love

Amy Lowell’s “A Decade”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Our most recent post in our April National Poetry month series using poems found in Louis Untermeyer’s between-the-world-wars Modern American Poetry contained some quotes from a long poem, contemporary with the anthology, recounting a conversation between two prize-winning male poets concerning women poets and Untermeyer’s evolving judgement about the poetic canon. There’s another post I might yet write about those choices, but “from A Letter to Robert Frost”  also had me thinking of The Sisters,  Patricia Wallinga’s one-act opera about the issues female poets face. Since it uses Amy Lowell as its central character, I wondered if I could quickly set a poem of Lowell’s to follow up.

Unlike Emily Dickinson, or several other women poets of Lowell’s era,* Amy Lowell hasn’t been central to my own thinking. I was aware of the “Imagism Wars” where Lowell, a prominent promoter of the new free verse forms that emerged in the 19-teens was accused of hijacking the artistic movement by Ezra Pound, who with Englishman F. S. Flint had originated that name. Pound’s tactics in the battle included declarations that Imagism was now passé anyway, and it was time to move to new strains of Modernism. The stragglers, #Pound said, should now call their movement “Amygism.” And those weren’t the only projectiles in that battle: weighty Amy Lowell got the sniggering nickname “The Hippoetess.” Schoolboy behavior.

Those elements of Ezra Pound’s character (and his eventual abysmal politics) aside, I rather preferred the early poems from the Pound-Flint version of Imagism. And there was another factor, Lowell was from a long-important and financially secure family. Wealthy patrons of the arts have done good things certainly, and Lowell was out there promoting the new American Modernism with more than just banknotes – but even that was part of the problem. Was her place as a consideration-worthy poet more-or-less purchased? She did, in fact, put energy and study into being a poet, but my own background and nature is to suspect things like that, and to hope for better in the arts.

There’s a counterargument. Lowell didn’t choose her family, and no matter what one thinks of rich-kids and nepo-babies, talent and achievement happens where it happens. I’d already looked at Amy Lowell’s segment in Untermeyer’s book. Nothing jumped out at me on the first overview. The striking image, the musically attractive approach to language, the interesting approach to subject matter – I didn’t find it on my first glance. Reputation alone doesn’t make for a Parlando Project piece, as you may have already figured out from some of the “who’s they” selections I’ve already presented this month.

But shouldn’t I look again at the woman who Wallinga chose as her Beatrice guiding her look at women in poetry, the same woman who Hillyer calls out to Frost in his long poem about the state of poetry in the 1930s as “our friend at Sevenells?”

And that’s when on Monday afternoon my eyes fell on Lowell’s “A Decade.”  First, it’s a short poem as a text, always a plus for me with my rapid and unpredictable production schedule. And I was, on second thought, attracted to this statement of passion melded into longer partnership.

A Decade

It’s possible to read this poem as not about desire and a personal relationship I’d suppose, but I don’t read it that way. Does the consensus Untermeyer reflects below reflect a blindness, intentional or not, to Lowell’s relationship to Ada Russell Dwyer?

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The next day was largely spent making the musical piece you can hear below from this poem. The music came together quickly. It’s a piano trio, but the fretless bass doesn’t offer its companionship until the ending, and the rest fell into place when I found for the piano an arpeggiator pattern that expressed a 5/4 beat that I liked. Harmonically, the music is remarkably static, occasional extensions and variations on a G major chord, an idea I felt complementary to the poem’s treatment of the relationship. Indeed, the experience of recording this musical setting changed my experience of Lowell’s poem tremendously. By making the poem audible, I could feel that transit from desire to devotion as I endeavored to make my limited voice an acceptable conveyance for her words.

Silent on the page it’s not the same poem I found by speaking, by performing, by singing the words. I looked back on the consensus reflected in Untermeyer’s introduction to Lowell in his book:

Miss Lowell was not at home among the emotions. She triumphed in the visual world, in the reflection of reflections, in capturing the minute disturbances of light and movement. It has been said that, though a poet, she failed as a humanist, that she never touched deep feelings because she never knew where to look for them.”

I had a recorded performance by Tuesday afternoon, and such a spare arrangement should have led to a quick mix of the tracks and a later Tuesday release. Except…

The recorded sonics were troubling me. First, I usually record my vocals pretty-much “dry” and fix EQ, leveling, and add things like reverb afterward, but in an effort to buck up the confidence of my singing voice I had applied more than a little “vanity reverb” (and delay)** while tracking. That did give me more confidence as I was singing, but in the cold light of the afternoon mixing, it lacked (using one of those vague terms people use to describe sound) “a solid place” in the mix. This issue was complicated in that I record on one computer system and software and mix on another. Removing or lowering the reverb and delay in modern computer software after recording is trivial as long as the musical tracks stay within that piece of software. Once extracted to “printed” tracks (which is what I mix with later) that flexibility is gone.

Furthermore, even in such a simple ensemble, getting the mix between the vocal and the featured piano was critical, and each time I made a mix that sounded right, it didn’t translate when I checked it on common earbuds that I suspect are used by many listeners to these pieces. I produced three “that’ll do it/no it won’t” mixes before settling on a fourth just before going to bed last night. The too airy and diffuse vocal was mitigated by a bit of low-mid EQ boost and the slightest of top end roll off, and now you can hear my performance with the audio player below. No audio player? Ah, that’s likely due to some ways of reading this blog suppressing showing the player – but this highlighted link will open a new browser tab with its own audio player then.

 

 

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*Speaking just of early 20th century American-based women that come to mind this morning : Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anne Spencer, Sara Teasdale, H.D., Elinor Wylie, and Mina Loy have all received musical settings early and often over the decade of this Project.

**”Vanity Reverb” is a common producer tactic to help weak singers perform – it makes the vocal heard in the monitoring headphones sound grander to the shrinking vocalist. Even though I am both the producer and the singer here, the trick still works. Of course, it would have been best if Producer-I had left a dry signal track in there for more flexibility in mixing – but in my haste to get the recording done while I could, I forgot to do that.

Lethe

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Continuing my April National Poetry Month observance with another poem from Louis Untermeyer’s between-world-wars anthology Modern American Poetry.  This one’s from a better-known poet than last time.

NPM starts with April Fools Day, an outdated holiday since we already had President’s Day in February, and can-you-believe-it outrages are somehow less funny this year. Yet, it’s also the day my late wife and I got married back in the 1980s. Not exactly a golden age back then either, and my wife would explain the decision to get married as a statement of the stubborn optimism of loving fools.

