Scrolling news and social media is how I misspend a lot of my time now, since the larger blocks when I can really bare down on artistic work are scarcer and less predictable in my life. Every so often someone famous in the 20th century will start to pop up unexpectedly in news article headings and post streams, a dreadful event. What is it this time, the back of mind thinks, nostalgia or death?
So yesterday it was Sinéad O’Connor that trended. One heading said the tense: “…she was….”
I was a little surprised at the building response, but shouldn’t have been. I have been aware, despite her shortish career in popular music, that her performances had a capacity to deeply touch people. There was a pure dialectic in many of those performances: fierceness and vulnerability simultaneously in an unstable state. When those two things exist at once, like flame and water, it’s dark and warm, bright and reflective, quenched and fueled.
When that combination resonates, it resonates deep with the listener. I myself have only the most inconsistent fierceness. There is an element of self-righteousness taken on as an armor that frightens me, no matter how just the cause, because I have seen the same armor worn on evil as often as good. But then, approaching injustice, as I may do with only questions and pain, seems to equivocate.
There was a pure dialectic in many of those performances: fierceness and vulnerability simultaneously in an unstable state.
My own oddest combination? I am something of a spiritual seeker deeply distrustful of every other pilgrim and certain that any mystical explanation obfuscates reality. This part of me may make me like and unlike O’Connor. As a human being I feel foolish and pretentious discussing any of this, though I hold my nose and type on today.
Yet, O’Connor, with her unstable and uncommon combination, should have taught me the insight that many are sharing in the past day: that there’s a human inside the armor. I knew that — but didn’t know that well enough. Art may be persistent in showing us that deeper knowing.
Today’s text was written as a children’s poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. What it notices about the enticing longer days and late sunsets of summer is not limited to children however. I suspect many adults too find it harder to wind down when it’s still light and pleasant out.
They say I’m supposed to go to bed, but there’s birds out there, and where’s my phone or my Nintendo?
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Stevenson published this in 1885 when some things of the earlier 19th century were wearing out. The voice of the child in the poem says they were used to arising from bed by candlelight in winter, and now they are going to bed in the still-daylight of a summer evening. How common was candlelight in a child’s room when this poem was first in print? Gas lighting had given its name to that age, and electric light was soon to become common. The adult Stevenson likely knew of such things, as I read his family business was lighthouse engineering. Perhaps Stevenson was recalling his own childhood, when humble candlelight was the norm? The collection that included this poem, A Childs Garden of Verses, was still in circulation in my mid-20th century childhood. I guess we young readers just translated the lighting technology, figuring that poems were from olden days when open flames in kids’ rooms weren’t problematic.
One thing Stevenson’s poem might have gained by being aimed at children is that it’s delightfully spare and unfussy. The adult verse of 1885 was often not so, but here there are no classical allusions, no high-flown metaphors, just that memory of candlelight, an evening’s sunlight, some active birds, and footsteps on the street. The poem is not idealized at all, instead it’s simply present in the child’s conundrum.
I performed it with a 12-string acoustic guitar, an instrument I always want to keep around in addition to the more common 6 string guitar. My music is simple and unfussy today, as is fitting for Stevenson’s poem. You can hear it with the audio player you should see below. No player? Some ways of viewing this won’t show it, but this backup highlighted link will open a new tab with an audio player then.
I can’t help it — actually I do try to help it, but sometimes I can’t. I was in a movie with my wife, the polemical Emily Dickinson biopic Wild Nights with Emily,* and they introduced Thomas W. Higginson as this nincompoop who couldn’t discern the poetic genius of Dickinson compared to the kind of poetry he preferred. For an example of the latter, the filmmakers briefly gave us Helen Hunt Jackson as a prim, forgettable, mediocrity.
I nudged my wife, “Jackson was better than that” I murmured.
This is what happens when you’re married to someone who likes to look in the odd, unswept-out corners of poetry’s storage shed. Jackson was a childhood classmate of Emily Dickinson. Jackson left for marriage to a brilliant engineer, who Emily then met and sorta-kinda-maybe had a crush on. Jackson’s husband was killed in an explosion working on a secret torpedo weapon during the Civil War, and widow-Jackson went on to a substantial literary career of her own with poems, novels, and early activism for Native American rights.
mid-19th century photographs often conceal their subject’s personality, which makes this one of Helen Hunt Jackson a bit special I think.
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No, she’s not as original as Emily Dickinson, but the congress of poets who could claim that level is small even now. She understood Dickenson’s worth enough to plead with her childhood friend to publish — and though it appeared anonymously, she did include the only Dickinson poem to be published between hard-covers during Emily’s lifetime within an international anthology she produced.
