audience

50 Thoughts on 900 Parlando Project Audio Pieces

~ Frank Hudson ~ 6 Comments
  1. I never imagined I’d complete this many pieces. My original thought was I’d do some impressive number – like maybe, oh, I don’t know, A Hundred!
  2. Before the first piece was published, I had around 10 or 20 Parlando Project candidate pieces already recorded that I thought I’d keep on hand for any dry spells as I worked on new ones. Most of them eventually got posted, a few didn’t – usually because of poor recording, performance quality, or flagrant copyright concerns.
  3. After the initial few months, I could see myself really getting into a groove with making these audio pieces, and I figured I could give myself a stretch goal, like maybe Two Hundred!
  4. As things progressed there were periods over the early years when I was doing a steady at-least-two pieces a week. That meant that I was essentially researching, composing, recording, and writing the blog posts about the pieces full time.
  5. I had ample quiet time for thinking and recording. My child was in school, my wife worked full-time or nearly so. I miss those years. If I blew off a day and played hooky from thinking about composing or recording, I knew there’d be a certain day, real soon, when I could pick it up again.
  6. Working at that level of production had me feeling like someone who learns they can run marathons or ride a bicycle century – I didn’t know I could do that, and then suddenly from doing it: knowing that I can do that!
  7. Does rapid production reduce quality? Yes, it can, but not necessarily as much as you might think. My honest guess is that unless I had musicians on call, professional audio production equipment, and experienced audio engineers, that the best of what I produced in a few days turn-around was as good as what I could have done with a few weeks work (or more) on one piece.
  8. On the other hand, some pieces failed, but I wasn’t able to realize how badly they’d failed until after I’d released them. So far, I’ve kept everything available anyway.
  9. And can one have a third hand? There are pieces that I thought were just marginally good enough to release that I now think are some of my best.
  10. Are there a lot of never released pieces? Not as many as one might think. Some just never work when I try to think of how to present them in performance, others fail manifestly at the recording stage when my limitations can’t be mitigated.
  11. Earlier in the run of the Project the LYL Band with Dave Moore as the alternative composer, voice and keyboardist, was recording at least every month, sometimes every week. LYL has always worked rough and quick – lots of first takes, hang on for the ride – producing some outright musical trainwrecks. I used some of the better takes, but not most. My thinking back then: the LYL material was most often songs, and the lyrics weren’t “literary poetry” enough.
  12. One of the LYL Band’s biggest influences was The Fugs, a band of East Village NYC poets who decided to form a band despite not having sweet voices or any musical pedigree whatsoever. Besides their own poetry repurposed as song lyrics, they frequently performed other poets’ work. Warning, the Fugs lyrics are often flagrantly sex-positive and Not-Work-Safe.
  13. Dave Moore and I have both written poetry since we were teenagers, and songs with our own lyrics since the Seventies. Dave’s lyrics were used extensively by a pioneering Twin Cities new wave/punk/indie band Fine Art. We don’t use other people’s words out of desperation, but out of a desire to illuminate other poets.
  14. Do I start with the words or the music? As one might well think, it almost always starts with the words, but I like changing that up. I always have a few musical pieces that stand by waiting for me to see or seek out a set of words to use with them.
  15. My solo recording focus, lasting for around a decade before the Parlando Project, was instrumental music with no words at all. I like music without vocals as a listener quite a bit, and since I realized my voice was not attractive to many listeners, not having vocals in the music I made public removed that worry for me.
  16. The Parlando Project eventually led me to use my singing voice more. I still worry about my lack of skill offending listeners, but I feel my singing has moved from mostly terrible to mostly just not very good. Really, there’s a palpable improvement there.
  17. I’m always puzzled by the question “What sort of music do you like?” Am I supposed to have an answer? Is everyone supposed to like one type of music?
  18. The Parlando Project has made me much more appreciative of poets whose words seem to ask to be sung: shorter Frost poems, Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale, William Butler Yeats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Joseph Campbell.
  19. Every time I mention Irish poet Joseph Campbell I feel I have to add “Not the Power of Myth guy.” That’s tiring.
  20. Some might assume that “Free Verse” makes things harder to set to music. I haven’t found that so. Instead, my experience has been that Carl Sandburg, Fenton Johnson, T. S. Eliot, or Langston Hughes are easier to combine with music than many metrical/rhyming poets. Some poets are musical, and others just aren’t. It has less to do with how regularly it scans.
  21. I can’t think of myself as a musician, because I think a musician has to have at least a minimal set of largely repeatable skills. I don’t. I’ve played guitar for decades and yet there are very basic skills on that instrument that I don’t think I could day to day assure someone I could demonstrate.
