Claude McKay

Claude McKay’s “After the Winter”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I have no direct information, but I experienced today’s Claude McKay poem as a companion piece to the poem I performed last time, “To Winter.” “ To Winter’s” voice was somber and alone, and the sparseness of winter is welcomed within the moment of that poem. “After the Winter”  in contrast leaves a present cold weather moment quickly and turns instead to a hopeful warm weather reverie. Here’s a link to the text of today’s other winter poem.

As I’ve already mentioned in this series, McKay’s poetry often includes flowers, and so it is with this one. I casually compared McKay to Emily Dickinson in this regard – and they are two poets who studied plants scientifically but also portray their aesthetic beauty in poems – but Dickinson’s flowers can often be philosophical, creatures of a searching, perhaps existential, mind, while McKay’s blossoms are flagrantly sensuous.

Snow Creature by Heidi Randen 800

Not by clay and wattles made.

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In the poem here, like my present February in northern America,* is still in winter, and any early birds are shivering, but in the reverie, there’s a bee among the flowers, just as we might find in Dickinson. Yet, as I read this poem I thought of another poet that McKay’s poem could be in conversation with: William Butler Yeats.

Tribute, coincidence? One more thing I don’t know, but as I read “After the Winter”  I strongly felt its resonance with Yeats famous “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” **   If McKay was thinking of his homeland of Jamaica, and Yeats of Ireland, the catalog of objects in their pair of poems sing harmonies: a built cabin and a cottage; bean rows and blue bells; bee loud and droning bees in a pair of glades; lapping lake water and laughing crystal rills. One difference in McKay’s cabin vs. Yeats’? Yeats dreams of living there alone, while McKay’s poem speaks of a “we” there.

Am I charging McKay with some crime of unoriginality? Nope. If he’d read and enjoyed Yeats poem (something I think likely) there’s in my world of poetry and song no harm in adding his own verses longing for his own homeland. Poets and singers do this. No less than a Robert Frost did his own reply to a lyrical passage from one of Yeats plays. Folk singers, folk musicians make a practice of this. This thing you’re reading, the Parlando Project? I’m borrowing from poets across the ages and places, singing or performing their words in my way, sometimes altering them intentionally or otherwise. If I sing a more than 100-year-old poem written by a Black Jamaican born in the 19th century, I’m adding myself, my inhabitation to it. If a Jamaican recalling in his deep heart’s core his rural childhood home while standing in another, colder country, sings along with an Irishman standing on urban pavement in London? That’s us, that’s our shared humanity, hearing and taking in each other’s songs.

How did I inhabit McKay’s poem musically? A predominate instrument sound in my performance is a Middle-Eastern santur, the ancestor of the hammered dulcimer of Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn. And I finish the performance by indulging in an electric guitar solo played on a Telecaster: the country & western instrument designed by a one-eyed American. You can hear that with the audio player below. No audio player to be seen with either eye? Some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing it, so I offer this highlighted link that will open its own tab with an audio player.

 

 

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*I was able to replace my dead LCD screen today. If you dream about a quiet bucolic place were you can hear bees and gentle breezes rustling some botany, I would suggest not going to a Microcenter on a Sunday. On the other hand, it’s good that there is such a bazaar beside the “pavements grey” where you can find a necessary cable to go from mini display port to full-sized display port.

**Yeats’ poem is famous for its invocation of Ireland, yet I found out in researching it for a Parlando Project performance of it some years back that it was written in London.

Late February, repairs, and Claude McKay’s “To Winter”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

My winter has been impacted by things a regime of some coarsely-ground humans brewed up, but it’s been good this February to take a quick dive into the poetry of early 20th century Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay. Yesterday I was closing in on completing a new musical piece in my series combining McKay’s poems with original music in differing styles. I’d sung McKay’s “To Winter” accompanied this time by electric guitar instead of acoustic, and I had constructed some nice harmonic support from spare MIDI piano. I wanted a melodic top line though since my rough-hewn singing wasn’t doing enough to carry that role in the song. I decided to use a Mellotron virtual instrument.*  Long-timers here may recall that I love some of the sounds that cranky mechanical 1960s tape-based sampler produces. Back then they were sold because it used actual recordings of real instruments – but the results? They didn’t sound all that convincing – and all that machinery was subject to glitches and breakdowns. However, once one stops aiming for verisimilitude, its sounds have a certain character. It probably doesn’t hurt that their very cheesiness brings back memories of crackling mid-century LPs and hazy concerts.

I was able to record those Mellotron parts, but my city was filling with heavy wet snow while I did that.

Authoritarianism of a meteorological kind as it accumulated, but I had another task for Wednesday. My newly inherited 12-year-old car had a worn drive shaft that needed replacing. I was to drop it off at a mechanic’s shop in a nearby suburb, and my wife had set a time to give me a ride back. She wanted to go right away, as the roads were getting worse from the snow. Long story short, what would have normally been a 45-minute round trip turned into over two hours of slow going.

