the year 2022, are gone, others will take up that imperfect and sometimes thwarted work.

That thought arose as I took Dave’s vocals from last spring and using the modern tools of audio editing, I sped up their tempo to increase urgency. For music I started with a rollicking piano part which I triggered on my little plastic keyboard but made sound impossibly knuckle-busting by invoking an arpeggiator that kept the sixteenth notes flying. After establishing that tempo, I had to give my fingers a workout on the bass to lay down a bass track, and frankly I was running to catch up the whole length of the song. I added a little vibraphone and guitar to add some visiting outside timbres to the dominant piano and that completed the unusual elegy “Don’t Have To (Now You’re Done)”  you can hear with the player below. Don’t see any player? This highlighted link is an alternative way to hear it.

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*A complicated term to translate, though the simple translation of “life is suffering” is common. Properly, it includes the sense of stress, unease, and dissatisfaction as well.

The House of Hospitalities

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s Christmas morning, and besides spending time with my little family, I spent Christmas Eve wrapping a little present to myself and to you, reader and listener. It’s a poem by British poet Thomas Hardy, who has supplied several texts for pieces by this Project. “The House of Hospitalities”  is wistful, even melancholy, but I think its heart is in memories — which after all, each Christmas gives and becomes. That’s what we seek out, make, and gift wrap: memories of each other, of each other’s gifts and presents.

Hardy writes using some older words and phrases, a few seeking the rhyme here, and the nostalgic sentiment in his poem might remind us that he lived, and lived past, the Victorian age in Great Britain when some of the Christmas traditions that are still part of observances of this day emerged. There’s hearth, food, company, and music in this Christmas memory, but like a good 20th Century Modernist Hardy tells this story in things, not labels. Note the absence of words naming emotions in this old man’s poem. Oh, “tired” appears in Hardy’s second stanza — but I can testify as a fellow old man that tired is not a verb or adjective, it becomes a very noun in later life. His word-music is graceful, but careful readers of Hardy’s text* that I sing here will notice that I modified it a bit to fit the song music I made and sang this with.

New Year's Gifts

Music as a gift: later today I’ll be going out to hear the Midwestern Jazz combo The Bad Plus, a present from my wife.

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While other members of my little household baked cookies, I worked on composing that music for “The House of Hospitalities.”   It’s a simple tune, but Hardy’s words and my sensibilities didn’t ask for more than that. I played it on an electric guitar as I sang — electric oddly, so that I could keep the sound lower and separate from the household’s other holiday tasks, for Hardy’s poem is solitary save for memories. Then late on Christmas Eve I worked on adding the bowed strings Hardy mentions in the viol that is now home to wood-worms, some treated electric piano, and the tiny lead instrument of the piece you can hear: glockenspiel. I finished after midnight’s noon, Christmas having entered in the dark.

This morning I give it to you to unwrap. You can play it with the graphical player below that most will see. Don’t see that? No problem, here’s an alternative highlighted link that will play my performance.

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*I need to thank the Fourteen Lines blog who introduced me to this poem of Hardy’s this month. Lots of variety in the poems they share there. Here’s a link to their presentation of it with Hardy’s original text.