performance

The Prodigal Son: Another mode of Fenton Johnson’s poetry

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Over this February I’ve presented a variety of early poems by the lesser-known Black Chicago poet Fenton Johnson. Johnson self-published two book-length collections of his verse in the years before WWI, and he’s an interesting Afro-American poetic bridge between the turn of the century Paul Laurence Dunbar and the poets like Langston Hughes who emerged in the 1920s.

I try to remind myself that one of my goals in these posts is to make things accessible with fewer pre-requisites than a lot of other writing about poetry. Effective poetry can have a degree of timelessness, but I’ve come to believe Johnson was pioneering poetic expressions that we might forget haven’t always been available — so let me briefly explain today some more context that makes Johnson’s work especially interesting.

Dunbar and Johnson’s poems that use conventional late-19th century English language verse are a demonstration that Afro-American poets could utilize established prosody and forms while reflecting their own experiences; but then, as awkward as some of it seems to me,*  Dunbar and Johnson’s dialect poems helped further something Mark Twain and other dialect writers were bringing to literature: a sense that the common vernacular had it’s own poetic diction that could have value. By the time we’ve moved onto Johnson’s dialect mode in a poem like “Mistah Witch” we’re getting something that is Afro-American in both sound and sense. My estimation of how valuable “Mistah Witch”  was as an expression increased many-fold in my journey to performance of it this month. More than anything in dialect that I can recall from reading Dunbar, Johnson’s “Mistah Witch”  reflected the Blues poetry that I treasure in Langston Hughes and song lyricists that will follow. Was there a direct flow-line of this innovation? Did Hughes know of Johnson’s work?**

Today’s piece is another example of Fenton Johnson’s prescience. Within his first two collections Johnson included poems reflecting Afro-American preaching modes to tell pointed versions of Biblical stories. He often called them “spirituals,” and in Visions of the Dusk  where “The Prodigal Son”  is printed, he introduces that section saying this:

These songs we offer, not as genuine Negro spirituals, but as imitations. We attempt to preserve the rhythm and the spirit of the slaves, and to give literary form and interpretation to their poetic endeavour. Here and there we have caught a phrase the unlettered minstrels used; here and there we have borrowed of that exquisite Oriental imagery the Africans brought with them.”

Note the careful and crafted way Johnson frames this section, thinking perhaps of the broad “crossover” audience he desired. To extrapolate: You might enjoy this even if you think of Black people as less smart, he pardons. It might seem strange, but strange might be exotic like other “foreign” things that interest you from farther lands, he offers.

Afro-American spirituals as a song-form emerged in the late 19th century as a popular concert music. White audiences found them moving — and to the best of my understanding, they often came to those feelings in a non-condescending way. For the Black intelligentsia, as late as the between-the-World-Wars “Jazz Age,” spirituals were used as an example of successful and laudatory Black musical expression, while Blues and Jazz might be held at arm’s length as too reflective of baser contexts.

Johnson’s spirituals don’t sound to me like the anonymously-authored choral concert music that has come down to us as spirituals. We have sheet music from before Afro-American artists were generally recorded in the 1920s, but those printed scores don’t show something substantially like the word-music I see portrayed in Johnson’s spirituals. What I do  hear in Johnson’s Literary Spirituals — something recoverable once later recordings entered our historic record — is Afro-American preaching modes.***  This style of preaching is musical, and it will (like Johnson) make quick jump-cuts to other ways of seeing an element of the story being portrayed.

The Prodigal Son

Though it appears in the table of contents as “The Prodigal Song,” here’s Johnson’s poem as it appeared in his 1915 collection Visions of the Dusk

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As it turns out, this is a strong and versatile poetic form. It continues to be a significant part of the Afro-American strain in American literature. Although we “hear” it through Johnson’s silent printed pages, and also through his particular mind and ear, these poems are valuable in preserving some of this tradition.

Johnson, largely based out of Chicago, was well-placed to observe this. Not only because of Chicago’s diverse Black community including many “Great Migration” internal-immigrants from across the American south, but because Chicago seems to have been a key center in the development of the more overtly musical strain from this tradition, Afro-American Gospel music.****

My performance of Johnson’s “The Prodigal Son”  is not exactly Black Gospel — I’m not sure it’s anything genre-wise really — but it’s more my independent attempt to perform the wide-ranging text of the poem with the musical resources I could bring to bear on it this month. “The Prodigal Son”  is easier to see as a Modernist poem than the more formal, redolent of the 19th century verse I started with this February. It uses a free sense of phrasing in its meter. It uses near-rhyme subtly but has no fixed rhyme scheme. And look at how the poem’s narrative cuts cinematically: starting with a specifically northern speaker in a blustery Chicago winter, to a jump to the Biblical parable of the wastrel son who is seen returning home and the father calling for a welcoming feast, followed by what?*****  Not a homecoming to a BCE Middle-Eastern farm settlement, but heaven, cast with Biblical notables — yet, the feast of welcoming does  occur.

As the poem moves on, a litany of the particular sufferings of American chattel slavery are movingly condensed, in this section echoing the abolition/Underground Railroad folk song “No More Auction Block.”  This welcome heaven/home will have no drivers’ whips, no bread and water diets, no more auction block separating families.

Johnson has one more final jump cut, one in time and place: we end at the River Jordan as the River Lethe (the river addressed in “Waters of Forgetfulness”  earlier this month), and at the end we find that our poem’s singer hasn’t yet arrived to what the middle of the poem has described.  This, the concluding metaphor for America: if we’re a nation of immigrants — including kidnapped ones, and ones driven here beyond their wills — we may find ourselves still awaiting arrival to the fulfilled landing of that promise.

My performance, as I said above, doesn’t really use Gospel music elements. Not only would that be a challenge to my singing constraints, I haven’t found the time to build a more grand musical ensemble that this poem could be said to deserve. I hope the sparse voice and acoustic guitar presentation you can hear below does it some justice. You can hear it with the audio player you should see below. No player? This highlighted link is a backup.

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*I’m not alone in finding this part of their work troublesome. I can’t say how white audiences of their time might have viewed it, but the air of minstrel show stereotypes must have been hard to escape. When performing blues tunes in vernacular I’ve made the choice to not put on vocal black-face — in part because I’d be bad at it — but also because it can’t (for me) escape that burnt-cork shading, even though I’ll retain informal/colloquial syntax.

**Likely Hughes would have known at least Johnson’s later post WWI work as they published in the same journals and were included in early Afro-American poetry anthologies together. But independent observation of less-documented Black musical expression contemporary to them both (though this was not yet widely recorded for posterity) would have been easy for the two of them. There’s no reason I’m aware of to think that Hughes used Johnson as a model, but it’s fair speculation that reading Fenton Johnson, even incidentally, could have validated or confirmed to Langston Hughes that he was onto something worthwhile.

***In the between-wars era, besides “live” sermons in church or over the radio, we have commercial recordings issued by the same “race records” companies that would have pressed Blues songs — recorded sermons which likely reflect what Johnson could have heard prior to WWI from a slightly earlier generation of Afro-American preachers.

