marriage

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.

Susan Partain Hudson’s Anniversary Poem

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Hudson and Susan Partain Mariage cert 600

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

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

David and Susan Hudson's Family with 11 kids 768

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

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

Susan Hudson's Annivesary poem-song chords

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward Thomas’ “Song”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

1913. 110 years ago. Two people met in England and called each other poets. One of them you might know: Robert Frost. He was almost 40 and hadn’t been making a calling as a poet in America. The other was a British man four years younger who wrote prose furiously as a freelancer for pay, “Burning my candle on three ends” as he described it. That freelancer was Edward Thomas. Some of the freelancer’s work was literary reviews, and unlike American editors and gatekeepers, Thomas admired Frost’s work. Within a year, Frosts first poetry collection, North of Boston, would be published in England and Thomas’ appreciation of Frost’s talent helped make it a success.

A little log-rolling for the work of a nascent poet who just happened to be a friend? Well, Frost’s slim volume included “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “The Wood Pile,” “Home Burial,”  and “After Apple-Picking.”   The evidence says that many readers know these poems over a century later without knowing the man. Friendship aside, Thomas recognized a poet worth consideration.

In looking at some of Thomas’ prose work-for-hire, Frost told Thomas that his close attention, particularly of the book of nature, was the stuff of poetry. Frost also thought Thomas already showed a grasp of musical cadence in his prose writing that was like Frost’s theory of poetic word-music. Neither man was one for high-flown language or trite metaphors — things that were present in much poetry being published then in English. Both men knew the complexity of human acts and emotions. And both men shared something else: they suffered from depression, suffered this in periods of greater or lesser depth.*

Thomas’ hard work as a freelancer was to support his wife and a young family who he loved — but that relationship, that feeling was not simple. He tried to keep some of his demons from his wife to spare her, and while I’m not knowledgeable of all the details, he had at least “emotional affairs” with others which his broadminded wife understood as helpful in keeping Edward Thomas’ spirits up.**

Edward and Helen Thomas

Edward and Helen Thomas. The iconography of a couple with one looking off to the side is inescapable.

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Within a year of meeting Frost, taking Frost at his word, Thomas began writing poetry. He wrote it just as furiously as his reviews, criticism, or hack work. In his first six months as a new poet Thomas wrote 75 poems. Beyond that quantity, when reading his collected poems I’m struck by how fresh even his early work seems when I read it against most of his British contemporaries. Many of Thomas’ peers of this era knew how to score points technically, and which images and plots would elevate their verse to seem professionally poetic. Thomas (and Frost) don’t seem to care as much for scoring well on the required figures and rules. Even the beginning Thomas’ word-music in English is attractive, his expression rarely seems hampered by a too-tight fitting prosody.

Today’s early piece, which he called simply “Song,”  is an example. Here’s a link to the text if you’d like to read along.  A short lyric that sings off the page should not seem  difficult to do for its reader or listener — but in deed,  it is hard to do. This paradox is a big part of pulling the trick off. Though printed in quatrains, “Song”  is approximately Alexandrines. Rhyme connoisseurs make note that “June/tune” and “sigh/die” have triteness demerits, but the opening pair “beautiful/invincible” delights me. And I believe a somewhat too-common rhyme is forgivable if the matter of the poem is fresh enough.

Without being an expert on Thomas’ life, I’m going to assume this is a poem to his wife. Invincible happiness would build a wall in many relationships with a depressive, yet that difference is acknowledged in the poem, yet accepted. The “She laughs” “I sigh” refrained pairing reinforces this difference. The spoiler cuckoo is a bird known in folklore and folksong as a bird of inconstant love and cuckoldry. Yet the poem says that the couple love each other unto death, as they summarily did in life. In matter, this is one of those rarer love poems that speaks of long-term committed lovers fitting themselves together despite seeming incompatibilities.

The poem’s refraining nature makes it attractive for casting into song, and so that is what I did. I even increased that factor by repeating the 3rd stanza also between the 1st and 2nd verses. I also set my composer-self a limitation in writing the music: to try to effectively use only some of the simplest and most common chord colors in my chord sequence. All major chords, no minors. No suspended chords dropping the third. You can hear how it came out as I perform it as a piano trio with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? This link is an alternative that will open a new tab with an audio player.

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*Again, I’m no expert on Thomas nor psychology, but the periods of high output and the periods of suicidal depression suggest bipolar.

