song

A fantasy wherein death and death predicted is balanced: “Her Strong Enchantments Failing”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Today’s piece in our Halloween Series is clearly fantasy. What value has fantasy?

Well, it’s often fun; it exercises the imagination by giving it an unlimited field. This potential has a natural limit however — humans are uncomfortable with the unlimited. We are animals quite tied to limits, to the actual, the particular. Even fantasy not intended as allegory must reference those things inside the everyday limits of our world, of our time. The SF of the past is often quaint with those make-dos, specifics that seem anachronistic to the stories unknown time. Watching a Sixties Star Trek TV show we see the family on the Enterprise bridge, the patriarch in an easy chair, the subsidiaries at kid’s-height tables, mom at the Radar Range — and all are watching one screen in front of them. Their haircuts are all in style for our now past mid-century. The warfare tactics: broadsides and boarding parties, already obsolete when freshly filmed. Watching it now, the other side — our present-day watcher’s side of the screen — we are farther into the future than these characters are.

I don’t believe poet A. E. Housman retains the readership in the U.S. that he retains in Britain. His best-known poetry collection A Shropshire Lad  is as series of poems considering rural adolescence and youth in the 19th century. UK readers might likely find that place in cultural memory more easily than Americans — but Houseman was not just local color. He was a classical translator and scholar of achievement. He knew how to put classical restraint, objectivity, and concision to work in poetry, like in this fantasy poem I set to music a few years ago, and will present today: “Her Strong Enchantments Failing.”

Her Strong Enchantments Failing

I like to include these chord sheets here from time to time. It’s my hope that better singers will improve on my own performances. Lot of suspended chords here, as this song’s moment is suspended.

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The poem is set in a timeless place, though time still has days and death. There’s magic and spells there, laid out in a sharply chiseled first verse. I love the cinematic zoom from falling castle towers, to empty potions, to a knife at the titular her’s neck. And as page-poetry it’s eminently singable; and for a performer, the compelling force of the storytelling is what every singer would want in a lyric.

The situation violently balanced in the final two verses may just be plot for the author. The Queen’s slayer is about to process his knife’s edge. The queen, who’s emptied her spells and potions knows that they will work in magical or biochemical time by the next day. I have no idea if Houseman had any intended allegory to a situation here, something that might have been clear and present to his contemporary readers. When I performed this in 2020, it was then a fine fantasy poem, so well-drawn and easy to sing. Today, I can look at this autumn’s news and find easy parallels to current events.

You can hear my performance of A. E. Housman’s “Her Strong Enchantments Failing”  with the audio player gadget below. Can’t see a player? Not a spell, just the limits of some ways to read this blog. Here’s a backup highlighted link that will open its own audio player.

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Exit the were-fox, chased by the land-holding patriarchy, “Reynardine"

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Did T. S. Eliot for Halloween* suffocate our audience with too much of the musty air of the classroom? I hoped those loud synth fanfares would set such terrors to run. Maybe not. Well, I’m ready to tempt you back with a bit of love and seduction, a song set away from graveyards and into castles. Our Halloween series continues, and this time with 100% wooden music I played on an acoustic guitar.

So, ladies in nightclothes flaunting impossibly flowing but still in good array hair, running through the forest under a moon over the branches kind of stuff? Maybe. First some literary history. Don’t worry, I won’t take long with that, and there’s a good creature-feature song at the end.

We started our Halloween series with Frost and Eliot, poets that many will know even if poetry isn’t an interest. Today’s piece uses words from a well-known name that when applied to a poet isn’t well-known: Belfast writer Joseph Campbell is that name. Yes, every cursèd time I mention his name here I’m required to say “No, not the Power of Myth guy.” Poet Campbell was a contemporary of Yeats. And like Yeats he visited London when F. S. Flint, T. E. Hulme, and the “What’s with the initials guys?” Yank-transplant Ezra Pound were taking up their make-it-new idea to be called Imagism. Several years before Pound and Flint published their famous essay on the tenants of Imagism, Campbell published some of the earliest Imagist poems.

Campbell’s relationship with Yeats is complex. They both were heavily into valorizing Irish culture. Campbell was even more so into Ireland throwing off its exploitative English colonial status. Both seemed to have an interest in the faerie and spirit realms, though Yeats had an interest in practicing wizardry, while Campbell, AFAIK, didn’t. Both had interest in music, but Yeats was specifically resistant to having his poems sung conventionally, while what of Campbell’s work survives (underrecognized) is as a lyricist** for songs better-known than he is.

