poetry

Paying the Piper chapter 3: Paper or Song?

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

While researching my questions about Edwin Ford Piper in his archives at the University of Iowa Special Collections Library, did other things occur to me? Yes, a few things did. I’ve warned you, I never seem to be able to tell stories simply.

I tapped this thought on my laptop computer during the first day with the yellowing paper newspaper clippings, cursive correspondence, and paperclipped notes on scraps of paper surrounding me: “Paper or Song?”

I hoped that would be enough to remind me of what occurred off to the side as I worked my way through this somewhat random archive containing the folk songs Piper had collected around the American Midwest early in the 20th century, often from rural settings.

Given the high cost of the more or less instant communication in my rural youth, I easily recognized Piper’s world of correspondence, little journals, and newspapers of the region. If my mid-20th Century had long-distance phone calls, or I suppose telegrams (I never sent the latter, but a couple appear in Piper’s files), long-distance calls were an expensive thing, something you saved for emergencies or life events for the most part. As in Piper’s days, tasks like exchanging folk songs or literary networking was something you might engage in with pen in hand like some medieval monk or courtier.

Bing Crosby Says Folk Songs are Goodies

We’ll bring in Carl Sandburg, and Carl’s birthplace where I saw this blurbed edition of his landmark folk song collection later.

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That information’s travel was slow: what one found in one small town might appear days later in the mailbox of another town, but it had persistence. It opened the possibility of staying around longer than the electronic instants we exchange now on little glowing rectangles. This document I’m entering into a computer gets saved to a solid-state device, and backed up to another — but who would care after I’m gone or know how to access if they did? This blog, widely public as it is today, exists more or less at the mercy of my monthly payment from my no-profit enterprise.

In summary: slow communication in Piper’s time, but a chance it’s kept long. Fast, facile communication now wizzes past in a flying timeline and disappears.

How much did Piper save? I can’t tell, we only have what we have, not what we don’t. In my last day at the Special Collections I read an in-passing comment from his wife written decades after Piper’s sudden death, telling which professor took over his position and classes and of the two of them going to Edwin Piper’s office and cleaning out the stuff there for his successor. Piper was not Robert Frost or Carl Sandburg then or now, but someone saved some things that could be held in hand so I could go on my time travel trip into the boxes in the library Special Collections.

Still, there’s nothing about paper that assures eternal. Beyond paper, Piper seems to have done good work, good things for others. As a professor there’s the legacy of his students and perhaps their students, and so on outward. The unarchived of us will have that too, with no library boxes, indexes, or perhaps even attribution.

But then this occurred to me, there’s something else, an archival format with a potential longer shelf life: songs. It was partly a folk song archive I had come to look at, and I’ve had an interest in folk song since I was a teenager. Therefore, I already knew many of the songs I came upon in Piper’s archive, at least in a version I could recognize were related to his. I’ve heard them sung, sung them myself. Some of them are old, some of them had Child folk song collection numbers since they were British Isles songs that had emigrated to North America and remained to be passed from one singer to another through time. Ford wanted to write them down, but at least at first it was said he just wanted to learn of them to sing them. Singing — that’s an instant, ephemeral communication — but at least for some songs, sometimes, there’s a lasting component that persists.

A folk song for this post? Here’s a song better known from the 1960s folk revival where its haunting supernatural elements started attracting singers in the British Isles, “Reynardine.”   While there are older songs with a like-named character, the version we know today descends from a song collected or recast in the first decade of the 20th century in northern Ireland around the time Piper was collecting his songs in the American Midwest.  You can read more about this at this earlier post, but here it is simply as a song to pass through your ears via the audio player below, or this backup link.

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Paying the Piper chapter two: time travel, wagon trains in space, & folk song

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

The walk across town to the University of Iowa main library turned out to be no problem, even in the heat. I walked into the modern lobby of the facility decked out with LCD screen-signage, a set of computer carrels, and airy windows. I used handy lockers with touch-screen set-your-own-combination lock panels there to store my bag and hat.*  The library is one of those amended buildings, representing different eras in décor as it was added to over time or remodeled — so it was almost a theme-park-ride effect as I walked further into the main entryway to reach an old elevator with a flickering florescent fixture that took me up to the third floor with dark wood trim that reminded me of the libraries of my mid-century youth.

The special collections staff set me up on a placard-numbered plain table in the reading room. It took only a few minutes for my selected boxes from the Edwin Ford Piper collection to be delivered by cart. Looking around the reading room as I waited, there were filled bookshelves, a globe, a couple of busts,** and a few framed posters. Curiously, there were life-sized carboard standups of 20th Century Star Trek actors in their character costumes in a couple of corners. Why? Generalized nerd culture? LaVar Burton’s following enlistment in Reading Rainbow? I momentarily thought, at the commencement of my time-travel by library collections, that the original Roddenberry Star Trek concept was travel to “seek out new life and new civilizations.” They called it Star Trek,  not the second-word choice of the later movie franchise Star Wars,  nor something referencing a technology-based science fiction premise. Pitching to SF resistant TV programmers, Roddenberry famously described his show it “Wagon Train in space.”

