I’ve been dealing out the civic poetry so far this American National Poetry Month, but for today’s Poem in Your Pocket Day here’s a charming poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. If I understand Poem In Your Pocket correctly, its idea (as distinct from the entire Poetry Month) is to put emphasis on publicly sharing other people’s poetry. The rest of Poetry Month has a lot of examples of encouraging the writing of poetry oneself: poetry prompts, daily haiku writing pledges, poets putting forward their own work, and so on. That’s all fine—but this Project from its beginning has sought to go beyond the supply side to encourage the consumption of poetry. With the recorded musical versions we make here, there’s a modest hope of community in singing or speaking the poetry aloud. A song not heard is one of those trees-falling-in-an-uninhabited-forest things—whatever the result, it means to be a sound. Now onto today’s poem, situated in a forest.
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“Counting-Out Rhyme” indicates with its title that it should be considered as that children’s game or process. As a game, a counting-out rhyme is a delineated incantation, each beat accompanied by a pointed indication around a group until the ending beat arrives and the final pointed-to individual is chosen. The most common folk poem in this manner in my childhood was “Eenie, Meanie, Miney, Moe.”*
I, having emigrated from the republic of childhood so long ago, have no idea if kids still use this process on playgrounds. From my more recent experience as a parent, modern younger children who would use it seem more supervised more often than my cohort, and responsible adults might be likely to select without rhymes. In my day, when the 20th century still had decades to run, kids just knew how this worked via the folk process.
Despite its title, as I worked with Millay’s poem I couldn’t really think she authored it for playground uses. Though not a long poem, it’s longer than it needs to be for selection, and the poem seems utterly beholden to its own, internal, incantatory powers. It picked up from the Imagists the flagrant naming of colors, decoration not needed for utility. I suspect Millay is remembering her own New England childhood here, much as E. E. Cumming was recalling his in his Spring poem, and the poem is rather more a magical spell, one meant to bring on Spring or bring one back to when the woodland sights of it were unprecedented and wonderous. It’s lovely word-music, and I heard it from off the page — and then played it in the musical version below — as a languid song, not the hurried rota of trying to make a quick, randomized choice.
In a week when chronological adults (whatever their maturity) are playing counting-out games with numbers that will empty or fill pockets and prisons, I share this poem from my pocket — not legal tender, but Spring tender. With the audio player below you can hear me perform this with 12-string guitar and sparse contributions from an ensemble of viola, violins, flute, clarinet, English horn, and silence. No player? You won’t need to find a wood-nymph to cast a spell, I provide this highlighted backup link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*In my experience from my times and place, the following line always included that dammed ethnic slur that makes the opening line of nonsense words almost offensive in anticipation. I noted in the Wikipedia article on that verse that the ethnic slur was an American variation, and there are multiple theories of the rhyme’s origin without it. I have no full accounting of the harm the slur brought by its childhood ubiquitousness — but I was somehow pleased to read as an aged adult that it was something the folk process added in America, and in order to form a more perfect playground republic, the same process can remove it.
The other similar selection process I recall from childhood was deciding which side would bat first in kids-run baseball games by alternating two kid’s hand-grasp up the length of the barrel of a bat until the final grasp topping the length was up first. Wouldn’t flipping a coin be faster? I’m not sure we had coins in our pockets back then.
I woke up to economic tumult around the world this morning after finishing a mix of this song I made from a poem by Carl Sandburg last night. I’d gone back and forth on mixing this simple piece of music. At one point I thought it needed piano. I tried an arpeggiated part. Hmmm….no. I tried a coda with underlying low-register sustained intervals. Nope too. So, no piano. I was going to post the remainder yesterday when I began to wonder if the bass line was mixed too high. I told myself I’d reconsider in the morning and went to sleep.
Awaking, I found the news of international economic fears overlaying the world of our current sustained carelessness and cruelties. Well, I thought, maybe it’s not all that important how perfectly the song is recorded or mixed. It’s time to get this little bit of Carl Sandburg out to our modern world for National Poetry Month.
This Project spends a lot of time in the previous decade to be called The Twenties, a time when all the arts and poetry had to deal with a changing culture that ended with a great falling of commerce. For much of the decade it was written up as a time of fashionable Modernism, easily pilloried as a faddish, brainless rush. The label “The Jazz Age” wasn’t meant as cultured praise. Even Afro-American intellectuals were worried that Jazz was just some fast-tempo frivolity, a soundtrack for licentiousness. Luckily for us, some Black composers and songwriters kept on making their form of Modernism.
From our time, we know the plot arc of that last Twenties. A great worldwide depression began in 1929. Fascism rose in multiple countries. Poets may have started the decade engaged with new, freer verse modes, but by The Thirties they’d be charged with dealing with the IRL world of racial-nationalist authoritarians, widespread economic hardship, and war.
I believe it’s easy to forget what an early and fervent Modernist Carl Sandburg was. He was close to his brother-in-law Edward Steichen, who was thoroughly engaged in the international visual arts Modernist revolution. His poetry helped popularize English language free-verse. His collections were peppered with clean, concise poems as Imagist as any written within that vanguard. It appears to me that he may have written Jazz/Blues literary poetry even before Langston Hughes.* Like some others in his American Modernist cohort, Sandburg had early ties to political economics of a leftist kind. How would he traverse this change in the artistic climate?
He was going to go folksy.
