acoustic guitar

Nature Can Do No More Blues: Combining mysteries with bottleneck slide guitar

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I thought I was done with my Emily Dickinson series. I had started to think of what poets would be next, and….

Emily came back.  Not the mystical psychedelic Dickinson. Not the weird indie-folk Dickinson. Oh, still mysterious, still a trickster — but she asked not for unusual harmonies or strange timbres this time. She wanted to Rock!

Well, if you’ve been in a mode lately of working with acoustic guitar, and you want to transition to Rock, then there’s no better way to start than Blues. I grabbed my bottleneck slide and my resonator guitar* and it was time to get down with some rough ‘n’ ready Delta Blues — at least the way I play them.

I didn’t learn how to play slide from some Papa Legba at the crossroads, nor by grizzled tutelage from an in-the-tradition player. I was an Iowa teenager when a white college kid from Minnesota pulled out a severed wine bottle top from his jean-jacket pocket and proceeded to show the results of the guitar lessons he’d had in Minneapolis.**   I recall his technique was not pristine, but the sound including the incidental noises of the slide grinding into the strings and occasionally slapping onto the fretboard entranced me.***  Five years later I finally decided to try to figure out how to play guitar, by myself, living in a little rented travel trailer, and unable to afford any lessons.

We know Emily Dickinson played piano. Did she have lessons her family could have afforded her? Did a family member teach her? I don’t know if we know what kind of music she played, but it may have been hymns and popular parlor pieces that were sold as sheet music. Did the Celtic immigrants in Amherst leak any of their music to her? Was Black American music in her ken, and if so what variety? All mysteries, but it’s unlikely she had any idea of Blues music, because as best as can be determined, it didn’t exist yet. Sometime around the time her poetic writing was tailing off, it seems that Black Americans began mixing the musics they heard around them in North America with the music that survived the slave ships, and lullabies, and work-a-day chants of work-gangs or field laborers. Most were newly freed from enslavement. Commercial entertainment was a newly opened field for them as musicians and as audiences. In this new situation they had a new story to tell.

Extracted as musicological theory, Blues can be expressed in a lot of ways, but my appreciation says it’s an attitude as much or more than a scale, timbre, or harmonic framework. What attitude? The Blues isn’t “the Blues” as Western European derived Americans knew it. It’s not melancholia or simply depression. It’s not elevated Romantic despair. Sad, bad, and difficult things happen in a Blues song, but that’s not the main point: the main points are that the singer is still here, can tell you about it, and has maybe figured out something about what has led to this situation that they’ll share with you.

So, here’s what Emily Dickinson did that was Blues-like. Like the Blues, Dickinson is going to use humor and incongruity to describe her experience. If death is a fact of human existence, she’s going to write its Yelp review telling you about it. She’s going to tell her tales using coded language at times, so as to not rile up those who think she shouldn’t have the thoughts she has — and besides, coded language gives one the paradoxical freedom to choose the strongest, sharpest words.

Now the poem I took today is from late in Dickinson’s life, and it’s more puzzling than many of her often puzzling poems. “Nature can do no more” strikes me as an Autumn poem. Here’s all it is, as she wrote it down:

Nature can do no more
She has fulfilled her Dyes
Whatever Flower fail to come
Of other Summer days
Her crescent reimburse
If other Summers be
Nature’s imposing negative
Nulls opportunity —

Nature can do no more in Manuscript

Dickinson’s “Nature can do no more” in manuscript. Above the poem she wrote: No dreaming can compare with reality, for reality itself is a dream from which but a portion of mankind have yet worked and part of us in a not familiar Peninsula.“

This poem expresses itself strangely. “Fulfilled her Dyes?” Floral blooming colors? Autumn leaves? Punning “dies?” The transcribers think she scribed “crescent” but it might be “descent” — but what’s accounts receivable here? “Negative Nulls opportunity?” As the Pythagorean math-lyricist Billy Preston put it “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.” Or it just clearing the field for new growth? I saw a short presentation on Dickinson poetry this week where the presenter compared Dickinson to Joyce’s tangled Modernist word-play mode. This poem would be an exhibit for that.

But this struck me as Blues-like too. You see, following up on my mid-century, Upper Mississippi white-blues-kid introduction to this old acoustic Blues style, I wanted to hear more of this music performed by its originators, and you did that listening to LPs re-recorded off of worn, made-cheap, second-hand-store shellac 78s, cut fast in any handy room with a single approximated microphone. It’s a powerful sound, but it’s not a pristine and clear sound. And the singers, even if I was in the room — maybe because I was in the room, a white guy like almost all the recordists — aren’t always going to speak out. They’re asking to be heard by other Afro-American listeners perhaps, so their patois and accents aren’t lightened or toned down.

To this day, after years of listening, after much more study of Afro-American history and language, after generations of audio restoration advancements, there aren’t 100% agreed upon transcriptions of lyrics sung and said on all those early 20th century records (and their meaningful context) — “crescent” or “descent” isn’t the half of it.

So mysterious Emily Dickinson, meet Geeshie Wiley.****  What’s “Eagles on the half dollar” have to do with commerce and sex, was it “bolted meal” and flour or flowers?  I was ready to combine the mysteries here — and yes Emily Dickinson, rock a little.

