Just a few days ago I was posting my rough and untrained voice singing with orchestral instruments. Today I’ve got nothing but a small and plainly ordained acoustic guitar and I’m going to whop on it to deliver a performance of a poem by David McCord that I found in Modern American Poetry, the between-the-world-wars anthology curated by Louis Untermeyer that I’m using as my theme and source for my celebration here of National Poetry Month.
McCord the poet specialized in light verse and poetry for children, but I don’t know if he intended today’s selection, “Reflection in Blue,” for kids. Perhaps that’s not critical to know. Going through the hundreds of poems in Untermeyer’s book, I marked it down as one that might welcome my performance without knowing. The poem is a delightful little painting in musical words, suitable for any age. The visual riff that it wants to play with and develop is to link three natural things in light blue: sea water, bird eggs, and the sky. While interleaving the words describing each of these things, McCord is constantly zooming perspective in an out: he starts with a bird in nest with the blue eggs, but the sea comes in and yet from some higher perspective the sea is smaller than the global blue sky, but then he’s musing on the blue eggs in the bird’s nest being like the sky dome and that it contains the sea stuff of birth – the Earth is like a giant egg encased by the blue shell of its sky.*
I did this as a playful, proclaiming song in a non-standard form that used elements of Blues musical expression. As I said, I used my small mahogany steel-string guitar for this, an instrument which has a strong midrange bark when picked hard, and that’s just what I did. Even before I played guitar, I loved those that could use the strings separately to voice in different registers and play against each other – it seemed so magical, a whole ensemble you could hang from your shoulder. That sort of playing is usually done by plucking the strings separately with the thumb and one or more fingers. When I started to teach myself, that’s what I intended to learn to do. There’s a long story that follows about that – but in the end, I don’t play that way now. Every note you hear in today’s piece is played with a single flat-pick, which I skip around from string to string to give the impression of finger-picking.
A picture and blurbs from a children’s poetry book of McCord’s from later in the 20th century.
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But before we go to that performance, a few words about the few things I’ve been able to find out about the poet McCord. McCord is a little like Robert Hillyer whose words were used with that recent orchestral piece: both now remembered more for their long-term positions at Harvard University than as poets, even though Hillyer did win a poetry Pulitzer and McCord was still publishing children’s poetry that was up for awards well into the 1970s. Light verse and children’s poetry are not reserved slots in literary poetry anthologies, but Untermeyer wanted to include some of that, and preserved examples of those approaches in his book. Would Hillyer and McCord rather have been remembered as poets, as I’m remembering them this month? I don’t know. I remain appreciative of Woody Allen’s joke “I don’t want to be immortal from my work – I want to be immortal from not dying.” McCord lived to be 99, so he came nearer to that measure than most.
There’s a graphical audio player below so that you can hear my musical performance of David McCord’s “Reflection In Blue.” What, has that player disappeared behind a cloud? No, it’s just that some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing the player, so I provide this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab that will supply its own audio player.
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*Just as with the Lake Superior poem I started this month off with, this pairing of a natural scene with blue sky and blue waters may have attracted me for local angle reasons. My state’s name, Minnesota, is a version of a Dakota, indigenous, word meaning water like sky. Now to be sure, my first impression of that was a cartoon bear mascot of a local beer company dancing to some tom-tom jingle about being from “the land of sky blue waters.” But now as an elder, I think it’s appropriate to celebrate poetry this month (and all year) since we live in the state named by its natives for a simile.
Unlike Emily Dickinson, or several other women poets of Lowell’s era,* Amy Lowell hasn’t been central to my own thinking. I was aware of the “Imagism Wars” where Lowell, a prominent promoter of the new free verse forms that emerged in the 19-teens was accused of hijacking the artistic movement by Ezra Pound, who with Englishman F. S. Flint had originated that name. Pound’s tactics in the battle included declarations that Imagism was now passé anyway, and it was time to move to new strains of Modernism. The stragglers, #Pound said, should now call their movement “Amygism.” And those weren’t the only projectiles in that battle: weighty Amy Lowell got the sniggering nickname “The Hippoetess.” Schoolboy behavior.
Those elements of Ezra Pound’s character (and his eventual abysmal politics) aside, I rather preferred the early poems from the Pound-Flint version of Imagism. And there was another factor, Lowell was from a long-important and financially secure family. Wealthy patrons of the arts have done good things certainly, and Lowell was out there promoting the new American Modernism with more than just banknotes – but even that was part of the problem. Was her place as a consideration-worthy poet more-or-less purchased? She did, in fact, put energy and study into being a poet, but my own background and nature is to suspect things like that, and to hope for better in the arts.
There’s a counterargument. Lowell didn’t choose her family, and no matter what one thinks of rich-kids and nepo-babies, talent and achievement happens where it happens. I’d already looked at Amy Lowell’s segment in Untermeyer’s book. Nothing jumped out at me on the first overview. The striking image, the musically attractive approach to language, the interesting approach to subject matter – I didn’t find it on my first glance. Reputation alone doesn’t make for a Parlando Project piece, as you may have already figured out from some of the “who’s they” selections I’ve already presented this month.
But shouldn’t I look again at the woman who Wallinga chose as her Beatrice guiding her look at women in poetry, the same woman who Hillyer calls out to Frost in his long poem about the state of poetry in the 1930s as “our friend at Sevenells?”
And that’s when on Monday afternoon my eyes fell on Lowell’s “A Decade.” First, it’s a short poem as a text, always a plus for me with my rapid and unpredictable production schedule. And I was, on second thought, attracted to this statement of passion melded into longer partnership.
It’s possible to read this poem as not about desire and a personal relationship I’d suppose, but I don’t read it that way. Does the consensus Untermeyer reflects below reflect a blindness, intentional or not, to Lowell’s relationship to Ada Russell Dwyer?
