song

Gone, Gone Again for National Poetry Month

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

We continue today our National Poetry Month series where we re-release some of our favorite performances from the early days of this Project in the hopes that more ears will be able to hear them. Today’s piece steps forward a couple of years from yesterday’s, where in “Adlestrop”  British poet Edward Thomas had written with beautiful attention about the sweet nothingness of a day of peace while the precipitating event of World War I was only hours away.

Today’s poem, “Gone, Gone Again”  (also known as “The Blenheim Oranges,”)  was written about the same English landscape, only after the war had broken out. If “Adlestrop”  is a poem about present nothingness, then “Gone, Gone Again”  is a poem about absences. It starts with the calendar march of time until autumn, but now the boat landings* are unusually quiet and empty. Next Thomas notes the apple harvest** was not looked after. The apples have grubs, no orchardmen are looking after them, and instead of autumn harvest, they are simply falling to the earth to rot.

There’s a stanza that follows that starts by enigmatically referring to “When the lost one was here —” It seems impossible to determine who that is. It could be anyone missing their soldier overseas in the war, but one of Thomas’ biographers thinks it likely a young woman artist Edna Clarke Hall*** who had what was at least an emotional affair with Thomas. I wondered if the “lost one” could be American Poet Robert Frost, a man who never had many friends, but who had struck up a strong friendship with Thomas while Frost was in England before WWI. Frost had planned for Thomas and his family to emigrate to the United States so that they could continue their friendship, but then the war.

I’d guess the reason there isn’t more speculation on a possible particular “lost one” is that the same stanza ends on a couplet so strong that the opening two lines are overlooked. That couplet? “And when the war began/To turn young men to dung.”

The lyric video. There’s a picture there of the Blenheim apples to get citrus out of your mind, and when we get to the lost one, a photo of Edna Clarke Hall and then Frost.

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The concluding four stanzas develop the theme of an abandoned house, something which rhymes with my own experience of abandoned farm houses in the American Midwest. The concluding stanza mourns the schoolboys who wantonly vandalize these absences, to which Thomas gives full and poetic attention.

I’ve always been happy with the music I composed and realized for this performance, including some parts for muted horns and woodwinds. I did mis-sing a number of Thomas’ words in the recorded take that was otherwise “the keeper.” I hope that won’t detract. On the other hand, one mistake I made I still consider an accidental improvement: “grass growing inside” in place of Thomas’ “grass growing instead” is not only a stronger image, it’s a better rhyme.

Three ways to hear my performance of Thomas’ “Gone, Gone Again:”  a player gadget is below for regular browser viewers of this blog, others may need to avail themselves of this highlighted hyperlink — and we’re continuing our special National Poetry Month series extra feature yet once more: there’s a lyric video above.

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*Quay is an uncommon word in American English. I learned it first from an avid Scrabble player, who probably triple-word-scored with it. A quay can be a seaside dock, but from some knowledge of the landscape Thomas wrote about, it’s likely a river or canal landing he speaks of. With the men overseas in the war, I’d assume the regular canal traffic in the English countryside would be reduced.

**Blenheim Oranges are a British apple type. It’s possible Thomas chose this particular apple not just because it was cultivated in the area of England he knew best, but because it’s named for an estate built for the victorious English leader in a battle fought centuries earlier in Blenheim Germany.

***I knew nothing of her, and research is so rewarding when you come upon a character like her. She’s fascinating, and abundantly talented in an era when women artists weren’t considered. Edward Thomas’ emotional and love life is complicated enough that it would make a tremendous series, with characters any screenwriter or actor would hunger for.

Millay’s “Rosemary” for National Poetry Month

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

It’s my hope that some of you are newer people reading this as a result of my increased posting frequency and other activity during April’s National Poetry Month. If you’ve just found this: welcome! What we do here is combine words (usually poetry) with original music in varied styles, and then write about our encounters with those words and what we discover from performing them.

Since we’ve been doing this for 6 years and over 600 pieces, what we’ve been doing this Poetry Month has been to highlight some of my favorites from the first half of our Project. Since the composition, performing, and recording tasks are already done for these pieces, this has made the daily posts possible, but it has still been a lot of work at a time when life has made other calls on my time and concern. I’ll skip that story, but I want to take a moment to tell those other blog authors that I follow that I’ve been unable to read your posts for the past couple of weeks. I miss that, and I still intend to catch up.

