dreams

Love Addict Blues

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

This week is the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Parlando Project. While I had completed some of the early musical pieces and even did a couple of test blog posts before summer 2016, I chose August 6th as the official start date because it’s the anniversary of my late wife’s, Renée Robbins, death.

I’ll talk more about the Project, and my life since those two events in upcoming posts, but today’s post is about my life-partner and the unlucky turn that made that so only for a little more than 20 years. To young people, I’d expect 20 years to seem a long time. To old folks like me, the same 20 years seems less – but then too this post won’t be nearly long enough to memorialize Renée. To some degree this whole Project is a memorial to the dreams of poets and poetry, music and musicians, that surrounded two young people who fell in love in that unloved and less-remembered decade, The Seventies. Dreams of my youth? Yes – and that would be a shared youth with Renée. It’s also wider than that: I’ve long harbored a romantic belief: that the dreams of the dead continue to exist out there somewhere, and we can call on, call in, those flickering things.

I met Renée in a writer’s group, specifically not the Lake Street Writer’s Group that I participated in until half the remaining members died within a few months of each other five years ago. At the time I was frustrated with the LSWG founder-poet-editor’s insistence on tamping down expression around eroticism. That fine man, Kevin FitzPatrick, wanted a big tent working-class literature and poetry, and his fear was that explicit sex and gender passages in our Lake Street Review little magazine would be problematic for a wide audience in the mid-1970s. I on the other hand looked at my pig-in-the-python generation and saw them embroiled in an entire barnyard of working out those things.

In protest, for a couple of years I decamped to another group of young writers, and one of them was Renée. She’d studied with a poet and writing professor Philip Dacey (and taken literature classes with poet-humorist Howard Mohr) in college, had published a few poems, and I was immediately impressed with her sense of humor.*  The range of human erotic turn-ons is astonishingly wide-ranging, but for me, a primary one is an alluring sense that someone might laugh in bed, and Renee had those vibes. We fell into a passionate and complicated relationship. The next couple of years would deserve at least two lengthy and unwritten chapters I won’t be asking you to read today. One of those chapters would describe that she was involved with someone who presented himself as a musician. He wasn’t, but the chancer was a bit of a con artist. This one still puzzles me – the Renée I knew was a savvy judge of character, and that blind spot may have been a folie de la jeunesse thing.**

We moved in together in 1979. Ten years later we married, with intent, on April Fool’s Day. 11 years later, she was dying of pancreatic cancer, diagnosed only a few months earlier. I’m an old man, remembering that partnership as a young man. Those 20 plus years we had together therefore seem alternately long and short, flashing as to recall moments when it seemed as long as any forever, and then the retrospective surety of knowing it wouldn’t be as long as we thought then.

Renee at Powerderhorn

Renée in Powderhorn Park, about the time we moved in together.

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Long and brief as what I wrote above is, I wanted to write this to present today’s musical piece. Its genesis was earlier this year when I was doing some old man “Death Cleaning,” the getting rid of stuff so others won’t have to do that work when I die. It was a page found in with Renée’s saved stuff from her youth, some of it going back to her college years before I met her – stuff that her short, brutal, illness never allowed her to clean out. I can’t say exactly when it was written – and if it was written “from life,” who is the lover in the situation it describes.

It looks like an intended song lyric, and although Renée was a competent basic pianist, she never practiced that skill nor (as far as I know) set anything to music. She was a fan of several Seventies singer-songwriters however. Did she intend it as a song, or was it a “literary ballad” from her youthful poet self that was meant to refer to popular music, but on a silent literary page?

Love Addict Blues lyrics

Lyrics for today’s song. I didn’t write out a chord sheet, but the recording is a two-chord vamp between D minor and C, though there’s some variations in both chords.

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The ambiguity in the situation described is hard to summarize. Lyrics may exaggerate love situations with extravagant metaphors not meant to be taken literally, but the references in the lyric to depression and “you’re making me sick” convince me that that love addiction it portrays isn’t just a playful trope. Later in her life, after Renée had gotten her Masters in Counseling Psychology, she worked as a professional counselor in a gambling addiction program. At least once when a client wondered what she knew about addiction, she would gesture toward her overweight body and say “Well, I show my addiction externally, for anyone to see. Let’s talk about your hidden one.”

The page I found titled “Love Addict Blues”  was from a younger version of herself. Would its youthful expression have embarrassed the older Renée? I could see it either way, but I’m now the living one, and like those floating dreams, I chose to see it as a surviving artifact of this woman I loved. And so, earlier this summer, I made an effort to set her “Love Addict Blues”  to music. Though her words aren’t in the classic 3-line stanza/12-bar-verse blues structure, I aimed for an electric blues feel, something vaguely in the BB King area. Early summer wasn’t giving me a lot of chances to play electric guitar though, and the page of her lyrics with my chords sat in my WIP stack, un-played.

Then, at the end of July, I was listening to a new song on the radio by Joyce & Tutty Moreno, modern Brazilian samba masters. I suddenly remembered one of Renée’s favorite LPs – not a singer-songwriter exactly, but instead Flora Purim, another Brazilian singer-composer who is usually filed under Jazz-Fusion genre-wise. I don’t have the chops to cop what Purim can do, not even close, but I immediately went about getting a Latin Jazz percussion module for my drum software so I could try for that feel, only with a much less animated and virtuosic vocalist like myself. This style would usually call for nylon string guitar, but the opposite problem prevented me from recording that – there would be too much environmental noise jumping into the sensitive mic. I made do with recording my fretless electric bass plugged directly into my recording software with the fresh percussion sounds arrayed in a basic syncopated groove, and finally a MIDI virtual-instrument-sound sampled piano to outline a simple two-chord harmony. But if there was noise about, how would I record the vocal? I used an Electro-Voice RE20 microphone. This mic is something of a rare bird: it’s a dynamic microphone, but it’s designed to not have as much “proximity effect” as other dynamic microphones.*** This means I can work right next to the microphone’s grill and greatly reduce any unwanted environmental sounds. You might notice that the resulting recording has audible breaths. Normally I’d address the RE20 slightly off axis to prevent that – and there’s even modern post-facto software that does a good job of removing breath sounds – but I was imprinted in my youth on Astrud Giberto’s breathy and intimate Bosa Nova vocals, and the breathy sound today is intentional.