It was later Wednesday evening when I returned to mix the resulting new and old tracks for the song in my home office, and I couldn’t get my home office Mac to light up my computer screen. First thought: a normal glitch, as the Mac sometimes just forgets that it should see the screen, but a restart or a re-plug did nothing. Connecting the monitor to another computer revealed the sad tale: my 15-year-old LCD screen had chosen that night to die.**

And this was a problem. All my mixing software is installed on the computer connected to that dead screen. So, no mixing Wednesday. It occurred to me: maybe the now dark computer monitor decided to go out because it was Ash Wednesday: remember, from silicon dust you came and to silicon dust you’ll return.

Thursday morning I pulled a smaller, lower resolution monitor from my studio space and hooked it up so I could finish this piece.

To Winter

Just as I trust the mechanic to fix my drive shaft, I trust that someone out there can probably sing this song better than I can, so here’s a chord sheet.

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“To Winter”  is Claude McKay considering this very time of the year in the Northern U.S. Days are getting longer, there’s more animal activity, water, once ice, will break and flow. McKay’s poem has a complex reaction to this. He concludes he’s feeling winter inside within the moment of the poem, and finds winter outside permits that mood. Last time, with his “Tired Worker”  I found some tension between McKay’s Keats-like language and prosody and the weariness of a 20th century blue-collar laborer. This poem’s my-time-is-like-Keats’-time-may-be-like-some-later-reader’s-21st-century-time choices cause less strain.***

What a wonderous range of coincidences wove into the past few hours. I chose the Mellotron, 19th century orchestral sounds as approximated by mid-20th century technology, mixed on a modern computer whose old LCD monitor left this mortal coil on a snow swirling night at the beginning of the Abrahamic religion’s overlapping spring holy days.

The mechanic has seen to my drive, shaft (“can you dig it”) so that it no longer makes disconsonant noises. I should have a replacement high-resolution computer screen by next week. February snows can be wet and heavy, but to water and mud-luscious they will soon enough go. Crude regimes? I can’t say just myself, but perhaps Carl Sandburg’s “The People, Yes” will increasingly say. So much to repair.

I hope to have a couple more Claude McKay pieces here soon, but to hear this one today, use the audio player below. No audio player to be seen? Mais où sont les neiges d’antan – but I offer this highlighted link as an alternative which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*A virtual instrument contains the modern, much more sophisticated expression of the same idea (the various notes and timbres of a “real” instrument stored as digital recording data instead of one timbre and expression on a strip of magnetic tape for each note pulled along by clockwork springs and levers). My initial attraction to virtual instruments was reading that for only a handful of dollars one could rather precisely “fake the fakery” of the Mellotron without searching out and maintaining a finicky, costly, and increasingly antique instrument.

**The deceased was an HP Compaq LA2405wg model from back when that deleterious merger was fresh. It was a stretch for me to afford then, but in 2010 it was a rare 16:10 1920×1200 display, and I can’t even begin to calculate how many hours I’ve looked at characters and controls on that screen! Everything I’ve ever mixed, every video I’ve ever done, and a lot of writing and research for this Project were done on it.

***McKay’s poem reminds me a little of my favorite John Keats’ poem, “In the Drear-Nighted December.”

The Tired Worker

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

On the page, and probably in my recorded musical performance, this poem is an odd combination. Here’s a link to the text of Claude McKay’s “The Tired Worker.”   Its subject is altogether common: the fatigue of someone who is overtaxed by their job, and a night whose worry and weariness has paradoxically robbed them of enough rest to hope for a better tomorrow. Claude McKay, the author I’m featuring this month, knew these feelings firsthand from the jobs he’d held to support himself as a newly landed US immigrant. I dare say most who read this poem have had nights like this too. As poem subjects go, it’s likely as broadly relatable as love and desire.*   McKay doesn’t go into detail what kind of work the poem’s titular subject does – but calling them a “worker” and expressing their experience of tired hands and aching feet would indicate a manual labor or a service job.

And here’s what strikes me (and perhaps you) as odd, encountering this in my 21st century time: the poem is written in flowery, elevated, 19th century language. For a 1920’s worker to speak of their daily lot as if it’s an 1820 poem contemporary with John Keats seems anachronistic. I’m trying to think of what a current equivalent of this would be, and maybe that’s impossible in that we can’t see, as we can with history’s perspective on McKay’s poem, how out-of-place this poem’s language is with the daily language of its worker or worker-reader.**

That this poem was first printed in The Liberator,  a radical socialist publication founded and edited by Max Eastman may be one clue. I’ve spent a few hours this week paging through its early 1920’s issues published from within the Greenwich Village progressive ferment of its time.

I’ve been fascinated by this scene, partly because I had a shirttail relative Susan Glaspell who was an integral part of it, but also because it was a rich mixture. Political, sexual, and artistic radicalism were literal bedfellows. The Liberator featured a great many ads for political tracts, but also for literary books, and many of latter were low-priced reprints aimed at a bohemian’s or workingman’s budget.

Book Series Ad in Feb 1921 Liberator

Doomscrolling in the 1920s? Michael Angelo’s Sonnets, Tolstoy,  William Morris, Shaw, Voltaire, Wilde, and Nietzsche. Also socialism and the story of what Karl Marx did during the American Civil War. 10-50 cents a piece, or all 50 for $4.75. If one can’t sleep after a long  workday, such a TBR pile near your bed could reach out to you.

