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Millay’s Sonnet 43

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Edna St. Vincent Millay was another poet who offered little to the “New Criticism” critics who largely set the canon for the 20th Century, even though her career, which covered the first half of the 20th Century, ran almost exactly through the same time as Eliot, Frost, Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens, and even though she achieved significant readership and a level of awards and accolades while living.

What was their problem with Edna St. Vincent Millay? Well her popularity would be a negative in some lights. In this regard, critics are often no different than the record store clerks of my own day, whose estimation of any indie band would inevitably drop as soon as they achieved a widely-played record. And there’s the “her” and “she” problem. The level of disbelief of the idea of a woman artist probably varied among these critics, but literature was still a very male world at that time and unconscious prejudices are a given. But even if we skip those two, frankly illegitimate, factors, there is the issue of Millay’s plainspokenness.

St Vincent

Annie Clark performs as “St. Vincent,” Edna St. Vincent Millay is on the right. Google carefully!
Clark has said the stage name came from a NYC hospital, but if that’s so, it’s a remarkable coincidence.

Odd isn’t that? This value that you might rate highly in friend was held as low regard by the New Critics, who likely thought it common and unremarkable. A Millay poem typically says exactly what it means, right out. There may be images, but they might not pass Imagist muster. They aren’t stark omens whose meaning is felt and then deciphered, they may be more like the illustrative images the Imagists wanted to leave behind. Millay’s all tell and too little show for them.

And Millay’s language often seems stuck in the 19th Century too. Some lyrical poets like Yeats and Frost adopted Modernist tropes and were able to make their rhymed and metrical poems sound more like contemporary speech. Millay sometimes seemed to be reading from a somewhat musty library book when composing her poems.

The most extended image in “Sonnet 43”  is a bare winter tree, which could be a borrowed image, or a homage, and I choose to manifest the later in this performance.

Can our modern (post-modern) age free up some respect for Edna St. Vincent Millay? I think so. With contemporary poets, we now sometimes value plainspokenness. And the cluster of things that Millay spoke plainly and honestly about include love, sex, and desire.

This sonnet was published in 1920, it’s nearing a century old. If we slide over some of the 19th Century “poetic diction” (something I found easy enough to do when performing this) it’s as honest and as nuanced report on the state of a heart as anything written then or now.

And if one must have ambiguities for art’s sake, honesty can contain that too. Some read this poem as bitter, or a lonely-hearts club statement, or as regret for a life that Millay’s time would’ve called promiscuous. That’s not how I understood it to perform it. I think the speaker is recalling an active love life they rather enjoyed. They reveal themselves (honestly) as something of a sensualist. As the Petrarchan sonnet wraps up its octet, the speaker allows a touch of regret about those lovers who turned to the speaker at midnight “with a cry.” What did the speaker offer them? I think the closing lines say some “summer,” a summer that “sang in me”—that is, that summer is not something the speaker intentionally gave or offered, and the speaker doubts that the muses of that summer offering will still speak through her. William Carlos Williams—unlike Millay, following all the Imagist rules—touches also on the caprices of summer and fulfilled desires in “It Is a Small Plant,”  but some are more accustomed to a male author speaking ambiguously about the honest incursions and boundaries of desire.

Perhaps this poem benefits with some listeners in being heard performed in a male voice? I can’t say for sure on that.

Among the 20th Century admirers of Millay’s verse were my father (who grew up on the 19th Century Longfellow and the like, so Millay’s 19th Century diction was no bar) and a distant cousinoid of mine, the modern American theater pioneer Susan Glaspell.

I rather like the musical accompaniment for this one. I worked quite a bit on the drum part trying to bring out different colors, and for the bass I was able to supplement the electric bass with some bowed contra-bass, which is one one of my favorite sounds in the world. Ironically, Millay started out wanting to be a concert pianist, and the top line here is one of my naïve piano parts. To hear me perform Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnet 43”  aka “What lips my lips have kissed…”  use the player below.

For the American Hendrix

~ Frank Hudson ~ 4 Comments

Today’s piece uses my own words to present some images regarding American musician and songwriter Jimi Hendrix. Just like William Carlos Williams meditation on a small plant last time, I pretty much follow the famous Imagist rules: direct treatment of the thing, no unnecessary words, and musical phrasing instead of mechanical metrical feet.

Each one of the images opens up what I hope is a rich question. It’s my hope that the resulting poem and audio piece assists you in remembering these questions that I see as posed in Hendrix’s life. Here is the poem I wrote and used with today’s music:

 

For the American Hendrix

 

And then he laid the guitar down, and set it afire

Which seems silly or sacred, depending on the art

He had only to keep himself alive, which would kill him.