As a song, today’s piece, “Reynardine,”  became oft-performed in the British 20th century folk revival. When those performers would present it, they would introduce it as an old song — which is true in part. Its melody is largely based on an old air. The name of its main character, and something in the general trope of “I’m in love with a mysterious bad boy” did have old ballad antecedents. But those revivalist performers would usually want their audiences to know that the main character, the haunting love interest the singer knows but society doesn’t, is a shape-shifter, a were-fox.

Campbell’s words as printed in “The Mountainy Singer” are better, more direct, than the lyrics usually used for performing this song. I made one change: Campbell has “took me for his leman” in his, and I translated this to “lover” for clarity.

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As I discussed briefly when I first presented this one a couple of years ago: that doesn’t seem to be so in the extant pre-20th century versions of this song. In 1909, our “Reynardine,”  now a were-fox eluding the patriarchy and foxhound driving hunters, was published in two books: as a collected Irish folk song from Belfast, and as a page poem in Campbell’s poetry collection The Mountainy Singer.  This idea of the song’s dark hero emerged that recently, and I have every reason to believe it was the little remembered Joseph Campbell who cast him that way.

I did my best with my performance of this one, thinking I was emulating those folk revivalists whose work I greatly admire. The one special thing I did was use Campbell’s set of words as printed in his poetry collection. With one small alteration, I think they work well to sing to modern audiences, and his version has the compression and specific mystery that can make Imagist poems and short lyrical songs compelling when contrasted with lengthy poems and discursive sung ballads. Audio player to hear the performance below. No player? This highlighted link will open a tab with a player.

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*Unlike the other pieces I’ll present in this series, my settings of Eliot are not listener favorites. I watch the stats here while not spending much time trying to maximize them. Eliot draws some interest outside the U.S., and very, very little from here in the States.

I also want to say that I want to celebrate Halloween this year (more about why later in this series) and I want to do it as Emily Dickinson once wrote she did in approaching some topics in her poetry “I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.” But writing as Eliot did of his unreal city of corpses that can’t be hidden, and casting it as a song of fantasy, vision, or delusion, can be offensive in a time where real corpses are piling up not from natural death, but from human intention.

If I offend you, you likely aren’t reading this far. I assure you I offend myself in doing so. “You! hypocrite lecteur! — mon semblable, — mon frère!” “You! Hypocrite reader! — my fellow, — my brother!” quoted Eliot, quoting Baudelaire, quote I.

**Even as the composer part of most of the Parlando Project, I want to say that a pet peeve of mine is folks crediting a song solely to the music composer. I hear this all the time with contemporary songs, particularly when the melodist has sung the piece: Brian Wilson, Carole King, Elton John, and so on. Besides his unacknowledged work in recasting “Reynardine,”  Campbell is the lyricist for “The Garten Mother’s Lullaby”  and “My Lagan Love.”

Our Halloween Series begins with “Stones Under the Low-Limbed Tree”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

What’s coming up? Halloween! And I’ve decided to dedicate the rest of this month to accelerated posting of some of the Parlando Project’s favorite pieces of fright, fantasy, and the uncanny. There will be ghosts a-plenty, curses, creatures, spells, and graveyards. The Project has done over 700 combinations of various words (mostly literary poetry) and original music over the past 7 years or so. The poetry is of different styles and eras, and the music differs to, at least as much as I can make it do so.

Here to kick things off is a poem by one of America’s favorite poets, Robert Frost, that I adapted and recast in making it into a song. Can Frost do eerie clothed in nature’s homespun? I think so. Frost called his poem “Ghost House.”   I revised it enough that I decided to use a different title when I presented it in 2020 as “Stones Under the Low-Limbed Tree.”

If you compare my lyric to the original poem hyperlinked above, you can see I refrained things more than Frost did in his page poem

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You can hear the resulting song with the audio player below. No player to be seen?  This highlighted link is an alternate way to hear it. It’ll open a new tab with its own audio player.

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The Poet’s Afterthought

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Does any poet know if their work is any good? Some perhaps have that conviction, but at least during substantial moments I think the majority of poets have doubts. This drives some poets to ever tinker with and improve their writing, and causes others to abandon the idea of poetic writing as a useless pretention. Some even numb themselves to the question — yet anything that numbs doubts can overshoot and numb creativity too.

Do bus drivers and child-care workers have these doubts about their work? Do politicians or generals? Is a poet’s lack of confidence in their work generally less than other artists? Let me only take the last question. I do think more poets have more doubt, because their audience is usually small, and that audiences’ response is so muted. Actors, musicians, or other performers can expect immediate audience response, it’s in the nature of their work that it exists only in front of others. Poets, even successful ones, read publicly much less often than they write. The attempts at bringing performance to poetry, with slam and other spoken word variations are seen by many literary poets as corrupting the complex and more contemplative aspects of their art. Novelists, screenwriters, the authors of non-fiction and memoir, can lucidly dream of paydays that would be fantastical for poets, and it’s not unusual for poets to step aside from their poetry to those other writing fields seeking something they can touch and deposit on account from their work. Visual artists are as abstracted from their audiences while doing their work as poets, but we have no auctions of living artists poetry that bring bidders to the alexandrine numbers.