You can hear my performance of Renée Robbins’ “Love Addict Blues”  with the audio player below. If you are grieving over audio player unleaving, Márgarét (or anyone else) can use this highlighted link to open a new browser leaf – ah, tab – that will have an audio player that isn’t viewable on this main page because some ways of reading this blog won’t display such a thing.

 

 

 

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*One of Renée’s party tricks: she could recite the entire 15 minutes plus of The Firesign Theater’s “The Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye”  from memory. And yeah, Old Possum, she do the voices too.

**Or it could have been part of Renée’s kindness and generosity, the other facet of her fierce understanding of the tricks and deceptions of the less than kind. I mentioned this to my living wife, telling her I was worried that including it might be seen as disrespectful to Renée.

“Well, she was generous enough to see the worth in both of us” she offered.

***Dynamic microphones are by their nature less sensitive to short, quiet, subtle sounds, and so are generally less than ideal for recording quieter acoustic instruments or vocalists with quieter voices and attractive upper-range timbral elements. My rough-hewn voice has less attractive upper level detail, so no great loss – and the RE20 preserves that detail better than other dynamics mics. Other popular “Cardioid Dynamic Microphones” – used nearly universally for club-stage-stadium vocalists – boost the lower range on the vocals being picked up from them when the mic is very near to the singer’s mouth. That’s the “proximity effect”, an artificial deepening. While that’s sometimes attractive, and can even give the impression of added power, it isn’t something I usually want in my recordings.

I often recommend the Electro-Voice RE20 to people that want to record vocals in untreated or less-than-ideal rooms. I also find it good to try when recording lead vocalists with a live band playing together in a room. Price-wise, this guy who started recording with Radio Shack microphones would still call the RE20 expensive, but in the great “professional” scheme of things it’s a mid-low-priced mic.

Paul Éluard’s “The Life” and behind the veil of translation

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I’m starting on one of my New Year’s Resolutions early: to spend more time presenting fresh translations here. I expect a sizeable portion of them will be from French. Today’s piece, from the poet Paul Éluard, will be one example. Since there will be others, I’m going to start today with an aside about the translator’s tasks and my tactics and credentials for doing them, before we get to today’s combination of poetry and music.

I am not a native French speaker, nor do I have great facility with that language. Growing up in a little Iowa town, I had the luck to be able to take French at our small community high school, and later attempted to study it in college. French was Hobson’s choice for any foreign language classes at my small high school, but I welcomed that particular chance. In at least one previous post I’ve mentioned some of my accidental connections to the French language, but let me summarize them for newcomers. I first encountered French during my father and his brother Bill’s fishing trips to Ontario Canada, where I, a grade-school aged kid, was amazed to find the labels on many boxes and cans were bilingual, French and English. Around the same time my beloved Auntie Red, found herself and her young family stationed in France when her military husband was restationed there. Back stateside, she would amaze me by reeling off French phrases still retaining elements of her Southern US accent. That there was such a thing, an entire other language to describe the world, presumably as rich as English, seemed marvelous.

My academic career with French was none-the-less fraught – both in high school and college. Much of the work was based on getting conversational mastery, and I was terrible at it. I have something (I’ve always suspected neurological) that frustrates me with vocal mimesis. It’s likely part of the reason I struggle with singing. Helpful correction of the “no, it’s pronounced like this” kind only made me seem stupid or uncooperative, because my second and further attempts would still be way off in trying to make the right mouth sounds. Though my academic career was eventually stunted anyway, I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I had lucked into a class based on silently reading and appreciating literature in another language.

But that wasn’t on offer, or affordable, to me. So, in my 20s, largely out of school, I started to translate French poetry. This was a laborious process. I would page through a French to English dictionary for all but the most common words. I still retained a smattering of knowledge of French syntactical and grammar practices back then, and putting the two together I was able to produce a handful of translations. One that survived from this work was my translation of Paul Éluard’s “L’Amoureuse”  which was presented here some years back.

My activity then, and my activity now, might occasion questions, ones I don’t know that I have a good answer for. Should I be doing this? Wouldn’t it be better if someone fluent in both English and French did any such literary translation? Isn’t the answer the that last question obvious?

My answers (then and now) would be: some of these poems don’t seem to have English translations I have access too, and even if translations exist, isn’t an attempt to do my own translation just another variant of doing one’s own “deep reading” of a poem? If for example, Helen Vendler has written an essay on what she found in a poem, does that mean I shouldn’t look at the poem myself and ask what all is in there – not because I think of myself as more learned or insightful than Vendler, but more at because I’m another human consciousness engaging with the consciousness of the poet.

What gave me such audacity, with so small a mastery of French, to do this? Well, I wanted to – enough for a stubborn young man. Now as an older man, still translating without mastery in the source language, I also tell myself that I did (and do) self-consider myself a poet, a chooser of words, focuser of images, composer of word-music. Part of the task of translation is to do the primary work of literal translation, but to produce the full pleasure to the reader of poetry, the poetic work is at least as important. Decades ago, I read that Ezra Pound used only someone else’s English glosses of Li Bai to create his landmark Cathay  collection. Eventually I became aware that Pound’s Chinese translations were not very accurate depictions of Li Bai – and since learning that as a young man I’ve sometimes “checked” translations of poems to see how varied the translator’s version may be from some literal word for word, or from other translators’ versions. I was too uncertain of my own translations to think I was doing better work, but what I read as taking liberties bothered the younger me. Are translators like Pound “cheating” by not serving the original poet faithfully? These resulting English poems (I would say of Pound’s Li Bai) were as much or more the translator’s poem as the source author’s.

