song

Searoads: a contemporary poem by Henry Gould

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today’s piece is rare for the Parlando Project: a presentation of a contemporary poem by American poet Henry Gould.

Contemporary? How contemporary? “Searoads” was written only a few days ago. I read it on Halloween when the poet shared it on Blue Sky shortly after it had been written.  Since I follow Gould on Blue Sky, I had read several of his poems before. He’s posted poems and poem drafts written serially as he works on a book-length opus dedicated to a topic. In recent Gould poem-series, historical time seems to take place simultaneously, and wide references to history and literary works weave through stanzas (or even within lines) of individual poems, this weave sometimes worked with the warp of wordplay.

That makes for a challenging density. Since my youth I’ve taken self-pride in being a history buff, and working on this Project has extended the poetry I’ve had contact with to a level that tests the working set of my old-guy memory. When I’ve got the energy to exercise those parts of my personality, digging into one of Gould’s poems can match up with those receptors. Gould’s work is ambitious and deals with earnest subjects, but I suspect it’s also playful. When you can catch, and hopscotch through the pattern of one of his sideways leaps to connection, there’s a pleasure in discovery – and this is so even though honest history and literature contains a great deal of conflict and pain.

I have a term I use for an effect I find in poetry – the polyphony layers of perceptions invoked with images, the melody of tracking from one thing to another like unto it, the intervals of sames separated by time – The Music of Thought. I assume this isn’t a new idea, but while study of the prosody of sound is commonplace, a prosody of the patterns when the images and what they present, composed in that order and layering, seems rarer to me. That I take any pride in writing about this is likely secondary to my ignorance of how thoroughly others have already written about this. I’m the kind of solitary, stubborn cuss that has to discover it myself to be able to integrate it into my enjoyment of poetry.

There can be a problem with the Music of Thought. While tastes in the word-sound-music may vary among readers and listeners to poetry, the effect requires nothing special in terms of shared knowledge. Children can enjoy Dr. Suess before they have much of a corpus of knowledge at all.*   Poems of Yeats, Eliot, Frost, or Emily Dickinson can charm us by their sound even when – if we were tested by some exacting taskmaster to do so – we couldn’t write an internally consistent and plausible essay on what they were on about exactly. Fear of that looming taskmaster kills poetry readership, but the lure of the pleasures of sound draws us back in. The Music of Thought may still be sensuous, but it’s more abstract, it requires more knowledge and attention from a reader.

Assembledge in Powderhorn Lake Halloween 2025 by Heidi Randen

My wife shot this mysterious assemblage in Powderhorn Park at the dawn of All Souls Day 2025

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When I came upon Gould’s “Searoads”  it was late in the day. I was in the context of the short-attention-span-theater that is a modern social media feed. Tough court for the poem?

The sound caught me first and last, and I also easily fell into this poem’s Music of Thought. In both musics, “Searoads”  drives forward attractively, and I was gathering meaning even on the first time through.**

How does it work? I’m bad at scansion (when creating music I’m habitually playing with offbeats and syncopations, sporting with measures, which probably demonstrates that I don’t understand the basic pattern well enough). Could “Searoads”  be intended pentameter with predominant iambic stresses? I read the stresses as having variation (which good verse should have) but I scanned the lines as having a goodly amount of iambs, while I hear them as predominantly four-feet lines.***

The use of rhyme here is excellent. I heard rhymes the first time through, but not the scheme – so I didn’t know when they were coming. My own ear or taste loves off/near rhyme, and that too helps the sound work without some regular clock-coocoo chime effect. If I take apart the mechanism, it’s ABABCABCA. And there’s a lovely moment in the poem when an extra C rhyme comes strongly in the middle of the last line of the first stanza with “infants.”

The poem has a few unusual words. I knew “sarabande” was a dance form that survives in European classical music, and I even knew that there is some dispute about its origin, including a theory that it includes American musical ideas adapted by Spanish colonialists in the 16th century from native central American music. I didn’t know the word “Argive” (of the Greek city-state of Argos) – but two things referenced in the poem were part of my attraction. On Halloween I was intending to work on a piece for All Saint’s Day (November 1st) or All Souls Day (November 2nd), but despite some effort earlier in the week I hadn’t found a suitable text. As I read Gould’s poem, he may be invoking circular reincarnated or pre-existing souls in the second stanza – so in celebrating all who have died and the unity of that human experience, we may celebrate all unborn as well. What a lovely autumnal thought! And the same stanza even needle-drops a line from one of the All Souls’ texts that I wasn’t progressing on making music for: the “full-fathom five (my father lies)” speech from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

But one word (well, hyphenated, but…) is most responsible for the piece you can hear today: “Ark-Dove.”**** I suspected the dove sent out from Noah’s Ark to confirm the time afloat in the great flood was ebbing. When I asked Gould, he confirmed to me he was thinking of that too, at least in part, as he wrote his poem. In our troubled times, a great flood of destructions, on a boat stinking of animal effluents, I think we are waiting for the dove to return with a green twig – but I had another specific thing going off in my mind too.

There’s a folk song, collected in 1906 in Texas at a temporary work camp along the Brazos river. A woman there, washing clothes on that riverbank sang this song about being abandoned; but imagining Noah’s dove anyway, singing “If I had wings, like Noah’s dove, I’d fly down the river to the one I love.” Beside the song, the folk-song collector only got the name “Dink” for the singer. He wrote that he tried to find out more later, but when he returned to ask about her, she was gone from the camp and no one knew where. We cannot know if she found wings to carry her above the river or if the river carried her, submerged, down its current.

So, as I returned to the top to read Henry Gould’s poem for a second time on Halloween, I was already humming that folk song, known as “Dink’s Song,”  to myself as I read the words. The next morning, I had no Dink to ask for, but on All Saints Day I decided to work out some music to sing Gould’s poem. I did this with no expectation that anyone besides myself (and probably Gould, who I figured I’d just send it to, unbidden) would hear it.

