poetry

Toward the Exit (Dem Ausgang zu)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Hans Arp was born split in two. His mother was French. His father was German. I just called him Hans, the name he was given at birth, but he used a French version of his first name as well, Jean.* He was born in Alsace–Lorraine, a set of disputed provinces that were alternatively French and German as wars whipsawed borders. During Arp’s lifetime, those two countries, those two languages, would be fighting as principals in two World Wars. Just by existing Hans Arp could be an enemy alien simultaneously in two ways.

Until this month I knew Arp vaguely as a 20th century modern artist, but while scrolling on Bluesky I saw four lines of an Arp poem that had been translated by Herbert Read as “The Exit To” posted. That immediately intrigued me.

These were eerie, surprising, wild lines – a kind of poetry that has long attracted me.** Was this all of the poem? Could I find it in its original language and work out my own translation for performance? What else could I find out about Arp and his art, visual and literary?

Luckily, I was able to quickly find Read’s 1968 book Arp, which covers Arp’s life and work. The book provides a good number of examples of that work, including not only the entire poem I was seeking in Read’s English translation, but the full text of two versions in the original German (as “Dem Ausgang zu”)  and in Arp’s own French translation. Read spends most of the pages on the visual art, but tells us that Arp was a life-long poet that considered his literary work an integral part of his expression.

Arp’s lifetime reflects his dual nature. Born in a then German territory, and soon connected with the early 20th century avant garde in France and Germany, he fled to neutral Zurich Switzerland at the outbreak of WWI. Significantly for the fleeing Arp, Zurich was the birthplace of the nonsense-word-named art movement called Dada.

Dada was formed by young people from all the sides in the First World War, who didn’t want to be on any of the sides offered. As France and the various monarchies ground themselves into doit and wurst on the battlefield, the Dada folks were pretty sure that exuberant non-sense was the best rebuttal. Arp himself dispatched his German draft status by going to the German consulate in Zurich, genuflecting and making the Sign of the Cross at every picture of the German minister Hindenburg there, and making non-sense patterns on the forms. He did not seem to the German recruiters there to have a keen tactical mind, nor the possessor of the cool sanity required to make sacrificial charges and retreats through no-mans-land.

You, valued reader and possible listener, may counter that patriotism and bravery, like poetry and art of wisdom and clarity, are not valueless. I myself am a confused soul. I like to fancy that I, gratefully, can engage with either outlook – a variety. I do weigh and consider that this is a luxury. Earnest warriors and confounding satirists have each expended their lives in dialectic for that luxury in art.

A man such as the great French Surrealist poet Éluard I recently featured here can fight on what I think of as the good side of the two World Wars, and still write Dada and then Surrealist poetry. I know much more about Arp now due to the English poet and critic Herbert Read’s book about him – Read who was a decorated and profoundly discouraged vet of the WWI trenches who became committed to art, pacifism, and anarchism as a result, yet then felt compelled to serve his native country when the armies of fascism were arrayed against his nation in the second World War.

To the best of my initial knowledge, Arp seems like a fine person. Modest, unpretentious though a persistent artist, with a sense of humor and somewhat rare ability among his peers to see value and collaboration with women artists in his circle and romantic life. Spontaneously he took to abstraction in his visual artwork quite early in the 20th century, independently of, and often ahead of other Modernists. He explained this by saying that he felt humans are pretentious when they try to depict nature, and that instead they should create things like nature does – not reflected depictions, but abstract though attractive, palpable things like a stone or leaf.***

So where does that leave him with poetry? Dada enjoyed nonsense of course. Surrealism brought forth odd and even random combinations. We may be more accepting of these tactics in visual object than a poem, but in today’s poem the young Arp is using those Dada and Surrealist tactics in this 1912 poem before either movement had been declared. What are we to make of poetry such as this that seeks to surprise us without the comfort of giving a clear path to a denotative meaning?

We might be attracted to its novelty. We might take comfort in our surprise rather than displeasure in our confusion. We might choose to delight in our sense of disorientation. In the same way that we might enjoy the texture and shape of an abstract sculpture, we can enjoy the words as sounds and texture. But I suspect all these are fleeting things to most of us much of the time. So, let’s look at such Dada verse as Arp’s poem another way, the way I had to in order to make my translation. The world of generative AI could easily produce endless combinations of nonsense, but it’s trained to go the other way, to give us the very thing we’ll think is expected of it.   Arp chose his words in German, and then went at it again and chose his words in French. A particular human made a particular set of choices. In Read’s account Arp did intend beauty in his art along with the humor, and he seems absent of any haughty sense of the hermetic artist who means to be misunderstood. He also had a sense of humor. My working understanding of the poem I perform today is that its mood is darkly humorous.

Dem Ausgang zu in three languages

I’ve changed, and think I’ve improved, my last line since I recorded my musical performance earlier this week.

.

Long time readers here will recall my primary goal in translation: find the images and convey them vividly in contemporary English. I’ll continue to do this, even as Arp’s images wish to burlesque and fracture reality. When an AI LLM hallucinates (and we use that very term) we are disappointed in it. When another human wishes to speak of an altered reality we wonder at the purpose, the intent, even unexpressed or accepted-accidental intent. This isn’t stone or wood that’s being shaped abstractly, this isn’t a dollop of paint, these are words we must array to make our human sounds, and we will find it hard to avoid making shards of meaning out of them. Arp may be laughing as he wrote down these words in one language, and then another – two languages that would be fighting and killing each other multiple times in his era – but he’s also delighting in the sound and stretch of his words, and I tried to convey that in English too. In the first two lines I see reflective eyes and mysterious night. In the next three lines, a litany of time and movement constrained by something as old and massive as the mountain.**** I see a tree’s lifetime subject to a timber harvest, long ago logs, then cut down and floating away. The poem concludes with night birds in barn lantern light gobbling a season’s harvest that must then have needed the labor of a manual threshing floor to gather, while the divine (angels) are effervescently seen condensing in clouds (baskets of air). And the final line: (as “when pigs fly” in another idiom) fish are holding their hiking sticks walking through the stars, a rising litany of impossibility leading to a certainty, that the poem and all our human effort will end.

