I regularly read and take part in a daily poetry thread on X/Twitter. Its host, Joseph Fasano, posts a theme word and an example poem reflecting a topic most mornings, and other poetry readers respond with poems that relate to that. Early this week the theme was “Longing.”
One of the responding poems was this one:
The X/Twitter poster here happens to be a relative of mine, though I’m not sure which one
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This is an English translation of a poem by the ancient Greek poet Sappho rendered by famed Canadian poet and translator Anne Carson. If we didn’t know it was a translation, if we thought of it as a poem by a modern poet, here’s one thing we might notice on the photographed page: those short lines, those white spaces, those fenced-off blanks kept apart by square brackets. Looking at the text this way, the poem on the page has a striking effect. Its incompleteness — its, well, longing — is amplified in those spaces.
In Carson’s presentation that’s an inescapable part of Sappho’s work. We have only fragments of Sappho after all, only a handful of her poems are even comprehensively within sight of being complete. Some Sappho fragments are but single words, and many, a phrase or a few lines. And we know so little of the poems’ context. What details recorded about Sappho’s life date at best from centuries after she is thought to have lived, and are inconsistent. That she was a woman in a male dominated world, and lived in an outlying area away from the centers of classical Greek culture that we most know from later surviving works adds to the mystery. That the Greeks of the Athenian Golden Age, or the later Hellenistic Greeks, misread is some way the larger corpus of Sappho still available to them as they supplied us with Sappho quotes, commentary, and biography is plausible.
As readers of modern poetry, we likely assume when reading a Sappho poem that it’s a more-or-less authentic voice of someone describing a moment in her own life. I can’t say that as being a sure thing (any more than it is for, say, Shakespeare’s sonnets). But maybe that makes little difference, especially in the absence of well-attested facts — the words have the effect they have on us, based on our own lives, our own culture, our own time.
Carson’s translations are well-regarded, but she’s not the first to translate Sappho into English — she’s not even the first Canadian to do so. The first attempts there I know of, likely the first in fact as it’s by such an early Canadian poet, were by Bliss Carman.* In 1904 Carman published Sappho: 100 Lyrics. Unlike Carson, who is a scholar, I don’t know if Carman was all that knowledgeable in ancient Greek, and from what I can find he’s less open in sharing translator’s notes on his methods. The preface to his book, written by a friend, says only he more-or-less imagined the poems as complete and wrote then from that imagination.
From a scholars’ standpoint this is an outrageous act. On the other hand, there’s a current in poetry of writers finding something in assumed characters, some for anonymity, some for fraudulent reasons, some to burlesque writing styles they wish to make fun of. Carman’s life was not straightforward. There were a lot of bumps and setbacks in his career — all as one might imagine at a time where the idea of a Canadian literary poet was yet to be established. So, to take a vacation from all that to the isle of Lesbos and imagine Sappho strumming her lyre within his earshot? Maybe understandable.
Another green world. Here a chord sheet for today’s musical performance.
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Published in the era just before the outbreak of English-language Modernism, Carman’s version of Sappho found some readers. Ezra Pound apparently read them, and in his loose Chinese translations and elsewhere he seems to have adopted a no-hurt, no foul practice of translation as a personal recasting of the original work. Carman’s Sappho is sensual without overelaborate decoration or any “I’m so naughty” stance. I can imagine some of those Not-Yet-Modernists who kept a well-thumbed copy of Swinburne in their back pockets circa 1900 appreciating these poems. If the tropes in these love poems are often common ones, he’s portraying Sappho who would have predated those tropes becoming commonplace, and he’s asking us to believe our moments are repetitions with a long heritage.
Many modern readers of Sappho have adapted Sappho as a pioneering Lesbian poet. In the many centuries between Sappho’s 600 B.C. E. and the present there have been a variety of renderings of Sappho’s sexuality. The text, fragmentary as it is, often shows attraction and praise for women and female gods. If we assume Sappho herself is the voice in her poems (and why not, we know so little, and nothing for sure, and Occam’s razor) this would follow. In this poem of Carman’s Sappho, the lover and object of longing is certainly female. Bliss Carman was an apparently hetero male, but his poem’s assigned author is a woman. Parsing….
Those that object to drag-time story hour at the library will have a hard time with all that. If for only that alone, I’m going to give voice to this poem from Carman’s collection of imagined Sappho translations. You can hear my musical performance of “O But My Delicate Lover,” with the audio player below. Has the important fragment that includes an audio player disappeared for you? This highlighted link will open a real, not imaginary, tab with its own audio player.
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*Carman’s 1904 work may also be the first American translation of Sappho, as it predates the top hit in a web search that shows Mary Barnard’s 1958 volume as the first from the U.S.A. Coincidently, Ezra Pound is attributed as someone who encouraged Barnard to do her book of Sappho translations.
Carman studied in the U.S. and was distantly related to Ralph Waldo Emerson. His ancestors emigrated to Canada as Tories escaping after the U.S. Revolutionary War.
Given two-thirds of this anniversary, it’s not surprising that “I Dream I Am Falling” is about grief and remembrance. It is a departure from the Parlando Project’s focus in that this freshly completed song uses a poem I wrote rather than our regular use of others’ words.