Like Dickinson, these poems include a close examination of nature, though I don’t sense here the notes of humor often found in Dickinson’s nature. In Jackson’s July example, the flowers mentioned are in danger from heat and drought, something that seems contemporary in my own midwestern summer. Only the poem’s water lily seems immune from the danger.
You can hear my musical performance of Helen Hunt Jackson’s “July” with the audio player gadget below. Don’t see the player? This highlighted linkwill open a new tab with a player for you. Want to see the text of the poem? Here’s a link to that too.
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*Released between the more scrupulous A Quiet Passion and the joyously anachronistic Apple TV series Dickinson, Wild Nights with Emily was the less fully realized, perhaps due to a lower budget. Its broad characterizations were intended in the service of satiric exaggeration. The film’s central point is to portray the often-suspected erotic bond between Dickinson and another childhood friend and confidant, Susan Gilbert.
My Project says it’s about where music and words meet, yet I’m still surprised and gratified when I encounter literary poets whose connection to music is significant. Most poets enjoy music — hell, most people do. And the arts of poetry and music have long been siblings. Who can count how many poems have the word “song” in their titles, or how many poems speak of birds or unfeathered human musicians making music? Yet the number of poets who have publicly taken to composing and performing music is limited.
One might think that songs with words, the music most listeners prefer, would be already halfway accomplished by any good poet. In practice, that’s not always the case. A great deal of literary poetry doesn’t work like a song that captures listeners in real-time once in and through their ears.
What you say: “You do this all the time, you take literary poetry and you combine it with music!” Yes, but I’m choosing what poetry to use, rejecting much more than I even attempt to compose music for. And while I appreciate the audience this project has developed for your open-mindedness and tolerant ears, by Internet standards my Parlando musical pieces have a small audience. Part of that is my voice, which has its limits, and my reach-exceeds-my-grasp musicianship — part of it too may be that I’m no one’s young, good-looking, begging-to-be-discovered talent.
Last time I said I’d leave a fourth example of someone combining poetry with music that I’ve discovered recently for a future post. That one is poet, novelist, teacher and promoter of poetry* Joseph Fasano. In the midst of his very active social media presence this summer, Fasano let it (rather casually) drop that he had publicly released an album of songs, The Wind That Knows the Way.
Fasano is an effective promoter of his own work on Twitter, and he’s amassed (by PoetryTwitter** standards) a sizeable number, thousands, of followers. “Followers” in the social media world is something of a hollow stat. Many in the count are proforma or “polite” followers mutually responding to follows from others, and then there are bots and insubstantial accounts seeking merely to draw attention to their causes & businesses. But when Fasano posts a poem of his or a series of notices about his latest novel, he gets (by literary standards, or mine, whatever I am) lots of eyeballs, re-tweets, and at least a bit of replies and response. By PoetryTwitter standards, people are paying attention to him.
To my knowledge, he’s not followed up to that single notice about his album of songs. For someone showing such effective and continuous effort to promote the other things he’s doing, that’s odd. Even though getting ear-time from me for musical work is tough — composing, recording, mixing the Parlando Project pieces take away from those opportunities — I listened to the album (available on Apple Music, Spotify, and likely some other current music streaming services) within a few days of the announcement.
It’s good, and a particular surprising adds to that goodness. I guess I expected a typical modern musical production — either pop in pretense or a rougher indie one. When someone tells me they have a recording these days, that’s what I’ll most often hear. Instead, the album’s sonic approach is a remarkable duplication of an early 1960s Folkways, Sing Out, folk-venue-appearing guitarist-singer with original songs record. In arrangements and general vibe, it’s like the early records of Gordon Lightfoot, Tim Buckley, Jackson C. Frank, or Eric Anderson. For musical particularists, let me add I’m not talking about post 1965 records. At times Fasano’s voice and musical approach reminds me of a less gruff Tim Hardin, but Hardin’s most popular later ‘60s records used highly skilled bandmates to fill out his sound. The Wind Knows the Way is just Fasano and his acoustic guitar, but like the early ‘60s records I’m referring to, his voice is pleasant and his music appealing, while his lyrics express more emotional complexity and range than the average pop song.
Here’s the title song from Fasano’s album for those that don’t use Apple Music, Spotify, et al.
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I don’t know who engineered this recording, but the recording is technically well done too. My favorite cuts on the album are “In My Time,” “The Trouble,” and “The Wind and the Rain.” I’m an outsider to Fasano’s creative process, but it appears to me that he already has a “song lyric” mode that both borrows from and differs from his page poetry. These songs don’t come at you with a strange torrent of unusual metaphors with hermetic connections between them. Song lyrics forgive, even arguably benefit, from less originality in tropes, from commonly returned to, simple, elemental words. Many literary poets have trained themselves to avoid those things — and so the Parlando Project sometimes asks the listener to allow more weird words and similes that one hears with most songs. Fasano seems to know that as a songwriter he can write differently for song.
