desire

Songs to Johannes 9 & 10

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Sometimes we don’t know there are heroes in our world, for adventurers don’t always move and report themselves in the most well-seen spaces. I think of Mina Loy as I write that. Early in the 20th century this London-born young woman began an odyssey that carried her from the St. John’s Wood art school, to the Munich Künstlerinnenverein, to Paris and the left-bank Montparnasse, to the Florence of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s circle, and then into the center of the Italian Futurist movement.

And she was just getting started filling up her passport leaves. Up to this point she seemed mostly working in visual art, having started as a girl as an admirer of the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris, but by her early 20s she was writing fierce Modernist poetry. She’d met Gertrude Stein while in Italy, and like the Pre-Raphaelites, the Futurists wrote as well as painting. After leaving Italy she moved to the extraordinarily vital 19-teens Modernist scene in New York City. If one was to survey those in the Western World’s avant-garde in their artistic hot spots in 1919, Mina Loy would likely be as prominent as any woman creator — but that’s one point in time, and far-flung doesn’t mean widely-known or lastingly famous.*  She was there at a lot of “theres,” a person on the scene when Modernism was being shaped, and then largely forgotten.

Loy had a complex love-life during this time, casting into alliances with several men. Involved for a time in a triangle with two Futurists principals, about which she wrote a series of poems that became her best-known/yet still under-known work, “Songs to Johannes.”  A version of it was first published in the landmark NYC based Modernist magazine Others**  in 1917, and subsequent editions of the poetic sequence were included in a couple of later book-bound collections of Loy’s work.

So, what’s the catch, why isn’t Loy as known as William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, et al? Can we chalk it down to “The Patriarchy?” Yes, that’s a factor, but until recently Loy also didn’t have the footprint of Marianne Moore or Gertrude Stein — Modernist poets to whom she was compared to in her heyday.

Jane_Heap,_Mina_Loy,_and_Ezra_Pound

The Freewheelin’ Mina Loy standing next to Ezra Pound in Paris. The woman on the far left is Jane Heap who edited The Little Review in which Pound wrote of Loy’s Others published poems “In the verse of Marianne Moore I detect traces of emotion; in that of Mina Loy I detect no emotion whatsoever.”

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Part of it may be a smallish corpus of work. Part of it may be due to her leaving active literary circles about 100 years ago, even though she lived until 1966. Key critic Pound thought her work however skilled was cold and without emotion.*** But more importantly, there’s this factor: her work, in particular “Songs to Johannes,”  scared people. Not just the un-hip general public (which never widely considered her, unlike Stein), but other Modernists. Harriet Monroe of the influential Poetry magazine thought Loy’s work unpublishable. The “Johannes”  poem sequence subject matter and her treatment of it was problematic.

Men for ages have been prone to “kiss and tell.”  Propriety might lead them to disguise the names of the paramours, even if insiders would know. Yet women arising from the prone to write about their experience might be on shakier ground. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale were  able to do this in the 1920s with popularity and prizes, but their poems of female desire were written within conventional romantic poetic tonality. Loy? Not so much. “Songs to Johannes”  can be frankly carnal. If Modernism was to speak otherwise and often of direct treatment of the thing, of charged moments, of images depicted in all their dimensions, this wasn’t something that automatically extended to women talking about sexual relations within the fine art of poetry. Boys will be boys when they do it —  and the boys become prim fuddy-duddies when a woman adventurer writes from her perspective.

So all this. Decades passed with Loy largely forgotten.

Feminism and now the 21st century has re-opened the case of Mina Loy, and now she’s considered a rising subject for academic study and consideration. What’s my consideration? I’ve always figured if someone writes a literary poem and calls it “Song…” that the poem is challenging the Parlando Project to realize that element. I chose two short poems from the sequence to fit things to my schedule and preferences; and for instrumentation, I used an acoustic guitar challenged by some keyboard ghosts. You can hear my performance of the segments of “Songs to Johannes”   numbered IX and X with the audio player gadget below. What, has the audio player ghosted you? No, it’s just that some ways of viewing this post will suppress showing it. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I’d suppose H.D. would be in the running in such a mooted 1919 survey too.

Curiously, Mina Loy’s Wikipedia article mentions that the delightful and highly popular classic Hollywood actress Myrna Loy may have gotten her stage name from our poet/artist Loy. Wikipedia footnotes that claim with two books I haven’t read. Mina Loy did act on the NYC stage at least once, in a Provincetown Playhouse play where she co-starred with William Carlos Williams.

**As its name implies, Others  saw as its purpose to publish outsider Modernist work, and in its short life it was troubled as many such publications are by shaky revenue and artistic factionalism. Long-time readers might remember that three traditionalist poets contemporary with Loy pranked Others  by concocting the Spectra hoax and wheedling the magazine into a special issue dedicated to the made-up Spectra movement poets who wrote parodies that they thought might pass as real Modernist poems. One of their pseudonymic poets, Anne Knish, may have been an inside dig at Loy.

***Pound’s critical blurb where he’s pairing Loy with Marianne Moore seems a strange judgement to me, though the quote I’ve seen says he meant it as at least a mixed complement. Work like Loy’s “Songs to Johannes”  seems quite charged with feelings. Reading the whole thing in one sitting — even given its Modernist fragmentation of narrative and proto-Surrealist metaphoric freedom — can exhaust one, buffeted from the range of conflicting states of emotion being depicted. You can read one version of the entire “Songs to Johannes”  sequence here.

