love

The Naked Truth

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Last time I had a chance to record a new piece using guitar, I rattled the bones of a Jazzmaster amid synth keyboards played with the same guitar. Monday I had another chance. My studio space was quiet, I could have made it loud – or I could open a sensitive microphone. Organic, wooden music? I uncased an acoustic guitar. I do like the directness of that instrument. I have microphones setup for recording in my studio space, so it’s as simple as opening a preset template on my computer recording software, arming the tracks, and clicking the red screen button.

The contrast that resulted could have been even greater. I tend to attack the strings on an acoustic guitar pretty hard. I use a flat pick, but I’m most often not strumming the way other plectrum players do. Instead, I skip from string to string, not striking them consecutively or with a “boom chuck” alternative strum either. I use that single flat pick’s point to do in succession what a “finger picking” guitarist does.* Many years ago when I tried to learn how to finger-pick, I noticed that many patterns didn’t strictly require that you strike two or more strings simultaneously, and I just spontaneously started to move the single point of a flat pick around to play what I would have done using thumb and fingers.

I had a new song to record – really new. Over the weekend I decided to crack open my old paperback of Paul Éluard’s Capitale de la douleur, Mourir de na pas mourir , Éditions Gallimard, 1966. The book’s entirely in French, and I can’t remember what bookstore I found it at in Iowa. As I’ve mentioned occasionally here, I had the impression that French poetry was an important influence on English Modernist verse, and living in a state (Iowa) that retained some French place names and seeing French on signs and labels when I visited Canada for fishing trips as a kid made me feel that French was a logical second language for me.**

Somewhat like finger-picking, I was a washout studying French in school. I had a terrible time pronouncing the words anywhere near correctly, and the introductory classes I took in high school and in my foreshortened college years had nothing to do with the French poetry I wanted to get ahold of.

So, kind of like guitar playing, I just went self-taught. Back in the 20th century I brute-forced my way through a handful of poems with a French-English dictionary and vague memories of basic French syntax and grammar from my school-room failure. Eventually, it was just easier to get the poetry already translated, where and when available.

It was only once the Parlando Project got underway in the twenty-teens that I returned to translation. Nearly all the English translations I had read are not in the public domain and free to reuse. And furthermore, I found that not every poet’s work I was interested in had even been translated extensively into English. This was true for many of the Dadaists, and I was also somewhat surprised that it was true of Éluard.

Éluard, as best as I can tell, is a big deal in Modernist French poetry. Present at the creation of Surrealism. Not just an important avant-gardist, admired for his love poetry too. Patriotically valorized for being a stalwart member of the anti-fascist Resistance during WWII. But none of that makes him all that important in America.

I wanted to go through the early poems collected in my book that would be in the public domain. Many of them do not have English translations I can find propagated on the Internet. I used my limited French vocabulary to scan them for what looked like interesting lines, and concentrated on the shorter ones that fit this Project’s needs.

I took the ones I picked out and put them through machine (computer) translation. Machine translation has gotten much better in the past few years,*** but it still doesn’t produce poetry. What it does produce seems, to my inexpert eyes, to be mostly accurate glosses of the literal poem. My job is to take those words, discern what they are trying to represent, and to make that into a poem that will seem vivid to a modern American reader.

In that process I would find even a pristine word-for-word translation inadequate. I want to translate the sequence of images as much as the words, and I want the result to have some musical or incantatory power (even if I don’t usually go so far as to try to duplicate a meter or rhyme scheme).

The Naked Truth in French

The poem, “Nudite De La Verite,” in its original French

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Éluard’s “The Naked Truth”  was not hard to work with. There’s not much wild imagery to it. There is the image of the incorporeal state of despair that has no wings in the literal translation. I decided to sharpen that to “no flight,” both to link it with the rest of the short catalog of always-present no-action and so that the sound of “no flight “ can better flow into the “no face” that follows.

I really wanted that negative flow about resistance to despair, and for that I made the most significant choice to change the sentence structure of Éluard’s text, which has the line stating despair at the start followed by the line about love. I reversed the order, putting the line about love first, almost as an interrupted side-thought that prefaces the statement about despair that we will momentarily think is what all the adamant stubbornness is about – until we get to the payoff at the poem’s end.

