Today’s piece is a fairly well-known poem by the Spanish poet. Given that I’ve played guitar nearly for 50 years and been interested in poetry for more than that, I keep thinking I must have run into it before this year. If that’s so, why don’t I recall considering it?
My answer is going to sound more judgmental than I mean it: bad translations. No, maybe I shouldn’t use “bad” here. I don’t suspect any moral failing or lack of effort by translators of this poem. And given that I’m not all that knowledgeable about the work of Lorca and have only the most limited grasp of his native language, I should have no standing to rate other published translations of “La Guitarra.” What I do know is that native speakers find his poetry passionate and vivid, and the English versions seem to my ears and heart (those being the entry points for poetry) stilted and muffled.
I’m not going to link any of the English translations I found of “The Guitar.” None I’ve seen seem fully effective to me, though I cannot say that they might be effective for others. I’m not going to link or line-by-line dis the translations I’ve seen. I will say that the first one I saw at one of the leading poets and poetry organization’s site was representative. I didn’t find it musically compelling, and it was a jumble of abstracted images that had little sock, little immediate feeling evoked. I assume the translator had the advantages I must clearly concede I don’t have. Why might their work not succeed, at least to this reader?
Two theories. Other translators may have been too literal in carrying over Lorca’s original sentence structure, which might be natural and unaffected in his Spanish. This is poetry, so one can make a case that how it’s said is essential — but when languages order words differently, following the original sentence structure and word order too exactly damages the natural vividness of a person speaking. Secondly, Lorca to my slight knowledge connects to Surrealist expression, a style of poetry I loved as a young man and still like to connect with today. Surrealism likes the wild and incongruous image; and from its ancestor Dada, it’s often willing to take an image in a random, raw and undercooked state. This creates a problem for me when I translate Surrealist and Dada work.
You see, I view my task as a translator to primarily find the images in the work and to then portray those images in clear modern English, and secondarily give the poem a word-music in the new language that gives pleasing movement and return to the poem. What if the original intent was to mystify the reader, to present an image that was intentionally confounding? I risk, while puzzling out the text in a language I don’t know well, to over-simplify or over-determine an image. I fear embarrassment of doing that, but I think it’s the better risk because vivid images that the reader/listener grasps and gasps are compelling to me.
As to the word-music, my version of “The Guitar” rephrased Lorca somewhat, aiming to make him sound like an English speaker. While doing that I tried to make the poem musical in English. The poem was already using repetition for poetic effect in Spanish, and I added just a touch more.
As you might imagine, this poem about the expression of a musical instrument has been set to music before my attempt you can hear today. While not a Lorca expert I know that he connected too with Spanish Deep Song and the evocation in that tradition of “Duende,” a difficult to translate term that some Afro-American musicians have seen as analogous to the Blues. I played a nylon string guitar for my setting, the type of guitar associated with Spain, and the simple chord progression I used would not be foreign to that tradition. But both from my skill level and inclination what I played for this song was simple and sparsely ornamented. Though the harmony wasn’t Blues, I approached playing this as if it was American Blues. Another Blues element I introduced that wasn’t in Lorca’s poem: my version has a gendered call and response. The guitar is a her, the singer (there’s no singer in Lorca’s poem) is a he.
I think there’s a misapprehension of Carl Sandburg’s poetry: that it’s simple, prosy work: that it says what it says, hearty single-minded messages with some decorative metaphor. Tastes differ, and mine may not be a guide to anyone else, but I sometimes don’t find him so. As I continue trying different things during the summer with this multipart personal story, I’ll return to our regular stuff at the end today with an example of Sandburg mysterioso.
The finale of my June trip to Iowa City to see what I could find out about an even more under-considered Midwestern 20th century poet, Edwin Ford Piper, was planned to be a visit to Galesburg Illinois, a small city just east across the Mississippi river where Sandburg was born. Piper and Sandburg compare easily. Both born in the American Midwest a couple of decades after the Civil War, both part of early 20th Century literary movements we no longer take as much notice of. Both were attracted to a broad swath of memorized vernacular music that would be called “Folk Music.” They knew each other, even shared stage programs. Sandburg’s 1927 music collection The American Songbag established what American folk music would be for my mid-century generation,* and from examining Piper’s papers I could see his definition paralleled Sandburg’s. Piper was one of the contributors to American Songbag.**
Poet Sandburg blurbing poet Edwin Ford Piper. I also saw a note from Sandburg thanking Piper for songs used in Songbag, but don’t have a picture of that.
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We arrived at Galesburg early for the 1 P.M.-opening of the Sandburg birthplace site. We wandered the wondering-what-it’ll-become-in-the-21st-century business district with its building facades still showing a variety of past decades abandoned styles left to fade, and browsed a charming small bookstore there. We were going to have an early lunch somewhere, and decided to just get sandwiches and go eat them in the small area behind the birthplace on benches by the Remembrance Rock there.
The rock is an unremarkable bolder, utterly plain and unshaped as a design choice.*** Sandburg and his beloved wife and partner’s ashes are buried under it. The lawn it sits on behind the house is circled by bushes and a few trees, and rather than any sense of a park, it reminded me of the backyard of the house where I grew up in Iowa. One thing the photos I have seen of the rock didn’t show: a ring of irregular, small, flat, stones that circle it, each engraved with a line from a Sandburg poem. If one wished, one could ceremoniously walk from flat grounded rock to rock stepping with your foot-soles on his words, which it seemed to me to be what one of Sandburg’s models Whitman has commanded — and so I did. There’s a nice bust of Sandburg on a stand there too, but to my sense of the place, walking his words was more meaningful. I’d told my wife that Sandburg’s father was a railroad blacksmith, and she figured that the neighborhood might have been handy for rail workers. After our lunch, she took a little stroll while I waited, and she came back to report that just over a rise a block away was the railroad line.
