Halloween

The Vampire (Part 4)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a 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.

The Spider and the Ghost of the Fly

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

As Halloween approaches, here’s a song that focuses on the playfully frightful aspects of the holiday. Wait a minute – I debated typing “playfully” there with “frightful.” I went with that combination as it’s my best guess at the intent of the Vachel Lindsay poem that I converted into a song, though I can’t be sure.

Playing with fear and horror is clearly a part of Halloween. We expect children to celebrate the holiday, and the adults participating in Halloween celebrations plan them to be happy occasions, even though the decorations will be full of spiders and their webs, and monsters, and skeletons, and those dream-flickering pumpkin skulls.

But if you take the poem (now a song) at face value, this is about a woman who is personified as a predator, the femme fatale trope and her victim fly. Had poet Lindsay felt himself wronged by some lover to come up with this piece? I don’t have biographical evidence to point to with an emphatic gesture,* and the internal evidence within the poem speaks to me of a playful mode to the condensed tale of horror it tells. There seems to be a paradoxical agreement on the part of the singer: they’ve been done wrong, but they’re going to speak lightly about this, and while the song’s fly doesn’t say it out-loud, they might be open to just a little more peril.**

Spider and the Ghost of the Fly

A poem that literally describes tearing the wings off flies, yet I’m still holding it as playful.

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Earlier this month I wrote about the mid-20th century “folk scare” in passing, and as someone who has some grasp of the songs revived by that movement, I couldn’t help but think that Lindsay referenced a floating verse that appears in some American folk songs. Did anyone else catch it from listening or reading the text above?

The spider takes her prey with the line: “She drove me to her parlor/above the winding stair.” Reading this, I immediately heard a specific tune – cementing the idea that this poem would get the Parlando Project treatment. What tune? One widely sung song that features the verse about a woman taking a lover to her parlor goes by the title “Cindy, Cindy.”   Besides the parlor destination – sometimes sung in the folk song as “She took me to her parlor and she cooled me with her fan” – most “Cindy, Cindy”  versions have devouring women in them too, with verses like “I wish I was an apple a-hanging on a tree and every time my Cindy passed she’d take a bite out of me”*** or even “My Cindy is a pretty girl. My Cindy is a peach; she throws her arms around my neck and hangs on like a leech.”

Quick research says that “Cindy, Cindy” was sung in America in the early 20th century when Vachel Lindsay wrote his poem. I’m going to suspect Lindsay knew one of the variations of it – and he might have thought some of his audience would too.

So, I’m calling it: playful. Likely erotically  playful.

I also suspect my music for today’s performance of “The Spider and the Ghost of the Fly”  had “Cindy, Cindy’s”  tune in its ear a little bit too. You might be able to hear that performance with the audio gadget below – but like the devouring and dangerous love between the spider and the fly, some of you may find the audio gadget hidden and suppressed. Aha! I have this highlighted link, a veritable grail-shaped beacon, that will open a new tab with its own audio player so you can hear the song.

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*Vachel Lindsay and Parlando Project favorite Sara Teasdale were romantically linked for a time. For more on the story of how that turned out, you can read one of the most popular posts in this Project’s history. The Teasdale poem musically performed in that above linked post also talks about the surrender of love.

**As per Sir Galahad’s tale in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

***This verse in the folk song rhymes in with the apple stealing fairies in Leigh Hunt’s poem from earlier in this month’s series, and I’d suppose the song’s connection of apples with erotic passion may echo back to the Garden of Eden. And that choice of Cindy as a name? Could that be evoking sin?

A Ghost’s Leavetaking. Returning to an odd-ball instrument and a resulting musical sketch

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Today’s piece, continuing our series as we consider the variousness of Halloween including the surrounding Days of the Dead and associated horror/fantasy elements, has odd origins. It starts, since it’s useful to mark a starting point, with the death of my late wife decades ago, something that led to an unusual instrument.

