creative writng

Records In Childhood

~ Frank Hudson ~ 5 Comments

As December begins, I’m going to be taking some time to celebrate and elaborate the roots and concepts of this long-running Parlando Project as we reach our 800th-released audio piece milestone.

For those who are new here, let me restate again what we do: we take various words, mostly literary poetry that was never intended by its authors to be performed, and combine them with music in differing styles. Sometimes the page-words are sung, sometimes they’re spoken or chanted. Sometimes the music will patently match the text, sometimes not. The latter class are some of my favorite pieces: Emily Dickinson as blues singer or psychedelic ranger, Robert Frost with EDM, Longfellow at a beatnik coffee-house, Li Bai with western orchestral instruments, Jean Toomer or John Keats as performed by an indie-folk combo. I expect long-term listeners to scratch their heads at times, though I also fear that some will sample a piece that they don’t much care for and leave off from future listening here.

No one idea or artist inspired this all, but today’s piece is about the farthest back I can recall anything that might have inspired the Parlando Project. I think this happened when I was around age 10.

I grew up in a mid-century Iowa town of 700 folks, and it wasn’t a particularly musical place. There was a small high-school marching band, a handful of children probably had piano lessons of some kind, if only in hopes there’d be someone to play piano in the three Protestant churches in town. The two best musicians in my childhood cohort played trumpet and accordion. The former was surprised to admire Louis Armstrong despite having personally absorbed dismissive racial stereotypes, the other might aspire to Myron Floren level of showpieces on the stomach-Steinway. The same little town might have over-achieved in literature though. It was named by its 19th century town-platter “Stratford,” and its streets were named for British poets and Longfellow — main street being Shakespeare Avenue. If you grew up on a street that was merely numbered, or an avenue named for some animal or geographic feature, such things never had a chance of shaping your worldview. I grew up thinking of Milton or Shakespeare as being a local possibility.

My father sang, mostly in church. My mother thought he had a good voice (“better than Perry Como” she once said) and I recall it having a very nice timbre when I was a child, but there was no piano or other instrument in the house, and he didn’t sing a cappella that I recall. We didn’t have a TV until I was 7 or 8 (and even then it was a chancy fringe-reception, rabbit-eared, used set that would send its display to snow or tumbling whenever it felt like it). There was some kind of radio, for which I’d hurry home from school to listen to the Lone Ranger on, though I can’t recall what the radio looked like. And at least some of the time there was a phonograph. I recall it was one of those that looked a bit like a portable typewriter with a luggage-finished case that could be clasped-closed. It may have been one of my parent’s from their college years. It sat in a little side room off the kitchen at home that we called “the breakfast nook.” And with it was a small cache of records. And here it gets odd — specifically odd — but applicable to the Parlando Project.

I clearly recall four 78-rpm disks, an unexpected set for a Fifties, small, rural-town-in-Iowa record collection. Two were commercial spoken word recordings, the sort of thing that was a viable genre then.** Record one: Robert Frost reading his poetry. My recollection that the featured poem was his “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” but so far I’ve found no Frost recording of that poem to refresh my memory or share here.*** The second was Vachel Lindsay reading from his “The Congo,”  which has an insistent, chanting, rhythmic flow. The fact that I can remember them would be clearly meaningful, but to be honest I have to say that I didn’t like either of them. I’m not sure what I expected from poetry that came from poets more recent than those whose names were on my streets, but Lindsay seemed overwrought to me, and even at a young age I might have been put off by the whole white-guy-doing-primitive-African vibe of his poem. And Frost? I’ve often written here that I didn’t care for him until I started to explore things musically that became this Project in the 21st century. Only then did I discover that he was a supple lyric poet — and furthermore, a much more subtle observer of humanity than I had appreciated in my youth.

The fact that I didn’t really dig these two poets didn’t keep me from playing the records. Experiencing them felt exotic then, and I liked that even if I didn’t admire what was engendering that feeling.