I’ve been composing a lot in October on acoustic guitar, this meant I had some musical ideas to try with the words. I loosely based my music on the chord cadence from the verse of “Dink’s Song,”  (D G5 D / Bm G5 D) with an even looser variation from the song’s chorus on the last line of each stanza (D G5 D Asus2 D). I’m not a very melodic singer, and unless one knows “Dinks Song”  and reads this, one won’t hear the connection. I recorded this using my usual cross-picking technique on acoustic guitar while singing, and picked the best out of about five passes I quickly recorded that afternoon. I added a low-pitched piano part that emulates the way a tanpura is used in South Asian music and a bass part as I thought the piece needed a little more low-end activity.

Henry Gould received the recording and has graciously allowed me to share this musical performance of his fine poem “Searoads”  here. You can hear it with the audio player below. Has the audio player flown down river? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress showing an audio player gadget. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player so you can hear it.

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*Adults could enjoy challenging Modernist poetry more if they allowed themselves to initially listen to it (even silently) as a toddler listens to board books. For that matter, I assume Dr. Suess/Theo Geisel had Lewis Carroll and Ogden Nash in his ear when he wrote, but his poetry makes me think he was reading Gertrude Stein or Marianne Moore too.

**I don’t rate myself highly in understanding poems, but a short poem that draws me in usually gets a repeated reading where often my understanding changes. One of the pleasures of doing this Project is that that the poem I start with can change to a poem I understand differently by the time I’m done with the recording.

***Today’s short discussion of prosody demonstrates why I do that sort of thing rarely here. I suspect a combination of being bad at it (not getting the correct answers in my scansion) and distrusting the classic accentual/syllabic theory that may need to be followed more loosely to produce a sophisticated effect.

****”Searoads’”  unusual “Ark-Dove” with hyphen and capitalization made me think Gould must have had something else specific in mind, beyond my folk song and the Bible story. I did a quick search and found that two ships, the Arc and the Dove brought the first English settlers to Maryland – the Arc and the Dove are sort of the Catholic U.S. version of the Pilgrims and the Mayflower. What a rich reference! I asked Gould. Nope, he wasn’t thinking of that. Ah, but the muses Henry – they must have whispered in your ear.

And the poem’s title gave me thoughts too. Isn’t “Searoads” the way medieval English poetry might refer to a ships’ path?

The Spider and the Ghost of the Fly

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

As Halloween approaches, here’s a song that focuses on the playfully frightful aspects of the holiday. Wait a minute – I debated typing “playfully” there with “frightful.” I went with that combination as it’s my best guess at the intent of the Vachel Lindsay poem that I converted into a song, though I can’t be sure.

Playing with fear and horror is clearly a part of Halloween. We expect children to celebrate the holiday, and the adults participating in Halloween celebrations plan them to be happy occasions, even though the decorations will be full of spiders and their webs, and monsters, and skeletons, and those dream-flickering pumpkin skulls.

But if you take the poem (now a song) at face value, this is about a woman who is personified as a predator, the femme fatale trope and her victim fly. Had poet Lindsay felt himself wronged by some lover to come up with this piece? I don’t have biographical evidence to point to with an emphatic gesture,* and the internal evidence within the poem speaks to me of a playful mode to the condensed tale of horror it tells. There seems to be a paradoxical agreement on the part of the singer: they’ve been done wrong, but they’re going to speak lightly about this, and while the song’s fly doesn’t say it out-loud, they might be open to just a little more peril.**

Spider and the Ghost of the Fly

A poem that literally describes tearing the wings off flies, yet I’m still holding it as playful.

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Earlier this month I wrote about the mid-20th century “folk scare” in passing, and as someone who has some grasp of the songs revived by that movement, I couldn’t help but think that Lindsay referenced a floating verse that appears in some American folk songs. Did anyone else catch it from listening or reading the text above?

The spider takes her prey with the line: “She drove me to her parlor/above the winding stair.” Reading this, I immediately heard a specific tune – cementing the idea that this poem would get the Parlando Project treatment. What tune? One widely sung song that features the verse about a woman taking a lover to her parlor goes by the title “Cindy, Cindy.”   Besides the parlor destination – sometimes sung in the folk song as “She took me to her parlor and she cooled me with her fan” – most “Cindy, Cindy”  versions have devouring women in them too, with verses like “I wish I was an apple a-hanging on a tree and every time my Cindy passed she’d take a bite out of me”*** or even “My Cindy is a pretty girl. My Cindy is a peach; she throws her arms around my neck and hangs on like a leech.”

Quick research says that “Cindy, Cindy” was sung in America in the early 20th century when Vachel Lindsay wrote his poem. I’m going to suspect Lindsay knew one of the variations of it – and he might have thought some of his audience would too.

So, I’m calling it: playful. Likely erotically  playful.

I also suspect my music for today’s performance of “The Spider and the Ghost of the Fly”  had “Cindy, Cindy’s”  tune in its ear a little bit too. You might be able to hear that performance with the audio gadget below – but like the devouring and dangerous love between the spider and the fly, some of you may find the audio gadget hidden and suppressed. Aha! I have this highlighted link, a veritable grail-shaped beacon, that will open a new tab with its own audio player so you can hear the song.

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*Vachel Lindsay and Parlando Project favorite Sara Teasdale were romantically linked for a time. For more on the story of how that turned out, you can read one of the most popular posts in this Project’s history. The Teasdale poem musically performed in that above linked post also talks about the surrender of love.

**As per Sir Galahad’s tale in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

***This verse in the folk song rhymes in with the apple stealing fairies in Leigh Hunt’s poem from earlier in this month’s series, and I’d suppose the song’s connection of apples with erotic passion may echo back to the Garden of Eden. And that choice of Cindy as a name? Could that be evoking sin?

A Ghost’s Leavetaking. Returning to an odd-ball instrument and a resulting musical sketch

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Today’s piece, continuing our series as we consider the variousness of Halloween including the surrounding Days of the Dead and associated horror/fantasy elements, has odd origins. It starts, since it’s useful to mark a starting point, with the death of my late wife decades ago, something that led to an unusual instrument.