Much of his energy would turn from poetry to a giant biography of Lincoln, who he’d portray as a canny folklore-sage. He would publish a popular landmark book of collected folk songs. He brought his guitar to poetry readings. A Robert Frost may have made much of his farmer neighbors, but his blank-verse eclogues were orchestrated with a more academic formality.**
Sandburg’s long-form poem “Good Morning America” is a case in point. It’s a civic poem, a stock-taking set of observations of the United States, peppered with folk-wisdom admonishments uttered in Sandburg’s version of contemporary vernacular. I picked out this section of it to use here because I noticed it riffs on a phrase also used in a remarkably durable American folk song: “Sitting on top of the world.”
As a lyric refrain that phrase appears in a song by The Mississippi Sheiks, an Afro-American jug band. As members of the continuum of the folk-process (i.e., appropriating and reusing any good stuff they could grab) these non-Arabian Sheiks stole a harmonic cadence from Tampa Red, who had used it in another oft-covered Blues song: “It Hurts Me Too.” “Sitting on Top of the World” quickly integrated itself into American folk music. It became a country and Bluegrass standard, but it could also be done with the force of a Howlin’ Wolf or by a classic British rock power trio like Cream.
It would be a neat package for me to say that Sandburg heard the Mississippi Sheiks and shaped this poem from their music, but the timeline doesn’t work out, though it gives me more connections to mention. Sandburg published “Good Morning America” in 1928. The Sheiks record of their song was released in 1930. Sheik Walter Vinson says he came up with it while playing a white dance. He and that audience might’ve been familiar with a 1926 hit song sung by Al Jolson which used the same phrase. The Jolson “I’m Sitting on Top of the World” is a friendly ragtime ditty about a man who cites his tenuous status in the economic prosperity around him as beside the point because he’s about to marry his sweetheart. Vinson on that dancefloor stage is going to fuse Tampa Red’s riff from a song about a singer who confesses empathically that his sweetheart’s troubles trouble him, because “when things go wrong…it hurts me too” with some new lyrics.
We don’t know what lyrics Vinson sang on that first performance. As the song proceeded over the years, new verses were plugged in by various singers, but the Sheiks’ recording we can hear starts off with both economic and romantic losses. Objectively, the singer isn’t presenting a happy life, but still he refrains he has “no worries…because I’m sitting on top of the world.” This is an ambivalent statement. Is it a mantra of positive thinking in the face of misfortune? A call to party on the dance-floor even if the rest of life is hard times? An easily seen-through statement of questionable bravado? Is it even possibly sarcasm, an answer-record dis of the happy sap in Jolson’s song?
In between Jolson’s Roaring Twenties white song using that title and Vinson’s post-Black-Friday Black version, Sandburg wrote his poem, closer to Vinson’s version that would follow. Sandburg’s poem is about national wealth and hegemony, but it wants to say that that’s temporary. All it takes is one mad king blind to any contradiction. So, I sang this part of Sandburg’s poem this month, with music leaning more toward the Mississippi Sheiks. You can hear that version with the audio player below. What, has a circuit-breaker stopped trading in graphical audio players? No, some way of viewing this just won’t show it, so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
In adapting the 14th section of Sandburg’s long poem, I doubled the number of times “I’m sitting on top of the world” is refrained and re-lineated it from the page to fit the music.
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The audio player for my version:
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*As I read the two of them, Hughes and Sandburg, I often feel an American kinship in their voices.
**The Southern Fugitives took another, if Copperhead, path on Modernist poetry tied to an agrarian tradition in the era between the World Wars. Sandburg would leave the urban center of Chicago, first to Michigan and then to rural North Carolina and a working goat farm in the between Wars era — but he never fell into the reductionism that the “real Americans” are Anglo-Saxon-stock farmers.
If Frost didn’t haul a guitar around like Sandburg, Edwin Ford Piper recounts that between-Wars Frost was willing to offer his own renditions of folk songs at informal poet’s after-party hootenannies.
I must apologize for how rapidly these new pieces for National Poetry Month are being released. That must tax some of my valued reader’s and listener’s time. I planned — and still plan — heightened activity here during Poetry Month, but I expect it won’t be near-daily posts.
In announcing this April’s observance, I said that following #NPM2025’s theme of “The Shared World” that I’d like to include some poetry that wasn’t originally written in English. I’ve done a fair number of translations here, despite not being much of a linguist. I’m also not a creative writing teacher, but I highly recommend for poets to follow my example in this and to do their own poetry translations. When I first started doing French to English translations in my 20s I had only my high school French to guide me, and I relied heavily on French to English dictionaries. This was a laborious process, but approachable with short poems. Nowadays, online dictionaries and even reasonably fluent automatic translation features are available on computers or the Internet. Just plugging in a poem’s text into Google Translate isn’t translation, or a translation that will help your poetic skills. The machine translators are pretty good these days for denotative texts, news accounts, manuals, advertisements, directions — that sort of thing. But poetry asks for at least two other things beyond that: a heightened sense of which exact word brings something to the poem, and those word choices are also part of how the sound and flow of the poem is presented in its new language. As a teaching exercise, sitting for a few hours beside the spirit of another poet and their poem of another language, helps one find skills in making those choices when one writes their own poems.
As a non-native speaker, it’s entirely possible you will make mistakes (even embarrassing ones) or come upon mysteries where even experts will not know what the poet intended in the original language. No matter. That’s scholars’ work — honorable work — but as a poet that’s not necessary for your translations.*
The imagery and the refraining way it’s presented made me think this a good candidate to sing. Looking at a couple of machine translations, I started work on making a poem in singable modern English out of it. This poem is not entirely straightforward to me, but it seemed to be about separation, though I cannot be sure it’s not about a subjective, obsessive, or jealous sense of separation, a “I want you so much, all the time, and all to myself” kind of feeling. As I started to work on the images — the shared-world-vision that the poet’s voice wants to invoke — and those word choices and sequences necessary for word-music, I was overcome with a connection likely unintended by Neruda.
