fantasy

The Vampire (Part 4)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

This is the final section in our Halloween series this year, a setting of Conrad Aiken’s narrative poem “The Vampire.”  It’s the longest section of the four parts as I’ve divided it, and I find it by far the most disturbing. As I have done when releasing these movements in the musical piece, I urge you to listen to them in order, starting with Part 1.

I had this post all written and ready go before I finished mixing my recording of the last part late this afternoon. Before hitting publish, I decided to check to see if Aiken himself may have suggested some context when he published it. I had found Internet statements that the poem was first published in 1914, which I assumed was a simple uncontroversial fact. I even jumped to the conclusion that this publication must have been in Aiken’s first book-length poetry collection published that year. I got a copy of that book, Earth Triumphant  and – it was not in it!*  Another web search gave a variant publication date: 1916. I downloaded copies of all public domain Aiken poetry collections before 1931. Searched each one of them. No “The Vampire”  in any.**   I even searched for distinctive words to see if the poem the Internet calls “The Vampire”   had another title or was only a portion of a longer poem. No winners. By this point I could even wonder, did Aiken even write this poem?

After supper I did more searching and found this tiny listing on The Internet Speculative Fiction Database that led me to the archives of The New Republic  for April of 1924 where Aiken’s poem appears as “The Vampire (subtitle line) 1914.”   In context that subtitle is almost certainly a reference to the beginning of WWI, that first great war of mechanized and chemical slaughter, not the Internet-mistaken date of the poem’s publication. It turns out that Aiken’s “The Vampire”  is yet another poem where 1914’s world-wide war inspired eerie and apocalyptic poetry, some of which escaped their specific inspiration to become more generalized poems brought out on Halloween.

Vampire Part 4

That plowman that ends Aiken’s poem made me think of William Blake’s “Drive your plow over the bones of the dead.”

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So it’s apparently a 1924 poem from the time when Modernism was fully in ascendence, which makes its archaic (if effective) prosody and its unusual narrative style more anachronistic. Aiken knows this. He edited the Harvard literary magazine with T. S. Eliot for example and was an active critic and anthologist promoting current American poets – but he expressly admired a lot of French symbolist poetry. Perhaps he was thinking too of that American antecedent to those 19th century French poets he admired, Edgar Allan Poe? In my childhood, some Halloween costumes were made from old clothes, and if this poem’s storytelling is old-style, its terror might still come through, particularly in today’s section. Further violating Modernist rules, Aiken is mostly telling here, not showing what exactly occurs when the mysterious creature arrives and reveals that the world’s populace will either love and worship her or suffer ignominious death. Throughout the poem, he mostly treats this situation with eldritch Lovecraftian rhetoric reflecting how strange and horrific the apocalypse strikes those experiencing it – but as today’s section gets underway, he adds the most horrific detail of all: many (most?) of the world’s people not only accept this deadly tyrant, they find her erotically attractive. In my last post I wrote that Aikin’s choice of a female gendered villain here is problematic. Thinking again this morning, and considering the erotic charge in the words of the subject populace’s reaction to the tyrannical “love me or die” vampire he portrays, and assuming Aiken assumes hetero-normative readers, then it’s possible (though unstated) that the hetero-normative women in the poem’s world are seeing a male identified vampire simultaneously with the female villain he’s describing.

Beyond the costume it wears, how old-fashioned and fantastic is this poem?

At the beginning of this series I wrote that when searching for a text to use for a Halloween piece this year I wanted to find something playful, because I have an overstock of disgust and fear for my country and the world right now. I did find pieces that might have fit the bill: benign ghosts, saucy witches, mischievous spirits. And then I read Aiken’s poem. I read a poem of the arrival of a deadly and narcissistic tyrant proclaiming that those in thrall to them must love them amid widespread devastation. This is what is most horrible – as savage as extra-judicial killings, dire mocking leadership, needless and cruel wars and callous destructions are, that express expectation that we love and bow down to its bringer disgusts me more. Or maybe the supreme horror is this: the sight of some of my fellows accepting – nay, even cheering such a creature on. And that’s what I ended up portraying today as I completed presenting Conrad Aikens poetic tale.

Happy Halloween. Enjoy your costumes, your microscopic candy-bars, and the twilight will-o-the-wisp fancies of wonderous spirits. Celebrate the treasures that are the memories of the ancestors. The grown men with masks and guns citing unilateral laws, such as they are, that apply to you but not them, expect at least your grudging acceptance, if not your loving worship of their faultless goals and grandeur. Set your Halloween joy in the first against the dire schemes of the latter.

Oh, and you can listen to my musical performance of the final section of Aiken’s poem with the audio player below. Out of candy-bars? No player?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Given that the Earth of this poem is utterly devastated, it would have made an ironic inclusion though.

**This included his Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winning Selected Poems  of 1929. I checked out a copy of the later 1961 edition too. No “The Vampire”  there either. I also quickly checked a 1961 book length consideration of Aiken’s life and work written by Frederick Hoffman. “The Vampire”  didn’t appear in the index. Checking out Reuel Denney’s 1964 Aiken book, no mention, though it does note the vampire that appears in Aiken’s 1916 “Jig of Forslin.”   What remains a mystery? There’s no indication I’ve seen that Aiken was especially fond of the poem. No sense that it once stood out in regard from within the large corpus of work that the long-lived and prolific Aiken wrote and published. Someone is responsible for the many modern Internet occurrences and performances of this more than 100-year-old poem. My working theory there: someone in fantasy and horror fandom put it forward before literary scholars caught on to it.