I continue to write poetry, though less often as I’ve aged. I think sometimes about prize-winning poet Donald Hall revealing in old age that he’d given up writing poetry. I don’t recall if he knew why he stopped writing poetry, or if he revealed the reasons for stopping if he knew them. For myself, there are elements of regular life interfering, but throughout my life the writing of poetry was the easiest art to interleave with other busyness. I would compose stanzas in my head, trusting memory retention as a good test of their value until they could be transcribed. Or like William Carlos Williams, I might jot down first drafts on prescription pads in slow worknight moments in the Emergency Department of a hospital.
Remembering that, I think writing poetry is unlike musical composition and recording, which for me is constrained by my life’s current contexts. Looking back I recall that as a younger person I was eager to write down observations from life which seemed to me to be important and unique. Now, in my older age, when I see similar things they seem less unique, and my expression of them less apt, for I sense that life I was once observing has all along been watching me too — watching me as the hunter does.
Still, the reason I set the official launch of this Project on my late wife’s death anniversary was to counter that. Life, the actuary, knows something, but I can sing in the meantime. The reason I sing others’ words in my unkempt voice is that the writers here are already dead, and I can stick my thumb in death’s eye by making their words current. Given that death’s eye socket is empty, that there’s no sensitive eyeball there, this does not stop Death — but it feels good to do it anyway.
Partway into this Project’s course I started to include Hiroshima Day, the anniversary of the first use of atomic weapons, in my August 6th observances. Death of one’s specific partner has an intimacy that sears because it’s so personal, but it’s not unique nor fully shareable. The death of thousands in a way that still threatens us by the millions or more — well, shouldn’t we share that?
Let me take then a tiny digression to this presentation of today’s musical piece. This summer I’ve been watching a 10-hour multi-episode documentary on Netflix titled Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. I’m only about ¾ done with it, and maybe there’s something at the end that I should have waited to observe before writing about it, but I’ve found it so good I want to mention it today. For something of this length, its storytelling is compelling, and it often takes the sophisticated choice of leaping out of time’s lockstep to connect things. OK, it is 10 hours, but also roughly equivalent to a graduate-level course on the Cold War and atomic weapons strategy in the breadth of its concerns and detail.
This is an American Sonnet, following my longstanding practice of breaking up the 14 lines in different ways.
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Now, returning to the new song. I hope it speaks for itself. Many of you, my treasured audience, will have their own experience of grief to resonate with what it sings. I was able to compose and realize it without access to a studio space where I could use acoustic instruments and sensitive microphones. Only the vocal, through a less-sensitive microphone* recorded sounds vibrating in the air as I played the block chords appearing in the left-channel that established the song’s harmonic structure on my little plastic MIDI keyboard. You can hear “I Dream I Am Falling” with the graphical audio player below. No player seen? This highlighted link is an alternative.
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*ElectroVoice RE-20. Worth considering for anyone needing to record vocals in a space that is not acoustically proper for recording, where low-level unwanted sounds would otherwise end up on the recording. For my budget level, expensive, but it’s been an important tool for me. No, it’s not magic — louder sounds will still intrude — but the sensitive condenser microphones I use to record with acoustic guitar in my studio-space hear everything: HVAC sounds, louder computer fans, outside traffic, even sometimes footsteps on another floor of the building. In my converted bedroom home office where this was recorded, the studio-space condensers would be highly problematic.
Here’s another short poem by Sara Teasdale that I’ve done the Parlando Project thing to by making it into a song. As a young woman, Teasdale won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1918, but as the century continued her poetry lost some of its literary/academic esteem for not being written in the manner of High Modernism’s Hermetic allusions.*
Teasdale grew up in the same turn-of-the-century St. Louis Missouri as High Modernism’s Chief Mage T. S. Eliot, though I’ve never been able to establish that they ever met as young people. One plausible reason why not: both were educated in gender-segregated schools for the most part. And Teasdale’s early life was like late-life Emily Dickinson in its isolation, largely confined to a room in her family’s home due to some vaguely defined illness. As a young woman she was able to break away from that confinement, moving to New York City and engaging with other literary figures there during her heyday as a poet. Like her contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay, she married a non-literary man after romances with other poets, but Teasdale’s marriage was less successful.
Teasdale’s Pulitzer-honored collection was titled Love Songs, and that does describe her most common subject. Today’s poem, at least on face value, is one step removed from a personal experience love poem, posing itself as a poet-supplied maxim applicable to a disappointed-in-love younger woman.** I’d dispute that the poem’s advice is only useful for women — but then the specific in poetry often stands for the general. Here’s a link to the text of this short poem.
“This truth, this hard and precious stone, lay it on your hot cheek.” Photograph by Man Ray
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Like many of the poets I feature here, Teasdale’s Wikipedia page is brief and fragmentary — but one thing it does document: her work has been set to music often, and by a wide range of composers. Early in this project I mentioned that singer-songwriter Tom Rapp’s setting of a Teasdale poem was an early inspiration for me. One could make the case that it was us composers, more than literary academics, who maintained Teasdale’s art until it could be re-engaged with.
