Margaret Widdemer

The House of Ghosts

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s been a busy week at the Parlando Project studio as I record more Halloween-themed songs freshly made by combining other people’s words (usually literary poetry in the public domain) with original music in differing styles. Let us go to the lab and see what’s on the slab.

Last dark-and-stormy-night-time we had a poem that started with someone at a household’s door asking to be let in. Waif or wraith? Therein lies that tale. Today we again have a piece that starts at a doorway — but the tale-teller here lets themselves in. What do they find there? Well, that’s the song.

The words I used today originated with a poem by early 20th century American writer Margaret Widdemer. While Widdemer is little remembered now, she was a successful presence in the literature of her day. And while the Parlando Project does the everlasting Greatest Hits of Poetry sometimes, I also like digging through old poetry collections and anthologies looking for overlooked poems and poets. Such “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore” reading let me find Widdemer, and one thing that drew me to her was that she seemed to have absorbed some stuff from the folk-music collectors of her time — for example, this eerie poem of hers that builds on the “Lyke Wake Dirge”  presented here six years ago.

One thing that folk-music tradition teaches us: the singer is free to change and adapt the song that was handed down to them. Entirely new words or new music may be applied. Verse order, much less exact wording is not sacrosanct. Instead, a good fit for the singer and the audience (these being the folk in folk-music) is the guiding force. Most composers who work in the Art-Song form are compelled to keep the text unaltered, and while I’m not of that tradition, I most often present the poet’s words as they published them for the silent page. But, for today’s piece I substantially altered Widdemer’s poem to make what I hope is a more effective song.

House of Ghosts

Widdemer’s poem is linked here if you’d like to see the “before” to my substantial revision.

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I started with a simple change: I created a refrain based on the initial verse of Widdemer’s original text when I found it ineffective for audience grabbing. In other revisions and additions, I sought to sharpen the “build” of the story’s details, and I excised antique words and diction that added no charm.

Musically I recorded a late-night laid-back Rock combo of two electric guitars, electric piano, bass, and drums for my resulting song. Here’s the chord sheet in case you’d like to play your own rendition. That’s also the in the folk-music tradition: the song shouldn’t belong to only one voice.

To hear the way I played and sang it you can use the audio player below. What? Has no audio player gadget materialized on your screen?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player then.

I plan to be back soon with an entirely different, more orchestral ensemble for the next piece in our 2024 Halloween series. Should I act like a YouTubber or Substack author and urge you to subscribe for this upcoming content?*

No, I’ll leave you as a free agent on that decision. This Project goes beyond non-profit — it is by design no-profit. I just love diverse music and poetry and get a kick out of exploring what’s possible. I have nothing to sell and would avoid anything that is paid by the click, because I have no makeup to be a small-businessman.** But my self-regard (or desire to promote a range of poetry) likes seeing viewers and listeners. Sharing this stuff on social media, or just telling a friend, will help keep this going.

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*The Parlando Project started as a short-form podcast, one sans the usual blather, paid-for-promotions, and between-host jocularity — presenting instead our typically 2-5 minute musical pieces unadorned. It turns out that podcast audiences prefer one-to-two hours of gab — but if you want a break between the talkers in your podcast app, you can still subscribe to the Parlando Project on Apple Podcasts or most other popular ways to get podcasts.

I don’t believe I misunderstand those who appreciate the typical podcast format. I sometimes listen to podcasts while cleaning or fixing something with my hands. Alas, as a person who spends much of their time reading, composing, playing, recording, and mixing music, my own ears are usually occupied, and so I lack time to partake.

**I admire small-business people in general — and yes, I appreciate how hard it is for musicians, composers, and writers to make even a meagre living these days. While I work at this Project like someone with a small-business enterprise, I’m just not suited to bookkeeping, form-filling, and tax-law lane-keeping.

The Dark Cavalier

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Long time readers here will know I’ve referred several times to an observation by former US Poet Laureate Donald Hall that I’ve called Donald Hall’s Law. Here’s how I’ve recorded what Hall wrote:

The majority of poets who receive prizes, notice and ample publication in their time, will be unread 20 years after their death.

If they are unread at 20 years post-mortem, their fate beyond that rarely changes, save by scattered efforts like this weird Project and its versatile readers and listeners. So, today’s piece is by one such awarded and forgotten poet, Margaret Widdemer. I can’t really claim that Widdemer is a great talent awaiting rediscovery. I fear some antiquated elements in her poetry make reading her in large doses more of an academic exercise. As an indifferent scholar with many other tasks in this project, I can only say I’ve skimmed her work. Yet, per Hall’s Law, she was a prolific oft-published prize winner. Widdemer was first published as a novelist in 1915, and in the silent film era several of her novels were adapted into movies. Her poetry has several modes and subjects, and she wrote selections dealing with social issues, including child labor and women’s suffrage. Perhaps the height of her prize-winning resume came fairly early, when she tied Carl Sandburg in the voting for the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, becoming the co-winner that year. Anyone who knows me knows I maintain that Sandburg is due for a reappraisal — but if Sandburg’s undervalued, he at least has a current value. If Widdemer was his peer in 1919, her stock has long ago dropped off the literary stock exchange.