Today’s piece is from a poem of love and respect lost by Edna St. Vincent Millay which is titled “Rosemary.”  As a lyric poem it’s somewhat mysterious in terms of time, place, and exact events. The opening verse’s rushes and bergamot have something of a house-cleaning feel to them. Rush stalks were used in place of rugs or other floor covering historically in homes as varied as Native American structures to European castles, and dried bergamot is fragrant and would be a nice way to make a place smell better, as is the herb rosemary, which may be the name of the speaker in the poem, and/or another way to freshen the smell of the house. Housekeeping is continued as a theme in the second verse. The final verse links back to the opening two lines, and I read it as a revelation that those tasks are being done out of duty and with a false-face of faithful servitude. After the final verse, those early fragrant herbs and fresh-straw-on-the-floor mentions now say something has gone off, is spoiled or rotten.

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I felt a contemporary link for dismay when I saw this picture of Millay “On a chaise lounge, on a chaise lounge, on a chaise lounge…”

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Is the poem’s speaker a wife or partner in a cold relationship? Or possibly a servant? The poem’s “gentle sirs” in its next-to-last line indicates more than one master is being acknowledged, but I can’t eliminate the idea that it could be a spurned lover chiding a partner as if she’s now a servant.

I called this poem “mysterious” rather than “vague” largely because I find Millay’s word-music enticing. Another poem with the same matter, but without that extra factor, might merit that second term. In my performance I created a jaunty tune for this enigmatic but essentially sad story. That’s a common tactic in British Isles folk music, where you can have brisk tunes telling stories of unjust and sorrowful fates. The performance ensemble is a small acoustic band: drum set, bass, two acoustic guitars — but I’m a one-man band performing that in overdubs. Listening back on this several years later I admire that I was able to make it sound like a live take by an actual band. My musicianship has remained inconsistent throughout my life, but this one works, and is able to serve the composer (me), though I wish I was a better vocalist here and elsewhere.

The lyric video

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Three ways to hear it: a player gadget below for some of you, and this backup highlighted link if you don’t see the player. And as I’ve done so far with all these re-releases of early Parlando Project performances, I’ve created a new lyric video that shows the full text of the poem above.

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On the Troop Ship to Gallipoli for National Poetry Month

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Though an often-puzzling poem, Eliot’s “The Waste Land”  is tightly written. I’m not talking about some raw stat like its number of lines, but that the language itself works in its sentences and small phrases directly and without much waste. That’s not a Modernist-only tactic, but early Modernism did make it a goal.

And a large amount of that vividness came not just from the sharpness of the experiences of grief, depression, and failure that Eliot had experienced, but from revision and re-writing, a process famously aided by Ezra Pound suggestions — most often excisions.

Back in this blog’s first year or so I decided to try an exercise based on those Modernist principles. I took this poem, or rather a fragment, written by British poet Rupert Brooke* while he was steaming on his way to the same disastrous Gallipoli landing in World War I that killed Eliot’s friend Verdenal.

My goal wasn’t just to do what Brooke himself might have done if he’d had time to polish up further drafts of his fragment, but to do what Ezra Pound would have done with his blue pencil. Even though I started with a 19-line fragment, I removed over a hundred words, including many that seemed uselessly archaic and flavorlessly formal. This wasn’t just a Readers Digest-style abridgment, I worked to remove the crud and bring forth the images as an Imagist would have.

Here’s the lyric video.

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I maybe favoring myself, but I thought the result increased the power of the remainders considerably,** and once I composed and performed the eventual musical setting, I titled my adaptation“On the Troop Ship to Gallipoli.”   It remains one of my favorite pieces that I’ve presented here for the past six years, and it easily became one of my candidates for this National Poetry Month series where I’m re-releasing some of the earlier pieces from this project along with new lyric videos. You can hear it three ways. The graphical player is below for some, but if you don’t see that, this highlighted link will also play it.  And you’ve seen the thumbnail picture above that will play the lyric video.

