joy

Wild Peaches, an Eden with undercurrents

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

There’s an undercurrent of grief beneath life. I don’t say this as a sentimentalist, it’s just there. This doesn’t preclude joy – it may in fact demand it.

I awoke at dawn today, August drizzle falling. I connected briefly with a livestream of the candlelight anniversary memorial service in Hiroshima,* and then shared a few tears with my living wife. Tears from each of us mixed on my face, shed for my late wife now dead for 24 years this morning. After she left for work, I took to my daily joy and hopped on a bike and rode to breakfast under gray skies without remaining rain.

I usually read the news with breakfast, a long habit – and I still do, though there’s little joy and much sense of loss in it these days. I took an old pocket music player with me (which no longer works except for the radio)** so that I could listen on air to the children of a recently assassinated state legislator memorialize her and her husband killed alongside her. They played their parent’s favorite songs mixed with sharing stories of hearing those songs in the back seat of a minivan while all sang along in flagrant voices. See what I mean: grief demands joy.

Perhaps you don’t. I express myself awkwardly, some will wonder what I’m on about. Let me look at it from the perspective of absent connection: the man who has gained some wealth by bamboozling someone or by force of power, often has the briefest of joys. The one who seeks joy in the suppression of others, has a meagre joy constructed out of a comparison to other’s pain inflicted. Grief for them might be a weakness, a sure sign of submission. I, a nobody in this world of power, can laugh at myself writing this and tell myself I should stop trying to be mistaken for Kahlil Gibran.

Today’s musical piece came about when someone shared a poem by Elinor Wylie called “Wild Peaches.”  Wylie, a contemporary of Edna St. Vincent Millay, gained an audience during the last decade to be called The Twenties. She was born into a successful family steeped in political rectitude, but her love life became a national scandal. She eloped with the son of an admiral at age 20, but soon left him for a married, older lawyer by the name of Wylie.***  The abandoned husband committed suicide after she left him, and the lawyer Wylie and Elinor fled to England and lived undercover under an assumed name. Eventually the couple married and were able to return to the U.S. in time to have that relationship too fall apart.

Hanging out with the East Coast Modernists, the now Elinor Wylie launched her poetry career. The scandals likely helped and hurt that career, but Millay and some other women poets were writing with complexity in melodic verse about eros (and what surrounds it) – and for a while they found readers hoping to understand “the New Woman” of the 1920s. As it turned out their careers were helped and hurt by many of them writing rhyming verse in metrical forms. Even before Modernism, rhyming verse was already becoming associated with less serious poetry, and women writing about eros were judged less substantial than men writing about the supposed important things. The oncoming middle of the 20th century was to be very concerned with important things – many deadly through new bombs or other means.

“Wild Peaches”  was published as a series of four sonnets, and I’ll link the full text here. My performance is only of the first one, which I think can stand alone and is representative. Rewardingly musical, the first impression one might have is of a poem that’s kin to the famous Yeats’ poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”  Instead of an Irish bee-loud glade and house of wattles made, the poem’s voice is describing an Eden, a locus solus, a blessed arcadia, in the south-eastern coast of the U.S.**** But wait, there’s an undercurrent.

This is the poem of a woman who had twice eloped – the second time was subject to an international “womanhunt” – and neither partner stuck. The voice of the poem knows full well flee and exile may the entry and exit point of such an Eden. I love the ironic turn the sonnet takes even within its octet when it goes all Frank O’Hara – though written before that poet or Disney’s Davey Crocket had come into existence – with the man taking to wearing a coonskin cap and the fleeing couture-debutante clad in homespun. The exultation of “We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown” is delicious, moving from Exodus past the parted sea to drowning.

Wylie in elaborate dress

Elinor Wylie, not wearing homespun fabric

 

The sextet seems to offer more Eden – but wait, the best season is Autumn, the season of The Fall, and we are left with the abrupt movement from wild fruity abundance to a subsistence bringing death, and a hunter whose shot will not miss.

Oh mercy, I’m going to go all Gibran again: death will surely win one battle, though love can win many battles. That’s what I’ve found – and though she died young, Elinor Wylie later seems to have found her most successful marriage the third time around.

After our last piece where I accompanied my speaking ghost with lots of electric guitar, today’s piece is full of bowed strings: cello, violin, and viola da gamba. In secret I’ll tell you I played most of the string parts for my Carolina Eve in Exile with my MIDI guitar. I’ve taken to calling pieces such as this “Punk Orchestral,” in that I’m not getting overly fancy with the rank and order of calling these instruments up. You can hear my song made from the first sonnet in Elinor Wylie’s “Wild Peaches”  with the audio player below. No player? You’ve not been driven out of the garden, it’s just that some ways of viewing this blog will suppress it, and so I’ll supply this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*For several years after my late wife’s death, I didn’t notice that it happened on Hiroshima Day, but I’ve found that linking a single death with the death of thousands underlines my point about humanity’s shared undercurrent of grief and loss.