 

He took every stop on the three 21 fret train tracks,

Slid between the rails, rode them underwater,

Understood the train-whistle called his ancestors

 

Living in the amplifiers, that he could not shake out,

That he could not know, that were here,

Before European words, that were here,

 

Brought in shackles, that were here,

Building in electricity, that were here

Now, for children who did not know they were children.

 

Voluntary orphans, immigrants discovering new worlds,

Walking on squatters’ land, not forgetting to bring their chains.

 

Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix plays for hippies in 1967. Do you envy them or feel superior to them?

In the first stanza, I remind us that Jimi Hendrix was a consummate showman, and that he used showmanship to wrest attention for his art, specifically when he appeared at his first significant concert as a bandleader at the famous Monterey Pop Festival and burned a guitar at the conclusion of a flamboyant act. I present this performance as being consistent to Hendrix’s commitment to his art, as a rock’n’roll musician, an itinerant life with associated dangers, which in his case lead to short life and career. Worth it? Necessary for success?


Hendrix ends his first American show as a bandleader with a sacrifice to his art.

The next stanza acclaims Hendrix for expanding the vocabulary of the electric guitar, using an image of the six-string guitar fretboard, which he transcended with notes beyond the temperament of the frets and though the use of feedback where the notes from the amplifier speaker reflect back to the guitar in the musician’s hands producing sustaining overtones that can be difficult to control but produce extraordinary effects. The question here: these sounds can be harsh, discordant, even painful, but do they too have a necessity?

Next stanza: this feedback is presented as Hendrix’s ancestry: part indigenous, native-American; part Afro-American, a descendent of slaves. This makes Hendrix the point where two arcs of American heritage cross: those that were brought to American against their will, like as to livestock; and those that that were already here and were supplanted by brutal or conniving invaders. The questions here should ask themselves, don’t you think?

The final lines move from Hendrix, to his audience while he was alive and performing: largely white, largely young, many taking a hippie bohemian voyage I liken to America’s famous immigrants, choosing to leave the world of their homes for some promised new world that cannot, and will not, be exactly as promised.

Whatever generation you reside in, you cannot get on a boat or plane to visit another generation’s time; but when you look at a picture or video of a crowd watching Hendrix play, consider those faces. They may be distracted by the day, transfixed or stunned, ignorant and seeking, intoxicated but intent, pleased and puzzled—they may not look like Hendrix, many will seem by their faces to not share his heritage, and none can know the depth of that heritage—and yet, they are dealing with the experience of his art. I ask you not to feel superior or inferior to them from the position of your age or the accident of your generation, but to instead to look to your own heart and ask if there you find some blindness or power, and then to ask, as the concluding words of “For the American Hendrix”  does: when coming to your new land, did you carry with you chains?

47 years ago today, Jimi Hendrix died, perhaps alone, perhaps ignored by his companion of itinerant convenience, trying to continue his art, ignorant of the strength of European sleeping pills.  To hear my performance of “For the American Hendrix,”  use the player below.

It Is a Small Plant

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

September 17th is the birthday of the American Modernist poet and physician William Carlos Williams, and today’s piece uses the words from one of his poems “It Is a Small Plant,”  the best known selection from a sequence of poems Williams called “The Flowers of August.”

William_Carlos_Williams_passport_photograph_1921

Just because you have have a passport doesn’t mean you have to move overseas.

 

Unlike some other American Modernists—including two poets he met and befriended while a student at the University of Pennsylvania, H.D. and Ezra Pound—Williams spent most of his formative writing years in the United States, much of it in his native state of New Jersey where he practiced as a pediatrician. Like his fellow stay-at-home Modernist Carl Sandburg, Williams wrote poems the followed the new Imagist rules, at least at the start, finding them useful in breaking away from the old poetic styles.

One of those Imagist rules, the first one in fact, was “direct treatment of the ‘thing.” That doesn’t mean that you just directly state the message from your heart. Rather, it means that you honor and hone the image(s) that represent your meaning as palpable thing, not as mere poetic decoration for your words. “It Is a Small Plant” demonstrates that by spending nearly the entire poem presenting a description of a flowering plant.

In the series “The Flowers of August,”  each of Williams’ other poems are titled with the name of a particular meadow or pasture flower, but not this one. So, I suspect this is meaningful. The description of the flower here sounds a bit to me like the common bluebell, but it’s possible that he diverged from botany in service of one of the poem’s images, or that the omission of the flower name in the title for this poem made a point for him.