I might have performed Dickinson’s exact words for this piece, but I wanted them to fit into a common Blues music form, and so I was already prepared to modify them. I decided to make words that were more my extrapolation of what I feel she might be saying as she views the null of winter coming on with the knowledge of the cyclical phase of the seasons meaning another summer follows. I tried to mumble the words a bit as I sang them to give it the air of those old slide-guitar Blues records. Here’s what I sang:

Nature can do no more, she has fulfilled her Dyes
Nature can do no more, she has fulfilled her Dyes
Flowers that failed to bloom left for other summer days

The crescent moon decrees, other Summers yet to be
The crescent moon decrees, other Summers yet to be
Colors’ slow cremation — nulls for opportunity

Yes, there’s a spoken aside in the middle of the song. I’m not printing that, because the spirit of the old 78s says you have to try to figure it out. You can hear my performance of this “after a poem by Emily Dickinson” song with the audio player you should see below. No player seen? You don’t have to jump the Katy looking for it, you can use this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*The, neck and the body’s outline shape is like a regular acoustic guitar, but the top and interior are replaced with a 10-inch metal speaker cone. This cone is driven to vibrate by the bridge holding the guitar’s strings producing a louder piercing tone that has a directness and can’t-ignore-it volume that Blues players liked.

**The kid’s name was Don Williams, an all-to-common name. If he’s still alive he’d be in his 70s. I’d love to meet him again if only to tell him that for all his pretentions and mine he imprinted my approach to the guitar.

***This is not how everyone plays slide guitar, even Blues slide. Precise touch and technique can produce music with tight intonation that avoids all these artifacts. I just like hearing those artifacts. I love recording piano with key or pedal noise or even a bit of a squeaking bench too.

****I often fear I’m too long-winded when a feeling starts me up. But I’m nothing like what recordings like Geeshie Wiley’s can do to folks whom the muse has touched. Here’s two of them (warning: long form writing)  Daphne A. Brooks. John Jeremiah Sullivan.

The Route of Evanescence

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Here’s another little mystery, a riddle inside a riddle, which makes up a new song using the words of Emily Dickinson — but first a little of me sounding like a regular blog that talks about itself.

As assured time to work on this project has largely disappeared, I’ve been turning to simpler compositions and quicker realizations of them to cope with this, but over the past few months a number of pieces have sat in limbo, waiting to be rediscovered, waiting for decisions to be finished or abandoned. In going through some of these this month and I came upon a recording session for “A Route of Evanescence”  from last August.

I recall the session. It was just me and a couple of acoustic guitars, with access to my quiet studio space. I had some advance notice, maybe a day or so, that I’d have that time. On the hurry-up, I prepared a number of compositions to record, and when the day came, I set about laying down tracks singing and playing that pair of acoustic guitars. I’m not an exact or exacting guitar player by temperament, but when I haven’t played as much, my old hands produce more imperfections. None-the-less the limited time meant that I pressed on. I think I may have recorded basic tracks for at least two or three tunes that day. It’s likely that I’ve already presented at least one of the others here, but not this one. Why?

I might have blanched at releasing too many acoustic guitar tunes in a row. Despite my limitations I like what I can do with that instrument, but “like” means that I could fall into doing that over and over, and my temperament also doesn’t like doing that. I might frustrate you a little* by jumping around musical goals and genres, but a bored artist won’t interest an audience either. Or maybe I had some songs more distinctly about summer that I wanted to get out before the end of the season, and so this one was set aside?

Listening again to the raw tracks I thought it sounded pretty good. It’s harmonically different from some ruts I fall into, and the playing and singing is at a level that represents what the composition is. I may have thought I’d record some additional tracks, build out a more elaborate arrangement back then — but it stood by itself when I listened this month. Therefore, I mixed it and made it ready for distribution. **

route of evanescence

Here the chord sheet for today’s Chimera. That 2nd inversion G is a neat sound.

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And then, as I went to prepare this blog post, there was one additional surprise. I thought it was one Dickinson poem that I performed back in August, the one named in the recording files, but the song was made from two: “A Route of Evanescence”  (F. 1489) and “Ferocious as a Bee without a wing”  (F. 1492).

Why did I combine them? I don’t remember. They sound good as a combined piece, though doing so may confuse Dickinson’s intended mystery, because both appear to be riddle poems. As a poetic or sung genre, the riddle has a long tradition (folk music, going back to the Middle Ages, has a bunch of them). The lyric gives you hints that don’t exactly make sense until you figure out, or are told, what the subject or answer of the riddle is. “A Route of Evanescence’s”  answer/subject is the ruby-throated hummingbird. “Furious as a Bee without a wing’s”  may be a honeypot ant.***  The riddle poem, and Dickinson’s examples of that, are antecedents of the early-20th century Imagist poem, where the moments details are exact, but inference or the title may be necessary to interpret the details meaning. Evanescence, as in the charged moment, is part of that Imagist creed.

Both of these are later Dickinson poems, written in the late 1870s more than a decade after the vast majority of her work written in the 1860s. Dickinson by then may have been like me, writing shorter and shorter — sometimes on scraps of envelopes or the back of food packaging in her case — trying to find autumn creation in the midst of life.

