bicycling

Before the Snow

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Long time readers know that the Parlando Project is largely about our encounters with other people’s words – usually their literary poetry. Poetry, even impersonal or hermetic poetry, is a rich way to transfer experience between consciousnesses. Poetry’s strengths in this transference over memoir, blog post, or informal conversation are largely the strengths of focused beauty – that thing that attracts us even before knowledge, expressed as sound or by novel connections.

Still, these beautiful elements of poetry come with costs, which is why many, most of the time, prefer other modes. Yet, I think the shortness and the compressed incidents of lyric poetry offer a possible compromise. We’re asked to share a little burden, a few minutes of reading or listening, subconsciously absorbing the word-music and linkages, which may in leisure or with mood be extended by re-reading and re-thinking such a small number of lines.

One of the things that caused me to begin this Parlando Project was thinking that a short musical accompaniment might add pleasures to possible serial re-encounters with the words. Is this so? I’m not sure, though I persist in doing this.*

That preamble out of the way, I’m going to look like I’m violating the “Other People’s Stories” maxim that is a principle of this Project, because I’m presenting today words I wrote to go with the music I compose and record – but hold on, I’m going to tell you this is still about a poetic transference across a gap.

Here’s why: once again I’ve been running into things from decades ago as I do my “death cleaning” reduction in things stored away or unlikely to be of foreseeable use. Just last week I moved aside a drum set that had been played by Dean Seal when he was in the LYL Band,** and found under the bass drum a plastic carryall tub with things hurriedly packed up after some gig: a Radio Shack battery-powered mixer, cables, a guitar strap, a cassette recorder, and a few tambourines we’d hand out for audience participation. And more spiral, college-ruled notebooks have come to light. Glancing through one I found a page with 9, untitled, lines – the start of a poem. From the style of the poetry in the fragment I think it’s from the 1990s, but it might be earlier or later. It caught my attention because it seemed to be talking about November in Minnesota in that interval right before the first snows come.

I remember nothing about writing this poem, or what prompted it, but it had some nice word-music and was roughly pentameter. That pentameter made me think I was writing a sonnet, and for some reason left off at this incomplete draft. That night, before bed, with my aching muscles and joints from twisting, bending, and hauling I decided to complete a full 14-line draft.

Before the Snow

More musical perversity: the difficulty in finding times to record acoustic guitar with sensitive mics in the past year or so has increased the number pieces I’ve done with that instrument.

.

For the final 5 lines I used an incident from a recent bike ride. Rolling down to a favorite breakfast destination at the borders of my wooded city I’m usually met with a rewarding bit of wildlife (outside of deep winter): constant squirrels, rabbits, small rodents, birds, including waterfowl by a pond and creek I pass, insistent crows, and so forth. If Keats wrote his “Ode to Autumn”  on Hampstead Heath in the Highgate section of the city of London, these near-daily rides of mine with this contrasting nature in the midst of modest single-family houses and parkland is my equivalent. What I saw this day was a little epiphany – a squirrel had been quite recently struck down crossing the road. Not smack dab run over, for it was not squashed, and there was only a little blood – yet it was clearly not moving or breathing, and even from the height of my bicycle its eyes could be seen fixed and dead. And then, as I was approaching, carelessly another squirrel scampered out onto the road and up to the corpse. Though I was riding onward, and only slowed a bit moving to the side, this squirrel bent down right to the head of the dead one, close enough to touch it barely with whiskers, clearly looking closely at it, for a moment regardless of my vehicular approach.

And then, just as I was beside them, it scattered off, missing by accident or close design, my slowed, but rolling, bike wheels. What was that squirrel after, what was it thinking in those few seconds with the dead one? This  was the matter to finish the poem that had started years ago with a rabbit finding scarcely-leaved autumn bush and brush to hide in. And I too had had my customary Parlando encounter without firm context, working with the part of the poem written by someone I hadn’t seen for decades: though in this case, it was my younger self. Not really that different from the usual encounters here with Frost, Dickinson, Sandburg, Millay, Stevens, Hardy, et al.

I originally gave the resulting sonnet the title “Before the Rapture of Snow,”  because I thought that tied-in the rabbit’s anxious waiting and the dead squirrel. I drew back from that thinking it too grand a reach, and because the theological implications of “rapture” would repel, puzzle, or draw in too-determinant reactions.

I was lucky enough to have a Monday to record this, finishing what felt like a good take of the vocals and acoustic guitar just before I had to leave my studio space. I added piano yesterday and mixed the tracks. As a non-pianist I’ve fallen into using that instrument simplistically as I do here, and I’ve grown fond of how these pounded single notes mesh with the timbre of acoustic guitar. You can hear “Before the Snow”  with the audio player below. Has the player been raptured up to heaven? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress displaying such a thing, so I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*Besides my lack of talents for promotion, I sometimes feel what I do with this Project presents a number of detriments to gathering an Internet-scale audience. Poetry, as I write above, is not something sought out by modern Americans in great numbers. And then the music I make suffers from these things that reduce audience interest: I’m not a singer with a beautiful voice, nor do I think of myself as a performer with charisma or erotic appeal, and the music I make despite that is both too varied and too limited.

Many potential listeners or readers, presented with an infinite library of options in our modern age, will avoid things that have but one of those strikes against it – and to add another one or two against the Parlando work wouldn’t be rare either.

All this isn’t breast-beating or humble-brag, and I’m even hesitant to waste your time writing this. I am proud of much of the work I’ve done over the last decade here. While my audience is Internet-small, I believe it’s not all that small by poetry standards, and increasingly, not completely outsized by the audience for much non-Pop Indie music. Thanks to my hardy listeners!

**Dean was working elsewhere in comedy, and with at least one other partner in music, when he played in the LYL Band in the 1980s. He was talented and creative, we were looking for a drummer or bass player, and we perversely came upon him as both – unconcerned with the challenges of one person filling both roles! He may have grown to think of us as less professional or ambitious than he was, I don’t know, or events of his life may have intervened, but for reasons unknown to me we just stopped playing together – but this happened without him picking up the small drum set he played with us, and stored at my place. While working on my cleanout this fall I briefly tried to find contact info for Dean to see about the drums, but the trail ran cold after finding articles about him being part of the pastoral lineup at a church that no longer listed him on staff.