The U of Iowa Special Collectons Reading Room 800

Transporter or time machine: archive boxes in the University of Iowa Special Collections Reading Room.

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I don’t know how Piper’s parents came to rural Nebraska. His mother’s family (Ford) emigrated from Ireland first to Canada around 1810. The Ford brothers who emigrated were stone masons. His father’s line had settled in Massachusetts from 17th century, near-Pilgrim times. Piper’s mother was born in rural south-west Ontario and his parents were married there in Zorra township in 1848. The parents moved to Auburn Nebraska in 1869 where Piper was born in 1871. The 1869 date means it was likely by wagon, as that date predates railroads there.

I know no particulars about why the Ford brothers emigrated to Canada. 1810 preceded the infamous Irish famine years a generation later. My guess (by inference) is that the Fords were Anglo-Irish protestants. I don’t know why Piper’s father was in a non-descript rural area of Canada either.***

It’s hard for me to judge his parent’s economic status. Piper speaks briefly in papers in the archive about his father being a rancher who raised livestock and that the barb wire that titled Edwin’s poetry collection came to Nebraska with homesteading post-Civil War farmers who tended crop-fields cordoned off with that fencing, causing his father to move his livestock grazing farther west to Alma Nebraska (southwest of Kearney) and then Box Elder, which is more than halfway to Colorado. In a short biographic note Piper prepared and found in the archives he says he “rode in the movers wagon.” In the same note he says he had “broken sod and raised corn to sell at ten cents a bushel; I have paid three percent a month interest.” Since he went to Omaha and university there when he came of age and was an academic the rest of his life, this would indicate that his family wasn’t exclusively a cattleman or other livestock operation.

In talking about places and names I found in the archives, I get ahead of myself, it’s just clear that the young Piper was a traveling man coming from a traveling heritage. When we speak nowadays about the Midwest as “the heartland” or casually assign it as a homogenous place in stasis we miss that it was (even its rural areas) just as much an immigration site as the tenements of New York City — there was just more space between farms or towns.

In effect I was another immigrant in the library archives. I was eagerly opening the contents brought to the table from first box and on, lifting out folders from inside them and examining the mix of handwritten letters and notes, typewritten pages, fragile yellow newsprint clippings, and occasional whole publications. The libraries abstract of the contents, and the Piper collection’s mixed filing, meant that I never knew what I’d find “over the next hill.” I had been concerned if I could keep my focus on this task for a full workday. I could. Easily. I was back in the era which The Parlando Project so often refers to, the first quarter of the 20th century when Modernism emerged. I’ll look at Modernism later in this series, but the folk songs are things the travelers carried with them from the past. Same quarter-century, Janus like, looking forward and backward.

As the collection abstract promised, the folk music collection materials were considerable. Many of them have marginal notes or material showing either they came from other collectors or that they had appeared in versions in other contemporary published collections. Some of these notes are from a 1934 run through of Piper’s folk song materials by a graduate student who cataloged and categorized the material while Piper was still alive, though his organization is not reflected in the current filing in the archive boxes. That student, Harold Daniel Peterson, no doubt using Piper as an informant, says that Piper first collected the songs to sing himself, that WWI interrupted Piper’s personal collecting, and that post-WWI, his students at Iowa contributed songs their families and locals knew. Correspondence and marginal notes with associated names show that Piper seems to have assembled or participated in an informal network of other folk song collectors. Piper also mentions the Journal of American Folklore multiple times, and that publication and society started in 1888.

There’s a number of files dealing with hobo songs (some with notes presumably by Piper about the particular hobo who shared the song) and articles about hobo culture, Hobos were migratory workers who often hopped trains to move from place to place.

Coincidences can move me, even if I realize I’m the one making chance meaningful. The very last folder in the last box I went through in my days examining the Piper archive folk song collection contained a version of “Jack of Diamonds”  a traditional song with a variant that also goes by the name of a commonly included verse: “Rye Whiskey.”  Long-time readers here may recall that I was told by uncles that “Rye Whiskey”  was a favorite song of my great-grandfather, after whom I am named. In my time travel during this June trip I wasn’t just traveling to the time of Modernism’s emergence, I remembered at that moment opening that folder that I was traveling back to that man’s, a common laborer’s, time too. When investigating something else years back, I was taught that folk culture isn’t uncomplicatedly pure, always the result of children learning songs from the old folks on the porch of an isolated cabin. I recorded a performance with music of a plausible theory of how my great-grandfather might have come to fancy and appreciate that song. You can hear that performance with the audio player below, or with this highlighted link if that player isn’t visible to you.

