influence

I reckon when I count at all: our 900th Parlando Project audio piece

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

This is going to be a two-part post to celebrate reaching a milestone in this long-running project. This, the first part, will deal with the Emily Dickinson poem I adapted for this occasion, and the second, to follow, will be more a reflection on the decade or so of this Project along with a hazy look forward.

Let me quickly set out what the Parlando Project does: we take various words, mostly literary poetry not intended for performance, and combine them with original music in differing styles. Sometimes the words are sung, sometimes spoken, sometimes in-between. Mine is the voice you hear most of the time (though I know my voice is a limited thing), I’m the composer of most of the music, and I create recordings so you can hear the performances, playing most of the instruments and scoring the MIDI parts. Over the years, another poet/musician/singer Dave Moore has been the leading alternative voice, musician, and composer in this. Dave and I have performed as the LYL Band since the late 1970s. It was from within the LYL Band that the Parlando Project emerged.

Now onto today’s piece, that 900th one.

My appreciation for Emily Dickinson has grown while doing this Project. I still recall back in the early 1970s an American Literature professor telling me that most of Emily Dickinson’s poems can be sung to “The Yellow Rose of Texas”  or any number of other familiar tunes.*  That intrigued me, as I was a poet and writer who also wrote songs and was starting to figure out how to play the guitar – but at this time Dickinson was not yet a strong literary influence for me. As the esteemed Professor Hillyer put it in the piece that I quoted from earlier this National Poetry Month, I was still subject to that summation where “coy” moved to the point of “cloy.” I casually allowed that framing, that expectation, and largely lived my life considering other poets.

Doh! Working with her verse here in order to perform it with music expanded that quickly. It turns out she had many modes and moods, she was capable of highly compressed metaphysical poetry (even to a fault), and I sensed the dry but cutting sense of humor of a social satirist in many poems. The younger, ignorant, me had thought her this tragic spinster with needlework homilies, but as I needed to decide what was inside this clearly wider range of her verse I could read her with Frank O’Hara layers of irony and stance, accompanied by a cathedral-organ panoply of emotional stops.

Today’s poem is on the subject of poetry and the poets that create it, so highly appropriate for National Poetry Month.**  I strongly marked the word “reckon” that comes in the poem’s first line, this poem starts to present itself as an expression of mathematics. Reckon and reckoning were in the 19th century terms for calculation and by extension with the particular mathematical/geometric skills of navigation. Dickinson had something of a scientific education: classification, dependencies, range, were things she’d studied.***  The poem starts, asking what are the significant integers, the prime factors, that make up the universe.

I reckon when I count

The chord cadence here was an experiment I was doing in close/but not the same symmetry, which is part of the reason I chose to modify Dickinson’s words instead of modifying the music.

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The list begins with the poets, and then adds the sun (the source directly of nearly all of earth’s energy). Moving on, she oddly next lists the transient summer, but as an avid and knowledgeable northern climate gardener in a household that was across from a farm field, she honored that fecund season. She concludes the list with what seems like piety and a stopping point: “The Heaven of God.” Put a pin in that last item.

She soon corrects herself: the poets already contain all this. The sun? She proclaims poets are as illuminating, warming, and energy producing as the Sun. If summer grows crops, their creativity, poetry’s has no off-season. Poet’s, poetry’s, endlessness makes it as immortal as some heavenly realm. Now of course this is metaphysical math, and after all, the entire poem starts with “when I count at all,” indicating that she might think there are limitations with mathematical counting. The poem’s final stanza (as printed in Untermeyer’s book)**** is somewhat mysterious, but in a good way. There are a number of ways to understand it. There’s one I’d paraphrase as: “So I (as a poet and reader of poets) will continue to appreciate and engender the beauty of a poetry that can present a universe of the known but also that of the surmised and the uncountable. And those who can trust what can’t be quantified or found by earthly navigation: trust in the poets. Could they be wrong? Could their imaginationed maps and internal suns be wrong in the cold light of day? Perhaps, but you can’t count some things, any more than one can survey the time and distance of dreams.” That trust, Dickinson is saying is such as others would put in the “Heaven of God.” The “too difficult a grace” is saying that even grace can’t contain what poetry is. Others read this stanza as saying that the poets are in fact not trustworthy, even if Dickinson admires them all, and is one herself – but she’s sticking with poetry anyway even if she knows that the believers in a heavenly supremacy will not grant her grace, and in that reading the “those who trust” are trusting in the “final Heaven.” When I performed this, I was thinking more the former than the latter, but I really don’t know, I just had to feel someway as I sung it.

