poetry

The Cherry Blossom Wand

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a poem by a poet you may not know of. I certainly didn’t until early this year when I saw a note about the later life of Anna Wickham on Bluesky, read the linked article (which I recommend), and made a note to look into her poetry.

Well, there’s life and my disorderly path – it wasn’t until this month that I did so. As a page poet Wickham may not capture you easily, depending on your expectations. I read a 1921 American collection that combined two books of hers published earlier in England: 1915’s The Contemplative Quarry  and 1916’s The Man with a Hammer.*   She wrote almost entirely in short formats, there are quite a few 8-or-fewer line poems that can remind one of Emily Dickinson poems of similar length. Short formats can be favored by those who dash off poems in an otherwise occupied life, and this may be the case here – but at least on first read through, there’s a different general attitude from the American genius. Dickinson to my reading is often playful in her poem’s argument, and even when writing of subjugation or from inside a gothic fantasia, she generally seems in control – and she was after all a member of a family that had achieved local prominence and financial stability. Wickham’s background seems less secure and more bohemian, and from 1906-1929 she was married to a man who is reported to have viewed her poetry as a sequalae of mental illness.** This horrid situation is reflected in the poetry – there’s ample counter-punching wit and protest deployed against the patriarchy in these two collections – but that also presents a certain closed-in feeling. Some of these poems take on the manner of quickly-whispered-where-he-can’t-overhear asides to friends from a woman in an abusive relationship. From extant drafts we know Dickinson had, and took, time to revise her verse, and she often strikes me as a talented structured improviser. Wickham (so far) seems to me to be more a jotter of quick poems from the first-thought-best-thought practice – biographical scraps I’ve read reinforce that conclusion*** – and some (most?) of her papers that might show more about work in progress do not survive.

older Anna Wickham in her kitchen

Anna Wickham in 1946. She made her living by turning her Hampstead home into a rooming house. Still asserting herself, she famously took umbrage with someone declaring: “You’d better retract, my good man. I may be a minor poet, but I’m a major woman.”

.

There’s a good chance my appreciation of her work will increase, but I also didn’t get a sense of compelling word-music on first reading, and that’s a quality that can attract me to a poem even before I understand it – which makes the first poem of hers that I’ll present today a bit of an anomaly. “The Cherry Blossom Wand” is  musical, and she even put a notation beside its title on the published page “To be sung.” I have no knowledge if she wrote music for it, or sang it,**** but that sort of thing is taunting the Parlando Project!

I see the poem as being a multifaceted account of beauty or love of beauty (and if we extend that, to love itself). The poem starts with its refrain stanza, telling us a branch of cherry blossoms is a “wand” that can do some kind of merciless bewitching magic. I like the refrain’s final line “a beautiful thing that can never grow wise.” Ambiguously: either we never wise up to the thrall of beauty, or that experience, time and wising up removes the beauty.

Blossoms are of course famously temporary, as the first non-refrained verse reminds us. On the page, Wickham only puts the refrain first and last, but since songs favor repetition, I put an extra refrain between the two verses.

The final verse before the ending refrain contrasts the merciless enchantment of the blossom wand with the “kind” removal of the bewitching beauty, and the verse then ends with its own internal refrain saying that the transience of beauty and time is eternal. There’s no change that can change that change, and the mercy is that we are not taunted long with its brevity.

As a whole then: bittersweet.

Cherry Blossom Wand

Chord sheet for the song I took as commanded by Wickham’s note on the page

.

Musically I got to play my nylon string guitar for the first time in a while. Every time I play that variety of guitar, I’m reminded of the cheap J C Penny nylon string guitar that I bought off the after-Christmas sale table in late 1974 to begin to learn how to play. Classical guitar players may be appalled, but I currently play my nylon string with a pick, which is wrong – but it’s how Willie Nelson does it.

You can hear my performance of Anna Wickham’s “The Cherry Blossom Wand”  with the audio player gadget below. Has some merciless hand removed any such player?  This highlighted link will bud a new tab with its own audio player then.

.

*Some accounts say Anna Wickham is more read and studied in the U.S., which would be the reverse of some poets I present here, most notably Welsh poet Edward Thomas who has some best-loved poems in Britain, and is hardly known in America. Influential 20th century American anthologist Louis Untermeyer thought enough of Wickham’s work to praise and include it. The Feminist-Modernist angle probably occasioned some interest too, and you can read her as a predecessor to Sylvia Plath in some of Wickham’s themes. Before she had a career as a best-selling novelist, American poet Erica Jong wrote a couple of poems dedicated in part to Wickham: this one, and this one.

**Wickham was eccentric. The linked article that sparked my interest has accounts that make that eccentricity seem charming, but depression seems to have figured in her life too. The complexities of our mental wiring and biochemicals mixed in with the stress of her life makes remote historical diagnosis chancy of course. The close publication of the two books of poetry that I read as a combined collection coincided with her husband going off to WWI, giving her some increased autonomy. Give a moment to imagine Edwin Starr singing a revised song: “War!! Uhh! What is it good for? Giving Anna Wickham a chance to see her poetry in print. Good God! Say it again!”

***The account of her reading one of her poems in public and presenting it with ““Rubbish, but there it is”” indicates this approach.

****After a childhood family sojourn to Australia, Wickham returned to England to take study in performing arts, particularly a singing career, though that doesn’t mean she composed music. The Cherry Blossom Wand”  has been set to music as Art Song before, at least this once 25 years ago.

She mentioned abandoning any search for musicality in her poetry in one of the poems I recall reading this month. This could be part of Modernist distain for frippery, or a practical act of triage for a poet without enough time. She’s a contrast to her American contemporaries Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay who wrote very musical verse even as they wrote about Modernist concerns.

Sedition. A poem which isn’t, and that’s a point it’s making

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Edmund Vance Cooke was a Canadian poet. At least I think he was. There’s not much on his life I can find, and sometimes his last name is rendered as “Cook.” His sparce Wikipedia entry says he was born in what was then known as West Canada in 1866, and back around the beginning of the 20th century he wrote a type of popular published poetry in a style that has largely died out. Wikipedia calls his genre “inspirational verse,” and some of it I’ve found is that: paeans to earnest striving and social virtues that now-a-days would be reduced to short easily-sharable quotes or the captions on “hang in there” motivational/affirmation posters. But there are indications that social criticism was also part of his repertoire, and this poem I perform today has some bite to it. Though written in 1917, I felt I should work up some music and sing it as a freshly-made song in 2025.

One of the things that irks me most this year is the outrageous lying by my country’s mad despot and his fawning courtiers. I can’t say for sure what drives all these fabulations and alibies across his administration. For some personalities a lie is a demented reflex, a neurological tic. Others spout the lies as a cold tactical choice of propaganda, with a sense that it will gain them some rewards. A more generous assumed motivation: that by saying this or that is so, when it’s not, may help manifest the thing not yet in existence – and this is akin to what affirmations invoke for personal improvement. Alas, most of the things not yet in existence that our current regime members are manifesting by statement are ugly, cruel things. We shudder – while considering the exaggerations, we fear they might not stay lies for long.

