Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Spring 2021 Parlando Project Top Ten, numbers 7-5

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Let’s continue our countdown of the pieces you most listened to and liked this past spring. As we move up toward the most popular one, we start today with number 7. If you want to read my first thoughts when the piece was first published, the bold-faced headings are hyperlinks to that. How well will these poems mesh with today’s Father’s Day? Let’s find out.

7 April Rain Song by Langston Hughes.  Hughes gets two appearances in this spring’s top ten, and his second one here is yet another song of rainfall that fell in this season’s list. Hughes had a strong element of practicality in his poetry, clear-eyed looks at his times and place, necessary observations — even in this poem written for a short-lived children’s magazine that works as a calming lullaby, something a parent might sing to a child. I said last time in his early poetry I can hear Hughes adopting some of older poet Carl Sandburg’s approaches, and this poem pairs nicely with Sandburg’s “Branches”  that came in at number 9 this quarter doesn’t it. But then Hughes in turn helped inspire Gil Scott-Heron, and I can hear how Scott-Heron used and extended what he gathered from Hughes.

“April Rain Song”  is a lullaby from a man committed to documenting and encouraging change. Earlier this month with another lullaby by William Blake I considered how that paradox may be explained. To hear Langston Hughes’ poem performed, there’s a player gadget below for many of you, and for the others, this highlighted hyperlink will also work.

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6 The World Is a Beautiful Place by Lawrence Ferlinghetti   This is a rare piece here that is not AFAIK in the public domain and completely free for reuse, but the death of it’s author this year felt like something that I must respond to, and the way I usually do that here is to perform their words. Listeners last winter and persisting through the spring continued to listen to this performance of one of Ferlinghetti’s poems leading to its second consecutive appearance in a Parlando Top Ten. Copyright aside, if you don’t have one of Ferlinghetti’s books, go ahead and get one. The generosity of his poetry will more than repay your contribution in buying it.

But for many in my generation, Ferlinghetti, and in particular his collection A Coney Island of the Mind,  was always there. You’d visit someone’s apartment to talk, to organize, to party, to make out — and there in some improvised bookcase made of boards and bricks or milkcrates there’d be this book-cover wrapping a thin volume: black night and grey illumination that seemed to turn silver from its contrast.

Most of us were in a demographic that said we would likely have had parents then, but in a poem like this one Ferlinghetti was taking, to some suitable degree, the role to be our father. So, for this Father’s Day it is altogether right to listen again to him welcoming us to, and showing us, life. Player gadget below for some to hear the LYL Band’s performance, or this highlighted hyperlink that will open a new tab window to also play it.

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Gil Scott Heron - Coney Island of the Mind - Dawn chases Tithonus

Influences.  Langston Hughes influenced Gil Scott-Heron, Ferlinghetti opened up poetry to many of my generation — and while immortal Dawn’s chasing the young Tithonus still seems a little pervy once we leave the mythological world, Rimbaud might well have been borrowing from that myth.

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5 Dawn  by Arthur Rimbaud  Rimbaud on the other hand was never the suitable father figure for anyone. He might have been a teenager when he wrote this poem, but he wasn’t quite acting the child’s role here either, for as I translated this my understanding became that he and that personified borderland time of dawn have run off to the wilderness to swive.

But it just so happened, with a backwards echo, that after I translated this poem and moved on to translate a poem by Sappho, that the two poems were connected. Sappho’s ancient poem ended with the recounting of a Greek myth of Tithonus who, like the singer of Rimbaud’s 19th century poem, was taken off by a love-besotted Dawn. I didn’t know Sappho’s poem or this mythological story when I was translating the Rimbaud, but it now seems possible to probable that Rimbaud knew this myth and was referring to it in his poem. I dealt with this anachronistic learning timeline by replacing Tithonus with Rimbaud and the twist of Rimbaud’s own later life in the ending of my version of Sapho’s poem that you can read about here.

Many a father knows there’s an unintended corollary in Wordsworth’s line “The child is the father of the man.” The teenaged Rimbaud taught the aged me.

To hear my performance of Rimbaud trysting with the Dawn, you may have a player gadget, and if you don’t, this highlighted hyperlink will serve.

Winter ‘20-‘21 Parlando Project Top Ten, numbers 10-8

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been tardy in many things for this project lately — but let me get on to recounting which pieces were most liked and listened to during the past quarter.

It may be a bit strange to revisit a winter we are glad to be emerging from, but poetry is about remembrance of all kinds of emotions and experiences. Which ones did the Parlando Project readers and listeners most connect with?

As we usually do, this is a countdown, so we start with the 10th most listened to and liked piece, and then over the next few posts we’ll move on to the most popular this winter. The bold-faced titles are links to the original post that introduced the piece in case you want to read what I wrote then.

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10 Trifles – I Know What Stillness Is   by Susan Glaspell.  I wanted to do something special for this project’s 500th audio piece, and I decided to try to use some words from my distant relative who was herself a figure in the Modernist revolution of the early 20th Century that I mine for many of the pieces used here. Glaspell is not a poet like most writers I present, but this short scene is from what remains her most famous work: a still effective short play about two women who have accompanied their husbands who are charged with investigating a murder* in a remote 1900 Iowa farmhouse. At this point in the play, we know that a farmer has been strangled there and that his wife, Minnie, has been taken into custody as a suspect, even though there is some doubt that a small, quiet woman could have had the motivation and strength to commit such an act.