If Arp was to perform this poem at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, would some patrons be availing themselves of the exit? For that matter, how many are still reading this far down in this post of mine, how many will want to hear this poem?

Did Arp intend for that to be in a cryptic poem about the absurdity of life’s effort? I can’t tell, but that’s what I found there, and he surely didn’t intend hard enough to prevent me from finding this.

You won’t have to work hard to hear my musical performance of Arp’s poem. I composed the guitar part in my head, silently, while doing other things this week, visualizing exactly the fingering I would use to play it. That’s something I used to do in my youth, but I can’t recall the last time I did it as an old man. I derived a chord structure from the guitar line for a piano part, laid down a bass line, and worked out a drum pattern, and there you go: angels in a basket of air. The audio player should be luxuriously there for you, brave listener. No player? No, Elon hasn’t muted Starlink, but you can also use this highlighted link which will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

.

 

 

*I’m using Hans Arp as I relied here much on Herbert Read’s book, and Read uses Hans. Wikipedia lists him as Jean, says than name is preferred in English, but there’s a German language page under Hans. Arp seems to have continued to use Hans when speaking German, and Jean when speaking French throughout his life.

** Yes, I enjoy Dada, oftentimes more than I think I would, and I take pride that I work to make fresh English translations of Dada poems publicly available for poetic work that is hard to find online in English, but I have noticed that even my hardy audience, whose attention I’m grateful for, has little interest in this. I cut my recent early Paul Éluard Dada-style poem series short due to lack of interest.

***To give some flavor to Arp sense of unpretentious, humorous absurdity, here’s his 1921 account of Dada first being uttered as a name:

I hereby declare that on February 8th, 1916, Tristan Tzara discovered the word DADA. I was present with my twelve children when Tzara pronounced for the first time this word which has aroused in us such legitimate enthusiasm. This took place at the Café Terrasse in Zurich, and I wore a brioche in my left nostril. I am convinced that this word has no importance and that only imbeciles and Spanish professors can be interested in dates. What interests us is the Dada spirit and we were all Dada before the existence of Dada….The morality of idiots and their belief in geniuses makes me shit.’”

Arp’s last sentence there sums up a lot of my current newsfeed and the pronouncements of our honored and self-sacrificing leader and his cadre of acolytes.

****In the black horse hitched to the mountain litany I thought of an element of Arp’s biography summarized in Herbert Read’s book. Arp joined in and exhibited with The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) group of artists around the time he wrote this poem, and that brought to mind Franz Marc’s 1911 painting that I visit at one of my local art museums.

Millay’s Tavern

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

In my Human Seasons, I awoke to the first cold morning of fall, and I thought that this just completed Edna St. Vincent Millay musical piece would be just the thing to release and write about today. Oddly, I had started working on the music for this in the midst of summer. Millay’s poem is one of those that sits up on the page asking to be sung, and from such temptation I’d worked up the basic musical idea back in a time when I could hop on a bicycle just wearing the clothes I was wearing around the house. This morning I needed a wind-proof beanie, three layers across my torso, and I had to wiggle into tights. An old man getting into tights is a rickety procedure, a vignette unfitting association with carefree bike rides.

I asked myself yesterday “What did this song need?” How dressed? How many layers? I have been presenting a lot of songs recently featuring acoustic guitar, and the tracks I had from summer were just my voice and guitar – acoustic, yes, but at least there was some variety in that it was my large-bodied 12-string. I pick the 12-string harder than most, hitting the strings with more of the flat-pick surface. This produces a bell-like clang, and I thought I’d underpin that sound with some gamelan gongs. I then added a bass line and thought about a top-line riff. For some reason – woodwinds,* and I played the left-channel part using one of my sampled “Virtual Instrument” libraries with my MIDI pickup guitar. I tried to mix this oboe part to a realistic level as it would be if this was an actual acoustic ensemble playing this live instead of myself playing track by track in a “one-man-band” format. The gamelan gongs? I wanted them distant, as if they were outside the tavern window in the scene of Millay’s poem. The final mix of the song works best on headphones or modern ear-buds, so go ahead and put those in your ears if you have a set handy when you listen.**

If you’d like to read the full text of Millay’s poem, here’s a link to that.

In these musical choices I was trying to bring out the mystery I sensed in Millay’s words. “Tavern”  could be read superficially as a desire to run a bread-and-breakfast or the like, perhaps somewhere in the Maine of Millay’s childhood. A nice enough way to understand the poem, but Millay put in something that undercuts reading it as a New York Times style section feature on charming getaways: a repeated reference to this inn she envisions being specifically for “grey-eyed people.”

If one searches for what “grey-eyed” might signify, you’ll get the usual cold under-contextualized information that search engines offer up. Grey is a very rare eye color. OK, is Millay saying she’s going to market her inn with some “Think Different” focus on gathering unusual people, perhaps the artists, writers, and bohemian figures of her youthful 1917 Greenwich Village times? Not impossible, but why then does she write about learning from the grey-eyed “long ago.” Is there something else about having grey eyes? There are results that say that eye color is supposed to be a sign of wisdom, including some that report it as an epithet applied to the famously wise Greek goddess Athena. OK, she learned something from the grey-eyed, but that seems an obscure way to say that, though evoking an air of generalized mystery with this grey-eyed matter seems to be part of her intent. The whole casting of her tavern in the poem doesn’t seem selective. It’s near the top of some mountain, but it would seem to be a welcoming place for all who come upon it. Is the voice in her poem going to ask everyone to take off their sunglasses or tinted contacts to see if they’re allowed in “Tavern.”  I don’t hear those that arrive pleading at the door: “Look, my fake ID says my eye color right here!”

Another sense I got from this poem is that it was possibly in conversation with another poem, one by Christina Rossetti, her poem called “Up-Hill.***”   I don’t know if Millay knew this poem, but it’s not so unlikely. In this case then the grey-eyed are the souls ascending up some mystic mountain toward a heaven or afterlife. They are grey-eyed because their eyes are clouded in the moments after death. One other, allied, possibility for why grey-eyed: her mid-19th century ancestors might have been pictured as early photographs, faces whose colorful eyes would all be rendered in shades of grey. Our poems, our songs, our memorialization, our celebrations around a table – these are to bring colors back to the grey eyed.

