infirmities

The Folly of Being Comforted

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Readers often hear different poems when reading the same text. It’s unavoidable, even though it causes some authors to despair at how they are misread. So, it should be no surprise that it is possible in performance to recast poetry considerably without changing a word.

Around 1902 Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote a poem taking exception to a too-easy consolation meant to comfort. He cared for the poem enough that around 20 years later he revised it slightly, to emphasize his response to this well-meaning gesture, explicitly writing out the one word concise enough to underline his feelings at the offer of comfort: “No.”

Those who study Yeats’ life are pretty sure this poem is biographical and is based on his unrequited courtship of Maude Gonne. That’s a long story, and to say that these were two complicated individuals is to understate the matter. If one reads today’s text, that poem “The Folly of Being Comforted,”  in that biographical way, it makes sense. Here’s a link to that text.  That reading, coldly condensed, would have it that someone told Yeats, “Hey, that hottie that you are so enamored with — I’ve heard she’s getting older, grey hair, older skin around her eyes. Sure, they say with age comes wisdom, but never mind any of that, she’s no longer so attractive that others will be chasing her. So now, maybe your chance will come around.” And to this Yeats gives his “No,” explaining that as he sees it, she’s not lost a step beauty and attractiveness-wise.

There’s a perfectly good romantic love sonnet there, and that’s not what I performed today.

I’m mentioned this year that I have family and others I know going through infirmities and transitions. It’s not my nature to talk about them, or even to directly write of my own experience of those situations. Even though one of the principles of this project has been to seek out and to present “Other People’s Stories,” I’m hesitant to speak over their own voices*  in the same way that I’m comfortable talking about those long dead and in some cases too little remembered.

As I was working today on finishing the mix of the audio performance you can hear below, Dave called me to tell me that our friend and poet Kevin FitzPatrick had died last night. We were planning to visit him in hospice tomorrow. Now we’ll visit him when we think of him. Visiting hours are now unlimited.

Kevin FitzPatrick and Ethna McKiernan

For many years Kevin and Ethna would celebrate poetry in a public reading on St. Patrick’s Day in Minnesota.

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Another poet we both know, Ethna McKiernan, is also facing a serious illness this year. When I read and then performed Yeats’ poem, I was thinking of these things. I recognized it was a romantic love poem, yes, but I read all sorts of undertones in it. We are meant to pass over them in the “correct” reading. Maude Gonne was all of 35 when Yeats first published his poem, the grey hair and “shadows…about her eyes” were likely subtle things. We’re all more than double that. Age is not subtle at that volume. When I read Yeats’ simple elaborating line “I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.” I felt my own lack of useful care or comfort I’ve offered Kevin or Ethna, partly because I fear I’d be rather bad at it, and partly because I’m less close to either of them than even Dave is. That said I’ve been acquainted with Ethna for about 40 years. I may have not been close to her in her “wild summer,” but I knew her when. Yes, the fire “burns more clearly” with her even now as Yeats says.  After all, when you get our age, there’s more fuel.

Yeats called his poem, “The Folly of Being Comforted”  and he ended the poem with that title. He likely had real feelings in this matter, long ago when he was alive. When I think of these mortal matters, now, here, my feelings are different than a witty sonnet about someone’s crude mistake regarding his estimate of Maude Gonne. And so I performed my feelings, using Yeats words.

The player to hear that performance is below for many of you, but some ways of reading this won’t display that. So, I also offer this highlighted hyperlink that will open a new tab window and play it.

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*I feel I must guard myself in that partly because I’d easily fall into it if I didn’t.

To Poets Not Dying Young

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Poems and songs about those artists who die young are easy to find.*  Why should that be? Well, tragic aspects there are plain to see and it’s easy to note the lost potential in an early exit. I think there’s a further factor too: we are much in love with the trope of young artists whose work is caught in a rising arc before falling with melted wings. It’s extraordinarily difficult for an artist to continue to impress or delightfully surprise over a long career. We artists repeat ourselves and are judged to have become stale — or we change and produce work that isn’t judged correct to be coming from us. Perhaps this is inevitable. Or maybe in part it’s us as readers, listeners, audience, who contribute some faults to this by always seeking new faces — or the practical use of any failures as telling markers to drop attention.

