creative writing

Lambing (Night-Born Lambs)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Over the years I’ve presented a fair number of poems by authors well-known for their prose work — James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Emily Brontë, D. H. Lawrence, and so on — but as I prepared today’s set of words for performance I thought of something I told its author, poet Kevin FitzPatrick, more than once: “If I came upon the matter of this poem, I’d probably choose to make it into a short story instead of a poem.”

That may sound like a harsh judgement. When I said this once, Kevin’s friend Ethna McKiernan once torted back at me sharply “It’s a narrative poem!”

Yes, I know that form. I may be personally more invested in the lyric poem’s momentary compression, but narrative is a perfectly valid approach. And if you look carefully at how Kevin writes, he subtly weaves into his work touches that are poetic extensions to efficient prose storytelling. I tried to explain to Ethna that I had a second part to my statement about Kevin’s poems like “Lambing,”  “…but you make it work when you make that your choice.”

This poem’s background is implied in small details within it, and Kevin FitzPatrick’s last collection strung together a series of poems portraying this part of his biography: in later middle-age Kevin’s life-partner Tina decided she wanted to run a small but diversified farm, and each weekend, Kevin would leave from his office job in the Twin Cities to this rural farm across the border in Wisconsin. Kevin was thoroughly a city boy, so many of the poems let us use his unaccustomed eyes to pay attention to the rural culture and tasks of this farm. One trait the poems often touch on: the web of interdependence and cooperation between the community of farmers and country dwellers around Tina’s farm. In “Lambing”  we meet Jim and Rose, neighbors and the former owners of Tina’s farm who are called to bring their knowledge to the incidents of the poem.

Kevin worked hard at keeping his narratives tight yet clear. Parlando alternate voice Dave Moore and I would give him notes, which Kevin was always gracious in receiving, and his solutions (not always ours) to problems we might note nearly always improved the poems.*  Unlike more elusive and allusive poetry I won’t have to act the village explainer to assist new readers to understand what’s going on in “Lambing.”

Instead, I’d like to point out that this isn’t just prose with more line-breaks. While not exactly a Robert-Frost-style blank verse poem, the Iambs with the lambs** put subtle music to this story. The sound of lines like “Their lantern lit up the shelter late” would in a lyric poem call attention to their sound, so don’t let the flow of the story overlook them if you want to pay attention to how this poem might work its way. And while not a compressed Imagist poem, the small details speak to that kind of poetic impact: Rose’s green dress shoes, the just-born lamb “like something discarded,” the nursing lambkin’s tail twirling like a gauge’s needle gone wacky.

Lambing illustration

Unintended in FitzPatrick’s spring-set poem, but this time of year I think manger/crèche.

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Kevin FitzPatrick’s final collection, titled Still Living in Town,  contains more poems about his farm experience, and other things as well. It’s a fine, fine book, and its poems are as carefully straightforward as today’s example. Here’s a link to more information on his poetry and a place to buy this book.

I performed Kevin’s “Lambing”  today with a piano, drums, and keyboard bass musical backing. At the end of the poem performance there’s a short, less than two-minute, purely instrumental piece for synthesizer and arco bass which I call “Night-Born Lambs”  that was inspired by the experience of working on the performance of this poem, and from thoughts of Kevin. You can hear this pairing with the audio player gadget you should see below. What if you don’t see that player?  This highlighted link is a backup, and it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I forget who said it, but I always remember this rule-of-thumb: when someone points out an issue with a draft you submit for notes: “They are usually correct in seeing something is a problem, but that doesn’t mean that their suggested solutions are also correct.”

**Type-nerd note: depending on what typeface you read this with, that sentence could seem a puzzling typographic tautology.

Van or Twenty Years After

~ Frank Hudson ~ 4 Comments

One of the interesting things about 20th century Modernism was that so much of its propagation seems to be based on a handful of pollinators who migrate from one place to another. Some of these pollinators are known but little-read today, others lesser-known, their names themselves faded from cultural memory.

I suspect Gertrude Stein fits into the first group. As a personage, often handily viewed via Picasso’s painted portrait, she remains known. Her main location, early 20th century Paris, remains revered for its scene, and her salon there filled with Modernist paintings can’t be left off the maps as Americans in Paris then gravitated to her. We can add to that notableness, that as the fluent domestic partner in a long-term relationship with another woman, she remains to this day something of a gay icon.

But is she read? I suspect her The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas  retains interest for its witness to the era. Her novels? Not sure they’re read much beyond scholars — and maybe they’re under-read even there. I gather her poetry remains controversial in this sense of the word: it’s spoken of in passing, its unusualness taken stock of — and after that its import is generally dismissed. When it was new, Stein’s poetry was often treated as a breathalyzer test. If you heard it and took it as meaningful or important you must be an intoxicated acolyte of Modernist excess. I don’t know if we’ve moved on from that stance. We may forget Hemmingway was a Modernist nowadays,* but we can never see Stein as anything more than an Modernist provocateur.