…but then all the birds know is to poop on poetry-engraved rocks, same as any other.
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One of the site’s staff members arrived ahead of opening time to do a little yard work, and when that time arrived, he changed tasks to welcoming and serving as a guide for about 30 older folks in an adult learning program who arrived from Peoria in two small busses. Beside the birthplace (our host preferred to not call it a house, but a railroad worker’s hut) there was another small, somewhat rundown house next door that served as the site’s offices and a small room of memorabilia backed with an illustrated wall timeline of Sandburg’s life. Behind the two houses was a garage that has been turned into a cozy theater space where they host musical acts in homage to that part of Sandburg’s heritage.
My wife and I plus the 30 others overwhelmed the birthplace site’s capacity. Resourcefully the staff divided the group into two, and after watching a short video on Sandburg our half got to walk through the birthplace hut or house. If you are familiar with the modern tiny house movement, the floorplan and the maximal utilization of it would strike a resonance. Outhouse, no plumbing or running water, it’s decorated in late 19th century Swedish immigrant homey style, but a couple, a young child, and a baby would have been a tight fit, much less our troop of visitors. I recall visiting a reconstructed Lincoln birthplace cabin as a child, and though the Sandburg birthplace is wood-frame construction, not a log cabin, the square footage and amenities might have struck Lincoln biographer Sandburg as similar.
Sandburg’s birthplace: house, hut, cabin. This side shows the smallness best I think.
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Perhaps because of the touring group’s visit, there was a special performance by a singer-guitarist whose name I didn’t catch, who did a short re-creation of Sandburg singing and talking about his life. I enjoyed that effort. Before leaving, I asked one of the leaders of the visiting group, an old professor, who had some years on your old guy reporter here, what Sandburg biography he’d recommend. He cited Penelope Niven’s bio, and I bought it at the site’s store.
No one hides the fact Carl Sandburg might not have much direct memory of the birthplace as his family moved to another Galesburg house while he was only a toddler**** But the link to his parents and the choice of it for a burial place (which was I believe his doing) speaks to the meaning to him. Unlike the larger house and goat farm where Sandburg spent his post-WWII life until he died that is a National Parks Service site, the birthplace is run by the State of Illinois and some local spirit and volunteerism. Sandburg retained throughout his life a fondness for Galesburg, never hid his roots there, and Galesburg was also the place where he attended college after his stint in the Army, though he never completed a degree.
Which brings me to today’s new musical piece, a setting of a Sandburg poem about someone who apparently left town wiping the dust off their shoes at the city limits. In his collections Sandburg called the poem “Gone,” but the main character’s name sticks in some memories, so it also gets called by the first line, or by the character’s name that appears in that line: “Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town.” Here’s a link to the text of the poem.
I promised mystery in this one. There are things left out, and various implications some of which complicate, some of which conflict, are left open. Can we even take that opening statement at face value? Not now, certainly not in 1916 could it be said that we all love “a wild girl” with a dream “she wants.” Some might, many would not. Wildness and dream-holding create envy, often a lot of it.
Is Chick Lorimer someone that everyone in town has marked as special, marked for greater things — someone so preeminent in their youth where that envy would be tamped down? If so, why the sudden leaving, with no one knowing where or why? Does a recognized prodigy, much loved, leave a place without saying goodbye? That would be a rare story.
Perhaps the “everyone” is a casual overstatement, referring only to a small group of friends who shared ideas? Later the poem seems to refer to larger numbers however.
Is she not actually loved by much of the town, and “loved” in a narrow, sexual, sense by many men? The “Dancer, singer, and laughing passionate lover” line could give testimony to that thought. That line is followed by two specific but puzzling lines, and their very specificity says we should pay attention to them. “Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick?” “Hunting” is a word choice, though we do say we hunt for the lost all the time without thinking of hunting as in wild game. Why the specific range, “ten or a hundred?” If this noteworthy young person is gone, no other info, that’s a missing person. Have they come to harm, are they being hunted for something they’re suspected of doing wrong? Why can’t they say, between 10 and 100 for the number of hunters? This hunt seems secretive from that wide range: 10 might be a small matter, 100 a greater one — but even 100 would be small if this is a universally beloved light of a town, unless it’s a very small town. It seems significant that the poem’s speaker can’t give a better estimate. And that’s followed by another stat: “five men or fifty with aching hearts.” The numbers are still widely separated, but they’re also halved from the number of hunters.
To perform this, I felt I had to have some plot in mind as I sang it. In my mind, Chick is a free-spirited libertine, and to a large degree that “loved” means no-strings sex. Chick likely left because she wanted something more, or because the disapproval of her “loving” everybody was getting intolerable. The maybe just five “aching heart” men thought they were, or could be, her significant partner.*****
How bohemian was poet Sandburg’s experience early in the 20th century? When he first moved to Chicago he lived in what was in effect a free-thinkers commune run by a strange guy, Parker Sercombe. From my reading, “Free Love” was just as much a topic in bohemian culture in the early 1900s as it was in the 1960s.
But maybe I’m wrong, and maybe your reading is different. It could be that Chick is like “Chuck” Sandburg (the name he used then) wanting to see the world, wanting to follow their dream. Sandburg had bicycled around Illinois, rode trains legally and illegally to other parts of the US, and he’d already been to Puerto Rico in the Army by the time he wrote this. Chick could be his anima. Sandburg never felt entirely alienated from his hometown or family however. He came back through town, wrote letters to his family, and so on. And if you want to see his beginnings and his decided final place to remember him, one goes to Galesburg.
