One of the issues with being half-learned is that one can fall into traps and tasks that are more difficult than you expected. This week I thought, why don’t I translate some Mallarmé? Alternate voice here Dave Moore had given me a book on him for my birthday (which I haven’t had time to read … Continue reading Saint (Cecilia) and Translating Mallarmé
Let’s just name the winner right off, and kill the suspense: Wallace Stevens’ “To the Roaring Wind.” There was a time in my teens and twenties when Wallace Stevens grabbed ahold of me. I think back at that young man and try to wonder why. Well there was the accident of a very affordable collection of … Continue reading The Most Popular Parlando Audio Piece This Past Winter 2018-19
Let’s pickup the countdown of the pieces that drew the most listens and likes over this past winter. Each bold-faced listing is a link to the original post on the piece in case you’d like to read what I wrote back then, and those original posts will also contain links to the full text of … Continue reading Winter ‘20-‘21 Parlando Project Top Ten, numbers 7-5
I’m sure many readers here are enjoying spring or its imminent promise. In Minnesota, not so much. It was 4⁰ F. when I awoke this morning, and everyone is already flinching for another snow-storm due this weekend. So let’s have one more winter piece, this time by Wallace Stevens from his landmark collection Harmonium, “The … Continue reading The Snow Man
I said last time that the Midwestern American poet Carl Sandburg is not often thought of as an Imagist when we recount the Modernist revolution in poetry. Indeed, I get the impression that his work as a whole is summarized as folksy/clumsy by academia, the efforts of a low-fi Modernist with middlebrow pretensions to real … Continue reading Gargoyle
Fifty years ago I picked up a copy of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens in a college bookstore. It was a paperback edition, and looking at the price, I can see why I might have selected it. The cover says $1.45 if you can believe that. Cheaper than a record album, and chock full … Continue reading To the Roaring Wind
Musically we ricochet again (as this project often does) from last-time’s acoustic South Asian ensemble to today’s rough’n’ready one-take rock band. For the words though, maybe not so great a jump, even though Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert Frost are approximately a century apart. Emerson is the prime American cultural instigator. Like many pioneers it’s … Continue reading Emerson’s Fable
Besides being National Poetry Month in America, April is also the birth month of William Shakespeare. The 23rd of April is sometimes celebrated as his birthday, though we don’t actually know that, only that his family baptized him and entered him into their church’s records on April 26th. The 23rd is also a handy date … Continue reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 152
Nostalgia may be cheap, but none-the-less, we feel it. Perhaps by “cheap,” we mean “common,” and if so, should artists always flee that, the common experience? Interrogating the common may verge on an obligation in many answers to that question. What is it in our mundane experience that we may share with others, that we … Continue reading Small Iowa Town, after World War Two
When I started this project a few years ago I didn’t realize that I’d have to largely work with poetry which is in the public domain. This can still disappoint me, but there’s been a welcome side-effect. This limitation caused me to look deeply into the first couple decades of the 20th century for texts … Continue reading Night, and I Traveling
Frank Hudson 