**Not being overly knowledgeable on the marriage, I can see how some feminist analysis could have different insights and conclusions on this. All my scattered reading says this cluster of friendships was complicated, and that’s enough to give background into why this love poem isn’t one to file in the more common desire thwarted/satiated, muse, heartbreak, or betrayal folders. And yes, Frost’s marriage too had elements of a long-suffering spouse and family tragedy.

The River Merchant’s Wife, Another Letter

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

What if you were to find out that a famous, much-loved poem was not a singleton, but that it was instead part of a pair?

“The River Merchant’s Wife, A Letter”  is perhaps the most famous Chinese poem in English, and it’s been widely anthologized since Ezra Pound published it in his 1915 collection of translations Cathay.  It’s not hard to see why. It’s a lovely piece of free verse, and though it holds to the Modernist style of showing not telling its sentiments, most readers can easily divine the emotions of the young wife displayed in the poem, separated and longing for her partner.

Be patient with me, reader. I feel I must deal with a few peripheral issues with this poem, which I too admire, for as close as it is to many of its readers’ hearts, there are a few issues. While it’s reasonably frank in its Imagist way about a woman’s desire, one could look at it as an endorsement of patriarchal marriage, rather than a portrayal of two people at a particular moment of time.*  One could conclude that the woman’s agency in the poem is limited to the feelings her tale evokes in us.

If you, like I’m sure some readers here and elsewhere are, seeking art as a break from social issues, there is also a literary issue, one of the nature of translation. I would discuss even more things I happen to think about when I consider this famous poem, but to keep this post to a reasonable length, I’ll just speak to the translation controversy.

Pound wasn’t a Chinese scholar, didn’t speak the language, and didn’t have any knowledge in depth about the history or culture of that vast country. What he was instead was a poet who had what musicians call, and I’ll repeat with punning intent, “great chops.” Particularly at the time literary Modernism was getting underway in the early 20th century, he had a sense of how to pare things back, to express something vital minus a lot of useless extra baggage. Pound likely recognized a kindred spirit in Li Bai,**  the 8th century Chinese poet, and so thought it all right to speak for him in English.***  The poem he produced from Li Bai’s work is a loose translation, missing nuance that more informed scholars find in the original. There have been other attempts at better, or at least more accurate translations. None have produced as widely an effective poem.

But it was in looking at that this past week, while trying to better understand Li Bai’s work and intents, that I had a remarkable discovery. It was probably around midnight, when I should have been sleeping, reading a .PDF scan of a 1922 book of Li Bai translations by Shigeyoshi Obata.****  His translation of the poem Pound made famous is rendered as “Two Letters from Chang-Kan,” the first of which is Obata’s rendering of “The River Merchant’s Wife, a Letter.”   But, But But—what!   There’s another letter!  Did Li Bai intend this to be from another persona, another river merchant’s wife, or is it a second letter written by the same character? Either could make sense. The situation is the same, absent traveling merchant partner, young wife left at home. The speaker’s mood has similarities to the well-known poem too, but there are differences. In my reading of more Li Bai poetry this month I’ve come to believe that he works in subtle associations, subtle parallels, implied metaphors not necessarily made into explicit similes.

Partch-Li Bai-Pound

Harry Partch kicks out the jams, Li Bai considers the abyss, Ezra Pound looking like he’s ready to write yet another crank letter to the editor

 

In this poem, the speaker is a bit more angry with the situation and more wary. She’s not fallen out of love, no, but her expressions seem to mix frank longing for her missing partner, with suspicion that it might not be mutual. Was Li Bai contrasting two women, or expressing that the human heart can hold all those emotions at once?

I’m indebted to Obata for making this Li Bai poem known, and since I know of no other translations, I based my version I use today on his English language one—though I, like Pound but having only my own talents—took liberties. I wanted to tell a story that worked as a song, one that would pull the listener in and bring forward in both the text and performance the wider meaning of what is said by the river merchant’s wife in this purported letter. So, my version has a stronger if not strict meter, occasional rhymes, and I try to emphasize those parallels that serve as images that I think are part of Li Bai’s poetic sense-making. Parallelism, refrains, rhymes—these are all musical tactics that can work to bring some things to the foreground that were undercurrents in Obata’s version of Li Bai.

My performance of what I call “The River Merchant’s Wife, Another Letter”  is available with the player gadget below. As this is already a long and much-delayed post, I’m not including texts yet for this, but I hope the performance will work in its way.