****Did Fenton Johnson influence Thomas Dorsey and contemporaries who helped formulate Black Gospel music in Chicago in the 1920s? I have no evidence, not even a likely. I’m reduced to those expressions from bad cryptozoology and UFO documentaries: “What if…” and “Could it be possible….” Weak stuff. Common inspirations is the real likely here — but with Johnson’s poetry we do have interesting examples of how this was emerging.

*****This is one of my favorite parables, because its narrative point is that the other sons are totally non-plussed by the father wanting to welcome the ne’er-do-well who’s been off carousing with outsiders, finding non-productive failure, and generally sinning. Other sons: “We had to stick around with you pops, doing all this righteous stuff day after law-following-day. Where’s our bar-b-que old man?” The point Jesus and Johnson then make from this: you celebrate the ending of suffering, and that goodness is its own reward.

Mistah Witch: Pioneering Blues Poetry

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Enjoy the Valentine’s candy if you have it, but this is a longer post, and we’re going to get into some uncomfortable stuff with this one. Yes racism, but then I’ll deal today with musicology and Modernist poetry too. The first is deadly in spirit and body, but then the latter two may often bring on the little death of boredom and indifference. This is why I respect you as an audience: poetry is a minority interest, mixing in the variety of musical styles I use here to the best of my subjective abilities will confound some of that audience, and then to discuss oppression — even the resistance to oppression which should be heartening — well, welcome rare, broad, and appreciated readers and listeners. Let us continue.

I said earlier in this year’s Black History Month series where I’m examining the early work of Chicago poet Fenton Johnson, that it may help us to orient ourselves into the time in which this young Black man in his twenties started writing and publishing. If we look at poetry and music, three big things are happening. They’re going to change how the 20th century, and even our own current century, approaches things.

The Fenton Johnson poetry I’ve presented so far this February has been in the 19th century tradition. It’s a style of poetry his school teachers would have taught him,* and like his chief model Paul Laurence Dunbar, he can speak for and about his fellow Afro-Americans using that mode of poetry. However, at this time something new is brewing in poetry. Over in England a small group of ex-pat Americans are joining forces with a couple of British poets/critics and a man from Belfast to create the first Modernist English poetry.** Few are noticing this yet, it takes a couple of years for it to get a foothold, but in 1909 the first poem in a style that would soon take to calling itself “Imagist” was published: “Autumn”  by British writer T. E. Hulme.

What makes that poem and the Imagist poems that follow Modernist? First off, it’s concise, it gets to the point. The language may combine things in unexpected ways, but it uses much more ordinary and day-to-day language to do it. Indeed, it revels in that — part of its freshness is that it wants to render sublime moments in the same way of speaking that something utterly mundane might be expressed. Its commitment to this is so strong that those mundane moments, the “unpoetic” ones, can be charged with a power. It doesn’t care to have the people in its poetry seem high-flown, they don’t have to be different more “poetic” creatures. Yet these same poems often have an important core of distrust for common or worn-out appreciations of reality. Emotions may be stated, yes, but many of the most vivid poems portray the landscape and the palpable things surrounding an emotion rather than hang signposts or explanatory placards of their feelings. Rhyme and meter could be used, but they aren’t the main point if they lead the poet to ignore these new things to emphasize.

While this is going on, Black Americans are forging a couple of new musical forms that are going to overthrow their nation’s music — and from there, impact the world’s. Because this happened before the full emergence of commercial music recording, some of this is literally un-recorded. Buddy Bolden and his like are playing instrumental music largely sounded on brass-band instruments along with pianos, where access to those instruments is available. Eventually that will be called Jazz. Many mark the first Jazz record as being issued in 1917, though Jazz existed before the recording.

At roughly the same time various strains of music with lyrics made by Afro-Americans are being extracted and refined from the ore of American folk music. I would maintain that the lyrical part of this sung music can be viewed as Afro-American Modernism. The songs love to get to the point of things, stripping away hypocrisy and pretense. They deal with disappointment and sadness, yes, but they most often deal with it in resiliency and wry resistance. Taking from the preexisting tactics of folk musics, they will borrow and reference each other’s individual songs — and like Modernism will soon take to doing, they will collage together unlike things and verses to jump from incident to incident. That sung music will eventually be called Blues, and because it’s a sung music, any instrument can be used for accompaniment, including cheap and portable ones. No Blues? No rock’n’roll, no country music as we came to know it, no rap.*** The first Blues recordings were done in the 1920s, but the first sheet music which might be classed as Blues dates to 1912, though again we know it existed unrecorded and off the books before this.

So, three things — all big, culture shaping stuff. In 1900 there’s no general cultural knowledge that these three things exist: English-language Literary Modernism, Jazz, and Blues. By the 1920s they all become part of the mainstream culture, however misinterpreted and misrepresented they may be. Modernist poetry might be thought of as self-consciously crude esoteric nonsense sticking its thumb into the eye of real poetic verse, while Jazz was thought of as hopped-up fast-tempo music to deaden the mind as rapidly as cheap liquor might, and Blues? That’s merely sad and sentimental music of resignation to fate.

This is Fenton Johnson’s world as a young man. The Harlem Renaissance writers that would come a decade or so later would still be dealing with this world. As we’ve seen in previous Black History Month series here, the Black cultural leaders of the first part of the 20th century were not yet fully on-board with Jazz or Blues, which they often felt reflected badly on their race. They did briefly note Fenton Johnson as a Black Modernist free-verse poet, but this happened in the Twenties as Johnson was withdrawing from writing new verse.

I was thinking of this as I read Johnson’s first collection of poems, no doubt written in the years before the book’s publication in 1913, and I come upon this short poem, “Mistah Witch”  printed in the phonetic dialect meant to represent unlettered Afro-American speech.

Mistah Witch as it appeared in A Little Dreaming

Here’s how it appeared published in Fenton Johnson’s “A Little Dreaming” in 1913

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What matter of word music is this? I used my musicological knowledge along with literary thoughts as I examined it. It could be a folk-origin nursery rhyme or play song.***  It could just be a short supernatural poem, for we’ve seen last time that fantasy poems were a genre Johnson touched on in his more conventional verse. It may just be me, but I couldn’t help but read it as Blues Poetry — and a very early example of it too.

No, as printed it doesn’t use the Blues’ 12-bar structure or the three-line (two refrained or near refrained lines, and a response in the third line) stanza. Blues has never been purist about that, and early Blues often didn’t fit into regular musical forms. But I got a Blues sensibility from it. Mistah Witch may be mythologically, potentially, or actually, frightening, but the poem’s speaker seems to know Mistah Witch’s game, how he operates. I thought the poem’s sharpest line was (translated from the phonetic dialect) “Ain’t you tired of scaring me?” That implies Mistah Witch’s “magic” terror is weakening out of boredom and the rote nature of it for the speaker!

If Blues, like other Modernist poetry, likes to get to the point of things, it can also enjoy encoding its statements. The tactic is often: I’m going to speak something publicly, and part of the audience (the ones I want to let know we share an outlook) will get what I’m saying — while at the same time those that might not approve of my statement will be in the dark about what I’m talking about. The latter will just be puzzled or indifferent to what they don’t understand.

What could be encoded in “Mistah Witch?”