To hear this Chimera song combining a hummingbird and a honey ant, use the audio player gadget you may see below. No player to be found?  This highlighted link will open a new window with an audio player.

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*Those I frustrate more than a little likely aren’t reading this. I keep thinking there are a goodly number of listeners who’ve heard one to a few of the Parlando Project audio pieces, but finding even a single ill-tasting example, leave off listening here for something elsewhere where they expect consistent rewards.

**I use an audio streaming service that is designed for podcasters, who are typically long-form talkers about their subjects. I could do a talking podcast, more or less replacing these written posts about the exploration that makes up this Project, but I don’t see the demand. So, the Parlando Project podcast is just these musical performances you see at the bottom of the blog posts. You can subscribe to or browse the last 100 or so Parlando audio pieces on most places you can get podcasts — except for Spotify, which for some reason they never shared with me, dropped the Parlando podcast distribution from their podcast section a few years back.

***A fascinating class of creatures that I knew nothing about. I’m not yet even sure if a species of it was found in Dickinson’s 19th century Massachusetts, or if Dickinson knew of this insect. This poem seems to use many similar words to another very short Dickinson poem (F. 1788) that is the penultimate poem in the Franklin listing of the complete Dickinson poems. However mysterious, it’s an image Dickinson returned to.

Exit the were-fox, chased by the land-holding patriarchy, “Reynardine"

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Did T. S. Eliot for Halloween* suffocate our audience with too much of the musty air of the classroom? I hoped those loud synth fanfares would set such terrors to run. Maybe not. Well, I’m ready to tempt you back with a bit of love and seduction, a song set away from graveyards and into castles. Our Halloween series continues, and this time with 100% wooden music I played on an acoustic guitar.

So, ladies in nightclothes flaunting impossibly flowing but still in good array hair, running through the forest under a moon over the branches kind of stuff? Maybe. First some literary history. Don’t worry, I won’t take long with that, and there’s a good creature-feature song at the end.

We started our Halloween series with Frost and Eliot, poets that many will know even if poetry isn’t an interest. Today’s piece uses words from a well-known name that when applied to a poet isn’t well-known: Belfast writer Joseph Campbell is that name. Yes, every cursèd time I mention his name here I’m required to say “No, not the Power of Myth guy.” Poet Campbell was a contemporary of Yeats. And like Yeats he visited London when F. S. Flint, T. E. Hulme, and the “What’s with the initials guys?” Yank-transplant Ezra Pound were taking up their make-it-new idea to be called Imagism. Several years before Pound and Flint published their famous essay on the tenants of Imagism, Campbell published some of the earliest Imagist poems.

Campbell’s relationship with Yeats is complex. They both were heavily into valorizing Irish culture. Campbell was even more so into Ireland throwing off its exploitative English colonial status. Both seemed to have an interest in the faerie and spirit realms, though Yeats had an interest in practicing wizardry, while Campbell, AFAIK, didn’t. Both had interest in music, but Yeats was specifically resistant to having his poems sung conventionally, while what of Campbell’s work survives (underrecognized) is as a lyricist** for songs better-known than he is.

As a song, today’s piece, “Reynardine,”  became oft-performed in the British 20th century folk revival. When those performers would present it, they would introduce it as an old song — which is true in part. Its melody is largely based on an old air. The name of its main character, and something in the general trope of “I’m in love with a mysterious bad boy” did have old ballad antecedents. But those revivalist performers would usually want their audiences to know that the main character, the haunting love interest the singer knows but society doesn’t, is a shape-shifter, a were-fox.

Campbell’s words as printed in “The Mountainy Singer” are better, more direct, than the lyrics usually used for performing this song. I made one change: Campbell has “took me for his leman” in his, and I translated this to “lover” for clarity.

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As I discussed briefly when I first presented this one a couple of years ago: that doesn’t seem to be so in the extant pre-20th century versions of this song. In 1909, our “Reynardine,”  now a were-fox eluding the patriarchy and foxhound driving hunters, was published in two books: as a collected Irish folk song from Belfast, and as a page poem in Campbell’s poetry collection The Mountainy Singer.  This idea of the song’s dark hero emerged that recently, and I have every reason to believe it was the little remembered Joseph Campbell who cast him that way.

I did my best with my performance of this one, thinking I was emulating those folk revivalists whose work I greatly admire. The one special thing I did was use Campbell’s set of words as printed in his poetry collection. With one small alteration, I think they work well to sing to modern audiences, and his version has the compression and specific mystery that can make Imagist poems and short lyrical songs compelling when contrasted with lengthy poems and discursive sung ballads. Audio player to hear the performance below. No player? This highlighted link will open a tab with a player.

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*Unlike the other pieces I’ll present in this series, my settings of Eliot are not listener favorites. I watch the stats here while not spending much time trying to maximize them. Eliot draws some interest outside the U.S., and very, very little from here in the States.

I also want to say that I want to celebrate Halloween this year (more about why later in this series) and I want to do it as Emily Dickinson once wrote she did in approaching some topics in her poetry “I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.” But writing as Eliot did of his unreal city of corpses that can’t be hidden, and casting it as a song of fantasy, vision, or delusion, can be offensive in a time where real corpses are piling up not from natural death, but from human intention.