Shortly after my wife died, and I was left alone in the house we once shared, I decided I’d take to playing more music in the silence. I went looking for new instruments to inspire me. This intimate death, as it happened, was followed by another kind of ending. To tell you about that, I won’t get too deep into the weeds of the musical instrument business, but one of America’s largest musical instrument makers, Fender, had in the late 1990s quixotically decided to introduce an entirely new guitar brand, DeArmond. In short order they created an entire line of electric guitars and basses, around two dozen models, priced between their budget Squier line that featured inexpensive renditions of traditional Fender instruments and their more expensive American line that the Squier guitars copied – but the DeArmond guitars weren’t copies of the highly popular Fender designs at all. Instead, they were versions of electric guitars and basses once produced by another company, Guild, which had around the same time been absorbed into Fender. I expect few who read this Project will know anything about Guild guitars, and that explains why they ceased to exist as a separate company. But those who do hear the name “Guild” and have a light bulb illuminate, are most likely to think of Guild acoustic guitars.*  Guild produced a successful line of acoustics. The Guild line of 12-string guitars were highly thought of: John Denver, Tim Buckley, and Ralph Towner constantly played jumbo-bodied Guild 12-strings, and other folk artists played acoustic Guild guitars in this era: Richie Havens, Paul Simon, and Bonnie Raitt.

So, this was a strange business idea: create a new brand, but make it closely reference past electric instruments many players had never heard of. So how did this turn out?

To quickly answer, I step back in marketing time and type: “Edsel.”**

OK, where are we getting to Halloween? This started with one death – trust me, we’ll get there – and now there’s the pseudo-death of guitar line. Fender pulled the plug abruptly just as our current century was getting underway. They had lots of unsold DeArmond electric guitar stock. I mean lots.  They gave some away to schools and music programs. They sold the rest at fire-sale prices. Guitars made to be sold for around $600 ($1200 in 2025 dollars) were being blown out at $200. I quickly bought three of their guitars: a large hollow-body archtop, a 12-string electric solid body, and a 6-string electric with a Bigsby vibrato bridge – not at BOGO pricing, but at those BOG2 prices. I’m writing about a lot of things today, but not those – instead, it’s another DeArmond.

One of the weirdest Guild designs that that Fender/DeArmond revived only to kill – indeed one of the oddest guitar designs of all time – was the Ashbory bass. Guitarist readers are now visualizing an electric bass: bodies at least as big as an electric guitar, but with longer necks. Old guys like me that play electric bass also are thinking weight – heavy, too often more than 10 pounds.

Nope. This is my Ashbory bass:

My Ashbory Bass 800-600

White lines, don’t do it. The Ashbory is a fretless instrument, the fretboard lines are just markers. Exact intonation with the thick strings and very short scale is a challenge.

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Weighs less than a Stephen King novel. Less than half the length of a regular electric bass. Body just a little bigger than a CD case. The original strings, specially designed for it, were translucent rubber bands. The current strings on mine are smooth white opaque nylon, essentially extra thick versions of a modern classical guitar string. Unlike a normal fretless electric bass, which is a beast to play, you need to be almost delicate when playing these extraordinarily low-tension strings.

Other than the tiny size, a goal here was to approximate the plucked sounds of the even more unwieldy upright bass, but neither the original 1980’s Guild Ashbory or the late ‘90s DeArmond copy sold well. I used mine when I wanted upright and fretless bass sounds for a while, but in the last few years I’ve moved over to using other methods to get that sound on Parlando recordings. This week someone mentioned they’d just purchased a used Ashbory, reviving memories of that time and leading me to revisit the instrument musically. In my studio space I got the tiny bass out and plugged it in to record. To get the upright bass sound from it you want to use bare fingers, but for some reason (habit?) I decided to use a thick rubbery pick – which is one way I play regular electric bass. This gave me a slightly more aggressive sound than I recall getting out of it and I then programmed in a drum pattern to match where that result was leading me. Building from the groove, I played some electric guitar and added a piano part, producing a short two-minute piece as my studio time ran out yesterday.

Listening to the result this morning I felt the music had a sense of longing or leaving. That may have leaked from my connection between the DeArmond Ashbory and the time after my wife’s death, which was followed by my mother’s, and then after an interval, my father’s death. Could I find some words to go with this music? Nothing I had in my files of poems for Halloween seemed to fit, so I did a web search for “poem about a ghost leaving or disappearing.” Bam, this lesser-known Sylvia Plath poem came up, right on point!

Plath’s “A Ghost’s Leavetaking”  is an 8-stanza/40-line poem, not all that long, but longer than my just-over-2-minute music could cover. The poem describes a somewhat distressed awaking in a morning where the speaker is mixing dreams and remembrance of the dead with an ongoing adjustment to mundane household tasks.*** Just as in Phil Dacey’s “Frost Warnings”  poem from earlier this month, Plath sets up tired laundry and bed sheets that “signify our origin and end” while they play the role of ghosts of the departed.

A good poem, but now I had two problems: an apt text too long for my music and a poem not in the public domain.**** “A Ghost’s Leavetaking”  was written in the 1950s and has not yet reached PD status in the U.S.*****

I made a quick decision. I would use only some lines from Plath’s poem. Artistically I thought that worked. It made a shorter set of text to fit the music I had finished. I was able to zoom in on the Day of the Dead and ghost elements of the poem, shortening the examination of how we sometime wake still recovering mundane reality from our dreams. If you would like to read the entire poem, as Plath published it, here’s a link. As to the PD situation, my solution is at best mixed. “Fair use” is not a firm concept, and my Project’s entirely non-revenue and educational purposes are no guaranteed Kings X. Using only a few lines would bolster my case, but as I used about a third of the poem, that’s not clearly kosher. Even forgetting laws, if Plath were a living author, she’d be well in her rights, regardless of the law, to take issue with someone cutting her poem up, making it less than she intended it to be.

