song

Adventures of Isabel, or weighing light verse

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Three things mark Louis Untermeyer’s taste in his between-the-world-wars Modern American Poetry:  comfort with elements of the Modernist avant garde, appreciation of the fantasy/gothic (Poe) strain in American poetry, and the inclusion of humorous verse in a “serious” anthology. We’re only partway into our National Poetry Month series featuring selections from that book, but we’ve seen H.D. and Maxwell Bodenheim’s Imagist poems, and Elizabeth Coatsworth’s subtle visitation of fantasy. Now we have a poem that combines elements of the last two – one written by a poet that many mid-century readers would have been as familiar with as with Frost, Eliot, or Millay: Ogden Nash, the at least once well-known 20th century practitioner of “light verse.*”

How much has Nash’s fame persisted into the 21st century? I suspect a small portion. That his verse includes humor might be a factor in that. Humor’s subjective and subject to fashion, but unlike the subjectivity regarding serious literary modes, few take the effort to make allowances for superficial mutations in its particulars or a joke not making a direct hit on our sense of humor. A solemn, carefully crafted poem about weighty subjects promotes itself for a balanced appreciation – so, even if we find it imperfect, we feel propriety requires we give it its due. In the age where much poetry presents memoir, “personal truth,” and exposition of experiences intimate, harrowing, or non-denominationally spiritual, this must be yet more so.

Even when present, humor may be deemphasized or missed in our poetic literary cannon. Many modern appreciators might be shocked to learn that Auden’s “Stop All the Clocks”  elegy was not intended to be fulsomely solemn. Most readers miss the sly Robert Frost tweaking indecision about decisiveness in “The Road Not Taken.”  Frank O’Hara’s beautiful humor can’t be denied, but it can still be deemphasized. Early readers of Emily Dickinson saw elements of what could be called light verse in her work, and that once hurt her standing in the literary canon. 21st century readers now are asked to see the signifiers of trauma and suppression in her poems, which there may well be, but some of the most sharply funny people have grown accustomed to injuries in the dark.

2026 National Poetry Month Poster 600

No chord sheet today, but this gives me a chance to say how much I love the Arthur Sze quote used on this year’s poster that speaks to what this Project hopes it’s doing.

.

 

Now, is Ogden Nash as essential as those poets? I’m not making that claim, but he can still be a whole lot of fun. What I have said, and still fervently believe, is that we harm poetry by worrying too much about “not-great poetry.” Because literary poetry now has a historically low presence in American culture, we may feel obligated to guard against a Gresham’s Law defacing its value. I question that tactic. I think vibrant arts are happy with all kinds of expression, and even if one’s aesthetic has constructed a defensible hierarchy, there’s room for vin ordinaire.**

Here’s a link to the text of today’s poem by Ogden Nash if you’d like to read along.

So, I’m for intervals of fun, and “Adventures of Isobel”  is fun, and I’d suspect even the toddler depicted in Nash’s mock epic might enjoy it once they become self-conscious – but there’s more: in our current times isn’t it good to revisit the stubborn “it’s not for me” or “you don’t scare me” bravado of the poem’s heroine? Those Americans recently pictured, standing up at streetside in their bathrobes (adult jammies, missing the bunny rabbits and shooting stars) as flack-jacketed masked federal troops are arrayed about them could be reviving that spirit. I often wonder about conscious intents and purposes that I speculate are found implied in poems I write about here. I can hear other intelligent readers – even the poets who wrote them – laughing at what I see under the poems. I may be subject to seeing shapes in clouds and tricks in the shadows, but were Nash and his muses just writing a funny poem with some jokes and outrageous rhymes to momentarily amuse a reader in 1936?***  Or did something compel him to prophesize: “You’ll be called the Greatest Generation. What’s fearful now will be yet more so. Look at how your kid takes on that which disgusts her, or demands that she mix fear with respect. You know that stuff is actually scary – but you’re going to need that.”

Alternate voice, and frequent keyboardist here, Dave Moore took a crack at Nash’s poem as a song to his music a few years ago with the LYL Band. I quite liked his take on it, and for today’s presentation I remixed the recording of that performance fixing a couple of things he and I thought didn’t work. You can hear it with the audio player below. Has the audio player fled, pursued by a bear? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress showing it. There is  a bear, but it won’t mind if you use this highlighted link to open a new tab with its own audio player to hear the song.

 

 

.

 

*Untermeyer also includes work in his anthology by Nash’s contemporary in between-wars light verse, F.P.A., as well as his own parodies of other poets, one of which I’ve performed here for the Parlando Project. I loved this Untermeyer loving parody of Walter De La Mare!

**There could be an argument against my stance based on overwhelming oversaturation. I worry that’s the case with music today. We have made its creation and distribution so trivially easy (something that happened even before the onset of AI) that we now have a market were new music qua music has a tough time finding traction. Visual capital (youthful good looks, sexual attractiveness, elaborate stage shows and video) becomes a requirement – not just an advantage – to bring forward a substantial audience. I don’t believe this is the case with poetry. With the exception of song lyrics in their ears, the modern literate person is likely to go for extended intervals without encountering any poetry whatsoever. And did Nash, F.P.A., or Untermeyer’s japes waylay readers from reading the canonical “great poets” of the 20th century?

***This year indicates that today’s poem is not clearly in the public domain. I normally refrain from using non-PD work. I plead good intentions toward keeping Ogden Nash’s work in mind and the Parlando Projects educational and entirely non-revenue practices.

A Lady Comes to an Inn

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

We first meet any poem as a stranger. And in going through Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry  for this year’s National Poetry Month series, I often met on its pages poets I knew nothing about. Elizabeth Coatsworth was one. This poem of hers, “A Lady Comes to an Inn”  is emblematic of that – starting with strangeness, ending with wonder.