Perhaps this isn’t the best choice? It’s not the order Éluard wrote down in French, and I want you to know that I changed that order. I may have been influenced by the way I, and many others feel – particularly in my town – with the current regime and its performative cruelty and callousness. Goddammit, we might see this through this little poem: a hope that our level of our despair at those things must be equal to a level of love.

The Naked Truth

My version in English, presented as a chord sheet for those that want to sing it themselves.

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You can hear my musical performance of my translation/adaptation of Paul Éluard’s “The Naked Truth”  with the audio player below. What? Has any such audio player taken wing the way your despair or love hasn’t? Well, I offer this consolation: a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*For the added volume and sharp attack, some guitar finger-pickers use picks too, but different ones than a flat pick – typically a plastic thumb-pick that fits ring-like, but over the distal part of the thumb, and metal or plastic picks somewhat like half-spoon thimbles on one to three fingers. Others use some combination of fingernails and flesh. I have terrible nails and my skin can only allow me to play a limited amount of time with my thumb or fingers on bass. I tried to use fingerpicks as a guitarist, but found them finicky to manage.

**If I was a kid in my present residence, it would be natural to have gravitated toward Spanish. While my town has a significant number of Francophone African-Americans, Latin American Spanish is often in the air around here, and whenever I delve into Latin American poetry I find great riches.

***I suppose these computer-translations could be called Artificial Intelligence of a kind.  The AI label gets thrown on a wide range of things these days both for promotion and disapproval. In my defense I’ll point out that computer translations aren’t “generative AI,” the thing that (deservedly) gets the most heat. When I type Éluard’s French into a machine translation entry box I’m not asking it to generate some reheated reprocessed slop of other, uncredited, artists’ work in order to present the pretense of originality. I’m asking it to do what I did when thumbing through my French-to-English dictionary, along with making some effort at producing an understandable syntax order for the resulting words. As for other AI issues: I casually assume my request to render a 35-word poem has a modest carbon footprint.

I still end up working with French-to-English dictionaries to check significant words, to see examples of the words or phrases in use, and to make at least an effort at understanding possible idiomatic usage. Would it be better if the poetry was translated by a bilingual poet with extensive knowledge about early 20th century France? Yes, but I’m not sure that Éluard’s fate has given us that – and so I make my efforts.

Song to the Siren

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

I’ve written briefly, here and there, about the time leading up to my late wife’s death, so let me write today about the days immediately afterward. Because this is a blog, and readers’ attentions are limited by that format’s expectations, it’s going to be brief again.

Most people have had experience with death before coming to the death of a spouse, but the qualities of that experience have their own specifics, felt by us one to another. My first feelings were of a very tangible physical absence. A skin-covered shape that was not there. The missing fingerprint sound of her voice. Isn’t that odd, I felt so intensely what I could not hear, could not feel. I was setting out into a life in silhouette.

Renée’s mother handled the funeral arrangements entirely, which was a blessing. That went by in a blurred quickly, and I remember little of it. I decided to go back to my demanding job right away. I thought it would be good to stay connected to those parts of my world that still existed, that carried on without – but I had a great deal of vacation time banked, and for a while set aside a day each week to do post-death tasks. Renée must have left me info on things like accounts, she was organized about such things, and I made a long list of the transitional stuff that needed to be done. I had a folder with lots of copies of her death certificate, and one-by-one I checked off the tasks. I think the very month she died was the last payment on our home’s mortgage, which I sent off thinking that she had just missed that milepost.

One of a couple who were in Renée’s large circle of friends started calling me, asking how I was, and listening to me express the little things, those grief specifics that flickered around me.*  They would invite me to get-togethers and events, keeping me engaged in society at large. I was numbed or preoccupied to think about this at the time, but I now suspect this was something Renée had asked them to do before she died, but whether they did this on their own or at a friend’s request, it was an extraordinary blessing. For a few months this couple (and my job) were my tugging connection to the ongoing world.