While the men continue their very official investigation, the two women discover a dead canary entombed in a fancy box and connect it with the lonely life of the farmwife. Should they tell their husbands what they found?

I solved a difficult problem by treating this scene as “poetic” enough to work with the music and then locating a dialog performance that let me avoid trying to do the voices of the two women myself. I’m also quite proud of the music I composed for this one. You can hear it one of two ways: this highlighted hyperlink, or for some of you, a player gadget  below.

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Susan Glaspell by the fireside

Susan Glaspell getting her work done. Per the radio-play practical audio-effects tradition: in the wintertime it’s nice to sit next to the crinkling cellophane and work on your manuscript.

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9 The world is a beautiful place  by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  I bent the rules to publish this older performance that Dave Moore and the LYL Band did with my off-the-cuff reading of a piece from Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind  collection that so many treasured decades ago. These words are not in the public domain, and I had never received a reply when I sent in inquiry about presenting them here a few years back, but on the occasion of Ferlinghetti’s death I felt I had to share this with you, some of whom are among those that treasured those words.

But maybe some of you hadn’t “met” Ferlinghetti’s words before. Buy or read his book and meet more. Perhaps a few of you have an idea that the label “Beat Poetry” requires a dour and slack protest, a litany of muttered and solipsistic defeat. Maybe that’s not so.

This highlighted hyperlink will play the performance, or you can use the player gadget some of you will see below.

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.8 Escape  by Georgia Douglas Johnson.  I still know little about this “Harlem Renaissance” writer who wasn’t actually located in 1920s New York City. As time for this project gets harder to locate, I still hope to remedy that. Despite my deteriorating ability to complete new pieces, I made an extra effort this year to do work celebrating Black History Month this February, using work found in the landmark The New Negro  anthology published in 1925. “Escape”  was the one that found the most favor with this Project’s current audience.

Musically, I used the magic of MIDI “virtual instruments” to pay tribute to the Afro-American fiddler tradition, playing the featured violin part on my MIDI pickup guitar. At the end of the recorded performance, I tacked on a verse by the altogether unrelated Moondog, a musician who ironically was  connected to New York City. Here’s the link to hear my performance, or if you see it, you can use the player gadget below.

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*Glaspell was able to use her earlier reporting on an actual Iowa murder case as matter in her ground-breaking play.

In memory of Lawrence Ferlinghetti: The world is a beautiful place

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Some people live so long as to make time and its boundaried eras seem a foggy measure. Such a man was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the American poet, painter, and bookstore owner who predates and post-dates the Beat poetry scene — or for that matter the Hippie scene, and our century’s activist eras and its search for peace and justice. If you are a fan of generational short-hand (I’m not) you will notice that every one of those eras was widely denounceable as impractical, delusional, and in most ways inferior to those that came before that.

Perhaps I should remind all that Ferlinghetti was 101 years old, and would have been 102 next month. That means: he knew the Roaring Twenties and whatever we have begun in these Twenties. To any of you XYZ believers, that means he was a member of the Greatest Generation. This man, Ferlinghetti, attached philosophically during the entirely of my own longish life to anarchism and pacifism was a WWII vet, who enlisted before Pearl Harbor, who served during the Normandy invasion, and who, when moved to the Pacific theater, was able to view Nagasaki shortly after the atomic bombing. Philosophical pacifism of a most visceral kind.

“Thank you for your service” is the reflex response nowadays. Surely due, but I think also of his post-war service, helping promote a new more vernacular American poetry via his work, encouragement, bookstore and small press. His own 1958 poetry collection A Coney Island of the Mind  was immensely popular,* and seeing it or Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems  (which Ferlinghetti published**) in their paperback black and white form was once a common marker in smoky apartments during my youth.

Around the time this Project was beginning I performed a couple of Lawrence Ferlinghetti poems live with The LYL Band. I’d actually hoped to get permission to post those performances someday, but emails to City Lights garnered no replies. Hearing today of his death, and thinking of his life that well-lived, I thought inescapably of this poem of his from A Coney Island of the Mind entitled “The world is a beautiful place.”   I’ve decided to post our performance here in the spirit of gratitude and in memoriam.  If any rights owner objects, let me know, and I will remove. The player gadget for our performance is often below, but this highlighted hyperlink will also work if you don’t have the gadget on your screen. If you want to read silently, or read along, here’s a link to the text of Ferlinghetti’s poem.

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Want to hear another version of “The world is a beautiful place?”

Here’s Ferlinghetti’s own reading of today’s piece. You can buy a copy of A Coney Island of the Mind from City Lights via this link.

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*Some accounts say Coney Island  is the most popular poetry collection ever published in English. I’m not sure of that.

**Was Howl  a big “get” that he was lucky to land for City Lights? Not exactly. He was put on trial for publishing it, and Ferlinghetti figured he’d go to jail. The Fifties judge, to some surprise, ruled it not obscene.