Here’s a well-worn trope you’ll see somewhere as the year 2022 ends. Someone will write or say:
“2022 — would it ever end? Glad to see that sorry year done.”
Troubling and bad things happened this past year. I know. I’m a grateful and privileged person, but still this year has had stressful and even frightening things in my family. And if we are to look fully at our nations and the world? Distress might seem a slighting word there.
Here’s another trope, one portrayed in many a cartoon around the New Years, one old enough to be old when I was a child: an aged man with a 2022 sash around his stooped body, and a young smiling toddler just able to stand and show the New Year 2023 banner arrayed across its torso. When I was a child, even a younger adult, I always looked fondly at that baby with the New Year’s sash. What wonders, what new things will the upcoming year bring? What burdens will be set down with the expiration of the old year? Even if I didn’t know how the balance of the forthcoming year would settle with the debts of the passing one, I was looking forward, closer in age to that toddler than to that geriatric December 31st.
Now that I’m an old man, that expiring year is closer to me than that tiny child — and it’s not just years that expire or stoop with age. Since last winter, long time alternative Parlando Project voice and LYL Band-mate Dave Moore and I did our part to say goodbye to some colleagues in poetry, and we both have had some family deaths. No wonder that there’s been a good number of elegies presented by this Project lately.
I’ve had the rough tracks of today’s elegy since last spring, the best of which was a vocal track that Dave laid down as part of a session we did in memory of poet Kevin FitzPatrick. It was only this December as the year was coming to a close that I found an idea of what to do with Dave’s song. His words in “Don’t Have To” are all about the routine troubles, tasks, and stresses of life mixed with the aspirations we poets dream to grasp. Kevin, who wrote about work and labor, and who labored and worked at his writing, had all of that.
This was Dave Moore’s own corrected manuscript I worked from to complete today’s piece.
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It struck me that this is a great life-lot of things, a glorious jumble — Kevin’s poetry that I was privileged to experience, the care and responsibility that his family, friends, colleagues, and clients were sheltered by. If the First Noble Truth of the Buddha is that life is dukkha sacca,* then noticing a cessation of dukkha is apprehending the punching out of the timeclock of a lifetime too. Might it be worthwhile for us on New Year’s Eve to notice, or even thank, the aged 2022 of our families, friends, colleagues, and ourselves for their labors however strained and imperfect they were? When we, like the year 2022, are gone, others will take up that imperfect and sometimes thwarted work.
That thought arose as I took Dave’s vocals from last spring and using the modern tools of audio editing, I sped up their tempo to increase urgency. For music I started with a rollicking piano part which I triggered on my little plastic keyboard but made sound impossibly knuckle-busting by invoking an arpeggiator that kept the sixteenth notes flying. After establishing that tempo, I had to give my fingers a workout on the bass to lay down a bass track, and frankly I was running to catch up the whole length of the song. I added a little vibraphone and guitar to add some visiting outside timbres to the dominant piano and that completed the unusual elegy “Don’t Have To (Now You’re Done)” you can hear with the player below. Don’t see any player? This highlighted link is an alternative way to hear it.
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*A complicated term to translate, though the simple translation of “life is suffering” is common. Properly, it includes the sense of stress, unease, and dissatisfaction as well.
Our Halloween series continues with the voice, music, and words of Dave Moore today as I present his piece “Sam and the Ghosts.” And as bonus autumn content, this one takes place in a garden just past harvest time.
I haven’t kept a garden in decades, but Dave and long-time friend of this blog Paul Deaton do. They remind me that at about this latitude north, October is the time to have removed the final products and to prepare the bed for the interval until spring planting time returns.
I may not have done this for decades, but this process goes back — way back. Folks were planting crops in the Midwest long before colonization. The mound builders here, like the earthworks and standing-stone raisers in the British Isles, fed themselves on the invention of agriculture. So in that way, every garden — that small geographical gesture — is a memorial. William Blake said the rebellious angels of art must need to drive their plows over the bones of the dead. I don’t think he was speaking of colonization or commerce when making that point, but his maxim is true reportage anyway. Whether we are speaking of poetry or music or tomatoes, were we plant has likely been tilled before by dead people. Isn’t it proper then that we should honor them before we make our gestures in the soil?
The song sheet Dave handed me the day we recorded this song a few years back.
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In Dave’s poem which he made song, Sam* has forgotten this. Some ghosts remind him. In his poem they are ghosts of settlers. Outside of the poem, they are people created by Bob Dylan.** Those definite levels in history are not the beginning, not the end. Who knows who ran the land from where the settlers’ family left to come to America? Then we do know who lived the land, and were so harshly displaced before the settlers’ opportunity. Who knows, maybe Hollis Brown’s farm is no longer farmland now after some other money has changed hands. How many songwriters are tilling Bob Dylan’s land?
Every seed you plant came from somewhere before you plant it. Every land has ancestors. Every garden is, or should be, a memorial. Winter will bury our gardens, turn our blank pages to blank pages again, and we wait and expect for spring.
The ancestors expect for spring too. We are that spring. The gaps of expecting are where the ghosts live.
To hear the LYL Band perform with Dave Moore singing his song “Sam and the Ghosts” you can use the graphical player below if you see it. No player? This highlighted link is your alternative.