So, in such solitude, such silence, or even within the quiet, diffuse reverence of award-winning poets, there is most often doubt. What would it be like if poetry was on most everyone’s mind, if living poets were giants in our culture?

Since I started this project I’ve sometimes thought of Longfellow, an American poet who reached that level of achievement. The American culture of Longfellow’s era wasn’t more educated or entitled to access to high culture that we are today. Yet, I grew up in a town, and live in a city now, which from that time created streets and spots, and named them for him like we would for Presidents or Generals. My father and his father would know, would memorize his work. We do not need to travel back to Classical Greece or the Confucian Odes to imagine that level of poetry in our culture.

And yet. Longfellow has disappeared, and as far as those that do care about poetry this is regarded as neither mistake nor injustice. This isn’t due to scandal. AFAIK, Longfellow lived a praiseworthy life. He must have said or written some things we could condemn, but on the big issue of his age, slavery, he was on the side of the angels. He was a nationalist, but an internationalist too. He may have appropriated First Nations names and legends with insufficient grounding, but he did it to ennoble not dehumanize them. No, the main reason we have dumped Longfellow off the bookshelves of our culture is that he doesn’t excite or move us in the least. His poetry seems like old civic statuary covered in pigeon dung, not worth noticing, and not worth any effort to replace.

American poetry is a different country now, and Longfellow is exiled from it.

Inside poetry, in its provinces, and within old classics where we might still retain interest, there’s current discussion about Emily Wilson and her fresh translation of Homer’s Iliad.  Wilson has been clear in discussing her practice of translation. She assumes or assays that there must be something there in the archaic Greek. Her task, she writes, isn’t to make a work that sounds like the original text, or to bring us its most exacting word-for-word translation, but to make a new poem that works like the original must have worked for it to have had the impact it had — a version which we can by extension expect to be something like the authors best intentions. We believe this is what Homer deserves, regardless of if our tactics vary from or agree with Wilson’s.

We do this for Dante. We do this for Du Fu. We even do this to some degree with Shakespeare’s plays. We don’t do it with Longfellow. Why not?

We may think there’s nothing much there. We may think that Longfellow’s English is close enough to our modern English that to do so would be presumptuous or dishonest to the work. This last objection is a funny combination with the first. If there’s nothing worthwhile there, who cares what we do with it?

For a recent live in the studio LYL Band recording I decided to “translate” — or more exactly, extract and arrange for greater direct effect to the modern ear, a portion of a lesser-known Longfellow poem, one he titled “Epimetheus, or the Poet’s Afterthought.”  Epimetheus, for those not up on your Greek mythology is Prometheus’s contrasting brother. If Prometheus is a hero, however tragic his fate, Epimetheus is the “Oops! I did that?” guy, a total fool. Prometheus is the I’ll give humans fire and suffer the eagle eating my liver forever hero. Epimetheus is the ”What’s in that cool box, Pandora. Let me have a look” disaster.

In my version I left Epimetheus out of it. Pandora too. Longfellow’s poem is a Friday-the-13th thirteen stanzas long and would require more melody and virtuosity than I can muster to capture a modern listener’s attention. I cut it to three stanzas, modified a couple of pieces of archaic word-order, killed one perfect rhyme for a near one. I did this because I think there’s a core in the piece that might speak to me or you without delay or overly baroque elaboration — and that’s the intent I found in Longfellow’s subtitle. If you write, particularly if you write poetry, you likely know the feeling: that joy and initial appreciation of the inspiration that carries you into the first draft, only to be followed by the problems of realizing the best poem that escapes us. And the completed poem? It travels out to a place where there are only wanderers like us.

Poets Afterthought

Here’s my much shorter adaptation of Longfellow. The full poem as originally published is linked here.

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You can find that performance of my revised version of Longfellow with the audio player many will see below. Don’t see any audio player?  This highlighted link will open a new browser tab that will have such a player.

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Touch lightly Nature’s sweet Guitar

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

This week while attending the online reading of all 1789 Emily Dickinson poems as part of the yearly Tell It Slant Festival, I have been noticing how many Dickinson poems use music as a metaphor. I know she played the piano herself, but I know little about what her personal musical aesthetic was, or if there were other musical instruments played in her home. Piano could be then, as it still was in my mid-century lifetime, a home entertainment device — provided that the family could afford the space and the cost.

