I can’t let the anniversary month of August go by without doing a summary of what have been the most popular of the more than 900 musical pieces and more than 1,000 posts since the Parlando Project publicly launched in 2016,
I’m going to do this Top Ten in a 6-3-1 format to keep these posts from running too long. Another difference: I tend to talk most about the words we use here and their authors, but the next few posts are going to be more about the music we compose and play as part of this Project. So, let’s not waste any time, on to the countdown.
At position 10 we find pioneering Imagist H.D.’s “The Pool.” This is a personal favorite of mine, not only for the enigmatic poem that provides the words, but for the early use of an arpeggiator to let me incorporate the – what is it? – mandolin or zither or oud virtual instrument here along with low bowed string riff that I played with a little plastic keyboard or my MIDI guitar. Maybe I should note here that “virtual instruments” (VI) does not mean AI by any definition of the term. They are databases of recorded notes, often with a range of articulations that can be called up instantly and played, just as “real” instruments are played or scored and played.
At position 9 we have another set of early Modernist initials: E. E. Cummings’ “Crepuscule (I Will Wade Out). I had forgotten that Bjork had already set a version of this poem when I did this setting in 2018. The instrumentation chosen is a favorite of mine: acoustic guitar and spare, sustained piano. The way the strings on a small wood box mix with the strings in large hardwood coffin struck with hammers as their overlapping waveforms combine never fails to please me. Here, as I often do, I’m playing single notes on the piano so as not to challenge my nearly non-existent piano skills. The piano is doing what a simple electric bass or solitary low bowed-string part might do in the arrangement.
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At number 8 we get Arthur Rimbaud’s “Eternity.” I try to mention the influences on this Project from time to time. They are many, and they are strong. They need to be strong because I’m not a “natural” as musician or performer. While I think I have some talent, however simplistic, as creator of musical ideas from the composer’s side, no one is going to pick me as the best choice for a vocalist – and even on “my instrument,” the guitar, I have inconsistent and varying skills. Patti Smith then is one of the influences, partly because she took her poetic vision and then went on will and audacity to become the frontperson in a band. Her championing of Rimbaud led me to consider that poet, and in my setting of “Eternity” I’m sort of emulating the sound of the Patti Smith Group, phrasing the vocal somewhat like she would.
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7 is held down by William Butler Yeats’ “The Stare’s Nest at My Window,” one of his poems about the Irish Civil War. A few weeks after I presented this poem musically, a man, George Floyd, was killed by callousness and negligence on the part of my city’s police force a few blocks south of where I live, and remembering this Parlando piece, I felt Yeats was speaking to my time and place. Listening to my musical setting now more than five years later, it still evokes that time for me. I can’t remember exactly how I treated the ominous string parts in it to get that sound, – some kind of delay or reverb I think – and the same spare sustained piano playing that I’ve use elsewhere in other pieces chills to the bone here.
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Place 6, “Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Once more listeners seemed to like, or at least try, my writing for bowed orchestral strings. Here the spare strangeness of the parts and the odd note choice, leaping interval, electric guitar solo over the top intends to evoke majesty of rustic nature – but I’m somewhat surprised at this one reaching this level of popularity, as I’m not sure the piece succeeds.
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Not that anything in today’s group of songs explicitly references Jazz…
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Last one for today, number 5, returns to a piece that is a favorite of mine and one that I think represents elements of what I do well: Emily Dickinson’s “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.” Another piece largely composed with orchestral instrument parts. I fear serious orchestral composers and aficionados think these compositions of mine simpleminded – and furthermore, practical necessity dictates that they are implemented by virtual instruments making up the orchestra, and so no matter how well recorded and implemented these approximations in software are, they lack the full detail of their real counterparts. In my defense, I’ve taken to calling my approach here “Punk Orchestral” – trying with that name to make the point that I’m using the tools, ideas, and opportunities that I have to make what music I can make now, without deferring to the prerequisites of virtuosity and more theoretical knowledge. Let me make this clear as I wrap up today: I recognize my limits, respect those skills and the dedication to practicing and perfecting them that I lack, but I persist in doing what I can with what I can marshal none-the-less.
Here’s another new translation of a poem by pioneering French Surrealist Paul Éluard that I made in order to perform it with music. This one, “A La Minute,” which I’ve rendered as “At This Minute,” also lacks the extravagant imagery that one might expect in a poem associated with Surrealism. I hear its language as informal speech, though this could be a mistake – remember I’m far from a fluent French speaker, nor am I an expert on early 20th century France. The only solid objects referred to in the poem are the eye and a more vague “instrument.*” There’s also the pronoun “it” present, and from the poem’s title and inference that may refer to the abstract concept of time.
Éluard’s original French, and my translation to English. That translation may still be a WIP. This morning I was thinking I should revisit the penultimate line.
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What the poem is talking about is elusive. Like the Éluard poem last time, the greater context and situation are left out of the poem, leaving a set of statements about it. At the time I performed the poem – as with “The Naked Truth” – I had decided that my performer’s subjectivity was going to use my dissatisfaction with my country’s current regime to animate the words. On deeper reflection afterward I’ve begun to think that both of these poems are complicated love poems. Perhaps if this series continues, I’ll write more about Éluard’s complicated love life, but even in the absence of that biographic information I remembered that Éluard is famous in his native France as a great love poet.
Those two frames can become congruent in poetic expression. If one loves one’s country and residents, one can have a complex relationship with its civic actions and outlook. Similarly, the intimate relationships between erotic partners cannot escape political and power questions. If early 20th century, or modern French readers, are expecting a poem about the affairs of love from this poet, they will likely hear it as such. As to the political reading? One thing I often see myself here in America: those women who carry experience with incompetence, reflexive lying, and lack of responsibility from intimate partners see immense resonance in my country’s current leadership. That is not a happy feeling, but it’s a clarifying one.
Éluard had a lifelong political side, and so consciously or unconsciously he may have intended this ambiguity. The poem seems to me to be addressed in hopes that a relationship will change, perhaps with the ending of it. What a speaker in the poem is declaiming then is that they are aware, can clearly see, what is wrong there. It may be a “who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?” situation.