The poem begins when a quartet of strangers comes to an inn. Two of them are described as men of color, a third gets even less description, but he has a wife – the “lady” of the title.

The rest of the poem is observations of that lady. Normal expectations and timeworn poetic tropes may blind us as she is first described. First, we’re told her hair is pale and somewhat transparent. Is she just blonde or perhaps white haired? Well, twice we’re given images of translucency: champagne and ale. Perhaps that’s a trick of the light, but even if the number and pigment of hair strands change with age, they’re still opaque. Perhaps the poem’s descriptive inventory of a lighter hair color, creamy complexion, and a rosy mouth hew so closely to many a poem and folk-song’s conventions we’ll be lulled into this opening as so much boilerplate.*

A Lady Comes to an Inn

Likely not intended, but I was reminded by the title of this poem of the old ethnic-joke form that starts with a group of nationalities or religions who walk into a bar and….

.

Things start to slip by the third verse: she speaks a language “nobody knows.” Does she speak this unknown tongue only some of the time, perhaps with her three companions, or is that unknown language her only one? The poem’s not clear on this, or even what the speech of the three men is like – they’re silent for all we know. This third verse has the two lines that “sold” the poem to me on first reading: “But sometimes she’d scream like a cockatoo/And swear wonderful oaths that nobody knew.”

Now we’re fully in strangeness. The cockatoo screech must have been startling, though no startling of those who have met these strangers is noted, and the oaths that may be understood as curses only from their musical tenor or other context, are said to be “wonderful.”

I get a sense of beguilement by the strangers, and the fourth verse may be to indicate that: the poem’s observer is gawking down the woman’s décolletage to read her tattoos. And what’s with those “bronze slippers?” Poetically fancified way to say brown shoes? Or are they really metal shoes. Weird. And no one can obtain the lady’s name. Language barrier? Beguilement? Since the other three in the quartet of strangers are unremarked on after the first stanza, the lady is holding everyone’s attention. Nobody knows where the lady and the others have come from, though it’s surmised it’s “marvelous.”

And then the poem and its strangers skip town, and the poem is the sum of the inn’s countrysider’s remembrance.

Let me be honest. On first reading I was picturing a quasi-Romani/”gypsy” encounter, and I even thought the poem might be seen as vaguely racist in an exoticist manner. Rather, I believe we’re supposed to get that sense – but the poem doesn’t say Roma explicitly, and easily could. That’s a misdirect. I think the countrysiders may even think the travelers are Romani at first. Taken more carefully, with a little more attention, I can see an unwritten final verse where a gray and time-jumping Rod Serling steps out from behind the inn to give us a benediction about being hospitable to strange travelers.

Did Coatsworth intend extraterrestrials? Modern readers might see that in the spaces between what she outlines in her poem: the thin extended limbs, pale skin, the indecipherable language, the metal shoes – ET, your inclusion in an important Modernist poetry anthology has come through. But in the early 1920s when Coatsworth published this poem, I think were more at fairy folk in her intent.

I spent an afternoon today reading more about Coatsworth’s interesting life and other literary work. Untermeyer makes much of her world-traveler resume in his anthology’s introduction of Coatsworth, and from further study it does look to be remarkable. As a young woman in the early 20th century she rode horseback across the Philippines and traveled widely in China and elsewhere in Asia – as well as the more common European “Grand Tour” stuff.** Though starting off as a poet for three book-length collections, she was a prolific writer in a variety of genres, including children’s literature and fantasy. Her most remembered work is an early Newbery Medal winner, The Cat Who Went to Heaven,  a children’s book with unusual subject matter melding extensive dharma talk with a Charlotte’s Web plot published in 1930. One of the highlights in today’s research was reading a couple of accounts by Coatsworth’s daughter, poet Kate Barnes, who writes about what her mother was like and the life she eventually led in rural Maine.

I wanted a contrast with the slower, sparer music I have used for the first two episodes; and when I had an hour in my studio space Friday, I quickly recorded three energetic takes of the music I wrote for “A Lady Comes to an Inn.”  Kate Barnes writes her mother wrote quickly,*** and that rhymes with my usual recording necessities these days: the first thought had to be a good enough thought. When I went to mix the resulting tracks, I realized I had a problem. I had played my jumbo 12-string guitar, and that beast when I pick it at a rapid tempo produces a lot of clashing harmonic content. It took a few tries using some mixing magic to temper that issue with the recording you can hear below using the audio player gadget. Has the audio gadget left for fairy land or Aldebaran? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog glamor the display of such a player, and so I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with an audio player.

 

.

 

 

*The lady’s elongated thinness also described may not stop the reader at first either, but the young maples in my yard would also say otherworldly if their branches would describe a humanoid limb.

**Her travels included “off the beaten path” journeys, and I theorize that she would have likely experienced herself, as a woman, being the exotic, mysterious, traveler at times.

***Coatsworth’s spouse, writer Henry Beston, was the opposite, a much slower writer who needed solitude to work. Mother/housewife Coatsworth might have needed that work-fast-with-inconstant-time-available outlook for external reasons, but daughter Barnes thinks it was intrinsic to her nature. Coatsworth published around 100 books and told her daughter that she had published the most poems of any poet of her era if you excluded the para-literary sorts like Edgar Guest

Lethe

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Continuing my April National Poetry Month observance with another poem from Louis Untermeyer’s between-world-wars anthology Modern American Poetry.  This one’s from a better-known poet than last time.

NPM starts with April Fools Day, an outdated holiday since we already had President’s Day in February, and can-you-believe-it outrages are somehow less funny this year. Yet, it’s also the day my late wife and I got married back in the 1980s. Not exactly a golden age back then either, and my wife would explain the decision to get married as a statement of the stubborn optimism of loving fools.