For whatever reason though, Dickinson chose to use guitar in this poem, and seeing my “home” instrument in it attracted me.

In Emily’s 19th century, guitar also played such a home entertainment role. I have a somewhat worn-out, very small bodied six-string that I sometimes play, and in today’s guitar marketplace such guitars are often called “parlor guitars.” The historic usage that name honors was that with less cost in space than a keyboard instrument, a home player could entertain themselves or their housemates with a guitar. These small guitars easily suited smaller-bodied women* and many of the players in the home were women.

A parlor guitar from the Emily Dickinson Museum’s collection**

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When it came to realize my music for this poem, I didn’t play my parlor guitar — I played an electric model — but as I continued to go over the words in the process of creating the audio piece I’m not sure that Dickinson had an actual guitar in mind either.

Touch lightly Nature’s sweet Guitar
Unless thou know’st the Tune
Or every Bird will point at thee
Because a Bard too soon —

The opening line, used in place of a title as we do with Dickinson’s untitled poems, has somewhat conventional words for playing a guitar: “touch” “lightly” and “sweet.” Indeed, a parlor guitar like mine responds sweetly to a lighter touch and isn’t designed for driving picking such as used in some later American guitar styles. But Dickinson is a master at choosing the unusual word, the one you or I might never come up with. Her opening line calls it “Nature’s…guitar.”

Given that she moves over to bird’s opinions by the poem’s third line, I think this guitar may be figurative. Its wood and strings might be tree branches, and the Bard too soon, a too early storm. Still, the final line might be speaking of prerequisites for musicianship or songcraft, seeming to warn that a player should be cautious until they know their “song well before I start singing” as another songwriter once stipulated.***

I left a middle section open for an additional top line when Dave and I recorded the basic tracks last week. Afterward I wasn’t sure what should go there, but I decided to score one of my simple orchestral instrument parts for this featuring a violin. You can hear the result with the audio player below. No player seen? Touch lightly this highlighted link and it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*They weren’t made especially small, the petite size was normal for guitars in that time. The current standard size acoustic guitar in our era, often called a “dreadnaught” (because it was seen on arrival between the World Wars as big and formidable as a battleship) is much larger in dimensions: deeper, longer, and wider, and often with a longer-scaled neck.

Men played these small guitars too. In an earlier post I showed a picture of what purports to be Mark Twain’s own guitar, which is also that then standard parlor size, though Twain said he played it for the roughs in his California sojourn.

**The Museum has only recently been able to digitally document the artifacts in its collection. Perhaps due to the difficulties in provenance because the houses of Emily Dickinson and her brother and important friend and sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson did not pass immediately into museum curation, there is no online information as to who may have owned it, or even if it was played in Emily’s presence. I’m somewhat knowledgeable, though not a professional appraiser, and think this guitar could be a 19th century instrument. The collection’s picture of the back of the guitar shows a blacksmith-quality repair at the headstock joint. A common guitar injury, then as now, is for the neck to fracture at that place. My somewhat-informed-amateur’s opinion is that the headstock may be later than the rest of the guitar and was grafted onto it.

***A stipulation I disregarded, as the first song I learned to play was the Dylan song containing that line, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”   I did not touch it lightly.

Like trains of cars on tracks of plush

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Later this month I’m hoping to attend remote online sessions of the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival run by the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, perhaps as many as I did last year. Something they do that I enjoyed was listening to all the sessions where a range of readers read all of Dickinson’s 1789 poems.

Now was I sitting in rapt, solitary devotion for every hour of that multi-day marathon? No, though I was paying some attention throughout. I restrung some guitars, reduced the clutter in my office and studio space, put away laundry, and tended to the dishes. If I gardened or cooked, I could pretend I was work-a-day Emily herself.

What makes the marathon meaningful, even if one does it only in part? The multiple voices for one thing. A group of several people read the poems in rotation each session, so there was no careful preparation from foreknowledge of which poems exactly each reader would read. A prepared reading might be powerful — having trained actors or voice artists read the whole corpus would bring something to it. This is not that, yet worthwhile.

I’ve heard a lot of folks read poetry over the years. Several of the readers struck me as better than most, even given that they might be reading the poems that came up in rotation for their turn essentially cold.*  Of course, every so often one of the readers in their turn would get one of ED’s greatest hits, and all of us: the reader, the other readers, and the attendant listeners would perk up. If one pays attention to this, that happenstance, it “dazzles gradually.”