I assume he wrote the music, though the modern streaming services and his sparce posting about the record make this only an assumption. His melodies are fine, not showy, catchy and very singable. Harmonically he shows some variety in this set of songs, but he’s not from the Joni Mitchell or Nick Drake school of advanced guitar composition. This isn’t a pioneering, challenging, or world-changing record, but then too our contemporary world doesn’t have many records like this anymore: a voice, a guitar, and tuneful well-written songs that don’t require anything more than that.
In summary if you are a fan of those early ‘60s records (as I am) or if you would like to hear an intelligent record that usefully uses simplicity and a direct unadorned presentation, there’s a good chance you might like Joseph Fasano’s “The Wind That Knows the Way.”
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*Fasano’s “promoter of poetry” element appeals to me. I’m forming a number of things I’d like to say about his efforts in that area, and if time and fate allow me, there’s maybe yet one more Joseph Fasano post to come this summer.
**Twitter, its faults and its problematic owner, is a current topic that’s launched a thousand takes, which I won’t add to today. I will say that PoetryTwitter is not overly large, but there are interesting people there. Part of what draws me to poetry is that I’m a naturally long-winded, run-on-story kind of person, and poetry’s compression lets me pare that back. The off-the-cuff, short-answer nature of Twitter lets me exercise the same muscle, and it fits my current fate of having few assured blocks of time to compose more complicated music or thoughts.
You might know this pedant’s complaint: something can’t be “more unique” — because the word unique means the only, singular. If so, what the Parlando Project does then is quasi-unique. I well know that setting literary poems to music isn’t unprecedented, but the way I do it is a smaller grouping. For reasons (some practical) I’ve taken to using my rough and not always reliable singing voice more often,* and more pieces have simpler arrangements featuring acoustic guitar. In the past couple of months I’ve become aware of four other people, singers and guitarists not totally unlike myself, who have being doing things related to this presentation of music combined with literary poetry.
I ran into Evan Gordon on a guitar-related online forum this year where he introduced himself as working on combining poems with acoustic guitar-centered music, including his version of a passage from Jack Kerouac that I too admire, and which supplied the name to his collection “The Long Long Skies Over New Jersey,” a short album released this year. Kerouac’s words are there along with Houseman and Yeats and a couple of covers of well-known songs. I rather like Gordon’s poetry settings, and though there’s only three songs taken from literature, the range of the poetic sources he chose to set echoes what this Project does. So, you might well like this too. My favorite in this collection is his setting of Yeats’ “When You Are Old,”a poem which I too have done. I (and some other listeners) like my expression of that poem, but Gordon’s is exquisite. You can find Evan Gordon’s “The Long Long Skies Over New Jersey” on streaming services such as Spotify or Apple Music.
Andrew Merritt introduced himself to me via a comment here at this blog regarding my versions of the classical Chinese Tang Dynasty poets, telling us he’s looked to them for inspiration too. Merritt has a collection that he calls “Twang Dynasty” where he combines influences from Tang poems with classic American country music. Does that seem far-fetched to you? Well, I can imagine a translated scroll stroked in traditional Chinese calligraphy of Hank Williams lyrics sitting beside those of the Tang classical masters, so I like Merritt’s imagination. His lead-off cut, “Drinking with the Moon” is Merritt’s version of a Li Bai poem I performed here.You can hear his work at this link.
In a recent post on Carl Sandburg I tried to make the case that this somewhat deemphasized Modernist poet’s footpaths can be seen all over music in folk and Americana genres. I wrote that Sandburg blazed a path and model for Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan; and as an early American folk music revivalist, he personally allowed a connection between folk songs presented in the raw (not as motifs in fuller orchestrations) with progressive/populist politics and high poetic culture. Sandburg did this not only by performing those songs publicly at his free-verse poetry readings (with a voice and level of guitar skills roughly like my own, not as a concert artiste) but by publishing a pioneering general anthology of American folk song purposely mashed together from around our whole immigrant country and its various sub-cultures with his 1927 The American Songbag.