 

 

 

 

*I’m sure some have written critiques on this basis, because there is matter there for this, including that the wife is a teenager (though the poem indicates the husband is roughly the same age.) I wonder if anyone has written that the husband’s absence is based on the needs of commerce, asking if this is a veiled attack on capitalism or a cultured acceptance of it?

**Li Bai is the now preferred way to write the poet’s name in western characters. Many works of Pound’s time use a different scheme to render the same poet’s name as Li Po. There are more variations too. Same guy. Confusing.

***Yes, one of the things I could talk about, instead of getting on to the pleasure of the resulting poetry, would be the cultural appropriation in that assumption. Big subject, worthy of a longer treatment.

****The Works of Li Po the Chinese poet done into English verse.  Obata was of Japanese heritage, but writes he had access to Chinese-speaking friends and other resources while studying at the University of Wisconsin. When he encounters Cathay  he realized Pound’s artistry, but also knew how loose Pound’s translations were, and how they missed certain cultural nuances. “I confess that it was Mr. Pound’s little book that exasperated me and at the same time awakened me to the realization of new possibilities so that I began seriously to do translations myself.” Despite reading both Arthur Waley and Pound’s Chinese translations as a young man, I had never heard of Obata, and there is little available in Internet searches to indicate he made any lasting impact—save for one thing: his translations have been used for settings of Li Bai poems by Constant Lambert and Harry Partch, which seems like remarkably rich company to the likes of me.

Monotone

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I love me some early short-form Carl Sandburg. Oh, I can enjoy him in his lengthy Whitmanesque catalog mode and I surely appreciate his too little recognized work in forging what we more recently call Americana, but in much of his early work he’s writing in a mode that people often forget. It’s similar to some of the other early Modernists before the High Modernist style absorbed that revolution and used it to make a complex and literary bureaucracy of allusions and images that were more showy and complex on the surface.

If you have a moment, look at “Monotone,”  a nine-line poem, linked here. How easy it would be to overlook this poem. There’s no exotic words or settings, and the images seem to risk falling into the banal. What’s there? A rainfall, a sunrise and a sunset. If most of us were to put those as the major images in a poem, our poems would likely fail to seem unique in any worthwhile way, or we’d stress and strain to make them unique. I myself might reach for the surreal or the odd detail because I would think I was otherwise making a poem with no worthwhile freshness. And perhaps Sandburg fails in that way for some readers here. What is he risking that failure to convey?

In these nine lines he wants to write a love poem of the least common kind. Poems of desire, poems of the kind of overthrow of the senses and proportion that new love brings, poems of enchantment with possibility—those are legion. And they’re worthwhile. Love and desire, like other visionary states, illuminate things we are otherwise unable to believe. Some of those things are true and some are false, some are the painful disguised as beautiful. They proclaim for us to give ourselves and give up ourselves.

Sandburg’s “Monotone”  isn’t that. It’s a lyric poem of a long-time relationship. Even its title dares to be unexciting. Monotone word-wise is near enough to monotony, and musically who would be attracted to a piece that claims that as its title?

The poem’s opening image makes an argument for musical monotone. A rainstorm has no melodic invention, but if listened to without seeking that quality and being disappointed that it lacks this, it has dynamics of volume and rhythm. Listen to what’s there, not to what’s missing  the first stanza asks of us, and we’ll find the “multitudinous rain.” This is not a showy stanza, but since multitudinous is by far the least common word in the poem, that one ornament stands out all the more. Even if one remembers only those two words “multitudinous rain,” one can carry it with ourselves and experience rain in new ways while thinking on that phrase on some grey and otherwise unappealing day.

Is the second stanza banal? If you think so I can’t give you an argument that’ll refute you. Yes, the sun on the hills is beautiful, and sunset over seas too. Thank you very much Carl Obvious Sandburg, but why have you wasted our time with those three lines about what everyone has already noticed. What value might they have? Well, for one they are  common. Carl Sandburg is fully baptized in the belief of a common humanity, so the fact that he states what we all know isn’t quite the sin that another artist might abhor. What Sandburg does with these commonplaces is to let us know there’s something we still don’t know about them, even when we think they’re too prosaic to have anything yet to perceive. In those few words in the second three-line stanza there is the notion that the sunset (precious, golden fire) is captured by the cold sea. So easy to overlook if we read it like a prose paragraph, assuming only quick utility. If one had to translate this from a foreign language, if this was written in Chinese ideograms, perhaps we’d slow down and see this. The beautiful in the guise of the desired, is captured, is quenched, rises and sets.

