New Jersey

From Philip Freneau’s “Reflections” or Darkness on the Edge of Town

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s winter, outside of Freehold New Jersey. An old man is walking home.

He’s not going to make it. Darkness, confusion from old age or infirmity, perhaps drink – I don’t know, I wasn’t there, but I’m going to ask you to imagine you are there with him. His clothes are worn-out, he still wears an old-style tricorn hat like some Yankee Doodle – and it’s 1832. Does he know enough to know that he’s in trouble? The man’s certainly not a stranger to trouble. Back during the American Revolution, he was imprisoned in the fetid hold of a docked British prison ship. Every morning, dead prisoners would be hoisted out of that darkness, hauled out to be thrown into a common grave. He wrote too, that after an escape attempt, jailors opened the hatch and fired indiscriminately down below killing four of his fellow prisoners in the close quarters of their oppression.

While there’s no one to talk to as he walks in this winter night, he once knew a certain kind of recognized eloquence. He wrote about his imprisonment. Wrote about other outrages of the empire’s powers, and wrote too of those resisting them. After the resulting celebration of American independence there’s recognition of what he wrote. They called him “The Poet of the American Revolution.” A high honor, but a small group – there aren’t a lot of poets in the running, or readers thereof, in the new country. He endeavors to make a post-war living with his pen. One of the most fluent and literary of the Revolution’s leaders, Thomas Jefferson, selects this poet to promote his new Democratic-Republican political party by founding and editing a newspaper, but eventually Jefferson leaves the political stage. In 1815 the old man’s home burns down, all is lost. He makes what little living he has repairing clocks, fixing time, which can’t be fixed.

Like I said to begin, he doesn’t make it home – the old man, Philip Freneau, freezes to death on the outskirt streets of his hometown. Then, all the lucky men from 1832 are gone now too, and poets leave behind books which nobody reads, but could.

Philip Freneau

The preface to the collection of Freneau’s poems I read says there are no depictions of Freneau made during his lifetime, so this one was made based on recollections of those that knew him.

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Last week I decided maybe I should start to look into that pioneering comprehensive anthology of American Poetry that Conrad Aiken edited in 1919. I don’t have to get in very far, for I find Philip Freneau just a couple of pages past Anne Bradstreet in the order of things. I’d never heard of him, and his poetry looked interesting. I spent the weekend reading about Freneau and working on the musical presentation of part of one of his poems.

As one might expect for someone involved in radical anti-colonialism and politics, Freneau wrote a lot of civic poetry. Besides his prison ship poem, he wrote a good deal of satiric verse tagging the British – but there are also some nature poems which some have seen as predecessors to the Transcendentalist movement that bloomed just after Freneau crossed over on that winter’s night. After independence, and even after his journalistic efforts for Jefferson’s new political party, he continued to publish poems regarding civic matters in verse. Looking further and into a volume of Freneau’s collected poems, portions of one in particular struck me. Titled “Reflections,”  with a long subtitle “On the Gradual Progress of Nations from Democratical States to Despotic Empires.”  The poem warns of “embryo monarchs” who sacrifice a nation’s strength and renown “to prop a tottering throne,” who would “seize on nations with a robber’s view” and “breed eternal hates” to distract the populace. Such a quaint antique poem. It will take an effort to cast one’s attentions and thoughts back to such a time so different from our own – but let’s try. I selected the last portion of Freneau’s poem for performance.

Last time we had a nocturne featuring two cellos and a quiet piano accompaniment. Let’s wake up for declaring Freneau’s poem! I rapidly built today’s rock ensemble: sequenced some drums, laid down the grounding electric bass, put in a droning Hammond organ pad (about all I can play), and ginned up a few phrases on electric piano, but both of them are sparce and quiet in the mix – that bass line is the tune’s load-bearing structure. I wanted to get all that out of the way because I really wanted to play some cranked electric guitar.

Which I proceeded to do. First a left-channel track with a Telecaster, then a right channel lead with a weird flat-black Les Paul Studio that I picked up some years back in an overstock sale. Indulge me listeners: there’s a two-minute coda of those guitars working out my co-signed statement on Freneau’s warning to the citizenry. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below – and if you listen quietly you won’t get what I was intending.

What, were the guitars so loud they blew out the audio player gadget? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress showing the player – but the man can’t bust our music! I provide a highlighted link that will bail out a new browser tab that has its own audio player.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*About 120 years after Freneau’s last night in Freehold, it would become the New Jersey hometown of the young Bruce Springsteen. I wonder if he knows about Freneau? This is, after all, a Springsteen who toured this year with his shouting band speaking explicitly about the duties of citizenship. While a web search finds nothing, I have my suspicions he just might.

William Carlos Williams’ Summer Song

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

One of my favorite Indie rock band names is Yo La Tengo. The name comes from a convention that was formulated decades ago as talented non-English speaking players began appearing in North American baseball teams. “Yo la tengo!” means “I’ve got it!” – a useful term as two or more fielders with their eyes fixed skyward tracking a fly ball might otherwise collide. In such a situation, the most confident player needs to call off the others who also think they might have a chance at making the play.

Today’s piece is by William Carlos Williams, who grew up speaking Spanish. It was published in Williams’ 1917 collection Al Que Quiere!   Wikipedia quotes from a later memoir by Williams where he translates that phrase as “to him that wants it,” a cry that he associates with playing football (AKA soccer). I don’t have access to that memoir, but he expands on that definition to make it sound like it’s an in-game cry meaning “I’m open, I’m confident, I have advantage on the defenders, get the ball to me!”*

Odd to think of WCW as a young athlete. I always picture him in his later years, the time that overlapped my lifetime, as an older man.**  But there is another element of his nature in that cry: if not exactly a poetry ball-hog, he seems to have been a poet who was not ashamed to make claims for his artistic validity. He got the Modernism bug early, and went right on to the business of “Making it new” even before this collection was published. Confidence. Or stubbornness.