Part of me wishes I could’ve produced a more polished performance of Teasdale’s “Advice to a Girl,” but my current life often reduces the time I can spend on the musical pieces. I like the harmonic cadence in this song’s music, but I expressed that with just an expeditious strummed guitar part along with some acoustic bass accompaniment. Still, the idea’s there now, and an unexpressed idea easily fades and disappears. You can hear my performance with the audio player below. If you don’t see any audio player, there’s also this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*That I’d write “Hermetic” there indicates that my moods and mind are not opposed to that kind of poetry — but then I’m also not opposed to poetry that speaks of our ordinary and present human relationships, which in their complexities and footnotes exceed any grimoire’s or textbook’s breadth. Just as with music, I’m a poetry eclectic.
**This poem could easily be read as someone talking to and soothing the memory of their own younger self. Our youth may lord over us with its misapprehensions we cannot correct, and that time-separated self often benefits from our wiser selves speaking to them from later up the years.
Here’s another one of these posts that is going to jump around a bit, though I’ll keep it brief, and there’s a heartbreak poem set to music that I’ll end with.
I don’t post every time some figure influential to me dies. It should be apparent to long-time readers of this that that group of influences is wide, and therefore large. Still sometimes the spirit moves me. This week a midlist musical figure, John Mayall, died. He was 90 — so not a surprise to any actuaries in my audience — but his extraordinarily long musical career (he was still regularly touring up until the last few years) might have masked the imminence of that death.
I can’t quite figure how many of you will recognize his name, and of those that do, how many will see why I’d count him as an influence. I often worry, what with the variety of the musical settings I publish here for strangers to listen to, that someone listening to one, two, or three of the Parlando musical pieces will think that I’m fixed in some musical genre. “Oh, he does folk-song-like stuff with solo acoustic guitar.” “Some kind of rough garage rock thing, isn’t it?” “Do you know you sound like Bob Dylan?” “What’s with all those orchestral instruments — and was that a sitar?” “You know, that beatnik to poetry slam kind of spoken word over spare Jazz backing stuff.”
To my mind, my aim is to vary the music, just as it’s my intent to present different sources for the words. But what’s that got to do with John Mayall who was not generally filed in any of those genre bins. If you look for Mayall’s work, he’ll be filed under “Blues.”
Blues, that great Afro-American musical approach, is (while often imperceptibly) as close as a center as I can find in my music. The other day one of the household teenager’s friends arrived when I was in another part of the house practicing guitar over an entirely not-Blues chord progression I had ginned up. I stopped, wanting not to intrude sonically on their get-together. When I met up with the young visitor (who plays guitar themselves) I apologized for the racket, and they replied, “Blues is always cool.”
Odd, I thought. I certainly didn’t think of the idea I was working with was Blues, but then the things I was playing over it used embellishments that I learned from musicians who played within a recognizably Blues song and harmonic structure.
“[Blues] is about – and it’s always been about – that raw honesty with which the blues express our experiences in life, something which all comes together in this music, in the words as well. Something that is connected to us, common to our experiences. To be honest, though, I don’t think anyone really knows exactly what it is. I just can’t stop playing it.”
Read the whole interview in that link above if you want an overview of the man’s career and its variations on what you might think defines the Blues— but I admire Mayall regardless of genre borders, because his career exemplified something I call the Indie Spirit. He was a “get in the van” sustainable-costs touring musician when D. Boon was a fresh kindergarten graduate. Like Grant Hart, he did the graphic design for his band’s records from the very start. He played for small audiences in small venues through most of his career, and ballroom and converted movie theater venues were about as big a draw as he could muster at the height of his popularity. If that bothered him (it didn’t seem to) it didn’t stop him. He played his music without a thought to maximizing its commercial potential, a genial stubbornness that I admire. Furthermore, every band he put together over around 60 years of music-making had musicians that were better than he was, and he based his bandleading on letting them shine. Every obit tries to list those once bandmembers, but the list extends over the horizon because that group of boosted musicians, like the bandleader, included many individual talents that never became big stars while making fine music.*
A song not by John Mayall: “You look to me like misty roses…” The roses from a morning walk my wife took. The picture of Mayall is on a pillar overlooking where Dave Moore plays in my studio space.
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That went on longer than I expected, but here’s a piece I just finished, with words from the American poet Sara Teasdale. Teasdale is another writer from the first third of the 20th century whose poetry I can’t resist setting with music. Much of Teasdale’s poetry is short and compressed like today’s selection “Dooryard Roses.” And much of it expresses heartbreak, as this poem does. But like the Blues, it tries to be honest and straightforward about it, and to sing it so we can say back to the singer “Yeah, I’ve been there too. Is that what you figured about it? Well, we’re both still here, so sing it some more!”
The music I composed for this piece, is it Blues? Maybe I don’t know, but I don’t think it is. I just can’t stop playing it. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? This highlighted link is your alternative then.
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*A personal factor in my connection to John Mayall’s music: alternative voice and frequent keyboard player in this Project, Dave Moore, is the person who introduced me to Mayall’s records. In those 20th century days when one might fruitfully evaluate a person by their record collection contents, Dave didn’t need any help there — I’d already heard his poetry — but he’s why I came to hear and follow Mayall’s music.
