Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker’s “Portrait of the Artist”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Is Dorothy Parker a humorist or a poet? If choosing one, do we diminish the other? Wikipedia leads with the latter – which surprises me a little, because if you’d asked me in the midst of my literary engagements decades ago, I’d have replied the former. The poetic literary cannon doesn’t mind wit, but it downrates those suspected of making humor the main point of their work. And there’s the matter of how it was presented: Parker published in general periodicals (though at a time when they were still engaged more than now with literary poetry). Her collections are filled with short verses sharply focused on catching the busy glossy page-turner a century ago. Are they the poetry equivalent of a New Yorker cartoon – some insidery cultural memeability, yes – but not meant to be judged alongside fine art with substantial complexity?

What if we were to read her in translation, and she was a writer from a culture and times we were substantially distanced from? Imagine a poem like the one I’ll perform today not as a 1920’s American work by a writer whose lifetime overlapped my own, but as a fragment of Sappho or a poem taken from the pen-work of Li Po? Might we see something else?*

Here are some things I see looking at today’s poem this way as I worked to set it to music and perform it. The first is some awkward syntax, some of which could be “poetese,” that mangling of normal word order that is reaching for a sense that this is “special” speech cast in some archaic or fancified manner. In humorous verse this is often used as part of the joke: you were expecting some grand edifice of beauty and truth – dressed in this artificial, inflated manner – and instead you get a pratfall? Ha ha! This still works as a humor tactic, though its sharpness is dulled by the relative absence of literary poetry in our culture. Needing to reach the rhyme is part of the humorous charm of light verse – forced or outlandish rhymes are laugh points. Parker doesn’t go Ogden-Nash-hard on this here, but I smiled when the “rankles” and “ankles” chime goes off in the first verse.

An allied tactic is the use of some unusual words, another high-falutin stance that aims to make the pratfall funnier. I actually had to fix my recording of this. Having recently worked on Yeats famous apocalypse “The Second Coming,”  I actually sang “And gyre my wrists and ankles.” “Gyve” is to bind or tie, “gyre” is to move in a circle or spiral. I don’t know, maybe I was visualizing RFK Jr’s falcons besetting the poem’s speaker with fetters in their beaks and claws.**

Portrait of the Artist

Here’s a chord sheet for the song I made of Parker’s poem

.

Also noted when dealing with this poem: the situation set out in the poem is extreme, and taken literally it’s a portrait of bondage, exile, or imprisonment. If parts of this survived as a Sappho fragment, I can see this being decoded erotically. Scholarship and kink cross-over more often these days – and the poem’s imagery is specifically sensual – but don’t put that in your scholarly paper until you do further research.

And here’s the last, most important thing I noticed: I’ve been living this poem recently. First off, a sidelight on the manner in which I found Parker’s poem: I have been going through books and disposing of most of them. My wife is distressed by the number of books and recordings I’ve accumulated over my life. Little difference most sit shelved at the edges of rooms, they are clutter,  and she believes that the space could be used otherwise. At this point in my life, I can see this issue another way: I’m of an age that there’s no world enough and time to imagine going back and rereading or reading the majority of them. Books that I once treasured as reference materials are likely obsoleted by the Internet. For example, I’m torn about keeping my thick hardbound French to English dictionary which was a companion when I started translating French poetry years ago. I’m keeping most of my books of poetry, and some on music, as I intend to keep doing this Project. Novels and general non-fiction? To be carried away.***  Is it clutter? Among my small segment of humanity, I’m not alone in being comforted by books and music surrounding me, and the irrationality of there being more than I can consume in whatever time I have left as an aged person doesn’t change this, but having accumulated an overwhelming amount submerges some books. Going through my books I was surprised to find a 1930’s printing of Parker’s collected poems. I don’t remember buying it, though I did spend time and a dollar or two in any used bookstore that had a hardbound poetry section during my youth.

Last week I read through the first segment of Parker’s book, work that is now in the public domain, and it’s there I found “Portrait of the Artist.”  I’ve mentioned recently that my opportunities to create new work here has become constrained. I’ll spare you the logistical details, but in the early years of this Project I had the five workdays of the workweek to research, compose, and record. The hundreds of pieces I produced in the first half of the Parlando Project’s run say I used that time productively – but if I was to be honest, I’d report that there were days I just blew off, knowing that the next day would be just as good to start or complete some Parlando work.

Now? I can’t tell for certain when I can record, I just know there will be fewer hours available. My energy level as I age is lower, and my old body no longer finds itself able to sit in an upright office chair for hours at a time. I do more of my research and reading on a tablet, which however marvelous, is a poorer environment for complex work with its constrained single smaller screen. I’m still able to play my instruments when I can use my studio space, though I need more time there practicing or simply blowing off the stress of life with a plugged-in electric guitar moving air around me. There are some mornings when my wife, being helpful, will tell me I’ll be able to work on recording for a few hours that day. I’ll think: I don’t have any new poem-texts selected, or the basis of a musical setting ready to be realized, and my energy is low. What can I do (anything?) with that time? And if I can’t do anything, when will the next chance come?