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*Neither Dave nor I can resist a pun. For extra Halloween-relevance points, Dave has named his gardener “Sam Hane.”
There were fewer audio pieces presented this past summer, so I’m going to abbreviate our traditional Top Ten review of the past season to reflect that — but I still kind of like this part of the Project, as I get to see what pieces got the most response. Like the Parlando Project in general, the most popular pieces tend to be quite various, and it’s often the pieces I’d least expect that bubble to the top. As a proper Top Ten, we’ll look at them as a countdown, starting with the 10th most liked and listened to one and ending with the most. The bold headings are links to the original posts in case you’re new here and would like to read what we said then.
Very briefly here are the pieces that make up numbers 10 through 6.
10. Arthur Hoehn by Frank Hudson. In the summer doldrums I felt free to include more of my own words. This is a short elegy for a classical music DJ who worked the overnight hours. I’m quite proud of the final lines of this one.
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9. Staying the Night at a Mountain Temple by Li Bai. Another of my loose translations of a Tang Dynasty classical Chinese poem. I based my translation on my understanding of Li Bai’s (his name is also rendered as Li Po) general outlook. An example here of how I work with orchestral instruments.
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8. Stratocaster by Frank Hudson. Really, this project is usually concerned with other people’s words, but this sideways ode to an ingenious radio repairman whose swoopy electric guitar design was enshrined in the Museum of Modern Art got a good amount of response.
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7. The Dick and the Dame by Dave Moore. Alternate voice and keyboard player here Dave Moore says some of this is adapted from Robert Coover, but this really holds together as a poetic liturgy for pulp noir. Also I got to wail on guitar.
Getting ready to lock up my bike late this summer, and my attention is drawn to a message on top of the post.
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Now let’s move on to the top 5 and say just a bit more about each of them.
5. From Cocoon forth a Butterfly by Emily Dickinson. We’ve done lots of Dickinson poems here over the years. Though we did this one in summer, it talks about harvest time. While poetically condensed, Dickinson observes harvest workers and the proverbially productive bee and contrasts them with a no doubt lovely, but also somewhat unoccupied butterfly. Is Dickinson, the poet, the butterfly? I’m not so sure. My understanding is that Dickinson’s domestic duties in her mid-19th century household, while less than those of poorer families, were also not insignificant. Is the butterfly then poetry, or the poem she’s written, or a fancied life of a full-time artist which she wasn’t? Dickinson ends with this point: at the end of it all, however joyful or laborious, is the Sundown, which is Extinguished. Like the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, I’m thinking she sees vanity in the whole scene.
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4. To Whom It May Concern (Carry Them Away) by Kevin FitzPatrick. Dave and I both admired Kevin’s poetry and outlook, even if neither of us wrote like him — but then as I said elsewhere here this summer, too few poets write like Kevin. Here’s a short poem written entirely in another’s voice, whose words Kevin the poet recognizes deserve repeating, deserve attention, deserve concern. If I don’t write like Kevin, that essence, that principle, is part of what I do here with the Parlando Project.
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3. Palingenesis by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Poets today read Dickinson (should) and Whitman (must), but few literary poets will admit to reading Longfellow now. Dickinson and Whitman are great rebels, geniuses of make it new. Longfellow worked in traditions, replanting them in America. If you want to rebel with your attention and consider Longfellow, I’d suggest the shorter lyrics. Was this lyric referencing Longfellow’s wife who died too young in his arms? I can’t say for sure, but I used it to reference my late wife who also died too young more than 20 years ago.
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2. Generations by Frank Hudson. This is a tiny poem in a tidy setting. I’ve been noting recently the lack of perspective in many older persons’ views of the young. Old people are supposed to supply that perspective, to know from intimately observing things over longer time that stuff thought new is just a variation or a carrying forward of the flow of society. Instead, I see all too many who want to proclaim some past got it right and the present is a decadent signal of end times. So, in this short piece I cast myself as the sage of advice to the young, but with a twist.
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What was the most popular piece this summer? Come back tomorrow for the answer.
This project spends a lot of time in the first quarter of the 20th century where the public domain diamonds are scattered free for recutting and reuse — but If I was able to expand this, I’d probably skip the Thirties and delve into the 1940-1965 mid-century quarter, the era I personally remember through youthful-eyed memory. What were those adults up to then, what were they thinking?
We can never answer that fully. Even through that time’s poetry and other art we can only get shadows and dappled sunlight. The high-level summary is “The Greatest Generation” with its dedication to institutions and its obverse face of turned-away conformity. One way the dark leaked out from this gloss color print with scattered blood stains was through paid-by-the-word hard-boiled detective fiction and the run-fast through the projector snap-traps of film-noir. This stuff was white-male written, and mostly for male audiences too. Misogynistic? Well, yes — and in its defense it’d plead misanthropic. That first quarter of the 20th century had its Lost Generation, but this quadrant had exiles. The former wandered off in search of something and doesn’t know where home is anymore. The latter was sent away from home and was pretty sure it couldn’t go back.
The misogyny can bother me when I read or view it, but the magnetic soundtrack of caustic oppositional views attracts me too. And then the outmoded slang involved can seem almost Shakespearian now, the anarchic becaming archaic.
“The underwires on this dress are killing me, so don’t think for a moment I won’t use this piece.” Dames on the covers, dicks on the bylines.