One problem with The American Songbag as published is that it appears to be aimed at the musically literate owners of parlor pianos more than guitarists, many of whom are allergic to sheet music.** So it was with great joy that I heard just this month of a project undertaken during the heights of the Covid pandemic by Stephen Griffith. He sought to record the entire Songbag, all 315 songs, and to present them, as Sandburg might have sung them himself with just simple voice and acoustic guitar. I eagerly went to his web site to thank him last week, only to find that it had fallen off the web. Given his apparent age in the videos, I hope Griffith is well and still with us, that he’s perhaps just engaged with other things. Luckily, his performances are still available on YouTube at this link — and their unadorned presentation is a treasure chest. Some of the songs in Sandburg’s Songbag became folk music “standards,” but the versions Sandburg and his collaborators collected ending in 1927 sometimes differ, not just in the folk-process of a few floating or varied verses and lines, but occasionally in entire melodies. I’ve listened to a lot of folk revivalist music over the years, but even though I haven’t made it through all of Griffith’s Songbag versions, some of the songs I’ve heard there, taken from Sanburg’s anthology, seem new to me. Anyone interested in The Old Weird America owes Stephen Griffith a debt of thanks (well, and Sandburg too).
There’s a fourth example I want to draw your attention to: Joseph Fasano, a man who is doing some other things while also being a poetry-aware person wielding an acoustic guitar. Because of that range of things he’s doing, I’m going to leave him for an additional post to follow.
*Earlier in the Project I was more likely to use spoken or chanted vocals. I still do this sometimes, depending on the text and what I feel is most effective.
**There are piano lead-sheets for the songs in The American Songbag, but no guitar chords or parts. Many/most folk music associated guitarists and singers learned their repertoire “by ear” from hearing others sing the songs, and those who wanted to notate guitar parts beyond chord sheets were likely to use guitar tablature not treble staff notation. There’s an old joke regarding guitarists as musicians: “Q: How do you make an electric guitarist turn down? A: Put sheet music in front of them.”
While technically possible in a narrow sense, it would have been an impractical task to try to present all 315 American Songbag songs as recordings in 1927. Decades later, after WWII, record collectors created anthology record albums such as the Folkways, Library of Congress, or Harry Smith’s LPs which “taught” old folk songs to new, young players. Sandburg’s existing work helped make this later work interesting — but those recording anthologies relied on dubs from 78 RPM records made a decade or so later than the era Sandburg and his collaborators were working in collecting songs from unrecorded singers.
The route today’s musical composition took to existence was almost comically round-about. I added a new virtual instrument (VI)* drum set this week, one with a drier, more retro sound. I decided I should try it out. I grabbed an acoustic guitar track I’d recorded weeks ago, but not used for anything, and went to creating a simple drum track using the new kit’s sounds to see how they meshed.
It sounded pretty good, but that track-of-convenience guitar part had bleed from other stuff into the acoustic guitar mic, and so I used a tool I have that extracts a chord progression from an audio file, and then had that extracted progression played with a VI piano.
That cleaned things up enough that I figured I should make a little instrumental piece with this. Why not complete a trio and play some bass? Just over my shoulder in my little bedroom-now-home-office sits a Squier fretless Jazz bass.** I love its sound, but my old fingers need to be in good shape to get a clean sound out of it. Yesterday, my fingers were feeling strong, so that’s what I grabbed. I found a bass motif and played it in my best attempt to fit into the “pocket” of the drum groove.
A great musician or a more meticulous recordist might have perfected this, but something in me accepts a certain looseness and imperfection. Even if I’m recording one track at a time in one-man-band mode I’m often looking to get that spontaneous live-take feel, and my resulting trio had that I thought.
At this point my little house was filled with a half-dozen late-stage teenagers, all looking to have an autonomous time playing video games and watching YouTube. I holed up in my little office to let them be young. Might as well look to add another VI to my trio — if nothing else, to pass the time. The computer I work with virtual instruments on doesn’t have speakers, only headphones. Returning to the world between the cups of the headphones, I wouldn’t be bothering them.
What could be that another instrument? I decided to try cello. What articulation should I choose? My cello VI has a dozen or so articulations to choose from: different bowing techniques, styles for flowing legato or choppy stabs. I auditioned a few, and found two finalists I liked with the existing trio. Two roads diverged within a wood. Which one to take? I decided I’d use both of the finalists.
I set the cello part to echo the keyboard part, a simple choice. I often enjoy simplicity in music, and my use of orchestra instruments often reflects that. I’ve taken to calling some of my pieces “Punk Orchestral” for this reason. Hey, ho, let’s go!
It was 11 PM by the time I finished the instrumental. The teenagers decided to decamp for a Perkins restaurant*** in a late-night post-modern way. Listening to the rough mix of the trio with the cello section I now thought this is good enough for a Parlando Project piece — I just need to find a poem for the words. I didn’t have much collected for possible imminent use. I had some Emily Dickinsons, but I fear I’m doing too much of Dickinson lately, as much as I like the results. I tried a Robinson Jeffers, but the mood of the poem didn’t match the jauntiness of the music’s groove. Then I tried a short poem I’d drafted in June, inspired by watching waterfowl in my city’s urban parks, lakes, and ponds. That fit!