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And in between John Reed and Eastman’s first-hand reports from the Russian Soviet Revolution, there was much art and poetry. The art included political/social satire cartoons, illustrations/posters (often in a bold style depicting heroic workers or radicals,) and black and white art depicting nature or the human form. The latter was Modernism of a kind, though I don’t recall much full-fledged abstract works. The famous NYC Armory Modern Art show was nearly a decade past at this point. Carl Sandburg*** had won a Pulitzer in 1919 for his Imagist and free-verse poetry. From the same NYC scene as The Liberator, Others: A Magazine of the New Verse  had completed its 4-year run publishing avant garde poetry. Yet, there was much less free-verse in The Liberator  than one might expect.

It turns out The Liberator  founder/editor Eastman was an early opponent of literary High Modernism. ****  If the world and society needed to change, change radically, the old verities of prosody could still serve well to elevate mankind as they strove for that change.

Did Claude McKay feel the same way? I don’t know enough to say. During the early 1920s, he’s listed as an editor on The Liberator’s masthead. Its broad progressive outlook generally supported racial equality, and the NYC Harlem Renaissance and the Greenwich Village scenes overlapped.

Claude McKay and Max Eastman

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Is that why McKay wrote his worker’s poem this way? There could be more to that choice – he apparently liked the sound of 19th century British verse; and knew how to extract some word-music beauty from it, as I hope examples I’ve performed may show. Perhaps he felt he was expressing his own soul existing within that workday fatigue – he wasn’t some generalized Worker, but his own particular self, Claude McKay, a man taking pride in knowing this part of his received culture. If so, a man, an Afro-American man, could express that dull proletarian grind with the same word-sounds that once extolled Grecian urns and English nightingales.

Yet, there’s a palpable disconnect here, and I was going to perform the song. I decided to just do my best to not linger on its anachronisms, the “O….thou.…wilts” of this poem. Maybe, the combined character speaking here as I performed it in 2026 is a man living in three centuries simultaneously while speaking in the manner of one class while living in the manner of another. McKay may be not so much colonized, as a colony-creature, a siphonophore banding together more than one mind and tongue. As I wrote talking about McKay earlier this month, poets are often, in effect, immigrants or exiles by their natures, souls seeking and divided from the world and nations they find themselves in.

You can hear my musical performance of Claude McKay’s “The Tired Worker”  with the audio player you should see below. Has the graphical player gadget said screw-it and called in sick? No, some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing the player, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

 

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*Once more I’ll remind readers that I’ve encouraged something I call “The Sandburg Test.” The test is to ask, does at least one poem in any substantial collection of poetry deal with the world of work? If you’re reading a Carl Sandburg collection, the answer will be yes. Other poets? Well, read, and ask yourself.

**The closest I could come up with would be the trope of some Americana artists of adapting decades-older styles of music and lyrics to express modern problems – but most of those borrowed styles are less formal and more-or-less reflect working-class speech of the past times.

*** Socialist and free-verse Modernist Sandburg did publish at least one poem in The Liberator.  And for contrast, here’s Sandburg taking his Imagist approach to the same subject as McKay’s poem.

****Eastman is a character I don’t have room to go into today. Escaping by the skin of his teeth from the grasp of the first American Red Scare as an editor of The Liberator’s  radical forebearer The Masses  in 1917 – that magazine was shut down by the federal government and he was arrested, charged, and tried with only a final hung jury keeping him out of prison. His long life saw him continue to resist the rise of obscure Modernist literature, while moving from founding fiery left-wing magazines in the WWI era, to becoming an editor of the Readers Digest  during WWII, to contributing to the post-WWII launch of the conservative The National Review.  and to at least qualified support for the second great American Red Scare in the 1950s.

Flower of Love

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Valentine’s Day comes within Black History Month in the United States. Might be coincidence – but when it comes to diverse lyrical depictions of love, desire, heartbreak, and joy-in-connection depicted in song, this would seem appropriate. But this wasn’t always so.

Read on. We’re going to talk about poetry and flowers – well, sort of, and there’s some nasty bottleneck slide guitar at the end of this.

Choosing the poetry of Claude McKay as my Black History Month focus this year, I’d have to deal with some preconceptions of his work. One, his poetry is written in the 19th century style that the Modernist poets I often select for use were all about replacing. I admire that early Modernist outlook, but it’s not required if the older prosody and what it is conveying attracts me. A second factor is that McKay (like many poets that don’t reach the upper levels of The Canon) is only known for one or two poems – poems anthologized enough to be recognized, but also poems misrecognizing the range of his poetry. Another Afro-American example I’ve featured here is Chicago poet Fenton Johnson who is known almost entirely for one poem, the short, bleak, despairing “Tired”  that begins “I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilization.” McKay’s equivalent is the defiant sonnet of self-defense “If we must die…” which is a striking, memorable, work – and then there’s one other poem of McKay’s that retains some current readership, his complex and eloquent poem “America.”  Despite these old-school accentual syllabic rhyming verse structures and elevated literary language, either of those McKay poems could be read today, in this America, and be understood as vigorous statements about contemporary civic issues – so perhaps there’s nothing wrong with those two being McKay’s representation. They’re not valentines though.