In plain talk: from the days of Fenton Johnson’s youth, through the years he began publishing his poetry, and continuing after his poetic work faded away, there was beside the slow incremental wear-and-tear of stereotypes and “civilized” discrimination an active and brutal threat of terroristic violence against Black Americans. Threats, attacks, lynching and (white) race riots are a part of American history that wasn’t talked about broadly out of a mixture of shame and “politeness.” *****   Blues doesn’t play that game, but a Blues singer (or a poet looking to find a broader audience) might encode a protest against that terror metaphorically. I did note that the poem concludes with telling us that Mistah Witch (“Mistah” signifying the frightener is someone the singer feels they must make a show of social respect to) has eyes like the sea — the bluest eye perhaps.

I’m not certain if that’s what Fenton Johnson is doing in “Mistah Witch,”  perhaps even unconsciously. I am planning to try to include some information that I have recently learned about Johnson’s political views later in this series. Musically I took Johnson’s original poem, and for this performance turned it more toward an irregular folk-Blues structure to reflect the Blues sensibility I saw in the poem.

And for those who want a little time-machine technical magic to travel back to those early Blues recordings often pressed cheaply for the “race records” market and worn with dust and the needles of heavy-armed Victrolas, I’ve included a Bonus Track today: a simulation of how the recording would sound in that context.

Here’s my rough’n’ready musical performance of Fenton Johnson’s “Mistah Witch” recorded with inexpensive modern equipment.

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Here’s the simulated worn 78 RPM shellac record version.

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*Johnson, unlike most Americans and even more so, most non-white Americans, had a first-rate college education, attending Northwestern and the University of Chicago.

**This group coalescing before the start of WWI included T. E. Hulme, from the less fashionable north of England who’d been expelled from Cambridge, F. S. Flint a self-made man of letters who risen from Victorian poverty, the Americans T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Pound’s former college sweetheart Hilda Doolittle, as well as Robert Frost, and the somewhat forgotten man from Belfast was Joseph Campbell. I count Frost as a Modernist, as I see his poetry aligning in its outlook with Hulme’s theories, differences in prosody aside. Remaining in America, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and Edgar Lee Masters would also be early Modernists.

***Jazz musicians will often maintain that the Blues is essential to Jazz as well. In that sense, my reading is that they aren’t just talking about Blues musical structures and vocal inflections portrayed by instruments, but the Blues sensibility.

****Blues could and did use lines shared with those folk music forms.

*****In 1919 Johnson’s Chicago suffered a mass racially motivated riot. In 1909 downstate Illinois had a similar incident in Springfield. Smaller acts of terrorism against Afro-Americans were continuous in Johnson’s time. Black History Month isn’t just about that, history shouldn’t be a flat picture. That stuff is ugly — it was meant to be so — and that ugliness is part of the reason it was suppressed and untaught. But. But. But — you can’t fully comprehend the beauty of resistance to that without knowing the ugliness it opposed.

“Mistah Witch”  in my reading is racism, or white-supremacist terror in general, and it could be specifically referencing the original Klan terrorists who fancied themselves in their costumes as representing murderous ghosts and spirits.

The Wraithie’s Message

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Is there anyone reading this far in these posts today mumbling to themselves “It’s Black History Month — and instead of the eclectic variety I expect from the Parlando Project, Frank is giving us this little-known early-20th century Black Chicago poet, this Fenton Johnson guy (who, huh)?”

Let’s keep you here, because Johnson is bringing the variety again today, with a piece that could pass for early William Butler Yeats, or someone else from the Celtic Revival that was happening contemporarily with Johnson’s first poetry collection A Little Dreaming  of 1913. And if our last piece of Johnson’s that had the Roman underworld didn’t warn you, this one is further into the dark fantasy/horror poetry genre as well.

Wraiths and wights, two names given to the wicked messenger in today’s poem have been popularized by later, fantasy books — Tolkien and Rowling et al. But Yeats and others in the Celtic Revival touched on various kinds of supernatural spirits around the time of Fenton Johnson. The non-human beings in these dealings were often at least chaotic or untrustworthy — and as a class, wraiths tended to be even more so. Though named as fairies, not wraiths, I’ve recently presented two linked fairy poems by Yeats and Robert Frost for example where the fairy is seeking to trick a human couple so that they can abduct one of them to fairyland.

Fiery Mask 800

Don’t stay up late reading blogs, for a wraithie might visit you

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In Johnson’s “The Wraithie’s Message”  the poem’s initial speaker beholds a marvelous creature made of “living flame” at his window. The creature tells our mortal, who the wraith addresses as “dreamer” that there is a lovely sea-side woman, the dreamer’s soul’s desire, who he has beguiled with “burning song” so that this woman is now dreaming of, desirous of, our dreamer.

The dreamer at the window is all in on this. He sees not an untrustworthy wraith in this apparition of living flame, but a “good elf” who might be of service to humans. And besides, as the poem ends, he explains that this dreamer is tired of his  dreams — ones that have not been realized. What really awaits? In my understanding of this poem, the wraithie is a siren by proxy. The promised maiden may be by “the deathless sea,” but that may be in the sense that the enthralled or the dead have no more dying to do.

Should it surprise us that a young Black Chicagoan is writing this poem? Perhaps a little, but it shouldn’t be a lot. I come from the Midwestern city of Prince Rogers Nelson after all. Versatility with many styles has been demonstrated by Black Americans over and over. In regard to Afro-American musicians, I lost my constrained surprise decades ago when I learned that Fenton Johnson’s early 20th century contemporaries, Blues musicians —who I prized for their distinctive “authentic” recorded music — had a wider repertoire and spread of influences than I had guessed, and that they were often capable of essaying a variety of white ethnic styles with aplomb.*

But the choice of this Celtic Revival flavor by Johnson may not have been entirely random. Remember that last time Johnson was trying on the title of “bard,” and a bard for a generation of Black Americans who were trying to propagate an Afro-American culture of achievement and distinction — not just out of some parochial ethnic pride, but out of a very serious need to establish their humanity in a country that still retained nearly its full measure of white supremacy. The Celtic Revival of Johnson’s time was similarly seeking to present themselves as full human beings by displaying a rich culture, and it’s not unlikely that Johnson was seeing what he could appreciate and adopt from that.

With a Celtic myth via an Afro-American, there is after all a story here of a despairing dreamer and an untrustworthy power willing to trick them to their doom.

The Wraithe's Message

Simple guitar chords, but my recorded version will sound different because I used a CGDGBE tuning

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I had planned to do this Fenton Johnson piece this month, but as I’ve mentioned before, I’m nearly always unsure of what time and focus I will have to do these pieces now. I had written a sketch of the music already (that helps) and in the middle of the day today I was able to try it out. It came together so quickly I was able to complete a basic track before attending a Canadian Zoom salon featuring friend of this blog Robert Okaji reading new poems. Then later tonight I finished mixing it, leaving it simple enough, though I hope it’s effective. This is another piece that may depend a great deal on my vocal abilities “of a subjective quality” — but that’s up to you the listener. You can hear my musical setting of “The Wraithie’s Message”  with the audio gadget below. No player? A substitute can be summoned with this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Some might be wondering if Fenton Johnson utilized or valued Afro-American music and modes. Yes indeed — he was early and effective in that, a decade before those in the Harlem Renaissance did similar things. I’ve got a couple of pieces planned demonstrating that yet this month.

