I started work on the Parlando Project early in 2016 by learning how distribute audio pieces via web-based player I could embed here in this blog and also through “Podcasting” where audio is listed for download on directories such as iTunes, Google’s Play Store, Player.fm and the like. Throughout the spring and early summer of … Continue reading How We Make the Parlando Project Pieces
I’m often attracted to Chinese poetry, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s the deceptive simplicity to the images, that hardly seem like images at all if one expects the showy metaphors used by many western poets. The concision of many of the most admired Chinese poems can be shocking. And to me there seems … Continue reading Spring View
Last post I said that Pablo Neruda’s departed lover was by definition absent by the time we got to the final love poem in his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. I’ve now read the entire collection in an English translation, and I’d have to say that the lover is to a large … Continue reading Poem 1 from Twenty Love Poems
The story this time is failure, diversion, randomness, and Dada. Some of it’s mine. After the largely pleasant interruptions of the holidays, I’ve been finding it hard to concentrate extensively on new pieces. This hurts the more intricate musical compositions, research on the context of their original creation and reception, and my fresh translations of … Continue reading Ghost Blues
When I select which texts to present here it’s most often an informal, beneath the consciousness, process. This week I thought I’d follow on from my last post and continue on the theme of a poet’s experience of age, but instead the events and times we live in overcame me. Earlier I was beginning to … Continue reading Song from Love’s Labour’s Lost
What age are we when we write poetry? What age should we be? Poet Donald Hall while writing memoir in essay form after age 80 said that part of why he turned to prose was that after a certain age he no longer felt he had the urge to, or could, write poetry. I’m not … Continue reading Winter Sleep
Here’s another poem by the lesser-known American poet Genevieve Taggard. Taggard was sometimes classed with a group of woman poets of the first part of the 20th century, all of whom suffered from the rise in the 1920s of “High Modernism” that held that longer poems with elevated metaphors referencing prior literature and art were … Continue reading Endless Circle
We’re now nearing the top of our look back at the most liked and listened to audio pieces this past fall. Yesterday we used words from a trio of women writers, and today starts off the same way. If you missed the original posts on my encounter with these texts and creating the music for … Continue reading Fall 2019 Parlando Top Ten, numbers 4-2
Continuing our review of the Top Ten most liked and listened to pieces this past season here at the Parlando Project, here are the next three. My son likes to needle me by asking what old dead white men I’m presenting today on the blog. What could be my defense? I could respond that many … Continue reading Fall 2019 Parlando Top Ten, numbers 7-5
Here’s a poem by 20th Century American poet and artist Kenneth Patchen performed with music which manually realizes some ideas often produced by machinery. Patchen is one of the original poetry accompanied by jazz guys, an idea that is one of the tributaries to the Parlando Project, but the poem of his I use today … Continue reading Do the Dead Know What Time It Is?