If I offend you, you likely aren’t reading this far. I assure you I offend myself in doing so. “You! hypocrite lecteur! — mon semblable, — mon frère!” “You! Hypocrite reader! — my fellow, — my brother!” quoted Eliot, quoting Baudelaire, quote I.

**Even as the composer part of most of the Parlando Project, I want to say that a pet peeve of mine is folks crediting a song solely to the music composer. I hear this all the time with contemporary songs, particularly when the melodist has sung the piece: Brian Wilson, Carole King, Elton John, and so on. Besides his unacknowledged work in recasting “Reynardine,”  Campbell is the lyricist for “The Garten Mother’s Lullaby”  and “My Lagan Love.”

Quiet Sanctuary

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I have trouble at poetry readings.  Oh, I enjoy them, but they tend to spark off ideas and associations* in my mind. When I come back from those jumps in my consciousness the poet reading in front of me may have gone off to the next poem — and I feel like I have been delinquent in my duty as an audience.

A couple of months ago at the poetry reading series I try to attend regularly,** a poet was introducing a poem, and somewhere in between that poem’s introductory material and the poem itself this connection, this metaphor, occurred strongly to me. I don’t now recall what it was the poet reading said. Was it something about an acoustic guitar? Possibly. Something about a church? Maybe. That I can’t remember says something about the utter rapidity and completeness of my leaving that room and into the germ of this poem.

Quiet Sanctuary

Here’s the poem presented as a chord-sheet with the guitar chords I used to accompany it.

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I saw immediately the churches of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation, small Midwestern US churches. Usually wooden and white with a steeple’s neck outside, and inside largely one room, the sanctuary within the single story, filled with dark brown wooden pew benches. A basement below, small children’s bible class spaces and a kitchen that smelled of brewing coffee, the sanctum of wives, mothers, and grandmothers of the congregation after weddings, funerals, baptisms.

South Marion church

The particular church most in my memory is decades gone, but this nearby one will serve as an example.

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When one thinks of churches, I suppose some think of grand spaces, cathedrals or those more modern large urban churches built to approach that scale and presumption. Weighty stone buildings, as unresonate as tombstones, intricate carvings and décor. Grand halls, chambers, perhaps a pipe organ, for they are the pipe organs of buildings, elaborate and encyclopedic, overwhelming anything human that would manipulate it.

The modesty of those small-town Midwest churches, the woodiness of them, has its own glory. And so it seemed natural to connect them to a instrument that is somewhat of a point of origin to me musically, the acoustic guitar.

I don’t know how well this little poem will communicate that to those who do not share my experiences with those buildings. I accept that a poem can’t be everything. There’s one detail in my poem that might not make sense or image to some readers: the attendance list. In my recall, it was common for these churches to have a board that toted up the attendance for the last service. I’m not sure that sign’s entire purpose. To remind those in the sanctuary that they were part of a continuance? Could be. The small continuances are what these churches contained.

You can hear my musical performance of “Quiet Sanctuary”  with the audio player gadget you might see below. No player to be seen? I offer this highlighted link as fall-back then. The link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*It occurs to me that I rarely have ideas as such so much as I have associations, things that seem to recall other things or suggest other things yet to be connected. It’s possible to write poetry without the poems containing metaphor, that kind of association, but most poets don’t. That trait may be why I’m drawn to poetry.

**That reading series, held the second Thursday of the month in St. Paul Minnesota, is the Midstream Reading Series. I know some of my readers are from the Twin Cities area. I find this event worthwhile, and you might too. Though I’m often inarticulate in person, I would try to say hello if you were to greet me there. Next reading is this coming Thursday, October 12th.

Touch lightly Nature’s sweet Guitar

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

This week while attending the online reading of all 1789 Emily Dickinson poems as part of the yearly Tell It Slant Festival, I have been noticing how many Dickinson poems use music as a metaphor. I know she played the piano herself, but I know little about what her personal musical aesthetic was, or if there were other musical instruments played in her home. Piano could be then, as it still was in my mid-century lifetime, a home entertainment device — provided that the family could afford the space and the cost.

For whatever reason though, Dickinson chose to use guitar in this poem, and seeing my “home” instrument in it attracted me.

In Emily’s 19th century, guitar also played such a home entertainment role. I have a somewhat worn-out, very small bodied six-string that I sometimes play, and in today’s guitar marketplace such guitars are often called “parlor guitars.” The historic usage that name honors was that with less cost in space than a keyboard instrument, a home player could entertain themselves or their housemates with a guitar. These small guitars easily suited smaller-bodied women* and many of the players in the home were women.

A parlor guitar from the Emily Dickinson Museum’s collection**

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When it came to realize my music for this poem, I didn’t play my parlor guitar — I played an electric model — but as I continued to go over the words in the process of creating the audio piece I’m not sure that Dickinson had an actual guitar in mind either.

Touch lightly Nature’s sweet Guitar
Unless thou know’st the Tune
Or every Bird will point at thee
Because a Bard too soon —

The opening line, used in place of a title as we do with Dickinson’s untitled poems, has somewhat conventional words for playing a guitar: “touch” “lightly” and “sweet.” Indeed, a parlor guitar like mine responds sweetly to a lighter touch and isn’t designed for driving picking such as used in some later American guitar styles. But Dickinson is a master at choosing the unusual word, the one you or I might never come up with. Her opening line calls it “Nature’s…guitar.”