Reading Stein’s prose-poems today we still find them sounding unlike most literary poetry of the present. If we’re reminded of anything, it might be Dr. Seuss books for early readers, full of repetitions rhythmically repeated.**

Sometime in my Twenties I was curious about her work, part of my early interest in Modernism and the movements that emerged from it in the last decade to be called The Twenties. I remember plowing through one or more of her novels*** and reading what of her poetry I could find, out of consideration that as an experimentalist she might have some discoveries I could put to use in my own writing. What do I remember from doing that a half century ago? Not so much passages or particular elements, more an idea which I continue to hold for: that the way we use language to express reality and consciousness has been constrained by expectations and convention.

What remains of that interest in Stein now decades later? I enjoy her in limited doses because it still can break those expectations on the floor, and stomp on the broken fragments in time to a word-music I can enjoy.

Stein-Van Vechten-Dodge-Seuss

Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, Mabel Dodge, Dr. Seuss. First 3 pictures are photographs by Van Vechten.

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I don’t know how much of that old interest of mine my friend, poet, and bandmate in The LYL Band, Dave Moore remembers, but when we got together earlier this fall to record some new things, he broke out this Parlando-worthy selection from Stein’s prose-poetry portraits of those she had met and interacted with. I asked him what he’d want readers/listeners here to know about “Van or Twenty Years After,”  and this is what he wrote back:

To avoid Morrison conclusions, I might shift the title to Van & Stein (Iowa boy made weird) — otherwise, references to Mabel Dodge in a history of first American surrealists, found in the library free stack, made me seek out the Gertrude piece about her, which turned out to be in a collection featuring this piece referencing her friendship with Van (sheesh my brain won’t pull up his name, I’m sure it wasn’t Dyke or Heusen), from which I excerpted this section delighted the way it concluded with a joke, then when I presented it to Frank I was incapable of delivering the sound of repetitious notes I had in my head, so anything salvageable here is probably due to Frank’s remixing skills.”

So, who’s the man the Van in Stein’s piece? Carl Van Vechten. Like Stein, Vechten was another of those Modernist pollinators, and he was an early and ardent proponent of Stein’s writing. His name, his own writing? By now he’s largely fallen into the second group, as Dave’s honest stumble testifies. Myself? I knew his name from my interest in Modernism, but nothing of his biography or work until I began to run into him as I read and studied more about the Harlem Renaissance which he was intimately involved in.****   It was only then that I discovered where he was born and grew up: Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And the Mabel Dodge Dave mentions? If you were to cross-reference Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, and Mabel Dodge’s blue links in their Wikipedia articles, you wouldn’t have to make more than one Kevin-Bacon-jump to encompass the whole Modernist enterprise in Europe and the United States. Pollinators.

After all that history, some of it often forgotten, we’re left with Stein’s words. Here’s a link to the whole prose-poem portrait which Dave took his segment from. You might enjoy them as word-music not having to judge them, or risking them replacing other poetries you enjoy. I did when Dave performed them. You can hear that performance with the graphical audio player below.  See no player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with an audio player.

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*We’re likely to charge Hemmingway with a lot of other sins — most of which he committed in flagrante — while forgetting his successful revolutions. Hemmingway, the young writer forging his style, was one of those who sought out Stein in Paris.

**Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel) likely knew of Gertrude Stein from the circles he ran in. I did a quick web search and found no instant citation of any considerations of a stylistic influence there. I can’t be the only one this has occurred to.

***An admission: I’ve never been much of a novel reader. Most book and literature lovers can embarrass me by exposing my lack of chair time with novels.

****Van Vechten wasn’t just Iowan, he was white. Some early Modernists recognized elements of Black and African culture as aligned with their Modernist project, and some young Afro-American writers and artists felt the same way. Modernism was not immune to racism, but this cross-pollination brought attention and prestige to Afro-American artists and art. This connection had and has its strained and strange elements — no doubt about it — but it’s important.

Another connector here: Van Vechten was bisexual, so were some of the members of the Harlem Renaissance (though some variation of The Closet was usual then).

The Listeners: a classic of mystery

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Judging from the numbers of its inclusions in Internet lists of spooky poems, Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”  comes to mind to more than just me when people are asked to think of Halloween poems. Yet it has no monsters, no sudden scares, no wicked battles, no fully-described supernatural events.