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When Dave Moore and I got back together to set down some live “in-the-moment” tracks this spring, Dave brought two outstanding longer pieces he’d written since we last worked together. The first, already presented here was “The Wall Around Heaven,” a satire which is set in our present day. If you haven’t heard it, you should. Here’s a link to it. I can’t praise it enough. The second I present today is a re-weaving of pulp detective and film noir tropes, told though. as Dave turns the pages, with his own poetic verve. Language of course was the chief freedom of the grayscale Abelards & Heloises in those stories, and Dave makes the most of that argot. In a note on the copy of the text we performed this spring, Dave wrote that “The Dick & the Dame” was “inspired by Robert Coover’s Noir.” Dave marked a handful of lines as “taken or shaped by Coover.”
The music here is Dave’s too, though some of the decoration is mine. There’d be a temptation to dress this set in mid-century Jazz sounds, which I didn’t do here. Afterall, Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives” went with the end of the mid-century era with its reggae and Secret Agent Man guitar twang. I went with funky electric guitar neck wringing and whammy bar abuse which would scorch the manners of the Jazz cigarette world. The result is longer than our usual pieces, and neither Dave nor I are well-known poets who’ve written well-known poems, so this breaks from our “Poetry’s Greatest Hits” format. I figure: by this point summer is breaking out and there are fewer listeners and readers of this project until fall anyway. Might as well turn it up and go loose today.
Warning: in this crescendo of innuendo, bad words and flawed people show up. You can hear that and it with the player gadget below, or where that doesn’t show, with this highlighted hyperlink.
This is going to be a sort of catch-all post following up on a variety of things. And speaking of catch-all, it’s Willie Mays’ birthday today,* and at the end there’s a recording of an early LYL Band performance of a Dave Moore song celebrating the great center-fielder.
I want to start off by saying that I plan to write something regarding the welcome and thoughtful response about translation Teresa Pelka left here a couple of weeks ago. Hope to have that here soon.
Next, I want to thank those of you who stuck with the experiment/new thing during April Poetry Month where I did daily posts which included some of my favorite pieces from the early years of the Parlando Project with short new accounts of how I view them in 2022. Many of my regular readers/listeners hadn’t heard some of those early pieces. On the other hand, I worried too that that much posting, that many audio pieces, could overwhelm some people.
I’m up to around April 25th in catching up with the blogs I usually follow. I’m too often a week or two behind, but I missed all of your own posts in my being “away” for National Poetry Month on my adventure.
Besides the “classic pieces from the early years” posts I did two other different things this April. The most easily noticed one was the lyric videos. I had noted that my teenager does a fair amount of searching for topics inside of YouTube itself, and sometimes follows algorithm suggestions for other videos, and since a large part of the readership of blog posts here comes from general search engines, I wanted to see if the YouTube audience might bring some new eyes and ears to this.
Did that work? Hard to say. YouTube analytics say that I didn’t get to a thousand views in the month, but I doubt they count the views of the embedded videos in the blog posts.** The most popular video as far as YouTube counts was Yeats’ “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” at just 33 views, but the effort may have a long tail, as some older videos of mine have slowly picked up views over the years. Having 30 videos of various kinds of poetry and music on YouTube at least gives something of a representation of what the Parlando Project does for those who happen upon it.
I thought I could knock off the lyric videos quickly. “It’s just a lyric video” I’d tell myself, but I kept getting interested in the limited toolset of the software I was using*** and wondering how this or that could be used. And I started wanting to include more and more relevant pictures behind the lyrics after the first couple of them, which led to rapid but extensive searches for pictures. One thing I feel bad about: I don’t have my wife’s photos (the better digital photographer in the family), or even my own, handy for quick search and retrieval, so I ended up under time pressure sometimes using other people’s work without giving the photographer their due credit. Photographers in my audience: my apologies to your art, and if I ever do successive lyric videos expect to see credits.
The less noticeable thing I tried — and that less-noticeable result was particularly disappointing — was that I became Twitter-active during April. I tweeted multiple times many days, and tried promoting the pieces with tweets embedding the blog post link and/or the video. Neither link drove any traffic to speak of. With YouTube the views on Twitter may have been invisible, but the WordPress blog post analytics tell me if someone read a post via a tweet link, and I don’t think I got into double digits for the whole month. The tweets themselves didn’t take as much time as the videos of course, but that wasn’t all. During the month I also monitored #NationalPoetryMonth hashtag tweets — reading many, liking those that gave me something I appreciated, replying to some that I thought I had something to say about, and at least skim-glancing the rest. That this was humanly possible to do says something about how skimpy the Twitter National Poetry Month traffic was by Internet standards. Yes, hundreds of #NationalPoetryMonth tweets a day, but I also monitored three “Day” events during April: Arbor Day, Anzac Day, and International Jazz Day. If Arbor Day swamps the number of tweets over National Poetry Month traffic that tells you something (Anzac Day was even heavier, I couldn’t even skim there were so many).
I think Twitter works if you already have a large circle of acquaintances and want to keep them at least minimally engaged, but I can’t say that it works well to grow that circle. I wasn’t the only one sincerely trying to promote poetry on Twitter in April, and it’s possible I wasn’t the best at it, but from watching not just myself but the others using the #NationalPoetryMonth hashtag, I’d say Twitter was non-rewarding in promoting poetry via #NationalPoetryMonth.
