NYC

Maxwell Bodenheim’s “Old Age”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

“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.

young Max Bodenheim

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.

Lenox Avenue: Midnight, an extension

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Here’s another early Langston Hughes poem from The Weary Blues,  his collection which I’ve chosen to focus on during this Black History Month. Given Hughes’ esteemed position as part of the Harlem Renaissance and the long career that followed, it may be hard to remember that this is a poem by a young man, less than 25 years old. Of course, as I reminded myself as I tried to write the best poetry I could as a young person: famous British poet John Keats died at 25 — so there’s no reason for our Afro-American poet to wait to write either.*

Though it was Langston Hughes’ first book, The Weary Blues  doesn’t make much of a point of his youth. While the perennial youthful topics of wine, love, and song make their appearances in this collection’s poems, there’s little if anything I can recall that makes explicit pleading that the author is of a new generation with new perceptions. The way Hughes did signal that was in the way he deals with the “song” part of that triumvirate: Jazz and Blues were still considered disreputable musics of little substance. The decade of the last Twenties may have been called “The Jazz Age,” but that then novel music was mostly the music to dance, drink, and swive to.

So, when Hughes claims right from the start that “The rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm” he’s making a fresh claim in 1926, that it’s not just some musical fad that’s passing through, a speeded-up frivolity. Even if white musicians and dancers were quick to latch onto the jaunty high-BPM rush of Jazz, Hughes is ready to claim that broken desires and pain were in there too.

Does he mean lovesick blues, or the Afro-American experience here when he makes that claim? Both I think. That’s a hella-reason why Afro-American forms pervade American music to this day: Americans as a whole have a long and strong dissatisfied streak. Plenty of musics sourced from around the world are good for dancing and signaling your erotic availability. Same for songs of utter sadness. But Afro-Americans figured out how to make sublime musics out of a combination of the oppressions and absurdities of life.

In his poem, Hughes twice makes the claim “The gods are laughing at us” — and despite the repetition of that line, he is ambiguous about what we should think of that. Are the gods the society that ignores, belittles, and oppresses? Or are the gods the wise eternals who know that we humans live short lives approaching half-knowledge, an absurdity that leaves laughing as wisdom?

I think at midnight — perhaps after some youthful partying that’s implied as preceding this poem — it’s a vibrating mixture of both. Overtones, undertones, Hughes says.

Move by Heidi Randen 800

Overtones, undertones….Jazz in Hughes’ 1926 was still thought of as a way to shake your groove thing.

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I often mention that my experience of the poems I use for texts here often changes in the process of making them into Parlando Project pieces. With this one, as I began to understand and express Hughes’ words I wanted to reply to the laughing gods in the original poem. So, I extended the original words with my own couplet: “Let them hear the laugh I return. / Let them understand the laugh I return.” Is that laugh and desire to the wise gods or the careless and oppressing system? Both. I’m far from 25, and that’s what I think reading and performing the young Hughes’ poem today.

Music in this piece is about as close as I can get to Jazz, though more of the Jazz of my youth than that of Hughes’ time. Yes, that fad was still going concern 40 years after Langston Hughes wrote his poem. I spent most of my time creating the piano part, which unlike a real pianist I have to compose by playing and selecting parts for each hand, but modern “virtual instruments” let me do stuff that Conlon Nancarrow had to hand-punch into player piano rolls to realize. I wanted a saxophone part too, but as I’ve already mentioned this winter, I can’t really get the articulations a good Jazz sax player relies on. My sax part sounded like an early student playing the most dismal society dance band number, and so I made the compromise I normally avoid and put in a short Gil Evans-ish horn section sample to enclose my sax part effectively.

You can hear Langston Hughes’ “Lenox Avenue: Midnight”  and my extension to it with the player gadget below, if you see one — or this highlighted link which will open a new tab to play it.

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*Lesser-known early 20th century Afro-American poet Anne Spencer made the same point eulogizing Paul Lawrence Dunbar with her short poem.