  22. Every time I pick up an instrument to play it, or record a part, I’m thinking “How can I fake what a real musician would do in order to make a sound that works here.” I don’t recommend that approach, but it’s what I do.
  23. Sometimes I fail to imitate something a real musician would play. Those can be some of my favorite tracks – or also, things you can be glad I didn’t make public.
  24. When I first was considering the Parlando Project I thought it’d be good to have various musicians contribute to the recordings. As it turned out, this rarely happened, other than Dave Moore’s crucial contributions. Whenever I ask myself if I can change things to allow that, I wonder how many musicians would want to record parts for this Project without pay, with little rehearsal – and now, how difficult it would be to reliably arrange times and studio space to allow those contributions.
  25. From my youth, one of my models was poet and artist William Blake. Blake was also a trained pressman and engraver, and so was able to produce his illuminated books from thoughts and visions to poems and drawings to pages through his own stubborn and dedicated efforts. I remind myself of Blake whenever I consider the different roles I need to play as composer, arranger, musician, producer, engineer, essayist, promoter. There’s also this: there are accounts Blake sang his poems – and the Fugs, Patti Smith, and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg have all recorded Blake poems, as has the LYL Band and the Parlando Project.
  26. I continue to try to make plain that I call myself a naïve composer. Alas, “composer” sounds grander than musician, and many composers are widely knowledgeable in music theory, score notation, and the historic repertoire, while I’m not. I still think it’s the best description of what I do. If I’m “faking” playing string parts or an oboe with my MIDI guitar, or triggering chords or arpeggios with my little plastic keyboard, I’m just doing the best I can to realize the musical aims in my head. That I edit on a MIDI piano roll instead of a musical staff is personal expediency.
  27. I worry that as a lower-talent, knowledge, and skills musician and composer I might do more than embarrass myself in front of those that are beyond that level, and that my persistence in doing what I do will be seen as ignorant pretense or perhaps a case of “stolen valor.” The only thing I can say to them is that it’s not ignorance on my part, I’m fully aware of what they have worked to be able to do, compared to what I do. That I have that knowledge could make what I do even worse to them, but still, I’m driven to do it.
  28. Even when it was contemporary, a great many people thought beatniks reading poetry while some vague sense of Jazz wafted around in the background was corny and affected. Who am I to say, but I kind of like it.
  29. Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s a professional voice talent from Chicago, Ken Nordine, made LPs reading his own free-associative spoken word pieces with cocktail Jazz backing – he called it “Word Jazz.” A few people thought that cool. I was one of them. Did it help that he was a practiced voice talent? Did it hurt that the Jazz was often a little too polite?
  30. More than a decade later an expatriate Chicagoan Laurie Anderson Zen-deadpanned in front of music of her own device. A few people thought that was cool. I was one of them. I would sometimes get a strange sense of déjà vu when I’d hear one of her performances, and then in an interview she eventually let on that Ken Nordine (alongside William Burroughs and eventual husband Lou Reed) was one of her influences – and Laurie Anderson is one of mine.
  31. Patti Smith’s first LP, Horses, is rightfully listed as a landmark. Oddly, there are few attempts at using and expanding that record’s style. I’ve always wished I could do that, and sometimes I try. Worth trying.
  32. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always been distrustful somehow of Slam Poetry. Maybe, however much it is “just for grins,” I distrust the audience competition aspect of it? I’ll just leave it by saying I also distrust my distrust.
  33. I’m also not entirely sure why I avoid overtly rapping to the beat. I was elated when the first hip-hop records were released. Somewhere on a cassette tape there’s evidence of me rapping in the early ‘80s. Yes, there are the issues of cultural appropriation, and then too of the associations (however narrow-focused and ignorant of the form’s range and reasons) with violence, bling, and misogyny – it’s also likely that I’m just bad at it. The hip-hop rapid flow thing is quite the skill, though I don’t value it nearly as much as others, and that’s my sour grapes on that. I should probably listen to more down-tempo variations though.
  34. Gil Scott-Heron is widely noted as a progenitor of hip hop. I always admired his records and used some of his and Brian Jackson’s ideas from those records to guide me.
  35. Do you ever think that you need to hold back ideas until they can get their best realization? Or that if you use an idea, your store of ideas is depleted by one, and so your larder will soon be empty? Doing this Project seems to say (that at least for me) you instead get more ideas when you use one, and that held-back ideas more often get lost unused than saved for the best time.
