music

The Wraithie’s Message

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Is there anyone reading this far in these posts today mumbling to themselves “It’s Black History Month — and instead of the eclectic variety I expect from the Parlando Project, Frank is giving us this little-known early-20th century Black Chicago poet, this Fenton Johnson guy (who, huh)?”

Let’s keep you here, because Johnson is bringing the variety again today, with a piece that could pass for early William Butler Yeats, or someone else from the Celtic Revival that was happening contemporarily with Johnson’s first poetry collection A Little Dreaming  of 1913. And if our last piece of Johnson’s that had the Roman underworld didn’t warn you, this one is further into the dark fantasy/horror poetry genre as well.

Wraiths and wights, two names given to the wicked messenger in today’s poem have been popularized by later, fantasy books — Tolkien and Rowling et al. But Yeats and others in the Celtic Revival touched on various kinds of supernatural spirits around the time of Fenton Johnson. The non-human beings in these dealings were often at least chaotic or untrustworthy — and as a class, wraiths tended to be even more so. Though named as fairies, not wraiths, I’ve recently presented two linked fairy poems by Yeats and Robert Frost for example where the fairy is seeking to trick a human couple so that they can abduct one of them to fairyland.

Fiery Mask 800

Don’t stay up late reading blogs, for a wraithie might visit you

.

In Johnson’s “The Wraithie’s Message”  the poem’s initial speaker beholds a marvelous creature made of “living flame” at his window. The creature tells our mortal, who the wraith addresses as “dreamer” that there is a lovely sea-side woman, the dreamer’s soul’s desire, who he has beguiled with “burning song” so that this woman is now dreaming of, desirous of, our dreamer.

The dreamer at the window is all in on this. He sees not an untrustworthy wraith in this apparition of living flame, but a “good elf” who might be of service to humans. And besides, as the poem ends, he explains that this dreamer is tired of his  dreams — ones that have not been realized. What really awaits? In my understanding of this poem, the wraithie is a siren by proxy. The promised maiden may be by “the deathless sea,” but that may be in the sense that the enthralled or the dead have no more dying to do.

Should it surprise us that a young Black Chicagoan is writing this poem? Perhaps a little, but it shouldn’t be a lot. I come from the Midwestern city of Prince Rogers Nelson after all. Versatility with many styles has been demonstrated by Black Americans over and over. In regard to Afro-American musicians, I lost my constrained surprise decades ago when I learned that Fenton Johnson’s early 20th century contemporaries, Blues musicians —who I prized for their distinctive “authentic” recorded music — had a wider repertoire and spread of influences than I had guessed, and that they were often capable of essaying a variety of white ethnic styles with aplomb.*

But the choice of this Celtic Revival flavor by Johnson may not have been entirely random. Remember that last time Johnson was trying on the title of “bard,” and a bard for a generation of Black Americans who were trying to propagate an Afro-American culture of achievement and distinction — not just out of some parochial ethnic pride, but out of a very serious need to establish their humanity in a country that still retained nearly its full measure of white supremacy. The Celtic Revival of Johnson’s time was similarly seeking to present themselves as full human beings by displaying a rich culture, and it’s not unlikely that Johnson was seeing what he could appreciate and adopt from that.

With a Celtic myth via an Afro-American, there is after all a story here of a despairing dreamer and an untrustworthy power willing to trick them to their doom.

The Wraithe's Message

Simple guitar chords, but my recorded version will sound different because I used a CGDGBE tuning

.

I had planned to do this Fenton Johnson piece this month, but as I’ve mentioned before, I’m nearly always unsure of what time and focus I will have to do these pieces now. I had written a sketch of the music already (that helps) and in the middle of the day today I was able to try it out. It came together so quickly I was able to complete a basic track before attending a Canadian Zoom salon featuring friend of this blog Robert Okaji reading new poems. Then later tonight I finished mixing it, leaving it simple enough, though I hope it’s effective. This is another piece that may depend a great deal on my vocal abilities “of a subjective quality” — but that’s up to you the listener. You can hear my musical setting of “The Wraithie’s Message”  with the audio gadget below. No player? A substitute can be summoned with this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*Some might be wondering if Fenton Johnson utilized or valued Afro-American music and modes. Yes indeed — he was early and effective in that, a decade before those in the Harlem Renaissance did similar things. I’ve got a couple of pieces planned demonstrating that yet this month.

Waters of Forgetfulness

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s the next poem in our series this Black History Month written by early 20th century Chicago poet Fenton Johnson. Like his “Dunbar”  poem from earlier this week, “Waters of Forgetfulness”  was found in his first book-length collection A Little Dreaming  of 1913.

When I look through a poetry collection for material for this Project I think I’m following a few unspoken criteria. I’m looking for poems short enough to be performed in under 5 minutes. I’m looking for unusual qualities or points of view, or striking images, but I’ll also favor poems that seem to have something song-like about them. This one qualified on the first and last parts. The middle part? I thought it was an example of the range of cultural references that this young Black American poet wished to weave into his verse. Two lines in, and we’re not at the Clark Street Bridge in Chicago like Johnson’s contemporary Carl Sandburg, or looking at the Mississippi river and thinking of ancient historic rivers like Langston Hughes, a young poet who began writing a few years after Johnson. Instead, we’re at an imaginary river, the river Lethe, one of the rivers in Hades, the underworld of the dead in Greek/Roman mythology. Before we’re done, will meet an unnamed man from the fabled city of Troy and the final river border to Hades and the dead: the river Styx. What’s an under-25-year-old Black American doing there?

Waters of Forgetfulness

Here’s the poem as it appeared in “A Little Dreaming”

.

When I selected this poem, I didn’t know. Partway into creating the musical performance you can hear below, I still didn’t know enough yet, but this is what I could understand to perform it: the poem’s speaker (let’s call him Johnson for simplicity) seeks the titular quality of the Lethe’s water, that it removes your memory of life.

I had to look up more about Lethe’s particulars to understand more: drinking its water allows the drinker the possibility of rebirth (without that forgetfulness, the reborn would be unable to gain a truly new life).