The poet who I’ll sing today published under the name H.D. – a nom de plume that still has a modern vibe for a pioneering Modernist. Maybe someone in our digital screen age will pay tribute by calling a project extending her work “QHD?” Something else that I’d expect might still sound modern is how she came to be a part of the Modernist vanguard that formed in England among a group including Americans living abroad. Hilda Doolittle was a young woman who had a college sweetheart. It appears they planned to get married. That other, a he in the pair, moved to England to meet up with the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats. His name was Ezra Pound. Young Hilda eventually traveled to London to reconnect with Pound.

Somewhere in the passages of boats and time the romance between the two died, for there’s no guarantee that optimistic fools will continue to share the foolish accords of love. Pound was a talker, a planner, a promoter of the kind of modern American poetry Untermeyer would start to collect a few years later in his anthology with that name. Meeting Hilda in London, Ezra hatches a plan for H.D. that’s not marriage.

Looking at a bunch of poems that Hilda had brought with her to England, Pound pronounced them delightful and perfectly modern, an unbidden expression of the new poetry movement he and his little group were promoting. Pound, ever sure of himself (a trait that is dangerous in politicians, but often advantageous in artists*) scribbled at the bottom of Hilda’s poems “H.D. Imagiste.” Later on the Frenchie “e” got dropped and the new English language poetry Modernists were Imagists.

Now, I wasn’t there – chronistically excluded – but if there was a function like social media then I can Imagist a whole lot of takes on this. Manipulating the poor girl! Way to change the subject EP. Patronizing, much?

Well, here’s the unexpected part: H.D.’s poetry was  striking. Still is. She could write very compressed short poems, nothing wasted: no dallying narrative story-telling or clearly identified speakers, but the images inside these enigmas so clear and evocative.

In his introduction to H.D. Imagiste in his anthology Untermeyer wrote:

She was the only one who steadfastly held to the letter as well as the spirit of its credo. She was, in fact, the only true Imagist. Her poems are like a set of Tanagra figurines….The effect is chilling – beauty seems held in a frozen gesture. But it is in this very fixation of light, color and emotion that she achieves intensity. What at first seemed static becomes fluent; the arrested moment glows with a quivering tension…. A freely declared passion radiates from lines which are at once ecstatic and austere.

The poem I selected from Untermeyer’s selection is the one called “Lethe,”  and it’s a good example of this effect. She leaves interpretive space in this poem: one could read it as a curse or an elegy. Is she decrying the separated lover, wishing upon them even more separation from nature, comforts, and others? Or is she with chilling remorse stating the plain facts of the dead: that they are separated – and we the living, separated too, but able to feel and sing that. Her poem is a sensuous litany of what the dead’s senses will not feel.

Lethe

Today’s “thimbleberries.” I didn’t know what “whin” mentioned in the poem was. The Internet’s department of tautology department tells me its a variety of the gorse plant.

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I chose the latter when I performed it – thinking on a day for fools, of marrying to share each other’s foolishness. You can hear that performance of H.D.’s “Lethe” with the audio player gadget below. What, you can’t hear the no wailing of reed-bird to waken you? Some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing the audio player, so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*Ezra Pound’s confidence did extend to politics. Alas – to say the least.

William Butler Yeats’ “Politics”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Are we through with Irish poets? No. Is there going to be less politics this time. Well, sort of.  This Project’s goals were not to provide political commentary – the Internet has plenty of that in all varieties – but I’m beginning to have some appreciation for what a hero of mine Carl Sandburg said when asked about his radical politics while already at risk because of his is-this-really-poetry free verse, he answered that politics must find its way into his poetry, in that it was part of him, surrounding him and his times.

So, here’s a poem by Irish poet William Butler Yeats about being weary of politics – yet, he couldn’t avoid it, it was part of him and part of his times too. This poem’s weariness elicits a short catalog of international political issues that he thought of while exclaiming he’s not wishing to think of them. It’s also an old man’s poem, written near the end of Yeats’ life, when he was in his seventies. I’m older than Yeats was when he wrote this, but I too can see what old men do with the weapons of political power so discordant from the Spring that still exists and says we are not here to be the last ones living, but to be as the first ones. Here’s a link to the text of Yeats’ poem, “Politics,”  and it’s an interesting link for more than just a reference to the text.

Let me delay you just a bit from listening to the song I made from Yeats’ verse to speak a little about its making. My household this year has become a haven for a small group of young people going through living as if they’re the first ones. Mostly, I try to stay out of their way, but their hustle and bustle in this house complicates the process of creating these pieces you read and listen to here. In these days, I remind myself of the musicians and composers’ prayer: “May music find a way.”

Unable to use one of my good acoustic guitars in my studio space, which I would normally record with a sensitive microphone, I decided to realize the song I had made using a guitar I keep in my home office. It’s an Ovation Applause, a battered old thing, designed as an experiment in making a cheap instrument out of materials thought unmusical.*  The body is plastic with plywood, and the neck doesn’t seem to be made from wood (other than the fretboard facing).**   Before I bought it used decades ago, my Ovation suffered from a fall or other accident as a lower edge has shattered and there’s a spiderweb of fine cracks extending from the site of that blow. For the past few years this guitar has been stuck in a rack out in the open in my home office because there’s little or nothing in it that could be damaged by the dry winter air there.

Many serious acoustic guitar players make something of a fetish around the woods and construction details of their instruments. It’s not just rosewood, it’s Brazilian rosewood. Sapele isn’t really mahogany, and don’t let them tell you otherwise. Spruce, sure, but from what forest region? Did they use old-school hide glue to assemble it and nitro lacquer to finish it?

This guitar is in opposition to all that: certainly the familiar of a heretic.

So, how’s it sound? Let’s give the witchfinder their due – not to put to fine a point on it, it sounds like crap. If you want richness of sound, this is poverty. There might be some value in its current role: a tool to compose on. That mystery neck has stayed stable all these years, it’s still easy to fret. And its sparce sound would keep one from being to enamored of a something that sounds pretty without having anything beyond its timbre to recommend it – but I’m not sure I’d go that far: it was even more inexpensive being used and damaged, I have it, it’s a hardy thing, and its small size makes it easier to play sitting in an office chair.

Ovation

It’s looks legitimate & peaceful sitting there, but what might it summon with its tinny horn?

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And one night this month, I had an inconvenient time to record a realization of a fine poem by the famous Irish poet Yeats. Yeats got a Nobel literature prize. Yeats became a Senator when his country achieved independence. Yeats is so honored in Ireland, a poem of his is on their passports. Yet, I played my song version of Yeats on an old battered guitar, its cheapness designed in.