I probably worked full time every day of April on these things, part for the adventure (which I received) and part to grow the audience for poetry and this Project (results mixed, some may be yet to come).
Well, I promised Willie Mays, and you shall get him in the person of Dave Moore’s exuberant piece from the middle 1980s recorded with Radio Shack microphones and battery powered mixer, a cassette tape recorder, and drums via me pounding on a four-pad Mattel Synsonics Drums electronic drum toy from the era. How did I play the drums and the guitar on this? I would pound out the beat and record it onto a second tape recorder first, and then press play while the rest of the band joined in with their parts. Dave’s on keys, and the bass player is Dean Seal.
Something this very short clip doesn’t show you. There were 2 men on base. You see Mays throwing the ball after the catch from that deep a center field and it was fast and on target to the 2nd baseman. The opposition batter who hit that didn’t even get a sac fly RBI out of it!
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I “remastered” this this morning from a stereo digital file I took from the cassette 20 years ago, but there’s only so much help I can give it. I like the way Dave tells the story though, and maybe you will too. Player gadget below where it can be seen, and this backup highlighted link for others.
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*Experience has taught me that baseball-related posts here get a very low interest. I understand somewhat — my interest in the game has dropped since my youth too. Still, Willie Mays was a baseball hero of my youth, and he was a very good centerfielder who could hit, run, and go and catch the ball in the strangely elongated center field of the New York Giant’s Polo Grounds stadium. Shaped like a very deep U, the deepest part of center field was nearly 500 feet from home plate, and the gaps a “mere” 450 feet or so. “Two-thirds of the earth is covered with water. The rest is covered by Willie Mays in center field.” Oh, and a super-tangential link to the name-alike baseball player to poet Ray Dandridge we featured last month: Ray Dandridge the baseball player played for the NY Giants high minor league team in Minneapolis for several years. One of the young Afro-American players he took under his wing: Willie Mays.
**It doesn’t appear the count includes views of the embedded videos you saw inside the blog posts here, and if you’re like me that’s how you view the videos in web posts, because viewing them on YouTube itself means you have to sit through at least the start of an ad or two in many cases.
***I started using Windows Movie Maker, which is slow, a bit buggy, and has been unsupported for several years now. I moved over to Apple’s iMovie on the Mac, the latest version of supported software from a huge company that is supposed to be very aligned with art and artist’s needs. I found it indistinguishable from iMovie versions of several years back, incredibly simplistic and simpleminded in how it treats text and typography, and yet because it was running on a nearly decade newer computer than my Windows desktop, faster and more responsive — and I found I needed that doing a video a day along with everything else. One other thing it became fast at during April: complete and utter lock ups of the Mac that would be followed seconds to a couple of minutes later by an unbidden computer reboot. This would happen when editing/creating pieces, particularly when I was trying to work rapidly, and other times when rendering the video. This was very frustrating, and I can’t understand how a company with Apple’s resources would produce application software running on its own operating system on its own hardware that could produce a crash of the entire system and an unbidden reboot like I was some 1990’s computer. Bizarre. If you ever find yourself in this kind of iMovie situation, the old “dumping prefs” thing seemed to help, and I went to a planned reboot before every render by the last half of the month.
“No one knows the words to the second verse of the National Anthem.”
“Sure they do.”
“Oh? What’s the second verse then?”
“Play ball!”*
We continue our celebration of National Poetry Month while tipping our hat to American Baseball’s Opening Day. Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry” seemed fitting, not just because she was a lifelong baseball fan, but because this poem of hers always seemed to me to be American poetry’s National Anthem. Like our constitution’s “More perfect union” the overall thrust of the poem is that a real, complete poetry is still a goal, still in process, and so in the meanwhile it’s OK to snub poetry’s failures, but to pass the time, OK too to enjoy its at bats anyway.
Partway through the poem Moore explicitly calls up a baseball metaphor:
the base —
ball fan, the statistician—case after case
could be cited”
Here’s today’s lyric video. Baseball has Blue Jays, Cardinals, and Orioles. Why not Cockatoos?
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Moore has already given us the choice to “Not admire what we cannot understand,” but my estimate of what she’s getting at there is that hitting a baseball effectively at a major league level is extraordinarily difficult. The very best players ever to play over more than a century fail to do it about two-thirds of the time over a career. Careful records have been kept. Fans know this is so. Poetry too may be a sublime effort to try to hit the implausible cleanly to land in the improbable place.
It’s become a common observation that baseball has diminished popularity because of this, because one needs to endure so much failure and not-quite to get to the aim of the game. Perhaps poetry can commiserate.
Here’s hoping my home team’s opening-day rookie pitcher can throw implausible stuff this week. Gnomic fastballs. Hermetic curves. Enjambed change-ups. Surreal sliders. Let the opposing bards wave their wands and form nothing but wind, and all their strokes come up trite and merely sentimental. Let their bats hang upside down, asleep.
This performance from our archives has vocals recorded in 2018 by the then members of the Lake Street Writers Group: Dave Moore, Ethna McKiernan, and Kevin FitzPatrick. Two-thirds of that lineup have been called up to another league since then, the one where we have no statisticians or toads — you may have read our memorial pieces to them here this winter. And now it’s spring, even if we don’t understand. How can we admire what we cannot understand?