**I could have Internet-streamed the children’s memorial radio program of course, but I decided to use the old device because it reminded me of the era I shared with my late wife.

***The imp of the perverse in me can’t help but think of the lawyer’s family name with the animated coyote and his well-funded Amazon Prime account who is none-the-less doomed. We find that funny.

****We can locate this poem’s Eden from its fruits. The wild peaches indicate it’s southeastern as that non-native fruit is only cultivated below the Mason-Dixon line. Wild peaches are the remains of abandoned orchards or animal-carried/buried/excreted seed-pit refugees of cultivated fruit. The poem’s other fruit, scuppernong, is a wild white grape native to the Carolinas.

If all the griefs…. Emily Dickinson and also music

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

We’ll get to a remarkable short Emily Dickinson poem today, but first a few words about the music.

One of the things I like about this Project is not caring about what style of music I make to combine with the poetry. You see, I don’t like “silos” — those ways of viewing music as having borders, types, genres, labels. Some days I want to make acoustic music, some days I go inside computers to see what I can score and program to happen, other days I want to take an electric guitar and lean into the amp so that I can hear that guitar respond to its own screaming. Then I’ll be so audacious as to fake music that I have no right nor sufficient understanding to make. Jazz and orchestral music are fields where extraordinary musical knowledge is required — or it would be if I paid attention to the rules. When delving into those kinds of ensembles and approaches I make do with quite simple ideas.

In the music for this Project I’ve become dependent on acting as the musicians that work with my composing self, and the composer knows the musician’s limitations intimately. At least the musicians in me can depend on the composer to keep them from being bored with the same challenges all the time.

Does this variety succeed or fail? I don’t know. Perhaps I am steeled in this effort by writing poetry for years before composing music. Poets in our age generally don’t know if they’ve succeeded. Poetry’s audiences are small and what audiences poetry has may be too cowed by the pretentions of the art to allow us mere listeners footing to talk about it.

Today’s audio piece combines unlike things even before it gets to combining with Emily Dickinson’s striking short poem. I took some very old things: A Telecaster (a 1950 design, meant for bar-room and dancehall cowboy music*) and a small Fender Princeton electric guitar amp I’ve had for more than 40 years. But instead of playing birth-spanking music for dancing and carousing, I played slow, spare music, exactly stumbling though while still keeping itself upright. That part of the piece’s musical approach has a label within the catch-all of indie rock: the sub-genre is called slowcore. To this I decided to add (or perhaps preserve is a better word) some artifacts of its making that you, I, or the next recordist might think defects. The mic was picking up a lot of the pick strikes on the guitar’s strings —well sobeit, they are the crickets or the tapping implements of this soundscape. And to this I decided to mic the floor beneath me as I performed this to capture my foot stomping time as I played.**

I believe this combining pairs well with the difference of Emily Dickinson. I’m not entirely sure what Dickinson meant to achieve in the short poem we title with it’s first line “If all the griefs I am to have.”   What was her internal intent in writing this, what did it mean to its author? Was she writing something to herself? Or was it expected to be a little greeting card epigram to thank someone else for the gift of joy? The first line we use out of need for a title leads us to think it’s about grief, and a recipient of this might think it awfully strange to think this a thankyou message — yet one through-line of the poem’s two stanzas is that the poet’s present mood is so joyful that a lifetime’s accumulation of grief wouldn’t phase her at the poem’s moment, and that any imagined accumulation of a lifetime’s joys would only measure the same as what she says “happens to me now.” We might assume the poem’s occasion is some joy then, yet this poem doesn’t say that outright.

Emily often enclosed poems in letters or gifts to others. I don’t know if this was one, but can one imagine being an acquaintance or family member of Emily and receiving these 8 lines? Others might be jotting down “I thoroughly enjoyed your visit/garden party/whatnot” in bread & butter notes. You open Emily’s and it’s “If all the griefs I am to have would only come today…”  Awkward. But to her mind the thought of all that grief, all the sadness, all that pain, all taken at once — it’s something to envision and grapple with. And your cherries jubilee was scrumptious.

thank you from Emily D

A goth who loves dessert? Emily was a dessert maker of some note to her friends and family.