To hear my performance of “Gone” AKA “Chick Lorimer” you can use the audio player below. Do you feel nobody knows where the audio player has gone? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*If you never cared about the post WWII folk revival for whatever reason, I will point out that Rock’n’Roll became self-aware artistic and literary-flavored “Rock Music” in the later 60s because folk revival musicians transferred their backgrounds into bands with electric instruments after The Beatles, electric Blues bands, and “Dylan goes electric” emerged to take over college and post-graduate audiences in the US. Over in the UK, the folk revival to Rock pipeline was supplied by “Skiffle” — an American jug-band folk revival style that swept UK youth in the 50s, merging with a peculiar British Trad Jazz revival that often featured the Blues element of pre-WWII Jazz.
**Piper’s wife, in her own papers collection at the University of Iowa library, claims that Piper’s contributions were greater than Sandburg credits in Songbag. Possible, I suppose, though the nature of Piper’s song collecting revealed by my examination of his papers shows a collaborative effort with collectors sharing with each other freely. Piper’s unpublished collection, like Sandburg’s published one, wasn’t done with a sense of ownership of songs.
****The family didn’t get sudden wealth, it supplemented the railroad wages by renting out rooms in the succeeding houses, and the children worked to add to the family income as they grew older.
*****For a fuller story fleshed out from the short poem’s details, there’s this 50 minute early 1960s TV episode from the Route 66 series which uses the poem idea as its central motif and title, with the leading man reciting Sandburg’s poem 2/3 of the way in. This linked version has hokey colorization of the series fine B&W photography, but it is easily viewable.
Today is Juneteenth, a holiday coming into greater recognition as a celebration of the ending of America’s race-based chattel slavery. Why this date? I repeatedly warned you that I can’t tell a story simply and briefly, but for this holiday I have an excuse.
Slavery began in the American British colonies somewhat haphazardly, but by the time we became an independent country we had lots of laws, customs, and beliefs to entrench it. As it often is with the mechanics of oppression, the structures to hold it up took work to maintain, and by the 1850s there was great worry between slaveholders that it would collapse. In the 1860 election, Lincoln won, and even though he’d stated a politician’s compromise middle ground on the slavery issue, his party included enough abolitionists that most powerful slave-holders were ready to press their states to rebel and set up their own government. Civil war ensued.
Which didn’t free the slaves — at least not yet.
Of course the enslaved had been freeing themselves, when they could, all along. Armed rebellions hadn’t worked for more than moments, but the brave, lucky, and skilled might successfully flee at least from the slave-holding states if not to Canada where US law couldn’t touch them.* But it wasn’t easy traveling all that far.
Once the war started in 1861, some enslaved people recognized they could try a shorter route: just make it to the Union troop’s camps, and a good many did just that, which created an awkward situation. You see: nothing had ended slavery’s legal framework, Lincoln still maintained he wasn’t doing that (if only because a few slave-holding states and slaveholders remained on the Union side). He just wanted to put down the rebellion.** Law still said the slaves were property.
Someone on the Union side came up with a peculiar idea. If the enslaved were legally property, they could be confiscated during wartime like a cannon, horse, ship or other enemy property could be. Dehumanizing language? Sure, but escaping past the Union lines meant an increasing chance that they wouldn’t be taken back.
Eventually, Lincoln supersized that freedom, by declaring that all the enslaved in the states in rebellion were free. This, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued at the beginning of 1863. American slaves elsewhere? Nope, not in the Proclamation. Slave owners in places under Confederate rebel control? Not gonna listen to Lincoln’s order. In April of 1865 Robert E. Lee surrendered the bulk of Confederate troops, but that still didn’t mean all enslaved were free, and the legal matter wasn’t consolidated until December of that year with the adaptation of the 13th Amendment.
A couple chapters back I talked about how slow by modern standards communication could be in the mid-19th and early 20th century. Well, it was slower yet when not everyone was on-board with the news. Juneteenth, with an absurdity that is so often a part of America’s racial history, celebrates when Union troops got over to Texas in June of 1865 to announce that the war had been over for over a month and the enslaved in Confederate Texas were no longer legally slaves.
When I left off I was (more or less) talking about folk songs and the songs collected in the American Midwest before WWI by poet Edwin Ford Piper. I’ve also already mentioned that folk songs aren’t unchanging, and aren’t pure. While going through the yellowing paper in Piper’s archives, I came upon this song, handwritten in his own handwriting. He has the title as “The Little Octoroon.” Things aren’t going to get simple here readers. I can’t be simple.
The song as Edwin Ford Piper heard it from his mother
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Octoroon is a largely obsolete word, derived from a lot of rigmarole regarding how Black someone was. It means 1/8th (octo=8) Afro-American. In general, the mumbo-jumbo legal biochemistry in American history regularly said it didn’t make much difference. Half, quarter, sixteenth — hell, for those who had trouble with fractions it was sometimes written down as: 1% Black, you’re legally Black.
An octoroon may not look Black. I can still recall when I was 14 or so, and having grown up in a tiny rural Iowa town. An Afro-American man who was a civil-rights activist was to visit my church camp. He arrives. Wait — that man’s Black? I remember in my naivete looking at his summer hands and forearms. The man had freckles people!
So why does this song, which is clearly a song from the Union and Abolitionist side make some point about the child being an octoroon? This will get weird: it was possible to be an abolitionist and a white supremacist thinking Afro-American’s inferior. Yes, you could be smart and ignorant at the same time! If you’re trying to end chattel slavery, and you’re counting votes or troops, you might not care to make a sticking point about this, ugly as it is. Those with pseudo-scientific beliefs such as an octoroon is “nearly a white person” might have stirrings of respect. (Ugh!) And then at the unconscious, illogical level, there’s the factor of that person looking much like me, so maybe they should have rights like me. Even if it’s a song (something with no visual element) those factors may have entered into its composition.***
While there are no notes I saw in the archive that Piper knew this, this song does have a composer: George F. Root. Root didn’t quite reach Stephen Foster or Dan Emmett level of 19th century American songwriter fame, but he had his “hits” such as they were in the pre-recording era. During the Civil War period and based out of Chicago, he specialized in songs for the Union side.