The Vampire (Part 3)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

This is turning out to be an interesting Halloween experiment: announcing here that I’m going to present a suite of songs (or a multi-movement musical setting, whatever I’ll end up calling it) using Conrad Aiken’s narrative poem “The Vampire”  – before I had conceived, composed, performed, or mixed them. And I did it quite late, with less than week before Halloween.

Scary? No, I’ve been too busy trying to complete this. I hope you’re enjoying the story unfolding with “new episodes” being released nearly every day – but if you’re coming to this post just now, I do suggest this way of hearing the pieces, in the proper order.

In Part 1 the world of the poem encounters a mysterious and distressed creature. In Part 2, this creature brings with it a frenzy of sorrow and deadly intimations, transmitted with disturbing dreams and visions. At the ending of that section, we’re told the creature has started to speak directly to the world of the poem. Today’s song tells us what the creature says.

The Vampire Part 3

Aiken’s poem gathers power from the incantatory power of its rhymes, so I’ll forgive him using the archaic version of “blended” in line 2

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In short, the creature announces that the citizens of the poem’s world have a choice: they will choose to worship and love her, or they will be slaughtered. This situation is so fantastic that the world seems in shock. Is this real? Is each citizen who has seen the portents in the earlier parts, and now has heard the creature’s dire pronouncement, insane or in trapped in some as yet unawakened nightmare?

Since this is a poem, we might see this is the dichotomy in most any fantastic poem: if it is proximally a poet’s imagined reality – how are we meant to take it? Yes, the poet could end the poem with an envoi “it was all a dream” or some other explicit framing device. Spoiler alert: Aiken will not do this. The world in this poem is doomed. In the midst of this horror is another horror: many (most) of the world’s people are enthralled by the creature, even after its tyrannical statement, most are following her around in some kind of adoring daze.

You may note that I’ve constantly used “the creature” and “it” to refer to the sinister eminence of Aiken’s poem until a couple of paragraphs ago. He never calls it a vampire outright, and his depiction so far has only had two elements in common with the vampire trope: it’s deadly, and it enchants its victims. The final section will include more depiction, including that that attraction has erotic dimensions. If I’ve avoided gendering the creature in my writing so far, Aiken doesn’t: his creature is a “she.”

Yes, I’m bothered by that, perhaps as much as I’m bothered by the rest of what is going to be described in the poem. I don’t know enough about Aiken to say if he consciously or subconsciously desires that choice’s resonance with misogyny, or the fear of female sexuality that can often underpin it.*  I think I’ll probably say more after I’ve completed presenting the poem, but one thing that allowed me to engage with the poem when I could have cast it aside: it’s plausible that Aiken, its author, is a young heterosexual man who seeks to confront two things in his mind (or the minds of others like himself): that beauty and charisma is not a reliable sign of virtue, and that desire is a strong force with strong dangers surrounding it.**

The musical mode shifts again for Part 3. If last time I wanted a little fuzz-tone frenzy as the ominous visions and dreams are unleashed, today’s music returns to a quieter sort of weird folk with the cello, violin, guitar and now bass clarinet ensemble. The world’s populace is in enthralled shock, caught between disbelief and horror, with a third element (even more disturbing) to be introduced in the next part. I hope to complete that final section within the next two days, so check back for it. Oddly, for the first time in the suite of songs, today’s gentler music uses something like conventional harmonic cadences. “Well, I guess we’ve got a murderous tyrant ruling the world, but at least we’ve got a more conventional and attractive song structure.”

You are listening in order, right? If it’s the proper time to hear part 3 of “The Vampire,”  there’s an audio player below for most of you. No player for you? I’m more accommodating than our story’s vampire, I offer this second way: a highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

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*Of course, women can do evil things, and some have evidenced overripe amounts of human villainy. If they’ve lacked a consistent power base in a largely patriarchal history, they’ve had their innings. Given such a history though – one that largely assumes male gender when creating a powerful character – Aiken’s choice is worthy of examination.

There’s an opportunity to write more about the male lothario vampire or the darkly attractive bad-boy-with-a-habit vampire tropes, and what they say to heterosexual women about their desires and attendant dangers, but in the interests of length and needs to complete the music, I’ll pass tonight.

**I think of the Shakespeare song from The Merchant of Venice  recently presented here, which occurs within a play with a stock ethnic stereotype villain (though made a bit more humanized and complex by the Bard) where the little song is a parable about the deceptions of surface “fancy,” a polite word for desire.

The Vampire (Part 2)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Did I set any expectations (musical or poetic) with the first part of my planned multi-movement Halloween presentation of Conrad Aiken’s “The Vampire?”  Well, this first: if you’re just coming onto this post someway, you’ll want to hear how Aiken and I tell this frightening tale in the proper order, so go ahead and leave this post and listen to the parts in order.

The opening had a small ensemble of mostly orchestral instruments, playing the simple parts in a mode that I sometimes use and call “punk orchestral.” In Aiken’s opening words we met a mysterious creature that interrupted the normal life of the poem’s world. We learned that the creature seems distressed. In the second movement today that distress is more widespread, as those in the poem’s world come under the thrall of the creature. Inescapable dark visions are rife. The creature is starting to speak, and what it says is the matter to be covered in the next section which I plan to release soon.