In the part of the poem that I made a bridge or second musical strain (lines 9-15) this rebirth is linked to some further material. Instinctively I felt it was this poem’s turn or volta, but what’s exactly happing there? Johnson is having a death experience; he sees at least in simile the Angel of Death. And in the penultimate line of this section, he’s glad to see morning. In between he sees himself as like some Trojan who crossed the final river into the land of the dead.

Who was this one from Troy? I had to do some research to find out.

He’s Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s Latin poem The Aeneid.   In that epic’s Book 6, by oracles, gods, and pluck, Aeneas completes a successful quest for a charmed golden bough and this refugee from the sacked city of Troy is able to cross the river Styx to the land of the dead, though for only a day. He passes through a condensed version of Dante’s circles to the happy land, where the most virtuous dead souls reside.*   It’s there that Aeneas is reunited with the soul of his dead father. There are tears and hugs, and the father, now wise in the ways of the underworld, tells his son that Aeneas will go on to found Rome, and he foretells the mighty empire that will result. Then by one more skillful choice, as dawn is about to break, Aeneas is allowed to return from the underworld knowing the true aim of his task: to form a new nation.

You may wonder: I thought I was reading a poem published by a 25 year old young Black American, did I click a link to footnotes for a section of “The Waste Land”  (published 9 years later) instead? Let me deal with two last things before leaving off for the musical performance.

Remember that middle “Temporarily Like Aeneas” section is a simile, framed in “like” and “as.” I take this to mean that the poem’s speaker isn’t the ancient Trojan, it’s most likely Fenton Johnson, or someone like him, seeking to take up the task of becoming a bard to his race, in his nation, in his time. That means this is a dream poem, in a collection that has other poems as dreams or visions — and is after all titled A Little Dreaming.   Johnson and his Afro-Americans have a lot one might bargain to forget, a harrowing dream to wake up from to live a new life. I started thinking this poem was a curious small example of Johnson’s range of subjects and modes. I’ve grown to think it’s making a serious Black History Month point. When this sleeper awakes, glad in the morn, he knows there’s a nation to build and he’s seen his goal.

And here’s the second point. Virgil might have been a more standard curriculum item at the start of the 20th century than he was in my mid-century, or in your 21st — but how many readers then or now will understand the reference Johnson’s making? I didn’t. Maybe you didn’t. This poem may have been written by the poet to the bard himself, to focus him on his calling. Or perhaps he overestimated his potential audience? We’ll return to that last point elsewhere in the series, providing I can complete all the parts I’d like to share this month.

The music for this is fairly straightforward, though I had some fun sound-engineering the grand piano heard in the left channel. This is another of the pieces where I do my best to represent the poem with my singing, even though I fear this composition calls out for a more spectacular singer. You can hear it with the audio player gadget you should see below. No vision of an audio player? This highlighted link is an alternative, it’ll open a new page with its own audio player.

.

*Unlike me, Dante had read Virgil, and this section helped him formulate his circles of Hell. Virgil writes, and perhaps young poet Johnson is noting this: this happy place in the afterlife includes the noble bards of nations.

Fenton Johnson’s “Dunbar”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Though poetry might aim for timelessness, time as we know it aims to hide itself in the past. For that reason, when I talk about Fenton Johnson this month, I want you to be able to step inside his time a bit. Depending on your expectations for poetry, or poetry by Black Americans, some of the elements of his poetry might seem out-of-place, but Johnson didn’t have the ability to see us — an audience of today — instead he was addressing the expectations of his time.

From reading Johnson’s first collection of poetry, 1913’s A Little Dreaming  it’s clear that one of Johnson’s chief models was Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar was born in 1872, Johnson in 1888. Depending on how you think of the amorphous boundaries of generations, the two are bookends of one generation or a generation apart, but two facts are important to understand in this relationship.

The leading fact? Dunbar was proudly counted as the first Afro-American poet to reach some level of general recognition. How well recognized was Dunbar in Johnson’s time? I can’t say for sure. Some established white critics reviewed his work. Public reading tours were advertised, indicating that there may have been expectations of greater than the folding-chairs in bookstore-aisles readings common for poets today. Part of Dunbar’s potential audience would be something new: an emerging Black American cohort born post-slavery who could read. Their parents might have been enslaved (as Dunbar’s were), and now they had this new broad skill, and they were allowed to indulge in it.* What was it they would read? Newspapers & magazines for sure. The popular press was growing during this time — and it was somewhat analogous to the Internet today, including the breadth of materials and parochial opinions, not all of them on the up and up. Novels and prose books? They were around, some inexpensive editions aimed at the less-wealthy casual reader’s budget. Poetry? Likely closely related to the availability of novels. Does that surprise any of you? In the Dunbar/Johnson pre-WWI era poetry was more a co-equal branch of literature than today. In our early part of our 21st century, open the books section of one of the big city American newspapers, and it’ll be rare to see any notice of new poetry collections. A literary author interviewed on TV is an increasingly uncommon event, but such guests will almost always be novelists. If you were to walk into a bookstore this year, how likely would you see poetry collections prominently displayed to tempt the general shopper?

I have no time machine to visit a circa-1900 bookstore, but my reading of the Dunbar/Johnson era indicates that to readers and the commercial side of publishing then, poetry was not consigned to a specialist interest of a small coterie of folks. Poets like Longfellow and Tennyson were as famous to the ordinary reader, if not more so, than many of the American novelists you might be asked to read in an American Lit survey course today. And there were contemporary, living, popular North American poets who were read by a general public then too: John Witcomb Riley, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Bliss Carmen, Robert W. Service, and Edgar Guest emerge in this era. All these poets had a general audience, even if these once popular poets might not be covered in an academic survey course today.

So, Dunbar’s intended audience was broad, general. Some of his writing followed the same formal structure and practices used by the most esteemed poets of the 19th century, but not all of it. To a Black audience he may have intended to capture the newly literate while also offering a more serious solace and uplift for these men and women only recently granted rights on paper. To potential white readers of his time a parallel intent: poems at the casual entertaining level to put them at ease, but then poems in elevated literary modes expressing the beautiful thoughts in a Black man’s head or the pressing problems he and his race are encountering.