Today’s Cooke poem “Sedition”  is a statement of the countervailing powers of truth. It reminds me of an anonymous poem about truth that was widely printed in the same era as Cooke was writing, “Truth Never Dies.”   Five years ago in this Project, I presented that poem and wrote about what I found about who had republished it. This link will be of interest if you wonder about that. Though it’s a statement without evidence, it’s not impossible that Cooke was the author of the much reprinted “Truth Never Dies”  poem – but “Truth Never Dies”  is a more religious and spiritual poem than “Sedition.”   I composed music for the former with acoustic guitar and strings presenting it as a firm, but gentle prayer. The latter, Cooke’s poem, is more sardonic, defiant, even militant – and so I decided to crank up some electric guitars for it.

Sedition

Here’s a chord sheet for my version of Cooke’s poem. I won’t take responsibility if you decide to play and sing it yourself, –  that might make you part of a conspiracy.

.

I played three guitars in the recording via multitracking. For the electric guitar nerds, the center channel has a Gretsch hollow-body playing the chords, the right channel’s a Jazzmaster solid-body with a pitch-shimmering wiggle stick, and the left side a Telecaster whose wide vibrato here was created by having enough personal frustration to expiate that my fingers directly wrung the strings sideways to way above their fretted pitch.* I associate this kind of guitar solo with Canadian Neil Young’s credo that sometimes your intent is to not sound like a “professional guitarist,” some master of tasteful licks and precise intonation.

You can hear the performance with the graphical audio player gadget below. No gadget? I’m not lying – some ways of viewing this blog suppress the player, so I offer this highlighted link that’ll open its own tab with an audio player.

.

*”Hey, posh-guy, you’ve got a lot of guitars there.” I accumulated cheap imported versions of these guitars over 30 years, using trades, hunting up second-hand examples, and waiting for sales. Coincidently, the current regime’s tariffs are threatening what has been a golden age of reasonable quality, good sounding instruments for musicians with limited funds.

The spider holds a Silver Ball

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Welcome back to our regular fare after a spate of summer diversions. And what is it that you’d expect to see here? We take various words, mostly literary poetry, and combine them with original music in differing styles. I’ve done this Project for over nine years, and within the archives here you can wander through nearly 850 of these combinations. Since poetry can be described as words that want to burst into song, such combinations might seem an obvious task – sometimes they are – but I enjoy looking for unusual connections, conversations between tendrils and mycelium deeper in the soil, not just the majestic and visible branches everyone sees.

One frequent supplier of words to be recast in sound here is the seminal American 19th century poet Emily Dickinson. Dickinson’s mind is Shakespearean in its scope, and while her modes of expression vary to meet those needs, much of her poetry sits in a rich intersection between short epigramic verse that superficially seems like it could be stitched as some crewel homily, and unconventional, rebellious, independence of thought.

For example, this lesser-known Dickinson poem: “The spider holds a Silver Ball.”   I’ll link the full text of it here. The opening four lines are praise to a spider’s industriousness, with the arachnid – unusually for this poet – standing in here for the highly common Dickinson totem, the bee. Dickinson, the avid gardener with a science-focused education, knows well the necessity of pollinating and honey-keeping bees. In this rarer appearance in her work, the spider is no such creature, for their work is occult or predatory. She praises its web-work none-the-less, that work’s imperial provisioning for prey goes unmentioned. This praise continues in the next stanza. The web is anchored or arises from “Nought” she says. The spider makes its spider silk from a secreted process, its attachment points may be a dimly lit corner unespied, its constructions do not exist until the spider’s efforts create them. But “Nought to Nought” is an omen too for all this effort as the final stanza will tell. Note too, Dickinson genders the spider: “His.” Spiders of either sex spin webs, but this action is male.

spider and mushroom by Heidi Randen 1080

A mélange of moss and mushroom. Can you spot the spider’s unperceived hands in the picture? (click to enlarge)

.

I’ll make a leap here: Dickinson, the prolific weaver of 1,789 poems, identifies with this spider. One accounting has this as poem 513, so there are hundreds of poems behind her as she makes this one, and more than a thousand yet to go. The bees in Dickinson’s poems are usually cast as joyfully playing, the spider here is more obsessive. Even the dourest Puritan in her era would know the worth of the bee’s work: flowers, food, unspoiled sweetness. In the final stanza, the spider’s work is destroyed by what Dickinson genders as woman’s work, by housework – as endless as this spider’s spinning. Another leap: I wondered if Dickinson might have composed this poem while busy with housework, secretly engaged in the (gendered by her) masculine work of inessential gossamer creation – no matter if “Nought to Nought” is that work’s fate.

As I read this poem I thought of another poet working in this mode, the William Blake of Songs of Innocence and Experience,  who wrote of “The Fly”  and likened his own intellectual and creative drive to the bothersome insect.

I combined Dickinson’s words with music that partakes of the sound of the 1960s psychedelic genre.*  The joy of that kind of expression is the freedom granted to instruments to take novel roles and reconstituted timbres. To a loping 6/8 time, the bass is allowed to rise to sing, the electric piano has been having an episode, the guitars wander onto new paths, an organ breathes, the drums fibrillate. Over this I sing wildly, unconcerned to be overheard. You can hear this performance with the audio player gadget below. What, has that audio player seemingly come to nought? Some ways of viewing this post will suppress the gadget, so I offer this highlighted link which will spin a new tab that has its own audio player so you can listen.

.

*I don’t find this a strained pairing at all. The 19th century American New Thought and Transcendentalist strain was still alive in the Beat and later counter-culture outlooks that arose a century later. Dickinson’s recasting of language and syntax in many of her poems is like to the sonic experiments of psychedelic music, which I’m attracted to for their adventuresomeness rather than their drugs. What is novel about my application of this to Dickinson is that this element of her poetry is under-observed, while it’s more common to view William Blake as “A ‘head’ before his time.”

I ask AI to write a protest song, and…

~ Frank Hudson ~ 6 Comments

A funny thing happened on my way to winding-up my Summer diversion series of thoughts on Artificial Intelligence. I’d concluded last time: since current AI was capable of producing musical pieces in popular styles that could pass for human works in casual listening – or plausibly even more exacting listening – those who’d prefer music expressed by humans might need to change the things they look for and value in music. What kind of things? Accept more imperfections in the music, cultivate an appreciation for the humanness inherent in live performance, and increase their consideration of the intent and motivations of the musical organizations they support.

That last point, about more significantly honoring intent, had hardly inscribed itself as a blog post here when a mischievous thought came over me: while AI is created by businesses with commercial intent, human-made music doesn’t have to be. As difficult as it is to refine authentic intent from music made by strangers distributed in a marketplace, could we be fooled about intent by entirely software-generated music? So, what if I asked AI music generating software to produce a protest song? What if I went further and presented it in a misleading context?

Disregarding my environmental footprint for the duration of the experiment, I created a free account on an AI music generating site, and I set about creating a new protest song. Out of the many outrages of 2025 so far, I picked the authoritarian assaults on academic independence which have sought fines/bribes/tribute from some of the U.S.’s most prestigious universities (known in America as “the Ivy League”) while demanding oversight into their operations and academic programs on flimsy pretexts.