I’ve made no secret here that I’m old. I missed out on being a has-been and I’m not anyone’s coming thing in the arts. In a strange way I find that frees me from those burdens, and I only need to carry my age and infirmities while producing new work. This summer as the blog and listenership has its seasonal drop off, I’ve indulged myself and your attention with more work with texts written by Dave or myself. I do notice that the poetry I’m presenting here of mine is overwhelmingly focused on loss, something Dave usually avoids. Young poets, young musicians, often add gravitas with similar emphasis — and I should note, young artists can and do directly experience those things outside of the world of imagining. Experienced artists may more likely realize this is a choice, one that we are free to question and doubt. But, speaking for myself and my summer it’s been more at reporting. The everlasting crisis of the wider world continues — unjust losses there are still noted — but each day I think of the closer infirmities of those I know: small losses for me beating in resonance to their greater losses, and less specific worries and predictions for myself standing before me as I look through them to assay these others unavoidably present and particular ones. This is likely the selfish and self-contained man’s version of empathy.

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To Poets Not Dying Young

I enjoyed some dissonant chord colors and an “Is it in major or minor?” rub in this one’s music.

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Today’s piece uses a text of mine I call “To Poets Not Dying Young.”   The effect I’m trying to convey is the wearing of life on the body and soul of older poets who persist in their observation and writing, and it’s written in the hope that we, as audience, retain our ability to read and hear them. I do worry that the images are too enigmatic in this one, but maybe the connotations or some incantatory power will carry the effect through to you. Even to myself, their author, some of the images reflect more than one thing, and I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.

The Parlando Project plans to restore our usual service in presenting texts by other writers in upcoming pieces you’ll see here soon, but to hear this one you can use a player gadget below if you see it, or this highlighted hyperlink which will open a new tab window with an audio player.

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*Here’s a post and a short and graceful poem linking several “died young” poets by American poet Anne Spencer.  And here’s a real-life ghost story post that has as its musical bit a poem by Carl Sandburg about another poet who died young.

And here are three to argue from the other side for older artists persisting. An aged Longfellow calls on the spirits of other older artists to make his case.  And his contemporary in Britain, Tennyson famously hymned a possibly deluded old Ulysses asking for one more voyage. And here’s another one of mine, in full rock fury recalling a young man who was once thought a coming man in his field and who persisted in making art past fame. If you didn’t like today’s musical piece, these five pieces will give you a wider sample of what we do here.

Every Day Is A Moving Day

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

The Parlando Project has been featuring a few more self-written pieces this summer, and here’s another sonnet continuing the story from last time about a daughter who’s caring for a mother with Alzheimer’s disease.

Every Day Is A Moving Day

Each afternoon she takes the pictures down,
stacks them neatly against the wall.
Less neatly, she gathers up her clothes
And stuffs them overflowing in a small basket.
When her daughter arrives, she’s ready
to move. “I put most everything together.”

Daughter answers, “No. We moved you to
Memory Care last month. You stay here now.”
“Here? Is this where I stay until they take me
out in a wooden box?” She says between
puzzled and stern. The daughter explains again —
though it may well be what her mother says.

And then they take their walk in August flowers —
hot, colorful, bee-busied, fruitful, short-lived, flowers.

– Frank Hudson

Last time I wrote how I composed a sonnet beginning with images I collected while obliquely considering the story. In this one, the nature image comes at the end, and the process of composition was different. This sonnet was composed through a more journalistic method.

Maybe 50 years ago I once considered a career as a journalist. I had, probably still have, some traits useful for that: curiosity, some research skills that can be applied to most anything, a commitment even then to “Other People’s Stories,” and an ability to write faster than some writers.*  But then I had some weaknesses that more than outweighed those skills: shyness combined with the inability to appropriately shut up sometimes chief among them. Journalism requires a lot of meeting new people, and when I do that I’m not only shy, but self-conscious that I may just start blurting out way too much self-blather. Awkward.

The story inside this sonnet was told to me, including most of the telling details. Good story, I thought. In my experience of daily journalism, one learns the inverted pyramid, good lede writing, and what should follow, and then pours the information and events to be covered into that form.

