herbs

Lonesome Water

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I hope you’ve been enjoying the bountiful crop of new musical pieces presented here this National Poetry Month.* Each of the dozen I’ve presented were based on poems found in Louis Untermeyer’s between-the-wars literary anthology Modern American Poetry.  Here’s another of the poets that Untermeyer noted then, but that time has forgotten: a Pennsylvania school-teacher named Roy Helton.**

This won’t be a long post today: there’s not much easily accessible information about Helton. Combining Untermeyer’s modest introduction of him in his anthology and the absence of much else surviving online even makes me wonder how Helton came to be included in the anthology. Others in the “haven’t heard of” class I’ve already presented this month seemed to be substantial poets in their era – prize winners or prominent in other ways – but Helton has only a handful of collections to be noted, and there’s a passing mention that he had things published in Atlantic Monthly magazine.***

One “dog that hasn’t barked” I see is that he attended the University of Pennsylvania and graduated there in 1908. He may well then have overlapped the early-20th century presence there of poets H.D., William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and maybe even Ezra Pound. Did one of them recommend Helton? Another possible vector: while I have no information on Helton’s politics, there’s the possibility that he may have had lefty connections in circles that overlapped Untermeyer or someone else.

What’s remarkable about the small amount of his poetry that I’ve seen? Today’s piece “Lonesome Water”  impresses me when seen on the pages of Untermeyer’s anthology as a folk-song lyric. Again, no evidence, but it’s difficult to take in the words of it and not imagine that Helton didn’t sing it.**** Assuming one is OK with the dialect, it’s an attractive piece melding herb-doctor mysticism with plaintive rural hermitage. Untermeyer says Helton spent time in Kentucky and North Carolina, but given that he seems to have been based occupationally in Philadelphia the choice of writing in Appalachian mountain dialect seems to be a poetic diction (or folklorist) choice as deliberate as Hart Crane’s King James Version portrait from last time.

Lonesome Water

Some dialect vocabulary here challenges me. “Sang” is ginseng. Is “cliv” a regional pronunciation of cliff?

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Well, we don’t know if Helton sang, but the recording below says I sang it, best I could, to some music I had to supply to make that happen. I usually have trouble performing accents and dialect, but this one caused me fewer issues – maybe the spirit of Tennessee ancestor Susan Partain helped me out? Besides guitar, the other instrument I played on this track is the distinctive Appalachian regional instrument, the mountain dulcimer. You should be able to hear my performance with the audio player gadget below. Huh? Wasn’t some plant-enchantment hasn’t made that audio player invisible, you’re just are reading this in a manner that won’t show it. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*I also worry I may have oversaturated even the huge and avid market for rough-voiced singers doing presentations of literary poetry. It could have been even more bountiful, or overwhelming here, but #NPM2026 is coming to a close and I think I’ll only get one more musical presentation of a literary poem out by tomorrow – but I hope that’ll be a good one: a lesser-known Langston Hughes poem for Poem in Your Pocket Day. Three or four other pieces from Untermeyer’s anthology remain in various states of completion, and they may appear later this year.

**Helton taught at the Pennsylvania Friends Central School, a K-12 institution. I don’t have info on what he taught at that school. Imagist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) attended this school, but that would have been before Helton’s time as a teacher.

***I can find nothing online searching at the Atlantic’s site, or generally, as to what kinds of things Helton published in that magazine. One short piece of light verse is quoted redundantly in the stub-entries that turn up in most web searches, something which may have been printed in the Atlantic: “Oaks are the true conservatives;/They hold old leaves till summer gives/A green exchange.”

****In case you wonder, the folk-song collector/singer/poet was a thing by the between-world-wars era. Carl Sandburg blazed that trail. Foundational creative writing professor and poet Edwin Ford Piper was another (and he supplied testimony that Robert Frost could be coaxed into singing a rowdy sea-shanty).

A note in the unreleased “talk” section of Helton’s Wikipedia stub says that he played Walt Whitman on stage in 1927, so one cite of performing.