The other, more important, mystery is who the “her” that is inspecting the flower with the poet is, the her who regards the subject flower as “a little plant without leaves.” At first. I wondered if it was perhaps a young girl looking at the flowers, but I now believe that it’s the “her” featured at the poem’s close: summer. If that’s so, that is the reason the flower has no name, as the human name doesn’t exist for nature and for nature’s incarnation as summer. And in the course of the poem, summer then too cannot care about the anthropomorphic desires presented in Williams’ presentation of the image of the flower.

Violet

Unlike William Blake, William Carlos Williams didn’t see Heaven in a wildflower,
but he did see nature observing himself observing the flower.

I’m not a quick understander of poetry. In working on this piece, I read Williams’ poem, enjoying some lines in themselves. The ostensible subject seemed to fit with the season and coincidentally with some other pieces I’m working on—but I wasn’t sure what it meant. In the course of fitting it with music, recording the vocal, and then tweaking and mixing the music, I lived with this poem for a good part of the last couple of days, reading or hearing the words over and over.

If I had been too concerned with its meaning, I might have stuck with my initial supposition, that it was child apprehending the flower. I was pre-disposed to that on first reading, having briefly re-meeting Margot Kreil earlier this week, a poet who wrote an excellent poem called “Weeds”  which featured just such an image. But I was more concerned with getting the drums right, playing the bass, setting up delay divisions for the guitar lines, and marshalling my limited keyboard skills for the soft keyboard parts, and then making that all fit together.

Through you don’t have to go through those composition and production steps, this points out again one of the things that music can do to change the context for words when it’s combined with them. While music can emphasize some mood or presentation of the words, in the same way that suspense music makes a film clip of a character walking down an unremarkable hallway scary, it can also offer its art as a distraction from worrying about meaning too soon with a poem.

To hear my performance of William Carlos Williams’ “It Is a Small Plant,”  use the player below.

 

 

Somewhere or Other

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Today’s audio piece is another by Christina Rossetti, connected through family with the Victorian art and literary movement that called itself the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In their painting and artwork, the Pre-Raphaelites often appeal to me. The paintings sometimes have a stunning, oversaturated palette; and they are fond of symbolic and esoteric subjects which fill the paintings with interesting details.

John Melhuish Strudwick When Apples Were Golden and Songs Were Sweet

Eb Bb , Ab Eb , then Fm Fsus4 Fm, and Ab Eb Ebsus4 Eb—flat keys are murder
on guitar, just so Frank can play simple black key stuff on keyboards

Many associated with the PRB wrote poetry as well, but when I’ve gone looking for pieces I can present as part of the Parlando Project, the brothers in the brotherhood just didn’t do much for me. Surprisingly, the poet who did was Christina Rossetti.  I don’t recall if she was even included in the “New Criticism” curated English literature anthologies of my school-age youth. She isn’t a poet with a lot of flash and filigree. A poem like today’s has not a single arresting image, and its language is simple too.  Using the criteria of the Modernists who came to dominate the assessment of poetry in the 20th Century, this poem should have nothing to recommend it.

So, what does it have or do, why did I bother to write some music for it and perform it for you?   Well, first it has a refreshing modesty of expression. This is a song of longing from first to last, a universal human experience. And the subject of the longing, is it for an earthly partner, the age-old “when will the right one come along” wish? Or is it for an otherworldly, completing partner, a presence beyond the moon and stars? Despite Rossetti’s homey words, it could be either, and the alteration of “near or far” with “far or near” in the 2nd and 3rd verses encourages us to see it both ways.

If one must choose which supposition, I lean to the spiritual object, and if so, the image, such as it is, if off-screen here: earthly love may stand for the longing for religious meaning and connection. The last couplet, the dying leaves falling on “turf grown green” is strangely incoherent, and it reminds me of some of images or rebirth and salvation in British folklore, leading me that way.

But if could also be a song of simple earthly longing for a suitable partner. Adding music to Rossetti’s “Something or Other”  both adds decoration to the simple words and allows the listener to relax in that ambiguity without a need for an immediate conclusion.

John Melhuish Strudwick - Saint Cecilia

See, E flat is so easy on piano, even saints can play it.
Both of today’s paintings are by  Pre-Raphaelite John Melhuish Strudwick

 

Today’s music for Rossetti’s poem combines acoustic guitar with some cello and strings integrated with a couple of piano parts in the background. It’s another short one, so go ahead and use  the player below to listen to it.

