A couple of posts back I mentioned that we’d meet Yeats “rook-delighting heaven” again as we visit some more expressions of the month of February. Well, here’s one, Boris Pasternak’s “February.”
Coincidently, it appears that Pasternak wrote his “February” within a few months one way or another of Yeats’ “A Cold Heaven.” And both poets put ravens in these poems, though Yeats’ crows show up early, and Pasternak’s drop in near the end. Though Yeats wrote his “A Cold Heaven” in more temperate Ireland, it resonated with a Northern Midwesterner like me with its burning ice and unwarming sun. Pasternak, presumably familiar with a colder climate more like my own, sets the thermostat on his February to an early spring melt; but this is a muddy, sodden spring. His black spring holds cold rains, mud, and slush—more like a real early spring than a happy-butterflies-and-wildflowers May spring.
Bluesman?
I’m not fluent in Russian, but the challenge of translating this lyrical poem from Russian to English has attracted many. As I recall, when I tried to put together the text for this performance, I used several of those as gloss, tempered with Internet translator apps fed the Russian. I know nothing of Russian diction, so I aimed for an informal American diction, and unlike some translators, I didn’t try to keep the original poem’s rhyme scheme in English—after all, I knew I’d be supplying music for this.
I believe the music I choose here, bluesy rock’n’roll, while American, is fitting. I hear Pasternak here singing the Russian Blues: blues like unto our great American music of endurance, and rock’n’roll that cares only to seek the state he speaks of in the last two lines:
The more haphazard, the more true, the poetry that sobs its heart out.
So I’ll be putting this post up, and then I’ll go out in our haphazard too-early spring February myself. I too will head out past the noise of city church bells, past the cars, biking to the edge of my city where I’m going to buy George Saunders sad new novel.
Today’s episode is dedicated Renee Robbins, who once was lost on the edge of Moscow herself, the last passenger remaining at the end of a bus route. She found her way back long enough for us to know her.
To hear the LYL Band perform Boris Pasternak’s “February” use the player that appears below.
I decided on my own that Yeats’ piece in the last post was about February, but I have some other pieces that say, right out, in their own words, that they are about our current month. Here is one, “2ebruary.”
Earlier this month I saw Jim Jarmusch’s film, “Paterson.” This movie succeeds, in its modest and appropriate way, to do something impossible: to film poetry, or more exactly, the composition of literary work. It does this two ways: by having a writer, its central character, portrayed as a regimented, routinized person, grounded in a particularized working-class city and job; and then by having him compose “aloud in his head” his work against this background.
this movie has no light-sabers
This is a wonderful choice. The city, the routine clock of the days, the job, become the metrical, musical background for the flowerment of the writer’s consciousness that becomes the poems.
Though the movie is set in the New Jersey city of it’s title, the filmmaker refers often to the “New York School” of poetry, using the poems of Ron Padgett to stand-in for the work of the film’s main character.
The New York School uses a lot mid-20th Century Modern ideas, combining them into various combinations, depending on the individual writer associated with the movement. Some of it can be obscure and abstract, taking off from the same ideas that launched abstract expressionism in painting around the same time. But some also find a tenderness and wonder in the abstract patterns of urban existence, a Pop Art with a depth beneath its surface able to hold a beating heart. At a point in the film, the main character opens his noon lunchbox to eat, and to write down the intermediate state of his morning’s writing aloud in his head, and there like a Thermos, nestled above an orange and a sandwich, is Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems.” It has to be there.
Don’t loose your Lunch Poems
O’Hara wrote in a great many styles, but this slim chapbook features several poems that someone once called his “I do this, I do that” poems. where O’Hara walks about, seemingly composing aloud in his head amidst daily tasks. These are my favorites, because, like “Paterson,” these poems seem to be about their own grounded creation in a city of routines, reflected inside the moist, encased, flowing mind of their writer.
Today’s piece “2ebruary” takes off from that Frank O’Hara mode, as I often like to do, though I’m an old man, writing in another century, in the Midwest, not New York City, and my old joints creak best on a bicycle.
a scene from today’s piece, breakfast not included
“2ebruary” is a short bicycle journey thinking of history, and past the events that are turning into history that we can still change. I take a pause, as every American should, to note that American culture is made from those who came here carrying something from elsewhere. And Midwestern culture? For many, those packing trunks are hardly great-grandparent’s-age-old, at the eldest.