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If you follow the logic, that’s what the poem could be saying. But the way of saying it, the framing of saying it*** causes one to see grief in an equivalent measure to joy. I see this poem as a Taoist statement, that there is one unified, effortless, way in things.

Is that Taoist reading an accident, an illusion I’m imposing? I’m frankly not sure. One thing I’ve learned as I’ve leaned into Dickinson this century is that her mind had within it a mode of trying to express vast philosophical points in tiny poems, and that the central thoughts that are embedded in just a few words in these poems can be difficult. She was reading Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and they were among the first Americans to try to come to grips with East Asian philosophy. Her poem does  explicitly say grief may seem an illusion to joy, which can flow around it; and that nothing (including joy) is so large that something else cannot be larger.

Well, that’s my awkwardness for today — but you can hear it with music if you use the audio player below. And if the audio player isn’t giving you a RSVP, this highlighted link is supplied for those ways of reading this that suppress showing the player, as it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*A great many musicians discovered that it was good for things well beyond what it was designed for. One side-effect of Leo Fender’s guitar design was that its bridge pickup was to deliver bright, clear notes which meant that no matter how much you smeared it with reverb and ambient effects or applied fuzztones and distorted murk, it still let its intent cut through. For today’s guitar part the Telecaster had things that went against this bright, clear nature: I tuned it down a full step (D to D instead of the conventional E to E) and the motifs tend to be played on the lower strings here. And the guitar was strung with flat-wound strings. Almost all modern guitarists use round-wound strings, which let the lowest pitched 2 or 3 strings have a brighter sound and bring out more of the harmonic series above the root frequency of a note. Flat-wound strings are wrapped with a tight flat layer of wire that suppresses that, which makes them contrast with the ringing plain, un-wound top 2 strings all the more. This timbral contrast can make the single guitar sound almost like two differing instruments.

**I had intent there, even though the sound and rhythms of today’s piece were unlike its model: John Lee Hooker’s early records were often just Hooker’s voice and electric guitar, and his work-boot stomps were clearly audible as percussion on some of them. When I listen to exemplary slowcore band Low’s spare drumming I  sometimes think it has the same effect as Hooker’s sole-music.

*** In poetry, unlike say the essay or expository writing, the way of saying is brought forward to be as important as the message of what is said.

Parlando Summer 2020 Top Ten, numbers 4-2

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

4. A Mien to Move a Queen by Emily Dickinson. My teenager, who suspects my musical output as being less than relevant, taunted me gently by asking as I started writing this post if I was presenting Winnie the Pooh. By “Pooh” we may decode: something simultaneously old and immature.

“No I said. I’ve never done any A. A. Milne.”

“Who’s A. A. Milne?”

“He wrote Winnie the Pooh—oh wait, I have  put Milne in a post. I was comparing an Emily Dickinson poem to Sixties psychedelic rock lyrics. I compared a poem of hers to a Milne/Pooh poem that was used by Jefferson Airplane in a song: ‘If I was a bird and flew very high…”

“Bored already.” He playfully rejoindered.

I can’t quite give you the flavor of this, but there’s a quicker wit in my house than mine even when my wife is out of town.

Well that post just happens to be the one that introduced the 4th most liked and listened to piece here this summer: Dickinson’s “A Mien to move a Queen.”  And yes, it is a strange poem, though it draws me in none-the-less. It may be one of Dickinson’s riddle poems, like “May-Flower”   though I can’t solve its riddle. Dickenson may be looking at another flower, or a bird or insect.

Well sometimes one can just let the mystery be.

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3. Long Island Sound by Emma Lazarus. One of the least-famous poets with one of the most-famous poems ever presented here, Lazarus is the author of a sonnet associated with the Statue of Liberty: the “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…” one. That was a poem of hope, and I’d say to, so is this one that she also wrote. Therefore, I made “Long Island Sound”  into a happy little summer song.

Did a carefree song seem out of place in our 2020 summer? Or was it something we wanted to visit, if only for the minute and 46 seconds the performance lasts? Well, in any season there is happiness. Seething anger, somber reflection, these may seem to be the noble emotions this summer, but joy is not an ignoble emotion.

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Black Joy Lives Here crop

The American Midwest loves lawn signs. I ride by many each morning in my neighborhood: election candidates, Justice for George Floyd, roofing contractors, high-school sports teams, and a couple of these too.