Summer has event dates for me. Wedding anniversary for my living wife, death anniversary for my dead wife. In between, my birthday. A birthday has the same date on the calendar, but they change over the years in their nature. I can still recall the birthdays for singular digit ages, those massive markers toward becoming, achieving oneself. And then there are the rights-granting ages, 18 and 21; or certain decade mileposts, 30 and 50.
Now aged, the age number becomes hazy, defining less. A fair number of people who’d be my age aren’t, due to death. Most of my cohort have some collection of Marley’s Ghost chronic conditions, mild to significant. This is, after all, the portion of life that takes away things, slowly or all-at-once.
But it’s important to add to this calculation, life adds each day too. I’m celebrating my birthday today with my wife and a couple of friends. We’ll meet at an art museum’s restaurant. Everyone and I have not stopped breathing.
I celebrated my actual birthday by getting an ultrasound study of my aorta. My doctor suggested it since I had smoked in my twenties, and there’s some increased risk that this major artery can later swell and be at risk for a rupture, something that is in that all-at-once class of ageing events. Weird going through a test like the one when I first saw the shadow of my child, to know if I have a shadow of death inside me.*
To a degree not equaling my enjoyment of life right now with my little family and this Project, with still being able to hop on a bicycle and ride, with the ability to meet an instrument and come to an agreement on some music, I do have a sense of shadows. Multiple family members, all younger than me, have had some mild to more significant cognitive issues diagnosed this past year. Slowly or all-at-once — that’s birthdays, that’s aging. I’m enjoying the days slowly.
“Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead,/Sleeping away the unreturning time.” Go ahead Vincent, it’s OK to take a nap. It what you get done when you wake up that counts.
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Today’s musical piece is my setting of a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay. You can read the text of her poem here if you’d like at this link, and listen to my performance with the audio player below. I had a half-a-dozen beginnings/basic tracks of Parlando musical pieces sitting on my hard drive, and I selected this one mostly out of how near to being finished it seemed. Then as I set down to write today’s post — asking myself what I was thinking — I realized the poem expressed elements of my life this summer.
I remember when I presented my first Millay sonnet for this Project, years ago. I knocked her then for using too much archaic language and sentence order, an affliction her contemporary Modernists were seeking a cure for. “Rejoicing Veins” is from later in Millay’s career, and by then the language in this one shows little of that fault. This is another poem that seems to me to speak accurately about old age, yet this was written by a 40-year-old poet. Vinny, that doesn’t seem so old to me, but you got it right!
There’s that graphical audio player now, or if you don’t see it, this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
The great American poet Emily Dickinson writes about death a lot, so maybe I should pause for a moment to mention how inescapable the living’s experience of death was in her time and place, what with disease, injury, a deadly Civil War, graveyards within the city limits, and approaching death happening often at home.
Because I lived across the street from death? When a child, Emily Dickinson’s family did not live in the Dickinson Homestead (now the Dickinson Museum), but at another house, located across the road from the town cemetery where she would later be buried. A child is born, plays, grows up, and crosses the fence.
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The poem I’ll sing below today speaks to that. If you’d like to follow along, here’s a link to the text of “As far from pity, as complaint.” This poem is more than its message —most good poems are — but let me write down here a sentence to summarize what I read this poem as saying: rather than pity, dread, or anger toward death, a result we cannot change, we should emulate the dead themselves who demonstrate that life is not everlasting — but the predicament of dying, and the predicament of living, are everlasting.
That’s a worthwhile thought, and poems in Dickinson’s time and place were often expected to deliver a lesson. But why is this a poem, why is this an Emily Dickinson poem? An essay, a sermon, a sympathy card, a letter, a conversation all could deliver this message as well or better as 12 lines not even pentameter-long and broken with the skeleton spaces of the pervasive Dickinson dashes (as if her “trade was bone.”)
Because it sings this situation, even silently on the page. There’s a dancer’s force, a singer’s force, an instrument’s augmented force in this way of telling. If death is inevitable — as is also meter, repetition, rhyme, the flow of sound into shapes — might we be comforted by these shapes? We live. We die. The shape of life continues. Quod Erat Demonstrandum, thus it is demonstrated.
When encountering this poem earlier this summer I sensed an intra-poem image-rhyme in this poems 7th and 8th lines. A better-known Dickinson poem which attracts us with what seems like mundane charm, “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose,*” has summer children playing from dawn — and at the end, disappearing over the horizon’s fence-line at sunset. That’s the continuing shape of our lives.
You can hear my musical performance of “As far from pity, as complaint” with the audio player below. If your way of reading this blog is numb to that revelation, don’t complain, I offer this highlighted link as a way to open a new tab that will have its own audio player so you can hear it.
Today’s piece is a fairly well-known poem by the Spanish poet. Given that I’ve played guitar nearly for 50 years and been interested in poetry for more than that, I keep thinking I must have run into it before this year. If that’s so, why don’t I recall considering it?
