immortality

In Another Language

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I mentioned last time that I’m cleaning out things I can no longer reasonably expect to use, and found a box which included poems by my late wife. Perhaps such things are past the use test, but I asked what use can I make of them?

After paging through the papers, I transcribed the handful of poems I found, typing them into documents on my computer, a now ordinary device which would have been a SciFi marvel to her back when she wrote these poems in the 1970s. Could I perform some of them, here, as part of the Parlando Project? Could that seem like special pleading, an enforced overlay of widower husband wants you to shed a tear for his dead wife? Let me try to move you past that. Decades after a death, and when one is old enough to reasonably consider one’s own death to be a nearish interval, shorter than the one from that loss, loss begins to take on a universal and obligatory aura. These aren’t sentimental poems – my late wife, Renée Robbins, was funny and was wearing the full costume of life when she wrote them. Those costumes of life go back into storage, kept for use in later productions. Perhaps her poem “In Another Language”  can be worn by someone still treading the boards?

Yes, these poems are little pieces of someone I loved deeply, written early in her too-short life, and bringing them on to you extends a tiny bit of what she was. Yes, it was particularly nice to feel I was working with and playing this part of her when I performed this poem this month – but yes too, it’s October: everyone’s wearing costumes and pretending they can see ghosts.

I can hear her responding to this situation. How? I’ll explain it with a quote from Woody Allen* that has been reverberating through my mind:

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”

So here you have it, a poem likely written while she was still in college, studying writing under Howard Mohr and Phillip Dacey. I’m fond of the obscure strangeness in the framing image. I can’t be sure what she, the author, was seeing. My best guess is a whole crab or lobster on ice in a seafood display, a mundane piece of unintended Surrealism – and being in a world of frozen water is also an accustomed strangeness to Minnesotans. I like the poem’s leaps, like the dream of the crab escaping to her bathtub, and the totally unexpected leap into the genderless cross-shifting-borders of “Finno-Ugaric.”**

In Another Language

Besides the crab image, I see Noah’s flood in the third stanza. I chose “lift” from the alternatives for that last line because it’s more sensual.

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I performed Renée’s poem in a style that still hadn’t gone-out-of in the Seventies, as spoken word with an approaching-Jazzy musical backing: drums, bass, and two electric guitars. I believe the music, taken by itself, might shows the subliminal influence of a current band, Khruangbin. It’s subliminal because I don’t use as much reverb.

So, there you go. Looped through with the footnotes, we’ve got Khruangbin, Krasznahorkai, Woody Allen, my late wife Renée Robbins, Phil Dacey, The 1970s, and a fifty-year-old poem by a twenty-something. There’s a lot of intervals and strange harmonies there, but I’ll end with another quote from an artist (actually, from his less famous brother). I read this one in a recent interview answer given by Ken Burns when asked how he makes those famous “Ken Burns Effect” intelligence flights over photos as he edits his work:

It’s all music—my brother, Ric, said that all art forms, when they die and go to heaven, want to be music.”

So, there you go Renée, not immortal from non-dying – but you get music.

As you can see today, we stay narrowly focused on the topic here at the Parlando Project, and we will return with poems by more famous literary poets soon – but to hear Renée’s poem “In Another Language”  as I performed it with music, use the player gadget below. No graphical audio playing gadget? I offer this heavenly highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own music player.

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*I know a fair number of possible readers of this have strong opinions when they hear his name. I’ve got at least half of those myself. There’s a second, artistic, set of subjects regarding his work that would overwhelm the focus of this piece. To stay on topic, let me just say that my late wife was a comedy fan who could recite from memory the entire 30-minute Firesign Theater Nick Danger radio drama parody, and that Woody Allen movies were a constant date night thread in our relationship. Renée had opinions too, consistently caring ones, but she would have laughed at that quote, and I’m laughing now too, but with a deeper resonance to that laugh.

**My memory of seeing Woody Allen movies with my late wife was intensified by the recent death of Diane Keaton, but there was even more coincidence as I worked on this: the Nobel Prize for Literature went to László Krasznahorkai, who writes in a Finno-Ugaric language. And yes, that language group is non-gendered, even the pronouns – at least from what I find when I checked on Renée’s reference in her poem. And if I may risk one more Woody Allen reference, in my life back then I was (roughly speaking) playing more the Annie Hall role.