But what if I publish my translations? There are what I call “guild concerns” there. In the same way that I worry that my naïve musical compositions and make-do musical skills are, in their small way, part of a flood in the musical culture that reduces the shrinking opportunities for “real musicians” and trained composers, am I doing the same for translators with better knowledge and cultural grounding? Back to Pound: his work out-shadowed other translators who knew Chinese, and I’ve featured here a contemporary of Pound, Shigeyoshi Obata, whose Li Bai translations are largely unknown.

As a guild concern for people who depend, or wish to depend, on income from their art, this can be considered an existential issue, and I wish them no harm. Yet they may think: no matter, you are  harming us. And now there’s another monster in the forest that they might view me as riding in on: computer-based artificial intelligence.

Since my early thumb-worn French-English dictionary forays, computer translations have become quite facile. An instant’s click will produce a literal gloss on one’s screen of a poem such as today’s selection. Let me stipulate to all, and to those that fear and dislike AI, these instant computer glosses are not good poetry.*   I will click for them, but I will still spend time with dictionaries. What are the various contexts of a word? Which choice in English brings the most to the poem?**

Herein lies one problem. I’m trying to read the source author’s mind, and that will bring in my own mind, experiences, and knowledge to filter that process. This part of translation is unavoidable for causing both errors and accuracy! As I’ve grown older, I now often understand those “cheaters” as other blind ones assessing the elephant of the poem. If, as Frost had it, poetry is what is lost in translation, then a translator’s job is to reclothe the poem’s bones in English poetry, using modern English poetic expression. Doing this has limits, dangers: readers may like their foreign poetry to sound, well, foreign, with an exotic awkwardness – and having ancient poets sound like your contemporaries at a local poetry reading risks unintentional humor.

So, here we go: an early poem by French Surrealist Paul Éluard, “La Vie.”   I start with a machine translation.

Life x2

The 1926 poem in its original French, and a computer translation

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The syntax comes out somewhat scrambled or hard to follow. As a prime Surrealist, one that knew and went through the Dada predecessors to Surrealism, this is likely there in Éluard’s original French I think. My first questions are what are the images: what does the author want me to see, or otherwise sensually appreciate? This can be hard with Surrealist poetry or the like: they often seek strangeness or even nonsense in images. All good imagery works with some degree of mystery or novelty, anything less risks cliché. Even one of those images that you read and think “I’ve never seen it like that before, but once I’ve read this, I’ll always think of this comparison” has to surprise you, cause you to take the leap of likeness. Surrealism says you need to outright react that’s impossible or outrageous to fully free and implement the imagination. So, my primary task is difficult with Surrealist poetry – they may want to be impossible or impenetrable, yet I still try to make the images clear, and this may be subject to mistakes. It’s also possible that in psychoanalyzing the poem that I may be putting things in there that the conscious intent of the original poet didn’t intend. ***

Examining the gloss, I think Éluard is describing a woman whose consciousness is either in a dream state mimicking waking life or living her waking day informed by, or as if, in a dream state. I think the image wants that ambiguity, to have it both ways. Either way, the people and things she meets are like strangers who have been hiding and she has found them for the first time.

The Life tranlated by Frank Hudson

My translation, used in today’s short musical performance

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I take the liberty while translating this image in giving double meanings to some words, using more than one English word to stand for a single French word. I’m doing what “rescaling” a lower resolution digital image does, I intersperse additional pixels/words to bring the image out. “Neu” is rendered “naked” and “new;” “fraiche” becomes both “cool” and “fresh.” This is a judgement call, and my choice may be wrong. In making those word choices, using a French dictionary with multiple meanings and usage examples of the word used in context remains useful. Another thought, that AI will miss, but bears considering: the author may have intended a pun or other wordplay .

The final two lines gave me a word-music chance to put a rhyme in to tie things up, what with “gaze” and “sways.” I was so pleased how that worked out that I overlooked one word, a mere possessive pronoun, “ses.” I’m enough of an idiot regarding French usage that I can’t be sure if it’s a male pronoun such as “his” or a general pronoun, a “he/her/it” equivalent. Who’s gaze is it? The woman in the poem? The poet, the male Éluard? Something else, life or imagination?

In my ignorance, and as an admitted failure of craft, I just put down “her,” because at the time I finalized my translation my focus had moved from the word-for-word elements to what is the vivid image; and I thought, this woman that Éluard is admiring in the poem, living the Surrealist outlook, is confident in her own gaze as she sways in either the intoxication of fresh experience or the artistic refinement of dancing her day forward, and so I wrote in my translation “her.” I thought the poem is about the woman – even should be about the woman in the conclusion if I was writing it – but Éluard might have chosen to end it with his gaze evaluating the woman’s experience: I’m the artist, they’re just “life.”

So unintentionally a feminist recasting of the poem? Surrealism does have a problem there: open to women as muses, yet not as open as it should have been in allowing them to be concrete artists themselves. Shades of Éluard and Breton, may I call my ignorant choice a “Freudian slip?”

Today’s music? This was a little exercise on my part using a depiction of a couple of chord progressions from a Joe Pass performance as the basis for the music. Pass was a great Jazz guitarist – but for external practicalities, once more there’s no guitar in this version at all! Dada composition! You can hear my musical performance of Paul Éluard’s “The Life”  with the audio player gadget below. No player visible? Not a mistake or slip, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog won’t translate into showing the player. If so, here’s a highlighted link that will open a new tab with an audio player.

