spoken word

Four Performances-Part One: a 19-year-old Reads Leonard Cohen

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I don’t know what I should tell him about the performance.

I think I know some things he doesn’t, but of course all knowledge is transient, subject to new knowing, new conditions. And the matter is complicated because the person whose performance I’ll present today is by my teenage self.

I was a few weeks into being 19. I was beginning my second year of what will become a foreshortened higher education at a small college in Iowa. The year before, my first year there, had been a high point of my then shorter life. I met my continued friend and musical co-conspirator Dave Moore there, along with his partner Celia Daniels; Jim Scanlon from Chicago, a right guard football player who wore an ankle length wool cape and shared lefty politics; John Schuler, a southern Illinois boy who soon grew a full John Brown beard and became a searcher for American ideals; and Louis Fusco, an east-coast kid who told me he’d sat right next to Steve Winwood’s organ on a stage back in Fusco’s hometown, and who like me had a little cassette deck and liked to record with it. Since I had grown up in a 700 population town near nothing much more than that, I’d never met anyone with these varieties of interests and experiences. I had made do with reading. First, 19th century gothic Poe, then iconoclasts like Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, and William Blake. Listening too: The Fugs and the Mothers of Invention, the skeleton key blurt of Bob Dylan, the psych-fi of the Jefferson Airplane, and that Rimbaud of Venice Beach: Jim Morrison.

But all that was assimilated inside my own head — an empty auditorium. Now an old man, that’s where these things, and much since, still echo.

I’d likely tell that teenage me that I was not conscious of class differences. I’m largely right in that — but the 19-year-old might say I knew of those differences, he was just ignoring them. In this time-spanning colloquium I’d reply ignoring this is close-enough-same to ignorance. The school had rich kids, and kids more secure in the mid-century middle-class than my family was. Besides the loans that seemed massive to me in Sixties dollars, I made ends meet as a “Work-Study” student, washing dishes and doing other tasks for the on-site food service. Most of the students were there enjoying their draft deferments and class-appropriate dating and social opportunities — education was largely a customary set of exercises secondary to that.

At the end of my first year, Dave, Celia, and Jim all left this small Iowa college for a better one in Wisconsin. We’d all worked on an “underground newspaper” at the little Iowa college — mimeographed pages filled mostly with satire, though one page printed my first published poem, an ode to the new Brutalist student center on campus that owed a lot to my fresh fascination with Wallace Stevens. That newspaper may have been how I was selected as editor of the official college newspaper for my second college year at the end of my first. I was the last man standing from that independent effort, even though I knew nothing of the editorial role. Celia gave me a crash-course in print layout and production, and I learned in a day from her things that I still used years later.

I’d first met Dave Moore when he presented a Sunday service at the college chapel in the fall of my first college year. The service included his reading from Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun  and Bob Dylan’s “With God on our Side.”   So, as the new school year began, this elevated-by-vacuum me decided to present something similar.

There were a couple of problems with that: I was (still am) a lousy performer — but I didn’t know this yet; and I would have to find something to present, choose a message which I’d justify by what was billed and playing inside the auditorium of my head. For some people this might be a good enough idea: their internal repertory aligns with the zeitgeist. With mine — not so much.

What was playing in my head? Leonard Cohen. In my last year of High School I heard a recording by Noel Harrison, the nepo-baby son of famous non-singer Rex Harrison performing Cohen’s song “Suzanne.”   That 45-single record had briefly fallen within the nether borders of the local Top-40 format radio station, and hearing it with no introduction or other context was profound. It starts like a somewhat genteel love/or crush song — but bang! there in the second verse Cohen brings Jesus in, as a character fully as present in the song as the love object — and then, as you’re reeling from this, the final verse assays a synthesis of the first two verses while folding in some workman sailors. Sixties pop songs were allowed psychedelia by then, but few leapt and gathered with such craft and reach. “Suzanne”  and its value had been discovered by Judy Collins the year before, and it was placed on her LP In My Life  where it kept company with songs by the Beatles, Brecht/Weill, and Dylan. Since hearing Collins’ version presumed access to the LP, it was Noel Harrison on the radio who did the job of introducing Cohen to me before I encountered Collins’ better version.*