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Reading through McKay’s 1922 Harlem Shadows  collection and his other 1920s work, I’m struck by how much of his poetry deals with his immigrant status – and then even more: how many are love poems or poems dealing with desire and eros. In the short term, this cost McKay. Long time readers here, or those familiar with American Black history in this era, may remember that the Afro-American cultural and political leadership circa 1920 were all about establishing the sober respectability of Black Americans, and erotic expression was not part of that. This wasn’t just run-of-the-mill prudishness – after all, rape was part of the crimes committed against Black Americans, and also a criminal fear used to trump up racism and violence against Black men. In either case, and beyond abuse, sexuality could be too easily seen as an “animal nature” thing not befitting a safe civic personhood.

So if we take Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues  poetry collection published four years after McKay’s Harlem Shadows  you’ll see some documentary depictions of nightlife depicted journalistically, and praise for disreputable Jazz music then associated with “loose living” – subjects that were considered edgy enough for The New Negro gatekeepers then – but you won’t see Hughes including a bunch of poems about erotic love.* Harlem Renaissance predecessor Paul Lawrence Dunbar wrote some sentimental love poetry which just might have some subtext,** but it was without the heat of desire. McKay, on the other hand, filled his 1922 book with it.

If he got away with it at all, it was because McKay hid his eros in poetry like that in today’s poem/now song with a hot-house language of flowers and landscapes cloaking the heavy-breathing. I had trouble when labeling my Apple podcasts posting of this song today. Should I click the warning “explicit” or stay with my usual “clean?” Do I have, as my own city’s bard once proclaimed, “A Dirty Mind” to think that this poem is written knowing that flowers are a plant’s sexual organs?*** In the end, I clicked clean, not because the poem isn’t saturated with desire, but because one must read it as a double-entendre to see that. My hope is that any kids that might find it (or its text I’ll link here) will gain research skills of some value, and I won’t go through the lines of the poem and “translate” what I think is being depicted – that’s the last thing kids want to hear an old man speaking of. IYKYK.

One other thing is striking about today’s poem, and much of McKay’s poetry of love and desire: there’s no gender in it. Accounts and accepted evidence vary somewhat, but many who want to determine McKay’s own biographical sexuality think he was bisexual. Given that his poem seems to be set in a diverse flower garden, it might resonate with a variety of ardent lovers as we approach Valentine’s Day.

Load of the Goat as per AI

When I tried to type Blake’s “lust of the goat” into a search engine to check the exact wording, I typed something that autocorrected “lust” to “load.” To my amazement AI decided to explicate goat loads of meaning from that typo.

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Music? One DEI I can’t foreswear is whatever I find myself doing musically, I’ll want to try something else if I see I’m settling into a pattern. So, back into the cases go the acoustic guitars. No spare pianos either. Glass bottleneck on the finger, Telecaster plugged in, and grindstone to the amplifier gain. The lust of the grit is the bounty of God! You can hear that with the audio player below. What, no player gadget? Joys impregnate! Sorrows bring forth! Clicking on this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player!

 

 

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*This Langston Hughes poem that I’ve performed is read as a depiction of the man’s own personal eroticism by many readers. I’m not entirely sure of that.

**I still not sure if this Paul Laurence Dunbar Valentine poem intentionally means to invoke slavery – it would be a stranger and stronger poem if it does.

***McKay came to America to go to an agricultural college, horticultural birds and bees would be a given. Flowers are often represented in his poetry, as much as in gardener-poet Emily Dickinson’s verse.

When I Have Passed Away

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Here’s another short poem by Claude McKay made into a song. In his “When I Have Passed Away”  a young poet seems to be imagining his own legacy – a prediction both restrained and hopeful. As in the first poem of this Black History Month series featuring his poetry, McKay will subtly mention two things that are potentially othering his living voice. Within the poem’s first quatrain he writes of a belief that he, the author, will likely be forgotten and uncelebrated. He posits an unmarked grave, which strikes one as a sad conclusion, but I think his second line “And no one living can recall my face” has an element of release. In this obscure future a reader will likely not know his black-skinned  face, that instant, contemporaneous, racial stereotyping will have been overthrown by a forgetting time that has discarded his particular self. And as in “The Cities Love,”   he will remind us that he’s writing this as an immigrant, who will likely die and be buried away from Jamaica, the country of his childhood, in “alien sod.”

When I have passed away

Here’s a chord sheet for today’s song. Somewhat like McKay, it’s my hope that someone else will someday choose to sing some of these Parlando Project songs

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Let me interject myself into McKay’s story here. I think many, perhaps most, American poets find themselves in a state of exile. Our dominant culture doesn’t greatly care for poetry, and it cares even less for poets than for their art. Yes, I am making a broad generalization, but McKay in his poem seems realistic in his expectations. If we become by choice or exile citizens of poetry, we will speak a different dialect with strange accents, we will be inured to different customs, we will have saints and prophets un-worshiped here. If Claude McKay can realistically expect that –  in McKay’s case, it will not be his poetic citizenship that exposes him to common and actively state-sanctioned dangers and discrimination so much as the inherent alienation bestowed upon an immigrant with dark skin.* None-the-less, I write this to point out that McKay the poet might share this smaller, ignored and unvalued, status with other poets too.