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*They don’t generate good literary prose either – producing as they do some estimate of the most probable word to be used, not the one chosen by another human’s consciousness that may not be the most common one-for-one. Moreover, with poetry the word-music issue is ignored by the AI translations, and poetry is musical speech. I generally don’t do rhyming accentual-syllabic translations, the cause of many an “inaccurate” translation, but I want the resulting translated poem to sound like poetry in modern English.

**These choices are a reason I highly recommend translation as training for poets. I don’t believe I undervalue topic, message, or prose-level-meaning in poetry, but many poets are stuck in finding the best combination of what they want to say with how it’s said. While I acknowledge the real issues with AI, for a monolingual, working with a literal/prose gloss of another poet lets one develop those selection-skills of the right word, right order, right connection, while one-step-away from their own experience and desired message.

***This may be proper since Andre Breton, another founding Surrealist, thought Sigmund Freud was on to something crucial with his recent theories and psychoanalysis. That Breton may be wrong about Freud or that Freud may be wrong about how the layers of consciousness and personality work only reinforces my stipulation that this outside consideration of the poet’s fellow consciousness is necessary for accuracy and errors.

Langston’s Blues (Dreams)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Some of you made it through my summarization of the musical career of the Cats and the Fiddle Jazz combo this week, but even though I was writing about music, we didn’t add much poetry there. One little thing I found out since I wrote that summary: that eBay matchbook collector item should have tipped me off about the site of one of those young Chicago kids’ gigs — a way stop on a trip to Hollywood to try breaking into the movies. It wasn’t at the “Airplane Café Club” as Marv Goldberg had it from his research, but the “Aeroplane  Café. I’ve found a postcard. Looks pretty swanky. I wonder how the Cats act went down there in 1936 — did the Denver white swing kids dig their act? Four or five years later I’d give our band of audacious teenagers better odds on that.

Well, however they were received, they were young, they had dreams of a career ahead of them.

Aeroplane Cafe

Looking at what musical acts were playing Denver at this club and elsewhere during the ‘30s, it was mostly white bands for dancing. Black bands started appearing on the bills in the ‘40s. My research said the Aeroplane Cafe lasted until the ‘80s, hosting in its last years rockabilly bands.

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So, let’s combine some literary poetry with music, Parlando style today. The words are by Langston Hughes, one of the first poets to recognize that Blues and Jazz were poetic, suitable for praise in poems, suitable to combine with Jazz words he’d contribute. When the young Hughes wrote today’s words for publication, he called the short poem “Dreams.”   I heard it as a kind of Blues, a Blues with a sorrowful side, but with an admonishment to endure. If some reading this are having a February of backlash and disappointment tempting despair, this is after all Black History Month. Afro-American poet Hughes knew that dreams may well be knocked down, ignored, belittled. Yes, I know the word “woke” is a word in present contention. I find it odd it is used by those who smirk and dismiss the word as they speak it, aiming it toward those who know very well the reasons that dreams are extinguished.

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

I’m looking at a bare and snowy landscape out my window this evening. I rode to breakfast in 10 degrees with a cold wind this morning. I read the newspaper when I got to the cafe, because I’m a man who still spills eggs and hot sauce on the news in the morning. None of the news was good.

I spent my last couple of days making the musical piece work as well as I could make it, tickling an old guitar that I played when I was young, playing piano the way I can: a finger or two on the keys, tracking the left and right hand parts separately to disguise my ham-handedness — because music may find a way. I sang Langston Hughes’ words quietly, mouth up near the microphone. I had to, it was near midnight when I sang them, and my family was asleep and I want them to keep their dreams.

I want you too to keep the sweeter of your dreams. Waking right now can script all the nightmares and anxiety dreams that need no help. When the best mysteries come under the eyelids, ones almost too good to remember, I want you to keep them, even just the sense of them.

The audio player to hear my adaptation of Hughes’ poem I call “Langston’s Blues”  can be heard with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? It’s off dreaming, but you can also use this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

I’m planning to return in a few days with more on why I wanted to work at figuring out all I could about that young Jazz combo of the 1930s and ‘40s.

Libertad! Igualdad! Fraternidad!

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

We’re going to have some William Carlos Williams poetry turned into a song below. If you’ve missed that sort of thing from me, I’ve returned with time to focus on what we do here.*

I think I’ve already mentioned that I’m disappointed in my country and its follies this past year after the national election. I could take your time and patience with some personal punditry on where to apportion blame for this. The electorate? The winning vassal party and it’s red duchies? The oligarchs and emperors ever-richer and more protective of prerogatives? And then too, the losing party, who gets apportioned blame for everything else on the list as well as bearing the sting of defeat?

I’m not going to do that. A complete list opens up the vulnerability of adding one’s own self to the blame. While many personalities have strong defenses against that self-indictment, I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. By now, if you wanted any variety of that, you’ve already had your fill. Rather, if you’re on the side that lost, you might feel left alone. As we approach the new regency in a matter of hours, let me repeat something I said after the election: we can, we should, forgive ourselves for hope. It is a right-sure prediction that we’re going to need more not less hope in the next few years.

As we approach the new regency in a matter of hours, let me also repeat something I said after the election: we can, we should, forgive ourselves for hope. It is a right-sure prediction that we’re going to need more not less hope in the next few years.

Further in that feeling alone — except for the exchange of blame and shame — I’m not thinking this group are presently at risk of being visited by reporters seeking to understand their sorrow, fear, disappointment, despair. They’ve had over 60 days to file those “I must understand them” stories, but there’s a general silence on that front. Perhaps there will be some stories of the manifestations to come of what some of us fear — though if the worst fears come, those could be harder to find, and stories after injury may be less efficacious than the now-impossible to file stories that could have come beforehand.

Libertad!