Widdemer’s Pulitzer Prize winning poetry collection was The Old Road to Paradise,  and it contained a representative mix of what I’ve seen while skimming her poetry. She writes rhymed verse, and her poems often seem to have music implied in their structure and prosody — you could class many of them as literary ballads or songs. Despite this structure, I’m unaware that she’s been commonly set to music by composers.*

At least to me, the most interesting of Widdemer’s work combines that “just asking for a musical setting” structure with strong fantasy elements.**  Given that fantasy literature retains cultural interest in the present day, these Widdemer poems are the ones that might have revival interest. Today’s selection “The Dark Cavalier,”  included in her Pulitzer book, is one such poem. Furthermore, if it was written more recently and set to music, we’d easily see it genre-wise as Goth. It certainly risks being disturbing, the poem being spoken by a seductive Death who wishes to lure the weary or troubled listener to settle for his stable and grave-set romance. The poem’s outlook is such that one could feel that reprints should have footnotes about the 988 number established for those dealing with suicidal thoughts. Yet it seems to be one of the relatively-known of her nearly-unknown works, and it was selected in 1958 as the title for a late selected poems collection.

Dark Cavalier

I didn’t know Widdemer married a cellist when I composed this, but this setting is acoustic guitar with a simple string quartet accompaniment.

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In musical performance I tried to undercut the poem’s speaker’s luring spiel, to bring out a little of the subsumed caddishness in a suitor who offers an everlasting relationship, when we know, that even for prize-winning poets, their attention will quickly fade.

You can hear my performance of the musical setting I did for Margaret Widdemer’s “The Dark Cavalier”  with the audio player gadget you may see below. No player to be seen? Some ways of reading this blog will suppress that player, so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Widdemer married the year she received the Pulitzer. Her husband was also a prolific author, but it’s also said he was a proficient cellist who wrote book-length biographies of composers.

**One recent reader noted that she wrote a poem about a “Gray Magician” in “Middle Earth” before Tolkien, which indicates that Widdemer may have had some knowledge like JRRT did of Old English. I also suspect that she must have been aware of the revival of interest in older British Isles folk-music by Cecil Sharp, Francis James Child, et al.

Full Moon

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Our last poet, Margaret Widdemer seems to have done most of her adventuring in fantasy, but today’s poet, Elinor Wylie—well, she caused quite a scandal in the pre-WWI years. Widdemer may have dreamed of cavaliers and wearing leather in a traveling Romany wagon; but for Wylie, there’s biography!  Elinor Wylie grew up in Washington D. C. the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt’s Solicitor General and infatuated with the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which, as we’ll see, could be a bit of a leading indicator. Elinor Wylie started right off by eloping with another would-be poet, Phillip Hichborn, shortly after high school. They had a child, but the match was not good, and the brief accounts I’ve read report the husband as “unstable” and “abusive.” Next, her story gets weirder. An older millionaire lawyer Horace Wylie, also married, began to, as Wikipedia puts it, stalk her. Again, I lack details, but he apparently followed her about, taking care to show up often wherever she was. I’m not familiar with dating etiquette for married people in the pre-WWI era, but this sort of thing began to attract notice.

Bad marriage. Stalker. What to do, Elinor? She ditched her husband and fled to England with the stalker. Now we have full-fledged scandal. They hid out in jolly old for a while under assumed names. President Taft reportedly made efforts to bring her back. Eventually Horace Wiley got a divorce, Elinor’s first husband Phillip committed suicide, and WWI broke out in Europe. The run-away couple returned to the US, got married, and settled in New England where according to one biographer “Shopkeepers boycotted her, and she could buy no food. People began to turn away from her in the street. [The Wylies] were ignored in the worst way possible.”

Back in the US, the marriage to Horace Wylie soured too. She was to have one more marriage, this time to Stephen Vincent Benet’s brother William Rose Benet. They eventually separated, but Benet continued to promote her literary efforts, until in 1928 at the age of 43, the writer, still writing under the name of Elinor Wylie, died instantly of a stroke at Benet’s home while looking over pre-publication galleys of her last poetry collection with him.

Eilinor Wylie by Carl von Vechten

Elinor Wylie, clean bones crying in the flesh

 

All that folly of love in one short life! Did she manage to produce any poetry worth noting? From a look at her first collection, written largely while she was still married to Horace, I found her poetry more immediately attractive when read in the present day than Widdemer’s work. It’s very concise, and often considerably musical. You can see the influence of Shelley in the intense feelings and in some of the elaborate word choices. During her lifetime, the musicality of her verse (like Teasdale, like Millay) was noticed and admired, but like all three of these skilled singers on the page, High Modernism eventually discounted that element of poetry and looked for grander, more elaborately worked-out themes. And, to be frank, it also seemed to be looking for men. Mid-Century Modernism was a boys club.