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The next day was largely spent making the musical piece you can hear below from this poem. The music came together quickly. It’s a piano trio, but the fretless bass doesn’t offer its companionship until the ending, and the rest fell into place when I found for the piano an arpeggiator pattern that expressed a 5/4 beat that I liked. Harmonically, the music is remarkably static, occasional extensions and variations on a G major chord, an idea I felt complementary to the poem’s treatment of the relationship. Indeed, the experience of recording this musical setting changed my experience of Lowell’s poem tremendously. By making the poem audible, I could feel that transit from desire to devotion as I endeavored to make my limited voice an acceptable conveyance for her words.
Silent on the page it’s not the same poem I found by speaking, by performing, by singing the words. I looked back on the consensus reflected in Untermeyer’s introduction to Lowell in his book:
Miss Lowell was not at home among the emotions. She triumphed in the visual world, in the reflection of reflections, in capturing the minute disturbances of light and movement. It has been said that, though a poet, she failed as a humanist, that she never touched deep feelings because she never knew where to look for them.”
I had a recorded performance by Tuesday afternoon, and such a spare arrangement should have led to a quick mix of the tracks and a later Tuesday release. Except…
The recorded sonics were troubling me. First, I usually record my vocals pretty-much “dry” and fix EQ, leveling, and add things like reverb afterward, but in an effort to buck up the confidence of my singing voice I had applied more than a little “vanity reverb” (and delay)** while tracking. That did give me more confidence as I was singing, but in the cold light of the afternoon mixing, it lacked (using one of those vague terms people use to describe sound) “a solid place” in the mix. This issue was complicated in that I record on one computer system and software and mix on another. Removing or lowering the reverb and delay in modern computer software after recording is trivial as long as the musical tracks stay within that piece of software. Once extracted to “printed” tracks (which is what I mix with later) that flexibility is gone.
Furthermore, even in such a simple ensemble, getting the mix between the vocal and the featured piano was critical, and each time I made a mix that sounded right, it didn’t translate when I checked it on common earbuds that I suspect are used by many listeners to these pieces. I produced three “that’ll do it/no it won’t” mixes before settling on a fourth just before going to bed last night. The too airy and diffuse vocal was mitigated by a bit of low-mid EQ boost and the slightest of top end roll off, and now you can hear my performance with the audio player below. No audio player? Ah, that’s likely due to some ways of reading this blog suppressing showing the player – but this highlighted link will open a new browser tab with its own audio player then.
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*Speaking just of early 20th century American-based women that come to mind this morning : Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anne Spencer, Sara Teasdale, H.D., Elinor Wylie, and Mina Loy have all received musical settings early and often over the decade of this Project.
**”Vanity Reverb” is a common producer tactic to help weak singers perform – it makes the vocal heard in the monitoring headphones sound grander to the shrinking vocalist. Even though I am both the producer and the singer here, the trick still works. Of course, it would have been best if Producer-I had left a dry signal track in there for more flexibility in mixing – but in my haste to get the recording done while I could, I forgot to do that.
Last time in our National Poetry Month series of musical settings of poems and poets included in Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry we heard from the poems of a leading practitioner of light verse, Ogden Nash. Today’s piece was made using some brief quotes from a much longer poem that fancies itself a step up from light verse.
In 1937 Robert Hillyer was a fresh winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and he had a professed friendship with the GOAT of all poetry Pulitzer winners, Robert Frost. That year he published a long poem in rhyming couplets, a format that in his day might make a cultured reader think of Alexander Pope – though a 21st century ear might hear in that rhyming form the philippics of Pulitzer winner Kendric Lamar. Couched as a letter to Frost, it’s a wry survey of the between-world-wars state of poetry. As an active professor of literature at Harvard, Hillyer’s in a good position to comment on and even change the nature of The Canon – that agreed upon pantheon of great poets to be taught and kept alive, even if as only as cadavers for academic dissection.
His poem from the start wants to make a point that The Canon is mutable – unlike arguments that it’s revealed truth only disputed by ignorant academic Visigoths with sub-rosa agendas. So, from the start (and the parts I chose to quote for today’s musical piece are all from the beginning of the poem) Hillyer uses himself and Frost (and meta-event! also the very anthology and anthologist that I’m drawing from for this month’s #NPM2026 series) to point out that we can change our mind and experience of poets, even long-dead ones.
His first case in point concerns Emily Dickinson. Let me do a quick attempt to summarize how that great poet – dead 50 years when Hillyer tells his tale – came to be vetted for a position in The Canon. Most of Dickinson’s best-considered work was written in the 1860s, and when she died in 1886 that work was almost entirely unknown, save for those poems she included in letters or otherwise distributed to intimates. None-the-less, in one of the cultural miracles of the ages, a large cache of hand-written fair copies of her poems were located after her death, and her surviving sister Lavinia Dickinson sought to publish them. More coincidence comes into play: Emily had corresponded with Thomas Higginson, a smart and well-connected Boston cultural figure, and two other culturally ambitious local women were willing to assist in editing these manuscripts: Emily’s sister-in-law (and now commonly assumed lover) Susan Gilbert Dickinson, and Mabel Loomis Todd, wife of a local astronomer and mistress of Emily Dickinson’s brother, the husband of Susan. No, this isn’t a season arc of Real Housewives of Amherst, that’s the mishigas/miracle that gives us one of America’s greatest poets.
Susan got first at bat with the surviving poems. She had grand plans for them, perhaps too grand. Lavinia grabbed the rights back and handed them to Mabel. Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Higginson were expeditious: they turned in a publishable manuscript quickly, doing what any responsible professional editor would do with this batch of handwritten “amateur” poems: cleaning up punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc., ordering their choice of best poems in a sequence, and adding helpful-to-the-casual-reader poem titles and subject-matter sub-sections.*
Still, the posthumous publication of a dead loved one’s poems generally produces about as much reaction as an engraved epigraph on a cemetery rock: a loving gesture with a small audience. Yet, surprisingly the Poems of Emily Dickinson sold very well, needing additional print runs only weeks after it was released. Two subsequent volumes containing more cleaned up and regularized poems quickly followed. So, at the turn of the 20th century, shortly before Modernism breaks out, this mid-19th century poet arrived.