 

 

Let Us Live and Love

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

A while back here there were several episodes where we discussed songwriters as literary figures, using the springboard of Bob Dylan getting the Nobel Prize for Literature. Dylan was the third songwriter to receive this award, preceded by William Butler Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore. But the Nobel prize is not really all that old, and the idea of the singer-songwriter is older. We know little about how the ancient Greeks performed their poetry, but accounts consistently say that it was accompanied by music, and in the case of at least Sappho of Lesbos, it’s specified that the lyricist played the lyre as well. Similarly in ancient Hebrew, David and his harp, or the west African griots and their Koras, and so on.

So, despite the idea that lyrics sung to music mark an inferior art, or that performing poetry to music is an affectation hardly to be endured, history says this was not always so. Of course, the way it’s done can please or not please, and it’s still possible that such performances are an obsolete form that we’ve now superseded with hugely popular and culturally significant poetry chapbooks and small press poetry collections—I kid! I kid!

Today’s piece is by just such a singer-songwriter, an Englishman born in 1567, Thomas Campion. He wrote his lyrics, wrote music for them, and was an accomplished lutenist, so the chances are that he was discovered by John Hammond and played the authentic Elizabethan blues music he misheard from 78 r.p.m. discs of Catullus. Well no, doubting Thomas, once more I Kyd.

Thomas Campion with Lute

Poetic Campions compose. Thomas Campion with his lute.
If he looks glum it’s because it’s two centuries until Martin Guitars is established, and 350 years until the Telecaster.

He did write lovely songs, in a style I can’t come up with a way to present. “Let Us Live and Love”  was one. You can hear it sung beautifully to his tune here. So instead of exploring my counter-tenor range, I’m going to go with a sort of loose skiffley blues in my performance.

I’m going to lean on my blues audacity hard here, because the poem is addressed to the singer’s lover, Lesbia. Beavis and Butthead style giggles are breaking out in the back, I can hear you.  Turns out Campion took the lover’s name and the idea for his first verse of his lyric from a Latin poem by classic Roman poet Catullus, before taking off on his own thoughts on the matter. Classics scholars explain this by saying the Sappho of Lesbos’ association in classical times was more at a widely experienced lover, not necessarily a lesbian one.

Catullus Comforting Lesbia over the Death of Her Pet Sparrow and Writing an Ode

OK, OK, forget the one about you might as well have sex with me.
How about this, we’re all going to die, just like that bird, and…

 

Another category “Let Me Live and Love”  could be put in would be a “Carpe Diem” poem, which is not the Department of Natural Resources limit on the number of bullheads you can catch, but is more Latin meaning: “seize the day,” which in the case of poems usually doesn’t mean seize the day for fishing. Instead, Carpe Diem poems usually offer this proposition: “We’re all going to die, so you might as well have sex with me.” Seriously. Poets have actually made that seem like a smooth line.

The twist Campion puts on Carpe Diem is to bend it around a bit. His song has it that you already love me, and that makes the idea that we’re all going to die bearable. That’s at least a little more flattering.

To hear my performance of Campion’s “Let Us Live and Love”  use the player below.

 

The Heart of the Woman

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

There’s two things that attracted me to T. E. Hulme, the lesser-known Modernist poet and theoretician that I’ve featured a few times this summer. The first is the sense in his poetry and critical writings of the limits of humankind. The other is his poetry’s surprising modesty and restraint, something embodied in the very brevity of its poetic expression and his images linking the mundane and the cosmic.
 
This was a man who wanted to overthrow hundreds of years of poetic tradition, and a person whose stubbornness kept him in trouble with authority figures throughout his youth, and yet Hulme expresses himself in these spare lines, as if the first lesson he’s teaching himself is to know his own limits. This seems to be Hulme’s problem with Romanticism as he saw and opposed it: humankind is not limitless, though our imagination says otherwise.
 
Today’s piece, William Butler Yeats’ “The Heart of the Woman”  moves in opposition to that outlook, but not in opposition to that expression.
 
Here in North America, many in the southern region are spending this week either cleaning up from a massive hurricane or clenching their jaws in anticipation of an even larger one due to strike this weekend. Peaceful, Rousseauean nature this ain’t. Hobbes is is a weatherman.

Hurricaine Irma

“Come in she said, I’ll give you, shelter from the storm.”

Yeats’ poem is as measured and modest as one of Hulme’s, though it is rhymed and metrical. When one is a good as Yeats is at that, one hardly notices the form. 12 lines, not even a sonnet in length. Like Hulme, this is no great ode of endless argument. On the face of it, it’s a love song, a basic trope of Romanticism, the reason we talk about human attraction and pairing as “romantic.” Its images are centered on a couple embracing.

