Conrad Aiken

The Vampire (Part 1)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

  I’m going to be out on a limb in this Project’s treehouse of horror this Halloween. How so? With today’s post I’m starting to present what at completion will be a larger musical piece than this Project usually presents, and I’ve decided then to publish this poem setting in sections over a week, as movements or a kind of suite. That in itself is a bit ambitious. Among the hundreds of pieces the Parlando Project has issued, only two strike me as similar. The most ambitious of those two? I set with music all of T. S. Eliot’s Modernist landmark “The Waste Land”  – and that piece too was presented here in sections, but it was composed and performed over a period of years. The other similar suite of songs goes back to the formative times of this Project: a series of songs largely written by long-time Parlando collaborator and keyboardist Dave Moore about the pioneering early 1950s late-night horror movie host Vampira – but as I recall, all those Vampira songs were written and recorded before the first one was published here. I knew what I had before I made them public.

Not so with this planned Halloween 2026 piece, which is Conrad Aiken’s narrative poem “The Vampire.”  As I woke up this morning, I had a rough idea for the final section, and some music for that section recorded, but no vocals for that. But if I’m going to present this longer poem serially this week, I would need to start with the first section. I had Aiken’s words, and nothing else.

Conrad Aiken sharpens a scythe

Conrad Aiken: harvest time or sundering time?

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So after a quick breakfast and glass of iced tea, I was onto composing the music for what will be the first, and shortest, section of Aiken’s “The Vampire.”   Working quickly, I started with modifying a drum sequence to use as a guide track for the rest. I next laid down two cello parts, a track using a pair of tape banks from the computer-emulated version of a 1960s’ tape storage “virtual instrument” the Mellotron,* and a clean electric guitar part. Despite the different instruments being sounded, and playing them one at a time, those three tracks were all played on an electric guitar, the non-guitar parts being played thru a MIDI pickup. I finished with an arco string-bass part – that one played on a little plastic keyboard MIDI controller because I want to use its volume wheel to articulate the bowed bass notes. “Real Musicians” and trained composers will recognize the simplicity of these parts. To explain myself, I’ve taken to calling compositions like this “Punk Orchestral.” This is shorthand to explain that just as a melodically simple 2-3 chord rock song played in an entirely non-virtuosic manner can still arguably be an effective piece, so too one might attempt the same thing with instruments we associate with “classical music.”  The vocals here are both spoken and sung. I have a limited skill set for this sort of singing, but I’m the one handy to realize this composition.

As we start then with my series of “The Vampire”  I feel called to do the Andrew Hickey** thing and warn listeners that this Aiken poem I’m presenting is a dark and distressing fantasy.  I had considered a more playful Halloween piece this year, partially because my country and the world has generated non-imagined horrors a plenty. Perversely, Aiken’s poem may have captured my attention because it approaches those current practical levels of fear, terror, and pity – and it has (I believe) a message about the dangers of human fancies. Today’s section of the poem isn’t telling us yet what will occur before we reach the poem’s end, for Aiken opens his story quietly with the world of his poem meeting a distressed and mysterious creature. You can hear it with the audio player below. Has the world darkened, and you can find no such player?  This highlighted link is your only hope (and fear) – it will open a new browser tab with its own audio player for the piece.

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*One tape bank is a Mellotron string section, the other male choir voices. The voices are mixed very low today, for they are off in the distance in this part of the poem’s story.

**Hickey’s long-term project, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is amazing and goes further into detail and research on its subjects than even I do on mine. I think Hickey’s project’s title is less attractive than the series is – for yes, music nerds might be up for it, but it’s much more than that: it’s a still unspinning story about history, culture, capitalism, the large caldron of creativity, and racism, and sexism. Hickey is meticulous about warning listeners that they’re going to be hearing more than a treatise on what color a record’s original pressing label is or the most effective settings for a Fender Deluxe guitar amp.

Nocturne of Remembered Spring

~ Frank Hudson ~ 5 Comments

So, who is Conrad Aiken? I don’t fully know yet, but I came upon one of his poems this spring, and found out that as a critic, anthologist, short-story writer, and poet, that he’s one of those first-part-of-the-20th-century Americans who helped establish American poetry in the Modernist era. He graduated from Harvard University in 1912, and before that decade was out, he’d established his literary footprint. In 1919 he published what he claimed was the first comprehensive anthology of American poetry, explaining in the book’s introduction that previously there was no clear call for such a collection as American poetry was such a small part of world literature. Here’s what I found most interesting about that anthology: he would retain only a smattering of poems by Longfellow and the Fireside poets, though using Poe, Dickinson,* and Whitman to fill out much of the 19th century section – and here’s the boldest part: he would give his early 20th century contemporaries a great deal of space.