The poet who I’ll sing today published under the name H.D. – a nom de plume that still has a modern vibe for a pioneering Modernist. Maybe someone in our digital screen age will pay tribute by calling a project extending her work “QHD?” Something else that I’d expect might still sound modern is how she came to be a part of the Modernist vanguard that formed in England among a group including Americans living abroad. Hilda Doolittle was a young woman who had a college sweetheart. It appears they planned to get married. That other, a he in the pair, moved to England to meet up with the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats. His name was Ezra Pound. Young Hilda eventually traveled to London to reconnect with Pound.

Somewhere in the passages of boats and time the romance between the two died, for there’s no guarantee that optimistic fools will continue to share the foolish accords of love. Pound was a talker, a planner, a promoter of the kind of modern American poetry Untermeyer would start to collect a few years later in his anthology with that name. Meeting Hilda in London, Ezra hatches a plan for H.D. that’s not marriage.

Looking at a bunch of poems that Hilda had brought with her to England, Pound pronounced them delightful and perfectly modern, an unbidden expression of the new poetry movement he and his little group were promoting. Pound, ever sure of himself (a trait that is dangerous in politicians, but often advantageous in artists*) scribbled at the bottom of Hilda’s poems “H.D. Imagiste.” Later on the Frenchie “e” got dropped and the new English language poetry Modernists were Imagists.

Now, I wasn’t there – chronistically excluded – but if there was a function like social media then I can Imagist a whole lot of takes on this. Manipulating the poor girl! Way to change the subject EP. Patronizing, much?

Well, here’s the unexpected part: H.D.’s poetry was  striking. Still is. She could write very compressed short poems, nothing wasted: no dallying narrative story-telling or clearly identified speakers, but the images inside these enigmas so clear and evocative.

In his introduction to H.D. Imagiste in his anthology Untermeyer wrote:

She was the only one who steadfastly held to the letter as well as the spirit of its credo. She was, in fact, the only true Imagist. Her poems are like a set of Tanagra figurines….The effect is chilling – beauty seems held in a frozen gesture. But it is in this very fixation of light, color and emotion that she achieves intensity. What at first seemed static becomes fluent; the arrested moment glows with a quivering tension…. A freely declared passion radiates from lines which are at once ecstatic and austere.

The poem I selected from Untermeyer’s selection is the one called “Lethe,”  and it’s a good example of this effect. She leaves interpretive space in this poem: one could read it as a curse or an elegy. Is she decrying the separated lover, wishing upon them even more separation from nature, comforts, and others? Or is she with chilling remorse stating the plain facts of the dead: that they are separated – and we the living, separated too, but able to feel and sing that. Her poem is a sensuous litany of what the dead’s senses will not feel.

Lethe

Today’s “thimbleberries.” I didn’t know what “whin” mentioned in the poem was. The Internet’s department of tautology department tells me its a variety of the gorse plant.

.

I chose the latter when I performed it – thinking on a day for fools, of marrying to share each other’s foolishness. You can hear that performance of H.D.’s “Lethe” with the audio player gadget below. What, you can’t hear the no wailing of reed-bird to waken you? Some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing the audio player, so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

.

 

 

*Ezra Pound’s confidence did extend to politics. Alas – to say the least.

Memory of Lake Superior vs. Donald Hall’s Law

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

April is U.S. National Poetry Month, and this year I’m going to focus on poems found within an in-between-the-World-Wars anthology titled Modern American Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer. It’s a book that might have been assigned when my parents were in college, filled largely with poets that were born in the vicinity of the turn of the 20th century. I don’t know enough to comment on Untermeyer’s taste in selecting his early 20th century poets, but he seems to have interests in some areas that overlap my own: early Modernism,* humor, and poetry with proletarian and gothic themes. I assume there’s at least a trace of literary log-rolling in the selection of some of the less-well-known poets in the book, but in the short essays that he writes to introduce each poet Untermeyer often finds room for sharp critical comments – this to me is evidence of a fair-minded attempt to get his time’s consensus consideration of American poetry since Whitman and Dickinson.

My plan (to the degree that my life allows plans, which is arguable) is to present around 10 poems from the hundreds in Untermeyer’s thick book. I expect one or two will be “poetry’s greatest hits” that I haven’t otherwise gotten around to, and others will be unknown poems by little-known poets. Long time readers may recall a statement I’ve taken to calling Donald Hall’s Law. That poet, a prize-winner, once wrote: “Most poets, even prize-winning ones, will be forgotten 40 years after they die.”  Modern American Poetry  went through 6 editions between 1919 and 1942, and from a quick look, the last of the included authors died in the 1980s, and so are subject and evidence to that law. Will my efforts and your attention amend Donald Hall’s Law? Slim chance, but I enjoy sporting with its iron rule. Once some pressman ran these pages through their oily machinery, they pressed a democracy between the boards – and so, next to your Wallace Stevens and Robert Frosts, there’s the someone elses who led a life, observed it, did their best to craft some poem to convey that.

And here’s the first of those: George Dillon. Know the name? Know their poetry? This isn’t a test – I didn’t. Some reading this are likely living poets,** and you might have careerist moments in some early AM hours once the muse has worn off. Are you submitting enough, and to the right places? Did you do enough to promote your collection? Are you behind in your social media or correspondence? And while you never think this one yourself, you might still think someone else is thinking “Who do I have to sleep with to gain some traction?”

I’ve reached a age. I look at Donald Hall’s Law and am strangely comforted. I don’t need to be encouraged in dream-stoking stories about poets who achieved lasting fame. I seek out instead stories that say someone else was once here, wrote a little, and I can find them, find some pleasure in a poem or two, and say: that’s enough, or better than some other human clap trap we had no choice in hearing.