Like a lot of AI, the one I used for this works on a “freemium” structure, with limited features for non-paying users. To make a song I only needed to enter in a text prompt (length-limited for free users) describing it. I asked another AI engine to suggest a prompt and asked it to create lyrics for a song (though the song-creating AI site would be glad to generate its own lyrics). The more general AI answer-bot suggested including artists whose style the music generating AI site should seek to emulate. I picked Phil Ochs and the Fugs. I wanted something with real anger and satiric bite.*

I created around six songs. None of them gave me that, even when I tweaked my prompt. What came out was sweet-voiced singers with an attitude of pop-music yearning, or acceptably sorrowful disappointment in their delivery. The AI lyrics did come up with a few phrases that had some charge to them, but the lyrics generally suffered from what I personally call “Horse With No Name” defects.** My prompt specified “gruff,” “angry,” rough” or even “sloppy” to describe the vocal delivery I was looking for, and out came the singers with an air of polished regret, and lyrics that groaned under their attempt at machine-constructed sincerity. The best I could say for the lyrics on the songs? They might pass as modern recording-production-style versions of the parodies created for the Spinal Tap acting company’s folk-music parody It’s a Mighty Wind.***

These results fed into the context I chose to present them in. I wrote a script for a podcast, supposedly devoted to American folk and Americana music. I decided the podcast presenter would be earnest, but a bit removed from the less-commercial segments of American folk music, and so I made her British. She would be portrayed by the machine speech that I use on my writing computer as a proofreading aid.**** As the token human in this enterprise, I’d appear as a hype-man for the Parlando Project.***** Over the next day I wrote the podcast script and recorded it folding in sections of the machine-generated protest songs. I slightly degraded the audio quality for the British host’s dialog, though after I finished I now think I should have done that for my own dialog instead, as I’d be more likely the guest relying on a remote overseas link for the imaginary podcast.

I had fun doing this, trying to gauge how many tells that this wasn’t on the up-and-up I should drop before revealing the near total AI nature of the content in the last minute. For the names of the Americana acts that were purported to be performing the AI songs, I decided to burlesque the names of U.S. 19th century Fireside Poets. I think “Greenleaf-Whittier” is a great name for a band in that genre – failing that, Jeff Tweedy if you’re reading here, you’re welcome to it for the next Wilco album title.

Greenleaf Whittier

Featuring the exciting new song “University Surrender” you heard on the “Kit That Sounds So Real” podcast.

.

The audio player below will let you hear the 18-minute program. The program opens with a snippet of an AI generated folk instrumental whose prompt I supplied was its title: “Obey in Advance.”   Though only a small selection, I think it demonstrates that AI generated music without vocals is particularly “real” sounding. The program continues with parts of three versions of a song called “University Surrender”  where the AI program supplied the words, music, and fully produced recording in three slightly different Americana styles it thought appropriate. The three versions resulted as I tried tweaking my text prompt – and while distinct, on repeated listening they seem somewhat “samey” to me. More smooth than I was asking for, “Ralph Waldo Bryant’s” version rising to falsetto delivery almost works for the material despite the pitch control artifacts I can detect in the computer-generated performance – but remember, as I said earlier in this series, the same artifacts are now common with recorded human vocalists in current pop. “Greenleaf-Whittier’s” cover did add one, nice, out-of-leftfield, touch: the flagrantly computer-voiced autotuned opening refrain of the title before continuing into its bouncy two-step country groove. And then there’s “Oliver and the Rolling Homes’” version of “University Surrender”  whose arrangement serves up a country-music playlist/station format sound. I was laughing hard as I heard the small-town-worshiping-my truck-my girl -I may get a little drunk sometimes-but I’m a hardworkin’ man-like my daddy sonic approach, but this time holding forth on tenure and syllabus issues. And then there’s “Ivy Towers Bow”  that is said to be written and performed by “J. R. Lowell.” The lyrics here were written by an AI chatbot and then those lyrics were given to the AI music generating program to make this song. Musically this one doesn’t give me anything – so generic. I almost didn’t include it, but I decided it was an example that a generate-songs-AI was on par with a text-focused AI when writing lyrics. The final song on the fake podcast might be the one of the group that does the best emulation. If I was listening casually and “E. E. Peterbuilt and the International Harvesters ““The Emperor’s New Chains”  came on, I’d think it better than many songs in its style. Oddly enough, the AI program produced it when I goofed and clicked generate when I’d only partly written the prompt “Folk or Americana protest song, gruff voice…” and by not having to lyrically add the academic details that made Oliver and the Rolling Homes version of “University Surrender”  so unintentionally hilarious, its Horse-with-No-Name lyric faults are not as exposed. If I wanted to pick one AI song from the ones I generated to fool a careful listener, I’d pick this one. You know you’re in the Uncanny Valley when the guitars have faded out and the robot vocalist gives us a little aside into the still open mic. Spooky.

If you don’t see the audio player gadget to play this imaginary podcast, this highlighted link was human supplied to let you hear it, and will open a new tab with its own audio player.

If my courage and energy hold out, I still want to write one more post about what I call “the guild issues” that concern some artists engendered by plausible AI results.

.

*The AI program didn’t object to those two 20th century folk-rock artists of outrage and cutting satire being supplied for models – but it completely ignored trying to emulate them. When I tried “Bob Dylan” – suggested by the separate AI that’d given me a prompt I could use elsewhere – the song AI immediately refused to do so, presumably due to a specific concern about IP.

**”A Horse With No Name” was a 1971 song, recorded in England by a band led by expatriate Americans. The recording, done by humans, not AI, sounded like someone had anachronistically entered our future and asked AI to “Create a song that sounds exactly like a Neil Young record.” The lyrics went forth despite including some awkward lines like “There were plants and birds and rocks and things,” “the heat was hot,” “’Cause there ain’t no one for to give you pain,” and “Under the cities lies a heart made of ground, but the humans will give no love.” To spare us from more lyrical howlers, the song also featured a lot of repeated “la la la’s” in its chorus, well-performed in a CSN&Y style of harmony.

The song was a substantial hit in both the U.S. and Britain, indicating that it worked as a song for its audience none-the-less.

***Hey, I’m a fan of Spinal Tap. Everyone is! And rating art is a fool’s game – but “It’s a Mighty Wind” is every bit as good, maybe better.

****The “read aloud” feature in the current versions of Microsoft Word is a huge aid to my self-proofreading. With my neuro-wiring, it lets me catch a great many errors I’d otherwise miss, and using the female British voice enhances the “hearing this anew, as if I didn’t write it” factor that makes it so effective.

*****The stuff I say in the middle of the satiric podcast concerning the Parlando Project is how I actually feel about the nine-plus years of stuff I’ve put out here.