In a short interval after Renée’s death, I also began spending much time playing music, by myself or with two or three others. I spent time searching out low-priced but unusual guitars, a not all-together-admirable spate of “retail therapy.” I began to compose and record music I made with them. Here’s the odd part for those who’ve followed this now more than a decade old Parlando Project: it was predominantly music without words, the stuff that would be genre-categorized as “instrumental guitar music.” Here I was, this poet, who had married this young poet, who was missing her voice intimately, making music with no words in it.**

And then during the next year, I met and started going out with the woman who’d become my living wife. This was welcome and yet a little strange. Like many people with loved ones who’ve died, I would have intense dreams of the departed, and sometimes those sensations would slip over into waking hours where I’d have this palpable demi-sense that Renée was present. I can remember one such time when I was awaking in my empty bedroom and I had the strong sense – no apparition, but just as when your “object permanence” knows what’s behind you or beside your peripheral vision – and without hearing in a vibrating ear-drum way, I was hearing my dead wife’s voice. I was embarrassed, and I thought I should try to explain that I was seeing this other woman.

How did this conversation resolve? There were no actual words, no transcript that could be recorded on some spirit-device, no ghostly pronouncement. Just a sense that some sense of Renée (or my own sense of Renée) knew, and that we acknowledged this new thing together.

Returning now to this present August. Like a lot of folks this summer I saw the new movie of “The Odyssey.”   One controversial thing in this elaborate (and IMHO, successful) take on the old tale was Matt Damon’s performance of a haunted Odysseus. This is not everyone’s view of the character, and auteur-school critics tell us it’s a repeating trope in the director’s work. But what was resonating with me as I viewed the movie was that same flattened-and-its-opposite facets in Damon’s portrayal. And what an odd thing to see: a cost millions, makes millions, IMAX spectacular movie version of a poem. Makes the Parlando Project seem so modest in comparison.

During the movie, a song, a favorite of mine from The Sixties™, kept going through my mind: Tim Buckley and Larry Beckett’s “Song to the Siren.”***  I decided I wanted to record it.

One problem with setting off on that odyssey? It’s a song that’s been done by many much-more talented singers than I am, and it’s the sort of song that calls for a vocalist capable of a bigger more dramatic sound than my voice can manifest. I thought I’d try. And I did. I made multiple attempts to sing Beckett’s words even if I knew I couldn’t portray Buckley’s vocal melody. Take my word for it, they were all bad. Even trying to “comp” a best of the bits vocal track was a failed effort.

But I was left with this arrangement of “Song to the Siren”  that I still liked, subdued electric bass, sweetly keening fiddle, and the Guild 12-string acoustic guitar that I bought as Guild was closing it’s Rhode Island factory and the store where I bought it at a deep discount was going out of business. Today’s musical piece has become an instrumental, presented here in “The Place Where Music and Words Meet” – and the words are, this time, absent.

Since Larry Beckett’s words are so important to the resonance of “Song to the Siren” for me, this video displays them.

 

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*One thing I can remember telling them about: every workday morning I would buy the daily papers at a convenience store near work. With the long-practiced eye of a veteran 20th century newspaper reader, I’d read them quickly in the early morning hours at my desk before the rest of the staff in my technology section would arrive, and then fold them and set them aside. At night I’d bring them home, and Renée would read them in the evening. In the first days after I’d returned to work I realized that there was no one at home to take the papers back to. This is the strange alternating contrast of grief: flattening at times and then at other times you can feel the textures of the smoothest surface, the tiniest detail.

Here’s a contrasting thing. One of the reasons I read the papers each morning, other than general habit, was that the radio network I worked for had a 24-hour news operation, with a large newsroom a couple of floors above me. Reading those papers was a way to keep appraised of what my coworkers there would be dealing with.

One morning, just over a month after my wife died, a tech coworker came back to the desk next to mine and said the newsroom was in an uproar, that a plane had flown into a skyscraper in New York. I told him (engage history-nerd tone) that this’d happened before: that an errant bomber had hit the Empire State Building in the Forties. “If you Google it, you can probably see photos of the aftermath.” “No, this is different.” my desk-neighbor said. I went up the newsroom. Yes, this was different: it was September 11th. That morning thousands of people died, and many more had risks and new realities to deal with. We had employees on airline flights in the air at that moment, the newsroom had an extraordinary news day, and we had offices in a nearby tower across the street a half-a-continent away – and the name of that tall Minnesota building was also “The World Trade Center.” I was heads-down in the technology logistics, my professional area. But here’s my specific thing: I felt no grief. Like a vaccine, I was inoculated, all my grief receptors were still occupied.