My answer is going to sound more judgmental than I mean it: bad translations. No, maybe I shouldn’t use “bad” here. I don’t suspect any moral failing or lack of effort by translators of this poem. And given that I’m not all that knowledgeable about the work of Lorca and have only the most limited grasp of his native language, I should have no standing to rate other published translations of “La Guitarra.” What I do know is that native speakers find his poetry passionate and vivid, and the English versions seem to my ears and heart (those being the entry points for poetry) stilted and muffled.
I’m not going to link any of the English translations I found of “The Guitar.” None I’ve seen seem fully effective to me, though I cannot say that they might be effective for others. I’m not going to link or line-by-line dis the translations I’ve seen. I will say that the first one I saw at one of the leading poets and poetry organization’s site was representative. I didn’t find it musically compelling, and it was a jumble of abstracted images that had little sock, little immediate feeling evoked. I assume the translator had the advantages I must clearly concede I don’t have. Why might their work not succeed, at least to this reader?
Two theories. Other translators may have been too literal in carrying over Lorca’s original sentence structure, which might be natural and unaffected in his Spanish. This is poetry, so one can make a case that how it’s said is essential — but when languages order words differently, following the original sentence structure and word order too exactly damages the natural vividness of a person speaking. Secondly, Lorca to my slight knowledge connects to Surrealist expression, a style of poetry I loved as a young man and still like to connect with today. Surrealism likes the wild and incongruous image; and from its ancestor Dada, it’s often willing to take an image in a random, raw and undercooked state. This creates a problem for me when I translate Surrealist and Dada work.
You see, I view my task as a translator to primarily find the images in the work and to then portray those images in clear modern English, and secondarily give the poem a word-music in the new language that gives pleasing movement and return to the poem. What if the original intent was to mystify the reader, to present an image that was intentionally confounding? I risk, while puzzling out the text in a language I don’t know well, to over-simplify or over-determine an image. I fear embarrassment of doing that, but I think it’s the better risk because vivid images that the reader/listener grasps and gasps are compelling to me.
As to the word-music, my version of “The Guitar” rephrased Lorca somewhat, aiming to make him sound like an English speaker. While doing that I tried to make the poem musical in English. The poem was already using repetition for poetic effect in Spanish, and I added just a touch more.
As you might imagine, this poem about the expression of a musical instrument has been set to music before my attempt you can hear today. While not a Lorca expert I know that he connected too with Spanish Deep Song and the evocation in that tradition of “Duende,” a difficult to translate term that some Afro-American musicians have seen as analogous to the Blues. I played a nylon string guitar for my setting, the type of guitar associated with Spain, and the simple chord progression I used would not be foreign to that tradition. But both from my skill level and inclination what I played for this song was simple and sparsely ornamented. Though the harmony wasn’t Blues, I approached playing this as if it was American Blues. Another Blues element I introduced that wasn’t in Lorca’s poem: my version has a gendered call and response. The guitar is a her, the singer (there’s no singer in Lorca’s poem) is a he.
I think there’s a misapprehension of Carl Sandburg’s poetry: that it’s simple, prosy work: that it says what it says, hearty single-minded messages with some decorative metaphor. Tastes differ, and mine may not be a guide to anyone else, but I sometimes don’t find him so. As I continue trying different things during the summer with this multipart personal story, I’ll return to our regular stuff at the end today with an example of Sandburg mysterioso.
The finale of my June trip to Iowa City to see what I could find out about an even more under-considered Midwestern 20th century poet, Edwin Ford Piper, was planned to be a visit to Galesburg Illinois, a small city just east across the Mississippi river where Sandburg was born. Piper and Sandburg compare easily. Both born in the American Midwest a couple of decades after the Civil War, both part of early 20th Century literary movements we no longer take as much notice of. Both were attracted to a broad swath of memorized vernacular music that would be called “Folk Music.” They knew each other, even shared stage programs. Sandburg’s 1927 music collection The American Songbag established what American folk music would be for my mid-century generation,* and from examining Piper’s papers I could see his definition paralleled Sandburg’s. Piper was one of the contributors to American Songbag.**
Poet Sandburg blurbing poet Edwin Ford Piper. I also saw a note from Sandburg thanking Piper for songs used in Songbag, but don’t have a picture of that.
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We arrived at Galesburg early for the 1 P.M.-opening of the Sandburg birthplace site. We wandered the wondering-what-it’ll-become-in-the-21st-century business district with its building facades still showing a variety of past decades abandoned styles left to fade, and browsed a charming small bookstore there. We were going to have an early lunch somewhere, and decided to just get sandwiches and go eat them in the small area behind the birthplace on benches by the Remembrance Rock there.
The rock is an unremarkable bolder, utterly plain and unshaped as a design choice.*** Sandburg and his beloved wife and partner’s ashes are buried under it. The lawn it sits on behind the house is circled by bushes and a few trees, and rather than any sense of a park, it reminded me of the backyard of the house where I grew up in Iowa. One thing the photos I have seen of the rock didn’t show: a ring of irregular, small, flat, stones that circle it, each engraved with a line from a Sandburg poem. If one wished, one could ceremoniously walk from flat grounded rock to rock stepping with your foot-soles on his words, which it seemed to me to be what one of Sandburg’s models Whitman has commanded — and so I did. There’s a nice bust of Sandburg on a stand there too, but to my sense of the place, walking his words was more meaningful. I’d told my wife that Sandburg’s father was a railroad blacksmith, and she figured that the neighborhood might have been handy for rail workers. After our lunch, she took a little stroll while I waited, and she came back to report that just over a rise a block away was the railroad line.