As mentioned in the footnote below, the version I used to start my work on today’s piece is not the most accurate representation of the extant poem in Dickinson’s own hand. I furthered that issue. This piece began with music I’d already composed and partly realized,  to which I decided to fit Dickinson’s text to. I could have modified the music, but I chose not to, and so added a few words to the shorter lines to fit the more symmetrical structure of the music. I made the most audacious change to the final line, adding “breadth” to make that line symmetrical. I did this because I liked the idea of returning to the sense that the poem started out exploring if the important things could be counted and sized, and one has no control over the length of dreams (or our lives for that matter). I also liked the homophone of it making its sound to a listener like “the breath of dreams,” which pleased the surrealist in me.

Everything I did there is not necessarily the admirable choice. I really wouldn’t know how to defend myself from charges of defacing the work of a great poet. I was guided by trying to make as arresting a song for the listener as I could – and I was thinking too about using this for the 900th Parlando piece – I was “counting” that occasion, and so like the poem I adapted, commenting on the ambiguity of counting poetry and the length of this Project. Did I make it interesting? You can hear my performance of “I reckon, if I count at all”  with the audio player below. No player? Well, you can’t count on that, because some ways of viewing this blog won’t show it, but this highlighted link will open a new tab with an audio player.

 

 

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*This is because Dickinson often utilized “hymn meter” aka “ballad meter” used for many Protestant hymns and quite a few popular and very secular ballads from the British Isles, with an alternating 8 and 6 beat stanza. Other “you can sing them to” suggestions: “The Theme to Gilligan’s Island” and “Amazing Grace.”   I’m not sure which (or both, hymn and ballad) were what Dickinson had in mind, but some of her poetic influences also wrote literary ballads which were not meant to be sung, but used the meter of the songs.

**And it’s part of my #NPM2026 series, in that this poem appears in Louis Untermeyer’s between-the-wars anthology “Modern American Poetry.” I could have written (and thought about doing) a post on how Untermeyer frames Dickinson from within his era. His evaluation of her was favorable, but he doesn’t bring forward her humor even though he found room for “light verse” in his book. The poems he chooses include some of the Dickinson “Greatest Hits,” but few of her more metaphysical poems – and it omits some of the texts that later became oft favored, explicated, and excerpted.

***To the extent that academic education of women was proper for her time and place, the sciences were considered most appropriate. Men might study theology, law, the higher arts, abstract philosophy that lady brains certainly weren’t suited for, but science was viewed as more of a practical craft and set of knowledge. I suspect math might have been part of the gendered curriculum. I think too of the female “human computers” used in the early days of NASA and illustrated in the Hidden Figures movie, or the Benchley Park code-breakers.

****The version in Untermeyer’s anthology was printed in 1929 as a then yet unpublished Dickinson poem in the Atlantic magazine. This version differs from the handwritten manuscript, and also with other later published versions of the poem. The manuscript is in one of her famous fascicles and includes a number of alternative words that indicate that the poet herself was still in a mind of some variance. See this link for more info on the various versions of “I reckon, if I count at all.”

Last Thoughts on Robert Bly

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

The poet and writer Robert Bly was unavoidable here in Minnesota, and to some degree that may be true elsewhere. Today would be the day this week I would have to record something new, but I’m going to write this instead on the week of his death.

I moved to Minnesota from New York in the mid-1970s, and Robert Bly was unavoidable even then, at least within poetry circles. Minnesota is used to single degrees, and it soon became clear to me that one didn’t need to reach a balmy high of 6 degrees of separation to connect a lot of the poets here to Bly.

Now as a younger man I was a big again’er, and so I was often moved to do by what I was in opposition to. Bly was this too, and he retained this spirit well into his middle age. I recall the first time I saw him read and then speak on more general cultural topics at a writers event. The reading was intriguing. I recall he spoke his poems in a Yeatsian* sing-song chant and I believe he may have strummed a mountain dulcimer haphazardly while intoning his poems. That sort of thing is not universally attractive, then or now, but I admired the attempt. The poetry held my attention while not bowling me over. I’m not entirely sure (memories of other Bly readings blur into my memory of my first) but he may have spent time in his reading speaking about the matters the following poem would be a distillation of. In effect a Bly reading sometimes seemed to be roughly in haibun form, prose talk containing associations and context, to be followed by a shorter lyric poem. In the mid-20th century this reading style was an again’er move, for the predominate public literary reading was flatter, trusting the words alone, or the persistence of memory from studying them on the page before or after, to bring forth the impact. The Beat poetry** with jazz thing still existed then, but this wasn’t quite that, and the Beats were still assayed plausibly as a faded popularizing fad with inferior poetry by many. Over the years my fondness/acceptance of Bly’s reading style continued, though I never wanted to sound like Bly reading.