To be continued…

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*As is now common in special collections, there are rules about what you can bring into the reading rooms. Alas, theft has been a problem in such places, so bags (much less spill-risk food or drink) are not allowed. I noted the University’s rules also restricted paper notebooks and outside writing instruments.

**Of who? I never left my focus to find out, but the human form amputated to a head and shoulders is already concentrating on the life of the mind. The Piper Archive papers mesmerized me, time passed rapidly as I tried to take in as much as I could. The first day I had packed a bagel in my shoulder bag, necessarily left in the downstairs library locker in case I needed to take a lunch break outside of the Special Collections Reading Room. I ate that bagel in the evening back at my room.

***This basic genealogical detail is from a typewritten sheet titled “Notes on Family History” with some pencil annotations in Piper’s handwriting in the archives. It also says that he was “the tenth child in a family of eleven children” and gives the date of Edwin Ford Piper’s own later marriage to Janet Pressley in Iowa City as 1927.

Paying the Piper chapter 1

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Very often I find myself unable to tell a story simply. While I find internal joy in expanding complexity there is a painful element too. Even when under the spell of things I’ve experienced and learned, I retain enough self-awareness to see what effect my expression has on others, the burden of strangeness. Then the reach between the teller and the listener becomes haphazard, unstable — pile it too high and it tiresomely topples — and so in some break for breath partway in, I realize I’ve dumped a cluttered mass of thought debris on a listener, long past any interest.

Perhaps this is why I’m attracted to lyric poetry, constrained as it is to moments, often held tight within the stiff glass bottles of forms.

Here’s a personal story that’ll go many places coming from the place I find myself in this June. It starts, I’ll guess, earlier this year when I came upon a poem, “The Last Antelope,”  a striking, empathetic account of the end of an animal’s life and wildness after settlers captured it. Edwin Ford Piper was the author, and there were only scattered bits of information to be found about him. Scattered and bits do not constrain my curiosity — if the bits were great distances apart, the space between them could hold a lot of things: born 1871 in rural Nebraska, parents part of early European-origin settlement there. Largely self-educated in a land of necessary child-farmhand-so-never-more-than-half-year schools, still goes on to university in Omaha studying literature with a specialization in Chaucer, and then to the University of Iowa where as a professor he helped establish the idea of teaching and granting degrees in creative writing.

The modern convention of a university as patronage for artists, and the rise of the credentialed MFA-holding poet is not without controversy — but isn’t it odd, this man who taught himself in a small town on the fluid boundary between the 19th Century Wild West and the 20th Century staid Midwest took that journey.

In the middle of this, the same man had a compulsion to collect songs ordinary people brought with them while journeying, the words and music carried in the light baggage of memory. He wrote down songs his relatives and townsfolk knew by heart. He asked others to send him more by mail. He paid particular attention to the songs of those on the move: hobos, cowboys, and other traveling workers. Did this connect with his literary poetry? There are no recordings of Piper reading his poetry, but accounts say he declaimed it with a musical lilt — perhaps like the surviving recordings of Yeats, or maybe like the more bombastic Vachel Lindsay — and at times he would break into full song. His students took to calling him “The Singing Professor.”

Since this Project is “Where Music and Words Meet” you can see why I’d be attracted. And I’m a small-Midwestern-town boy, though without degrees. But did that seem strange then, to mesh high culture and the songs remembered by old women and rude mechanicals?

Piper was born just west of the Missouri River in Nebraska — and in Illinois, just to the east of the Mississippi River and less than a decade later, Carl Sandburg was born to an immigrant railway blacksmith who signed his name with an X. Iowa, the state where I was born in the middle of the next century, and Minnesota, the state where I’ve lived the longest, sit in a delta between those two tremendous rivers. Sandburg too mixed the latest in Modernist poetry with folk songs he collected and sang. Did Piper influence Sandburg? Did Sandburg influence Piper? Or are they the same genus of plant, raised in the same climate, but in separate plots? Questions.

Answers fork like river systems. Even with little information being readily available on Piper, I was already in flood stage. And here’s how much my wife loves me: for our 20th anniversary she agreed to go on a road trip with me to Iowa City and Sandburg’s home-town of Galesburg. My scenery in Iowa City? An archive of Piper’s papers* held in the university library there. Our grand museum of the arts of poetry and song to visit on the trip: a railway worker’s shack in a small rust-belt city, a town worn-out but still running like a paint-shedding Oldsmobile.