**I had one epiphany that helped me begin making music with words again. That benevolent couple who helped me bridge over my transition took me to a concert by Le Tigre at First Avenue. Le Tigre was a follow-up project led by the Bikini Kill principal Kathleen Hanna. They were non-virtuosic musically, and the lyrics were sharply funny/social analytical – and served as a punky early-21st-century reminder of the promise of bands like The Fugs or my own LYL Band work with Dave Moore.

***This song is one of several The Sixties™ musical efforts that refer to “The Odyssey.” Another fine song, “Tales of Brave Ulysses”  was inspired not just by Homer but by it’s lyricist listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”  with its doomed sailors. A more oblique one: The Zombies magnificent final LP “Odessey and Oracle.”  No sailors, no sirens, in it – and the epic poem’s title is famously misspelled on the echt Sixties™ cover. I’m unfamiliar with how the title was chosen for this album recorded in another summer, the one in 1967 just before the group that made it broke up from lack of commercial viability, but it’s a suite of songs about loss and separation that ends in the celebratory song “Time of the Season.”   Remarkably, that final song became a hit nearly two years later, when there was no band remaining to tour behind the hit. The suitors at the banquet recruited some chancers from Texas to pretend to be this British group. That bogus bunch of Zombies included 2/3 of what would become ZZ Top.

Love Addict Blues

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

This week is the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Parlando Project. While I had completed some of the early musical pieces and even did a couple of test blog posts before summer 2016, I chose August 6th as the official start date because it’s the anniversary of my late wife’s, Renée Robbins, death.

I’ll talk more about the Project, and my life since those two events in upcoming posts, but today’s post is about my life-partner and the unlucky turn that made that so only for a little more than 20 years. To young people, I’d expect 20 years to seem a long time. To old folks like me, the same 20 years seems less – but then too this post won’t be nearly long enough to memorialize Renée. To some degree this whole Project is a memorial to the dreams of poets and poetry, music and musicians, that surrounded two young people who fell in love in that unloved and less-remembered decade, The Seventies. Dreams of my youth? Yes – and that would be a shared youth with Renée. It’s also wider than that: I’ve long harbored a romantic belief: that the dreams of the dead continue to exist out there somewhere, and we can call on, call in, those flickering things.

I met Renée in a writer’s group, specifically not the Lake Street Writer’s Group that I participated in until half the remaining members died within a few months of each other five years ago. At the time I was frustrated with the LSWG founder-poet-editor’s insistence on tamping down expression around eroticism. That fine man, Kevin FitzPatrick, wanted a big tent working-class literature and poetry, and his fear was that explicit sex and gender passages in our Lake Street Review little magazine would be problematic for a wide audience in the mid-1970s. I on the other hand looked at my pig-in-the-python generation and saw them embroiled in an entire barnyard of working out those things.

In protest, for a couple of years I decamped to another group of young writers, and one of them was Renée. She’d studied with a poet and writing professor Philip Dacey (and taken literature classes with poet-humorist Howard Mohr) in college, had published a few poems, and I was immediately impressed with her sense of humor.*  The range of human erotic turn-ons is astonishingly wide-ranging, but for me, a primary one is an alluring sense that someone might laugh in bed, and Renee had those vibes. We fell into a passionate and complicated relationship. The next couple of years would deserve at least two lengthy and unwritten chapters I won’t be asking you to read today. One of those chapters would describe that she was involved with someone who presented himself as a musician. He wasn’t, but the chancer was a bit of a con artist. This one still puzzles me – the Renée I knew was a savvy judge of character, and that blind spot may have been a folie de la jeunesse thing.**

We moved in together in 1979. Ten years later we married, with intent, on April Fool’s Day. 11 years later, she was dying of pancreatic cancer, diagnosed only a few months earlier. I’m an old man, remembering that partnership as a young man. Those 20 plus years we had together therefore seem alternately long and short, flashing as to recall moments when it seemed as long as any forever, and then the retrospective surety of knowing it wouldn’t be as long as we thought then.

Renee at Powerderhorn

Renée in Powderhorn Park, about the time we moved in together.

