David Shove

The Most Popular Parlando Audio Piece This Past Winter 2018-19

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Let’s just name the winner right off, and kill the suspense: Wallace Stevens’ “To the Roaring Wind.”

There was a time in my teens and twenties when Wallace Stevens grabbed ahold of me. I think back at that young man and try to wonder why. Well there was the accident of a very affordable collection of his best work that I mentioned when I first posted “To the Roaring Wind”  back in early January. I think that I also liked the way his poems looked. Free verse looked right on the page to me as well to my ear—I was not writing metrical, rhymed poetry when I started—but the poems also looked ordered, focused, a tightly built thing. E. E. Cummings or Marianne Moore with their ragged lines and strange fragmentation looked like that they were confused about how to put things into words, where Stevens looked sure. Other favorites that came to me later in life, like Frost and Dickinson, seemed to my younger self all too pat and superficial then, and there was Stevens, his poems with majestic numerabled sections that seemed to be laying out a lawyerish or legislative structure filled in with an exact poet’s eye.

wallace-stevens

Poet Wallace Stevens. Gromit not pictured.

 

That I didn’t understand all that he was getting at in his poems wasn’t a problem. No, that was a benefit. For my paperback edition $1.45 I got work that one could re-read without knowing already how it would come out! I recall writing poems that I didn’t know how they would come out either, something I will still do. There was one longer one from that era, the first one of mine ever to be published.  It had Stevens’ influence all over it,  copying his Blackbirds-numbered sections.

Frost, who I thought was entirely too conventional then, claimed that he never liked Stevens’ work “Because it purports to make me think.”  Isn’t that line so Frost-ian? First you might high-five Frost and shout “burn!” And then, if you pause and think about it, in decrying Stevens Frost makes a good argument for why you might want to read him—indeed, why I wanted to read him.

Oddly, this poet who was attractive to this teenager, published his first collection Harmonium when he was 44 years old. Lewis Untermeyer, one of the canon-gatekeepers of Stevens’ time, reviewed it then:

“…lacking the spell of any emotion, Harmonium  loses both itself and its audience. It has much for the eye, something for the ear, but nothing for that central hunger which is at the heart of all the senses.”

Untermeyer and Frost may have been right to some degree. I fell away from Stevens as I aged, not from any conscious choice, but because I had other poetic worlds to explore, ones that often had emotional and visionary aspects that weren’t overt in Stevens work.

Here is where the Parlando Project, which performs the poems with music, comes in. There is no inherent emotional content in any series of notes stronger than what the musician manifests when they perform it.

As I noted that Harmonium,  as a work published in 1923. was now in the public domain as of the first of January 2019, I looked for a piece from it that wasn’t one of its “greatest hits,” a deep cut to represent the collection itself rather than an often anthologized and well-known poem. My attention fell on the last piece in the book, this one. As I did this, a connection emerged with a local poet and poetry-reading organizer, David Shove who I learned had died at the turn of the year. “To the Roaring Wind”  is a call to two things: to the muse, that time-honored concept that what supplies us as artists isn’t from our individual merits, but from things outside us that we must serve, and then, to speaking poetry aloud.

David Shove Remembrance Event

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

“Papa John” Kolstad worked to arrange at least one more Midstream poetry reading event tonight, as a remembrance and continuance of the series run for the past six years by David Shove who died at the turn of this year.

I know this blog has  a good number of Twin Cities Minnesota readers, but even locally the Midstream series was a less-known-than-it-should-be thing. Best as I can tell, three things made it special: David Shove himself, who had a beautiful offhand way* of presenting a wide-ranging group of poets and writers; the space itself, a large second floor room full of clutter that says unpretentious and informal;**  and the upper-Midwest kind of poets, who have a tendency to community feeling, a sense that they, their poetry, and their readers/listeners are all in this together.

David Shove Rememberence Midstream Reading 1-21-19

Community Feeling. Some of the folks gathered to remember David Shove tonight in Minneapolis

 

Therefore, even though the event occurred with the palpable absence of David Shove, it still felt part of the series—and not just because absence is a kind of presence. As it sometimes does, the reading opened with some music—tonight, Kolstad on guitar and Richard Terrill on saxes performing some jazz as folks wandered into the room from the trench warfare of our most recent eight-inch snowfall. Then sixteen people with various connections to David and the Midstream series spoke of him, often concluding with a short poem.

I was one of those, perhaps the one who knew David less than any of the others. I only knew him from the reading series, but that was still a something. Yes it was.  I did an off-the-cuff reading of the Wallace Stevens’ poem “To the Roaring Wind”  that I had posted in a musical performance here last month when I first heard of Shore’s death.

Here’s a player gadget to allow you to easily hear that performance of “To the Roaring Wind”  from January.

 

 

 

*Shove as a presenter had a slow, dry way of speaking that the first time you saw him you might not think much of it. Then the next time you’d notice the method of it, and the third time, the art of it.

**The decor of the room I think is the unstoppable flotsam of past enterprises run out  of the room and Kolstad’s own intended collage sense. Part Marcel Duchamp and part Daniel Kramer’s “Bringing It All Back Home”  record cover.

To the Roaring Wind

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Fifty years ago I picked up a copy of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens  in a college bookstore. It was a paperback edition, and looking at the price, I can see why I might have selected it. The cover says $1.45 if you can believe that. Cheaper than a record album, and chock full of more strange words and mysterious lyrics than any batch of LPs that might sit in a dorm room in 1969.

Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

Yes, $1.45!

 

I’d probably run into a few Stevens poems before then, but my actual teenaged poetry bookshelf had no other entire volumes from Stevens early 20th century Modernist cohort yet. After reading it, I immediately set out to write poems that looked and sounded like Stevens for the next few months.

That edition started off by reprinting Stevens’ first collection, Harmonium,  from 1923. And now after a pause of decades, works from that year are now in the public domain and available for presentation.*

So now 2019 is here, and 1923 is freed for reuse. By sad coincidence, I learned last night that David Shove who organized a long-running and well-loved monthly poetry reading series had died on New Years Eve. And so that evening I started reading Harmonium,  until I finished it this morning, thinking of David Shove and his dry humored manner as he would introduce poet after poet to an audience, and how I’ll miss that. The obituary said that the monthly reading that would have happened tonight may still go on, but to my shame, I couldn’t face a crowd of people tonight.

I learned last night that David Shove who organized a long-running and well-loved monthly poetry reading series had died on New Years Eve.

Unlike crowds, with art you can allow your feelings to shake and settle into a form. It’s a smaller group, just yourself and sound. So I plugged in my Telecaster and started working on a droning riff to accompany the last poem in Stevens’ Harmonium, “To the Roaring Wind.”  Supporting the guitar I played—well, why not—harmonium, double-tracked cleanly and through a fuzz-box. I then improvised the vocal tracks using Stevens’ words as best as my voice would allow today while thinking of David and those readings.

Wallace Stevens is the Lemony Snicket of Modernists, in love with unusual words, and in the 13 words of “The Roaring Wind” one is “Vocalissimus.” Heard in passing it may remind you of “vocalization,” but someone with an education in Latin has supplied a further, more exacting, explanation.

If souls hover around, David Shove and those that sound with him, this is for them. The rest of you with mice and screen-fingers can hear “The Roaring Wind”  using the player below.

 

 

*A somewhat complicated story, but in the U.S. a law was enacted in 1998 that changed the term of copyright long after the works were created. For a few commercial properties this extended their revenue potential, but for a large portion of poetry and other non-commercial work it only helped make them largely unavailable for re-vitalization.