Since I’m accustoming you to link two seemingly disparate worlds when hearing this poem, let me jump now to the music I made for performance. There’s a producer/musician and music theory teacher, Rick Beato, who has a very popular YouTube channel. One of his regular segments is to listen to the top 10 contemporary pop music streaming songs. This sort of thing is red meat for older listeners who eagerly click on those episodes wanting to hear Beato’s declarations of the lack of merit in modern pop music which will include objective reasons for that lack of achievement.** In one recent episode he noticed that many of the streaming hits didn’t “go anywhere” – meaning that they didn’t modulate to new keys, change tempo or time signature, or even change chords very much. Since there is a universe of sophisticated things that a composer or performer can do with all that, there’s value in pointing out the potential of using those musical tactics. But what he doesn’t stop to ask himself (or his audience) is: why might acts make that choice, and are then rewarded with large contemporary audiences for doing so?
Two putative answers that quickly come to mind: we are seeking something that seems stable and comforting – and conversely, we may be quite frustrated by the lack of positive change in our world and want to express that.
There’s a great, complicated, love song made famous by Aretha Franklin, written by Don Convay: “Chain of Fools.” Lyrically, that song may be a cousin to Éluard’s poem, and the song’s harmony is an interlocking one-chord riff, broken only for a few bars where all the instruments fall away and only voices and handclaps carry on in the same key. Whenever I hear someone make a statement that assumes that harmonic complexity is the key to effective music, I will call Aretha Franklin to testify.
Now I’m not Aretha Franklin – as far as I can determine, no one is – but my music for “At This Minute” is based on one chord (Em) with the tiniest movement in how it’s voiced. I built this composition starting with the rhythm, a pair of related and repeated broken chord piano arpeggios expressing that chord, underlaid with a simple bass part I played on my U-Bass.*** To drive home the statis, I plucked my kalimba (thumb piano) right up next to the microphone so that it sounded almost like musical hammer blows.
Rather than performing my translation from Éluard’s French straightforwardly, I decided to improvise repetitions of phrases in it. While it doesn’t sound like ecstatic Afro-American gospel a la Franklin, conceptionally, it’s akin. You can hear that performance with the audio player gadget below. No audio player? It hasn’t said goodbye, but I hope and hope you’ll see this alternative:a highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.
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*What is that “instrument?” A clock or watch face perhaps? Or since the poem wants to riff on the eye and seeing – the spider face of Éluard’s poetry is as full of eyes as Emily Dickinson’s is of bees – the instrument could be the instrument of vision, the eye. If one was to create a Surrealist painting to illustrate this poem, both of those instruments should be melded together.
**To Beato’s credit: while he savvily promotes these run-downs (both senses of the word) as disparagement of modern pop music, he’s got a wide enough musical taste to offer praise for things he hears and likes in these top-tens. His grasp of music theory and enthusiasm for how it can be deployed is infectious, and that’s a good thing. As to how good or bad modern pop music is compared to the golden era that (just coincidently) happened when the oh, so, objective evaluator was a young person, I’ll call to the stand Mr. Theodore Sturgeon with his law that “90% of everything is crap.”
***The U-Bass is the size and construction of an ukelele, but with very thick nylon strings meant to be tuned to the same notes and register as a bass guitar (EADG). I love the upright bass, but I can’t afford, store, or play one well-enough – but I have three or four ways to make something like that instrument’s sound, such as today’s U-Bass.
Last time I had a chance to record a new piece using guitar, I rattled the bones of a Jazzmaster amid synth keyboards played with the same guitar. Monday I had another chance. My studio space was quiet, I could have made it loud – or I could open a sensitive microphone. Organic, wooden music? I uncased an acoustic guitar. I do like the directness of that instrument. I have microphones setup for recording in my studio space, so it’s as simple as opening a preset template on my computer recording software, arming the tracks, and clicking the red screen button.
The contrast that resulted could have been even greater. I tend to attack the strings on an acoustic guitar pretty hard. I use a flat pick, but I’m most often not strumming the way other plectrum players do. Instead, I skip from string to string, not striking them consecutively or with a “boom chuck” alternative strum either. I use that single flat pick’s point to do in succession what a “finger picking” guitarist does.* Many years ago when I tried to learn how to finger-pick, I noticed that many patterns didn’t strictly require that you strike two or more strings simultaneously, and I just spontaneously started to move the single point of a flat pick around to play what I would have done using thumb and fingers.
I had a new song to record – really new. Over the weekend I decided to crack open my old paperback of Paul Éluard’s Capitale de la douleur, Mourir de na pas mourir , Éditions Gallimard, 1966. The book’s entirely in French, and I can’t remember what bookstore I found it at in Iowa. As I’ve mentioned occasionally here, I had the impression that French poetry was an important influence on English Modernist verse, and living in a state (Iowa) that retained some French place names and seeing French on signs and labels when I visited Canada for fishing trips as a kid made me feel that French was a logical second language for me.**
Somewhat like finger-picking, I was a washout studying French in school. I had a terrible time pronouncing the words anywhere near correctly, and the introductory classes I took in high school and in my foreshortened college years had nothing to do with the French poetry I wanted to get ahold of.
So, kind of like guitar playing, I just went self-taught. Back in the 20th century I brute-forced my way through a handful of poems with a French-English dictionary and vague memories of basic French syntax and grammar from my school-room failure. Eventually, it was just easier to get the poetry already translated, where and when available.
It was only once the Parlando Project got underway in the twenty-teens that I returned to translation. Nearly all the English translations I had read are not in the public domain and free to reuse. And furthermore, I found that not every poet’s work I was interested in had even been translated extensively into English. This was true for many of the Dadaists, and I was also somewhat surprised that it was true of Éluard.
Éluard, as best as I can tell, is a big deal in Modernist French poetry. Present at the creation of Surrealism. Not just an important avant-gardist, admired for his love poetry too. Patriotically valorized for being a stalwart member of the anti-fascist Resistance during WWII. But none of that makes him all that important in America.
I wanted to go through the early poems collected in my book that would be in the public domain. Many of them do not have English translations I can find propagated on the Internet. I used my limited French vocabulary to scan them for what looked like interesting lines, and concentrated on the shorter ones that fit this Project’s needs.
I took the ones I picked out and put them through machine (computer) translation. Machine translation has gotten much better in the past few years,*** but it still doesn’t produce poetry. What it does produce seems, to my inexpert eyes, to be mostly accurate glosses of the literal poem. My job is to take those words, discern what they are trying to represent, and to make that into a poem that will seem vivid to a modern American reader.