A young poet today might aim for a published collection, likely with an academic or specialist small publisher. Might aim for poetry awards watched mostly by other poets. Might aim for a teaching position. In the Dunbar/Johnson era it may have seemed possible for a poet to aim for a deeper/wider presence than today in both the literary and popular sense.

How far did Dunbar get in accomplishing that? My understanding, subject to correction from better scholarship, was that he became “Black famous.” His efforts would have been known and recognized by more-educated and culturally ambitious Black Americans, even if he would have been unlikely to be known to my (white) grandparents. To Black literary writers, whatever size that group was? He seems to have been huge.

Which brings us to the second important Dunbar fact. Dunbar died young: 33 years old, in 1906. Johnson would have been 18 and was about to go to college. If you were Afro-American, a poet, and interested in furthering the prestige of your culture in the first part of the 20th century, Dunbar was the man to consider. That Dunbar had fallen, still not meeting his highest expectations, could be seen as a standard bearer staggered short of the wall, but another young poet could pick up the flag and carry it further.

Dunbar by Fenton Johnson

Once again, here’s a chord sheet for those who’d like to sing this themselves.

.

Long time readers here may recall that another of Johnson’s Afro-American poetic contemporaries, Anne Spencer, wrote a short poem linking the died-young Dunbar with early 19th century British Romantic poets like Keats and Shelley.  Today’s piece from Fenton Johnson is a poem with similar goals. Johnson’s “Dunbar”  is just 12 lines itself, but it makes a concise case for Dunbar’s broad worth. In a refrain at the end of each stanza he calls Dunbar “bard” to indicate that he as a poet is representing his culture, and Johnson is particularly interested in bringing forward that Dunbar can do the serious and be a “Bard of grief and woe” but that also he is the “Bard of happiness.” In this claim for Dunbar’s worth in comedy and tragedy he may be exceeding Spencer’s claims for Dunbar — as this best for comedy and tragedy claim echoes one made for Shakespeare.

What does Johnson mean when he writes that Dunbar’s poems were “sung in accents?” Dunbar’s rhymed metrical verse would use standard English (including a willingness to use elevated “poetic diction”). Johnson would begin doing the same. Dunbar also wrote in dialect: poems where the language is meant to portray less-educated speakers, is written in colloquial grammar, and is printed in phonetic approximations of heavy accents. Dialect was a literary vogue in the late 19th century in both prose and poetry. Of the popular poets mentioned above, John Whitcomb Riley, specialized in dialect poems reflecting common-man white speech of the rural Midwest. Dunbar wrote a poem in praise of Riley, Riley wrote a letter complimentary to Dunbar. Modern readers may have an inescapable problem with this sounding like minstrelsy.** And there is correspondence from Dunbar where he wrote that he was increasingly troubled by what he saw as the greater acceptance of the dialect poems. Fenton Johnson may not have known of that, and Johnson would also write in dialect in the mode of Dunbar.

I said at the start of this Black History Month that Fenton Johnson was a bridge between Dunbar and the Harlem Renaissance poets such as Langston Hughes. At the beginning of his writing Johnson is clearly on the Dunbar side of that bridge, so this poem in praise of Dunbar — now song with the addition of my music — is a good place to start. You can hear it with the audio player below, and if that player isn’t there, with this backup highlighted link which will open a new page with its own audio player.

.

*Dunbar’s mother Matilda was born enslaved and illiterate. She worked as a domestic servant after emancipation and took night classes to learn to read. There are stories that she had her children teach her ABCs, perhaps with the dual utility of drilling them while helping teach herself! Paul began writing poetry as a schoolchild, and she encouraged him and organized the family to allow Paul to complete high school. Paul Laurence Dunbar died so young that he was survived by his mother who lived until 1934.

**Bothers me too, and not just because it seems belittling even when it is only so by association with racist beliefs. I have little to no facility for reading or reproducing phonetic speech for some reason.

Black History Month 2024 and Langston Hughes’ birthday

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Not to put the curse on things that fate might cast whenever you make plans, but I have a plan for February. I’ve been reading a bunch of Chicago-based early 20th century Afro-American poet Fenton Johnson’s poems this winter. Long time readers here may recall that I did a series on Johnson’s poetry in 2018, still early in this Project’s life.

Johnson is a bridge between Paul Laurence Dunbar, who died young after becoming the first Afro-American poet to pick up much notice, and the early poets of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes who more fully brought Black American poetry into greater recognition.

One of Johnson’s poems, “Tired,”  is still included in some anthologies of Black poets, perhaps because pioneering Afro-American poetry anthologist James Weldon Johnson (no relation) included it. In my 2018 series I tried to outline my estimate of how Johnson came to write such a despairing poem and to explore other modes of his verse. Since then more information on Johnson’s early years has become available to me, and I have a more complicated theory of his poetic progress that includes more data points.

I hesitate to lead off with “Tired” to represent him, though it’s a fine poem which James Weldon Johnson selected bringing notice to Fenton Johnson. See this post to see what James Weldon Johnson wrote about it.

.

One thing that attracts me to Fenton Johnson is that he (like Langston Hughes) wrote using his experience of Afro-American musical idioms. Regardless of current panics and nonsense expressed around the issue, Black history is American History—and oh my, is Black music American music!   To keep’em separated would be so damaging to America’s culture. Oddly, believing that misapprehensions and ignorance must be behind such a self-defeating and self-denying idea, I continue to go forward trying to defeat that in my small way, despite realizing that there is much I don’t know and can’t portray as well as it might be portrayed.

Writing on and performing Fenton Johnson is a case in point. He seems to have too few considering him right now or bringing his story forward. I’d rather do the best I can illuminating his work with what skills and time I have, than to shrink from this out of deference or modesty.

Since today was Langston Hughes’ birthday, I’ll precede my Fenton Johnson February series with this piece of his that I performed previously for this Project. Hughes’ “Lenox Avenue: Midnight”  is a beautiful expression of that complex thing: Black Joy. I was audacious enough to add a couplet at the end of Hughes’ poem/text that was my reaction to what Hughes portrayed in his poem, which is just about as presumptuous as my attempt to compose and play something that sounds like Jazz. You can hear my musical performance with the audio player below — or if no player, with this highlighted link.