But then too the ordinary readers, the times when someone stumbled on a word, the lesser-known poems, the small ones that might be no more than a quatrain or two — they two are part of the fullness of Emily Dickinson. She may have been a genius, but she produced these hundreds of poems among a more-or-less ordinary life, infusing them with worthwhile attention. With this many poems it’s unlikely anyone (certainly not I) can really hold all of Emily Dickinson’s work in memory. And so it is, in such a complete reading, that some poems will spark with my attention as if they were just written and never before read or heard. With the smaller poems especially, it may be not much more than a glimpse we share in real-time with Dickinson’s ability to see and think differently. Yet, those small visions add up over the hours, grander from their numbers of unique takes.

Which are the poems she drafted while baking, head full of the hymnal meter, hands dusted with flour? Which while in the garden? Which while caring for her sick mother?

Virtual attendance is planned for many of the Tell It Slant sessions that run from September 25th through October 1st. You can sign up for them at no cost at this link. No one’s taking attendance — see or not see any of the sessions as they fit into your life or level of interest. Given the uncertainties in my life, I’m not sure how many I will be able to fit in.

One game I played during the readings — where I eventually jumped into the chat window with exclamations — was whenever the poem cycle came upon a bee. Dickinson closely observes many plants and animals, but she seems to have had a particular affinity for the bee. Is it a symbol of the Puritan work ethic? A chunkier, easier to observe bug? A symbol of fertility? A flying rose with sweetness and a sting? A coworker the knowledgeable horticulturalist knows is essential to pollination?

like trains of cars on tracks of plush illustration

Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington aside, sometimes the muse takes the bee train,

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Here’s one of her short bee poems, particularly extravagant in its imagination. And here’s a link to what I believe to be the authoritative text.**  That opening image alone should astound. Bees as a railroad train, with the plush flowers as directive as train-tracks —yet soft, not iron.***  “A jar” in the second line is ambiguous. A jar as in a container for the pollen it collects? Possibly, but I’m suspecting more at ajar’s meaning as apart or out of harmony. Bees as locomotives and their train of cars makes them outsized from reality’s proportions. They may move the petals on close examination, their industry is harder and heavier than the plants.

In the second stanza, the metaphor shifts. Now the bee is a knight, the flower a fortress or castle they assault. The bee-knight seems a strangely chivalrous marauder, if inconstant and ready to move off to the next bloom.

As an Imagist poem, this then can be apprehended as simply a picture, an observation of a charged moment of attention. How strange to see the tiny bee as a train or even a knight — but yes, it must travel in appointed commerce on its compelled track, and yes, like a wandering knight-errant it must move on.

But this bee could be a muse too, couldn’t it? It knows its schedule, even if we don’t. It arrives, shakes us like a passing train, assails our walls, then bids a courtly adieu and passes on to another artist, writer, musician.

You can hear my musical performance of this short Emily Dickinson poem “Like trains of cars on tracks of plush”  below with the audio player gadget you should see there. No player? This highlighted link is another way to hear it, as it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I once worked for a radio network. Watching the on-air folks, I was reminded that the ability to cold read text is a skill. It sounds easy to do — when it’s done right.

**There’s a twice as long version out there which I think is derived from the 19th century Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas W. Higginson posthumous collections. These were straightened up for easier public assimilation and were given, by the editors, their ideas of meaningful titles. Did they append two fragments thinking them connected? My apologies for not researching this issue further.

***As striking as Dickinson’s image is here, railroads were as essential to 19th century American commerce as bees are. Towns grew and shrunk based on their routes. Another plausible reason for the train image: one of Dickinson’s father’s commercial achievements for Amherst was assuring that it’d get a railroad line.

Another Child (“To Any Reader”)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

When I used a Robert Louis Stevenson poem last July I wasn’t expecting to follow it up with another. When introducing his “Bed in Summer”  then I mentioned that writing poetry for children, as Stevenson was doing in his A Childs Garden of Verses,  seemed to reduce some of the fustian of a lot of Victorian verse.

So, when I happened upon this other example from that collection I was even more struck by the sensibility of this one. Though I had no reason to believe Stevenson was intending visionary poetry, today’s piece could almost fit inside of Blake’s Songs of Innocence  — though it was written a half-a-century after Blake’s death.

another child layout

Here’s one illustrated edition of the book and the original text with Stevenson’s title “To Any Reader”

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What was the author’s intent? I first read it as Stevenson making a pitch that even if the poems in his book might someday seem quaint and old-fashioned, they could still relate to like-experiences of some future another child. Was this canny foresight on Stevenson’s part? Stevenson was only 35 when he published this book, so his own childhood memories should not have been all that outdated as he wrote the material. On the other hand, his childhood nurse (to whom the book is dedicated) raised him on John Bunyan, stories from the Bible, and tales of 17th century Scottish Covenanters. That may have made him aware from a young age that tales from past times could be transmitted to young minds.