And in the woman-poet’s “you can’t win” department: in the post-Eliot world of High-Modernism some of Loy’s female contemporaries like Teasdale and Millay were down-rated for writing extensively about love, desire, and romance as subjects to be examined in their poetry, rather than the big-boy themes of culture and philosophy.

When the Year Grows Old

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Here in Minnesota, the weather is turning, as it does at a time of its choosing in the Fall. Tomorrow morning the Fahrenheit temperature will be in the teens when I get up, and the forecast says single digits will greet me by Friday.

I began work on setting this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay last week after seeing it at the Byron’s Muse blog. Two things grabbed me when I saw it: sitting there as silent words it begs to be sung, and it’s tantalizingly ambiguous.

This poem was from Millay’s first collection, published (1917) as Modernism was starting to find an audience in America. Americans in the last decade to be called The Twenties saw Millay as a Modern, though her prosody wasn’t like the free-versifiers, and her lyric’s narratives weren’t fragmented word-Cubism. So, a more comfortable Modernist to those whose expectations of poetry still flowed from the 19th century? Somewhat. Still, though not so much in her first book, but soon, Millay began to stand for The New Woman, a character that took up the prerogatives of independent thought, act, and agency in love and desire. A William Carlos Williams might have absorbed radical Modernist visions in Modern Art into prosody. A Carl Sandburg may have taken his Imagist eye and cast it toward workers and immigrants in his poems. But soon after this poem, Millay was using somewhat traditional verse to speak about female independence in life and desire. Cubism and Socialism were controversial, sure, but the kind of change Millay was covering in her poems was large in scope. Man Ray or Monet, Debs or Debussy, Pound or Reverdy — change was in the air — but as far as art such as poetry was concerned, the charge for change from women (and Afro-American artists) in the Last Twenties is a big deal, not something to shelve off as some sideline.

OK, so what does this early poem have to do with that? I’m not entirely certain. Yes, the overall scene of the poem is clear to any Northerner — but even as the poem starts the seemingly simple language has faceted surfaces. The poem is titled “When the Year Grows Old,”  but I’d suspect you might mistakenly remember it as “When the Year Grows Cold.”  It’s not just the rhyme, the poem is clearly about the weather getting colder, all the images intensify that. Intensities of anything old are not there directly at all. And then, I can’t say how idiomatic the opening statement (refrained at the end,) “I cannot but remember,” would be in 1917 — but it’s easy to read it (out loud, or in understanding) more than one way: “I will reflexively remember,” “I have only memory of this,” or even “I can’t do this, but I am forced to remember.”

And who’s the “she” in this poem? I had a thought in early-days with the poem it might be a pet, likely a housecat. Beside a generalized factor of love for warmth, cat owners might recognize the bird watching vocalizations — that, and a reference to “the warmth of fur” led me to that consideration. One reader’s reaction I read online this week thought “she” was a mother. I’m not sure of Millay’s mother’s (if that would be the mother here) characteristic feelings for tending a fire or even the specific kitchen task of making tea. My cursory non-scholarly thoughts are: not likely her happy place.*  Still, I could imagine that a general poetry reader in 1917 (like the Internet contemporary I came upon this week) could think that, or that the “she” is a friend of the poem’s speaker (which we might expect to be Millay), and so find this poem Millay’s predecessor to something like the young old Bob Dylan writing “Bob Dylan’s Dream”  about his remembering lost friends who’d once gather around a wood stove.

When the Year Grows Old

Simple chords for today’s piece, presented here as chord sheet  in case you’d like to sing it too.

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Living with this poem as I set it to music and performed it, I came to think of it more at “Girl from the North Country” — a song about a lover who is longingly thought of lovingly, but who is now separated. By the time of the performance that you can hear below, that was how I was singing it. Why did I think that?

Partly from reading later Millay poetry, partly in biographic clues of Millay’s sexuality. There’s a definite undercurrent in the poem of the “she” feeling ambivalent: the sighing look at the flying birds, the melancholy chimney wind, and most directly in the abrupt “look of a scared thing/sitting in a net!” And what follows that line feels lustily sensual to me: those rubbing “bare boughs,” that fur by the fire verse.

That reading also answers the why the year being “old” is the title, not “cold,” other than just seeking variety. A once passionate attachment has been reconsidered by the other party, has grown old/cold.

Millay could have made other meanings (“cat lady,” “dear old mom.” etc,) clear with no commercial readership risks, but following my understanding, this presentation is coded so those who know will see that, and others will see a vaguer poem while recognizing late autumn weather. If I’ve misread it, or if Millay ever explained what she was intending — well, it wouldn’t be the first time — but it worked for me to find an experiential place to inhabit the poem.

You can hear my performance of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “When the Year Grows Old”  with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? It’s nothing personal, just that some ways of viewing this blog suppress that. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*As poetic testimony: tender as Robert Hayden’s well-loved poem “Those Winter Sundays”  is, it’s not a story of a parent finding happy beauty in loading up a household’s fire box.

Anna Akhmatova’s “Love”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

It wasn’t a conscious plan, but I’ve been pretty tough on love within recent presentations here. Today’s piece from Russian poet Anna Akhmatova continues that, but it wasn’t something I just started to work on either. My efforts on this 1912 love poem “Liubov”  began when I did a fresh English translation of it last June. Perhaps because of its striking winter imagery, I decided not to publish it until later in the year. I stuck with this decision even though I’d also completed writing the music eventually used for the performance you can hear below.