It creates its strange effect in this strange way: it gives us lots of details which may seem inessential, and next to nothing of its central situation. The plot is simple: a man travels to a building on horseback. He knocks at the building’s door. No one answers. He leaves. As an elevator pitch summary, it has little to call us in or disturb us. Why does it leave us with a wondering chill? It’s those details. Here’s a link to the poem.

First off, there’s a supporting character in the poem which seems to have only one for sure, the Traveller. That character: his horse. We meet the horse right at the start, noticing that it is unconcerned and grazing as the Traveller opens with his door-knocking announcement of arrival.

We’re also told it’s night. Only slightly unusual, in that one generally doesn’t schedule appointments at night. The Traveller knocks again. We’re told the building has a turret. Castle or fortress, or just a decorated Victorian era house? We know by this it’s not a small hut or cabin. The listeners that are spoken of soon are something of some means.

The Listeners Illustration 1080

Our two characters: the Traveller, and the horse he rode in on. One thinks it’s very important to be there, the other couldn’t care less.

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We’re told the Traveller has grey eyes. What an odd detail! We’re not filling out his driver’s license after all. Grey is a quite rare eye color in de la Mare’s Great Britain or Western Europe. Does the poem mean to suggest the Traveller is coming from a far distance?

Is there anyone inside the house? The poem mentions “phantom listeners” and these listeners are in the title. “Phantom” says they aren’t in the house at present in the way the Traveller and the horse are outside the door. We learn that the house has a hall, reinforcing by detail that the building isn’t small. The Traveller senses these whatevers, their “strangeness.” How are they strange? Nothing is said — but our second character, the horse, remains only interested in grazing.

The Traveller is insistent, pounding louder, shouting the intriguing line “Tell them I came…that I kept my word.” This is the plot’s climax, we don’t know what duty brought the Traveller there, perhaps from a long way off. Of course, we wonder what the bargain is, what the promise was. Is our wonder stirred by not knowing? Mine always is.

Another detail: we’re told the Traveller is “the one man left awake.” How are we to take that statement? That the “phantom listeners” are asleep and can’t be awakened? Or should we take it more catastrophically: that the “phantom listeners” aren’t human, never were, and that the Traveller is the last man at all, anywhere, awake? I never considered this latter reading until typing this tonight —perhaps I’m over-reading — but if so, is the Traveller coming to ask them to lift that spell, the only man still with agency to plead?

I love the final quatrain of this poem. Our horse returns, and the listeners, we’re told, can hear the creak of the leather from its saddle stirrup — a lovely detail, and a quieter sound compared to the pounding and shouting that has preceded it. Finally this sound: the evocation of the horseshoes ringing on hard stone inside a world of otherwise silence. The horse may be unconcerned by the silence, perhaps even the lack of any other awake people is not of any matter to it.

My music for this features the electric 12-string guitar, an instrument that I love. You can hear me perform Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”  with the audio player below. If you can’t see that player, no need to knock louder, use this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player. Thank you for being The Listeners for this Project!

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A fantasy wherein death and death predicted is balanced: “Her Strong Enchantments Failing”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Today’s piece in our Halloween Series is clearly fantasy. What value has fantasy?

Well, it’s often fun; it exercises the imagination by giving it an unlimited field. This potential has a natural limit however — humans are uncomfortable with the unlimited. We are animals quite tied to limits, to the actual, the particular. Even fantasy not intended as allegory must reference those things inside the everyday limits of our world, of our time. The SF of the past is often quaint with those make-dos, specifics that seem anachronistic to the stories unknown time. Watching a Sixties Star Trek TV show we see the family on the Enterprise bridge, the patriarch in an easy chair, the subsidiaries at kid’s-height tables, mom at the Radar Range — and all are watching one screen in front of them. Their haircuts are all in style for our now past mid-century. The warfare tactics: broadsides and boarding parties, already obsolete when freshly filmed. Watching it now, the other side — our present-day watcher’s side of the screen — we are farther into the future than these characters are.

I don’t believe poet A. E. Housman retains the readership in the U.S. that he retains in Britain. His best-known poetry collection A Shropshire Lad  is as series of poems considering rural adolescence and youth in the 19th century. UK readers might likely find that place in cultural memory more easily than Americans — but Houseman was not just local color. He was a classical translator and scholar of achievement. He knew how to put classical restraint, objectivity, and concision to work in poetry, like in this fantasy poem I set to music a few years ago, and will present today: “Her Strong Enchantments Failing.”

Her Strong Enchantments Failing

I like to include these chord sheets here from time to time. It’s my hope that better singers will improve on my own performances. Lot of suspended chords here, as this song’s moment is suspended.