.

Stars: Robert Frost and The Book Of Nature

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Robert Frost. Long-time readers/listeners here will know I love to sing Frost’s early poems as part of this Project. We’ll get back to Frost, but another thing long-timers here know: for me, roundabout is the best mental journey — and there will be a piece of music at the end as we rest from our walk.

Ok, let’s stroll.

It’s a famous midcentury half-hour black & white TV episode. So famous that you don’t have to have seen it to know the recognition scene near the end of its story that has become a modern myth that SF and Fantasy fans like to point out their stories aspire to. Given that, I’m going to assume no one will need a spoiler alert for this 1962 Twilight Zone episode called “To Serve Man.”

The format’s so brief, the story must be told rapidly. We’re told that a race of other-planetary beings have landed on Earth. With retrospectable irony, their leader is described as “Christopher Columbus from another galaxy.” They go about setting things here in benign order with advanced technology. They leave behind a book in their language that seems to be a guide to the extraterrestrials’ efforts. Partway in, Earth’s code-breakers have deciphered the book’s title: To Serve Man.  And they seem to be doing just that: ending hunger, gently enforcing world peace, taking selected humans on spaceship rides to their home planet.

Many of you are now speaking — telepathically or aloud — to a device’s screen what is urgently delivered to the story’s human hero once the humans can decrypt more of the book than just the title: “It’s a cookbook!”

I’ve written here often about something I call The Book of Nature. Though not an exclusive American idea, I connect it with the 19th century American “New Thought” movement called Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists believed that a true scripture of the universe’s higher power was transcribed in nature. By contemplating nature big to small one could discern the highest truths. Our contemporaries who are “spiritual but not (sectarian) religious” may hold to this as a core belief, but it’s likely that every denomination of religious belief can incorporate this too — after all, if The Creator made this, their authorship means there is plausibly something there to be read.

Now we can get back to Robert Frost. Frost no doubt knew Transcendentalist thought, but unlike his fellow great American poet, Emily Dickinson, Frost didn’t hold with its doctrines.*  Yes, Frost wrote seemingly “En plein air” about nature often. His early poems, some of the ones I like best, are suffused with the landscape and particulars of New England nature. Did he see a supreme being’s handwriting there?

If so, Frost would be critical of The SB’s penmanship.

stars

Chord sheet so that you can sing this one yourself.

.

If we look at this example, “Stars”  from Frost’s first book of poems, A Boy’s Will,  what do we “read” from nature’s book? The stars come out at night. What is their nature?** “Countless(ly),” we can’t even get the basic stats correct. Oh wait, Frost can see a primary Roman goddess in there: Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and strategy. No, he reconsiders: it’s a statue of Minerva he sees in the stars, a human-made simulacrum — and her marble eyes are the form of sight organs without any such function. So should we look lower down at our earthly landscape?***  Snow covers it profoundly, drifting “as tall as trees” and so obscuring even the ground-level facts. Wind is blowing — the choreographer of this landscape — yet, this dance doesn’t tell a story, it obscures it, though here at last Frost reads a message. That wind, that obscuring snow, is “our fate.” In the most mysterious part of the poem, the second stanza, we cannot see where we’ve walked or where to guide our steps. The gothic part of my nature reads Frost’s “place of rest invisible at dawn” as death. I read the image in this stanza that in such deep and overblown snow, one cannot even see the walk fate will not reveal to a farmhouse graveyard.

Nature acts “with neither love nor hate.” Robert Frost has decrypted The Book of Nature — and all the pages are blank.

Here’s that song at the end of our mental walk where I set Frost’s poem to music with acoustic guitar. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below, or with this backup highlighted link if that gadget is not shown.

.

*Frost’s friend and fellow poet Edward Thomas was an exquisite nature poet of his British Isles countryside. In regards The Book of Nature, he’s between Frost and Dickinson for he has a horticulturalist’s specific eye like Dickinson — and his consistent naming of natural details and seeing them as readable symbols indicates he finds them plausibly capable of guidance.

** Astrologers, Biblical Magi, and classical constellation dots-connectors of course are reading that sky in clear text.

***In a changeup meant to fool this writer and singer, my specific winter this year has been oddly empty of any expected Northland winter symbolism. We’ve had next to no snow, only a week or so of bitter sub-zero cold, and I look out today on a sunny brown yard over which squirrels are carelessly playing tag and tree as we rise to our predicted afternoon high of (in Minnesota! In January!) of 55 degrees F.

I’ve been riding my summer bicycle with its summer tires most every day this “winter,” where that bike normally stays hung up high in the back of my shed. Spring in Minnesota is famously snowy, my winter bike with studded knobby tires cannot be put out of the way. Perhaps as long as I leave it by the door we may continue to have a mild winter.

If all the griefs…. Emily Dickinson and also music

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

We’ll get to a remarkable short Emily Dickinson poem today, but first a few words about the music.

One of the things I like about this Project is not caring about what style of music I make to combine with the poetry. You see, I don’t like “silos” — those ways of viewing music as having borders, types, genres, labels. Some days I want to make acoustic music, some days I go inside computers to see what I can score and program to happen, other days I want to take an electric guitar and lean into the amp so that I can hear that guitar respond to its own screaming. Then I’ll be so audacious as to fake music that I have no right nor sufficient understanding to make. Jazz and orchestral music are fields where extraordinary musical knowledge is required — or it would be if I paid attention to the rules. When delving into those kinds of ensembles and approaches I make do with quite simple ideas.

In the music for this Project I’ve become dependent on acting as the musicians that work with my composing self, and the composer knows the musician’s limitations intimately. At least the musicians in me can depend on the composer to keep them from being bored with the same challenges all the time.

Does this variety succeed or fail? I don’t know. Perhaps I am steeled in this effort by writing poetry for years before composing music. Poets in our age generally don’t know if they’ve succeeded. Poetry’s audiences are small and what audiences poetry has may be too cowed by the pretentions of the art to allow us mere listeners footing to talk about it.

