Louise Bogan

Cassandra

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Louise Bogan is somewhat of a poet’s poet – and that’s sort of a mixed blessing. Earning that title means that other folks who work at the craft of poetry recognize the things she’s able to do even if they may not be noticeable by the general reader. Indeed, when done well, the kinds of skills Bogan had with the music of words or the music of thought may not be noticed because the poet deploys them without creaky prying levers, showy lifting, or grunts of effort.

Continuing our celebration here of National Poetry Month, I selected a poem of hers out of Louis Untermeyer’s between-the-world-wars anthology Modern American Poetry. It’s titled “Cassandra.”  We may therefore assume it’s in the voice of, or the shared experience of, this figure in classical mythology.* Cassandra had the gift of prophecy, but when she spoke her doomed predictions of the fall of Troy and the fate of those (on both sides) who took part of that conquest, she was more than disbelieved, she was deemed mad. Mixed blessing.

Cassandra

As I mention below, you could have heard this with Mellotron strings, but Cassandra predicted you won’t.

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Of course, if you have the unerring gift of prophecy you might well know that’s how your messages will be received. Cassandra would also know her own fate (and like many Greek myths, it’s trigger-warning brutal) and she had to bear up under that too.

Louise Bogan took that paradox and put its facets into eight lines of pentameter with perfect rhymes. With a little less skill she might have chosen more space thinking that would demonstrate all the things she could do – and that poem would have been longer.

I love the opening two lines of this poem. Cassandra seems to be calling the gift of prophecy a “silly task,” a “trick” even if the myths say it was a gift from the gods, but she dismisses it as something any wise observer would say are the predictable extractions from the lust and pride of men. What a piece of characterization! The next four lines express knowing the future, and knowing too the foolishness of mankind, only adds pain. The concluding two: an unflinching statement of bearing up under the gift of being the knower-of. Her knowledge of fate gives her a vision of the gods of a “shrieking heaven.”

I tried quite a full arrangement of the music I wrote for this, with two tracks of Mellotron wheezing and some other things, and yet I struggled to come up with a mix that retained listener impact. This afternoon I decided to subtract, taking away track after track until I had just the voice, guitar, and bass – and sure enough there was more there with less. You can hear my performance of Louise Bogan’s “Cassandra”  with the audio player below. What, has my prediction failed – there’s no player to be seen? No, I know that would happen since some ways of reading this won’t show the player, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

 

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*I read a little about Bogan’s life before posting this piece today. Are there reasons she’d empathize with the struggles of Cassandra? One summary of her life that I read is so well done that if you’d like to know more about her, you’d do well to take a few minutes to read this link rather than for me to try to restate it.

I keep thinking that I’d probably like reading more of Bogan’s poetry later this year – and yes, likely present some more of it here too.

Fall 2019 Parlando Top Ten, numbers 7-5

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing our review of the Top Ten most liked and listened to pieces this past season here at the Parlando Project, here are the next three.

My son likes to needle me by asking what old dead white men I’m presenting today on the blog. What could be my defense? I could respond that many of the poets whose texts I end up using were young when they wrote their poems—but he’s a teenager, and frankly the idea that Rilke wrote his poem “Autumn Day”  that seems to be about the restlessness at the onset of old age when Rilke was still in his 20s wouldn’t impress him. Someone in their 20s may not be ancient to him, but they aren’t exactly young in the way he is either.

And dead? That state is somewhat masked by literature. The writer, especially the poet, is always whispering in your ear. Perhaps we can tell by clues of language if they are ghosts or more present confidants, but they both whisper just the same. Will they lie pretty or tell the truth? Ghosts and the living do both. Are the living wiser, do they know all that the ghosts know and more besides? Only if they have listened to the ghosts.

Are they white today? Yes, plenty pale. I talked to my son this month about the arbitrariness of “Western Culture.” I asked him “Just how white was Socrates? Just how white was Homer?” This week the news announced some finds from a Mycenean grave dating from Homeric times, and the featured picture was a pendant engraved with an African goddess. Well, we don’t have Homer in the Top 10 today, though we do know—however misunderstood and thus transformed—that ancient Greek and Chinese poetry influenced our founding English language Modernists.

Hathor pendant from Pylos gravesite

An African goddess pendant found in an ancient grave in Greece.

 

And none of today’s trio are men today, which shouldn’t surprise long-time readers here.

7. Besides the autumn poets sing by Emily Dickinson. It’s remarkable how much Emily Dickinson, a woman born nearing 200 years ago can seem modern, maybe even more modern today than she seemed to her first readers at the turn of the 20th century. Back then she seemed the quaint and curious poetess, a little rough around the edges technique-wise, but bringing some charming homespun metaphors with just a bit of a gothic edge. Now we may read her as if she had time-traveled to read late 20th century European aestheticians and philosophers instead of Emerson.

I believe we’re more correct now. This old man has listened to the ghosts and they are often dunderheads regarding Dickinson. And besides, as I wrote in my original post about this piece, I think this poem is having some wicked fun with the old white male poets of her time.