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The poem is set in a timeless place, though time still has days and death. There’s magic and spells there, laid out in a sharply chiseled first verse. I love the cinematic zoom from falling castle towers, to empty potions, to a knife at the titular her’s neck. And as page-poetry it’s eminently singable; and for a performer, the compelling force of the storytelling is what every singer would want in a lyric.

The situation violently balanced in the final two verses may just be plot for the author. The Queen’s slayer is about to process his knife’s edge. The queen, who’s emptied her spells and potions knows that they will work in magical or biochemical time by the next day. I have no idea if Houseman had any intended allegory to a situation here, something that might have been clear and present to his contemporary readers. When I performed this in 2020, it was then a fine fantasy poem, so well-drawn and easy to sing. Today, I can look at this autumn’s news and find easy parallels to current events.

You can hear my performance of A. E. Housman’s “Her Strong Enchantments Failing”  with the audio player gadget below. Can’t see a player? Not a spell, just the limits of some ways to read this blog. Here’s a backup highlighted link that will open its own audio player.

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The Poet’s Afterthought

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Does any poet know if their work is any good? Some perhaps have that conviction, but at least during substantial moments I think the majority of poets have doubts. This drives some poets to ever tinker with and improve their writing, and causes others to abandon the idea of poetic writing as a useless pretention. Some even numb themselves to the question — yet anything that numbs doubts can overshoot and numb creativity too.

Do bus drivers and child-care workers have these doubts about their work? Do politicians or generals? Is a poet’s lack of confidence in their work generally less than other artists? Let me only take the last question. I do think more poets have more doubt, because their audience is usually small, and that audiences’ response is so muted. Actors, musicians, or other performers can expect immediate audience response, it’s in the nature of their work that it exists only in front of others. Poets, even successful ones, read publicly much less often than they write. The attempts at bringing performance to poetry, with slam and other spoken word variations are seen by many literary poets as corrupting the complex and more contemplative aspects of their art. Novelists, screenwriters, the authors of non-fiction and memoir, can lucidly dream of paydays that would be fantastical for poets, and it’s not unusual for poets to step aside from their poetry to those other writing fields seeking something they can touch and deposit on account from their work. Visual artists are as abstracted from their audiences while doing their work as poets, but we have no auctions of living artists poetry that bring bidders to the alexandrine numbers.

So, in such solitude, such silence, or even within the quiet, diffuse reverence of award-winning poets, there is most often doubt. What would it be like if poetry was on most everyone’s mind, if living poets were giants in our culture?

Since I started this project I’ve sometimes thought of Longfellow, an American poet who reached that level of achievement. The American culture of Longfellow’s era wasn’t more educated or entitled to access to high culture that we are today. Yet, I grew up in a town, and live in a city now, which from that time created streets and spots, and named them for him like we would for Presidents or Generals. My father and his father would know, would memorize his work. We do not need to travel back to Classical Greece or the Confucian Odes to imagine that level of poetry in our culture.

And yet. Longfellow has disappeared, and as far as those that do care about poetry this is regarded as neither mistake nor injustice. This isn’t due to scandal. AFAIK, Longfellow lived a praiseworthy life. He must have said or written some things we could condemn, but on the big issue of his age, slavery, he was on the side of the angels. He was a nationalist, but an internationalist too. He may have appropriated First Nations names and legends with insufficient grounding, but he did it to ennoble not dehumanize them. No, the main reason we have dumped Longfellow off the bookshelves of our culture is that he doesn’t excite or move us in the least. His poetry seems like old civic statuary covered in pigeon dung, not worth noticing, and not worth any effort to replace.

American poetry is a different country now, and Longfellow is exiled from it.

Inside poetry, in its provinces, and within old classics where we might still retain interest, there’s current discussion about Emily Wilson and her fresh translation of Homer’s Iliad.  Wilson has been clear in discussing her practice of translation. She assumes or assays that there must be something there in the archaic Greek. Her task, she writes, isn’t to make a work that sounds like the original text, or to bring us its most exacting word-for-word translation, but to make a new poem that works like the original must have worked for it to have had the impact it had — a version which we can by extension expect to be something like the authors best intentions. We believe this is what Homer deserves, regardless of if our tactics vary from or agree with Wilson’s.

We do this for Dante. We do this for Du Fu. We even do this to some degree with Shakespeare’s plays. We don’t do it with Longfellow. Why not?

We may think there’s nothing much there. We may think that Longfellow’s English is close enough to our modern English that to do so would be presumptuous or dishonest to the work. This last objection is a funny combination with the first. If there’s nothing worthwhile there, who cares what we do with it?