In that process I would find even a pristine word-for-word translation inadequate. I want to translate the sequence of images as much as the words, and I want the result to have some musical or incantatory power (even if I don’t usually go so far as to try to duplicate a meter or rhyme scheme).
The poem, “Nudite De La Verite,” in its original French
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Éluard’s “The Naked Truth” was not hard to work with. There’s not much wild imagery to it. There is the image of the incorporeal state of despair that has no wings in the literal translation. I decided to sharpen that to “no flight,” both to link it with the rest of the short catalog of always-present no-action and so that the sound of “no flight “ can better flow into the “no face” that follows.
I really wanted that negative flow about resistance to despair, and for that I made the most significant choice to change the sentence structure of Éluard’s text, which has the line stating despair at the start followed by the line about love. I reversed the order, putting the line about love first, almost as an interrupted side-thought that prefaces the statement about despair that we will momentarily think is what all the adamant stubbornness is about – until we get to the payoff at the poem’s end.
Perhaps this isn’t the best choice? It’s not the order Éluard wrote down in French, and I want you to know that I changed that order. I may have been influenced by the way I, and many others feel – particularly in my town – with the current regime and its performative cruelty and callousness. Goddammit, we might see this through this little poem: a hope that our level of our despair at those things must be equal to a level of love.
My version in English, presented as a chord sheet for those that want to sing it themselves.
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You can hear my musical performance of my translation/adaptation of Paul Éluard’s “The Naked Truth” with the audio player below. What? Has any such audio player taken wing the way your despair or love hasn’t? Well, I offer this consolation: a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*For the added volume and sharp attack, some guitar finger-pickers use picks too, but different ones than a flat pick – typically a plastic thumb-pick that fits ring-like, but over the distal part of the thumb, and metal or plastic picks somewhat like half-spoon thimbles on one to three fingers. Others use some combination of fingernails and flesh. I have terrible nails and my skin can only allow me to play a limited amount of time with my thumb or fingers on bass. I tried to use fingerpicks as a guitarist, but found them finicky to manage.
**If I was a kid in my present residence, it would be natural to have gravitated toward Spanish. While my town has a significant number of Francophone African-Americans, Latin American Spanish is often in the air around here, and whenever I delve into Latin American poetry I find great riches.
***I suppose these computer-translations could be called Artificial Intelligence of a kind. The AI label gets thrown on a wide range of things these days both for promotion and disapproval. In my defense I’ll point out that computer translations aren’t “generative AI,” the thing that (deservedly) gets the most heat. When I type Éluard’s French into a machine translation entry box I’m not asking it to generate some reheated reprocessed slop of other, uncredited, artists’ work in order to present the pretense of originality. I’m asking it to do what I did when thumbing through my French-to-English dictionary, along with making some effort at producing an understandable syntax order for the resulting words. As for other AI issues: I casually assume my request to render a 35-word poem has a modest carbon footprint.
I still end up working with French-to-English dictionaries to check significant words, to see examples of the words or phrases in use, and to make at least an effort at understanding possible idiomatic usage. Would it be better if the poetry was translated by a bilingual poet with extensive knowledge about early 20th century France? Yes, but I’m not sure that Éluard’s fate has given us that – and so I make my efforts.
This week is the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Parlando Project. While I had completed some of the early musical pieces and even did a couple of test blog posts before summer 2016, I chose August 6th as the official start date because it’s the anniversary of my late wife’s, Renée Robbins, death.
I’ll talk more about the Project, and my life since those two events in upcoming posts, but today’s post is about my life-partner and the unlucky turn that made that so only for a little more than 20 years. To young people, I’d expect 20 years to seem a long time. To old folks like me, the same 20 years seems less – but then too this post won’t be nearly long enough to memorialize Renée. To some degree this whole Project is a memorial to the dreams of poets and poetry, music and musicians, that surrounded two young people who fell in love in that unloved and less-remembered decade, The Seventies. Dreams of my youth? Yes – and that would be a shared youth with Renée. It’s also wider than that: I’ve long harbored a romantic belief: that the dreams of the dead continue to exist out there somewhere, and we can call on, call in, those flickering things.
I met Renée in a writer’s group, specifically not the Lake Street Writer’s Group that I participated in until half the remaining members died within a few months of each other five years ago. At the time I was frustrated with the LSWG founder-poet-editor’s insistence on tamping down expression around eroticism. That fine man, Kevin FitzPatrick, wanted a big tent working-class literature and poetry, and his fear was that explicit sex and gender passages in our Lake Street Review little magazine would be problematic for a wide audience in the mid-1970s. I on the other hand looked at my pig-in-the-python generation and saw them embroiled in an entire barnyard of working out those things.
In protest, for a couple of years I decamped to another group of young writers, and one of them was Renée. She’d studied with a poet and writing professor Philip Dacey (and taken literature classes with poet-humorist Howard Mohr) in college, had published a few poems, and I was immediately impressed with her sense of humor.* The range of human erotic turn-ons is astonishingly wide-ranging, but for me, a primary one is an alluring sense that someone might laugh in bed, and Renee had those vibes. We fell into a passionate and complicated relationship. The next couple of years would deserve at least two lengthy and unwritten chapters I won’t be asking you to read today. One of those chapters would describe that she was involved with someone who presented himself as a musician. He wasn’t, but the chancer was a bit of a con artist. This one still puzzles me – the Renée I knew was a savvy judge of character, and that blind spot may have been a folie de la jeunesse thing.**
We moved in together in 1979. Ten years later we married, with intent, on April Fool’s Day. 11 years later, she was dying of pancreatic cancer, diagnosed only a few months earlier. I’m an old man, remembering that partnership as a young man. Those 20 plus years we had together therefore seem alternately long and short, flashing as to recall moments when it seemed as long as any forever, and then the retrospective surety of knowing it wouldn’t be as long as we thought then.
Renée in Powderhorn Park, about the time we moved in together.
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Long and brief as what I wrote above is, I wanted to write this to present today’s musical piece. Its genesis was earlier this year when I was doing some old man “Death Cleaning,” the getting rid of stuff so others won’t have to do that work when I die. It was a page found in with Renée’s saved stuff from her youth, some of it going back to her college years before I met her – stuff that her short, brutal, illness never allowed her to clean out. I can’t say exactly when it was written – and if it was written “from life,” who is the lover in the situation it describes.