So, from that decision, we’re left with this musical piece where I quickly sketched out today in my little home office “Studio B” how one might sing some lines from Plath’s poem with the music I finished yesterday. I’m aware of the limitations of my voice, and in an ideal world the melodies could be better worked out and ornamented by a better singer. None-the-less, I found it personally rewarding to inhabit Plath’s words and do the best I can today to convey the emotions and images she put in them, and some listeners may gain something from that performance. You can hear my sketch using lines taken from “A Ghost’s Leavetaking”  with the audio gadget below. Has the audio gadget gone to Plath’s “lost otherworld?” I offer this alternative as a keeper of the “profane grail,” a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Fender had never been able to make itself a factor in the upper end of the acoustic guitar market, so it was assumed that’s why they snapped up the distressed Guild company: for the well-thought-of acoustic guitars.

** There are car folks who will tell you that the Edsel was a perfectly fine late 1950’s American car, but that doesn’t change what the brand name invokes.

The Guild electrics were pretty good guitars, if not answering what the market wanted back in their day. Some of the DeArmond sort-of copies were arguably better instruments than the originals, but they were just as out of sorts with what the market wanted. In 1998 the electric guitarist customer wanted a Stratocaster or a Les Paul, with a Fender or Gibson name on it, or one of the slightly hot-rodded extensions of those Fender or Gibson models. The sort of funky, oddball looks of the DeArmond guitars would have stood a better chance a decade later after Indie rock stars started to come forward making a point of playing anything but a Les Paul or a Strat.

***I had the vivid experience of my late wife seeming to return to my bedroom in the liminal hours. From things I’ve heard from others, this is not uncommon for those who’ve lost intimates.

****I’m not all that troubled by asking for forgiveness from a ghost, but one of Plath’s children is still alive, and may hold the IP rights to Plath’s work. Her web site lists the Faber and Faber UK offices as the contact for Sylvia Plath rights permissions, but I got no reply early in this project when I asked that very organization about my small-time, non-revenue use of another Faber and Faber author. I would remove this piece on any objection.

*****If I did a little day trip up Highway 61, to say Thunder Bay Ontario, Plath’s poem would be PD there. And thanks readers for following me on this post’s road trip.

Robbing an Orchard

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Halloween is a multi-valent holiday. There’s the cluster of religious and spiritual holidays of prayer and remembrance for the dead, the holiday of horror and monsters, the children’s festival of costumes and small candy-bars, and so on. I went looking for some supernatural poems that might be fun to present this week, and I came upon this short poem by British Romantic-era figure Leigh Hunt that was begging to be sung – after all, the full title of his poem was written down as “Song of the Fairies Robbing an Orchard.”  It’s light fantasy, but then the news has stolen all the horrors.

Was I thinking of a particular orchard as I worked on this piece? There were two apple trees just to the side of the house I grew up in, but they were past their prime by my time. I remember they bore small and not very appetizing fruit, and sometime around when I left home they were cut down. I recall my sisters and I climbing in the low and scraggly branches when barely more than toddlers – but it wasn’t exactly that pair of trees. I was probably thinking more of an orchard I have never seen: the apple trees that are part of the homestead “kitchen garden” that blogger Paul Deaton often writes about.  I also probably visualized Deaton’s apple trees and his stories of work with them when I performed Robert Frost’s great harvest-time poem “After Apple Picking”  a few years back. Deaton’s a regular reader of this Project’s blog – so Paul, if you read this, and when you next check you are missing some of your apples, you’ll know who tipped off the fay. Well, the more they take, the fewer you need to harvest and put up.

Leigh_Hunt

An engraved drawing of Leigh Hunt by J. Hayter

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Leigh Hunt is one of those Zelig or Forrest Gump like characters of the 19th century British Romantic-era. He knew and worked with all the big three Romantics: Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Hunt was key in launching Keats poetic career, was there for Shelley’s death by drowning, and had a tempestuous relationship (I suspect the most common kind) with Byron. As a poet himself, he’s decidedly minor, but this opus’ mischievous whimsy charmed me. I love the characterization tidbits in it: the fairies peeping in at pious humans worshiping in chapels, and their admission that they don’t even care that much for apples, but are in it more for the challenge of stealing them.

The 12 string guitar as played by Leadbelly 800

Come to think of it, Julius Lester probably has as least as high a Zelig/Forest Gump score as Leigh Hunt

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For music to sing Hunt’s poem, I used a 12-string acoustic guitar. Last week while commenting on a poem I’d read online, its author asked if I’d read Julius Lester. An old man, my steel-trap memory has corrosion problems, but the name rang a rusty bell. I remember seeing Lester’s byline in the Village Voice back in the Seventies, and I had some vague recall of him working on radio. But poetry? No, I had no idea he wrote any poetry. I hit a quick web search, and Julius Lester as it turns out was a multi-hyphenate: author of many books in several fields, social activist, college professor, photographer, critic, broadcasting host, and folk-scare-era folk singer. Reading about him I realized that I had owned one of his books: the early Sixties instruction manual “The 12-String Guitar as played by Leadbelly.”   I’ve long been interested in this 12-string variation of the great folk instrument of my country: the steel-string, flattop acoustic guitar. Leadbelly was a pioneering performer on that instrument.*  I can’t say that today’s piece is fully in his style, but it’s the work of someone who’s heard Leadbelly and some of his more apt descendants. You can hear the short song I call “Robbing an Orchard”  with the audio player gadget below. What, have the fairies run off with the audio player too? Naughty fairies! I give you this alternative enchantment then: a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I heard a counselor at a kids summer camp play a 12-string in the early part of The Sixties around the time that the 12-string-featuring song “Walk Right In”  made it to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.  I note in the linked wiki article on that song, that in 1962 12-string guitars were so scarce that when they decided to use two 12-strings playing together for an even more powerful sound, they had to wait for a second one to be made by the Gibson guitar company. Lester’s book, co-authored with no-less-than Pete Seeger, was a rare publication on how to play this instrument.

