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2021 Parlando Project Hits (and Misses)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Once again a variety of things we call life is keeping new material from being posted as part of this project. So, why not do what a lot of bloggers do this time of year and give a short rundown of 2021 traffic for this blog and the associated audio pieces? That might be interesting. What do people come here for?

In general, this blog traffic continues to grow, as it has every year so far. Over the five plus years we’ve been active, there’s been an expected yearly pattern sweep: rising in the fall and carrying over until spring, then dropping off in the summer. This might indicate that some of the traffic here is related to schoolwork assignments or interests lit around that, or that even in our always connected age, that more are outside reading the “book of nature” in the summer than inside curling up with a poetry-related blog by the glow of a crackling screen light. We had 43,621 views last year, modest by political or lifestyle blogging standards, but rewarding in the context of poetry event attendance.

To my personal disappointment, listens to the audio pieces are close to flat in contrast to increased blog readership. The continuing Covid-19 epidemic has put a damper on my ability to collaborate or even to work as extensively on the audio pieces in other ways, and over the past two years I sometimes fear that the quality and variety of the audio pieces could suffer from that. That fear aside, as “The place where music and words meet,” says, these pieces were the real spark that led to all this.

Here are the ten most viewed posts here during 2021. This is the 754th post here, and all of these posts are older posts made over the years since we launched in 2016. I made them hyperlinks in case you’re curious, as a few of them are quite old, and could be from before you started following Parlando.

1. Poem 1 from Twenty Love Poems

2. The Lake Isle of Innisfree

3. The Stare’s Nest at My Window

4. Edward Thomas’ October

5. Rimbaud’s Eternity

6. Hitch Your Wagon to a Star

7. The Red Wheelbarrow

8. The Aim Was Song

9 .“Hope” is the thing with feathers

10. The Pool

The popularity of the Pablo Neruda translation from Spanish I did in 2020 shouldn’t surprise me. Love and its ornery cousin lust are attractive subjects after all, and this early collection of Neruda’s is a poetry best-seller in its original language. I myself prefer the final poem in the series to the opener, but they are both part of the story told in the series. Posts on Yeats make two high-placed appearances. I suspect the posts on “The Red Wheelbarrow”  and “The Pool”  get hits from those looking for homework help on what to say about these enigmatic short poems that appear in many anthologies. The puzzler for me is Edward Thomas’ “October,”  which is a lovely poem by a poet better known in the British Isles than in America, but I can’t guess how that post got so popular. My post on Emily Dickinson’s well-loved “Hope’  is the thing with feathers “ may be attractively controversial. Many read that poem as motivational poster simple: praise for plucky hope. I took the idea that the “Hope” quoted in the title may refer to a lesser known poem by Emily Dickinson influence Emily Bronte that makes hope something of a taunting flirt.

None of these top ten for page hits this year was written and posted in 2021. Even though total blog traffic increases smartly year to year, most days I find older posts are among the most read — or at least loaded into readers browsers in hope of finding out something — proving the notion that poetry is news that stays news. The most hits for a 2021-written post was Rimbaud’s Dawn (#21), followed by William Carlos Williams’ Thursday (#26), and my memorial post for Lawrence Ferlinghetti (#36).

What was the least viewed 2021 post, other than very recent ones from the year? My post on the unusually gritty Joyce Kilmer poem “The Subway.”   What’s that mean? Joyce Kilmer may be past his sell-by date in the 21st century? Or maybe it was reflected pandemic fear of crowded mass transit?

Audio pieces? These new audio pieces posted in 2021 had the most listens:

1. The Negro Speaks of Rivers

2. The Snow is Deep On the Ground

3. The World is a Beautiful Place

4. Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Escape

5. Reynardine

Sure, I’m the composer and sole performer on 4 out of those 5 pieces, but not a bad grouping of Parlando music performances, even if none of them have more complex arrangements (harder to get done this year). Listening to them again reduced my fears about the 2021 audio pieces not being as good as in the years past. I was surprised that “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”  had made it to the top by the end of the year, but it’s one of those “long tail” audio pieces that continues to attract listeners long after it was first posted. “Escape”  was another surprise, because both my vocal and fiddle performance was aiming at “not pretty.” I didn’t expect that one to be so popular.

Early T-Rex and Swinburne - Bongo Fury!

What more can I say in my defense? T-Rex before they had a hyphen and then Swinburne. Bongo Fury!