It looks like an intended song lyric, and although Renée was a competent basic pianist, she never practiced that skill nor (as far as I know) set anything to music. She was a fan of several Seventies singer-songwriters however. Did she intend it as a song, or was it a “literary ballad” from her youthful poet self that was meant to refer to popular music, but on a silent literary page?
Lyrics for today’s song. I didn’t write out a chord sheet, but the recording is a two-chord vamp between D minor and C, though there’s some variations in both chords.
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The ambiguity in the situation described is hard to summarize. Lyrics may exaggerate love situations with extravagant metaphors not meant to be taken literally, but the references in the lyric to depression and “you’re making me sick” convince me that that love addiction it portrays isn’t just a playful trope. Later in her life, after Renée had gotten her Masters in Counseling Psychology, she worked as a professional counselor in a gambling addiction program. At least once when a client wondered what she knew about addiction, she would gesture toward her overweight body and say “Well, I show my addiction externally, for anyone to see. Let’s talk about your hidden one.”
The page I found titled “Love Addict Blues” was from a younger version of herself. Would its youthful expression have embarrassed the older Renée? I could see it either way, but I’m now the living one, and like those floating dreams, I chose to see it as a surviving artifact of this woman I loved. And so, earlier this summer, I made an effort to set her “Love Addict Blues” to music. Though her words aren’t in the classic 3-line stanza/12-bar-verse blues structure, I aimed for an electric blues feel, something vaguely in the BB King area. Early summer wasn’t giving me a lot of chances to play electric guitar though, and the page of her lyrics with my chords sat in my WIP stack, un-played.
Then, at the end of July, I was listening to a new song on the radio by Joyce & Tutty Moreno, modern Brazilian samba masters. I suddenly remembered one of Renée’s favorite LPs – not a singer-songwriter exactly, but instead Flora Purim, another Brazilian singer-composer who is usually filed under Jazz-Fusion genre-wise. I don’t have the chops to cop what Purim can do, not even close, but I immediately went about getting a Latin Jazz percussion module for my drum software so I could try for that feel, only with a much less animated and virtuosic vocalist like myself. This style would usually call for nylon string guitar, but the opposite problem prevented me from recording that – there would be too much environmental noise jumping into the sensitive mic. I made do with recording my fretless electric bass plugged directly into my recording software with the fresh percussion sounds arrayed in a basic syncopated groove, and finally a MIDI virtual-instrument-sound sampled piano to outline a simple two-chord harmony. But if there was noise about, how would I record the vocal? I used an Electro-Voice RE20 microphone. This mic is something of a rare bird: it’s a dynamic microphone, but it’s designed to not have as much “proximity effect” as other dynamic microphones.*** This means I can work right next to the microphone’s grill and greatly reduce any unwanted environmental sounds. You might notice that the resulting recording has audible breaths. Normally I’d address the RE20 slightly off axis to prevent that – and there’s even modern post-facto software that does a good job of removing breath sounds – but I was imprinted in my youth on Astrud Giberto’s breathy and intimate Bosa Nova vocals, and the breathy sound today is intentional.
You can hear my performance of Renée Robbins’ “Love Addict Blues” with the audio player below. If you are grieving over audio player unleaving, Márgarét (or anyone else) can use this highlighted link to open a new browser leaf – ah, tab – that will have an audio player that isn’t viewable on this main page because some ways of reading this blog won’t display such a thing.
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*One of Renée’s party tricks: she could recite the entire 15 minutes plus of The Firesign Theater’s “The Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye” from memory. And yeah, Old Possum, she do the voices too.
**Or it could have been part of Renée’s kindness and generosity, the other facet of her fierce understanding of the tricks and deceptions of the less than kind. I mentioned this to my living wife, telling her I was worried that including it might be seen as disrespectful to Renée.
“Well, she was generous enough to see the worth in both of us” she offered.
***Dynamic microphones are by their nature less sensitive to short, quiet, subtle sounds, and so are generally less than ideal for recording quieter acoustic instruments or vocalists with quieter voices and attractive upper-range timbral elements. My rough-hewn voice has less attractive upper level detail, so no great loss – and the RE20 preserves that detail better than other dynamics mics. Other popular “Cardioid Dynamic Microphones” – used nearly universally for club-stage-stadium vocalists – boost the lower range on the vocals being picked up from them when the mic is very near to the singer’s mouth. That’s the “proximity effect”, an artificial deepening. While that’s sometimes attractive, and can even give the impression of added power, it isn’t something I usually want in my recordings.
I often recommend the Electro-Voice RE20 to people that want to record vocals in untreated or less-than-ideal rooms. I also find it good to try when recording lead vocalists with a live band playing together in a room. Price-wise, this guy who started recording with Radio Shack microphones would still call the RE20 expensive, but in the great “professional” scheme of things it’s a mid-low-priced mic.
So, who is Conrad Aiken? I don’t fully know yet, but I came upon one of his poems this spring, and found out that as a critic, anthologist, short-story writer, and poet, that he’s one of those first-part-of-the-20th-century Americans who helped establish American poetry in the Modernist era. He graduated from Harvard University in 1912, and before that decade was out, he’d established his literary footprint. In 1919 he published what he claimed was the first comprehensive anthology of American poetry, explaining in the book’s introduction that previously there was no clear call for such a collection as American poetry was such a small part of world literature. Here’s what I found most interesting about that anthology: he would retain only a smattering of poems by Longfellow and the Fireside poets, though using Poe, Dickinson,* and Whitman to fill out much of the 19th century section – and here’s the boldest part: he would give his early 20th century contemporaries a great deal of space.
In things like this I sense that Aiken is reflecting or creating a canonical moment that lasted well into his 20th century. His choices are similar to the choices I was presented later with the mid-century textbooks of my youth, but I recall being frustrated back then: why were the poets and poetry worth studying ending with Eliot and Frost? While that pair were still living as I began to study literature, their anthologized poems were 30-40 years old then, seemingly ancient to my teenage self. OK, Aiken’s canon may have been much like the one I was later presented, but back then his 1919 book included poems not even 5 years from publication. Not just a handful, some appendix set aside as a gesture, but around a third of the anthology!