Two considerations worried me as I thought about this trip, one for my wife and one for myself. For my wife, I worried if there’d be something rewarding for her to do while I enthused at the library. She was able to solve that one easily, locating nature reserves, parks, and trails within an hour’s drive. I often tell her that she’s a nymph, and I complement her on how seriously she takes her job to supervise the plants and animals when she returns with soggy hiking boots from her hikes with pictures of landscapes, mushrooms, wildflowers, birds, and other critters. I love her pictures and stories on return (her stories briefer and better organized) — but my old joints ache just thinking about hiking for hours.

For myself I worried about my old-ager endurance. The library was two-thirds of a mile from where we’d stay. I’d need to hoof it with my laptop bag back and forth, which would have been a trifle in my youth, but nowadays longer term standing and walking is troublesome. I considered taking a bicycle with me, which would have made the library to-and-from easy, but a lot of hotel/AirBnB places don’t have any good places to lock up overnight, and on further consideration I thought that a bike would just be one more thing to worry about, taking my focus away from the trip’s main goals. And then I worried too about spending full days at the library’s special collections reading room. Because my time was limited, and to minimize the walking, I planned no break for lunch. I’d need to keep my focus and energy up, something that I have not been consistently able to do this year even with all the comforts of home.

On average I bike at least once every day in my normal routine, often in the morning. In the past two years I’ve not been a longer distance bicyclist, but 30-50 miles a week easily exceeds those 150 minutes exercise recommendations, and it lets me get to a café for morning breakfast and handle a lot of routine shopping and other trips. I ride year-round. In 2016 I bought my first 21st Century winter bike with studded tires; and in 2019 I upgraded the winter season bicycle to a Fat Bike with monstrous 4.5-inch-wide tires that handled ice and snow with the challenging ice ruts and potholes that my city’s current “We’ll get to all the streets in 3 days after the snow stops” plowing regime supplies. My overall stamina for the walk wasn’t my worry so much as how well my joints and stiff back would take the more load-bearing walk.** And to make it through the day I’d planned, there’d be no old-man’s afternoon nap either.

Pay the Piper Chapter 1 800
Piper, once a “poet of considerable distinction.” A later version of his collection Barb Wire. My Iowa City view, and yes the guitar got some use. Example breakfast.***

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The first day we arrived at Iowa city was hot and very humid, so I put on my best hot weather clothing. Spouse-nymph headed off at dawn for her day’s supervisory encounter with nature, and I planned a big breakfast fuel-up. I’m a “eat little meat” kind of guy, but for good or ill I take the lacto-ovo part of my lesser meat diet seriously, so I’m a big frittata, omelet, hash, scrambler kind of guy most mornings. I note that I eat like an old-time farmer, despite never farming, but the good thing about this higher fat/protein kind of meal is that it can hold me until supper, and that was my plan.

I put on my best hot weather clothes, slung my bag over my shoulder, and headed for the university’s main library building for my encounter with poet-professor Piper’s papers.

Thus ends Chapter One.

Here’s a musical performance I put together in March of Piper’s “The Last Antelope.”   You can play it with the audio player you should see below. No player?  This highlighted link is another way to hear it.

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*When I arrived at the library archives will-call desk, I asked them to pick Piper’s Papers. The librarian suggested puckishly that I was nearly reconstructing the old tongue-twister folk-rhyme, Roud Folk Song index 19745.

**Local papers/forums are full of folks who bemoan bike lanes in my city, often remarking that “not everyone is young and fit.” Despite that, most bicyclists I meet and see on my city’s streets aren’t of the MAMIL (Middle-Aged Man in Lycra) variety — and I’m maybe 1.5 letters of that acronym. I joke with my wife that as my joints get older, a bicycle is becoming a “fore-and-aft wheelchair” for me, allowing me increased mobility and beneficial low-impact movement for the old joints.

***That’s a St. Paul Sandwich: egg foo young on sourdough with lettuce, tomato slices and mayo. Near as anyone knows, my Twin City of St. Paul has no tradition regarding it, and no restaurant there serves it now. Its origin is something of mystery.

For Father’s Day: Kevin FitzPatrick’s “Bicycle Spring”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s been an eventful June so far for me, and I plan to be writing like a real blogger about what I’ve experienced in the last couple of weeks shortly. Then too, just this week I started working on a few further Parlando audio pieces. At least one may make the cut to appear here in the next few days.

This weekend is Father’s Day, and a new musical piece that I thought I’d present for that turned out too rough, even for my tastes. So, here’s a well-loved poem by Kevin FitzPatrick that alternate Parlando Project voice Dave Moore performed with The LYL Band a couple of years ago. It seems apropos. Kevin’s books of poetry are available from this website: kevinfitzpatrickpoetry.com Today’s poem appears in his 1987 collection Down on the Corner.

“Bicycle Spring”  was first presented here in 2022, but for today’s post I remastered it and made this little video for it. Here it is:

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Wishing my versatile readers and listeners a happy Summer.