…but then all the birds know is to poop on poetry-engraved rocks, same as any other.
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One of the site’s staff members arrived ahead of opening time to do a little yard work, and when that time arrived, he changed tasks to welcoming and serving as a guide for about 30 older folks in an adult learning program who arrived from Peoria in two small busses. Beside the birthplace (our host preferred to not call it a house, but a railroad worker’s hut) there was another small, somewhat rundown house next door that served as the site’s offices and a small room of memorabilia backed with an illustrated wall timeline of Sandburg’s life. Behind the two houses was a garage that has been turned into a cozy theater space where they host musical acts in homage to that part of Sandburg’s heritage.
My wife and I plus the 30 others overwhelmed the birthplace site’s capacity. Resourcefully the staff divided the group into two, and after watching a short video on Sandburg our half got to walk through the birthplace hut or house. If you are familiar with the modern tiny house movement, the floorplan and the maximal utilization of it would strike a resonance. Outhouse, no plumbing or running water, it’s decorated in late 19th century Swedish immigrant homey style, but a couple, a young child, and a baby would have been a tight fit, much less our troop of visitors. I recall visiting a reconstructed Lincoln birthplace cabin as a child, and though the Sandburg birthplace is wood-frame construction, not a log cabin, the square footage and amenities might have struck Lincoln biographer Sandburg as similar.
Sandburg’s birthplace: house, hut, cabin. This side shows the smallness best I think.
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Perhaps because of the touring group’s visit, there was a special performance by a singer-guitarist whose name I didn’t catch, who did a short re-creation of Sandburg singing and talking about his life. I enjoyed that effort. Before leaving, I asked one of the leaders of the visiting group, an old professor, who had some years on your old guy reporter here, what Sandburg biography he’d recommend. He cited Penelope Niven’s bio, and I bought it at the site’s store.
No one hides the fact Carl Sandburg might not have much direct memory of the birthplace as his family moved to another Galesburg house while he was only a toddler**** But the link to his parents and the choice of it for a burial place (which was I believe his doing) speaks to the meaning to him. Unlike the larger house and goat farm where Sandburg spent his post-WWII life until he died that is a National Parks Service site, the birthplace is run by the State of Illinois and some local spirit and volunteerism. Sandburg retained throughout his life a fondness for Galesburg, never hid his roots there, and Galesburg was also the place where he attended college after his stint in the Army, though he never completed a degree.
Which brings me to today’s new musical piece, a setting of a Sandburg poem about someone who apparently left town wiping the dust off their shoes at the city limits. In his collections Sandburg called the poem “Gone,” but the main character’s name sticks in some memories, so it also gets called by the first line, or by the character’s name that appears in that line: “Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town.” Here’s a link to the text of the poem.
I promised mystery in this one. There are things left out, and various implications some of which complicate, some of which conflict, are left open. Can we even take that opening statement at face value? Not now, certainly not in 1916 could it be said that we all love “a wild girl” with a dream “she wants.” Some might, many would not. Wildness and dream-holding create envy, often a lot of it.
Is Chick Lorimer someone that everyone in town has marked as special, marked for greater things — someone so preeminent in their youth where that envy would be tamped down? If so, why the sudden leaving, with no one knowing where or why? Does a recognized prodigy, much loved, leave a place without saying goodbye? That would be a rare story.
Perhaps the “everyone” is a casual overstatement, referring only to a small group of friends who shared ideas? Later the poem seems to refer to larger numbers however.
Is she not actually loved by much of the town, and “loved” in a narrow, sexual, sense by many men? The “Dancer, singer, and laughing passionate lover” line could give testimony to that thought. That line is followed by two specific but puzzling lines, and their very specificity says we should pay attention to them. “Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick?” “Hunting” is a word choice, though we do say we hunt for the lost all the time without thinking of hunting as in wild game. Why the specific range, “ten or a hundred?” If this noteworthy young person is gone, no other info, that’s a missing person. Have they come to harm, are they being hunted for something they’re suspected of doing wrong? Why can’t they say, between 10 and 100 for the number of hunters? This hunt seems secretive from that wide range: 10 might be a small matter, 100 a greater one — but even 100 would be small if this is a universally beloved light of a town, unless it’s a very small town. It seems significant that the poem’s speaker can’t give a better estimate. And that’s followed by another stat: “five men or fifty with aching hearts.” The numbers are still widely separated, but they’re also halved from the number of hunters.
To perform this, I felt I had to have some plot in mind as I sang it. In my mind, Chick is a free-spirited libertine, and to a large degree that “loved” means no-strings sex. Chick likely left because she wanted something more, or because the disapproval of her “loving” everybody was getting intolerable. The maybe just five “aching heart” men thought they were, or could be, her significant partner.*****
How bohemian was poet Sandburg’s experience early in the 20th century? When he first moved to Chicago he lived in what was in effect a free-thinkers commune run by a strange guy, Parker Sercombe. From my reading, “Free Love” was just as much a topic in bohemian culture in the early 1900s as it was in the 1960s.