At one point in the journey, I note those that had no trunks when they came to America, they had only their chattel bodies and souls—and even of those two things, the former had been appropriated by others for handy profit. What could they unpack? Well for one thing: the largest and grandest part of our American music. Our history is short compared to many nations, but it contains mighty things like this. We who are joining that history, already in progress, can turn it one way or another. Which way do you choose to turn?
To hear the LYL Band perform “2ebruary” use the gadget below.
We’ve already met Irish poet William Butler Yeats with a brief poem earlier this month. Now his words return with a piece suitable for the aftermath of Valentine’s Day, for “A Cold Heaven” is the tale of a rejected valentine. It’s also fitting, because Valentine’s Day comes in the midst of late-winter. February, as Margaret Atwood put it, is a “month of despair, with a skewered heart in the centre.”
Here in the northern Midwest it was a “seasonable” 19 degrees F. this morning, and hardy ice has outlived any soft covering snow. There is a promise of a thaw this weekend, but that will only recall mud and the detritus of what the snow once remembered inside it.
Critics from more temperate climes praise Yeats for his oxymoron here of “ice burned,” but up north we know that’s just what happens to skin in the cold, with no need for poetic intercession. And my back yard, my cities’ parks, and our central greenway have been home to that “rook-delighting heaven” he speaks of as well. Strange isn’t it, that the bird of death is so smart, so intentional, so sure, and yet inscrutable.
In “A Cold Heaven,” Yeats’ winter and his death-omen birds lead to a missed and misunderstood, “crossed” love; and he takes the blame: if not for the season, for the failed love. Like so many, and without the succor of chocolate or flowers, he is left in the rejected lovers worshipful, davening stance, “rocking to and fro.”
But he is a poet still! “A Cold Heaven” breaks itself in two with an image that is also a pun: “Riddled with light.” Yes, we Northerners know that winter light. Brighter than summer, and paradoxically the sign of a piercingly cold day. He knows his love’s in vain, and yet no amount of blame that he can assign himself—even if he exhausts “all sense and reason” to catalog that blame—can account for the failure of his love. What can solve this “riddle?”
Yeats begins again, with a majestic “Ah!” only to take us on a short ghost story, the spirit of his love in purgatory, in bardo, naked as a corpse or as a lover, wandering and asking why clear skies, clear answers, seem like punishment.
So to all those whose valentines were not accepted yesterday: peace. Such riddling has no end to its depths. I know this: that hole is too deep to be plumbed, just know that it’s deep. The correct prayer for such things is unknown.
Look, maybe she’s just not that into you…
As a performance, “A Cold Heaven” had some challenges because Yeats makes use of enjambment, where lines break in the middle of sentences; and where the meaning too, often forks, seeming to mean one thing before the line break and another afterward. Since I like to let the lines “breathe,” so that the music can interject, and so that the words’ impact can sit a little bit before the next line, I resorted to repeating a few words. There are also a couple of other audio tricks in the piece. The string parts, particularly at the beginning have a “backwards tape” articulation where the sound swells from louder to silence, in the reverse of the normal decay of strings, which I hope signifies the drop into the past in Yeats’ text.
To hear “A Cold Heaven” use the player gadget you should see just below this.
The motto of the Parlando Project is “The Place Where Music and Words Meet,” but in practice it has been the place where music and poetry meet. However, just as I want variety in the music used (within the limits of the musician’s talents) I don’t plan to always use poetry for the texts here. Today’s post is an example. I’m going to use a short public speech, but as I have done with poetry in other episodes, I’m going to treat the words as if they are specifically meaningful, and I’m going to treat those words as if they want to sing.
We are also continuing the investigation of artists and politics, something I’ve touched on several times already this winter.
A few days ago, a cast of actors received an award, and the actor acting as spokesmen for the cast delivered the acceptance speech. Though not entirely a political speech, it was received as one, and it was almost certainly intended to make a political point.
The actor, David Harbour, was speaking for the cast of a series available on Netflix called “Stranger Things.” That show is a sort of bumblebee. Like the famously un-aerodynamic bee, it shouldn’t fly, but it does.“Stranger Things” is a show that uses tropes of 1980s movies and books to tell a story set in that same decade. It should be a winking meta exercise where you spend more time noting the references than to the story itself, or a dreary “I’ve seen this one before” drama that plays as an unoriginal re-hash of ready-made plot points and incidents. Perhaps for some viewers it is one of those things, but for many viewers it’s an ingenious contradiction of all the ways it could fail, doesn’t, and instead flies.