Minnesota’s Twin Cities was something of a hotbed of 12-string players in the 20th century, and shortly after I moved there, I bought my first 12-string, a cheap one sold as a sideline in a Musicland record store.

Beautiful Justice

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

This poem by the French Surrealist poet Paul Éluard wandered into my view earlier this month, and it seems like it, and my work translating it into English, slots right in between my late wife’s poem I performed last time and this Saturday’s planned #NoKings protests planned around America.

I’ve mentioned earlier this year that in my youth I became interested in the French Modernists because I had gotten the impression that they were a key force in English-language Modernism. Later, from my work for the Parlando Project, I came to learn that this is only partially so. I wasn’t far into the Project when I realized that there was in London before WWI (at that time still the center of English-language literature) a “reverse British Invasion” going on as crucial as the 1960’s British Invasion that helped revitalized rock’n’roll music. Americans: Pound, Eliot, H.D., Frost, and even the important British Imagist theorist T. E. Hulme who had spent some expanded-sky time in Canada, were all there shaping up a make-it-new freshness. Now it’s also true that Eliot and Pound were fond of some French poets,* but as I later traced those French poets with the greater resources I could obtain this century, I found that some of those French writers were taken with Whitman and Poe.

Still, the French Symbolists, and the more internationally-sourced but eventually Paris-centered Dada and Surrealist poets were  important. Having only High School French it was hard for me to absorb a great deal of French Modernist poetry, but what I was able to find in translation, or painstakingly translate myself in the 1970s was an important influence on me.

It was soon enough that I came upon Paul Éluard then, who as far as the French were concerned, was a big deal, often rated as the greatest Surrealist poet. Well, ratings are silly – ought to remain so – but his poetry had striking imagery and was often concerned with some combination of erotic love and anti-fascist politics. In the 1970s, the first attracted me primarily, while the latter seemed a noble history lesson.

Ha ha! History, it seems, has jumped out of the past, and the anti-fascist Éluard is due for a revival – and so I welcomed seeing his poem “Bonne Justice”  appear on BlueSky in its original French. I could make out enough of it (my French is even more scant than it was in my 20s) to want to do a translation and possible performance.

bonne-justice-paul-eluard-manuscrit

I don’t know why his handwritten manuscript uses a circular format. Éluard may be trying to convey the eternal in natural law. Cynics might read “circling the drain.”  Young moderns seeing this would need to start with the translation task of reading cursive.

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Translation moved quickly. Vocabulary issues are easily handled by computer these days, and online sources help to drill down on a word’s flavors.**   Éluard’s language here is not fancy, there are no obscure or archaic words, and he seems to me to be speaking to a general audience, not artistic theorists or avant-garde cadres. I proceeded as I normally do when translating from a literal gloss: first finding the images and what word choices will most clearly illuminate them, while giving care in preserving the “music of thought” in how the poem introduces the images and sets them off in the context of each other – though then I will take a hand at using a modern English word order and sentence structure that has some new music of sound in its new language. I rarely try to make rhyming translations. This poem’s word-music retains Éluard’s original repetitions, which I think are sufficient.

Beautiful Justice

A chord sheet presented so that others can sing this fresh song created in English from Éluard’s poem.

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So, my “Beautiful Justice”  keeps all of Éluard’s parallels, though I made one set of considered changes, both for the benefit of myself as the performer of the result, and from my reading of Éluard’s intent. This poem seems to be speaking of qualities and situations of mankind as a whole, but he uses “hommes” (men) for this, and in another case a masculine noun for brothers (“frères”) which I rendered as “family.” I decided these gendered words were outdated conventions that would benefit from translation. Yes, I was thinking too of my late wife’s poem, “In Another Language,”  performed here last time, who in those same 1970’s was dreaming a genderless language.

It’s just a single acoustic guitar and my rough-hewn voice for this performance. If one wanted to remember this poem, now song, when marching on October 18th, it could be portable that way, though I don’t think my own performance is a stirring march – it’s more a reminiscent prayer. Prayer is focused speech. Song adds intensity of breath and music to speech. Marching and standing together, as simple as that is, adds action from our bodies (even this old man’s body). There may be more going forward that we will be called to do – who can tell with accuracy – but I think it’s not a bad start to be praying in song for those laws old/yet new, those always perfecting laws that protect us, the laws that aren’t capricious decrees to persecute and sever us.

You can hear my song in English made from Paul Éluard’s French poem with the graphical audio player below. No player? This law says you’re permitted to click on the highlighted link and it will open a new tab that will have its own audio player.

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*Core Imagist F. S. Flint, working-class-born, but a native Londoner, worked hard to promote modern French poetry in this pre-WWI era for one.

**Though an online French dictionary I use for that had a service outage while I was working, and I began to dismay that I’d given away to charity my large old French-English dictionary volume.

Dorothy Parker’s “Portrait of the Artist”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Is Dorothy Parker a humorist or a poet? If choosing one, do we diminish the other? Wikipedia leads with the latter – which surprises me a little, because if you’d asked me in the midst of my literary engagements decades ago, I’d have replied the former. The poetic literary cannon doesn’t mind wit, but it downrates those suspected of making humor the main point of their work. And there’s the matter of how it was presented: Parker published in general periodicals (though at a time when they were still engaged more than now with literary poetry). Her collections are filled with short verses sharply focused on catching the busy glossy page-turner a century ago. Are they the poetry equivalent of a New Yorker cartoon – some insidery cultural memeability, yes – but not meant to be judged alongside fine art with substantial complexity?

What if we were to read her in translation, and she was a writer from a culture and times we were substantially distanced from? Imagine a poem like the one I’ll perform today not as a 1920’s American work by a writer whose lifetime overlapped my own, but as a fragment of Sappho or a poem taken from the pen-work of Li Po? Might we see something else?*

Here are some things I see looking at today’s poem this way as I worked to set it to music and perform it. The first is some awkward syntax, some of which could be “poetese,” that mangling of normal word order that is reaching for a sense that this is “special” speech cast in some archaic or fancified manner. In humorous verse this is often used as part of the joke: you were expecting some grand edifice of beauty and truth – dressed in this artificial, inflated manner – and instead you get a pratfall? Ha ha! This still works as a humor tactic, though its sharpness is dulled by the relative absence of literary poetry in our culture. Needing to reach the rhyme is part of the humorous charm of light verse – forced or outlandish rhymes are laugh points. Parker doesn’t go Ogden-Nash-hard on this here, but I smiled when the “rankles” and “ankles” chime goes off in the first verse.