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*Brooke was — let’s not put too fine a point on it — a very good-looking young man, with full access to the class-bound academic and social circles of early 20th century Britain. Yeats called him “the handsomest young man in England.” He was considered promising as a poet, or certainly something, even before the war. Frances Cornford, a concise poet who counted Charles Darwin and William Wordsworth as her ancestors, wrote of Brooke “A young Apollo, golden-haired/Stands dreaming on the verge of strife/Magnificently unprepared/For the long littleness of life.”

So, when Byronically larger-than-life Brooke saw WWI’s outbreak, he saw a way to join in something big and heroic. He wrote an instantly famous sonnet about the honor of dying for one’s country in battle. That poem was read by the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday — and then less than a month later Brooke was dead. Back in 1915, an editor/fate blue-penciled this: Brooke never reached the doomed landing at Gallipoli. He was bitten by an insect which led to a generalized infection, which killed him three days before the battle.

**Perhaps I shouldn’t have left this for a footnote: you might want to try a similar exercise on some other person’s poem or two yourself, and then try what you learn on your own work. Yes, one can add lines and words in a revision, but what this exercise usually does is show how much you can add in power by excision.

“Sweet Thames” from Eliot’s “The Waste Land” for National Poetry Month

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today we’re going to commemorate something we did to celebrate National Poetry Month during the earlier years of this Project. In a series of posts and performances each April over five years we serially presented the entire “The Waste Land”  here.

Eliot’s Modernist masterpiece famously begins “April is the cruelest month…” — a line that is endlessly quoted during NPM and otherwise to make it as famous a line of poetry as any. Yet the extraordinary collage of words that follows may have frustrated or just turned-off as many poetry readers as it has attracted. To counter that, as I presented this poem over the years, I tried to make these points about it:

  • It’s abundantly musical. It’s possible to enjoy it while understanding little about what it’s trying to mean, as if it were a cousin of “Jabberwocky.”
  • For such a complex and multi-layered poem, it makes more sense more quickly spoken than on the page. “He do the police in different voices” was the working title for it. Vocalizing the various characters was assumed in its vision.
  • It’s a poem written by a depressive about their experience of depression. That might sound like a recipe for needless wallowing. Yet “Depressing English Majors is Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel” is not  a suitable blurb for “The Waste Land.”   It ends in uplift and a rage against self-pity.
  • Generalizing wildly: English poets sing melancholy songs, American ones sing the Blues. The Blues is analytical about sadness, tells sorrow it knows its game. Eliot, the America-to-England emigree, is somewhere in the middle, and then he draws on Buddha the bluesman.
  • The poem has a thread that examines sexual roles (summary: it excoriates them) and even indulges in some gender dimorphism. The theory that there’s a gay subtext hangs together pretty well — but objective correlative and all, the ghastly, haunting, lost, and unclaimed corpse of Jean Verdenal, and all the WWI dead, suffuses the poem. Alas, we’re now in another cruel spring of warfare this year.

But still and all, what’s the deal with a poem that has footnotes,* and seems to require them? Even my high school English teacher who did so much to introduce poetry to me thought that a little embarrassing back in the Sixties. Can we understand the wide range of quotes, parodies, references, allusions, and just plain collage better as Modernism has permeated our culture even more by our 21st century? Can we now see “The Waste Land”  as a big mix tape, full of samples being dropped? Can one dig the groove and general effect without needing to know where the sample was taken from, or what in-joke M. C. Eliot was putting down?

With a T and an S and L I @ / here to rock this mic with my river rats. / Think you’re a sick rhymer with a mad dose? / I’ve been to a Swiss asylum and been diagnosed,./ Dis my soft Thames flow while I’m singing my song,. / you might end up drowned like that Phoenician! /Peace (that passeth all understanding) out!

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The section I decided to use to represent the entire serialized performance was this one, the start of the poem’s “The Fire Sermon”  section. In this part that I titled “Sweet Thames,”  we begin with a decidedly not-so-sweet urban river, a polluted river being actively polluted, an adjoining gashouse is visited (a hideously smelly polluter), and finally we get the corpse of Jean Verdenal, lost in the sea/sand verge of the disastrous WWI Gallipoli landing being sung to and fro to a bawdy hymn about a madam and her girls who euphemistically are washing their “feet” in water.