Prompt: write that AI post you’ve put off for a year

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

The responses invoked by so-called Artificial Intelligence are a complex mix. Expressed feelings recently would include any of the following in any combination: disgust, fear, ridicule, outrage at theft of Intellectual Property, and charges of tech-bro over-valuing. Let me say at the outset that I have caught myself feeling all those feels too.

I’ve planned for some time to write a post about AI here, and this summer period when I feel free to take short holidays from our usual music/literary focus would be a good time for it. Then this morning I read this post by a blogger/teacher/musician Ethan Hein,* and I’ve been driven to start this long-delayed, provisional, and likely incomplete post on the subject.

What Hein wrote isn’t extraordinarily provocative. “I understand the impulse to decorate your newsletter with AI slop images but when I see that, it makes me assume that you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

If I’m not a proponent of AI, why would that motivate me?

Well, for one, I could be found guilty of the failing he uses as a marker of knowledge. And if my energy holds out, there’s more than that to say.

THE MATTER OF IMAGE

As the Parlando Project moves into its 10th year, how I work and present things has been a learning experience for me. Some years back I noted that images in blog posts increase new visitors to this blog. Now, the Parlando Project is a poetry/varied music thing, and a great many of the casual visitors don’t become regular readers or listeners – but some  might.

Given that I’m an abysmal visual artist, I began using this way of finding images: public domain pictures or (I hoped) benign reuse of images found on the Internet. This is a more complex subject than I’ll go into today, and I know enough to know that as a courtesy or strict matter of rights, I’ve likely sinned in regards to crediting images. The Parlando Project isn’t even a non-profit organization at this point – my plan from the start was deliberately to be a non-revenue thing. I want to spread knowledge and outlooks and to promote other people’s art. I certainly don’t want to remove value from others’ art.

The original attempts at figurative AI illustrations that I saw were ludicrous. I knew there was this thing called DALL-E, and its warped and poorly detailed images others shared seemed to have come straight from the Island of Misfit Toys. But in 2022, I was made aware of a new option. I’m a long-time user of the Adobe Audition audio editing program, and Adobe had a new product offered for beta-testing called Firefly. Firefly claimed to produce better AI illustrations, and it also claimed this Unique Selling Proposition that, AFAIK, has remained unique: they said it was trained only on art whose creators had been compensated for.**

The very first image I used from Firefly actually pleased me. I did modify it, but it worked for illustrating the musical setting of the poem I was presenting, Hey, I could use something like this, I thought.

April 2023, I want to show William Carlos Williams dancing alone. My first use of Adobe Firefly to generate an image.

This acceptance of the tool was reinforced by my decision to present videos some times. While a blog post needed only a single illustration, having something germane to put up against the linear flow of a video asked for multiple images to fit different points in the song.***

I think this was the final Parlando Project use of AI-generated images to illustrate this very short Emily Dickinson poem’s “lyric video.”

.

Over about two years, I continued to use Firefly. My experience was mixed. No matter how much care and detail I tried to put into the prompts I often couldn’t get anything like what I wanted. I’d resort to 20 or 30 tries to get one I could charitably use. Afterwards, I’d sometimes wince at what I accepted and included with Parlando work, but I have a policy here of leaving work up “warts and all.” But I did write “mixed.” Just like that initial image that I used of a purported dancing William Carlos Williams, some of the ones I got from Firefly pleased me, and I hope pleased audiences. Maybe someone now sees a poem in a different light, or checked out some music they otherwise wouldn’t have heard.

A combination of things turned me away from AI-generated illustrations. The amount of time to go through all those bad results to pick the sometimes barely acceptable one bugged me. I could use that time to read or research more on poets and poetry, or to make somewhat better recordings! And partway through my use I started to read the charges of extraordinary energy use by datacenters generating AI.****  While I didn’t make some hard and fast decision, my Firefly use just tailed off. Now in the past year, the outrage against AI has grown, particularly from artists in various fields. If my personal energy holds out and I continue to write on this, I’ll get into more detail on those concerns and theorizing around AI, but those concerns are genuine feelings about genuine threats.*****

This is not an AI-Generated Image

.

Which leads me to my personal concern, one I had reading Hein’s honest and informal opinion. I’m nearly willing to join the pitchfork and lit torch brigade marching on the AI castle, and I share their concerns. But for around two years I was up in my energy-dense lightning-powered lab twiddling the dials to generate this – well, yes it is, isn’t it – monster. Look, villagers, I didn’t intend to drown the little flower-picking girl – I was just trying to juice up my low-budget poetry/music blog. I actually had moments of pleasure when the monster grunted semi-intelligibly!

I made a short reply to Hein this morning, he clarified that his statement was more of a vibe thing. I understand – I make those suppositions too. This post is, in so many words, asking for mercy for using AI image generation. If posts on AI here continue, what I’ll write will get more complicated yet, but that’s enough for today.

.

*Hein has a wonderful way of writing about the theory and practice of musical composition. I’m grateful for the things I, an untrained and largely naïve composer, have learned from what he’s written. His particular specialty is examining (with practical examples) the disconnect between the venerable Western/European musical tradition and the way music is realized here in modern America. Currently he seems to be pivoting to podcasting his information, but links to his work are here.

**Presumably, Firefly’s source material was Adobe’s stock art library.

***I sometimes ask myself why I don’t just do a single still image and leave it at that in my videos. After all, there are many YouTube videos that do only that for music-centric content. Despite my love for spare, concise poetry, I speculate I’m just a maximalist with the arts that I’m not knowledgeable about.

****My first thought reading those energy estimates was: what is the methodology to determine how much energy draw was due to AI? I’m an old IT guy. If one has full access to all the systems, and wished to log the amount of CPU and access time for each sub-process running on them that they knew pertained to AI, then one could make a reasonable estimate from that mass of information as a proportion of the total energy drain of the entire facility. I couldn’t imagine anyone writing about the astronomical AI heat and energy drain had such access. They might have some sense of the total for a particular facility, but I’m unaware of any facility that only  does AI processing. Facility A may use a whole lot of cooling and electricity, but how much is for transcoding cat videos, searches for what actor played who in that movie, and order processing for Labubu orders? Did someone use estimates from proposals? It would be easy to imagine that any engineer asked to create energy and heat needs for establishing AI at a site would be encouraged to spec high.

That said, total energy costs for our modern computerized world does seem to be increasing, and AI does seem, at this time, to be remarkably energy-demanding.

*****What did I do instead? I think I’ve had less weird or imaginative blog illustrations recently – that’s a loss, if a survivable one – and per Hein, the cheesiness of some of them might not have helped. For videos I’m subscribing to a product that offers a portion of a leading stock image library. My report: there are plenty of times when I hate a not-quite-right stock image as much as any AI fresh-off-the-slab monstrosity. And I worry that those stock image libraries may soon enough include AI-generated images.

If you are reading this post and think, “But he didn’t say this! That’s the key point.” I may yet get to that.

Wild Peaches, an Eden with undercurrents

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

There’s an undercurrent of grief beneath life. I don’t say this as a sentimentalist, it’s just there. This doesn’t preclude joy – it may in fact demand it.