I read on the Internet this is supposed to work!
As an actor, Harbour was part of that levitation. In his acceptance speech, he makes a choice as doomed to fail as the concept of “Stranger Things.” In his awards-banquet tuxedo, standing in front of an audience of actors, he gives his acceptance speech more-or-less in the person of his character, a gruff, down-on-his-heels Midwestern town sheriff.
What’s the percentages on this working? First off, actors are not their characters, often not even close. Humphrey Bogart wasn’t a grizzled tough guy, he was the son of a cardiac surgeon who grew up upper-middle class. John Wayne was a football player and son of a dirt farmer, not a cowboy or a military man. Actors themselves would know this more than anyone else. Secondly, whatever audience size “Stranger Things” has, that audience isn’t everyone. Will folks who haven’t watched “Stranger Things” get your message if it references tropes from your series?
Well, like the series, like the bumblebee, Harbour’s speech worked in the room none-the-less. You can view that short speech and the reaction here.
In turning this speech into today’s post, “Artists Hunting Monsters,” I changed a few things. First off, the video I first saw after the event did not include his prelude to the words I ended up using. In the part I didn’t have while composing, Harbour talks eloquently about his view of an artist’s role today. In editing the words I did have, sifting them down, and dressing them with music, I choose to universalize his rhetoric to the degree I could, so that even those who haven’t seen “Stranger Things” would have access the message; and in so doing, I changed things to address the role of artists in general, not only the actors that were his present audience.
I’m once more going to violate a principle I thought I would hold to here, and “explain” the text. Harbour, and my selection and recasting of his text, says that an artists’ job, an artist’s calling, is to offer succor to the disenfranchised: to show with our artifice, truth; with our play fighting, successful struggle; with our imagined detectives, the underlying monster. It’s a call to arms for artists to pick up blunted stage-swords and to deploy magnifying metaphors against oppressive decisions, systems and persons.
How did I speak with the music? Well, I won’t be so bold as to dance about that architecture. The main melodic line is a guitar played with an Ebow, a device that drives an individual guitar string into a cycle of feedback where it sustains with increasing volume until the device is moved away from the string. As the name implies it, it can mimic the sound of a bowed instrument, but that increasing volume feedback loop takes some finesse to manage. The secondary electric guitar line that emerges about halfway into the piece is a guitar feeding back with an amplifier, an even more chaotic effect. I was playing that part live in the main tracking session with bass, drums, and keyboards and was trying to get to the feedback “spot” with the guitar, but mics and other stuff were in the way, and it wasn’t until the track was nearly over that I finally got it to howl properly. And so, I was “hunting monsters” during the main tracking session for recording this piece.
This guitar D string is about to find out how bumblebees fly
Before we leave the music part, did you know that the way the bumblebee flies is the way those guitar strings vibrate?
There are still questions left to examine on the role of the arts, and more Parlando Project expressions of music meeting up with words to be posted here in the upcoming months. If you would like to be notified about these new pieces when they are posted, you can click the little orange “RSS – Posts” icon down on the right side of this post. To hear the LYL Band perform “Artists Hunting Monsters”, use the player you should see just below.
Here in the upper Midwest we are now in the middle of winter, and so are in a various ambivalence about it. Part of us doesn’t like the burden of winter, part of us wants to taunt it, and show that we can still have the upper hand over it, and some of us, those who don’t want to stop reading the book of nature, can find a cold, white chapter to puzzle over and admire.
I’ve already spoken here about how Minneapolis was settled as something of a colonial outpost of New England. The author of the words for this episode, Emily Dickinson was a lifelong New Englander, steeped in Transcendentalist thought, so we know she’s read that Winter chapter.
Just before dawn this morning, I jumped on my winter bicycle and took a ride to my favorite breakfast café. It was seasonable, 20 degrees Fahrenheit and snowing, the streetlight globes surrounded with particulate halos of pelting snow. My tires were crunching the snow, the big knobs of their tread like typewriter keys imprinting the blank pavement’s page. It really was quite beautiful, if obscure of meaning. Summer rain saturates us, inebriates us. Snow surrounds us, but we are never more than a transient part of it, unable to understand its dance.
Winter is good – his Hoar Delights! Also, there is tea and a frittata involved.