As to the missing people of color, let me supply the answer to a clue in that original post. Though disguised by the acoustic music arrangement, I based the changes in my music for this around a cadence from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”

 

6. Song by Louise Bogan. Unlike Dickinson, I had nothing to reassess about Bogan when I first encountered her poetry while working on this project. Bogan’s song is as straightforward in its complexities and contradictions as Dickinson is sly. The stark emotional directness of Bogan’s poem challenged me as a singer. I decided to modify the text by using the classic Afro-American Blues line stanza form, repeating a line to add an opportunity for emphasis and shading.

I partially apologized for my voice needing to be the singer to get this song out as part of the Parlando Project in my original post. I try to not apologize for my musical limitations (doing so helps no one) but this is one of those pieces that I’ve composed for this project that I hope someone who is a better singer will take up.

 

 

5. November by Amy Lowell.  Speaking of the blues, this piece by the born rich and died much too young promoter of concise Imagist poetry Amy Lowell uses bottleneck* slide guitar, a playing method associated with blues musicians.

Which brings me to another side point: American music is American music substantially because it has had Afro-American music to anneal its soul. Strange that: the colonizers’ sin driven by not having enough healthy indigenous people to exploit brought forth upon this continent a new music which is its leading artistic glory. I can’t write a poem much less a sentence to properly express that.

As I wrote in my original post on this piece, I’m still coming to grips with Amy Lowell. I suspect those bohemians who disrespected her were right and wrong, but I have no idea of the proportions. This poem of hers is  quite good I think.

 

 

*I’d read about blues slide guitar, but I can still recall the first time I saw it played (in “The Sixties”) when a teenaged kid from the Twin Cities area named Don Williams removed from his authentic folk-scare Levi’s denim jacket pocket an actual severed bottle’s neck, tuned his guitar I think to open D, and played a John Fahey-ish rendition of “Poor Boy (a long way from home).”  Reconstructing that moment, Don (like Amy Lowell) probably had access to material and cultural resources that I a poorer kid from a tiny town didn’t have—what a strange way for the blues to work!—but I remain grateful to this day for the introduction.

Louise Bogan’s “Song”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

One of the nice things about this project is that I’m still running into poets that were essentially unknown to me. This is like one of the joys of my youthful musical life: digging through used LP records or a bin of “cutouts” looking for an interesting title, some compelling cover art, or an intriguing song listed, and bringing home a record that as far as I could tell, no one else knew.

In theory this process is easier now, expansive catalogs of recordings available instantly for streaming, but I’m not sure if my son or anyone currently young will do a revised version of that. I suppose part of that was the imminence of the next object, the foot-square cardboard housing with or without wear, perhaps with someone’s name scrawled on the corner against sibling or dorm room misappropriation of the thing, or the shameful diagonal corner amputation, branding the still shrink-wrapped “cutout” record a failure of expectations.

But for poetry, particularly for poetry before 1924 that is in the public domain, there is no lost former ubiquity of sources for discovery of the less-known or passed by, and happily the Internet makes them near alike in availability: Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay—or Fenton Johnson and Charlotte Mew. And so I can come upon work by Louise Bogan who published just over 100 poems in a long 20th century lifetime where she was perhaps best known then as being the poetry editor of the New Yorker  magazine for a few decades.

Louise Bogan
Louise Bogan. I got nothin’ snarky to say today.

 

I’ve only started to sample her work, but she has a very interesting voice. One could compare her to Millay, and like Millay a complex examination of love and romance seems to be a prime subject, and like Frost she uses metrical and rhymed verse while having a thoroughly Modernist outlook.

Other than the vagaries of fate and the culture of her time, there’s no reason for her work not to be better known. Take today’s example. “Song”  is as condensed in expression as it’s title might lead you to expect. It’s a love song of a kind, but its kind isn’t conventional. Unlike some other poems of Bogan’s, there’s also not a single unusual poetic or high-culture signifying word in it. It could have been written yesterday, and it could be sung yesterday as a song for general non-literary or art-song consumption, streamed on Spotify* or iTunes.

And of course, thanks to the magic of the Parlando Project, it now is. Also thanks to the current limitations of the Project, I had to sing it, but then it’s better that it’s sung than not. If somewhere out there there’s a charismatic singer for this, that would be wonderful.

Bogan’s “Song”  is a request, a command, a begging cry, a lament, a report, a prayer, a need, a meditation, a love song. You can hear it with the player gadget below. The full text of “Song”  is here. You may note that I come in singing with stanza two in the version I present. I think of this song (as I performed it) as a repeating cycle capable of expressing all of those things above, so it can start with either stanza. I also repeated the opening lines of each stanza, a tactic ingrained in me by blues singers.

 

 

 

*Speaking of which Dept. The audio pieces featured here have been, from the beginning, available from the same places that you get podcasts, such as Apple podcasts and the like. Spotify also has podcasts in it’s app, and as of late this summer you can add Parlando Project pieces like this one to a Spotify playlist on the Spotify mobile app, which seems like a good way to spread the news about what the Parlando Project does.