Grey-eyed in Carl Van Vechten’s photo, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

.

You can hear my performance of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Tavern”  with the audio player below. No player on your mountain? Damn your eyes, or rather the way you’re reading this blog which might suppress showing a reader – but this highlighted link will open the door, or new browser tab, with its own audio player.

 

 

.

 

 

 

*It would have been subconsciously, but perhaps the mixture of oboe, 12-string guitar, acoustic bass, and unusual percussion may have been a ghostly presence in my mind from the times I saw an admired the musical ensemble named Oregon that used that mix of instruments.

Which reminds me of a tavern joke: An ego and a super-ego walk into a Freudian bar. The bartender says, “I’ll need to see an ID with that.”

**I used to have time and opportunity to check my mixes on various ways to listen to them. I particularly miss my old car for this, as it had a great stereo for revealing aspects of a recording mix. In my current living situation I often have no opportunity to mix my recordings on external speakers, much less give them a quality check with these extraverted noisemakers. A check I still do before release: listen to a new song on at least one pair of mobile-device ear-buds, which I assume are the most typical “hi-fi” system for modern listeners.

***If you have the time, the song version I made of Rossetti’s poem is a favorite recontextualization of mine. You can see and hear that at this older post from the Parlando Project at this link.

The Human Seasons

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I was reading a social media thread this week and John Keats name came up as a youthful gateway into poetry. Being a long-obsolete child, I don’t know if 21st century young people, and particularly young Americans, are introduced to Keats and the British Romantic poets in high school as I was, and as I suspect many of my ancestors were. It would be good to establish that the time of my youth was another era. Poetry was probably a bigger part of the arts, the arts an obligatory part of education, and we were only about a generation past the late 1920’s American poetry anthologies for young people that were oversubscribed with UK authors. We got Shakespeare and Milton and a smattering of 17th century poets from before the Americans even got up to bat, and we moved on to the principle British Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly, and Keats.* The last three easily attractive to the adolescent mind and emotions.

That trio’s language was close enough to modern while far enough removed to seem a little exotic. The emotions in the poems, anger, desire, dread, disdain, close to the skin.

Did it help that all three could be fitted into foundational “live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse” models? Why is that stance catnip to so many young people? Is it a force multiplier for their considerations and thoughts to add as context that they are distressed, senses intent or bent, experienced in risk taken and disregarded, living or not caring about mortal danger?**  Does that sound harsh to say? Well then, I sometimes see myself reaching for the same imminent mortality filter in my old age. Poets don’t necessarily outgrow this reflex.

It probably helped these poets that back in my youth we barely had our Buddy Holly and James Dean, and as yet no full constellation of dead young music and movie stars to compete with poets.

John Keats Drawing 700

John Keats writes today about old age, which he didn’t get

.

Of the three young romantic poets, all doomed to die young,*** I was team Keats all the way. He seemed the wisest of them, and I could identify with his unprivileged background, and his earnestness about writing. I still remember telling myself that Keats died at 25 back in my twenties, and so I had better get on with my writing. Now past three-times that I don’t allow myself the luxury of worrying what years I squandered in incomplete, mistaken, or mediocre work, or of insufficient promotion of my best stuff, taking comfort that it will all be forgotten, even the best of it. In many cases, we old folks no longer play the immortality lottery, and so forego the costs and damaging mitigations of a busted ticket.

The romantic young Keats writes often of dun mortality while propounding the ardent song of beauty. Let me be clear: in Keats’ case, this dichotomy is more than a stance. Sometimes a young poète maudit risks finding themselves, embarrassingly, surviving – but this wasn’t Keats’ fate. With his medical training and caretaking through to the death of his brother he knew his own tuberculosis prognosis for a full year before he died. He wrote “The Human Seasons”   in between that brotherly caretaking and his own onset, and in this poem he presumes a full lifetime, the titular seasons being perhaps a couple of decades each, while he’d be dead in three years. The dying was indeed young, but in consideration there’s these dancing words that still may ask for a tune. Here’s a link to Keats’ words.

You can hear my performance of John Keats’ “The Human Seasons”   with the audio player you should see below. Audio player called home? No, likely just a side-effect of the way you view this blog, but I can prescribe that you take this highlighted link that’s been shown effective in opening a new browser tab with a working audio player of its own. Side effects include hearing my voice “of subjective quality,” acoustic guitar, cello, and contrabass.

 

 

.

 

*What about Blake? Nope, not in my schoolbooks, I had to seek him out on my own. Did my textbooks move on to Americans Whitman, Dickinson, and Poe? Yes. From my recall the American Fireside poets may have been already largely relegated out for high school readers, though I knew Longfellow from illustrated children’s books. Then there was some Browning, Tennyson, and “Dover Beach” and finally Frost, Eliot, and Sandburg – those final three still living, literally and in practice treated as contemporary poets.

**Beyond the self-imposed dangers some young people choose or are led into, I don’t want to minimize the real dangers externally inflicted on them: war and oppression exist, and such titanic Cronuses devour children. I’m speaking here of the young who generate or amplify mortal risks because it makes them seem louder.

***Shelley 29, Keats 25, and Methuselah Lord Byron at 36.

A song made from Fenton Johnson’s “Revery”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Longtime followers of this Project will know that I’m a proponent of early 20th century Chicago Afro-American poet Fenton Johnson. The “elevator pitch” for Johnson is that he slots in between Paul Laurence Dunbar and the slightly later Harlem Renaissance. Back then, prominent contemporary Black critics such as the remarkable polymath James Weldon Johnson categorized Fenton Johnson’s work as altogether “radical” and “full of despair,” enough so that they were of mixed feelings about the value of his verse.