Three strikes and you’re out, but three ways to hear this performance. There’s a graphical player below for some of you, and if you don’t see that, this highlighted link. And if you want to see the lyric video that I just made that is part of the series of those I’m doing for National Poetry Month, that’s above.
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*Joke footnotes — they always add so much to the humor — but I know we have a lot of foreign readers. American baseball games traditionally start with a singing of the National Anthem. Yes, just the first verse. Patriotism, but in a measured dose there. After which, the head umpire announces the commencement of the game with the cry of “Play ball!”
Let me start out by saying I think that today’s poem is a fine piece of writing capable of making its listener think anew. “The Wall Around Heaven” is satire. Satire has two dangers: that one will take its audaciousness as a literal program or doctrine, or that one will laugh simply at the outrageousness without thought. Satire often believes laughter can be the germ of thought even if you laugh before you know what that thought could be.
This project’s usual thing is to present poetry old enough to be freely reused, and then performing it with original music. If one was to note that the poetry wasn’t meant to be performed with music, or that there is a danger that our understanding of the poet’s intent is incomplete, I reply that’s part the point. We want to think anew about the works, some of which are revered poems, some of which are poems that are lesser-known or rated.
In this case we have the poet themselves performing the piece, longtime Parlando contributor Dave Moore. When I asked Dave if he wanted to add some background on “The Wall Around Heaven’s” intent, here’s what he wrote:
At this point I don’t even remember when Larry died. As you know he lived right around the corner from you, drove a cab, and identified as a folk poet. Not to mention, tho I’m sure you will, sharing a name with a musician. He also vocally retired from poetry, tho a lot I heard from him seemed spontaneous (I’m missing a word here). When I wrote this of course I was thinking about Trump’s cruel & ridiculous buzzpoint (missing another word, must be too early in the day for me).
Anyway I was thinking in Larry’s voice when I drafted the piece.”
Who’s that Larry Williams that Dave speaks of? Nope, not that guy. Our Larry was also someone who attended the Lake Street Writer’s Group along with Dave and myself, and the two poets who died this winter that we’ve been introducing you to: Ethna McKiernan and Kevin FitzPatrick. So, in that way, Dave’s poem inspired by our Larry Williams is of a piece with those matters, even if it uses different tactics than the poems by Ethna or Kevin.
I don’t want to say a lot about Dave’s “The Wall Around Heaven.” I think it’s best encountered as one listens to its satiric fable, its parable, without my commentary. I’ll add only this: this month I went the long way around to see the roadshow production of the folk opera Hadestown. Hadestown’s first act closes with what may be the most heard song from this opera, a rousing act-closer “Why We Build the Wall.”I think that song was written nearly 10 years ago, but by the time Hadestown evolved into its current staged version, the song was seen — as Dave also recalls about the genesis of his own piece — as commentary on a certain U.S. presidential campaign’s idée fixe: an impenetrable border-long wall on the country’s southern border.
The set for the production of the folk-opera Hadestown I saw last week.
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To this listener “The Wall Around Heaven” is something much more than that. In some part it’s a satire on a long-time Christian theological question. But what if you’re not a Christian? Well, one doesn’t need to be an acolyte of classic Greek polytheism to enjoy Hadestown.* The Larry Williams I knew would often speak, poetically or otherwise, about social injustice and elite indifference. I suspect that the muses were whispering those shades into Dave’s ear as he wrote this — but the concept of a wall around paradise and the capricious human understanding of the rules to gain entry is broader and richer than even that.
This one is a bit longer than many pieces here, but it’s well worth a listen. The player gadget is below for many of you. Can’t gain entry to that? This highlighted link is the other way to hear it.
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*Here’s my summary review of Hadestown: I enjoyed, appreciated, and was moved by it. Having heard a few of the songs by the original Broadway cast, and having a modest grasp of some of the mythological tales, I was still glad that I encountered it as a discrete story-telling experience whole for the first time. I discovered, as with Dave’s parable, Hadestown adds an undercurrent of social inequality to its mythopoetic story. External to Hadestown itself, the story’s impact was amplified by sitting next to someone just out of hospitalization for suicidal ideation during this performance. Orpheus in Hadestown makes a point that he entered the underworld of the dead “the long way.”
That’s the way I wish for you to get to heaven or hell — the long way.
Today let’s examine the place of hands and humor in poetry and music. Let’s start with hands, before we turn to the subject of humor and a poem about farming.*
You just heard alternate Parlando Project voice Dave Moore last time here, but besides letting you get a break from my vocals, Dave has played keyboards with me since the late 1970s as the core of The LYL Band. That’s a long piece of work, particularly in that I’ve needed him more than he’s needed me with this. Here are the basics of that: I’m a poor rhythm guitarist. I like to add color and decoration whether the song is fast and loud or quiet and moody. Groove, beat, a solid march of chords to carry you along? Not in my wheelhouse. The LYL Band has had other guitarists over the years to handle some of that, but most of the time it’s been down to Dave for the chords and groove. Back in the earliest days of recording us, when four tracks were a fresh luxury, I’d put Dave’s keys on the same track as a drum machine, sure that he’d be solid as the machine.