I awoke at dawn today, August drizzle falling. I connected briefly with a livestream of the candlelight anniversary memorial service in Hiroshima,* and then shared a few tears with my living wife. Tears from each of us mixed on my face, shed for my late wife now dead for 24 years this morning. After she left for work, I took to my daily joy and hopped on a bike and rode to breakfast under gray skies without remaining rain.

I usually read the news with breakfast, a long habit – and I still do, though there’s little joy and much sense of loss in it these days. I took an old pocket music player with me (which no longer works except for the radio)** so that I could listen on air to the children of a recently assassinated state legislator memorialize her and her husband killed alongside her. They played their parent’s favorite songs mixed with sharing stories of hearing those songs in the back seat of a minivan while all sang along in flagrant voices. See what I mean: grief demands joy.

Perhaps you don’t. I express myself awkwardly, some will wonder what I’m on about. Let me look at it from the perspective of absent connection: the man who has gained some wealth by bamboozling someone or by force of power, often has the briefest of joys. The one who seeks joy in the suppression of others, has a meagre joy constructed out of a comparison to other’s pain inflicted. Grief for them might be a weakness, a sure sign of submission. I, a nobody in this world of power, can laugh at myself writing this and tell myself I should stop trying to be mistaken for Kahlil Gibran.

Today’s musical piece came about when someone shared a poem by Elinor Wylie called “Wild Peaches.”  Wylie, a contemporary of Edna St. Vincent Millay, gained an audience during the last decade to be called The Twenties. She was born into a successful family steeped in political rectitude, but her love life became a national scandal. She eloped with the son of an admiral at age 20, but soon left him for a married, older lawyer by the name of Wylie.***  The abandoned husband committed suicide after she left him, and the lawyer Wylie and Elinor fled to England and lived undercover under an assumed name. Eventually the couple married and were able to return to the U.S. in time to have that relationship too fall apart.

Hanging out with the East Coast Modernists, the now Elinor Wylie launched her poetry career. The scandals likely helped and hurt that career, but Millay and some other women poets were writing with complexity in melodic verse about eros (and what surrounds it) – and for a while they found readers hoping to understand “the New Woman” of the 1920s. As it turned out their careers were helped and hurt by many of them writing rhyming verse in metrical forms. Even before Modernism, rhyming verse was already becoming associated with less serious poetry, and women writing about eros were judged less substantial than men writing about the supposed important things. The oncoming middle of the 20th century was to be very concerned with important things – many deadly through new bombs or other means.

“Wild Peaches”  was published as a series of four sonnets, and I’ll link the full text here. My performance is only of the first one, which I think can stand alone and is representative. Rewardingly musical, the first impression one might have is of a poem that’s kin to the famous Yeats’ poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”  Instead of an Irish bee-loud glade and house of wattles made, the poem’s voice is describing an Eden, a locus solus, a blessed arcadia, in the south-eastern coast of the U.S.**** But wait, there’s an undercurrent.

This is the poem of a woman who had twice eloped – the second time was subject to an international “womanhunt” – and neither partner stuck. The voice of the poem knows full well flee and exile may the entry and exit point of such an Eden. I love the ironic turn the sonnet takes even within its octet when it goes all Frank O’Hara – though written before that poet or Disney’s Davey Crocket had come into existence – with the man taking to wearing a coonskin cap and the fleeing couture-debutante clad in homespun. The exultation of “We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown” is delicious, moving from Exodus past the parted sea to drowning.

Wylie in elaborate dress

Elinor Wylie, not wearing homespun fabric

 

The sextet seems to offer more Eden – but wait, the best season is Autumn, the season of The Fall, and we are left with the abrupt movement from wild fruity abundance to a subsistence bringing death, and a hunter whose shot will not miss.

Oh mercy, I’m going to go all Gibran again: death will surely win one battle, though love can win many battles. That’s what I’ve found – and though she died young, Elinor Wylie later seems to have found her most successful marriage the third time around.

After our last piece where I accompanied my speaking ghost with lots of electric guitar, today’s piece is full of bowed strings: cello, violin, and viola da gamba. In secret I’ll tell you I played most of the string parts for my Carolina Eve in Exile with my MIDI guitar. I’ve taken to calling pieces such as this “Punk Orchestral,” in that I’m not getting overly fancy with the rank and order of calling these instruments up. You can hear my song made from the first sonnet in Elinor Wylie’s “Wild Peaches”  with the audio player below. No player? You’ve not been driven out of the garden, it’s just that some ways of viewing this blog will suppress it, and so I’ll supply this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*For several years after my late wife’s death, I didn’t notice that it happened on Hiroshima Day, but I’ve found that linking a single death with the death of thousands underlines my point about humanity’s shared undercurrent of grief and loss.

**I could have Internet-streamed the children’s memorial radio program of course, but I decided to use the old device because it reminded me of the era I shared with my late wife.

***The imp of the perverse in me can’t help but think of the lawyer’s family name with the animated coyote and his well-funded Amazon Prime account who is none-the-less doomed. We find that funny.

****We can locate this poem’s Eden from its fruits. The wild peaches indicate it’s southeastern as that non-native fruit is only cultivated below the Mason-Dixon line. Wild peaches are the remains of abandoned orchards or animal-carried/buried/excreted seed-pit refugees of cultivated fruit. The poem’s other fruit, scuppernong, is a wild white grape native to the Carolinas.

The Unquiet Grave

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

August brings me this triple obligation: it’s the anniversary of the public launch of the Parlando Project, of my late wife’s death, and of the atomic bombings — three things varying in nearness, scope, and heart-weight. Two of them plainly have to do with grief — and poetry’s connection to matters of death and survival is there to be examined too.

Today’s musical piece isn’t exactly literary poetry, as its survival can largely be laid to singing, not printing and the murmuring eye.*  “The Unquiet Grave”  is one of those works from that prolific author Anonymous. Their publisher? The memories of people who wanted something to sing. The version of “The Unquiet Grave”  that you can hear below was collected by Cecil Sharpe in Great Britain from the singing of a “Mrs. Lucy White at Hambridge, Somerset, 6 August 1904.” This is a portentous coincidence: I just went to the book where I saw that version to gather the note on its collection, and that date of the year is the very day my late wife died; the year of collection, the same that the house my late wife and I bought and I still live in was first occupied; and the place it was sung “Somerset,” says August in its sound.

The Unquiet Grave

With all the words flowing through the Internet, you still might want to pause and listen when the ghost begins to speak.

.

The story in the ballad is compressed, but it opens with a lover’s mourning. The next event, the dead partner becoming present and speaking is not just supernatural, it’s also an empirical report of what many of those in grief experience.

Just last week I was listening to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross interviewing podcaster/comic Marc Maron.  As they talked, ostensibly about Maron’s career, the two bonded over their own recent partner’s deaths — Maron’s a couple of years ago, Gross’ earlier this year. They each shared that their dead spouse’s presence and voice had vividly returned to them, and each averred that this experience was not horror-show scary — rather it was, while remaining strange, comforting. I can remember one of my own experiences around a year after my wife’s death. I was becoming involved with my present wife around this time, and I felt it awkward that here was the presence of my dead wife returning. I don’t know if I spoke to my dead wife’s presence out loud, but then in such a spirit world our conversations likely needed no sound or syntax, only the sense, and that sense was a common realization between us that it was  awkward, but that this new complexity was fine. More than speaking — do ghosts laugh? Do we laugh in their presence? I think we both might have that night.