Vampire Part 2

Text of the second section of Conrad Aiken’s The Vampire, performed today.

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With the poem’s now revealed dread, the sweet violin from last time starts keening, and my black Telecaster electric guitar rasps chords thru a fuzz-box distortion. There are broad statements reporting cries and anguished words in Aiken’s text, and so a second electric guitar enters halfway in – an instrument which I aimed toward amp speakers for feedback in its part.* The cello has nothing to play in this section, but my most “rawk” electric bass takes over the low end.*

The gentle vocals in that first part might have benefited if I had a trained and sweet voiced singer instead of myself. Today’s vocals? Well, I like shouting and ranting, but I’m no Ozzy Osbourne either. I did my best. Only after I completed the mix for today’s section did I think that that fuzzy Telecaster part I played was more akin to Norman Greenbaum’s immortal “Spirit in the Sky”  than sinister dark metal.

OK, if you’ve done your part and listened to Part 1 first, you can now listen to Part 2 with the audio player gadget below. Do your “Fixed and burning eyes” not see any such player? It’s not the end of the world, you can use this highlighted link which will open a new browser tab with just an audio player.

 

 

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*It’s a recent Squier Rascal short-scale solid-body electric bass with pair of thick voiced humbucker pickups. I bought it earlier this year to replace a similar sized and equipped bass that I traded Dean Seal for decades ago. The pickup switches and finally the volume pot on the older instrument used since the early days of the LYL Band 40 some years ago have given up the ghost.

**I’ve sought a somewhat controllable version of that sound from the first time I plugged a cheap, used, thin brown hollow-body guitar into my phonograph amplifier and received an unholy wail of distortion sliced open by the squeal of feedback. Maybe part of the fascination is that “somewhat controllable” aspect of using such sounds in a musical piece, that mixture of challenge and chance. The sound also annoys people, which can be good or bad, depending on my mood.

The Vampire (Part 1)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

  I’m going to be out on a limb in this Project’s treehouse of horror this Halloween. How so? With today’s post I’m starting to present what at completion will be a larger musical piece than this Project usually presents, and I’ve decided then to publish this poem setting in sections over a week, as movements or a kind of suite. That in itself is a bit ambitious. Among the hundreds of pieces the Parlando Project has issued, only two strike me as similar. The most ambitious of those two? I set with music all of T. S. Eliot’s Modernist landmark “The Waste Land”  – and that piece too was presented here in sections, but it was composed and performed over a period of years. The other similar suite of songs goes back to the formative times of this Project: a series of songs largely written by long-time Parlando collaborator and keyboardist Dave Moore about the pioneering early 1950s late-night horror movie host Vampira – but as I recall, all those Vampira songs were written and recorded before the first one was published here. I knew what I had before I made them public.

Not so with this planned Halloween 2026 piece, which is Conrad Aiken’s narrative poem “The Vampire.”  As I woke up this morning, I had a rough idea for the final section, and some music for that section recorded, but no vocals for that. But if I’m going to present this longer poem serially this week, I would need to start with the first section. I had Aiken’s words, and nothing else.

Conrad Aiken sharpens a scythe

Conrad Aiken: harvest time or sundering time?

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So after a quick breakfast and glass of iced tea, I was onto composing the music for what will be the first, and shortest, section of Aiken’s “The Vampire.”   Working quickly, I started with modifying a drum sequence to use as a guide track for the rest. I next laid down two cello parts, a track using a pair of tape banks from the computer-emulated version of a 1960s’ tape storage “virtual instrument” the Mellotron,* and a clean electric guitar part. Despite the different instruments being sounded, and playing them one at a time, those three tracks were all played on an electric guitar, the non-guitar parts being played thru a MIDI pickup. I finished with an arco string-bass part – that one played on a little plastic keyboard MIDI controller because I want to use its volume wheel to articulate the bowed bass notes. “Real Musicians” and trained composers will recognize the simplicity of these parts. To explain myself, I’ve taken to calling compositions like this “Punk Orchestral.” This is shorthand to explain that just as a melodically simple 2-3 chord rock song played in an entirely non-virtuosic manner can still arguably be an effective piece, so too one might attempt the same thing with instruments we associate with “classical music.”  The vocals here are both spoken and sung. I have a limited skill set for this sort of singing, but I’m the one handy to realize this composition.

As we start then with my series of “The Vampire”  I feel called to do the Andrew Hickey** thing and warn listeners that this Aiken poem I’m presenting is a dark and distressing fantasy.  I had considered a more playful Halloween piece this year, partially because my country and the world has generated non-imagined horrors a plenty. Perversely, Aiken’s poem may have captured my attention because it approaches those current practical levels of fear, terror, and pity – and it has (I believe) a message about the dangers of human fancies. Today’s section of the poem isn’t telling us yet what will occur before we reach the poem’s end, for Aiken opens his story quietly with the world of his poem meeting a distressed and mysterious creature. You can hear it with the audio player below. Has the world darkened, and you can find no such player?  This highlighted link is your only hope (and fear) – it will open a new browser tab with its own audio player for the piece.

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*One tape bank is a Mellotron string section, the other male choir voices. The voices are mixed very low today, for they are off in the distance in this part of the poem’s story.