By that year Aiken had published five books of his own poetry, one of which shares its title with its lead-off poem inside: “Nocturne of Remembered Spring.”The nocturne is a musical form, and references to musical forms and the experience of music abound in the Aiken poetry I’ve read so far. Oddly, I don’t consistently fall under the spell of his word-music off the page. His poems do have some lyrical moments, but they are obscured by a problem I’m having: his long windiness. As I page through Aiken’s early books many poems span a dozen pages or more, and while he did try his hand at sonnets, they don’t seem to be is métier. Perhaps I’m not appreciating the sense of the tune behind the poems. Unlike many of his contemporaries, I rarely hear strains of American folk musics in these early poems. I can’t help but think that his evident attraction to the related art of music is more conceptional or one-abstraction-layer-removed impressionism than simply producing dancing words and prosodical earworms.
Aiken at around the post-graduate age when he was helping form the canon of American poetry.
Luckily for your composer/presenter here, he will often break up his longer poems in shorter, numbered, sections. So, the seven pages of the poem “Nocturne of Remembered Spring” are split in six sections, each obsessively recalling the same youthful love affair, each going over memories of it. Given the length of the poem I’d have liked to see more contrast in the sections, but for page after page it remains inside the head of the poem’s voice as it goes over memories. This psychological internalism may have been a novel effect in 1916 when the poem is dated, but it tires me. Aiken’s work is new to me, but I can’t help but compare his theme here unfavorably to early work by Mina Loy (her extravagantly expressive “Songs to Johannes”) or Neruda’s extraordinarily popular “Twenty Love Songs.”**
My choice for a musical setting of Aiken was to select out only the final section, numbered “VI.” It sufficiently summarizes the poem, and I think it has more chance of listener impact by compressing its expression and it highlights there a musical device by refraining lines about remembrance.*** As so often in this Project’s choice of texts, this was the section with words that “asked” to be sung. I’m a composer who tends to bagatelles due to lack of time and sophisticated skills. The length was right. I wrote a simple cello line, quickly extrapolated a series of chords for nocturnal piano and improvised a second cello top line melody to be played via my MIDI guitar sounding a good cello VI**** which would also help guide my rough-hewn vocal. As I wrote earlier this month, a musical piece like this would seem to be Art Song of a type, but one which classically trained and skilled singers would find outrageous. My hope, aware of my limitations, is that it can still communicate something and help vivify a presence for writers like Aiken who have fallen into the cracks in the canon.
You can hear my performance of part VI. from Conrad Aiken’s “Nocturne of Spring Remembered” with the audio player gadget below. What no player? I, or rather some ways of reading this blog, haven’t forgotten it, it just won’t show in every kind of reader. I provide this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player so it can still be heard.
*Though Dickinson wrote her remarkable work in the middle of the 19th century, none of it was publicly known until it’s posthumous publication began with three book-length volumes in the final decade of the 1800s. This means that even when including Dickinson in his survey of American poetry in 1919 that Aiken was featuring poems less than 30 years from publication date. In 1924 Aiken published a selected poems of Emily Dickinson, a step in establishing her place in the American poetic canon. Last time, when I presented a Dickinson poem, I almost presented a capsule history of the tangled provenance of Dickinson’s poems, using “A Something in a summer’s Day” as an example. Tight summary: decendents of Susan Gilbert Dickinson (Emily Dickinson’s sister-in-law, neighbor, friend, and presently oft-assumed lover) and of Mabel Todd Loomis (the mistress of Susan’s husband/Emily’s brother) each had a tranche of Dickinson poems and claimed rights to them, and each was publishing them as well as letters and recollections of the poet. Both sources were editing the poems, normalizing their distinctive language and punctuation, and ordering them in chapters of common high-minded themes. Aiken’s Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson issued from his seat as a critic and anthologist offered additional canonical approval to the poet who he judges in his introduction is “among the finest poets in the language.” At the time he was drawing from less than half of the now known poems of Dickinson! And the Dickinson that we know today – all dashes and abrupt leaps of thought – only became available when I was a schoolboy!
**A decade later Aiken’s Selected Poems won a Pulitzer. That book didn’t include any of Nocturne of Remembered Spring. The author himself may have moved on.
***As I enter into the month of August, I’m in my annual period of personal remembrance of the summer now long ago when my late wife was dying. The refrain in section VI. of “Do you remember” coincidentally brought to mind the translation in English of the name of the Twin Cities based indie rock trio Hüsker Dü. I missed my chance by not setting Aiken to reflect that.
****A pun, and with Roman numerals! A “VI” is a “virtual instrument.” These are made when a company records snippets of a real cello playing its range of notes in a variety of performance articulation and puts the result into what is in effect a database of all those sounds which can be played with an otherwise silent device – most often a piano style keyboard, but it can be another instrument control surface such as my MIDI guitar which tells it what to play in notes, timing, and expression, all of which are retrieved in real time.
A wonderful something about Emily Dickinson’s large body of poetry is that there are always “new” poems to discover just by paying attention to them. Take this one for example. It’s not one of the Greatest Hits, yet despite being an early poem – the estimated date of its manuscript is 1859, a few years before Dickinson’s most productive years in the 1860s – it already demonstrates her poetic strengths. Today I’m going to catalog some things I note in it, but if you’re not into such details, feel free to skip down the page to the performance.
Let’s start with some Dickinsonian unusual word choices, since she hits us with a couple right off. Uncountable poets have described the light of sunrise, but her choice of “flambeaux” to describe it seems novel. What’s a flambeaux?* It’s a big torch, often with a rank of multiple flames. To Dickinson it’d be a feature of a parade. Did she see or read of such? In her day, marches were a significant part of political campaigning. Her father was a politician, did his Whigs or the more raucous Democrats march with such torchlight? There are other parades that might feature flambeaux. Far from her largely Protestant Massachusetts, flambeaux were (and still are) part of New Orleans Mardi Gras. That’s something she wouldn’t have seen, but her poems sometimes gather exotica taken from her reading – perhaps this is one?
And “solemnizes me.” As a choice, a more active way to describe a change in outlook or mood. A reaction of mine here is a stretch, but my looking for connection ear also hears “Solomon-izing me.” Would the famously herbaceous Emily recall the line about the nature of field lilies from the Gospel of Matthew: “…not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these.”
A chord sheet for today’s musical performance, included because I believe there are others out there who might like to sing this poem.
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Word sound-music is rich in the poem. Besides this poem’s rhyme — none of her slant or off rhymes here, though I love the sound of that apostasy elsewhere in her poetry — but the sounds of inline words are constantly resonating and chiming with each other, a “shimmering grace” in sound.