When Untermeyer presents Emily Dickinson in his Modern American Poetry, it’s only her and Walt Whitman who are from the mid-19th century – the pair considered suitable to be considered “moderns” – but he points out that with the rise of High Modernism in the late 1920s, Dickinson’s poetry had taken a hit in critical assessment: she didn’t seem “serious” enough, and even with the Higginson-Todd edits, her prosody seemed sloppy. Untermeyer notes that the myth and mystery aspect of Dickinson’s biography, as understood then, was in danger of taking over from the verse: why did she withdraw socially, and was that part of some doomed romance?
That was still the Emily Dickinson that I read and heard about in school in the mid-20th century: a curious eccentric with a cozy-gothic-romance backstory to go with those poems of strangely polite funeral carriages. Real poets, like Frost, Stevens, and Eliot had no backstory, just texts that could support impersonal New Criticism exegesis.
But Emily Dickinson’s poetry was still to be written – or rather, printed. It was only in my lifetime that accurate and complete editions of her poetry were released. Shorn of half-measures, her language when faithfully conveyed, unleashed from conventional rules, now seemed less careless and more passionate and incisive. New readers started to see a Shakespearean width to Dickinson’s concerns, partly I suspect because there were smart women now with academic rhetorical skills who didn’t put blinders on when reading Dickinson, poems now sharper with the varnish taken off.
I took you on that little side-trip for two reasons. First, I wanted to be fair to Robert Hillyer as he recounts his and Frost reactions to Dickinson in the between-world-wars era. In the first blush of Modernism before the end of WWI, Dickinson (even if still regularized) seemed contemporary, because those early American Modernists prized concise directness and freedom from tired metaphorical tropes in poetry. Sandburg wrote a poem calling Dickinson an Imagist, the name taken for that early 20th century vanguard. And so it is too, that the young Hillyer recalls his original fondness for Dickinson, but then Hillyer’s journey as a poet and academic** taught him to value exactness in prosody: perfect rhymes, precise metrics, correct grammar arrayed in longer poems with grand themes. And what of his reporting of Frost reply to his youthful Dickinson enthusiasm: “Perhaps a genius, but mad?” Hillyer heard that judgement when Frost was teaching in Dickinson’s home town, people there still lived that knew the living Emily Dickinson, town eccentric.
I think it’s fine to (I quickly did this myself) ascribe the incident I extracted from Hillyer’s much longer poem to so much patriarchal prejudice – but the judgement of The Canon as its caissons go rolling along was for us to forget Hillyer’s verse and study Dickinson’s. The second reason I told Dickinson’s story, the greater point, and the reason I perform these few lines from Hillyer’s poem now, is to show that The Canon isn’t static, that it changes, or rather that we change it by our attention, what we find, what we take into ourselves. Because Hillyer’s long 1937 poem is likely still in copyright, I’m not able to provide a link to the full text on the Internet and I’ve chosen not to print the quotes I excerpted from it for educational purposes this National Poetry Month.
Robert Hillyer. I don’t know if he ever got to revise his learned opinion of Emily Dickinson’s poetry once again.
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I also present this piece as evidence of the music in differing styles precept of this Project.*** I am a naïve composer with limited musician skills. I suspect nearly all composers compose on an instrument, and that most inform their trial-and-error exploration with more adequate skills on an instrument buttressed with more knowledge of musical theory that I have. My mitigations, which I hope to hide from listeners partway, it to use anything I can do with my instruments and voice in my compositions, and avoid those things I can’t. If I learn some new musical theory or tactic, I’ll turn it into a composition while remaining ignorant of the panorama of musical structural theory – and when I work with orchestral instruments, as I do today, I’m closer to the Lego school of musical construction, using arpeggiators, MIDI editing, and lots of trial and error to make something that may be worthwhile. Today’s piece is therefore limited – from its composition through to its recording you can hear below – by the composer/performer’s limits to realize it. I believe that it will still work for some listeners – perhaps you. The audio player to hear this short piece with quotes from Robert Hillyer’s “A Letter to Robert Frost” is below. No player seen? Some ways of viewing this blog won’t let audio player gadgets into the canon, but I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*Modern critics and scholars generally decry their work. Todd in particular is often taken to task today for suppressing anything in the poems related to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, and both are accused of making the genius of Emily Dickinson all too conventional with their edits. But, if they had not done their work, not gotten Emily published, not done the commercial “clean-up” that made her immediately approachable to general readers in print, we likely wouldn’t have an Emily Dickinson to be concerned with.
**Hillyer seems more remembered today as an important teacher at Harvard than as a poet.
***Beside my own listening to orchestral music and art song (amidst a broad palette of other musical expressions) two pieces by trained composers likely influenced this work. Many years ago I was able to hear a locally-based composer, Dominick Argento’s Letters from Composers performed, and much more recently I was delighted to hear the premier performance of young composer Patricia Wallinga’s The Sisters, a one-act opera featuring singers portraying Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Amy Lowell together on stage singing about their poetic careers. I’d almost consider my little work today to be a modest response to The Sisters from the male side, as three of Wallinga’s quartet of women poets are observed in the Hillyer excerpt I performed. Where’s Amy Lowell? “Our friend at Sevenells” mentioned in Hillyer’s poetic letter to Frost is a reference to Amy Lowell’s home. Wallinga’s less-than-an-hour opera performance is available to be seen and heard at that hyperlink on YouTube.
You might notice that those composer/performer particulars I mention above limit the sophistication of my two-minute piece compared to these of course, my saving grace is the hope that my piece retains some value. I’ve taken to calling my efforts in this vein “punk orchestral” to make my case.