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Long and brief as what I wrote above is, I wanted to write this to present today’s musical piece. Its genesis was earlier this year when I was doing some old man “Death Cleaning,” the getting rid of stuff so others won’t have to do that work when I die. It was a page found in with Renée’s saved stuff from her youth, some of it going back to her college years before I met her – stuff that her short, brutal, illness never allowed her to clean out. I can’t say exactly when it was written – and if it was written “from life,” who is the lover in the situation it describes.

It looks like an intended song lyric, and although Renée was a competent basic pianist, she never practiced that skill nor (as far as I know) set anything to music. She was a fan of several Seventies singer-songwriters however. Did she intend it as a song, or was it a “literary ballad” from her youthful poet self that was meant to refer to popular music, but on a silent literary page?

Love Addict Blues lyrics

Lyrics for today’s song. I didn’t write out a chord sheet, but the recording is a two-chord vamp between D minor and C, though there’s some variations in both chords.

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The ambiguity in the situation described is hard to summarize. Lyrics may exaggerate love situations with extravagant metaphors not meant to be taken literally, but the references in the lyric to depression and “you’re making me sick” convince me that that love addiction it portrays isn’t just a playful trope. Later in her life, after Renée had gotten her Masters in Counseling Psychology, she worked as a professional counselor in a gambling addiction program. At least once when a client wondered what she knew about addiction, she would gesture toward her overweight body and say “Well, I show my addiction externally, for anyone to see. Let’s talk about your hidden one.”

The page I found titled “Love Addict Blues”  was from a younger version of herself. Would its youthful expression have embarrassed the older Renée? I could see it either way, but I’m now the living one, and like those floating dreams, I chose to see it as a surviving artifact of this woman I loved. And so, earlier this summer, I made an effort to set her “Love Addict Blues”  to music. Though her words aren’t in the classic 3-line stanza/12-bar-verse blues structure, I aimed for an electric blues feel, something vaguely in the BB King area. Early summer wasn’t giving me a lot of chances to play electric guitar though, and the page of her lyrics with my chords sat in my WIP stack, un-played.

Then, at the end of July, I was listening to a new song on the radio by Joyce & Tutty Moreno, modern Brazilian samba masters. I suddenly remembered one of Renée’s favorite LPs – not a singer-songwriter exactly, but instead Flora Purim, another Brazilian singer-composer who is usually filed under Jazz-Fusion genre-wise. I don’t have the chops to cop what Purim can do, not even close, but I immediately went about getting a Latin Jazz percussion module for my drum software so I could try for that feel, only with a much less animated and virtuosic vocalist like myself. This style would usually call for nylon string guitar, but the opposite problem prevented me from recording that – there would be too much environmental noise jumping into the sensitive mic. I made do with recording my fretless electric bass plugged directly into my recording software with the fresh percussion sounds arrayed in a basic syncopated groove, and finally a MIDI virtual-instrument-sound sampled piano to outline a simple two-chord harmony. But if there was noise about, how would I record the vocal? I used an Electro-Voice RE20 microphone. This mic is something of a rare bird: it’s a dynamic microphone, but it’s designed to not have as much “proximity effect” as other dynamic microphones.*** This means I can work right next to the microphone’s grill and greatly reduce any unwanted environmental sounds. You might notice that the resulting recording has audible breaths. Normally I’d address the RE20 slightly off axis to prevent that – and there’s even modern post-facto software that does a good job of removing breath sounds – but I was imprinted in my youth on Astrud Giberto’s breathy and intimate Bosa Nova vocals, and the breathy sound today is intentional.

You can hear my performance of Renée Robbins’ “Love Addict Blues”  with the audio player below. If you are grieving over audio player unleaving, Márgarét (or anyone else) can use this highlighted link to open a new browser leaf – ah, tab – that will have an audio player that isn’t viewable on this main page because some ways of reading this blog won’t display such a thing.

 

 

 

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*One of Renée’s party tricks: she could recite the entire 15 minutes plus of The Firesign Theater’s “The Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye”  from memory. And yeah, Old Possum, she do the voices too.

**Or it could have been part of Renée’s kindness and generosity, the other facet of her fierce understanding of the tricks and deceptions of the less than kind. I mentioned this to my living wife, telling her I was worried that including it might be seen as disrespectful to Renée.

“Well, she was generous enough to see the worth in both of us” she offered.