Her famous 4-foot/3-foot hymn or ballad meter is present here, but with a twist: all save the last stanza have two 4-foot lines and then a concluding 3, which gives them a feeling of conclusion, much like the line/repeat/different sequence of the classic 3-line Blues stanza.
The plot of the poem is the procession of a day from dawn through day, then night, then the next dawn, but the middle of poem explicitly promises ecstasy.** The episodes contained there, I experience as such. There’s a nighttime wash of bright stars or moonlight.*** Dickinson’s voice here turns transported acolyte, clapping in my mind, dancing as well, like some Amherst Sufi.
What does she see, and want us to see, in the 4th stanza? Its transport is somewhat mysterious. It could be something like wispy clouds drifting over the stars and moon, but as a fellow northern-parts American with Dickinson, I suspect that “fluttering,” subtle–shimmering” grace is the Northern Lights.
And what’s being described in the 5th stanza? On the face of it, a little brook in nighttime – but I see something else in metaphor being developed here: the constrained “purple brook” seems to me to be veins. Veins in plants, veins in animals, coursing blood-vessels in ourselves. And the red, the next dawn’s red, that follows is as if the blood life-force within all of Gaia is bursting forth in this ecstatic vision beyond venous constraints.
And finally, there’s another switch-up: we get a concluding 4-line stanza, this time in the conventional hymn/ballad quatrain. And what does it present after this mystical vision? That vision’s mundane container: (just) another day. Is Dickinson trying to conventionalize herself here? Calm a possible reader that she’s not a wild-night, wild-eyed mystic, but just another twenty-something 19th century upper middle-class young woman who indulges herself in some daily nature thoughts in verse? Could it be a smile at a sense of contrast: that we attend to and then not attend to the great eternities of things throughout our lives? Or is she in addition reminding us that ordinary, ongoing, oh-so-daily, life is the stage, the ground, the staff upon which any visionary song of experience is scored?
I chose to stay calm in my solemnized performance of Dickinson. I used a small half-broken parlor guitar (the size of guitar Dickinson would have known) and also played a restrained upright bass part. In the background I allowed a shimmering modulated electric piano which I’m playing with one or two fingers to flutter for the fathomless stars. You can hear the sum of all this with the audio player below. If that’s not there, it’s only veiled by some ways of reading this blog – and you can click on this grace-granting highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player gadget.
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*It’s not a term relating to your friend who’s dating a drummer. Sorry. Not sorry. The mystic has written that the road of puns leads to the palace of wisdom.
**Earlier this summer I read Wild Poets of Ecstasy compiledby D. J. Moore, a near-400-page anthology collecting poems of erotic and spiritual passion. Capsule review: it promised more than it consistently delivered, but I appreciated the attempt, and it probably put me in the mood for this understanding of Dickinson’s poem today.
***An overwhelming wash of starlight would have been mundane to Dickinson in her time and place, as it still was for me in the tiny rural town I grew up in a century later. Whenever I return on some clear night to such skies over and outside of dense collections of lighted buildings and roads, I am star-drenched.
OK, I told you this is my summer plan: fewer readers, fewer listeners, and some of the posts are going to get weirder and deal with specialized topics that diverge from the usual stuff I write about here. Let’s start today with some personal history, something I worry about running on too long about, but I’ll try to keep it brief:
I have no formal musical training, and I even hesitate to call myself “self-taught,” as to me that infers that I have self-studied music and could demonstrate some organized mastery of it. One of my inspirations, Frank Zappa, for example, liked to recommend “Go to library, find some books, and learn how to compose.”* This is not the way complex, particularly orchestral, composition has traditionally been taught, but it made sense to me. I tried it. It didn’t stick. Though when younger, I made an effort for a couple of years to learn basics of theory and notation, but as soon as things got to examples I started to play with those examples which distracted my orderly hierarchical learning. This still happens: I’ll read some deconstruction of a musical piece, or I’ll come upon an explanation of a musical technique, and I’ll drop studying it and go off and try to use it for my own purposes.
In summary, I learned to compose music largely by playing with music. Complex or orchestral music has few examples of composers who learned in the absence of ordered instruction, but there are more examples of vernacular and popular music musicians who learned this way. Many/most of those musician/composers are effective musicians in the style they are composing in – and if large ensemble works are rarer, otherwise the complexity and sophistication of music by such composers is not necessarily limited. And now here’s the next limitation I have use ingenuity to deal with: I honestly don’t think I’m a competent musician. I’m an inconsistent guitarist with some ideas and techniques I can execute on good days. I started as a terrible singer and with improvement I hope my rough-hewn singing can rise to the level of eccentric stylist.
But – even as a child I had an appreciation for “classical music” – that highbrow stuff made with educations and exacting training. In 1960 or 61 I got an Airline transistor radio: one of those little chrome-plated trim plastic boxes a little larger and thicker than a cigarette pack that otherwise might occupy a mid-century pocket. This was in the interregnum between Rock’n’Roll’s emergent artists and the Beatles, and I listened largely to WOI-AM. Run out of a university, it could claim to be one of the first American “public radio” stations, and one that broadcast large blocks of classical music. Around this time, the wife of our little town’s public school superintendent tried to teach my classmates, farm kids, about orchestral music, and they wanted nothing to do with her seriousness about it. The besieged teacher appreciated my appreciation and likely strained herself tolerating my off-key signing in her school choir. I liked the pieces she played the class off records, often remembering them as snippets of the same pieces that were played as underscore in animated cartoons on TV. Any underground, prog rock, punk, indie, goth, etc kid from younger generations may appreciate: my peers not digging the Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms stuff was part of the attraction.
Then for two years I went to college, at a small school south of Des Moines, which, oddly enough had an ambitious opera program. Eventually the director behind this would have a nice, newly-build concert hall for his productions, but back then it was a tiny college theater or the flat-floor hall over the top of the college lunchroom. There I had the experience of hearing my classmates, kids my age, along with a few imported “ringers,” singing the classical repertoire, sometimes less than 10 yards away. This is human music, made by creatures like myself, even if I wasn’t – and wouldn’t be – able to duplicate their sound.
I promised you weird. Have I delivered? I at this point didn’t play any instrument, but I was enamored of and writing poetry. Somewhere around then I was introduced to art song.**
The same Willa Cather poem as our last Parlando episode has been set by two modern composers working in the classical tradition. This one is by William Bolcom, a composer whose breadth and aims I admire, even if I don’t think this works particularly well.