McKay’s second quatrain hopes for some distant youth and a surviving dusty volume of verse. Perhaps this youth might be an immigrant from the country of poetry and song who has found themselves a minority in our nation of casual oppression and mercantile investment.

Again, I feel I must appear again here, though I am not exactly what McKay expected. I’m entirely far from young. I read this poem in a scanned e-book – not dusty, though my touch screen had a light scrim of fingerprints over his more than 100-year-old words. When McKay writes of his page poem as a “little song” and implies it has a tune, I’m called to do the Parlando Project thing with it. Here we are then, separate: this young Black immigrant from Jamaica, and this an old white man away from his tiny Iowa town he grew up in – we meet on these simple words of his and, touch – and I find I must hum out a tune for Claude McKay whose name and some little of his life I do know.

You can hear that song with the audio player below. If you don’t see a player, if there’s no tree or stone or html gadget to mark its place, I’ll offer this highlighted link that will open a new first-edition-with-dust-cover browser tab displaying its own audio player.

 

 

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*I think here of Renee Good – killed on the broad avenue across the alley behind the window where I sit writing this – a border-crossing death in a cultural battle where immigrants are the “vermin” from “garbage countries” projected as monstrous invaders to justify thuggery and the decrees of tyrants. As a poet, as she was, no one would have asked for her papers, her hard-won college award for her poetry, even if that made her one who will try to find her way as an immigrant-of-a-sort in the land she was born in. It is also not out of the question that she was executed, at least in part, for her being gay.

The City’s Love

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

It’s Black History Month, and this year I’m planning on presenting a series of musical pieces based on poems by Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay. McKay is often associated with the early 20th century flowering of Afro-American poetry and the arts called “The Harlem Renaissance.” Like some filed under that name, he did live in New York City sometimes – but also like some, he also lived elsewhere. Born and raised in Jamaica, he spent time in Kansas, South Carolina, New Hampshire, England, France, Russia, North Africa, and Chicago.

Claude McKay in 1920, shortly after he’d immigrated to the United States

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Today’s piece, “The City’s Love”  is a poem from his inaugural American poetry collection Harlem Shadows  published in 1922. It’s a poem written in the voice of an “alien guest,” a situation that McKay would often touch on in his early poems as he contrasted his Jamaican youth with his immigrant experience in the U.S. Given that my America, and in particularly my city, is currently enmeshed in vindictive federal government acts directed at immigrants, I thought this poem would be a good one to start with. Throughout my city and the state of Minnesota, immigrants from many countries are spending days frightened of summary detentions by a poorly led and oft-times violent set of armed troops. These troops seem to have been given orders to just hunt and stop anyone who appears foreign to them, citizen or not, here legally or not.*

McKay’s immigrant situation, his wonders and hopes, his fears and literal alienation, would have had their own particulars. He first landed in Jim Crow era South Carolina, but he also saw the genesis of “The New Negro” in New York City. In the moment of “The City’s Love”  his poem presents, the color-line seems bent or broken, and like the Paris of Rimbaud’s dawn, the city seems able to hold him in a love embrace. A beautiful vision, but one he also knows is “strange.”

The conciseness of McKay’s poem also recommended it to me, as I must struggle to get my poetry and music work done these days. I rapidly recorded the vocal and acoustic guitar part, banging out five quick takes of which this is the fifth. Late at night, when even the clicking of a pick on an unplugged electric guitar’s strings might disturb my household, I put on the vibraphone synth patch part and mixed in some simple, low pitched grand piano. Though I just finished mixing it this afternoon, I think this song’s rubato approach works, and you can hear it with the audio player below. No audio player? It hasn’t been detained, some ways of viewing this blog won’t naturalize its presence, so I offer this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*I have to write “seem,” though their directions seem clear thanks to citizens who have taken to following and observing them, but one of the tyrannical elements of this is that the federal leadership is dishonest or secretive in rotation about exactly what the troops orders are, and what they are doing. Early in these actions their targets were claimed to be “The Worst of the Worst” and a handful of mug sheets would be proffered by the Feds of violent criminals – on examination, many/most of whom were found to have been handed over to them at the conclusion of their prison terms by the local authorities. Since then, we cannot know exactly how many have been detained in Minnesota – though the number is in the thousands by various statements and estimates – but there is no official reporting. Outside observers and journalists are responsible for us knowing how commonly citizens and those legally present in the US are detained – but again, there is no accounting of that by this massive and secretive government force, much less any apologies or repercussion for mistaken or baseless detentions, which should shame a republic. “Illegal” status is a matter of federal legal definition with many grey-areas and transitive situations (such as application for asylum – an increasingly lengthy process) and our Mad King has acted to try to change by fiat the status of those previously “legal.”

I Was Blind with Hunger for Your Love (Summer Morn in New Hampshire)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

A lot of the poetry I combine with music here was published around 100 years ago, making it clearly in the public domain for reuse. Given my age, some of the poetry from the Previous Twenties doesn’t seem all that old — after all, many of the poets’ lives overlapped mine — but some poets and poems look back, as I do now from my 2020s, to older styles of poetic expression, ones from an additional 100 years before the 1920s poet. That may be too much for some younger audiences I think.

Since poetry is at least partly about how  something is said, it’s not out of line for style to be substantial when we choose to read or listen to poetry — but, sometimes we might choose to “translate” poetry for performance to make it more immediate.