The third record didn’t match suit. It was a recording from the 1940s of a song called “Open the Door Richard.”   I didn’t know then, but this was an unusual “Novelty Record” piece, charting in versions by as many as five different musicians within one year, 1947. All those musicians were Black, and before it was one of their recordings it apparently was a Black Vaudeville comic number that the musicians spruced up with swinging jive-cat musical settings and choruses. The musical versions all differ in detail while sharing the chorus. Some of them are largely drunk-act comedy,**** while others are more at down-on-one’s luck frustration and focus on the riffing, musical, chorus-hook. From listens today I suspect the recording I listened to back them could have been the Count Basie Orchestra version or (best guess) this one by the Three Flames. I liked that record, though I thought it a little odd, and I probably didn’t fully understand it. If these first three records have a link, that’s it, isn’t it? I enjoyed the strangeness, the difference.

Open_the_Door_Richard_sheet_music_cover

Tortured Poets Department, but my childhood: disks containing a psalm of comfort, a song of misapprehension,. and two early 20th century Modernist American poets.

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The final record was the one I listened to the most. It was not a commercial 78, but a recording, perhaps from a record-yourself booth (or offers like that) which provided the earliest Elvis Presley recordings. It was my father reading “Psalm 23,”  the famous psalm of David. The voice was someone in my life, no exotic stranger, but I was totally mesmerized. If no one is more mundane than one’s own parents, this everyday, ordinary person had their voice on a record!   And the text, in familiar English translation, is one of the most comforting pieces of poetry in the canon. When I’ve revisited the Psalms periodically as an adult I’m sometimes shocked at violent and authoritarian themes I find weaving in and out of Psalms’ religious rapture — but if “Psalm 23”  implies frightful things, it does so to say that they pale in comparison to a connection with a godhead.

Parents sometimes comfort their children, do so by saying “it will be all right, we’re here to protect and care for you.” My parents weren’t much like that in expression however, though by action in life they were being that with much effort. This object, this record, did that, using someone else’s words translated from a Bronze-Age king, poet, and musician.

I think I asked about the “Open the Door Richard”  record and the “Psalm 23”  record. I can’t recall what my dad said about the Psalm recording, though I wish I did. I have a vague memory that he said the “Open the Door Richard”  song was something of an in-joke between his brothers. I didn’t get, or can’t remember the full story, but one of my father’s brothers went by the name Richard (one that became a successful Protestant minister). Another brother was named David, though he never talked to Leonard Cohen about secret chords or sling trajectories.

So there you go, in summary: I had formative exposure to poetry on recordings. One case with my own father’s voice offering comfort; and another, an Afro-American tale of misapprehension. It would be years before I had any idea to do likewise, and decades before I could do something from this early experience regularly in ways that you could hear.

Longish post, but here’s a short musical piece called “Records in Childhood”  using a sonnet I wrote this year casting some of that remembering my early experience with recorded words. You can hear it with the audio player below. No player?  This highlighted link will open a new page with its own audio player

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*There may have been other records, though it was not any kind of large stack. The fact of memory that these four are the ones I recall testifies to their impact.

**Besides poetry recitations, sermons, and even some secular speeches were released on disk — and spoken-word comedy records were often big general-interest sellers. In a previous post I talked about how vividly I experienced Hal Holbrook’s one-man stage show of Mark Twain Tonight on an LP record in a library in Iowa.

***I did find this professional recording of Frost reading some of his “greatest hits,” and was surprised to hear quiet piano backing was used in a way that could be compared with some Parlando pieces.

It’s possible that my home’s Frost recording was a separated part of a set. 78 RPM records were sometime sold in a bookbinder of page-sleeves holding multiple disks, which is the reason we still call a longer form vinyl LP, CD, or issued-together set of digital files “an album”

****Drunk act comedy goes back to at least Shakespeare’s Falstaff, and in an earlier personal history Parlando piece I found out how my teetotal great-grandfather might have perceived the sometimes brutal alcoholic folk-song “Rye Whiskey”  as stoner comedy.