  36. A problem I haven’t figured out what to do about: if you release too much stuff too fast there’s a high risk of wearing-out whatever audience you have or develop.
  37. A problem I think I’m dealing with: I’m an old man, and I can’t say when my body will disable me in some crucial way, or the date Emily Dickinson’s carriage driver will take me away in my tulle PJs. So, if I’m going to get out what I want to express, there’s no waiting for a better time, or choosing a more deliberative release schedule. My apologies to my audience if I weary them.
  38. The more I work at this Project, the less I listen to music. After spending some hours composing, recording, mixing; listening to music is not how I usually wind down. This troubles me, as listening to music was, for much of my life, one of my chief pleasures. Perhaps I will have a “retirement” interval from this Project when I’ll listen again to music often after not having the energy or need to be constantly making it myself. Then, it’s also possible the end of my life will be more abrupt, or that listening to others making music, when I cannot, will vex my future self.
  39. I’m less constrained (other than by the limits of waking hours in a day) from reading poetry outside of the texts I work with on this Project, though I wouldn’t call myself exceptionally well-read in poetry.
  40. Because my Project prefers to keep on the good side of clear public domain status for the words it uses, my poetry reading has been focused on the decade or two just over the line into U.S. public domain status. I find I enjoy this. A friend of the blog wrote her own blog for some years called “My Life 100 Years Ago.” While working, I often feel like I’m vacationing in the last decade to be called “The Twenties.”
  41. I sometimes wish for a longer-life because I’d like to delve more deeply into the 1930s-1950 era. Alas, that’s not a realistic expectation.
  42. I’ve started to bend a little on PD status, telling myself that I’m totally non-revenue and educative. “Fair use” is a fuzzy legal conception, but I assume I have a case for exception there.
  43. For much of the early years of this Project I wrote my posts here using my child as the imagined audience. This means that in the earliest years I would be writing for their soon-to-be future-self, but in the middle years of the project, I wrote for a curious middle-schooler, and then for a high-school student.
  44. As far as I know, they’ve never read any of this Project. I know they’ve written music and poetry themselves. They’ve never shared it with me, and I haven’t asked to hear it. I think they’d feel awkward doing that.
  45. I’ve always expected a small audience for the Parlando Project. Literary poetry is a tiny part of contemporary American culture; and independently made and distributed music with a singer whose qualities are decidedly of a subjective value is a minority interest as well. Combining these two things may decrease rather than increase the potential audience.
  46. I’m always wishing for a larger smaller audience. Every day hundreds reach out to hit one of the posts here and dozens listen to the audio pieces. By Internet standards this is miniscule for popular music or successful blog topics, but likely far from the bottom if one puts it in the context of poetry or non-commercial music offerings online. But because of the considerable (if joyfully entered into) effort involved on my part, I keep hoping for more.
  47. I don’t do enough self-promotion, and I don’t especially care to do the self-generated promotion I eventually do. I worry that I’m bothering people, even driving them away when I do it. I expect that others in poetry or indie music that are self-promoting may feel similarly, yet I sometimes turn away from rampant self-promotion when done by others – who , like me, have no choice but to attempt it dutifully. The only respite I have from this feeling is when I remember: for the most part I’m promoting other folks’ words and trying to explore the experience of a variety of poetry.
  48. Lately, I often include simple chord sheets for the Parlando Project musical settings. I took this idea from mid-century “folk scare” publications like Sing Out and Broadside which encouraged reading guitarists and banjo pickers to perform the songs themselves that those magazines printed in each issue. Given the limits of my skills, it’s my hope that others could perform one or more of those songs and do better with them than I could.
  49. I’ve considered collecting some of my better Parlando Project recordings as one or more albums that would appear on streaming services or through digital distribution (such as Bandcamp). I wouldn’t expect them to find a wide audience, but they might find a few more ears in such places. One problem with doing that: there doesn’t seem to be a way to do this without “risking” revenue, which however small would add the overhead of running a small business, something that I personally cannot bear to undertake.
  50. I’m currently expecting to continue to produce new Parlando Project pieces more-or-less in the same way I have for ten years here. Having reached 900, the obvious next objective is an even 1,000. That might take upwards of two years, and so that assumes good health and opportunity that are not a given. For those that read what I write today or other days, or listen to the Parlando Project musical pieces: I hope you’ve enjoyed some of them, and have maybe found a new poet, poem, or form of musical expression to consider. I am so grateful for your time and attention.