It was only this week when I decided it was winter enough to complete my work on this, and oh does Akhmatova’s “Love”  fit in with the Australian poet Kenneth Slessor’s “Wild Grapes”  and Margaret Widdemer’s “The Dark Cavalier.”   Her poem wastes no time making its sinister case for distrusting love: it opens with a cold-blooded snake shape-shifting itself into a frosty heart, persistent, and pretending to be as harmless as a dove. It ends with the poet warning others that desire “Knows how to cry so sweetly/with prayers of an aching violin” and its final statement that the hint of interest shown by any man’s smile now sends fears, warning, to the poem’s speaker.

It’s such an arresting statement that it sounds like the judgement of a woman’s hard-won experience. One never knows with poets and their conjured personas, but this is a poem of a young woman, written when Akhmatova was in her early 20s, and the poet herself later rejected her early work off-hand as “naïve poems by a frivolous girl.”*  Yet, even by that age she was already participating in avant-garde circles within an adventurous life of shifting romantic alliances.**

Akhmatova by Modigliani

Portrait of the young Akhmatova reclining on a couch by Modigliani

Anna Akhmatova on couch

Later photo of Akhmatova on a couch. “Is that a smiling winter snake-heart-dove at my frosty window? I’m in no mood to get up to answer.”

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In my translation (which relied on English literal glosses as I don’t speak Russian) I followed my usual practice: to try to determine what images the poet is presenting, and then to vividly portray them in a way in contemporary English language word-music, even if that’s not closely tied to the original “tune” of the poem’s native language. I thought the solutions I came up with for this poem worked well, and I hoped my instrumental music would add to that. I had recorded the basic tracks of energetically strummed acoustic guitar and my vocal first, and then found it somewhat difficult this month to work out a keyboard part to flesh out some additional melodic interest. I tried to follow myself with the added keyboard arpeggiation, but the eccentricities of the rhythm was challenging. My final judgement was the tension of my attempts might be a feature not a bug, and perhaps you’ll find it so too. You can hear the musical performance of my translation of Anna Akhmatova’s poem “Love”  with the audio player below. If you see no player, this alternate method is offered: you can use this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

*Akmatova’s life was complicated by more than love affairs, as she lived through two world wars, a revolution, and shifting and threatening political currents in the USSR. It’s not impossible for older writers to see their work as a progression and to discount the fondness readers have for their previous work, but living through such history suggests that shifting cultural expectations could have made expressing such doubts an external expectation.

**From choice, chance, and restriction, she lived her life within the bounds of the old USSR. However, before this poem was published, she’d traveled to Paris where she met artists and writers there. If Gertrude Stein had her Picasso portrait to display in her famous French apartment, Akhmatova had a portrait by Modigliani which she carried with her and displayed in her living spaces throughout her life.

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.

I’m Gonna Make Love to My Widow ‘fore I’m Gone

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to take a short break from our February celebration of 1926’s Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists*   to celebrate old people — really old people. The audio piece today is also not as solemn as some of the issues we’ve dealt with in other posts: it’s about love, desire, lust — and those feelings are represented as Shakespeare or many of the Afro-American Blues artists of our last decade to be called “The Twenties” might present it, as “country matters.”

There’s a long poetic lyrical tradition of mixing rural metaphors with desire. We’ve done more than one piece here over the years in the bucolic poetic tradition of lusty shepherds and comely rural maids, but it has occurred to me in my present old age that they are almost always young and single. I, on the other hand, am an old, long-married man. Not to put a damper on the prurience factor, but when I say old, I mean old enough to think about not being around to promise love forever. I’ll repeat what I’ve said here before: that at my age when offered a lifetime guarantee on a product, I’ll ask now if there’s a better deal. Yet, oddly enough, that for me makes the desire to connect with my beloved no less ardent. Carpe Diem is no longer just a trope to be trotted out.

Does today’s rambunctious piece do a good job of communicating that? I’m not sure. I presented an earlier draft of this a decade ago to a writer’s group I was participating in — and they, in the springtime of their mid-60s, thought it was a persona poem about someone wooing a rural widow, while I thought the inescapable ribald joke in the piece was that the singer wanted to, ahem, get down with it, before they died making their wife a widow. That group was often right about such lack of clarity, but I sometimes wonder if they were too young — and now that half that group has died, that they might have a different understanding of this lusty Blues poem. And it occurs to me that’s an additional joke! The audience for poetry may be small, but am I expecting the audience for this one to be made up of dead people?

Make Love to My Widow

Here’s my Blues-poem lyric. We’ll be back with other peoples’ words soon.

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I don’t know, but I wish all of the readers and listeners here, of whatever age, a happy Valentine’s Day. We may not understand love — after all, we barely understand lust — but let us fumble toward that understanding with chocolates and flowers in a cold February. You can hear me perform this Blues-poem with bottleneck-slide guitar using the graphical player gadget below, or with this alternative highlighted link.

Are you looking to further connect Black History Month with love poetry? Patricia Smith is presenting new and existing Black love poems this February via a month of curating their Poem-a-Day feature.

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*You might think, “1926, that’s old people!” but Fire!!  was organized, edited, and written by members of the famed Harlem Renaissance when they were barely out of their teens.

Crepuscule (I Will Wade Out) for National Poetry Month

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today’s re-released Parlando piece from our early years is “Crepuscule”  by American poet E. E. Cummings. This is certainly a passionate, ecstatic poem, isn’t it! Looking back at what I wrote about it in 2018, I was then taking the main meaning of the poem to be a portrayal of falling into a Surrealistic dream state. In the same post I confessed I hadn’t remembered that Björk had performed a version of this poem that seemed filled with erotic desire.