Paying the Piper: Epilog

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Those following my June series on my trip to investigate the life of a largely forgotten poet, folk-song collector, and teacher Edwin Ford Piper may wonder why I titled it “Paying the Piper.”  There were a couple of reasons I knew as I started writing the series after returning home after the trip.

The first: I’d be paying attention to Piper when nearly no one else was. That may be a strange choice, though it’s one I’m largely comfortable with. I enjoy looking at places others aren’t, and I love stories that connect seemingly unlike things. So, Piper’s settler family moving to the frontier of Nebraska just after The Civil War, raising a poet-son who educated himself on the plains amid those who stayed, and those who passed through. I being a guitarist who grew up in the folk song revival, I appreciated that he collected the songs that entertained those people, songs that I could run into decades later because of the work of collectors like Piper. Even my search on that elusive question I couldn’t solve had it’s rewards: what of the pervasive Workshop and MFA culture of poetry of the last 70 years arose, perhaps unwittingly, from Piper’s own methods.*

The reason we call it paying  attention implies it has a cost. I could have done more new musical pieces here, ones featuring poets there is more general interest in. The longer posts in June took a lot of work for a small audience. I chose to pay that cost. If you come here for the more known poets and for the musical performances, some of those are already in progress this week.

My wife and I returned home in the evening after my sojourn to the University library in Iowa City. I had a lot of notes, and pages captured but not yet analyzed, and I had ordered a couple of books to help that would arrive in the upcoming week. It was good to have gone on this trip. It was good to be home. Now the second paying.

What was the one thing I was most looking forward to at dawn the next day? Getting on one of my bicycles and moving my old body briskly through the cool morning air. I would ride to a café and have a frittata and a big glass of iced tea, read the newspaper, and think about poetry or music tasks for the upcoming day.

I walked out that next morning to the garage access door, and I found it slightly ajar, unlocked. I opened it. Sometime during my Iowa trip, my family’s bicycles had been stolen.**

I could write a thousand words here on the stolen bikes if I thought there was a readership for that. I lost my old original generation mountain bike. It was the first bike I bought to ride through Minnesota winters back in the early 1980s instead of buying a car. I rode it in snow as planned, and over rough trails in woods — and in a couple of returning trips, in the river valley hills and gravel roads of Iowa where I grew up, With less knobby-tires it worked well to ride around the city too. Over a decade ago it was the bike I attached a trailer bike to, to take my young child for rides. In the last few years it had become my rain bike since it had full length fenders, and it was the one I rode when the place I’d need to lock up was a little more risky. I’d figured, scratched up and faded, outdated in every regard, it didn’t look like anything to steal. But, it was gone, though I tell myself the memories aren’t stolen.

Diamondback Ridge Runner Spring 2013 600

Picture of the OG mountain bike taken a bit over 10 years ago, when it still had the trailer-bike hitch on it.

.

20 years ago I decided to replace it, and bought what was then a modern “Hybrid Bike.” It was an aluminum Trek, not the fanciest in their line then, but it had indexed gear shifting and the ability to run thin high-pressure tires that I thought would make the bike nimbler. However, the bike and I just didn’t bond. It never was a joy to ride, even with the 28mm narrow tires that were expected to make it faster and easier rolling. Aluminum frame bikes, particularly the ones from that generation, are known for having a harsh ride, maybe that was it I told myself — but whatever, it just wasn’t any fun. Then a couple of years ago I obtained a set of new wide 50mm tires that didn’t fit the bike they were bought for. I’m not sure why, but I mounted them on the aluminum Trek along with a Brooks Flyer leather saddle (that’s the one with springs). The bike was transformed. The extra tire air volume and the saddle not only made the bike more pleasant to ride, those tires made the bike feel more nimble (and more tolerant of bad street surfaces). In the past year it had become the bike I rode more than any other. It had been some mice and a pumpkin, then a splendid carriage and horses — and now, poof, it was gone.

The bike I was looking forward to ride that morning? A purple REI Randonnee that my wife and I had bought used with the idea that she might want to try longer bike rides at some point. It too was probably 20 years old like the Trek, but it had a smooth riding double-butted steel frame. That touring idea never worked out, but I had modified it over the years with a better set of handlebars, a tweaked stem height, some used “brifters” for indexed shifting (my wife never cared for the bar-end shifters it came with). I ended up riding it on longer rides. It was comfortable, responsive, and I miss it.

Also lost, both my wife’s and my winter “Fat Tire” bikes.

Just inanimate things, but I ride my bikes almost every day for joy and utility, the loss was something like loosing a pet.

All lost as I was in a library studying the life and times of a largely forgotten poet and singer of songs people kept.***

.

*I might write more on that Workshop/MFA issue for poets and writers later this summer, but one of the folks who helped guide me on my search S. L. Huang wrote a thoughtful article on the dangers of this paradigm for many writers which I’ll link here.

**I won’t go into the details of how/why the garage was unlocked, though I likely know.

***Besides the thing-grief of these oft-used tools for joy being gone, and the work of trying to nail down details with the Edwin and Janet Piper stories, a large part of my June was taken up replacing the stolen bikes. You’ll meet the replacement bikes later, likely in use.

Paying the Piper chapter 1

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Very often I find myself unable to tell a story simply. While I find internal joy in expanding complexity there is a painful element too. Even when under the spell of things I’ve experienced and learned, I retain enough self-awareness to see what effect my expression has on others, the burden of strangeness. Then the reach between the teller and the listener becomes haphazard, unstable — pile it too high and it tiresomely topples — and so in some break for breath partway in, I realize I’ve dumped a cluttered mass of thought debris on a listener, long past any interest.

Perhaps this is why I’m attracted to lyric poetry, constrained as it is to moments, often held tight within the stiff glass bottles of forms.