Fenton Johnson’s poetry does speak at times of hardship, oppression, even hopelessness, but upon further reading of his overlooked work, there’s a side of him that’s aspirational. In his short-lived attempts to establish an Afro-American focused journal he presented himself as a conventional Black Republican, perhaps hoping that the Reconstruction era of his elders could still be invoked.*  In addition, there’s another facet in his poetry: elements redolent of the modern Black Gospel music tradition which was forming up in Chicago while he was actively publishing just before WWI. The folks creating that music were attempting to fuse decidedly Black secular music like the Blues  and Jazz with the older (slavery era) strains of spirituals and preexisting hymnal songs. If the somewhat younger Langston Hughes gets due credit as a premiere Jazz poet, Fenton Johnson seems to me to have been trying to do the same thing with his poetry and Afro-American gospel.**

I could go on about Fenton Johnson, but instead I’ll try your attention by finishing up today by talking about making a musical piece out of his poem “Revery.”  Earlier this month I for some reason saw the text from which I adapted this week for my performance. Published in 1915, “Revery”  is one of the small number of Johnson’s poems available at the poets.org site. Reading those words, it struck me immediately that they could be a hymn to the Creator – or one could read it as a recounting of the “oversoul” that passes in an out of human lives. Having gone through September anniversaries for death and birth associated with Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane, this poem attracted me. I started by thinking I’d condense Johnson’s published text to more succinctly bring out that sense of soul essence passing through our human lives. While I think I retain the “The Creator Has a Master Plan”  sense of the poem***, in a human-limited lifetime I could see the result being used at a funeral.

Revery

The link above will show you Johnson’s full poem, which I shortened in my adaptation for performance.

.

Beginnings of musical pieces have quite a variety of first movers for me. This one started when I saw a new-to-me voicing for a Csus2 guitar chord. Sus is short for a suspended chord, a favorite of mine. The sus recipe is to drop the 3rd of a chord, the note that makes a chord major or minor – even in a basic simple 3-note triad – but then put something else in its place. In a Csus2, it’s the second degree of the scale, D. From what I understand in classical harmony, sus chords are considered an unstable, transitional chord, one that traditionally asks for a quickly following major or minor 3rd decision to resolve it. Me? I don’t mind sounds staying out there in an unresolved fog for a good long time. I began to write the whole song with three sus chords and one minor 9th chord. To better fit my voice, I used a capo to shift the Csus2 voicing and the rest up two semi-tones, and if the minor9th is the resolving chord and key center, the recording of the song is in Bminor.

Revery Chord Diagrams

The alt-tuning and easy to finger guitar chord forms I used for this song. That A7sus4 could be given other names, and I think it has some sort of G flavor as I sound it. The 3rd chord in the picture, the one that started off the composition, has a so much deeper sound that the common conventional tuning Dsus2 voicing.

.

I’ve been doing a great deal of work in my studio space in the past month or so. Lots of multitudinous clean up and organizing work – rejiggering what goes where recording-wise and seeking a richer environment for my keyboard playing compatriot Dave to record there.**** All the bending and crawling around really challenges my elderly body – and my memory taunts me, recalling running some of the connections I was changing when I was a much younger man for whom diving under a desk or contorting myself to work in the backside of a low equipment rack was routine. I took a break, not even half-way done in this, and told myself I should allow my aching body a creative vacation day. And that was the day when I recorded this setting of Fenton Johnson’s “Reverie.”

I was feeling tremendous gratitude when playing this. I was using equipment accumulated slowly over decades arrayed in an ugly looking space that still had piles and boxes of stuff from the re-org to sell, give away, or store properly – but that ugly looking place sounds fine. In my monitoring headphones and when listening to the recording tracks later I was pleased as how well my space sounds. Some famous studios with envied sounds were not purpose-designed and architected rooms. Motown was a residential basement. Its reverb chamber was the house’s attic. Sound Techniques where Joe Boyd and John Wood produced the recordings of Nick Drake  and the cream of British folk-rock was upstairs in a former dairy with a naturally reverberant high vaulted ceiling and slate-lined walls. Stax in Memphis was a neighborhood movie house, the floor still slanted to accommodate the now absent movie chairs. Bert Jansch and John Renbourn’s first significant LPs were recorded in an ordinary London flat, the sound treatment: whatever the odd furniture was in it.

My space? Low ceiling, and noise from those in the floor above can easily be an issue, but it’s irregular in floor plan without any complete parallel walls. Sound treatment? It’s frankly clutter and happenstance. Today’s piece is a simple, unadorned recording. The recorded solo acoustic guitar has no reverb or delay, what you hear is just it and the microphones in this odd shaped room where I’ve recorded since the 1990s. You can hear me rebroadcast the soul of Fenton Johnson from there with the audio player gadget below. No player to be seen? Has it passed over the horizon in the meat-wheel of rebirth? No, it’s just not displayed within some ways of reading this blog, and so I supply this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

 

*It may be confusing to 21st century readers, but before the New Deal era, the businessman oriented Republican party that was already associated with some conservative cultural stances was in the matter of Black Civil Rights still the Party of Lincoln, however weak that association had become.

**This working theory of mine is not (AFAIK) supported by any deep scholarship – it’s just a reasonable supposition by someone like myself with wide interests in music, poetry, and history. Remarkably little seems to be extant regarding Fenton Johnson’s privately expressed thoughts over his lifetime, and even those who knew him later in his life are now likely dead. A younger scholar interested in Afro-American culture could well take up investigating him.

***If you click on the link you’ll get a 34 minute Pharaoh Sanders spiritual Jazz piece that eventually meets up with an unforgettable vocal by Leon Thomas. Do your ears feel like praying for half-an-hour? I’m listening to it now as I finish formatting this for the blog.

****His keyboards can now be more often recorded in stereo. I now have a different vocal mic that may better suit his voice. When we record “live in the studio” we use loops I create with sequenced drums and bass, and these are now going to be separated tracks in my new plan and routing. We’re not going to start sounding like a Steely Dan record or anything, but the plan has promise.

Tell me where is Fancy bred: Shakespeare the Songbird Poet

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

In writing about Sara Teasdale last time here I mentioned that she has been grouped with a set of 20th century female poets as a “Songbird Poet.” The implied charge here is that these poets are less concerned with the deep meaning of poetry and are content to just make pleasant word-music.

If we are to attend the deeper meaning school, I’d have an opening to report that in nature the songs of birds are not all pleasant and meaningless – for they sing for desire, for companionship, to legislate territory, and for existential defense among other things. If birds are likely deficient in theology and philosophy, I’m too ignorant to know if a sense of avian metaphor is present.