***Dynamic microphones are by their nature less sensitive to short, quiet, subtle sounds, and so are generally less than ideal for recording quieter acoustic instruments or vocalists with quieter voices and attractive upper-range timbral elements. My rough-hewn voice has less attractive upper level detail, so no great loss – and the RE20 preserves that detail better than other dynamics mics. Other popular “Cardioid Dynamic Microphones” – used nearly universally for club-stage-stadium vocalists – boost the lower range on the vocals being picked up from them when the mic is very near to the singer’s mouth. That’s the “proximity effect”, an artificial deepening. While that’s sometimes attractive, and can even give the impression of added power, it isn’t something I usually want in my recordings.

I often recommend the Electro-Voice RE20 to people that want to record vocals in untreated or less-than-ideal rooms. I also find it good to try when recording lead vocalists with a live band playing together in a room. Price-wise, this guy who started recording with Radio Shack microphones would still call the RE20 expensive, but in the great “professional” scheme of things it’s a mid-low-priced mic.

Nocturne of Remembered Spring

~ Frank Hudson ~ 5 Comments

So, who is Conrad Aiken? I don’t fully know yet, but I came upon one of his poems this spring, and found out that as a critic, anthologist, short-story writer, and poet, that he’s one of those first-part-of-the-20th-century Americans who helped establish American poetry in the Modernist era. He graduated from Harvard University in 1912, and before that decade was out, he’d established his literary footprint. In 1919 he published what he claimed was the first comprehensive anthology of American poetry, explaining in the book’s introduction that previously there was no clear call for such a collection as American poetry was such a small part of world literature. Here’s what I found most interesting about that anthology: he would retain only a smattering of poems by Longfellow and the Fireside poets, though using Poe, Dickinson,* and Whitman to fill out much of the 19th century section – and here’s the boldest part: he would give his early 20th century contemporaries a great deal of space.

In things like this I sense that Aiken is reflecting or creating a canonical moment that lasted well into his 20th century. His choices are similar to the choices I was presented later with the mid-century textbooks of my youth, but I recall being frustrated back then: why were the poets and poetry worth studying ending with Eliot and Frost? While that pair were still living as I began to study literature, their anthologized poems were 30-40 years old then, seemingly ancient to my teenage self. OK, Aiken’s canon may have been much like the one I was later presented, but back then his 1919 book included poems not even 5 years from publication.  Not just a handful, some appendix set aside as a gesture, but around a third of the anthology!

By that year Aiken had published five books of his own poetry, one of which shares its title with its lead-off poem inside: “Nocturne of Remembered Spring.”   The nocturne is a musical form, and references to musical forms and the experience of music abound in the Aiken poetry I’ve read so far. Oddly, I don’t consistently fall under the spell of his word-music off the page. His poems do have some lyrical moments, but they are obscured by a problem I’m having: his long windiness. As I page through Aiken’s early books many poems span a dozen pages or more, and while he did try his hand at sonnets, they don’t seem to be is métier. Perhaps I’m not appreciating the sense of the tune behind the poems. Unlike many of his contemporaries, I rarely hear strains of American folk musics in these early poems. I can’t help but think that his evident attraction to the related art of music is more conceptional or one-abstraction-layer-removed impressionism than simply producing dancing words and prosodical earworms.

conrad aiken young

Aiken at around the post-graduate age when he was helping form the canon of American poetry.

 

Luckily for your composer/presenter here, he will often break up his longer poems in shorter, numbered, sections. So, the seven pages of the poem “Nocturne of Remembered Spring”  are split in six sections, each obsessively recalling the same youthful love affair, each going over memories of it. Given the length of the poem I’d have liked to see more contrast in the sections, but for page after page it remains inside the head of the poem’s voice as it goes over memories. This psychological internalism may have been a novel effect in 1916 when the poem is dated, but it tires me. Aiken’s work is new to me, but I can’t help but compare his theme here unfavorably to early work by Mina Loy (her extravagantly expressive “Songs to Johannes”)  or Neruda’s extraordinarily popular “Twenty Love Songs.”**