Two ways to hear it, one way to see and hear it. There’s player gadget below for some ways this blog is read. This highlighted link is here for those that don’t see the player.  And as we’ve been doing so far this April, there’s a lyric video too, linked here.

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*Eliot later apologized for the footnotes.

Stopping by a Woods with Bad Cellphone Service for National Poetry Month

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

A couple of posts back I suggested we do more than poetry prompts or poem a day writing challenges for National Poetry Month. Here’s a demonstration of an idea that’s half-way there. While still a poetry writing prompt, it also acknowledges the tradition we’re working in.

Write a parody of a poem you like, you dislike, or you just have heard too too-often that you want to mess with it.*

One of the first teenage poems I wrote decades ago was a parody of Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn”  titled “Ode to a 1953 Automobile Ad.”   I loved Keats’ poem, and while I wanted the smile that my title could engender, my parody was more at pointing out that Keats’ painful air of not-quite-realized truth portraying beauty wasn’t just a 19th century thing. Like most all of Sappho, that one may be lost to the ages, but here’s one recent enough to have been performed in the early years of this project: “Stopping by a Woods with Bad Cellphone Service.”

Did I like, hate, or just want to mess with Frost’s “Stopping by a Woods on a Snowy Evening?”   Maybe a little of each. Long time readers here will remember that I disliked Frost in my youth. I thought then he was spouting platitudes, but I was wrong on that. When I presented Frost’s “Snowy Evening”  here years back I said that the most important thing in the poem has been little realized. The poem’s speaker isn’t being tempted by wasting time admiring natural beauty. He’s not seeking Transcendentalist truth by closely reading the book of nature — though Frost does read the book of nature, his readings are unusually dark. Those are common understandings of Frost’s poem, which do sort of find the poem’s ending as a platitude: “You know what you need to do, get to work.” So is it darker? Is he basically being tempted to crawl into the woods and end it all? Not quite that either. The most important fact in the story of this poem is that the speaker is lost  on a rural road in the early 20th century on the “darkest evening of the year,” which would be utter darkness in the days before electric light. There’s no beautiful Currier & Ives woods. It’s so deserted and without information you can hear snowflakes rubbing on each other. The famous opening is (with added italics) “Whose woods these are I think  I know.” Not really knowing = lost. When he decides to press on, it’s the act of acting without there being any knowledge that he’s going the right way. The poem sounds beautiful, and that ennobles that act, even if it says the speaker may have been foolish and is risking acting without knowledge at the end.

Frost Drake

April is National Poetry Month, and spring is here. Two gentlemen are unbuttoning their coats.

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My parody is more lighthearted, and is set in the 21st century, but like a lot of jokes the situation isn’t pleasant. By writing a parody you are acknowledging the poem and your knowledge of it — so even if your parody is meant as a corrective to make the reader never read the original poem the same way again, you are engaging in the type of activity I’m urging more of this Poetry Month: that we should encourage more expression not just by adding to the sum total of poetic examples of it, but by acknowledging it in others.

Three ways to hear The LYL Band rip into this snowy poem: this is the link to a lyric video, or (for some of you) a player gadget below to hear just the audio, and finally there’s this fallback link that will play it also.

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*There’s a long tradition of this in poetry and songs. It’s not just Weird Al. In my youth they were called “answer records” — and later on in hip hop, a “dis track” might twist someone else’s rhymes or musical samples in service of dialectic. We’ve presented some poetic “answer records” here. Like this famous set of poems here and here. Or this quippish answer I appended to another short poem.

I also sometimes make moves that feel a little like parody in some of my looser or “after” translations of older poems. Here’s one example. And another. And one more. These aren’t meant to be “funny ha-hah,” but there’s a pleasure in finding history’s cultural “rhymes.”

The Aim Was Song for National Poetry Month

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s National Poetry Month, and we’re celebrating here by re-releasing some of my favorite pieces from early in this project’s six-year history. Today’s poem’s poet is American Robert Frost speaking about spring, spring winds, and the poets’ transcendental task of continuing and shaping nature.