Rereading and reconsidering, I’m more unsure which is metaphor and which is meaning — and I think that’s often a good thing in poetry. We’re in one of those gestalt drawings created with a spell of words. We could be in the transport of desire, and it is like unleashing a spectacular dream: flowers are not just colorful, but burning with color. We will be still in bed, yet leaping with sleep-closed eyes. And so on.*  It’s difficult to not feel the erotic pull of the text. For a dream, the mystery is very much of the flesh. Mouths, thighs, bodily curves, fingers, lips…is it dream as sex or sex as dream?

An argument for the dream is the framing device of the poem reinforced by the title (crepuscule is an archaic word for twilight). Night and the dreamer have swallowed the sun, and the final line has one biting on the voltaic silver of the moon. But then Rimbaud took the arrival of dawn and sexualized it, so why couldn’t Cummings do the same for nightfall?

Here’s the new lyric video.

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Three ways to hear my performance of E. E. Cummings “Crepuscle:”  there’s a player gadget below for many, and there’s a backup highlighted link for the others. Want some dream images flowing behind the words of a lyric video? That video is above.

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*The most mysterious line has lovely word-music: “with chasteness of sea-girls.” I’m assuming a reference to nereids, sea nymphs, but I’m unsure if the poet’s speaker is becoming one, or trysting with one, in the rush of their dream. If water spirits, perhaps gender fluidity is a subliminal?

Song to the Dark Virgin

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I’ll promise you a love song at the end of this, but let’s look briefly at some other stuff that surrounds that song.

As I look in the Langston Hughes poetry collection I’m featuring this Black History Month for a Valentine’s Day piece, there is less to pick from than one might imagine. Even though his The Weary Blues  is a first book by a young man, and it includes some of the Afro-American poet’s best-known poems — poems of love or passionate desire are conspicuous in their absence.

Even for 1926, the year The Weary Blues  was published, this is somewhat unusual. You might think roughly a century ago the down and dirty lunge of love might be automatically missing, and to some degrees of physical explicitness you’d be correct, but poems on the emotional variety of love and desire were if anything the very fashion for the last decade called The Twenties. Popular and esteemed poets of that era Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, and others were quite ready to talk frankly about desire. Nor were Afro-Americans silent on this subject. Jean Toomer wrote what I think is flat-out one of the best surrealist love poems of all time. Claude McKay wrote beautiful and passionate love sonnets, and the Blues singers performing and recording then were quite willing to serve in the lust and fond department of art.*

We’ve already said that Hughes was a pioneer in valuing those very Blues and Jazz singers. Early this month we performed Hughes’ “To Midnight Nan at Leroy’s,”   a Blues poem presenting just such a singer and a condensed late-night view of a hook up. Was the man in this poem Hughes himself? Possible, but I think the preponderance of the evidence says not. I think he’s an observer of the tryst, and even given the value he puts on short poems in his collection, he somewhat stints on the details.

No, Langston Hughes, for all his night-life settings and ash-can-school observations in The Weary Blues is almost prudish about sex and love. If he feels desire himself, he’s loath to talk about it — while all around him poets and singers were talking and talking about that.

I’m not a scholar, just a person who actively seeks out poetry encounters and then gathers some information that helps me grasp what the poem may be on about. Hughes was guarded about his sexuality. I gather this was true for his entire life. Some believe he was gay or bi, but then other poets of his time were and that didn’t stop them from writing about desire even if their readers didn’t necessarily understand the gender object of their affections.**   I read at least one piece that concluded Hughes was asexual. Frankly no one seems to know, and if you’re looking to date Langston Hughes, he’s dead, so it may not matter.

Today’s piece uses Hughes’ “Song to the Dark Virgin.”   It does show passion, and if not as Surrealist as Toomer’s great poem, it dips into almost a Robert Herrick style 17th century set of conceits***  Hughes’ use of the archaic pronoun “Thou” and a few other less current words in common speech show him code-switching to something a bit like the Bible’s “Song of Songs”  in the King James translation.

And speaking of “Song of Songs,”  it’s not even clear if this love poem is to some anonymous person or if in some sense it’s to Black people in general, just as “Song of Songs”  melds what seem like individual lovers into Judaism. If you read this poem as Black is Beautiful breaking out 40 years before it’s more publicized instances, you could make a good case.**** The Weary Blues  includes poems set in the various ports Hughes landed at around the world during his stint as a merchant sailor before assembling the book, and his father was living in Mexico. From this I wondered if the ”Dark Virgin” is a reference to the Black Madonna paintings and figures he might have encountered overseas. A possible clue to this not just being a young person’s love poem is that it’s titled “to the  Dark Virgin” not “to a.”

Mother of God of Andronicus

A Greek Orthodox icon, one of the examples of the Black Madonna found in Eurasia and Latin America.

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But Valentines Day is here, so let’s perform this as a romantic love song. In Robert Herrick style, just calling out a love object as a virgin isn’t unusual. In such a reading or performance this is how the poem may be described: the poem opens with the idea of being a scattered and shattered love offering to the beloved in Part I. Part II gets a little more intimate: the speaker wants to be the layer of clothes next to the beloved skin. Kinky, but Herrick and for that matter “If I Was Your Girlfriend”  Prince would approve. Part III gets closer to consummation of desire as in the trope of consummation as consumed by fire. Yes, it’s a little bit of archaic dress up, but who knows, maybe a love whisper of “I want to annihilate your body” is still a working bedroom line?

Song to the Dark Virgin

The above are guitar chords as I fingered them, but the recording uses a capo on the 3rd fret, so it’s heard in the key of Bb today. Interesting progression, there’s no V chord in it!

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If you follow the progress of the imagery Part I starts out with shining light, then the more obscured light inside folds of clothing, and finally in Part III it’s out in blazes of leaping flame.