The sheet music from George F. Root’s music publishing firm. When Piper remembers his mother singing this tune, it would have been only 10-years-old.
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Did Piper’s mother learn this from someone else? Was there sheet music in a piano bench for this, unknown to the 5-year-old Piper? In the quiet library archive, I visualized two white people, a mother and child, in rural frontier Nebraska sharing this song. The differences in the printed song from the one Piper wrote down from his mother’s singing say this isn’t likely a handwritten copy from sheet music.****
Here’s my conclusion, which I hope I’ve demonstrated even though I’ve trimmed parts of this piece back: Juneteenth is the most complicated American legal holiday. The only simple thing about the holiday is that it stands for freedom and the lifting of oppression. Taken at its whole, though messy and with calculated delay, that makes it a favorite of a person like me, who still cries and wonders at how simple truths and rights take so long to be established. The song I’m performing today, its path and turning into a folk song, isn’t that complicated — but yes, the path of American freedom is.
You can hear my performance of Root’s “The Little Octoroon” with the audio player below. No player? This highlighted link is an alternate.
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*In 1850 a Fugitive Slave Act was passed that required northern state governments, not just the federal government to return enslaved people who reached northern states. Some cities and states wouldn’t comply (there’s this Minnesota case for one example).
Piper’s mother was in Canada near the US border in this era. It’s possible that fugitive slaves might have crossed over into her region. I also note that Piper says she was singing it in 1876, perhaps because that’s the border of Edwin Ford Piper’s memory, but I read the date and think about it being the year Reconstruction largely ended and new de-jure laws and customs greatly restricted Afro-American citizenship.
**No, Nicki Haley, slavery was the cause of the Civil War, even though many liked to parse Lincoln’s compromise and coalition statements of this time to make it sound like it wasn’t. The flaw in that framing? Lincoln didn’t start the war, the South did, and they were explicit in proclaiming why they did it.
***There’s another song using this terminology that this Project has already presented: Longfellow’s scathing pre-Civil War poem “The Quadroon Girl.”In Longfellow’s poem the situation leading to that poem’s mixed-race child is laid out: feudal concubinage and/or rape by slaveholders. For making a speech implying the same, Longfellow’s friend, US Senator Charles Sumner was beaten to within an inch of his life on the floor of congress.
****The biggest difference: the printed song’s title calls out the chorus — it’s officially “Glory, Glory, The Little Octoroon.” I only sang the martial chorus twice in my performance because I was more drawn to the bravery and sacrifice told in the verses. We have two holidays that say soldiers made us free, but it’s not only soldiers.
I followed Piper’s transcription for the words, not the printed lyrics, honoring the chain of transmission to me rather than accuracy. I also modified Root’s tune and chords to suit my tastes and tendencies. I could not help but think of these things as I sang this: first, the mother, her family heritage caught in that sexual exploitation making the choice to stay and face the slave hunters and their dogs to assure her child’s escape. We never find out if she and the daughter will be reunited, or even if she survives. Then next I think of those pursuers who to the degree they are portrayed in the song would be gaslight villains — but in history they would be real people doing great evil, who could be thinking they were serving justice. And then lastly, the final-verse gunner who cares for the child, though he’s more the Horatio of the story, with the mother being the tragic hero. I ask you not to skip over the villain characters. It’s fine if you empathize with the gunner, but some great dangers in one’s life (and often to other lives) are those middle souls, like the slavecatcher pursuers, who have a system that tells them they are arduously, justly, doing right.
Very often I find myself unable to tell a story simply. While I find internal joy in expanding complexity there is a painful element too. Even when under the spell of things I’ve experienced and learned, I retain enough self-awareness to see what effect my expression has on others, the burden of strangeness. Then the reach between the teller and the listener becomes haphazard, unstable — pile it too high and it tiresomely topples — and so in some break for breath partway in, I realize I’ve dumped a cluttered mass of thought debris on a listener, long past any interest.
Perhaps this is why I’m attracted to lyric poetry, constrained as it is to moments, often held tight within the stiff glass bottles of forms.
Here’s a personal story that’ll go many places coming from the place I find myself in this June. It starts, I’ll guess, earlier this year when I came upon a poem, “The Last Antelope,” a striking, empathetic account of the end of an animal’s life and wildness after settlers captured it. Edwin Ford Piper was the author, and there were only scattered bits of information to be found about him. Scattered and bits do not constrain my curiosity — if the bits were great distances apart, the space between them could hold a lot of things: born 1871 in rural Nebraska, parents part of early European-origin settlement there. Largely self-educated in a land of necessary child-farmhand-so-never-more-than-half-year schools, still goes on to university in Omaha studying literature with a specialization in Chaucer, and then to the University of Iowa where as a professor he helped establish the idea of teaching and granting degrees in creative writing.
The modern convention of a university as patronage for artists, and the rise of the credentialed MFA-holding poet is not without controversy — but isn’t it odd, this man who taught himself in a small town on the fluid boundary between the 19th Century Wild West and the 20th Century staid Midwest took that journey.
In the middle of this, the same man had a compulsion to collect songs ordinary people brought with them while journeying, the words and music carried in the light baggage of memory. He wrote down songs his relatives and townsfolk knew by heart. He asked others to send him more by mail. He paid particular attention to the songs of those on the move: hobos, cowboys, and other traveling workers. Did this connect with his literary poetry? There are no recordings of Piper reading his poetry, but accounts say he declaimed it with a musical lilt — perhaps like the surviving recordings of Yeats, or maybe like the more bombastic Vachel Lindsay — and at times he would break into full song. His students took to calling him “The Singing Professor.”