Waters of Forgetfulness

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s the next poem in our series this Black History Month written by early 20th century Chicago poet Fenton Johnson. Like his “Dunbar”  poem from earlier this week, “Waters of Forgetfulness”  was found in his first book-length collection A Little Dreaming  of 1913.

When I look through a poetry collection for material for this Project I think I’m following a few unspoken criteria. I’m looking for poems short enough to be performed in under 5 minutes. I’m looking for unusual qualities or points of view, or striking images, but I’ll also favor poems that seem to have something song-like about them. This one qualified on the first and last parts. The middle part? I thought it was an example of the range of cultural references that this young Black American poet wished to weave into his verse. Two lines in, and we’re not at the Clark Street Bridge in Chicago like Johnson’s contemporary Carl Sandburg, or looking at the Mississippi river and thinking of ancient historic rivers like Langston Hughes, a young poet who began writing a few years after Johnson. Instead, we’re at an imaginary river, the river Lethe, one of the rivers in Hades, the underworld of the dead in Greek/Roman mythology. Before we’re done, will meet an unnamed man from the fabled city of Troy and the final river border to Hades and the dead: the river Styx. What’s an under-25-year-old Black American doing there?

Waters of Forgetfulness

Here’s the poem as it appeared in “A Little Dreaming”

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When I selected this poem, I didn’t know. Partway into creating the musical performance you can hear below, I still didn’t know enough yet, but this is what I could understand to perform it: the poem’s speaker (let’s call him Johnson for simplicity) seeks the titular quality of the Lethe’s water, that it removes your memory of life.

I had to look up more about Lethe’s particulars to understand more: drinking its water allows the drinker the possibility of rebirth (without that forgetfulness, the reborn would be unable to gain a truly new life).

In the part of the poem that I made a bridge or second musical strain (lines 9-15) this rebirth is linked to some further material. Instinctively I felt it was this poem’s turn or volta, but what’s exactly happing there? Johnson is having a death experience; he sees at least in simile the Angel of Death. And in the penultimate line of this section, he’s glad to see morning. In between he sees himself as like some Trojan who crossed the final river into the land of the dead.

Who was this one from Troy? I had to do some research to find out.

He’s Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s Latin poem The Aeneid.   In that epic’s Book 6, by oracles, gods, and pluck, Aeneas completes a successful quest for a charmed golden bough and this refugee from the sacked city of Troy is able to cross the river Styx to the land of the dead, though for only a day. He passes through a condensed version of Dante’s circles to the happy land, where the most virtuous dead souls reside.*   It’s there that Aeneas is reunited with the soul of his dead father. There are tears and hugs, and the father, now wise in the ways of the underworld, tells his son that Aeneas will go on to found Rome, and he foretells the mighty empire that will result. Then by one more skillful choice, as dawn is about to break, Aeneas is allowed to return from the underworld knowing the true aim of his task: to form a new nation.

You may wonder: I thought I was reading a poem published by a 25 year old young Black American, did I click a link to footnotes for a section of “The Waste Land”  (published 9 years later) instead? Let me deal with two last things before leaving off for the musical performance.

Remember that middle “Temporarily Like Aeneas” section is a simile, framed in “like” and “as.” I take this to mean that the poem’s speaker isn’t the ancient Trojan, it’s most likely Fenton Johnson, or someone like him, seeking to take up the task of becoming a bard to his race, in his nation, in his time. That means this is a dream poem, in a collection that has other poems as dreams or visions — and is after all titled A Little Dreaming.   Johnson and his Afro-Americans have a lot one might bargain to forget, a harrowing dream to wake up from to live a new life. I started thinking this poem was a curious small example of Johnson’s range of subjects and modes. I’ve grown to think it’s making a serious Black History Month point. When this sleeper awakes, glad in the morn, he knows there’s a nation to build and he’s seen his goal.

And here’s the second point. Virgil might have been a more standard curriculum item at the start of the 20th century than he was in my mid-century, or in your 21st — but how many readers then or now will understand the reference Johnson’s making? I didn’t. Maybe you didn’t. This poem may have been written by the poet to the bard himself, to focus him on his calling. Or perhaps he overestimated his potential audience? We’ll return to that last point elsewhere in the series, providing I can complete all the parts I’d like to share this month.

The music for this is fairly straightforward, though I had some fun sound-engineering the grand piano heard in the left channel. This is another of the pieces where I do my best to represent the poem with my singing, even though I fear this composition calls out for a more spectacular singer. You can hear it with the audio player gadget you should see below. No vision of an audio player? This highlighted link is an alternative, it’ll open a new page with its own audio player.

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*Unlike me, Dante had read Virgil, and this section helped him formulate his circles of Hell. Virgil writes, and perhaps young poet Johnson is noting this: this happy place in the afterlife includes the noble bards of nations.

If all the griefs…. Emily Dickinson and also music

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

We’ll get to a remarkable short Emily Dickinson poem today, but first a few words about the music.

One of the things I like about this Project is not caring about what style of music I make to combine with the poetry. You see, I don’t like “silos” — those ways of viewing music as having borders, types, genres, labels. Some days I want to make acoustic music, some days I go inside computers to see what I can score and program to happen, other days I want to take an electric guitar and lean into the amp so that I can hear that guitar respond to its own screaming. Then I’ll be so audacious as to fake music that I have no right nor sufficient understanding to make. Jazz and orchestral music are fields where extraordinary musical knowledge is required — or it would be if I paid attention to the rules. When delving into those kinds of ensembles and approaches I make do with quite simple ideas.

In the music for this Project I’ve become dependent on acting as the musicians that work with my composing self, and the composer knows the musician’s limitations intimately. At least the musicians in me can depend on the composer to keep them from being bored with the same challenges all the time.

Does this variety succeed or fail? I don’t know. Perhaps I am steeled in this effort by writing poetry for years before composing music. Poets in our age generally don’t know if they’ve succeeded. Poetry’s audiences are small and what audiences poetry has may be too cowed by the pretentions of the art to allow us mere listeners footing to talk about it.

Today’s audio piece combines unlike things even before it gets to combining with Emily Dickinson’s striking short poem. I took some very old things: A Telecaster (a 1950 design, meant for bar-room and dancehall cowboy music*) and a small Fender Princeton electric guitar amp I’ve had for more than 40 years. But instead of playing birth-spanking music for dancing and carousing, I played slow, spare music, exactly stumbling though while still keeping itself upright. That part of the piece’s musical approach has a label within the catch-all of indie rock: the sub-genre is called slowcore. To this I decided to add (or perhaps preserve is a better word) some artifacts of its making that you, I, or the next recordist might think defects. The mic was picking up a lot of the pick strikes on the guitar’s strings —well sobeit, they are the crickets or the tapping implements of this soundscape. And to this I decided to mic the floor beneath me as I performed this to capture my foot stomping time as I played.**

I believe this combining pairs well with the difference of Emily Dickinson. I’m not entirely sure what Dickinson meant to achieve in the short poem we title with it’s first line “If all the griefs I am to have.”   What was her internal intent in writing this, what did it mean to its author? Was she writing something to herself? Or was it expected to be a little greeting card epigram to thank someone else for the gift of joy? The first line we use out of need for a title leads us to think it’s about grief, and a recipient of this might think it awfully strange to think this a thankyou message — yet one through-line of the poem’s two stanzas is that the poet’s present mood is so joyful that a lifetime’s accumulation of grief wouldn’t phase her at the poem’s moment, and that any imagined accumulation of a lifetime’s joys would only measure the same as what she says “happens to me now.” We might assume the poem’s occasion is some joy then, yet this poem doesn’t say that outright.