Whine. Whine. What else is the Internet for – complaint and its opposite, the carefully curated presentation of one’s perfectly actualized life to be envied. In Apollonian distance I can clearly see that to have the opportunity and the wonderous technology to do creative work, is a historical exception of the first order.

But then artists, many of whom are toward the introverted side, are often like the one in Parker’s poem: always swearing they wish they had the solitude and freedom from the distractions of life. And then the poet faces the blank page, the composer the silence in the room, their muse taunts them “What’ya got?” and the artist mumbles “That’s your job,” knowing that there’s really no one else in the room, just as they wanted.

There are lots of things in life that are temptations for self-pity or abuse. Sometimes the de profundis answer is “Ha ha.” That doesn’t mean it isn’t serious. The consequences for this troubled encounter with the chance to be creative, and perhaps to come up dry, have killed and crippled.

Simeon the Stylite 600

Simeon the Stylite has figured out how to get some work done without Robert Benchley, FPA, George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, et al.

.

All this feeds into the choices I made in the musical performance of Parker’s poem. I treated it no differently than I would have a “serious” literary poem by Parker’s contemporaries Elinor Wylie or Sara Teasdale, though I believe there are a couple of times I’m subtly winking as the singer seeks the situation of a desert-steeple mendicant. The fool is funny – still is when the situation is serious. This is often the lonely place of business for creativity: weighted on commercial and logical scales, it’s absurd that we do it – even, or especially, alone in that room with silences and tabla rasa.

You can hear this performance of Dorothy Parker’s “Portrait of the Artist”  with the audio player gadget below. What, is any such gadget gyved up somewhere? Well then, I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*We can prosecute mootings on more recent American authors too. I’ve recently written here on the difficulties in deciding how often Emily Dickinson means to make a humorous/satiric point in her poems vs. how often she’s an earnest transported romantic. A mixture? Likely, but what are the proportions? What are we missing if we miss the joke?

**Ah, the powers of overdubbing. I fixed that word-mistake ex-post-facto.

***I’m fond of the term “Death Cleaning” for this process. Time’s winged chariot is heading for Goodwill. While I’m blessed to be healthy for my age, I can no longer fool myself into thinking that someday I’ll get around to this, and that…and that, and that.

Distance Blues (Theory)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s another woman writing very compressed verse about life and love around a hundred years ago, during that last decade we called “The Twenties.” She’s Dorothy Parker, and you’ll often find her work filed under “humorist.” As I said a few years ago when first talking here about Parker, I suspect that classification tended to prevent her work being discussed as poetry.

Young Dorothy Parker

Let me extend Charles Mingus: If Dorothy Parker was a gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of dead serious romantic poets

.

That label, used to set humor aside from “important work,” like the idea that verse sung with music is unlikely to be real poetry, seems not just needlessly exclusionary, but ahistorical. The western classical canon didn’t make this distinction when the verse was in Greek or Latin. Maybe translation slows down the appreciation of the jokes in Catullus for example? Perhaps Parker’s real fault (other than being a woman who wasn’t publishing in poetry journals in this era) was in being seen as “only” a humorist, and one that tended to write, like several other popular female poets of her time, about the abundant absurdities in human romantic relationships.*

This April I finished my several-year serial-performance of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,”  a poem that wants to, indeed its innovative design is to, talk about a wide variety of things. Its middle part, like our middle parts, is very concerned with just such human miss-connections — but for good or ill that section is surrounded by an elaborate series of scenes time-adrift and spiritual that wear the mask of tragedy and religious/academic vestments. Does Eliot ever make you laugh at the absurdities? Well, there are a few sly jokes in it — but more in contrast, “The Waste Land”  is long, it’s elaborate, and for me it remains powerful assuming you can accept the way Eliot sung his suite of songs printed silent on paper. Is elaboration the superior art? You tell me. I think it has its powers, as does concision. Are we less likely to be moved or changed by laughter or tears? Again, you tell me, I don’t know.

Where is it that Parker fails if we are not to consider her short pieces, printed in glossy magazines as witty amusements, as actual poetry? Are her observations merely trite, just a chuckle the first time we hear them, and unrewarding beyond that? Does humor outdate faster than solemn meditations?

I’ll sing a couple, and you decide. Today’s audio piece is an old recording where I combined two Parker poems, “Distance”  and “Theory,”  with a bit of acoustic guitar blues feeling. Combining short pieces is a tactic taken by several of the Modernists of Parker’s era:** the idea is that short, epigrammatic poems can gain power if presented as a facet in a collection of other short verses. The player gadget will appear below for some of you, and if you don’t see it, this highlighted hyperlink will open a new tab or window to allow you to hear it.