I do recall encountering A Child’s Garden of Verses  as a young child in the mid-20th century, though I can’t say for sure where. Did someone read it to me in my pre-literate days? Was it a book from my parents’ library, perhaps a keepsake from their childhoods? Did I run into it while exhausting my tiny Iowa town’s small library children’s section?

I would not have minded if it was old-fashioned, for I was from a young age fascinated with the past. It could have seemed juvenile unless I came upon it very early in my reading years, but most editions were illustrated, and illustrations excited the ekphrastic in this young reader. Yet my recall on this is not that specific, I just remember that I had seen it. I have more recall of reading Stevenson’s Treasure Island  and enjoying that.

Oddly, when I finally looked this week, this is not the lead-off, introductory poem in the book. Instead, it’s the final poem — not the place to make the case to continue reading “To Any Reader”  who just happened onto the book. Instead, in this place, it’s a ghostly envoi, a reminder to the child (or to the adult reading to them) that they, their childhoods, will obsolete themselves.

As I did with Claude McKay a couple of pieces ago, I decided to adapt Stevenson’s words slightly for singing. Some changes were to make it less awkward to separate things into a series of sung verses. A couple of changes just fit better to my non-agile tongue. Most significantly, I devised a repeating coda to drive home a final summary to the listener. One subtle thing I did was a covert attempt to speak to my own child’s specific journey to young adulthood.

Another Child song with chords 1080

Here’s my version. Since I want to emphasize that other child of air, I also retitled the poem.

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An uncomplicated folk-song style setting seemed appropriate. The chords today are simple for the guitarist, though the alt-tuning I used changes the sound of this simple chord progression slightly. You can hear my performance with the graphical audio player below. If you can’t see any player, I also provide this highlighted link which will open a new tab window with its own audio player.

I Was Blind with Hunger for Your Love (Summer Morn in New Hampshire)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

A lot of the poetry I combine with music here was published around 100 years ago, making it clearly in the public domain for reuse. Given my age, some of the poetry from the Previous Twenties doesn’t seem all that old — after all, many of the poets’ lives overlapped mine — but some poets and poems look back, as I do now from my 2020s, to older styles of poetic expression, ones from an additional 100 years before the 1920s poet. That may be too much for some younger audiences I think.

Since poetry is at least partly about how  something is said, it’s not out of line for style to be substantial when we choose to read or listen to poetry — but, sometimes we might choose to “translate” poetry for performance to make it more immediate.

Here’s an example. I came upon this 1922 poem by Claude McKay while looking for summer poems. I’ve presented McKay a few times already here.  A figure stored away in the Tupperware container labeled The Harlem Renaissance, McKay’s poetry is still preserved and sometimes read — often the portion of his poems that speak eloquently about racism and the double alienation of being a Black Caribbean emigrant to the United States. Since these things are still factors in the 2020s, that supplies relevance to continue to consider them. A poem like his 1919 sonnet “If We Must Die,”   however formal in prosody, presents clear reasons to our current ears.

But McKay is also a passionate love poet.*  Now, to say the least, love is still a contemporary experience, so one might think his love poetry would also get more contemporary exposure. My casual estimate says this hasn’t happened. Yet.

Why not? This poem is significantly old-fashioned, 19th-century-like. Its sentences are poetic in an outdated style, they don’t flow casually in a spoken way. This is a style we might forgive in 19th-century verse if written back then, particularly if the poem is a Hall-of-Fame, “Poetry’s Greatest Hits,” poem — but not so much for a 20th century poet’s less honored selection.

Young Claude McKay

Don’t make the mistake when reading old poetry to think that the poets must be old too. McKay was just 30 when he first published this poem.

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This poem also makes a mistake writers can fall into. McKay seems to think that leaving a surprise for the ending will strengthen the poem — that when the reader finally sees that surprise they will be happy to have waited for the poem’s context.

There are poems that work that way.**  To me, this one doesn’t. Coming upon it, one may not read through the facile but not necessarily compelling nature poem that makes up more than ¾ of the text. Therefore, in my “translation” for today’s performance, I’ve decided to create a refrain out of the poem’s final line, spoiling the surprise but urging the listener to consider the nature and weather report portions of this poem as reports of human desire and inner weather. You’ll hear how it works in the musical performance you can hear below.

Taking liberties like this is one reason I use public domain work: it’s now free for one to do with it what one wants. If you want to read McKay’s work as he intended it, here’s a link to the 1922 version. That link includes its own link to an even earlier published version by McKay, evidence that the poem’s author himself was trying to improve his poem’s impact.