Here’s a personal story that’ll go many places coming from the place I find myself in this June. It starts, I’ll guess, earlier this year when I came upon a poem, “The Last Antelope,”  a striking, empathetic account of the end of an animal’s life and wildness after settlers captured it. Edwin Ford Piper was the author, and there were only scattered bits of information to be found about him. Scattered and bits do not constrain my curiosity — if the bits were great distances apart, the space between them could hold a lot of things: born 1871 in rural Nebraska, parents part of early European-origin settlement there. Largely self-educated in a land of necessary child-farmhand-so-never-more-than-half-year schools, still goes on to university in Omaha studying literature with a specialization in Chaucer, and then to the University of Iowa where as a professor he helped establish the idea of teaching and granting degrees in creative writing.

The modern convention of a university as patronage for artists, and the rise of the credentialed MFA-holding poet is not without controversy — but isn’t it odd, this man who taught himself in a small town on the fluid boundary between the 19th Century Wild West and the 20th Century staid Midwest took that journey.

In the middle of this, the same man had a compulsion to collect songs ordinary people brought with them while journeying, the words and music carried in the light baggage of memory. He wrote down songs his relatives and townsfolk knew by heart. He asked others to send him more by mail. He paid particular attention to the songs of those on the move: hobos, cowboys, and other traveling workers. Did this connect with his literary poetry? There are no recordings of Piper reading his poetry, but accounts say he declaimed it with a musical lilt — perhaps like the surviving recordings of Yeats, or maybe like the more bombastic Vachel Lindsay — and at times he would break into full song. His students took to calling him “The Singing Professor.”

Since this Project is “Where Music and Words Meet” you can see why I’d be attracted. And I’m a small-Midwestern-town boy, though without degrees. But did that seem strange then, to mesh high culture and the songs remembered by old women and rude mechanicals?

Piper was born just west of the Missouri River in Nebraska — and in Illinois, just to the east of the Mississippi River and less than a decade later, Carl Sandburg was born to an immigrant railway blacksmith who signed his name with an X. Iowa, the state where I was born in the middle of the next century, and Minnesota, the state where I’ve lived the longest, sit in a delta between those two tremendous rivers. Sandburg too mixed the latest in Modernist poetry with folk songs he collected and sang. Did Piper influence Sandburg? Did Sandburg influence Piper? Or are they the same genus of plant, raised in the same climate, but in separate plots? Questions.

Answers fork like river systems. Even with little information being readily available on Piper, I was already in flood stage. And here’s how much my wife loves me: for our 20th anniversary she agreed to go on a road trip with me to Iowa City and Sandburg’s home-town of Galesburg. My scenery in Iowa City? An archive of Piper’s papers* held in the university library there. Our grand museum of the arts of poetry and song to visit on the trip: a railway worker’s shack in a small rust-belt city, a town worn-out but still running like a paint-shedding Oldsmobile.

Two considerations worried me as I thought about this trip, one for my wife and one for myself. For my wife, I worried if there’d be something rewarding for her to do while I enthused at the library. She was able to solve that one easily, locating nature reserves, parks, and trails within an hour’s drive. I often tell her that she’s a nymph, and I complement her on how seriously she takes her job to supervise the plants and animals when she returns with soggy hiking boots from her hikes with pictures of landscapes, mushrooms, wildflowers, birds, and other critters. I love her pictures and stories on return (her stories briefer and better organized) — but my old joints ache just thinking about hiking for hours.

For myself I worried about my old-ager endurance. The library was two-thirds of a mile from where we’d stay. I’d need to hoof it with my laptop bag back and forth, which would have been a trifle in my youth, but nowadays longer term standing and walking is troublesome. I considered taking a bicycle with me, which would have made the library to-and-from easy, but a lot of hotel/AirBnB places don’t have any good places to lock up overnight, and on further consideration I thought that a bike would just be one more thing to worry about, taking my focus away from the trip’s main goals. And then I worried too about spending full days at the library’s special collections reading room. Because my time was limited, and to minimize the walking, I planned no break for lunch. I’d need to keep my focus and energy up, something that I have not been consistently able to do this year even with all the comforts of home.

On average I bike at least once every day in my normal routine, often in the morning. In the past two years I’ve not been a longer distance bicyclist, but 30-50 miles a week easily exceeds those 150 minutes exercise recommendations, and it lets me get to a café for morning breakfast and handle a lot of routine shopping and other trips. I ride year-round. In 2016 I bought my first 21st Century winter bike with studded tires; and in 2019 I upgraded the winter season bicycle to a Fat Bike with monstrous 4.5-inch-wide tires that handled ice and snow with the challenging ice ruts and potholes that my city’s current “We’ll get to all the streets in 3 days after the snow stops” plowing regime supplies. My overall stamina for the walk wasn’t my worry so much as how well my joints and stiff back would take the more load-bearing walk.** And to make it through the day I’d planned, there’d be no old-man’s afternoon nap either.

Pay the Piper Chapter 1 800
Piper, once a “poet of considerable distinction.” A later version of his collection Barb Wire. My Iowa City view, and yes the guitar got some use. Example breakfast.***

.

The first day we arrived at Iowa city was hot and very humid, so I put on my best hot weather clothing. Spouse-nymph headed off at dawn for her day’s supervisory encounter with nature, and I planned a big breakfast fuel-up. I’m a “eat little meat” kind of guy, but for good or ill I take the lacto-ovo part of my lesser meat diet seriously, so I’m a big frittata, omelet, hash, scrambler kind of guy most mornings. I note that I eat like an old-time farmer, despite never farming, but the good thing about this higher fat/protein kind of meal is that it can hold me until supper, and that was my plan.

I put on my best hot weather clothes, slung my bag over my shoulder, and headed for the university’s main library building for my encounter with poet-professor Piper’s papers.

Thus ends Chapter One.

Here’s a musical performance I put together in March of Piper’s “The Last Antelope.”   You can play it with the audio player you should see below. No player?  This highlighted link is another way to hear it.

.

*When I arrived at the library archives will-call desk, I asked them to pick Piper’s Papers. The librarian suggested puckishly that I was nearly reconstructing the old tongue-twister folk-rhyme, Roud Folk Song index 19745.