Since this Project is “Where Music and Words Meet” you can see why I’d be attracted. And I’m a small-Midwestern-town boy, though without degrees. But did that seem strange then, to mesh high culture and the songs remembered by old women and rude mechanicals?
Piper was born just west of the Missouri River in Nebraska — and in Illinois, just to the east of the Mississippi River and less than a decade later, Carl Sandburg was born to an immigrant railway blacksmith who signed his name with an X. Iowa, the state where I was born in the middle of the next century, and Minnesota, the state where I’ve lived the longest, sit in a delta between those two tremendous rivers. Sandburg too mixed the latest in Modernist poetry with folk songs he collected and sang. Did Piper influence Sandburg? Did Sandburg influence Piper? Or are they the same genus of plant, raised in the same climate, but in separate plots? Questions.
Answers fork like river systems. Even with little information being readily available on Piper, I was already in flood stage. And here’s how much my wife loves me: for our 20th anniversary she agreed to go on a road trip with me to Iowa City and Sandburg’s home-town of Galesburg. My scenery in Iowa City? An archive of Piper’s papers* held in the university library there. Our grand museum of the arts of poetry and song to visit on the trip: a railway worker’s shack in a small rust-belt city, a town worn-out but still running like a paint-shedding Oldsmobile.
Two considerations worried me as I thought about this trip, one for my wife and one for myself. For my wife, I worried if there’d be something rewarding for her to do while I enthused at the library. She was able to solve that one easily, locating nature reserves, parks, and trails within an hour’s drive. I often tell her that she’s a nymph, and I complement her on how seriously she takes her job to supervise the plants and animals when she returns with soggy hiking boots from her hikes with pictures of landscapes, mushrooms, wildflowers, birds, and other critters. I love her pictures and stories on return (her stories briefer and better organized) — but my old joints ache just thinking about hiking for hours.
For myself I worried about my old-ager endurance. The library was two-thirds of a mile from where we’d stay. I’d need to hoof it with my laptop bag back and forth, which would have been a trifle in my youth, but nowadays longer term standing and walking is troublesome. I considered taking a bicycle with me, which would have made the library to-and-from easy, but a lot of hotel/AirBnB places don’t have any good places to lock up overnight, and on further consideration I thought that a bike would just be one more thing to worry about, taking my focus away from the trip’s main goals. And then I worried too about spending full days at the library’s special collections reading room. Because my time was limited, and to minimize the walking, I planned no break for lunch. I’d need to keep my focus and energy up, something that I have not been consistently able to do this year even with all the comforts of home.
On average I bike at least once every day in my normal routine, often in the morning. In the past two years I’ve not been a longer distance bicyclist, but 30-50 miles a week easily exceeds those 150 minutes exercise recommendations, and it lets me get to a café for morning breakfast and handle a lot of routine shopping and other trips. I ride year-round. In 2016 I bought my first 21st Century winter bike with studded tires; and in 2019 I upgraded the winter season bicycle to a Fat Bike with monstrous 4.5-inch-wide tires that handled ice and snow with the challenging ice ruts and potholes that my city’s current “We’ll get to all the streets in 3 days after the snow stops” plowing regime supplies. My overall stamina for the walk wasn’t my worry so much as how well my joints and stiff back would take the more load-bearing walk.** And to make it through the day I’d planned, there’d be no old-man’s afternoon nap either.
Piper, once a “poet of considerable distinction.” A later version of his collection Barb Wire. My Iowa City view, and yes the guitar got some use. Example breakfast.***
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The first day we arrived at Iowa city was hot and very humid, so I put on my best hot weather clothing. Spouse-nymph headed off at dawn for her day’s supervisory encounter with nature, and I planned a big breakfast fuel-up. I’m a “eat little meat” kind of guy, but for good or ill I take the lacto-ovo part of my lesser meat diet seriously, so I’m a big frittata, omelet, hash, scrambler kind of guy most mornings. I note that I eat like an old-time farmer, despite never farming, but the good thing about this higher fat/protein kind of meal is that it can hold me until supper, and that was my plan.
I put on my best hot weather clothes, slung my bag over my shoulder, and headed for the university’s main library building for my encounter with poet-professor Piper’s papers.
Thus ends Chapter One.
Here’s a musical performance I put together in March of Piper’s “The Last Antelope.” You can play it with the audio player you should see below. No player? This highlighted link is another way to hear it.
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*When I arrived at the library archives will-call desk, I asked them to pick Piper’s Papers. The librarian suggested puckishly that I was nearly reconstructing the old tongue-twister folk-rhyme, Roud Folk Song index 19745.
**Local papers/forums are full of folks who bemoan bike lanes in my city, often remarking that “not everyone is young and fit.” Despite that, most bicyclists I meet and see on my city’s streets aren’t of the MAMIL (Middle-Aged Man in Lycra) variety — and I’m maybe 1.5 letters of that acronym. I joke with my wife that as my joints get older, a bicycle is becoming a “fore-and-aft wheelchair” for me, allowing me increased mobility and beneficial low-impact movement for the old joints.
***That’s a St. Paul Sandwich: egg foo young on sourdough with lettuce, tomato slices and mayo. Near as anyone knows, my Twin City of St. Paul has no tradition regarding it, and no restaurant there serves it now. Its origin is something of mystery.
It’s been an eventful June so far for me, and I plan to be writing like a real blogger about what I’ve experienced in the last couple of weeks shortly. Then too, just this week I started working on a few further Parlando audio pieces. At least one may make the cut to appear here in the next few days.
This weekend is Father’s Day, and a new musical piece that I thought I’d present for that turned out too rough, even for my tastes. So, here’s a well-loved poem by Kevin FitzPatrick that alternate Parlando Project voice Dave Moore performed with The LYL Band a couple of years ago. It seems apropos. Kevin’s books of poetry are available from this website: kevinfitzpatrickpoetry.com Today’s poem appears in his 1987 collection Down on the Corner.