Emily Dickinson’s words are featured here a lot because she’s a great lyric poet and her words fit with music almost without effort. I learned decades ago that Dickinson favored “hymn meter,” that 8,6,8,6 syllable verse that makes much of Dickinson singable to the melodies of “Amazing Grace” or the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song. For “Winter is Good” I decided to throw out that pattern, turning some lines into refrains and marrying it to a melody similar to the Christmas carol “Joy To the World” instead.
Dickinson’s second verse is a doozy. Just 17 words in her text, but it twists so wildly. “Generic as a Quarry”—there’s winter’s white page I suppose. “And hearty – as a Rose-“ not sure where we go there. Dickinson was an avid gardener, and she no doubt missed her summer plants, but my best guess is just rosy cheeks. And finally, the concluding two lines “Invited with asperity/But welcome when he goes.” A jokey finish that seems like it’s singing the old joke about the pleasure of hitting oneself on the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop.
Our various ambivalence aside, that’s what the Winter chapter in the book of nature says to us Northerners, our words arise and are recovered over by the white page; our music only the spaces between silence, soon to be drifted in.
To hear the LYL Band play this hymn to winter with words by Emily Dickinson, click on the gadget below.
You can be in my dream, if I can be in yours. Bob Dylan said that.
You may have noticed that blog post frequency has fallen off a bit this month. Well besides the usual struggle of an upper Midwest winter, both alternative Parlando Project reader Dave Moore and I have had some extra tasks this month. I’ve been helping transition my mother-in-law to new living arrangements, and Dave has been working on editing a book of his father’s sermons.
Today’s post is a piece that Dave wrote a few years back about his parents, and his father’s experience after Dave’s mother had died. Like many good stories, it seeks to find meaningful connections in the flow of coincidental events.
And speaking of coincidence or archetypes or something, I wrote another piece myself a few years back. Though I did not mention it explicitly, my piece was also engendered by thinking of my father now living alone after my mother had died. Both pieces used the image of a bird trapped in a house.
I’ll not attach any more meaning than that to this. Today’s piece is Dave Moore’s story, read by Dave. Click on the gadget below to hear his story. Tomorrow I’ll post mine.
I often wonder when reading opinions when someone stops or starts thinking.
Opinions generally come from two states. One is intuitive emotion the other is from reason, a thoughtful weighing of something or another. In the case of the former, thought has little to do with it. We know something is wrong, wonderful, disgusting, laudatory, whatever from something we feel innately. The child saved from the burning building, the willful act of unnecessary violence—but we feel intuitively about more complex and controversial things too: the results of an election, the worth of some work of art. In the case of art, many of us are comfortable with expressing that intuitive response, we like it or we don’t, we don’t know why, and don’t really care to know why. However, in politics and public policy, that sort of response can seem irresponsible. Furthermore, mere internalized like or dislike is no good for recruiting others to your side.
The other state, the opinion generated from thought, from some comparison of the options and a reasoned judgment brought forth on the results seems admirable. The problem is that too much thought seems to stop as soon as some conclusion can be reached. There’s no second thought on the thought, no deeper examination of one’s assumptions. There’s a worth to this—speed is a value in decisions not about art after all—and the nature of thought and questions is for them to be never-ending. At some point, one has to stop thinking to ever reach a working conclusion.
I opened this morning’s local paper and saw a man from Crosby Minnesota moved to think about political matters and how they intersect with art. Meryl Streep, a famous movie actor, has expressed political opinions about a TV actor—let me look this up, oh yes—Donald Trump, who has taken up politics and found himself with a prominent new job in the public policy field.
The man from Crosby feels he has found an important thought in this Meryl Streep matter, and his thoughts are expressed as a couple of questions and answers:
“Who wrote those words for her? After all, her whole life has been one of just reading and acting out the words creative thinkers have written for her. She has been good at it, but how can someone who has never had a thought of her own criticize others who have?”
Did he answer his questions too quickly? Did he not expand his inquiry enough?
So, assuming we think about something, when do we stop thinking? We have to stop sometime, but stopping too soon can leave us with meager conclusions and less rewarding art.
For that matter, when do we stop practicing our art? In 2013 a local actor (Kate Eifrig) made a decision to stop acting because she felt that continuing was harmful to her. She gave an interview about her decision, which I felt it was an honorable and insightful one, and this audio piece with the LYL Band performing the music was the result. The first sentence is a quote from her interview, which I then developed into the rest of Acting.
