angels

It’s been hard to complete new work recently, so “Anglers” for Minnesota’s Sport Fishing Opener day.

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

The world of this poem is scribed with the understanding that when you’re on a lake’s surface you are at the boundary level of two worlds. Like unto angels in Medieval drawings, those fishing are pulling the fish from the aqueous world into the sky world, and I often felt I could sense the hooked fish’s wonder and distress. “Who are these scale-less giants unconcerned by gaseous air?” This poem is called “Anglers.”

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, the Yip Abides blog and rmichaelroman caught this wall painting in 2009. Whimsey aside, the very fish the anglers are seeking to catch in Minnesota today are spending their day trying to catch other fish.

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It’s unsaid in the poem, but I was in the boat described. I didn’t put myself there because I wanted to focus the reader’s attention on the two brothers and yes, on the fish. There are other undercurrents that I think I kept out of the poem, and someday should make at least one other fishing boat poem. If any in this blogs’ diverse readership reads this before or after getting in a boat and wetting a line, net, or spear, the poem asks you to consider this if you like to think on the water and not just chum with talk: you are frighteningly miraculous.*  Don’t let it give you a big head or anything. There are angler forces without skin on another level above our surface.

My grandfather’s actual Johnson Seahorse outboard motor mentioned in the poem

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I recall that the more published and noticed members of my little writer’s group Kevin FitzPatrick and Ethna McKiernan were not particularly satisfied as readers/listeners of this poem in an earlier version, and I may have made a couple of changes based on that in the version you can hear today. I think they may have been puzzled or unimpressed** by the pun at the heart of the title: that on the flat surface of the lake, the “anglers” are the highest upward length of a right-angle to the water surface, the sharpest break vertical the fish would ever experience. And then there’s the even more obscure eye-rhyme-ish pun of anglers and angels. Neither of them cared much for puns, while Dave Moore and I indulged generously, enough to wrinkle the other half of the group’s noses.

Now Kevin and Ethna have been, like the fish, also pulled through the surface, and today there’s a church-based memorial service for Ethna which I don’t think I will be attending, though I’m glad to have attended a poetry-centered one for her earlier this year, and I’m planning to attend the poet-focused one for Kevin later this May.  In lieu of today’s service attendance, and out of guilt from my absence, I’ll say that if their skin-less existence is in wonder and distress, that my thoughts go with them, and in my dim watery existence here I ask us on all our levels to turn our circle-eyes toward wonder.

And I know too there are practical voices in the fishing opener today. “That’s what I get for getting into a fishing boat with a poet. Such high-flown thoughts! Damnit. I’m trying to get a worm on this rig’s hook. We feed worms to fish, and then well, we feed worms.”

If you’d like to hear my performance of my own poem “Anglers”  there’s an audio player gadget below this for many of you, and for those who can’t see that, this highlighted link  will open an audio player  for it in a new tab. My music for this uses what I often call my “punk rock orchestration.” I use very simple orchestral instrument colors both because I lack the knowledge/skill to do more complex ones and because I think there’s a direct charm remaining and being featured by stripping that sound down.

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*Ah, footnotes, the sinker-weighed lures bobbling along near the bottom! No, I’m not out fishing today, or most any days in this part of my life, though I think about my hours of fishing as a young person. I always considered the fish though, a little to a lot. One thing’s simple though: every poet wants to be miraculous.

**When a poem or poet doesn’t “hook” us, these two feelings can be cause and effect in either order.

Winter ‘20-‘21 Parlando Project Top Ten, numbers 4-2

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today’s report on the most listened to and liked pieces featured here over the past quarter will show three experiences of the mystery of winter. So, let’s return to our countdown:

4 Twilight Fallen White and Cold  by Joseph Campbell.  I seem to have become something of a promotor of this little-known in the United States Irish-born poet who I still know little about. He published a series of poetry collections before the end of WWI, and then his poetic output dropped off, for reasons I’m not yet clear on, though the politics of his country’s decolonization struggle may have contributed. This piece using his words that a lot of you liked and listened to may be the most mysterious of today’s trio.

Best as I can figure it, this winter nature landscape poem may be an expression of his nation’s detracted state and situation, particularly in the invocation of ancient earthworks (raths) and burial mounds — but I cannot plumb the entirety of the refraining line of “wounds of Eliom/weep on me” that I feature in my setting of Campbell’s poem. Eliom is a plural word for gods, sometimes used for polytheistic gods, sometimes used for the singular monotheistic diety, and as it may be here, used for angels. If that’s so, then the starry constellations, the winged vampires, the curlew birds, the floating mists, the carrying sound of the ocean are all the Eliom, the angels in this changed winter nighttime vision.