 

Here’s something else I may do more of: video content. While that adds work and another needed skill-set, it might help in creating that “larger small” audience.

 

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Heaven and Hail

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I sometimes think I’m working against gathering a larger audience for this.

Twice in the past month or so I’ve had an opportunity to speak in passing with poets about what I do with the Parlando Project. I’ve got my elevator pitch carved out: “I combine poetry, usually literary poetry not intended to be performed, with original music in different styles.” Both poets came back with this replying question: “What kind of music?”

Maybe I should start hitting that word “different” with hard emphasis — but Midwesterners know that kind of spoken underline could be parsed in our regional argot as cloaked disparagement. If I was to say:

“I’ve written a piece for a string quartet in which the instruments are placed on the floor and filled with nuts and seed. A herd of squirrels is then unboxed and will proceed to chew through strings and tonewood for the course of the musical evening.“

The Midwesterner is bound to reply “Oh, that sounds different.”

Squirrel Quartet 3

For Friday the 13th: presenting the unexpected, not gnawful, just “different,”  the Squirrel String Quartet.

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Now, I believe both of those poets this past month are perceptive, I read it in their admirable poetry. If they miss the word “different” it’s because many people have strong feelings about the music they care about.* Long before reaching the age of those poets most listeners have strong affinities for some music and equally strong dislikes for the sounds that they don’t wish to put in their ears. The idea of combining poetry with music is attractive, but what kind of music is an unavoidable point in describing the Parlando Project, and I can’t encapsulate that. Elevator pitch? If I tried, I’d be out of breath and walking up flights of stairs. To both poets I was reduced to trying to start my response with “That’s my problem: it varies.”

Readership of the blog posts here continues to increase through the years, while listenership to the audio pieces has been for the last half of this Project’s life flat to somewhat lower. This bothers me, and I have theories, but one that seems particularly plausible is that the variety itself turns off listeners. One day acoustic guitar folk-scare strumming, the next day some kind of synthesizer sound, a garage-rock quality electric combo, something like Jazz, small orchestral ensembles, Blues slide-guitar, or alt tunings in a matrix somewhere between John Fahey, Joni Mitchell, and Sonic Youth. And then on the third day, a combination of one or more of the above.**

How well do I (who much of the time needs to play or score all the parts) present that variety? I think my own judgement approximate, but it goes like this: on good days I think I do it well enough, on bad days I feel embarrassed by the faults in execution and conception I hear. So, my limitations are a factor here, but even if I was a master of all these forms, I think the problem would remain. In this theory it takes only one or two “bad fit” musical pieces for a new listener’s taste to judge the work has no value, and no further listening occurs.

What will I do about this? I don’t know. I can’t help the eclecticism — it’s been in me since my youth*** and I don’t think I want to try to scrub it out.