Today’s audio piece combines unlike things even before it gets to combining with Emily Dickinson’s striking short poem. I took some very old things: A Telecaster (a 1950 design, meant for bar-room and dancehall cowboy music*) and a small Fender Princeton electric guitar amp I’ve had for more than 40 years. But instead of playing birth-spanking music for dancing and carousing, I played slow, spare music, exactly stumbling though while still keeping itself upright. That part of the piece’s musical approach has a label within the catch-all of indie rock: the sub-genre is called slowcore. To this I decided to add (or perhaps preserve is a better word) some artifacts of its making that you, I, or the next recordist might think defects. The mic was picking up a lot of the pick strikes on the guitar’s strings —well sobeit, they are the crickets or the tapping implements of this soundscape. And to this I decided to mic the floor beneath me as I performed this to capture my foot stomping time as I played.**

I believe this combining pairs well with the difference of Emily Dickinson. I’m not entirely sure what Dickinson meant to achieve in the short poem we title with it’s first line “If all the griefs I am to have.”   What was her internal intent in writing this, what did it mean to its author? Was she writing something to herself? Or was it expected to be a little greeting card epigram to thank someone else for the gift of joy? The first line we use out of need for a title leads us to think it’s about grief, and a recipient of this might think it awfully strange to think this a thankyou message — yet one through-line of the poem’s two stanzas is that the poet’s present mood is so joyful that a lifetime’s accumulation of grief wouldn’t phase her at the poem’s moment, and that any imagined accumulation of a lifetime’s joys would only measure the same as what she says “happens to me now.” We might assume the poem’s occasion is some joy then, yet this poem doesn’t say that outright.

Emily often enclosed poems in letters or gifts to others. I don’t know if this was one, but can one imagine being an acquaintance or family member of Emily and receiving these 8 lines? Others might be jotting down “I thoroughly enjoyed your visit/garden party/whatnot” in bread & butter notes. You open Emily’s and it’s “If all the griefs I am to have would only come today…”  Awkward. But to her mind the thought of all that grief, all the sadness, all that pain, all taken at once — it’s something to envision and grapple with. And your cherries jubilee was scrumptious.

thank you from Emily D

A goth who loves dessert? Emily was a dessert maker of some note to her friends and family.

.

If you follow the logic, that’s what the poem could be saying. But the way of saying it, the framing of saying it*** causes one to see grief in an equivalent measure to joy. I see this poem as a Taoist statement, that there is one unified, effortless, way in things.

Is that Taoist reading an accident, an illusion I’m imposing? I’m frankly not sure. One thing I’ve learned as I’ve leaned into Dickinson this century is that her mind had within it a mode of trying to express vast philosophical points in tiny poems, and that the central thoughts that are embedded in just a few words in these poems can be difficult. She was reading Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and they were among the first Americans to try to come to grips with East Asian philosophy. Her poem does  explicitly say grief may seem an illusion to joy, which can flow around it; and that nothing (including joy) is so large that something else cannot be larger.

Well, that’s my awkwardness for today — but you can hear it with music if you use the audio player below. And if the audio player isn’t giving you a RSVP, this highlighted link is supplied for those ways of reading this that suppress showing the player, as it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*A great many musicians discovered that it was good for things well beyond what it was designed for. One side-effect of Leo Fender’s guitar design was that its bridge pickup was to deliver bright, clear notes which meant that no matter how much you smeared it with reverb and ambient effects or applied fuzztones and distorted murk, it still let its intent cut through. For today’s guitar part the Telecaster had things that went against this bright, clear nature: I tuned it down a full step (D to D instead of the conventional E to E) and the motifs tend to be played on the lower strings here. And the guitar was strung with flat-wound strings. Almost all modern guitarists use round-wound strings, which let the lowest pitched 2 or 3 strings have a brighter sound and bring out more of the harmonic series above the root frequency of a note. Flat-wound strings are wrapped with a tight flat layer of wire that suppresses that, which makes them contrast with the ringing plain, un-wound top 2 strings all the more. This timbral contrast can make the single guitar sound almost like two differing instruments.

**I had intent there, even though the sound and rhythms of today’s piece were unlike its model: John Lee Hooker’s early records were often just Hooker’s voice and electric guitar, and his work-boot stomps were clearly audible as percussion on some of them. When I listen to exemplary slowcore band Low’s spare drumming I  sometimes think it has the same effect as Hooker’s sole-music.

*** In poetry, unlike say the essay or expository writing, the way of saying is brought forward to be as important as the message of what is said.

Have you tried rebooting? And Melanie, in memoriam

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

There’s new Parlando stuff coming. Indeed, there would already have been a new piece with words by Emily Dickinson this week if it wasn’t for a couple of issues.

Issue #1 was with a new, upgraded Macintosh computer system which handles most of the complicated recording stuff I do for this Project. After working beautifully the night before, the next day it was nearly unusable. I first noticed the mouse wasn’t working well — or a times, at all. I use wired mice, as I’d have no patience with Bluetooth gremlins — but still and all, maybe that mouse had gone bad? I swapped in an old one (I’m a packrat of old computer stuff, so I had a spare handy). Mouse back to working. But then the keyboard was nearly unusable, being extremely balky at registering keypresses. It was so bad that logging in again after rebooting the Mac was a challenge.*  Keyboard dying too? Tried a different keyboard. Same deal. I even tried booting the Mac into MacOS safe mode, which for some reason caused a kernal panic with a crash dump rather than completing a boot into that version of the operating system that’s a fall-back stripped to just the basic stuff. Was my new system demonstrating an internal hardware issue? Besides the nearly unusable keyboard, the whole system was slow, even though the system monitor showed plenty of resources available.

I wondered how much time would be wasted getting warranty service or restoring my complicated music creation environment. And then I noticed that my Time Machine backup drive was no longer mounted — or recognized as a drive in Disk Utility either. Would a warranty replacement Mac be able to transfer my stuff back from that backup? The last Time Machine backup was logged early that morning, then nothing as it had no drive to back up to. Additional worries: that drive might have checked out for good.