Part of what might seem too much at a Bly reading, perhaps part of why he chose to explain the human connections not always overt in the poetry which followed, was that he really seemed to want us to treasure the words. That could seem vain or self-important — but of course he, or any of us poets, are only borrowing the words.

The video looks like it may be Bly reading around the same time I first heard him.

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Later in the event series where I had heard him read, I heard him talk about culture. I recall the core of his talk that day was about how young people (he may have been restricting his subject to young men, even though this was years before Iron John)  had this narcissistic irresponsibility and lack of order. He called those suffering from this syndrome “Boy Gods” and he said these two words so close together that I wondered if this was a new word I hadn’t heard before: “buoygaadz.” Anyway, I wasn’t having this. Yes, nearly all writers, and more nearly all poets, have a sliver of un-endorsed self-regard for their thoughts and work.*** And we don’t generally know what to do with what skills we have, but at a young age drawing on our own lives isn’t just narcissistic, it’s also largely what we have any grasp on so far in our short years.

So, my again’er back was up. Maybe it wasn’t me he was talking about? Didn’t occur to me. I’d been working full time since I was 20 first in nursing homes taking care of folks Bly’s parents’ age, then in urban Emergency Rooms where people had no where else or no choice but to come. I didn’t need some writer with writing prizes giving me tough love, it was my day job to provide some pretty tough love to some needy people.

That’s often what happens when two again’ers meet. How much did I misunderstand? How much was Bly wrong? As an old man I’m not sure. That again’er part of me still arises, even in old age; but now I’m prone to doubt that there’s one way and one understanding — which was always part of my being against stuff that claims there was. Similarly, I was never attracted to Bly’s denomination of a men’s movement, though some others who seem a decent sort of person in my estimate were. I have no understanding of that part of Bly’s lifework, and so look elsewhere if that’s what you’re looking for. Also missing in my accounting today will be that there was, even more so in the older Bly, a sense of general good humor about our less than murderous follies.

Skip forward some decades and into a new century. Partly from examining closely the early Modernists (who wrote differently than most Modernism that followed) and partly from a renewed interest in how the classical Chinese poets expressed poetry, my poetry became more like Bly’s without any direct intent on my part to write like him (remember, my first impressions of Bly’s poetry were: nice enough, but not impressive or something I needed to copy.) If you’ve listened to some of the hundreds of examples of various performance styles I’ve used here combining poetry and music, I don’t think you’ll find me sounding much like Bly reading — but he is one of several whose courage in trying different ways to make verse work aloud inspired me.

And then, as readers here will know, I started to do more translations. I did this to expand what I presented here, and also because I think it’s a great way to get inside other ways poetry can express itself for my own writerly benefit. In the course of doing that, I would run across works that Bly had translated. My first thoughts? “He put stuff in there that wasn’t in the poem. And he makes them all sound like Bly poems.” Well, there’s my again’er again! I told myself that I want to honor the poet I’m translating — and sure, I can’t move the exact word-music over, but it should remain their poem, not mine. Oh, I still think I’m trying to do that, but I’m failing into doing what I see in Bly’s translations more and more. I’m not sure how I’ll eventually feel about this failure on my part. I’ll say only this (in example) if you think you’re reading Rumi by reading Bly, you’re not. You’re looking over the shoulder or between the ears of Robert Bly reading Rumi. That may be a fine location, just don’t hang the wrong sign on it. Ah, but as with the poetry we write, we’re only borrowing the words.

Have I been too dismissive or hard on the man who has just died, and who earned his honors and esteem and perhaps deserved even more? And who am I to cast this as if Bly and I are peers in any estimation! I worry that I might give some readers those impressions, but no, my intent is to say this in gratitude to Bly; and then to say this to you: if you, even partially, progress by opposition know that opposition may be like a pair of powerful magnets with poles repelling — they may snap around in your intending hands, together.

For an audio piece today, here’s an autumn poem by Rilke that Bly and I both translated. Here is a link to a page with Rilke’s own German beside Bly’s English version, and here’s mine.