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Least listened-to new piece last year (excluding those from end of the year that probably haven’t risen to their eventual level)? “Love and Sleep.”  Maybe I just couldn’t pull off a fusion of Algernon Charles Swinburne and early Tyrannosaurus Rex — even with a line like “Glittering eyelids of my soul’s desire…” dictating that attempt.

I really hope to have more new pieces here soon, but since it’s not one cause that is preventing things from progressing, I can’t be sure how quickly we’ll get to our 600th audio piece combining various words (mostly poetry) with original music (as varied as I can make it). Thanks to everyone who read and listened here last year. I appreciate your time and attention — and then even more so the likes, reblogs, mentions, Tweets and Facebook posts. I want to reward all of you with more encounters with new stuff. I really do. Wishing all of us a productive New Year….

The Most Popular Parlando Project audio piece this past spring is…

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s something I’ve noted in the years I’ve been doing this: these quarterly Top 10 lists advantage pieces posted earlier in the season since they have more weeks to accumulate listens and likes. So it was quite an achievement for D. H. Lawrence’s “A Winter’s Tale”  posted near the end of February to make it to number 4 in our last-winter countdown, but it happens. After all, this time, “They Say Life is Precious”  released in the middle of May this year, made it to that 4th position in our spring’s list.

Still, past the earliest days after posting there’s a predictable drop off slope. Listens are “front-loaded” as people notice it as a new post or podcast, and after that it’s mainly the explorers and those who find things from a web search. I am gratified that many of you check out our archives and listen to the nearly 350 audio pieces we’ve already presented, but the sheer number of pieces means that the long-tail listenership tends to be spread between those hundreds of pieces, making repeat appearances in the Top Ten rare—but we have one this time, one all the way at the top.

And it’s that D. H. Lawrence piece, “A Winter’s Tale.”  I can see how: a large number of folks were still discovering and listening to it in March, and after the expected dip in April, more people actually listened to it in May than April. But I don’t really know the why.

D. H. Lawrence’s poetry* is not exactly forgotten, but he’s still better known as a novelist—but that could help if the interest in novelists is greater than that for poets.

Was it the music I wrote and played for it? My music for “A Winter’s Tale”  was rather explicitly ‘80s related, what with the piece’s arpeggiating synths and big reverbed drums. I do rather like what I accomplished there, both the recording and the ideas of the musical arrangement still sound good to me, and so perhaps they did to you. One memory I have of doing the piece was wanting to remember to make use of silence. I always need to remind myself to do that, and too often I don’t obey. Listening to Mark Hollis’ music as I wrote and arranged this piece may have made that reminder stronger this time.

Shakespeare-Hollils-Hendrix-Lawrence quadrent

OK, some of you guys must have helped make this spring’s Number One.

 

 

Was it the title? Shakespeare** seems to be a reliable boost to interest over the years (sort of like putting Jimi Hendrix on the cover of a guitarist magazine), and Lawrence’s title is shared with a Shakespeare play. Was it Lawrence or Shakespeare drawing those later listens, or the combined power of both?

Like I said, I don’t know why, but thanks for listening and reading this spring! There’s still a fair amount of In Real Life and studio re-organization putting pressure on the amount of new music I can put together, but I still hope to be dropping new audio pieces this summer and writing about my experience with the words.

So here it is, as we approach summer, the enigmatic story of D. H. Lawrence’s “A Winter’s Tale” that’s just a click on the player below away.

 

 

 

 

*I’ve called Carl Sandburg “The Forgotten Imagist.” His early poetry uses the Imagist rules, but despite the way he wrote, Sandburg as a person doesn’t “read” as an Imagist: an immigrant’s child who wasn’t seen in Paris and London, and who wrote often about the world of work and those who sought and were bound to it, he doesn’t seem the aesthete (even though he was, in part, that). D. H. Lawrence too doesn’t inevitably get called an Imagist, even though his verse shared some Imagist characteristics and he was published in the movement’s anthologies. Lawrence was never viewed as a theoretician or leader in Imagism, and socially he mixed with poets like Edward Thomas and Witter Bynner who were outside the movement. Is he too a forgotten Imagist, or just “Imagist-Adjacent?”

**One measure of Shakespeare’s strength to draw listeners is a piece I did taken from Shakespeare’s play “Twelfth Night”  which I still find embarrassing. After seeing what friend of the blog Weekesgaehl could do with her actual acting chops I figured I’d give it a go with a short scene from the play to frame a song found in it. The song turned out just OK, but my “acting” lead-in makes me cringe. Tragic fate and the draw of Shakespeare made sure a whole lot of people listened to that one—and continue to listen to that one—sustaining my embarrassment.