Emily often enclosed poems in letters or gifts to others. I don’t know if this was one, but can one imagine being an acquaintance or family member of Emily and receiving these 8 lines? Others might be jotting down “I thoroughly enjoyed your visit/garden party/whatnot” in bread & butter notes. You open Emily’s and it’s “If all the griefs I am to have would only come today…”  Awkward. But to her mind the thought of all that grief, all the sadness, all that pain, all taken at once — it’s something to envision and grapple with. And your cherries jubilee was scrumptious.

thank you from Emily D

A goth who loves dessert? Emily was a dessert maker of some note to her friends and family.

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If you follow the logic, that’s what the poem could be saying. But the way of saying it, the framing of saying it*** causes one to see grief in an equivalent measure to joy. I see this poem as a Taoist statement, that there is one unified, effortless, way in things.

Is that Taoist reading an accident, an illusion I’m imposing? I’m frankly not sure. One thing I’ve learned as I’ve leaned into Dickinson this century is that her mind had within it a mode of trying to express vast philosophical points in tiny poems, and that the central thoughts that are embedded in just a few words in these poems can be difficult. She was reading Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and they were among the first Americans to try to come to grips with East Asian philosophy. Her poem does  explicitly say grief may seem an illusion to joy, which can flow around it; and that nothing (including joy) is so large that something else cannot be larger.

Well, that’s my awkwardness for today — but you can hear it with music if you use the audio player below. And if the audio player isn’t giving you a RSVP, this highlighted link is supplied for those ways of reading this that suppress showing the player, as it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*A great many musicians discovered that it was good for things well beyond what it was designed for. One side-effect of Leo Fender’s guitar design was that its bridge pickup was to deliver bright, clear notes which meant that no matter how much you smeared it with reverb and ambient effects or applied fuzztones and distorted murk, it still let its intent cut through. For today’s guitar part the Telecaster had things that went against this bright, clear nature: I tuned it down a full step (D to D instead of the conventional E to E) and the motifs tend to be played on the lower strings here. And the guitar was strung with flat-wound strings. Almost all modern guitarists use round-wound strings, which let the lowest pitched 2 or 3 strings have a brighter sound and bring out more of the harmonic series above the root frequency of a note. Flat-wound strings are wrapped with a tight flat layer of wire that suppresses that, which makes them contrast with the ringing plain, un-wound top 2 strings all the more. This timbral contrast can make the single guitar sound almost like two differing instruments.

**I had intent there, even though the sound and rhythms of today’s piece were unlike its model: John Lee Hooker’s early records were often just Hooker’s voice and electric guitar, and his work-boot stomps were clearly audible as percussion on some of them. When I listen to exemplary slowcore band Low’s spare drumming I  sometimes think it has the same effect as Hooker’s sole-music.

*** In poetry, unlike say the essay or expository writing, the way of saying is brought forward to be as important as the message of what is said.

Have you tried rebooting? And Melanie, in memoriam

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

There’s new Parlando stuff coming. Indeed, there would already have been a new piece with words by Emily Dickinson this week if it wasn’t for a couple of issues.

Issue #1 was with a new, upgraded Macintosh computer system which handles most of the complicated recording stuff I do for this Project. After working beautifully the night before, the next day it was nearly unusable. I first noticed the mouse wasn’t working well — or a times, at all. I use wired mice, as I’d have no patience with Bluetooth gremlins — but still and all, maybe that mouse had gone bad? I swapped in an old one (I’m a packrat of old computer stuff, so I had a spare handy). Mouse back to working. But then the keyboard was nearly unusable, being extremely balky at registering keypresses. It was so bad that logging in again after rebooting the Mac was a challenge.*  Keyboard dying too? Tried a different keyboard. Same deal. I even tried booting the Mac into MacOS safe mode, which for some reason caused a kernal panic with a crash dump rather than completing a boot into that version of the operating system that’s a fall-back stripped to just the basic stuff. Was my new system demonstrating an internal hardware issue? Besides the nearly unusable keyboard, the whole system was slow, even though the system monitor showed plenty of resources available.

I wondered how much time would be wasted getting warranty service or restoring my complicated music creation environment. And then I noticed that my Time Machine backup drive was no longer mounted — or recognized as a drive in Disk Utility either. Would a warranty replacement Mac be able to transfer my stuff back from that backup? The last Time Machine backup was logged early that morning, then nothing as it had no drive to back up to. Additional worries: that drive might have checked out for good.

There’s a large overlap in musicians with folks involved with computer technology, but since that Venn diagram convergence is much slighter for poetry, I’ll cut to the solution.**  At some point I power-cycled the powered USB hub that holds most all the USB stuff that my kind of music production needs: two software protection dongles, two MIDI interfaces, a little plastic piano keyboard, an audio interface, that Time Machine hard drive, and a charger cable for my MIDI guitar. Mind you, the mouse and keyboard were plugged directly into a USB port on the Mac itself, not into this hub. And —

Everything returned to working normally. How a USB hub plugged into a different USB port from the one used for the mouse and keyboard could all but disable them, as well as causing the other issues, is beyond my knowledge level.

Large, powered USB hubs are not a common in-stock item in local stores, but just in case the issue with mine might return, I ordered a spare. It would be at a will-call desk the next morning. I’d pick it up along with my weekly major grocery run.

Issue #2. A member of the household awoke in clear emotional distress and was unable to talk about it. I thought it best to stay home. I told them I loved them and would be here if they needed me. I spent much of the day worried and concerned, but puttering around in case there were any needs that would emerge. By the middle of the afternoon they were better and talking (though not about the issue that had struck them earlier). They asked for their favorite take-out quesadillas.

I made a quick trip and grabbed the spare hub and that requested late lunch. Issues. Problems. Things don’t always work, sometimes they shut down and don’t tell you why. My late wife worked as a mental health therapist before her mortal illness. I worked decades in hospitals, then another couple of decades in IT. Some people think poetry is difficult, that it taunts you with its obscurity. Maybe so, but life does that too. Spares are difficult for us human beings. We wear and wear-out the ones we have for the most part, learning to use what we have at hand.

I would return to my studio space this morning to continue Parlando Project work. I’d read the night before that the songwriter Melanie had died, I learned of her death in a modern way that somewhat famous strangers have their fortunes told now: by folks speaking their name in past-tense on social media. As I was awaking, with my aim to record at dawn, I read a post by one of those I follow mentioning that they had a favorite Melanie song: “What Have They Done to My Song, Ma.”   Myself? My favorite Melanie is likely her cover of the Rolling Stones “Ruby Tuesday,”  or maybe even her big hit fronting a gospel group, “Candles in the Rain.”   But “What Have They Done to My Song, Ma”  is a fine song, maybe better than you remember it, if you remember it.

I sat at the mics alone, and I decided to sing that song before recording a new Parlando Project piece. In the moment I found it to be about folks attempting to fix you, or make you fit with them and their expectations or needs. That’s not always bad. That’s not always good — which is what this song feels.