The poem that became today’s lyric
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I revised the music slightly to use with these words. Guided by the instrumental’s chords and using my imperfect voice, I devised an expeditious melody. I tried a couple of takes singing the words, and found that my poem sung better with some mild editing of its text. It was around midnight when I tracked the final vocal take you can hear today before going to bed. It was just after that final tracking that a comic turn happened. The drum track, the new VI sound I started with, that, which had inspired the course of this composition, stopped playing, muted itself. A bug perhaps? But in the early AM hours I decided it sounds better without the drums, as the other instruments now have absorbed the groove conception I started with within themselves.
Today I mixed the resulting piece “All These Wild Geese Poems.” Mixing involves placing the instruments within the soundfield in stereo width and volume depth, and using other audio processing on their dynamic envelopes and frequency ranges. I then created the final mix using some computer tools to adhere to current streaming services loudness levels, and uploaded it to the service that shares my audio to play here and on the podcast platforms of Google, Apple, etc.
You, poet, you’re not much of a goose, or much of a Yeats either, so get out of my way!
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“All These Wild Geese Poems” takes off from the many romantic poems about geese, cranes, swans and such large waterfowl. The urban geese I meet in my city nature are instead cantankerous beasts, and I thought our contemporary poems often take a similar stance, no pristine “Wild Swans at Coole” musings for these birds — more at the famous Dustin Hoffman Midnight Cowboy “I’m walkin’ here!” self-involved swagger with a limp. You can hear the performance with an audio player below if you see that, or with this alternative link that will open a new tab with an audio player.
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*Virtual Instruments are precisely recorded sounds of the various notes and timbres of a physical instrument. Either by using compositional scoring, or the computer equivalents of that; or by playing the notes with a MIDI controller equipped keyboard or guitar, one can make reasonably convincing performances of instruments that one cannot play or afford in real life.
**I play interesting but relatively inexpensive guitars. Squier is an entry-level brand devised by Fender to sell low-cost versions of their famous instruments. Back in the 20th century any aspiring player found with a Squier was considered non-serious. “Real musicians” used “pro instruments” — but in the past decade or so the quality of the better Squier instruments has increased substantially.
***Perkins restaurants are like a Denny’s. Big menus with lots of senior-citizen specials and tastes —but open early and late for the time-expanding young person.
Like many days recently with this Project, I have been thrashing about looking for time to find an inspiration for a new audio piece, and some inspiration to spend that time. This weekend I found one sliver of inspiration in musical memory, and then yesterday, I found an Independence Day piece so monumental that I had to figure out how to grasp it inside music.
The sliver? I recalled a song, or rather just a line, a refrain from a song, from my younger years. That refrain was also the song’s title, and the title of today’s piece, but by itself it was insufficient. “Almost Independence Day” is a song that closes an early 1970s album by Van Morrison. It’s a peculiar song,* a lengthy (10-minute) two-chord jam with largely mundane lyrics that earns it’s interest — if it does — by the singer’s investment in presenting the ordinary, and by the unusual combination of instruments it uses to accompany itself. Morrison’s “Almost Independence Day” has drums, bass, two guitars, and keyboards. But the bass is an upright Jazz-sounding bass, allowed a high place in the mix at times, and one of the guitars is a 12-string guitar prominent in the song’s texture. And the keyboards? The keyboardist on the cut is Mark Naftalin, the son of a former mayor of my city. Naftalin was the keyboard player in the classic Butterfield Blues Band lineup, a tough sounding, gritty integrated band that played post WWII Chicago Blues — but on this song, the most prominent keyboard part is a low electronic synthesizer, reportedly played on one of those made by American synth pioneer Robert Moog. Wikipedia thinks it’s one of the earliest uses of that instrument on a “rock” record.
I had only remembered that song’s refrain — but even on re-listening to it, I found little besides the refrain and the song’s odd musical texture that I thought I could use.
Then early yesterday morning I thought of another, more substantial, set of words for Independence Day: a speech given in 1852 by Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” I’ve read it silently before, and I read it silently again. It’s a 19th century oration, the kind of lengthy and precisely enunciated rhetoric that would seem archaic to modern ears and attention spans.** Yet, it’s worth reading because it’s a unstinting analysis of American Ideals (worthy), acknowledging of American scientific and civic achievements (evidence of the possibility of unimaginable change), and yet clear and precise on great failures in extending its best to all Americans. As the title given to the speech makes clear, Douglass spoke at a time when chattel slavery was a large part of our country, when he himself had been enslaved, when a reticent and resistant national government had (through the Fugitive Slave Act) made clear that the whole nation was to support and maintain this evil.