One thing she may not have accounted for in making her decision: while as an actor she would have been allowed to serve in a political office like Helen Gahagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Franken, Ronald Regan, Fred Grandy, Jesse Ventura, George Murphy, or Fred Thompson; but she would not, by our man from Crosby’s accounting, be qualified to comment on political matters.
I object to this too, but don’t compound it by saying something at the Golden Globes!
In one limited way I agree with the man from Crosby. While thought, sometimes even considerable thought, goes into acting and performing; the performance itself is not a thoughtful process: for it is entering into, embodying, a thought, often someone else’s thought. That is a visceral, not intellectual experience whatever thought went before it.
I would ask one more question, reformulating the man from Crosby’s rhetorical question to a familiar piece of folk wisdom: how can someone who has never lived someone else’s thought criticize others?
To hear the LYL Band perform Acting, use the gadget below.
Names are funny things. I was recently watching an old TV show from 1969 where Janis Joplin sat on the talk-show couch with a young British-accented rock critic named Michael Thomas. A Platonic dialog of sorts broke out on that show. Janis, the more intellectual than she liked to pretend singer, proposed that rock critics fundamentally obfuscated the experience of music. Thomas, self-evidently aware that he was a member of said tribe, tried to counter that all he was doing was presenting in words the same subjective experiences that Joplin said were the essence of music.
He could have said more, said that he was providing meaning and context for those experiences. She could have replied that meaning was beside the point, or at least meaning was beyond the point of the approximate trivialities that he writes. They could have agreed that experience was the greater part of the meaning of art, but that something remains, and can be changed and reflected upon after the experience and in doing so they could come to the conclusion of poet William Wordsworth, that it’s “Emotion reflected in tranquility.”
But they didn’t say that—commercial breaks stopped the dialog just as it was getting interesting, but I wondered about that guy, Michael Thomas. What had he written? Did he evolve a unique understanding of music as he developed as a critic? There he was, young and good looking, a member of the generation that was going to, like most generations, reform and reconstruct our culture. How did his individual story turn out?
I found a couple of magazine articles online he had written by the time of this TV appearance. Elaborate little hip-bourgeois celebrity profiles of no great import—but then most magazine articles are like that. And he was fairly early in writing about “Rock,” that more serious outgrowth of rock’n’roll that was still new in 1968. There as a lot everybody had to learn then. So, what did he learn?
Turns out there’s no way to tell. Wikipedia has over two dozen Michael Thomases listed on its disambiguation landing page, and none of them are him. Rolling Stone’s archives list a few articles by Michael Thomas, the earliest written in 1970 seem to be by the same man, while the last under the byline are about buying stereo equipment at the end of the same decade. After that? More than 35 years of nothing I can find on the web. If I want to catch up on what, for example, Jaan Uhelszki did after writing about music in the Seventies, it’s pretty easy. Michael Thomas—not so much.
Frequent keyboardist and alternate voice here, Dave Moore has his own eponymous issues, but let’s cut to another name issue.
In 1964 a young English guy wanted to get into the performing business as a singer. Lots of folks did in those days. His first recording, a single with his teenage blues band Davie Jones and King Bees came out that year. He kept plugging away at English pop-blues to no great success, until 1967, when he had a problem.
Davie Jones is the teenager in the middle
Well, he had a couple of problems. First, no one was buying any of this records; but secondly, his performing name Davie Jones, the informal diminutive of his given name David Jones, was more-or-less the same name as the performing and birth name of much more successful performer and teen heart-throb: Davy Jones of the Monkees. So, he changed his performing name to David Bowie and remained unsuccessful for a couple more years without being confused with the Monkee or the roughly 100 other David Joneses on the Wikipedia disambiguation page.
Eventually, he got his first hit. Eventually he started changing more than his name. Eventually he helped change our culture, making some dazzling records along the way. There was an immediate experience, and then something remained to be reflected on over time.
A year ago, he died. The official launch post of the Parlando Project here last August was the tribute I choose for Bowie, my setting of Carl Sandburg’s “Stars Songs Faces” that the LYL Band recorded the day after Bowie died. Now for our 41st official Parlando Project post, here’s Dave Moore’s self-written tribute “This One’s for David Jones.” Dave recorded this the same session as we did “Stars Songs Faces.” It’s a rockin’ little number, because it seems like it’s been a bit since we rocked out. If you see it, you can click on the gadget below to hear it, or if there’s no visible gadget, this highlighted hyperlink will work too.