My choice for a musical setting of Aiken was to select out only the final section, numbered “VI.”   It sufficiently summarizes the poem, and I think it has more chance of listener impact by compressing its expression and it highlights there a musical device by refraining lines about remembrance.*** As so often in this Project’s choice of texts, this was the section with words that “asked” to be sung. I’m a composer who tends to bagatelles due to lack of time and sophisticated skills. The length was right. I wrote a simple cello line, quickly extrapolated a series of chords for nocturnal piano and improvised a second cello top line melody to be played via my MIDI guitar sounding a good cello VI**** which would also help guide my rough-hewn vocal. As I wrote earlier this month, a musical piece like this would seem to be Art Song of a type, but one which classically trained and skilled singers would find outrageous. My hope, aware of my limitations, is that it can still communicate something and help vivify a presence for writers like Aiken who have fallen into the cracks in the canon.

You can hear my performance of part VI. from Conrad Aiken’s “Nocturne of Spring Remembered”  with the audio player gadget below. What no player? I, or rather some ways of reading this blog, haven’t forgotten it, it just won’t show in every kind of reader. I provide this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player so it can still be heard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Though Dickinson wrote her remarkable work in the middle of the 19th century, none of it was publicly known until it’s posthumous publication began with three book-length volumes in the final decade of the 1800s. This means that even when including Dickinson in his survey of American poetry in 1919 that Aiken was featuring poems less than 30 years from publication date. In 1924 Aiken published a selected poems of Emily Dickinson, a step in establishing her place in the American poetic canon. Last time, when I presented a Dickinson poem, I almost presented a capsule history of the tangled provenance of Dickinson’s poems, using “A Something in a summer’s Day” as an example. Tight summary: decendents of Susan Gilbert Dickinson (Emily Dickinson’s sister-in-law, neighbor, friend, and presently oft-assumed lover) and of Mabel Todd Loomis (the mistress of Susan’s husband/Emily’s brother) each had a tranche of Dickinson poems and claimed rights to them, and each was publishing them as well as letters and recollections of the poet. Both sources were editing the poems, normalizing their distinctive language and punctuation, and ordering them in chapters of common high-minded themes. Aiken’s Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson issued from his seat as a critic and anthologist offered additional canonical approval to the poet who he judges in his introduction is “among the finest poets in the language.” At the time he was drawing from less than half of the now known poems of Dickinson! And the Dickinson that we know today – all dashes and abrupt leaps of thought – only became available when I was a schoolboy!

**A decade later Aiken’s Selected Poems won a Pulitzer. That book didn’t include any of Nocturne of Remembered Spring. The author himself may have moved on.

***As I enter into the month of August, I’m in my annual period of personal remembrance of the summer now long ago when my late wife was dying. The refrain in section VI. of “Do you remember” coincidentally brought to mind the translation in English of the name of the Twin Cities based indie rock trio Hüsker Dü. I missed my chance by not setting Aiken to reflect that.

****A pun, and with Roman numerals! A “VI” is a “virtual instrument.” These are made when a company records snippets of a real cello playing its range of notes in a variety of performance articulation and puts the result into what is in effect a database of all those sounds which can be played with an otherwise silent device – most often a piano style keyboard, but it can be another instrument control surface such as my MIDI guitar which tells it what to play in notes, timing, and expression, all of which are retrieved in real time.

The Hawthorn Tree

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

You could put Willa Cather within a group: writers known as novelists who also wrote some worthwhile poetry. I didn’t know she wrote verse, but this poem of thwarted love, “The Hawthorn Tree”  charmed me when I read it in an anthology this summer. Furthermore, I had sense immediately that it wanted to be sung.

Cather’s best-known prose deals with European immigrant pioneers settling in the rural American Great Plains; but though they’ve been recommended to me, I’ve never read her novels.*  Cather’s family moved to Nebraska when she was 9 and she attended college there. After college she moved east, and she lived most of her long life in New York, where she wrote of Nebraska while living far from it – a distance that has fueled many a novel.

willa-cather-when-she-was-a-student-everett

The young Willa Cather in her student days

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“The Hawthorn Tree”  poem doesn’t tell us where it takes place on any state map — it refrains instead on the titular tree somewhere, a location of a tryst between two people that the poem’s voice will tell, and not tell, us about. Since the hawthorn tree is a very widespread species, it’s not a clue about what state or time it occupies – but let’s ask: why is it a hawthorn, not an ash, maple, or apple tree? Perhaps it’s an accident of biography – a specific tree in some incident Cather herself experienced or knew of. I can’t rule that out, but it’s given such importance within this short poem I think the author made a choice to name it.