And you know, I appreciate a good sounding acoustic guitar. Those folks in thrall to the details aren’t imagining things. But then my singing voice isn’t a finely crafted instrument either, and I’m asserting I can express something of the essence of Yeats’ poem anyway. You can hear it with the audio player below. No player? Has that old wizard Yeats summoned the devil to fly from the shuttered Ovation Connecticut factory with Hartford’s Mark Twain and Wallace Stevens riding with his hoard to take that audio player from you? No, it’s likely just a matter of some ways of reading this blog choosing to not show the player gadget.  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*The Ovation brand still exists, a shadow of itself, having been haunted through a series of owners. The plastic bowl-shaped back – though often paired with much better sounding other components than my low-end example – is still controversial. In its glory days, Ovation was well-known for pioneering under-saddle acoustic guitar pickups. They were so preeminent there, that in the last quarter of the 20th century if you were to see a popular guitarist in concert in any sort of larger venue playing acoustic guitar, you’d be more than likely to see them playing an Ovation guitar that looks remarkably like my more lowly example.

Eventually other manufacturers caught up with their own acoustic guitar pickup systems, eclipsing Ovation’s USP. Come the 21st century, the New Hartford Connecticut Ovation headquarters and factory, home to these innovations, was closed.

**At least some early Applause models used aluminum necks. I can’t say for sure what’s under the black paint of mine, but it sure isn’t wood.

Only Until This Cigarette Is Ended

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Did I promise an upcoming, complicated, love poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay last time? Well, let me deliver that.

This poem is one that taunted me to sing it as I read through several dozen Millay poems early this month. Millay chooses rich yet strange images in it, the poem’s erotic mood includes complex uncommon elements within its lyrical account of two consciousnesses which have met and are about to separate, and that makes me think of other songs I admire. Its splendor in an alienated nighttime moment makes me think of “Visions of Johanna,”  while it’s notes of respect beside begone absence makes me think Dylan’s suite of songs within Blood On the Tracks.  And Millay’s choice of images here verge toward the surreal enough to think of Robyn Hitchcock as I worked out the music and performance you can hear below.

Until This Cigarette Is Ended

I chose to leave this chord sheet showing the chord forms I fretted on a standard-tuned guitar, even though the recording sounds in a different key due to my use of a capo. This is an easy song to play on guitar, even strummed rather than using my cross-picked arpeggio playing style, and I wish to encourage others to sing these Parlando Project songs.

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I choose one lyrical change as I made the poem into a song: I decided to create a refrain out of one of its lines. I’m personally OK with songs that eschew choruses and refrains, and a great many poems taken down word-for-word as song lyrics will not have that element that’s increasingly prominent in popular songwriting. This choice brings forward that two-consciousnesses element. The poem has the poem’s voice (for simplicity, I’ll call that voice Millay’s) speaking what we’d call these days “her truth.” Though the poem is compressed into a lyric moment, that truth is that there’s been a pleasant enough erotic event between two people, but that Millay knew, or has decided, that that’s enough and this will not be an ongoing erotic bond. For a woman to publicly write this over a hundred years ago was striking – this poem’s honesty is precedent to those more contemporary expressions.

But the poem is more than precedent, let me linger on the images, starting with the titular cigarette, that quick and casual tube of tobacco. Rather than fade into Millay’s century ago, this reader (now singer) is drawn back half-that interval to when he, and most in his circle, were smokers. For Millay the cigarette would’ve been a somewhat modern signifier – and one without the more lingering girth of the cigar or the apparatus of pipe smoking – but for me, I was drawn back to what I tried to explain to my wife yesterday was my youthful erotic imprinting on cigarettes. My thoughts were not the trope of the post-prandial smoke after a buffet of lovemaking (something I never chose to do) but on the smell and taste of tobacco about the lover’s body. To younger moderns, disdainful of my evoking that, I’d try to explain that a common sharing of certain oils and ash on our skin and lips was kind of intimate comingled pyre. Millay doesn’t explicitly evoke that – I think the modern briefness and offhand casualness was her intent, but she portrays another image I think here that is specific to cigarettes in my memory” a well-packed, factory made, Modernist for Millay, cigarette can produce a lengthy ash as it’s smoked. I can still recall one college literature professor, one with a very John Berryman beard and manner, who would, while animated with some literary thought he was expressing, continue to puff on his cigarette as the distal ash grew to maybe half the length of the number in his mouth. This drooping ash would jiggle as his lips that held its cigarette continued to expound, and the suspense of its suspension would sometimes disconnect my attention to what he was saying with the other part of his mouth. All our thoughts, all our desires, all of us, will eventually fall to ash might be the image here, and I believe that’s the lance Millay evokes in her poem.*

There’s also fireplace, firelight in this shared post-lovemaking pyre, and Neanderthal meets Plato expressionist shadows make a visual Jazz noise with some off-screen radio or record player. For Millay a palpably Modernist mise-en-scène, but even for more modern moderns, there’s really nothing to turn off, it’s just lovers, so entwined, but these visions…

The final six lines make it so precise and so clear: something, a lasting erotic pairing, is not to be. Millay’s voice here is precise: this person momentarily beside her will not hence imprint with their body, hers – but that other’s words will stick with her? Something they said? Something they wrote? Since there’s no hint of rancor or lack of respect in the boundaries of this lyric poem, it may be the latter, a love of the poetry of the word not the poetry of the physical deed.

And in Millay’s final six lines comes that line I’ve chosen to refrain, a choice that brings her to an in passing but significant notice of that other consciousness inside this short poem’s fleeting embrace further to the fore: “But in your day this moment is the sun.”

What is that saying? That the other takes this as more overt than the covert firelight and briefly burning cigarette? Probably. That could easily be read as more than a bit egotistic, a trope in the more well-worn notched bedpost of the male “Babe, I gotta be moving on” road song. Or it could be, as I tried to make it my musical performance of Millay’s poem, a rueful acknowledgement that there’s a gulf between the two consciousnesses, even inside their closeness in the moment of the poem, now song.

So, complicated – a love song, or a song of something close to love.

That musical performance is available below with an audio player gadget. What? Is that side of the embed empty, the sheets now cold? Ah, the poem-now-song peddler now speaks, there’s jewels and binoculars – no, a link, a link, a highlighted link, that will open a new tab in your browser that will have its own audio player so you can hear it.

 

 

 

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*Yes, yes, this obligates the sometimes “a cigar is just a cigar,” Freudian mention. That it’s a cigarette here – a genderless tobacco product rather than the male-coded cigar or pipe – is Millay’s choice.

Flower of Love

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Valentine’s Day comes within Black History Month in the United States. Might be coincidence – but when it comes to diverse lyrical depictions of love, desire, heartbreak, and joy-in-connection depicted in song, this would seem appropriate. But this wasn’t always so.

Read on. We’re going to talk about poetry and flowers – well, sort of, and there’s some nasty bottleneck slide guitar at the end of this.

