horror

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.

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?

One need not be a chamber to be haunted. You could be a cassette tape.

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

However similar if amorphous shapes, everyone’s ghosts are private spirits, and I have a new musical piece with words by Emily Dickinson testifying to that — but let me slide over to a couple of personal things first, as if I was a regular blogger externalizing their internal story.

I’ve had a couple of weeks when I’ve needed to come back to the Parlando Project stuff from other things. I had a colonoscopy with unremarkable results. Huzzah. That’s some prime blogger internal dialog! But before that, I searched around my crowded little bedroom/office to find old cassette tapes. The oldest are from The Sixties when I had one of those small battery powered monaural cassette recorders with a slide-out chrome handle, a single speaker on the top, and a chorded plastic microphone with a start-stop slider button on its side. Others were from the 1970’s-2000 era when I recorded musical things, first on the stereo tape decks of the late 20th century home hi-fi era until I was able to afford one of the legendary Portastudio models designed for musicians, using the same humble cassette tapes, but able to record 4 distinct tracks. My task: to make digital copies that I can store in no appreciable physical space and are independent of an obsolete format.*  More than 30 years of this stuff, much of it of only private interest, though you may hear some of it eventually.

Cassettes 600

Some of the cassette tapes.

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The ubiquitousness of inexpensive video is fairly recent, but assuming no catastrophic events, many born in the past 15-20 years will likely have color video with sound of their childhoods and young adulthood that could follow them the rest of their lives.**  Is that a good thing, something they welcome? I don’t know. Before this some folks had diaries and journals, or kept letters, so some level of self-documentation is not entirely novel. Still, for me, a person whose Project lives in music and sound, whose favored form of literature began in sound before writing was invented — retaining an element of the sound of the words, and their sequence, and echoes — my particular audio time-capsules have a special tang. And fears.

Most of the tapes are not just me, in a few I’m just the man holding the microphone, though I’m there as the shadow that chose to start the recorder. They hold our imperfections: things before we knew, before we learned — and then too the persistent faux pas that we still commit: there, and committed to a recording. Given that most can record now anytime with the tap of screen, how many will simply erase to save future embarrassment?

So back to Emily Dickinson and this poem about ourselves and what we think we fear — which may not be what we actually fear, or should fear. “One need not be a chamber — to be haunted”  is a poem about that self we either can’t lose or can’t consider. In five stanzas Dickinson lays out some conventional gothic scenery (some of which she herself will erect in other poems) haunted houses, undead ghosts, church graveyards, and finally an assassin laying in wait for us.***  Dickinson points out that the self may be making or amplifying those fears, and perhaps that self, making scary movies in our imaginations, may be doing it to displace us from seeing the real fear source, our mind’s-self. “Ourself — behind Ourself — Concealed — Should startle — most” Dickinson’s poem concludes. You can read the text of Dickinson’s poem at this link. And yes, you might note I sang “alley” by mistake instead of “abbey” messing up Dickinson’s graveyard implication.

So, is that our choice? To ignore ourselves, out of fear of what we’ll find, or to disappear into a copious kingdom of solitary solipsistic self, many of us with the digital equivalent of Krapp’s Last Tape  clanking and dangling from them like Marley’s ghost? Socrates decried the unexamined life. Memoir can be an honorable genre. Despite my taking the time this month with the old tapes, I think of this Scylla and Charybdis, and in the end there’s ultimately no keeping of this life and self, though sometimes there is sharing.

Today’s musical ensemble is a Rock-band of some kind: drums, bass, piano, 12-string acoustic guitar, and two electric guitars, one of which is run through enough effects to mask its guitaristic nature. No need to rewind, you can hear it with the audio player below. No player? No need to untangle that with a pencil in the reel-hole — this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Many years ago, I was on a committee working on the technical design for a radio network’s archives (most of which were still on audio tape then) which involved long-term storage and public accessibility elements. The online “New Media” folks had their ideas about what formats to use for listeners to stream over the Internet, the audio engineers had concerns about what would give the longest life and best fidelity, and the computer IT folks had thoughts about what media would have the capacity to hold something that might climb into the then hard to imagine “terabytes” of digital storage. The three groups weren’t always in agreement, and a grizzled consultant from some outside large, already in existence, archive was brought in to meet with us. Should we use digital tape, hard drives, optical disks? What file-system format on which? What audio file format should be used on that media? Is some of this going to die from “bit rot” on the media in how many years? We had lots of questions and wanted the wizard to arbitrate our concerns. He listened for a while as we cross-talked.