And so we have George Dillon. He made it into Untermeyer’s anthology, slotted between Robert Penn Warren and Kenneth Patchen. He was an editor at Poetry Magazine for over a decade! He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1931 poetry collection! He and Edna St. Vincent Millay were lovers!

Memory of Lake Superior

Chord sheets like this one might encourage you to sing this poem too.

.

I said Untermeyer could be toughly critical even of those he included. Here’s the end of his introduction to the selections of Dillon’s poetry in the anthology:

His defect is his fluency; he is sure of his craftsmanship, a little too sure. The subject-matter is conventional to the point of being stereotyped and the tone in the sonnets is a shade too pompous. Yet the verse is unusually flexible and few will question his gift of song.”

Fair enough. When I look through a collection seeking something to use here “gift of song” is going to attract me. And there’s another factor. The title of the poem I set to music is “Memory of Lake Superior.”   My late wife lived in Duluth for a while; we both loved the north shore of that Greatest Lake. My living wife too hikes there even as I’ve become too old for long walks. Besides the “words that want to break into a song” effect, Dillon’s poem is well observed: the famous red-brown sandstone, the fungal debris on the forest floors. My wife tells me*** that the thimbleberries there that Dillon mentions “have larger flowers than razzberries.” It’s National  Poetry Month, sure, but I thought leading off with a Spring poem with home field advantage would be appropriate.

Thimbleberries by Heidi Randen

Thimbleberries, their flower, their berry.

.

You can hear Dillon’s “Memory of Lake Superior”  with the audio player below. Are you asking, “Has Donald Hall hidden the player to enforce his law?” No, just some ways of viewing the blog won’t show the player gadget, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

.

 

National Poetry Month 2026 logo

.

 

*My initial interest in the early American Modernist era was fed by having a relative (Susan Glaspell) who was part of it, but the practical aspect of having work from 1930 back being in public domain and free for unrestrained reuse makes this era primary for poetic texts to combine with music here. Though the bulk of Untermeyer’s anthology republishes work from before 1930, I am using a later edition, and it’s possible a few of the works may be borderline: e.g. Dillon’s poem is obscure enough to not have an easily findable date of first publication.

**Dead poets reading here have damnably low engagement scores, and Ouija board planchettes never click links or hit “like.”

***Again, living wife – though a ghostly partner who whispers woodland lore to me from the undiscovered country would have a certain gothic charm.

The Sun – just touched the Morning, or Emily Dickinson’s No Kings

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I’ve told some folks that I’m working on Emily Dickinson’s “No Kings” piece this week. Now, that’s hardly true. There is a king in this poem and he doesn’t come off so well in its telling; but there’s a naïve maiden too, and Emily’s going to paint her as much a fool as the pompous potentate.

If much has been made about the use of hymn meter in Dickinson’s verse and connections there to her skeptical view of conventional religion, plot-wise this poem takes its tale from an extremely common folk and folk-broadside trope: the foolish maiden. In countless variations some man of high-degree dallies with a young woman of the common folk, and it usually doesn’t turn out well for the girl.*  In the best of it, he’s a cad and leaves her; in the worst, there’s murder most foul in the offing. Many folk songs, including those in this grouping, open with it being a Spring morning. Springtime promises, it seems, aren’t to be trusted the voice of folk music says.

I’m not scholar enough to tell how many such songs Emily Dickinson knew, but they were highly common in her time, and I suspect she was using that folk-music plot here to make her point about what life promises us, and about trusting kings.

Sun just touched the Morning

Here’s a chord sheet to assist if you’d like to sing this in your parlor. I like the sound of 9th chords, but they were chosen here to ease my fingering on guitar and can likely be simplified if that suits other players.

.

In “The Sun – just touched the Morning”  we have the morning herself playing the foolish maiden and the sun is the sun king who likely believes that when you’re a king they just let you grab it. The sun, as we might guess, soon has to be moving on doing important stuff like making dew into a passing mock-up of glittering jewels, but Morning thinks she is to be his queen. Dickinson reports Morning trying to act like the imperial Sun, crowned with a dew-drop diadem: “She felt herself supremer – A Raised – Ethereal Thing!”

Dickinson knows how this comes out: there’s no crown on offer, no coronation. Some divine right will not tell us who is right, honorable, reciprocal, or trustworthy – that will be up to our “unanointed foreheads.”

So it is: hymns generally tell us how to live right, how to praise a beyond-human perspective, while folk songs take on the task of telling us not to be a fool.

As I composed this, I tried to use a 19th century popular song kind of feel, but ended up being enticed by rock quartet instrumentation with a chiming electric guitar element. If I was to do another version, I might lean more into parlor instruments – but this’ll have to do for now, for we have present business with kings we refuse to allow.

You can hear this song version of Emily Dickinson’s “The Sun – just touched the Morning”  with the audio player below. What? Has the king refused to fund any such audio player? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog won’t show the player, and I offer this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player so you can hear it.

 

 

.

 

 

*There are exceptions. Every so often the young woman susses out or tells off the cad; and though told in a different plot-order, in one of my favorite British Isles folk-songs “Willie of Winsbury”  the young girl’s suspicious father is the fool.

Sonnet III: Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

This Saturday in Minnesota was marvelous. We already go a little crazy when the temps reach 50 degrees Fahrenheit – there are always folks out in shorts and short sleaves as soon at the bulb’s red rise tips over 49 degrees, but Saturday my thermometer read 79 degrees  by the afternoon, and everyone that could was outside. Walkers were everywhere, and if they had dogs, they had a shared happiness. The smaller crew of hardy bicyclists I see within Winter were joined by a fresh multitude of carefree riders in summer attire coursing through the city. I myself rode to a place a block or so away from my wife’s apartment when we were courting, and there I had a double scoop of ice cream which I ate sitting on a bench outside soaking up the sun.