I include a chord sheet because I was inspired by folk revival publications Sing Out! and Broadside back in the day. You might sing it yourself as a prayer and plea for the two Garcias.
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The poem’s speaker talks about being captured, even imprisoned, constrained as he speaks of his beloved. I thought of a pair of recent news stories of men taken abruptly from their families, one hauled off to a brutal prison in El Salvador, the other pried from the embrace of his wife and children.** The charges, the evidence? They are, what, maybe gang members. How do we know that? “Oh, we just know” says our government. OK, what are their crimes? “No matter, we just have to say so — or maybe we don’t have to say, we can just do.”
It’s possible we have nonsensical laws, though I’d hope our consideration is better than that. But there seems no way this can be just.
I stopped trying to make a better translation. I’d normally want to take more care — after all, this is a work of a young poet who later won the Nobel Prize. I just wanted to put together the sense of this way I could hear the poem’s speaker speaking across our Shared World, because I wanted to sing it to salve my own heart.
The poem, as I now shape it in English, is speaking as a man who loved America, loved his wife, loved his family. All this can be taken away. In one case some executive branch functionary in court, being asked of one of these men, is said to admitted his deportation and subsequent imprisonment there was “an error.” With such slipshod execution, this might be expected. What is to be done? “Nothing can be done. He’s in another country now. Out of our hands.”
This is a project about poetry and music. There’s nothing those two things can do but sing. I did say I would share civic poems this month. Why? To sing a poem, or to listen or read it closely, you must feel it somehow. What you do afterward, I don’t know.
*When sharing such translations publicly, I often take the example of another poet I came to read through this blogging adventure, Robert Okaji. Okaji, like myself, sometimes takes literal, non-poetic, glosses of classic Chinese poems and renders something vital in modern English out of them. He uses the traditional note of “After a poem by…” which indemnifies either of us from lack of fully understanding the Tang dynasty and ancient Chinese.
As it so happens, Neruda in “Poem 16” writes at the top of this poem that he’s paraphrasing another poet and songwriter, Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore’s poetry and song lyrics are sometimes psalms to his country or godhead, written in the language of love poetry.
I wrote down this poem earlier in the year as a good fit for an April National Poetry Month piece. It’s author, Edna St. Vincent Millay, was from Maine, and I write from another northernmost American state, Minnesota. If a southern-born St. Louis boy like T. S. Eliot who went to live his life in temperate England wants to ironically write about April being the cruelest month, dryly riffing on the Middle English of a Chaucer’s pretty “Aprille with his shoures soote” — well, what with all the flowers and pleasant nourishing rain, that kind of puts a climatic brand on the month poetry-wise.
I rise with Millay to contradict: we have birdsong here, but it’s a more desperate, assertive song, not some celebratory strope — because it rained, sleeted, and concludingly snowed a sloppy wet mix all night and afternoon as I worked on completing today’s musical piece, and this morning everything — tree branches, overhead wires, yard fenceposts, garbage cans — had, to the very limits of toppling, piles of sticky snow as high as any booklover’s stack of unread books.
My nature loving wife took a European-born friend on a hike last week and showed the friend skunk-cabbage, a strange red, raw-meat looking early Spring plant that is exothermic — it creates its own heat like some huddled mammal so that it can bake through the snow cover. Nearer to home, indeed right next to the foundation, a small surviving clutch of tulips has sent up green leaves, but no buds yet. Their leaves course with some green antifreeze, as nighttime temps remain consistently below freezing.
“O April, full of blood, full of breath, have pity on us!”
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My wife and I have varied memories of who planted the tulip bulbs. I remember it was my late father, long ago — while she thinks it was her mother more than a decade ago. There are only a few left. Brazen squirrels dig them up, or perhaps they are only perennial in the same sense that we are, bound to rise in many springs, but not forever.*
So, if the theme of this April’s Poetry Month is The Shared World, I certainly felt I was sharing the world within Millay’s poem “Northern April.” The wind, the resonance of a creek with remaining ice, the just warm enough to be rain/rain. At least for me, in my northern clime, there’s a rich sensuousness in the poem, and enough word-music inherent in it to command me to sing it.
I’ve noticed that I haven’t used my 12-string guitars much this winter. They are a little more stout to play, and I think they show less forgiveness for my less-than-pristine technique, but I tried to plant today’s piece in the furrows dug between my limitations.
My music today makes use of a couple of instruments playing at the edge of their ranges. The bass guitar part is entirely played in the upper octave of the instrument, giving it an unusual sound I found I liked; and for a bit of melodic embellishment, I played an oboe line, again at the upper reaches of the instrument. Why an oboe? I thought of a 20th century band called Oregon who would mix 12-string guitar with reed/woodwind instruments, and I wanted to revisit that set of timbres from the composer/player side instead of from my listener’s memory.
*I took leave from poetry and music to very briefly look at that issue from gardening knowledge. It appears that the bulbs shoot off other child bulbs, a process hidden in the dark underground in the later, non-flowering, part of the year. If so, appropriate for the idea that we think these spring flowers are from our parents.
The song below using the words of William Butler Yeats had a direct, contemporary inspiration: John “Paddy” Hemingway died this St. Patrick’s day. He was Dublin born, and in Dublin he died — and he was in the news because he was the last surviving RAF pilot from the Battle of Britain during WWII.
Reading the notice, I immediately thought of this Yeats poem, about a fatalistic Irish pilot during WWI who flew into battle having no love for the British Empire. John Hemingway’s Wikipedia summary mentions nothing about his weighing of the enormous risks he took in RAF battles, but a recounting of the number of times he was shot down and got back to flying again makes me think he’d accepted his death as a probable result of his service. Fate had sport with him, he lived to be 105.