Now we’ve both got some mileage on our hands, and Dave has encountered some issues with both of his arms and hands. He tells me that the fingers just won’t do what he asks them to do some of the time. He’s become more like me now as a musician: able to do some things, some days, within limits. My own hands have had problems too, which currently are no worse, and many days a little better. Oddly, writing and composing can let my hands weaken. To wrangle a guitar as I often like to takes not just flexibility but also finger strength which is best approached by regular use with a gentle uptake, not a two-hour live session where I need them to work right off after weeks of musing on poetry and tapping out a sonnet. I’ve been trying to carve out more time to “just play” in order to keep my digits loose and strong.
So, when Dave and I got together this month to honor our friends who’ve recently died, I assessed that my hands were ready to rumble by current standards; but Dave, while game, wasn’t sure. During the session, he did all right, even if he wasn’t nearly as strong as he was in our little band for years.
Now on to humor. Kevin FitzPatrick was a poet we got together to honor. We both knew him for decades, and Kevin even played a little blues harmonica with us a few times in the early days. One thing that Kevin’s poetry often used was his dry sense of humor. If his poems “had other people in them” the interaction between those characters was often humorous. Humor is like that, isn’t it? With poetry one can easily fill a chapbook with solitary musings, singing philosophies, and hermit’s prayers, but humor generally requires other people, our rubs, our missed and kissed connections.
Kevin’s final collection Still Living in Town has several characters, but the central ones were his own persona, a city-living office employee and his life partner, Tina, a woman who had decided she wanted the rural life — and not a Walden cabin in the woods, but a farm growing a variety of produce and sheep.** Kevin was in his 60s, but he was a big fit guy (he boxed and taught martial arts in his youth) and however urban his life had been, his character pitched in with the farm labor.
Kevin’s farm poems are and aren’t like Robert Frost’s to compare them to a famous example. That Kevin could approach a blank verse feel in some poems would connect them — but Frost, urban-born and professionally an itinerant teacher, liked to cast his persona in his farming poems as knowledgeable and in place with farming, while Kevin portrayed himself with beginner’s mind on the farm. Given that fewer living readers have any connection with farm work, Still Living in Town invites us into that milieu wonderfully.
The poem of Kevin’s I used for today’s piece is looser metrically, but while it’s set in like weather to this current March (wheeling rain and snow and thaw) it most wants us to hear a little story about the two characters, the labor of farming, and yes, the humor in hands and their stubbornness.
Jazzmasters! From the upper left: Jimi Hendrix without a Strat; Pete Townsend about to decrease the supply of used guitars; some guy named Jimmy James (wonder what became of him?); Frank Zappa, who didn’t say “The Jazzmaster isn’t dead, it just smells funny;” my Jazzmaster painted the homeopathic color Sonic Blue; Tom Verlaine, vanguard of the alternative nation which latched onto the bargain unwanted Jazzmaster in the 1970s.
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A few notes on the music. I sometimes create the drum tracks for my compositions before the live session begins. And since I’m usually needed in the guitarist role, I sometimes lay down the bass parts with those tracks ahead of time too. That’s how this piece was. On the day of the session, I sang and played the wailing lead guitar*** and recorded the reading of Kevin’s words live with Dave playing a baaing/buzzing synth part live. Dave’s part, subject to his current hands, didn’t fulfill all the groove chop I thought the piece needed. So I added a second guitar part doing my best at rhythm guitar on my Telecaster, but a lot of the final groove you hear is an electric piano part that I laid down trying to imitate my friend and partner Dave’s playing as I recall it from the past.
By now I hope you’re ready to hear the musical story of Kevin FitzPatrick’s farm poem “Coyotes.” The player gadget is below for many of you. Don’t see that? This highlighted link is provided as an alternative so you can hear it that way too.
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*I have to repeat this one, which I read in a comment thread this month regarding the upcoming Hollywood Oscar awards event: “The only Oscars I care about are Peterson and Wilde.” In the context of Dave Moore, even the young Dave wasn’t likely to stand toe to toe (finger to finger?) with Oscar Peterson on piano. On the other hand, I’ll hop on top of Oscar Wilde’s tea table in my slush-muddy Minnesota shoes and declare Dave’s poetic wit with Wilde’s.
**Other reoccurring characters weave in and out in the farm poems too — and while four-legged, the couple’s farm dog, the incongruous poodle named Katie, makes a cameo appearance in this one and others.
***The lead guitar part is played on a Jazzmaster, a famous failure in Fender’s otherwise wildly successful line of mid-century electric guitars. A couple of decades into its Edsel-hood of “what were they thinking” failure, unwanted used Jazzmasters became an affordable choice pragmatically chosen by some punk and alternative musicians. Even so, few think of a Jazzmaster for this kind of wailing lead guitar with a bit of funk flavor. As long as one is able to address the Jazzmaster’s bridge design issues, it can do that sort of thing.
I ran long the last time, let me be short today. Last week after Ethna McKiernan died, Dave Moore and I talked briefly, and I said that I was going to try to write something for Winter Solstice.
“Make it a happy one” Dave requested. I’ve written at length about the losses Dave and I have had with poetic colleagues in recent posts, so for those who want more details, I’ll refer you to the last couple of posts here instead.
How far did I get to that “happy?” Not all the way. The piece I wrote and you can hear my performance of today is more at bittersweet. I’ve talked to Dave about how I’m hearing Kevin FitzPatrick’s and Ethna’s voices, very distinctly at times when I’m quiet. And since I knew them largely as poets, I’m hearing them reading their poetry. I tell you honestly I don’t find this eerie at all. I find it comforting. I expect that those voices will fade with time, but right now to hear them keeps them with me.