Today’s musical piece comes from that “We’re a garage band, We come from Garageland” mode — looser still in that like most of the LYL Band pieces presented here over the years it’s spontaneous, not the execution of parts each instrument is supposed to play. As keyboardist Dave Moore says at the end, the words are “a personal experience story,” an exception in the Other People’s Stories texts the Parlando Project finds, experiences, and presents. Just over a year ago a storm with 60 mph winds and golf-ball sized hail struck Minneapolis. Overall, it caused 1.1 billion dollars in damages. On my roof, my shingles were totaled (the classic hail-storm result), windows were shattered, and there were plenty of cracks in the siding from the wind-driven hail. As “Heaven and Hail”  tells it, it took months, well into the winter, for overwhelmed builder crews to get all the home damage repairs completed in my neighborhood.

Last year at this time work started on fixing the damage at my place. One experience amid the hammers, ladders, and supply pallets: hearing one of the crew’s boomboxes playing a record of garage rock classics all sung in Spanish. Another Rosetta Stone moment, like reading those cereal boxes in French.

To hear this short account of the storm and aftermath you can use the audio player gadget below. No player? This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Neither asked me —and few people ask me — “What kind of poetry?” With non-poets, I ascribe that to the lesser interest in poetry as an art and therefore a lack of strong likes and dislikes.

**This leaves out the subjective qualities of my voice, something which I recognize is of overwhelming importance to most listeners.

***”Top Forty” rock’n’roll radio was extraordinarily broad in “The Sixties™” and I was listening to the classical music station and a country-western station along with that format. Hootenanny was on TV, folkie music was part of church camp. Other than the occasional cross-over hit I’d hear on the radio, the Jazz waited a bit to creep in late in my youth. Eventually the smart programmers figured out that a pop music station that played a “button pusher” record would cause the listener to switch to a competitor. I’m the odd-duck that when I hear a record I don’t like, right after one I do like, I want to hear the third and maybe fourth or fifth record played, particularly if any of the small sample (liked or not-liked) is something I don’t think I’ve heard before.

Reading One’s Own Poetry in Public

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

It’s one of those things that is hard to do well but is none-the-less important to do anyway. Why is it hard? Why is its realization often imperfect? What might one do or aim for when attempting to read one’s own poetry for the public? Well, before I write down some responses to those challenges, let me say that these are not the opinions of an expert or the summary judgements of some important critic, but only observations of someone who attends readings and occasionally reads my own verse aloud before a live audience.

Why is it hard? Perhaps I’d rather say it this way: there’s no good reason it should be easy. The writing of poetry, emphasis on the second word in that sentence, is not a public act. For many of us it takes extraordinary private concentration to create our poetry — and too, we often put in it things we would otherwise never share face-to-face. As a result, a great deal of poetry, particularly our present age’s poetry, derives its power from whispers to ourselves in the dark. Why should the same person who does that writing be any good at reading it aloud?

I attend at least one poetry reading every month and I’ve seen over a hundred poets read. Let me be honest about myself: I’m not a very good listener. I have a racing mind, and any spark that a reader’s words set off, has a tendency to cause my mind to follow it off into my own bonfires. And if the reader’s own tinder is damp, I as a poet myself will spend internal time noting how poorly the campfire chances are progressing. How much better (or worse?) is the average poetry reading audience member in listening? I can’t say, but I fear I’m a bit worse than the average audience member, but that doesn’t mean I don’t notice some ways poets reading may fail more than others.

I’ll summarize one class of failure with a general statement of an issue: not convincing me that the words the reader is sharing are important to be shared. Yes, yes, I know this is hard. Most poets don’t have the audience or objective awards and rewards to be reinforced that their stuff is any good. And those that do (or those that inflate what small elements of that they’ve received) can forget that there may be audience members who still need to be convinced. If you make that case in your manner of presentation and in any introductory speaking you do before and between poems, you’ve improved the chance of the audience paying attention.

Oddly, general posture and “stage presence” doesn’t seem to have as much effect as I might guess it would. Readers who make extensive eye contact vs. those whose heads are downcast to the page on the podium — is the former better than the latter? Probably, but I’ve seen success and failure with both. I’ve seen a few poetry readers with more extensive motion moving around the stage or reading area. This has been rare, and I’ve seen it work (for me as audience member). If I’m not otherwise compelled, it might seem off-putting or artificial. Literary poetry readings do not seem the same as general public speaking or stage performance in expectations or needs in this regard.