Not much research required in this case, it’s widely recognized as a poem written as an elegy to a particular doomed Irish Airman, Robert Gregory, the son of a friend and ally of Yeats, Lady Gregory.
I know nothing of how this poem was received by the mother who’d lost a child. Yeats portrays a peculiar heroism with the poem’s subject. Using only the evidence within the poem’s boundaries, it’d be a fair reading to say that the titular airman here was driven to mortal combat because there was no hope otherwise in his country’s situation. Another reading, more specific to the man Yeats had in mind, might be that the airman was drawn to air warfare for the pure sport and sensation of it, but that latter reading still incorporates, if not an outright death wish, a sense that the most intense love of the moment asks for an acceptance of imminent death. So, an odd poem, poised between self-destructive despair and dark romantic thrills.
Well, whatever — it is a poem by Yeats, so of course it’ll sound wonderful, and reading it on the page will cause any number of its silent readers to want to sing it. After I completed my version, I listened to nearly 10 other musical versions, yet I still hope that my version isn’t superfluous.
Here’s the chord sheet for today’s song version of Yeats’ poem. Feel free to improve on my attempt. As I play it the G and A chords in the last line of each stanza are played at the 3rd & 5rh fret positions.
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I chose to make my song entirely jaunty, a reverse of my minor key remembrance in the E. E. Cummings Spring poem last time. That doesn’t mean I want the listener to take it as a recruiting poster or an endorsement. Poetry is portraiture you can feel in your ears or breath, but you’re still allowed to think. Whatever his internal motivations or conflicts, the singer of Yeats’ words seems proud of his choice. John Hemingway likely thought he was in for the same deal that Robert Gregory signed up for. Fate laughed. Reports say Gregory, the brilliant Irish WWI flying ace, may have died either from friendly fire or pilot error secondary to a case of the flu. Another man, a proudly stupid one, once said that he liked pilots who didn’t get shot down. Hemingway, as it happens, was shot down several times in WWII, and yet had decades to live other pleasures I’d find more delightful than combat. And that otherwise unrelated man, the one who truncates his thought, but not before he asks to be judged by his judgements — how is he weighed?
You can hear my performance of Yeats’ “An Irish Airman foresees his Death” with the audio player below. No player to be seen? You can hear my performance stored somewhere in the clouds above by clicking this link, which will open a new tab with its own audio player.
This E. E. Cummings poem is often read as delightful. And it is. It’s also a poem some encounter in childhood. At least in my youth, it was an anthology favorite that vied with Carl Sandburg’s “Fog” as an introductory example of free verse. And no verse is ever more free than this: the letters smattered like mudprints all over the page, capital letters not yet grown, stuff smushed together. No colonnaded sonnet, no astringent exhale of meditative breath like a haiku. On your poetic menu, this is a mudpie for Spring.
Is it just this?
I set it to music. That’s what this Project does in Spring, and Fall, and Winter too. Every chord in the music I made today is a minor chord. Is this a sad poem, did I want to force it to be one? Not that simple. Just lowering the 3rd note in a scale a half-step to form a chord from it, is that really determinative? These are just sounds playing together.
But this is a considered song about Spring and the distance in half-steps from childhood, not just some neutral exhalation of it. The poem itself grew up, or blew up, over a few years. It was first submitted for a class assignment by a Harvard college student in 1916, and that version, while free verse, lined up this way.
I found this excerpt of the original version of the poem in a section on Cummings written by Michael Webster included in A Companion to Modernist Poetry published in 2014.
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That college student would soon go overseas into a world war as an ambulance driver, and Cummings and his cohorts there took exception to simplistic war piety. I’d guess the logistics of suffering didn’t firm up the young man’s patriotism. In something I see echoed in this week’s American news, his talk was deemed an imprisonable thing to say, and Cummings was imprisoned in France. It’s one thing to write free verse, it’s another to convert the currency of one’s free thought into loss of freedom. I wonder if at this point the blood-soaked mud of WWI’s trenches were known to the young man. Anything but mud-luscious.
Cummings had enough luck or privilege to be released. In 1920 The Dial publishes a new version of that college poem. In a few years more this magazine would publish an expatriate American’s poem that indicted Spring, starting “April is the cruelest month…” But this is Cummings’ poem, and this is how it looked on The Dial’s pages.
On first publication it’s largely the poem we now know, but it doesn’t have a title. And curiously, the second instance of balloonman is “balloonMan.” Did a proofreader just get exhausted editing Cumming’s manuscript?
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In 1923 Cummings published a poetry collection, Tulips and Chimneys. He put the still untitled poem in a section “Chansons Innocentes” (Innocent Songs). By innocent did he mean from childhood’s sensibility, or a plea of not guilty? And this is how that version went.
Nope, the balloonman to balloonMan thing must have been Cumming’s intent.
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We’re near the final version, but at some later date (I’d assume a selected or collected poems publication) it converted its first line (strictly constructed) into a title with some typographical marks to make it look like Cummings was establishing Bon Iver’s song titling methods a few decades before the bard of Eau Claire. In the end, the poem that a lot of folks informally recall as “In Just Spring” is [in Just-]. I can’t help but read that title as a pun.
Here’s how the poem in it’s final form appears collected on the PoetryFoundation.org web site. “Just” is the only capitalization and man stays lowercase.