I’ve always felt that “The Unquiet Grave”  has a practical, darkly humorous, intent. If ghosts have additional knowledge, extra-existential wisdom, what the ghost in the song shares is that one can cherish the dead, even hear them speak, but that they are changed forever — and the living can, should, change too. When the ghost says that you wouldn’t want to kiss the corpse’s lips, the gothic joke on deadly “mourning breath” almost writes itself.

The words in Lucy White’s version, which I remained faithful to, somewhat fumble the lyric’s closing statement. What the final exchange the lovers share means to say is “When the autumn leaves fall from the trees/and (then) spring up green again.” I just sang what was on the page, but that fumble is, I now think, also exemplary of grief, it’s misdirection. Grief’s disruption, like a slight-of-hand magician: something is here (like what you meant to say), and then it’s, poof, gone.

Today’s musical performance of “The Unquiet Grave”  is a tribute to Fairport Convention, the pioneering British folk-rock group — a choice of mine inspired by recently listening to Andrew Hickey’s 500songs.com history on how that group formed its own Cecil Sharpe revival-with-Stratocasters after their own encounter with death and grief. You can hear my performance with the audio player below. Has any such player failed to materialize? If so — mourn but organize — and click this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*It’s hard to date the ur-versions of folk songs, though many were printed in the 18th and 19th centuries, first by commercial broadsheet publishers and then by collectors and song-catchers like Cecil Sharpe and Francis James Child. Child collected “The Unquiet Grave”  in America in the late 19th century and numbered it 78 in his ballad collection. It’s always seemed to me that “The Unquiet Grave”  (also known in versions as “Cold Blows the Wind”)  is an extended variation of one of the oldest fragments of English language poetry “Westron Wynde,” which has been dated to the Middle Ages, plausibly to quite early in that era.

Four Performances-Part Four: We play an Alternative Prom

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

The experience of the fourth performance in this July series was unlike the previous three. Those reading along may recall that each of the first three I’ve written about this month left me with its own distinct feeling of disconnect, of ways that I had not been able to reach an audience. I could’ve taken the performer’s side in this failure to connect — there is a long and necessary tradition of confounding audience expectations after all — but emotionally I couldn’t live with that unreservedly. Given that the core of the LYL Band was a band of poets not reliable professional musicians, and those poets were reflexive non-conformists singing songs that held up to examination or ridicule civic and cultural matters, I should have expected that outcome.*   Intellectually, I understood this, but emotionally, it bothered me, particularly after the U of M concert I wrote of last time.

Society picks a few non-conformists, perhaps ones bound with redeeming qualities or compelling evolutionary necessities, and is fine dispensing with the rest.**  If it didn’t do this mostly, well, the non-conformists wouldn’t be non-conformists would they? The LYL Band in this metaphor is the platypus.

But as I said, today’s performance is different. Somewhere in the mid-1980s a couple of nurses at the hospital I worked at had an idea: they wanted to put on a Prom to remediate memories of less-than-accepting Proms from their high-school years. What a great idea! They set a date and went about decorating a house’s basement with festooned crepe paper and colored light bulbs, plastic flowers, and some cardboard gilding, just as small school gyms had been transformed in teenage midcentury America. One of the nurses knew I had a band, would we be the rockin’ dance combo for this event?***  Sure, we’d do it — if we could find a drummer.

If nothing else, the perceived (by me) failure of the U of M concert from last time cemented in my mind that playing electric instruments without a backbeat couldn’t sustain the illusion that we were a Rock band. Someone knew a drummer. He agreed. We rehearsed with him a single time, and Dave and I selected from our repertoire songs that might be fit for dancers.

When the night of the Alternative Prom arrived, we set up in the house’s basement. We had no PA as such for vocals at this time, so I used a small Radio Shack mixer connected to my home stereo for the vocals, with no provision for monitors. I even set up one mic for any members of the audience that wanted to sing backing vocals.

The Prom attendees arrived. Some had scrounged old formal wear from second-hand stores, and even accessorized with corsages, while others were in come-as-you-are casual dress. Some came with their we’ve-achieved-adulthood-now partners, others just themselves. Given the nurse-origin of the event, women were in the majority. How many in the audience? Again, memory can’t count, but the basement was soon quite full, just enough room to dance, maybe 30-35 people? I really can’t be sure. I think there was some food and drink, but I don’t recall the particulars as my mind was keyed up for the performance.

Our little trio began to play about 10 p.m., myself with my electric guitar, Dave with his Farfisa combo organ with grey bass-register left-hand keys, and our for-the-night-drummer at his kit.

Dancing broke out, and continued through our roughly 60 minute set which concluded with a cover of Wilson Pickett’s garage-rock classic “In the Midnight Hour.”   I don’t know what experiences any of my readers who play instruments have had, but let me say that if you ever get a chance to play for a dancing audience, I highly recommend it. I believe that music (and to a degree, its sibling art poetry too) are meant to move bodies. While I have never been a very good “rhythm guitarist,” here in a trio I had to fill that space however shambolically I could. It helped that the drummer was good, and fully-invested in “more cowbell,” and Dave’s left hand on the organ grey keys filled in well for no bass player.

I’d considered what should be our encore if the performance worked, and my idea was to lean on my still patent Patti-Smith-inspired vocal improvisation skills. The planned framework would be the ultimate chestnut of its era “Louie Louie,”  a three-chord song that I would connect with whatever songs came into my head by converting them to fit “Louie Louie’s”  three-chord-trick cadence.

Dave started the encore, his voice hoarse from singing without the benefit of vocal monitors that night. “Louie Louie” soon slid into Dave’s song “Sugar Rush.”   As the guitar breaks and audience sing-alongs carried us forward toward midnight, I merged in other songs: “Like a Rolling Stone.” “La Bomba.” “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “Fortunate Son,”  and finally, tiny snippets of the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes”  and “Sweet Jane.”

The performance was over. Art is hard to measure, harder yet when it’s rough-edged, imperfect, and improbable; but it may have been the single best LYL Band performance, despite (or because) of its unconcern for sophistication. The recording is crude too, and the vocals suffer from the lack of monitors and strained voices. The funk of the sweaty basement, the joy of the dancers remediating their teen-age years, the surrounds of dance steps and emotions: none-of-than can make it directly onto audio tape. But Rock’n’Roll isn’t a juried competition. On any one night, with any one audience, it’s a shared mood of ecstatic feelings, and no level of skill and fidelity sans those feelings can’t maintain it.

I can’t find any pictures from the Alternative Prom, but for visuals I put in a bunch of LYL ‘80s posters and pictures from other gigs, including the U of M concert I wrote about last time. One level of our non-conformity:  we tried and succeeded in not dressing for the part of a punk band.

.