Then he answered. “It doesn’t make much difference what you choose. You’re going to have to convert to other media, file-systems, and audio formats in the future, and every few years going forward. Plan for that.”

**Many of my mid-century generation have photos from their youth. I had a “baby book” that lasts into my grade-school years in black and white. A few families had movie cameras (though no one I knew did) but many of those shot silent film. The cost of film and developing that film constrained the amount of pictures and home movies made. Lots of birthday parties, weddings, holidays. Parts of life yes, but selected shorts.

***I was working on this in the wake of the news of a planned, lay-in-wait killing of an insurance company CEO, which will be followed in the American drama by the killing of a teacher and a teenage student in a school reported by a 2nd grader who called 911. The first was caught on ubiquitous digital video, and the emergency call of the second perhaps made on one of those smaller than a fat postal-letter things we call phones even when we aren’t making phone calls. More than social embarrassment may haunt our digital archives as we live going forward.

I also note that final stanza of this poem’s “revolver” is another example to go with “My life has stood — a loaded gun”  of Dickinson poetry citing a firearm being held as the high card in some kind of deadly personal dispute.

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 Wraithie’s Message

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Is there anyone reading this far in these posts today mumbling to themselves “It’s Black History Month — and instead of the eclectic variety I expect from the Parlando Project, Frank is giving us this little-known early-20th century Black Chicago poet, this Fenton Johnson guy (who, huh)?”

Let’s keep you here, because Johnson is bringing the variety again today, with a piece that could pass for early William Butler Yeats, or someone else from the Celtic Revival that was happening contemporarily with Johnson’s first poetry collection A Little Dreaming  of 1913. And if our last piece of Johnson’s that had the Roman underworld didn’t warn you, this one is further into the dark fantasy/horror poetry genre as well.

Wraiths and wights, two names given to the wicked messenger in today’s poem have been popularized by later, fantasy books — Tolkien and Rowling et al. But Yeats and others in the Celtic Revival touched on various kinds of supernatural spirits around the time of Fenton Johnson. The non-human beings in these dealings were often at least chaotic or untrustworthy — and as a class, wraiths tended to be even more so. Though named as fairies, not wraiths, I’ve recently presented two linked fairy poems by Yeats and Robert Frost for example where the fairy is seeking to trick a human couple so that they can abduct one of them to fairyland.

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Don’t stay up late reading blogs, for a wraithie might visit you

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In Johnson’s “The Wraithie’s Message”  the poem’s initial speaker beholds a marvelous creature made of “living flame” at his window. The creature tells our mortal, who the wraith addresses as “dreamer” that there is a lovely sea-side woman, the dreamer’s soul’s desire, who he has beguiled with “burning song” so that this woman is now dreaming of, desirous of, our dreamer.

The dreamer at the window is all in on this. He sees not an untrustworthy wraith in this apparition of living flame, but a “good elf” who might be of service to humans. And besides, as the poem ends, he explains that this dreamer is tired of his  dreams — ones that have not been realized. What really awaits? In my understanding of this poem, the wraithie is a siren by proxy. The promised maiden may be by “the deathless sea,” but that may be in the sense that the enthralled or the dead have no more dying to do.

Should it surprise us that a young Black Chicagoan is writing this poem? Perhaps a little, but it shouldn’t be a lot. I come from the Midwestern city of Prince Rogers Nelson after all. Versatility with many styles has been demonstrated by Black Americans over and over. In regard to Afro-American musicians, I lost my constrained surprise decades ago when I learned that Fenton Johnson’s early 20th century contemporaries, Blues musicians —who I prized for their distinctive “authentic” recorded music — had a wider repertoire and spread of influences than I had guessed, and that they were often capable of essaying a variety of white ethnic styles with aplomb.*

But the choice of this Celtic Revival flavor by Johnson may not have been entirely random. Remember that last time Johnson was trying on the title of “bard,” and a bard for a generation of Black Americans who were trying to propagate an Afro-American culture of achievement and distinction — not just out of some parochial ethnic pride, but out of a very serious need to establish their humanity in a country that still retained nearly its full measure of white supremacy. The Celtic Revival of Johnson’s time was similarly seeking to present themselves as full human beings by displaying a rich culture, and it’s not unlikely that Johnson was seeing what he could appreciate and adopt from that.