.

*Parker also ridicules patriarchal attitudes, which might have been minimized as mere jokes without consequence to assuage male privilege, but she’s also rough on some female-gendered behavior. This can be read by some as both-sides-ism, but maybe there’s also a reading that says it’s a more essential, radical critic of gender.

**I’ve been thinking about that tactic, used by poets Wallace Stevens, Alfred Kreymborg, Edgar Lee Masters, and others in the early Modernist era, and just now I recognized that the common practice of Blues singers of combining as series of floating or not directly related Blues verses has at least surface similarity. Perhaps this subconsciously led me to combining two Parker poems in my bluesy singing of them — but it could also be for a practical reason, one that may have obtained for some of the Blues singers: it made a piece out of shorter material that reaches a longer, desired length.

Looking for a Way to Go

~ Frank Hudson ~ 6 Comments

The year 2018 marches on, as we pass onward past Thanksgiving toward December. I’m quite thankful for the opportunity to continue this project. Time-consuming though it is to do these pieces, it also continues to fascinate me and (one hopes) it also continues to surprise and entertain you. For me there’s considerable enjoyment in trying out or finding out something new, thinking about something, or playing something, different.

Another blog that gives me those pleasures is My Year in 1918,  where its author has been immersing herself in the publications of that epochal year. Her recent thankfulness post looked at some 1918-era people she has run into on that nearly year-long project. As Thomas Hardy put it in his poem of this era, it was a time of the breaking of nations, but as Mary Grace McGeehan looks over her year of 1918, she highlights a few that were mending and mitigating.

Though they may no longer be as well-known, some of McGeehan’s list you and I might recognize: W. E. B. Du Bois, Jane Adams. Others, such as women’s suffrage activist Anna Kelton Wiley and bra designer Mary Phelps Jacob were unknown to me. Three writers get a nod, all three wrote poetry: Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams and Dorothy Parker.

Dorothy Parker 1924

That plant looks like it could use a little water. Dorothy Parker at home in 1924.

 

Amy Lowell is a literary force I need to address sometime in my own project, though I’ve yet to absorb anything of her poetry. Though I overlooked Williams in my youth, he’s grown on me throughout this project as his public domain, pre-1923, work explores the lyric impulse with eyes whose perspective has been expanded by the Modernist explosion. The third, Parker, is a double surprise. I can see where My Year in 1918’s McGeehan will encounter her, as Parker was writing for magazines (one of My Year in 1918’s chief sources of material), but she’s not some inescapable pantheon writer. And though later in life she became a committed social activist, particularly in regard to African-American civil rights, her WWI self had yet to develop in this regard. But she’s a, a—oh, the never-immortal shame, the art that dare not speak its name—a humorist.

Algonquin Round Table

Parker with the Algonquin Round Table group of wits. We don’t know if they’re having lunch with those drinks, but it’s something of a sausage fest anyway.  I haven’t seen a caption naming those present, proof that humorists don’t make the pantheon. Besides Parker on the lower right, I think it’s Alexander Woollcott 2nd from left in the upper row, but I’m drawing a blank on the rest.

 

Humorists, whatever their skill and craft, tend to damage their reputations as literary figures. We like our literary titans dour and serious for the most part. They can scatter a little wit around for decoration or as weaponry, but to be celebrated for their merit—even if that’s all we end up really noting about them, their worthy merit—you need to rise above that. The assumption seems to be: if the point is to make you laugh, the point is ephemeral.

We think too little of humorists as agents of social change, or as participants in the Modernist artistic revolution of the early 20th Century. We do this even after Dada, even after Mark Twain’s now-recognized status as another American who broke Modernist ground before the 20th century.

To take Dorothy Parker seriously (not solemnly) you need to start by acknowledging that she’s fighting with two hands tied behind her back: she’s a woman before women were considered capable of human complexity, and she wants you to laugh at our folly. Parker survives at times wielding dark, survivors’ humor, the sensibility that remembers her poem “Resumé,”  a meme in verse about suicide. She might step on a few toes while doing that, and she’ll laugh about it.

Alternate voice here, Dave Moore, has appreciated Dorothy Parker for some time. Several years back the LYL Band covered Alan Moore’s “Me and Dorothy Parker,”  and here today is the LYL Band doing a Dave Moore original that expands on Parker’s observations on suicide in his own words.

Parker ended “Resumé”  with the punch-line “You might as well live.” I’d add, you might as well create art. After all, even in the worst-case, you’re only burning part of your life-time while struggling with joy and it’s opposite. If there’s no hope, you might as well hope.

Thanks again for reading and listening. Thanks to spreading the word about the Parlando Project. In the Internet world of millions of likes and shares, we’re a small thing, but I’m grateful for you helping keep this little thing going. The player for the LYL Band’s performance of Dave Moore’s “Looking for a Way to Go”  is below.