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If I was to describe the Parlando Project it would sound like a definition of art song: “Literary poetry (generally not intended for musical performance when written) set to music by a composer who normally is not the adapted lyricist. From what I can see, art song pieces tend to be “audition” or “resume” pieces for classical music singers. Many are written to be sung with just piano or other solo instrument accompaniment, or at best, a small backing ensemble, and so are low-budget and logistically undemanding. Complex orchestrations can be added, large-scale opera and oratorio are the grander relations of this tradition.
Long time listeners here will not need me to say that a typical Parlando Project piece doesn’t sound like art song, even if it sits inside the definition. More on that soon – but art song ought to be right up my alley, right? I’ve listened to a fair amount of art song in the decades since. If my energy and life avails, I’m still amendable to hearing more of art song in concert, particularly by modern composers. And…
…I don’t care much for a lot of it. Oh, I almost always admire the training and skill of the singers and their competent musicians. I observe and admire the composers’ shared goals with my own. It’s easy for me to see them as fellow strivers intending to bring the expanded palette of music to the sound and dance of poetry. The whole enterprise, singers, accompanists, composers have resources objectively beyond those I can marshal – which should be a good thing. In thinking about this paradox, I think that’s part of the problem. And no, I’m not talking about jealousy. I genuinely want them to succeed every time, and if it’s only sometimes that I think they do – well, batting averages and shots on goal percentages come with the effort. They certainly do with my art.
Here’s a setting by Libby Larsen. Notice how the singer increases the level of ornamentation after the opening verse. I’ve briefly met Larsen, a couple of times., and like Bolcom I admire the aims of her work.
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First off, the composers often write complex melodies. Hampered by my lousy singing talents, I feel my pieces should have more melody – but with the art song composers I often think their elaborateness obscures the impact of the words rather than reinforcing them. The “word-music” and phrasing of the poetry can be contorted to fit the melody’s interest, and only sometimes will that contortion produce interesting effects by abstracting the flow an actor would use rendering the words, with unexpected phrasing being applied from the notes. In these matters I sometimes think of the stillborn dream of one of the most musical of English-language poets, William Butler Yeats: to create a para-art-song tradition that would preserve more of his “word music.” I’m just a naïve composer, a nobody, but I’d suggest that harmonic or timbral elaboration might better stand in for over-reliance on melodic complexity in art song with significant poetry.
Another performance of Larsen’s setting of Cather’s poem. Would this singer be judged as lacking the technical polish of the ones above? Even if so, I preferred it. Sung at a slower tempo and I sense the singer wants to inflect more meaning into the words.
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The singers or conductors, working from score, are asked to faithfully reproduce the composer, but I believe they are allowed some freedom in ornament. Given that constrained outlet, there’s a temptation to over-exercise this. Even from my limited knowledge, I know that some of the vocal articulations are traditional techniques in classical singing to express emotional states. Like all conventions (even contemporary ones in vernacular music) they risk being misunderstood or even taken for cliches when the convention isn’t correctly “translated” by the listener.
And now for someone else doing something with the same “The Hawthorn Tree” poem, using an approach much like mine. The performer (and, I believe composer) David Ellis has done nothing I can locate since issuing a set of 4 poem settings similar to this one, and they don’t seem to be widely available.
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Does a thru-line become apparent as I wrap this up? I probably come to art song believing in the power of the words to work for an audience with less adornment, and this may be the prejudice of a poet who later composed music and preforms it with their personal limited skills.*** I suspect all these dangers and detriments are already known to trained composers and performers, just as I know intimately the limitations I work with in making my pieces here. I respect their hard work and knowledge.**** How some of their work is experienced by this listener may well be my limitations, though I suspect (however muffled inside my own makeup and experiences) I’m more amenable to traditional classical art song than large portions of its potential audience.
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*This is a paraphrase from an interview I read, and a report of what he himself did. Flavorful quotes I can grab from Zappa: “Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts” and “If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.” Generally lacking money for college, this iconoclasm was promising to me, but let me point out empirically that sustainable non-academic orchestral composing is even more unlikely than following the thin odds of a conventional academic route.
**I also worked in my adulthood for more than 20 years for a radio network with a 24-hour classical music service. Kind of like I was saying about SF literature and fandom a couple of posts back: I’m not an expert in that field, but I’ve hung around with folks that where.
***Some singers in the folk music field, performing with single or sparce accompaniment can do this, but with more melodicism than my voice can provide. One of the more enthralling concerts I’ve experienced was June Tabor and a keyboardist. I felt the meaning of every single word she sang that night.
****The Parlando Project is designed, and has met its goals so far, as a non-revenue thing, despite my putting serious effort into it. Most classical-tradition performers and composers receive very little revenue for all their efforts, study, and hard work invested in their art. If we hear each other’s results differently (as I suspect we do) I recognize that difference/similarity.
You could put Willa Cather within a group: writers known as novelists who also wrote some worthwhile poetry. I didn’t know she wrote verse, but this poem of thwarted love, “The Hawthorn Tree” charmed me when I read it in an anthology this summer. Furthermore, I had sense immediately that it wanted to be sung.
Cather’s best-known prose deals with European immigrant pioneers settling in the rural American Great Plains; but though they’ve been recommended to me, I’ve never read her novels.* Cather’s family moved to Nebraska when she was 9 and she attended college there. After college she moved east, and she lived most of her long life in New York, where she wrote of Nebraska while living far from it – a distance that has fueled many a novel.
The young Willa Cather in her student days
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“The Hawthorn Tree” poem doesn’t tell us where it takes place on any state map — it refrains instead on the titular tree somewhere, a location of a tryst between two people that the poem’s voice will tell, and not tell, us about. Since the hawthorn tree is a very widespread species, it’s not a clue about what state or time it occupies – but let’s ask: why is it a hawthorn, not an ash, maple, or apple tree? Perhaps it’s an accident of biography – a specific tree in some incident Cather herself experienced or knew of. I can’t rule that out, but it’s given such importance within this short poem I think the author made a choice to name it.