I’m feeling my age as more than just an additional year in 2026, but to be old or young or anywhere in-between in such a Minnesota day induces a feeling of specialness. Perhaps for the young the coming spring and summer can have an interval long enough to induce boredom, a sense of regular expectable warmth, and a dispensable ease of adventure – but to be old is to know the shortness of things.

Sunday returned to gray skies and an ordinary chilliness. Saturday seemed like a dream. Spring and Summer are still promises, more sure than many human promises in this corrupted world, but promises still.

All that dilly-dallying with ice cream delayed me completing making a song from this Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet. Earlier this month I was saying Millay wrote complex love poems. Well, she wrote complex Spring poems too. The sonnet I was working with is one of the Spring ones, but like her apostrophe poem from earlier this month speaking to mankind, this time it’s an apostrophe to the season. It’s an intimate dialog with elements of greetings to Spring, but as that season arrives, the poem tells us it also knows it will depart.

I’ve found that Millay’s poems often improve with performance. While not exactly a slam poet with planned-in applause lines, Millay’s language (even with its touch of archaic poetic diction) has a pleasing sound, and near rhyme and rhyme add a sensuous chime to the lines. It really is one of those poems that ask to be sung. That said, I found myself modifying Millay’s line breaks as I set it to music. The chord sheet version I provide today can be compared to this link of the printed text to see how I adapted it. I also added a refrain again.

Sonnet III

Some less common chords in this one, but I offer these chord sheets in hopes that other singers will try these songs out.

.

One last thing developed from the poem as I did this work: the poem, ostensibly addressing Spring, may be speaking also to the passing youth of the poet, and the line I chose to refrain is repeated to bring forward that which I felt on that extraordinary warm Saturday when I performed Millay’s poem, that we can cherish (and be considered) being more than young and sweet and fair. We all live as promises.

To hear that performance of Millay’s sonnet you can use the audio player gadget below. No audio player seen? That throat isn’t gone on departed wing, it’s just some ways of reading this blog suppress showing it, and so I also offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

William Butler Yeats’ “Politics”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Are we through with Irish poets? No. Is there going to be less politics this time. Well, sort of.  This Project’s goals were not to provide political commentary – the Internet has plenty of that in all varieties – but I’m beginning to have some appreciation for what a hero of mine Carl Sandburg said when asked about his radical politics while already at risk because of his is-this-really-poetry free verse, he answered that politics must find its way into his poetry, in that it was part of him, surrounding him and his times.

So, here’s a poem by Irish poet William Butler Yeats about being weary of politics – yet, he couldn’t avoid it, it was part of him and part of his times too. This poem’s weariness elicits a short catalog of international political issues that he thought of while exclaiming he’s not wishing to think of them. It’s also an old man’s poem, written near the end of Yeats’ life, when he was in his seventies. I’m older than Yeats was when he wrote this, but I too can see what old men do with the weapons of political power so discordant from the Spring that still exists and says we are not here to be the last ones living, but to be as the first ones. Here’s a link to the text of Yeats’ poem, “Politics,”  and it’s an interesting link for more than just a reference to the text.

Let me delay you just a bit from listening to the song I made from Yeats’ verse to speak a little about its making. My household this year has become a haven for a small group of young people going through living as if they’re the first ones. Mostly, I try to stay out of their way, but their hustle and bustle in this house complicates the process of creating these pieces you read and listen to here. In these days, I remind myself of the musicians and composers’ prayer: “May music find a way.”

Unable to use one of my good acoustic guitars in my studio space, which I would normally record with a sensitive microphone, I decided to realize the song I had made using a guitar I keep in my home office. It’s an Ovation Applause, a battered old thing, designed as an experiment in making a cheap instrument out of materials thought unmusical.*  The body is plastic with plywood, and the neck doesn’t seem to be made from wood (other than the fretboard facing).**   Before I bought it used decades ago, my Ovation suffered from a fall or other accident as a lower edge has shattered and there’s a spiderweb of fine cracks extending from the site of that blow. For the past few years this guitar has been stuck in a rack out in the open in my home office because there’s little or nothing in it that could be damaged by the dry winter air there.

Many serious acoustic guitar players make something of a fetish around the woods and construction details of their instruments. It’s not just rosewood, it’s Brazilian rosewood. Sapele isn’t really mahogany, and don’t let them tell you otherwise. Spruce, sure, but from what forest region? Did they use old-school hide glue to assemble it and nitro lacquer to finish it?

This guitar is in opposition to all that: certainly the familiar of a heretic.

So, how’s it sound? Let’s give the witchfinder their due – not to put to fine a point on it, it sounds like crap. If you want richness of sound, this is poverty. There might be some value in its current role: a tool to compose on. That mystery neck has stayed stable all these years, it’s still easy to fret. And its sparce sound would keep one from being to enamored of a something that sounds pretty without having anything beyond its timbre to recommend it – but I’m not sure I’d go that far: it was even more inexpensive being used and damaged, I have it, it’s a hardy thing, and its small size makes it easier to play sitting in an office chair.

Ovation

It’s looks legitimate & peaceful sitting there, but what might it summon with its tinny horn?

.

And one night this month, I had an inconvenient time to record a realization of a fine poem by the famous Irish poet Yeats. Yeats got a Nobel literature prize. Yeats became a Senator when his country achieved independence. Yeats is so honored in Ireland, a poem of his is on their passports. Yet, I played my song version of Yeats on an old battered guitar, its cheapness designed in.