The Subway

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I think I’ve established that I like examining lesser-known Modernists, or even writers who weren’t always considered part of the Modernist movement. Now today I may cause a few literarily knowledgeable readers to throw up their hands and do a spit take. Why? Yes, today’s piece is a sonnet, but we should note that not all Modernists rejected rhyme, and after all this is also a piece of down-beat gritty urban experience. Just look at the opening two lines:

Tired clerks, pale girls, street cleaners, business men
Boys, priests and harlots, drunkards, students, thieves…

A litany that wouldn’t be out of place in the Unreal City a few years later. It could sound like the opening of a piece by Whitman or even Lou Reed as it starts out. As it continues, it doesn’t stint on the darkness literal and figurative. Those subway riders are riders, without agency. With fixed tracks underground they go their “sunless way” with “reluctant feet” as our Modernist Dante tells us. When I first read this* having seen the author’s name before reading, my thought was “Could the writer of this piece be misattributed?”

Go ahead, go to the bottom of the post and listen to the performance I put together using this early 20th century New York City poem about ordinary and agentless people lost in underground darkness. It’s less than 3 minutes long. Hear it first without knowing who wrote it.

Joyce Kilmer in uniform

Is this something of a belated Memorial Day post? Today’s author would die serving overseas in the U.S. Army during WWI.  But stop reading and skip down to the bold-faced section at the end for a chance to hear the audio piece first.

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OK, now let’s take off the Masked Singer costume: the author of the sonnet that I used as the text for today’s audio piece is Joyce Kilmer. I expect two responses to that information: “Huh?” and“What!”   The former “Huh?” might be from my younger readers, as this is less likely a poet they’ve run into in our present century. That was not always so. Those my age or older will likely associate Kilmer with a single poem which was once so well-known and liked that it became a point of contention with many educated folks. That poem was “Trees,” the one that begins “I think that I shall never see/A poem as lovely as a tree.” My first High School English teacher Terry Brennan explained that he had had a High School teacher who had recited it while bodily enacting the “lifts her leafy arms to pray” part of Kilmer’s “Trees”  poem. I believe he told us this to establish that he was not going to inflict a similar pedology on us (thanks Terry for that, and much more!) A columnist I liked to read in the Des Moines Register as a teenager, Donald Kaul, loved to pillory Kilmer’s “Trees”  as a crime against better culture.**  They had a point. “Trees”  was ripe enough with pleasant sentiments that it likely did its part to help kill off the pathetic fallacy in modern poetry, but let’s start with its first publication: in Poetry  magazine in 1913, in an issue of that important publication for new verse that also included certified Modernists Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, and Skipwith Cannell, the later a favorite of the Others  circle.

And speaking of Others  magazine, Kilmer was in New York as a young poet in the years before WWI, rubbing elbows with those who would be associated with that city’s fearless avant-garde. Orrick Johns mentions him as someone he knew in those days. When Poetry’s editor Harriet Monroe published her anthology The New Poetry  in 1917, Kilmer and his poem “Trees”  is included alphabetically between poems by Orrick Johns and Others’  founder/editor Alfred Kreymborg. Kreymborg in his interesting memoir Troubadour  recounts that Kilmer was one of the few “actual writers” he was acquainted with in his earliest days as a poet. Kilmer read some of Kreymborg’s short free-verse poems and suggested “You ought to divide those lines and make them rhyme—there’s poetry in them” which Kreymborg considered encouragement. Kilmer was working then for Funk and Wagnall’s, the dictionary people, and even gave Kreymborg some assignments for the dictionary which paid the young man $10, his first check for writing anything.

But all that is circumstantial Modernism. Besides “Trees”  the Kilmer verse I’ve found online is almost entirely religious in nature, and it doesn’t come close to threatening Gerard Manley Hopkins’ gravity and vitality in that regard. If there are other poems that Kilmer wrote that are like “The Subway”  I haven’t seen them.

Why did that “Trees”  poem stick? Trees may not be the Internet Cat Pictures of nature poetry, but readers do seem attracted to those stately greenhouse-gas-absorbing plants. And there’s more: unlike Great Britain, Kilmer was just about the only U. S. poet killed in WWI.***  In England a young poet like Rupert Brooke could gain public attention that persisted after the war even if he was only one poet-casualty out of several of his countrymen. In America, the “Trees”  man received the whole pension, and a large East Coast military base was named Camp Kilmer and served as the place where many of the Greatest Generation embarked and returned to America for WWII.

Did you jump down to here in order to listen to the song I made out of this early 20th century American poem about the New York City subway? If so, there’s a player gadget for some of you, and for the rest, this highlighted hyperlink that will open a new tab/window to play the piece. After you listen to the song you can return to the rest of the post to find out what “Modernist” wrote the lyrics.

 

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*I first read this poem over at the Fourteen Lines blog, which, as you might guess, likes to present shorter poems in the sonnet range. This link is their post about this poem, and it also includes the much more widely-known “Trees.”

**Even later in his career, satirist Kaul couldn’t help but get one more lick in against Kilmer and his poem “Trees.”   Kaul also didn’t like girl’s basketball, which I and Iowa were in agreement was a mistake on Kaul’s part.

***The other name that comes to mind was Alan Seeger, the “I Have a Rendezvous with Death”  poet who died ahead of the U.S. participation in the war fighting with French forces. His nephew was Pete Seeger, as Pete liked to point out at times.

Up-Hill

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Last post I compared late 19th Century cultural hipsters with early 21st Century urban cultural revivalists.  Did modern natural-fiber clad, skin-inked and perforated young people study up on William Morris’ Arts & Crafts movement and visit museums to absorb the Pre-Raphaelites? Some perhaps, not all. And the same can be said for what is carried onward from punks, hip-hop kids, hippies, beatniks, and so on. I’m too old, and too little a sociologist to answer this definitively.

I can say that when I tried to discover what kind of music I wanted to make in the 1970s I copied imperfectly many musicians from the previous decades as well as my contemporaries working down the river in New York City. And those NYC contemporaries? They too were looking backward to move forward. What had been overlooked? What had gone out of fashion for no good reason? What had been uncompleted? So, in listening to them, I was listening to their understanding and misunderstandings of the past too.
 
One of our principles with the Parlando Project is “Other People’s Stories.” Part of the above is “my story”—but my musical story is really made up of other people’s stories.
 
Tracing the path of influence is often hard to do. Today’s piece “Up-Hill”  is an example. The words were written by Christina Rossetti, that sister of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Obviously, she’s familiar with the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle—but she’s also deeply interested in a Christian religious revival, and that too gets reflected in “Up-Hill.”  Would she have known Anna Coghill’s poem that was set as the hymn “Work for the Night is Coming?”  That’s unknown to me, but “Up-Hill”  and “Work for the Night is Coming”  are both poems understood in context as being Christian devotional, while containing not a single specific utterance about a deity, salvation, or an afterlife. With revivals, context changes things.

Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti thinking about an up-hill journey?

 

And here’s another way that influence is hard to trace: it becomes unconscious. As I was writing the music for “Up-Hill”  I was mostly interested in varying my customary harmonic cadences while keeping it to just two or three chords, a short number that often works best for performance with the LYL Band. And “Up-Hill”  is, after all, a work of beautiful simplicity, saying something profound without pretentious elaboration.  I settled on a simple I V IV I progression, and tried it with the band last month, but my vocal wasn’t working. Trying again this month, the unconscious struck.

VU - Shall I Meet Other Wayfarers At Night

“Shall I meet other Wayfarers at night?” The Velvet Underground  certainly think so.

 

I didn’t realize until I was working out the rhythm track that I was falling into a Velvet Underground groove, like the one they used in “I’m Waiting for my Man,”  a tune that is also understood as devotional in context—though to drugs, not a deity. Both songs feature a journey to a destination (up-hill or up-town), both engage in conversation along the way. Was this subconscious choice a sly comment on Christina’s brother Dante Rossetti’s addictions? A comparison of recovery to salvation, or of addiction to salvation?  No, the groove was just working, and it helped me get a better vocal down. If I understood anything about what I was choosing while doing, it was that I was linking sub-cultures and following the near invisible web connecting Other People’s Stories.

Velvet Underground and Christina Rossetti Cover

So what would that sound like? Use the player below to find out.

 

Same as always, the player should appear below.to hear the performance of “Up-Hill.”  And keep sharing the links, subscribing, and telling folks about the Parlando Project.