Yeats by Sargent
Why Mr. Yeats, I didn’t realize you were, well, dreamy, without your glasses

But look closely in those dozen lines. The woman who’s singing it, has left religion (“prayer and rest”) and family, and has followed a lover’s invitation into what is introduced as “gloom”. Merely the dark of night?

No, in Yeats’ lovely line, darkness is found inside the “Shadowy blossom” of her hair which will hide the lovers from the “bitter storm.” Now we are fully in the Romantic world, where our own darkness may be willful, wishful, blissful, ignorance of the “hiding hair and dewy (blurry) eyes.”

Are there any more Romantic and romantic three lines as Yeats’ final three that conclude this piece? If there are, I can’t recall any at the moment. That the simple murmurs of human breath can seem to equal a hurricane’s—is that glorious or folly or both?
 
In the spirit of defying human limits, this is the first time you’re going to hear me sing a Parlando Project piece acapella. And though Yeats’ poem doesn’t rule out the same romantic faith on the part of the “he” in this poem, I’m somewhat troubled by the idea that romantic devotion is presented here as female, from the poem’s title onward, so I’ll undercut that by singing this. My less-able singing voice is one reason that we chant or speak-sing a lot of Parlando Project material, but my young son’s carefree acapella singing is reminding me of the value in the singing voice. To hear “The Heart of the Woman,”  use the player gadget below.

Trenches St Eloi

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I was talking with my wife this weekend. She’s reading a memoir about current military deployments (and redeployments) and she said a Wilfred Owen poem was mentioned in it.

“Well, World War I was the last war to be covered by poets.” I replied. Which is not strictly true of course. World War II generated a number of poems I’d love to share here, but I have no time to try to track down the rights issues to use words that still may be under copyright. And I suspect other wars have generated other poems since then, even if I don’t know many of them. But that’s not what I meant.

World War I was the last war to be covered by poets.

What I meant was that WWI was the last war in which a considerable portion of the English-speaking public looked to poetry for meaning and consolation regarding the battles and their losses. I’m not sure if they looked to poetry more than journalism or political oratory, but I believe that poetry then still operated somewhat in the same theater as these other words when addressing current events. Longer forms of literature, such as novels, tend to lag events substantially, changing or fixing our view of things afterwards, instead of framing it while the picture is still moving. I think of two epithets, for journalism and then for poetry: “The first draft of history” and “The news that stays news.”

I think of two epithets, for journalism and then for poetry: “The first draft of history” and “The news that stays news.”

This morning, my son wanted to show me this brilliantly parsed cartoon summary of the Iliad. The narrator there has a lot of fun with the meandering and seemingly arbitrary plot of that Greek epic poem, but it struck me that it’s possible that the ur-version of the Iliad might have been written contemporaneously to the events, only to be shaped afterward like a collection of old news dispatches repurposed for later use.
 
So, this is a long tradition in Europe from Homer to the war poets of WWI, for the battles and the experience of the battles being reported in poetry.

Why has this use of poetry, to report current and crucial events, fallen away? The first explanation that occurs to me is we have other media to do this now. Film, radio, video, and now cellphones capture the moment without pretending to rely on subjective art. The Imagists who forged their poetic theory in the years around WWI, would seem to have lost their territory as their theory won the war. A cellphone or nose-cam video of the bomb exploding follows two out of the three famous Imagist rules: The “thing” is treated directly, there are no unnecessarily words (indeed there may be no discernable words at all), while more or less ignoring the less-noticed third rule (the one we at the Parlando Project keep pointing to and speaking about), the one that asks for musical phrasing.

Hulme's company in the trenches at St Eloi
This photo shows men in T. E. Hulme’s Artillery company at St. Eloi in 1915

  
Poetry, like painting, is no longer necessary for reportage. Modernists often chose to respond to this by a movement into abstraction, conveying thoughts in motion and novel conceptions, seeking to demonstrate what can be meaningful without meaning.

Today’s piece “Trenches: St. Eloi”  is attributed to T. E. Hulme, a man who helped form this Modernist revolution and died before he could live in it. I say “attributed” because, like Homer, he did not write it down. The exact attribution is “Abbreviated from the Conversation of Mr TEH” when it was published by Ezra Pound, and it may have been Pound who chose what to transcribe or how to lay out the transcription. My guess is that some of the language sounds like Hulme (the unusual, but so perfect word choice of “pottering,” the homey image of trench soldiers strolling compared to the shoppers on the busy London street of Piccadilly), but the overall arrangement sounds like Pound to me.
 