I suspect grieving people have heard similar departed voices since we first began to speak, and that those voices would be more sure to come on a long dark winter night. But here’s my modern variation: due to the pandemic the last few meetings of the Lake Street Writer’s group happened over Zoom Internet videoconferencing. I became accustomed to seeing Ethna’s face after she began her cancer treatment on the same home screen I’m typing this on, and so now when I’m on a Zoom conference I sometimes expect to see her face again as one of the squares on my grid — and I will allow myself to visualize my expectation. You can read all 2916 lines of “In Memoriam,” and you won’t find Alfred Tennyson having that exact image to deal with.
Here’s my own text I performed from. Due to short recording opportunities, I worked out the drums and percussion, and then rapidly laid down a bass, piano, and then an arpeggiated 12-string guitar part to further establish a harmonic flavor. I had time to quickly improvise three passes of a lead electric 12-string part, and this was the best of them.
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Then the last time I saw Ethna McKiernan, it was her book launch reading at Celtic Junction on August 6th. I recall she wore a brightly colored headwrap on those last Zoom conferences, and for the public reading she was all in bright red. I melded those two visual memories with our seasonal gift-wrapped packages in the poem.
So those are some of the consolations the poem’s title refers to. And too, one of the fine things in winter and on winter solstice is to be inside, in our lights, at home with our partners, family, house-pets, and welcome ghosts.
Here’s what I speak of in the final line: our lakes and ponds and the still parts of rivers have ice surfaces now. Whichever side of the ice you are on: under it and in the underwaters, or over precarious ice not thick enough to securely separate yourself from those cold underwaters — laugh with more than happiness, laugh with that knowledge that that ice is a fragile and temporary division.
I fear this is going to be one of those bad elegies, one where the writer goes on too much about themselves and not about the person who has died. I’ve already mentioned that I find myself unacceptable and self-absorbed when I talk about myself, and saying that again only digs the self-dug hole I’m going to speak from today deeper.
In the mid-1970s when I moved to Minnesota from New York I connected back up with Dave Moore who I knew from a year in my aborted attempt at college. Through Dave I fell in with a literary group that varied in size and was herd-of-cats led by Kevin FitzPatrick. The group had just started a little magazine they called the Lake Street Review, Lake Street being a long commercial and industrial street that ran east/west through the center of Minneapolis: bars, gendered barber and beauty shops, warehouses, grocery stores, used car lots, a high-towered Sears linked to a rail-freight line and distribution center behind it, neighborhood movie theaters and former such theaters now grinding porn, the recording studio where “Surfin’ Bird” was recorded, a small attempt at a non-suburban shopping mall built on the tract where tractors and tanks were once factory-built, a “hardly a foot we can’t fit” shoe store whose upstairs apartments housed Robert Pirsig when he wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Literary magazines generally preferred foreign words, or landscape landmarks like rivers, lakes, or mountains for their names. Yes, there were lakes at the west end of Lake Street, a self-improvement plan for nature dredged out from what had been swampy wetlands as part of a series of landscaped urban parks that circled Minneapolis — but let me be clear to those who aren’t from around here: calling an artistic enterprise The Lake Street Review was something of a provocation. This was a group of working-class writers with a non-academic outlook toward poetry.
The groups earliest meetings were held at a bar, and Dave noted to me that a large portion of the informal membership was made up of bartenders. Let me also set one other demographic fact: this was a group of men moving from their 20s to their 30s. Eventually the membership thinned out, and the remainder continued meeting in rotation in the members homes and apartments.
As the clan leader, Kevin was generally gentle and accepting. A high-school graduate, working in an urban ER, the again’er in me was attracted to the outsider stance, but Kevin also wanted the magazine’s public work to be acceptable to the parents and grandparents of us young men. The 1970s had still extended the “generation gap” of the 60s, so the “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television” you also couldn’t say on the pages of the Lake Street Review. Feminism was mysterious, like women generally were to these young men, but those women were talking about it which made the mystery unsettling. Anything gender-queer was probably beyond the pale.
I liked those folks, but some of this rankled me. Kevin’s desire to speak across the generation gap as a poet was more noble than I appreciated at the time, but I wanted to go much more radically into discussions of sexuality and sexual roles than Kevin did, and what work I shared with the group privately I thought was underappreciated and misunderstood. I skipped off to two other groups sometime in the 80s, only to return to the Lake Street Writers Group after more than a decade away.
By this time the group had become smaller and more fixed in membership and was no longer concerned with the discontinued magazine. Four or five others, interesting writers and persons in their own right, were regulars, and then not; until by the last few years it became a quartet that would meet every month to share and discuss work in progress.
So when that group ended, it was Kevin FitzPatrick, Dave Moore, Ethna McKiernan, and myself. I’m not sure exactly when Ethna became one of the group as it was likely during my sojourn away from it. At one point she was one of two women generally attending, but as we contracted into the quartet, she was the only woman. As we aged it’s possible that this was less of a filter or division, even if it didn’t disappear. Another thing that happened as we condensed: the group had become predominantly Irish-American. Ethna’s father had been a force in the Irish cultural renaissance, something I was almost entirely ignorant of,* and Ethna’s speaking voice retained a distinct Irish pronunciation undertone. Kevin and Ethna took it upon themselves to establish an annual Twin Cities St. Patrick’s Day poetry reading, a reminder that non-descript leprechauns, green plastic hats, sham-shamrocks, and ever-filled and spilled red cups and flushed faces were not the sum total of Irishness.