And you know, I appreciate a good sounding acoustic guitar. Those folks in thrall to the details aren’t imagining things. But then my singing voice isn’t a finely crafted instrument either, and I’m asserting I can express something of the essence of Yeats’ poem anyway. You can hear it with the audio player below. No player? Has that old wizard Yeats summoned the devil to fly from the shuttered Ovation Connecticut factory with Hartford’s Mark Twain and Wallace Stevens riding with his hoard to take that audio player from you? No, it’s likely just a matter of some ways of reading this blog choosing to not show the player gadget.  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

.

 

*The Ovation brand still exists, a shadow of itself, having been haunted through a series of owners. The plastic bowl-shaped back – though often paired with much better sounding other components than my low-end example – is still controversial. In its glory days, Ovation was well-known for pioneering under-saddle acoustic guitar pickups. They were so preeminent there, that in the last quarter of the 20th century if you were to see a popular guitarist in concert in any sort of larger venue playing acoustic guitar, you’d be more than likely to see them playing an Ovation guitar that looks remarkably like my more lowly example.

Eventually other manufacturers caught up with their own acoustic guitar pickup systems, eclipsing Ovation’s USP. Come the 21st century, the New Hartford Connecticut Ovation headquarters and factory, home to these innovations, was closed.

**At least some early Applause models used aluminum necks. I can’t say for sure what’s under the black paint of mine, but it sure isn’t wood.

Ethna McKiernan’s “The Day My Mother Gave Me Away to the Tinkers”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a poem that I’ve turned into a song for my second post honoring two Irish-American poets who led a St. Patrick’s Day poetry reading in Minnesota for several years before their death. Of the two, Ethna McKiernan had more direct ties to Ireland, having spent some time living in Dublin, and then in Minnesota running an Irish book and music arts store in the Twin Cities for many years.

For a part of those years I was acquainted with Ethna through the Lake Street Writer’s Group,* where a small group of poets shared works in progress and discussed on the side our lives and outlooks. When I look back on those years, I miss those writers, but I also fear I was inappropriate in critiquing their work, particularly Ethna. My style in that sort of thing tended to be highly detailed (picky might be a word), and even if I would lengthen my responses to their work in progress with “you could consider this or that alternative” because I believed in an honest “test reader” response without claiming to having some reliable recipe for a successful poem, or authority to ask them to change anything. That claim, that belief, should have opened me up to considering “so why then bother them (or myself) with these suggestions or reactions?” I have no academic training in poetry (Ethna did) and in my late twenties I gave up working at submitting for publication. Ethna did publish. She and Kevin each had several book-length collections as well as the usual small-press acceptances. All this would testify that whatever I thought about poetry’s workings, those ideas were unlikely to be commercially helpful.

Well, you can’t apologize to the dead. They either know better or not at all. I meant well, and I could be amazed by Ethna’s best poems. So, here’s to letting you know about their work here, which I hope is a pleasure for you. And if you would like more of that pleasure, Ethna’s last book, a new and selected collection finished as she was in her final illness, is available here from her Irish publisher.

I think I heard Ethna read today’s poem selection, “The Day My Mother Gave Me Away to the Tinkers,” more than once, including at one of those annual St. Patrick’s Day public readings, where it’s an apt choice, what with its Dublin setting. Before reading it, Ethna would instruct the listeners that, just as with many people of our shared generation,** her mother had issued the threat inside the poem’s title in jest, at worst during momentary frustration; and that the subject of her poem was but her teenage mind thinking in response “Well, I’ll take her up and that, and then she’ll be sorry.”

What else do I want you to know before you hear my song performance of this poem? First, for practicalities sake, there’s a man singing this mother-daughter poem. That might be a detriment. Otherwise? I made a mistake singing the name of a baker mentioned in the poem, Johnston Mooney and O’Brien. I dropped the “Johnston,” but at first figured no one would care, that it must be just some immaterial tiny particular bakery – but it turns out that firm is a famous and long-standing Irish baking concern, Oh well. I hope you enjoy the song anyway.

Johnston Mooney and O'Brien Nutty Doorsteps

Forgot the “Johnston?” Never darken (or spread jam on) my doorsteps again!

.

You can hear it with the audio player gadget below. Has any such audio player disappeared? No, the gadget’s mother hasn’t given it away, it’s just that some ways of viewing the blog must want the audio player to not be seen (or heard) – and so I offer this highlighted link that’ll open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

.

 

*Alternative voice here Dave Moore, and our other St. Patrick’s Day poet Kevin FitzPatrick, were principals of the Lake Street Writers Group.

**My own mid-century mother had her variation of this “give you away” phrase, and but seven kids to test her patience.

Only Until This Cigarette Is Ended

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Did I promise an upcoming, complicated, love poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay last time? Well, let me deliver that.

This poem is one that taunted me to sing it as I read through several dozen Millay poems early this month. Millay chooses rich yet strange images in it, the poem’s erotic mood includes complex uncommon elements within its lyrical account of two consciousnesses which have met and are about to separate, and that makes me think of other songs I admire. Its splendor in an alienated nighttime moment makes me think of “Visions of Johanna,”  while it’s notes of respect beside begone absence makes me think Dylan’s suite of songs within Blood On the Tracks.  And Millay’s choice of images here verge toward the surreal enough to think of Robyn Hitchcock as I worked out the music and performance you can hear below.

Until This Cigarette Is Ended

I chose to leave this chord sheet showing the chord forms I fretted on a standard-tuned guitar, even though the recording sounds in a different key due to my use of a capo. This is an easy song to play on guitar, even strummed rather than using my cross-picked arpeggio playing style, and I wish to encourage others to sing these Parlando Project songs.

.