I’ve often reminded readers here that I didn’t care for Robert Frost when I was a young person. He was still a living poet while I was a teenager, and I associated him (wrongly) with dreary homilies and his placement in the school anthologies as the most recent poet included. More than once I complained to teachers and any fellow students who seemed at all interested in poetry that there had to be something, someone, newer and more relevant than Frost that could be studied.

What I didn’t know then was that Frost could be a nimble lyric poet delivering subtle messages, and that he was, in the generational nomenclature that would come 20 years later than my youthful 1960’s complaints, “a slacker.”

Frost spent the first 40 years of his life basically failing and flailing as a poet and human being. American interest in his poetry was nil. Only after wandering to England did he find a publisher for his first collection and a key promoter in fellow American in pre-WWI England, Ezra Pound. Pound was nearly a dozen years younger than Frost.

Frost didn’t write poetry as memoir, as many modern poets do, but all that experience made it into his poetry. Frost wrote often of failure and limitations* — but today’s poem “The Aim Was Song”  isn’t one of those poems. First published 101 years ago, this is Frost exulting in the triumphs of poets and poetry after he had finally broken through into acclaim in his home country. And it’s a good one for the Parlando Project to perform during National Poetry Month because Frost’s imagery here celebrates the oral, vocal, and musical heart of poetry. Also it’s an excuse for the composer to tell the guitar player: “Why don’t you turn up and play some.”**

Laptops were larger and more wooden in Robert Frost’s day. 

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As with our other re-releases this April, you can hear my performance of this poem with the player gadget below (where seen), or this highlighted link, as well as with today’s low-budget lyric video that is trying to catch the attention of additional listeners to the Parlando Project.

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*By the time his poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay”  was made into a motif in The Outsiders  movie in the 1980s, “slackers” could sense that kinship that I missed.

**OK, it’s the same guy, so the guitar player has considerable influence over the composer.

The Red Wheelbarrow for National Poetry Month

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Besides being the first day of National Poetry Month, it’s April Fools day, so maybe it’s a good day to present a poem that caused many readers to wonder if it’s a joke: William Carlos Williams “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

I’m not against a poem causing wonderment, are you? It’s fine to look at it and respond “You can’t be serious — is that really a poem?” but I urge you to follow that question with other ones, such as “What use is it?” “Is this just an artsy provocation?” or “What should poetry be then?”

I think Williams’ poem is a late but effective representation of the movement that launched Modernist poetry in English: Imagism. Fairly quickly, a great deal of English language Modernism soon moved on to more complex poetry, a poetry that was often hard to grasp due to intense but hermetic personal material or elaborate references to other works of art, but “The Red Wheelbarrow”  is none of that. Instead it expresses, like a sub-two-minute punk song from the mid-1970s, a rejection and clarification of overly elaborate poetry.

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and this place has chickens. Also a short 12 tone-row composition.

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I think Williams genuinely thinks the rain-water makes the wheelbarrow beautiful, and he doesn’t even think he needs to say that word “beauty” or make some elaborate metaphor to seal the deal. To say that, and just that,* is a provocation against poetry that asks more, and to readers that expect the poet to give them more. But it’s not just the momentary rain-water glaze that makes it poetic: it’s useful, something to depend on. Now that’s a goal for poetry (or any art) to meet at least some of the time, don’t you think? Self-impressive poetry, trickster poetry, poetry that gathers and unites widespread allusions — all have their place as well, but sometimes it’s good to see what there is seen naked in the rain. When the cave dwellers put their hand or the hand of their child up against the wall of the cave and blew red ochre dust around it, that’s art — not of the artists showing us skills, but the art of our shared and transient experiences made fixed.

Musically here I decided to use another contemporary early Modernist tactic: the tone-row. If one knocks “The Red Wheelbarrow”  for not having poetry’s elaborate or fanciful imagery, or some tight connection with the artist’s personal biography, perhaps this performance will show something traditional it retains: a lovely, largely iambic, word music. Yes, it’s music in miniature, but still that poetic element was there for me to express.

To hear my audio performance of William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”  set to my own music, you can use this highlighted link, or (if visible) a player gadget below. And as I’ve been doing with our National Poetry Month re-releases, there’s a simple, low-budget, lyric video at this link.