One benefit of having an acquaintance with this largely forgotten song was that when I first heard the Bob Dylan Basement Tapes song “Open the Door, Homer”  I knew the reference.

Brahma by Emerson

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

The early 20th century American Modernist poets I often feature in this project were born in the 19th century. What American poets could they look to as their influences while they developed the poetry that rapidly re-shaped English language poetry? The answer/list for American American-Modernist influences is surprisingly short, and as a result these poets looked to writers from outside the United States. A summary list would include the early 19th century British Romantic poets and those still emulating that style in the UK. French writers got attention (even those French writers who had been influenced by American writers). Classical poets were still part of the British-influenced education system, so like Shakespeare the turn of the century Americans might have gotten “some Latin and little Greek” in school.

What are we left with for home-team poets? Poe, that formative poète maudit? Not much — even though his influence on some of the French writers was there second-hand. Dickinson? Less than some now may imagine in our age where she is considered a giant of American poetry. Dickinson was not significantly published in the mid-19th century, and so she was, on the printed page (beginning in the 1890s) a near contemporary of the Modernists. So, for our early Modernists at the beginning of the 20th century, Dickinson was considered more often as a new, interesting oddity than as the canonical mainstream. Longfellow, the massively successful American poet whose own roots lay in recasting European language poetic forms to American English? It is to laugh. Did even Vachel Lindsay or Carl Sandburg, the most populist and public minded of early Modernist era American poets ever dare to tip their hats to him? I haven’t seen it if they did, as Longfellow was already beneath contempt. Sandburg and the Black American Modernists like Fenton Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Bennett did look to Afro-American Spirituals, Blues, Jazz lyrics and forms, but like Dickinson this influence would become greater later in the 20th century than it was in the first part. That leaves us with Whitman, who “broke the new wood,” as Ezra Pound put it, with his free verse, his hardly subtext eroticism, his ostensibly personal I-am-the-one-who-wrote-these-lines voice, and his poetry of mystical optimism.

Today I’m going to perform a poem by the only poet whose pioneering interests and corresponding influence are plausibly greater than Whitman — and not just because he was a direct influence on Whitman and Dickinson: Ralph Waldo Emerson. You can trace Emerson’s spirit in 20th century (and 21st century) American poetry not by his poetic tactics (he was often a mediocre-to-awkward poet) but by his underlying world-view, one that helped form a widely influential New Thought movement in the United States called Transcendentalism.

What did Transcendentalism give American poetry?*

  • Individualism and equality of office. Every person’s soul has an equal potential to receive important revelations and insights. From the start this included women and eventually it included all ethnic backgrounds and races.
  • The Book of Nature is the scripture. Nature isn’t just a decorative metaphor — it’s the revelation of all that is.
  • The job of poetry is not just to be beautiful, it’s to instruct. Transcendentalists didn’t do irony** that much and they almost never took to the poète maudit stance. That is not to say that it didn’t have stoic threads*** in its weave, or that its optimism was unbounded.
  • America is not only, maybe not even primarily, an Atlantic continent. It’s also a Pacific one. We should be open to China, India, Japan, et al as artistic and philosophic influences.

That last one is shown distinctly in today’s piece, a poem of Emerson’s from 1856 that shows he’s been deep into the Hindu Mahābhārata**** — something I haven’t been. Reading Emerson’s poem to prepare for composing my music and performing it, I’m as lost as an ordinary someone listening to a Tolkien adept, or as a father listening to my daughter talk anime or Homestuck.  My research says that many of the stories in this Hindu sacred epic deal with wars and wars between gods — and that behind it all, though not usually as an active part, is Brahma, the maker of the universe, who, as Emerson’s poem tells us, is above and beyond such struggles. The poem final line, “Find me, and turn thy back on heaven” then says that all else, even some heavenly reward or alliance, is illusion — that nature, the all that is, Brahma’s abode, is the highest revelation.