Choosing the poetry of Claude McKay as my Black History Month focus this year, I’d have to deal with some preconceptions of his work. One, his poetry is written in the 19th century style that the Modernist poets I often select for use were all about replacing. I admire that early Modernist outlook, but it’s not required if the older prosody and what it is conveying attracts me. A second factor is that McKay (like many poets that don’t reach the upper levels of The Canon) is only known for one or two poems – poems anthologized enough to be recognized, but also poems misrecognizing the range of his poetry. Another Afro-American example I’ve featured here is Chicago poet Fenton Johnson who is known almost entirely for one poem, the short, bleak, despairing “Tired”  that begins “I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilization.” McKay’s equivalent is the defiant sonnet of self-defense “If we must die…” which is a striking, memorable, work – and then there’s one other poem of McKay’s that retains some current readership, his complex and eloquent poem “America.”  Despite these old-school accentual syllabic rhyming verse structures and elevated literary language, either of those McKay poems could be read today, in this America, and be understood as vigorous statements about contemporary civic issues – so perhaps there’s nothing wrong with those two being McKay’s representation. They’re not valentines though.

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Reading through McKay’s 1922 Harlem Shadows  collection and his other 1920s work, I’m struck by how much of his poetry deals with his immigrant status – and then even more: how many are love poems or poems dealing with desire and eros. In the short term, this cost McKay. Long time readers here, or those familiar with American Black history in this era, may remember that the Afro-American cultural and political leadership circa 1920 were all about establishing the sober respectability of Black Americans, and erotic expression was not part of that. This wasn’t just run-of-the-mill prudishness – after all, rape was part of the crimes committed against Black Americans, and also a criminal fear used to trump up racism and violence against Black men. In either case, and beyond abuse, sexuality could be too easily seen as an “animal nature” thing not befitting a safe civic personhood.

So if we take Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues  poetry collection published four years after McKay’s Harlem Shadows  you’ll see some documentary depictions of nightlife depicted journalistically, and praise for disreputable Jazz music then associated with “loose living” – subjects that were considered edgy enough for The New Negro gatekeepers then – but you won’t see Hughes including a bunch of poems about erotic love.* Harlem Renaissance predecessor Paul Lawrence Dunbar wrote some sentimental love poetry which just might have some subtext,** but it was without the heat of desire. McKay, on the other hand, filled his 1922 book with it.

If he got away with it at all, it was because McKay hid his eros in poetry like that in today’s poem/now song with a hot-house language of flowers and landscapes cloaking the heavy-breathing. I had trouble when labeling my Apple podcasts posting of this song today. Should I click the warning “explicit” or stay with my usual “clean?” Do I have, as my own city’s bard once proclaimed, “A Dirty Mind” to think that this poem is written knowing that flowers are a plant’s sexual organs?*** In the end, I clicked clean, not because the poem isn’t saturated with desire, but because one must read it as a double-entendre to see that. My hope is that any kids that might find it (or its text I’ll link here) will gain research skills of some value, and I won’t go through the lines of the poem and “translate” what I think is being depicted – that’s the last thing kids want to hear an old man speaking of. IYKYK.

One other thing is striking about today’s poem, and much of McKay’s poetry of love and desire: there’s no gender in it. Accounts and accepted evidence vary somewhat, but many who want to determine McKay’s own biographical sexuality think he was bisexual. Given that his poem seems to be set in a diverse flower garden, it might resonate with a variety of ardent lovers as we approach Valentine’s Day.

Load of the Goat as per AI

When I tried to type Blake’s “lust of the goat” into a search engine to check the exact wording, I typed something that autocorrected “lust” to “load.” To my amazement AI decided to explicate goat loads of meaning from that typo.

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Music? One DEI I can’t foreswear is whatever I find myself doing musically, I’ll want to try something else if I see I’m settling into a pattern. So, back into the cases go the acoustic guitars. No spare pianos either. Glass bottleneck on the finger, Telecaster plugged in, and grindstone to the amplifier gain. The lust of the grit is the bounty of God! You can hear that with the audio player below. What, no player gadget? Joys impregnate! Sorrows bring forth! Clicking on this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player!

 

 

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*This Langston Hughes poem that I’ve performed is read as a depiction of the man’s own personal eroticism by many readers. I’m not entirely sure of that.

**I still not sure if this Paul Laurence Dunbar Valentine poem intentionally means to invoke slavery – it would be a stranger and stronger poem if it does.

***McKay came to America to go to an agricultural college, horticultural birds and bees would be a given. Flowers are often represented in his poetry, as much as in gardener-poet Emily Dickinson’s verse.

Susan Partain Hudson’s Anniversary Poem

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s New Year’s Day. Most everyone’s looking forward, but I’m going to double-jump into the past, first to exactly 99 years ago, and then to more than 160 years ago.

I do a lot of stuff from the Modernist era of the first part of the 20th century here at the Parlando Project, but of course not every poet was going all Imagist or Surrealist or whatever new ist was their jam. And one can well note that written poetry in this era still retained a bit of the mass-media or populist strains that are harder to find in our 21st century.*  Non-literary-circle people then still might read poetry or write it without taking a stand between Amy Lowell or Ezra Pound.

An example: on New Year’s Day in 1927 an 80-year-old woman wrote an anniversary poem to her husband of 61 years. Susan Emeline (Partain) Hudson was my great-great-grandmother, the mother of my great-grandfather for whom I am named. Her New Year’s poem isn’t looking forward much, but then her husband would die later that year, and she would die within two more years. Instead, her poem recounts how the couple met and gives some hints about how they came to settle in Iowa.

Susan Emeline Partain was born in 1847, the daughter of a carpenter who lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Tennessee’s stance during the American Civil War over slavery was somewhat unique. It was a slave state, but it joined the Confederacy only after the war broke out – though eventually supplying the second highest number of troops to the retain slavery side.**  Yet the state government also officially withdrew from the Confederacy shortly before the end of the war, and this move meant that Tennessee didn’t come under the short-lived era of Reconstruction when the federal government sought to remediate the former slave-holding and secessionist leadership. Tennessee was also the place where the very first WASP-supremacy KKK terrorist group was founded, right at the end of the Civil War.

That’s a hell of a paragraph to put in a love story isn’t it! In calmer national times than ours of New Year’s 2026, throwing this in would be as inappropriate as my choosing a poem-made-into-song of religious persecution for this past Christmas.