Shortly after my wife died, and I was left alone in the house we once shared, I decided I’d take to playing more music in the silence. I went looking for new instruments to inspire me. This intimate death, as it happened, was followed by another kind of ending. To tell you about that, I won’t get too deep into the weeds of the musical instrument business, but one of America’s largest musical instrument makers, Fender, had in the late 1990s quixotically decided to introduce an entirely new guitar brand, DeArmond. In short order they created an entire line of electric guitars and basses, around two dozen models, priced between their budget Squier line that featured inexpensive renditions of traditional Fender instruments and their more expensive American line that the Squier guitars copied – but the DeArmond guitars weren’t copies of the highly popular Fender designs at all. Instead, they were versions of electric guitars and basses once produced by another company, Guild, which had around the same time been absorbed into Fender. I expect few who read this Project will know anything about Guild guitars, and that explains why they ceased to exist as a separate company. But those who do hear the name “Guild” and have a light bulb illuminate, are most likely to think of Guild acoustic guitars.*  Guild produced a successful line of acoustics. The Guild line of 12-string guitars were highly thought of: John Denver, Tim Buckley, and Ralph Towner constantly played jumbo-bodied Guild 12-strings, and other folk artists played acoustic Guild guitars in this era: Richie Havens, Paul Simon, and Bonnie Raitt.

So, this was a strange business idea: create a new brand, but make it closely reference past electric instruments many players had never heard of. So how did this turn out?

To quickly answer, I step back in marketing time and type: “Edsel.”**

OK, where are we getting to Halloween? This started with one death – trust me, we’ll get there – and now there’s the pseudo-death of guitar line. Fender pulled the plug abruptly just as our current century was getting underway. They had lots of unsold DeArmond electric guitar stock. I mean lots.  They gave some away to schools and music programs. They sold the rest at fire-sale prices. Guitars made to be sold for around $600 ($1200 in 2025 dollars) were being blown out at $200. I quickly bought three of their guitars: a large hollow-body archtop, a 12-string electric solid body, and a 6-string electric with a Bigsby vibrato bridge – not at BOGO pricing, but at those BOG2 prices. I’m writing about a lot of things today, but not those – instead, it’s another DeArmond.

One of the weirdest Guild designs that that Fender/DeArmond revived only to kill – indeed one of the oddest guitar designs of all time – was the Ashbory bass. Guitarist readers are now visualizing an electric bass: bodies at least as big as an electric guitar, but with longer necks. Old guys like me that play electric bass also are thinking weight – heavy, too often more than 10 pounds.

Nope. This is my Ashbory bass:

My Ashbory Bass 800-600

White lines, don’t do it. The Ashbory is a fretless instrument, the fretboard lines are just markers. Exact intonation with the thick strings and very short scale is a challenge.

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Weighs less than a Stephen King novel. Less than half the length of a regular electric bass. Body just a little bigger than a CD case. The original strings, specially designed for it, were translucent rubber bands. The current strings on mine are smooth white opaque nylon, essentially extra thick versions of a modern classical guitar string. Unlike a normal fretless electric bass, which is a beast to play, you need to be almost delicate when playing these extraordinarily low-tension strings.

Other than the tiny size, a goal here was to approximate the plucked sounds of the even more unwieldy upright bass, but neither the original 1980’s Guild Ashbory or the late ‘90s DeArmond copy sold well. I used mine when I wanted upright and fretless bass sounds for a while, but in the last few years I’ve moved over to using other methods to get that sound on Parlando recordings. This week someone mentioned they’d just purchased a used Ashbory, reviving memories of that time and leading me to revisit the instrument musically. In my studio space I got the tiny bass out and plugged it in to record. To get the upright bass sound from it you want to use bare fingers, but for some reason (habit?) I decided to use a thick rubbery pick – which is one way I play regular electric bass. This gave me a slightly more aggressive sound than I recall getting out of it and I then programmed in a drum pattern to match where that result was leading me. Building from the groove, I played some electric guitar and added a piano part, producing a short two-minute piece as my studio time ran out yesterday.