There’s a large overlap in musicians with folks involved with computer technology, but since that Venn diagram convergence is much slighter for poetry, I’ll cut to the solution.**  At some point I power-cycled the powered USB hub that holds most all the USB stuff that my kind of music production needs: two software protection dongles, two MIDI interfaces, a little plastic piano keyboard, an audio interface, that Time Machine hard drive, and a charger cable for my MIDI guitar. Mind you, the mouse and keyboard were plugged directly into a USB port on the Mac itself, not into this hub. And —

Everything returned to working normally. How a USB hub plugged into a different USB port from the one used for the mouse and keyboard could all but disable them, as well as causing the other issues, is beyond my knowledge level.

Large, powered USB hubs are not a common in-stock item in local stores, but just in case the issue with mine might return, I ordered a spare. It would be at a will-call desk the next morning. I’d pick it up along with my weekly major grocery run.

Issue #2. A member of the household awoke in clear emotional distress and was unable to talk about it. I thought it best to stay home. I told them I loved them and would be here if they needed me. I spent much of the day worried and concerned, but puttering around in case there were any needs that would emerge. By the middle of the afternoon they were better and talking (though not about the issue that had struck them earlier). They asked for their favorite take-out quesadillas.

I made a quick trip and grabbed the spare hub and that requested late lunch. Issues. Problems. Things don’t always work, sometimes they shut down and don’t tell you why. My late wife worked as a mental health therapist before her mortal illness. I worked decades in hospitals, then another couple of decades in IT. Some people think poetry is difficult, that it taunts you with its obscurity. Maybe so, but life does that too. Spares are difficult for us human beings. We wear and wear-out the ones we have for the most part, learning to use what we have at hand.

I would return to my studio space this morning to continue Parlando Project work. I’d read the night before that the songwriter Melanie had died, I learned of her death in a modern way that somewhat famous strangers have their fortunes told now: by folks speaking their name in past-tense on social media. As I was awaking, with my aim to record at dawn, I read a post by one of those I follow mentioning that they had a favorite Melanie song: “What Have They Done to My Song, Ma.”   Myself? My favorite Melanie is likely her cover of the Rolling Stones “Ruby Tuesday,”  or maybe even her big hit fronting a gospel group, “Candles in the Rain.”   But “What Have They Done to My Song, Ma”  is a fine song, maybe better than you remember it, if you remember it.

I sat at the mics alone, and I decided to sing that song before recording a new Parlando Project piece. In the moment I found it to be about folks attempting to fix you, or make you fit with them and their expectations or needs. That’s not always bad. That’s not always good — which is what this song feels.

This is a video as it’s my understanding that if any appreciable streaming occurs (unlikely with my fame and impeccable musicianship) that the rights owners would be paid by YouTube. Back soon with that Emily Dickinson song-setting.

.

*Yes, I worked in IT. Yes, I’m capable of asking myself “Have you tried rebooting?”

**Early in the days of home computers, SF author Jerry Pournelle had a monthly column in Byte magazine which aimed to cover the emerging field of personal computing, but more often than not, it instead dealt with some problem with a computer system in his household. In the early days of BBSes and dialup online services, there’d be lot of chatter about how this guy who got paid to write about stuff in a glossy magazine didn’t know some detail that was sure to have caused his problem right away. Best as I can figure, something inside the hub itself was “stuck” and no amount of unplugging the USB cable from the Mac, or plugging the devices in an out from the hub, helped until the hub’s own power supply was cycled.

The Sparrow

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Paul Laurence Dunbar is most often introduced as the first successful Afro-American poet, and I guess I’ve just followed form by starting this post that way. That statement is more-or-less true. I’d suppose a case could be made for the primacy of Phillis Wheatley who published a book of poems with some notice in the 18th century even before American Independence. And then too, there’s the question of success levels. Dunbar was able to publish more than a dozen books, got praised by some white literary critics and established poets. Figures in Afro-American culture put him forward as a leading Black poetic voice: Frederic Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, pioneering Black orchestral composers William Grant Still and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

As noted in Anne Spencer’s elegant short eulogy poem linking him with other died-young poets, Dunbar was only 33 when he died. Carl Sandburg was just 6 years younger than Dunbar, Robert Frost was but two years younger — both of those poets survived into the 1960s. Dunbar died in 1906 after being debilitated by illness and a series of personal crises. By the time the Harlem Renaissance came around to start making Afro-American artists chic, Dunbar was more than a decade dead. How much more growth and new circumstances could have accrued for Dunbar!

That we still remember him, that a couple of his poems, “We Wear the Mask”  and “Sympathy (I know why the caged bird sings),”  survive to be widely read and considered, should be counted as a success.*  “The Sparrow”  is not as well-known, but I’d note that it both comments on the Afro-American experience and a more generalized human experience.**

“The Sparrow”  is a poem about being sent joy, being sent song, being offered the peace of fellowship, being offered something — and being too callous, or too ignorant, or too busied with the things that aren’t joy and song. In the course of this poem, it may be simply drudgery that is keeping the poem’s singer from noting the bird. Even non-unpleasant rote life can obscure those offered gifts. And oh yes, oh yes,  it can be fear and prejudice that shuts them out too.

The Sparrow

Guitar chord sheet for those that want that want to perform my song setting of Dunbar’s poem.

.

Beyond his remembered poems, I think often of Dunbar’s own life as a sheaf of strong metaphors. His mother was born enslaved. Sensing somehow that her son had a talent as a child, she herself learned to read to help him along, so that eventually that son wrote of that caged bird and of today’s offering sparrow. After publishing his first poetry collection, Dunbar sold it while working at his job as an elevator operator in his hometown of Dayton Ohio. He would offer it to his passengers migrating a few floors up or down inside his elevator cage.***  He grew up in Dayton with a couple of bicycle mechanics, Orville and Wilbur Wright. Orville was his school classmate and helped Dunbar find a publisher for that poetry collection. After eventually attaining some notice for his poetry and public readings of it, Dunbar got a job in the Library of Congress. Around that time his mortal illness was diagnosed as tuberculosis. I read today that he thought the dust of the books in the library made him — the man who could once charm musicians with the way his poetry sung off the page — choke and cough. He descended into his illness and depression for the foreshortened rest of his life. Three years before he succumbed, those bike mechanics made and flew the first airplane, and some of mankind slipped the surly bonds.