*If only in a footnote, I feel a need to note the death of Tom Lehrer this week. He really made an impression on me, and Lehrer’s presentation was, like the early LYL band, centered on the idea of gleefully rubbishing many cultural standards and pieties. I even tried to work in a punked-up version of his “We’ll All Go Together When We Go,”  as our answer to “99 Luftballons.”.

If the Fugs, that other band of poets, were arguably the first punk rock group, I suspect any acerbic singer-songwriter from my generation had listened to Lehrer’s LPs. Here’s one odd thing I noted in the reaction to his death, and the inevitable short pieces on his career: I have yet to see a conservative weigh in with their view. No tut-tutting from the religious cultural nationalists on Lehrer’s satire tearing down the church and militaristic state. No remarks on his musical asides to sexual laissez faire oppressing or not-oppressing in the proper ways. No public-health consequences drawn from his 1953 ode to “The Old Dope Peddler”  recorded when Lou Reed hadn’t turned 12 years old. Somewhere there may have been some “he’d be cancelled today” edge-lord free-to-be-fascist Lehrer elegy, but the respectable conservatives are leaving the field to the crickets. My theory: there’s an audience result that isn’t “enemy list” notoriety, but is more at “never heard of him” where Lehrer resided for 75 years or so.

**Frank Zappa, who understood a scientist’s cool examination of such things, had this quote: “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”

***Let me do a capsule American Rock history lesson here. During the 1960s and into the early ‘70s the nation was full of small musical combos made up of young semi-professional musicians. They had different models: some wanted to be the Ventures, or Booker T and the MGs, others The Beatles, or Animals, The Young Rascals, The Rolling Stones, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, or the Yardbirds. By later in this era many of these combos took on psychedelic trappings and had converted to ballroom and movie-house stage ambitions, but for a few years before, these “garage rock” band’s gigs would be bars, under-21 not-bars or teen-clubs, and youthful social functions such as high-school dances and proms.

Four Performances-Part One: a 19-year-old Reads Leonard Cohen

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I don’t know what I should tell him about the performance.

I think I know some things he doesn’t, but of course all knowledge is transient, subject to new knowing, new conditions. And the matter is complicated because the person whose performance I’ll present today is by my teenage self.

I was a few weeks into being 19. I was beginning my second year of what will become a foreshortened higher education at a small college in Iowa. The year before, my first year there, had been a high point of my then shorter life. I met my continued friend and musical co-conspirator Dave Moore there, along with his partner Celia Daniels; Jim Scanlon from Chicago, a right guard football player who wore an ankle length wool cape and shared lefty politics; John Schuler, a southern Illinois boy who soon grew a full John Brown beard and became a searcher for American ideals; and Louis Fusco, an east-coast kid who told me he’d sat right next to Steve Winwood’s organ on a stage back in Fusco’s hometown, and who like me had a little cassette deck and liked to record with it. Since I had grown up in a 700 population town near nothing much more than that, I’d never met anyone with these varieties of interests and experiences. I had made do with reading. First, 19th century gothic Poe, then iconoclasts like Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, and William Blake. Listening too: The Fugs and the Mothers of Invention, the skeleton key blurt of Bob Dylan, the psych-fi of the Jefferson Airplane, and that Rimbaud of Venice Beach: Jim Morrison.

But all that was assimilated inside my own head — an empty auditorium. Now an old man, that’s where these things, and much since, still echo.

I’d likely tell that teenage me that I was not conscious of class differences. I’m largely right in that — but the 19-year-old might say I knew of those differences, he was just ignoring them. In this time-spanning colloquium I’d reply ignoring this is close-enough-same to ignorance. The school had rich kids, and kids more secure in the mid-century middle-class than my family was. Besides the loans that seemed massive to me in Sixties dollars, I made ends meet as a “Work-Study” student, washing dishes and doing other tasks for the on-site food service. Most of the students were there enjoying their draft deferments and class-appropriate dating and social opportunities — education was largely a customary set of exercises secondary to that.

At the end of my first year, Dave, Celia, and Jim all left this small Iowa college for a better one in Wisconsin. We’d all worked on an “underground newspaper” at the little Iowa college — mimeographed pages filled mostly with satire, though one page printed my first published poem, an ode to the new Brutalist student center on campus that owed a lot to my fresh fascination with Wallace Stevens. That newspaper may have been how I was selected as editor of the official college newspaper for my second college year at the end of my first. I was the last man standing from that independent effort, even though I knew nothing of the editorial role. Celia gave me a crash-course in print layout and production, and I learned in a day from her things that I still used years later.

I’d first met Dave Moore when he presented a Sunday service at the college chapel in the fall of my first college year. The service included his reading from Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun  and Bob Dylan’s “With God on our Side.”   So, as the new school year began, this elevated-by-vacuum me decided to present something similar.

There were a couple of problems with that: I was (still am) a lousy performer — but I didn’t know this yet; and I would have to find something to present, choose a message which I’d justify by what was billed and playing inside the auditorium of my head. For some people this might be a good enough idea: their internal repertory aligns with the zeitgeist. With mine — not so much.

What was playing in my head? Leonard Cohen. In my last year of High School I heard a recording by Noel Harrison, the nepo-baby son of famous non-singer Rex Harrison performing Cohen’s song “Suzanne.”   That 45-single record had briefly fallen within the nether borders of the local Top-40 format radio station, and hearing it with no introduction or other context was profound. It starts like a somewhat genteel love/or crush song — but bang! there in the second verse Cohen brings Jesus in, as a character fully as present in the song as the love object — and then, as you’re reeling from this, the final verse assays a synthesis of the first two verses while folding in some workman sailors. Sixties pop songs were allowed psychedelia by then, but few leapt and gathered with such craft and reach. “Suzanne”  and its value had been discovered by Judy Collins the year before, and it was placed on her LP In My Life  where it kept company with songs by the Beatles, Brecht/Weill, and Dylan. Since hearing Collins’ version presumed access to the LP, it was Noel Harrison on the radio who did the job of introducing Cohen to me before I encountered Collins’ better version.*

There was a strong resemblance later in Cohen’s career: in the 21st century Cohen’s song “Hallelujah”  went from his own recording of it that his record company deemed uncommercial** to a widely beloved song of generalized endurance. How many were drawn by the similar jump cuts of devout psalmist David and his functional harmony lesson, the same’s Biblically accurate homicidal lust, and the light bondage of being tied to a kitchen chair? How many elided over the sex and stuck with the spirituality? I can’t say, but my judgement then, like my judgement of the bubbling under “Suzanne”  in the Sixties was that many heard a different song than I was hearing. And expressing that difference could be, well, easily felt as snobbish.

Dunn Library

My campus memory fades, so I’m not sure this is the correct side of the library where the performance took place. The library was less than 5 years old then, and subsequent landscaping may have changed the grassy area.

.