For a recent live in the studio LYL Band recording I decided to “translate” — or more exactly, extract and arrange for greater direct effect to the modern ear, a portion of a lesser-known Longfellow poem, one he titled “Epimetheus, or the Poet’s Afterthought.”  Epimetheus, for those not up on your Greek mythology is Prometheus’s contrasting brother. If Prometheus is a hero, however tragic his fate, Epimetheus is the “Oops! I did that?” guy, a total fool. Prometheus is the I’ll give humans fire and suffer the eagle eating my liver forever hero. Epimetheus is the ”What’s in that cool box, Pandora. Let me have a look” disaster.

In my version I left Epimetheus out of it. Pandora too. Longfellow’s poem is a Friday-the-13th thirteen stanzas long and would require more melody and virtuosity than I can muster to capture a modern listener’s attention. I cut it to three stanzas, modified a couple of pieces of archaic word-order, killed one perfect rhyme for a near one. I did this because I think there’s a core in the piece that might speak to me or you without delay or overly baroque elaboration — and that’s the intent I found in Longfellow’s subtitle. If you write, particularly if you write poetry, you likely know the feeling: that joy and initial appreciation of the inspiration that carries you into the first draft, only to be followed by the problems of realizing the best poem that escapes us. And the completed poem? It travels out to a place where there are only wanderers like us.

Poets Afterthought

Here’s my much shorter adaptation of Longfellow. The full poem as originally published is linked here.

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You can find that performance of my revised version of Longfellow with the audio player many will see below. Don’t see any audio player?  This highlighted link will open a new browser tab that will have such a player.

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Quiet Sanctuary

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I have trouble at poetry readings.  Oh, I enjoy them, but they tend to spark off ideas and associations* in my mind. When I come back from those jumps in my consciousness the poet reading in front of me may have gone off to the next poem — and I feel like I have been delinquent in my duty as an audience.

A couple of months ago at the poetry reading series I try to attend regularly,** a poet was introducing a poem, and somewhere in between that poem’s introductory material and the poem itself this connection, this metaphor, occurred strongly to me. I don’t now recall what it was the poet reading said. Was it something about an acoustic guitar? Possibly. Something about a church? Maybe. That I can’t remember says something about the utter rapidity and completeness of my leaving that room and into the germ of this poem.

Quiet Sanctuary

Here’s the poem presented as a chord-sheet with the guitar chords I used to accompany it.

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I saw immediately the churches of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation, small Midwestern US churches. Usually wooden and white with a steeple’s neck outside, and inside largely one room, the sanctuary within the single story, filled with dark brown wooden pew benches. A basement below, small children’s bible class spaces and a kitchen that smelled of brewing coffee, the sanctum of wives, mothers, and grandmothers of the congregation after weddings, funerals, baptisms.

South Marion church

The particular church most in my memory is decades gone, but this nearby one will serve as an example.

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When one thinks of churches, I suppose some think of grand spaces, cathedrals or those more modern large urban churches built to approach that scale and presumption. Weighty stone buildings, as unresonate as tombstones, intricate carvings and décor. Grand halls, chambers, perhaps a pipe organ, for they are the pipe organs of buildings, elaborate and encyclopedic, overwhelming anything human that would manipulate it.

The modesty of those small-town Midwest churches, the woodiness of them, has its own glory. And so it seemed natural to connect them to a instrument that is somewhat of a point of origin to me musically, the acoustic guitar.

I don’t know how well this little poem will communicate that to those who do not share my experiences with those buildings. I accept that a poem can’t be everything. There’s one detail in my poem that might not make sense or image to some readers: the attendance list. In my recall, it was common for these churches to have a board that toted up the attendance for the last service. I’m not sure that sign’s entire purpose. To remind those in the sanctuary that they were part of a continuance? Could be. The small continuances are what these churches contained.

You can hear my musical performance of “Quiet Sanctuary”  with the audio player gadget you might see below. No player to be seen? I offer this highlighted link as fall-back then. The link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*It occurs to me that I rarely have ideas as such so much as I have associations, things that seem to recall other things or suggest other things yet to be connected. It’s possible to write poetry without the poems containing metaphor, that kind of association, but most poets don’t. That trait may be why I’m drawn to poetry.

**That reading series, held the second Thursday of the month in St. Paul Minnesota, is the Midstream Reading Series. I know some of my readers are from the Twin Cities area. I find this event worthwhile, and you might too. Though I’m often inarticulate in person, I would try to say hello if you were to greet me there. Next reading is this coming Thursday, October 12th.

The Terror of the Blank Page

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I think today’s audio piece is something many writers will relate to, but since it’s one I wrote I’ll be brief later down the page in writing about my encounter with it. The top part of this post will be a process post about music and working “live in the studio” with Dave Moore again after a long break. Feel free to skip to the bottom if this process stuff isn’t your thing.