I choose one lyrical change as I made the poem into a song: I decided to create a refrain out of one of its lines. I’m personally OK with songs that eschew choruses and refrains, and a great many poems taken down word-for-word as song lyrics will not have that element that’s increasingly prominent in popular songwriting. This choice brings forward that two-consciousnesses element. The poem has the poem’s voice (for simplicity, I’ll call that voice Millay’s) speaking what we’d call these days “her truth.” Though the poem is compressed into a lyric moment, that truth is that there’s been a pleasant enough erotic event between two people, but that Millay knew, or has decided, that that’s enough and this will not be an ongoing erotic bond. For a woman to publicly write this over a hundred years ago was striking – this poem’s honesty is precedent to those more contemporary expressions.

But the poem is more than precedent, let me linger on the images, starting with the titular cigarette, that quick and casual tube of tobacco. Rather than fade into Millay’s century ago, this reader (now singer) is drawn back half-that interval to when he, and most in his circle, were smokers. For Millay the cigarette would’ve been a somewhat modern signifier – and one without the more lingering girth of the cigar or the apparatus of pipe smoking – but for me, I was drawn back to what I tried to explain to my wife yesterday was my youthful erotic imprinting on cigarettes. My thoughts were not the trope of the post-prandial smoke after a buffet of lovemaking (something I never chose to do) but on the smell and taste of tobacco about the lover’s body. To younger moderns, disdainful of my evoking that, I’d try to explain that a common sharing of certain oils and ash on our skin and lips was kind of intimate comingled pyre. Millay doesn’t explicitly evoke that – I think the modern briefness and offhand casualness was her intent, but she portrays another image I think here that is specific to cigarettes in my memory” a well-packed, factory made, Modernist for Millay, cigarette can produce a lengthy ash as it’s smoked. I can still recall one college literature professor, one with a very John Berryman beard and manner, who would, while animated with some literary thought he was expressing, continue to puff on his cigarette as the distal ash grew to maybe half the length of the number in his mouth. This drooping ash would jiggle as his lips that held its cigarette continued to expound, and the suspense of its suspension would sometimes disconnect my attention to what he was saying with the other part of his mouth. All our thoughts, all our desires, all of us, will eventually fall to ash might be the image here, and I believe that’s the lance Millay evokes in her poem.*

There’s also fireplace, firelight in this shared post-lovemaking pyre, and Neanderthal meets Plato expressionist shadows make a visual Jazz noise with some off-screen radio or record player. For Millay a palpably Modernist mise-en-scène, but even for more modern moderns, there’s really nothing to turn off, it’s just lovers, so entwined, but these visions…

The final six lines make it so precise and so clear: something, a lasting erotic pairing, is not to be. Millay’s voice here is precise: this person momentarily beside her will not hence imprint with their body, hers – but that other’s words will stick with her? Something they said? Something they wrote? Since there’s no hint of rancor or lack of respect in the boundaries of this lyric poem, it may be the latter, a love of the poetry of the word not the poetry of the physical deed.

And in Millay’s final six lines comes that line I’ve chosen to refrain, a choice that brings her to an in passing but significant notice of that other consciousness inside this short poem’s fleeting embrace further to the fore: “But in your day this moment is the sun.”

What is that saying? That the other takes this as more overt than the covert firelight and briefly burning cigarette? Probably. That could easily be read as more than a bit egotistic, a trope in the more well-worn notched bedpost of the male “Babe, I gotta be moving on” road song. Or it could be, as I tried to make it my musical performance of Millay’s poem, a rueful acknowledgement that there’s a gulf between the two consciousnesses, even inside their closeness in the moment of the poem, now song.

So, complicated – a love song, or a song of something close to love.

That musical performance is available below with an audio player gadget. What? Is that side of the embed empty, the sheets now cold? Ah, the poem-now-song peddler now speaks, there’s jewels and binoculars – no, a link, a link, a highlighted link, that will open a new tab in your browser that will have its own audio player so you can hear it.

 

 

 

.

 

*Yes, yes, this obligates the sometimes “a cigar is just a cigar,” Freudian mention. That it’s a cigarette here – a genderless tobacco product rather than the male-coded cigar or pipe – is Millay’s choice.

The modern kings will throttle you to greet the piping voice of artificial birds

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a new Claude McKay poem song setting, “To a Poet,”  completed as part of my concentration on his poetry this February. Somewhat of a “deep cut” in McKay’s poetry, but as sometimes happens when reading a bunch of poems, there was one set of lines that stood out as I read this pioneering Jamaican-American poet’s work. I’ll get to those lines, but first a detour about the music.

Which is something I don’t write much here. The Parlando Project started as a musical idea, though I always thought I’d want to say something about the experience of encountering the poems on the way to making the music, and so this blog. While true engagement with the blog posts here is hard to judge – something made harder by occasional bouts of what appear to be bots skimming (and reskimming) posts here since last autumn – there’s been a satisfying and unrelenting increase in visits to this blog over 10 years. Blogs may no longer be the new-hot, but the visits keep coming. Thank you, readers, and I wish that my personality and situation would allow me to be more attentive to your comments.*  I treasure anyone that spends a little time here.

But the musical pieces, the cause of this all? They get no more listens than they did only a few years into this Project when monthly readership and listening numbers were roughly equal – while presently listeners are maybe 10% of the numbers of readers. I’m realistic about the limitations of my musical expression. I’m about as far from a poptomist composer as could be imagined, and I’ve long feared that not sticking to one style of music creates what used to be called by radio programmers “button pushers” – those who hear one or two songs they strongly dislike and decide to go elsewhere. I understand, people react to music sensually, emotionally, and so a bad experience with music creates a stronger distaste than a duff blog post or the choice of a poem some don’t care for – but my music making reflects my listening, it’s eclectic. I’m committed to musical adventurousness and variety, and so by intent or missteps the music may not always be something you’d choose. I don’t believe I’d enjoy this Project if it was anything else.