But I go forth, and here’s the background of the tale Susan Partain Hudson put down. That husband was David Hope Hudson, a young corporal from Ohio who enlisted in the Union Army. His unit was fighting in Tennessee, and involved in some of the bloodiest battles of the war. On and around New Year’s Day 1863 they are engaged in the Battle of Stone’s River. Union forces suffered 32% casualties over 4 days of fighting. For those that aren’t military history nerds, that approaches Charge of the Light Brigade levels of carnage. That summer these Union forces take control of a critical railroad/riverboat center, the town of Chattanooga. Later that year, in the autumn, they are in the battle of Chickamauga as the Northern forces seek to expand their control in that region. Once again, casualties on both sides are terrifying, 28%, and given that 150,000 troops were engaged (counting both sides) it was the second bloodiest battle of the American Civil War to Gettysburg.

Chickamauga was a Union defeat. The forces that included David Hudson had to fall back to Chattanooga. The Confederates, bloodied by the equivalent casualties to the Union at Chickamauga, didn’t press on against the retreating Union army, choosing instead to surround and cutoff the town of Chattanooga. For about a month, the Union army is besieged with no supplies able to get through. Hardtack and salt pork run low, are rationed. And here I need to leave off details, as I haven’t found a detailed account of that month for the Union army troops, or for remaining civilians.***

Susan Partain was a teenager living with her family there, and it’s possible they remained in the town, or at least in the area. Without details, one can only speculate on what things were like for Susan and David during this siege. I’d hold that it’s possible that the cup of water that her poem speaks of was symbolic of more than that, though the poems says the exchange happened in summer and the siege-stage of these battles was in the fall – but clearly this matter is much more risky than a simple flirtation between two young people. Susan’s poem doesn’t give us those details, but her audience – chiefly her husband now near the end of their long-life together – wouldn’t need for that to be said.

We also don’t know everything Susan’s family felt. Hudson family lore says they might have had Union sympathies, but also that they weren’t supportive of Susan’s romance with the soldier. In the summer of 1865, Susan’s mother died, and that may have broken some constraints for her. David, still stationed in the south, was mustered out in October 1865, and he and Susan eloped off back to Ohio for that New Year’s wedding.

David Hudson and Susan Partain Mariage cert 600

Two things I notice in this marriage certificate: that it may have been necessary to be in another state for Susan to marry without her father’s permission, and that David, or whoever filled out the Jan. 1st date, may have suffered from the still common error of writing 5 first before revising the year with the current 6.

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Susan never saw nor stayed in contact with any of her family back in Tennessee until 1905, by when many of her elders were likely dead and she wanted to find out what had happened to her siblings. The newly-married Hudsons also didn’t stay in Ohio – Susan was viewed with suspicion there too. The place they chose to raise a family (eventually, 11 kids!) was Iowa, where David got work in a coal mine.

David and Susan Hudson's Family with 11 kids 768

“From Kisses we make mankind:” Dave and Susan Hudson with 10 of their (take that Nigel Tufnel) 11 kids. The tallest boy on the front left is Frank Hudson, my great-grandfather (who looks a lot in this picture like my dad in his younger years).

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But it’s still a love song – these are my kin, and as Paul Éluard would have it, their kisses helped make me. They married, looking forward on New Years Day 1866. And Susan made this poem that says they celebrated a long life together in 1927 when looking backwards on another New Year’s. Some other little things before I hand you over to the song made with Susan Partain Hudson’s words. Susan mentions being struck by David’s dark moustache and goatee. A few decades ago, I took to that facial landscaping, proximally because I don’t like the irritation of shaving those areas – but who knows, maybe something whispered the idea from some DNA, and my wife only knows me, from the day we met, with that face. And writing poetry? At least one of Susan’s grandsons did too, as I have seen a poem written by my grandfather to my father on his birthday. And the other half of this Project, music? Susan’s family name, Partain, is common in Tennessee. In days when literacy was far from universal, the exact written spelling of a name was not strictly enforced, and a leading spelling variant of Partain is Parton, also commonly found in Tennessee – in particular, with one Dolly Parton. Family genealogies have found no link whatsoever, but that hasn’t stopped me from stretching beyond fact to joke about “Cousin Dolly.” I should also mention that much of what I know about this story comes from work of a later David Hudson, my uncle, who put together information remembered or gathered by other older relatives.

Susan Hudson's Annivesary poem-song chords

Susan’s poem in chords-sheet form for those who’d like to sing it themselves.

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I’ll leave it to you how much Tennessee heritage can be found in the song I made from my great-great-grandmother’s poem, but like Dolly I compose a lot on guitar, and I also plucked a little mandolin to frame today’s musical piece. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below. Has any such player eloped from your view? Well then, I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Today is also Public Domain Day in the US, works first published in 1930 are now freely available for reuse. Each year a couple of places celebrate with a list of the works now freed-up. In previous years I’d gratefully see a handful of poetry collections or poems in those lists. This year? Nothing highlighted in the summaries. I think this is a double reflection. By 1930 both poetry as a mainstream publishing genre and the Modernist revolution have entered a downward slope, and landmark collections of verse are rarer; and for putative readers in 2026, it’s likely understood that only a handful of readers will be looking for poems to gather.

Populist poetry, everything then from newspaper and radio poets, to greeting cards with short verse, to scrapbook keepers, to folks who simply wrote their own verse for themselves/friends/family without any aim of publication – all these are hard to locate in our current year. “Instagram poets” and others who use social media are perhaps something like this past group. Early in this project I suggested that this kind of poetry, even “bad poetry,” wasn’t harmful to literary poetry, that it wasn’t any different than other “high arts” that tolerated examples that were simply vin ordinaire.

**Wikipedia says Tennessee also supplied a relative high number of Union soldiers for a Confederate state.

***The siege was lifted when a couple of Union Generals named Grant and Sherman sent troops to break the Confederate encirclement, but of course there was more fierce fighting around Chattanooga related to that effort.

Like the Touch of Rain

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I wanted to get another musical piece up this week as I was somewhat dissatisfied with my performance in my last one here for Armistice Day/Veterans Day. I looked a pieces I had near ready, and selected this one, by Anglo-Welsh poet Edward Thomas. Thomas is lesser-known in the United States, but is more recognized in Britain where he often gets grouped as a “War Poet.” The main reason for that: he volunteered and was killed in WWI, and some of his poetry speaks about his thoughts as he considered volunteering for overseas front-line service.

Sitting in America, which hasn’t regarded Thomas enough, I’d like to expand him a bit from behind that label. First off, like Wilfred Owen (another British poet filed under war poets, and another WWI casualty) Thomas was something of a beginning poet,* but like Owen his poetic voice is so strong it doesn’t need to apologize for being early days. As powerful as Owen’s poems about trench warfare are, I’m just as impressed by his home-front poem “Shadwell Stair.”   And Thomas, this other “war poet,” seems not to have finished any poetry about his short front-lines experience before his death in that service. As we celebrate Veterans Day it would be good to remember that each person who served is not just their service.

edward_thomas_in_uniform800

Edward Thomas in his uniform. He was married and past the age of most soldiers, but still volunteered.

