birdsong

Tell me where is Fancy bred: Shakespeare the Songbird Poet

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

In writing about Sara Teasdale last time here I mentioned that she has been grouped with a set of 20th century female poets as a “Songbird Poet.” The implied charge here is that these poets are less concerned with the deep meaning of poetry and are content to just make pleasant word-music.

If we are to attend the deeper meaning school, I’d have an opening to report that in nature the songs of birds are not all pleasant and meaningless – for they sing for desire, for companionship, to legislate territory, and for existential defense among other things. If birds are likely deficient in theology and philosophy, I’m too ignorant to know if a sense of avian metaphor is present.

I, of course, am being stubbornly literal there, Teasdale appears to be without feathers and everyone should know this, save for those who are sure the female mind is insufficient and therefore may have doubts. One of the things we may claim as humans is that we are a flexible sort of creature of many moods and levels. One kind of song, one kind of poetry? There’s no handy phone app that can identify our songs as one sort of human.

So, even if calling them “songbird poets” is plausibly belittling, as a person in this Project I have to say that making a song, something one appreciates uttering, can be a worthwhile thing. Here’s another minor poet who I’m sure we’ve kept in a parlor cage as a songbird, one William Shakespeare. This tidy little song, from his play The Merchant of Venice, talks about idle, surface-deep, love (“Fancy”). But wait – like is often the case with the Songbird Poets, there’s a more complex message inside it. In the play, one of a pair of lovers is given a test: a choice of three boxes and selecting the correct one will allow them to marry. Shakespeare, prefiguring the ding-dong theme played when the Jeopardy game-show contestants are making their final answer and wager, provides this song to fill the stage time as the lover thinks it over.*

Tell me where

I made a point to write this one entirely with my ham-handed skills on keyboards.

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As a poem it seems simple doesn’t it. Sure, there’s some now-archaic language in it, but to modern readers or listeners, that probably only makes it seem more the nursery rhyme.

But it turns out there’s a little bit of metaphysics in the modest verse: where does “Fancy,” that insubstantial, fickle, flimsy love come from? From the mysteries of the heart and its desires? From some reasoning of the mind? Nope. It’s all from looks – all “I’d hit that” surface the singer warns – it’s hardly born, and it’ll die. Finally, the singer asks us to celebrate the death of that kind of infatuation, and joyously ring its funeral bell, as time is up and the lover must make their decision.

So, is a little song like a Fancy: never more than a flimsy, momentary thing? Or can it tell us something about food, partnership, where we are, where the predators are?

Well in the present case of my performance of Shakespeare’s song, I’m the dun, leaden box since I needed to use my voice for this, and I made a simple pealing accompaniment with a viol, a reed pump organ, and a harpsichord. You can choose to hear it with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? It hasn’t flown south in a honking V arpeggiation, it’s just hiding in the brush cover of some ways of reading this blog. I offer this alternative then, a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I believe that none of the music used in Shakespeare’s plays in his lifetime has survived. Merv Griffith, himself a gameshow host and producer, wrote the tune used on Jeopardy. I haven’t watched that long-running TV show in decades, yet his tune (in its original version) is still stuck in my head.

A Minor Bird

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

The recording of this musical version of a short Robert Frost poem somehow was able to slip itself in-between standing watch, comforting, and grieving this month in Minnesota. Increasingly people outside our area are expressing admiration for our fortitude, but inside our local theater of atrocities, I’d say our thoughts and feelings are still a jumble. My aged body has its limits, but I’m trying to support others during this time. Things you might see here? I still find it difficult to integrate these events into the long-ongoing Project.* There’s a great deal of news coverage and analysis being done elsewhere, but during this time you have been spared hundreds of words I’ve written and then not posted, longish things where I sought to add to that. My audience isn’t that large; my remaining skills in prose I’d self-assay as not unique enough to be required. My Parlando Project creative time is constrained both internally by aging and my acute reactions to the present crisis, and externally by limited times when I can use some musical and recording tools.

Yet, somehow, this piece is here today. Does it address the events here this January?** I think it does, at least partially, but first here’s a short account of how it was made.