Writers: if you are ever writing a surprise-ending piece, if you ever are withholding something from your reader or listener because you think it’ll be a grand or witty “Aha!” moment at the end, consider the alternative. The alternative here, the bringing out the key context that the poem’s speaker is viewing his summer night and morning “Blind with hunger for your love,” strengthens listener engagement I think, and it lets the listener see that the speaker/singer is just as attracted to the early rain-storm, sleepless-night portion of the weather, as the “miracle” of the subsequent sunny morning which is so incongruent with their present feelings. I’ve doubled down on that revision by making the newly refrained line the title too. ”Summer Morn in New Hampshire,”  as McKay titled it, is too specific yet generic in my hindsight judgement.

I did my best with the musical performance of this as a song. I enjoyed playing my big, heavy, 20-plus-year-old 12-string Guild guitar and weaving in the rest of a quartet of ringing and raining instruments. It’s not a humble-brag, but a statement of the song’s potential to say that this piece would benefit from a higher-skilled singer than I am. Perhaps my voice’s approximations can be heard as bringing an imperfect human immediacy to the words? You can hear the performance with a graphic audio player below (if you see that). No player?  This is a hyperlink that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Let me leave this final point to a footnote. Best as can be determined, Claude McKay’s erotic connections seem to have been with men. Given the homophobia of his time — or perhaps from artistic choice — McKay has written this poem, as he has many of his love poems, in an entirely genderless manner.

**This poem isn’t a sonnet, but it is “sonnet-ish,” and the popular English/Shakespearean sonnet conventionally expects a somewhat surprising summation in its final couplet.

Come August, September

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

The usual remit of this Project is to take words — somebody else’s words, words that were intended as literary poetry — and to combine them with original music in some way. Every so often, I’ll use my own poetry, but the journey there is similar, not like most songwriting where the songwriter will as likely as not begin with a tune, or a set of words that seem to emerge with a tune.

But I have written that way. No one can spend as much time with music as I do without having the music muse show up dancing with the lyric muse sometimes. Today’s piece is an older composition, one that I considered posting for the Parlando Project since its beginning years ago. You haven’t seen it before today because of that difference, because it always was a song.

I recall distinctly how this song began. I was reading an interview with Brandon Flowers, the lead singer of the modern rock band The Killers. In it he wanted to make plain that for all the traveling showmanship and flash of that part of his life, he was a guy who grew up in a small town where one could see a farm tractor driving down a main street as an unremarkable occurrence.

Bang!

As I read that I thought of the small mid-century Iowa town I grew up in. A tractor on main street? Yes, that had never registered as unusual until this other person made a point to remember that. A version of this song came quickly from that moment of coincident remembrance. Taken back to my mid-century small town in my mind, I could see this teenage schoolkid who had a springtime crush on a fellow classmate, but who couldn’t get up the nerve or words to speak to her of his feelings. And then it would be summer vacation. In my town, my school, in my time, most of the kids lived in the surrounding countryside and disappeared from the town outside of the school-year.

And eventually, as I saw this kid in my mind, this time of year, late August, would arrive. He’d have another chance to speak to her. Would he have the courage? He knows half-way at least that he might not. Does he? We never find out.

Good Tractor 5

Another AI generated image. I couldn’t get the AI genie to generate one of the tall, narrow farm tractors I remembered from my youth, so I had to settle for this.

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A version of the words came out fairly quickly as I inhabited that kid’s mind and the tune was nearly there simultaneously. The somewhat odd phrase that became the refrain and title was there from the beginning. I don’t know why that phrase came to me. Researching, I see there was a 1961 Rock Hudson movie with the title Come September.   Not a small-town setting, more the Italian Riviera. Our little town did have a movie theater then, or that film might have played on our black & white TV as a “movie of the week.”  Bobby Darin was also in the film and wrote music for it, including a title-tune “Come September.”*  That title laying fallow in my unconscious is plausible — but whatever, I like my variation, as the overlap from late August to September seems a distinct “month” on my calendar, and perhaps yours.

Maybe I should have performed this with a full rock-band setting in honor of The Killers, but my mood and logistics brought this voice and acoustic guitar version out instead. You can hear it with the graphic audio player below if you see that. No player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I checked this morning, it was an instrumental.

Warm Summer Sun, the 700th Parlando Project piece

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

This is a modest little piece — a small number of words, a simple musical setting — so it may seem odd to choose it as the 700th audio piece from this Parlando Project. Well, this whole project is odd, isn’t it? You, for reading this and listening to the audio pieces are unusual. I’d say I’m odd too for taking the uncounted hours this Project has taken: looking for available words that strike me as worthwhile for performance, composing the music, performing most of the instruments, recording them, and figuring out what to briefly say about my experience of these words.