But maybe I’m wrong, and maybe your reading is different. It could be that Chick is like “Chuck” Sandburg (the name he used then) wanting to see the world, wanting to follow their dream. Sandburg had bicycled around Illinois, rode trains legally and illegally to other parts of the US, and he’d already been to Puerto Rico in the Army by the time he wrote this. Chick could be his anima. Sandburg never felt entirely alienated from his hometown or family however. He came back through town, wrote letters to his family, and so on. And if you want to see his beginnings and his decided final place to remember him, one goes to Galesburg.
To hear my performance of “Gone” AKA “Chick Lorimer” you can use the audio player below. Do you feel nobody knows where the audio player has gone? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*If you never cared about the post WWII folk revival for whatever reason, I will point out that Rock’n’Roll became self-aware artistic and literary-flavored “Rock Music” in the later 60s because folk revival musicians transferred their backgrounds into bands with electric instruments after The Beatles, electric Blues bands, and “Dylan goes electric” emerged to take over college and post-graduate audiences in the US. Over in the UK, the folk revival to Rock pipeline was supplied by “Skiffle” — an American jug-band folk revival style that swept UK youth in the 50s, merging with a peculiar British Trad Jazz revival that often featured the Blues element of pre-WWII Jazz.
**Piper’s wife, in her own papers collection at the University of Iowa library, claims that Piper’s contributions were greater than Sandburg credits in Songbag. Possible, I suppose, though the nature of Piper’s song collecting revealed by my examination of his papers shows a collaborative effort with collectors sharing with each other freely. Piper’s unpublished collection, like Sandburg’s published one, wasn’t done with a sense of ownership of songs.
****The family didn’t get sudden wealth, it supplemented the railroad wages by renting out rooms in the succeeding houses, and the children worked to add to the family income as they grew older.
*****For a fuller story fleshed out from the short poem’s details, there’s this 50 minute early 1960s TV episode from the Route 66 series which uses the poem idea as its central motif and title, with the leading man reciting Sandburg’s poem 2/3 of the way in. This linked version has hokey colorization of the series fine B&W photography, but it is easily viewable.
Today is Juneteenth, a holiday coming into greater recognition as a celebration of the ending of America’s race-based chattel slavery. Why this date? I repeatedly warned you that I can’t tell a story simply and briefly, but for this holiday I have an excuse.
Slavery began in the American British colonies somewhat haphazardly, but by the time we became an independent country we had lots of laws, customs, and beliefs to entrench it. As it often is with the mechanics of oppression, the structures to hold it up took work to maintain, and by the 1850s there was great worry between slaveholders that it would collapse. In the 1860 election, Lincoln won, and even though he’d stated a politician’s compromise middle ground on the slavery issue, his party included enough abolitionists that most powerful slave-holders were ready to press their states to rebel and set up their own government. Civil war ensued.
Which didn’t free the slaves — at least not yet.
Of course the enslaved had been freeing themselves, when they could, all along. Armed rebellions hadn’t worked for more than moments, but the brave, lucky, and skilled might successfully flee at least from the slave-holding states if not to Canada where US law couldn’t touch them.* But it wasn’t easy traveling all that far.
Once the war started in 1861, some enslaved people recognized they could try a shorter route: just make it to the Union troop’s camps, and a good many did just that, which created an awkward situation. You see: nothing had ended slavery’s legal framework, Lincoln still maintained he wasn’t doing that (if only because a few slave-holding states and slaveholders remained on the Union side). He just wanted to put down the rebellion.** Law still said the slaves were property.
Someone on the Union side came up with a peculiar idea. If the enslaved were legally property, they could be confiscated during wartime like a cannon, horse, ship or other enemy property could be. Dehumanizing language? Sure, but escaping past the Union lines meant an increasing chance that they wouldn’t be taken back.
Eventually, Lincoln supersized that freedom, by declaring that all the enslaved in the states in rebellion were free. This, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued at the beginning of 1863. American slaves elsewhere? Nope, not in the Proclamation. Slave owners in places under Confederate rebel control? Not gonna listen to Lincoln’s order. In April of 1865 Robert E. Lee surrendered the bulk of Confederate troops, but that still didn’t mean all enslaved were free, and the legal matter wasn’t consolidated until December of that year with the adaptation of the 13th Amendment.
A couple chapters back I talked about how slow by modern standards communication could be in the mid-19th and early 20th century. Well, it was slower yet when not everyone was on-board with the news. Juneteenth, with an absurdity that is so often a part of America’s racial history, celebrates when Union troops got over to Texas in June of 1865 to announce that the war had been over for over a month and the enslaved in Confederate Texas were no longer legally slaves.
When I left off I was (more or less) talking about folk songs and the songs collected in the American Midwest before WWI by poet Edwin Ford Piper. I’ve also already mentioned that folk songs aren’t unchanging, and aren’t pure. While going through the yellowing paper in Piper’s archives, I came upon this song, handwritten in his own handwriting. He has the title as “The Little Octoroon.” Things aren’t going to get simple here readers. I can’t be simple.