Emerson reading

Influencer. “Hey, @Fuller, @Thoreau, @Alcott — this easel thing is a great lifehack for reading Indian sacred literature.

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My musical performance is available below with a graphical audio player. The acoustic guitar composition here is within another Asian and Afro-American influenced musical style, one that its founder called “American Primitive.” I’m not fond of that label, but John Fahey meant it in the sense that it looks to show a direct experience in the music, not that it was unsophisticated or ham-handed. In my case the pork-fingers are a risk, but it fits Emerson’s text (linked here) well. No player visible?  This highlighted link is your alternative way to hear my performance.

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*Note to readers: I am not a scholar of American literary history, just a curious visitor who writes about my exploration. I’m not an expert on Transcendentalism either. I could be wrong in details or significance in today’s post, or with many others here. All this is offered as “It seems to me (sometimes).”

**Dickinson, who may have been a Transcendentalist, and certainly was familiar with its precepts, does have access to a side-eyed, darkly humorous at times, irony.

***Robert Frost, the stoic, seems to have a deep and dark reading of the Book of Nature which he shared with his British friend Edward Thomas.

****By later in the century, we began to take for granted that South Asian and Japanese religion, philosophy, and art are available for American poetry, while Emerson was there at the beginning. I’d expect the non-Asians, however well-meaning, to misunderstand some of it, even as they appropriate it — but then I’d assume some Asians misunderstand, or differ in their understandings, too. Yankee Emerson was one of the first here, and I have no standing to discuss what he got egregiously wrong or surprisingly right. Let me also note since this is cruel April, that T. S. Eliot, a half-century after this Emerson poem was published, took to studying Indian religion in college, dropping his own samples from Hindu and Buddhist scripture into the Modernist landmark “The Waste Land”  while still an expatriate American.

Five Ways of Looking at “The Waste Land”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’ve seen some takes celebrating the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s Modernist landmark poem “The Waste Land”  this month. To the smallish degree that Twitter recognizes poetry, there have been several threads there — and general arts and literature sections of publications and websites have taken notice as well. I think this notice is greater in the UK,* since the poem has more purchase in Eliot’s adopted homeland than in the US, but long-time readers here know that I spent five years serially performing the whole thing as part of my annual National Poetry Month observance.

Some of the notices disappoint me a little. Maybe I think of it too much as a poem I “own” in the same way you may feel about another poem you’ve kept in your consciousness over time. I was going to write, and may still write, a personal memoir piece on how the poem entered and mixed with me over the years — but those same long-time readers will know that isn’t my most common mode. Instead, I think it’s more important that you take some art, poetry and/or music, inside yourself. I’m here by my intent and your accident to raise the shades or turn on a light.

More than the centenary pieces themselves, what most causes me to rise to write this month is a response that commonly follows where comments or replies are allowed. Let me create a composite example of that: “The Waste Land’  is an over-intellectualized bunch of incomprehensible nonsense that requires footnotes to understand.**”

This may be how the poem first struck you, or the way school caused you to see and discard it. Let me open some shutters and offer five ways of looking at “The Waste Land”  that may allow you to see it with fresh eyes.

1. It was written after a great war in which nearly everyone in England knew casualties—and after a great deadly flu pandemic.  English culture had trouble confronting this, and the man who wrote “The Waste Land”  was in depressive crisis usually without the emotional capacity to confront these events, personal and national. Miraculously, the poem’s art is none-the-less that confrontation.

2. The poem doesn’t require you to understand some secret encoded message, it isn’t constructed to ask you to do that, at least immediately. Instead, it’s an intensely musical composition with various voices, motifs, and tones. Its words and images can gather more specific meaning over time, yes, but the experience is still saturated with the variety of voices and their moods.