For many years I’ve taken time every September 18th to remember guitarist and composer Jimi Hendrix. This September 18th I planned to get together with Dave Moore to do what we’ve done off-and-on for more than 40 years: attempt to make music together as The LYL Band.*   For almost all that time we’ve done this in a peculiar way.

I have a space with various guitars, basses, drum pattern software, and a couple of keyboards. Dave comes there after I’ve setup the recording equipment. I start playing something harmonically simple (often a one-chord groove) and Dave walks up to a keyboard. I start with some words (usually something from another writer) as we play off the top of our heads while the recording software rolls.

After that, Dave hands me a sheet of paper with something he wrote or wants to play. Sometimes there are chords handwritten on the sheet, sometimes not. I ask for a key center. He starts off and I try to follow and figure out a part on the spot. We finish playing to that set of words. I hand Dave a chord sheet with chords written out, something I’ve composed or want to play. I start out and Dave tries to come up with a part on keyboards.

We almost never do second takes. We rarely present the songs to each other by playing the sections through to demonstrate before recording. This alternation of I, then Dave, leading a piece continues for a couple of hours with a short break in the middle to rest our hands and voices.

A great many musicians cannot do this, wouldn’t do this, are perhaps afraid to do this. It is not an exact way to accomplish the art of music. Many skilled folk, Blues, and Jazz musicians can do this if they choose to.**  Dave and I are not at that skill level. What comes out can be inarticulate, chaotic, of no use whatsoever. We give it permission to utterly fail.

Are we just lazy or eccentric. Well, maybe the latter, but the aim is to catch moments when something happens spontaneously that has a quality of that type of creation. You know the expression “Building an airplane while it is flying?” That’s the feeling when something coheres as we feel our way into the piece. I believe the best of the pieces that come out of this process may transfer some of that feeling to a listener later on.

When I work on the Parlando Project pieces I work as a composer, usually playing or directing most of the parts myself. It’s a thoughtful process, painstaking to a degree though I try to create more pieces rather than a few most perfect and maximally impressive pieces. There’s lots of do-overs, retakes, instruments attempted and rejected. What Dave and I do when we play together uses a very different part of the brain. I love the change, each type of music-making refreshes the other.

Epimetheus Unbound Cover picture

Part of collating the useable material from a session is creating a cover image. I had no idea who Epimetheus was until I encountered this Greek titan in a Longfellow poem that you may hear more about later this fall.

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Today’s new audio piece

Back to today’s new audio piece. It’s the first thing Dave stepped up to the keyboards to play with me this past Monday. “The Terror of the Blank Page”  is a poem I wrote more than a decade ago during what the US liked to call “The War on Terror.” I think the germ of the idea may have come from finding out that Saddam Hussein had fashioned himself as a novelist and had several books published attributed to him as an author. The finished piece isn’t really about that, it’s about how we punish ourselves if we are writers for fearing and avoiding starting new work. What if it’s not the best idea? What if it’s bad, embarrassing, revealing of our faults as artists? In the end, I think my poem and this performance makes fun of that fear as it names some imagined incarnations.

The process I talked about above, the one that Dave and I use to make music quickly is a way to get out the door before the fear arrives to arrest us. To hear our live in the studio performance of “The Terror of the Blank Page”  you can use the audio player gadget below. No gadget? This highlighted link is there for those whose way of viewing this doesn’t show the gadget — it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Various other musicians have played with Dave and I from time to time in The LYL Band. Given our peripatetic musical path, it takes a special kind of musician to enjoy playing with us. One could easily say that a model for The LYL Band is The Fugs, an intently impolite band created around a core of two poets and assorted others. Don’t go listening to The Fugs recordings around your parents, your children, your school board censors, or anyone who can’t help but mention when your singing or guitar is out of tune.

**Two accomplished musicians who have used something like this approach are Miles Davis and Bob Dylan. Dylan’s classic mid-60’s ensemble recording sessions would start off pieces live in the studio which (just maybe) a music director of a sort had prepared the musicians somewhat for. He’d try a few takes, and if it didn’t work, he just went on to something else or some other combination of musicians. A record like Highway 61 Revisited  is corralling the best attempts to make chaos cohere. Miles Davis hired exceptional musicians with extraordinary ears and knowledge of the Jazz repertoire. Even though Davis was comfortable with charts and pieces with set forms and sections, he had periods when he worked with a roomful of musicians given little direction. He made a series of records from In a Silent Way  on that were mostly assembled after these live sessions by editing and collaging the best parts of this spontaneous playing.

That approach by Davis is similar to what I do with some pieces that Dave and I originate together in spontaneous live playing. I’ll add parts and remove or edit parts to create a resulting hybrid recording that contains live and composed playing.