So, one early fall dusk, in The Sixties, on a small Iowa college campus, I gathered my coterie for this chapel service, outdoors on a grassy mound by the library. I can’t recall why outside rather than inside the chapel, though the chapel bells can be heard on the recording announcing the start. Brian Lynner, who’d founded the college’s SDS chapter but was now concentrating on becoming a good actor would sing “Suzanne.”   Another student, who’d I’d met just a couple of weeks before, Don Williams,*** would play a fine rendition of a Leo Kottke song,**** and talk briefly about selfhood. And I would perform — for the first time really. I didn’t play guitar. I didn’t sing. I’d read from Leonard Cohen’s 1966 novel Beautiful Losers.

Beautiful Losers is an unusual book, ostensibly a novel. It contains everything found in the jump cuts of “Suzanne”  and “Hallelujah”  and then some. There’s polymorphous sex, a lengthy sub-plot on the as yet uncanonized 17th century Native-American Catholic saint Kateri Tekakwitha, a hilarious deconstruction of the famous Charles Atlas comic book ad, a vibrator that attains sentience, and much, much more, including a remarkable litany about magic that seemed apt for performance to me,*****  but I started my Cohen reading with something else from the book: a satiric recounting of the contradictory desires a likely Cohen stand-in character had for his life before flowing into the more celebratory and spiritual litany of “God is Alive, Magic is Afoot.”

Not the best order I’d tell that teenager now. The first section likely alienated the audience before the second could beguile them. And to conclude the service as a matter of benediction, I read short poem of my own, one that sounds presumptuous and pretentious to me now. That teenager thought he was being brave. Is he right, at least in part, at least from his side? Oh, if only we could sit, separated as I pretend today, and talk.

You can hear my part of the chapel service, recorded live on a cassette tape in The Sixties with the audio player below. If the player doesn’t appear out of the mist of memory, it’s only that some ways of reading this suppress it, and I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*Collins is largely responsible for Cohen becoming a musical performer. When he played “Suzanne”  for her, he told her he wasn’t even sure it was song (it had been a page poem first) and Collins assured him it was a very good song. Shortly after this, and her recording of it, Collins cajoled Cohen to perform “Suzanne”  at a benefit concert. Her account of this is somewhat surprising, as Cohen had been documented previously as a skilled performer reading his own poetry in 1965’s “Ladies and Gentlemen Mr. Leonard Cohen,”  and in broadcast interviews on cultural programs he was consistently provocative and confident in even the earliest extant interviews. But the Collins story has it he stumbled only partway into the song, tried to leave the stage, and was only able to complete the song with Collins returning to the stage and singing the song beside him. I knew none of this in The Sixties, but Leonard Cohen, the man who was to inspire this simultaneously over-and-underconfident teenager in Iowa, was in this account capable of conflicted shame in calling forth his performing nerve.

**The immortal words of his record company said after hearing and rejecting the album containing “Hallelujah”  were “Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good.”

***I keep saying this to the void, but I owe Don Williams an immense debt. His approach to guitar (I suspect secondary to his family’s ability to provide him lessons back in his Minneapolis hometown) formed the basis of my approach to the instrument to this day. Due to Don Williams’ entirely generic name (no, he’s not the late 20th century country crooner) I’ve never been able to track him down to thank him.

****Kottke would have been largely unknown outside of the Twin Cities at this point. His 6 and 12-string Guitar  (the “Armadillo LP”) was freshly released on John Fahey’s tiny Tacoma label, and the Kottke song Williams sang was written before that LP.

*****The same year, singer Buffy Sainte-Marie thought so to, and recorded a musical performance of the “God is Alive, Magic Is Afoot”  section of the novel. Other than that passage, nothing of Cohen’s novel made much of an impression on the culture, even among the eventual admirers of Leonard Cohen as a singer-songwriter. Cohen himself didn’t retrospectively speak much of it, describing it as a grab-bag, last-ditch effort to make a literary reputation beyond his native Canada just before his pivot to music. Cohen did recount though that when he first met Lou Reed at the Chelsea Hotel in NYC in 1966, Reed immediately gushed: “You’re the one who wrote Beautiful Losers!”

I had a guinea golden

~ Frank Hudson ~ 4 Comments

It’s known that Emily Dickinson played piano, but my scattershot scholarship doesn’t inform me if she played any other instrument, or exactly what kind of music she played or appreciated. Many of her poems use hymn or ballad meter, and I was still a young person when I first was told that you can sing many a Dickinson poem to the tune of “Amazing Grace,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,”  or “The Theme to Gilligan’s Island.”

That factoid tells us that her metrical musical inspiration is hard to pin down, for in her 19th century a great deal of music followed that form. By our time, ballad meter is heard as presenting a certain kind of old-timey folk-music vibe — in Dickinson’s 19th century a wide variety of more or less contemporary music used it.*  Did she ever sing her poems, or perhaps noodle a tune on piano while composing poetry? I know of no accounts. Still, when I ran into this early Dickinson poem, written by her as a twenty-something before the bulk of her poems followed during her highly productive thirties, I couldn’t help but think of it as being made to be sung.

“I had a guinea golden”  is a poem about loss of friends or lovers, and it’s not hard to think it a characteristic work of someone in their twenties. Dickinson grew up in a dynamic time, in a small college town. Her school-and-college-age friends would, as they likely would today, be due to scatter to occupational and romantic opportunities during that decade of life, and the biographic data on Emily Dickinson would give us a goodly number of separations from meaningful people in her life during this time. From memory, I can think of only one who was separated by death in this part of Dickinson’s life (Benjamin Franklin Newton) — and I mention that because it may be impossible to be certain about how seriously Dickinson took this poem’s lament at losses.

My suspicion is that “I had a guinea golden”  is layered. That it catalogs more than one loss (the guinea coin, the singing robin, the bright star) and takes time to note that each of these losses are not generally the loss of wealth, bird song, or a starry firmament seems to say to me that these losses are less serious than they feel. In letters to those Dickinson longed to hear from, she often takes a stance that she feels betrayed or onerously deprived of contact from her separated friends. In the informality of friendly correspondence that reads as playful there, and so it could well be here in this poem too. As we reach the poem’s — now song’s — conclusion, I suspect this lawyer’s daughter (unlike our country’s mad king) well knows that unforgiveable treason is not actually indictable just because someone has traveled away from Amherst. But even if playful, the piece does speak to how these losses feel, and in performance I chose not to wink at the pain of the symbolic losses portrayed.

Guinea_1775

Back in 1775 this mad king was taxing and tariffing Americans out of spite, and sending government troops to “protect” American cities that wanted no part of his chaotic misrule. This was the gold guinea coin that might have paid those troops.

.

Well frankly, I was glad to be able to use the limited instrument of my voice once again to record anything. Since late June I have had some kind of flu or respiratory bug that had me greatly fatigued, coughing, and so brain-fogged I could read only superficially. I’m not sure that intentional irony has yet come back fully online, so I performed “I had a guinea golden”  as a serious lament. I’ll let Dickinson’s words and the listener provide the layered context. You can hear my performance with the audio player gadget you should see below. No player visible? “Treason!” “Exile!” “Avicide!” No, it’s just that some ways of viewing this blog suppress the player, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*Poets too, including ones we know Dickinson read, used the format for literary ballads not necessarily meant to be sung.