**Hickey’s long-term project, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is amazing and goes further into detail and research on its subjects than even I do on mine. I think Hickey’s project’s title is less attractive than the series is – for yes, music nerds might be up for it, but it’s much more than that: it’s a still unspinning story about history, culture, capitalism, the large caldron of creativity, and racism, and sexism. Hickey is meticulous about warning listeners that they’re going to be hearing more than a treatise on what color a record’s original pressing label is or the most effective settings for a Fender Deluxe guitar amp.

A Faery Song (We who are old)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

My wife, who I suspect of having some strain of a woodland nymph in her genetic background, is going to take me to her elflin grot  this summer – well, an off-the grid cabin on the North Shore of Lake Superior – close enough. During this stay, she will take supervisory woodland hikes where she will photograph fungi and wildflowers as part of documenting that nature is working up to spec. I, one of those who are old, will stay in the cabin and read poetry, a media format that doesn’t require any wired or wireless energy other than the long sunlight of a northern summer.

I’m unsure if this cabin will be explicitly in a bee-loud glade, but such plans make me think of William Butler Yeats, and here’s an early poem of his, written by a 20-something poet amplifying his Irish heritage amid the still extant 19th century fashion for antique fantasy.

A Faery Song

A chord sheet in case you want to sing it yourself

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Yeats provides context for his lyric poem, with the note: “Sung by the people of Faery over Diarmuid and Grania, in their bridal sleep under a Cromlech.” Is there a tale alluded to there? Yes, and it’s a major part of Ireland’s bardic Fenian saga, set in the 3rd Century reign of king Cormac. The over-riding hero of these linked tales is a warrior with supernatural powers, Finn McCool,* who is the leader of the king’s army. McCool is not the hero of the Diarmuid and Grania part of story however, but a jealous third-wheel antagonist.

The story of Diarmuid and Grania has many retellings, which vary, but the general outline is that Cormac promises his daughter Grania to the aging great hero and warrior Finn. However, before this marriage can happen, one day in court Grania spies Diarmuid, who is a major young hottie of Lancelotian proportions. Not interested in the old Finn and the entire warlord power structure, she drugs Diarmuid with some enchantment potion causing him to carry her off elopement-style.**

There’s a great deal more to the tale, with a major twist that the noble Diarmund resists letting Grania seduce him sexually because he’s warrior-loyal to his leader Finn McCool; and even though the pursuing McCool, the great warrior who commands a literal “and whose army” wants to apprehend and likely kill him, he leaves a pre-Internet breadcrumb trail in hopes that the eloping couple would be found out.

Unless you’re Robert Bly booking your hero’s journey, there’s enough there that you may be wanting to just get on with Yeats’ short poem, but there’s one more detail in Yeats’ note: what’s a “Cromlech” where the fleeing couple bed down? No, that’s not the Gaelic-transcription-name for a low-powered Google notebook used in schools. It’s an ancient tomb made from piles of stones – no gmail or Google docs available there. The faeries looking over the Eros/Thanatos couple hiding in a tomb could have sung Thomas Campion’s loose translation of Catullus if they couldn’t book Yeats.

The skip-ahead reader, without all that backstory, might hear “A Faery Song”  as a “Forever Young”   blessing of young people by their elders and by the traditions of those elders. That’s a perfectly fine sentiment – and it’s not just some sweet cliché, but one I say is too rarely expressed. It was easy to think that way about the poem as I worked on the music and its recorded performance, being an aged man whose house has several young lovers moving through it. But I think Yeats was, in this context I’ve outlined, offering that ancient  heritage, older than any living. may speak to comfort and guide the young, give them rest from the elders in power, from a world of men (gender and species). Of course, that is made from fantasy, faery fantasy. It is a dream of wishes.

I had one other reason to move this short poem up in my “maybe do this one” pile: I’ve been trying to catch up on blogs I follow after the absorption of National Poetry Month,*** and I came upon this post by a friend of this Project Lesley Wheeler where a dream was recounted:

This weekend I dreamed that my problem joints (knees, hips, an ankle that requires babying) were replaced by faery joints (in the dream, I knew faery was spelled with an e!). They looked like cloudy ice or crystal. I like the idea of being a human-faery cyborg.”

While we cannot fully dream anyone else’s dream, poets and poetry can fancy some of their substance. Reading this I figured this in addition: ever light and gossamer wings sprouting from out our backs, devices that would radiate and transfer the sciatica from too many hours sitting with books and blank pages of paper.

Yes, that’s but a dream – but we carry our bodies around to have dreams and maybe to shelter other’s dreams.

My musical performance of Yeats’ “A Faery Song”  with that “e” is available to hear with the player gadget below. Has any such player dematerialized? No, it’s the Internet, that enclouded scrying crystal that will suppress the audio player when you’re reading this blog some ways – and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

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*All these names were originally in Gaelic, and how they are transcribed into English an inexact science. I can’t say in detail what choices went into rendering the name as “Finn McCool,” but you must admit it’s a most excellent name.

**Patriarchal gifting of daughters is historically accurate if grating. The quasi-sinister date-drugging gender reversal is hardly a clear symbol of women’s empowerment, and just exactly how sympathetically Grania is portrayed varies with the teller. In a play dramatizing this story that Yeats and George Moore later co-wrote, there was friction between the co-writers based on Yeats wanting a more sympathetic Grania. Another variation of the tale says that Diarmuid had a “love spot” on his forehead that caused any woman who looked at him desire him, and so dual-enchantment situation.