Given that she moves over to bird’s opinions by the poem’s third line, I think this guitar may be figurative. Its wood and strings might be tree branches, and the Bard too soon, a too early storm. Still, the final line might be speaking of prerequisites for musicianship or songcraft, seeming to warn that a player should be cautious until they know their “song well before I start singing” as another songwriter once stipulated.***

I left a middle section open for an additional top line when Dave and I recorded the basic tracks last week. Afterward I wasn’t sure what should go there, but I decided to score one of my simple orchestral instrument parts for this featuring a violin. You can hear the result with the audio player below. No player seen? Touch lightly this highlighted link and it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*They weren’t made especially small, the petite size was normal for guitars in that time. The current standard size acoustic guitar in our era, often called a “dreadnaught” (because it was seen on arrival between the World Wars as big and formidable as a battleship) is much larger in dimensions: deeper, longer, and wider, and often with a longer-scaled neck.

Men played these small guitars too. In an earlier post I showed a picture of what purports to be Mark Twain’s own guitar, which is also that then standard parlor size, though Twain said he played it for the roughs in his California sojourn.

**The Museum has only recently been able to digitally document the artifacts in its collection. Perhaps due to the difficulties in provenance because the houses of Emily Dickinson and her brother and important friend and sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson did not pass immediately into museum curation, there is no online information as to who may have owned it, or even if it was played in Emily’s presence. I’m somewhat knowledgeable, though not a professional appraiser, and think this guitar could be a 19th century instrument. The collection’s picture of the back of the guitar shows a blacksmith-quality repair at the headstock joint. A common guitar injury, then as now, is for the neck to fracture at that place. My somewhat-informed-amateur’s opinion is that the headstock may be later than the rest of the guitar and was grafted onto it.

***A stipulation I disregarded, as the first song I learned to play was the Dylan song containing that line, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”   I did not touch it lightly.

Four people doing something like what the Parlando Project does

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

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.

Here’s one of Giffith’s Songbag performances, a variation of a song I discussed here that my great-grandfather liked in this post.

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*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.

Instructions for Angels

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

What I’ll write about today’s piece might be needlessly complex. I’ll try not to take too much of your time so you can get to the simple performance of the poem below and you can decide.

The usual job of a critical essay on a poem or other work of art is to explain how something works and doesn’t work, usually making use of, or in the context of, criteria for artistic value. Within these efforts, the spread of essays praising or condemning a poet, poem, or poems is maintained. There’s no contradiction here. How can there be good art if we don’t have bad art? Judgments, pointing out good and bad, are equally creative, just as when we are writing and revising ourselves.

Is this a critical essay? I’m not sure it is. Instead, I think of these pieces of prose as short notes about my experiences with the texts, nearly always literary poems, as I combine them with music and perform them. And in the case of today’s audio piece using Kenneth Patchen’s “Instructions for Angels”  my experience so contradicts what criteria I believe I have that it calls into question that I have them or really believe in them.

What do I think are the things I look for in a successful poem? First, I think poetry is musical speech. “Instructions for Angels”  is free verse, something formalists take as problematic. I doubt I’m a formalist. I admit the effects of rhyme and meter, but my musical sense admits also that the amount of symmetry and regularity can and should vary. There’s some underlying da DUM da DUM iambic back-beat feel here in Patchen’s poem, that King James version 17th century English thing that can itself now feel overused or overfamiliar. But familiarity is not always bad, no more than regularity in structure. “Instructions for Angels”  does clearly use one musical feature: the refrain. Perhaps this is what drew me to it when skimming through a book-length selected poems looking for what would be good to set with music. I’m not alone in choosing this poem. I’ve found several other musical settings online.

instructions for angels

Today’s piece is easy enough to play on guitar, so guitarists have at it.

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I do think we too often confuse imagery with poetry’s essence, praising coded word-play rather than word-music. But imagery is a more abstract version of word music isn’t it? That this-is-like-that, or things arrayed in an as-above-so-below manner is an intellectual harmony. The intervals and combinations are pleasing as audible music is. “Instructions for Angels”  is plainsong in this regard. Yes, I suppose angels and God have a certain majesty, but as a recent coronation reminds us, tired pomp can bore quickly. The rest of the poem is full of threadbare, generalized counters isn’t it? “pretty girl,” “red mouth,” “baby,” “beautiful,” “rain,” “snow,” “flowers,” “trees,” “winds,” and “fields.” If one looks for fresh and arresting imagery this poem doesn’t seem to have it. If I was revising this poem or it was being workshopped, it would be easy to imagine changing a few of those general terms to more specific ones. I can see someone asking “But Ken, what flower exactly do you like? Give us the name so we can see it.”