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*Well, he also admires the contrasting chickens.

Kicking off our celebration of National Poetry Month: Stars Songs Faces

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Aha! I have a plan for National Poetry Month.

You might think we’d need do nothing but what we usually do — after all, we’re always celebrating poetry here. We have over 600 pieces you can find in our archives, performances that combine words (mostly poetry) with original music we compose and record ourselves. But here was my problem as April arrived: time to compose new pieces is inconsistently available.

So, I’m going to lean on that collection of pieces we’ve done and make this also a celebration of what the Parlando Project has done over this past 6 years. My plan is to regularly repost pieces from the first half of our history this April. For many of you who joined this Project already in progress these may well be pieces you haven’t heard, but an additional goal is to introduce new listeners to these audio performances.

Why do that? Readership of this blog, originally intended as brief “show notes” for the audio pieces, has grown tremendously over the past year, but the audience for the musical presentations has increased only by a small amount over the same time. I’m hoping to capture more ears for those performances and the poets whose work we interpret, sometimes in surprising ways.

To gather more ears I’m going to be making new low-budget YouTube videos for these classic pieces, mostly just “lyric videos” that display the poet’s words we are presenting. Most new people find us via search engines, and my wild guess is that putting things in front of YouTube searchers may bring more listeners and readers.

To begin this series? Why not use the first piece from this project’s official public launch in 2016: Carl Sandburg’s “Stars Songs Faces.”   Speaking of strange, The LYL Band performed this on January 11th 2016, the day after David Bowie died. Carl Sandburg didn’t have the opportunity to prepare a eulogy for Bowie, since that American poet died in 1967, but back in 1920 he wrote this short evocative poem that we used for the words in this performance. Spookily, Sandburg’s poem presented this way makes it seem like he did write a eulogy for Bowie. And to eerily evoke that short time when both Sandburg and Bowie were extant, the music makes use of one of The Sixties most distinctive sounds: the wobbly Mellotron that could sound like a string section whose batteries were running down.

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“What will I be believing, and who will connect me with love?” The young Swedish-American and the star with songs and faces.

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Here’s a link to that simple YouTube lyric video. And here’s a link to just the audio performance if you’d like to rest your eyes. And finally, some of you will see our traditional audio player gadget below, another way to just play the audio.

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Winter 2020-21 Parlando Top Ten (abbreviated edition)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Given the everything I’d rate between losses, troubles, and mere distractions I’ve gone through since late last autumn, I’m not in a mood this week to do the traditional Parlando Top Ten list for the past season. These are the same issues in repertory that have reduced the number of new pieces I was able to present here during that time. You, the audience for this Project, have stayed with this: readership to this blog is growing, overall listenership to the audio pieces is slightly up. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. There’s more than three of you — I mean to thank all of you three times.

I know some of you do like these quarterly Top Tens, and I enjoy them myself — if only just to see what pieces from the variety presented here got the most response. That said, let’s rush through the numbers 10 up to 6 for the record:

10. Song to the Dark Virgin by Langston Hughes

9. Winter Solstice Consolations by Frank Hudson

8. I died for Beauty —  but was scarce by Emily Dickinson

7. Oh, Maria by Ethna McKiernan

6. Letting Go the Wolves by Ethna McKiernan

You can see in those five pieces two from my memorial observance for the Irish-American poet McKiernan who I had the privilege to know and examine poetry with, and one from my February Black History Month celebration of Langston Hughes’ first poetry collection The Weary Blues.  There in the middle, there’s one by long-time Parlando Project favorite Emily Dickinson. And my own piece in that group talks about the loss of Ethna and also my March memorial subject who Dave Moore and I also knew and worked with: Kevin FitzPatrick. If you missed any of these, each of that above list is a link to my original blog posting and the audio performance of it, just as the following ones bolded titles are.

We join the countdown to the most listened to and liked piece then at number 5.

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Spring, a rebuttal.

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5. Velvet Shoes by Elinor Wylie. A lovely, graceful winter poem by a too-often-overlooked poet from “The Last Twenties” in our previous century. I like the music and performance I created for this one just as much as I did when I created it back around the beginning of 2022.