***I’m still weeks behind.

Adventures of Isabel, or weighing light verse

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Three things mark Louis Untermeyer’s taste in his between-the-world-wars Modern American Poetry:  comfort with elements of the Modernist avant garde, appreciation of the fantasy/gothic (Poe) strain in American poetry, and the inclusion of humorous verse in a “serious” anthology. We’re only partway into our National Poetry Month series featuring selections from that book, but we’ve seen H.D. and Maxwell Bodenheim’s Imagist poems, and Elizabeth Coatsworth’s subtle visitation of fantasy. Now we have a poem that combines elements of the last two – one written by a poet that many mid-century readers would have been as familiar with as with Frost, Eliot, or Millay: Ogden Nash, the at least once well-known 20th century practitioner of “light verse.*”

How much has Nash’s fame persisted into the 21st century? I suspect a small portion. That his verse includes humor might be a factor in that. Humor’s subjective and subject to fashion, but unlike the subjectivity regarding serious literary modes, few take the effort to make allowances for superficial mutations in its particulars or a joke not making a direct hit on our sense of humor. A solemn, carefully crafted poem about weighty subjects promotes itself for a balanced appreciation – so, even if we find it imperfect, we feel propriety requires we give it its due. In the age where much poetry presents memoir, “personal truth,” and exposition of experiences intimate, harrowing, or non-denominationally spiritual, this must be yet more so.

Even when present, humor may be deemphasized or missed in our poetic literary cannon. Many modern appreciators might be shocked to learn that Auden’s “Stop All the Clocks”  elegy was not intended to be fulsomely solemn. Most readers miss the sly Robert Frost tweaking indecision about decisiveness in “The Road Not Taken.”  Frank O’Hara’s beautiful humor can’t be denied, but it can still be deemphasized. Early readers of Emily Dickinson saw elements of what could be called light verse in her work, and that once hurt her standing in the literary canon. 21st century readers now are asked to see the signifiers of trauma and suppression in her poems, which there may well be, but some of the most sharply funny people have grown accustomed to injuries in the dark.

2026 National Poetry Month Poster 600

No chord sheet today, but this gives me a chance to say how much I love the Arthur Sze quote used on this year’s poster that speaks to what this Project hopes it’s doing.

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Now, is Ogden Nash as essential as those poets? I’m not making that claim, but he can still be a whole lot of fun. What I have said, and still fervently believe, is that we harm poetry by worrying too much about “not-great poetry.” Because literary poetry now has a historically low presence in American culture, we may feel obligated to guard against a Gresham’s Law defacing its value. I question that tactic. I think vibrant arts are happy with all kinds of expression, and even if one’s aesthetic has constructed a defensible hierarchy, there’s room for vin ordinaire.**

Here’s a link to the text of today’s poem by Ogden Nash if you’d like to read along.

So, I’m for intervals of fun, and “Adventures of Isobel”  is fun, and I’d suspect even the toddler depicted in Nash’s mock epic might enjoy it once they become self-conscious – but there’s more: in our current times isn’t it good to revisit the stubborn “it’s not for me” or “you don’t scare me” bravado of the poem’s heroine? Those Americans recently pictured, standing up at streetside in their bathrobes (adult jammies, missing the bunny rabbits and shooting stars) as flack-jacketed masked federal troops are arrayed about them could be reviving that spirit. I often wonder about conscious intents and purposes that I speculate are found implied in poems I write about here. I can hear other intelligent readers – even the poets who wrote them – laughing at what I see under the poems. I may be subject to seeing shapes in clouds and tricks in the shadows, but were Nash and his muses just writing a funny poem with some jokes and outrageous rhymes to momentarily amuse a reader in 1936?***  Or did something compel him to prophesize: “You’ll be called the Greatest Generation. What’s fearful now will be yet more so. Look at how your kid takes on that which disgusts her, or demands that she mix fear with respect. You know that stuff is actually scary – but you’re going to need that.”

Alternate voice, and frequent keyboardist here, Dave Moore took a crack at Nash’s poem as a song to his music a few years ago with the LYL Band. I quite liked his take on it, and for today’s presentation I remixed the recording of that performance fixing a couple of things he and I thought didn’t work. You can hear it with the audio player below. Has the audio player fled, pursued by a bear? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress showing it. There is  a bear, but it won’t mind if you use this highlighted link to open a new tab with its own audio player to hear the song.

 

 

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*Untermeyer also includes work in his anthology by Nash’s contemporary in between-wars light verse, F.P.A., as well as his own parodies of other poets, one of which I’ve performed here for the Parlando Project. I loved this Untermeyer loving parody of Walter De La Mare!

**There could be an argument against my stance based on overwhelming oversaturation. I worry that’s the case with music today. We have made its creation and distribution so trivially easy (something that happened even before the onset of AI) that we now have a market were new music qua music has a tough time finding traction. Visual capital (youthful good looks, sexual attractiveness, elaborate stage shows and video) becomes a requirement – not just an advantage – to bring forward a substantial audience. I don’t believe this is the case with poetry. With the exception of song lyrics in their ears, the modern literate person is likely to go for extended intervals without encountering any poetry whatsoever. And did Nash, F.P.A., or Untermeyer’s japes waylay readers from reading the canonical “great poets” of the 20th century?

***This year indicates that today’s poem is not clearly in the public domain. I normally refrain from using non-PD work. I plead good intentions toward keeping Ogden Nash’s work in mind and the Parlando Projects educational and entirely non-revenue practices.