Here’s an example. I came upon this 1922 poem by Claude McKay while looking for summer poems. I’ve presented McKay a few times already here.  A figure stored away in the Tupperware container labeled The Harlem Renaissance, McKay’s poetry is still preserved and sometimes read — often the portion of his poems that speak eloquently about racism and the double alienation of being a Black Caribbean emigrant to the United States. Since these things are still factors in the 2020s, that supplies relevance to continue to consider them. A poem like his 1919 sonnet “If We Must Die,”   however formal in prosody, presents clear reasons to our current ears.

But McKay is also a passionate love poet.*  Now, to say the least, love is still a contemporary experience, so one might think his love poetry would also get more contemporary exposure. My casual estimate says this hasn’t happened. Yet.

Why not? This poem is significantly old-fashioned, 19th-century-like. Its sentences are poetic in an outdated style, they don’t flow casually in a spoken way. This is a style we might forgive in 19th-century verse if written back then, particularly if the poem is a Hall-of-Fame, “Poetry’s Greatest Hits,” poem — but not so much for a 20th century poet’s less honored selection.

Young Claude McKay

Don’t make the mistake when reading old poetry to think that the poets must be old too. McKay was just 30 when he first published this poem.

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This poem also makes a mistake writers can fall into. McKay seems to think that leaving a surprise for the ending will strengthen the poem — that when the reader finally sees that surprise they will be happy to have waited for the poem’s context.

There are poems that work that way.**  To me, this one doesn’t. Coming upon it, one may not read through the facile but not necessarily compelling nature poem that makes up more than ¾ of the text. Therefore, in my “translation” for today’s performance, I’ve decided to create a refrain out of the poem’s final line, spoiling the surprise but urging the listener to consider the nature and weather report portions of this poem as reports of human desire and inner weather. You’ll hear how it works in the musical performance you can hear below.

Taking liberties like this is one reason I use public domain work: it’s now free for one to do with it what one wants. If you want to read McKay’s work as he intended it, here’s a link to the 1922 version. That link includes its own link to an even earlier published version by McKay, evidence that the poem’s author himself was trying to improve his poem’s impact.

Writers: if you are ever writing a surprise-ending piece, if you ever are withholding something from your reader or listener because you think it’ll be a grand or witty “Aha!” moment at the end, consider the alternative. The alternative here, the bringing out the key context that the poem’s speaker is viewing his summer night and morning “Blind with hunger for your love,” strengthens listener engagement I think, and it lets the listener see that the speaker/singer is just as attracted to the early rain-storm, sleepless-night portion of the weather, as the “miracle” of the subsequent sunny morning which is so incongruent with their present feelings. I’ve doubled down on that revision by making the newly refrained line the title too. ”Summer Morn in New Hampshire,”  as McKay titled it, is too specific yet generic in my hindsight judgement.

I did my best with the musical performance of this as a song. I enjoyed playing my big, heavy, 20-plus-year-old 12-string Guild guitar and weaving in the rest of a quartet of ringing and raining instruments. It’s not a humble-brag, but a statement of the song’s potential to say that this piece would benefit from a higher-skilled singer than I am. Perhaps my voice’s approximations can be heard as bringing an imperfect human immediacy to the words? You can hear the performance with a graphic audio player below (if you see that). No player?  This is a hyperlink that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Let me leave this final point to a footnote. Best as can be determined, Claude McKay’s erotic connections seem to have been with men. Given the homophobia of his time — or perhaps from artistic choice — McKay has written this poem, as he has many of his love poems, in an entirely genderless manner.

**This poem isn’t a sonnet, but it is “sonnet-ish,” and the popular English/Shakespearean sonnet conventionally expects a somewhat surprising summation in its final couplet.

The Snow Fairy

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

When it comes to pieces for Valentine’s Day, there’s a great deal of love poetry to draw from. And it’s not uncommon for those love poems to be sonnets — after all, that form has been used from the times of Petrarch and Shakespeare for poems about passionate relationships. The course of love is often complex and unstraightforward, and fittingly most sonnets contain a volta, or turn, where the poem shifts from one aspect to another, a feature that is useful for portraying the alternating currents of passion.

For today’s piece I’ve used a distinctive winter love poem by Afro-American and Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay. In this poem, “The Snow Fairy,”  McKay uses an unusual form, a double sonnet, a pair of 14-line poems that allows additional volta/turns. Here’s a link to McKay’s text if you’d like to follow along.

Claude McKay 2

poet Claude McKay as a young man

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“The Snow Fairy”  opens with a fine sonnet about a winter snowfall. If one was to read it as a stand-alone poem it wouldn’t seem truncated or insufficient by itself, but McKay wants to present it as part of a pair, and as we’ll see it’s both foreshadowing — and in a time-twist, the actual conclusion of the poem chronologically. Sonnet I has the snow, as per the title, personified as fairies, a kind of otherworldly being that may have connotations of light-heartedness or simple wonder. But note a very subtle shift in the supernatural creatures fluttering down in the second quatrain: “As though in heaven there was revolt and riot.” The merely fantastic in the opening quatrain has taken a more consequential air. I’m not sure how many readers notice this, but to me this is an unmistakable reference to Milton and Satan falling after the war in heaven in Paradise Lost.