But one musical constraint has always been with me: my singing voice and its take it or leave it limitations. Spoken word poetry, even with integrated music, is one thing, and I’ll do that, but some words tell me they expect to be sung, and almost always, that means the singer is me. I’m grateful for the times my long-time LYL bandmate Dave Moore has given me and my listeners a break, and there have been scattered other “guest vocalists” over the decade. Today’s song is different. I wanted to do something (however simplified, as I think simplified music retains powers) more like Art Song, the composed music that features trained singers who express strong melodic contours through skilled techniques, rather than off-the-cuff, I’ll-give-it-a-go, folk-singing.

Go ahead, scroll down and listen to today’s piece setting to music the words of Claude McKay. I’ll wait. And here’s the text of McKay’s poem that was performed with my music.

To a Poet 600

 

.

 

 

OK, you’re back. Who’s the guest vocalist? The stage name is Felicia. Felicia is a virtual instrument. Readers here may recall what that is, but I think it’s important to reiterate: a VI is often a set of atomized recorded samples of a real “acoustic” instrument, a whole range of notes with articulations expressing a range of colors. Let’s not confuse two-letter-acronyms, VI is not AI as expressed by services like Suno which take an overall text description of the nature of a song and create in one fell swoop the finished melodic lines of the singer (and all their arrangement and accompaniment) by apparently recombining conventional musical materials. If I take a VI of, for example an organ, and invoke it on my computer it won’t play a toccata, early Phillip Glass, or “Rock Lobster,” or anything like those pieces, no matter how I write a run-on requesting sentence about it. It instead needs me to play my MIDI guitar or little plastic keyboard, or inscribe notes on a MIDI piano roll notation. I could (as a very limited keyboardist) invoke arpeggiators or chord and pattern generators to extend what I play or write – but it still feels like composition to me. In contrast, AI like Suno feels like I’m a royal patron asking my musicians for some conventional musical noise to underscore my cultural pretenses, caring only that it be inoffensive.

Another difference: even a despot likely paid their court musicians something. AI? Not so much. The company that sells the Felicia voice VI (Dreamtronics) claims it pays the human singers that it samples to make its products.

Still, I expect this revelation, or its implementation in this piece, will repel some listeners. The spirals inside the ear have their own Uncanny Valley, and I too feel that fearful symmetry. It sounds like a human putting artifice onto itself or an artifice taunting the qualities of human. I put up with it because I had a goal, and my voice could never sing with the VI’s technique, particularly over a longer piece. I played the vocal line on my little plastic keyboard, and typed each syllable as text that the notes would sing. Early vocal VIs were very picky about needing explicit phonetic text, but this one knows much more about the baroque tangles of English pronunciation, yet I still had to tweak some syllables. The program has a range of controls for expression variations – learning how to use them will improve results – but it presents default expressive choices that keep the monotonous spiel of old-school robot speech away.**

Felicia made it much easier to get something that wasn’t fakey bad or unintelligible as older vocal VIs I’ve tried, even as I still felt the need to do work to improve problematic passages. It took me several hours to create the vocal line realization you hear in today’s piece. A trained human singer at the mic could have done it in an hour, even including leeway for retakes and “try it this ways.”

One thing I noticed: even when I had polished up the intelligibility of the VI sung text, the meaning of the words seemed abstracted to me as a listener. Oddly, this is the same thing I sometimes hear as a listener with Art Song, where the composer’s elaborate melodies or the singer’s concentration on demonstrating virtuoso technique make the words vehicles for expressing music more than shared experience. Human vocalists singing Art Song, in their own way, produce their own unsettling Uncanny Valley.

Which may bring up the question, why not just use a real singer? Yes, that would be better. I, who am socially awkward, not able to schedule a time to do my creative work, and heading-up a non-revenue Project can say that would be an ideal, but unlikely, option. Furthermore, in the process of composition I wouldn’t be able to test my musical choices as a limited singer, so there’d likely never be a score for such a singer to follow.***

Will I use a vocal VI again here? Likely, though I don’t think I’ll use it most of the time, or even often. My voice is my voice, and I feel I should use it. Still, I was very happy that I could realize this musical piece. Through the technology of VIs I was also able to play the atomic recombinations of an oboe, a viola da gamba, and a hurdy-gurdy as part of the accompaniment.

OK, so back to Claude McKay’s poem. Like his “When I Have Passed Away”  from earlier this month, McKay’s poem here speaks of posthumous poetic legacy. In the context of this month while using a computer VI to sing his words, I was much taken with the pair of lines in his poem: “The modern kings will throttle you to greet/The piping voice of artificial birds.” Maybe 100-years-ago, a prophetic McKay knew how I’d come to try to make a song of his poem using a voice of artifice under the rule of a disordered king and assorted technological barons.

You’ve already heard that song haven’t you? What, you didn’t obey the words and stop partway for the music? You’re a rebel! An outlaw! A traitor! You have one – no, two – more chances to hear my musical setting of “To a Poet:” with the audio player you should see below, or with this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

 

 

 

*Besides mundane life-chores, these increasing problems are partly from aging, and partly secondary to the folks I share my home and life with. It’s hard for me to devote regular and predictable time to this Project, and when opportunity time comes, my nature is to work on finding new words and creating the musical pieces. For some reason (aging? self-doubt?) it’s increasingly hard for me to make the social small-talk that should be trivial and expected.

**I doubt this variation of expression is heavy duty AI either. For a long time VIs have used a pseudo-random cycle of expression variations as an option in their programs. I didn’t get a sense the VI generally knew from the denotative sense of a word or placement in a sentence or musical phrase to give it a particular kind of invocation.

***A product like this, it seems to me, would be ideal for a composer who doesn’t sing well and who would like to rough out scores before an actual performance, as it might give a better quick approximation than just playing the vocal line’s notes on a piano for instance, just as orchestral composers are increasingly roughing out arrangements on other virtual instruments.