How about a poem’s message? Shouldn’t that count for something? Yes, I think it should, yet over the ages critics can worry that worthy messages are too common, too cheap — or that art for art’s sake has judged any meaning as secondary. Writing in the 1930s Patchen was often reacting to a Modernism that was too inhuman, too concerned with form, and too unconcerned with the fates of its readers. I sense the present pendulum has once more swung and we are now again asking poems to tell us worthy things, and for the poets to be worthy people. I should be happy, yet I’m not always happy with poems on the right side of the issues. I wouldn’t like it if that was all the poetry I read and sing. Am I just cursed with contrariness? Should I note here that Patchen’s pacifism continued throughout WWII? That was a contrary position and not helpful to his poetic career at the time.

If a poem’s message is important, shouldn’t it be as clear as prose about saying it? How obscure can or should poetry be? Again, poems and critics differ on this, but there’s a consensus that a poem shouldn’t be harder to understand than it has to be.

That “has to be” is a broad thing however. Proponents of exciting and fresh images and language will say beauty and skill allows indirection, ambiguity is true to life, a little, even a lot, of mystery can compel, and that irony combats blandness and tiresome cliché. The greatest benefit of workshopping poems, or at least second readers, is for a poet to find out they are sometimes unintentionally obscure.

One could say that “Instructions for Angels”  is clear. But on first and later readings, even into my performance, there was one small thing that was less than clear and more at odd. We don’t have to wait long for it: the first sentence says “Take the usual events/For your tall.” “The usual events” is clear, it’s a statement of purpose for the everyday and common that Patchen will praise as the poem continues. But “tall?” It looks like a typo.* I could make more immediate sense if it was “tale,” “tail,” “toll” or “tell.” Is Patchen saying “Angels pass this info up (way up,  like to heaven) the chain?” A phrase soon to come, “Blue weather,” is fine, and there is some nice ambiguity there: blues or blue skies? Patchen returns and expands that image with “The weather in the highest soul” indicating he intends that ambiguity.

So where does that leave me, all this applying of what I think and have been taught to understand might constitute a “good poem?” In my present, poems have two states: ones that interest me, often because I can see performing them; and then, the ones I skip over. It may not be the fault of the poet or their poem that I skip them — that poem just doesn’t exist with me in my moment. I’m not totally without criteria, some things I can predict, but this poem is an example of a poem that met me emotionally in my moment, the place where some poems live while others are undressed tombstones. Is Patchen’s poem technically perfect? Unlikely, but there’s a ruined recording take were I just started crying a bit as I tried to sing.

I don’t believe every poem needs to do that. Pleasure in the words, images, and music of some other poems will make them live for me. Amazement at virtuosities can compel at times. If every poem in the world was like “Instructions for Angels,”  I’d be a rebel angel, and crawl into a John Ashbery volume and never come out. As it is, I’d instruct the angels to not poop on my head and to pass it up the line that I’m grateful for Kenneth Patchen.

You can hear my performance of “Instructions for Angels”  with the graphical player below. No player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with one.

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*I have a scanned pdf of the published collection presumably OK’d by Patchen, but the typo theory remains possible. Patchen was recorded reading some of his poems, sometimes with music. That would answer this doubt, but as far as search goes I haven’t found him reading this  poem.

Yeats’ Coat

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Let me briefly slip, Wordsworth-like, into reverie, and note that “Oft, when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood…” I turn to the vast daffodilian array of scanned material available from a brief Internet search. I’d been thinking about Irish poets after reading this exchange between poets Ann Grá and Sean Thomas Dougherty.  Grá asked “What’s the best way to improve one’s active writing vocabulary?” Dougherty’s answer? “Read Irish poets. Everything will improve. Including life.” Irish poets mentioned — and William Butler Yeats enters the chat. You may have noticed that I led-off last time by remembering a Yeats poem about a friend whose work has come to nothing. This all entered into seeking another Yeats poem to perform this week. I came upon this one. Poetry workshop devotees, note that I read it even though it has just about the most generic title imaginable: “A Coat.”

But here’s the neat thing: I was able to read it in its first American publication, situated exactly with added meaning and context in a scanned copy of a 1914 number of Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based Poetry  magazine. Poetry,  the magazine, was fairly new. Yeats reputation was well-established — so publishing a tranche of new Yeats poems was likely “a get” for Monroe rather than a breakthrough for an emerging poet. With rhyming coincidence, the selection of 11 Yeats’ poems begins with that one from last time “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing,”  and ends with today’s: “A Coat.”   These poems are followed by a short editor’s note from Monroe who writes of the resistance from cultured readers to the Modernist verse her less than two-year-old magazine had received, singling out the objections to Carl Sandburg’s Chicago poems* she’d published. Then as I read the scanned magazine, and without even a page-break, the indispensable English-language Imagist Mephistopheles, Ezra Pound, pops up from the hellmouth trap-door with a review of Yeats new verse.

Then, as often now, what sits on the page as if it’s an objective bit of selected poetic criticism is really an insider comment from those who already know each other in some way.** Pound reviews “A Coat”  specifically in his piece, just a few pages past the poem’s American unveiling. “Is Mr. Yeats an Imagiste?” Pound is rhetorically asked. “No,” Pound answers himself, “but he has written des Images as have many good poets before him.” In writing here about Yeats then current poetry Pound praises the directness of style and unfussy language and syntax the Irish poet is now using. He mentions that Yeats’ earlier poetry with a more 19th century music and setting has attracted followers and imitators in their now 20th century, but perhaps the imitators miss some of its vitality — so much so that Pound wonders if the reader would “Rather read Yeats in the original” than these bad copies. Pound’s conclusion? “I’ve not a word against the glamour as it appears in Yeats’ early poems, but we have had so many other pseudo-glamours and glamourlets and mists and fogs since the nineties that one is about ready for a hard light.”