This is a video as it’s my understanding that if any appreciable streaming occurs (unlikely with my fame and impeccable musicianship) that the rights owners would be paid by YouTube. Back soon with that Emily Dickinson song-setting.

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*Yes, I worked in IT. Yes, I’m capable of asking myself “Have you tried rebooting?”

**Early in the days of home computers, SF author Jerry Pournelle had a monthly column in Byte magazine which aimed to cover the emerging field of personal computing, but more often than not, it instead dealt with some problem with a computer system in his household. In the early days of BBSes and dialup online services, there’d be lot of chatter about how this guy who got paid to write about stuff in a glossy magazine didn’t know some detail that was sure to have caused his problem right away. Best as I can figure, something inside the hub itself was “stuck” and no amount of unplugging the USB cable from the Mac, or plugging the devices in an out from the hub, helped until the hub’s own power supply was cycled.

Wanderers Nightsong II

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Despite my inveterate bicycling and my wife’s love of nature walks, I’ve never been much of a hiker, and I’m very much not so in my old age. None-the-less I was charmed this winter when I saw this short poem because it appealed to my mental wandering. Walk with me: it’s not all that long a hike to a short audio piece.

When I saw today’s poem, I immediately noted that its translator from Goethe’s original German was the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Let me reassure the poetry hardcore who might be reading this post that Longfellow was far from my interests when I started this project. While 19th century worthies Whitman and Dickinson remain staples of American poetry, Longfellow was to me only a schoolchild’s memory — and at that, not even a literary anthology schoolbook memory. My Midcentury-Modern anthologies of poetry in English didn’t concern themselves much with him, so I recalled only the Longfellow of illustrated poems for children that predated Dr. Seuss’ ascendency, Midnight rides, patriots at the bridge, culturally appropriated native Americans epics in stalwart meters. Longfellow’s Wikipedia page, reflecting critical consensus, still makes the case to downgrade him — and that’s hard to do, to downgrade someone who is now largely overlooked. The judgement handed down can be summarized: you don’t know him, and it’s probably best to keep it that way.

How did Longfellow come to me then? Part way into this Project I visited Massachusetts, planning to see the historic sites in Boston. While in Boston I decided to add a visit to the Washington/Longfellow house in Cambridge. This was a toss-in, yet it was while I was there that I heard about Longfellow’s life and I started to pay a bit more attention to the range of poetry he wrote.

While on that tour, our group was walked through Longfellow’s study where he wrote. I noticed right away that he had something that 21st century Americans would recognize immediately as a modern adaptation for intellectual work: a standing desk. If you must be deskbound, current theories hold, it’s best for your body to spend some of it on your feet during its mental wanderings.

The other thing that stood out was a statue on the desk. It’s not a small little desktop trinket that some of us keep on our own desks,* but something you could easily see across the room from behind the tour ropes. “Who’s the statue on the desk of?” I asked our guide.

“Goethe.” They replied.

If Longfellow has some incontrovertible objective value remaining, it’s that he established the idea of a preeminent American national poet. Those children’s books were thinly veiled citizenship lessons, direct appeals to America’s nationhood after all. So, what’s up with this German poet?

Longfellow, born of a generation where many living adults knew the American Revolution firsthand, was tasking himself with finding what could be an American poetry. What materials did he gather for this?

It’s likely he knew British literature of his time well, but he was officially a professor of Modern European Languages, and while still a young man he taught himself French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and German. He read literature in those languages, translated works from them into English. Whitman and Dickinson largely looked inward (within national and mental borders) for their remarkable American poetry, Longfellow was (as far as influences) a proper internationalist.

He could have decorated his desk with former householder: George Washington I suppose, or that other Washington who was a pioneering American literary figure, Washington Irving. Nope. The man he wanted staring at him when he stood and wrote was this formidable German poet and polymath.

Longfellows Desk 1080

Longfellow’s desk, and Goethe is right up in his grill when he wrote there.

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was not a model for a faint-hearted writer, but perhaps one of the things from Goethe’s overstuffed portfolio might have interested Longfellow: Volkspoesie, “Folk poetry.” The idea here was that shared history, mythic tales, and interests of ordinary people experiencing their landscape was a nation-forming cultural foundation. Here’s a connection Longfellow might have felt: France, England, Spain, and Portugal had been nations for centuries by Goethe and Longfellow’s time: but Germany was not yet a nation in the modern sense, and Longfellow’s United States was only freshly one.**

“Wanderers Nightsong”  is not a grand, nation-building poem however. It’s a tiny little lyric, really only concerned with an internationally-known experience of being outside under one’s own power, perhaps by choice recreationally, perhaps in some outside-directed travel or need to escape, but anyway alone enough in one’s landscape that all things are silent. You can hear your own breath, feel your own accumulation of footsteps, and the landscape says: rest with us.

This means that Longfellow has a delicate task. The thoughts contained in Goethe’s German are not unique — indeed, they wish to speak of a shared experience. Nor are there striking images or clever language effects in the poem. No strange worlds or visions are portrayed. The song-sense here, even on the silent page, is the poem’s substance. Like Hank Williams’ American country song standard “I’m so Lonesome I Could Cry,”   the point here is not that the singer has seen something you haven’t seen, the point is that he sees what you’ve seen, felt what you’ve felt, and you, even reading silently, can sing it with them. Therefore, Longfellow chose to keep Goethe’s German rhyme scheme in his translation to English so that it continues to sing on the page in its new language.

wanderers nightsong

Schubert fans will tell you, I’m a follower not a lieder.

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Longfellow’s choice here is the right one, and I’ve honored it while slightly modifying his syntax and usage. You can read Longfellow’s original text and Goethe’s German at this link. Coincidentally, the poem’s original germ was written on a wall, a fact shared by “Smells Like Teen Spirit”  and this poem presented here a few years back. My performance is not complicated — it’s folk-song like — though the chord structure uses some less-common chord extensions. I do use one of my standbys, the simple sustain-pedal piano notes which testify to my absolute non-mastery of that instrument while wanting to make use of its sonorities. Like some other poems I’ve presented here, an accomplished composer has set this before me. You can hear my simple version with English lyrics using the audio player gadget you should see below. No gadget?  This highlighted link is an alternative way that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I used to keep a sentimental ceramic rabbit that was a gift from my late wife on my writing desk. More recently, a Lego figure of Shakespeare my child assembled and gave to me.

**Yes, nationalism, and in particular German or American nationalism, has its downsides — but the case that it’s foundational to establishing a civic bond can be mooted without denying it’s plausible faults. I should also note for students: my knowledge of German literature is scant, despite my mother having been bilingual in her childhood, and her grandparents speaking German in their home and church. This is a blog written by a “layman” explorer of poetry and music, my scholarship is spotty, though my interests are broad.