Will I ever get to Ethna in this post? To my shame, I will speak more in silhouette, about myself. In many ways I felt the junior member of this group. Kevin and Ethna has several collections published. Ethna got arts grants, had an MFA. Kevin and Dave had degrees from fine private colleges, I was a High School graduate. I gave up trying to publish shortly after my temporary leaving of the group, and it would have been understandable if it irked Kevin and Ethna sometimes that here was this opinionated yet apparently non-professionally serious person taking up their time. I retained a close friendship and collaboration with Dave outside of the group throughout the decades, and grew to understand and appreciate Kevin’s artistic goals, but no such closening happened with Ethna. I knew much less about the details of her life, and what bits I picked up second hand, sometimes from the poetry itself and not from her own conversation, indicated a life with more than it’s share of staggering life events. I also got a not-unexpected sense that men had been part of some of those staggerings, something that she didn’t express much directly in our group of three men and herself. Here’s a statement: I know more about the life-details of Emily Dickinson than I know about the life of a poet, my own contemporary, who I shared a few hours with every month.**
Kevin’s mature poetry never seemed to aim at beauty as such. It is a beautiful thing to find beauty were it isn’t. Ethna indeed aimed for beauty, sometimes comforting and sometimes fierce, and as the saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there. Ethna got there some of the time, which is all we artists can do. Looking through her recently published Light Rolling Slowly Backwards, New and Selected Poems it is easy to find that she was the most skilled poet in our little group, which sounds like fish-in-small-pond praise — but if you (who don’t know us) were to read her, I think you might find similar achievement to whatever other poets you read. When I read Kevin and Ethna’s last books during my yurt retreat early this fall I observed that while I had heard almost every one of Kevin’s published pieces in Still Living in Town in early draft form, I hadn’t heard many of Ethna’s. I know she attended more than one group sharing works in progress, but the amount of work new to me was surprising. I do plan to share one of her striking poems with you soon, but let’s wrap this long introduction up and get to the final part of my countdown of the most listened to and liked Parlando pieces from this past fall.
Three Irish poets: Yeats, McKiernan, and Campbell.
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2. The Folly of Being Comforted by William Butler Yeats. Ethna never simply said something like “Read Yeats!” but before I encountered her I didn’t think much about him one way or the other. Now over the five plus years of this project you’ll have heard the fruits of that influence from her in my many well-liked presentations of Yeats. As I said when I presented it, Yeats was making a very specific point in his poem relating to his own life. I chose in my performance to stubbornly ignore what Yeats intended his poem to be about, and to instead sing it remotely to her on her hospice bed with my own intent. If I snub Ethna in this eulogy, I’ll ignore Yeats too. No respect.
It’s a challenge for me to work out my approximations of Jazz when I’m playing all the parts one pass at a time while being far from a master of any instrument. When it succeeds, as some thought here, I try to combine my simplicities (unimpressive I’m sure to a skilled musician) into something that still pleases when heard together. The highlighted title above will link to my original post on this where I discuss Yeats’ intended meaning, but you can hear my performance dedicated to Ethna with a graphical player (if you see that) or this highlighted hyperlink.
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1. Reynardine by Joseph Campbell. Before the depths of their illnesses, I asked Kevin and Ethna if they’d heard of this early 20th century Irish poet, and they both drew a blank, which I’ve now found is generally true about this overlooked and worthy of more study poet. If Ireland is thought known for exuberant and willing to risk excessiveness expression, Campbell is never more masterful than when he’s compressing things to a handful of words.
Reynardine is a supernatural story in three short verses. From what I’ve been able to determine (see the original post on this) the supernatural element may have been introduced by Campbell, who took an existing long-winded run-of-the-outlaw ballad, and boiled it down with a shapeshifter element. After he’d done that, the resulting folk revival song, one sung by many of the best revival singers of the British Isles, always includes at least hints of that element. My presentation uses Campbell’s original lyrics, which I think are superior to those usually sung.
As far as it’s popularity here this fall, this is an odd one. The blog post presenting it wasn’t read much at all, and the likes for my explanation there of how Campbell transformed the Reynardine story were low in number. But the listens to the song (as with all the audio pieces here, available via Apple Podcasts or most other podcast directories) were easily higher than any other recent piece. To hear it now you can use the player gadget if your blog reader shows it, or this highlighted hyperlink.
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*I once joked, confessing my cultural ignorance there, that my idea of an Irish writer was Frank O’Hara. Joke or not, someone somewhere must have addressed what connections O’Hara’s poetry had with Irishness, but I haven’t found it.
** It was only a year or two ago, after my interest in Dickinson intensified that I found out that Ethna too had a deep appreciation for that genius. Of course, I have my portion of blame for this, just as with this inappropriate eulogy, but suspect she believed that I wouldn’t understand or have any sense of her experience or sensibility. I’d estimate she was wrong, but saying that only adds to my inappropriateness here today.
Frank Hudson 