So, why do Irish writers have something to teach us other English speakers about using our language. First off, as a colonized and exploited country, they may look at the language from a critical parallax. If it’s the language of your colonizer, your oppressor, you may want to ask what English words should  do, and you have reasons to be warry of what they can  do.***  And I have a second idea, less fully-formed, that the whole mists and fogs of Celtic folklore, to which Yeats added his own caldrons of turn-of-the-20th-century magic and occult stuff, offer a conscientious poetic distiller a chance to speak the shades of the ineffable vividly in their poetry because their folkloric traditions and magikal folderol have already saturated their personal needs for glamorous elaboration. Other poets embroidered robes, either traditional or ceremonial, will get caught in such, but if one can escape, you have the contrast of a new clarity. This clarity is different — you have the experience of having worn the long robe, and now the new Eden.

Adam-Eve

Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, then Adam explained plant-based couture  Eve wonders why she suddenly knows the Latin genus Toxicodendron.

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Today’s performance of Yeats’ “A Coat”  has music for solo acoustic guitar, something that I’ve fallen back to often this past summer. The final guitar performance turned out to be an exercise in the various timbres I could pull from the guitar. The tuning and chord voicings used had several two and even three-string unisons which resonate and sustain, and then some contrasting pizzicato muted notes. You can hear it with a player gadget below — or if you don’t see that, with this backup highlighted link.

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*Reading Monroe’s 1914 account reminds me of just how alien Sandburg’s poetry must have seemed to an early 20th century ear. To my 21st century ear and mind, I can more easily find the music in it, and I treasure now his Imagist “direct treatment of the thing” being applied to ordinary life, workers, immigrants, and the cultural powers that obfuscated that with elaborate English language.

**The American Pound and the Irish Yeats were both in London at this time. It’s likely that Pound himself was the conduit by which the new Yeats poems found their way into Monroe’s magazine. London then was the locus of the new Imagist ideals which stressed simplicity. Poets who wrote primarily in metrical and rhymed forms then, such as Yeats, Frost, Hardy, and Edward Thomas absorbed or resonated with this new, fresh, directness as a poetic effect.

***Though for various reasons this project has limitations on using modern English-language poetry, it strikes me that contemporary American poetry benefits from similar parallaxes. I was going to supply a catalog of those groups who know English as having been used as the language of an oppression, but it occurs that anyone who’d go with this thought can already supply their own catalog.

Stones

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to write here a bit, but if you’re in a hurry, I urge you to do two things. The first is to simply listen to today’s audio piece. I think that will reward you. You’ll find a way to play that near the bottom of this post along with my second suggestion.

To a large extent this project adapts other people’s poetry in the process of combining it with music I write and record. Occasionally when I mention this, or when the more general topic of a difference between poetry and song lyrics comes up, there will be objections or distinctions brought forward: those two things (poetry found on the page and words designed to be combined with music) aren’t the same, they’re different.

I’ve written about this here in the past. My conclusions in summary: the thing we call poetry includes a great deal of unlike expressions,*  and many are comfortable with that. Why chop off “song lyrics” as an appendix of non-poetry or not-quite-good-enough poetry? Well, if we do that are we forgetting that poetry across multiple cultures began as an oral presentation almost certainly combined with music? Why would that precedent not mean that literary poetry, however prized and skilled, has failed to sing or express its music explicitly?

So, if I move past those differences between poetry meant for the page and poetry meant for performance with music, and seek to test literary poetry in that context, what do I find? Well, a number of things that seem like problems with musical performance of Modernist page poetry are often less difficult than they seem. Poem doesn’t rhyme? That doesn’t help one memorize for unaided performance, but it’s not really a big deal. Uneven meter or line lengths? Modern musical expression has long slipped the bonds of straight beats or fixed length of melodic lines. One can even up shorter lines with musical elements too.

What is challenging? There are auditory challenges. Texts designed for performance often take into account pronunciation obstacles and allow space for breath. At least for myself there is a general difference in attention between words heard and words read in terms of attention. If a word or image requires one to pause for consideration on the silent page, there is an automatic “pause button” in our consciousness, and this is not so in the ear. The richest literary poetry may overwhelm us when listened to, though performance itself may also illuminate things we would never hear on the page, even after multiple readings.

In the context of today’s piece, let me speak of another issue. Work for performance, such a song lyrics, thrives on repetition, or refrains. Rhyme itself is one of those matters of repetition, even if it’s not required. Refrain draws our attention as it combines with the rest of the performed text, allows us to more fully absorb one part of what is expressed, and combines naturally with musical motifs that also repeat.

When I look through a poetry collection looking for Parlando candidates, the poems that use repetition will often be the ones that seem most suitable for performance — but that said, many pieces I’ve performed here have no refrain, no repeating chorus. Particularly with shorter texts this can still work, but piece after piece of poetry performed without repeating elements seems too much of avoiding that useful thing.