Beatnik Crime

Taking steps to earn the audience’s attention can pay off.

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Pacing, setting audience expectations, and “set-list structure” does seem important. Don’t read too fast or too slow. Help the audience understand what you’re going to do (even mundane things like “I’m going to read six poems today” or “This is the last poem I’m going to read tonight”). Musicians most often work out the order of pieces they will present with some thought. It may help the performer (and therefore the audience) if you start with a “greatest pop hit” that you know how to consistently perform without making any extraordinary demands on either audience or reader. Place your most emotionally or intellectually demanding piece at the end, or next-to-last.*

Because we have to get over two obstacles when reading our own poetry, I’ve suggested to poets that they consider splitting their task into two parts. First, practice by reading other poets’ work aloud, even with no audience. Pick poets whose work is meaningful or influential to your own writing style, and figure out how to make them sound their best and most compelling in your voice.**  Then, move on to your own poetry, and read it in the same voice and manner, as if it was as important and “certified” as your poetic models.  The self-doubt, the “who am I to…?” factor can possibly be tricked with this path. However, what should you do if, when you get to the second task, you choke at how it sounds? It’s possible that your models, your influences, may need to be expanded. I myself started loving romantic era 19th century poetry for example, but later wanted to develop a more conversational style in my own writing. I could try reading Keats or Blake as if they were talking to me, or I could try reading aloud some Frank O’Hara instead.

How do you know how you sound when reading other poets or your own work. You need to record yourself. Your basic smartphone or laptop will do well enough. In the Parlando Project I make efforts to make my recorded voice sound better on recordings, but that’s not important in this effort. Will you feel self-conscious listening to your own voice? Almost certainly. Get over that it won’t sound right — it will sound more like what the audience hears. Do you feel your reading voice has a weird or unappealing timbre? That’s likely of less importance, so get over it.

It’s a good idea to practice your “set” before a public reading. Highly experienced readers can skip this step,***  but inexperienced readers should not.

In summary then, most readers of their own poetry are not great readers, even those who’ve widely published or won awards — so congratulations, it’s OK to be an imperfect reader, most of us are! Yet it’s still worthwhile becoming a better public reader.

A week ago I decided to read a love poem at a rare open mic session for a longstanding local reading series. I picked a slightly revised version of a poem I presented here a few years ago “The Phones in Our Hands (are so Magical).”   The organizers’ instructions said that we should read only a single poem of our own and keep it under four minutes. I prepared for the reading by informally recording myself reading my poem about three times, to get a quick sense of if I had it down as to its presentation. On the night of the reading, I was able to present it at about 75% of what my third and best practice reading was. Where was the fall off? I read it just a bit too fast (nervousness) and I probably was less than optimum in handling some of the phrasing. I’ll give myself a middle grade in my overall presentation. I did try to set the expectations in introducing the poem, but in the end, the overall effect was less effective than it could have been for two reasons. I didn’t properly setup or convey the tonal shift in the poem, so the surprise when the poem shifts from the mysterious/playful to the experience of the separation of death from one’s partner confounded the audience. The difference between pleasurable surprise and confusion is subtle to describe, yet critical in effect. The other issue was “set-list” related. Most of the readers disregarded the one poem request and read 2-3, and as a Valentine’s Day themed reading, many of the poems were light-hearted and playful. My single poem was a “downer” and a “thinker” poem. I had considered doing two poems (still well within the four minutes) and would have led off with the Valentine’s poem I presented here last time, which is a more informal and joyous poem, even if it addresses the same issues of old love and eventual widowhood. In retrospect, that would have improved my “set” considerably. The bottom line I’ll convey from my most recent public reading: accepting imperfection is an important skill, ever more so if you are trying to do things well, and I enjoyed taking my swing at sharing my poem.

Today’s audio piece is the third take of my practice run-through of “The Phones in our Hands (are so Magical)”  with an impromptu two-handed improv over a synth pad, one track a soft grand piano and the other a more plaintive high-in-its-range violin. Apropos to the above discussion of recording your own voice, the poem coincidently mentions how odd our recorded voice seems to most of us. You can hear it with the player below or this alternative highlighted link.