I ardently performed this one today with guitar, chorused fretless bass, and a warped low string section. I let those bowed strings play what an electric bass would play so that the actual electric bass could do other things. Many of you can hear it with a graphical player below, but those whose way of reading this won’t show the player can use this highlighted link to play it.

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*She’s not Black, but Genevieve Taggart wrote one of the most pointed and poignant of love poems about love on the poor side of town during the last Twenties too.

**Today’s poem never uses a gendered pronoun or name.

***No, not meaning he’s vain — it’s a poetic term for a metaphor that’s not afraid to be elaborately weird or fanciful.

****Back to “Song of Songs,”  get to the 5th verse and you get “I am black, but comely” in the KJV. Or as “Ecclesiastics”  had it: “Nothing new under the sun.”

Bond and Free

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Looking for texts to feature here this month, I came upon this odd Robert Frost poem “Bond and Free”  and I could easily see how I could perform it Parlando style. Performance unavoidably involves choices, even if it can precede fuller understanding. Let me talk some about those choices I made and what understanding I’ve come to have about this poem. If you want to have the full text available while I discuss it, it can be found here.

What seemed odd about this poem? Well, I associate Frost with specific and palpable imagery. If one has any sense of the rural landscape of the 20th century, as I do, I can often place myself directly on the stage with the speaker in a Frost poem and examine the set decoration. Critical overviews of Frost’s era will sometimes want to clearly distinguish his work from the Modernists, mistaking the devices of rhyme and meter as the essentials of his work. This ignores that he’s so often working in his early short poems with the same direct observation, avoidance of worn-out tropes, and fresh, lyrically present moments as the Imagists.

This poem with it’s capitalized “Thought” and “Love” is not like that. In some ways it’s like Emily Dickinson in her more philosophical or legalistic abstract mode. To the degree that this poem has a landscape, a stage set, the one on which this poem plays is cosmic.

Frost’s poem begins “Love has earth to which she clings.” Any accustomed Frost reader would expect that garden or farming matters will follow. We first read Love here as implying a plant’s roots, but what follows has a topography viewed from aerial heights. From there the valleys of a hilly country are, as they can practically be in Frost’s time, wall after wall that separates people and their towns from each other. That third word “earth” as the poem progressed could well be capitalized too, for it’ll turn out to be more at the planet Earth, not mere soil. The first stanza ends by introducing Love’s contrasting principle in this poem — Thought, as in Free Thought. Right away we see Thought is flying above it all, in the mode of Icarus or Daedalus.

The poem’s speaker (I’ll call them Frost, for as there’s no sense that Frost is setting up some special other voice from his own) follows Thought as the second stanza views Earth’s earth from above as a landscape with marks of human effort on the ground visible as a printed page. “Nice enough” it seems to have Free Thought thinking, but “Thought has shaken his ankles free.”

It’s now a good time to take note of the poem’s title: “Bond and Free.”   Frost is writing this about 50 years after African-American emancipation. Like Emily Dickinson (who wrote most of her poetry during the Civil War) Frost almost never mentions slavery, the issues of racism, or the widespread theories of racial differences or superiorities in his poetry.*  Leg shackles could be applied to prisoners of course, but like the broken shackles that are hard to view at the feet of the Statue of Liberty, in the American context I think slavery is an intended connotation here. Essays on cultural appropriation could be written from this. Not here, but it’s possible. I could suppose someone could see a BSDM reading. While I know a blog post titled “Robert Frost and Sexual Kink” would be surefire clickbait, I’ll resist. It’s also plausible that he was connecting “bond” in the sense of “marriage bond.” More on this below.

“You read your Emily Dickinson. And I my Robert Frost…” The two great American poets lived in Amherst in different centuries, and this set of statues there commemorates that.

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In the third stanza we outdo Bezos, Musk, and Branson as Frost notes with inexpensive poetic efficiency that Free Thought is not bound-in by earthly hills but is capable of interstellar flight. This stanza’s final lines, an Icarian or Luciferian plummet, find that at the end of the limits of the dreams of a night Thought invariably returns to an “earthly room.” As my footnote below notes, Frost is fairly sure of the fallen nature of humanity.

The final stanza is, to my reading, an ambiguous judgement. If humanity is fallen, Frost too is unable to judge the competition and contrast of Love and Free Thought. Thought’s freedom and range, even if temporary, even if illusionary, has a pull and value. And “some” (Frost externalized this opinion and doesn’t say they are right or wrong) say Love (even if it’s bondage and constrains one) can have a fuller possession by nature of its grounded stasis.

The poem’s final couplet retains this duality, Free Thought has partial experiences of multitudinous beauties in a wonderous universe, but these beauties are “fused” to other stars. To choose other than temporary dreams, just replaces New Hampshire with Sirius.

I said at the start performance means choices. I made an audacious choice. In Frost’s poem he consistently gendered Love as female and Thought as male. Furthermore, I’ve read second-hand references that in an earlier draft he chose to make both Love and Thought female, an unusual choice that he abandoned. I made my choice for my own reasons, to help the performer, myself. I think that choice makes it a stronger piece for myself and for my audience.

The reports of Frost’s abandoned choice would make for a different poem. English writing in Frost’s time usually used male pronouns for universals and abstracts, so that original choice of female pronouns must have been intentional. His choice for skyward Free Thought as male, and earthy and fecund Love as female is archetypal, and I in turn made a conscious decision to reject that. I did this because I feared that too many listeners might grasp this poem as a conflict of male sexual freedom vs. the clingy women. Intentionally or subconsciously, this may have been in Frost’s mind, and even so then this is Frost’s version of the complicated love poem that the female “songbird poets” were developing in his time, even if it’s more abstract in describing the bond and free of desire.**  I just preferred the duality of the poem ungendered, and I think modern audiences are ready to receive that version.