The Doomed regard the Sunrise

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s another example of a short Emily Dickinson poem that seems in some facets simple, and yet when examined more closely still shows her uniqueness. On first reading it reminded me of a saying attributed to Benjamin Franklin* “Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged at dawn.”

One might read this poem from the start as a restatement of that Franklin quote — except, Dickinson may be saying this isn’t someone’s last day, she wants to set down the situation someone’s next-to-last day. In the first stanza, it is sunrise, and the poem says that the doomed person has delight. Why? Because there is one more day before their death at the dawn.

Doomed regard the Sunrise

Chord sheet in case you’d like to sing this one yourself.

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This idea is clearer in the second stanza, where again, death is clearly due — but tomorrow. There the doomed man is listening for the bird that will likely sing at the next dawn. Perhaps he’s listening to the Meadow bird in the day-before dawn more intently, knowing the next time he hears that song it will be his execution, and this is his last day to hear it in the more generally hopeful context of introducing a day, not an execution. He might choose this — after all, if he knows he’s to die tomorrow, he can be somewhat assured he will not die in that present day as the bird sings the day to begin.

The final stanza may be the oddest, but indicates that this is so. It twice tells us the mood is joyful, which would indicate that the condemned does feel assured of, and is in love with, this day — the full day before. There’s a somewhat ambiguous word-choice in the last line: “ought.” The word can be a stand-in for zero, for nothing, but it’s primary meaning is more at obligated. If we take the zero/ought meaning, or the obligated meaning, Dickinson’s poem is saying the poems doomed subject is joyful though the next-to-last morning Meadow bird has a duty to sing nothing but elegy, because the poem’s subject will accept the day with joy.

So, this is goth-mode Emily with death certain, but this is also certainly the day before  the last day.

Musically I had to throw this one together quickly, but it came out OK. Though in a minor key it’s somewhat jaunty. You can hear it with the graphical player below, or if the Meadow bird’s audio player isn’t visible, you can use this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*There’s a similar quote attributed to Samuel Johnson, and there’s this later extension authored by Terry Pratchett “They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged.”

Reading Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I spent much of today reading through Carl Sandburg’s landmark 1927 folk song collection American Songbag,  all 500-plus-pages of it. It’s not the first time I’ve looked into the book, and indeed I’ve paged through it or jumped to songs I was interested in before. But next month I’m planning a trip to Sandburg’s boyhood home in Illinois and to Iowa City where I will be taking a look at some papers relating to early 20th century poet and professor Edwin Ford Piper who was one of the sources of folk song material used in Sanburg’s anthology.*  So, looking at the book in full seemed a good grounding for this trip.

I’ve made the case before here, such as this post from a year ago, that besides being a somewhat deemphasized Modernist poet these days, Sandburg is a primary model for the American Folk Music Revival, which eventually produced in the second half of the 20th century several genres of popular and semi-popular music.**  Here’s the matrix that Sandburg built in the 1920s, a hundred years ago:

  • American folk music can be appreciated like art music
  • It will be associated with literary poetry
  • It expresses, or can be adapted to express or accompany, progressive/left-wing causes
  • It’s multi-ethnic, and the contribution of Afro-Americans will be substantially acknowledged
  • Humor and funny stories will be part of its presentation

Sandburg was including segments of folk music performance as part of poetry readings before American Songbag.  AFAIK we don’t have any transcripts or recordings from that era, but all these things are demonstrated for the record in the 1927 book. Sandburg is not the only American doing any of these things a hundred years ago, but he’s doing all of them at once,  and he’s doing it with a degree of fame and cultural acclaim that was significant.

I was aided in my rapid march through American Songbag  by already knowing many of the songs it contains, and as I encountered them I remembered hearing them in my half of the 20th century performed by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and many of those other “folk singers” that surrounded them.***  The Sing Out magazine and Jerry Silverman folk songbooks of the Sixties that are my foundation, are successors to Sandburg’s work, right down to the touch of  using vintage B&W line drawings as interspersed decorations.

Sandburg often includes little stories about the collector (Piper was one of a group who collected the songs “in the field” for Songbag)  and for those he collected himself he says a few words about how, where, and with whom he first heard the song. Here’s one of the most engaging of those stories I came upon today in the book:

Once when the night was wild without and the wintry winds piled snowdrifts around the traffic signals on Cottage Grove Avenue, Chicago, we sat with Robert Frost and Padraic Colum. The Gael had favored with Irish ballads of murder, robbery, passion. And Frost offered a sailorman song he learned as a boy on the wharves of San Francisco.