In things like this I sense that Aiken is reflecting or creating a canonical moment that lasted well into his 20th century. His choices are similar to the choices I was presented later with the mid-century textbooks of my youth, but I recall being frustrated back then: why were the poets and poetry worth studying ending with Eliot and Frost? While that pair were still living as I began to study literature, their anthologized poems were 30-40 years old then, seemingly ancient to my teenage self. OK, Aiken’s canon may have been much like the one I was later presented, but back then his 1919 book included poems not even 5 years from publication.  Not just a handful, some appendix set aside as a gesture, but around a third of the anthology!

By that year Aiken had published five books of his own poetry, one of which shares its title with its lead-off poem inside: “Nocturne of Remembered Spring.”   The nocturne is a musical form, and references to musical forms and the experience of music abound in the Aiken poetry I’ve read so far. Oddly, I don’t consistently fall under the spell of his word-music off the page. His poems do have some lyrical moments, but they are obscured by a problem I’m having: his long windiness. As I page through Aiken’s early books many poems span a dozen pages or more, and while he did try his hand at sonnets, they don’t seem to be is métier. Perhaps I’m not appreciating the sense of the tune behind the poems. Unlike many of his contemporaries, I rarely hear strains of American folk musics in these early poems. I can’t help but think that his evident attraction to the related art of music is more conceptional or one-abstraction-layer-removed impressionism than simply producing dancing words and prosodical earworms.

conrad aiken young

Aiken at around the post-graduate age when he was helping form the canon of American poetry.

 

Luckily for your composer/presenter here, he will often break up his longer poems in shorter, numbered, sections. So, the seven pages of the poem “Nocturne of Remembered Spring”  are split in six sections, each obsessively recalling the same youthful love affair, each going over memories of it. Given the length of the poem I’d have liked to see more contrast in the sections, but for page after page it remains inside the head of the poem’s voice as it goes over memories. This psychological internalism may have been a novel effect in 1916 when the poem is dated, but it tires me. Aiken’s work is new to me, but I can’t help but compare his theme here unfavorably to early work by Mina Loy (her extravagantly expressive “Songs to Johannes”)  or Neruda’s extraordinarily popular “Twenty Love Songs.”**

My choice for a musical setting of Aiken was to select out only the final section, numbered “VI.”   It sufficiently summarizes the poem, and I think it has more chance of listener impact by compressing its expression and it highlights there a musical device by refraining lines about remembrance.*** As so often in this Project’s choice of texts, this was the section with words that “asked” to be sung. I’m a composer who tends to bagatelles due to lack of time and sophisticated skills. The length was right. I wrote a simple cello line, quickly extrapolated a series of chords for nocturnal piano and improvised a second cello top line melody to be played via my MIDI guitar sounding a good cello VI**** which would also help guide my rough-hewn vocal. As I wrote earlier this month, a musical piece like this would seem to be Art Song of a type, but one which classically trained and skilled singers would find outrageous. My hope, aware of my limitations, is that it can still communicate something and help vivify a presence for writers like Aiken who have fallen into the cracks in the canon.

You can hear my performance of part VI. from Conrad Aiken’s “Nocturne of Spring Remembered”  with the audio player gadget below. What no player? I, or rather some ways of reading this blog, haven’t forgotten it, it just won’t show in every kind of reader. I provide this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player so it can still be heard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Though Dickinson wrote her remarkable work in the middle of the 19th century, none of it was publicly known until it’s posthumous publication began with three book-length volumes in the final decade of the 1800s. This means that even when including Dickinson in his survey of American poetry in 1919 that Aiken was featuring poems less than 30 years from publication date. In 1924 Aiken published a selected poems of Emily Dickinson, a step in establishing her place in the American poetic canon. Last time, when I presented a Dickinson poem, I almost presented a capsule history of the tangled provenance of Dickinson’s poems, using “A Something in a summer’s Day” as an example. Tight summary: decendents of Susan Gilbert Dickinson (Emily Dickinson’s sister-in-law, neighbor, friend, and presently oft-assumed lover) and of Mabel Todd Loomis (the mistress of Susan’s husband/Emily’s brother) each had a tranche of Dickinson poems and claimed rights to them, and each was publishing them as well as letters and recollections of the poet. Both sources were editing the poems, normalizing their distinctive language and punctuation, and ordering them in chapters of common high-minded themes. Aiken’s Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson issued from his seat as a critic and anthologist offered additional canonical approval to the poet who he judges in his introduction is “among the finest poets in the language.” At the time he was drawing from less than half of the now known poems of Dickinson! And the Dickinson that we know today – all dashes and abrupt leaps of thought – only became available when I was a schoolboy!