Now the third, three-line stanza concludes this book of changes, bringing synthesis to the previous two. Beholding one’s long-time partner, one sees the multitudinous monotone rain and  the moments of passion or anger, unease or loss, joined. With the “Monotone”  title at the head and the ending line I read that sunny mountain scene and picture postcard sea-sunset of the second stanza as being measured against a rarer and more precious multitudinous rain of long-love.

With this simple concise expression of a complex feeling, the poem requests you to see that. In 1916 when this was published in Sandburg’s Chicago Poems  its very simplicity was still audacious, and that itself made the case for this poem. In a generation or so it would seem to not be trying hard enough to capture our attention. While poetry was free to leave strict meter and reliable rhyme schemes behind, it had returned to an aesthetic of surface complexity equaling merit.

Carl and Lillian Sandburg by Edward Steichen

Espoused. Carl and Lillian Sandburg around the time “Monotone” was published. Photograph by Lillian’s brother, the photographer Edward Steichen. Earlier, inn 1908 Sandburg wrote “I would rather be a poem like you than write poems,” but we got the multitudinous rain of his poetry anyway.

 

A few words on the musical setting before I remind you that you can click on the player gadget to hear my performance of Sandburg’s “Monotone.”  As I composed this I was concentrating more on timbre and less on melody. The dominant keyboard sound in the piece is a complex combination of a grand piano with every bit of string resonance brought forward, an electric piano, and a keyboard piano bass (that last a sound mostly known from Ray Manzarek’s playing with the Doors). It’s kind of the idea of the “Hard Day’s Night”  chord being used throughout the piece. this is another composition where it would probably be better if I wasn’t the vocalist who sings it, but that’s who I have available. Listen to it with the gadget below.

 

Sara Teasdale’s I Am Not Yours or the Love Song of Ernst Filsinger

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Sara Teasdale wrote some of the saddest love poems I’ve ever read.

Less-well remembered than she should be, for a time about 100 years ago Teasdale was the most popular and esteemed love poet in America. In 1918 she won the Pulitzer prize for a new collection of her poetry, labeled right there on the cover with the title “Love Songs.”

Harriet Monroe, the founder and editor of Poetry,  the indispensable American poetry journal of the day, said of Teasdale “She was as delicate as a lily, but under the white-petaled perfume one felt in her presence an impassioned intensity of feeling which her brief lyrics were then beginning to express.”

So, what did Teasdale know about love? More and less than you might expect. Born in 1884 in a wealthy and religiously conservative St. Louis family, she was protected and sheltered* until she was nearly 30 when her poetry career took her away from St. Louis to New York and Chicago.

As her poetry expresses, she dearly wanted to fall deeply in love, but she also wanted the independence to write, and though she moved in bohemian circles during a time of great social change, she’d internalized some of her family’s conservative values.

Romantic stories revel in love triangles, but Sara Teasdale, the woman who’d get the Pulitzer Prize as a love poet was about to deal with a love rhombus. She was crushing on a young poet she admired, John Hall Wheelock. She told Wheelock he was “The greatest living poet.” He wasn’t, though he was flattered. Wheelock, like Teasdale’s family, was a bit of a blue-blood, and he respected Teasdale’s poetic talents, but he was not interested in marrying her.

Then there was Vachel Lindsay, a literary phenom of the time, who had vagabonded about the U.S. trading his poems for meals and then bootstrapped that into touring the country’s speaking halls giving flamboyant readings of his chanted poetry. Lindsay, unlike Wheelock, wanted to marry Teasdale, and he plied his troth by dedicating books of his poetry to her**, but the reserved and sheltered Teasdale was both intimidated by his bluster and worried about his ability to provide the kind of stable home that would allow her to continue writing.

Who’s the fourth rhombus side? A St. Louis businessman, Ernst Filsinger. Like the other two, Filsinger appreciated Teasdale’s poetry, and like Lindsay he wanted to marry her. Problem solved? Well, Teasdale wanted to be deeply, mutually in love, and she wasn’t sure she loved Filsinger that much.

Sara Teasdale's Love Rhombus

Tuning up for her Pulitzer-winning “Love Songs” Teasdale was tempering her intonation with three men.