“Bicycle Spring” was first presented here in 2022, but for today’s post I remastered it and made this little video for it. Here it is:
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Wishing my versatile readers and listeners a happy Summer.
Here’s another example of a short Emily Dickinson poem that seems in some facets simple, and yet when examined more closely still shows her uniqueness. On first reading it reminded me of a saying attributed to Benjamin Franklin* “Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged at dawn.”
One might read this poem from the start as a restatement of that Franklin quote — except, Dickinson may be saying this isn’t someone’s last day, she wants to set down the situation someone’s next-to-last day. In the first stanza, it is sunrise, and the poem says that the doomed person has delight. Why? Because there is one more day before their death at the dawn.
Chord sheet in case you’d like to sing this one yourself.
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This idea is clearer in the second stanza, where again, death is clearly due — but tomorrow. There the doomed man is listening for the bird that will likely sing at the next dawn. Perhaps he’s listening to the Meadow bird in the day-before dawn more intently, knowing the next time he hears that song it will be his execution, and this is his last day to hear it in the more generally hopeful context of introducing a day, not an execution. He might choose this — after all, if he knows he’s to die tomorrow, he can be somewhat assured he will not die in that present day as the bird sings the day to begin.
The final stanza may be the oddest, but indicates that this is so. It twice tells us the mood is joyful, which would indicate that the condemned does feel assured of, and is in love with, this day — the full day before. There’s a somewhat ambiguous word-choice in the last line: “ought.” The word can be a stand-in for zero, for nothing, but it’s primary meaning is more at obligated. If we take the zero/ought meaning, or the obligated meaning, Dickinson’s poem is saying the poems doomed subject is joyful though the next-to-last morning Meadow bird has a duty to sing nothing but elegy, because the poem’s subject will accept the day with joy.
So, this is goth-mode Emily with death certain, but this is also certainly the day before the last day.
Musically I had to throw this one together quickly, but it came out OK. Though in a minor key it’s somewhat jaunty. You can hear it with the graphical player below, or if the Meadow bird’s audio player isn’t visible, you can use this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*There’s a similar quote attributed to Samuel Johnson, and there’s this later extension authored by Terry Pratchett “They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged.”
I could, maybe should, write about a number of things this weekend. The end of May brings Memorial Day, one of the United States’ two holidays celebrating those who served in the armed forces, the spring version being more focused on those who died in wartime duty. It also brings to mind the anniversary of the drawn-out, agonizing death of George Floyd a few blocks from where I’m writing this. I think of that little group of South Minneapolis people, ordinary citizens of my neighborhood, who witnessed it, who pleaded with the police officers to cease their officiousness. I think of the new policemen in that squad, earnestly following the lead of their trainer who’d arrived, the man with his knee on Floyd’s neck. Duty.
Duty is a small word, but one that we have two holidays to honor. We generally respect it, and in small and large ways we carry duties through our days. My wife does in her workdays what I did for a couple of decades, taking on the duty of helping the sick. In between workdays she takes on the obligations to her mother suffering from increasing Alzheimer’s in a care home.
I’ve written about all those things here. I could write at length about them here tonight. In doing so I could say I am following my obligations to humanity, to those who suffer, to those who’ve lost. We use poetry often to decorate those tasks, more often perhaps than we use the more capricious song to do so. Thus I could write, and you might view it as your duty to read that.
Instead, I’ve been filled this month with the realization that this is my teenager’s last summer as a teenager. They’ve concluded an indifferent year of post-secondary education, and now have taken their first job. As to next Fall plans: they are thinking of stopping with school, saving money from the job, and moving out. Studying seems like a duty — their work-a-day job does too, but maybe it’s a more novel duty, or at least one that has a biweekly award of a paycheck.
Music is a key to memory, particularly emotional memory to me. During these feelings this May, I came upon a performance of a song by Jonathan Richman. Richman has an utterly strange career. He’s one of those you might see called a cult artist, which means those who “get” him sometimes puzzle those who don’t, but also it means that many who read this won’t know his work at all. As a teenager Richman became something of a Velvet Underground* superfan, and his early work shows direct influence of Lou Reed’s songwriting. In the early 70s he and his band The Modern Lovers recorded more than a dozen tunes that prefigured a lot of what was to come in Punk and Indie rock a few years later, but the recordings were not issued when they were made. Then in 1976, when the first stirrings of Punk were drawing attention, they came out along with newer recordings.
Here’s complexity to that odd: the old, early 70s songs and recordings were unvarnished, and they followed Reed’s model of being emotionally honest, but their timbres and approach would be in tune with some of the vanguard of what was called Punk at that time. The newer songs were even more childlike, though no longer being written by a teenager or recent teenage time-emigrant, and the sonics were quieter, even more stripped back. As his career continued, Richman generally proceeded down that path, writing ever more childlike songs focused on everyday wonderment. If his early singing called on some of Lou Reed’s snarl and assertion, the later work took on elements of 50s Do-Wop teenage innocent sweetness.** Richman in a sense started out before his time, had a recording career launch when his early work seemed of the moment, and then continued until the present day as a singer-songwriter presenting the impression of coming from a place that was younger and younger.
The song I heard while thinking of my teenager at the borderline, “That Summer Feeling,” was sung by a 40 something Richman a couple of decades into that career. On Richman’s record the Do-Wop influence is apparent, backing harmonies and call and response from additional voices. Compared to the version you can hear below, there are more verses, more detail of youthful specifics. Blind to the career history I’ve summed up above, you might easily think someone about 19 or 20 recorded it, fresh with passing through that borderland.