One would think I’d be through with snow experiences this far into spring, but my morning bike ride today was in big wet flakes and a cold enough north wind. Wylie’s velvet snow is more the dry January sort, but then appreciating snow for its beauty qualities may be best done in past-tense. If so, you may enjoy listening to this one in what I hope is a pleasant spring.

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4. Lenox Avenue: Midnight by Langston Hughes. “The rhythm of life is a Jazz rhythm” says the first line of Hughes’ poem. I did my best to honor that injunction from one of the first Afro-American poets to unabashedly celebrate that musical form. Although I’m a vary unskilled keyboard player I was able to compose a satisfying two-handed part using MIDI as a scoring tool. I wanted a saxophone solo too, which you can hear a bit of in this performance, but I just couldn’t score or execute enough articulation to “make it.” The piece’s final horn section flourish is one of my rare surrenders to using a sampled musical phrase.

Of course, motif sampling is now an oft honored tactic in the ongoing Afro-American musical tradition, so perhaps I shouldn’t view it as a failure on my part. On the audacity front: I decided to extend Hughes’ lyric which ended with “And the Gods are laughing at us” with a newly written affirmation from after the poem’s time of 1926, one that says that the young art of Jazz and of young writer Langston Hughes’ has answered those gods.

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3. Sonny Rollins, The Bridge 1959. Staying with Jazz for this one, though with my own words straight through. There are beliefs — some sincere, some insincere — that Afro-American history is but a sorrowful tale, a grievance and a pandering response. If you can heartily do so, I ask you to improvise your own expletive response to the call of that fearful theory, one with as much eloquence and melodic force as you can deliver. Now our response may not be Sonny Rollins level improvisation. That’s not a reason not to — after all, Sonny Rollins wasn’t sure his improvisations were Sonny Rollins’ level improvisations. That’s the story in this piece.

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2. After Apple Picking by Robert Frost. I made my pitch that Robert Frost was verging on being a bluesman elsewhere this winter, but that piece didn’t make the Top Ten as this one did. His Black American contemporary Langston Hughes called his first book and a featured poem in it The Weary Blues,  but this poem of Frost’s could have that name too. Both Hughes’ Weary Blues and Frost’s end in sleep.

I seem to lack the concentration, or the assured concentration of blocks of time, to do arrangements as full as the one I created for Frost’s poem right now. But you can still enjoy this one.

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1. Stones by Ethna McKiernan. One answer to lack of compositional time is to write solo instrument pieces, which for me usually means acoustic guitar. Of the several pieces I did to introduce more of you to McKiernan’s range of poetry, this was the one that by far got the most listens this winter — in fact, more listens than any piece has received for more than a year during its first season after posting.

Before I leave you to listen to it, I want to say that beyond soothing my grief at Ethna’s death, that performing those pieces which used her words this winter made her seem closer than our too casual life connection sometimes had us. Wherever we voyage, the same waves lap the same sounds on the walls of our boats.

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Sonnet To Beauty — Two Women Who Wrote Poetry While Working with the Economically Desperate

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I’m posting a bit late in the day, but it’s International Women’s Day, and so today’s audio piece uses as a text a poem by a very international woman, Lola Ridge. Ridge’s poetry is perhaps best known for a fierce commitment to social justice and the situation of the poor in early 20th century America; but she was born in Ireland, left with her parents for New Zealand as a child, emigrated from there to Australia to attend college, and then to America, eventually New York City, where she mixed with most of the political and artistic radicals of the early Modernist era, including on the arts side: Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, and William Carlos Williams and the rest of the circle around the NYC Modernist magazine The Others.  Over at the Midwestern anchor of Modernist American poetry, it’s editor/founder Harriet Monroe was said to have called Ridge a genius, and she won awards and some favorable reviews in the years between the two World Wars.

Late in the 1930’s she apparently fell from the scene politically and artistically, and when she died in 1941 she was as poor as the people she wrote about, and then seemingly the subject of a rapid and rather complete forgetting for the rest of the 20th century.

Luckily our 21st century has become interested in reassessing the women who were on the scene a century ago along with the male Modernists, and there’s now a revival in considering her work.