A Lady Comes to an Inn

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

We first meet any poem as a stranger. And in going through Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry  for this year’s National Poetry Month series, I often met on its pages poets I knew nothing about. Elizabeth Coatsworth was one. This poem of hers, “A Lady Comes to an Inn”  is emblematic of that – starting with strangeness, ending with wonder.

The poem begins when a quartet of strangers comes to an inn. Two of them are described as men of color, a third gets even less description, but he has a wife – the “lady” of the title.

The rest of the poem is observations of that lady. Normal expectations and timeworn poetic tropes may blind us as she is first described. First, we’re told her hair is pale and somewhat transparent. Is she just blonde or perhaps white haired? Well, twice we’re given images of translucency: champagne and ale. Perhaps that’s a trick of the light, but even if the number and pigment of hair strands change with age, they’re still opaque. Perhaps the poem’s descriptive inventory of a lighter hair color, creamy complexion, and a rosy mouth hew so closely to many a poem and folk-song’s conventions we’ll be lulled into this opening as so much boilerplate.*

A Lady Comes to an Inn

Likely not intended, but I was reminded by the title of this poem of the old ethnic-joke form that starts with a group of nationalities or religions who walk into a bar and….

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Things start to slip by the third verse: she speaks a language “nobody knows.” Does she speak this unknown tongue only some of the time, perhaps with her three companions, or is that unknown language her only one? The poem’s not clear on this, or even what the speech of the three men is like – they’re silent for all we know. This third verse has the two lines that “sold” the poem to me on first reading: “But sometimes she’d scream like a cockatoo/And swear wonderful oaths that nobody knew.”

Now we’re fully in strangeness. The cockatoo screech must have been startling, though no startling of those who have met these strangers is noted, and the oaths that may be understood as curses only from their musical tenor or other context, are said to be “wonderful.”

I get a sense of beguilement by the strangers, and the fourth verse may be to indicate that: the poem’s observer is gawking down the woman’s décolletage to read her tattoos. And what’s with those “bronze slippers?” Poetically fancified way to say brown shoes? Or are they really metal shoes. Weird. And no one can obtain the lady’s name. Language barrier? Beguilement? Since the other three in the quartet of strangers are unremarked on after the first stanza, the lady is holding everyone’s attention. Nobody knows where the lady and the others have come from, though it’s surmised it’s “marvelous.”

And then the poem and its strangers skip town, and the poem is the sum of the inn’s countrysider’s remembrance.

Let me be honest. On first reading I was picturing a quasi-Romani/”gypsy” encounter, and I even thought the poem might be seen as vaguely racist in an exoticist manner. Rather, I believe we’re supposed to get that sense – but the poem doesn’t say Roma explicitly, and easily could. That’s a misdirect. I think the countrysiders may even think the travelers are Romani at first. Taken more carefully, with a little more attention, I can see an unwritten final verse where a gray and time-jumping Rod Serling steps out from behind the inn to give us a benediction about being hospitable to strange travelers.

Did Coatsworth intend extraterrestrials? Modern readers might see that in the spaces between what she outlines in her poem: the thin extended limbs, pale skin, the indecipherable language, the metal shoes – ET, your inclusion in an important Modernist poetry anthology has come through. But in the early 1920s when Coatsworth published this poem, I think were more at fairy folk in her intent.

I spent an afternoon today reading more about Coatsworth’s interesting life and other literary work. Untermeyer makes much of her world-traveler resume in his anthology’s introduction of Coatsworth, and from further study it does look to be remarkable. As a young woman in the early 20th century she rode horseback across the Philippines and traveled widely in China and elsewhere in Asia – as well as the more common European “Grand Tour” stuff.** Though starting off as a poet for three book-length collections, she was a prolific writer in a variety of genres, including children’s literature and fantasy. Her most remembered work is an early Newbery Medal winner, The Cat Who Went to Heaven,  a children’s book with unusual subject matter melding extensive dharma talk with a Charlotte’s Web plot published in 1930. One of the highlights in today’s research was reading a couple of accounts by Coatsworth’s daughter, poet Kate Barnes, who writes about what her mother was like and the life she eventually led in rural Maine.

I wanted a contrast with the slower, sparer music I have used for the first two episodes; and when I had an hour in my studio space Friday, I quickly recorded three energetic takes of the music I wrote for “A Lady Comes to an Inn.”  Kate Barnes writes her mother wrote quickly,*** and that rhymes with my usual recording necessities these days: the first thought had to be a good enough thought. When I went to mix the resulting tracks, I realized I had a problem. I had played my jumbo 12-string guitar, and that beast when I pick it at a rapid tempo produces a lot of clashing harmonic content. It took a few tries using some mixing magic to temper that issue with the recording you can hear below using the audio player gadget. Has the audio gadget left for fairy land or Aldebaran? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog glamor the display of such a player, and so I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with an audio player.

 

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*The lady’s elongated thinness also described may not stop the reader at first either, but the young maples in my yard would also say otherworldly if their branches would describe a humanoid limb.

**Her travels included “off the beaten path” journeys, and I theorize that she would have likely experienced herself, as a woman, being the exotic, mysterious, traveler at times.