Of course, the “literary ballad” has a long page-poetry tradition too. When the dialect or setting is some misty British Isles locale, Celtic fairyland, or ancient days it’s easier to accept its high culture bonafides. Helton’s narrator is an American lower-class contemporary and lacks any such exotic cache. Myself, I find poetry in this poem, but in American academic culture it must have been a harder lift to romanticize a speaker sounding like Pa Kettle or Jed Clampett.

Rosemary

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s been awhile since a new post, what with holidays and family occasions, but here’s another piece, “Rosemary,”  using the words by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Millay was one of the most popular, most often read, poets of the first part of the 20th Century, but the later part of the century gave her less consideration. A contemporary of the Imagists and other poetic Modernists that we’ve featured a lot this year here, and while connected to their world, she didn’t sustain favor with the rise of the “New Criticism” that became the dominant academy in the English-speaking world after WWII.

Reasons? Well, there’s gender. One must assume that played a role. And popularity of the general-readership sort would not have been an asset either, as perhaps only Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson survived being read by a general readership in the mid-century without losing their high-art cred. Why couldn’t Millay have joined Frost and Dickinson in these critics’ esteem?

Millay with books

Millay at work. Other than the lack of guitars, just about the perfect décor.

I think it’s largely a case of her poetry not seeming to have the subject of their criticism: fresh, complex, allusive and illusive, imagery. Frost and Dickinson may have used homey sounding language, but in the end those funerals in the brain and snow, roads and woods added up to something to talk about in critical prose.

The New Critics were an inflection point. Before them, poetry was largely considered musical speech, a container that could hold a variety of subjects, after the New Critics, poetry was about the imagery, how you portrayed things with it. And unless one aimed for satire, such complex rhetorical structures must be in service to serious matters.

And so, there’s subject matter too. Millay’s great subject was love and affection, it’s presence, absence and all the shades in-between. In doing so, she addresses much of life and its condition, but did she receive enough credit for that? Is a heartbroken man a tragic philosopher of fate, and a woman merely a spurned lover? Narrow-mindedness can’t be ruled out.

“Rosemary”  allows us to examine these issues. This looks to be a poem about the death of a passionate love or the death of a dear one. I’m not sure which of those two possibilities is standing for the other, but for an audience, it does not matter as both events are common to our hearts.

I think there is an intent here to conjure a complex world of timeless folk magic. Though written in the 20th Century, it could have been written anywhere up to five centuries earlier. In the title we have rosemary, an herb associated with remembrance even in Shakespeare’s time (Ophelia’s mad speech in Hamlet for example), and in the first stanza we have rushes being scattered on a room’s floor, a custom from medieval times to hide the stink and mess of a less hygienic age, a strewing of reeds that may have included rosemary because it was thought to be something of an insecticide. Bergamot is another fragrant plant. Stink, rot and pestilence are all inferred subtly in this verse that on the face of it seems only a short catalog of flowers.

The second verse adds a rain barrel to catch rain, or is it tears? And what’s with that iron pot. Is it a cauldron? The poems last two lines are in quotes on the page. I was suspicious that the “An it please you, gentle sirs,” line was a quote, and finding out what it was from might be important, but I can’t place that line—if any reader knows, please clue me in.

And at the end of this timeless lament: “well-a-day,” which might sound to you or me like “have a nice day,” but is instead a word that harkens back to Old English, meaning woe-is-me.

What I think we have here is a poem, that read quickly, seems to be a trivial verse about some flowers with a bit of a kitchen scene, but it’s stated with deliberately archaic specifics so that the attentive modern reader might notice that time cannot heal this loss. And each thing in it is an image, though they don’t loudly announce themselves as such.

I’m reminded of my distant relative Susan Glaspell’s famous play “Trifles,”  where the domestic clues hide all the information the dense men seeking important information miss.

The Pentangle

The Pentangle. It’s not fair to compare. There’s 5 of them, and only 1 of me. Oh, and talent.

Musically, I went with bass, drums, two acoustic guitars and my voice for this. I was aiming for an impression of the sort of thing The Pentangle did many years ago. They were better at it, but it was good to try. Use the player below to hear my performance of Millay’s “Rosemary” or failing that, this highlighted link.