I urge folks to sing these Parlando songs themselves, so here’s a chord sheet for today’s piece. Some will likely do a better job than I do, and additional voices strengthen a song.

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So, I was happy to find, write music for, and sing this short William Carlos Williams poem this winter, even though it was written back in the last decade called The Twenties. I too feel forced into the mud, and so much now depends on the stink of the ash-cart rolling toward us. You can hear it with the graphical audio player gadget that should appear below. No player? No editor looking over his shoulder at their owner-baron has spiked it. No algorithm has ruled against it in court. The audio gadget has always been impartially suppressed by some ways to view this blog — but you can use this highlighted link to open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*This isn’t the first holiday season that has caused a drop in new pieces or posts, but I’ve spent a good deal of time in this cold bilaterally looking January shopping for a replacement for my 20-year-old car. I had previously figured I’d wait until that car had reached its full majority this upcoming fall to shop for a replacement, but like some others I played the odds that new tariff taxes and repercussions would raise prices.

A Sonnet of Two Letters

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

It happens to us alone, but it happens to so many it’s a trope we share. It goes like this: you have one of those bad dreams. Something terrible has gone wrong — and you, inside the dream, feeling it is real, try to fix it — but you can’t because the other people in the dream are oblivious to the terrible and are acting stubbornly in odd, irrational ways. While dreaming you’re trapped in this desperately unsolvable situation only you can clearly see and try to act rationally on, running in place, thinking in circles.

I had one of those dreams this week: felt so real, so heart-wrenching. Then the dawn comes, and you realize that experience was a dream — oh, that’s why you couldn’t fix it, that’s why everyone else in the dream was acting so wrongly!

OK, exiting satire mode, but let’s stay strange.

Early this Fall I was cleaning out something: a box, a drawer, a binder, a little used bag, I can’t remember exactly what. But in it was a clutch of papers. I glanced at the pages and recognized it was a mix of things: some works-in-progress looking for first reads from the old group of poets I used to meet with every month, and some initial drafts of a longer, multipart poem I was writing as my mother was going through her last hospitalization, the one from which she would ask to return to the home I grew up in with my father and sisters in order that she could die there. I set those sheets of paper aside.*  I figured I’d look them over later, maybe digitally scan them, or put them in my filing cabinet. At that later I’d also look to see if there were any drafts in the small stack that were unfinished pieces I could revisit.

Now here it is, we’re November and I finally got around to that sort-out. One of the pages was a college-ruled notebook sheet with a complete intermittent draft of an irregular (American) sonnet. What was this? While I remember well working on the longer poem around my mother’s last illness 20-some years ago, I had no memory of working on this sonnet. Complete blank. Moreover, the sonnet seemed to speak of someone’s story that I didn’t recognize as mine — nor anyone else’s I could recall either.** With the time-interval between discovery of the papers and my finally going over them, I can’t even be sure if this sonnet was found among the stuff from the time of my mother’s death or not. Trying to determine why I didn’t remember it, I wondered if it was even older. I recalled that scholars date Emily Dickinson manuscripts by looking at the changes in her handwriting over time, so I tried that assay. Looked to me more like my 20th century handwriting, so the poem could be older. Still, it was my handwriting, testifying I, however unremembering, wrote this poem — and “What was it about?” That intrigued me. The poem asks the reader to work obliquely, details are supplied but not all the details, something that can tantalize.

A Sonnet of Two Letters

The gardening stake metaphor used in the final section reminds the 2024-me of Robert Frosts “Pea Brush,”  a poem I didn’t know when the me I was back then wrote it

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Why did the voice in the poem not mail their first letter? What was it about the recipient’s husband that was germane to that decision? Was there an affair or appearance of one? Clearer to me was the latter part, the stuff of the second letter, a recalling of youthful aspirations and a friend who by what they said helped make them more substantial than pretensions. What an interesting yoking, I thought. The imperfect, the not said, or the thing whose saying we keep hidden — combined with the things that were said that help us realize our lives.

As you might tell from the previous paragraph, I was experiencing this poem just as I would the general run of Parlando Project poems, ones written by others in a project which has as one of its mottos “Other People’s Stories.” Its mystery and ambiguity captivated me, and so I set about making it into a Parlando song.

I did a revision of the initial handwritten draft I had found and worked on combining it with the music you’ll hear with it below this week. The music today is played as a conventional LP-era rock ensemble: there’s the usual quartet: bass, drums, chordal and “lead” guitar. Added to that are two keyboards, piano and Hammond organ. You can hear the result with the audio player gadget you should see just below. No gadget? Wake up, this highlighted link opens a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Two of those poets have since died, I re-handled those pages, ones they’d typed in and handed to me years ago, and thought tenderly of them. My part of the household is due for an austere “death cleaning,” the tossing of those things an old man keeps to extend something of the life of that-and-those who’ve passed on. I have no grave illness, but the keeper now must consider that they will pass on and that there’s no real keeping.

**I did write from personas in my writing life regularly, a bit more so in prose than poetry. I was likely imagining the “short-story” plot that I then went about expressing in the sonnet.

Quiet Night Thoughts under a harvest moon

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

If we think of poetry as more than a barren art, we might think of things we read in poems as things that occurred to another person, somewhere, sometime. Oh it may be a mistake to automatically read poems as memoir — invention has always been one of those occurrences — but the more universal the poem’s account, the more we may think: this decorated thing I’m reading came from the senses of someone feeling an experience.

If we do that, we can think today that somewhere in China, sometime in the 8th century, an adventurer turned poet in middle-age awoke at night. What kind of bed, what kind of bedroom? The poem tells us nothing posh, despite its brevity: the poet’s expectation in the shining he sees around his bed is that it’s frost. It might be a lean-to, or even a bedroll on some improvised pallet out in the open. At best it might be an unheated room.