Unlike Shelley, when time and death wore out the notoriety, the poet was more or less forgotten.

“Full Moon”  shows Wylie’s concise intensity well, and it shows a flair for visceral imagery too. In search of music or from love of obscure words, Wylie crafts lines that sound great even if one must keep a dictionary window open to grasp their gist. The poem as vocabulary test, a bit Wallace Stevens-like. Lines such as “My bands of silk and miniver momentarily grew heavier” and “Harlequin in lozenges” start the first two stanzas. Miniver? I think only of a Greer Garson movie. It’s a fur coat lining. Harlequin, a stock pantomime clown/fool character sure, but what’s with the lozenges, is the harlequin mute because of a sore throat? Nope, lozenges also means diamond shaped, the traditional harlequin costume has a diamond pattern.

nicoMarbleElinor Full Moon Album Cover

Harmoniums without Wallace Stevens: Nico and Elinor Wylie

 

What’s it all mean? It’s not hard for me to see Wylie’s biography in this, the experience of being seen as the bad woman, shunned and condemned. I made a mistake in performing this, singing “carnal mask” instead of the more perfect rhyme Wylie wrote: “carnal mesh.” I noted it right off and tried to sing the verse again, correctly, but I ended up liking the mistake and left it in. Musically, a Nico solo record from the mid-20th Century vibe came out, as I could hear Nico singing something like “harlequin in lozenges” and getting away with it a half-century after Wylie. To hear my performance of Elinor Wylie’s “New Moon”  use the player below.

When I Was a Young Girl

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

When I look at a more well-known poet or poem, I often find someone else less well-remembered connected with them. This sort of thing naturally intrigues me. Are we overlooking something of interest? Does this lesser-known person change our understanding of the more well-known poet?

I’ve noted earlier this month that Carl Sandburg won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1918 collection Cornhuskers—but that’s not the full story. For some reason, they decided to give out two awards for poetry that year, and another poet’s 1918 work was the co-recipient: Margaret Widdemer’s Old Road to Paradise.

Huh? Who?

I don’t aim this project to literary scholars, who likely know more than I do about the poets whose words I use, but there are indications that Widdemer’s name would stump them too, even those whose field includes the Modernist era. From a look through Widdemer’s Old Road to Paradise  this can be partly ascribed to Widdemer not writing in the Modernist style that triumphed as the century continued. Furthermore, Widdemer’s outlook, though feminist, is middle-class and lacks the bohemian allure of Millay or even Sara Teasdale (the poetry winner the previous year). As time passes, rebels and poètes maudite often retain their outsider excitement while losing their air of present danger, and Widdemer offers none of that. And while I’m hesitant to judge from a skim through one book, a further issue is that she may not be very good.

pre-war-lady-by-margaret-widdemer

Widdemer also had a successful career as a popular novelist between the wars.

 

Particularly for me, and for the Parlando Project, Millay and Teasdale’s words just want to sing off the page. Widdemer’s, though rhymed and following metrical schemes, generally don’t. There is a flatness to subject matter and a conventionality of imagery that fails to grab me as well. I would have loved to have picked up Old Road to Paradise  and found something as interesting as Fenton Johnson, Edward Thomas, or Anne Spencer; but not this time.

Margaret-Widdemer
Margaret Widdemer

 

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. Widdemer seems a level-headed person, and she is writing from a woman’s point of view that has fewer representations in the literary cannon of her era. What little I know of her biography says she worked to advance poetry and literary efforts. Could I find something to use? As I paged through Old Road to Paradise   I marked “When I Was a Young Girl”  as a possibility.

Why did this one stand out? It seems based on a folk song, but while it takes lines and tropes from folk songs, it presents an alternative viewpoint to the songs it borrows from. Since the post-WWII folk song revival, folk song has been even further associated with bohemianism and adventuresome living, even though the traditional texts used most often tell of sad ends.

From its title and often refrained first line, the folk song we can most easily connect with Widdemer’s poem is the female version of “The Unfortunate Rake”  a 17th Century song with dozens of popular folk song variations, including the American cowboy song “The Streets of Laredo.”  With the “When I Was a Young Girl”  title it’s been sung by Feist and Marlon Williams, and back in the 20th Century by Julie Driscoll and Nina Simone. The general plot of these variations is that a young person is dying after a short, intense life of drink and venereal disease. The too short life of pleasure is valorized even if the song’s singer often remarks that they know they are doomed to hell. No wonder this song has remained popular—both sinners and saints, and listeners on a journey from either pole to the other, can find something in the tale!

Widdemer starts as some of these folk songs do, by telling of the excitement of their youth before the song’s present moment, though in her more circumspect telling, the young girl’s adventures are in daydreams and fantasies, including (in another folk song reference), a longing to run off with the “raggle-taggle gypsies.”

I used a minor key melody for this, not unlike that used in the folk song. I won’t spoil the ending Widdemer puts on her version of this story by foretelling it here, but it’s not where that folk song and its variations take you. To hear it, use the player below.