The player to hear my performance will appear below for many of you. However, some ways of reading this blog won’t show it, and so here’s a highlighted hyperlink to play it. You will notice that besides the pronouns there are a few other textural differences, some accidental, some chosen to make the language more colloquial***  and easier for a modern listener to grasp on hearing. I don’t know if these changes are for the better, but they were this performer’s choice.  As promised earlier in this month of noisier musics, acoustic 12-string guitar and piano featured this time, but just enough sarod and tambura in the background to add a non-New England air.

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*Frost did write one searing poem on racial hatred and violence: “The Vanishing Red,”  which I presented here. A brief search today didn’t return much. I would expect that he held stereotypical views and used ugly racial epithets casually. Like Dickinson, Frost’s silence on this central American issue should be more often considered as a loud silence. In her defense, Dickinson’s stance on human freedom, often expressed in her poetry, can easily be viewed as inspirational by all. Frost is surer of a fallen humanity, but that too can be appreciated by those weighed down by life or oppression.

**That reading would say that Frost was more guarded and indirect in dealing with desire than Millay, Teasdale, and the “songbird poets.”  Thus, the uncharacteristic abstraction of this poem

***One of Frost’s Modernist strengths was to largely remove from his metered and rhyming verse the sense of stilted and too formal poetic diction. My judgement was that this skill deserted Frost several times in this poem. Perhaps abandoning his usual distinct and grounded settings for this more abstract poem also blunted his naturalness of speech.

Recuerdo, or we celebrate Joni Mitchell’s Blue with some Edna St. Vincent Millay

~ Frank Hudson ~ 5 Comments

A longish one this time. I’ll try to make it worth your while.

In the places I go it has been hard to escape Joni Mitchell and the 50-year anniversary of her breakthrough record album Blue  this month. Mitchell is one of those artists like Emily Dickinson* or Thelonious Monk who people contemporaneously recognized as someone on the scene, someone whose work might appear at hand or gain mention — but then decades afterward the level of originality and importance of what they had done becomes more and more clear.

Mitchell’s Blue  wasn’t immediately recognized as a classic, successful statement. Musically it’s a bit odd, even by the eclectic field of 1971 recordings. Though “singer-songwriter”** was a growing genre at the time, most of them would present their songs in a full band context on record. Instead, Mitchell’s record is spare, often just her voice and one instrument — and sometimes the instrument is a mountain dulcimer at that! She often used her voice unusually, with quick almost yodeling leaps in service of the originality in her melodic contours, and this was off-putting to some. One thing I remember about listening to Joni Mitchell LPs back in my youth was that the amount of volume in her upper register would rattle the plastic frame and enclosures of my tiny portable stereo’s speakers, producing a very unpleasant buzzing distortion.

To the degree that she was noticed in 1971, that she could be a figure who’s fame might outreach her record sales or rock critic esteem — it wasn’t just that she was a successful songwriter for others who could round-off her corners just a bit to present “Clouds (Both Sides Now),” “Woodstock,”  or “The Circle Game”  to a wider audience than their author could — it was because she was known as (this gets complicated, stay with me here) as the “girlfriend” of a lot of male rock stars. This got joked about. The now infamous Rolling Stone “Old Lady*** of the Year Award” in 1971, or a joke picture of a purported Joni Mitchell LP with a song listing of: 1. Crosby, 2. Stills, 3. Nash, 4. And Young.

Do those of my generation remember that? Did you laugh? I did. That’s part of the complication, but then I believe sex is only funny when you’re risking doing it “wrong” — and it is best if it’s funny some of the time. Dead serious and entirely secret? We might as well sign up for Brave New World  industrial reproduction or efficient devices shipped in plain brown wrappers.

That said, now-a-days that 1971 behavior toward Mitchell is now viewed as belittling and a case-study in patriarchal attitudes in the “counter-culture.” Which it was. In the era’s defense I’ll say that the times were groping (should I revise that word?) toward an imperfect but different attitude toward sexual relationships. Just exactly what women would have to say about this wasn’t the first or second thing on the official list of speakers, alas.

It just so happens that Mitchell spoke up anyway, and mixed that with a kind of music which might have seemed just a bit odd or imperfect then, but now is seen as effective, important, and original.

And now it’s time to play Frank’s favorite history game. Folks are thinking about Joni Mitchell and 1971’s Blue  here in 2021, but what could we see if we rebound off that 1971 time and look back 50 years from then?

Millay-Mitchell

Well, they do tilt their berets the opposite way. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Joni Mitchell

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The poetry fans who are still with this post were wondering when I’d get to Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1921 Millay had broken out as a young poet to watch, partly by that “being on the scene” presence in New York City in the era around and just after WWI, and by famously losing a poetry contest with a poem that many (including the contest’s winner) thought was the best of the lot. That poem was then featured in her debut book-length collection, and now it was time for the “difficult second album.” She planned that second collection to be what was to eventually become her book: Second April,  a title that suggested that plan. But she was having trouble with her publisher, and eventually another collection came out ahead of it, just as the 1920’s began to roar: A Few Figs from Thistles.****   It’s a fair analogy: that book was Millay’s Blue. And like Mitchell’s Blue  people noticed the author’s public persona not just the poetry. Millay became the exemplar of “The New Woman” of the 1920s, who were sometimes finding patriarchal marriage a doubtful institution, and flaunting disregard for traditional arguments financial and domestic for that. Speaking openly about erotic feelings. Creating their own art rather than settling for standby muse duties.