Third quatrain, and we’ve switched our attention to the poem’s speaker, who’s gone to bed without mention of any other person, and awakes to view the once individual fairies/fallen angels, now lying still, yet joined together after their night long whirling dance. In the concluding couplet, as often in a Shakespearean sonnet form like McKay uses, we have a turn. We’ve spent our focus up to now on these snowflakes, but in the couplet he tells us by the end of the day they’ve melted away.

In sonnet II, the poem’s speaker flashes backwards in time, connecting via the memory of the first sonnet’s night of winter snow. He’s reminded of a “you who came to me upon a winter’s night” as did our snowflake/fairy/fallen angel creatures did in sonnet I. In sonnet II’s second quatrain this couple are like our snowflakes of the first sonnet, tossed and dancing in what he tells us is passion. In an echo of the third quatrain of the sonnet I, in the same quatrain of sonnet II, they are tenderly joined and bedded.

And then the turn, the volta: faster even than the by midday melting snow of sonnet I, at the break of dawn the partner is gone, leaving the poem’s speaker alone to be the writer of sonnet I, watching the snow fairies fall in winter.

Read with modest care, the story told in the most minimal of sonnet sequences is plain. Love is wonderous. Love joins us, un-times us for a time — and then, whether parting by the single night or death, it is “stol’n away.” But are there additional undercurrents?

I sense there’s a question in the last row of readers out there, and over the Internet I can’t tell if it’s snarky, sincere, or asked hesitantly: “The title is ‘The Snow Fairy.’   Is this two guys hooking up? Is McKay gay?”

Even today when the acronym for non-heteronormative affections and gender extends ever outward, such answers aren’t always simple binary switches, but yes, it seems generally assumed that Claude McKay had erotic connections with other men. McKay never “came out” in a way that folks in our lifetimes do. In the context of this poem, the question may be focused to a subsidiary question, is “The Snow Fairy”  a coded statement of his sexuality, written so that that those who know would know, and the others would not?

One could write an essay longer than this post, but on balance my reading is that, like his equally lovely summer-day-long love poem “Memory of June”  this feels as if McKay is describing the difficulties of gay people being able to form lasting relationships when that was desired in his time. The subtle turn from fairies to Miltonic fallen angels in sonnet I also seems to be signaling outsider status. There’s also a possible significance in the title snow fairy being singular while the snow fairies/snowflakes are multitudinous. But was “fairy” a clear signaling word? It seemed like that to me when I first read this poem, but upon research that’s ambiguous. Terms used for gay people have a history of emerging and shifting over time, both inside and outside the community. Fairy as a slang word for an effeminate man seems to have emerged in the mid-to-later 1920s,*  and was in common understanding by 1940 or so, but this poem was published in 1922. That means that it might  be too early for it to be understood by other gay people generally, or even McKay, as signaling. On the other hand, it seems likely that a general reader in 1922 would not  read fairy = gay when seeing this poem on the page then.

But in another way, is that the only thing that matters about this poem? No. Love and desire is both complex and unitary. Passing love, passing sweetness, unrequited desires, loneliness for absent lovers — put all the genders, nationalities, races and practices together in one snowbank and you can’t separate out the unique snowflakes. We love and we are gone is one whole part of humanity. Perhaps that’s why Valentine’s Day is but a day?

I performed Claude McKay’s “The Snow Fairy”  in this simple arrangement to get it done in time. I had another version with basic tracks of a more full-band arrangement, but this one with just 12-string acoustic guitar and bass was easier for me to complete. To hear my performance, use the player gadget below — or if you don’t see the player this highlighted hyperlink will do the job too.

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*Somewhere in my research I found citations that seemed to narrow it down to this between-the-wars period, at least for significant usage, but alas I’ve lost my cite notes on that, and, this blog post indicates fairy = gay may have origins as early as the 1890s.

Claude McKay’s America

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

As we enter into the weekend celebrating American Independence Day on July 4th, I thought I’d put together some poetry about the American experiment. While not unprecedented, this is a complex time to be doing that. We are clearly in troubled times, and while I myself am as troubled as the times, I can still try to grasp what some others in their troubles and troubled times have chosen to say about America.

Let me start off with what a particular immigrant had to say almost exactly 100 years ago. The immigrant was Claude McKay, a Black man who came from Jamaica in 1912. Now of course, the presence in the then English colony of Jamaica of a man of African descent can be traced to the violent and involuntary diaspora of the slave trade before McKay’s time, but in his own lifetime, as an immigrant, McKay chose to come to America.

By the time he wrote this poem, first published in 1920, a number of then current events would have been impressed upon his thoughts. He first landed at the Tuskegee Institute in the de jure segregated American south, as close to the time of American slavery and the Civil War as we are to Martin Luther King and Woodstock today. He eventually traveled to the onset of the Harlem Renaissance in New York as well has visiting London and Russia. The life of a Black man was complicated by racism in all these places. Furthermore, if we are to apply the 21st century term “intersectionality,” McKay was working class, gay, and a committed Leftist.

Troubled times? The Palmer Raids and the original “Red Scare” imprisoned or deported many. The now better-known* and understood series of race riots and other acts of terrorism in the service of racial oppression were raging. Even in black and leftist circles, issues of black sexuality were a third rail, and McKay touched that rail.