Here’s the intuitive choice I made when I decided to quickly work up a cover of “That Summer Feeling:” to record it more in the style of the early 70s The Modern Lovers recordings than the “mature” Jonathan Richman. If I had more time, I would have overdubbed a garage rock guitar solo at the end or maybe some combo rock’n’roll organ as those records sometimes had. Following my taste, I preferred the songs less specific but most summer-set verses.*** This musical change and the way I sang the lyrics also brings out more of the undercurrent in this song, a complexity that a casual listen to a more smoothly produced recording might let one overlook. The singer isn’t just doing a let’s remember our youth story here. He warns in slightly mutating refrains that that youth will haunt you, and then he pleads with the (presumably teenage) listener to not wait until they’re older to, what — it’s not entirely clear — somehow integrate that duty-free time’s outlook fully into oneself or it won’t just haunt you, it’ll taunt you, and finally it will hurt you “the rest of your life.”
Would any kid ever listen to that message? Doubtful. My fatherhood duty knows limits, even counterproductive effects, of advice. Still, I wanted to sing it anyway.
After the jumps of this Memorial Day post, I won’t make the proforma Memorial Day holiday wishes. Some will be decorating graves. Some will be thinking of how life was disregarded. Some are caring for the sick and infirm. Some will be having cookouts or taking a little vacation trip away from work. Black joy, worker’s rest, flopping down in the grass without any duty, playing or listening to music. We honor duty. Let us also honor some respite from it.
Here’s my performance of Richman’s song.
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*As many writers do, I must reiterate the Eno quote about how only a few thousand bought the first Velvet Underground record — but that everyone who did went out and started a band. Historians have determined that the record actually had decent sales, but Richman is one of the early examples of direct VU influence. The early Modern Lovers band included folks who would go on to being in The Talking Heads and The Cars.
**The small vocal ensemble 1950 style of urban teenage music that got called Do-Wop was often written by teenagers or near teenagers — and like the Punk, Rap or Indie music that followed later, it was inexpensive and approachable to create for the kids who made it. Arch cultural critics and satirists-in-song Lou Reed and Frank Zappa both appreciated it, thought it honest in its innocence. Punk founders Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye met because Smith loved an appreciation of Do-Wop that Kaye had published. I on the other hand have vocal limitations that keep me from indulging in the style.
***I am struck by the specific the song takes in one verse where it goes from singing swimming ponds and cool lawns to a traffic stop. I don’t think Richman meant to make that an existential moment, even if our modern gun-soaked life might make it seem so now.
Today’s musical piece uses another very short Spring poem by Emily Dickinson “A little Madness in the Spring.” I was reminded of this poem when I attended the May Midstream Poetry Reading Series this month where Thomas R. Smith opened a set of his own poems by reading this one of Dickinson’s. If you’d like to follow along, here’s a link to the text of that poem. Spring madness is not an unique poetic subject, but there’s an odd character we meet in this 6-line poem: a clown. Smith told us that “Clown” in his mind is best illuminated by understanding that the word emerged from a character that would have been understood as a country bumpkin. Checking on this, I confirmed that. The silent, white-makeup, big-shoed, red-nosed presentation that likely arises in your mind when you read “Clown” has not yet come into its full form when Dickinson wrote her poem, but the rural clod stock character reached back through commedia dell’arte to the works of Latin and Greek comedic playwrights.
I can’t say how Dickinson visualized clowns in her mid-19th century. I don’t know her access to whatever comic drama or the opera bouffe, but she might have run into clown characters in books or periodical reviews too. One thing that occurs to me: an American form that uses stock buffoons that was popular in Dickinson’s time and place was the minstrel show. Minstrelsy is infamous for using largely white actors playing black slaves acting foolishly, a context which cannot be disengaged from the larger social evils of slavery and white supremacy. It’s not to excuse our parochial evils to note that these character tropes existed outside of the peculiarities of America and white blackface.
When I had seen “A little Madness in the Spring” with its “Madness,” “King” and “Clown” before I heard Smith read it, I casually thought the poem referenced Shakespeare’s King Lear. Looking at that today, I can’t find evidence for it. The Fool in Lear is always The Fool, the word clown is never used. Nor is Springtime evoked in the play.
“As if it were his own…”
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So, I think Dickinson may have a generic King and Clown in her little poem. The meaning I’d extract is: It’s fine to be irrational in Spring, even if one has powerful responsibilities, but even more so we should note the foolish notion of the innocent peasant or farmer clown who observes all this new growth of spring, the “whole Experiment of Green” and believes it is their property. One fine point I’ll put onto that last part: even an unschooled farmer — and avid gardener Dickinson too — would know the work and craft that goes into starting a garden, crop field, or orchard. A King might puff himself up and portray that husbandry as “his own,” but the man or woman dealing with the exact logistics and labor knows well their part, regardless of who owns the crop or the field.
Is Dickinson winking at that difference in her comparison of the King and Clown? But neither labor nor legal papers and titles make the Earth and Springtime fully our own. We sing it, but the music comes from elsewhere.
You can hear my musical performance of Dickinson’s “A little Madness in the Spring” with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
For a cluster of reasons, it’s been increasingly difficult to create new audio pieces for this Project. For one thing, having done over 750 of these pieces during the past 8 years, a lot of musical ideas, poets, and poems have been explored already. For another, my increasing age and high-mileage body have decreased my stores of reliable energy and dexterity. But one other reason is that I no longer have a predictable and luxurious access to times when I can record something that involves a microphone. Oh, I still get such time — but I don’t always know when it’s coming — and so an opportunity may arise, and I’m committed to something else, or it comes about and I’m weary and spend it napping or resting my aching old frame, or it opens up, and I have nothing prepared to record.
This frustrates me even as I realize that what I do have to bring to the Parlando Project in terms of resources and time is something to be grateful for.