As the name implies, a hawthorn has thorny branches, a prickly botanical feature which is a common trope in poems and songs of thwarted love. Likewise, it has blossoms and sweet fruit in season, more reasons for it to be in a love poem. Not knowing Cather’s work, or much detail of her life, I can’t say what she might know about the myths, legends, or herbal-medicine knowledge regarding the hawthorn. I read that it’s a tree sacred to fairies, it’s thought to be a sentinel or guardian of gateways between worlds, and that the fruit can cure a broken heart.**
So, invention or memoir incident? That mystery accompanies the mysteries in this story’s telling. It could be rendering the common folk-song plot of a couple who briefly meet (and perhaps make love) somewhere while out in nature, and who are then parted. Cather could be taken with such folk songs and tales, could be writing her version of that – or it could be autobiographical.*** One other thing: we’ve been exploring poems of the faery world recently, it could be slyly fantastical – the unnamed creature who meets the poem’s singer from out of the mist could be from the faery realm. Cather’s poem happens in spring-time, another marker found in many of the folk-songs – which often start with some variation of “one morning in May” or the like – but Cather’s mysterious tale says its tryst happens in the night-time.
Whatever the exact and unsaid details, the poem had captured my attention, and those references to folk-song elements drove me to write music for it. I used an unusual open tuning here, one called Csus (CGCGCD), and the lower pitch of the tuning and the chord voicings I used caused me to break out my less-used larger-bodied dreadnaught guitar for this one.
I followed Cather’s text for the resulting song, but then at the end of the performance you can hear with the audio player below I adlibbed my own short variation expanding on the mysterious details of the meeting under the hawthorn tree. What ho? There’s no audio player for you? Ah, I have provided a gateway to a dimension that will show the audio player that’s hidden to you, mortal – likely due to the method you’re using to read this blog. Use this hawthorn branch – no, this highlighted link – which will open a new browser tab manifesting its own audio player.
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*I’m far from well-read regarding novels. Poetry captured me in my youth, and that art meshed so easily with my love for music that I can easily be embarrassed in any literary crowd which takes “literature” to largely mean “fiction.”
**Besides folk-medicine, there’s been some modern pharmaceutical investigation of the hawthorn fruit’s ingredients. This video explains a bit about the hawthorn and the beliefs surrounding it.
***Cather’s love life is not an open book, but her life partner was a woman. The one from the mist who the poem’s voice meets under the hawthorn tree is a “he.” I made a choice not to alter the genders here, perhaps because this spring my home has been full of gender-dynamic visitors and residents. Or perhaps I’m following the example of famous gender-crossing singers like Eric Burdon and Ringo Starr.
Just time for a short post presenting a short musical piece made from a short poem by Sara Teasdale. Teasdale’s “A Prayer” goes over some of the same ground (or gravely, below ground) as her better-known poem “I Shall Not Care,” each poem ending a telling stanza with a variation of and end-of-life caring not.* But of the two, “A Prayer” is more positive and less bitter. “I Shall Not Care” posits the grave’s lack of care as justice for lack of care from a lover, “A Prayer’s” poetic voice vows careless love throughout a lifetime regardless of the elusiveness of mutual love.
Simple enough music for this short piece, though the F Major 7th is a favorite alternative flavor of mine. I also enjoyed coming up with the snap modulation in the little section between the two verses.
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While working with this poem this past week I thought too of Teasdale’s contemporary Robert Frost’s proposed epitaph that he wrote at the end of a much longer poem of his:
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.
You can hear my musical performance of Teasdale’s poem with the audio player gadget below. If you can’t see that gadget, I shall not care, because I’ve provided this highlighted link for you that will instead open a new browser tab with it’s own audio player.
It’s been a while since I presented a musical performance of a poem by English poet Frances Cornford, but here’s one from her early book-length collection published in 1910 when the poet was 24 years old. The poem is brief, but it presents the speaker as having had their life and soul ransacked by evil. I don’t know a lot about the biography of Cornford’s youth,* but the situation outlined in the poem is so bleak that it brings up the suspicion that it may be a “persona poem” where the young poet is, perhaps as an exercise, trying to write poems from a variety of viewpoints.**
Many poets early books collect material originally drafted a few years before publication, so it’s plausible that this Edwardian-era poem was written by someone even younger than 24, and yet I, an old man living under a disreputable 21st century regime, found its complaints easy to slip into. I think it helps a modern performer (and I hope, a modern listener) that the poem expresses itself straightforwardly without a lot of shopworn 19th century metaphoric baggage which many of Cornford’s English contemporaries might easily fall into.
I love that description of the soul that had been taken from the singer, a soul that was “bitter, & tender & sweet.” Close readers will note that Cambridge-scene-raised Cornford eschews the Oxford comma in that inventory.
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So, if this is a made-up poetic exercise by a young poet, she did a good clean job of making something. Despite its title and the daunting situation cataloged in the poem, Cornford’s prosody seems almost jaunty, and so that’s how I approached creating the music and performance for it. The words in the poem offer no consolation for all that the devil has taken from the singer – but just as in Afro-American Blues lyrics, the very fact that the singer is singing (not whimpering in pain or self-pity) and accounting for what has been put upon them makes its own point of survival and ability to analyze what they’ve suffered.
You can hear my performance of Frances Cornford’s “Dirge” with the audio player below. What, did the Devil take that away too? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog won’t show it, but I provide an alternative: this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.
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*Nepo baby rating? Cornford will see most any other writer’s hand and bust yah: her paternal grandfather was Charles Darwin, and on her mother’s side she was William Wordsworth’s great-niece. Her mother was a lecturer in English Literature at Newnham College. Her father was a notable botanist that flourished in the shade of his evolutionary father. At time of publication, she was newly married to a Cambridge classics scholar. Fun (and confusing) fact: her father and her husband’s given names were both Francis – so upon taking the conventional married name she repeated the complication of being a distaff homonym-named person in a household. One of her grandchildren, Adam Cornford (still living) followed the clans’ conflation of fields between poetry and science.
**Included in the same collection as “Dirge” was Cornford’s best-known poem, the triolet about “A Fat Lady Seen from the Train.” Similarly clean, spare, and sharply spoken in its verse as today’s poem, it curiously has one of the first plausibly disparaging uses of the term “white” by a white poet – and others took issue with that poem’s treatment of its subject almost immediately.
I think it’s possible that the speaker in that poem may not be Cornford, but an invention or external observation. I’ve even mused that since the “fat white woman who nobody loves” is seen through a train window, that the poem’s speaker is seeing her own reflection in the glass. In photos Cornford looks quite thin, making me then speculate about anorexia.