And, as we now all know, 1918-1919 was also the time of the last great worldwide epidemic.

Given this background, as you listen to or read McKay’s sonnet “America”  you may be surprised that this cri de cœur is as nuanced as it is. In the three quatrains before the closing couplet McKay is essentially making the case that he’s energized by being at a time and place when these evils are present and unmasked to confront. I’ll personally extend his statement: The American Experiment is this. It’s not the absence of evil, our country was never an Eden. That we are still fighting for our ideals of openness, opportunity, and equality under the law is evidence of our frailty—and our stubbornness.

McKay America

Tragic persistence of metaphor: in 1920 McKay would paraphrase “I can’t breathe.”

 

Now what to make of McKay’s closing couplet, the turn the poem takes there as many a sonnet does? My first reading was that this is just the judgment of history: Babylon will always fall. Ozymandias leaves so fast he forgot to pack his trunk. That’s the clear reading of the 13th line.

A final line follows though. I think McKay the prophet here might have meant this too in his warning: we must change to extend our republic’s life, that all is at risk—even if every human, and every civilization, like every artist, will fail. Did we change from his time to extend our experiment? I believe we did. Are we called, are we in need of, more, further, change today? Well, what I think is less important that what you think, particularly if you are younger.

The player to hear my performance of McKay’s sonnet as a song with acoustic guitar is below. Is this the only statement for the 4th of July? No, I’ll be back soon with a reading from another American prophet.

 

 

 

*I was a history and civics nerd as a young person. I can tell you there was next to nothing to read about the racially charged riots of the WWI period until this century unless one knew to dig into primary sources from that time. The more distributed evil of lynching was acknowledged to some degree, but even when urban unrest returned less than 50 years later in the United States during The Sixties, I can’t recall a single pundit or think piece that referenced these events of the post WWI era.

The Easter Flower

~ Frank Hudson ~ 5 Comments

I could have chosen another poem for Easter, but besides this one’s song-setable qualities, “The Easter Flower”  is a poem about a Christian holiday written by a non-believer.

No, let me strike that casual term, “non-believer,” which doesn’t seem to fit McKay. He was a life-long radical, an unwavering believer in workers rights and social justice, always stalwart against colonialism and racism. As a radical, black, gay, immigrant man these beliefs were no simple balm to his soul, and by that I judge his beliefs to be strong and tested. McKay was also a confirmed skeptic, analyzing situations and sometimes changing his views on how these goals may be achieved, but that doesn’t alter those beliefs.

Now some of that may or may not resonate with you. Believers who do not share your beliefs can be rough companions to your reading or listening. Rest easy, this poem isn’t like that.

Here’s a link to the full text of the poem.

First off, like Wordsworth’s famous “Daffodils,”  this is a poem about a past-tense experience, something that exists for the poem’s singer only as a limerent memory as he sings of the flower. McKay who grew up in rural tropical Jamaica spent much of his life in more northern climes. The weather forecast for Minnesota calls for a few inches of wet snow for this Easter, and if non-tropical Minnesotans find this disappointing, all the more so for McKay.

So, the lily in the poem is likely a childhood Caribbean memory, and the plant the Trumpet Lily, the Easter Lily, is not native to these then English colonies. It was introduced there by a missionary who brought it from Japan in the 19th century. I don’t know if McKay knew that, but this flower he remembers at Easter time amidst thoughts of home is a colonial artifact as well as a Christian symbol.

Claude McKay and Easter Lily

Claude McKay and the flower of his complex memory

 

In the poem’s second stanza McKay modulates the flower memory, displacing the pale flowers in his mind by liking it to a formation of “rime,” the hoar-ice that forms along shapes when foggy water vapor freezes rapidly, uniting the poems present voice in a colder Easter with the warmer past. The end of this stanza and the beginning of the next form a vivid spring rebirth image, as devotional as any Christian mystic could have written.

And then the poem let’s us know that McKay isn’t a Christian. Indeed, at the time the poem was written he was an atheist.*  Therefore, the remembered image of the Easter flower is extraordinarily alienated from the singer. It’s in the past, in the ground of a country he no longer lives in, it’s a religious symbol not of his religion, it’s a non-native plant introduced by colonialists, growing in a climate of soft fragrant April nights, not a sleety cold northern city.

How easily we might skip through this poem, hearing but it’s lovely sounds and involuntarily resonating to the memories of a holiday with flashbacks of chocolate bunnies and jelly beans—or for devout Christians, one might hear only the inspiration of the image of the tomb earth giving way in resurrection. But that’s not this poem. McKay ends saying that he, “a pagan,” is overcome by this none-the-less, worshiping at another religion’s shrine. Why? From what? I think he chooses to make it undetermined. Homesickness even for a colonial homeland he felt he needed to leave is there. A certain ecumenical mystery too. The sensuousness of the flower is an undercurrent, the night smell of the flower has pheromonic power.

To hear my performance of Claude McKay’s “The Easter Flower”  use the player gadget below.

 

 

*In the last decade of his life, 20 years after this poem was written, McKay was attracted to the Catholic worker movement. After a period of self-searching he became a member of the Catholic Church.