I’ll skip the details, but the present recording logistics here limits the ways I can record guitars, though guitar is the instrument which I have the most facility with. Electric bass, my “second instrument” is easier. Recording an electric bass by directly plugging into a jack in an audio mixer or interface has long been a best practice for everyone from home recordists to pro studios, and since there are no amp speakers in the chain and a generally inert plank of wood holding the plucked strings, this is near silent in the room and it eliminates microphones capturing unwanted noise. Electric guitar can be recorded the same way, but for some stylistic choices you want the guitar to react to sound coming out of a speaker – and furthermore (for me, anyway) I express things differently when I’m moving air loudly in a room when playing electric guitar. This doesn’t factor into playing bass. So “A Minor Bird”  started out with me working out a computer drum pattern and playing a bass line. I created a chord cycle based on the bass line (the reverse of how I often do it) and used a computer piano to create a MIDI piano roll expressing those chords.*** I then edited that MIDI score to get a part that pleased me. I next hacked playing a Hammond B3 organ part myself with my little plastic keyboard, though mercifully, all you will hear are the best bits. The next track was my singing Robert Frost’s words. Each of these steps could be done in the odd hours I could grab, so the song took form in dribs and drabs over a few days. I had intended to overdub an electric guitar solo in the middle, but that time wasn’t there, which leaves the drums/bass/piano trio grooving alone, which might even be addition by subtraction.

This Frost poem is not one of his better-known ones, though published in his 1923 collection New Hampshire, the book that won his initial Pulitzer Prize. The first thing that struck me about it is how modest and unassuming it is: four couplets long, no exotic words, a vignette with two characters: a bird and the poet/speaker. I would almost say that there is no prerequisite reading or coursework needed to understand the poem, but my next thought was that the situation here, poet and a single bird, might be in conversation with other poetry. One could think of other romantic poems of a poet and birdsong – Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”  for example – but if I was to think of a single poem that Frost is writing his in conversation with, it would be Poe’s “The Raven.”   Both poems are set in the context of the faceted emotions of grief/melancholy/depression. Both have the poet wanting the bird to leave, but despite the shortness and plain language of Frost’s poem, there’s room in his short poem for a volta, a turn of thought. Frost never names the species of bird, but by calling it “a minor bird” in his small poem, he’s also explicitly casting the bird’s song as being in a (sad) minor key. The poem’s conclusion is that the calling of grief and sadness should be included in our consciousness.

vigil 1-24-26

Saturday, after the latest killing of one of the observers who was filming the actions of the Federal troops elsewhere in Minneapolis, other observers in our neighborhood and their families gathered in the below-zero dark on our streetcorner, each of us carrying a candle from our houses.

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The doorknob where I write this has a lanyard with a whistle. It’s to grab, to take outside in the winter cold and to make our minor sound at anything from the incursion into our city that calls us to flock witnesses too. This state in this country, and this composer and plain singer of Frost’s words, have had their griefs this month. We have chosen not to shoo them away – despite the raptor dread encircling our minor birds, we have not silenced the song.

To hear the performance of Robert Frost’s “A Minor Bird”  use the audio player below. No player? Nothing has caused it to withdraw, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog won’t display the player. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*Perhaps I’m an odd duck, but to release art about these events worries part of me that some portion of the artist is seeking to use these largely selfless and unsigned acts of resistance as a platform to promote their work.

I’m not saying you should feel that way! And yes, I am quite aware that conversely some artists and their work have been down-rated, suppressed, and punished due to their art for causes.

My feeling is more akin to the idea that in either case, the thoughts of pros and cons of careerism must be humbled by the everyday bravery and service Minnesotans have shown this month.

My one art-for-cause step so far has been to release alternative Parlando Project voice Dave Moore’s re-casting of Wendell Phillips cry about fighting injustice, “I’m On Fire”  from 2014. Thanks largely to some folks reposting it on BlueSky it’s garnered more than usual listenership.

**Under what name will this month’s resistance be recorded under? “The Battle of Minneapolis” has already been used for a 20th century labor action. I’m fond of wordplay, but “The Mother Whistlers” is too humorous. “The Minnesota Witnessers?” “The ICE Breakers?” “The iPhone Militia Movement?”

***MIDI notation makes-do for this naïve composer who tried to learn musical notation decades ago, but largely passed it by. Something in me loves it is the computer adaptation of the paper piano rolls such as my grandmother’s player piano or maverick composer Conlon Nancarrow used.

The Late Singer, a song for Spring

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

A short post and a short off-the-cuff audio piece today. I keep trying to fit this Project into my life, and this William Carlos Williams’ Spring poem reminds us that it’s never too late to sing.

I had to cancel a more pristine time in my recording space this week. I lost sleep the night before as I prepared fresh material to record, and then woke up early the following morning, anxious to see what I could do performing this new material. Then just as dawn and others woke up, I heard that a mild illness would cancel my plans. Disappointing, but, oh well. If life wasn’t bigger than this Project, what would there be to sing about?