I mention Rupi Kaur in an attempt at getting more followers

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I refer to it less, but this ongoing Parlando Project actually causes me to spend more time with music—composing, playing, recording, and mixing it—than with the words. The words, of course, are mostly poetry, as condensed expression is so often found there mixed with musical devices in word form.

I’m not alone in thinking there’s a natural connection there. Perhaps that’s why you’re reading this, rather than a blog on cinema, graphic novels, or the interesting things I did last night. From what comments I get, the words, mostly poetry, are the larger draw and concern—or it may be that it’s easier to talk about words and their potential messages than it is about music.

But speaking now of America and the English-speaking musical world, what if it largely functioned in this manner…. Insert woozy musical cue here indicating we’ve moved away from our mundane current world into some speculative alternate reality as a new voice takes over this blog:

 

Music is a sublime art, which alas is much ignored and misunderstood by most people. Oh yes, there are occasional times when folks seem to pay some attention to what they think is music, but in fact it’s not really music they are listening to. For someone younger than I, it seems it’s always been so. How did this happen?

In my youth there were people who listened to a highly commercial aggregation of “musicians” who went under the name “The Beatles.” In their unsophisticated way The Beatles would bash away for a couple of minutes, never showing the development and dynamic range of actual music, and then they’d publish their “songs” on recordings that would be played on abysmal “record players” that were aptly named because they could only spin the vinyl record at something approximating the correct speed and could only transduce the rude noise to an even cruder racket. The Beatles, to be honest, weren’t the worst of those “pop musicians”—they were Stravinsky compared to some others in their field—clearly actual musical quality was beside the point.

Perhaps I shouldn’t object too much now to this commercial enterprise once undertaken by those naive or craven young men back in the 1960s, but what happened next was worse. Some actual musicians and musical critics started to give them big heads, and as a result, even worse crimes were committed. Throwing aside centuries of established artistic criteria, these commercial appeasers called what The Beatles and “pop musicians” were doing music. They would search for even a hint of actual compositional intent or accomplishment in these works, and praise them if they could pretend they found it.

Soon, The Beatles started to tack on elements used by actual musicians in their recordings. It was all transparently fake, and perhaps I should find it strange that even audiences ignorant of what real music is and can accomplish allowed it was art rather than pathetic pretense. And so, they presented recordings with string quartets, when none of them knew so much as which side of the bow to apply to the strings. They made fraudulent representations of actual music, using paid studio technicians who modified their feeble attempts at playing music so that they sounded profound to those “listeners” who didn’t know any better.

And now as I survey what could otherwise be our musical landscape and see young people who “listen” to what they “think” is “music” while playing their “video games”, dancing their interminable “dancing,” “streaming” it on their “phones” ( that they actually don’t use to make phone calls on), while “Tweeting” and “Instagraming” with tiny screen keyboards that make it hard to enclose every other word with quote-marks like an intelligent person.

I said I should be surprised. I take that back. In a world that has given us Donald Trump and Brexit and inconsistent intra-city train service, we cannot count on most people to have an authentic understanding of what they’re missing when they call such things music.

7-8th of Alban Berg is invisible

Now you know.

 

But let us, the intelligent critics who understand art and its important criteria, acknowledge the consequences of this commercial folly. Now we have people claiming to be musicians who do not play instruments, save perhaps for something called a synthesizer (a name like something from Aldous Huxley), a sequencer (gene therapy?), or drum machines (oh, such industrial nomenclature invades art in our year of Ford). They don’t know that 7/8ths of an Alban Berg is invisible, they can’t tell their krummhorn from their sackbut. When asked to defend this false and phony “art,” audiences say they “enjoy” it.

And while this pretense continues, actual musicians—people who create and perform complex compositions that take years of study to create, and nearly as many years of study to understand, are ignored.

Since when did enjoyment have anything to do with the sublime art of music?

 

Reprise that spooky musical cue that says we now return to our real world, and to Parlando – Where Music and Words Meet. Yes, our real world has musical snobs and exclusive musical passions, but in general, those haven’t harmed the ubiquity of music in our culture. Yes, musicians who produce music that challenges your expectations, usually have a harder time finding an audience, but a broad-based, vibrant musical culture has always allowed some of them to sneak in to a wider listenership, not prevented it. And musicians tend to be sensualists more than aesthetic puritans.

What can poets and literary critics learn from musicians?

 

 

(As to the title and occasion for this satire, an article has caused some discussion lately in poetry circles.)