We know pretty much the where and when that is being talked about, more than we know of the actual history of Troy. Hulme got a chance to relate these details while in an English hospital after being wounded in the spring of 1915 in trench warfare in St. Eloi. He recovered, returned to the war, and to his eventual meeting with a German artillery shell that ended his life.

T. E. Hulme may have said it, Ezra Pound may have edited it and written it down, but to hear me perform it with my musical accompaniment, use the player below.

Fall 2017 Parlando Project Top 10

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

It’s time to report the most popular audio pieces posted here over this increasingly busy summer. Before I get to this season’s Top 10 countdown, I want to thank everyone who has listened, followed, liked, or shared our posts and audio pieces on social media or on other blogs. I don’t have time (or perhaps the talents) to do all the promotion that some other blogs do, so it’s the kind words and enthusiastic work that you readers/listeners do that has spread the news about this combination of various words with various music.

Lots of changes from our last Top 10, so let’s get started. There should be a player gadget after each piece on the list, so you can easily hear the audio combining those words with music we create and perform as part of the Parlando Project.

10th place? Turns out it’s a three-way tie for 10, and since the three pieces demonstrate the variety I seek to present here, let’s just dispense with tie-breakers and list all three audio pieces that are tied at number 10..

“Sonnet 18”  is, so far, our only Shakespeare selection. Shakespeare is, or course, inescapable, and setting Shakespeare’s sonnets to music isn’t a rare thing either, but one of the good things that comes from the Shakespeare phenomenon is that a listener can hear a lot of different takes on one text. I choose to bring out the brag in this one.

“A Summer’s Night”  uses a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first widely published Afro-American poet who died tragically young in 1906. A lot of Dunbar’s success during his lifetime was with dialect pieces which he had ambiguous feelings about. He sometimes said that he wished to be known more for his poetic work in standard English, something that “A Summer’s Night”  demonstrates.

 

“On the Troop Ship To Gallipoli”  demonstrates a small bit of artistic courage on my part to pay tribute to the real-world courage of Rupert Brooke, who died in service to his country in WWI. The “Great War” redrew the world’s maps, overturned several empires, and it also drew a literary dividing line, as post-war poetry embraced Modernism which made the poetic stylings of Brooke seem decades old only a few years after he wrote them. Those who lived through that time often adapted to the new ideas of modern poetry, but Brooke never had that chance. So, in this piece I recast a late fragment of Brooke’s words as if it was an Imagist poem.

In 9th place, we have “Zalka Peetruza (who was christened Lucy Jane),”  which uses a poem by journalist and poet Roy Dandridge, who coincidently like Dunbar, was another Ohio Afro-American. By evidence of this poem, Dandridge deserves to be better known than he is, as it’s a tart observation of the art of getting over while Black, in this case by passing one’s self off as exotic.

8th place goes to a bit of a surprise, my slightly Beefheartian musical setting of two sections of Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons.”  Don VanVliet (Capt. Beefheart) and Gertrude Stein were both uncompromising artists who hoed their own rows, so I viscerally made the connection in creating this piece.

7th is Sir Walter Raleigh’s damning litany “The Lie.”  It’s a poem I’ve loved since my youth and I don’t think one has to add much musical vengeance to amplify Raleigh’s words. 400 years old, and still pissed off.

6th slot goes to one of my translations, Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Dark Interval.”  I did this translation a few years ago, and it was intended to be a somewhat freer variation. As I learn more, I think my assumptions on what the poem was getting at were wrong, but this looser version got 20 more listens that it’s more literal translation I also presented here this summer.

Halfway to number 1, at number 5, is Parlando Project alternative reader Dave Moore’s tale “I Was Not Yet Awake.”  Dave also plays many of the keyboard parts you hear here, including the organ part on this.  “I Was Not Yet Awake”  is short for a story, but longer than many pieces we present here. Dave’s story is so well told that it still managed to pick up a lot of listens this summer.

At number 4, dropping down from two straight appearance as number 1, is “Frances,”  a teenaged George Washington’s acrostic love poem. That’s still a marvel, as week after week I look at stats and see that it’s still getting listens, long after its appearance here last February.

Top 3 time! In position 3 is “The Death of Apollinaire,”  my translation of Dada principal Tristian Tzara’s surprisingly sincere eulogy for the multi-national poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who invented the term “Surrealism” and helped weave together many of the strands of European Modernism before he died from complications of wounds he suffered in WWI.