But still he’s awakened to something shining. He soon re-adjusts. No, this brightness that has occurred is moonlight not the frost of a more northern climate. Commentaries I read on classic Chinese poetry note that “bright” is something of a favorite poetic ideogram in those poems. A good symbol for immanence and essence? That light from the now open eyes of our poet must be seen. Oh, it’s the moonlight, likely a full moon on a clear night, he figures out. But that realization says something about near and far. The moon is more than 200,000 miles away. Yes, the moonlight is near, he could touch it but feel nothing.

What can  he touch? He can put his head back down on the bed and think, perhaps to think himself into dreams of his home. Feel that now with him as the side of face and scalp touch back down. How far, that home? Moon far?

The 8th century poet who wrote this, Li Bai (also known as Li Po), was an itinerant for much of his life. Choice? Consequences of other choices? Exile? The traditions seem to indicate a mixture of all that.

Quiet Night Thoughs

This is a well-known poem in Chinese, taught as an early lesson in poetry to children like Sandburg’s “Fog.” In my translation I did something I don’t normally do: imposing an English meter & some rhyme.

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Now another man, in another bed. I can tell you with more exactness where and when: September 18th, 1970 comes in within a night in London, England. The man has been out to nightclubs, “sitting in,” playing music with others, something that consistently energizes him. For much of his life music has possessed him like that. He’s been blessed or cursed with the compulsion to make it. It’s just a couple days past the harvest moon in this room, the moon as far away as Li Bai’s moon.

He’s with a woman whose role is somewhere between girlfriend and convenient stranger, but this is not strange to him. He barely knew his mother, his father’s time was taken with drink, low wages, and a skin color that marked him as an outsider, and so he could rarely care for him. This had often been. As a child, taken in by other women, neighbors, and relations — and as he left home, others in the various valences between girlfriends and strangers.

Do non-performers understand how hard it can be to transition to sleep after the active interaction of live performance? Performers likely have tried it all: sex, boring TV, cannabis, food, and even more alcohol than they drank to take the edge off self-consciousness before performing — enough to move them from the level of self- to un-consciousness. And yes indeed, other drugs.

This man had moved from at least some of the above to the other drugs: his companion’s sleeping pills. A foreign formulary, they were much stronger than he anticipated.

September 18th, 1970, Jimi Hendrix, the man in London, quiet night thoughts. Did he awaken in that night as Li Bai did in his poem? Accounts differ from that London night. Let me think that at least his consciousness tried to return — in his head the sparkling currents like the magnetic waves when electric guitar strings are strummed. Did he think of home as the great Chinese poet did? If so, what would be home? Did he think of America? He was doubly American in a fierce way: some of his ancestors had been kidnapped and sold to enslavement there, and some of his ancestors had had their before-it-was-named-America taken too, a trail of tears. Did he think of his parents, even more so because of their relative absence in his life? Others who had episodically cared for him? He might have. Maybe too his night thoughts were of music, of songs. We can still hear him sing about dreaming on recordings, so he could have dreamt of singing a new and elusive verse. Did he open his mouth to say it, and there was nothing? No air. No breathing. No life.

You can hear my performance of Li Bai’s “Quiet Night Thoughts” (for Jimi Hendrix)  with the audio player below. See just a pool of moonlight at the end here, no audio player? This bright link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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Avebury Song #2

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Is it even possible to mention Stonehenge without risking the unbidden memories of the feet-to-inches comic debacle from Spinal Tap? Well, that’s one reason I’m a little hesitant to introduce today’s piece in our Halloween Series this year.

But still, I’ve been talking and singing about ghosts, ancestors, spirits, and their home fires a good deal, and I remembered this performance by the LYL Band of this song I wrote after visiting an altogether homier set of Neolithic English standing stones at Avebury several years back. I understand Stonehenge is fenced off, and that enforced distance probably does little to staunch the tales of quasi-Medieval druids with magical rites floating stones in the air. Avebury’s large henge basically had a country hamlet grow up inside it, there’s even a pub in the midst of the circle. You can walk right up to the stones, feel these cool earth-aerials, measure them against one’s own height and age. A walk around the Avebury henge is a good walk, and one may also look over the equally amazing earthen ditch-works that are part of the site. As you stroll a flock of official government sheep wander the grassy meadow keeping overgrowth at bay without internal combustion clatter. So at Avebury, as I was walking around all this, I did not think of druids. I thought of men and women who dug and moved that earth, dug and moved those stones, erected them watching over each other.

Avebury collage

There are several rings in the henge at Avebury, and the stones are individual in shape and size, furthering the thoughts I had while visiting the site.

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Did they have some chieftain or matriarch who planned and ordered its construction? Perhaps. What belief was being expressed in large rocks? Some likely, at least to the level that metaphor asks of us. But as I said, I thought of who did the work — the sweaty, hard-breathing, hand-callousing work. They worked stones with stones, dug with pickaxes made of antlers. At night in what huts did they sleep, on dried grass beds perhaps? And in that night they no doubt slept hard after their day of work, dreamt dreams harder than those of old poets who need only to move words around. If the energy of the earth and sky was transmitted up and down those big stone antennas, so too must the energy of their dreams be drawn in there. And I was there where they must have slept, dreaming under night breaths, their aches soothed by the rest. Dreaming of what? Children, parents, lovers, siblings, colleagues, whole days of rest, the mighty thing they would construct, a story, a prayer, a melody, the little joys of a meal or exactly good weather?

Not druid magic in my thoughts at Avebury, but I felt those dreams might be — no must be — harder than the dulling mutes of time. They sparked around in their heads, and when their heads became skulls and then dust, where is that spark, and can we read it still, tune it in? A belief, at least to the level of metaphor, felt we could. That’s the song.

Avebury Song 2

Here’s the songsheet. If you ask for scenery to back your performance of this, get the measurements right.