I, of course, am being stubbornly literal there, Teasdale appears to be without feathers and everyone should know this, save for those who are sure the female mind is insufficient and therefore may have doubts. One of the things we may claim as humans is that we are a flexible sort of creature of many moods and levels. One kind of song, one kind of poetry? There’s no handy phone app that can identify our songs as one sort of human.

So, even if calling them “songbird poets” is plausibly belittling, as a person in this Project I have to say that making a song, something one appreciates uttering, can be a worthwhile thing. Here’s another minor poet who I’m sure we’ve kept in a parlor cage as a songbird, one William Shakespeare. This tidy little song, from his play The Merchant of Venice, talks about idle, surface-deep, love (“Fancy”). But wait – like is often the case with the Songbird Poets, there’s a more complex message inside it. In the play, one of a pair of lovers is given a test: a choice of three boxes and selecting the correct one will allow them to marry. Shakespeare, prefiguring the ding-dong theme played when the Jeopardy game-show contestants are making their final answer and wager, provides this song to fill the stage time as the lover thinks it over.*

Tell me where

I made a point to write this one entirely with my ham-handed skills on keyboards.

.

As a poem it seems simple doesn’t it. Sure, there’s some now-archaic language in it, but to modern readers or listeners, that probably only makes it seem more the nursery rhyme.

But it turns out there’s a little bit of metaphysics in the modest verse: where does “Fancy,” that insubstantial, fickle, flimsy love come from? From the mysteries of the heart and its desires? From some reasoning of the mind? Nope. It’s all from looks – all “I’d hit that” surface the singer warns – it’s hardly born, and it’ll die. Finally, the singer asks us to celebrate the death of that kind of infatuation, and joyously ring its funeral bell, as time is up and the lover must make their decision.

So, is a little song like a Fancy: never more than a flimsy, momentary thing? Or can it tell us something about food, partnership, where we are, where the predators are?

Well in the present case of my performance of Shakespeare’s song, I’m the dun, leaden box since I needed to use my voice for this, and I made a simple pealing accompaniment with a viol, a reed pump organ, and a harpsichord. You can choose to hear it with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? It hasn’t flown south in a honking V arpeggiation, it’s just hiding in the brush cover of some ways of reading this blog. I offer this alternative then, a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*I believe that none of the music used in Shakespeare’s plays in his lifetime has survived. Merv Griffith, himself a gameshow host and producer, wrote the tune used on Jeopardy. I haven’t watched that long-running TV show in decades, yet his tune (in its original version) is still stuck in my head.

September Midnight

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Well, as more-or-less promised, here’s a return to literary poetry that may probably meet audience expectations: a season-appropriate poem by American poet Sara Teasdale titled “September Midnight.” Teasdale’s been a long-time favorite here, which goes back to one of my models of setting literary poetry to music. She’s one of a group of American female poets firmly in the early-20th century Modernist era, reflecting by degrees a Modernist outlook, but without adapting Modernist poetic language and prosody. Others I’ve presented here multiple times with this stance would include Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elinor Wylie, or even Dorothy Parker and Margaret Widdemer.

Canon-wise I sense a push-pull with these poets. On one hand they provide a female poetic outlook that coincides with important cultural movements for women’s equality, but on the other hand they – somewhat like the “Georgian Poets” in Britain – get marked down for not getting on with the new prosody. Of course, sexist blinders enter into this – the very idea of writing from a woman’s perspective is still often weighed as “slight” by the male dons of poetry, who might be Modernist in verse but old-school patriarchs regarding what’s important. For much of their century, the more through-going Modernist women poets like Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and H.D. had to dance backwards in high heels while Robert Frost’s metrical-syllabic net balls were allowed to freely score points with vers libre Modernists.

And all this happened as it slowly dawned on the summary American literary establishment that Emily Dickinson was quite possibly America’s greatest poet. All of which doesn’t necessarily make Sara Teasdale some sort of upper-level-of-the-Pantheon “great poet” in current 21st century estimate.*

Which brings me back to a point I make repeatedly: poetry isn’t some serial single-file hierarchy, which might well direct us to only read the top ten or so – or to carefully guard against anyone paying the slightest attention to poets ranking numbers 238 and below or something. Poetry isn’t poetry, singular – it’s poetries.

Poetry like Teasdale’s likes to be sung out loud, even if there are elements of old-fashioned poetic diction that come along for the ride. That means that this Project puts it thumb on the scale for her work.

Teasdale was a contemporary of T. S. Eliot in St. Louis Missouri, then a commercial hub in the middle of the U.S., but like Eliot her family has roots in New England. Like Dickinson, I can sense the American spiritual thread of Transcendentalism in her fabric, particularly when she writes about nature, as in this poem. Transcendentalists tend to see nature not simply as a handy metaphor for the divine or highest reality, but the very incarnation of it. Transcendentalist scripture isn’t a bound book of thoughts and laws, it’s the Book of Nature, observed.

September Midnight

Chord sheet in case your grasshoppers and locusts want to sing this with you.

.

 

So besides falling easily into a singing voice (even one as limited as mine) her “September Midnight”  is a Transcendentalist hymn I think, and the lesson it wants us to take after our breath and voices finish with it is that we do not presume to go to some heaven after we die, but that heaven (as in the sublime reality) is with us in the creation we are presently living.**

My song performance of Teasdale’s poem can be heard with the audio player below. If there’s no audio player to be seen, it’s not that you’ve forgotten our present heaven, but more likely that the way you’re reading this post eliminates showing the graphical audio player gadget. “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite,” wrote Blake. I write that you can click on this highlighted link and a new browser tab will appear with its own audio player – not quite the same thing, but there’s music in it.

 

 

.

 

*Rankings inevitably become silly, and it’s hard to keep them contained into casual, personal preferences – but still one can fairly observe a 20th century progress with Dickinson from “somewhat interesting and eccentric” to “wow, there’s some deep stuff incredibly condensed into its own original and attractive prosody.”