***Coatsworth’s spouse, writer Henry Beston, was the opposite, a much slower writer who needed solitude to work. Mother/housewife Coatsworth might have needed that work-fast-with-inconstant-time-available outlook for external reasons, but daughter Barnes thinks it was intrinsic to her nature. Coatsworth published around 100 books and told her daughter that she had published the most poems of any poet of her era if you excluded the para-literary sorts like Edgar Guest

Robbing an Orchard

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Halloween is a multi-valent holiday. There’s the cluster of religious and spiritual holidays of prayer and remembrance for the dead, the holiday of horror and monsters, the children’s festival of costumes and small candy-bars, and so on. I went looking for some supernatural poems that might be fun to present this week, and I came upon this short poem by British Romantic-era figure Leigh Hunt that was begging to be sung – after all, the full title of his poem was written down as “Song of the Fairies Robbing an Orchard.”  It’s light fantasy, but then the news has stolen all the horrors.

Was I thinking of a particular orchard as I worked on this piece? There were two apple trees just to the side of the house I grew up in, but they were past their prime by my time. I remember they bore small and not very appetizing fruit, and sometime around when I left home they were cut down. I recall my sisters and I climbing in the low and scraggly branches when barely more than toddlers – but it wasn’t exactly that pair of trees. I was probably thinking more of an orchard I have never seen: the apple trees that are part of the homestead “kitchen garden” that blogger Paul Deaton often writes about.  I also probably visualized Deaton’s apple trees and his stories of work with them when I performed Robert Frost’s great harvest-time poem “After Apple Picking”  a few years back. Deaton’s a regular reader of this Project’s blog – so Paul, if you read this, and when you next check you are missing some of your apples, you’ll know who tipped off the fay. Well, the more they take, the fewer you need to harvest and put up.

Leigh_Hunt

An engraved drawing of Leigh Hunt by J. Hayter

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Leigh Hunt is one of those Zelig or Forrest Gump like characters of the 19th century British Romantic-era. He knew and worked with all the big three Romantics: Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Hunt was key in launching Keats poetic career, was there for Shelley’s death by drowning, and had a tempestuous relationship (I suspect the most common kind) with Byron. As a poet himself, he’s decidedly minor, but this opus’ mischievous whimsy charmed me. I love the characterization tidbits in it: the fairies peeping in at pious humans worshiping in chapels, and their admission that they don’t even care that much for apples, but are in it more for the challenge of stealing them.

The 12 string guitar as played by Leadbelly 800

Come to think of it, Julius Lester probably has as least as high a Zelig/Forest Gump score as Leigh Hunt

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For music to sing Hunt’s poem, I used a 12-string acoustic guitar. Last week while commenting on a poem I’d read online, its author asked if I’d read Julius Lester. An old man, my steel-trap memory has corrosion problems, but the name rang a rusty bell. I remember seeing Lester’s byline in the Village Voice back in the Seventies, and I had some vague recall of him working on radio. But poetry? No, I had no idea he wrote any poetry. I hit a quick web search, and Julius Lester as it turns out was a multi-hyphenate: author of many books in several fields, social activist, college professor, photographer, critic, broadcasting host, and folk-scare-era folk singer. Reading about him I realized that I had owned one of his books: the early Sixties instruction manual “The 12-String Guitar as played by Leadbelly.”   I’ve long been interested in this 12-string variation of the great folk instrument of my country: the steel-string, flattop acoustic guitar. Leadbelly was a pioneering performer on that instrument.*  I can’t say that today’s piece is fully in his style, but it’s the work of someone who’s heard Leadbelly and some of his more apt descendants. You can hear the short song I call “Robbing an Orchard”  with the audio player gadget below. What, have the fairies run off with the audio player too? Naughty fairies! I give you this alternative enchantment then: a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I heard a counselor at a kids summer camp play a 12-string in the early part of The Sixties around the time that the 12-string-featuring song “Walk Right In”  made it to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.  I note in the linked wiki article on that song, that in 1962 12-string guitars were so scarce that when they decided to use two 12-strings playing together for an even more powerful sound, they had to wait for a second one to be made by the Gibson guitar company. Lester’s book, co-authored with no-less-than Pete Seeger, was a rare publication on how to play this instrument.

Minnesota’s Twin Cities was something of a hotbed of 12-string players in the 20th century, and shortly after I moved there, I bought my first 12-string, a cheap one sold as a sideline in a Musicland record store.

The Three Friends: an audio play adaptation of a Walter de la Mare short story

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I indicated last time that I had another piece I wanted to present before Halloween by Walter de la Mare, that British master of the subtle supernatural. It took a bunch of concentrated effort to produce something of a realization of it, but it’s as ready as I can make it in time. How’d it come about, and why was I not sure I could promise it?

I use the Internet Archive often as part of this “not just non-profit — it’s non-revenue” Project. One of the things the IA has is a large library of scanned public domain literary works,* which affords me a handy way to look through “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.” In the run up to Halloween I made a note to see if there was some Walter de la Mare work I could use for my Parlando Project purposes.

This Project lets me not only explore the well-known writer’s and musical composer’s habit of procrastination, but also the reader’s and researcher’s branch of that foible too. I put that book search in my I’ll-do-that-tomorrow bin for about a week. “I’ll get around to it” I told myself.

And then in mid-October some numbskulls hacked the Internet Archive causing it to go largely offline for more than a week. When the scanned book section returned to availability, I was already into making other new work for this year’s Halloween series, but a few days ago I was finally able to access some additional collections of de la Mare’s work from the IA. In looking through those, I found that Walter de la Mare wasn’t only a poet. He also wrote short stories, which like his poetry, exhibit his dry sense of the strange. “The Three Friends”  is one of his shortest published stories — short enough to work into one of my short-format audio pieces.