With a Celtic myth via an Afro-American, there is after all a story here of a despairing dreamer and an untrustworthy power willing to trick them to their doom.

The Wraithe's Message

Simple guitar chords, but my recorded version will sound different because I used a CGDGBE tuning

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I had planned to do this Fenton Johnson piece this month, but as I’ve mentioned before, I’m nearly always unsure of what time and focus I will have to do these pieces now. I had written a sketch of the music already (that helps) and in the middle of the day today I was able to try it out. It came together so quickly I was able to complete a basic track before attending a Canadian Zoom salon featuring friend of this blog Robert Okaji reading new poems. Then later tonight I finished mixing it, leaving it simple enough, though I hope it’s effective. This is another piece that may depend a great deal on my vocal abilities “of a subjective quality” — but that’s up to you the listener. You can hear my musical setting of “The Wraithie’s Message”  with the audio gadget below. No player? A substitute can be summoned with this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Some might be wondering if Fenton Johnson utilized or valued Afro-American music and modes. Yes indeed — he was early and effective in that, a decade before those in the Harlem Renaissance did similar things. I’ve got a couple of pieces planned demonstrating that yet this month.

Storm Fear

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Of all the English language poets who have achieved a general readership, it’s likely that Robert Frost is the most misunderstood. I don’t say that to shame that broad audience — after all, in my youth, when asked to read Frost, he seemed too full of tired maxims and quaint commonplace situations. Sure he comforts folks I ignorantly thought, and maybe I undervalued comfort, but that wasn’t what I was looking for.*

I won’t blame that youth I was then too much. I was onto other things — but as far as Frost goes, I was carelessly understanding his best work too quickly. Decades later, partly as a result of this Project, I came to his short lyrical poems, beginning to appreciate their supple word-music — and then once beguiled, I began to see what he’d put in these concise pieces.

“Stopping by the Woods” isn’t about lollygagging when there’s duties to do.  “The Road Not Taken”  isn’t about the so-consequential road taken. This poem, “Storm Fear”  from Frost’s first collection, A Boy’s Will, isn’t about settling down to a little hygge-time in a winter snowstorm. Here’s a link to that poem’s text if you want to follow along.

Maybe it’s its concision, or the careful way Frost uses incremental details, but this poem was first published in 1915 and yet the horror it contains seems to have passed most readers by. As I read it this month, now more attuned to how Frost can work, my first thought was this is as harrowing as Bob Dylan’s “Hollis Brown”  or as stark as Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska  album.

My first reminder as you read this poem is that it’s set in a circa 1900 rural America that was more isolated than you might imagine today. Farm families didn’t always have daily connections with others, and those institutions that offered connections: churches, shopping towns, exchanged labor, and rural schools were episodic. Long winter nights and snowstorms restricted what travel there was. Frost himself went through a brief attempt at living that farm life in this era. Perhaps he had a writer’s lighthouse-keeper fantasy of splendid, thoughtful isolation. His poetry testifies that he learned the reality.

Frost’s poem opens with a snowstorm in progress in the nighttime. How many poems, stories, blog posts, other accounts portray such a scene? Frost wants to let us know this isn’t a greeting card picture. The wind is a “beast” and it’s curiously imploring “Come out!” How many readers will miss this odd inclusion and take it as so much filler merely indicating that there’s a wind?**

The poem’s speaker, who we’ll find out is a young husband in the house with a wife and child, responds that it doesn’t take much interior debate to not obey what the beast outside is requesting. He’s thinking: there’s a storm, I’m staying in.