Sonnets don’t work exactly that way, but they are (however loosely their forms are treated by American poets) structures. You know you’re going to tell your story or chapter in 14 lines. Every poet, like every writer, has to decide how much story are you going to relate and how much are you going to go on about it. It just so happens that 14 lines is somewhat of a perfect length with poetic compression. Then, though you probably want something enticing in the first line or two, you aren’t going to use the lede/inverted pyramid narrative order — you’re going to reverse that. Particularly in the English/Shakespearean sonnet, “burying the lede” with a concluding couplet is your task. Somewhere in the sonnet you will probably want to present a turn, a twist, or as Petrarch would have had it, a volta.

I myself love to play with factoring the 14 sonnet lines every which way. This one decides that instead of an eight and then six lines Italian Sonnet organization or the three quatrains and couplet English sonnet, to do it with a six then six ending with a couplet. The poem’s first turn happens at line seven as the daughter tries to reorient the mother with dementia, but then the final couplet nature image is in effect another turn, another volta, as I attempt to leave the mundane journey of Every Day and move it to another level.

Two Pages from Heidi's Calendar

My talented spouse created her own daily calendar for the year using some miscellaneous quotes and her own photography.  Here are two days from August.

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The player to hear my musical performance of “Every Day Is A Moving Day”  is below for some of you. Not seeing it? Some ways of reading this blog won’t display that, so I’ll give you this highlighted hyperlink that can also play it.  Do you like the audio files of the musical performances and want a handy way to listen to those other than inside this blog? Did you know that the Parlando Project has been available as a podcast** since it began in 2016? You can subscribe to it by searching for our tag line “Parlando – Where Music and Words Meet” on most any podcast service, including Apple podcasts.

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*I write faster than most “creative writers.” On the other hand, if you think my posts here contain awkward writing (I do) you wouldn’t want to see my first drafts. Good work-a-day journalists I’ve been around can produce reasonably good copy a lot faster than I can.

**No, you won’t hear me reading this post on our current podcast episodes. The existing Parlando Project podcasts are just the audio file of the performance. Which brings me to a question: would you like to listen to a podcast with the text of the entire post read and with the musical performance at the end? This might reduce the number of episodes I could issue each month, but if my voice holds out, I could offer that. What do you think?

Smells

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Traffic for the blog has picked up again a bit after its summer slump, but I’m still going to be presenting a few more of my own poems before returning to our usual presentation of other authors’ words. One thing that this does is allow me direct access to the poet’s intent, so today let me pull back the curtain and discuss what choices I made and what I was trying to convey in this sonnet that is part of a series I’ve done this year about a family dealing with one of their members with Alzheimer’s disease. The main characters so far are the older woman with dementia and her middle-aged daughter. The mother has transitioned to a Memory Care Unit as her dementia has increased.

Here’s the text of today’s poem, “Smells,”  so that we can follow along line by line as I discuss what I was trying to do and how I chose to do it. For today, for length reasons, I won’t talk as much about sound-music choices. Maybe another time for that.

Smells

The August after-rain smelled of rot and growth
where it dropped drought leaves on the lawn.
And by the garage door a bug had left its
solar-boat sarcophagus molt on the door frame,
implacable as any statue. Then down the block
the young dog walker looks at their phone
while the dog sniffs longingly at the weeds
tufting a stop sign. On to the MCU.

It smells today of urine just in the door;
and the mother asks again if she can leave —
which they do only for a walk. They pass
a bee garden, which has a sign “bee safe.”

The mother laughs. The daughter smiles.
She can still recognize a pun — its
accident.

Even though the poem follows the consciousness of the daughter character, the first three images of the poem were taken from things I observed myself on August mornings this summer. It can be chancy imbuing personal thoughts on a character when the character may jump across gender, age, or other boundaries from the author — but the alternative of not making that leap and to attempt to invent outside of the body and consciousness the author lives in risks as much if not more.

The first two lines discuss a dichotomy or dialectic: in this summer’s drought, when we had a short rain, it actually stripped the just hanging-on leaves off of some trees rather than greening their canopies up. Oddly, there was an autumn/spring smell from this, that, as the poem says, included a bit of decay and a bit of fertility in the air. The poet here hopes the reader can feel this moment of loss and change from these images, and as the poem develops remember how they may reflect on the other events.