An allied tactic is the use of some unusual words, another high-falutin stance that aims to make the pratfall funnier. I actually had to fix my recording of this. Having recently worked on Yeats famous apocalypse “The Second Coming,”  I actually sang “And gyre my wrists and ankles.” “Gyve” is to bind or tie, “gyre” is to move in a circle or spiral. I don’t know, maybe I was visualizing RFK Jr’s falcons besetting the poem’s speaker with fetters in their beaks and claws.**

Portrait of the Artist

Here’s a chord sheet for the song I made of Parker’s poem

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Also noted when dealing with this poem: the situation set out in the poem is extreme, and taken literally it’s a portrait of bondage, exile, or imprisonment. If parts of this survived as a Sappho fragment, I can see this being decoded erotically. Scholarship and kink cross-over more often these days – and the poem’s imagery is specifically sensual – but don’t put that in your scholarly paper until you do further research.

And here’s the last, most important thing I noticed: I’ve been living this poem recently. First off, a sidelight on the manner in which I found Parker’s poem: I have been going through books and disposing of most of them. My wife is distressed by the number of books and recordings I’ve accumulated over my life. Little difference most sit shelved at the edges of rooms, they are clutter,  and she believes that the space could be used otherwise. At this point in my life, I can see this issue another way: I’m of an age that there’s no world enough and time to imagine going back and rereading or reading the majority of them. Books that I once treasured as reference materials are likely obsoleted by the Internet. For example, I’m torn about keeping my thick hardbound French to English dictionary which was a companion when I started translating French poetry years ago. I’m keeping most of my books of poetry, and some on music, as I intend to keep doing this Project. Novels and general non-fiction? To be carried away.***  Is it clutter? Among my small segment of humanity, I’m not alone in being comforted by books and music surrounding me, and the irrationality of there being more than I can consume in whatever time I have left as an aged person doesn’t change this, but having accumulated an overwhelming amount submerges some books. Going through my books I was surprised to find a 1930’s printing of Parker’s collected poems. I don’t remember buying it, though I did spend time and a dollar or two in any used bookstore that had a hardbound poetry section during my youth.

Last week I read through the first segment of Parker’s book, work that is now in the public domain, and it’s there I found “Portrait of the Artist.”  I’ve mentioned recently that my opportunities to create new work here has become constrained. I’ll spare you the logistical details, but in the early years of this Project I had the five workdays of the workweek to research, compose, and record. The hundreds of pieces I produced in the first half of the Parlando Project’s run say I used that time productively – but if I was to be honest, I’d report that there were days I just blew off, knowing that the next day would be just as good to start or complete some Parlando work.

Now? I can’t tell for certain when I can record, I just know there will be fewer hours available. My energy level as I age is lower, and my old body no longer finds itself able to sit in an upright office chair for hours at a time. I do more of my research and reading on a tablet, which however marvelous, is a poorer environment for complex work with its constrained single smaller screen. I’m still able to play my instruments when I can use my studio space, though I need more time there practicing or simply blowing off the stress of life with a plugged-in electric guitar moving air around me. There are some mornings when my wife, being helpful, will tell me I’ll be able to work on recording for a few hours that day. I’ll think: I don’t have any new poem-texts selected, or the basis of a musical setting ready to be realized, and my energy is low. What can I do (anything?) with that time? And if I can’t do anything, when will the next chance come?

Whine. Whine. What else is the Internet for – complaint and its opposite, the carefully curated presentation of one’s perfectly actualized life to be envied. In Apollonian distance I can clearly see that to have the opportunity and the wonderous technology to do creative work, is a historical exception of the first order.

But then artists, many of whom are toward the introverted side, are often like the one in Parker’s poem: always swearing they wish they had the solitude and freedom from the distractions of life. And then the poet faces the blank page, the composer the silence in the room, their muse taunts them “What’ya got?” and the artist mumbles “That’s your job,” knowing that there’s really no one else in the room, just as they wanted.

There are lots of things in life that are temptations for self-pity or abuse. Sometimes the de profundis answer is “Ha ha.” That doesn’t mean it isn’t serious. The consequences for this troubled encounter with the chance to be creative, and perhaps to come up dry, have killed and crippled.

Simeon the Stylite 600

Simeon the Stylite has figured out how to get some work done without Robert Benchley, FPA, George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, et al.

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All this feeds into the choices I made in the musical performance of Parker’s poem. I treated it no differently than I would have a “serious” literary poem by Parker’s contemporaries Elinor Wylie or Sara Teasdale, though I believe there are a couple of times I’m subtly winking as the singer seeks the situation of a desert-steeple mendicant. The fool is funny – still is when the situation is serious. This is often the lonely place of business for creativity: weighted on commercial and logical scales, it’s absurd that we do it – even, or especially, alone in that room with silences and tabla rasa.

You can hear this performance of Dorothy Parker’s “Portrait of the Artist”  with the audio player gadget below. What, is any such gadget gyved up somewhere? Well then, I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*We can prosecute mootings on more recent American authors too. I’ve recently written here on the difficulties in deciding how often Emily Dickinson means to make a humorous/satiric point in her poems vs. how often she’s an earnest transported romantic. A mixture? Likely, but what are the proportions? What are we missing if we miss the joke?

**Ah, the powers of overdubbing. I fixed that word-mistake ex-post-facto.

***I’m fond of the term “Death Cleaning” for this process. Time’s winged chariot is heading for Goodwill. While I’m blessed to be healthy for my age, I can no longer fool myself into thinking that someday I’ll get around to this, and that…and that, and that.

Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Emily Dickinson poems are easy to set to music, but they can be more difficult for the performer. Having absorbed Protestant hymn books and folk songs in my youth, the common meter/ballad meter stanza Dickinson easily falls into makes it especially easy for me to find music for them. But then the composer me turns things over to the necessary performer me – and in that role I’m left with the question: what is she on about in this poem? What’s the attitude to the material she’s presenting: is she playful, joking, earnestly existential, or some hard to assay mixture of those approaches?

Here’s an example of how this dichotomy works out. In August I completed a setting and performance of a Dickinson poem, “Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe,”  inspired, as I was with the recent D. H. Lawrence “Bavarian Gentians”  poem, by a flower that my wife had seen and photographed on one of her nature walks. Working rapidly on that song setting I went with a casual judgement that this is a playful poem, a little portrait or riddle around the entirely pale white Indian Pipe plant. It has no green chlorophyll at all – doesn’t need it, it doesn’t use photosynthesis to get its nutrition, instead feeding parasitically off deep soil fungi. Dickinson may have been especially drawn to the plant (she had an avid horticultural interest throughout her life) because it’s, well, so weird. As the poem proceeds, my quick understanding was Dickinson commenting on its oddities. That would be consistent with other short nature portraits-in-verse that she wrote.

Ghost Pipe flowers photo by Heidi Randen 1080

If they are symbol of the afterlife, they aren’t immortal. The Indian Pipe/Ghost Pipe flowers are short-lived, and this one, near the end of its life, has lost its pipe-bowl shape.

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Now in September, I looked again at the poem, and I can see the primary mistake I made leading me to understand this poem too soon. The poem begins “Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe.” Duh! While the things she writes in the rest of the poem could  be characteristics of an impressionistic plant description, she’s declaring right off that the poem isn’t about this unusual plant, though it will make use of the comparable flower as a symbol. Here’s a link to see the text of the poem and a scan of the handwritten manuscript including alternative words Dickenson considered.

What is the thing she’s sort of riddling us to guess is her subject? Some kind of immortal soul, some extension of being or consciousness past death. Oblivious to this at first, in this new understanding Dickinson’s poem is a good pairing with Lawrence’s “Bavarian Gentians” – each poem is examining the prospects of that “undiscovered country” past death, illuminated by a late-summer/autumn flower. This poem’s speaker (likely Dickinson herself) is unsure of such a thing: it’s colorless in the shade, makes no sound, is not something all can see. Belief in it might well be romantically exaggerated, “hyperbole.” This pale uncertainty continues, an ongoing “drama” about the possibility of an ongoing plot for our souls, instead of a tragedy’s concluding act.*

The original music and performance I created was lighthearted. In this new understanding, Dickinson is still playing, balancing thoughts about immortality, riddling with mysteries without solution. My new music would have a stronger “drone” center to depict on the necessarily faith or grounding in the unanswered question here. The core instrument in this recorded performance is my old Seagull Folk acoustic guitar, a smaller-bodied cedar-topped instrument, brown and worn as the leaf-beds the Indian Pipe might sprout from. For the drone grounds I played a tanpura, an Indian of a more correct than Columbian geography instrument. For drums, I stayed with the emerging South Asian sounds and played tablas with only the simplified technique I have for them.**

I liked how the new version came out. You can hear it with the audio player below. No player to be seen? Well, “not any voice denotes it here” – some ways of viewing the blog suppress the audio player gadget – but it be not tragedy, I supply this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Oddly, for all her oft-expressed gothic touches, she doesn’t use one of the symbolic plant’s other common names which include “Ghost Pipe,” and “Corpse Flower.” Perhaps the name she used was entirely predominate in her time and place? A supposition is that the plant’s long stem topped with a bowl-shaped flower is reminiscent of a ceremonial native American smoking pipe. By 1879, First Nations people were largely absent from Amherst (see also this extraordinarily brutal Robert Frost poem) – and to call this haunting plant “Indian” may have had a cultural or specific undercurrent for Dickinson.

1879 – I note this is a late Dickinson poem. Dickinson was very prolific in the early 1860s, but by this time in her life the number of poems we have of hers tails off. She’d gone through the death of her father, and her mother’s crippling stroke, and all the national casualties of the American Civil War – all occasions for considering if death was really the end. She wouldn’t have known this, but the 49-year-old poet would be dead herself in 7 years, but with the ghostly flowers we have within her poetry I can make customs of the air by singing them.

**Just to be clear – my studio space is cluttered enough – I used virtual instruments (computer databases of all the sampled notes and articulations of the actual instruments) to allow my MIDI guitar and little plastic piano keyboard to play those sounds.

I Should Turn to Be – Jimi Hendrix Tribute 2025

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Thinking of the late Nineties, I think of the Sixties, 1970, and then the end of the 19th century. When you’re an old man, that’s the kind of swift mobility you retain.

It’s difficult to comprehend how short the careers of some musical figures from The Sixties™ were. This month I watched a documentary on Jeff Buckley, the charismatic late 20th century singer. One of the challenges of his foreshortened life was to deal with the artistic inheritance and distraction of being the son of another singer, one of those Sixties™ artists, Tim Buckley.*

Here’s something I think remarkable, comparing those two. Jeff Buckley was two years older than Tim when he died at age 30. Jeff left one full-length recording, his extraordinary, eclectic debut album Grace.** Tim, beginning in the onrushing Sixties, and continuing through its continuance in the early Seventies when rock performers were increasingly hobbled by drugs of dependence, released nine LPs! Nine,  moving between three  distinct personal stylistic eras in eight years.

Neither Buckley ever made it to the toppermost of the poppermost, but obscured by their creative and commercial hegemony, posthumous fame, and trailing post-group recordings, consider that even the Beatles band was a living presence for only seven years in America.

Back to the Buckleys – there’s a sharp line ending in their careers: Tim died of an overdose of drugs stronger than he expected, Jeff drowned in river currents during an unwise spontaneous swim. We may expect our artists to be audacious – risks come with that.