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So, here’s a poem that I think has nothing to do with the war directly – perhaps not indirectly either. “Like the Touch of Rain”  seems to me to be a love (or rather a loss of love) poem, though the nature of the relationship is not spelled out.** It uses as its central symbol rainfall, and I suspect it’s speaking of erotic love because of the sensuous opening where the rain, however wild, is caressing the poem’s speaker and he sings and laughs here. The poem ends by telling us he’s now closed in, out of the rain, not by his choice but by some her’s “Go Now.” It’s a turn-about from the typical “Who’ll Stop the Rain”  or “Shelter from the Storm”  depiction of rain vs. shelter. Here’s a link to the text of the poem that I’ve now turned into a short song.

“Like a Touch of Rain”  is not the most complex or virtuosic poem, but it also doesn’t detract from its depiction with any overreaching or stilted poetic diction. There’s a power in that. Reading Thomas’ contemporaries’ poetry in search of material for this Project I’ve read a great deal of published poetry that doesn’t escape those faults. My wife gave me a copy of Thomas’ collected poems a few years back – it’s not a thick volume, and I believe that most of the poems in it were first published in this collection posthumously through efforts of Thomas’ friends.***

After overreaching with my Padraic Colum poem setting earlier this week, and having to settle for an incomplete recording, it may behoove me to leave today’s piece as just voice and acoustic guitar accompaniment – and as rough-hewn as my voice is on this performance, I think it’s better too.

You can hear my performance of Edward Thomas’ “Like a Touch of Rain”  with the audio player below. What, has the door to any such player gadget been shut? Well, this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Thomas took up poetry only a couple of years before his death, at the insistence of his American friend Robert Frost.

**I have not read a full biography of Thomas, but before the war he seems to have had a complicated set of affections as well as bouts of depression and drug use. Those two things might cause one to suspect a ne’er-do-well life, but through-out that he wrote voluminous freelance reviews and essays to pay the bills for a young family.

***Friends? Well, Frost for one. And since one of the good things in my post before this one was the discussion of poets best remembered for what became a song lyric, one of his close affections was with a young writer Eleanor Farjeon, who wrote what became the lyrics to the song “Morning Has Broken.”

Credo (The Will To Love)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

A friend of the blog noticed today I used a particular phrase when I wrote about late-night work on the musical piece you can hear below. I’ll try not to take too much of your time, but I thought I’d expand on my explanation to him, and at the bottom you’ll be able to hear a 2-minute song made from a poem by Alfred Kreymborg.

The early years of the Parlando Project benefited from several things that are not in as great a supply now: I had multiple days in each week when I could work on finding and making these musical pieces. I worked regular workday hours on this, beginning after my morning bicycle ride for breakfast. I was eight years younger then, and those days were filled with rewarding creative work as I learned more about musical composition and recording technology. Shortly after the public launch of the Parlando Project, we had a consequential election in America,*  but that (if anything) increased the energy I found most weeks.

Those who happen upon early posts here might notice a tone that isn’t as common in recent years. Without announcement, I was writing back then with my child in mind as an audience. They were going to be entering the 6th grade, and I vividly recall from my own youth how a great vista of complex, connective, and evaluative thought opens up around that age. I wasn’t going to make it a point to them to read this — adolescents aren’t looking for that sort of thing from parents — but rather more, I thought others in their peer group might come upon this Project and find some interest in my promotion of discovery and enjoyment. Working from that aim, as my child grew, I gradually changed the age group I was aiming the blog writing here at — though I don’t know if I ever achieved an adolescent audience.

Then a few years ago my family went through a series of crises, and it was only after a period of distress that the wise and resourceful members of my little family met those issues and managed them. I tried to be supportive — I probably was, to my imperfect degree — but that work was largely their doing. I’ll say that in that year or so of the greatest distress, my time spent here was a tonic for me from the stress and worry. How much of that was (in the modern terminology) “self-care,” and how much was temporary flight from responsibility? I can’t say, my perspective is too close-in.

But now in the past year or so, the time I can devote to this Parlando Project is constrained by external and internal factors. By choices outside my control, days go by when I’m restricted from recording, and even the blocks of assured time to compose or research are harder to come by. At the same time my energy endurance is lower as I age. As grateful as I remain to have the opportunity to do this Project, I guilt and grumble as an old codger when an opportunity comes — time when I can play or record — and at that moment my body is saying: take a nap instead. If I could schedule creative time, if I was to ask for concessions to schedule it, I’d probably face complex outcomes and reactions when my old body can’t be assured the energy levels and ready fingers like my 70-something self could.

Let me be complexly-clear about that though: that frustration doesn’t outweigh the gratitude. To have the opportunity and resources to do this Project remains a blessing! I just have to work with this, that’s all.

Here’s one “how” of that: after everyone in the house has gone to sleep early, or is at work on an evening shift outside our home — I can do my work, as long as it’s in silence. Knowing this, I often get a “second-wind” after 8 or 9 PM or so. I might spend this time researching or writing early or final drafts of these posts. There’s even limited music-making that can be done without making noise. I can go over the things I have been able to record, evaluate if they are worth using, perhaps adding additional parts silently using my little plastic keyboard, and mix the results into something suitable for releasing to the public. So: the hours between 9 PM and 1 AM have increasingly become working hours for the Parlando Project.

I’ve come to call that time “burning the midnight lamp.” As I told my online friend this morning, that phrase is taken from two particular sources — ones you might not guess could be combined.

“Burning the Midnight Lamp”  is a song, a lesser-known “deep cut,” by Jimi Hendrix. The song had a long gestation, Hendrix struggled to complete it. It was written early in his Jimi Hendrix Experience career, while living in London. Hendrix was a young man who previously had been in the care of a succession of childhood relatives, foster homes, and then a short Army barracks stint followed by couch-surfing until this point. For the first time he had his own place, shared with a woman in what sounds like an equality of love.**  That Hendrix London flat has been restored to appear as it did then, and when I visited it some years back I thought of what a special place it must have seemed to him. I imagine his thoughts: my own place, paid for with my own money, living on my own recognition, work done under my own name. In anyone’s life (not just a “rock star”) the time when one has achieved that — that’s something.

Here’s an odd connection: when you visit the site it’s a joint institution. Hendrix’s apartment is upstairs, but the main floor is laid out to reflect another emigrant musician of another era: this address was also George Frideric Handel’s London home.