William Carlos Williams’ poem “Summer Song”  starts out straightforward, with the Moon still visible just after dawn. If you’d like to follow along, here’s a link to the text.***  WCW is right-off attributing personhood to the Moon. If self-aware, the Moon must know it will soon be washed out by the rising sunlight, but Williams says the Moon is indifferent to that, it goes on smiling, for even if it’s a “wanderer” it also seems to understand that it will come to a new place, a new town, a new day, soon enough.

In the final section I’m a bit less clear at how surreal WCW is going. Let’s presume he’s the poem’s speaker, the man observing this moon in the summer morning. I try to picture the image he portrays. He says he might buy a shirt the color of the Moon (white? gray? silver? ruddy?) and accessorize it with a sky-blue tie. I’m puzzled. Wouldn’t the blue of the sky be the field (the shirt) on which the moon would (whatever color) be the tie in the foreground? Is he purposefully reversing foreground object and background field? Perhaps his intent is to say that the wanderer moon is really bigger than the present blue morning sky?

decalcomania by rene magritte

Painter Rene Magritte reversing field.

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I’m unsure, but his final line is clear — if he too may be overshadowed — he may wander too, even if fading into invisibility, until his time might come. And here we are, some 106 years later, and I’m singing his words in front of a rock quartet today. You can hear that performance with an audio player you’ll see against the field of this web page. Or not? Well, then this highlighted link will tie you to a new tab which will supply its own audio player.

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*I’m unable to find any confirmation in a quick search that this is some kind of standard on-field player cry. The Wikipedia excerpt from WCW explaining it also goes on to have him say that “I was there willing to pass the ball if anyone did want it.” So, is “al que queire” the cry of the player who wants the ball — or the cry of someone putting up a long kick in hopes one of their teammates will be there to receive it, a soccer equivalent of an American football “Hail Mary pass?
Again, Willians was like that. He was willing to write and to publish, put himself out there, without the level of attention and praise that some of his Modernist contemporaries received during their lifetimes. Anyone know anything more about this Spanish phrase?

**Also like the band Yo La Tengo, Williams was based in New Jersey.

***Here’s a link to an earlier version of this poem as published in 1916 in Poetry  magazine. As I improvised while singing, unaware of the this alternate version, WCW extended and refrained his ending there.

It Is a Small Plant

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

September 17th is the birthday of the American Modernist poet and physician William Carlos Williams, and today’s piece uses the words from one of his poems “It Is a Small Plant,”  the best known selection from a sequence of poems Williams called “The Flowers of August.”

William_Carlos_Williams_passport_photograph_1921

Just because you have have a passport doesn’t mean you have to move overseas.

 

Unlike some other American Modernists—including two poets he met and befriended while a student at the University of Pennsylvania, H.D. and Ezra Pound—Williams spent most of his formative writing years in the United States, much of it in his native state of New Jersey where he practiced as a pediatrician. Like his fellow stay-at-home Modernist Carl Sandburg, Williams wrote poems the followed the new Imagist rules, at least at the start, finding them useful in breaking away from the old poetic styles.

One of those Imagist rules, the first one in fact, was “direct treatment of the ‘thing.” That doesn’t mean that you just directly state the message from your heart. Rather, it means that you honor and hone the image(s) that represent your meaning as palpable thing, not as mere poetic decoration for your words. “It Is a Small Plant” demonstrates that by spending nearly the entire poem presenting a description of a flowering plant.

In the series “The Flowers of August,”  each of Williams’ other poems are titled with the name of a particular meadow or pasture flower, but not this one. So, I suspect this is meaningful. The description of the flower here sounds a bit to me like the common bluebell, but it’s possible that he diverged from botany in service of one of the poem’s images, or that the omission of the flower name in the title for this poem made a point for him.

The other, more important, mystery is who the “her” that is inspecting the flower with the poet is, the her who regards the subject flower as “a little plant without leaves.” At first. I wondered if it was perhaps a young girl looking at the flowers, but I now believe that it’s the “her” featured at the poem’s close: summer. If that’s so, that is the reason the flower has no name, as the human name doesn’t exist for nature and for nature’s incarnation as summer. And in the course of the poem, summer then too cannot care about the anthropomorphic desires presented in Williams’ presentation of the image of the flower.

Violet

Unlike William Blake, William Carlos Williams didn’t see Heaven in a wildflower,
but he did see nature observing himself observing the flower.

I’m not a quick understander of poetry. In working on this piece, I read Williams’ poem, enjoying some lines in themselves. The ostensible subject seemed to fit with the season and coincidentally with some other pieces I’m working on—but I wasn’t sure what it meant. In the course of fitting it with music, recording the vocal, and then tweaking and mixing the music, I lived with this poem for a good part of the last couple of days, reading or hearing the words over and over.

If I had been too concerned with its meaning, I might have stuck with my initial supposition, that it was child apprehending the flower. I was pre-disposed to that on first reading, having briefly re-meeting Margot Kreil earlier this week, a poet who wrote an excellent poem called “Weeds”  which featured just such an image. But I was more concerned with getting the drums right, playing the bass, setting up delay divisions for the guitar lines, and marshalling my limited keyboard skills for the soft keyboard parts, and then making that all fit together.

Through you don’t have to go through those composition and production steps, this points out again one of the things that music can do to change the context for words when it’s combined with them. While music can emphasize some mood or presentation of the words, in the same way that suspense music makes a film clip of a character walking down an unremarkable hallway scary, it can also offer its art as a distraction from worrying about meaning too soon with a poem.

To hear my performance of William Carlos Williams’ “It Is a Small Plant,”  use the player below.