 

Wheelock says that Teasdale asked him to decide who she should marry. “You know Vachel. I want you to meet Ernst. And I want you to tell me what to do. Which of these two good men should I marry? Should I marry Vachel Lindsay, who’s a genius and whose poetry I love? Or should I marry this fine, tall, dark, good-looking businessman who seems to care for my poetry?”

Wheelock may not have been the greatest living poet in 1914, but he seems a sensible sort of guy.*** He says he told Teasdale she  must make the choice. She replied that no, he had to tell her which to marry, that she wouldn’t blame him if anything went wrong. OK, he said, he didn’t see her being happy with Lindsay “I don’t think you are one who could live in the kitchen doing all the housework and scrubbing the floors.”

She married Filsinger.

The next year she published the poem I used for today’s piece “I Am Not Yours”  in a collection titled Rivers to the Sea,  whose title came from a poem by Wheelock. “I Am Not Yours”  also appears in her  Love Songs  collection that won the Pulitzer.

It’s possible to read this poem quickly and read it as a crush poem, a supple lyric about being madly in love with someone, where the title and opening phrase is poised rhetorically in the moment before love’s inevitable consummation will occur, as a poem written by someone who realizes her autonomy, but is willing to submit it to overwhelming passion. Teasdale’s poetry was not just prize-winning, it was popular in its time. Someone might read this poem at a wedding. It’s likely that Teasdale, who wrote this the same month as she married, wrote it thinking of hers.

Go ahead, listen to it now. Here’s the player gadget.

 

 

So how did things turn out for the Sara Teasdale love rhombus?

Wheelock lived until 1973. In his memoir of his life in publishing he said that the best way to edit poets is to not edit them. “If a person needs to have his poems edited, then he’s not a poet, because poets are perfectionists, and by the time they get through with all their agonizing work on a poem, either they’ve ruined it by revising too much or it’s the way it should be.” He’d tried to apply that principle to Teasdale’s marriage choice.

Vachel Lindsay may have been too odd and flawed to ever last long, but the Eliot and Pound wing of cultured expatriate High Modernism crushed him by the late 20s, and the mid-century New Criticism could barely bother with the effort to find the grievous lapses in good taste in his “higher vaudeville.” In 1931, depressed by his inability to keep his debts at bay as his touring revenue dried up, he drank Lysol and killed himself.

At first Sara Teasdale’s marriage seemed to work. Filsinger allowed her to concentrate on her writing, but she eventually felt the loss of not being lost in passion. In 1929, while Filsinger was overseas on a business trip, she headed west to a state with easier divorce laws and informed him by telegram. By the Thirties, Teasdale’s lyricism and complex emotional content fell out of favor with High Modernism/the New Criticism too.**** The poet who had won the Pulitzer Prize for a book called Love Songs  felt unloved and forgotten. A little over a year after Lindsay’s death, she took an overdose of prescription meds and died in a filled bathtub.

And Ernst Filsinger? No one cares for the biographies of businessmen much after they die. We are not likely to sing the book he authored Exporting to Latin America  to music decades later. His obituary claimed he gave the first transatlantic after-dinner speech by radio in 1929, speaking from Berlin to the National Foreign Trade Council sitting in Baltimore. Who now notes what he said? He died in China in 1937. In his memoir, Wheelock says he heard Filsinger too committed suicide, but I have no confirmation of that. Is it possible that he, Prufrock-like, heard the mermaids singing, but pointedly, personally knew they had, at least once, sang for him?

Even if we largely ignore it, we store away beautiful things like prize-winning lyric poetry, so we can read and hear what Sara Teasdale wrote the month she married. Listen again to “I Am Not Yours”  or read it here. Looking to be the I that is I, but longing to get lost in love and knowing she was not, speaking of her light, a mere candle lit at noon, and asking for it to be plunged, put out.

As you read this, I tell you again that the first duty of an artist is to survive

Love poetry if it’s any good is as varied and complex as love is, as life is. Sara Teasdale wrote some of the saddest love poems I’ve ever read.

 

 

 

*Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Teasdale also had some kind of long-standing (and hard to diagnose via remote historical methods) illnesses. This only increased the family’s protectiveness.

**Another admiring poet who dedicated work to Teasdale was Witter Bynner. Bynner was gay.

***Wheelock eventually had a long career in publishing, and he prided himself with befriending, scouting and signing poets from Louise Bogan and Conrad Aiken to May Swenson and James Dickey. His memoir is The Last Romantic: A Poet Among Publishers.