Cicada Molt 1024

It’s remarkable how the winged cicada can emerge and yet leave this detailed casing behind so intact and empty.

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Lines 3-5 include the second image, another dichotomy, an inert and lifeless thing left from an insect’s life-cycle and change. I sort of piled on here with the Egyptian allusions in line 4, and I questioned that. First off, not everyone has any interest and knowledge of those historical myths, and I’m calling them in without deep expertise in that. My hope here is that neither does the reader need more than superficial knowledge. As an inconsistently educated American I see these leftover bug shells, so lifelike and yet empty, and marvel as they often call to mind the Egyptian use of insects in their iconography. Once more this is nature’s change, even growth, though with evidence of loss intentionally invoked. I think too that subconsciously I was referring to the Jewish tradition of mezuzah devices on doorposts. The traditional mezuzah contains verses from Deuteronomy invoking the supremacy of the godhead, meant to remind all that pass through doors that we may come and go, but that something else is eternal.

As an author I often find that images like these present themselves to me as images first, and I need to ask myself what they mean or potentially mean. I collect the image, and the poem to use them in follows. My expectation here is that such images are richer than ones simply ginned up to decorate or explain by simile something in a poem, but the risk here is that they may not seem similarly meaningful to a reader. How many notice something as odd as leaves falling in August instead of later Autumn, or intact cicada shells except empty of their insect, or recalls particulars of old Egyptian or Hebrew iconography?

A casual, quick reader will just see these things as time-wasters, dawdling until the poem says something. I’m putting some trust in my readers here.

The final image of the sonnet’s octet is perhaps more universal. I could see it as a New Yorker cartoon or cover, and it’s common enough that I suspect that someone has drawn a cartoon meant to make us smile at this combination: a dog smelling for scent markings left by other dogs’ urine while the human at the other end of the leash is checking something else for connections to others of their species. The opening two images are ambiguous, growth and loss. I’m hoping the reader smiles a bit at the third, assuming they pause a bit to consider this combination of the dog and human.

The octet ends with the information that the daughter is seeing this while getting into her car and then driving to the MCU, the Memory Care Unit. I worried that by itself the abbreviation will be puzzling but saw no way out inside the structure of this sonnet. In the series,* the MCU acronym should become familiar.

At line 9 we link from the comic scene before it to a more concerning one regarding the message that the MCU smells of incontinent folks further along in their dementia. Line 10 introduces what will be a re-occurring motif in the sonnet collection: the mother wants to leave the MCU, but her increasing confusion while still being active and mobile makes it necessary that she be in a constantly supervised, structured, place for her safety. The daughter and mother get a walk and make yet another nature observation: a garden intentionally meant to attract pollinators with a whimsical sign. When the mother laughs, the daughter is reassured that at least for now, the mother still understands the concept of a pun, and once more the tension of the situation is sweetened with humor.

Just as I was making the version of the sonnet shown above I decided to leave the poem’s final word on an indented line continuation. My intent here was to make the reader stop and consider why the poem ends with “accident.”

What does this poem mean by that or mean in its entirety? I occasionally get asked that and I’m embarrassed to find myself tongue-tied, unable to do anything more but burble something inane. I am somewhat aware and can articulate (as I did above) what each image or event in the poem is intending to convey, but the whole thing? Ah, err, well, a….

A confident artist would say that if I could convey the combined intent of a poem, even a short poem —perhaps even more so with a short poem — what the combination of words and their sounds and sequence means with a prose paragraph or three, that I wouldn’t have written it as a poem. I’m not being coy or secretive when I say that — it’s just that a poems indirection and sound music undercurrent means differently than a prose explication means. The foreshadowing nature images here should mesh with the events of the last six lines, and the juxtaposition allow each to illuminate each other and the reader.

“Accident” is the end word to make us consider that just as a pun makes us laugh at the coincidental double meaning of a word-sound, that the infliction of the indignity of Alzheimer’s and our accommodations as sufferers or caretakers to deal with it are not punishments or acts of evil.

My performance of my sonnet “Smells”   is available with a player gadget below, or if you don’t see that, with this highlighted hyperlink that will open a new tab window to play it.

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*Another sonnet in this sequence was presented earlier this summer in this post here.