Someone had to be the first men to compose flight — but flying or caged, we need to sing, need to hear the singer, even after they’ve flown away. As Dunbar’s “The Sparrow”  has it in its ending line we often “Know not our loss till they are gone.”

I composed the music for Dunbar’s poem earlier this week, and dedicated much of today to completing the arrangement you can hear below with the audio player you may see below. No player?  This highlighted link will open a new page with its own player so that you can hear it. You may notice that I changed a few words in Dunbar’s poem while singing it. Some of the longer sentences didn’t give the song (or at least this singer) enough space for breath — and where rhyme didn’t demand it, I unconsciously changed a couple bits of the 19th century poetic diction as I strove to bring out the poems meaning as I sung it. That’s generally considered a fault in classical song settings, but I come from a looser folk songwriting tradition where that sort of thing is allowed. Here’s a link to the poem as Dunbar published it with all his words and syntax intact.

.

*To be known for a single poem, to have that carried by others, even in part, in reader’s memory, is an achievement I’d say. I can remember having a discussion with Kevin FitzPatrick some years back when he put forward that Dylan Thomas should be weighed by only being known for one poem — or maybe just that one poem’s refrain. That’s an arguable assessment, but even accepting that, that’s more than many poets, including prize winning-poets, achieve years after their death.

**In dealing with Autism Spectrum Disorder I often think of Dunbar’s poem of Black code-switching to seek acceptance or protection from mainstream white culture, and apply it to the ASD tactic of “masking” to seem more neurotypical. Dunbar’s caged bird never has to say it’s a metaphor for Afro-American experience to Black folks, but caged hopes are not an exclusive experience. I’ll split hairs on thin ice to mix those metaphors re: cultural appropriation vs. cross-over impact.

***Further risking flippancy on my part, it could be argued that the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, but the enterprising Paul Laurence Dunbar invented the elevator pitch.

To not be scared of death that doesn’t understand us

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

I’m going to start off the new year 2024 with something I do less often, presenting a new piece that uses my own words. I give myself permission in part because it was engendered by thoughts of another poet, Robert Okaji, who I’ve considered as something of a kindred spirit to my efforts here since this Project began 8 years ago. Like most every blogger I can’t help but talk about myself, but when I do that I fear I become a spendthrift of boredom, so one of this Project’s mottos has been “Other Peoples’ Stories.” Yet, for all that, this isn’t Robert Okaji’s story in any summary — he’s his own poet, his own writer. I’m presumptuous, but I won’t go there. I don’t know him, though I’ve read his blog, his poetry, seen him read online once. Is that like knowing him in some way?

Many of us poets could admit that we see ourselves in a timeless guild. Homer, Sappho, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Du Fu, Yeats — they’re our co-workers. We flatter ourselves at times that we now occupy their offices. By the same conceit, I could think of Okaji as a compatriot. We live in the same country at the same time, we’ve exchanged the customary short notes over the Internet. At least once before today, something he wrote caused me to write something myself. I think I started writing translations/adaptations of classic Chinese poetry before reading his, but his approach (we both need to start from literal English glosses) ratified mine in effect.

So we poets, at the moments our heads swell up so that poetry can burst forth,* may think it’s as if we know each other, because we think we know each other in poetry. To say then that it’s like companionship, that it’s as if, is to do that thing that’s called in poetry a simile.

Every simile when examined harshly knows it’s pathetic. Every poem is not the thing it represents — even the great poems that change how we look at the thing they represent. Let all in the poetry guild admit this to each other within the walls of the guild hall.

I started writing today’s words on one of my more-or-less daily bicycle rides. In spring there may be many kinds of birdsong in my well-forested city, but in winter it may be only crows — which, as the poem describes, are quite vocal about a solitary early morning bicyclist in their midst.

Crows, ravens, big dark birds, are a death symbol of long repute. And it struck me that while we might chide ourselves for not having sufficient knowledge or understanding about death, we could just as well say that death doesn’t understand us. Living in our consciousness as if the present continues indefinitely, we don’t understand death, but death doesn’t understand that moment either. And then, we poets think we can capture the flow of consciousness and preserve it in poems. Today’s poem carries on in a series of similes and then makes a final summation of the series.

Okaji has written a group of poems over the years featuring the character of a scarecrow. Perhaps he too is riffing on crows as the death symbol, but his scarecrow is at times a comic figure too. A scarecrow is just another simile, a sort of, an as if symbol for us — and so I speak of Okaji’s scarecrow in my poem.

Scarecrow takes a winter bike ride

Scarecrow rides a bicycle in early winter mornings, and the crows object. (a note: I begat these AI illustrations with Adobe Firefly, which claims it doesn’t use uncompensated artists’ work to train itself)

.

I said my poem isn’t Okaji’s story — it’s more mine partway — but if you’re like me in some ways, particularly if you want to consider those of us aged to where a compatriot’s death seems next door, then it might be as if it’s partway yours too. The admonition in the poem’s title is therefore not addressed impertinently to Robert, but to myself and perhaps others who might read or listen to this.

Woody Allen wrote a great line: “I don’t want to be immortal from my work. I want to be immortal by not dying.” We write poems, we make those “like a” statements by writing poetry. As if: in our minds we walk into those poetic offices, write our metaphors, our similes. And some day, we must clean out our offices, leaving on our desks a few sheets of paper, maybe enough to stuff a scarecrow.

Today’s performance started with two electric guitar lines I recorded early on New Year’s Day, following the tradition of trying to do things on that day that one would like to continue to do regularly the rest of the year. The two somewhat irregular riffs were spontaneous,** thinking that promise to myself required doing  as much as planning. The bass line was laid down almost a day later to try to hold things together, and the decoration of the keyboard parts arpeggiating the spontaneous chord changes which had started things off, were the final tracks. Those things done, I had my rock band to declaim my sonnet “To not be scared of death that doesn’t understand us” over.