****Teasdale was born in St. Louis only four years before T. S. Eliot, even if she seems like she was born to a different generation, one both before and after Eliot. Their families, though Midwestern at their birth, shared similar New England backgrounds, and Teasdale attended a private St. Louis prep school founded by Eliot’s parents, and that was located next door to Eliot’s home until he was 16. One wonders if the two young poets were aware of each other as children, but Eliot left town at 17, Teasdale’s sheltered upbringing reduced the chances of social interaction, and Teasdale’s family were staunch Baptists while the Eliots were Unitarian.

Oh, and by the way, that Prufrock of Eliot’s first great poem? Prufrock was the name of another St. Louis businessman. If Eliot considered other name options from his St. Louis youth, Filsinger was less iambic as a name. Teasdale could have sounded its own connotations, but it wouldn’t fit with measuring with coffee spoons.

How Do I Love Thee

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s the plot of a story. It’s a difficult one to tell without it sounding like a romance novel—yet as best as history knows, it’s what happened.

There was this woman who grew up in a rich family whose wealth came from exploiting slave labor in colonial Jamaica. Shortly after she reaches adulthood the family fortunes take a severe blow as Britain outlaws slavery. The men of the family might think this the work of do-gooders with their onerous regulations ruining their business, but our woman aligns with the do-gooders, holding for the abolition of slavery and writing poems for that cause. In fact, she’s a very prolific writer, and has been writing since she was near Hilda Conklin’s age. In 1840 when William Wordsworth dies, she’s even considered a British poet laureate candidate. Well no, that didn’t happen. Woman and all I suppose.

Now let’s add some more difficulties for our heroine. She’s got a long-standing opiate addiction based on a hard to diagnose and painful chronic illness. And there’s some domestic tyranny to go with all this. Her father has forbidden his children from marrying.

That stipulation seems odd. There’s one theory, one that our heroine had some belief in: she may have been creole, that is, mixed-race.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning crop

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who believed she had “African blood”

 

None the less, as a woman of letters, her writing was free, and circulated widely. Her poetry found an admirer in another poet, Robert Browning, though he was at that point less successful than our heroine. They began to correspond and fell in love. Eventually there was a dramatic elopement. Her family condemned her and disowned her, but the love match seems to have sustained her for the rest of her life.

Other than her thought that she might have an African ancestor mixed in with the atrocity of slavery*, this story, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s story, was once very well-known.

As romantic as the Elizabeth Barrett Browning/Robert Browning story was considered in its day, I can’t help but think how a supermarket tabloid or Internet gossip site would treat this today. I can see the blurb:

“Unable to shake drugs, Liz escapes abusive home with stranger!”

 

Shortly after her marriage, she wrote a series of sonnets to the love of her life. In 1850 the love sonnets were published as Sonnets from the Portuguese**,  and today’s piece is the most well-known of them. Indeed, it’s likely the most loved Victorian love poem, and no matter the excess of old-fashioned sounding “Thees” in it, it’s still hanging around as one of “Poetry’s Greatest Hits” as we approach Valentine’s Day.

Clasped_Hands_of_Robert_and_Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning_By Harriet Hosmer

Sculpture of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning’s clasped hands

 

Even if you feel too modern for it, or are concerned that the level of devotion expressed in it doesn’t seem consistent with a healthy independent self-image*** one should still be grateful for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, if only because she and the Bronte sisters were the chief models for Emily Dickinson.

To hear my performance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee,”  use the player below.

 

 

 

*This theory is not universally accepted, and as far as I know was first suggested in 1995 by Julia Markus in her book Dared and Done  about the marriage. As I read of this, I was struck by the coincidence of having just presented Jean Toomer’s striking Modernist love poem, written by another writer with ambivalence about his mixed-race ancestry.

**The collection’s title was first chosen because there were Victorian-era worries that the book, with its somewhat scandalous subject of a woman expressing agency in love, might need to be presented as a translation of an anonymous foreign author. It also referred to Robert Browning’s pet name for Elizabeth, “My little Portuguese,” likely based on her darker coloration.

***By the way, I do not recommend footnotes for any of you who may send someone a Valentine-poem.

Wild Plums

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Is love enough in dealing with matters of translation? I want to talk a bit about some issues with this, and while it may start out sounding esoteric, stay with me, I’ll end up as immediate as anything.