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*If next-to-last, your last poem can then be another “greatest pop hit,” a poem of clarity that seeks to leave the audience energized and feeling they’ve comprehended what you’ve presented, rather than drained or perplexed.

**Does this sound like the Parlando Project, where 90% of the time we present performances of other poet’s words? I guess it does, but the main reason that I do the Project is that spending extended time with those words and integrating them with music tricks me into listening to them in a deeper way. It gets me past those issues I have being distracted while listening to another reader. In melding their poem with my breath and music, I’m forced to inhabit it.

***A great many (not all) musicians go through an intense practice regimen while developing their skills on their instrument, but a more relaxed and informal one later. Someone who’s gigging and playing regularly (using their bank of skills deposited from their own-room practice) is often able to maintain or even sharpen those skills without the need for as much solo practice. Similarly, if you are regularly reading, there’s much less need to practice your set.

The Fisherman

~ Frank Hudson ~ 5 Comments

Complaints about the size of the audience for poetry are far from new. So too, complaints about the quality of its audience. Throughout the course of the 20th Century, one increasingly common theory was to assume that a quality audience for poetry is likely incompatible with a quantity audience for the art.

We’ve just about used up two decades of our century, and that theory is still around. This quantity/quality audience-linkage belief is not always stated plainly, but it’s not hard to see its presence. Poets that rise to modest or surprising audience size will sometimes face some degree of backlash from critics. It may naturally be so that their poetry is less worthy by some criteria. This could be coincidental, honest criticism. It may be that it’s hard to find an audience for poetry criticism, as it is for poetry, so writing about better-known practitioners who have failed in some way helps grow the audience for the critic.

Another way to hold to this theory is to limit what poetry is allowed to do, to narrow its practice or even its definition. Spoken word or slam poetry? Not really poetry, or it encourages a poor selection of poetry’s virtues. Song lyrics? Self-evidently a different art, though given that the consensus canon of poetry is so different among itself, surely difference alone cannot be the criteria. Mix those two as rap or hip-hop and risk both  explanations of why it’s not poetry. Short, aphoristic poems? Too insubstantial. Long poetic forms once much in evidence, like the poetic epic or verse drama? No longer living forms of the art for the most part, if for no other reason than the type of poetic techniques the modern academic poet often uses can wear out an audience in a matter of minutes.

Myself, I don’t disagree or agree with those judgements in particular cases, and they could even be theoretically correct, I just viscerally dislike the idea that this thing poetry is so small and limited, that it’s a desert island disc for a few scattered islands, deeply loved by solitary coconut eaters with a very constricted shoreline.

When I break out of those narrow roles and rules for poetry, I will fail, and I do get discouraged. My limitations are bothering me two years into this project; and now 240 published audio pieces later, I may be running out of rules to break and the motivating pleasures of audacity.

William Butler Yeats with cat

Also dreaming of catching fish. Are cat pictures the secret to gathering an Internet audience for poetry?

 

Here’s a piece today using a poem by someone who somewhat agrees with me: William Butler Yeats. In one way it’s specific to him, and his time. I’ve recently honored two working-class sport fishermen in one of my favorite pieces so far this year, but the fisherman in Yeats’ title, the simple man working his craft on nature to help feed himself rather than for hobbyist enjoyment—well, he, even in a much poorer Ireland of 1916, is admitted as imaginary.

Otherwise, how about those folks listed in the middle section of today’s piece that are harshing Yeats’ mellow? How little imagination is needed to see them today?

I admire Yeats in this poem, embracing his failure, even though he brought immense poetic talents to his work, so much so that I should be embarrassed to admit to that admiration. In one way, the fisherman here is Yeats, casting with deft wrist or verse, but not in the course of the poem catching anything. There’s a saying with the fishermen in my family, “It’s called fishing, not catching.”