You can hear that with the audio player you should see below. No player?  This highlighted link is a back-up method, as it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*A metaphor that sounds more like a sneeze than Athena’s birth when I re-read this.

**I fancy the right channel line played on my Telecaster has some crow-call-like moments.

Storm Fear

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Of all the English language poets who have achieved a general readership, it’s likely that Robert Frost is the most misunderstood. I don’t say that to shame that broad audience — after all, in my youth, when asked to read Frost, he seemed too full of tired maxims and quaint commonplace situations. Sure he comforts folks I ignorantly thought, and maybe I undervalued comfort, but that wasn’t what I was looking for.*

I won’t blame that youth I was then too much. I was onto other things — but as far as Frost goes, I was carelessly understanding his best work too quickly. Decades later, partly as a result of this Project, I came to his short lyrical poems, beginning to appreciate their supple word-music — and then once beguiled, I began to see what he’d put in these concise pieces.

“Stopping by the Woods” isn’t about lollygagging when there’s duties to do.  “The Road Not Taken”  isn’t about the so-consequential road taken. This poem, “Storm Fear”  from Frost’s first collection, A Boy’s Will, isn’t about settling down to a little hygge-time in a winter snowstorm. Here’s a link to that poem’s text if you want to follow along.

Maybe it’s its concision, or the careful way Frost uses incremental details, but this poem was first published in 1915 and yet the horror it contains seems to have passed most readers by. As I read it this month, now more attuned to how Frost can work, my first thought was this is as harrowing as Bob Dylan’s “Hollis Brown”  or as stark as Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska  album.

My first reminder as you read this poem is that it’s set in a circa 1900 rural America that was more isolated than you might imagine today. Farm families didn’t always have daily connections with others, and those institutions that offered connections: churches, shopping towns, exchanged labor, and rural schools were episodic. Long winter nights and snowstorms restricted what travel there was. Frost himself went through a brief attempt at living that farm life in this era. Perhaps he had a writer’s lighthouse-keeper fantasy of splendid, thoughtful isolation. His poetry testifies that he learned the reality.

Frost’s poem opens with a snowstorm in progress in the nighttime. How many poems, stories, blog posts, other accounts portray such a scene? Frost wants to let us know this isn’t a greeting card picture. The wind is a “beast” and it’s curiously imploring “Come out!” How many readers will miss this odd inclusion and take it as so much filler merely indicating that there’s a wind?**

The poem’s speaker, who we’ll find out is a young husband in the house with a wife and child, responds that it doesn’t take much interior debate to not obey what the beast outside is requesting. He’s thinking: there’s a storm, I’m staying in.

Then we get a different calculation. He tells us about the wife and child. They’re asleep, there’s no awake partner to bounce ideas off of. Suddenly he’s worried about the isolated farmhouse’s sole source of heat, a wooden fire. I think the implication here is that at the very least he thinks he needs to visit an outside woodpile. Or perhaps the winter has been hard enough that he’s short on fuel.

In the poem’s concluding scene, he’s now set on going outside. In the snowhills and blowing snow, even the barn looks “far away.” Is he even considering trying to make it to a neighbors for fuel? Is he making a difficult but sane decision, or is his isolation and “cabin fever” such that he’s thinking of making a risky trip for less than necessity?

Storm Fear 1

I thought too of the deadly rural winter isolation of Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” reading today’s Frost poem.

.

Let me note one other thing about the poem. For Frost, the famous formalist, this poem’s form is very irregular. Poetic feet, meter, rhyme scheme? It’s all over the place, though periodic iambs are there in the confusion. Formalists who teach Frost would likely skip over this example for lessons. Workshopping this poem with a formalist? I can imagine the markup.

In setting “Storm Fear”  for performance I was able to deal with the irregularities in Frost’s design, but then I’ve worked in this Project with a lot of outright free verse and have found it not as difficult to sing or mesh with music as some might guess. But when you’re performing (rather than writing a page poem) there are a couple of things you might want to add stress to: a sense of repetitive or choral structure and some additional guidance to the listener to intrigue understanding on one listening.

My choice here was to make the poem’s 7th and 8th lines into a refrain that repeats twice more, the last with a variation. The first time we hear “It costs no inward struggle not to go,/Ah no!” we hear it as the easy rejection of the beast-storm’s call. The second time, as the singer thinks of his wife and child, it seems more as a statement of the imperative for him to take action and leave into the storm. And in the final statement at the end of the song, he’s about to enter the storm thinking he must seek aid.

Would Frost have approved of my changes? Who knows. He was a man of strong opinions and an often brusque manner. Many poets or their rights-holders would forbid changing even a word. But this old poem is in the public domain now, I need no permission, and I hope my setting honors the intent of Robert Frost.***

You can hear my musical performance of “Storm Fear”  with the audio player gadget you may see below. Is that player snowed out?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player in those cases.

.

*So yes, I was a dolt about Frost, but not singular in that ignorance. Frost’s first two poetry collections were published in England after he left America for there. One reason for that hejira: American publishers were not in the least interested in his poetry. Frost was nearing 40 when A Boy’s Will  was published. So at least in 1915, the experts were also misreading Frost.

**Some Faustian readings of this poem take that beast as The Beast — that the poem’s speaker is a sinner being stalked by his sins’ debt collector. Frost may have been aware of that implication, though it doesn’t strike me as consistent with what I understand of Frost’s own theology. Making the wind “howl” or “growl” is a commonplace, and calling it outright a beast may be stronger — but if enough readers miss the eminent dread in this poem, maybe it wasn’t strong enough.

***Generalizing, poets who feel they’ve worked their words with a fine touch are often resistant to editing by collaborative outsiders. Since Faust has entered the chat, I think of the collaboration between Bob Dylan and Archibald MacLeish who were slated to do an adaptation of Steven Vincent Benét’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster”  for Broadway. MacLeish knew Benét, and likely thought he could do right by his late friend’s work. Dylan has his ways, and MacLeish had his — so the two fell out, and Dylan’s songs in progress for the play were not used. The eventual Broadway production bombed. Dylan used some of the songs later on his own. His “Father of Night”  is often attributed as one of those rejected songs.