Thomas Hardy’s “Transformations”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

If you’ve noticed I’ve been gone for a while, I have as well. The last few weeks have had a lot of other things to attend to. Mostly happy things: travel, and work around the teenager’s graduation from high school. Still, I found myself picking up a book from my teetering “plan to read” pile that I thought would be mildly diverting:  Donald Hall’s Old Poets. This book is a hybrid, like one of my favorite books from last year, Lesley Wheeler’s Poetry’s Possible Worlds.*   Like Wheeler’s book, Hall’s book contains some memoir elements mixed with consideration of poets the writer knows, and from there the qualities and connections of poetry and poems with the poets. Hall’s memoir material covers the bildungsroman years, that life era of a few posts about my life I’ve done this spring, while Wheeler’s examines her relationship to her parents and poets well into midlife. The time settings of the two books are different: Wheeler more in this century, Hall centered around the last midcentury.

Here’s something I found striking in Hall’s accounts from his time and place. As an undergraduate he had access to not just his Harvard contemporaries** but to Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot. Since a good portion of Hall and my lives overlap, Hall being only about 20 years older, I found it strange to read that as a 20-year-old he had a series of informal interactions with these two while they were giants in a way that no poet today is. The effect was scarcely less shocking than some SF novel where the author dines and discusses poetic topics with Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and Whitman. I suspect much of Hall’s access is due to Ivy League effects, whereas I think today’s poetry scene is more decentralized even while being more academic/MFA connected. If I was 20 in 1949, I would have been as likely to repeatedly meet the two great poets as I am to contact them by Ouija board today.

Hall’s book has 6 sections devoted to 7 poets, including ones on Frost and Eliot. Hall’s portrait of the older Frost is particularly vivid and special, while his stories of drinking with Dylan Thomas are less unique.*** Yet, within his Thomas chapter, Hall dives into why Dylan Thomas’s poetic stock fell off by the end of the century. Hall reveals that Thomas himself told him that he had only written about three good poems.**** The one Thomas poem we all think of, the villanelle whose refrain has become memeable, was not one of those three. Thomas and Hall agreed over potent-potables that “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” was only a skilled attempt to put on Yeats’ coat.

Now to get on to today’s new audio piece. Hall compares one of the poems Thomas thought was one of his best early works unfavorably to a poem by Thomas Hardy, and Hall’s Thomas chapter gives us that Hardy poem, “Transformations”  in full.

If reading Hall’s book was to be a portable replacement for work on this Project, that Hardy poem was stunning enough to cause me to try to get something composed and performed in the spaces between other things this week. Hardy’s “Transformations” is an account of the experience of a non-spiritual approach to immortality — not to life after death, but life as a thing that only changes form, of which we as people are only incarnations. Here’s a link to the text of this poem.

Hardy himself worked out this method of consolidating a graveyard’s worth of tombstones, and it makes a striking illustration for his poem.

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Hardy, an Englishman born of the middle of the 19th century drops in but one or two anachronistic words in this poem — but while “grandsire” doesn’t sound natural on a 21st century American’s lips, the gist of this metrical and rhymed poem is easily singable in 2023 I thought. Down went Hall’s book and up went the efficient composer! I whipped up the music quickly. Long time listeners here will know that my music is usually not harmonically complex, but my simple cadences often try to confound the usual chords and progression resolutions. I hope I’ve done that with this one. The time to record the piece was scant, so I went with my go-to “I may have to hop a freight train shortly” folk music standby, the acoustic guitar and overdubbed a quick bass guitar part. You can hear it with an audio player below — or if you can’t see that graphical device, with this backup link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Few click hyperlinks, so let me put this in a footnote. Wheeler’s book has these additional reasons to read it beside just being good: its story and poetry is contemporary, and as a writer and a woman Wheeler focuses on elements of our lifetime journeys that other poetic memoirs gloss over. Here’s those hyperlinks: Wheeler’s book. Hall’s book.