**Local papers/forums are full of folks who bemoan bike lanes in my city, often remarking that “not everyone is young and fit.” Despite that, most bicyclists I meet and see on my city’s streets aren’t of the MAMIL (Middle-Aged Man in Lycra) variety — and I’m maybe 1.5 letters of that acronym. I joke with my wife that as my joints get older, a bicycle is becoming a “fore-and-aft wheelchair” for me, allowing me increased mobility and beneficial low-impact movement for the old joints.

***That’s a St. Paul Sandwich: egg foo young on sourdough with lettuce, tomato slices and mayo. Near as anyone knows, my Twin City of St. Paul has no tradition regarding it, and no restaurant there serves it now. Its origin is something of mystery.

For Father’s Day: Kevin FitzPatrick’s “Bicycle Spring”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s been an eventful June so far for me, and I plan to be writing like a real blogger about what I’ve experienced in the last couple of weeks shortly. Then too, just this week I started working on a few further Parlando audio pieces. At least one may make the cut to appear here in the next few days.

This weekend is Father’s Day, and a new musical piece that I thought I’d present for that turned out too rough, even for my tastes. So, here’s a well-loved poem by Kevin FitzPatrick that alternate Parlando Project voice Dave Moore performed with The LYL Band a couple of years ago. It seems apropos. Kevin’s books of poetry are available from this website: kevinfitzpatrickpoetry.com Today’s poem appears in his 1987 collection Down on the Corner.

“Bicycle Spring”  was first presented here in 2022, but for today’s post I remastered it and made this little video for it. Here it is:

.

Wishing my versatile readers and listeners a happy Summer.

William Carlos Williams “The Birds” and what nature sounds

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Something about the Spring I noticed this year — oddly, this year as an old man who has had a full lifetime of Springs — is the intensity of natural sounds in my city. There’s a tendency, demonstrated in many poetic tropes, to make nature a portrait or a silent movie, putting nature in contrast to the noise of our civilization’s hum and bark.

I ride my bicycle nearly every day off to a café to have a breakfast, sometimes early enough to feel like the single soul on the street, but by the return trip certainly part of the city waking and doing: kids on their school bus stops, sometimes with a parent, sometimes waiting with their own cohort only, folks holding coffee flasks unlocking their car doors to go to work, a few other bicyclists, including those on big front basket bakfiets or long-tail rear-seat-shelf bikes holding small kids, this observant cargo watching whatever in the morning beneath their pastel helmets. The human noise is slight and clicking. In such mornings we are more like crickets rubbing their wings.

But the birds! When most of those humans are making only accidental noise this early, and the kids waiting for the yellow bus aren’t always talking, perhaps practicing quiet for the ordered schoolroom, the birds are singing at the tops of their voices in the morning. Like miniature feathered fiddles, their song cuts through larger sounds, it insists on being heard. “Ladies, I got your genetic material here!” “This is my and my kind’s tree!” “Whatever this is, this Spring, I am here, and I’ll use my breath to say it!”

Like us bipeds lacking much fur, other mammals aren’t sounding much. Yard bunnies are suspicious and quiet. The squirrels don’t chirp, and their little feet make quiet footfalls. The dogs on leashes: all nose-leading in an alternate sensory dimension. But the frogs and toads are singing out too — whole amazing choirs of them, all wanting to contest Emily Dickinson’s Nobody with a harrumph and high whistle of who they are.

So, it is this Project’s nature to add sound to page poetry. Today’s audio piece is just me alone with a Telecaster electric guitar during a hurried session early this Spring to put down some musical ideas. In the poem that I’m combining with my music, “The Birds,”  William Carlos Williams follows Imagist principles, melding a moment into concrete images. Given that we’ve just had a set of rainy days throughout the long holiday weekend in my city, I resonate as Williams poetically paints the bird-morning wet as undried paint.

Is the world not “wholly insufflated” as he says at the start? The bird song is breathing into our world — nature is not silence, but poetry aloud.

Strange Powers Magnetic Fields photo by Heidi Randen 600

My wife found these* stapled to poles around our neighborhood on Sunday.

.

You can hear my performance of Williams’ “The Birds”  with the player gadget below. No gadget to be seen? This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player. Want to follow along with the text of the poem? Here’s a link to that.

.

*This bird couple’s heads are superimposed over a human pair of heads from the cover of The Magnetic Fields Holiday  album. The quatrain quoted below is from a song found there “Strange Powers.”   Despite being a substantial Magnetic Fields admirer myself, I had never seen this album cover.

Unrequited March

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Here’s a sonnet of my own about the oncoming spring. I live in Minnesota, and here that season’s arrival is something of a lottery ticket. Oh, it’s likely that by sometime in February a Minnesotan is tired of winter, and we know that somewhere around May Day we’ll not have snow or cold to deal with for a few months, but when today’s high got to 40 F, we know no more than that. When I moved here, I was told that on days like today we might see folks wearing T-shirts outside — and yes that’s so. We are so in a hurry for spring that what would be a 5-degree Celsius winter day in more temperate regions seems time to ditch the jacket. Yet we are still likely to have more cold, and even more likely to get substantial snowfall, particularly in March.

So it is, from late February to late April is a two-month season of “what d’ya got” in our state. That’s what my poem performed today deals with.

Things are still snow-covered around here, but it’s not fluffy, Christmas-card snow— more at rugged crusts. I still ride a bicycle nearly every day year-round, and so winter means that I pay special attention to the surface conditions of the side-streets that I most often ride. You know the old factoid that Inuit peoples have a multitude of words for snow in their vocabulary? A day or two after a snow what’s often found is compressed and polished snow with some patches of white glaze where tires’ friction has buffed a gloss.*  A few days later there will be areas where that surface further abrades and patches of dull-brown porridge-like snow aggregates are scattered on the roadway. I call the later “brown-sugar,” and the earlier hard white surface looks to me like the smooth inside of a shell.

Spring-time bike rides in Minnesota aren’t necessarily what you think.

.