**I’m thinking today of Annie Dillard, whose work I paid some slight attention to back in the Seventies where parts of what we later think of as The Sixties™ happened. I saw in an obit that she’s yet another American figure who left off from poetry to find an audience. Her one book of poems was quickly eclipsed by the audience for the prose of her second book, Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek.  Dillard’s “Tickets for a Prayer Wheel”  briefly returned to print more than 20 years ago, and I’ve located and ordered a copy of it.

(Note: as I was proofreading this post, a notice came back that my order for “Tickets for Prayer Wheel”  has been cancelled – now unavailable from that store. I’ll try to re-order this afternoon.)

Habitude

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today I’m going to wrap up my late summer series of fresh English translations of the early poems of French Surrealist Paul Éluard. Frankly, these poems are having trouble finding an audience – and in my suppositions, this is understandable. Earlier in the series I wrote (generalizing) that modern audiences have expectations of poetry – pre-requisites for our attention and valuation – and these early Éluard poems refuse to meet those expectations.*  That’s a large part of what I like about them: their laughter at their refusal.

This abrupt ending means that I won’t get a chance this month to write more about what I know of Éluard’s life and how it might inform that refusal. I probably should know more about the details before writing such an account anyway, but the shortest summary would say: WWI vet therefore likely suffering its endemic PTSD, a leftist in a world where communist and fascist regimes are the current weather fronts, and an unruly, committed lover bilaterally lucky and unlucky in love. He would eventually write some grander poems, poems more full of the stuff that might please more readers and listeners, but this summer’s set of early refusenik poems are one way to confront the way of the world.

Talk to the hand Eluard

Paul Éluard, not a window-shutter hand.

.

As performed, Éluard’s “Habitude”  is so short that it’s one of the shortest pieces in the history of this Project. It says, I think, a few things about the rules of desire and constraints of propriety. Written when Éluard was helping found Surrealism, it shows how influential the absurdity of Dada was in that movement’s birth. The poem is just long enough to have a contrasting middle section, and I try to highlight that contrast by switching from speaking to singing in performance. The truth, that Éluard proclaims “without saying it” here is that he wants an open window and an ever-expanding wind rushing in.

Habitude

Even with this foreshortened series, my  translations here have likely increased the number of easily online-available English translations of Éluard’s early poetry by 50% or so.

.

I’m not sure what the next piece will be (I have several in various stages of completion), but your presenter values variety highly, so it’ll likely be different. This Project is “oversized” and off-the-rack clothes can’t contain it.

To hear my translation and performance of “Habitude”  you can weigh the audio player that should be below – but Internet viewing doesn’t make that gadget mandatory, so I offer this highlighted link which will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

.

 

*It’s also possible that my musical settings and performances might have been less worthwhile, or my being unable to refrain from connecting Éluard’s poems with present political and civic concerns in my recent posts was tiring or awkward to readers. I almost released another musical version of “Habitude”  late last week, but I decided my singing on it – though my singing is always roughshod – wasn’t up to the impeccable standards of exquisite vocalizations you’ve come to expect here.

Giorgio De Chirico, but this is a poem

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Returning now to my series presenting the early poems of French Surrealist Paul Éluard, you may recall that I was talking about the small contemporary presence early Surrealist poets like Éluard have in America compared to their contemporaries in Surrealism who were painters and visual artists. I wrote then about few reasons you may not have heard of, much less considered, Éluard’s poetry. Here’s another reason: we generally expect poetry to deliver a message to us, if not an explicit moral, memoir bit, or assayable philosophical, spiritual, or political point, then something that conveys a comprehensible, palpable, report of the experience of these things. Sure, poetry might be condensed and shorn of elaborate contextual frameworks – just as a text we might receive on our phones would seem vague to those not party to the conversation and the ongoing relationship of its writer and reader – but we fill in those things most of the time when we consider a poem worthwhile, while visual art is allowed a great deal more freedom. No one is required to hold forth on what water lilies or sunflowers mean in a painting, and melting clocks or obscuring apples may sport with our expectations, but still intrigue us.

So today’s Éluard poem is an appeal to readers to cut him some slack by presenting an ekphrastic poem, a poem implying a case that you could consider its set of words beyond finding its message, but to just enjoy it as a not-fully-decodable object in itself. If we don’t know what a Surrealist painting means, we might still have an experience with it, and one such experience is what Éluard’s “Giorgio De Chirico”  means to convey.

One side-effect of that open field we allow visual art is that we may have varied and dynamic experiences – derive entirely new and novel “frames” in our experience of it. As I wrote recently in my run-down of the most popular posts over the decade of this Project: the most popular post here was about how the Statue of Liberty, which is most often seen as a clear expression of freedom and welcome, has another context, partly intended by its creator, but unseen from our usual perspective, the metal giant’s feet have broken free from shackles and chains, and the small island its pedestal rests on once had a jail. Or let’s take the ubiquitous image of the Mona Lisa. What did Da Vinci intend? We don’t know, and we even like to think the enigmatic smile depicted intends for us to wonder. To its patron, the painting they commissioned might mean something about patriarchal ownership. Some surmise that the woman is pregnant and is musing on the child that is to be born. Others, pregnant themselves, could take that same framing and wonder if that face is attempting to misdirect its body from a bout of morning-sickness nausea.

So, as I translated “Giorgio De Chirico”  I could see things about De Chirico’s paintings that Éluard was experiencing and reporting on. I enjoyed finding singing English words to convey that from his French. I performed it, tracking just voice and solo acoustic guitar this time, during the same sessions where I was working on the other Éluard poems that I presented in August.

Four De Chirico paintings

Here are four representative De Chirico paintings. The sharp lines of shadows and bright light, the tiny people dwarfed by structures, all were motifs he commonly used.

.

Then yesterday, instead of buckling down and preparing a final mastered mix of the song I’d made, I watched a documentary about 9/11. The one I watched focused on the part not usually considered: the experience in the Pentagon, that giant military office building in Washington D. C. that also suffered a deadly hit by a hijacked airliner that day.

In it, one survivor told her tale of that day. She was a light colonel, working in an administrative desk job, in a building that (other than its massive size) is like a great many other office buildings many work at during any workday, and furthermore she was about to give a presentation on some matter in that common workday misery, a morning meeting in a small conference room there.