Since this version from 2019, I’ve changed the 8th line to a less awkward one: “If you don’t have a house, you won’t build one now.”

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You can hear me perform my translation combined with my own music either with the following player gadget (where shown) or with this highlighted hyperlink.

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*I didn’t know back then, but William Butler Yeats had designs to do just such a thing early in the 20th century, perhaps more pitched than what Bly did, but by Yeats own instruction also not “art song” with elaborate melodic singing.

**While in New York I’d heard Ginsberg sing poetry; and though his pitch sense had issues, he was singing in full voice. Though I left New York before the hip-hop explosion, Gil Scott-Heron was a thing, and again, the cool, sly Beat infused (in both senses of the word) Scott-Heron thing wasn’t what Bly was doing. Bly then was always slowing the flow down, sometimes elongating the words almost like a stage hypnotist.  The Last Poets sounded more like drill sergeant chants compared to Bly. Ken Nordine’s “Word Jazz” had moments of that slow, hypno-suggestion groove, but it also had rhythmic variety. Later Bly chopped with a raised hand while reading, chopping also the words off at their feet with more variety in tempo.

***Often fighting with a stubborn bit of self-destruction or outright self-hate. Many artists think they know what they’re doing maybe 51% of the time, and then “I don’t have any idea about how to do it” fills the remainder 49%. The former pride lets us work, maybe even impress the results on others, the later portion calls us self-deluded. Some self-medicate trying to dampen down one portion or the other, but the drugs, drink, etc are not accurate enough.

Parlando Spring 2018 Top 10-Part One

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

As I’ve done most quarters, I like to look at the most played and liked pieces during the past season and report back here. Usually a few of the results surprise me, they aren’t always my favorite pieces or even the ones that I think came off best.

I do this in classic countdown fashion, so we start off with number ten and move in the next few days up to the number one. The audio pieces for the Parlando Project can be consumed a number of ways. Some listen to them here using the audio gadget on the blog, but others listen by subscribing to us through any of the leading podcast services. The audio pieces are the same, but the blog allows me to write about the pieces in a much richer manner than I can with any of the leading podcast services. However, if you, or someone you know might be interested in just the music and words, this is a handy way to get them on your phone or other handheld. So, if you just want the tuneage, search for Parlando – Where Music and Words Meet on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, or any of the other podcast services. You should find our audio pieces in their podcast sections.

On to the countdown…

Coming in at number Ten is one of the two pieces from May that gathered enough likes and listens to make it, despite having a shorter time frame to do it in, “Letters to Dead Imagists and A Pact.”  I often like to look at who influences the writers we feature here, and this piece lets me do that with short poems from two poets: Carl Sandburg and Ezra Pound. Sandburg tips his hat first to Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane, while Pound, rather grudgingly, acknowledges Walt Whitman. Despite being contemporaries with similar lifespans, despite both having connections to the American Midwest, despite Sandburg’s use of the early 20th Century Modernist/Imagist poetic practices as promoted by Pound; these are two very different men outside of their work with pen and typewriter. Interestingly, it’s Sandburg’s work that has an obvious Whitman influence though it’s Pound that points to him. Though Pound thought Whitman too careless in his craft, he’s the one that chose to give Whitman his due here.

 

 

Speaking of Imagists, at number Nine, we have the poet Hilda Doolittle and her “The Pool.”  Pound acted as a high-handed branding consultant would with  her, reading her poetry and then scrawling at the bottom of her manuscript her new brand: “H. D. Imagiste.” Doolittle writing henceforth as H. D. went on to a long career, and I’ve read that Hilda herself didn’t care much for the connotations of her family name anyway. Maybe that marketing advice helped, but early H. D. work like “The Pool” is  striking short poetry mixing concreteness and mystery, so maybe it was an inspired choice to use the short and less defined H. D. for a pen name.

Musically, I really like what I came up for this one too.

 

censor smelling woodcut

“Now is a time for carving…” Pound once decried “the exceedingly great stench” of Whitman’s poetry

At number Eight, let’s welcome to our stage the man who Pound said in our number-ten-holding poem “broke the new wood” in free verse poetry: Walt Whitman. What an odd image for Pound to use! In looking at why he might have chosen that image I found out that Pound’s family established itself in Wisconsin by building a thriving sawmill there, so it may be that Pound is liking Whitman to a pioneering lumberman, bold in seizing the ground and resources he found there, while Pound seems to say he pictures himself more as a William Morris style furniture craftsman or perhaps even as a skilled woodcarver.