When Hendrix was searching for the extra sound needed to complete his “Burning the Midnight Lamp,”   he found the recording studio he was in had an odd instrument present: a harpsichord. Comparing Hendrix’s guitarist skills to my own would be laughable, but things even out in naivete when at the musical keyboard. Today’s song uses piano, but I had to play separate right and left hand tracks to realize the simple part. Likewise, Hendrix hacked out a little harpsichord part for his song. Was Hendrix tipping his hat to his downstairs ghost with that harpsichord?

Why did Hendrix write his tune about working late within the endemic uncertainty of creatives using the image of a lamp? No guess. But another lamp, elsewhere, in another visit: something I recall when visiting Emily Dickinson’s bedroom was the little table that was her writing desk. On the small top of the table was a whale oil lamp. Dickinson, living with her family in a household, with household tasks and human needs that would take the daylight hours, had this little mid-19th Century, middle-class luxury of a warm effective light to work by after the busier-with-others’ hours.

dickinson's desk and lamp

“Ready for the same old explosion/Going through my mind…” A small writing table and lamp in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom (photo from the Emily Dickinson museum)

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Looking at Dickinson’s lamp, I thought of the whole system that represented: the swimming mammals of the dark, cold sea, the diverse Moby Dick industry which captured, killed and deconstructed those massive bodies — and so, extra hours glowing with North Atlantic juice opened for a woman to scribble and sew little booklets. If I’d try to tell these thoughts and feelings when looking at the lamp to the average person, they’d sense a disproportion. Someone might even harrumph to me “It’s just a lamp — an unexceptional, domestic thing.” Readers here? You’re not that sort of person — and on her part, Dickinson too, she had further thoughts.

And so I continue, to burn the midnight lamp. Alone.

Today’s results came after a week of disappointing myself as I looked for some words to express what I was feeling, words that would ask me to sing them out even with my inexact and unprofessional voice. I was seeking words that would add something hopeful in a time of extraordinarily slipshod callousness carried out with motives of punishment as a virtue. It was this short poem by early American Modernist poet, editor, and publisher Alfred Kreymborg that captured me.

Credo keyboard chords

As I often say here under these chord sheets: someone out there can likely sing this song better than I can.

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Last post here was a series of inspirational maxims carried by a Jazz musician. Maybe Kreymborg’s “Credo” seems a little too hopeful, too earnest for some of you. It’s probably not the sort of poem you’d first think of as an early text of American Modernist poetry from a colleague of William Carlos Williams, Man Ray, and Mina Loy. Little matter, I felt I needed to sing it. That’s enough for now.

You can hear my performance of “Credo”  with the graphical audio player gadget below. No gadget? It’s not that you didn’t keep your lamplight trimmed and burning, it’s just that some ways of reading this suppress showing the player gadget.  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Decades before, longtime Parlando contributor Dave Moore and I started the LYL Band just before Ronald Reagan’s election. Then too something that wasn’t very good for the country paradoxically encouraged creativity as contrast.

**This short video shows the flat decorated to look just as it was in the mid-Sixties, and features Hendrix’s then-partner, Kathy Etchingham, speaking briefly about their time together. Hendrix, like other struggling musicians, lived before largely at the behest of his hosts. From accounts, the two lovers seemed to be in a somewhat equitable partnership (within the expectations of the time). Etchingham worked as a DJ in London clubs and had a resident’s knowledge and straight-white-British appearance to bring to the arrangement. Hendrix’s fame was still somewhat localized, and his uprising career had offered him a semblance of a regular income.

Isabel

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I enjoy the part of this Project that gives me cause to examine the lesser-known and forgotten poets and poems. Even the most famous literary poetry principally exists in quiet books, but give me a book now largely unread and my interest is perked.

Today’s poem is by Richard Hovey, one of the co-authors of a remarkable yet forgotten three-book series that began with Songs from Vagabondia  published in 1894. Who was Hovey?

He was the son of a Civil War general* who privately published his first book of poems in 1880 when he was a teenager. He attended Dartmouth College, graduated with honors in 1885, and was highly active in literary activities there, coming to write what remains the official school song. After college he seems to have considered various paths. He studied for a while in New York’s General Theological Seminary, taught briefly at Barnard College and Columbia University. In 1887 he met his Vagabondia  co-author Bliss Carman, and true to their eventual series title, they spent some time tramping around New England. Hovey wrote that he decided to dedicate himself to writing on New Year’s Day of 1889 while viewing a solar eclipse, which seems somewhat magical for an epiphany, but yes, there was an eclipse on that date. In 1891 he began publishing a planned lengthy series of verse plays based on King Arthur’s court, and he seemed to have traveled to Europe around this time where he met writer Maurice Maeterlinck and took on the job of translating Maeterlinck’s work into English. Hovey was also enamored with the French Symbolist poets and did English translations of their work.

Let me set the literary stage for this young poet as he began his career: Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé were still alive. So was Walt Whitman. So was Mark Twain. The first and just-posthumous volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry was still in process. Ezra Pound was a toddler in Idaho. While Hovey was a college student, Oscar Wilde toured America giving lectures on Aestheticism.** Hovey and Carman, with their on-the-road poems of beauty and poetry, of wit over dour seriousness, seemed to have resonated.

Richard Hovey with his mother

Richard Hovey around the time of the Vagabondia books. The woman here is his mother Harriet, not his “older-woman” wife Henrietta. A cousin who knew the young Hovey wrote that he “was so strikingly good-looking that I have seen people turn in the street to look after him.”

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I learned one other possibly salient fact about the time Hovey and Carman were putting together the first Vagabondia  book. In 1893 there was a sudden economic depression in the United States. Vagabonds were not always free-thinking college boys yet to establish their literary careers. Was there a sub-rosa political/economic point at the start of this series? There’s little I’ve found in the Vagabondia  books that tip me to Hovey’s political stance, if he had formulated one.

I chose Hovey’s poem “Isabel”  from Songs from Vagabondia  partly because it was short and naturally suggested being set to music on first read. Given that I was also trying to get a grasp on Hovey’s life, I wondered who this Isabel might be. I didn’t find out. There’s no Arthurian Isabel, and I haven’t found any prominent Isabel characters in the works of Hovey’s literary heroes. I believe it was a somewhat common name in this era.***

Despite Vagabondia’s  praise for male comradeship, I’m not (as yet) catching any homoerotic overtones there. Where eros does appear, it seems directed at women. The only romantic relationship I know for Hovey was a married woman who he had a child with and later married after her divorce. If you want to wonder at Hovey’s sexuality from afar, clouded in a sexually repressed time and with the small amount of information, I can only offer this tidbit: his lover and eventual wife was said to be “old enough to be his mother.”