The Sparrow

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Paul Laurence Dunbar is most often introduced as the first successful Afro-American poet, and I guess I’ve just followed form by starting this post that way. That statement is more-or-less true. I’d suppose a case could be made for the primacy of Phillis Wheatley who published a book of poems with some notice in the 18th century even before American Independence. And then too, there’s the question of success levels. Dunbar was able to publish more than a dozen books, got praised by some white literary critics and established poets. Figures in Afro-American culture put him forward as a leading Black poetic voice: Frederic Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, pioneering Black orchestral composers William Grant Still and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

As noted in Anne Spencer’s elegant short eulogy poem linking him with other died-young poets, Dunbar was only 33 when he died. Carl Sandburg was just 6 years younger than Dunbar, Robert Frost was but two years younger — both of those poets survived into the 1960s. Dunbar died in 1906 after being debilitated by illness and a series of personal crises. By the time the Harlem Renaissance came around to start making Afro-American artists chic, Dunbar was more than a decade dead. How much more growth and new circumstances could have accrued for Dunbar!

That we still remember him, that a couple of his poems, “We Wear the Mask”  and “Sympathy (I know why the caged bird sings),”  survive to be widely read and considered, should be counted as a success.*  “The Sparrow”  is not as well-known, but I’d note that it both comments on the Afro-American experience and a more generalized human experience.**

“The Sparrow”  is a poem about being sent joy, being sent song, being offered the peace of fellowship, being offered something — and being too callous, or too ignorant, or too busied with the things that aren’t joy and song. In the course of this poem, it may be simply drudgery that is keeping the poem’s singer from noting the bird. Even non-unpleasant rote life can obscure those offered gifts. And oh yes, oh yes,  it can be fear and prejudice that shuts them out too.

The Sparrow

Guitar chord sheet for those that want that want to perform my song setting of Dunbar’s poem.

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Beyond his remembered poems, I think often of Dunbar’s own life as a sheaf of strong metaphors. His mother was born enslaved. Sensing somehow that her son had a talent as a child, she herself learned to read to help him along, so that eventually that son wrote of that caged bird and of today’s offering sparrow. After publishing his first poetry collection, Dunbar sold it while working at his job as an elevator operator in his hometown of Dayton Ohio. He would offer it to his passengers migrating a few floors up or down inside his elevator cage.***  He grew up in Dayton with a couple of bicycle mechanics, Orville and Wilbur Wright. Orville was his school classmate and helped Dunbar find a publisher for that poetry collection. After eventually attaining some notice for his poetry and public readings of it, Dunbar got a job in the Library of Congress. Around that time his mortal illness was diagnosed as tuberculosis. I read today that he thought the dust of the books in the library made him — the man who could once charm musicians with the way his poetry sung off the page — choke and cough. He descended into his illness and depression for the foreshortened rest of his life. Three years before he succumbed, those bike mechanics made and flew the first airplane, and some of mankind slipped the surly bonds.

Someone had to be the first men to compose flight — but flying or caged, we need to sing, need to hear the singer, even after they’ve flown away. As Dunbar’s “The Sparrow”  has it in its ending line we often “Know not our loss till they are gone.”

I composed the music for Dunbar’s poem earlier this week, and dedicated much of today to completing the arrangement you can hear below with the audio player you may see below. No player?  This highlighted link will open a new page with its own player so that you can hear it. You may notice that I changed a few words in Dunbar’s poem while singing it. Some of the longer sentences didn’t give the song (or at least this singer) enough space for breath — and where rhyme didn’t demand it, I unconsciously changed a couple bits of the 19th century poetic diction as I strove to bring out the poems meaning as I sung it. That’s generally considered a fault in classical song settings, but I come from a looser folk songwriting tradition where that sort of thing is allowed. Here’s a link to the poem as Dunbar published it with all his words and syntax intact.

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*To be known for a single poem, to have that carried by others, even in part, in reader’s memory, is an achievement I’d say. I can remember having a discussion with Kevin FitzPatrick some years back when he put forward that Dylan Thomas should be weighed by only being known for one poem — or maybe just that one poem’s refrain. That’s an arguable assessment, but even accepting that, that’s more than many poets, including prize winning-poets, achieve years after their death.

**In dealing with Autism Spectrum Disorder I often think of Dunbar’s poem of Black code-switching to seek acceptance or protection from mainstream white culture, and apply it to the ASD tactic of “masking” to seem more neurotypical. Dunbar’s caged bird never has to say it’s a metaphor for Afro-American experience to Black folks, but caged hopes are not an exclusive experience. I’ll split hairs on thin ice to mix those metaphors re: cultural appropriation vs. cross-over impact.

***Further risking flippancy on my part, it could be argued that the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, but the enterprising Paul Laurence Dunbar invented the elevator pitch.

To not be scared of death that doesn’t understand us

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

I’m going to start off the new year 2024 with something I do less often, presenting a new piece that uses my own words. I give myself permission in part because it was engendered by thoughts of another poet, Robert Okaji, who I’ve considered as something of a kindred spirit to my efforts here since this Project began 8 years ago. Like most every blogger I can’t help but talk about myself, but when I do that I fear I become a spendthrift of boredom, so one of this Project’s mottos has been “Other Peoples’ Stories.” Yet, for all that, this isn’t Robert Okaji’s story in any summary — he’s his own poet, his own writer. I’m presumptuous, but I won’t go there. I don’t know him, though I’ve read his blog, his poetry, seen him read online once. Is that like knowing him in some way?

Many of us poets could admit that we see ourselves in a timeless guild. Homer, Sappho, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Du Fu, Yeats — they’re our co-workers. We flatter ourselves at times that we now occupy their offices. By the same conceit, I could think of Okaji as a compatriot. We live in the same country at the same time, we’ve exchanged the customary short notes over the Internet. At least once before today, something he wrote caused me to write something myself. I think I started writing translations/adaptations of classic Chinese poetry before reading his, but his approach (we both need to start from literal English glosses) ratified mine in effect.

So we poets, at the moments our heads swell up so that poetry can burst forth,* may think it’s as if we know each other, because we think we know each other in poetry. To say then that it’s like companionship, that it’s as if, is to do that thing that’s called in poetry a simile.

Every simile when examined harshly knows it’s pathetic. Every poem is not the thing it represents — even the great poems that change how we look at the thing they represent. Let all in the poetry guild admit this to each other within the walls of the guild hall.

I started writing today’s words on one of my more-or-less daily bicycle rides. In spring there may be many kinds of birdsong in my well-forested city, but in winter it may be only crows — which, as the poem describes, are quite vocal about a solitary early morning bicyclist in their midst.

Crows, ravens, big dark birds, are a death symbol of long repute. And it struck me that while we might chide ourselves for not having sufficient knowledge or understanding about death, we could just as well say that death doesn’t understand us. Living in our consciousness as if the present continues indefinitely, we don’t understand death, but death doesn’t understand that moment either. And then, we poets think we can capture the flow of consciousness and preserve it in poems. Today’s poem carries on in a series of similes and then makes a final summation of the series.

Okaji has written a group of poems over the years featuring the character of a scarecrow. Perhaps he too is riffing on crows as the death symbol, but his scarecrow is at times a comic figure too. A scarecrow is just another simile, a sort of, an as if symbol for us — and so I speak of Okaji’s scarecrow in my poem.

Scarecrow takes a winter bike ride

Scarecrow rides a bicycle in early winter mornings, and the crows object. (a note: I begat these AI illustrations with Adobe Firefly, which claims it doesn’t use uncompensated artists’ work to train itself)

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I said my poem isn’t Okaji’s story — it’s more mine partway — but if you’re like me in some ways, particularly if you want to consider those of us aged to where a compatriot’s death seems next door, then it might be as if it’s partway yours too. The admonition in the poem’s title is therefore not addressed impertinently to Robert, but to myself and perhaps others who might read or listen to this.