Like trains of cars on tracks of plush

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Later this month I’m hoping to attend remote online sessions of the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival run by the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, perhaps as many as I did last year. Something they do that I enjoyed was listening to all the sessions where a range of readers read all of Dickinson’s 1789 poems.

Now was I sitting in rapt, solitary devotion for every hour of that multi-day marathon? No, though I was paying some attention throughout. I restrung some guitars, reduced the clutter in my office and studio space, put away laundry, and tended to the dishes. If I gardened or cooked, I could pretend I was work-a-day Emily herself.

What makes the marathon meaningful, even if one does it only in part? The multiple voices for one thing. A group of several people read the poems in rotation each session, so there was no careful preparation from foreknowledge of which poems exactly each reader would read. A prepared reading might be powerful — having trained actors or voice artists read the whole corpus would bring something to it. This is not that, yet worthwhile.

I’ve heard a lot of folks read poetry over the years. Several of the readers struck me as better than most, even given that they might be reading the poems that came up in rotation for their turn essentially cold.*  Of course, every so often one of the readers in their turn would get one of ED’s greatest hits, and all of us: the reader, the other readers, and the attendant listeners would perk up. If one pays attention to this, that happenstance, it “dazzles gradually.”

But then too the ordinary readers, the times when someone stumbled on a word, the lesser-known poems, the small ones that might be no more than a quatrain or two — they two are part of the fullness of Emily Dickinson. She may have been a genius, but she produced these hundreds of poems among a more-or-less ordinary life, infusing them with worthwhile attention. With this many poems it’s unlikely anyone (certainly not I) can really hold all of Emily Dickinson’s work in memory. And so it is, in such a complete reading, that some poems will spark with my attention as if they were just written and never before read or heard. With the smaller poems especially, it may be not much more than a glimpse we share in real-time with Dickinson’s ability to see and think differently. Yet, those small visions add up over the hours, grander from their numbers of unique takes.

Which are the poems she drafted while baking, head full of the hymnal meter, hands dusted with flour? Which while in the garden? Which while caring for her sick mother?

Virtual attendance is planned for many of the Tell It Slant sessions that run from September 25th through October 1st. You can sign up for them at no cost at this link. No one’s taking attendance — see or not see any of the sessions as they fit into your life or level of interest. Given the uncertainties in my life, I’m not sure how many I will be able to fit in.

One game I played during the readings — where I eventually jumped into the chat window with exclamations — was whenever the poem cycle came upon a bee. Dickinson closely observes many plants and animals, but she seems to have had a particular affinity for the bee. Is it a symbol of the Puritan work ethic? A chunkier, easier to observe bug? A symbol of fertility? A flying rose with sweetness and a sting? A coworker the knowledgeable horticulturalist knows is essential to pollination?

like trains of cars on tracks of plush illustration

Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington aside, sometimes the muse takes the bee train,

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Here’s one of her short bee poems, particularly extravagant in its imagination. And here’s a link to what I believe to be the authoritative text.**  That opening image alone should astound. Bees as a railroad train, with the plush flowers as directive as train-tracks —yet soft, not iron.***  “A jar” in the second line is ambiguous. A jar as in a container for the pollen it collects? Possibly, but I’m suspecting more at ajar’s meaning as apart or out of harmony. Bees as locomotives and their train of cars makes them outsized from reality’s proportions. They may move the petals on close examination, their industry is harder and heavier than the plants.

In the second stanza, the metaphor shifts. Now the bee is a knight, the flower a fortress or castle they assault. The bee-knight seems a strangely chivalrous marauder, if inconstant and ready to move off to the next bloom.

As an Imagist poem, this then can be apprehended as simply a picture, an observation of a charged moment of attention. How strange to see the tiny bee as a train or even a knight — but yes, it must travel in appointed commerce on its compelled track, and yes, like a wandering knight-errant it must move on.

But this bee could be a muse too, couldn’t it? It knows its schedule, even if we don’t. It arrives, shakes us like a passing train, assails our walls, then bids a courtly adieu and passes on to another artist, writer, musician.

You can hear my musical performance of this short Emily Dickinson poem “Like trains of cars on tracks of plush”  below with the audio player gadget you should see there. No player? This highlighted link is another way to hear it, as it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I once worked for a radio network. Watching the on-air folks, I was reminded that the ability to cold read text is a skill. It sounds easy to do — when it’s done right.

**There’s a twice as long version out there which I think is derived from the 19th century Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas W. Higginson posthumous collections. These were straightened up for easier public assimilation and were given, by the editors, their ideas of meaningful titles. Did they append two fragments thinking them connected? My apologies for not researching this issue further.