Listening to the result this morning I felt the music had a sense of longing or leaving. That may have leaked from my connection between the DeArmond Ashbory and the time after my wife’s death, which was followed by my mother’s, and then after an interval, my father’s death. Could I find some words to go with this music? Nothing I had in my files of poems for Halloween seemed to fit, so I did a web search for “poem about a ghost leaving or disappearing.” Bam, this lesser-known Sylvia Plath poem came up, right on point!

Plath’s “A Ghost’s Leavetaking”  is an 8-stanza/40-line poem, not all that long, but longer than my just-over-2-minute music could cover. The poem describes a somewhat distressed awaking in a morning where the speaker is mixing dreams and remembrance of the dead with an ongoing adjustment to mundane household tasks.*** Just as in Phil Dacey’s “Frost Warnings”  poem from earlier this month, Plath sets up tired laundry and bed sheets that “signify our origin and end” while they play the role of ghosts of the departed.

A good poem, but now I had two problems: an apt text too long for my music and a poem not in the public domain.**** “A Ghost’s Leavetaking”  was written in the 1950s and has not yet reached PD status in the U.S.*****

I made a quick decision. I would use only some lines from Plath’s poem. Artistically I thought that worked. It made a shorter set of text to fit the music I had finished. I was able to zoom in on the Day of the Dead and ghost elements of the poem, shortening the examination of how we sometime wake still recovering mundane reality from our dreams. If you would like to read the entire poem, as Plath published it, here’s a link. As to the PD situation, my solution is at best mixed. “Fair use” is not a firm concept, and my Project’s entirely non-revenue and educational purposes are no guaranteed Kings X. Using only a few lines would bolster my case, but as I used about a third of the poem, that’s not clearly kosher. Even forgetting laws, if Plath were a living author, she’d be well in her rights, regardless of the law, to take issue with someone cutting her poem up, making it less than she intended it to be.

So, from that decision, we’re left with this musical piece where I quickly sketched out today in my little home office “Studio B” how one might sing some lines from Plath’s poem with the music I finished yesterday. I’m aware of the limitations of my voice, and in an ideal world the melodies could be better worked out and ornamented by a better singer. None-the-less, I found it personally rewarding to inhabit Plath’s words and do the best I can today to convey the emotions and images she put in them, and some listeners may gain something from that performance. You can hear my sketch using lines taken from “A Ghost’s Leavetaking”  with the audio gadget below. Has the audio gadget gone to Plath’s “lost otherworld?” I offer this alternative as a keeper of the “profane grail,” a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Fender had never been able to make itself a factor in the upper end of the acoustic guitar market, so it was assumed that’s why they snapped up the distressed Guild company: for the well-thought-of acoustic guitars.

** There are car folks who will tell you that the Edsel was a perfectly fine late 1950’s American car, but that doesn’t change what the brand name invokes.

The Guild electrics were pretty good guitars, if not answering what the market wanted back in their day. Some of the DeArmond sort-of copies were arguably better instruments than the originals, but they were just as out of sorts with what the market wanted. In 1998 the electric guitarist customer wanted a Stratocaster or a Les Paul, with a Fender or Gibson name on it, or one of the slightly hot-rodded extensions of those Fender or Gibson models. The sort of funky, oddball looks of the DeArmond guitars would have stood a better chance a decade later after Indie rock stars started to come forward making a point of playing anything but a Les Paul or a Strat.

***I had the vivid experience of my late wife seeming to return to my bedroom in the liminal hours. From things I’ve heard from others, this is not uncommon for those who’ve lost intimates.

****I’m not all that troubled by asking for forgiveness from a ghost, but one of Plath’s children is still alive, and may hold the IP rights to Plath’s work. Her web site lists the Faber and Faber UK offices as the contact for Sylvia Plath rights permissions, but I got no reply early in this project when I asked that very organization about my small-time, non-revenue use of another Faber and Faber author. I would remove this piece on any objection.