I plan to say more about reaching this milestone in a follow-up post, but I will put that off so that we can get to American author Mark Twain’s words without overwhelming them with my particulars.

I came upon this as if it was a poem written by the famous novelist, something I took immediate note of. Poets who publish novels at least once or twice aren’t extraordinarily rare. Established novelists who take to writing poetry may be slightly more unusual, but there are examples. The two arts are unlike enough that the list of those whose expression in both fields remain worth considering exists, but that list isn’t likely to take more than one page. But Twain’s poem was specifically unexpected. If you have followed this Project completely for a while you will have encountered most of what might be considered poetry by the great novelist Twain. One was a little monolog that performs easily.*  That piece is a still-acute skewering of poète maudit literary stances. Twain’s other poem used here was a satire produced by a character in a novel who wrote rafts of terrible elegies, a poetic form that Twain’s era loved more than any other: Tennyson’s book-length, multi-part, In Memoriam  elegy was a Victorian best-seller. Twain’s USP while he worked in the book trade was instead books full of life and absurdity written in garrulous American vernacular. Yet, here’s a poem by Twain that is:

Heartrendingly sincere
An elegy
Short enough to be engraved on a headstone

Where did this come from? It has both a biographical and literary inheritance. The biographic one: the headstone it was engraved on was for Twain’s beloved eldest daughter, a talented young woman who died at age 24. If you’ve got a few minutes, click this link and read her Wikipedia entry, so that you can mourn along with Twain. The literary antecedent, who Twain credited on the headstone as the author, was a contemporary poem written by an Australian expat-to-Scotland named Robert Richardson. Richardson is next to unknown and I’ve only glanced at the collection in which his poem titled“Annette”  appears. He was a newspaper and periodical poet who wrote (as did Twain) for popular audiences — but unlike the Twain we best remember today, he is (at first glance) conventional in his literary diction and full of the usual Victorian sentiments. Richardson’s “Annette”  takes up three pages and many stanzas, and Twain’s adaptation uses only the final stanza. Twain’s poem is 27 words long. Only 20 of those words come from Richardson’s stanza.

Here’s Richardson’s stanza followed by Twain’s poem as it appears on the headstone:

Warm summer sun, shine friendly here;
Warm western wind, blow kindly here;
Green sod above, rest light, rest light,
Good-night, Annette!
Sweetheart, good-night!

Warm Summer Sun Twain headstone

Here’s a link to a page where I found this picture of Olivia Susan Clemens’ headstone in Elmira New York. The link also includes the full text of Richardson’s Annette.

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What are the alterations, which I’ll presume to be Twain’s, and which I assume are changes, not Twain using a different version than I found in an 1893 Richardson poetry collection?

“Friendly” is dropped from the description of the sun. “Kindly” is moved to the sun in Twain. “Softly,” a more objective adverb is used for the wind by Twain. Imagists (who’ll arrive only a decade after Twain’s poem) would have preferred kindly to be dropped entirely for an objective word, but on balance Twain is just slightly more modern. “Southern wind” not western may be localizing weather patterns between Richardson and Twain’s locales, but making this change shows a careful choice is being made.

Both Richardson and Twain make the choice to move from the above world of the living to the below ground world of the buried in their stanzas. Richardson has the sod “resting,” personifying in Victorian fustian. Twain has the weightier and more objective “lie.” Small difference, but I hold with Twain’s choice.

“Dear heart” for “Annette” removes the inapplicable specific from Richardson. In the final phrase Twain again adds power in my judgement by refraining “good night” rather than using the specific Victorian term “sweetheart.” Although Twain intended his poem as an inscription, the refrain adds to the effect when sung in performance.

Tiny poem, tiny changes, but of course the greatest difference, one made by a novelist (of all trades) was to presume that these spare 27 words from the end of Richardson’s longish poem make an apt summary of the situation: a beloved, talented daughter struck down by illness in her youth. This may have been a practical choice: carving it on a headstone (though larger headstones with longer inscriptions are found in Victorian graveyards). Intent and practicalities aside, I was moved.

You can hear my performance of Twain’s epitaph/elegy with the following audio player. No player? This is a backup link that will open a new tab with it’s own audio player. As I said, simple music today. Just me playing a nylon string “classical” guitar, the kind of instrument that I first played when I started out.

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* Besides being credited by Hemingway as the progenitor of “All modern American literature,” Twain pioneered what today we’d call standup comedy.