2. The Poet’s Voice from speeches by William Faulkner and Bob Dylan.  Our current American age is suffering much from insufficiency of empathy. What kills or mutes empathy? Fear is one thing. One sentence in William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech struck me so strongly when I read it this year. Not the one I was quoted so often by teachers then my age now, back when I was nearly 20, the one that went: “Man will not merely endure: he will prevail”—this, somehow, they seemed to be saying would come from literature, of all things, stuff written largely by dead men. Thanks pops. Now let me return to being worried about which of us is going to run out of tuition money or the will to continue this hidebound education, and get drafted. No, that one was Faulkner’s hopeful future, a future we haven’t yet made obsolete. Instead, it was this sentence, earlier in the speech, the one that should make you sit up and take notice:

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.”

Old man Faulkner, though he may be as imperfect as the brightest and most perceptive person today, is really saying something there. In the context of his entire speech he appears to be referring to the particular fear of a nuclear war, but then how strange that he calls this “so long sustained” when nuclear arms were around the age of our current Presidency’s term when he gave this speech in 1949.

So, if fear mutes empathy, let us acknowledge that carrying someone else’s song in your ear, your mind, your mouth, is the pathway through which it can infect your heart with empathy.

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I’ll return soon with the post revealing the most popular piece here this past summer. That’s going to be a somewhat complicated story.

Wordsworth’s March

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Let’s launch the Parlando Project’s celebration of National Poetry Month with one more poem about march, about spring, and about joy. And oh, could I use some joy in this uncertain pandemic plagued spring! You too?

I’ve chosen to use this poem, “Written In March,”  by British poet William Wordsworth today. National Poetry Month is a U.S. thing—but that’s OK, because I’m going to make him an American for the day by combining his original English rural scene with some American music: the blues.

NPM_2020_poster

Lots of folks will think of ways to celebrate poetry this April. The Parlando Project has been doing our odd part for several years now.

 

This is not so wild a thought as you might think. While Wordsworth is not the kind of early 20th century Modernist that I often feature here, a century before them he helped make a statement for plainer speaking and broader subject matter in his landmark Preface to the Lyrical Ballads  in 1801. He famously stated there that poetry is simply “Emotion recollected in tranquility.” Among the things that he and his fellow English Romantic movement poets looked to for influences were folk music and ballads.

American blues was created by the uncrowned Afro-American Modernists of the early 20th century. Since there was very little authentically American “serious music” in 1900, and what there was they weren’t exactly welcomed in it, they created a Modernist form of their own device. We could call it a folk music, but then Louis Armstrong was fairly sure “All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.” Musically it used all kinds of things, some of it was from African nations their forebears had been abducted from, some of it was from native American soil, some of it was from other immigrants, some too may have been from indigenous Americans, and some of it had to have been the creation of their own minds, needs, and creativity. Musically it has many descendants, and its core is the greater part of what makes something musical distinctly recognized as American around the world.

That this form could be called “The Blues” was a problematic branding, because the term then and now can be confused with a long-existing synonym for sadness or depression. While there are sad and pitiful blues songs, the typical stance of a blues to trouble is to say that it’s wise to the situation, that even if the singer is beaten down by something, that they’re still here. And many Blues songs are also perfectly happy to be joyous, and that’s the mode I went for today.

So, I maintain that this is a reasonably natural combination. Wordsworth wants to tell us a rural tale of winter’s end arriving, of fields and livestock thriving, of an outdoors that welcomes us again with open arms. In this year’s troubled spring we may not have a full measure of spring’s blessings, but we are still given a portion. Let’s devour the portion we’re given all the more joyously even if the serving may be smaller this year.

I played acoustic slide guitar for this one, using a favorite guitar variety used by early American blues musicians: the resonator guitar invented by Slovakian immigrant John Dopyera. It’s essentially a big pie-plate-sized metal speaker cone driven by the strings of an otherwise more-or-less conventional guitar that houses it. The guitar is retuned to a non-standard tuning that many blues players called “Spanish” and some think may have been learned from Mexican laborers that crossed paths with the Afro-Americans in the southern U.S. I wear a ceramic tube on a finger of my fretting hand to stop the notes, and this sliding tube on top of the strings gives legato note transitions and microtones. Many players can use this slide guitar technique fluidly, giving the guitar a smooth legato note envelope as the only artifact of using the slide, but I also enjoy letting other possible artifacts stand out more, putting a mic near to the fretboard so I can hear the heavy slide strike against the strings or even slap the fretboard wood at times.

The player gadget to hear William Wordsworth’s “Written In August”  played as a slide guitar blues is below. To read the full text of Wordsworth’s original poem, it’s here.

Join us over April’s National Poetry Month to see what else we can come up with to surprise you with. If you want to sample the range of different things we do immediately, our archives here have over 400 other examples of words (mostly poetry) combined with original music.