William Blake wrote “To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.” Brothers and sisters, it’s time to testify, and I want to know: are ready to testify? I give you a testimonial: Emily Dickinson! Okay, … Continue reading Further In Summer Than the Birds
Well, this is sort of embarrassing. The Parlando Project is about wandering about in the universe of other people’s words that I might combine with music. I wanted to cast for a wide choice of words because that was part of the core energy of one of the project’s ideas: “Other People’s Stories” and how … Continue reading The Most Popular Parlando Piece this Past Fall Was…
Heard this one? A Chinese poet, a shadow and the moon walk into a bar, and they order wine from a translator…Oh, that was last time, and Le Bai’s “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon.” Well I promised I’d say a little bit more about translation in another post, as yesterday’s was already long enough. I’ve … Continue reading Translation for Poets and Other Monolinguals
Our last audio piece this month had American satirist Mark Twain pointing out incongruities in the longstanding trope of the tortured poetic genius who dashes off “weird, wild, incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility, and then gets booming drunk and sleeps in the gutter.” How far back does that trope go? Well at least to 8th … Continue reading Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon
There used to be a thing, back in the Seventies when “The Sixties” were being established as a retrospective era: “The Beatles or The Stones?” The idea was that this choice, which was supposed to be somehow exclusive, was an “opener,” a what’s your (astrological) sign query that would tell the questioner who you were—or … Continue reading On the Grasshopper and the Cricket
Are there people today still falling in love, or not falling in love together, or remembering love and almost love? Seems like a silly or rhetorical question doesn’t it. So, yes, I suspect there are, as there have been before. People fall in love on marches, at the barricades. Policemen fall in love. People fall … Continue reading The Most Popular Parlando Piece, Spring 2020
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
And now for something completely diff…Oh, Monty Python references may be lost on a good portion of the modern audience—and then today November 22nd is one of those dates that some folks remember, and some don’t. Someone older than Dave, George Bernard Shaw, once said “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.” … Continue reading Surely You Could Do Better Than This
Once more, let’s travel back to 1914. For several months, as summer 1913 turns to ’14 through autumn and winter, a 35-year-old woman is creating the manuscript for her first book-length collection of poetry. Creating a book-length manuscript is always a challenging task, and regardless of whatever realistic expectations the author might have for its … Continue reading Three More Cinquains
Moving from 17th century Welsh poet Henry Vaughn we’ll jump forward to a favorite of this blog: 20th century Welsh poet Edward Thomas. Thomas is less well-known in the U.S. than he is in the U.K., perhaps because he’s sometimes classed as a “Georgian poet,” a loose classification given to early 20th century British poets … Continue reading Edward Thomas’ October