And then the speeding fuel-laden airliner slammed into the wall of her facet of the five-sided Pentagon. In darkness, thick smoke, and heat she led a small group trying to find an exit. She grabbed a damp sweater that she found by touch to try to stifle the smoke. She didn’t know the dampness was from jet fuel, not water. The building segment was already aflame, parts not yet immediately destroyed were collapsing in the heat. No one could see much of anything, they had to hold hands to stay together. Her small group made it to a window, a bit of light in the dark chaos. Like many modern office windows, it was not designed to be opened – more than that, it had recently been upgraded to be “blast proof” as protection from something like an outside truck-bomb attack. It was made so that it couldn’t even be broken! Someone in her party picked up that trouble-spot of many an office day, a heavy laser printer, and hurled it at the window. It bounced right back off the glass. Somehow in the dark and smoke, they found the printer again, and threw it again – and that time the blow started to uncase the window’s frame. They pried it out and leapt outside.

Now that’s more excitement than many poetry blogs will offer you most days. Watching this account, everything was intensified by the story’s setting, for I’ve worked in modern office buildings like this, I’ve had the boredom or anxiety of meetings, I’ve carried heavy laser printers and made them work again the second time – frames that make it easy to share that experience.

The documentary also had an account from a man standing outside who saw them pounding ineffectively on that window and who went into the burning building to try to see if he could lead them out, only to find the destruction and conditions inside made it impossible to find any way to them from that exit. It wasn’t until a decade later he found out those pounding at the window had escaped, but for ten years he thought he was the last one to see them alive.

And then, I expanded in my empathy as I watched these accounts, including those who didn’t escape. It called to mind that folks elsewhere in buildings or working boats struck, perhaps nowadays with un-maned mechanisms that don’t need suicidal fanatics inside them, but have up-the-chain commandants upwards to the Commander in Chief who’ve loosed them thinking they have good and sufficient reason to do so.

Now, I’ve ruined a perfectly good essay on art and poetry – and your expectations if you came here for that – but as I revisited this performance this morning to make a final mix you can hear below, those sudden and shuddering skies, the words I translated in August from French: denounced and spinning walls, daylight through leaves, and those who speak without knowing. Mysterious, enigmatic poems and songs can act like objects (as painting or sculpture) engender new feelings, new meanings.* Perhaps it takes a Surrealist, with a willingness to combine outlandish things without favoritism to sensible intent to portray some realities.

Giorgio de Chirico

A chord sheet of the song I made from my translation of Éluard’s poem.

.

If you want to hear my performance of my own translation of Éluard’s “Giorgio De Chirico,” there’s the audio player below. If it’s not there, don’t throw a printer, there’s this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

.

 

 

*Regarding art and unintended re-framing due to the events of 9/11, I think of the breakthrough work by one of my acknowledged models for this Project, Laurie Anderson’s 1981 “O, Superman.”   What with it’s “Here come the planes. They’re American planes” and the spookiness of disembodied voices abstracted and preserved by machines, it can be, and has been, experienced differently post 9/11.

In Order To

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

In the U.S. this Monday is Labor Day. I’m not sure how often it occasions particular observances these days. To some degree, it’s the unofficial end of Summer, and is observed as that. I suppose there will be some celebrations of work and workers, even among the workers in song, our musicians and poets – but they will not overwhelm the American zeitgeist. The important things of the world, irregardless of our political philosophies, we ascribe to the powerful: politicians, oligarchies and the individually famous; or to nameless fate or divine will. The minor things of our enjoyment and sustaining survival we may well do this weekend, but we won’t make odes about it.*

I’m going to call on the words of Kenneth Patchen for the day, though his poem “In Order To”  isn’t strictly speaking a celebration of work and workers. I love its slyness in observing some asymmetrical things about this matter. It opens with something workers may recognize: we can take, even perversely, pride in getting some assigned job done, while laughing at the ignorance of our taskmasters. We think, after all, that such forbearance is survival. Patchen wants us to note: that’s not necessarily so, the survival part.

Patchen ends on a killing joke. The damn fool stuff we put up with, because that’s “the way of the world” or a bill of work we can’t see our way to change, we endure – but we (or our fellow workers, feeling similarly) may not endure from it. Does that make those things, as they slide from idiocy to cruelty, from callousness to killing, our fault? Would he, would I, would you, say that, in part, that is so? Patchen wrote this poem in the 1930s, gave it its title, before the plea “I was just following orders” became infamous. The strongmen and monsters of history may give the orders bourn from their evil notions, but even as machines and mechanisms increasingly, inhumanly, carry them out, we are still asked to do our part, or to look away.

For those who’d like to read the text of Patchen’s poem, here’s a link to it.

My apologies to those looking for something merely restorative during this long weekend. I’m no consistent model of noble actions, and I know you can’t be that either, what with the burdens you carry. As summer ends, I think back to what I called out to the young men wearing their irregular uniforms and masks, deployed on the broad urban avenues on either side of my home last Winter: “Go home. You can quit your jobs, and go home. We’re already home – this is where we live, and we don’t want you here.” Some of them seemed to just be standing around, unsure of what to do. The more senior, perhaps more experienced, among them had a work plan: tear gas and flash-bangs. Other times the work was incarceration, or yes, bullets.

Winter 2026 in Minneapolis

On this Labor Day, Minnesota crowds might be at the State Fair or in a park, but at the beginning of the year ordinary workers – not on holiday, but in dismay, – chose to stand together. When you saw captions then writing, “activists,” that would be inexact – mostly just folks who didn’t want to say “yes” to governmental activists.

.

This blog has a small audience. I think of it, I’m grateful for you, I’m not here to hector anyone or say I know better than you do with your best thoughts, best knowledge, best hearts. I imagine some will just nod in agreement as they read this. Others have tuned out before reaching this paragraph, tired (as I often am) and having no mood for civic matters, and this Project doesn’t intend to make you endure that instead of its usual inexact attempts at beauty and wonder. And maybe, even after reading this far, someone is reading this and saying “You don’t understand. It’s complicated.  There’s this, and this, that you’re ignoring or don’t know.”