Which brings me to today’s annual duty, where I mourn the death on September 18th 1970 of my patron saint of The Sixties™ music martyrs, Jimi Hendrix.***  Time and again in these observances here I’ve tried to make the case that Hendrix – the rightfully proclaimed pioneer in expanding the electric guitar’s vocabulary – is underrated as a songwriter, and particularly as a lyricist. I say this, even if I believe such things shouldn’t be reduced to a rating, because his strengths there are just so under-considered. In the pursuance of this goal, I’ve done things like make the lyrics of “Third Stone from the Sun”  audible, and illustrated in a video the scenario of “Up from the Skies,”  but today I’m going to link the lyrics of one of Hendrix’s greatest compositions to a trope not of the 20th century, but more the 19th.

Are you ready for:

Mermaids.

In his song “1983 A Merman I Should Turn to Be”  Hendrix skillfully unravels a Science-Fantasy story without much wasted exposition: in a troubled world beset by wars and violence, a couple of lovers enter the ocean, find they can breathe underwater, and return to the salty brine from which we all have emerged through birth or evolution. Hendrix’s first-order inspiration for this tale is likely mid-century SF writing which he had been reading from childhood – but his imagination made this material his own and he should be remembered as an early Afro-Futurist – but let’s trace those SF stories he read back: the SF pulp writers were still following on from the Verne/Gernsback/H. G. Wells/William Morris late 19th century genesis of their genre.****

This week I went looking for literary mermaid/merman poems, thinking that a possible route into my Hendrix memorial this year. Surprise, there’s a lot of them!   I don’t have a theory as to why this would be, but a great many British Isles poets had a mermaid poem somewhere in their collected works from around the turn of their centuries. In some of the poems the sea maidens are depicted as sirens, luring men to danger or soggy death in their arms, and this kind of naughty sex/death double feature might be a good fit with Victorian decadence. Then there was the highly successful Little Mermaid  story of Hans Christian Anderson, but that’s an opposite plot from most of the poems: Anderson’s heroine wants to flee from the sea to the land, not from the land to the sea, and the mermaid is the story’s protagonist, not the landlubber male poets hearing sea maidens. Baring the example of Hendrix’s song, mermaids in my lifetime more likely follow Anderson fairy tale path onto dry land.

What turned the tide with this poetic trope? It might be T. S. Eliot’s famous use of sea-girl sirens in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”  his first prominent poem. The satiric uncommitted romanticism of the poem’s Prufrock concludes with human voices awakening us from the sea girl romantic/decadent dream. We’ve largely followed suit ever since.

So, for a text for today’s piece I decided to weave together sections of five mermaid poems from that earlier era,***** but I am putting them in the context of a memorial to Hendrix, on the anniversary of Hendrix’s death, which came to him slept-under from unfamiliar pills, drunk on wine – when and where the man who dreamed a tender escape into the sea died on dry land in the middle of London. He was 27, yes too young, only four years in the general public’s eye, yet he had created his revolution for the guitar, and four albums of songs, songs I maintain that are good enough to be remembered alongside the guitar playing. What mighty things to have done in such a short time.

I Should Turn to Be

Selections from mermaid/siren poems by Tennyson, Beckett, De la Mare, Symonds, Eliot, and Yeats were woven together to make the lyrics to today’s musical piece.

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My song “I Should Turn to Be”  had to be created in a small amount of studio-space time, but I’m reasonably happy how it turned out. I was aiming for some dynamic range in this tale of doomed fantasies underwater, and I was able to get there. I haven’t been able to play electric guitar much for simple enjoyment this month, but even the focused playing to realize this composition felt good, so forgive the indulgence in two guitar solos – The Sixties™ would forgive me. You can hear the performance with the audio player below? Has any such player slipped beneath the waves? It’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress showing the player gadget, so I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I recommend that film, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley.  For a music documentary about a male artist, it’s remarkable that it relies largely on testimony from women. Yes, like most music documentaries it avoids talking in detail about music – and the musical examples are short clips, which may not convey enough of the man’s art for the uninitiated – but the emotional narrative is richer for this uncommon choice by the makers.

Tim abandoned Jeff’s mother to focus on making his first record and subsequent touring. Jeff broke up with his partner in the midst of trying to launch his own career, though without a child being involved in his case. Questions about his father bedeviled Jeff, understandably – more so in that both père and fils were taken with a strong ethos of living in the moment. Still, it’s hard not to note the similarities in the two singer’s unbounded singing, and the two even sounded a likeness when describing their dedicated artistic drives.

**In Jeff’s defense, his career as a recording artist was only 4 years, having not made his first recordings until his mid-20s. And the range of musical approaches he assayed over fewer recordings is comparable to his father’s.

***The tight cluster of the Jimi, Jim, Janis deaths in 1970 gave rise to that gothic “27 Club” thing. I’d be risking a lot of “who’s that?” shrugs if I’d say that I myself am probably more like Al Wilson, the singer/guitarist/folklorist who died on September 3, 1970, also at age 27. But Hendrix is my choice because he was as much a poet as Jim Morrison, and doubly an artist when he played his guitar.

****Reviving 19th century Victorian fashions and art was a significant part of the English psychedelic era. This undercurrent too might have led Hendrix to compose his merman/mermaid song.

*****One couplet introduces the piece that isn’t from a late 19th-early 20th century poem. Those two lines are from the most-covered Tim Buckley song, lyrics written by his high school friend and collaborator Larry Becket for “Song for a Siren” – another late contribution to the mermaid genre Tim Buckley released in 1970. It’s a haunted song, and it takes only a little dose of gothic romanticism to wonder if Jeff Buckley heard the sirens beckoning from out across that fatal river in Memphis. See, I wasn’t wasting your time with that Buckley stuff at the beginning, it’s a plan.

The Cherry Blossom Wand

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

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

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

older Anna Wickham in her kitchen

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

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

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

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

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

As a whole then: bittersweet.

Cherry Blossom Wand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

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

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

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

Sedition

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

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

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

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