Low-pressure studded bike tires work pretty well on the hard shiny stuff, and large knobby treads are the thing for the loose brown sugar. My deep-winter bike’s tires are a pair of Venn diagram hoops circling both.

That’s a poet’s bike ride for you: metaphors per hour.

Unrequited March

The meter’s a bit loose, yet not loose enough to cry “Kings X — Free Verse!” either.

.

Does any of this help “translate” my poem for those without my climate? That’s my hope anyway. Though the title of my poem is “Unrequited March,”  my wish for you, curious or stalwart reader/listener, is that spring will love you back this year. The player gadget to hear about the uncertainty of that is below for many readers, and for those whose way of reading this blog won’t show that graphical player, this highlighted hyperlink will open a new tab to play the performance just as well.

.

*The large, knobby, low-pressure tires are also capable of riding on fresh snow before cars get to it. Un-rutted light and granular cold-weather snow is kind of fun to ride in. The wetter and clumpy snow that will likely come in any heavy storms for the rest of the season is much less joyful. That stuff is like riding in deep mud. The tires’ knobs will get traction — it’s not the tires, it’s an old out-of-shape guy like myself who’ll get tired quick riding through that.

Edward Thomas’ “The Owl” as heard in a yurt

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Every so rarely I treat this Project as a “regular blog” and talk about what I’ve done recently. Not my usual mode, but this is one of those.

In case you’ve noticed a gap in posting, this week I’ve been in a yurt situated in a forest a few miles from Lake Superior. No cellphone service, no Internet, just books, bicycles, an acoustic guitar, and my woodland-nymph wife for whom this is just the right sort of place.

A yurt is a circular tent adapted from Central Asiatic designs.*  The tent fabric is stretched over a wooden lattice so that it becomes in effect a small rustic cabin with no corners and soft walls. In the example we rented for our stay it had an elevated wooden floor, a conventional bed, a couple of chairs, and a door and windows that looked out onto the woods it sat in. In the center of its fabric roof, where the smoke from a central fire would exit in the original yurts, the modern version substitutes a clear plexiglass dome, a device I always read as an emblematic Sistine Chapel of The Sixties: like those domes fitted to Ken Kesey’s Furthur bus or Ed Roth’s Beatnik Bandit.

Three Plexiglass Domes

Three Plexiglass domes. Salad bowls of my salad days.

.

I brought books, poetry and poetry adjacent: Rush Hour  and Still Living in Town  by Kevin FitzPatrick, Rhythmic Stories & Prehistoric Mythteries  by Dave Moore, Swimming with Shadows and Light Rolling Slowly Backwards New & Selected Poems  by Ethna McKiernan, How to Read a Poem  by Edward Hirsch, and Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods  by William Logan.

The three from the poets I know were particularly piquant reads, Kevin having just died, Ethna facing serious illness, and Dave and I both a little worse for wear. This post won’t allow me to speak at length about those five books, which I read completely from cover to cover in the yurt. The Hirsch book turned out a little too basic and introductory for my mood, though it might well serve for someone seeking to get more involved with poetry. The Logan book was outrageous in a way that made me shake my head and yet keep reading.

I never assumed the Parlando Project was going to involve as much short essay writing. The reason that the Parlando audio pieces (which are available as podcasts in the usual places like Apple Podcasts et al) are simply the performances, not discussions and descriptions, is that I wanted to present and to allow listeners to experience poetry in the ear without a lot of framing or explaining, the same way that they largely experience lyrics in a song. But over the years I’ve fallen into writing here more about experiences with the poems, even delving into explications and musings about how the poems are set into poet’s lives.

When I enter into that mode and come upon a question — where many bloggers would simply say “I don’t know” or “One could guess” — I often make an attempt to find out if there’s an answer. These searches can take up more time than composing and recording the music. One of the most consistently popular posts here was my presentation of Yeats’ “To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing”  where I felt I had to find out who the friend was that the poem addresses, and what the work was. That wasn’t something easily discovered on the web — and apparently thanks to my post, it now is.

Logan takes this sort of thing to another level and then another, and another and…. I sensed him smiling and shaking his own head to the levels he was driven to go. In his discussion of Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”  Logan makes sure to determine what livery Frost’s farm owned in order to estimate what the speaker in Frost’s poem might be sitting in. In his discussion of Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”  he takes note of a story surrounding it: that a draft of the quickly-written sonnet was in the hands of the other young man that Keats’ had spent an all-nighter reading a rare copy of Chapman’s English translation with, by early the following afternoon. Logan tries to determine if this was possible via normal “penny post” service in London at the time, or would it have to have been a specially hired courier service. For poetry obsessives, Logan’s book will wear you out with “do we know, can we find out” side-trips like that.

Meanwhile, back at the yurt whose woods we are knowing, upon a peak above Lake Superior, we had planned to ride our bikes into town for breakfast, a distance figured at three miles via GPS maps. The same maps accessed at home warned me that it was a nearly 400 foot elevation climb on the way back to our yurt’s address, but I have done double that and more in my dotage. Both of us took our original generation “mountain bikes” which by modern standards are both heavy and altogether too mechanically unsophisticated, but this was good in that the first-part of our journey was a rutted gravel access road from our yurt to the local highway which descended steeply for about a half a mile.

From that point on into town I could have passed for a motorcyclist, coasting at 30 mph on the steep downward slope of the blacktop highway. At a stop sign I looked over to my wife and said, “You know, we’re going to have to climb this on the way back.”

After breakfast, she went off to take pictures, and I started the ride back by myself. **

Three years ago this autumn, I climbed 800 feet in 25 miles on Minnesota’s Iron Range. Not only am I older but doing 450 feet of climb in 3.3 miles is different. Different, as in harder. Different in as pedaling up a wall verses pedaling up a ramp. The temp that day was in the 50s and I wore a light vest and a non-zip long-sleave shirt, both of which were good during the speed of the descent into town. But when I finally arrived back at the yurt, I was quite tired and soaked in sweat — an autumn mixture of hot and chilled as soon as you stop.

Bayfield Climb

Graph of the climb back to the yurt from town. My research said 400 feet net climb, but it didn’t include the steep gravel access road at the end which added another 50 feet. Well-conditioned bikers will scoff at this climb, but where’s your understanding of Robert Frosts wagons?