I assume we are all in agreement on that evil, on that horrendous disconnect.*** But continue: Douglass’ speech still speaks to us today if we can translate a bit from its old-style oratory. Doing so, it’s a forceful reminder on this holiday that American ideals, such as the things stated in our historic Declaration on the first Independence Day, aren’t an award citation — they are a to-do list. The work of our founding, the work of emancipation, the work of fulfillment of our ideals, is on-going. So, if we are clear in retrospect about the acceptance and legal enforcement of slavery, that’s only a beginning lesson. We need to be as unstinting in asking where we are today out of step from our best principles and practices.
American ideals, such as the things stated in our historic Declaration on the first Independence Day, aren’t an award citation — they are a to-do list.
In devising a way to use Douglass’ speech in our short musical format, I decided to take a short part of it, a litany of assertions made in 1852, and make them an enduring set of questions to ask ourselves (or for any nation to ask itself) about that disconnect now and in the future. Douglass’ recast litany starts at about 1:20 in the audio piece, and the other words are mine, though I’m seeking in them to convey Douglass’ insights.
So yesterday, in an hour or two that I had available after finding my inspiration, I worked to perform Douglass’ litany of questions, and still was able to finish with a couple of lines from an Irishman’s song. Why was Van Morrison singing about almost Independence Day? Perhaps, it was only July 3rd, and he was noticing, as an immigrant, the expectations of this American holiday. But maybe too, this white man who sang “they can’t stop us on the road to freedom” was thinking that we are always, should be always, like those men in granite who declared our Independence two days before July 4th, looking forward to Independence Day, not remembering it.
You can hear my musical performance of this recast portion of Frederick Douglass’ speech with the audio player below. No player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with an audio player.
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*Peculiar and a Van Morrison record is a tautology.
**Consider this: for all its elaborate speech, it’s shorter than the usual modern podcast length, and spends less of its time with repetitive familiarities and co-host back-slapping. Have our attention spans really gotten shorter, or is it the density of 19th century speeches like Douglass’ that wears out our attention?
***Well, there are still some neo-Confederates out there who will tell us it was a benign sort of thing, unremarkable really, and so long ago that we need not think about it — and coincidently, we should not think or teach about this example, and so setting out laws or best practices against that.
It’d be possible to do something like this Project using only the poetry of the great American poet Emily Dickinson. While we’re approaching publishing our 700th piece of original music combined with various words (mostly literary poetry) — there are nearly 1800 poems that Dickinson wrote. That’s a lot of material.
The Parlando Project has featured poets all the way from classical antiquity through the first quarter or so of the 20th century,* and I like to vary moods and poetic approaches in the pieces I set to music here — but Dickinson has enough different modes that just her work alone might suffice for variety. Would I miss some of the freshness I find in early poetic Modernism? A woman of the middle of the 19th century, Dickinson was present in an America that is both like and unlike our present country, but like all poetic geniuses she has the power to make time and place fade in importance. As it happens, I was looking for and reading early 20th century poetry when this poem came across my screen, and I found it as immediately fresh and vivid as one of those newer poems. Dickinson’s poem here uses the title of convenience taken from the poem’s first line: “Those cattle smaller than the Bee,” and you can read the text at this link. Rather than a grand poem about important life points, specific social conditions, intense feelings, existential issues, or majestic nature, this is a poem about a prosaic insect, the fly. Dickinson starts out very much like a Surrealist here, imagining as if the fly was a useful domestic animal, like a cow or the honey-producing bee, but the poem then goes on describing what could be a bothersome number of flies inside the Dickinson Homestead house.
“Well Lavina, I’m thinking I’ll go for prize houseflies at the next town fair.” Surrealism manufactured by the AI art program that claims it’s trained on art work that the artists have been paid for.
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I may be paying too much attention to detail in this playful poem, but I wondered what kinds of flies she’s observing. The season of winter is mentioned, and houseflies generally lay their eggs inside in colder parts of America to hatch during winter. Since Emily cooked for the family, I can imagine that hatching would not make for a pleasant kitchen. Noting Dickinson’s choice of an unusual word “odiouser” in the poem, that may be what that strong language is about.
The final stanza admits that the chapter of the Transcendentalist book of nature describing the worth and meaning of flies is one that Emily hasn’t yet read. Also note: she chose “remand,” a courtroom term, in that final verse — more evidence that Emily picked up some lawyerly ideas from her male family members’ line of business. The Bee mentioned in the first line is something of an Emily Dickinson touchstone, the word and animal appearing often in her poems. In contrast, the fly is quite rare in Dickinson compared to the bee or the butterfly. There is another Dickinson poem that begins “If you were coming in the fall” that mentions a housewife brushing away a fly — but by far the most famous fly in Dickinson is inside “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” one of her strangest and most gothic poems.