Yesterday I had foreknowledge of one of those recording times coming. I collected two things I wanted to do something with: a well-known poem by Emily Dickinson and another musical piece that I wanted to record just for my own personal enjoyment. As I sat down in my studio space to record my musical performance of the better-known Dickinson poem, I noticed on my music stand a chord sheet for a lesser-known Dickinson poem I had done the music for early this spring: “Sexton! My Master’s sleeping here. ” “Sexton!” hadn’t been recorded, even though it was ready — I didn’t have the time in early Spring as I rushed to do all the pieces on the children’s verse theme I had chosen for National Poetry Month.
Dickinson’s “Sexton!” is an early Spring poem, a season that arrives at different times in different climes, but I figured that I needed to record it right away if I was going to keep it at all timely. I grabbed a dreadnaught guitar (a larger, more powerful sounding guitar than my usual instrument) and quickly refreshed myself on how I had intended to perform “Sexton!”
I was so eager to record on this occasion when the restrictions to making a sound had fallen away that I ripped into the piece at a reckless tempo. A choice or a mood? Moot point, I had to get on with it. Thinking about that tempo today I also wondered if my teenager’s hardcore punk listening had seeped into my mental metronome. But then “Sexton!” does start with an exclamation point, and the whole poem is that: an exclamation of Spring.
Of course this is Goth Emily — so even if her poem and performance are as short as a cut by the so-rapid punk bards of San Pedro The Minutemen, there’s context crammed into 90 seconds. Here’s a link to Dickinson’s poem if you want to follow along. What do we find in those words?
This is what you come to the Parlando Project for: stuff that’s stuck on each other like cockleburs.
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A sexton* takes care of church grounds, typically including a graveyard. The sleeping Master’s bed chamber is therefore likely a grave. Spring has come with flowers and birds expecting new life.**
Spring isn’t stopping to reflect on this, like the tempo of the song it’s got work to do. Dickinson is in a churchyard, but it’s full of death departed and life arriving, not dogma. What replaces that dogma, sermon, homily? Bird-troubadours, secular Spring-song: its shortness, its insistence. You can hear my performance of Emily Dickinson’s “Sexton!” with the graphical audio gadget you should see below. No gadget? This highlighted link is a backup that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*By anachronistic coincidence, the poem’s sexton made me think of Anne Sexton, a 20th century American poet. Poetry is like a cocklebur: its tropes and metaphors will stick to anything.
**More coincidental connections: in considering Dickinson’s poem in the context of a song I thought of this Earl Sykes song, best-known from a Ralph Stanley bluegrass version, called “A Robin Built a Nest on Daddy’s Grave.” I wonder if Sykes knew Dickinson’s poem, or if there’s some third source that both the poet and the songwriter tapped for this springtime combination. My Dickinson poem-now-song would make a good medley with Sykes’ song —and good bluegrass high vocals and harmony would certainly spruce up my rough-hewn singing performance.
There are more things than well-made that a poem can be — but as someone who’s worked to make their own poems work, I can use that experience to admire what Robert Frost does in today’s piece.
“Pea Brush” is a rhymed iambic poem, based on four-foot lines, but it throws in enough variation that it never seems like it’s limping along in its gait. The rhymes aren’t fancy, and at least for me, they quietly chime along in the background without calling attention to themselves. This is prosody that isn’t bragging or showing off. It was easy to sing in my rough-hewn manner for the most part,* but if I was to reformat it into blocks as if it was prose, it wouldn’t seem all that strange either. Indeed, as I performed it, I wanted to stress its conversational quality.
I myself haven’t had a garden in decades, but one friend of the blog Paul Deaton covers their kitchen garden regularly at his blog, and alternative Parlando voice and keyboardist Dave Moore has a garden that we talk about sometimes. I could imagine reading the first-layer plot of this poem as a post Paul might make. “I’ve arranged with a neighbor to use the small limbs from some birch trees he’s clearing as poles for some of my climbing garden plants. When I went to pick them up on Sunday, I noticed bent-over wildflowers** blooming under the brush pile. My reuse of the felled branches will help my pea vines and give the wildflowers room to grow.”
Besides this clear plot line, there are fine clear images in the poem’s story: the smell of sap still in the air from the just-cut trees, the pause in the frog’s song, the near-like to a baby’s grip of an adult’s finger to the tendrils of a climbing plant on garden stakes.
Wishing good luck to all the gardeners reading this.
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Below this surface, what is the poem trying to convey? The poem’s speaker (as a character perhaps a more prosaic farmer than the poet and indifferent farmer that Frost was) just notes the practicality of the arrangement — free garden stakes — while letting us in on the blooming of May flowers and the promise of harvest aided by this arrangement. Frost the poet has written this well-made play, painted this scenery, blocked and directed its performance. The play portrays the give and take of humankind in nature. We’ll grow (and consume) the peas with their infant tendrils. Neighbor John has amputated the treescape for his own agricultural designs. These are planned acts of life and death. The episode of the frogs has them portraying those things outside our plans, their Sunday-service silence to hide from a two-footed demigod that might come to capture them to a final silence.
I’ll note too the poem’s ending “had to come” interjection breaking the meter to make a final statement of the budding wildflowers that couldn’t wait for humans to make their plans.
I had to make do with a single hour to get this musical performance down today, and I chose to grab an acoustic guitar to get this accomplished. The results felt right enough to produce this new piece that you can hear with the graphical audio player below. No player? This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*The line “The same as you seize cat’s-cradle strings” is a bit of a tongue-twister. And while I get Frost’s image clearly in that line’s stanza, the syntax is a little disordered I think.
**Frost names his wildflowers as trillium. I don’t know if Frost was the exact botanist that his friend Edward Thomas or his great New England predecessor Emily Dickinson were. Neither am I, but I’m often open to researching specifics like this in poems. I find that one of the species of trillium that grows in Frost’s New England is the Nodding Trillium, a variation that grows crooked stems naturally, not because a brush pile has altered its growth.
Frank Hudson 