.

That night as we went to sleep in the yurt, the leaves falling on the taunt roof gave us a sound like we were inside a scattered drum-roll. Off in the distance then we heard piercing owl cries*** that this musical-obsessive would liken to Eric Clapton signaling the wind-up of Ginger Baker’s drum feature “Toad”  — but then this person, whose Project has made him equally poetry-obsessed, also thought of Edward Thomas, and his poem “The Owl.”

Thomas besides being an avid walker (he was the actual walking companion Frost was chiding in “The Road Not Taken”)  was also a bicyclist, and “The Owl”  appears to be telling of a bicycle tour ride as it begins “Downhill I came…” and the full text goes on to describe that cold “yet heat within me” feeling that vigorous exercise produces in changing temperatures like my October ride. Thomas’ poem and his welcome rest at nightly lodgings on his tour turns in the middle on the sound of an owl’s cry.

Thomas’ thoughts are turned in that cry not to the band Cream and rock power trios of The Sixties, but those who didn’t have shelter in the night. And I had been reading the new poems section of Ethna McKiernan’s New & Selected  which is dedicated by her to “the hundreds of homeless clients I’ve worked with through the years.”

I performed Thomas’ “The Owl”  a few years back, but it’s one of my performances that I don’t think got all it could out of the piece, so here’s a fresh performance of my setting of that poem, recorded back home, but in yurt-style with acoustic guitar. For some, you can use a player gadget below to hear it. Others won’t see that, so this highlighted hyperlink will also play it.

.

*This Wikipedia listing about yurts says that a Mongolian Buddhist variation is called “uyangiin ger” which means “home of the lyrics.” I didn’t know that.

**She too had to struggle with the climb. While she stopped often to take pictures, breaking up the exertion somewhat, she found it difficult to overcome gravity to get her old bike going from when she stopped on steeper sections. Pictures of what? This and that in the local scene, though the highlights were a catalog of closeup pictures of various fungi in their autumn-leaf colors and fairy architecture.

***I’m not sure what species of owl. It might have been a barred owl or a horned owl. The calls were not the characteristic “who cooks for you” barred owl melody, but it had a similar pitch and timbre.

Following up on In Pursuit of Spring

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I completed reading Edward Thomas’s In Pursuit of Spring  yesterday, the book about a bicycle tour across southern England published just before his transition from a self-described hack writer to a much loved English poet. I’ve already noted some surprises in a reply to a comment earlier, but now that I’ve finished I have more to say.

I at first thought the journey was more than a month long, as I read a quote from the book mentioning finding May at the end of his journey—but that was poetic license on Thomas’ part, his bicycle trip from London to the Bristol Channel took only a few days, it was only the vicissitudes of English climate that he was expressing. So, my supposition that the time on his bicycle on a country trip helped break the cycle of hack writing is likely wrong. And more than the time-span says this. The book internally shows evidence of work for hire. Parts of it are uninspired writing—prolix and tangled  writing at that—which is doubly surprising given that Thomas’ poems are usually so sharp and short, where every word tells. The book contains digressions which may or may not have been conventional in English travel books of the time, but they vary in quality and subject. At one point he simply begins to tell a folk tale about two sisters for no reason I can discern. Some of the digressions geek-out on detail. There’s a monolog on clay pipes that I quite enjoyed, which might still pass today as a post on a hipster blog. His shorter discussion of “waterproofs” (rain gear) for bicycling would gather likes in a post today too.

Edward Thomas 2

“I have discovered that sellers of waterproofs are among the worst of liars, and they communicate their vices with their goods.” Even today, many all-weather bicyclists would agree with Thomas.

 

Thomas’ hack work included literary reviews, and there are mini-essays on several English poets thrown in amidst the travelogue. The only living poet this 1913 book dealt with at any length is Hardy (Thomas approves of him) but the strange case he recounts of the 18th Century rural poet Stephen Duck lead me to look for more about him. Thomas was reviewing the contemporary early 20th Century Modernists at this time, and no doubt absorbing some of their tactics, but he does not speak of them in the book.

Over the course of the book he spends an inordinate amount of time in village churches and their graveyards, often cataloging the ordinary names of those buried there—not just the plaques enshrining local now-forgotten notables—and he recounts many epitaphs he finds. This seemed padded and tiresome to me at first, but as the book continued I just grew to accept it. Was this a conventional part of travel book writing then? Are the family names or ordinary people particularly redolent of a region in England? I don’t know. But as this practice continued at every town, I recalled again, this is less than two years before WWI changed England and four years before Thomas met his own Eastertide death in that war. Prophetically intended or not, the book’s catalog of graves does begin to tell.

Another Thomas tic, carried over somewhat into the poetry, is his naturalists-level knowledge of plants and birdsong. At one point early in the book he’s riding off in the morning and identifies a great number of the birds calling by their song, and he never seems to pass a plant without knowing it’s common name.  When I think of his much beloved “Adlestrop,”  a poem I much admire, written only a bit more than a year later.  I wonder if he had to restrain himself from cataloging for several stanzas the species that make up “all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.”

When Robert Frost saw the poetry in In Pursuit of Spring,  he performed a task of greater perception than I expected, even though there are lovely phrases, a keen intellect that pops in and out, and an odd charm to the whole thing.  Have you run across the current craze for creating poetry by redacting the greater part of large blocks of text so that found poetry emerges? Frost must have mentally done something like that.

How much of Thomas’ mode of prose expression was warped by the pay-by-the-word and deadlines/assigned topics of hack work I can’t say, but the poet Edward Thomas is all the more remarkable to me after reading this.

No new music today, but since I mentioned “Adlestrop,”  it would be good to remind newcomers that they can hear it. The player is below.

 

In Memoriam Easter 1915

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Here’s a story about a poem appropriate for this Memorial Day, though the story includes three Easter holidays.