To hear my setting of Campbell’s poem, you can use this highlighted hyperlink which may open a new window with a player, or in many cases, you’ll see a player gadget below to directly play it.

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What the Story Tells Itself by Kenneth Patchen

It’s been too long since I’ve said this: thank you for coming to read or listen here.  It’s become harder for me to respond to comments or properly promote this project, but I appreciate so much those who come here, listen, and let others know what the Parlando Project does.

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3 The Snow is Deep on the Ground  by Kenneth Patchen.  Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose words we met earlier in this countdown, would sometimes remind folks that he wasn’t really part of the Beat Generation, even if he was associated with others who might have been so thought. Patchen is a similar case, or perhaps more so, in that his poetry career started in the 1930s,

As with many of the best Patchen poems, even the political ones, this is a love poem, delicately poised between the enchantment of love and the world that allows the shattering of it. If one can fully absorb the illumination of this poem, as with some of the best of Patchen, you would cry tears of joy and sadness at the same time.

You can hear my performance of Patchen’s “The Snow is Deep on the Ground”  with this highlighted hyperlink, or if you see it, with a player gadget below.

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2 The Sky is low  by Emily Dickinson.  Some years back in this project I once compared Emily Dickinson to one of those unexploded, yet potential, bombs that are still unearthed in Britain or Europe from the World Wars. Originally she was found as the creator of curious little poems from an eccentric woman, then as a prescient 20th century Imagist, and now in our deconstructed age we can stare at one of her tiny poems, and like one trying to follow the decent of a single flake of snow in a flurry, fall as far as one can follow.

You can read, or listen to my performance, of “The Sky is low”  and find a whimsical nursery rhyme, and find enough enjoyment in that — but let it stick in your memory or repeated ear and a little dialog about predestination, first causes and fate is discernible. To listen, use this hyperlink, or you may see a player gadget to directly play it below.

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One more post in the Top Ten countdown to go, and then we can move on from the mysteries of winter to the mysteries of spring.

Fenton Johnson’s “A Dream”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Since I’ve been unable to supply new pieces for the past few days, it has occurred to me that I could point out some other pieces this project has already done that fit into the Black History Month theme. Here’s one that has been found by a number of visitors during their own searches here this month: Fenton Johnson’s “A Dream.”

Johnson is another Afro-American writer who sometimes gets linked with the Harlem Renaissance even though he doesn’t seem to have spent significant time in New York. Instead, Johnson worked in Chicago. He was active and publishing before Locke’s 1925 The New Negro  anthology, yet while James Weldon Johnson’s earlier The Book of American Negro Verse  included a selection of fine poetry from Fenton Johnson, The New Negro only mentions him in passing. As we’ve seen earlier, some of what Locke aimed to do was to bring forward quite young poets and writers, and even if Johnson was only 38 when The New Negro  was issued, it may be that he was considered “the older generation.”

Fenton Johnson. Dressed conservatively here, but he wrote Modernist and socially engaged poetry.

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“A Dream”  is one of several poems I’ve read of Fenton Johnson’s that deal with Afro-American Christian spirituality. I don’t know enough about Johnson’s life to understand his personal connection to that, but his poetry often speaks in the voices of various Afro-American characters, and “A Dream”  may be such a poem. Here’s a link to the text of his poem and its companion poem as published in Poetry Magazine in 1921 as “Two Negro Spirituals.”

If Johnson was the older generation, his poetry is more Modernist in its word-music than some of “The New Negro”  poets, often freer in meter and shorn of rhyme. When I performed his “A Dream”  and wrote about it three years ago I wasn’t sure I had done it justice, but listening back to my performance of it now it doesn’t seem to be hurt much by my limited voice. To hear it, you can use the player gadget below — or it that isn’t below, with this highlighted hyperlink.

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A Visit from the Angels

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Back more than 200 years ago, poet, painter, engraver and mystic William Blake was reported to be conversing with angels in English trees. Last episode we had William Carlos Williams celebrating celebrity scientist Einstein in a blooming New Jersey night early in the 20th Century. Today we have Dave Moore in his backyard garden in Minnesota in our present century.

Blake Angels on spiral

William Blake illustration of Dave’s Minneapolis garden night, sort of.

Is this poetry, song, or story-telling? It might be a little bit of all of them, but then labels are just sticky paper. Let me refrain this time from talking so much about the piece, but I encourage you to just listen to the LYL Band and Dave Moore tell the story. Use the player gadget below to hear it, or this highlighted hyperlink.