I’ve presented Chinese poetry here before. Collected classical Chinese poetry goes back to around the 10th Century BC, materials gathered from an oral tradition around 700 BC and written down by Confucius or his school, and also a later golden age in the 8th Century AD for literary Chinese poetry. In Western terms, that’s from the time of the Bronze Age Trojan War to the time of Homer to the European Dark Ages.

If you enjoy thinking about large amounts of time, consider those dates again, that’s 1,800 years between the time of the oldest Confucian Odes  (or the Book of Songs  as it is often called), and the time of Du Fu and Li Bai, and then over 1,200 years until now, a total of 3,000 years—enough time to get through that bookshelf of books I’ve put off reading to do this project. Or if you’re a listener and want to relate this to the oral culture of the Modern or the Bronze ages, in that 3,000 years span you could listen to every one of the 20 million tracks on Spotify 26 times each and still have time to go for a night walk in the country while trying and failing to count the stars.

Let us contemplate the differences inherent in that much time. How different was the culture of Du Fu’s time or his anonymous predecessors who sang the Book of Songs  before it was a book? I can’t even begin to compress those differences into a short post.

We sometimes speak about unchanging “human nature” when talking about such a great divide of time and place—and yet, then we turn the page (or flip to a new browser tab) and read about how technology and social changes may have significantly altered how humanity works in a decade or two. How much differently did a poet or a listener/reader evaluate, create, and experience poems then, compared to now?

Both of those conclusions could be true (essential, retained, human nature elements and change that is not slowing in velocity), each moving from opposite edges of the human experience in proportions hard to measure objectively from inside it.

Into this gap steps the translator (and in our case here, also the performer) who seeks to render the written record of these poems from a place so far away in time that great geographical distances seem minor. The task of translating a hundred-year-old poem from French to English is difficult enough—but this?

Should there be any surprise that many of these translations will seem inaccurate and differ significantly between themselves in their approximations, or that areas that would be understood by the poet or their more contemporary readers remain mysterious?

Greater scholarship and cultural knowledge than mine may help in these approximate efforts at translation and performance, but even then, one should understand the difficulties and likelihood of success. And yet I do it. I want to try to grasp this, however imperfectly, not because I am Du Fu, or his nearest like extant, but because his story is different.

I promised I’d eventually get immediate. Here’s the first level of the now: think of the occurrences in our times where a choice to use, perform, or even experience cultural expressions of our contemporaries will draw condemnation on the grounds of cultural appropriation, non-identical background tone-deafness, or of just plain laughable or painful ignorance on the part of the artist (that last often two sides of the same flaw).

Some of these are very practical objections. In financial (as opposed to artistic realms) cultural appropriation impacts people’s livelihoods. Yet there’s no Du Fu or other 8th Century Chinese man to perform his work with a closer understanding today. And Du Fu himself, as a neo-Confucian, probably realized that his appropriation of Confucius’ literary appropriation of the oral tradition Book of Songs  material would be different and inexact in his own way.

Even if we’re necessarily failing, creating in our errors a cultural “telephone game,*” if we do this humbly and with respect for our forebearers, ancient or contemporary, I believe it’s honorable work.

Wild Plums

Wild plums my wife found along the Mesabi Trail, leading me to today’s piece

 

Here’s a second here and now: I mentioned I was re-reading some translations of the Confucian Odes  because my wife sent me a copy of one of those poems in translation, the one I’ve reworked into today’s piece which I call “Wild Plums.”  This was a gift of love I received in gratitude—even if the composer/performer-with-a-pedantic-streak part of me wanted to know who translated it, and if I could find a literal raw translation for another perspective on the work.** And here I found this, which indicates that it was not intended originally in Chinese in the way the translation presents it in English. My guess is that the translator loved the word music they found in it, that repetition of the line “the plums are falling ,” and this lured them away from the original meaning.

As best the literal translation I linked above can transfer an original meaning to me, the woman who speaks in it is either claiming that she has so many suitors that a successful one will need to up his game to make the cut (a Bronze Age “No Scrubs”) or it’s a portrayal of an eligible woman who is being too picky about a husband and has driven suitable mates off.

So, the poem that my wife sent me is probably not accurately translated, and yet it expresses something that was engendered in the translator by it, and by the caroms of life that bounced off my wife and to me. And that poem’s yearning, and the music of it in English has its own beauty, like the love that brought it to me.

And so that is what I adapted and performed. I’ve even added some additional refrains to further emphasize the musicality of the piece. To listen to the LYL Band’s musical version of this very old poem in it’s more romantic guise, use the player below.