“I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’
I heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
I heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley”
-Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”
How much did the young Bob Dylan learn about Greenwich Village history that might have been known to long-timers when he arrived early in The Sixties?™ His early “Song to Woody” testifies that the young man who traveled from the Midwest to New York idolized some lefty-aligned folkies who came before him. Residents like his early NYC mentor Dave Von Ronk (“The Mayor of MacDougal Street”) could’ve further instructed him, and Dylan himself might have studied the Greenwich Village culture as a cross-country immigrant seeking to fit in. If so, here’s one example* he might have heard of: there was a between the wars Village fixture who eventually became a starving poet, and who more-or-less died in the gutter: the bold self-styled “King of the Village Bohemians:” Maxwell Bodenheim. Bodenheim’s sordid death happened less than seven years before Dylan’s NYC arrival – though the peak of his fame was in the 1920s, that’s still only 30-40 years before the young Midwesterner rolled into town,** well within the memory of living adults.
Now I have to say no one has schooled me on Bodenheim, though as a non-playable character, he’s strolled across research and reading I have done. My limited impression is that he tried a bit too hard to underline his bohemian cred, and that as a literary force his brief candle was snuffed out even before his inglorious end. So, I hadn’t read any of his poetry, even if he published in the right American Modernist journals and had several book length poetry collections printed during the last decade to be called The Twenties. As such, Louis Untermeyer’s attempt at an objective survey in his between-world-wars anthology I’m using to supply this April’s poems includes him – but in introducing Bodenheim’s poems there he throws some pretty sharp elbows:
In 1918 his first volume appeared and even those who were puzzled or repelled by Bodenheim’s complex idiom were forced to recognize its individuality…. Sometimes he packs his metaphors so close that they become inextricably confused. Sometimes he spins his fantasies so thin that the cord of coherence snaps and the poem frays into unpatterned ravelings.
The communication [in his later 1920s work] is more involved than ever: the expression of an acrobatic mind that juggles a dozen mixed metaphors, balancing itself meanwhile upon the knives of emotion with a mordant grimace…. He has something to say which the reader, provoked though he may be by the author’s supercilious disdain, might listen to with profit. It is, never the less, still true that Bodenheim too often writes in the role of literary ring-master, cracking his savage whip over cowering adjectives and recalcitrant adverbs, compelling them to leap in unwilling pairs over the fantastically piled barriers of his imagination.”
I chose to perform Bodenheim’s “Old Age.”Here’s a link to the text of the poem. Just as with George Dillon writing about Lake Superior the poem has already sold itself to me partway with its title – I’m an old man, and I think about that state a fair amount of the time, whether I want to or not. For this poem I’m not sure what in it is metaphor and what is memory. The poem sets out the scene of a village or neighborhood from an era before motorized trucks. While there are details, it’s a generalized enough portrait that I can’t say where this village is located. This poem was first published in 1918 – it could have been a NYC neighborhood, perhaps the immigrant section that would come to be known as the East Village. Or it could have been parts of Chicago where Bodenheim lived before New York. I even get a sense it could be a European town. Bodenheim was the son of German/French immigrants, and if he was to think of old men, his grandparent’s generation, in his bloodline if not first-hand experience, that would be their locale.
Still, this may not be some early 20th century “Penny Lane.” I take seriously the line “The old men are my thoughts.” Is he a careless writer who meant to write “are in my thoughts?” I like the poem better if I take him at his word. His thoughts, his consciousness, would then be portrayed as this semi-autonomous set of people, with their customs and cross-purposes that he has become accustomed to so that he views his inner psyche like an old man who’s seen them all many a time, is comfortable that he’s seeing that flow of things again; and who will choose casting his inner self as the old men talking, or the gamboling children, or the young strong men, or the shopkeepers, or the women with some tinkling part in the multicurrent flow inside his head.
I can resonate with that, what with the variety I seek to keep up with this Project. I am happy in this village of choices of poetry and music I choose to experience and work with, each of which seems native to me, even if outwardly they seem so differing. And I’m hustling like the line in the poem that brings an urgent cartload of supplies to the village with pale flowers in its square, because I know the poem’s last line, “Some evening I shall not return to my people,” intimately.
Maxwell Bodenheim. No chord sheet this time, but today’s music is a 2-chord vamp: CMaj7 & Bm7. I wrote this post during the afternoon of April 7th, and I’m grateful the my country’s mad king didn’t make me think even more of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall today.”
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Before I leave off and ask you to listen to my performance of Bodenheim’s poem, I have one more observation to make: this is yet another poem by a young person about being old. Bodenheim was 25 when this was published. Some years back I even did a series here of such poems: poets under 40 who wrote of the experience of old age. That there’s a goodly number of such poems, some examples among the ones most cherished by older readers, surprises me. I don’t recall in my 20s spending a great deal of time thinking of how I’d experience old age. Oddly, at my current age I find myself thinking of my future time much like I did as a child – then I knew that in 10-12 years I’d be this other creature with other concerns, an adult. Now, I know in that interval (or less, oh yes, the chance of less) I’ll likely be dead or significantly incapacitated. These two similar considerations over the horizon line were (for me) a feature of childhood and being much older than young adulthood or middle age.
Full-on spoken word this time, and the electric Telecaster guitar returns in full voice for today’s musical performance. Spring allergies or a late season cold hampered my voice, but I have several more poems from Untermeyer’s anthology I want to get done, and so this one needed to unload its creaking cart. You can hear that performance of Maxwell Bodenheim’s “Old Age” with the audio player below. Has that player crossed the rainbow bridge? Send no flowers, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog hide the player, so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*The other NYC name that has made me have similar thoughts: Sweet Marie Ganz was a local political activist who was imprisoned around the time Bodenheim published today’s poem. Ganz was pretty pissed-off by the mutual-aid failure of other socialist-anarchist figures to support, or even visit her when she was behind bars. Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie” with its up-the-river penitentiary and anarchist motto “to live outside the law you must be honest” has me making wild speculations that someone like Von Ronk told him tales of the young woman who stood in front of John D. Rockefeller’s NYC townhouse and told an angry crowd protesting there that she herself was so mad that if she had a gun she’d shoot the oligarch. Then someone in the crowd handed Sweet Marie a gun. Damn that’s a good story, but one for another day.