The song as Edwin Ford Piper heard it from his mother
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Octoroon is a largely obsolete word, derived from a lot of rigmarole regarding how Black someone was. It means 1/8th (octo=8) Afro-American. In general, the mumbo-jumbo legal biochemistry in American history regularly said it didn’t make much difference. Half, quarter, sixteenth — hell, for those who had trouble with fractions it was sometimes written down as: 1% Black, you’re legally Black.
An octoroon may not look Black. I can still recall when I was 14 or so, and having grown up in a tiny rural Iowa town. An Afro-American man who was a civil-rights activist was to visit my church camp. He arrives. Wait — that man’s Black? I remember in my naivete looking at his summer hands and forearms. The man had freckles people!
So why does this song, which is clearly a song from the Union and Abolitionist side make some point about the child being an octoroon? This will get weird: it was possible to be an abolitionist and a white supremacist thinking Afro-American’s inferior. Yes, you could be smart and ignorant at the same time! If you’re trying to end chattel slavery, and you’re counting votes or troops, you might not care to make a sticking point about this, ugly as it is. Those with pseudo-scientific beliefs such as an octoroon is “nearly a white person” might have stirrings of respect. (Ugh!) And then at the unconscious, illogical level, there’s the factor of that person looking much like me, so maybe they should have rights like me. Even if it’s a song (something with no visual element) those factors may have entered into its composition.***
While there are no notes I saw in the archive that Piper knew this, this song does have a composer: George F. Root. Root didn’t quite reach Stephen Foster or Dan Emmett level of 19th century American songwriter fame, but he had his “hits” such as they were in the pre-recording era. During the Civil War period and based out of Chicago, he specialized in songs for the Union side.
The sheet music from George F. Root’s music publishing firm. When Piper remembers his mother singing this tune, it would have been only 10-years-old.
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Did Piper’s mother learn this from someone else? Was there sheet music in a piano bench for this, unknown to the 5-year-old Piper? In the quiet library archive, I visualized two white people, a mother and child, in rural frontier Nebraska sharing this song. The differences in the printed song from the one Piper wrote down from his mother’s singing say this isn’t likely a handwritten copy from sheet music.****
Here’s my conclusion, which I hope I’ve demonstrated even though I’ve trimmed parts of this piece back: Juneteenth is the most complicated American legal holiday. The only simple thing about the holiday is that it stands for freedom and the lifting of oppression. Taken at its whole, though messy and with calculated delay, that makes it a favorite of a person like me, who still cries and wonders at how simple truths and rights take so long to be established. The song I’m performing today, its path and turning into a folk song, isn’t that complicated — but yes, the path of American freedom is.
You can hear my performance of Root’s “The Little Octoroon” with the audio player below. No player? This highlighted link is an alternate.
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*In 1850 a Fugitive Slave Act was passed that required northern state governments, not just the federal government to return enslaved people who reached northern states. Some cities and states wouldn’t comply (there’s this Minnesota case for one example).
Piper’s mother was in Canada near the US border in this era. It’s possible that fugitive slaves might have crossed over into her region. I also note that Piper says she was singing it in 1876, perhaps because that’s the border of Edwin Ford Piper’s memory, but I read the date and think about it being the year Reconstruction largely ended and new de-jure laws and customs greatly restricted Afro-American citizenship.
**No, Nicki Haley, slavery was the cause of the Civil War, even though many liked to parse Lincoln’s compromise and coalition statements of this time to make it sound like it wasn’t. The flaw in that framing? Lincoln didn’t start the war, the South did, and they were explicit in proclaiming why they did it.
***There’s another song using this terminology that this Project has already presented: Longfellow’s scathing pre-Civil War poem “The Quadroon Girl.”In Longfellow’s poem the situation leading to that poem’s mixed-race child is laid out: feudal concubinage and/or rape by slaveholders. For making a speech implying the same, Longfellow’s friend, US Senator Charles Sumner was beaten to within an inch of his life on the floor of congress.
****The biggest difference: the printed song’s title calls out the chorus — it’s officially “Glory, Glory, The Little Octoroon.” I only sang the martial chorus twice in my performance because I was more drawn to the bravery and sacrifice told in the verses. We have two holidays that say soldiers made us free, but it’s not only soldiers.
I followed Piper’s transcription for the words, not the printed lyrics, honoring the chain of transmission to me rather than accuracy. I also modified Root’s tune and chords to suit my tastes and tendencies. I could not help but think of these things as I sang this: first, the mother, her family heritage caught in that sexual exploitation making the choice to stay and face the slave hunters and their dogs to assure her child’s escape. We never find out if she and the daughter will be reunited, or even if she survives. Then next I think of those pursuers who to the degree they are portrayed in the song would be gaslight villains — but in history they would be real people doing great evil, who could be thinking they were serving justice. And then lastly, the final-verse gunner who cares for the child, though he’s more the Horatio of the story, with the mother being the tragic hero. I ask you not to skip over the villain characters. It’s fine if you empathize with the gunner, but some great dangers in one’s life (and often to other lives) are those middle souls, like the slavecatcher pursuers, who have a system that tells them they are arduously, justly, doing right.
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.
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.”
Frank Hudson 