The song Frost sang for Colum and Sandburg? A subtle wry ballad of farming? A nuanced lyric of nature cooly observed? No, it was this one. Some will know it from its latter association with the Assassin’s Creed video game franchise:

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*Besides the folks songs Piper contributes, Sandburg even quotes a part of a poem from his contemporary Piper’s Barb Wire  poetry collection in Songbag.

**Besides the Folk Scare of the 50s and 60s, the American “Rock Music” that extended Rock’n’Roll to FM radio, college campuses, and rock critics was generally formed from folks who had connections with the just preceding folk revival. Modern Americana and roots music links to the same strains and connections that Sandburg was personifying 100 years ago.

***Guthrie composed music for Sanburg poems later. Ruth Crawford Seeger (Pete’s step-mom, Mike and Peggy Seeger’s birth mother) was one of the composers who created harmonized music for the folk songs in Songbag,  and she also set Sandburg’s page poems to music. When the young Bob Dylan started to expand the poeticism of his song lyrics, he decided to pay a visit to Sandburg, briefly meeting him unannounced in North Carolina at Sandburg’s farm. Other folk luminaries connected? At least a couple songs collected from Leadbelly by John Lomax are included in Songbag.  Lomax is credited, but Leadbelly isn’t, though Leadbelly’s more general public career hadn’t yet started. Let me just say that Lomax’s relationship with Leadbelly is complicated. Just this month I was reading a recollection of a performance by Spider John Koerner (who first performed in the mid-century Minneapolis folk music scene along with Dylan) where he told a humorous story about a farmer who fed his pig by lifting him up to the branches of an apple tree. That’s a story Sandburg also told. I’ll also note that when I came upon several songs in Songbag,  the rendition I recalled from the Folk Scare of the mid-century was by Dave Van Ronk, a wonderful performer and a mentor to Dylan when he arrived in New York.

William Carlos Williams “The Birds” and what nature sounds

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Something about the Spring I noticed this year — oddly, this year as an old man who has had a full lifetime of Springs — is the intensity of natural sounds in my city. There’s a tendency, demonstrated in many poetic tropes, to make nature a portrait or a silent movie, putting nature in contrast to the noise of our civilization’s hum and bark.

I ride my bicycle nearly every day off to a café to have a breakfast, sometimes early enough to feel like the single soul on the street, but by the return trip certainly part of the city waking and doing: kids on their school bus stops, sometimes with a parent, sometimes waiting with their own cohort only, folks holding coffee flasks unlocking their car doors to go to work, a few other bicyclists, including those on big front basket bakfiets or long-tail rear-seat-shelf bikes holding small kids, this observant cargo watching whatever in the morning beneath their pastel helmets. The human noise is slight and clicking. In such mornings we are more like crickets rubbing their wings.

But the birds! When most of those humans are making only accidental noise this early, and the kids waiting for the yellow bus aren’t always talking, perhaps practicing quiet for the ordered schoolroom, the birds are singing at the tops of their voices in the morning. Like miniature feathered fiddles, their song cuts through larger sounds, it insists on being heard. “Ladies, I got your genetic material here!” “This is my and my kind’s tree!” “Whatever this is, this Spring, I am here, and I’ll use my breath to say it!”

Like us bipeds lacking much fur, other mammals aren’t sounding much. Yard bunnies are suspicious and quiet. The squirrels don’t chirp, and their little feet make quiet footfalls. The dogs on leashes: all nose-leading in an alternate sensory dimension. But the frogs and toads are singing out too — whole amazing choirs of them, all wanting to contest Emily Dickinson’s Nobody with a harrumph and high whistle of who they are.

So, it is this Project’s nature to add sound to page poetry. Today’s audio piece is just me alone with a Telecaster electric guitar during a hurried session early this Spring to put down some musical ideas. In the poem that I’m combining with my music, “The Birds,”  William Carlos Williams follows Imagist principles, melding a moment into concrete images. Given that we’ve just had a set of rainy days throughout the long holiday weekend in my city, I resonate as Williams poetically paints the bird-morning wet as undried paint.

Is the world not “wholly insufflated” as he says at the start? The bird song is breathing into our world — nature is not silence, but poetry aloud.

Strange Powers Magnetic Fields photo by Heidi Randen 600

My wife found these* stapled to poles around our neighborhood on Sunday.

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You can hear my performance of Williams’ “The Birds”  with the player gadget below. No gadget to be seen? This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player. Want to follow along with the text of the poem? Here’s a link to that.

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*This bird couple’s heads are superimposed over a human pair of heads from the cover of The Magnetic Fields Holiday  album. The quatrain quoted below is from a song found there “Strange Powers.”   Despite being a substantial Magnetic Fields admirer myself, I had never seen this album cover.