**Early part of the 20th century had plenty of Midwesterners making big noise without going through the East-Coast Ivy League gateway and finishing school: Floyd Dell, Don Marquis, Carl Sandburg, Carl Van Vechten, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and my relative Susan Glaspell. Bodenheim was another. He started his literary efforts in Chicago where he paled-up with Dell and Ben Hecht before decamping to New York.
We first meet any poem as a stranger. And in going through Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry for this year’s National Poetry Month series, I often met on its pages poets I knew nothing about. Elizabeth Coatsworth was one. This poem of hers, “A Lady Comes to an Inn” is emblematic of that – starting with strangeness, ending with wonder.
The poem begins when a quartet of strangers comes to an inn. Two of them are described as men of color, a third gets even less description, but he has a wife – the “lady” of the title.
The rest of the poem is observations of that lady. Normal expectations and timeworn poetic tropes may blind us as she is first described. First, we’re told her hair is pale and somewhat transparent. Is she just blonde or perhaps white haired? Well, twice we’re given images of translucency: champagne and ale. Perhaps that’s a trick of the light, but even if the number and pigment of hair strands change with age, they’re still opaque. Perhaps the poem’s descriptive inventory of a lighter hair color, creamy complexion, and a rosy mouth hew so closely to many a poem and folk-song’s conventions we’ll be lulled into this opening as so much boilerplate.*
Likely not intended, but I was reminded by the title of this poem of the old ethnic-joke form that starts with a group of nationalities or religions who walk into a bar and….
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Things start to slip by the third verse: she speaks a language “nobody knows.” Does she speak this unknown tongue only some of the time, perhaps with her three companions, or is that unknown language her only one? The poem’s not clear on this, or even what the speech of the three men is like – they’re silent for all we know. This third verse has the two lines that “sold” the poem to me on first reading: “But sometimes she’d scream like a cockatoo/And swear wonderful oaths that nobody knew.”
Now we’re fully in strangeness. The cockatoo screech must have been startling, though no startling of those who have met these strangers is noted, and the oaths that may be understood as curses only from their musical tenor or other context, are said to be “wonderful.”
I get a sense of beguilement by the strangers, and the fourth verse may be to indicate that: the poem’s observer is gawking down the woman’s décolletage to read her tattoos. And what’s with those “bronze slippers?” Poetically fancified way to say brown shoes? Or are they really metal shoes. Weird. And no one can obtain the lady’s name. Language barrier? Beguilement? Since the other three in the quartet of strangers are unremarked on after the first stanza, the lady is holding everyone’s attention. Nobody knows where the lady and the others have come from, though it’s surmised it’s “marvelous.”
And then the poem and its strangers skip town, and the poem is the sum of the inn’s countrysider’s remembrance.
Let me be honest. On first reading I was picturing a quasi-Romani/”gypsy” encounter, and I even thought the poem might be seen as vaguely racist in an exoticist manner. Rather, I believe we’re supposed to get that sense – but the poem doesn’t say Roma explicitly, and easily could. That’s a misdirect. I think the countrysiders may even think the travelers are Romani at first. Taken more carefully, with a little more attention, I can see an unwritten final verse where a gray and time-jumping Rod Serling steps out from behind the inn to give us a benediction about being hospitable to strange travelers.
Did Coatsworth intend extraterrestrials? Modern readers might see that in the spaces between what she outlines in her poem: the thin extended limbs, pale skin, the indecipherable language, the metal shoes – ET, your inclusion in an important Modernist poetry anthology has come through. But in the early 1920s when Coatsworth published this poem, I think were more at fairy folk in her intent.
I spent an afternoon today reading more about Coatsworth’s interesting life and other literary work. Untermeyer makes much of her world-traveler resume in his anthology’s introduction of Coatsworth, and from further study it does look to be remarkable. As a young woman in the early 20th century she rode horseback across the Philippines and traveled widely in China and elsewhere in Asia – as well as the more common European “Grand Tour” stuff.** Though starting off as a poet for three book-length collections, she was a prolific writer in a variety of genres, including children’s literature and fantasy. Her most remembered work is an early Newbery Medal winner, The Cat Who Went to Heaven, a children’s book with unusual subject matter melding extensive dharma talk with a Charlotte’s Web plot published in 1930. One of the highlights in today’s research was reading a couple of accounts by Coatsworth’s daughter, poet Kate Barnes, who writes about what her mother was like and the life she eventually led in rural Maine.
I wanted a contrast with the slower, sparer music I have used for the first two episodes; and when I had an hour in my studio space Friday, I quickly recorded three energetic takes of the music I wrote for “A Lady Comes to an Inn.” Kate Barnes writes her mother wrote quickly,*** and that rhymes with my usual recording necessities these days: the first thought had to be a good enough thought. When I went to mix the resulting tracks, I realized I had a problem. I had played my jumbo 12-string guitar, and that beast when I pick it at a rapid tempo produces a lot of clashing harmonic content. It took a few tries using some mixing magic to temper that issue with the recording you can hear below using the audio player gadget. Has the audio gadget left for fairy land or Aldebaran? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog glamor the display of such a player, and so I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with an audio player.
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*The lady’s elongated thinness also described may not stop the reader at first either, but the young maples in my yard would also say otherworldly if their branches would describe a humanoid limb.
**Her travels included “off the beaten path” journeys, and I theorize that she would have likely experienced herself, as a woman, being the exotic, mysterious, traveler at times.
***Coatsworth’s spouse, writer Henry Beston, was the opposite, a much slower writer who needed solitude to work. Mother/housewife Coatsworth might have needed that work-fast-with-inconstant-time-available outlook for external reasons, but daughter Barnes thinks it was intrinsic to her nature. Coatsworth published around 100 books and told her daughter that she had published the most poems of any poet of her era if you excluded the para-literary sorts like Edgar Guest
Continuing my April National Poetry Month observance with another poem from Louis Untermeyer’s between-world-wars anthology Modern American Poetry. This one’s from a better-known poet than last time.