**Hall’s Harvard classmates circa 1951 included Frank O’Hara, Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and others. Eliot — and to a trivial extent, Frost — were Harvard alums. My personality, alas, is not socially skilled, but even at my most sociable, my circle of working-class Lake Street poets and state college teachers in my 20s is not as name-dropingly famous.

***It’s possible that everyone even vaguely literary in sundry metropolitan areas around this time had drinking with Dylan Thomas stories, even if Hall’s analysis of Thomas’ poetry is individually savvy.

****In his Eliot chapter Hall says that Eliot said more than once to him that no poet knows if their work is any good. When Eliot said this in an interview Hall did with him that was destined for print in a literary magazine, that statement was cut because it seemed too down-beat.

from Tennyson’s Ulysses

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a piece to celebrate the announced discovery of the oldest intact shipwreck, a 2,400-year-old Greek ship discovered in the Black Sea with its mast, rudder, and even a rower’s bench still in place. This can’t be fully romanced into being Ulysses’ ship—it’s centuries newer—but it does give us an object, beyond the stories, to remind us of ancient sea voyages.

“Tales of brave Ulysses, how his naked ears were tortured by the sirens sweetly singing.” This vase depicts a ship like the one in the shipwreck.

Tennyson’s Ulysses is one of his best-known shorter works, and one I was a bit surprised to find still survives on the seabed of modern teaching syllabuses. I expect that many will read “Ulysses”  as a complement to Tennyson’s American contemporary Longfellow’s “Morituri Salutamus”  which we’ve featured here, as a pledge from one who is old and past their expected prime to continue to strive. After all, the most quoted section, the one I used, starts right off declaring “You and I are old.”

Well for someone my age or Dave’s—that is to say, old—this understanding might seem natural.*   Indeed, as we recorded this last week, we too were not “that strength which in the old days.” But if one looks at Tennyson’s “Ulysses,”  both biographically and mythologically, there are some surprises to be found.

Would you be surprised to learn, as I was, that this was not some later work by a long-lived poet (as Longfellow’s “Morituri Salutamus” was),  but instead the work of a 25-year-old? Odd that in our modern times, where we often expect authenticity in our poets, were the poem is expected to be biographically true to the author’s own experience. But of course, it isn’t rare for younger people to feel old and to feel an age is past. Tennyson chose to make his poem’s speaker aged because it did represent something he felt after the death of his close friend Arthur Hallam (the same friend that his book-length epic elegy “In Memoriam A. H. H.”  was dedicated to).

If one looks at the poem and sets aside preconceptions, you may find, even in its oft-quoted concluding exhortations I used, an undercurrent from this inspiration. Not only is this Ulysses a hero well-past the age of his greatest physical vigor, he’s demonstrating in his concluding speech two other characteristics. He’s looking backward to look forward. He recalls his Homeric feats, acts that in that story literally had heroes that “Strove with Gods.” He reminds his crew, in effect, “Look, we are the generation that knew Achilles personally, not the modern folk who only read about him.” Which brings us to the subject of his crew, the men he’s addressing in this exhortation. Homer’s Odyssey  is clear on what happens to them, after deadly battle followed by deadly mistakes: they were all killed, long before this poem begins. Like Tennyson after the death of his friend, those who know, those who shared and could testify to Ulysses soul, are gone. So, when he asks to set sail in that boat, there will be no rowing soldiers on those benches sitting well in order, except in his soul.

So, he’s crazy? Deluded? After all, he’s plainly talking to those that aren’t there. Well this is a poem, a work of art. Ulysses might never have existed, or might not have existed in the way we know him if not for Homer, who also might not have existed. And Tennyson and his friend Hallam? We can pretty well know they existed, even if anyone who could say of the eventually long-lived Tennyson “who we knew” is now dead, and so closely equal to the imagined. This is a poem about the hereness of the not-here.

I was telling my son the other day, “Death is the leading cure for immortality,” but sometimes the cure doesn’t take. I can’t say that the LYL Band’s performance of this part of “Ulysses”  is immortal, but we do strive to seek to find and not to yield. Hear it here:

Did you not see a player gadget above? Some ways of reading this blog won’t show it, so here’s a highlighted hyperlink that will also play the piece.

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*An example of the waterworks potential for this poem when read by Helen Mirren, making Stephen Colbert cry.