International Women’s Day

I Sit and Sew

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today is International Women’s Day, and I was fortunate to be able to complete this recording of a new musical piece setting a poem by Alice Dunbar-Nelson before the day ended.

“I Sit and Sew”  is likely Dunbar-Nelson’s best-known poem — it’s certainly the first one I knew of. I’d encountered it as a poem written amid WWI during the years this Project was noting that conflict’s centenary. “I Sit and Sew”  still comes up fairly often in regards to war and destruction, or because it mentions domestic, woman-associated work in the context of the greater world.

I noticed one other element in re-reading it this week: it seemed to me to relate to another line of woman-associated work: medical nursing. Having spent a couple of decades doing nursing work myself, the poem’s focusing-in on the trauma and injuries of warfare really made me think Dunbar-Nelson wasn’t just thinking generally, writing something that could be paraphrased as “War is terrible, and yet here I am peacefully making or mending something with needle and thread, as women have for millennia.” There’s nothing wrong with experiencing the poem that way, as a companion-piece perhaps to Hardy’s “In the Time of the Breaking of Nations” — but I’m a person who often asks questions while reading.

While the poem can stand on its own, I wondered if Dunbar-Nelson herself wanted to serve as a nurse.*   Short answer: this issue has additional complications. Currently in the United States we’re suffering from numerous outlandish statements and acts snuffing out complexities of diversity, but historically women’s wartime work, including nursing, is tightly connected with increasing respect and civic equality for women.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was an Afro-American woman. The U.S. armed forces were segregated during WWI, and the roles available to the non-White military were limited along with that, based proximally on rules about race-mixing no-doubt supported by a pervasive background of racial superiority. A few years back, while learning about another poem, I came upon the case of Col. Charles Young, a Black West Point educated officer with experience in two foreign deployments who couldn’t get himself utilized as America mobilized for WWI. The situation for Black Americans who wanted to work overseas as nurses was also exclusionary. I’ve found out Dunbar-Nelson was working as a national organizer, a member of something called the Women’s Committee of the Council of Defense, and her focus was on Afro-American support of the war effort. She published today’s poem in 1918, and after the war she wrote up a summary of Black women’s WWI efforts.

Kashmire for colored red cross nurse Crisis Vol 16 No 4 Aug 1918

We Wear the Mask Dept. I found this ad here in another post mentioning this poem. In her article linked above, Dunbar-Nelson mentions, in passing, (pun intended) that some lighter-complexion Afro-Americans snuck through the overseas nursing service ban.

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No long post today, that’s a start for anyone who wants to dig deeper.

The song I made out of her poem came together more efficiently than many, partly because it began before I knew I was making a song. This week I remodeled a nearly 30-year-old Squier Telecaster that I had put a Bigsby vibrato bridge on a decade or so ago. This guitar and that bridge just never worked out. I couldn’t get the neck angle and string height right, the saddles rattled, and the strings slipped sideways when I bent strings. After some looking, I unearthed the guitar’s original non-vibrato bridge and put it back on.**  The guitar was transformed. Back when I put on the Bigsby I’d also installed a set of upgraded replacement pickups, and with the string-path mechanics sorted out, the guitar played and sounded great! While I was resetting the action/intonation etc., I quickly made a short musical piece on my recording computer that would let me play strummed chords, arpeggiated chords, and single-note lead lines over three separate sections — just so I could have fun while seeing if I’d eliminated all issues.

Funny how fast you can compose, if you’re not composing. I saved the drum pattern, the bass track, and the keyboard noodling after testing the guitar, thinking “Hey, I like that groove, might be useful.” This morning, I had about an hour when I could open a mic and record. I loaded the saved rhythm tracks, worked them into a longer song-form, recorded the guitar parts using the transformed guitar, and found that I could sing Dunbar-Nelson’s poem to this.

You can hear it with the audio player below. No player? It’s not hiding under a box, it’s just some ways of reading this blog suppress the player gadget.  This highlighted link will open a tab with its own audio player.

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*”Nursing” is a very broad word covering a wide range of caring work and levels of technical knowledge. Dunbar-Nelson’s write-up seems to indicate the women’s war work she was promoting covered a range of things, not just licensed medical nursing as we know it this century.

**One difficulty was that the original — like the Vibramate-brand vibrato bridge I took off — was a non-standard bridge. When I finally found the original bridge, it was sitting underneath  a storage box in my studio space. Luckily, like most Telecaster parts, it’s not a fragile thing. By the way, I’m not knocking Vibramate’s hardware. I’ve used Vibramate products to add Bigsby vibrato bridges to other guitars with good results, and their “Spoiler” accessory for Bigsby bridges makes restringing or replacing a broken string a much calmer experience.