Indeed, after all this search for biographic info, today’s poem might seem a tad insignificant. As a short love poem “Isabel”  reminds me of Robert Herrick more than any of Hovey’s contemporaries, and she might be only a device to let Hovey write that sort of poem. In straightlaced society I suppose the poem’s breast-pillow line could have seemed 1894-era hot stuff, but I’m immune to that level of “I’m so naughty” eroticism — likely why Swinburne (also still alive in Hovey’s time) always seems laughable to me.

But Aestheticism holds that a poem doesn’t have to have great wisdom or weight as long as it’s beautiful, so I spent more than my usual amount of time with this 6-line poem’s music to justify asking for your attention to it. “Isabel”  uses some of my favorite odd chords and flavors, and you can hear it with the audio player below. No player?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Father Charles Hovey was the President of what is now Illinois State University in its early days, and organized the 33rd Illinois Regiment (known as “the Teacher’s Regiment”) at the outbreak of the American Civil War, serving the Union as a Brigadier General.

**The fact of Oscar Wilde’s tour I first learned about from an episode of the TV Western Have Gun Will Travel.  Those who knew him remember a young Hovey who seems to have taken Wilde for a model, dressing like him with colorful topcoats, long hair in a center-parted style, and dyed carnation corsages.

***I wondered about writers with that name Hovey could have read. The only hit in that search was the marvelous early 19th century folk poet, folk singer, and tavern keeper Isabel Pagan. Pagan’s poem “Ca’ the Ewes to the Knowes”  was popularly set to music by Robert Burns, a poet who Bliss Carman extolled earlier in this series. I did read that Hovey either knew or took classes with Francis Child, of the famous Child Ballads collection. That the Vagabondia  series calls itself “Songs” is evidence that folk song, at least of the literary variety, is one its elements.

The most famous poetic Isabel remains Ogdon Nash’s from 25 years later.

O But My Delicate Lover: Canadians translate Sappho

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I regularly read and take part in a daily poetry thread on X/Twitter. Its host, Joseph Fasano, posts a theme word and an example poem reflecting a topic most mornings, and other poetry readers respond with poems that relate to that. Early this week the theme was “Longing.”

One of the responding poems was this one:

Sappho-Carson Longing

The X/Twitter poster here happens to be a relative of mine, though I’m not sure which one

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This is an English translation of a poem by the ancient Greek poet Sappho rendered by famed Canadian poet and translator Anne Carson. If we didn’t know it was a translation, if we thought of it as a poem by a modern poet, here’s one thing we might notice on the photographed page: those short lines, those white spaces, those fenced-off blanks kept apart by square brackets. Looking at the text this way, the poem on the page has a striking effect. Its incompleteness — its, well, longing — is amplified in those spaces.

In Carson’s presentation that’s an inescapable part of Sappho’s work. We have only fragments of Sappho after all, only a handful of her poems are even comprehensively within sight of being complete. Some Sappho fragments are but single words, and many, a phrase or a few lines. And we know so little of the poems’ context. What details recorded about Sappho’s life date at best from centuries after she is thought to have lived, and are inconsistent. That she was a woman in a male dominated world, and lived in an outlying area away from the centers of classical Greek culture that we most know from later surviving works adds to the mystery. That the Greeks of the Athenian Golden Age, or the later Hellenistic Greeks, misread is some way the larger corpus of Sappho still available to them as they supplied us with Sappho quotes, commentary, and biography is plausible.

As readers of modern poetry, we likely assume when reading a Sappho poem that it’s a more-or-less authentic voice of someone describing a moment in her own life. I can’t say that as being a sure thing (any more than it is for, say, Shakespeare’s sonnets). But maybe that makes little difference, especially in the absence of well-attested facts — the words have the effect they have on us, based on our own lives, our own culture, our own time.

Carson’s translations are well-regarded, but she’s not the first to translate Sappho into English — she’s not even the first Canadian to do so. The first attempts there I know of, likely the first in fact as it’s by such an early Canadian poet, were by Bliss Carman.*  In 1904 Carman published Sappho: 100 Lyrics.  Unlike Carson, who is a scholar, I don’t know if Carman was all that knowledgeable in ancient Greek, and from what I can find he’s less open in sharing translator’s notes on his methods. The preface to his book, written by a friend, says only he more-or-less imagined the poems as complete and wrote then from that imagination.

From a scholars’ standpoint this is an outrageous act. On the other hand, there’s a current in poetry of writers finding something in assumed characters, some for anonymity, some for fraudulent reasons, some to burlesque writing styles they wish to make fun of. Carman’s life was not straightforward. There were a lot of bumps and setbacks in his career — all as one might imagine at a time where the idea of a Canadian literary poet was yet to be established. So, to take a vacation from all that to the isle of Lesbos and imagine Sappho strumming her lyre within his earshot? Maybe understandable.

O But My Delicate Lover

Another green world. Here a chord sheet for today’s musical performance.

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Published in the era just before the outbreak of English-language Modernism, Carman’s version of Sappho found some readers. Ezra Pound apparently read them, and in his loose Chinese translations and elsewhere he seems to have adopted a no-hurt, no foul practice of translation as a personal recasting of the original work. Carman’s Sappho is sensual without overelaborate decoration or any “I’m so  naughty” stance. I can imagine some of those Not-Yet-Modernists who kept a well-thumbed copy of Swinburne in their back pockets circa 1900 appreciating these poems. If the tropes in these love poems are often common ones, he’s portraying Sappho who would have predated those tropes becoming commonplace, and he’s asking us to believe our moments are repetitions with a long heritage.

Many modern readers of Sappho have adapted Sappho as a pioneering Lesbian poet. In the many centuries between Sappho’s 600 B.C. E. and the present there have been a variety of renderings of Sappho’s sexuality. The text, fragmentary as it is, often shows attraction and praise for women and female gods. If we assume Sappho herself is the voice in her poems (and why not, we know so little, and nothing for sure, and Occam’s razor) this would follow. In this poem of Carman’s Sappho, the lover and object of longing is certainly female. Bliss Carman was an apparently hetero male, but his poem’s assigned author is a woman. Parsing….

Those that object to drag-time story hour at the library will have a hard time with all that. If for only that alone, I’m going to give voice to this poem from Carman’s collection of imagined Sappho translations. You can hear my musical performance of “O But My Delicate Lover,”  with the audio player below. Has the important fragment that includes an audio player disappeared for you?  This highlighted link will open a real, not imaginary, tab with its own audio player.

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*Carman’s 1904 work may also be the first American translation of Sappho, as it predates the top hit in a web search that shows Mary Barnard’s 1958 volume as the first from the U.S.A.  Coincidently, Ezra Pound is attributed as someone who encouraged Barnard to do her book of Sappho translations.

Carman studied in the U.S. and was distantly related to Ralph Waldo Emerson. His ancestors emigrated to Canada as Tories escaping after the U.S. Revolutionary War.