Then we get a different calculation. He tells us about the wife and child. They’re asleep, there’s no awake partner to bounce ideas off of. Suddenly he’s worried about the isolated farmhouse’s sole source of heat, a wooden fire. I think the implication here is that at the very least he thinks he needs to visit an outside woodpile. Or perhaps the winter has been hard enough that he’s short on fuel.

In the poem’s concluding scene, he’s now set on going outside. In the snowhills and blowing snow, even the barn looks “far away.” Is he even considering trying to make it to a neighbors for fuel? Is he making a difficult but sane decision, or is his isolation and “cabin fever” such that he’s thinking of making a risky trip for less than necessity?

Storm Fear 1

I thought too of the deadly rural winter isolation of Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” reading today’s Frost poem.

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Let me note one other thing about the poem. For Frost, the famous formalist, this poem’s form is very irregular. Poetic feet, meter, rhyme scheme? It’s all over the place, though periodic iambs are there in the confusion. Formalists who teach Frost would likely skip over this example for lessons. Workshopping this poem with a formalist? I can imagine the markup.

In setting “Storm Fear”  for performance I was able to deal with the irregularities in Frost’s design, but then I’ve worked in this Project with a lot of outright free verse and have found it not as difficult to sing or mesh with music as some might guess. But when you’re performing (rather than writing a page poem) there are a couple of things you might want to add stress to: a sense of repetitive or choral structure and some additional guidance to the listener to intrigue understanding on one listening.

My choice here was to make the poem’s 7th and 8th lines into a refrain that repeats twice more, the last with a variation. The first time we hear “It costs no inward struggle not to go,/Ah no!” we hear it as the easy rejection of the beast-storm’s call. The second time, as the singer thinks of his wife and child, it seems more as a statement of the imperative for him to take action and leave into the storm. And in the final statement at the end of the song, he’s about to enter the storm thinking he must seek aid.

Would Frost have approved of my changes? Who knows. He was a man of strong opinions and an often brusque manner. Many poets or their rights-holders would forbid changing even a word. But this old poem is in the public domain now, I need no permission, and I hope my setting honors the intent of Robert Frost.***

You can hear my musical performance of “Storm Fear”  with the audio player gadget you may see below. Is that player snowed out?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player in those cases.

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*So yes, I was a dolt about Frost, but not singular in that ignorance. Frost’s first two poetry collections were published in England after he left America for there. One reason for that hejira: American publishers were not in the least interested in his poetry. Frost was nearing 40 when A Boy’s Will  was published. So at least in 1915, the experts were also misreading Frost.

**Some Faustian readings of this poem take that beast as The Beast — that the poem’s speaker is a sinner being stalked by his sins’ debt collector. Frost may have been aware of that implication, though it doesn’t strike me as consistent with what I understand of Frost’s own theology. Making the wind “howl” or “growl” is a commonplace, and calling it outright a beast may be stronger — but if enough readers miss the eminent dread in this poem, maybe it wasn’t strong enough.

***Generalizing, poets who feel they’ve worked their words with a fine touch are often resistant to editing by collaborative outsiders. Since Faust has entered the chat, I think of the collaboration between Bob Dylan and Archibald MacLeish who were slated to do an adaptation of Steven Vincent Benét’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster”  for Broadway. MacLeish knew Benét, and likely thought he could do right by his late friend’s work. Dylan has his ways, and MacLeish had his — so the two fell out, and Dylan’s songs in progress for the play were not used. The eventual Broadway production bombed. Dylan used some of the songs later on his own. His “Father of Night”  is often attributed as one of those rejected songs.

“Stones,” rolling slowly and backwards

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Nine days ago I started this Halloween Series with my sung adaptation of a graveyard poem by Robert Frost. Now we’re nearing the end of the series, and today I’m going to present another graveyard poem that sits with my sense of Halloween, Ethna McKiernan’s “Stones.”