Walter de la Mare in front of a microphone

When Walter de la Mare worked the mic, he had a whole radio network to support him.

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“The Three Friends”  is dialog-centric, and in less than a day I was able to jury-rig up a three-person play out of it — but who’d be my voice-acting ensemble? It was less than 72 hours until Halloween. I’d have loved to have used Dave Moore’s voice, but my production schedule is catch-as-catch-can, and I didn’t know if I could corral him in time. My wife agreed to play the part of Lacey, the tavern keeper member of the three friends, assuming she wasn’t completely worn-out from her work and the rest of her life. Last night she stepped up to the mic and recorded that part in a quick pass. I made a logistical compromise and recorded the other two parts with my own voice, also working quickly.**  By about 9 PM last night I had the dialog recorded.

Between then and about 3 PM this afternoon I worked on the audio production of the recordings, selecting a bit of instrumental music (from my last-weekend exploration of a new audio software feature) to serve as a plausible theme music for “The Parlando Project Theatre of the Air.” The 19 hours from first opening up the microphones to an audio play ready to upload weren’t all Project work: I did go to sleep after midnight, I got up at dawn and did a bicycle ride to breakfast, and early this afternoon I made another bike trip to the grocery store — but there was a lot of production work trying to meet the needs of this format that isn’t what the Project normally does. “Radio play” music production isn’t the same as recording and mixing a 3-minute song, and I had to learn how to apply my computer audio tools in a slightly different way. If you haven’t done audio production, it’s a heap of tasks even to get a half-way polished result: finding environmental sound effects, balancing levels, fixing the most egregious dialog glitches, deciding if any pauses are too long or too short, and so on. The result of this experiment is good enough to present, though I note things that I would have liked to do better.

So, what’s the story our actors are presenting for your ears today? Two friends are casually talking about a problem bedeviling one of them. That troubled man, Eaves, has been having reoccurring dreams or visions. His friend Sully tries to make light of it, but in the course of their evening they meet up with the third friend who works in a tavern, Miss Lacey. They talk over Eaves’ problem: you see Eaves thinks he has pierced the Samhain veil. Has Eaves seen, will he tell of, “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns?”

Well, it’s de la Mare. Most writers would break out the purple pen to write such visions, de la Mare wants to make a more subtle (and human) observation. The orchestra (well, the piano trio) has started to sound. Take your seats and listen to the short, 10-minute world-premiere performance of the audio play “The Three Friends”  by using the audio player below. What, has someone tall with a large hat sat in front of your audio player gadget? I provide this alternative, a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*The Internet Archive has also taken an aggressive stance to works that are not clearly in the Public Domain. That activity is controversial and has had some legal judgements handed down for rights-holders. I won’t take your time to go into all that, but its scanned PD literary archive is a treasure for readers and researchers.

**Oh, if only I was one of those skilled voice actors who can call up entirely different vocal timbres to create distinctive sounding character voices! I tried to mitigate the lack of distinction between Eaves’ and Sully’s voices both being portrayed by mine by using stereo separation on today’s audio

The Song of Finis

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Last time in our Halloween series I reported that Edgar Allan Poe had movies made from some of his poems — well, sort of.  Today’s poet Walter de la Mare’s poetry, in title and under his name, wouldn’t have served for such, because so much of what de la Mare does is understated and inferred. He’s one of those poets that when read casually seems to not be doing as much as he’s actually doing. There may be no fireworks going off when you read a de la Mare poem of the supernatural— until after reading it once and remembering the poem later, you may sense the flash-bang-backs of what’s there and evoked.

Today’s Walter de la Mare piece “The Song of Finis”  is an example. It seems simple enough to be children’s poetry, and indeed his publisher bound selections of de la Mare’s more whimsical short poems to market them as children’s books. “The Song of Finis”  presents an eerie short scene and situation, supplying only the barest of details still rich in specificity, and wraps it all in some fine word-music that urged me to make a song of this proclaimed song.

The Song of Finis

I present these chord sheets so that you can sing these songs yourself.

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We have a knight, but one out of his time, yet still errant. The once shining armor is rusted.*  When he lifts his helmet visor, we see yet “skin and bone,” a choice that lets us imagine a gaunt face suggesting the skull beneath. He’s alone somewhere warm and windless (warm enough to summon the tea-time image of steeping).

There are but two lonely sounds of dialog recorded. His horse whinnies knowing something’s up, and the knight calls out “Lone for an end!” The latter is a bit poetic-dictiony, but I’ll allow it to depict the out-of-time knight, and I suspect de la Mare wants us to hear “lone” as double-sounding for “long.”

What happens in the poem’s conclusion? Does the knight and horse charge off some cliff to end his anachronism? Or is he challenging that empty place he finds himself in with that single cry that has no answer? My thought, it’s sort of both, the song of “Finis” is about endless endings, and the desire for one last adventure.

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In de la Mare’s poem there are no angels

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You can hear my song setting of Walter de la Mare’s “The Song of Finis”  with the audio player gadget below. It’s not finis is you can’t see that audio player, as I supply this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player. Not finis for me either this year, for my plans are to return soon with at least one more de la Mare fantasy piece before this Halloween charges into memory.

*As a fan of the 20th century Rock group Procul Harum, I wondered if the band’s lyricist Keith Reid read de la Mare’s poem once and remembered it in his song “Conquistador.”