NPM starts with April Fools Day, an outdated holiday since we already had President’s Day in February, and can-you-believe-it outrages are somehow less funny this year. Yet, it’s also the day my late wife and I got married back in the 1980s. Not exactly a golden age back then either, and my wife would explain the decision to get married as a statement of the stubborn optimism of loving fools.
The poet who I’ll sing today published under the name H.D. – a nom de plume that still has a modern vibe for a pioneering Modernist. Maybe someone in our digital screen age will pay tribute by calling a project extending her work “QHD?” Something else that I’d expect might still sound modern is how she came to be a part of the Modernist vanguard that formed in England among a group including Americans living abroad. Hilda Doolittle was a young woman who had a college sweetheart. It appears they planned to get married. That other, a he in the pair, moved to England to meet up with the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats. His name was Ezra Pound. Young Hilda eventually traveled to London to reconnect with Pound.
Somewhere in the passages of boats and time the romance between the two died, for there’s no guarantee that optimistic fools will continue to share the foolish accords of love. Pound was a talker, a planner, a promoter of the kind of modern American poetry Untermeyer would start to collect a few years later in his anthology with that name. Meeting Hilda in London, Ezra hatches a plan for H.D. that’s not marriage.
Looking at a bunch of poems that Hilda had brought with her to England, Pound pronounced them delightful and perfectly modern, an unbidden expression of the new poetry movement he and his little group were promoting. Pound, ever sure of himself (a trait that is dangerous in politicians, but often advantageous in artists*) scribbled at the bottom of Hilda’s poems “H.D. Imagiste.” Later on the Frenchie “e” got dropped and the new English language poetry Modernists were Imagists.
Now, I wasn’t there – chronistically excluded – but if there was a function like social media then I can Imagist a whole lot of takes on this. Manipulating the poor girl! Way to change the subject EP. Patronizing, much?
Well, here’s the unexpected part: H.D.’s poetry was striking. Still is. She could write very compressed short poems, nothing wasted: no dallying narrative story-telling or clearly identified speakers, but the images inside these enigmas so clear and evocative.
In his introduction to H.D. Imagiste in his anthology Untermeyer wrote:
She was the only one who steadfastly held to the letter as well as the spirit of its credo. She was, in fact, the only true Imagist. Her poems are like a set of Tanagra figurines….The effect is chilling – beauty seems held in a frozen gesture. But it is in this very fixation of light, color and emotion that she achieves intensity. What at first seemed static becomes fluent; the arrested moment glows with a quivering tension…. A freely declared passion radiates from lines which are at once ecstatic and austere.
The poem I selected from Untermeyer’s selection is the one called “Lethe,” and it’s a good example of this effect. She leaves interpretive space in this poem: one could read it as a curse or an elegy. Is she decrying the separated lover, wishing upon them even more separation from nature, comforts, and others? Or is she with chilling remorse stating the plain facts of the dead: that they are separated – and we the living, separated too, but able to feel and sing that. Her poem is a sensuous litany of what the dead’s senses will not feel.
Today’s “thimbleberries.” I didn’t know what “whin” mentioned in the poem was. The Internet’s department of tautology department tells me its a variety of the gorse plant.
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I chose the latter when I performed it – thinking on a day for fools, of marrying to share each other’s foolishness. You can hear that performance of H.D.’s “Lethe” with the audio player gadget below. What, you can’t hear the no wailing of reed-bird to waken you? Some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing the audio player, so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*Ezra Pound’s confidence did extend to politics. Alas – to say the least.
April is U.S. National Poetry Month, and this year I’m going to focus on poems found within an in-between-the-World-Wars anthology titled Modern American Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer. It’s a book that might have been assigned when my parents were in college, filled largely with poets that were born in the vicinity of the turn of the 20th century. I don’t know enough to comment on Untermeyer’s taste in selecting his early 20th century poets, but he seems to have interests in some areas that overlap my own: early Modernism,* humor, and poetry with proletarian and gothic themes. I assume there’s at least a trace of literary log-rolling in the selection of some of the less-well-known poets in the book, but in the short essays that he writes to introduce each poet Untermeyer often finds room for sharp critical comments – this to me is evidence of a fair-minded attempt to get his time’s consensus consideration of American poetry since Whitman and Dickinson.
My plan (to the degree that my life allows plans, which is arguable) is to present around 10 poems from the hundreds in Untermeyer’s thick book. I expect one or two will be “poetry’s greatest hits” that I haven’t otherwise gotten around to, and others will be unknown poems by little-known poets. Long time readers may recall a statement I’ve taken to calling Donald Hall’s Law. That poet, a prize-winner, once wrote: “Most poets, even prize-winning ones, will be forgotten 40 years after they die.” Modern American Poetry went through 6 editions between 1919 and 1942, and from a quick look, the last of the included authors died in the 1980s, and so are subject and evidence to that law. Will my efforts and your attention amend Donald Hall’s Law? Slim chance, but I enjoy sporting with its iron rule. Once some pressman ran these pages through their oily machinery, they pressed a democracy between the boards – and so, next to your Wallace Stevens and Robert Frosts, there’s the someone elses who led a life, observed it, did their best to craft some poem to convey that.
And here’s the first of those: George Dillon. Know the name? Know their poetry? This isn’t a test – I didn’t. Some reading this are likely living poets,** and you might have careerist moments in some early AM hours once the muse has worn off. Are you submitting enough, and to the right places? Did you do enough to promote your collection? Are you behind in your social media or correspondence? And while you never think this one yourself, you might still think someone else is thinking “Who do I have to sleep with to gain some traction?”
I’ve reached a age. I look at Donald Hall’s Law and am strangely comforted. I don’t need to be encouraged in dream-stoking stories about poets who achieved lasting fame. I seek out instead stories that say someone else was once here, wrote a little, and I can find them, find some pleasure in a poem or two, and say: that’s enough, or better than some other human clap trap we had no choice in hearing.