Later that same afternoon I decided that I should do something, anything, with what had been put off. It occurred to me that by the time I’d have an occasion to reschedule I might forget the musical material I had only in my mind, since at this point the songs only existed on simple paper chord sheets, like this one.

The Late Singer

Simple chords for this one, which you can take as an invitation for you to sing this one yourself. The most obscure part of this poem is the “moth-flowers.” I’m not sure what WCW is going for there. Maple trees do have small Spring flowers. I read today that their different flower colors are actually sexually differentiated.  There’s also a moth WCW might have known that is attracted to maple trees.

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Here’s one catch of my recording space: while ramshackle, and having a remarkable sound capturable in the room, is not acoustically isolated. Since outside sound leaks in, recording quieter acoustic instruments requires planning and scheduling. I decided, no matter if it wasn’t quiet there, I should record short, demo versions of the seven songs I was planning to work up. I figured I could do that in an hour or so, and I could afford that time.

I sat down in the space, background noise accepted, and used my Telecaster electric guitar* instead of an acoustic guitar, and ran through the seven songs one after the other. A couple of takes each, a third only if I had a major stumble. Time was so compressed that the first take was largely my own test of my “so far, only in my head” plans for the song.

During that hour I produced this quick & dirty version of William Carlos Williams’ “The Late Singer”  that you can hear below with the audio player you should see. No player?  This highlighted link then.  It occurs to me that Spring itself has its way of being quick and dirty, and we find charm in that.

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*Electric guitar masks much of the leaked noise compared to the sensitive microphones used for acoustic guitar. Some of the leakage into the vocal mic I found I could minimize with software that does a good job of “ducking” that noise. Solo electric guitar with a single singer is not a common musical format. Jazz has some examples, ones using more chops than I have. Some early Blues makes it powerful, but that format was soon superseded by full bands. Jeff Buckley’s outrageously good “Live at Sin-é”  makes me want to put my voice inside a box in a closet and hide it. Billy Bragg, a man more of my utilitarian approach, busked and recorded with just his own electric guitar backing.

Adlestrop for National Poetry Month

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

You’ll sometimes find Edward Thomas filed under “War Poets,” but his best-known poem “Adlestrop”  is a unique peace poem that emerged from a journal entry written a few days before war broke out in Europe in 1914. In Thomas’ “Adlestrop”,  nothing happens — the sweetest nothing.

This poem is lesser-known in America than it is in Britain, but its achievement deserves to be celebrated more generally. Now, I won’t knock the accomplishments of the World War I “War Poets,” but from the time of Homer it’s been assumed that the heightened events and sorrows of war can make powerful poetry. But to write poems about the day before a war, the minutes of mere inconvenience amid beauty so ordinary we will not burnish it on paper, that’s a rarer thing.

And now, with a new war being waged in Europe, the “Adlestrop”  moment may have gained fresh power for us.

The new lyric video.

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Adlestrop is, and was in 1914, a tiny English village in the Cotswolds. Edward Thomas did take a train ride a mere four days before Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated tripping off the first world war. He was journaling at the time, a busman’s holiday for a man who made his living freelance writing at a “bills-to-be-paid” rate.*  In his journal he noted the heat and the sleepiness of the train station (which was outside of the town’s edge). An avid naturalist, he made exact notes of the plants there, and the birds. Oh, the birds. Thomas’ writing is always full of bird-song.

Here’s what he wrote on June 24th, 1914, the first draft of what would become the poem:

Then we stopped at Adlestrop, through the willows could be heard a chain of blackbirds songs at 12.45 and one thrush and no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam.

Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass willowherb and meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between the two periods of travel — looking out on grey dry stones between metals and the shining metals and over it all the elms willows and long grass — one man clears his throat — a greater than rustic silence. No house in view. Stop only for a minute till signal is up.”

The final poem, the one we know and perform below, was then written after the outbreak of the World War. It transforms that entry’s already poetic detail into that masterful poem of nothing, the sweetest nothing. The poem’s final zoom out to “Farther and farther, all the birds/Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire” seems an invention, a choral work derived from a smaller bird-song ensemble in the journal entry.

The performance features one of my better examples of melodic bottleneck electric guitar playing. You can hear this performance three ways: a player gadget below for some, this highlighted link for others, and a new lyric video that you’ll see the picture/thumbnail/link for above.

One other note: my own accelerated posting schedule for National Poetry Month 2022 is wearing me down a little this April. I have more pieces like “Adlestrop”  that I plan to re-release yet, but it’s possible that I may reduce frequency in the second half of the month.

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*Thomas wrote around a hundred poems in the just over one year that he worked at writing poetry. His work for hire productivity was prodigious too. One stat that is often noted was that he once reviewed 19 books in one week.