First Easter: on Easter 1913 in March, a freelance writer, normally so pressed for a paycheck that he worked 15-hour days writing piece after piece, started off on a bike tour across Britain from his home near London to the south-western coast of England. Of course, there was a paycheck involved, a travel book was planned and resulted, which was called In Pursuit of Spring.

Edward Thomas Easter Bike Trip 1913 crop

Can’t tell the model, but from the front it’s clear that Thomas was riding a classic English “roadster” on his tour.

 

This trip started in overwork and near the ending of a glum winter, and finished in May with true spring; and this bicycle journey allowed the harried writer to expend a bit more focus on his writing. In the book, his trip ends in Somerset England, but a packet of photos he took during the trip indicates that he must have somehow crossed the Bristol Channel to Wales, the homeland of his ancestors. A tell-tale photo with his handwriting on the back was discovered recently, saying it was taken near Tinkiswood, the site of a Welsh Neolithic stone burial chamber. A year later the site was excavated, and 920 human bones were located. Welsh legend has it that staying the night in the chamber will cause any surviving visitor to go raving mad or become a poet. That wasn’t included in the book.

The overworked freelancer who took this journey was Edward Thomas. Shortly after the journey completed, he met a then little-known American poet who’s work Thomas had reviewed perceptively. The poet was Robert Frost. Frost read In Pursuit of Spring  and suggested that Thomas should write poetry.

“How so?” asked Thomas.

Frost told him that Thomas had already shown close readings of the book of nature and the rhythm of verse in passages in In Pursuit of Spring.

So, at this time Thomas began writing poetry, extraordinary poetry that is little known in the United States, but which is much loved by poets and readers in the U.K. Some of it so concise and so infused with deep attention to the natural world’s calligraphy that it rivals classical Chinese and Japanese forms.

And World War I breaks out.

I’ve already written about Thomas’ dilemma in deciding if he should enlist in the war, and Frost’s part in Thomas’ ambivalence, so here I’ll just say that Thomas did enlist. The records say it was in a company called “The Artists’ Rifles.”

Can Americans of our time imagine such a military organization? Of course, artists of all kinds have served in America’s military services, but I can’t envision that sort of name being used here in place of something like “The Screaming Eagles.”

Edward Thomas' company in training with Thomas in rectangle

Thomas’ company in training camp

 

The second Easter: the somber name today’s poem was published under was not his. Thomas in his manuscript simply wrote down the Eastertide date in 1915 when he apparently wrote the first draft of this, two years after he’d started the trip that had indirectly formed him into a poet. That summer he was even stationed for a while on military training in one of the towns he’d passed through on the bicycle journey.

But never mind the name, what a poem. It’s four lines, a single quatrain. Nearly every word is telling, even ones you slide over in the first line. Decades later Pete Seeger wrote a song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,”  condensing an episode from a WWI novel expressing a similar idea to Thomas’ poem. Seeger’s song is not long as songs go, but it’s a good length for a room to sing along with. Thomas’ poem has only started when it comes to its fourth line. The previous line breaks abruptly, enjambed, with “should,” and its final line reveals itself as it unwinds in heartbreaking fashion.

And Thomas? A third Easter: another spring, 1917. His diary entry in France wonders if the enemy is unseen in the fields ahead of him, which he still must view with the precision of a nature poet. He pauses to light his pipe. A bullet pierces straight through his beating heart that, will, do, never, again.

To hear my performance of the poem eventually published as “In Memoriam (Easter 1915)”  use the player below.

 

 

 

Additional notes:  There’s a new paperback edition published a couple of years back of In Pursuit of Spring,  which includes for the first time the photographs Thomas took during his journey, and it’s available from booksellers. Yes, English people do take up the idea of trying to duplicate Thomas’ bicycle trip today, for example Kimberly Rew, the  guitarist alongside Robyn Hitchcock in The Soft Boys and songwriter and guitarist of Katrina and the Waves, and also the Nick Drake estate manager and vintage bike enthusiast  Cally Callomon, whose plans included riding the trip on a period-correct English roadster bike.

I recognize that Memorial Day is an American Holiday, directly derived from the post American Civil War Decoration Day. I know this blog has a large segment of U.K. readers, so to explain: in the U..S. we have two holidays celebrating the armed forces, Memorial Day, which retains some of it focus on honoring the dead who served, and Veterans Day, which is the U. S. holiday that coincides with Remembrance Day. For readers on either side of the Atlantic who’d like to hear the LYL Band present a performance of an American poet for Memorial Day, here’s Carl Sandburg’s “Grass.”

 

There is another sunshine Part 2

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

As I warned everyone yesterday, I seem to like Daze & Weekes Sunshine Blogger questions a little too much. Longest post ever…

1. What inspired you to start blogging?

The Parlando Project started out as a podcast, which I wanted to be just the short audio pieces combining various words (mostly poetry) with as varied music as Dave and I could produce, presenting just the piece itself, without chit chat. The Parlando Project is available on all the leading podcast sources, it still can be consumed that way, even though it’s not a podcast as the form is now expected to be. In contrast, I loved how pop music radio operated in my youth, when bang bang you’d hear 3 minute records by Aretha Franklin, The Zombies, Slim Harpo, The Beatles, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, James Brown and Bob Dylan all jumbled together without any defenses of their value other than the glorious, various, numerous sound that came out of the speaker grill.

But, some folks will want to know something about the pieces, and rather than rambling on mic about them, the “show notes”/ blog entries began to get more elaborate as the project went on. Last summer I started to think of the blog as the main thing instead of the adjunct thing.

2. What is your favourite post on your blog?

My favorite (losing u, and crossing the ocean—which sounds like the germ of a might-be-too-half-clever song)? The blog post is one of my shortest, and the audio piece doesn’t even have my voice, but “The Garden of Trust”  is the Parlando Project piece that moves me the most. I’d tear up when I was mixing it.

By far the most popular piece has been George Washington’s teenage love poem, “Frances.”  Why? Illuminati web-bots boosting Washington’s hits? Angsty teenagers? Xerxes fans looking for a break from Purim?