Sonnet To Beauty — Two Women Who Wrote Poetry While Working with the Economically Desperate

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I’m posting a bit late in the day, but it’s International Women’s Day, and so today’s audio piece uses as a text a poem by a very international woman, Lola Ridge. Ridge’s poetry is perhaps best known for a fierce commitment to social justice and the situation of the poor in early 20th century America; but she was born in Ireland, left with her parents for New Zealand as a child, emigrated from there to Australia to attend college, and then to America, eventually New York City, where she mixed with most of the political and artistic radicals of the early Modernist era, including on the arts side: Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, and William Carlos Williams and the rest of the circle around the NYC Modernist magazine The Others.  Over at the Midwestern anchor of Modernist American poetry, it’s editor/founder Harriet Monroe was said to have called Ridge a genius, and she won awards and some favorable reviews in the years between the two World Wars.

Late in the 1930’s she apparently fell from the scene politically and artistically, and when she died in 1941 she was as poor as the people she wrote about, and then seemingly the subject of a rapid and rather complete forgetting for the rest of the 20th century.

Luckily our 21st century has become interested in reassessing the women who were on the scene a century ago along with the male Modernists, and there’s now a revival in considering her work.

Unlike some of Ridge’s poetry, today’s piece is not formally Modernist. It’s not only a sonnet, it attempts to present a passionate if conventional poetic argument regarding the abstract ideal of artistic beauty. Taken by itself it’s more Percy Bysshe Shelley than William Carlos Williams, but if we look just a little beyond its surface we can be reminded that Shelley was a thoroughgoing political and social radical as well as a Romantic era poet. Here’s a link to the text of Ridge’s “Sonnet to Beauty,”   from a blog that does a great job of presenting sonnets and similar shorter poems, FourteenLines.blog.

Ridge’s poem starts by worshiping beauty almost as an awed acolyte unable to face the godhead. But in the midst of the poem, something strange starts to manifest itself: a buzzard (an ugly, carrion-eating bird) appears gussied up by “The wizardry of light” to appear “All but lovely as the swan.” I read this as Ridge saying that artists and society can fail, can deceive, can fake beauty.

A musical metaphor follows this that says despite the diversity of artistic endeavor — including false beauties or injustice like unto our buzzard — that beyond the dissonance and the harmonic stress of this dialectic, that the chords can resolve. The poem ends avowing that true beauty can still chime through ugliness, falsehood, and strife.

Beyond sonnets, I will now make a turn in this post before giving you a chance to hear my performance of Ridge’s poem. Let me quickly summarize the event I attended this past Sunday remembering Irish-American poet Ethna McKiernan. There may be more than coincidence that Lola Ridge started this off.

Ethna McKeirnan - Lola Ridge

Ethna McKiernan reading, with lipstick, and Lola Ridge, I’m not sure.

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Minnesota weather and continued Covid-19 concerns might have conspired to reduce attendance, as the side streets were still full of sloppy snow from Saturday’s snowfall.*  I arrived early and helped the bookstore staff setup chairs. They seemed to be expecting maybe a couple of dozen, which may be par for a Twin Cities local-writer poetry reading, but both the event organizer and myself the bystander suspected we’d need to maximize the amount of chairs the space could hold. I think we were able to get nearly 40 folding chairs into the designated space, but as the crowd started to assemble, extra chairs needed to be rounded up and put in the various aisles between the bookstore shelves to handle those that kept coming in, and we had a few standees who fit in where they could.

More than typical bookstore poetry readings, I suspect most of the crowd knew Ethna for a long time. And that may have given a boost to the eight poets who read poems of Ethna’s, a smattering of their own, and gave short thoughts about her as a writer and a person. So less a usual public reading where some poets might be nervously trying to consider how they would come off presenting their work to an audience which might not know it, and more like an experienced and informal poetry group of long-time colleagues.

Several of the readers were members of other periodically-meeting writer’s groups that included Ethna, like unto the Lake Street Writer’s group that Dave Moore, Kevin FitzPatrick, Ethna, and I were decades-long members of. I’m sure that if Kevin had lived, he would have been a valued part of this event, as Ethna often credited Kevin as an influence on her writing — but he died a few weeks ahead of Ethna. I tried to make myself useful by playing stagehand and raising and lowering the mic stand for the variety of readers.

Many of the readers spoke of Ethna’s work with homeless outreach, and read some of her poems that dealt with that work, something that echoes today’s poet Ridge. Though the audience was entirely masked, a few noted that Ethna was a stickler for always putting on lipstick when out in public. For all anyone knew, what with our Covid era masks, we all were wearing lipstick! Who could see — but I believe all of us were remembering Ethna.

Backpart of the crowd at the Remembering Ethna Event March 2022

Covid-era ambiguity: “Lipstick? We were supposed to wear lipstick?” A portion of the crowd at the “Remembering Ethna” event last Sunday.

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So, as I speak of a woman who promoted culture, wrote beautiful poetry, and was committed to helping the economically desperate, I will now leave you with a piece using the words of another woman who a century before us did the same. You can hear Lola Ridge’s “Sonnet to Beauty”  with a graphical player below if you see that, or if you don’t, with this highlighted link.