I’m not sure if even an incomplete list of Millay’s lovers was known to a general poetry reading public 100 years ago, and one can’t quite imagine Poetry  magazine naming Millay “The Old Lady of 1921,” but the persona in A Few Figs from Thistles  gave us that adventurer in love character that makes Millay and Mitchell echoing artists. But the original edition was a thin volume, chapbook length, and from things I’ve read this week it seems that Millay worried that it wasn’t substantial enough while Second April’s  publication faced continued delays. A second version of A Few Figs from Thistles  was hurriedly planned and issued, and some of the additions were standout poems in the collection as we now know it, such as the one I use for today’s audio piece: “Recuerdo.”   Here’s a link to the full text of that poem if you’d like to follow along.

In her heyday of the 1920s Millay’s Modernist milieu and outlook wasn’t always reflected in her poetic diction. This may have helped her readership who were not yet used to, or appreciative of, free verse or other experiments in expression. Robert Frost or William Butler Yeats would also retain a poetry audience in this time with lovely metrical verse that expressed the modern condition, but Millay was (to my mind) not consistently as facile with metrical verse and more often fell back to fusty 19th century syntax and language,***** but she could also rise above those limitations. “Recuerdo” is an example of that. It has an effective refrain expressing two contradictory and relatable emotions: “tired” and “merry.” Those emotional words are contained solely within the refrain. The rest of the poem progresses in the Modernist/Imagist style: things and events are described out of order, and in a common Modernist trope in a mixture of tones and importance. How many love poems include a phrase like “smelled like a stable?” Yes, this is largely a love poem — why it even touches on the aubade formula of the pair’s night being interrupted by the dawn — but look again: love (or sexual desire) as a word or even as a direct description is not mentioned once! Yet many readers can sense and feel the limerence of erotic love all through the poem intensely. That is  there in this objective and fragmented depiction. Remarkable!

But that absence does allow for some ambiguity. Is there some level of inconsequential going-through-the-motions experience available in a reading of this poem? Or at least some sense of transience in the experience, which after all is framed by the title which means memory in Spanish? I think that’s accessible there too. Suppose I was to present this poem by inventing a frame that imagines it was written by two drug-addled addicts hooking up for one night and to say that that emotion word “merry” in the refrain has some archaic meanings that are congruent with “high.” Same words, different effect in that frame. Or if the same poem was written with a title like “How I Met your Father.”

We do have one clue to Millay’s intent. There is an extant recording of the author reading this poem, and though it’s not very dramatic, it hints at a bit of ironic distance on the events in the poem, a sense of noting the paradoxical koan of memorable inconsequence.

Perhaps I overthink things, but the last stanza with the donation of fruit to the older woman who responds with words of gratitude was rich in ambiguity to me as well. An act of Christian charity, mixed in Modernistically with other random events and sights? Seems likely, but if I’m traipsing around tired and tipsy with my night’s hot flame and somehow, someway we’re carrying two dozen minus two each of apples and pears, their value isn’t exactly gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Is the older woman’s “God bless you” a simple expression of thanks or an implied suggestion that maybe the two younger lovers might want to kick in some spare change, which they consequently provide? Given the push-pull of political radicalism and romance in Millay’s work, can we be sure she doesn’t intend to portray something of the limits of the gesture to the old woman?

How many are thinking then that I’m an unromantic old cynic who has misunderstood and harmed this poem? Is there another group that says I’m not straightforward in my social and political analysis of the situation? Well, my fate is to be doomed to be in both states alternately and sometimes at once. That’s why I like this poem.

One knock against Millay and other New Woman poets of her time once the peak of her fresh fame wore off was that she wrote love poems, not statements about the important, complex issues facing us. Fifty years later, one knock about Joni Mitchell was that she was writing songs about two little people who don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Both of those summary beliefs are incorrect — but then, what is it you are saying: love songs are simple?

Maybe for you. Not for all of us.

The player gadget to hear my performance of Edna St Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo”  will appear below for some of you. No player to be seen? Then this highlighted hyperlink will open a new tab window and play it. My music today isn’t very Joni Mitchell-ish (though later Mitchell, much past Blue,  was a bit into synths). The vocal turned out to be a “scratch track” I kept because it seemed usefully spontaneous, even though I omit a few words in the poem’s text inadvertently.

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*Dickinson wrote much of her work in the 1860s, and a small group of people knew of some of it though almost nothing was published in her lifetime. I speak here of the Dickinson that existed at the turn of the century after several volumes of her poetry with regularizing edits had been issued. Today she’s taught as one of the great American poets. Back when I was in school she was a charming slight oddity that seemed to fit in with some of the small, short poems the Imagists/Modernists produced in Millay’s time.

**Years ago I wrote a humor piece where I called this 1970’s trend “Singer Sewing-Machine” artists because so much of their ethos had airs of “back to the land/rent a house in Laurel Canyon/sew hippy blouses and embroidered patches on your jeans.”

*** “Old lady” and “Old man” as in “My old lady” were usages borrowed from what were the old-fashioned/outdated terms for wedded partners. Used in the more fluid arrangements by young people in the mid-20th century counter-culture they were supposed to be ironic statements of: partnership at least for now. Mitchell’s song on Blue “My Old Man”  is an encapsulation of that moment.

****Back when I first presented a poem from that collection that so many of you liked this spring,“First Fig,” I was unaware of the origin of that book’s title. I wonder if my father who memorized Millay’s short poem but also studied to become a Christian minister in the Millay era would have known that Millay’s book title is from Jesus’ words in Matthew.