A little Madness in the Spring

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today’s musical piece uses another very short Spring poem by Emily Dickinson “A little Madness in the Spring.”   I was reminded of this poem when I attended the May Midstream Poetry Reading Series this month where Thomas R. Smith opened a set of his own poems by reading this one of Dickinson’s. If you’d like to follow along, here’s a link to the text of that poem. Spring madness is not an unique poetic subject, but there’s an odd character we meet in this 6-line poem: a clown. Smith told us that “Clown” in his mind is best illuminated by understanding that the word emerged from a character that would have been understood as a country bumpkin. Checking on this, I confirmed that. The silent, white-makeup, big-shoed, red-nosed presentation that likely arises in your mind when you read “Clown” has not yet come into its full form when Dickinson wrote her poem, but the rural clod stock character reached back through commedia dell’arte to the works of Latin and Greek comedic playwrights.

I can’t say how Dickinson visualized clowns in her mid-19th century. I don’t know her access to whatever comic drama or the opera bouffe, but she might have run into clown characters in books or periodical reviews too. One thing that occurs to me: an American form that uses stock buffoons that was popular in Dickinson’s time and place was the minstrel show. Minstrelsy is infamous for using largely white actors playing black slaves acting foolishly, a context which cannot be disengaged from the larger social evils of slavery and white supremacy. It’s not to excuse our parochial evils to note that these character tropes existed outside of the peculiarities of America and white blackface.

When I had seen “A little Madness in the Spring”  with its “Madness,” “King” and “Clown” before I heard Smith read it, I casually thought the poem referenced Shakespeare’s King Lear.  Looking at that today, I can’t find evidence for it. The Fool in Lear  is always The Fool, the word clown is never used. Nor is Springtime evoked in the play.

A little Madness in the Spring clown 600

“As if it were his own…”

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So, I think Dickinson may have a generic King and Clown in her little poem. The meaning I’d extract is: It’s fine to be irrational in Spring, even if one has powerful responsibilities, but even more so we should note the foolish notion of the innocent peasant or farmer clown who observes all this new growth of spring, the “whole Experiment of Green” and believes it is their property.  One fine point I’ll put onto that last part: even an unschooled farmer — and avid gardener Dickinson too — would know the work and craft that goes into starting a garden, crop field, or orchard. A King might puff himself up and portray that husbandry as “his own,” but the man or woman dealing with the exact logistics and labor knows well their part, regardless of who owns the crop or the field.

Is Dickinson winking at that difference in her comparison of the King and Clown? But neither labor nor legal papers and titles make the Earth and Springtime fully our own. We sing it, but the music comes from elsewhere.

You can hear my musical performance of Dickinson’s “A little Madness in the Spring”  with the audio player gadget below. No gadget?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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Sexton!

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

For a cluster of reasons, it’s been increasingly difficult to create new audio pieces for this Project. For one thing, having done over 750 of these pieces during the past 8 years, a lot of musical ideas, poets, and poems have been explored already. For another, my increasing age and high-mileage body have decreased my stores of reliable energy and dexterity. But one other reason is that I no longer have a predictable and luxurious access to times when I can record something that involves a microphone. Oh, I still get such time — but I don’t always know when it’s coming — and so an opportunity may arise, and I’m committed to something else, or it comes about and I’m weary and spend it napping or resting my aching old frame, or it opens up, and I have nothing prepared to record.

This frustrates me even as I realize that what I do have to bring to the Parlando Project in terms of resources and time is something to be grateful for.

Yesterday I had foreknowledge of one of those recording times coming. I collected two things I wanted to do something with: a well-known poem by Emily Dickinson and another musical piece that I wanted to record just for my own personal enjoyment. As I sat down in my studio space to record my musical performance of the better-known Dickinson poem, I noticed on my music stand a chord sheet for a lesser-known Dickinson poem I had done the music for early this spring: “Sexton! My Master’s sleeping here. ” “Sexton!”  hadn’t been recorded, even though it was ready — I didn’t have the time in early Spring as I rushed to do all the pieces on the children’s verse theme I had chosen for National Poetry Month.

Dickinson’s “Sexton!”  is an early Spring poem, a season that arrives at different times in different climes, but I figured that I needed to record it right away if I was going to keep it at all timely. I grabbed a dreadnaught guitar (a larger, more powerful sounding guitar than my usual instrument) and quickly refreshed myself on how I had intended to perform “Sexton!”

I was so eager to record on this occasion when the restrictions to making a sound had fallen away that I ripped into the piece at a reckless tempo. A choice or a mood? Moot point, I had to get on with it. Thinking about that tempo today I also wondered if my teenager’s hardcore punk listening had seeped into my mental metronome. But then “Sexton!”  does start with an exclamation point, and the whole poem is that: an exclamation of Spring.

Of course this is Goth Emily — so even if her poem and performance are as short as a cut by the so-rapid punk bards of San Pedro The Minutemen, there’s context crammed into 90 seconds. Here’s a link to Dickinson’s poem if you want to follow along. What do we find in those words?