Yes, the things I think are evil, some may think are “complicated.” They are. They are. Evil – and even more certainly, even more so, is the restoration of things after evil acts. As I look toward the next Thirties that are to come after previous Thirties when Patchen wrote his poem, I can’t see how the great work of fixing evil and ineptitude can be imagined into plans, much less attempted, much less accomplished. I think of this as I laugh at the killing joke at the end of today’s piece.

You can hear my musical performance of Kenneth Patchen’s “In Order To”  with the audio player below. If you think I’ve forgotten the work-order for that player, I assure you I haven’t, but I know you might be reading this blog in ways that won’t show the player, so there’s this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

.

 

*What about art on Labor Day? I think about the duties of artistic workers toward other workers, but in my observation many artists, and specifically poets, don’t reflect this in their poetry. Since most poets (and increasingly, many musicians) are not solely employed working in poetry, I suspect this is due to embarrassment at that lot – or it may be a hard-bitten escapism, a choice to do, and separate, their art work as respite from the everyday context of the “day job.” Joy is resistance! Beauty is opposition! Or you may not be called to be evangelists, you may be called to be saints. You may take spiritual pride in not writing dreary tracts in the costumes of poetry, and this may be blessed work. Anger, even righteous anger, can scare away the muses. Or you could simply need the commercial art paycheck to make ends meet.

Among Others

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

After our Anniversary Month celebrations, I’m returning to performances of some more poems by principal Surrealist poet Paul Éluard. It’s struck me that Éluard is less well-known to English speakers than he should be. I have only half-formed ideas why that may be so. Let me briefly list them.

Was it his politics? He was a self-avowed Communist – which as we know from the wisdom of our peerless American leader is correctly the name for anyone with a smidgen of concern for how the government might organize it’s efforts beyond the interests of the wealthy – but back in the midcentury when I was growing up, it meant support for corrupt one-man-rule authoritarians who erected bulwarks against free elections, sent spies and armed thugs against their opponents, and gloated in jails, prisons, and the power to exile. Despite his full-throated poetic odes to liberty and acknowledged heroism in the resistance to fascists during WWII and the run-up to that war, Éluard didn’t forthrightly oppose Communism when those things were mistakenly taken to be the bad things about Communism – before we knew better.

Was it Surrealism, or specifically being a Surrealist poet?  Defined broadly, at least in my youth, Surrealism as a force in the visual arts was important and popular. How popular? Magritte, Dali, and Escher were inescapable as LP record-covers, posters, or reproductions on the wall. But Surrealist poetry? Not so much. Oddly, Surrealist poetry’s 19th century inspirations as well as its post-WWII descendants were popular enough. Baudelaire to Rimbaud to Bob Dylan to New York and Black Mountain School poets have substantial presence in our culture, but in the middle parts between the World Wars where we have Surrealists like Éluard, their Dada and Surrealist poetry falls into a memory hole.

Is it something as simple as the tastes of translators?* The masses of monolingual readers in English-speaking countries rely on them to embody poets like Éluard. They are an underappreciated and (even within the realm of poetry) underpaid lot – but they, for a large part, get to pick who we pay attention to. Maybe they just didn’t encounter or take a liking to Éluard? Particularly in his early poetry, which supplies the examples I’ve used so far, Éluard doesn’t have as much esoteric imagery as some other Modernists. It may sometimes be hard to explicate exactly what he’s saying in his poetry, but he often writes, at this point in his career, in what I read as plain-spoken colloquial speech that doesn’t dazzle with its decoration while remaining elusive in intent. I’m not immune to being caught by surprising language myself. Afterall, the first Éluard poem I ever translated (and likely his best-known in English) begins “She is standing on my eyelids…” – and once you translate that, you want to continue and complete a translation of the entire poem. Today’s poem, “Among Others,”  doesn’t go that hard.

None of the above have stopped Spanish language poet Pablo Neruda from having a footprint in English-speaking culture that I casually measure as being a bit larger than Éluard’s. Go Figure.

Among Others

This can’t be so: if I complete everything I’ve planned in this Éluard series, will this blog will be the site of nearly half of all the English translations of his French poems on the Internet?

.

So, now let’s get to another of Éluard’s early poems, “Among Others.”   My usual mode of translation is to try to convey the poem’s images. As a side effect, that allows me to land a beachhead without having forward intelligence as to what the poem means to say as if it was ordinary prose. Best as I can tell (I’m not a French linguist by any means) the language here is as plain as that in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “Fog,” or “In a Station of the Metro” – poems from American Modernists in the demotic yet diffuse-meaning mode. There’s a single clue simile that something in Éluard’s short poem may call for extraordinary attention: “as in the time of miracles.” Could this be an ordinary bit of French idiom, or is it a tip that something miraculous is to occur?**

What is Éluard getting at in this poem? I’d say the betting odds are that he’s portraying some men talking about whatever they think is important and compelling, but the poet’s voice says that while he is among those men, his attention is on other, more carnal or incarnated thoughts, a vision of a desirable woman.***

Yet, as I worked with the poem, and as I finally performed it, I decided to place my bet on the longshot: that it’s not that the poem’s speaker’s thoughts are just like a woman, but that the poem’s speaker is, at least for that moment “in the midst of all these men,” seeing themselves as that vision of a young, tall, beautiful woman – in other words, in his image he gender changes.

Now, I am sporting with authorial intent there – but even in the first, best odds, version there could be an element in the male poet’s imagination seeing union with that woman.

Anyway, here’s my performance which is taking the long odds, including side-bets that my voice can put this song, from this point of view, over. There’s a good chance there’s a player gadget below. If not, don’t tear up your betting slip, there’s a highlighted link too – and if you click that, it’ll open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

.

 

*I base my estimate of Éluard’s popularity by casual searches for English-language translations of his poems on the Internet. I haven’t done any strict count, but my impression is maybe 10-20 poems are extant there. “L’Amoureuse”  and “Liberté”  have a footprint in English online, but the air gets thin quickly past those two poems.

**If an American football fan was to write about a “hail Mary play” we know not to call to imagination the venerated Blessed Virgin being hurled tens of yards through the air by desperate athletes. Some naïve translator-from-English making that image clear and literal would likely mistake the authorial intent.

***A more facile and time-granted musician might be tempted to musically quote one of the last hits from England’s The Hollies while they sing the poems last sentence.