A July Afternoon by the Pond

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I’m much enamored of this clip where Jack Kerouac appears on Steve Allen’s show on network television. This happened in 1959 when there was only triune TV culture in America —and less than that, there were often only two sides to things. Allen is going to open here by taking the side that Kerouac was an authentic writer of merit. The other side? Kerouac was a tiresome imposter best able to fool young people, who of course didn’t know any better.

Nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old. I think of Walt Whitman. I even think of old Walt Whitman the father we never found. I think of Walt.  Whitman.

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At around two and a half minutes into the clip, Allen and Kerouac have this interchange:

Allen starts it by asking “Who else writes poetic type prose, Thomas Wolfe I guess…”

“Walt Whitman” Kerouac quickly responds.

“Uh, huh.” Allen laughs, perhaps thinking Kerouac was making ironic reference to the criticism that free verse was really prose not deserving of being called poetry.

“His Specimen Days…”   Kerouac then repeats this for emphasis. He really wants to get a plug in — not for his book, but for this lesser-known Whitman book.

“Oh, I thought you were putting me on there. All right, we’ll look into that.” Allen says.

This is all prelude, what follows is Kerouac reading to a jazz combo backing with Allen apparently playing live on piano and meshing well. You may or may not like that sort of thing, but if you’ve stuck around here, you probably at least tolerate it. Me? It gets me, every time I view it, when Kerouac comes to the part where he reads “In Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out…” Kerouac, the East Coast guy who traveled back and forth to the West Coast, had some notice, some feelings of that state in-between* that was not either/or. It’s a coincidence, but Iowa is where I would have been in 1959, not necessarily crying — or not, for sure, not. I’d be looking then at those night stars from Iowa ground, the sky that Kerouac says he can see in New Jersey, remembering his Iowa nights.

So, as that filmed interchange left off promising to do in 1959, let’s look into Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days. Today’s piece is Whitman, looking at his ground, his water, his skies, on a hot summer day in a section of his book titled “A July Afternoon by the Pond.”   Here’s a link to the full text on which I based my performance. One can easily see what Kerouac drew from Specimen Days.  Whitman’s consciousness is free-flowing** and seems informal, off the cuff. Yet it takes care to catalog a lot of the moment it’s describing at length. There’s no legendary telegraph paper roll, but Whitman does roll on without pause or paragraph. Spontaneous Bop Prosody before its time? Close enough.

I’ll leave you with one more light by which you can read or listen to this piece. Whitman wrote and collected Specimen Days  while he was dealing with the aftereffects of a stroke. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been working on a theme of infirmities recently. That infirmity is not indicated in “A July Afternoon by the Pond,”  but Whitman, in his convalescence, prescribed for himself a heavy dosage of nature observation. A young person could have seen this pond, but the man who included this piece in his late-career book, was an older man. The eternity the Whitman here sees in the natural world is not the eternity of innumerable afternoons to come as it might be for a young person, but instead the observation of age and infirmity, that of an ongoing nature that will be there after he’s gone, mysterious and as yet unsolved. I love Whitman’s final two words here: “Who knows?” He doesn’t expect you to solve it either, only to share the mystery with him.

You can hear my performance*** of “A July Afternoon by the Pond”  either of two ways. There’s a player gadget embedded below for some of you. But some ways of reading this blog will not show it, and so I also provide this highlighted hyperlink that will open a new tab window to play it.

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*One summarized view of Kerouac’s vision of Iowa is collected at this blog link.

**More so than my performance includes, for reasons of length and production schedules. I had one musical track down when I recorded my performance of Whitman’s words, and found that I had to rush the text too much to get it all in. Rather than re-record the musical foundation or damage the groove of the words, I ended up editing Whitman’s text on the fly, leaving out some of the digressions.

***As it happens, in the end I didn’t use the musical track that caused me to trim back some of Whitman’s digressions. What you will hear is a two-part improvisation (based on the chord structure of the excluded track) that I recorded to respond to my reading of the words, much as Steve Allen needed to respond to Kerouac in the video clip above. The two instruments are a hollow-body electric guitar and the distinctive voice of my Fender Squier Bass VI, an electric bass that includes two higher pitched strings above the usual four for a bass, giving it access to a baritone guitar range here. Using that facility, there are some high F notes in this piece, played on this bass, that are not available (other than as harmonics) on a conventional bass.