I also promised in the beginning of the series that I would say why I’ve decided to make an extra effort to note Halloween. Decades ago, I met a young man (we were both young then) who had many interests, John Brower. The immediate bond: we both loved unusual music, not just strange or adventurous Rock that one could find in many a large record store back then, but harder to find Modernist orchestral music, and the even harder to find musics from other cultures around the globe. John also had a strong interest, much stronger than mine, in fantasy and horror genre fiction and film. What links those two groupings? For one thing, they were outsider-ish things then. If you want direct evidence of this mysterious connection you only need to investigate the trope of using the musics of the first of John’s interests with the movies and TV shows within his second one. The first signals the second: dread, tension, and the unknown. Scary movie, unknown planet, unsettled minds, eldritch times and places, it was a good chance that the less tonal string sections, the theremins and early electronica, the gongs or tuned percussion, the swooping vibratos and strange timbres of otherwise unheard avant-garde or exotic musics would emerge in the soundtrack. In the obverse, can anyone think of a well-known happy or loving scene similarly soundtracked with odd music? I can’t.*

But that doesn’t explain John. He gathered about him an eclectic mix of folks interested in these things, many of whom would be loners by inclination or classification. And every Halloween he would take them into the dark autumn north woods to his family’s cabin for a celebration of the holiday of the things less -heard than feared, we all in this group lit by the light of frightening movies until deep into the night.**

John grew up, continued to be engaged in many things, keeping those core interests and working to foster them. Then he died suddenly, while still young by the way I’d measure lifetimes from my current age.

There so much more to his story, and I’m sure parts I don’t really know, but within the briefness I prefer for these posts I want to say that I learned things from John and his enthusiasms, and in the scattered pre-Internet age he was a rare ear interested in some of the things that I spent my time thinking about and seeking out. Two decades after his death, I still will hear a piece of music, see a movie referred to, or encounter a piece of dark fantasy, and I’ll think of John, remembering some of what he thought of it, or I’ll be occasioned to consider what he might say about it today,

John had this spirit of Halloween, the old spirit of the things we repress and shush-up the rest of the year. Now, long after his death, and the death of others who so graciously tolerated and helped inform my interests in music and poetry, I have this personal graveyard in my head that I’m tending. As the Blues Poet Bo Diddley sang, I find “I’ve got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind…”

Stones Illustration 800

One of the most striking and effecting poems in my Halloween Series, Ethna McKiernan’s Stones. If you want more, and I’m thinking some of you will, buy her book, linked below.

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Which brings me to today’s poem I set to music. Regular readers may recall Ethna McKiernan from earlier posts. She was part of a small poet’s group alternate Parlando voice Dave Moore and I were part of — and unlike Dave or I, she published her poetry regularly both locally and via her connection with Ireland.***  She died nearly two years ago now, but in my head she has a mind’s gravestone like my late wife, like John Brower, like Ethna’s friend and poet compatriot Kevin FitzPatrick.

Poets, musicians — we play in our heads all the time. We look back at inscribed dates inside there, and compose in that dark using beats and sounds strung over time. Those beats come to rests, those sounds fade to silence. When I set Ethna’s poem “Stones”  to music I chose to refrain a line from her beautiful poem so that it won’t end before you pay attention to it: “I am watching over all of you.” In Ethna’s poem that line is hauntingly unclear by design. We the living are charged with watching over our personal graveyards. We hope, transparently and by wisps of sight, that their residents are also watching over us.

Happy, yes, Happy Halloween that we knew them. The audio player to hear me trying to do justice to Ethna McKiernan’s poem “Stones”  with my own music and performance is below. No player on your screen? This highlighted link will open a new tab which will supply you with an audio player.

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*While the avant-garde or the exotic was only used for terror and unrest, for some reason the foundational composer of western classical music, Johan Sebastian Bach was the other go-to music for frightening undercurrents. Why? As young children, did filmmakers sit under towering pipe organ tubes fearing that wolves would appear out of that forest, or that teetering from low notes, that they would fall over and crush them?

**John was one of the first folks I knew with a home VCR, and even as video rental stores started to emerge he proudly purchased movies he admired, just has he collected esoteric avant-garde records, and small-press books. Neither of these things were inexpensive to his income level then, but he considered this his form of patronage of artists and their art.

***As she was dying, Ethna finished her final new and collected book, and it’s very very good. You can order Light Rolling Slowly Backwards  from your local bookstore or from the publisher at this link.