***As striking as Dickinson’s image is here, railroads were as essential to 19th century American commerce as bees are. Towns grew and shrunk based on their routes. Another plausible reason for the train image: one of Dickinson’s father’s commercial achievements for Amherst was assuring that it’d get a railroad line.

From “The Windy City"

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

This Monday, Labor Day in the U. S., is a legal holiday which arose from the idea of a day to celebrate workers. Some see this holiday as being in conflict with May 1st, International Workers Day, but I myself have no beef with having two days to celebrate work and those that do it.

Poets and poetry are not, as a rule, oversaturated with attention to labor. Creative work such as writing is, in itself, labor — but the wages are so scant for poetry that it’s hard to see it as allied with such. Currently television and movie writers are on strike, but poets have little in the way of wages and rights to negotiate. If the weekend and the 8-hour workday were obtained through labor struggle, it’s hard to imagine poets picketing for a full honorarium for the 12-line sonnet, or chapbooks for sale on every bookstore shelf that stocks James Patterson books.

What I find less forgivable is that poets don’t write about labor as much as I think is due. Poetry’s Greatest Hits will tell us about mystery, death, love, war, dreams, desire, loneliness, family, friendships, every facet of our non-commercial relationship with nature, all the panoply of pain and joy. What poetry won’t speak of much is the third or so of our lives spent making or getting a paycheck.*  And I don’t think the situation for the subject of labor is getting better. Farm work, even if romanticized into shepherd tropes or the like, supplies many of the poems in the canon that speak of work. As the percentage of Americans engaged in, or even living among others engaged in that line of work decreases, we see fewer of those poems.

Around Labor Day or May Day, I often find myself dipping into the work of Carl Sandburg. Despite his less than illustrious education, not of the Ivy League but more a Row-Crop League college with hobo semesters, and attendance in The Front Page era of journalism, rather than sessions abroad and drawing room soirees. Sandburg was by intent a thoroughgoing Modernist artist, making it new as much as any of the early 20th century Americans, but his Modernist solutions and prosody get little respect currently. Maybe they’re right, though I find Sandburg can be effective for my purposes. Judge those things as you might, he does pay attention to labor and laborers as colleagues. He can portray all kinds of struggle in doing so, but also endurance, achievement, and harbored joy.

Before I get on to the piece I found in Sandburg to celebrate Labor Day, let me suggest a rough analog of the Bechtel Test.  Let me call it the Sandburg Test. To be clear, it’s not my suggestion that every poem has to be about work, about the things we do for our daily bread. But, if we are viewing an anthology or substantial poetry collection from a poet, to pass the Sandburg Test it has to have poems that deal with work in some substantial way. How does the speaker or characters in the poem relate to work? What are they doing that work for? What is it in presenting them that portrays something about life? What are the mysteries, sensations, and systems of that work?

What Sandburg poem did I choose? I picked a selection from the 6th part of a longer, multipart poem, “The Windy City.”   This one is sort of an extended revisiting of Sandburg’s Greatest Hit “Chicago,”  sometimes remembered as a boosterish paean to the great Midwestern American city, which it’s not — “Chicago”  is a poem about a city and a workforce in struggle. “The Windy City”  on the other hand is more mystic, and the section I chose is essentially a labor hymn. Physicists tell us that the things we see about us, solid things apparently, are in fact full of moving atoms and vibrating particles, their close motion making solidity. Sandburg’s windy city is such. The labor we celebrate on Monday, and do most every other Monday, is the gusty current that makes our world.

Carl Sandburg looks out on midcentury Chicago

Looks solid enough, but it’s made of something as transitory as work. Carl Sandburg looks out on mid-century Chicago.

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My music for today’s piece is in my punk orchestral mode: simple musical structures making use of orchestra instruments and a few interlopers. You can hear it along with Sandburg’s words with a player gadget below. No gadget? Here’s a highlighted link, that’ll open even on Labor Day to present you with an alternative audio player. Want to read more of from the poem from which I selected today’s passage? Here’s a link to that.

Thank you for reading and listening. Thank you for the work you do when you’re not doing that. Yes, you may be paid for that, well or not, but our lives and communities are made out of that work. How can that not be mystical?

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*My diagnosis of this avoidance is that poets may still feel an expectation that they should either be full-time poets earning a living from their poems, or if not that, rich enough to not need a “day job.” Their day jobs then are not poetic, and so don’t appear in their poems. Poets with academic jobs are a considerable middle case however. I suspect administrative policies and faculty politics still don’t seem poetic. Perhaps office-based work in bureaucracies is harder to press into non-humorous verse than the village smithy or a steel-drivin’ man?

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.