*****If I did a little day trip up Highway 61, to say Thunder Bay Ontario, Plath’s poem would be PD there. And thanks readers for following me on this post’s road trip.

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.

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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 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.”

Poe’s The Haunted Palace

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Let’s continue our series of fantasy and supernatural poems with a musical performance of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe — a poet that might be expected to appear in any such series. Before we go to that poem and my performance, let me take a quick jaunt back to my mid-century youth.

Poe sat in a unusual place in literature back then (and probably still does now). His writing, including his poetry, remained in circulation. Unlike Longfellow, it wasn’t likely because it was deemed worthy lessons for young people — Poe’s writing kept its place for its gothic sensation into the 20th century. Without Poe or his sensibility, would there have been then a Vampira, EC horror comics, pedantic pulp detectives, Lovecraftian horror, a great deal of Heavy Metal lyrical content, or a post mid-life movie career for Vincent Price? And that’s not even broaching the topic of Poe’s influence on the French Symbolists, who took elements of his strange and abnormal on an emigration journey from the asylum to the academy.

For a year or so around middle school age, I went on a Poe jag, reading a great many of his stories in collections that also included his poetry. It was a short-lived enthusiasm, and I’m not sure what remains of it. Did I start there with my love for an unreliable narrator? Was the on-the-spectrum “Aha” moment attractive to me neurologically anyway before this reading? Since I can’t say, let’s get on with an example of Poe being the inevitable poet that a Halloween series calls forth when the boundary-line between the dead and the living becomes permeable.

The scenery about the ghosts in “The Haunted Palace”  is something of a poetic trope. Poetry loves a ruin, and poets being the unacknowledged back-benchers in the world of political power, there’s a draw to poems about the death of kings — and so we have poets writing “Ozymandias”  or “Jade Flower Palace.”

Poe though is drawn almost entirely to the sensuousness of the decay here. There’s no lesson about unwise or tyrannical rulers in the poem. There’s no tragedy — if we can even guess the kingdom’s tragic flaw it might be that it was all too beautiful.*  On one hand I find the poem a hallow poem of hollowness — but intended by the author or not, that hollowness is a statement about great kingdoms and their lovely riches. And the ending’s invocation of always escaping — and therefore not escaping — unsmiling ghosts of hideous laughter completes the poem with a powerful rhetorical burst.


Take a sideways jump to the genius of SCTV

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Perhaps because of the simple harmonic structure of my musical setting, I worked some hours unproductively this week on additional musical decoration. I made two attempts at twin bowed-string lead lines for this, and abandoned both those ruins to our mutual benefit. After that wrong turn, I decided that the piece’s feature is more its swaying, understated groove which I left to stand for its value. Mid-century ghosts visiting this music are welcome to do The Frug or The Jerk while listening, but those on any side of the Samhain borders can visit “The Haunted Palace” with the audio player gadget below. Has such a gadget disappeared within a fetid mist? Oh, no matter, you can hear it with this highlighted link then, as that will open a pale-doored new tab with its own audio player.

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*Poe wrote that the death of beauty was the ultimate poetic theme — the gothic manifesto in short. I’d note in that an undercurrent there that many (most) artists feel: that they create all their beauties, only for them to become abandoned ruins with rare and uncommon audiences. As Frank O’Hara’s fraternal twin brother Count Floyd said: Pretty scary, huh, boys and girls!

The Puca

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

As our Halloween series continues, let me advocate today for an element of the fantastical: the goblin. Some fantasy creatures are, by definition, not fully alive: your vampires, zombies, golem, all animated undead meat; your ghosts “spirited” in some way, but incorporeal. The goblin, like all the variations in the fairy realm, seems akin to the human, but not in the beautified, glammed-up way that many fairies are depicted; and also, like the human, goblins seem subject to motivations and whims, not driven by some designed in need.