*****Her admirers can parse this as a Modernist use of older “ready-mades” which are being modified in the context of her 20th century verse.

The River Merchant’s Wife, Another Letter

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

What if you were to find out that a famous, much-loved poem was not a singleton, but that it was instead part of a pair?

“The River Merchant’s Wife, A Letter”  is perhaps the most famous Chinese poem in English, and it’s been widely anthologized since Ezra Pound published it in his 1915 collection of translations Cathay.  It’s not hard to see why. It’s a lovely piece of free verse, and though it holds to the Modernist style of showing not telling its sentiments, most readers can easily divine the emotions of the young wife displayed in the poem, separated and longing for her partner.

Be patient with me, reader. I feel I must deal with a few peripheral issues with this poem, which I too admire, for as close as it is to many of its readers’ hearts, there are a few issues. While it’s reasonably frank in its Imagist way about a woman’s desire, one could look at it as an endorsement of patriarchal marriage, rather than a portrayal of two people at a particular moment of time.*  One could conclude that the woman’s agency in the poem is limited to the feelings her tale evokes in us.

If you, like I’m sure some readers here and elsewhere are, seeking art as a break from social issues, there is also a literary issue, one of the nature of translation. I would discuss even more things I happen to think about when I consider this famous poem, but to keep this post to a reasonable length, I’ll just speak to the translation controversy.

Pound wasn’t a Chinese scholar, didn’t speak the language, and didn’t have any knowledge in depth about the history or culture of that vast country. What he was instead was a poet who had what musicians call, and I’ll repeat with punning intent, “great chops.” Particularly at the time literary Modernism was getting underway in the early 20th century, he had a sense of how to pare things back, to express something vital minus a lot of useless extra baggage. Pound likely recognized a kindred spirit in Li Bai,**  the 8th century Chinese poet, and so thought it all right to speak for him in English.***  The poem he produced from Li Bai’s work is a loose translation, missing nuance that more informed scholars find in the original. There have been other attempts at better, or at least more accurate translations. None have produced as widely an effective poem.

But it was in looking at that this past week, while trying to better understand Li Bai’s work and intents, that I had a remarkable discovery. It was probably around midnight, when I should have been sleeping, reading a .PDF scan of a 1922 book of Li Bai translations by Shigeyoshi Obata.****  His translation of the poem Pound made famous is rendered as “Two Letters from Chang-Kan,” the first of which is Obata’s rendering of “The River Merchant’s Wife, a Letter.”   But, But But—what!   There’s another letter!  Did Li Bai intend this to be from another persona, another river merchant’s wife, or is it a second letter written by the same character? Either could make sense. The situation is the same, absent traveling merchant partner, young wife left at home. The speaker’s mood has similarities to the well-known poem too, but there are differences. In my reading of more Li Bai poetry this month I’ve come to believe that he works in subtle associations, subtle parallels, implied metaphors not necessarily made into explicit similes.

Partch-Li Bai-Pound

Harry Partch kicks out the jams, Li Bai considers the abyss, Ezra Pound looking like he’s ready to write yet another crank letter to the editor

 

In this poem, the speaker is a bit more angry with the situation and more wary. She’s not fallen out of love, no, but her expressions seem to mix frank longing for her missing partner, with suspicion that it might not be mutual. Was Li Bai contrasting two women, or expressing that the human heart can hold all those emotions at once?

I’m indebted to Obata for making this Li Bai poem known, and since I know of no other translations, I based my version I use today on his English language one—though I, like Pound but having only my own talents—took liberties. I wanted to tell a story that worked as a song, one that would pull the listener in and bring forward in both the text and performance the wider meaning of what is said by the river merchant’s wife in this purported letter. So, my version has a stronger if not strict meter, occasional rhymes, and I try to emphasize those parallels that serve as images that I think are part of Li Bai’s poetic sense-making. Parallelism, refrains, rhymes—these are all musical tactics that can work to bring some things to the foreground that were undercurrents in Obata’s version of Li Bai.

My performance of what I call “The River Merchant’s Wife, Another Letter”  is available with the player gadget below. As this is already a long and much-delayed post, I’m not including texts yet for this, but I hope the performance will work in its way.

 

 

 

 

*I’m sure some have written critiques on this basis, because there is matter there for this, including that the wife is a teenager (though the poem indicates the husband is roughly the same age.) I wonder if anyone has written that the husband’s absence is based on the needs of commerce, asking if this is a veiled attack on capitalism or a cultured acceptance of it?

**Li Bai is the now preferred way to write the poet’s name in western characters. Many works of Pound’s time use a different scheme to render the same poet’s name as Li Po. There are more variations too. Same guy. Confusing.

***Yes, one of the things I could talk about, instead of getting on to the pleasure of the resulting poetry, would be the cultural appropriation in that assumption. Big subject, worthy of a longer treatment.

****The Works of Li Po the Chinese poet done into English verse.  Obata was of Japanese heritage, but writes he had access to Chinese-speaking friends and other resources while studying at the University of Wisconsin. When he encounters Cathay  he realized Pound’s artistry, but also knew how loose Pound’s translations were, and how they missed certain cultural nuances. “I confess that it was Mr. Pound’s little book that exasperated me and at the same time awakened me to the realization of new possibilities so that I began seriously to do translations myself.” Despite reading both Arthur Waley and Pound’s Chinese translations as a young man, I had never heard of Obata, and there is little available in Internet searches to indicate he made any lasting impact—save for one thing: his translations have been used for settings of Li Bai poems by Constant Lambert and Harry Partch, which seems like remarkably rich company to the likes of me.