But the imagined fisherman is also that audience Yeats seeks. Maybe once, Yeats says at the end, maybe once,  he can please an audience correctly, with a single valid poem and valiant audience—even if he can only see that audience in his imagination. I surely hope (and Yeats’ life helps me here) that the singular fisherman is an image for a possible greater audience, and not a headcount. After all, to write for something as large as “his race” (by which he means Ireland), is too small a target to hit, while that tweedy imagined fly-fisher inside his jacket might possibly expand to more countries, more times, more genders. In Yeats’ case, as with all artists, he failed; but he failed reaching for a larger audience with a larger poetry, a poetry which he risked allying with other arts. Many of us will not be able to accomplish that failure, but I’m glad Yeats tried.

You can hear my try to alloy William Butler Yeats “The Fisherman”  with a rock band by using the gadget below.

 

Help grow the audience and alternative ways to get the Parlando Project

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I enjoy making these pieces and talking about the process that leads to them. If you’ve ever come across a post here and pleasantly thought “I didn’t know that,” well, I likely had that same experience, sometimes just a few days before you did. Similarly, if you’ve ever listened to one of the audio pieces and enjoyed music and words illuminating each other; well, I’ve spent hours composing, playing, recording, and mixing it—heard parts of it up to a hundred times—and I enjoyed doing that. I’m not bragging there. As my own “producer” I’m well aware that I’m pushing my limits as a musician in making these pieces—but why go to the trouble if you aren’t making music that you, the musician, want to hear?

Well yes, I know one answer to that question, but we’re not a commercial enterprise. We don’t do sponsorships or ads. I do this to hear these poets and writers in a new way and because I’m attracted to the stories surrounding the words. But when I do those things, I’m often thinking about you too,  listeners and readers, the folks who pay us not with money, but with your attention.

I can’t say enough about how much I appreciate that.

As we near 200 audio pieces published, I’m looking for that audience to increase this year. I know we’re quirky, but so’s this modern world. Variety has been a goal from the start, so I expect that some episodes/posts/pieces will be more interesting than others to any individual reader/listener. I intentionally do that, because I find there’s often no delight without surprise.

So how can you help this audience grow?

Well, read and listen, though you’re already doing that, and you don’t need to do anything more.

Hit the like button if you like something. It’s a little thing, it’s become an Internet cliché, but it may help some for folks finding us, and it always gives me a good feeling when I see those icons at the bottom of the post.

Subscribe. There’s another term that’s become cliché, but there’s no cost or obligation to do it. I use the subscribe feature for blogs I’ve found interesting even for a portion of their posts, because it helps me find those posts of interest more easily.

Subscribe part 2. The Parlando Project started out as a podcast, where the audio pieces you see at the bottom of most posts can be automatically downloaded to your smartphone, tablet, or computer. Again, there’s no subscription cost. As a reader of this blog you’re “insiders,” and you get more information on the audio pieces, but we still have more listeners via the podcast than listener/readers here on the blog. The podcast audio is the same as what you get on the blog, but it comes to a subscriber automatically. You can find the Parlando Project on Apple Podcasts/Itunes, Stitcher, Google Play Music, player.fm, and many other podcast sources/apps.

Subscribe part 3. Since the beginning of 2018 we’re on Spotify, though with a footnote. The Parlando Project is in Spotify’s podcasts section, which is gradually being rolled out to the various Spotify apps. Only the most recent Parlando Project pieces are in Spotify’s listing, but it looks like you can add a Parlando Project audio piece to a Spotify playlist.

Yes, I’ve considered getting at least some of the audio pieces on “regular” Spotify or other popular streaming music services, but so far the costs and time to do that are stopping me.

Use the social media buttons. At the end of each post there are buttons to use a variety of social media platforms. The time producing the Parlando Project keeps me from all but minimal time on these platforms myself, but when someone does do this, it seems to help other people find us.

There. Now back to what we do regularly. Here’s one of the first audio pieces posted here back in 2016. “Angels in the Alley”  is a bit longer than what’s become our average, and I like to think our audio quality is getting better since then too;  but “Angels in the Alley”  is also more of a narrated spoken word story than others. What’s the  story? The death of English poet and artist William Blake, and how it connects with this famous rock’n’roll video clip. Ever wonder what Allen Ginsberg is gesturing about in the background at 1:35 into this?

 

And here’s the LYL Band with one theory: