Paul Blackburn

Fall 2018 Parlando Project Top 10 Numbers 10-8

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

 

Here we go with our quarterly run down of the most liked and listened to audio pieces over the past season. We’ll be counting up to the most listened to piece over the next few days as we approach winter solstice. Who’ll chart? The most famous poets with their best-loved words? The literary poets’ poets? The poems of the now largely forgotten figures I like to dig up sometimes?

10. “Seventeen Almost to Ohio,” words by Paul Blackburn arranged by me.  Where does Paul Blackburn fit now? Probably in the poets’ poet bin, though he’s also verging on forgotten. He doesn’t seem to have benefited from connections to a poetic movement, though he had them in overplus. He’s sometimes associated with the Black Mountain School, though he himself says he wasn’t really. He visited Ezra Pound and shared Pound’s interest in imaginative translation and the old French Provencal poets, and he is there connected to the original English language Modernist movement. He was based in New York coincident with the New York School of poets though he’s never mentioned as one in any summary roundup I’ve read. The Beats touched edges with the New York School—and with Blackburn, and again there are similarities in their approaches. Perhaps the most significant connection is that Blackburn was a leading NYC-based encourager of spoken and recorded poetry, including being the original organizer of the St. Marks poetry readings, a spoken word radio host, and a recordist of many other poets reading.

“Seventeen Almost to Ohio”  comes from an aside Blackburn made while recording Mina Loy in 1960, where he (apparently) spontaneously recalls an event from his own youth while asking Loy about hers at the dawn of Modernism. I lightly edited and arranged his anecdote and then composed the music.

Cowboy_Paul_Blackburn

Paul “Does Jeff Tweedy look like me when he looks in the mirror” Blackburn

 

9. “Fog”, words by Carl Sandburg.  Early Modernists were fascinated by extreme compression and very short poems, and anthologists since then so often include Pound’s “A Station in the Metro,” Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow,”  and this 21-word Sandburg poem. And because it so baldly displays its central metaphor of fog and cat, the poem is often used to introduce grade-school children to metaphor.

In writing about “Fog”  this fall I wondered if there’s anything we’ve overlooked for over a century in this short poem, and came up with this question: Might it matter what kind of cat it is?

 

Carl Sandburg, Marilyn Monroe and some cocktails, 1962
Marilyn: Carl, Carl, you simply must tell me what kind of cat it was!
Carl: In good time, my dear—but first I need to finish inspiring Sonny Bono’s Sixties look.

 

8. “The Temple of Summer,” words by Frank Hudson.  Well, I’m almost as short-winded as the Sandburg of “Fog”  in this 31-word Mellotron drenched goodbye to summer. Longtime readers here will already know of my devotion to the sound of this primitive attempt at a sampling instrument used memorably in many late 60s and 70s British Prog-Rock recordings. The real thing is finicky, bulky, and hard-to-find and maintain, but the Mellotron’s sampling of real instruments to strips of recording tapes, whose notes can then be played by a keyboard press, is an easy trick for the computer-hosted Virtual Instruments that the Mellotron inspired and I use.

King Crimson with Mellotron on stage

Robert Fripp, on the right with King Crimson, declared after dealing with voltage issues on tour: “Tuning a Mellotron, doesn’t”

 

Want to nerd out on things Mellotron? This site looks very complete, and for the dabblers, they have just a listing of all the English Top 30 singles that used a Mellotron, which might refresh your memory on where you’ve heard that sound before.

 

Summer 2018 Parlando Top 10

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

It was an odd summer traffic-wise for the audio pieces of the Parlando Project, with listens quite slow in the first half of the season, and then picking up to the point that August listens were a near record. That increase in traffic (new listeners?) may be why we had no older, pre-summer audio pieces that made this season’s Top 10 (though one, “Poetry,”  made a valiant run at it).

As we’ve done the last few Top 10 lists, we’re going to count down in trios until we get to number 1, starting with number 10.

10. Crushed Before the Moth.  The Bill James style stat-freak in me has threatened to do a poet/listener batting-average post on which writers seem to get the most and least response. Without really running the numbers, my impression is that Emily Dickinson, who like Frost and Yeats retains a general readership as well as scholarly cred, still doesn’t always hit it out of the park in listens when the audio pieces use her words.

I’m reminded here of one of my favorite bits of baseball trivia, what pair of brothers hit the most major league home runs? The true baseball fan will have many candidates to choose from. The three DiMaggios? (Dom was a very good player, and some have heard of Joe). Or the Alou trio (who once made up an entire outfield of brothers). Or Boyers, Boones or Alomars. But the answer is Hank and Tommy Aaron. Hank had 756 home runs, Tommy crushed only 13—but add it up, and the Aarons come out on top not just alphabetically.

Emily Dickinson’s sister-in-law and confidant, Susan, is not a famous poet, but she shows a bit of the same Emily Dickinson flare in her poem we used for this. Emily has that Hank Aaron level achievement, but Susan had her at bats too.

 

9. Seventeen Almost to Ohio.   In the several years I’ve been doing this, I still love how pieces arise obliquely as I look for material and research its context. At the end of July, I was looking for more info on Mina Loy, the fascinating Modernist whose work was forgotten for decades and now seems to be attracting increasing scholarly interest. This led me to a tape made in 1960 of Loy being interviewed about her work. The interviewer, Paul Blackburn has now entered that vale of forgottenness himself, but besides being a serious poet with a strong interest in the audio value of poetry, he was a promoter of other poets, so I naturally feel an affinity for him. The Loy interview tape has moments of interest, even though Loy seems distracted and at times uninterested in her own long-past work, and Blackburn, true to our Other Peoples’ Stories ethos, encourages her, but doesn’t fill the gaps by yapping-on himself about, well, himself—as I fear I would have done. Yet, for a minute or two, he does  do that, and this ad lib description of hitchhiking trip from his own youth was so striking I had to form it into what it sounded like to me, a beautiful little poem. It’s one of my favorite pieces from last summer as well as for the listeners here.

 

My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

Like side-trips? Want to read how a poet who’s fallen into the Forgottenness Zone still bumps around after being laid in books? Edie Jarolim, the teller of this tale, blogged it here — and the more extensive version of her story is here.

 

8. Plum Tree Blossoms on 40th Street.  The vast majority of the words used here for the audio pieces are not mine. That’s by intent. Both Dave Moore and I have written since our teens, but when I started the Parlando Project I thought that the special jump, the bridging of a gap, that occurs when you perform a piece and others listen may be intensified if the performer too is making the jump across the gap to the writer, just as they are asking the audience to do. This summer’s top 10 will violate that principle three times, probably more than it should.

A number of things I’ve written this year have focused on memory and time, and how they can be experienced in odd ways. How we can intensely experience a past event as if it’s still going on in its full dimensionality, or in “Plum Tree Blossoms on 40th Street,”   how we may fill in sensory information and intensity in remembered events long after they have happened, even though at the time they were occurring they seemed mundane. The routine of biking to school is to my son is just another day to him now, but it can be transformed into something else much later. Artists believe they can access that special intensity and meaning instantly, without nostalgia and the confining frame of memory, and that may be a necessity for their work to be created—but in another sense, what’s the hurry?

Seventeen Almost to Ohio

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Two threads lie here, waiting to be woven together. One thread: those young pre-WWI Modernists, the other: writers in old age.

Young: Mina Loy, Alfred Kreymborg, Glaspell and Cook of the Provincetown Playhouse, early in their careers, workers shaping modern literature—though none of them are remembered much now. Older poets: Longfellow, Donald Hall, and even Sarojini Naidu, Dave Moore and I, all speaking for carrying on past youth. Longfellow of course is no longer read for his intrinsic value, Naidu’s poetry is not read in the West, and Donald Hall concludes in his late-life essays, that he, like the majority of poets who receive prizes, notice and ample publication in their time, will be unread 20 years after their death. Moore and I of course are in a different, more perilous, class of ranked achievement. If Hall is right, Dave and I can look forward to equaling prize winner and American Poet Laurette Donald Hall’s status (unread, forgotten) in only 20 years!

There’s your writer’s affirmation for today.

What happened to those bright young Modernists? Cook died young. Kreymborg, that pre-WWI networking avant garde-ist, had a long post-war career judged by literary critics as undistinguished. Glaspell had an increasingly difficult second half of a career, though she won a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1931 for a play that few praise now, the sort of late plaudit that sometimes comes to pioneers when prize committees compensate for overlooking earlier achievements. Like Hall, Mina Loy lived into her 80s, but unlike Hall, the last half of her life seems fallen from any career path. So, even before she died in 1966, she’d already achieved Hall’s 20-years-past-death status.

In 1960, Loy was 77 and living in the Western US when young poet Paul Blackburn was sent to interview her. A creaky hundred-minute tape exists of the encounter. Loy’s memory of things a half-century old seems spotty by this time, and this once eloquent poet grasps for words, even her own words, when asked to read her still modern sounding verse from her youth. Her readings are flat, though she occasionally is stirred by remembrance of the times and places when the poems were written. Once or twice she humble-brags or finds sincere surprise at how clever she had been. Listening, I wanted her to claim outright the fierceness she had shown back then. Instead, she seems an old 77, tired and distracted.

Mina Loy Paul Blackburn

Mina Loy in later life by Jonathan Williams, Paul Blackburn 1966 by Elsa Dorfman

 

Blackburn is patient, and he rarely man-splains or talks over Loy, something I would be all too prone to do if I was the man holding the microphone. He seems to genuinely admire Loy’s poetry as he seeks to add to a record of a career that was forgotten then, and he wants her to know that in 1960, at least one reader “gets” what she wrote in 1914.

Just past one hour in the recording, something extraordinary happens. Blackburn, touched by one of Loy’s recovered memories, a feeling perhaps amplified by additional visual clues he would have in the room that are not imprinted on the audio tape, exchanges with Loy a memory from his own youth during the second instead of the first world war.

I have taken that story, much as Blackburn expressed it that day in 1960, with some minimal editing and shaping for the words of today’s audio piece.

Of course, we’ve now largely forgotten Paul Blackburn as a poet too, following Hall’s law. Blackburn died too young, and more than 20 years ago, but his story struck me as a tightly expressed spontaneous poem. What was this: a poem he had already written, one he was paraphrasing from memory for Loy? Was it a poem he was thinking of writing as he interviewed the aged poet, perhaps thinking the tape recorder could serve as well as a notebook jot to put a first draft down? Was Blackburn simply a practiced poet who could orally improvise from his skills a well-shaped improvisation?

Whichever, I think it’s beautiful. His story combines looking back at youth and a landscape that is no more, with Dante’s Inferno moved forward to Greatest Generation Pittsburg, and it has a closing that contains a remarkable Imagist jump into synesthesia. I call my arrangement of Blackburn’s anecdote told to Loy “Seventeen Almost to Ohio.”

Today’s music, like the interview, is restrained: contrabass, a pair of cellos, piano, and percussion. I strove in my  performance and arrangement to do justice to Paul Blackburn’s story. To hear it, use the player below.