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And now decades have past — and I, an old man, have gone to perform this poem for this year’s Spring, and I pick minor chords. Much has past us, dancing toward or running from: another world war, and current cruel wars happening somewhere further than the far distance whistle of the balloonman. Cummings’ childhood was close enough to me that I can actually recall playing marbles in the dry dirt finger-writ circle of a schoolhouse playground.* I know how a hopscotch chalk field is laid out. Do children still jump rope with rapping rhymes, and if not, what has poetry and hip-hop lost? If there’s a balloonman, his creatures are mylar and determinedly decorated no doubt. All this 20th century stuff is now as archaic as the arcadian goatfoot-god Pan who whistles like escaping air. I, and once-girls with names like Betty and Isbel, know this. Now, as I experience the poem this year there’s more distance there than there was for a twenty-something poet who wrote it. I put a distance far and wee in the music — for Cummings was of an age that he knew he was to be an adult now, while still young enough in years to know within his body’s memory the lost experience of the playing children delighted at the balloons. Balloons that would either fly away or deflate — escape/ascent vs. air loss or a pop as sharp as a bullet.
It’s the first day of spring. My chords have a third a half-step deflated. Disordered self-important dolts are running things, and I think better to have an old halt body with a bouquet of floating hearts. If the world can still seem puddle-wonderful — to be aghast is not to wonder. So, I must recall how to wonder, far and wee.
You can hear my performance of E. E. Cummings “In [Just] spring” with the graphical audio player below. Did someone let go of the string and a player is blown away? Don’t whistle, just use this highlighted link alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*And playing pirates without extra-faceted dice, is a lost quattro too — but I wonder if Cummings was thinking of Barrie’s Peter Pan in choosing that manner of play. I’ve just finished watching an absorbing 2022 TV documentary series called Wonderland on BBC Select that often asks over its episodes how much childhood trauma, WWI, and social injustice informed English children’s literature a hundred years ago.
I’ve made note that I didn’t do a piece from Dave Moore for St. Patrick’s Day, but I’m about to deal with that. Readers of earlier posts this month know that I was writing about falling in with a group of Irish-American writers almost 50 years ago. The group in its last decade or so was just four of us, and you’ve heard my performance of words from the two of them who died a few years ago. Dave’s not in that group — well, he was in the group, but he isn’t dead — and I don’t know if Dave ever considered himself an Irish-American writer either. At the other pole, we have Ethna McKiernan who spent time living in Ireland, whose father was a figure in the Irish cultural renaissance, who ran an Irish-arts focused store for many years, and some of her poetry was published by an Irish publisher. That’s more Irish than green beer.
What makes one an Irish or Irish-American writer? I’m just an observer here, but I suppose opinions differ. It never crossed my mind to consider Edna St. Vincent Millay an Irish-American writer, but there’s Irish heritage there, and while her most well-known poems don’t explicitly speak of Irish themes or history, I eventually found and performed this poem of hers that’s quite Irish. Shortly after I discovered Joseph Campbell and was in my first burst of enthusiasm for him, I asked Kevin and Ethna if Campbell was counted in the realms of Irish culture. He was as unknown to them as he remains generally, but he was deeply embedded in Irish culture in his writing and life in both Ireland and the United States, and even his downfall was largely due to ending up on the losing side in the Irish Civil War. Campbell’s clearly an Irish writer who lived in the U.S., but he’s just so little-known. Let me add one more: does anyone consider Frank O’Hara an Irish-American writer? I once did a web search looking for anything written along those lines. If I didn’t come up dry, what I found wasn’t enough to dampen the leather above my bootsoles. If I was asked to find such a connection, I’d point to O’Hara’s manifest sense of mischief and his greater interest than most mid-century Americans in poets who weren’t British.
Perhaps it’s somewhat a coincidence if one is an Irish-American writer or one isn’t. You don’t have to write one way or the other, and it may not have to do with where your parents or grandparents were born. And by coincidence too long to interject here, I came to see that this Tuesday, the day after St. Patrick’s Day, is the anniversary of SciFi writer R. A. Lafferty’s death. I saw this and — ta-da — I remembered that I have a recording of Dave Moore singing his song about that writer. Recalling that, I found that recording and worked today on spiffing it up a bit sonically since it was 10-years-old and reflects some older recording tech. And sure enough, right in the lyrics Dave claims Lafferty as an Irish writer. So, an easy job to complete today’s musical piece and post?
Sort of. I didn’t plan this enough ahead of time to give Dave time to say anything about Lafferty and his writing. I had memories of his telling me, or trying to tell me, about Lafferty’s writing, which had a brief flowering in the 1960s-80s — but what was that he said back then? I thrashed about this afternoon finding a copy of his 1972 short-story collection Strange Doings. I rapidly read a half-a-dozen of his stories just trying to get a flavor, and I got some sense of why Dave had a hard time encapsulating Lafferty’s virtues. At least in this collection, his prose style is somewhat creaky pulp, yet with that instrument he sets out to tell rather strange metafictions in even stranger ways, often ending in a shaggy dog joke. The image I got was I’m at a dive bar, and there’s this man sitting on one stool. He wants to tell me a story. As he goes on, I try to get a read on who he is. Is he some kind of scientist on a weekend bender, or an in-his-cups academic from a nearby Catholic college? Or maybe he’s a man who’s watched too many episodes of Ancient Astronauts, and takes Neil Oliver and Graham Hancock as his vademecum? Are the beverages why the story started to twist, or are you just not ready to understand the essence of the fractal he’s generating? I ask him what he does for a living, and he tells me he’s an electrician.
One thing’s certain: he needs just one more drink to finish his story.
“So why are you so interested in all this you’re telling me?” I ask.
“Oh, I’m also a writer. You said you’re a writer. I thought you might be interested in this.” He looks at me, expecting reply.