The player many will see below will play “Avebury Song #2,”  and if you don’t see it, you can use this alternative highlighted link. I hope to complete at least one more new Halloween piece to present here yet this month, though the moving pieces of my life doesn’t make that sure.

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Yeats’ “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” for National Poetry Month

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing our National Poetry Month celebration, here’s another poet’s love poem, loved by other poets, William Butler Yeats’ “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.”   If Millay’s “Rosemary”  portrays a relationship turned cold, “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”  is more at the wooing stage.

The speaker in Yeats poem begins by saying that they’d offer their beloved heaven or the heavens — well, to be exact, a luxurious simulation as some kind of cloth — and then not care that the beloved might just use it like a rug and walk all over it. And then they say they don’t have those cloths of heaven, only a dream. Still, the beloved can walk on that, the poet’s dreams; but the poem finishes with a plea that they should walk softly on that treasure, the wooer’s dreams.

In this short eight-line poem, Yeats does some fine things. First — no surprise if it’s Yeats — it sounds beautifully, and he does this almost entirely with meter, supplely alternating two and three foot beats in my scansion of it, though you can force an iambic feel.*  Unlike many poets and poems that pour on the consonance seeking musical sounds, he avoids this here other than “dim and dark.” Nor is end rhyme a factor, though there are 2.9 internal rhymes in the entire poem (“night” – “light,” “spread” – “tread,” and “cloths” – “enwrought.) Instead, Yeats leans on repetition of words, even though one can read or hear this poem without noticing just how heavily repetition is used. These words are repeated at least once: “cloths,” “light,” “feet,” “I,” “dreams,” “spread,” “under,” “my,” and “your” along with generally-repeatable articles like “and” and “the,” and with only 61 words in the entire poem, almost half the poem has another half echoing it.

It’s also subtle in it’s meaning. Yes, it has been used in “real life” as a wooing poem by others, but being subtle in a valentine is a risky business. Yeats himself originally published this as a persona poem in the voice of a character as “Adah Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,”  even though many identify this as an expression of his in-real-life love for Maude Gonne. But notice this: the poem’s speaker would be extravagant with something he doesn’t own (and maybe no one could own fabric as rich as heaven) — but he’s asking for some mercy with the actuality of his immaterial dreams.

So, there’s a lot here for other poets to admire, but there’s more: this poem restates the situation of most poets when they are writing too. We plan to create the closest we can with words and their weave to the heavens — and those plans, those wishes, are our dreams. And then — like Maude Gonne, the plausible love interest this poem may have been directed to — people walk, not on them, but around them.   Don’t be dismayed, such is life. All Artists Fail.  We are the wooers, and then when we read or perform poetry such as this one by Yeats, we become the lovers, the beloved.

Watch here for views of a statue depicting this poem created by Jackie McKenna that I much admire. One thing I just noticed when doing this video: the crouching figure of the wooer looks quietly satisfied viewed straight on, and then in the final profile shot, a little sad or resigned. Intended or trick of the light?

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Three ways to hear my music and performance of Yeats’ “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven:”   there’s a player gadget for some, this highlighted link for others to use, and, at least for now, I’m continuing to create new lyric videos for this National Poetry Month series, and that is available above.

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*That sort of repetition with variations, trod gently, gives a better musical effect in most cases.

Ethna’s Dream

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Long time readers here will know that one of this Project’s ideas is “Other People’s Stories.” I’ve chosen to make that one of its principles for a couple of reasons. First, the Internet is full of folks telling their own stories, and this is fine (after all, to me those would all be “Other People’s Stories”). I wanted to do something different, to focus on how you and I experience a variety of words from a variety of writers with a variety of outlooks. The second is that I’m rather uncomfortable with promoting myself. That one’s complex.*  Like most writers or composers or artists I think my own work has value at some percentage over half the time. Which then, mathematically, allows that I doubt its value, or my handling of its value, or the costs of declaiming its value to the universe a bunch of the time too.

No one creates without the first thought. It would be impossible. And no one who cares about what they create, about their audiences, or about how much craft and care can be devoted to any art; without seeing the faults, the missed communication, the needs for just one more revision or tomorrow for any work.

Many of us create instinctively, because we have to — but sharing that work is a choice. I’m nearing 600 Parlando Project audio pieces presented here. I could have presented at least half or two-thirds of that easily with things Dave or I wrote, but I made a different choice. It’s less conflicted for me to publicly look at, to be honestly surprised and delighted at Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Sara Teasdale, or Du Fu; and then to share that with you.

But there’s a problem with “Other People’s Stories.” I’m likely not understanding everything those authors intended.** And they’re their  stories, their  visions. I’ve talked recently here about how when I translate a poet who wrote in another language how I want to honor their work and transfer accurately their particular powers, and yet then become tempted to break off into something their work makes me see through my own eyes.

A long prolog to presenting today’s piece, one I wrote and titled “Ethna’s Dream.”  Ethna is Ethna McKiernan, a poet who I used to meet and talk about work with once a month or so, along with two to four others. Ethna cared and crafted her work over decades, and in her life did other useful work: running an Irish heritage book and art shop, working with the homeless. She’s currently in hospice, comforted by family, and the reports are that she’s now mostly in an out of what appears as sleep.

I couldn’t call Ethna a close friend. I always sensed a distance there. I think often of her none the less these days, and of every rudeness, awkwardness, or self-dealing on my part around her; and those or any number of things could have caused that. The very fact of writing a poem about her death, her dying, that mostest personal thing, seems problematic.