Puca is a goblin name of uncertain etymology, and specifics of their appearance and nature are like the word’s origin, broad-ranging. That non-specific appearance is baked into many accounts: they are shapeshifters. Some accounts link them to taking on animal forms: rabbits, red-eyed horses, and so on.*  Today’s puca is related in a poem by Irish poet Joseph Campbell.**  While Campbell is attuned to shapeshifters, his puca doesn’t change species or form in his poem: he starts and remains a hairy creature of the forest, human-enough to mirror human behavior, which becomes the signal incident in the poem.

Puca drawing

Shapes of pucas. I don’t know the artists for the two on the sides, but the sculptor in the middle is Aidian Harte and his mid-transformation depiction caused a commotion in the Irish town it was to be displayed in.

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If goblins are unpredictable, portrayed as helpful and troublesome, this puca does in a way transform. In my reading of the poem, I sensed it describes something of a turn-about: rather than a human encountering a magical creature and then by elfin spell or trickery the human is changed, Campbell describes the opposite: a shy creature emerges, is observed laughing, dancing, poetry on his lips. And then a stanza later, his mood is sad, distressed, bitter. What causes this change?

The poem doesn’t say, but another creature, the poem’s voice is observing the puca. Let us assume he’s human, even that he may be the poet himself. The unhappy puca is said to have become “the double of distress.” Does “double” just mean equal to the happiness of the second stanza? Or does it mean the puca has taken on, mirrored, the human who has revealed that he envies the puca’s “sunny mood” in the happy verse before?

The poem ends by telling us this human/goblin encounter has caused the puca to retreat back into its cave, hiding itself. The puca may have been enchanted by the human’s sadness, and thus fled from the human’s thrall.

Unsaid in the poem, but I’ll ask: is the human changed by this encounter? While the puca instinctively flees the dissatisfied human, it’s the poet that’s telling us this story, and I think they’ve concisely explained that their bitterness has an effect, causing the happy fantastic to leave. Did the poet learn something from this?

I’ll add this biographic note on the author: Campbell’s involvement with the Irish Civil War that followed independence broke him. He was imprisoned, faced at least some danger of execution — and once released, he fled the Ireland whose culture had fed his art. His literary efforts tailed off sharply and the “gall and bitterness” that the puca demonstrates was Campbell’s lot in the last part of his life.

But this is a poem of Campbell’s early career, first published in 1913. Mute on the page, it set out a spell for me to set it to music. I think “The Puca” shows one of Campbell’s strengths: concision. A great many literary balladeers want to write epics. While I admire those that can vivify a 10-minute ballad in performance, I also observe that that endurance is beyond me — and Campbell, fresh from rubbing shoulders with the concise Imagists, has packed a charged moment in time into four stanzas — and if my reading is valid, more is evoked in the incident described than might be explicated in extra verses.

I tried for the eerie in the music I composed and recorded here: a certain wildness in the keyboard line’s contour and oddness in their timbre. You can hear my performance with the graphical audio player below. What? Such player has crept away into a cave or twilight glen?  This highlighted link is an alternative, as it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Articles on the puca I read this month relate this creature to the Easter Bunny and the invisible friend in Harvey,  generally benign creatures — but then, the red-eyed horse is said to offer rides home to the inebriated, the acceptance of which will lead to a wild, bucking, bramble-scratched ride, ending with the rider being bucked off in a field far from home. Unmentioned in the pieces I read would be the animated cartoon character of Bugs Bunny, the gender-fluid trickster that I’d see as in this tradition too.

**Obligatory footnote every time I bring Joseph Campbell up — no, not the Power of Myth guy. This Campbell is a deserving-of-more-interest writer of the turn of the century Irish cultural revival. Like many others of his generation, he was caught up in the Irish independence struggle, used Celtic folklore material, and dabbled in writing for performance (plays and song-lyrics) — but he was also connected with the Imagists and early English language poetic Modernism that emerged in London before WWI.