Dickinson-The Minutemen-Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys-graveyard

This is what you come to the Parlando Project for: stuff that’s stuck on each other like cockleburs.

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A sexton* takes care of church grounds, typically including a graveyard. The sleeping Master’s bed chamber is therefore likely a grave. Spring has come with flowers and birds expecting new life.**

Spring isn’t stopping to reflect on this, like the tempo of the song it’s got work to do. Dickinson is in a churchyard, but it’s full of death departed and life arriving, not dogma. What replaces that dogma, sermon, homily? Bird-troubadours, secular Spring-song: its shortness, its insistence. You can hear my performance of Emily Dickinson’s “Sexton!”  with the graphical audio gadget you should see below. No gadget?  This highlighted link is a backup that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*By anachronistic coincidence, the poem’s sexton made me think of Anne Sexton, a 20th century American poet. Poetry is like a cocklebur: its tropes and metaphors will stick to anything.

**More coincidental connections: in considering Dickinson’s poem in the context of a song I thought of this Earl Sykes song, best-known from a Ralph Stanley bluegrass version, called “A Robin Built a Nest on Daddy’s Grave.”   I wonder if Sykes knew Dickinson’s poem, or if there’s some third source that both the poet and the songwriter tapped for this springtime combination. My Dickinson poem-now-song would make a good medley with Sykes’ song —and good bluegrass high vocals and harmony would certainly spruce up my rough-hewn singing performance.

Pea Brush

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

There are more things than well-made that a poem can be — but as someone who’s worked to make their own poems work, I can use that experience to admire what Robert Frost does in today’s piece.

“Pea Brush”  is a rhymed iambic poem, based on four-foot lines, but it throws in enough variation that it never seems like it’s limping along in its gait. The rhymes aren’t fancy, and at least for me, they quietly chime along in the background without calling attention to themselves. This is prosody that isn’t bragging or showing off. It was easy to sing in my rough-hewn manner for the most part,*  but if I was to reformat it into blocks as if it was prose, it wouldn’t seem all that strange either. Indeed, as I performed it, I wanted to stress its conversational quality.

If you’d like to follow along, here’s a link to the text of Frost’s poem used for my performance.

I myself haven’t had a garden in decades, but one friend of the blog Paul Deaton covers their kitchen garden regularly at his blog, and alternative Parlando voice and keyboardist Dave Moore has a garden that we talk about sometimes. I could imagine reading the first-layer plot of this poem as a post Paul might make. “I’ve arranged with a neighbor to use the small limbs from some birch trees he’s clearing as poles for some of my climbing garden plants. When I went to pick them up on Sunday, I noticed bent-over wildflowers** blooming under the brush pile. My reuse of the felled branches will help my pea vines and give the wildflowers room to grow.”

Besides this clear plot line, there are fine clear images in the poem’s story: the smell of sap still in the air from the just-cut trees, the pause in the frog’s song, the near-like to a baby’s grip of an adult’s finger to the tendrils of a climbing plant on garden stakes.

Pea Vine Tendril!

 Wishing good luck to all the gardeners reading this.

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Below this surface, what is the poem trying to convey? The poem’s speaker (as a character perhaps a more prosaic farmer than the poet and indifferent farmer that Frost was) just notes the practicality of the arrangement — free garden stakes — while letting us in on the blooming of May flowers and the promise of harvest aided by this arrangement. Frost the poet has written this well-made play, painted this scenery, blocked and directed its performance. The play portrays the give and take of humankind in nature. We’ll grow (and consume) the peas with their infant tendrils. Neighbor John has amputated the treescape for his own agricultural designs. These are planned acts of life and death. The episode of the frogs has them portraying those things outside our plans, their Sunday-service silence to hide from a two-footed demigod that might come to capture them to a final silence.

I’ll note too the poem’s ending “had to come” interjection breaking the meter to make a final statement of the budding wildflowers that couldn’t wait for humans to make their plans.

I had to make do with a single hour to get this musical performance down today, and I chose to grab an acoustic guitar to get this accomplished. The results felt right enough to produce this new piece that you can hear with the graphical audio player below. No player?  This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*The line “The same as you seize cat’s-cradle strings” is a bit of a tongue-twister. And while I get Frost’s image clearly in that line’s stanza, the syntax is a little disordered I think.

**Frost names his wildflowers as trillium. I don’t know if Frost was the exact botanist that his friend Edward Thomas or his great New England predecessor Emily Dickinson were. Neither am I, but I’m often open to researching specifics like this in poems. I find that one of the species of trillium that grows in Frost’s New England is the Nodding Trillium, a variation that grows crooked stems naturally, not because a brush pile has altered its growth.