Here’s a link to the text of Willa Cather’s poem.

As the name implies, a hawthorn has thorny branches, a prickly botanical feature which is a common trope in poems and songs of thwarted love. Likewise, it has blossoms and sweet fruit in season, more reasons for it to be in a love poem. Not knowing Cather’s work, or much detail of her life, I can’t say what she might know about the myths, legends, or herbal-medicine knowledge regarding the hawthorn. I read that it’s a tree sacred to fairies, it’s thought to be a sentinel or guardian of gateways between worlds, and that the fruit can cure a broken heart.**

So, invention or memoir incident? That mystery accompanies the mysteries in this story’s telling. It could be rendering the common folk-song plot of a couple who briefly meet (and perhaps make love) somewhere while out in nature, and who are then parted. Cather could be taken with such folk songs and tales, could be writing her version of that – or it could be autobiographical.***  One other thing: we’ve been exploring poems of the faery world recently, it could be slyly fantastical – the unnamed creature who meets the poem’s singer from out of the mist could be from the faery realm. Cather’s poem happens in spring-time, another marker found in many of the folk-songs – which often start with some variation of “one morning in May” or the like – but Cather’s mysterious tale says its tryst happens in the night-time.

Whatever the exact and unsaid details, the poem had captured my attention, and those references to folk-song elements drove me to write music for it. I used an unusual open tuning here, one called Csus (CGCGCD), and the lower pitch of the tuning and the chord voicings I used caused me to break out my less-used larger-bodied dreadnaught guitar for this one.

I followed Cather’s text for the resulting song, but then at the end of the performance you can hear with the audio player below I adlibbed my own short variation expanding on the mysterious details of the meeting under the hawthorn tree. What ho? There’s no audio player for you? Ah, I have provided a gateway to a dimension that will show the audio player that’s hidden to you, mortal – likely due to the method you’re using to read this blog. Use this hawthorn branch – no, this highlighted link – which will open a new browser tab manifesting its own audio player.

 

 

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*I’m far from well-read regarding novels. Poetry captured me in my youth, and that art meshed so easily with my love for music that I can easily be embarrassed in any literary crowd which takes “literature” to largely mean “fiction.”

**Besides folk-medicine, there’s been some modern pharmaceutical investigation of the hawthorn fruit’s ingredients. This video explains a bit about the hawthorn and the beliefs surrounding it.

***Cather’s love life is not an open book, but her life partner was a woman. The one from the mist who the poem’s voice meets under the hawthorn tree is a “he.” I made a choice not to alter the genders here, perhaps because this spring my home has been full of gender-dynamic visitors and residents. Or perhaps I’m following the example of famous gender-crossing singers like Eric Burdon and Ringo Starr.

Sara Teasdale’s “A Prayer”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Just time for a short post presenting a short musical piece made from a short poem by Sara Teasdale. Teasdale’s “A Prayer”  goes over some of the same ground (or gravely, below ground) as her better-known poem “I Shall Not Care,”  each poem ending a telling stanza with a variation of and end-of-life caring not.*  But of the two, “A Prayer”  is more positive and less bitter. “I Shall Not Care”  posits the grave’s lack of care as justice for lack of care from a lover, “A Prayer’s”  poetic voice vows careless love throughout a lifetime regardless of the elusiveness of mutual love.

A Prayer

Simple enough music for this short piece, though the F Major 7th is a favorite alternative flavor of mine. I also enjoyed coming up with the snap modulation in the little section between the two verses.

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While working with this poem this past week I thought too of Teasdale’s contemporary Robert Frost’s proposed epitaph that he wrote at the end of a much longer poem of his:

I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

You can hear my musical performance of Teasdale’s poem with the audio player gadget below. If you can’t see that gadget, I shall not care, because I’ve provided this highlighted link for you that will instead open a new browser tab with it’s own audio player.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*”I Shall Not Care”  was my introduction to Teasdale’s work, as I recount it this post from early in the Parlando Project about how a musical performance of it helped inspire how I do these things.

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.