Birds Busking

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

This project doesn’t operate by some master plan, but it does operate keeping in mind a number of principles. I want to explore various ways to combine words with music. There’s a long tradition of setting poetry to music as Art Song or Lieder. While elaborate melodic contours can sometimes detract from the expression of the text, I have no objection to that tradition, just a feeling that there are other approaches.*  I want to vary the music used, as much as my resources and skills allow. I would like the texts to vary in expression as well, so much so that even though this project started with the help of a fellow poet and musician, Dave Moore, it doesn’t use our own poetry or writing for text to connect with music much here. I like to honor “Poetry’s Greatest Hits” but I also like to go crate digging for overlooked writers and poems. And unlike most of the modern web, this blog and this project isn’t out to sell you anything. I’m well past my sell-by date as an indie music act.

I’ve been at this for around five years and presenting things here at this blog for nearly four. Today’s piece makes the 450th combination of various words with various music. My current expectation is to continue this project to the 500th piece. The audience continues to grow, which is gratifying and motivating, but this project takes a tremendous amount of effort. How can one weigh these things? My own subjective feeling right now is that the continued amount of effort involved would make more sense with a larger audience than I’ve been able to attract, even now as this thing nears its fourth-year anniversary.

Parlando 450 Chagall

the 450th audio piece since we launched in August 2016

 

There are ways that might increase that audience that are somewhat known. Most of them have costs in money, time, focus, and complexity that are daunting to me.**  The introverted, heads-down composer, researcher, writer, and musician for whom those efforts would be undertaken is likely incapable of sustaining that and continuing to do as much creative work as this project has become accustomed to. Other than the rewards of perseverance, much of the growth that motivated me in the past few years has been due to the efforts of readers and listeners to spread the word. If you’ve done this, even a little bit by telling a friend or linking a piece, particularly on those social networks that I don’t have time to participate in, thank you!

I should reach 500 pieces sometime later this year. I continue to think on these things and what to do about this project as I continue to work on new pieces.

Today’s piece violates that principle of featuring other writers. I may bend that way a bit more in the coming weeks than in the past, as I have a few pieces I wrote that I want to present. But it does speak to my thoughts today about this project at piece #450. “Birds Busking”  is about that music offered every morning by those exiled dinosaurs. Oh, they have hopes too, if not actual open musical instrument cases with a few bills salted inside. Maybe some territorial claim, mating opportunities, or commiserating calls to like birds-of-a-feather. But one can think, as poets do as they continue, that they might sing anyway.

Birds Busking

I may have invented a word (“eached”) in the 12th line.

 

How many poets have listened to that birdsong? I cannot count and neither can you. The countlessness of that is magnificent! The wonder of all those poets and all that music is what this project is about. And so I write and post this new piece here this morning, tenaciously.

The player to hear “Birds Busking”  is below.

 

 

 

 

*In fact I enjoy Art Song, and just because the style has its characteristics doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its worth. But I can’t sing elaborate melodies successfully (my tune bucket’s got a hole in it). Similarly, I think hip hop can do remarkable things, but the fast rap flow is something my voice can’t quite hack.

**I’m not even good at following up and acknowledging your comments on these pieces. It’s not something you said! I’m just writing another piece of music, or recording it, or researching or looking for a new poet or poem.

The Birds Before Us

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Most days I take a bike ride to and from a cafe I have breakfast at. It’s my conviction that exercise is a good thing for people of all ages, but it’s more at required for folks my age. The kind of sitting that goes into composing music or the reading and writing that contributes the texts this project uses is pleasant and absorbing, so I think that if I don’t start my day with something that gets me moving outdoors all I would see is screens and pages. No matter if they are blank or full pages, the book of nature cannot be found there.

When it comes to the book of nature I’m not well read. When I read poets like Emily Dickinson or Edward Thomas I can easily tell that. Therefore, my only advantage is that I get to read the book of nature as if for the first time.

Rust Lacework Truck

Chemical nature observed. My homage to the Yip Abides blog. I love how the rust has created a sunburst finish lacework that matches the original paint color of this truck I passed this month.

This spring I began to notice birdsong more and more. In early morning rides the birds were active and making a note of that with their calls and singing. Summer writes diminuendo, and by now my northern state is quite silent. Nor do I get to see any birds much, though the streets here are full of the year’s batch of weaned squirrels, now nearly adult-sized, who are dashing about as if they have a plan for winter. And with the squirrels I hear less of the cackles from those that take time to chase another squirrel for sport. I sometimes imagine those pursuing pairs were littermates, another they were once eyeless beside.