 

*Also called “Chinese whispers,” unintentionally helping me make my point.

**That my wife is willing to tolerate this dreadful mix of traits is one of her charms, she even found and sent the less romantic literal translation as well.

(footnotes because I love My Year in 1918 using them)

To W.C.W. M.D.

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

It’s now 1916—well not really—but allow me immediate mode for the time being. Some early 20th Century Modernist characters we’ve already met are about to collaborate in New York City with a largely forgotten figure whose words we’ll meet today.

The Provincetown Playhouse, that CBGB’s of Modernist American theater, has moved its organization from the remote Cape Cod artist’s colony to New York’s Greenwich village, and they’re still looking for new types of plays by new playwrights. How about drama using Modernist poetry?

Verse drama, despite continuing productions of Shakespeare, is a thing that often generates rumors of revival while never really reviving. In 1916, the Provincetown group was open to trying this. Which poets can come up with something?

Alfred Kreymborg could. Kreymborg was a leading networker or influencer in the New York area for Modernist poetry. Ezra Pound, and then Amy Lowell, would publish anthology books of Imagist Poets. Harriet Monroe out of Chicago was also gathering new Modernist work for Poetry  magazine. In 1916 Kreymborg would do the same in New York, with a magazine and anthology book series called “Others.”  Kreymborg had also been writing poetry, short poems mostly, all of them free verse. Now a play.

Others group

The “Others” group: L to R in back: Jean Crotti, Marcel Duchamp, Walter Arensberg, Man Ray, R. A. Sanborn, Maxwell Bodenheim. In front: Alison Hartpence, Alfred Kreymborg (bowtie daddie), William Carlos Williams (w/ Internet click-bait cat) and Skip Cannell

 

The play he wrote is an odd thing to describe. Titled “Lima Beans,”  it’s a two-character play about a couple. The husband loves lima beans, the wife decides he might also like string beans and surprises him with the new beans—but no, he loves lima beans. He stalks off, angry. She scrambles and gets some lima beans. He realizes he loves his wife, returns and she’s got lima beans for him. Kiss. Curtain.

I guess this could be a Seinfeld  episode plot decades later, but that’s not how Kreymborg uses it. He writes his play with litanies of repeated words, hocketing between the two voices. After reading the play this month, I’m guessing a performance might sound like a cross between Dr. Suess’ Green Eggs and Ham  and a late 20th Century Minimalist musical work by someone like Phillip Glass or Meredith Monk. Or as Preston Sturges’ Sullivan would have it, Waiting for Godot  plus vegetables—but with a little sex in it. That musical comparison is particularly apt, because even though the play did not use musical accompaniment, Kreymborg saw it as a musical structure.

So here in 1916 we have the Provincetown group, putting on a play that pioneered a performance aesthetic that still seems audacious 50 or 60 years later. Who are you going to get as actors to realize this—words and a presentation of thought conveyed musically, without actual music?

Poets.  In the role of the husband, William Carlos Williams. In the role of the wife, Mina Loy, who had just arrived in New York after getting away from those Italian Futurists. Neither poet had acted before, but Kreymborg rehearsed the two poets until they could present his free-verse vision.

Loy and Williams in Lima Beans

Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams in Lima Beans. The set for the proudly independent Provincetown Playhouse production cost $2.50, and its set designer, William Zorach,  also played the 3rd character whose hands are hanging, Soupy Sales-like, out the window.

 

I toyed with the idea of trying to realize Lima Beans  here, although with music this time. But it really needs two voices, and I wasn’t sure that a short section could do justice to the structure of the piece.

In it’s place, I looked for a short poem of Kreymborg’s to use instead. This proved more difficult than I thought it would be. I read his two poetry collections from this era, but no poem grabbed my attention. As in the play, he’s looking for a new poetic language in these poems, but it’s hard to grab the emotional center of many of them for performance.

In the end I chose today’s piece: “To W.C.W. M.D.”  It’s dedicated to William Carlos Williams. This might be more of Kreymborg’s log-rolling networking skills on display, but its subject also answered a desire I have to do a piece remembering my late wife Renee Robbins in some way today. As best as I can penetrate the emotional core of this poem, it speaks of the need to separate and not separate from those that have died.

Musically, the piece is based on one stacked chord, E minor7/11, but the notes are spread out between the instruments. Besides drums there are two bass guitars, piano, two viola parts, a violin part, and a clarinet in this. To hear it, use the player below.