“If you write like you talk, you’re more like how I play electric guitar. I run off in some direction until I hit something, then I bounce off in another direction.”
This 1972 collection of Lafferty short-stories credits the cover design to “ONI”
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There should be a graphical audio player gadget below to hear Dave and I playing Dave’s song “R. A. Lafferty” back in 2015. At the very start of the Parlando Project I set this recording in a folder of possible pieces to use for it, but I never did because I feared the audience for literary poetry might not find much relevance in Lafferty. Well, the imp of the perverse convinced me otherwise. No audio player? You see, Lafferty has documented that the audio player gadget was invented by Higgston Rainbird and — oh never mind, you can use this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player if you don’t see the gadget.
Here is a piece based on a poem by a second Irish-American poet, Ethna McKiernan, who before her death in 2021 would host a reading every St. Patrick’s Day. I can’t say I knew her very well as a person, though as mentioned last time she was a long-time participant in the Lake Street Writer’s Group with myself, Parlando contributor Dave Moore, and the poet featured last time, Kevin FitzPatrick. I’ll next be going off on a short tangent, as is my nature, but it any of this writing displeases or tires you, just skip to the bottom. I quite like the piece that is the occasion for writing this today, and you are excused to go there and just listen to it.
I don’t think Ethna liked me much as a person, and I can imagine any number of reasons why that might be so. Let me leave most of those guesses behind for today’s purposes. In my old age I’ve come to the realization that I am often a careless and inappropriate person. I suspect that’s for neurological reasons, but who can say, it may be a defect in my soul as would have been said in the old ways.
One peculiarity that I had in writing groups is that I was prone to writing long responses to drafts shared by other members. I’d often get quite detailed with noticing what works, and at least as much so with what I thought didn’t or had alternatives to be considered. The audience of this Project know that I have a broad appreciation for styles and approaches. I don’t hold to a narrow poetic style and down-rank anything that doesn’t follow it, but just as I do with editing audio or trying out compositional ideas in music, I tend to look closely, and over the years of doing this, I’d notice how zoomed in and nit-picky some of my responses were — and I wasn’t at all sure my suggestions for alternative approaches were actually improvements. It’s been a few years since I’ve done that, but I still cringe at some of the things I wrote, particularly in response to Ethna’s poems. After all, here was a poet with several published collections, a grant-winner with a distinct cultural connection to a great poetic culture, and who had taken advanced academic creative writing study. Me? I’m a high-school graduate from nowhere, who has no distinct poetic style to trumpet, who last was published in the 20th century. And need I add one more kicker — I would be in Etna’s case a man writing to a woman poet. Women poets reading this know how that often goes.
So in summary: matters of technique and poetic tactics vs. being emotionally myopic. A lot of the first only emphasizes the second.
My reactions to Ethna’s poems continue to trouble me because, at her best I considered her to be an excellent writer, but one that left me tantalized by another poet within her — a far stranger one, one that only materialized from time to time, and seemed to be constrained by her internal editor and self-anthologist.* Yes, it’s a writer’s prerogative to choose what to present or emphasize, but I wonder if other writer’s group respondents, creative-writing seminars, or outside editorial preferences/fashions kept that element down in McKiernan’s writing. Those things have standing, and it may be me who’s out of step, whose taste is questionable or unlikely. But that’s how I felt when reading the poem “Barn Burning” used to make today’s musical piece. I was compelled to do something that may be regrettable. I strongly thought that a developed image just past the midpoint of the poem was not quite as vivid as possible, and that the poem’s ending was short of how sharply spoken it could be.**
Ethna is some years dead now. Poets have trouble finding audiences when alive, and once they cross the Lethe, our forgetting often matches the dead’s. Improper, inappropriate, imperious, presumptuous — convict me of the lot. I’m taking the risk that I’m damaging the poem, though that’s not my intent. It’s done out of love for the poem and in hopes of bringing forth this element of the poet who might be condemning me from the other side.
If the worst is the case, take the performance below as damaged, counterfeit goods. If the best of the case is so, enjoy this poem’s mystical experience with my best efforts at adding music to it. I’m not Irish, I just hung out with some Irish-American poets, and it seems consistent to make this offense out of admiration.
*I remain puzzled why her poem “Letting Go the Wolves” was not included in her own final new and selected collection Light Rolling Slowly Backwards. While it’s a fine collection, well worth reading, to my tastes that’s a pluperfect anthology piece, one I’d say any poet could be proud of having be the one poem others know of their work. Of the poems included there, poems as strange as “Stones” and “Barn Burning” display moods not widely indulged in, even though her other poems have their virtues too.
**Should be? Let me say again, I don’t know. I’m just one reader, but one who chose to perform it, and who wants to maximize its impact. Here are the last six lines of “Barn Burning” as McKiernan had them in her final collection: “The outline of the lit barn/and its lean bones;/the world changed suddenly/as baptism, my life changed/forever with the knowledge/of fire.” Here is what I performed: “The outline of the barn,/the eager edges of its light/surrounding reluctant bones./The world, now sudden as baptism./My life forever with fire knowledge.” And as evidence of how zoomed in my suggestions sometimes were: I think the poem’s title is stronger with a comma in the middle.
Today is International Women’s Day, and I was fortunate to be able to complete this recording of a new musical piece setting a poem by Alice Dunbar-Nelson before the day ended.
“I Sit and Sew” is likely Dunbar-Nelson’s best-known poem — it’s certainly the first one I knew of. I’d encountered it as a poem written amid WWI during the years this Project was noting that conflict’s centenary. “I Sit and Sew” still comes up fairly often in regards to war and destruction, or because it mentions domestic, woman-associated work in the context of the greater world.