We’re approaching the halfway point in the Parlando Project’s first year, and my plans for 2017 are to feature more 21st century words, when and if I can get permission from publishers/authors to use them here. Today’s audio piece features words from the first “external” 21st Century author to be used here: Philip Dacey.
Philip Dacey
This year has been much commented upon for the death of musician/lyric writers, two great cultural stylists and movers, David Bowie and Prince, foremost among them. It would be careless to extend the list of 2016’s lost musician/poets for fear of who would drop off the bottom for reasons of length. After all, Merle Haggard or Phife Dog or Greg Lake mean as much or more to some listeners as Prince or Bowie. For me personally, two Fall 2016 musician/poet deaths hit me with specific force: Leonard Cohen and Mose Allison. You might have guessed that, for this is the place “Where Music and Words Meet”—though both are better composers than generally realized, both Cohen and Allison were known for their lyrics.
A Cohen and a Mose
But that’s not exactly why. You see Mose Allison and Leonard Cohen shared a writing sensibility that I particularly prize: they’re funny as hell. “Funny as hell”—not as merely the common idiom— “Funny as hell,” in that both saw clearly the fallen human limitations and made us laugh at it. Laughter can be a good teacher, and as the profoundly comic blues sensibility tries to teach us, even what we can’t learn or think our way out of can be better endured knowing that it’s not right, that it’s incongruous, illogical, unexpected—in other words, that it’s funny.
The importance of our musician/poets may be falling in the 21st Century, though the speed of that decent is hard to judge, as we, their human society, are falling too. And if we look below we see the poets of the past: Dickinson, Whitman, Keats, Blake, Frost, Sandburg, Yeats, Eluard and all their heavenly host, and Shakespeare, Sapho, Basho, Homer, Li Bai, and many more that we cannot name and have never heard. We are falling toward all of them.
not Phil Dacey
And Philip Dacey falls with us, and he smiles “Look, we are all falling.”
Dacey too is funny as hell. So if you are coming to this podcast from a musician/poet listenership, you could think of Philip Dacey as a Midwestern Leonard Cohen without all the sackcloth and ashes; or that Dacey is Mose Allison without the constantly modulating piano. And there’s another difference: Dacey’s poems find forgiveness more consistently and honestly than Cohen or Allison, or most any other writer.
We are all falling, and Philip Dacey falls with us, and he says “I’ll bet there is an end to this fall, but who knows?”
Butterly: Upon Mistyping Butterfly is a love poem based on simple mistake (as love sometimes is). Phil, like Leonard Cohen—but like Phil—wrote a great many love poems. This one is uncomplicated (as love sometimes is). Mose Allison, wrote far fewer love songs, though I can think of one that is goofy and joyful, like these words of Dacey’s.
It’s not a coincidence that I put my remembrance of Philip Dacey as one of the first Parlando posts, because when I heard that Phil had died I was working on gathering, performing, and producing material for the Parlando Project. I’m grateful for the permission to present the LYL Band performing my reading of this poem of Phil’s. If you like this, you may want to seek out one of Philip Dacey’s books or read more about him online at the philipdacey.com web site. If you’d like a taste of how Phillip Dacey presented his poems, there is a 30-minute video of a late reading by him here.
To hear the LYL Band perform Butterly: Upon Mistyping Butterfly, click on the gadget you’ll see below.
Ok, did everyone read those “click here to read” user agreements for their new gift gadgets, software, and computers? Good, because we’re going to have a little fun with them this time.
I suppose the purpose those ubiquitous agreements is to disabuse the user of any assumptions they may have about that new thing they now “own”. Will it work? Can you do with it what you will? Will it be fair and understanding to you? Does the software or device know about Asimov’s laws of robotics—even though those laws won’t be written down for another 41 years? Have I given up my money, privacy and self-respect for the price of a free app? The agreement will let you know that the answer to all but the last question is “no.”
He didn’t click “Accept”
It occurs to me that poets have been doing the same thing for a long time, intrinsically restricting their subject’s and reader’s rights in various ways, but they don’t even bother with the user agreement. So, let’s fix this right now!
Today’s audio piece, User Agreement for this Poem, spells out those expectations with the LYL Band providing the musical setting. To hear it, you can click on the gadget that will appear below. Please click, but acceptance is optional.
Frank Hudson 