3. If you think of Eliot as all the voices in the poem, then the poem plays with gender and sexuality more than you might expect.  The speaker in the poem is male, female, indeterminate, and in the case of Tiresias, canonically intersex. This in 1922 people! Some read the poem as misogynist, a logical deduction from Eliot himself being easily indicted as a misogynist. Yet I didn’t find it so. The men and women in the poem are degraded, damaged and distressed more or less equally. I do see two plausible gender inequality issues in the imagery woven in the poem: sexual violence in the underlying Philomena-related refrains which we may read as a female-role specific event; and if we read the final section as mostly in the male poet’s voice then only one character, a man presumably, Eliot himself presumably, is allowed to emerge from the waste land and into some consoling resolution. If I ever write my long personal piece I’ll go further into those things. In summary: I found that I could read, experience and perform the poem with sympathy and shared grief for those sufferings regardless of the faults of Eliot.***

4. Eliot, a smart, talented, but also wounded and limited soul could not have made this poem himself.  Ezra Pound and his wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood were necessary editors and midwives. While I resonate with “The Waste Land”  I’m not particularly connected to Eliot’s work in general, though the musicality of it can charm me. “The Waste Land”  may be an example of how muses speak through, despite the limits of authors. And just this year it occurred to me why so many of the poem’s words are paraphrases or quotes—used musically as samples might be if this was a hip hop record. The new thought that came to me: the damaged and constricted Eliot couldn’t (or wouldn’t) allow himself to write those words in his closed-in depression.**** I think that later in his life, the emotional expression of “The Waste Land”  frankly scared Eliot.

5. Want a demonstration of the points made above, that “The Waste Land”  wants to primarily convey emotions, not sense?  That it becomes vivid when performed, like music? That its voices are gender-fluid in their variety? This highly recommended Fiona Shaw video below is better than a raft of scholarly papers or old-men’s Internet posts in empirically demonstrating the poem’s impact. It does ask 35 minutes of your attention however.


You can find all of my musical performance of “The Waste Land” here, but this 20 minute section may best show what I hoped to achieve.

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I plan to return with more musical pieces and encounters with other poems here shortly with a focus on Halloween, ghosts, and the gothic.

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*For example, there was a new documentary this week broadcast on the BBC which I cannot yet see since I’m a US resident. I posted an earlier version of this piece on Twitter myself, but the Twitter audience and algorithm is smaller for me than this blog. Want another blog post with an incisive take on the critical blind-spots in representing “The Waste Land?”   Lesley Wheeler’s recent take caused me to jump in a bit too hot and barking in my shared frustration with those cold, shiver and sliver of humanity, appreciations of “The Waste Land.”

**The infamous footnotes — which I now explain in a footnote — were a makeshift tactic to lengthen the poem for hardcover publication. They may have also helped a closed-off fellow like Eliot cover the emotional tracks of the poem his name was now on, but even Eliot later admitted they weren’t the secret decoder ring to his poem.

***Plausibly, I should be more concerned with authorial intent, or how some misogynist or anti-Semite could view or perform the poem differently from me. The points that gender, joyless power-unequal sexual acts, and sexual violence are integral to the events and imagery of the poem is incontrovertible to me, and were overlooked or down-played by the “let’s find the secret scholarly message” critics for decades until queer and feminist readings emerged. Saying above that you can appreciate the poem without stopping for deeper analysis isn’t denying that deeper thought and examination isn’t worthwhile. Even given the professional format of many scholarly papers, I read some of them and out from me comes a “Yes! Someone else finds, sees, feels this too.” Lesley Wheeler again gives us links to one such set of papers from a 2020 conference. Oh, and if the idea of how one can personally resonate with poetry, how it can change how poetry works, her most recent book, Poetry’s Possible Worlds,  written for interested readers and requiring no scholarly pre-requisites is recommended.

****If you’ve ever suffered depression, you may relate to this.