I noticed one other element in re-reading it this week: it seemed to me to relate to another line of woman-associated work: medical nursing. Having spent a couple of decades doing nursing work myself, the poem’s focusing-in on the trauma and injuries of warfare really made me think Dunbar-Nelson wasn’t just thinking generally, writing something that could be paraphrased as “War is terrible, and yet here I am peacefully making or mending something with needle and thread, as women have for millennia.” There’s nothing wrong with experiencing the poem that way, as a companion-piece perhaps to Hardy’s “In the Time of the Breaking of Nations” — but I’m a person who often asks questions while reading.
While the poem can stand on its own, I wondered if Dunbar-Nelson herself wanted to serve as a nurse.* Short answer: this issue has additional complications. Currently in the United States we’re suffering from numerous outlandish statements and acts snuffing out complexities of diversity, but historically women’s wartime work, including nursing, is tightly connected with increasing respect and civic equality for women.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson was an Afro-American woman. The U.S. armed forces were segregated during WWI, and the roles available to the non-White military were limited along with that, based proximally on rules about race-mixing no-doubt supported by a pervasive background of racial superiority. A few years back, while learning about another poem, I came upon the case of Col. Charles Young, a Black West Point educated officer with experience in two foreign deployments who couldn’t get himself utilized as America mobilized for WWI. The situation for Black Americans who wanted to work overseas as nurses was also exclusionary. I’ve found out Dunbar-Nelson was working as a national organizer, a member of something called the Women’s Committee of the Council of Defense, and her focus was on Afro-American support of the war effort. She published today’s poem in 1918, and after the war she wrote up a summary of Black women’s WWI efforts.
We Wear the Mask Dept. I found this ad here in another post mentioning this poem. In her article linked above, Dunbar-Nelson mentions, in passing, (pun intended) that some lighter-complexion Afro-Americans snuck through the overseas nursing service ban.
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No long post today, that’s a start for anyone who wants to dig deeper.
The song I made out of her poem came together more efficiently than many, partly because it began before I knew I was making a song. This week I remodeled a nearly 30-year-old Squier Telecaster that I had put a Bigsby vibrato bridge on a decade or so ago. This guitar and that bridge just never worked out. I couldn’t get the neck angle and string height right, the saddles rattled, and the strings slipped sideways when I bent strings. After some looking, I unearthed the guitar’s original non-vibrato bridge and put it back on.** The guitar was transformed. Back when I put on the Bigsby I’d also installed a set of upgraded replacement pickups, and with the string-path mechanics sorted out, the guitar played and sounded great! While I was resetting the action/intonation etc., I quickly made a short musical piece on my recording computer that would let me play strummed chords, arpeggiated chords, and single-note lead lines over three separate sections — just so I could have fun while seeing if I’d eliminated all issues.
Funny how fast you can compose, if you’re not composing. I saved the drum pattern, the bass track, and the keyboard noodling after testing the guitar, thinking “Hey, I like that groove, might be useful.” This morning, I had about an hour when I could open a mic and record. I loaded the saved rhythm tracks, worked them into a longer song-form, recorded the guitar parts using the transformed guitar, and found that I could sing Dunbar-Nelson’s poem to this.
You can hear it with the audio player below. No player? It’s not hiding under a box, it’s just some ways of reading this blog suppress the player gadget. This highlighted link will open a tab with its own audio player.
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*”Nursing” is a very broad word covering a wide range of caring work and levels of technical knowledge. Dunbar-Nelson’s write-up seems to indicate the women’s war work she was promoting covered a range of things, not just licensed medical nursing as we know it this century.
**One difficulty was that the original — like the Vibramate-brand vibrato bridge I took off — was a non-standard bridge. When I finally found the original bridge, it was sitting underneath a storage box in my studio space. Luckily, like most Telecaster parts, it’s not a fragile thing. By the way, I’m not knocking Vibramate’s hardware. I’ve used Vibramate products to add Bigsby vibrato bridges to other guitars with good results, and their “Spoiler” accessory for Bigsby bridges makes restringing or replacing a broken string a much calmer experience.
A friend of the blog noticed today I used a particular phrase when I wrote about late-night work on the musical piece you can hear below. I’ll try not to take too much of your time, but I thought I’d expand on my explanation to him, and at the bottom you’ll be able to hear a 2-minute song made from a poem by Alfred Kreymborg.
The early years of the Parlando Project benefited from several things that are not in as great a supply now: I had multiple days in each week when I could work on finding and making these musical pieces. I worked regular workday hours on this, beginning after my morning bicycle ride for breakfast. I was eight years younger then, and those days were filled with rewarding creative work as I learned more about musical composition and recording technology. Shortly after the public launch of the Parlando Project, we had a consequential election in America,* but that (if anything) increased the energy I found most weeks.
Those who happen upon early posts here might notice a tone that isn’t as common in recent years. Without announcement, I was writing back then with my child in mind as an audience. They were going to be entering the 6th grade, and I vividly recall from my own youth how a great vista of complex, connective, and evaluative thought opens up around that age. I wasn’t going to make it a point to them to read this — adolescents aren’t looking for that sort of thing from parents — but rather more, I thought others in their peer group might come upon this Project and find some interest in my promotion of discovery and enjoyment. Working from that aim, as my child grew, I gradually changed the age group I was aiming the blog writing here at — though I don’t know if I ever achieved an adolescent audience.