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*My friend and participant here in the Parlando Project Dave Moore was unable to attend due to concerns with the street conditions. I’ve attended two other book-launch poetry readings given by Ethna herself, and this Sunday’s was the smallest crowd of the three. Consider though that most of those who knew Ethna are “senior citizens,” and some are frail as well.

March 2018 Parlando Top 10 Part 2

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

An artist named Linnea Hadaway made a book earlier this year. It had no words in it. She said it had no words because it was about listening.

Today is International Women’s Day, an arbitrary thing like all special days, months and years. I can hear some grumbling off in the distance as some read this: “Another one of those special-interest things. I go to poetry and music to get away from that faddish nonsense.” There’s consistency in that opinion: if one is upset at “identity politics,” dividing the world in halves is just as deplorable as dividing it into tenths or smaller.

Are there dangers in division? There certainly are. But I don’t see these sorts of things as division, but as requesting attention—and attention is what art, and this Parlando Project is about. You see, life is incarcerated in the ultimate special interest group, the ultimate identity, political and otherwise: our own selves. Breaking the cellular barrier to spill our selves, or enticing us into opening a tiny pore to stare across at the skin holding another self inside another world, the still unexplored world we share, is the whole of art.

There is no apportionment so small as to be smaller than that. There is no way out but the way of art, to pay attention. Our ears cannot see, they can only listen.

No planning in this, but the next three audio pieces in our Top 10 count-down of the most liked and listened to pieces this past winter use words written by women.

Carrington 3

Surrealist Leonora Carrington captures the Parlando Project recording another audio piece

 

7. We Grow Accustomed to the Dark

I think I’ve used more Emily Dickinson pieces for words here than any other writer. I didn’t plan it that way. I’m not sure that Dickinson planned it that way either. Obviously, she meant what she did, assiduously creating and collating the more than a thousand short and engagingly enigmatic poems that we now see as a cornerstone of American poetry.

But as a careerist she’s a mess. She showed some of her work to friends and family, but like most friends and family they probably saw them as artifacts of the ordinary Emily, that stubborn particular. Perhaps they understood or didn’t understand her poems better than we do; but we, her current readers, believe it’s the later.

She had a lucky break with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the critic and social activist who answered her letter and saw something there. Even in the intellectual ferment of Transcendentalist New England, how many would have? The posthumous publication he shepherded, made possible the Dickinson we have today. But did he understand her art? We, as posterity, think otherwise.

So, like the woman in “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark”  Dickinson pressed on, walking, almost straight, and like the bravest, aware that the comedy of striding face-first into a tree was possible.

 

The Emily DIckinson Internal Difference

I was there! What a concert! The music was good too.

6. A Certain Slant of Light

I didn’t think about this while writing the music for and performing “A Certain Slant of Light”  and “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark,”  but these two Emily Dickinson poems are companion pieces. The Dark poem is more clear, even comedic, the Light poem more mysterious.

In my original post I decided to not talk about what I think the poem means. In some ways, I think that’s true to the poem’s “Where the Meanings, are.” I had fun with the mock psychedelic rock poster I created to illustrate it, but I think the core experience of the poem is the same that some were seduced into having by ingesting drugs, the insight that the universe’s meaning may be unknowable and its substitute only available by fiat.

Cure the cod-sitar sounds, and stereotyped sparkle-eyed hippie whooshing “Oh, Wow!” Of course, we must laugh. This is an insight available even to the young that can apparently be induced by mere intoxication.

But it’s true. It may be easier to see the borders of truth if one comes upon it without chemical aids; but even true, it’s an insight that’s hard to integrate into an active life and compassion. Dickinson integrated it with these little packets of poems. “None may teach it,” she says, but I can let you see my experience of it.

 

5. In the Bleak Midwinter

And one slot higher in the countdown, a woman who isn’t Dickinson, but is roughly her contemporary, English poet Christina Rossetti. Her’s is a Christmas and Christian poem, faith is her fiat; and a shaped and received story is her poems plot.

As this post talks about division, opposites—and how, if one distrusts them, one must cross them, sometimes listening, rather than shouting at them to come down—“In the Bleak Midwinter”  is all about divisions and opposites, and where they fail to hold.

In the moment of Rossetti’s beautiful song, even if earth is iron and water stone, heaven cannot contain God, nor can the earth sustain winter or meagre poverty.

I remember someone asking one of the earnest folk-singers of my generation (alas, I can’t remember who) if a song could change the world. Their reply was something like, “Of course not, but during the time the song is being sung the world is changed.” Perhaps an argument for longer songs, better memories, or us slowly learning how to integrate the experience of art into the rest of our lives.

 

I plan to return tomorrow with the next three in our Top 10 count-down of the most popular pieces over the past Winter.