No one’s singing because there’s autumn work to be done—but what work? Will it bring reward? What to store, what to leave behind.

Today’s text is a poem I wrote about birdsong, and the larger book of nature in which we are only an entry, somewhere between horseflies and iguanas as alphabetized with our symbols. It’s occurred to me that I have taken time in this later year of my life to listen to the birdsongs, their piercing intervals; and that after I no longer roll down these streets looking for tea and scrambled bird eggs, that there will be birds in spring moving from note to note, and birds in fall, quiet and studious.

The Birds Before Us

Here’s the poem if you’d like to read along as you listen to the performance.

The piece is called “The Birds Before Us,”  and you can hear my performance of it with the gadget below. We’ll return soon with the usual Parlando Project thing: encounters with other people’s words.

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.

 

The Oven Bird

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

With today’s post, we’ve reached the 100th official episode of the Parlando Project, where we mix words from many sources (mainly poetry) with various kinds of music. For the 100th piece I’ve decided to feature an older recording of mine, almost 10 years old, of my performance of Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird,”  because it marks some of the initial ideas that lead me to this ongoing Parlando Project.

Parlando Project 100th audio piece

the Parlando Project has posted 100 audio pieces combining music and words

 

Frost’s “The Oven Bird”  is a devastatingly accomplished lyric poem written early in the 20th Century. The rhythm of the lines both grooves and varies itself, like the best music, and the rhyme scheme is elaborate, yet it never falls into forced rhyme. Frost’s language here is so plainspoken, ironically saving the fanciest and longest word for the poem’s last line. Frost is as rigorous a modernist as any of his contemporaries in the Imagist school. He’s as willing as any of them to hack away all the overused and overgrown 19th century “poetic language” and to use no word more than needed, but he does it here while writing a sonnet in rhymed metrical verse that sounds as natural as any free verse.

Allow me to indulge for minute my musical interests for a moment. What Frost does here (and elsewhere) is like what John Coltrane did shortly before changing his focus to what was to be called “free jazz,” where melodic freedom was stressed by radically simplifying the underlying harmonic structure. Coltrane wrote and recorded the most devilish difficult set of rapid chord changes constantly shifting the harmonic center, an obstacle-course of a composition called “Giant Steps”,  and then proceeded to improvise over it as if it was no matter to him to make those changes. Like Coltrane, Frost could seem free, natural, and innovative, while writing inside a constraining form. This sort of kindred accomplishment speaks to what attracts me in the Parlando Project to equally privileging music and words.


“The Oven Bird”  has a reputation as a downbeat poem, and while Frost will not sugar-coat the human condition, I did not, and still do not, find it so. In “The Oven Bird”  Frost draws our attention to a bird that sings on, past the promising days of spring, and whose song is none-the-less, loud and insistent, even though he’s singing in a season where he might well feel out of place and out of time for song. Then in the closing section we’re first told that the future holds the fall season—and by extension, both the fallen state of man and the death cycle of nature—and “the highway dust is over all.” Some have read that line as Frost noting the coming of the 20th Century roads that will close out even more forest and bring some measure of end to the natural world. I think instead the “highway dust” is more at a statement of the death of all living things (dust implies in my reading “to dust”) and that dust is the dust of a set, laid out, road.

Oven Bird

The oven bird: “He knows in singing not to sing”

 

Finally, Frost hits us, and me specifically near 10 years ago, with his conclusion—one that says much for this project that seeks to find “The place where music and words meet.” He says those of us, also mid-summer and mid-wood who listen knowing these things, sharing the bird’s predicament, should know that the bird has these teachings to pass on to us, “He knows in singing not to sing” (a zen koan of a line) and that the present question is “what to make of a diminished thing.” What a progression to this, from the plainest language with simple words never more than three syllables long, singing us the oldest cycle known to self-conscious humans—and then Frost gives us a line suitable for meditative thought and a question.

This is where I break from those who see this as a despairing poem about death, failure and decline. The poem asks what to make of that, offering the example to loudly sing.

To hear my performance of Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird”, the 100th offical audio piece posted here as part of the Parlando Project, use the player below. “The Oven Bird”  performance is voice and acoustic guitar, but if you listened to others,  you know that the music and poetry we use varies. If you haven’t listened to other audio pieces in this project, check out the monthly archives for more. And if you like this, hit the like button or the follow button, and share this post or this blog address on your favorite social media channels. Those who’ve already done so help keep Dave and I encouraged to create new material, and you have helped grow the number of people listening to pieces from “Parlando – The Place Where Music and Words Meet.”