And in position #2, up one place from 3rd in the last Top 10, is Dave Moore enigmatic song “Love and Money.”  It may offer an American answer to the question the Beatles once asked in “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

adlestrop Station

“The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. No one left and no one came…”

Position number 1 is another return, and an even higher rise in the chart due to the large number of listens over this summer: “Adlestrop,”  British poet Edward Thomas’ famous moment on train platform on a hot June 24th 1914, were nothing much happens, but everything palpably is.

The poem portrays the train’s stop as unscheduled, but research into train schedules (see them here in this blog post at The National Archives) says otherwise. Adding this element was a conscious choice by Thomas.

It’s a much-loved poem for many reasons. Some find extra resonance in the lines describing calmness in the tiny village train stop, the literal calm before the storm of WWI, and that’s a fine thought for those that hold it, but I believe the poem exists beyond those associations. “Adelstop’s”  closing lines are sublime even without that particular war, that particular trauma to that specific nation, and as it was, to the ending of the life of its author Thomas, who became another of the poets killed in that war.

Sky

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I describe the Parlando Project as various words (mostly poetry) combined with various music. The limits on the music portion are largely the limits of my own musical abilities and those of the LYL Band, but I try to stretch those limits as much as I can. The words we’ve used have been poetry more than 90% of the time, but I like to mix up eras and writing approaches there too. Today’s piece uses words that weren’t published as poetry, but they are instead taken from an interview with Laurie Anderson published in The Believer  magazine about 5 years ago. The interviewer (a couple of whose interjections I’ve included) was Amanda Stern.
 
Just before the small section I used from the interview, Anderson was relating that artists do not necessarily need to invent something new themselves, rather they can use art to just call attention to things that already exist. That’s an idea that we honor here with the Parlando Project. Instead of endless creating and featuring new sets of words that Dave or I write, we instead largely seek to pay attention to the work of others. That thought, attention versus creation, led Laurie Anderson to her meditation on the sky that I have now combined with my music for today’s piece, “Sky.”

Laurie Anderson and electric violin

American artist Laurie Anderson:  famous long ago for playing electric violin…

Part of what attracted me to this was her attribution of her sky meditation to growing up in the American Midwest, in a town without big mountains or large bodies of water. In such matters I could easily resonate with her feelings, having been similarly enraptured myself by the sky blue and clouds or the black with serious stars in my youth in Iowa. The book of nature has few words and a lot of blank spaces, but it reads deeply if you look at it.

The book of nature has few words and a lot of blank spaces, but it reads deeply if you look at it.

While I write this, I’m still reading more about the last episode’s author, pioneering English modernist T. E. Hulme, finding out that he felt the need to change his art after spending time on the Canadian Great Plains. Certainly, there was sky where he grew up in England, but the sky of great open places, with its null, yet present reflection on the earth, is the whole garment, after which having seen it, one can be reminded of it, even if all one currently has is a tattered swatch.

Laurie Anderson gives some advice to young artists—might work for old ones too.

 
I cannot describe Laurie Anderson fairly in the space I take for these things here. There are no other better-known artists like her, and so resorting to record store clerk shorthand such as: “She’s like Garrison Keillor combined with Yoko Ono and Andy Kaufman and…” is so strained it doesn’t really get the point across. I can see the lineage from Dada though the developments of 20th Century art in her work, but after all, everyone has influences and comes upon things they resonate with, just as Laurie Anderson’s way of combining spoken word with music is an influence on me.

Anderson’s spoken voice phrasing and speaking style is one of the distinctive things about her audio art. Some describe it as a monotone, but I’d say that’s incorrect. Yes, there’s a compression of affect, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t considerable impression of mood and attitude in it. Perhaps she’d ascribe that to Midwesterness as well. Even her non-pitched performance speaking has in intensely lulling cadence and music to it, not just hypnotic in metaphor, but very much in the mode of the spell-casting of a stage hypnotist.
 
That shouldn’t work—and as much as I love her work, in larger doses I sometimes find it hard to retain even sub-conscious attention throughout the whole work—but with the right amount of attention, it’s extraordinarily powerful stuff.

As she has developed her audio style over the years, she’s added singing and a strong use of electronic voice modifications. As far as I know, she’s one of the pioneers in the use of that electronic voice manipulation. I even considered using some of that in “Sky,”  but opted instead for a more straightforward presentation.

To hear my music accompanying words excerpted from this print interview with Laurie Anderson, use the player below. The whole interview, is also a great read for any artist.