Unlike some of Ridge’s poetry, today’s piece is not formally Modernist. It’s not only a sonnet, it attempts to present a passionate if conventional poetic argument regarding the abstract ideal of artistic beauty. Taken by itself it’s more Percy Bysshe Shelley than William Carlos Williams, but if we look just a little beyond its surface we can be reminded that Shelley was a thoroughgoing political and social radical as well as a Romantic era poet. Here’s a link to the text of Ridge’s “Sonnet to Beauty,”   from a blog that does a great job of presenting sonnets and similar shorter poems, FourteenLines.blog.

Ridge’s poem starts by worshiping beauty almost as an awed acolyte unable to face the godhead. But in the midst of the poem, something strange starts to manifest itself: a buzzard (an ugly, carrion-eating bird) appears gussied up by “The wizardry of light” to appear “All but lovely as the swan.” I read this as Ridge saying that artists and society can fail, can deceive, can fake beauty.

A musical metaphor follows this that says despite the diversity of artistic endeavor — including false beauties or injustice like unto our buzzard — that beyond the dissonance and the harmonic stress of this dialectic, that the chords can resolve. The poem ends avowing that true beauty can still chime through ugliness, falsehood, and strife.

Beyond sonnets, I will now make a turn in this post before giving you a chance to hear my performance of Ridge’s poem. Let me quickly summarize the event I attended this past Sunday remembering Irish-American poet Ethna McKiernan. There may be more than coincidence that Lola Ridge started this off.

Ethna McKeirnan - Lola Ridge

Ethna McKiernan reading, with lipstick, and Lola Ridge, I’m not sure.

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Minnesota weather and continued Covid-19 concerns might have conspired to reduce attendance, as the side streets were still full of sloppy snow from Saturday’s snowfall.*  I arrived early and helped the bookstore staff setup chairs. They seemed to be expecting maybe a couple of dozen, which may be par for a Twin Cities local-writer poetry reading, but both the event organizer and myself the bystander suspected we’d need to maximize the amount of chairs the space could hold. I think we were able to get nearly 40 folding chairs into the designated space, but as the crowd started to assemble, extra chairs needed to be rounded up and put in the various aisles between the bookstore shelves to handle those that kept coming in, and we had a few standees who fit in where they could.

More than typical bookstore poetry readings, I suspect most of the crowd knew Ethna for a long time. And that may have given a boost to the eight poets who read poems of Ethna’s, a smattering of their own, and gave short thoughts about her as a writer and a person. So less a usual public reading where some poets might be nervously trying to consider how they would come off presenting their work to an audience which might not know it, and more like an experienced and informal poetry group of long-time colleagues.

Several of the readers were members of other periodically-meeting writer’s groups that included Ethna, like unto the Lake Street Writer’s group that Dave Moore, Kevin FitzPatrick, Ethna, and I were decades-long members of. I’m sure that if Kevin had lived, he would have been a valued part of this event, as Ethna often credited Kevin as an influence on her writing — but he died a few weeks ahead of Ethna. I tried to make myself useful by playing stagehand and raising and lowering the mic stand for the variety of readers.

Many of the readers spoke of Ethna’s work with homeless outreach, and read some of her poems that dealt with that work, something that echoes today’s poet Ridge. Though the audience was entirely masked, a few noted that Ethna was a stickler for always putting on lipstick when out in public. For all anyone knew, what with our Covid era masks, we all were wearing lipstick! Who could see — but I believe all of us were remembering Ethna.

Backpart of the crowd at the Remembering Ethna Event March 2022

Covid-era ambiguity: “Lipstick? We were supposed to wear lipstick?” A portion of the crowd at the “Remembering Ethna” event last Sunday.

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So, as I speak of a woman who promoted culture, wrote beautiful poetry, and was committed to helping the economically desperate, I will now leave you with a piece using the words of another woman who a century before us did the same. You can hear Lola Ridge’s “Sonnet to Beauty”  with a graphical player below if you see that, or if you don’t, with this highlighted link.

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*My friend and participant here in the Parlando Project Dave Moore was unable to attend due to concerns with the street conditions. I’ve attended two other book-launch poetry readings given by Ethna herself, and this Sunday’s was the smallest crowd of the three. Consider though that most of those who knew Ethna are “senior citizens,” and some are frail as well.