Woody Allen wrote a great line: “I don’t want to be immortal from my work. I want to be immortal by not dying.” We write poems, we make those “like a” statements by writing poetry. As if: in our minds we walk into those poetic offices, write our metaphors, our similes. And some day, we must clean out our offices, leaving on our desks a few sheets of paper, maybe enough to stuff a scarecrow.

Today’s performance started with two electric guitar lines I recorded early on New Year’s Day, following the tradition of trying to do things on that day that one would like to continue to do regularly the rest of the year. The two somewhat irregular riffs were spontaneous,** thinking that promise to myself required doing  as much as planning. The bass line was laid down almost a day later to try to hold things together, and the decoration of the keyboard parts arpeggiating the spontaneous chord changes which had started things off, were the final tracks. Those things done, I had my rock band to declaim my sonnet “To not be scared of death that doesn’t understand us” over.

You can hear that with the audio player you should see below. No player?  This highlighted link is a back-up method, as it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*A metaphor that sounds more like a sneeze than Athena’s birth when I re-read this.

**I fancy the right channel line played on my Telecaster has some crow-call-like moments.

Storm Fear

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Of all the English language poets who have achieved a general readership, it’s likely that Robert Frost is the most misunderstood. I don’t say that to shame that broad audience — after all, in my youth, when asked to read Frost, he seemed too full of tired maxims and quaint commonplace situations. Sure he comforts folks I ignorantly thought, and maybe I undervalued comfort, but that wasn’t what I was looking for.*

I won’t blame that youth I was then too much. I was onto other things — but as far as Frost goes, I was carelessly understanding his best work too quickly. Decades later, partly as a result of this Project, I came to his short lyrical poems, beginning to appreciate their supple word-music — and then once beguiled, I began to see what he’d put in these concise pieces.

“Stopping by the Woods” isn’t about lollygagging when there’s duties to do.  “The Road Not Taken”  isn’t about the so-consequential road taken. This poem, “Storm Fear”  from Frost’s first collection, A Boy’s Will, isn’t about settling down to a little hygge-time in a winter snowstorm. Here’s a link to that poem’s text if you want to follow along.

Maybe it’s its concision, or the careful way Frost uses incremental details, but this poem was first published in 1915 and yet the horror it contains seems to have passed most readers by. As I read it this month, now more attuned to how Frost can work, my first thought was this is as harrowing as Bob Dylan’s “Hollis Brown”  or as stark as Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska  album.

My first reminder as you read this poem is that it’s set in a circa 1900 rural America that was more isolated than you might imagine today. Farm families didn’t always have daily connections with others, and those institutions that offered connections: churches, shopping towns, exchanged labor, and rural schools were episodic. Long winter nights and snowstorms restricted what travel there was. Frost himself went through a brief attempt at living that farm life in this era. Perhaps he had a writer’s lighthouse-keeper fantasy of splendid, thoughtful isolation. His poetry testifies that he learned the reality.

Frost’s poem opens with a snowstorm in progress in the nighttime. How many poems, stories, blog posts, other accounts portray such a scene? Frost wants to let us know this isn’t a greeting card picture. The wind is a “beast” and it’s curiously imploring “Come out!” How many readers will miss this odd inclusion and take it as so much filler merely indicating that there’s a wind?**

The poem’s speaker, who we’ll find out is a young husband in the house with a wife and child, responds that it doesn’t take much interior debate to not obey what the beast outside is requesting. He’s thinking: there’s a storm, I’m staying in.

Then we get a different calculation. He tells us about the wife and child. They’re asleep, there’s no awake partner to bounce ideas off of. Suddenly he’s worried about the isolated farmhouse’s sole source of heat, a wooden fire. I think the implication here is that at the very least he thinks he needs to visit an outside woodpile. Or perhaps the winter has been hard enough that he’s short on fuel.

In the poem’s concluding scene, he’s now set on going outside. In the snowhills and blowing snow, even the barn looks “far away.” Is he even considering trying to make it to a neighbors for fuel? Is he making a difficult but sane decision, or is his isolation and “cabin fever” such that he’s thinking of making a risky trip for less than necessity?

Storm Fear 1

I thought too of the deadly rural winter isolation of Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” reading today’s Frost poem.

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Let me note one other thing about the poem. For Frost, the famous formalist, this poem’s form is very irregular. Poetic feet, meter, rhyme scheme? It’s all over the place, though periodic iambs are there in the confusion. Formalists who teach Frost would likely skip over this example for lessons. Workshopping this poem with a formalist? I can imagine the markup.

In setting “Storm Fear”  for performance I was able to deal with the irregularities in Frost’s design, but then I’ve worked in this Project with a lot of outright free verse and have found it not as difficult to sing or mesh with music as some might guess. But when you’re performing (rather than writing a page poem) there are a couple of things you might want to add stress to: a sense of repetitive or choral structure and some additional guidance to the listener to intrigue understanding on one listening.

My choice here was to make the poem’s 7th and 8th lines into a refrain that repeats twice more, the last with a variation. The first time we hear “It costs no inward struggle not to go,/Ah no!” we hear it as the easy rejection of the beast-storm’s call. The second time, as the singer thinks of his wife and child, it seems more as a statement of the imperative for him to take action and leave into the storm. And in the final statement at the end of the song, he’s about to enter the storm thinking he must seek aid.

Would Frost have approved of my changes? Who knows. He was a man of strong opinions and an often brusque manner. Many poets or their rights-holders would forbid changing even a word. But this old poem is in the public domain now, I need no permission, and I hope my setting honors the intent of Robert Frost.***

You can hear my musical performance of “Storm Fear”  with the audio player gadget you may see below. Is that player snowed out?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player in those cases.

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*So yes, I was a dolt about Frost, but not singular in that ignorance. Frost’s first two poetry collections were published in England after he left America for there. One reason for that hejira: American publishers were not in the least interested in his poetry. Frost was nearing 40 when A Boy’s Will  was published. So at least in 1915, the experts were also misreading Frost.

**Some Faustian readings of this poem take that beast as The Beast — that the poem’s speaker is a sinner being stalked by his sins’ debt collector. Frost may have been aware of that implication, though it doesn’t strike me as consistent with what I understand of Frost’s own theology. Making the wind “howl” or “growl” is a commonplace, and calling it outright a beast may be stronger — but if enough readers miss the eminent dread in this poem, maybe it wasn’t strong enough.

***Generalizing, poets who feel they’ve worked their words with a fine touch are often resistant to editing by collaborative outsiders. Since Faust has entered the chat, I think of the collaboration between Bob Dylan and Archibald MacLeish who were slated to do an adaptation of Steven Vincent Benét’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster”  for Broadway. MacLeish knew Benét, and likely thought he could do right by his late friend’s work. Dylan has his ways, and MacLeish had his — so the two fell out, and Dylan’s songs in progress for the play were not used. The eventual Broadway production bombed. Dylan used some of the songs later on his own. His “Father of Night”  is often attributed as one of those rejected songs.