Three Session men with Carolyn Hester

Straining at connections, because I love this photo so much: folksinger Carolyn Hester once recorded Whitman’s “O’ Captain,” but the 3 session men behind her appeared on many great folk records of the 60s: guitarist, Bruce Langhorne; bass player Bill Lee, father of filmmaker Spike Lee, and in the middle. the harmonica player with the shayna punim cheeks is known to trivia buffs as the father of Jakob Dylan, the leader of the 90’s band The Wallflowers.

 

Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”  is one of a pair of elegies Whitman wrote responding to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and the one I prefer to the other: “O Captain! My Captain!”  regardless of the feelings some have for that other Whitman poem’s use in the movie Dead Poets Society.  Furthermore, Whitman’s lilacs here are one of the reasons that T. S. Eliot’s landmark of High Modernism “The Wasteland”  begins in spring with that very flower blooming “out of the dead land.”

 

 

We’ll have numbers Seven, Six and Five coming back here soon. So don’t touch that dial—wait, this is the Internet, you can touch the dial any time you want—but do check back, as we continue our countdown of the most listened to and liked audio pieces combining various words  with original music here over the past season.

Side-Walks

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a tribute to a couple of other American originals who are inspirational to this Project.

“Side-Walks”  is the second piece here using words taken from a Laurie Anderson interview. In the earlier piece, Anderson was talking about how the sky of her Midwestern childhood taught her to realize that she was “nothing and everything.” Today’s words are quoted from a 2015 interview where she’s talking again about childhood, but particularly her childhood as she can revisit it in memory.

The phenomenon she talks about is extraordinarily common, while still extraordinary: the intense memory of childhood, rich enough that one feels they are experiencing it in fully dimensional, traversable, 3D space, with access to senses other than vision (such as smell and touch).

If you don’t feel you have this ability, Anderson suggests a method to engender it in her story. Although, I took this account of hers from a written interview, anyone familiar with Anderson’s speaking style from her work, may hear it in her performance voice, that slow, measured coo that never rises in intensity or volume, and varies only in a slight, auditory smile that can indicate any number of stances without determining one.

As I mentioned last time I used Laurie Anderson words, her performance voice is hypnotic, and influenced as I am, I can sort-of imitate it, but choose not to. But as I listened to this piece over and over as part of the mixing process, I began to realize that I was somewhat imitating the performance style of another influence of mine, Ken Nordine.

At some point, in another post, I’ll probably need to discuss Ken Nordine at some length, but hearing that echo, I said to myself “I bet no one has ever connected Laurie Anderson and Ken Nordine. Wait until I tell everyone about how these two unique American artists have these striking similarities!”

Ken Nordine-Laurie Anderson

Nordine and Anderson. What if I’m not a spoken-word artist, but a listening-word artist?

 

Because I write, my mind immediately starts writing, all in my head, all the ways their work connects. Both are native Midwesterners, who can carry that mindset to any cosmopolitan location. Both use that very even speaking style in performance, with Nordine allowing just slightly broader bemusement to sneak into his affect for contrast to Anderson’s often present, but more muted, smile. Both use music in combination with their hypnotic words, but both will choose music that is not calm, conventional “music beds.” Both love the sideways movement from one topic to another that seems alternately random and deeply meaningful, and both enjoy the shaggy-dog story conclusion that doesn’t overdetermine which.

I pop Laurie Anderson and Ken Nordine into a search engine, and find…

I’m too late. Laurie Anderson has been listening to Ken Nordine since her Chicago childhood. She’s a fan (her late partner, Lou Reed, too), and she knows Nordine influenced the development of her concepts.


Here’s a single dip into the 50 years or so of Ken Nordine’s audio pieces

 

Well then, let’s go back to Anderson’s story of how she can revisit a vivid childhood time, as many of us can. Her story is vivid too, even if she’s telling it off-the-cuff in an interview, not in performance, but what I found most striking were her conclusions. A couple of centuries ago, William Wordsworth wrote “Intimations of Immortality from Memories of Early Childhood,”  the poem that ends with the line “Thoughts…too deep for tears.” Do we think that means, too sad for tears—and, if so, what does that mean? Or is it, as Wordsworth had it in his ode, the “meanest flower”—or as Ken Nordine and Laurie Anderson speak it, is it that smile, however broad, that is deeper?

The player for my performance of this brief story Laurie Anderson told is just below.