**A decade later Aiken’s Selected Poems won a Pulitzer. That book didn’t include any of Nocturne of Remembered Spring. The author himself may have moved on.

***As I enter into the month of August, I’m in my annual period of personal remembrance of the summer now long ago when my late wife was dying. The refrain in section VI. of “Do you remember” coincidentally brought to mind the translation in English of the name of the Twin Cities based indie rock trio Hüsker Dü. I missed my chance by not setting Aiken to reflect that.

****A pun, and with Roman numerals! A “VI” is a “virtual instrument.” These are made when a company records snippets of a real cello playing its range of notes in a variety of performance articulation and puts the result into what is in effect a database of all those sounds which can be played with an otherwise silent device – most often a piano style keyboard, but it can be another instrument control surface such as my MIDI guitar which tells it what to play in notes, timing, and expression, all of which are retrieved in real time.

Variations V.

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Poems as we encounter them on the page often try to attract us: “Here’s something I want to say, an idea I want to convey to you” or “I’m playing with language and I think you will enjoy playing with me.” And then there are poems that don’t make much of show of any of that.

I found this unpresupposing poem within a series of short poems by 20th century American poet Conrad Aiken called collectively “Variations.”   As the title suggests, Aiken often seems to have had musical forms in mind, and so it will not be surprising to long-time visitors here that this would attract me – but the poem’s text doesn’t go out of its way to call attention to itself. The “Variations” series repeats motifs of observations of people and of nature,* often with an autumnal cast scattered about and serving as hints of loss or impermanence in things. In this one, the fifth in the sequence, there are no learned or high-cultural allusions. There’s only a trace of heightened “poetic diction,” some light reversal of most-common sentence order along with a subtle metrical cadence and a rhyme scheme that one hardly notices until the final couplet.

This manner, a suite of short observations, was common within early English-language Modernism, and to the genre that was important in its emergence, Imagism. In the years around the first World War Imagism was a short-sharp break with the worn damask and filigree of the expired 19th century. Americans were key figures in propounding it,** and I never tire of calling the remarkable confluence of American poets in England in this era “the Reverse British Invasion” – likening this group of para-WWI expatriates in England to the arrival of musical groups like The Beatles, The Animals, and The Rolling Stones to America fifty years later in the 1960s. Aikin was one of those living in England Americans, along with Pound, Frost, H.D., and Eliot. Largely staying in America, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Amy Lowell pressed Imagism’s ideas of a radical simplicity forward.

So, Aiken was in England then, knew some of this crew, and yet I believe he’s not read or considered much these days. Like Eliot, a life-long friend who he met in college, it seems Aiken moved into a more complex High Modernist style soon enough, won the high-culture awards (including a Pulitzer and the Library of Congress Poet Laureate seat), without ever gaining a wide readership or scholastic recognition as an original stylist.

But we here don’t care about all that, a poem can be performed, well-known or not – and no matter how old, it’s just as new and un-assayed as any at the moment one of our musical pieces start up with it. If we pay attention, fresh attention, to what it’s saying by seeing, what’s there?

variations v

Chord sheet provided in case you want to sing this yourself.

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It’s a poem about presence, loss, and beauty, the loss from its nature but also from action, unremarkable yet made remarkable by the poet’s choice. A fountain – likely an urban fountain, for there are always people around it – sprays water which sunlight catches prismatically. Youth (children and young girls) within this sunny day are accounted. There’s one singular living thing, introduced in that final couplet: a sparrow, an unremarkable, less colorful, species of bird itself – a small creature like this poem. The sparrow, (with demi-angelic?) wings is dutifully washing its feathers, and this diverts and scatters the short-lived jeweled water drops. Everything has been eternally present until the poems final two lines – though we (and the poem’s speaker I believe) know that children, sunny days, and young girls are short spans of individual being. Only at the last does an explicit “vanishing” appear as disappear.

This poem, like many of my favorite Imagist and Early Modernist poems does not work without your attention. While it may not demand it, it won’t work without it. So, I gave it my attention, some music I made, and I offer a performance of it with my rough-hewn voice, acoustic guitar, and celesta that you can hear with the audio player below. No audio gadget? Has some wing diverted it? No, some ways of reading this blog won’t show the player, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*In Aiken’s poetic series’ repeated play of shadow, light, and contrast playing on leaves, trees, water, and reflective surfaces I was personally reminded of the lo-res urban photos often featured on the Yip Abides blog, which I’ve enjoyed for years.

**F. S. Flint, a native, working-class Londoner, was also important. A key theorist, T. E. Hulme was British-born as well, but Hulme credited a stint working in Canada as helping form his poetic outlook. Irish writers were sometimes allies: Yeats, Joyce, and a personal favorite Joseph (not-the-Power-of-Myth-guy) Campbell.