3. Who are the top 3 bands/musicians that most inspire and influence you as a musician?

Oh, this is so painful. The list should be more like 300. Even though the blog is about “Where Music and Words Meet,” I must rein back from talking about music on the blog or I’d wear a reader out. Doesn’t everyone understand that the book and movie “High Fidelity”  is a documentary and has no funny parts whatsoever?

Artists—just as important in some regard to me—will be left off! You ask three, so I’ll focus on musicians associated with words that motivated me most generally, and not singer-songwriters.

Frank Zappa. I met him and talked with him for a bit more than an hour in 1970. Reformed me artistically from a romantic to something else in that short of a time. I don’t completely share Zappa’s Dadaist sensibility, which is something like Dave Moore’s, but I need that to buffer my tragicomedy, even when it offends me. Here was a guy who didn’t separate R&B, rock, jazz, and “classical”/serious composed music. There was nobody who did that before him, and there’s nobody that’s done it since, so I try to do it at a lower level.

The Patti Smith Group. I could fill a list somewhere between 50 and 100, of artists who combined music with spoken/chanted word and poetry, therefore influencing the Parlando Project in doing the same; but if I had to pick one, it’d be the PSG. I’d read Patti Smith on the page before the PSG, and so I was already primed, but their first single and LP galvanized me when they came out. Taken together they are predominately spoken/chanted word records with co-equal music that’s not just a background sound bed. Obviously, there’s a sensibility there that comes from Patti Smith, but I’m saying the Patti Smith Group not just Patti Smith. Lenny Kaye from the first poetry readings with just Smith and Kaye on electric guitar had to invent something new with whatever musical chops he had on hand. I still think “What would Lenny Kaye do?” when working with a poet, and the younger Smith’s ecstatic vocal style, along with the other modes she added since then, is something I still aspire to.

John Coltrane. In regard to musical chops on any instrument, I’m not John Coltrane’s left pinky. I even have trouble faking saxophone lines. I like his later free jazz recordings in small doses, and appreciate the concept, but I can’t listen to it for hours, but when I’m most troubled or down on myself, listening to prime era John Coltrane just sets me vibrating with him on a molecular level. If I had to suggest a syllabus for a course on being an artist (any field) I’d suggest a John Coltrane biography or two. To me they’re like reading the life and sermons of the Buddha must be to Buddhists. It’s this, and his uncanny ability to speak wordlessly on his instrument, that makes me include him as a music/words influence.

Apologetically, I’ve just realized that none of these are musicians who are invariably easy to listen to; that they all have more detractors and “does nothing for me” listeners than fans. Two out of the three even offend on purpose when they wish too. That’s not representative of the whole of my musical influences, or how I want art to always work—but these are three who moved me to do work. If you want to stream a musician you haven’t heard of until you read it on a blog, then I suggest Bill Frisell, Steve Tibbetts, or Dean Magraw, all of whom have a breadth and beauty to their work I try to emulate, both as a guitarist and in my use of percussion.

Mason Zappa Cale Patti Smith Television bill
That last show in particular sure looks worth $9.50

 

4. If you could have a drink with any poet (alive or dead), who would it be?

Once more my love of variety makes for a hard choice. Often if asked, it would be the poet I’m trying to interpret with performance and music on that day! That said, I’ll say Emily Dickinson. I’d so want to tell her “You’re going to win! You and the immoral Mr. Whitman are going to be the founders of American poetry. Every single day, people are going to read and be pleasantly puzzled by your little verses, and esteemed writers will look at what you did and wonder how you could invent such a new way to speak poetically.” I’d want her to answer all the Sunshine Blogger questions and more, and finally, though we’d be challenging bladder capacity by then, I’d want her to dish.

sunshine

Alas, Emily Dickinson has no blog and can’t  be nominated

 

5. If you could go back in time, when and where would you travel?

Easy first part. I’d target the first two decades of the 20th Century. I’ve always been drawn there for some reason, even though it’s not a period that gets much attention generally. That feeling has only intensified from my need to draw largely on works in the Public Domain (pre-1923) for the Parlando Project. Modernism in a lot of delicious flavors was breaking out all over, and in every art. Politically, a challenging time of vast inequality, but also a time of great hope that change was at hand. So, like time-travelers everywhere I’m going to expect to be reasonably well-off—but where to land?

If New York City, a chance to observe the melting pot at its most brimming. Visit the 1913 Armory Show to watch the onlookers’ new eyes seeing for the first time the paintings by the new eyes? Hobnob with the political, social and artistic radicals, some of them recently emigrated from my own family’s base in south-eastern Iowa like my “cousin” Susan Glaspell. Maybe fake a letter of introduction from my grandparents and ask Susan to show me around the Provincetown Playhouse and Greenwich Village? Meet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Or Chicago? Meet Carl Sandburg and his young family. Swing by the offices of Poetry magazine and suggest to Harriet Monroe that she should read my blog (grin) for tips on hot new writers. Ride with Fenton Johnson in his electric motor car, and refrain from telling him he isn’t going to win and that there’s nothing I can tell him with my extra century of knowledge that can change the racial ignorance and prejudice of America between his time and now.

Or Paris. Meet Apollinaire, Reverdy, Picasso, Satie, and—oops! my French speaking skills are non-existent. OK, next.

London. That’s it! Frost! Pound! Yeats! HD! Florence Farr! George Bernard Shaw! Crash the Poets Club to meet T. E. Hulme and hope I don’t get on his bad side. Sit close to F. S. Flint as a cover and act like I know him. Ask Flint about Herbert Read. Learn to play the Yeats’ psaltery and find out exactly what the Yeats-desired music “chanted, not sung” style sounded like. Slip Rupert Brooke a can of Deep Woods Off and suggest he look up Pound. Visit with Rabindranath Tagore in Hampstead. And the clincher for London? Buy a Raleigh bicycle with a Sturmey Archer 3 spd hub and a kerosene headlamp and ride around town. Why is that the clincher? I’m an introvert. Sadly, I might never make those social connections, even after traveling through time, but the bike ride would be worth it.

1910_Raleigh
Yeats, Pound, HD, Frost, & Flint…tally ho and toodle pip!

Next up, my Sunshine Blogger questions and nominations.