I tried to keep the music today reasonably light to go with the mode of today’s poem. You can hear my performance of Dickinson’s “Those cattle smaller than a Bee” with the audio player below. No player to be seen? This highlighted link will open a new tab with a player then.
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*I rather like the early Modernist era of poetry, but another reason that I generally cut things off at 1927 is that such works clearly in the public domain are free to modify and use however I wish.
1913. 110 years ago. Two people met in England and called each other poets. One of them you might know: Robert Frost. He was almost 40 and hadn’t been making a calling as a poet in America. The other was a British man four years younger who wrote prose furiously as a freelancer for pay, “Burning my candle on three ends” as he described it. That freelancer was Edward Thomas. Some of the freelancer’s work was literary reviews, and unlike American editors and gatekeepers, Thomas admired Frost’s work. Within a year, Frosts first poetry collection, North of Boston, would be published in England and Thomas’ appreciation of Frost’s talent helped make it a success.
A little log-rolling for the work of a nascent poet who just happened to be a friend? Well, Frost’s slim volume included “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “The Wood Pile,” “Home Burial,” and “After Apple-Picking.” The evidence says that many readers know these poems over a century later without knowing the man. Friendship aside, Thomas recognized a poet worth consideration.
In looking at some of Thomas’ prose work-for-hire, Frost told Thomas that his close attention, particularly of the book of nature, was the stuff of poetry. Frost also thought Thomas already showed a grasp of musical cadence in his prose writing that was like Frost’s theory of poetic word-music. Neither man was one for high-flown language or trite metaphors — things that were present in much poetry being published then in English. Both men knew the complexity of human acts and emotions. And both men shared something else: they suffered from depression, suffered this in periods of greater or lesser depth.*
Thomas’ hard work as a freelancer was to support his wife and a young family who he loved — but that relationship, that feeling was not simple. He tried to keep some of his demons from his wife to spare her, and while I’m not knowledgeable of all the details, he had at least “emotional affairs” with others which his broadminded wife understood as helpful in keeping Edward Thomas’ spirits up.**
Edward and Helen Thomas. The iconography of a couple with one looking off to the side is inescapable.
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Within a year of meeting Frost, taking Frost at his word, Thomas began writing poetry. He wrote it just as furiously as his reviews, criticism, or hack work. In his first six months as a new poet Thomas wrote 75 poems. Beyond that quantity, when reading his collected poems I’m struck by how fresh even his early work seems when I read it against most of his British contemporaries. Many of Thomas’ peers of this era knew how to score points technically, and which images and plots would elevate their verse to seem professionally poetic. Thomas (and Frost) don’t seem to care as much for scoring well on the required figures and rules. Even the beginning Thomas’ word-music in English is attractive, his expression rarely seems hampered by a too-tight fitting prosody.
Today’s early piece, which he called simply “Song,” is an example. Here’s a link to the text if you’d like to read along. A short lyric that sings off the page should not seem difficult to do for its reader or listener — but in deed, it is hard to do. This paradox is a big part of pulling the trick off. Though printed in quatrains, “Song” is approximately Alexandrines. Rhyme connoisseurs make note that “June/tune” and “sigh/die” have triteness demerits, but the opening pair “beautiful/invincible” delights me. And I believe a somewhat too-common rhyme is forgivable if the matter of the poem is fresh enough.
Without being an expert on Thomas’ life, I’m going to assume this is a poem to his wife. Invincible happiness would build a wall in many relationships with a depressive, yet that difference is acknowledged in the poem, yet accepted. The “She laughs” “I sigh” refrained pairing reinforces this difference. The spoiler cuckoo is a bird known in folklore and folksong as a bird of inconstant love and cuckoldry. Yet the poem says that the couple love each other unto death, as they summarily did in life. In matter, this is one of those rarer love poems that speaks of long-term committed lovers fitting themselves together despite seeming incompatibilities.
The poem’s refraining nature makes it attractive for casting into song, and so that is what I did. I even increased that factor by repeating the 3rd stanza also between the 1st and 2nd verses. I also set my composer-self a limitation in writing the music: to try to effectively use only some of the simplest and most common chord colors in my chord sequence. All major chords, no minors. No suspended chords dropping the third. You can hear how it came out as I perform it as a piano trio with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? This link is an alternative that will open a new tab with an audio player.
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*Again, I’m no expert on Thomas nor psychology, but the periods of high output and the periods of suicidal depression suggest bipolar.
**Not being overly knowledgeable on the marriage, I can see how some feminist analysis could have different insights and conclusions on this. All my scattered reading says this cluster of friendships was complicated, and that’s enough to give background into why this love poem isn’t one to file in the more common desire thwarted/satiated, muse, heartbreak, or betrayal folders. And yes, Frost’s marriage too had elements of a long-suffering spouse and family tragedy.
If you’ve noticed I’ve been gone for a while, I have as well. The last few weeks have had a lot of other things to attend to. Mostly happy things: travel, and work around the teenager’s graduation from high school. Still, I found myself picking up a book from my teetering “plan to read” pile that I thought would be mildly diverting: Donald Hall’s Old Poets. This book is a hybrid, like one of my favorite books from last year, Lesley Wheeler’s Poetry’s Possible Worlds.* Like Wheeler’s book, Hall’s book contains some memoir elements mixed with consideration of poets the writer knows, and from there the qualities and connections of poetry and poems with the poets. Hall’s memoir material covers the bildungsroman years, that life era of a few posts about my life I’ve done this spring, while Wheeler’s examines her relationship to her parents and poets well into midlife. The time settings of the two books are different: Wheeler more in this century, Hall centered around the last midcentury.
Here’s something I found striking in Hall’s accounts from his time and place. As an undergraduate he had access to not just his Harvard contemporaries** but to Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot. Since a good portion of Hall and my lives overlap, Hall being only about 20 years older, I found it strange to read that as a 20-year-old he had a series of informal interactions with these two while they were giants in a way that no poet today is. The effect was scarcely less shocking than some SF novel where the author dines and discusses poetic topics with Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and Whitman. I suspect much of Hall’s access is due to Ivy League effects, whereas I think today’s poetry scene is more decentralized even while being more academic/MFA connected. If I was 20 in 1949, I would have been as likely to repeatedly meet the two great poets as I am to contact them by Ouija board today.
Hall’s book has 6 sections devoted to 7 poets, including ones on Frost and Eliot. Hall’s portrait of the older Frost is particularly vivid and special, while his stories of drinking with Dylan Thomas are less unique.*** Yet, within his Thomas chapter, Hall dives into why Dylan Thomas’s poetic stock fell off by the end of the century. Hall reveals that Thomas himself told him that he had only written about three good poems.**** The one Thomas poem we all think of, the villanelle whose refrain has become memeable, was not one of those three. Thomas and Hall agreed over potent-potables that “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” was only a skilled attempt to put on Yeats’ coat.
Now to get on to today’s new audio piece. Hall compares one of the poems Thomas thought was one of his best early works unfavorably to a poem by Thomas Hardy, and Hall’s Thomas chapter gives us that Hardy poem, “Transformations” in full.
If reading Hall’s book was to be a portable replacement for work on this Project, that Hardy poem was stunning enough to cause me to try to get something composed and performed in the spaces between other things this week. Hardy’s “Transformations” is an account of the experience of a non-spiritual approach to immortality — not to life after death, but life as a thing that only changes form, of which we as people are only incarnations. Here’s a link to the text of this poem.
Hardy himself worked out this method of consolidating a graveyard’s worth of tombstones, and it makes a striking illustration for his poem.
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Hardy, an Englishman born of the middle of the 19th century drops in but one or two anachronistic words in this poem — but while “grandsire” doesn’t sound natural on a 21st century American’s lips, the gist of this metrical and rhymed poem is easily singable in 2023 I thought. Down went Hall’s book and up went the efficient composer! I whipped up the music quickly. Long time listeners here will know that my music is usually not harmonically complex, but my simple cadences often try to confound the usual chords and progression resolutions. I hope I’ve done that with this one. The time to record the piece was scant, so I went with my go-to “I may have to hop a freight train shortly” folk music standby, the acoustic guitar and overdubbed a quick bass guitar part. You can hear it with an audio player below — or if you can’t see that graphical device, with this backup link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*Few click hyperlinks, so let me put this in a footnote. Wheeler’s book has these additional reasons to read it beside just being good: its story and poetry is contemporary, and as a writer and a woman Wheeler focuses on elements of our lifetime journeys that other poetic memoirs gloss over. Here’s those hyperlinks: Wheeler’s book. Hall’s book.
**Hall’s Harvard classmates circa 1951 included Frank O’Hara, Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and others. Eliot — and to a trivial extent, Frost — were Harvard alums. My personality, alas, is not socially skilled, but even at my most sociable, my circle of working-class Lake Street poets and state college teachers in my 20s is not as name-dropingly famous.
***It’s possible that everyone even vaguely literary in sundry metropolitan areas around this time had drinking with Dylan Thomas stories, even if Hall’s analysis of Thomas’ poetry is individually savvy.
****In his Eliot chapter Hall says that Eliot said more than once to him that no poet knows if their work is any good. When Eliot said this in an interview Hall did with him that was destined for print in a literary magazine, that statement was cut because it seemed too down-beat.
Frank Hudson 