So, when you listen to my piece “Ethna’s Dream”  you now know all that. This is not a poem about those things I’ve discussed in prolog, or at least I hope so. Instead, my intent is that it’s a poem about what we should treasure of that sharing of the unconscious that we have with artists (including those whose main art is just living). What I present in “Ethna’s Dream”  is not a romantic, imaginary, sentimental metaphor in my own mind — though it may attract or repel you if you see it as such — it’s more at the essences of what we do, share, and take with art.

Ethna's Dream

There’s references to Bottom’s speech in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Am I prettifying  myself up with pretentiousness, or comparing myself to the foolish play character? I wrote it, and yet I can’t tell.

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There’s a player gadget to hear it below for many of you, but some ways of reading this blog won’t show it, so there’s this highlighted hyperlink to play it as well.

Thanks for reading and listening.

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*One problem, leading to one fear, is that when offered the chance to promote myself I see myself as overdoing it, and coming off as a self-absorbed narcissist that runs on too long about the arts I work in, prattling about the obvious and the obscure in equally embarrassing ways. If you’re still reading at the footnote stage, you may have forgiven me for that.

**Beside just plain embarrassment of ignorance, we now more often talk about cultural appropriation in regards to this. The travesties of cultural appropriation are real, but my belief is that they should, must, be risked.

Winter ‘20-‘21 Parlando Project Top Ten, numbers 7-5

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Let’s pickup the countdown of the pieces that drew the most listens and likes over this past winter. Each bold-faced listing is a link to the original post on the piece in case you’d like to read what I wrote back then, and those original posts will also contain links to the full text of the poems used.

7 Thursday  by William Carlos Williams.  Quite often when reading through early 20th century Modernist poetry, I repeat my surprise of how plainspoken and outwardly simple some of it seems. This poem by Williams is one of those. There’s not a single word in it that would be unfamiliar to a grade-schooler. One need know no complex allusions to anything other than ordinary life. Not all his contemporaries wrote like this. Wallace Stevens will pleasingly stump us with his love of obscure words, T. S. Eliot will ask us to consider how history rhymes its myths, and William Butler Yeats will make English sing with beautiful and metrical word-music. Against that sort of thing, this poem by Williams may seem ordinary. As ordinary as a Thursday.

There’s only one bit of word-trickery in it — and having no other in this short poem should invite us to ponder it: that unusual use of the common word “carelessly” in the context of “I remain now carelessly/with feet planted on the ground….” Carelessly? Huh? How many quick readers would slide over that and not notice anything out of place! In the opening of his poem Williams has told us his dream has come to nothing. Is this dream one of our ordinary nighttime hallucinations or a strong and potentially life-changing imagination for the course of things? He doesn’t say and may perhaps mean either. His stance on this? Back to observing the world standing simply and unmoved with both feet on the ground, “carelessly” in the sense of “without a care” regarding that; with the sense also that the overlords of guilt and ambition or the lure of more surreal and spectacular verse are saying he should  care and he’s going to ignore them.

In place of that care, of that “tyranny of the shoulds,”* Williams offers us ordinary life, ordinary words, the meditation of breath. That resilience and carelessness, those two steady feet able to stand up to the sky, is this song. You can hear it with a player gadget that may appear below, or with this highlighted hyperlink that will also play it.

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6 I wake and feel the fell of dark  by Gerard Manley Hopkins.  What a combination this makes with Williams’ poem that it happens to sit next to in our countdown! Hopkins’ poem has its speaker also awakening from a non-productive dream “Hours I mean years, mean life” — this dream is clearly both a nightly and a life’s dream. And he’s in the opposite of careless: roiled with distress and self-disgusted guilt over it.

What a combination this makes with Williams’ poem…

The language here is extra-ordinarily charged. Some of us have had such a self-castigating night, but few of us could express it in such a tight compressed form as a sonnet that moves musically and emotionally. Hopkins’ feet are not firmly on the ground at all — he’s rolling and tumbling as the great American floating Blues verse has it — and that’s the nature of Hopkins’ song.

This is the distress half of the engine of the Tao. We may more easily recognize it quickly as great poetry, and should, though without some balancing aspect it cannot long whirl.

My performance of this greatest of his  “Terrible Sonnets” can be heard with this hyperlink, or in cases where it appears, the player gadget that may be below.

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Williams-Hopkins-Shakespear 3 collars

Collar styles of poetry, a retrospective. William Carlos Williams, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and William Shakespeare

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5 Sonnet 97  by William Shakespeare.  I understand there’s this guy, Shakespeare, who wrote some poetry. Is it any good?

Well, the jury’s still out on that one. It is always so with art, as art happens in the present when we look, read, listen, hear. That’s a large part of what this blog is about: encountering stuff written in various ways and times and seeing what we can make of it in the immediacy of a musical performance.

“Sonnet 97: How like a Winter hath my absence been”  is  neither the calm meditation after a dream’s failure nor the roiling disgust our first pair of poems had. Instead, this sonnet is all about the ambiguity. What kind of ambiguity? Shakespeare will pick several. One of the basest tests of mental state is “oriented to time and place.” This poem certainly isn’t — that’s its most pressing point. Is it winter, summer, fall, or spring? Can’t say for sure. The purportedly male authorial voice dons rhetorical drag and speaks of his sonnets as if they are birthed from a poetic womb as if the addressed “fair youth” is the only begetter in a very patriarchal metaphor for these sonnets. And what’s the true nature of the relationship between that authorial voice and the fair youth being addressed? Complicated. Author as vassal of the ruling class?**  Lover? High-minded patronage? Some of all? Well, that’s Shakespeare’s song for us. This hyperlink will play my performance of it, or if you see it, you can use a player gadget that may appear below.

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*The phrase is psychotherapist and author Karen Horney’s, whose mid-20th century work may still have something useful to say about us today.

**It was while dealing with this sonnet that this aspect of the “Fair Youth Sonnets” first occurred to me. I assume it’s occurred to others, but not being a Shakespeare scholar I can’t say who or where.