Then a few years ago my family went through a series of crises, and it was only after a period of distress that the wise and resourceful members of my little family met those issues and managed them. I tried to be supportive — I probably was, to my imperfect degree — but that work was largely their doing. I’ll say that in that year or so of the greatest distress, my time spent here was a tonic for me from the stress and worry. How much of that was (in the modern terminology) “self-care,” and how much was temporary flight from responsibility? I can’t say, my perspective is too close-in.
But now in the past year or so, the time I can devote to this Parlando Project is constrained by external and internal factors. By choices outside my control, days go by when I’m restricted from recording, and even the blocks of assured time to compose or research are harder to come by. At the same time my energy endurance is lower as I age. As grateful as I remain to have the opportunity to do this Project, I guilt and grumble as an old codger when an opportunity comes — time when I can play or record — and at that moment my body is saying: take a nap instead. If I could schedule creative time, if I was to ask for concessions to schedule it, I’d probably face complex outcomes and reactions when my old body can’t be assured the energy levels and ready fingers like my 70-something self could.
Let me be complexly-clear about that though: that frustration doesn’t outweigh the gratitude. To have the opportunity and resources to do this Project remains a blessing! I just have to work with this, that’s all.
Here’s one “how” of that: after everyone in the house has gone to sleep early, or is at work on an evening shift outside our home — I can do my work, as long as it’s in silence. Knowing this, I often get a “second-wind” after 8 or 9 PM or so. I might spend this time researching or writing early or final drafts of these posts. There’s even limited music-making that can be done without making noise. I can go over the things I have been able to record, evaluate if they are worth using, perhaps adding additional parts silently using my little plastic keyboard, and mix the results into something suitable for releasing to the public. So: the hours between 9 PM and 1 AM have increasingly become working hours for the Parlando Project.
I’ve come to call that time “burning the midnight lamp.” As I told my online friend this morning, that phrase is taken from two particular sources — ones you might not guess could be combined.
“Burning the Midnight Lamp” is a song, a lesser-known “deep cut,” by Jimi Hendrix. The song had a long gestation, Hendrix struggled to complete it. It was written early in his Jimi Hendrix Experience career, while living in London. Hendrix was a young man who previously had been in the care of a succession of childhood relatives, foster homes, and then a short Army barracks stint followed by couch-surfing until this point. For the first time he had his own place, shared with a woman in what sounds like an equality of love.** That Hendrix London flat has been restored to appear as it did then, and when I visited it some years back I thought of what a special place it must have seemed to him. I imagine his thoughts: my own place, paid for with my own money, living on my own recognition, work done under my own name. In anyone’s life (not just a “rock star”) the time when one has achieved that — that’s something.
Here’s an odd connection: when you visit the site it’s a joint institution. Hendrix’s apartment is upstairs, but the main floor is laid out to reflect another emigrant musician of another era: this address was also George Frideric Handel’s London home.
When Hendrix was searching for the extra sound needed to complete his “Burning the Midnight Lamp,” he found the recording studio he was in had an odd instrument present: a harpsichord. Comparing Hendrix’s guitarist skills to my own would be laughable, but things even out in naivete when at the musical keyboard. Today’s song uses piano, but I had to play separate right and left hand tracks to realize the simple part. Likewise, Hendrix hacked out a little harpsichord part for his song. Was Hendrix tipping his hat to his downstairs ghost with that harpsichord?
Why did Hendrix write his tune about working late within the endemic uncertainty of creatives using the image of a lamp? No guess. But another lamp, elsewhere, in another visit: something I recall when visiting Emily Dickinson’s bedroom was the little table that was her writing desk. On the small top of the table was a whale oil lamp. Dickinson, living with her family in a household, with household tasks and human needs that would take the daylight hours, had this little mid-19th Century, middle-class luxury of a warm effective light to work by after the busier-with-others’ hours.
“Ready for the same old explosion/Going through my mind…” A small writing table and lamp in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom (photo from the Emily Dickinson museum)
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Looking at Dickinson’s lamp, I thought of the whole system that represented: the swimming mammals of the dark, cold sea, the diverse Moby Dick industry which captured, killed and deconstructed those massive bodies — and so, extra hours glowing with North Atlantic juice opened for a woman to scribble and sew little booklets. If I’d try to tell these thoughts and feelings when looking at the lamp to the average person, they’d sense a disproportion. Someone might even harrumph to me “It’s just a lamp — an unexceptional, domestic thing.” Readers here? You’re not that sort of person — and on her part, Dickinson too, she had further thoughts.
And so I continue, to burn the midnight lamp. Alone.
Today’s results came after a week of disappointing myself as I looked for some words to express what I was feeling, words that would ask me to sing them out even with my inexact and unprofessional voice. I was seeking words that would add something hopeful in a time of extraordinarily slipshod callousness carried out with motives of punishment as a virtue. It was this short poem by early American Modernist poet, editor, and publisher Alfred Kreymborg that captured me.
As I often say here under these chord sheets: someone out there can likely sing this song better than I can.
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Last post here was a series of inspirational maxims carried by a Jazz musician. Maybe Kreymborg’s “Credo” seems a little too hopeful, too earnest for some of you. It’s probably not the sort of poem you’d first think of as an early text of American Modernist poetry from a colleague of William Carlos Williams, Man Ray, and Mina Loy. Little matter, I felt I needed to sing it. That’s enough for now.
You can hear my performance of “Credo” with the graphical audio player gadget below. No gadget? It’s not that you didn’t keep your lamplight trimmed and burning, it’s just that some ways of reading this suppress showing the player gadget. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*Decades before, longtime Parlando contributor Dave Moore and I started the LYL Band just before Ronald Reagan’s election. Then too something that wasn’t very good for the country paradoxically encouraged creativity as contrast.
Frank Hudson 