And so we have George Dillon. He made it into Untermeyer’s anthology, slotted between Robert Penn Warren and Kenneth Patchen. He was an editor at Poetry Magazine for over a decade! He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1931 poetry collection! He and Edna St. Vincent Millay were lovers!
Chord sheets like this one might encourage you to sing this poem too.
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I said Untermeyer could be toughly critical even of those he included. Here’s the end of his introduction to the selections of Dillon’s poetry in the anthology:
His defect is his fluency; he is sure of his craftsmanship, a little too sure. The subject-matter is conventional to the point of being stereotyped and the tone in the sonnets is a shade too pompous. Yet the verse is unusually flexible and few will question his gift of song.”
Fair enough. When I look through a collection seeking something to use here “gift of song” is going to attract me. And there’s another factor. The title of the poem I set to music is “Memory of Lake Superior.” My late wife lived in Duluth for a while; we both loved the north shore of that Greatest Lake. My living wife too hikes there even as I’ve become too old for long walks. Besides the “words that want to break into a song” effect, Dillon’s poem is well observed: the famous red-brown sandstone, the fungal debris on the forest floors. My wife tells me*** that the thimbleberries there that Dillon mentions “have larger flowers than razzberries.” It’s National Poetry Month, sure, but I thought leading off with a Spring poem with home field advantage would be appropriate.
Thimbleberries, their flower, their berry.
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You can hear Dillon’s “Memory of Lake Superior” with the audio player below. Are you asking, “Has Donald Hall hidden the player to enforce his law?” No, just some ways of viewing the blog won’t show the player gadget, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*My initial interest in the early American Modernist era was fed by having a relative (Susan Glaspell) who was part of it, but the practical aspect of having work from 1930 back being in public domain and free for unrestrained reuse makes this era primary for poetic texts to combine with music here. Though the bulk of Untermeyer’s anthology republishes work from before 1930, I am using a later edition, and it’s possible a few of the works may be borderline: e.g. Dillon’s poem is obscure enough to not have an easily findable date of first publication.
**Dead poets reading here have damnably low engagement scores, and Ouija board planchettes never click links or hit “like.”
***Again, living wife – though a ghostly partner who whispers woodland lore to me from the undiscovered country would have a certain gothic charm.
Today I take on one of those poetic expressions a great many poets have engaged with: the poem about the state of poetry. The title gets written in Latin to puzzle readers, and because Horace wrote in Latin back when the world had to worry about the whims of tyrannical kings and poets got their words carved in marble. We’re much more culturally advanced now. You can hear this poem anywhere in the world using the Internet. Dozens will listen with you during National Poetry Month. Dozens! Imagine the value of that if that dozens was of eggs.
I briefly hesitated to share this poem of mine publicly. Not only is this project largely about other people’s words, but my Ars Poetica poem starts off comparing some poets to assassins. That’s a metaphor, a conceit, a simile. I’ve shared other civic poems about the fate of nations this month, but I’m not a big fan of political assassination — but then I’m also not a big fan of making fun of poets, and I’m going to do that today. And it is a civic poem. On my way to comparing poets to assassins I make note of the state of mass transit in my fair-sized midwestern American city, which is: pretty bad. Not assassination bad. No! Rather my point is that it would be bad for an assassin. Or for poets trying to get to and from poetry readings.
32 bar AABA tune. Chords are F C Am G and then Cm Gm Cm Dm in the bridge, though there are some substitutions.
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Well, you don’t have to go anywhere to listen to the performance. And it’ll be doubly good to do so because the last day of National Poetry Month in April is also International Jazz Day, and I’m going to make some fake Jazz.* Poets, we get a month! Jazz — like a whole world of it — gets only a day. Well, it’s an international day, sliding across the globe’s time zones, but still…
You can hear me reading my Ars Poetica poem with a Jazz combo using the audio player below. No player? The Jazz Police haven’t come for it, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress it. There’s an alternative: this highlighted link will open its own browser tab with an audio player.
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*Way back in the 20th century, when we had to carry the dead weight of a constitution around all the time with laws, and due process, and so forth, a group of local improvisational comic performers used to get together and the agenda was to play bad Jazz. No, not to parody or put down Jazz, more at an honest admission that their musical skills weren’t up to that level, but the desire to have a go at it was still there. That’s me making up this Jazz quartet today. I’ve cut a corrupt deal with the composer to only write things I can play on bass and guitar, and I give the computer the chords to tickle on the piano.
Another poem for April Poetry Month. Another Emily Dickinson poem. Once more, wildflowers. Once more they’re that early spring flower, daffodils. Once more the poet is looking back because something’s missing.
Chord sheet because someone else might sing this better than I can
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Last time the voice in Dickinson’s poem was also alienated from Spring, but there was a taunting wit to that one. The mode in today’s Dickinson is more abstract, and the second, final, stanza is so gnomic here I can’t say I know fully what it’s conveying. Even the first stanza is tied in knots, tangled with those Dickinsonian dashes. Is “an April Day” the “Absent Place” — or is the April day, with present dancing-in-the-breeze daffodils, in contrast to the Absent Place? The stanza’s final line asking us to consider the viewpoint of “the Souls that snow” could be saying then the snow is more full of motion and drifting shapes than mere blossoms — or that April brings forth feelings that makes the Absent Place snow-Souls uncomfortable?
In intent or effect, it may be a shifting Tao — an all of the above in motion with each other?
But the final stanza? I assume “Drift” within is of the snow-Souls’, a self-impediment worse than snowed-in roads or walks, but the concluding two lines are harder to follow. Perhaps she’s saying that snow-Souls are the ”Him” in the last line, and their change and emotion is as strong as (“duplicate”) as the wind-moved daffodils? But “duplicate” is a strange word choice. Even within slant-rhyme it’s quite strained to rhyme with “without.” I even toyed with pronouncing the duplicate as the noun, not the verb, which would be a nice sound-pair with “but.” However, that’s syntactically sour and doesn’t follow the first stanzas ABAB rhyme scheme.