The Embankment

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I return today to the work of pioneering English modernist T. E. Hulme, he of the entire compass of poetic work comprising 260 lines. “The Embankment”  is 7 to 9 lines, 63 words, of that.

St Pauls from the Embankment

The Embankment in London, with St. Paul’s  Cathedral in the distance.
It was a well-known site at the time for the homeless to sleep out the night.

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What can a writer put in such a small container? Hulme was a founding theorist of Imagism. In that small circle in England where Imagism emerged, the pioneers looked to various models in poetic concision. Pound to the Tang Dynasty Chinese poets. H.D. to Sappho and the early Greek lyric poets. Hulme probably considered the classic Latin poets—a form of writing I’m largely ignorant of—but in his writing about what modern poetry should be, he spoke more about what his ideal of poetry was in opposition towards.

T.E._Hulme_1912

He looks serene, but Hulme was kicked out of school twice for misconduct

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He called everything he didn’t want in the new poetry “Romanticism,” and he was having none of that. Lofty, fulsomely expressed sentiment? Away with it. Elaborate conceits where everything would be compared to something Olympian and mighty? Nope. Mankind, and mankind’s artists, the heroic part of the world? No! Fallen, humbled, limited…

Instead he propounded a new classicism, a “dry hardness” he called it. Imagism, presenting things directly without extraneous comment, and the concision of Hulme’s poetical works, follow from this thought. The epic, the soaring ode, the dramatic statement many acts long—even if it reflects those same convictions in its content—defies its argument with its elaboration. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, two writers influenced by Hulme, tried to disprove this, but with Eliot’s “The Wasteland”  or Pound’s Cantos,  they often used small, fragmented sections collaged into a larger thing, trying to make this contradiction work.

I’m now halfway through Dr. Oliver Tearle’s book-length consideration of Hulme’s poetry, but besides introducing me to Hulme’s work, Tearle’s book (T. E. Hulme and Modernism,  available wherever books are sold) points out that Hulme, so sure and combative in his critical writing, was not so pure in his expression of those ideas in his poetry. The poetry’s radical simplicity can achieve a humility that no theory written in disputive counter-punches can express.

Tearle on Hulme

Tearle also founded InterestingLiterature.com, which is what it says on the tin.

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“The Embankment”  demonstrates this. Following the theory, its sole character is that of a homeless man, his history shortened to a former gentleman’s status, once accustomed to finesse, joy, and fine clothes, currently sleeping outside on the banks of the Thames. Then, for three lines, theory breaks in: “Now see I/That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy./Oh, God, make small”—that last line ending, we will find, in an enjambment, but we do not know that yet as we listen or read.

Hulme has called for a “dry hardness” in his critical theory, and the bum in his poem certainly has the hardness in the pavement he’s sleeping on, and we can only hope he also has the dryness to go along with that. Is the warmth that the bum desires, that he—suddenly an aesthetic philosopher—states is essential to poetry, part of his fallen state? Or is it, as we the reader might empathize, a universal human want that none of us can escape?

Oh God, make small.

And then that wonderful, short line, Hulme’s own “Beauty is truth, truth is Beauty” — “Oh God, make small.”

And as the enjambment on the embankment falls to the next line, we learn that what the bum wants small is the sky, presented in a perfect Hulme reverse-Olympian image, as a star-pierced, moth-eaten blanket, full of holes.

Is there comfort in those lines of prayer that conclude “The Embankment?”  If there is, it’s in the strange—and unstated in the poem—comfort of empathy, that sometimes painful human emotion of warm connectedness that possibly transcends our imperfections.

Musically I thought I couldn’t help but take a cue from the “finesse of fiddles” mentioned in the poems few words. No longer jaunty dance fiddles of the the fallen gentleman’s partying past, but two violins none-the-less. I’m a bit worried that the arrangement echoes my arrangement of Hulme’s “Raleigh In the Dark Tower,”  the other Hulme poem I’ve presented here, but perhaps I should say that I attempted to connect them musically rather than accepting my fallen state as a musician? The one new timbre I introduced in “The Embankment”  are some soft, far-off clock-tower bells, a tip to my memory of looking across the Thames from The Embankment one evening last year at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

To hear my presentation of T. E. Hulme’s “The Embankment,”  use the player below.*  And continue to spread the word about what the Parlando Project is doing combining various music with various words here by sharing our links on social media and elsewhere. Thanks!

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*Don’t see any audio player? Some ways of reading this blog will not show it. For those of you in that situation, this highlighted link will open a new window containing its own audio player.