More than 50 years ago, a pioneering rock critic Richard Goldstein, published a book, The Poetry of Rock,  examining the possibility that rock lyrics of that era could be considered as poetry. Despite the title, the book did not wholesale advocate for the conclusion that they were simply poetry. Instead Goldstein noted, as I’ll admit, that these two ways of encountering words lend themselves to different experiences.** One tactic Goldstein decided on when dealing with song refrains in his printed examples to be experienced as literary poetry was to not completely transcribe the refrains in his versions of the lyrics. Instead he might just put them once at the end of the set of words. Making them the final statement on the page gave them emphasis, as repetition in a chorus would, without overwhelming the expression of the verses.

Working the other way, as I will do today, one can reverse this tactic. One can simply repeat a stanza, perhaps the first one, as a chorus, or at the end. Or one can take a line and make it a refrain, as I did with Sheng-Yu’s “Lament”  this fall.

Celtic Ouroboros

The Poetry of Rock? A Celtic representation of the ouroboros. This is a mystical symbol beloved by Jung and alchemists that is often used in graveyards. What does it mean? Thoughts differ, so may I offer one: Death can go kiss its own ass.

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Did you skip to here? That’s fine.

OK, let’s get to the good stuff: this poem “Stones”  appears in the new poems section of Ethna McKiernan’s Light Rolling Slowly Backwards.  It’s a fine poem on the page, and I highly encourage you to experience more of McKiernan’s work there by buying her book or seeking it out via a library. Here’s the publisher’s link.  That’s the other “ask” I have for you today. But “Stones”  is also a poem of lyric experiences, it calls out to be performed with the context of its implied emotions shared in your ear.

And this I did. Besides presuming unilaterally to do that, I made one other adaptation in the piece for performance’s sake: I took a line in the final stanza and made it a refrain. Because that line is repeated now six extra times, I’m bringing it forward for you to make sure you notice it and its possible meanings.***  I could throw in some more paragraphs about what I considered those possible meanings to be as I performed this beautiful poem, but I’ll not do that today. May your ear link to your heart, and listen with the player gadget below —if your way of viewing this blog shows that — or this highlighted hyperlink otherwise.

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*”Paradise Lost,” “Tyger,” “We grow accustomed to the dark,”  and “The Red Wheelbarrow”  are all worthy poems we might agree. Are they less different from each other than some random literary poem is from some song lyric?

**I may be repeating myself to say this here in a footnote — but that’s part of why I do the Parlando Project: because I expect you’ll experience the texts differently when you hear them performed with music.

***Did Ethna intend that line, now a refrain, to reflect itself in those meanings? I can’t say, but perhaps not. I, who performed it, intend for those extra meanings to come forward. I completely subverted William Butler Yeats intended meaning in one of his poems this fall. Judge me as you will.

A Cradle Song

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today’s audio piece is another simple arrangement, just acoustic guitar and voice, but the simplicity allowed me to move quickly from composition, to arrangement, and finally to recording an acceptable performance.

I only decided to record this text, by the English mystic, poet, and artist William Blake early this morning. This week was already scheduled for two important life transitions in my family by those older and younger, and this poem seemed to say something from that universal point in all lives when everything, when all, is change before us.

So, Blake cast this story as a lullaby, which is by design a calming song meant to accompany change from wakefulness and worry to sleep and the hallucinations, visions, or amorphous brain activity of dreams. The infant in his poem may not understand, may even dread this nightly change. It’s only a daily moment, but mysterious for one so new to experience, and so the poet-singer as parent is there to soothe the infant — and themselves. Here’s a link to the text of Blake’s poem that I used.

Is this only a story of an infant, or does the mystic Blake mean to say more about us? I believe he intends more. Infancy is only a starting point, an illustrative state before change. If we’ve been parents, we could recall our experiences in helping the infant journey from this beginning point. Blake wants to take us there to show us something.

And so it is this week. A grandmother is moving farther from memory and autonomy, graceful and befuddled, to a new care setting; and a teenager is moving too, earlier in life with more paths before them, yet more sure, and we don’t know how much to guide or understand. Yes, in-between are us middle-people who need to help both, and yet we’ve never been on exactly either’s path ourselves.

The lullaby is for the child and the parent. The parent and the child.

Blake The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun
Typical “sandwich generation” work for women as illustrated by William Blake.

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When I composed the music and performed “A Cradle Song”  I thought it was from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.  And it has been included in the Songs of Experience  portion in some editions, but not by Blake himself. Blake even seems to have toyed with an additional stanza I didn’t sing or know, and the supposition is that today’s text may have been meant to be the Songs of Experience  compliment to the other Blake Cradle Song that was engraved in Blake’s Songs of Innocence* — but that Blake changed his mind or was unable to complete the engraving for Songs of Experience.  Both Blake cradle songs have been set to music: the Songs of Innocence  one by Allen Ginsberg, the one I sing today by Benjamin Britten, but I have taken my own path and done my own music for today’s version of Blake’s “A Cradle Song.”  You can hear it with a player gadget that some will see below, or with this highlighted hyperlink that will open a new tab window to play it.

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*There are other contrasting, paired poems in the two books.