For awhile I engaged in a little fantasy extension of this brief poem while asking why daffodils, rather than another Spring flower. Poet Dickinson famously knew her plants — not just as an avid gardener — but as a woman with more education than most in her time and place (which included science, considered a presentable ladylike field). She was the maker of an impressive book of pressed flowers labeled with their scientific names. Did she know her Greek myths as well as the scientific name for the daffodil, Narcissus? The essential piece of the Greek myths of Narcissus is that the youth of that name dies because he becomes entranced by his reflection, his duplicate. Is the last line’s “Him” Narcissus or something like him?
Or is she taking another route into the roots of the word narcissus, related to narcosis, a drugged numbing? Does the final stanza mean to say that springtime joy can be as numbing as wintertime sadness?
It may be wise to consider my thoughts about the final stanza over-thinking. They’re surely speculative, but it still seems likely that the poem means to link the emotions extracted from Winter and Spring landscapes.
As April National Poetry Month winds down, I’ve fallen into a theme without designing it. Many of us are feeling crabby, dismayed, disgusted, frightened, but Spring doesn’t know that. The cold of Northern April is now behind us, and May lays out ahead with greening and warmth. Is it taunting us by being pleasant and hopeful?
For the music in the performance you can hear below, I fell into it too, as certain and mindless as Spring. The recording started with the chordal guitar part, which I played on my jangling Squier Jazzmaster instead of an acoustic guitar because I was telling myself I’ve been stuck on acoustic playing too much lately, and I hate to be predictable. In timbre and volume it was hardy enough to easily accept the drums and electric bass that I matched with it. The final part was the lead guitar line played largely on the B string of the guitar up and down the neck, in that “I’ve just heard a Ravi Shankar LP” way that was popular in The Sixties — the 1960s, not Emily’s 1860s. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below. No such gadget to be seen? The authorities haven’t shut down the psychedelic ballroom, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress showing the audio player. This highlighted link is an alternative which will open its own tab with its own audio player inside.
The attention I’ve been calling forth this National Poetry Month has been divided up between “civic poetry” about the state of nations, and poet’s examination of Springtime. Today’s piece continues with the wildflowers and wildlife side of April, but because it’s by Emily Dickinson, it’s a complex statement.
Dickinson here uses the ballad meter as she often did, a form also used for many Protestant hymns. This form as common as the robin. Simple music, startling images, another disconnect.
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This poem, approximately dated at 1862, can still startle the modern reader. Over a century and a half of poems have been written since then, yet the language, images, and play of thought within it still seem fresh and surprising. And there’s no wait for the surprise in this one, beginning with the idea that I used for a title for the resulting song I made of it. Dread of Robins? This common North American bird is anything but frightening. It’s not large, or fierce, no raptor or raven. In the context of the poem, the outstanding thing about the American Robin is that it’s a migratory bird whose arrival is a sign of Spring. Yet it causes pain somehow.
The next stanza seems to amplify sound. The song of the robin is not that loud, but the sound of wild birds in Spring taken together does have a choral aspect. In their territoriality and mate-seeking, there is a shout to their throats. Dickinson hears some music in it, but it’s not altogether pleasant. The Piano in the Woods image delights in sideways incongruity. The piano is Dickinson’s instrument, the one she played, but as an acoustic guitarist one thing I know about the piano is that it can be overpoweringly loud. And placing the piano with its wooden case in a woodland implies a metamorphosis. Perhaps ED hears a piano whose notes are bird calls? “Mangle” here is another characteristic unusual word choice by Dickinson. In her day she’d know the machine named with the verb: the wringer for squeezing water out of laundry. Spring is putting the speaker in the poem through the wringer.
Many of this April’s pieces have featured wildflowers, and specifically daffodils, but the colorful brightness of the flower here does not delight even after the dreary monochrome of a Massachusetts Winter.
Bees are everywhere in Dickinson’s poems, more than angels in Blake or Rilke. She often speaks fondly of their seeking sweetness, their industry, their pollinating agency in horticulture. Dickinson had by interest and education knowledge of these details, yet here the Spring bee too is unwelcome and she feels alienated from them.
In the penultimate stanza the creatures and flowers of Spring are present. She grandiloquently calls herself, “The Queen of Calvary,” suffering as if the crucified Jesus of Lenten Spring.
In the final stanza there’s a parade of sorts, with drums and salutes. “Plumes” here strikes me as an odd choice. It may be a bereaved funeral procession. Black ostrich plumes were apparently used for funeral decorations in the 19th century, so oddly we start with a modest small bird and end with the plumage of one of the largest. The poem’s speaker dreads the robin, yet seems accepting of the plucked raiment of the giant.
Is this a poem of disappointment and depression? Yes, that is there — but it’s majestic too. The poem is a catalog of Spring’s changes, all of which the poem’s speaker is unable to find pleasure in: dreaded little robins, pianos in forests, piercing yellow wildflowers, the energy of bees. There’s wit here, and like a Blues singer, there is a power of being able to sing knowing the score of a bad outcome!
I think this is a poem of a divided mind. I can relate. Spring remains wonderful, much as this Spring I’m experiencing this year, but my civic world has presented us with discordant changes, public cruelty, careless acts, all cloaked in self-serving bluster. Dickinson’s poem is dated to 1862 — the American Civil War, which for now still has a singular name, had started.*
I originally tracked my musical setting here with just my voice and acoustic guitar. I thought that spareness might contrast with the last two musical pieces here with full-on Rock ensembles. I had second thoughts though: this may be a poem about internal sensations, but it’s also about change in a fuller natural and national world. Eventually this arrangement, one that evolves throughout with high wind instruments and emerging synth seemed better suited. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below. No dreadful robin, I mean player, to be seen? You may be reading this blog in a way that suppresses the player, so here’s a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*One reader of a Dickinson blog has a detailed theory of the personal particulars that might have faced ED when the poem was written. Deadly Civil War or mentors splitting for the coast would be matters of mismatched scale. Is the Spring of closely watched bees, and little birds and yellow wildflowers smaller or bigger than those things?
Frank Hudson 