There was a strong resemblance later in Cohen’s career: in the 21st century Cohen’s song “Hallelujah”  went from his own recording of it that his record company deemed uncommercial** to a widely beloved song of generalized endurance. How many were drawn by the similar jump cuts of devout psalmist David and his functional harmony lesson, the same’s Biblically accurate homicidal lust, and the light bondage of being tied to a kitchen chair? How many elided over the sex and stuck with the spirituality? I can’t say, but my judgement then, like my judgement of the bubbling under “Suzanne”  in the Sixties was that many heard a different song than I was hearing. And expressing that difference could be, well, easily felt as snobbish.

Dunn Library

My campus memory fades, so I’m not sure this is the correct side of the library where the performance took place. The library was less than 5 years old then, and subsequent landscaping may have changed the grassy area.

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So, one early fall dusk, in The Sixties, on a small Iowa college campus, I gathered my coterie for this chapel service, outdoors on a grassy mound by the library. I can’t recall why outside rather than inside the chapel, though the chapel bells can be heard on the recording announcing the start. Brian Lynner, who’d founded the college’s SDS chapter but was now concentrating on becoming a good actor would sing “Suzanne.”   Another student, who’d I’d met just a couple of weeks before, Don Williams,*** would play a fine rendition of a Leo Kottke song,**** and talk briefly about selfhood. And I would perform — for the first time really. I didn’t play guitar. I didn’t sing. I’d read from Leonard Cohen’s 1966 novel Beautiful Losers.

Beautiful Losers is an unusual book, ostensibly a novel. It contains everything found in the jump cuts of “Suzanne”  and “Hallelujah”  and then some. There’s polymorphous sex, a lengthy sub-plot on the as yet uncanonized 17th century Native-American Catholic saint Kateri Tekakwitha, a hilarious deconstruction of the famous Charles Atlas comic book ad, a vibrator that attains sentience, and much, much more, including a remarkable litany about magic that seemed apt for performance to me,*****  but I started my Cohen reading with something else from the book: a satiric recounting of the contradictory desires a likely Cohen stand-in character had for his life before flowing into the more celebratory and spiritual litany of “God is Alive, Magic is Afoot.”

Not the best order I’d tell that teenager now. The first section likely alienated the audience before the second could beguile them. And to conclude the service as a matter of benediction, I read short poem of my own, one that sounds presumptuous and pretentious to me now. That teenager thought he was being brave. Is he right, at least in part, at least from his side? Oh, if only we could sit, separated as I pretend today, and talk.

You can hear my part of the chapel service, recorded live on a cassette tape in The Sixties with the audio player below. If the player doesn’t appear out of the mist of memory, it’s only that some ways of reading this suppress it, and I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Collins is largely responsible for Cohen becoming a musical performer. When he played “Suzanne”  for her, he told her he wasn’t even sure it was song (it had been a page poem first) and Collins assured him it was a very good song. Shortly after this, and her recording of it, Collins cajoled Cohen to perform “Suzanne”  at a benefit concert. Her account of this is somewhat surprising, as Cohen had been documented previously as a skilled performer reading his own poetry in 1965’s “Ladies and Gentlemen Mr. Leonard Cohen,”  and in broadcast interviews on cultural programs he was consistently provocative and confident in even the earliest extant interviews. But the Collins story has it he stumbled only partway into the song, tried to leave the stage, and was only able to complete the song with Collins returning to the stage and singing the song beside him. I knew none of this in The Sixties, but Leonard Cohen, the man who was to inspire this simultaneously over-and-underconfident teenager in Iowa, was in this account capable of conflicted shame in calling forth his performing nerve.

**The immortal words of his record company said after hearing and rejecting the album containing “Hallelujah”  were “Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good.”

***I keep saying this to the void, but I owe Don Williams an immense debt. His approach to guitar (I suspect secondary to his family’s ability to provide him lessons back in his Minneapolis hometown) formed the basis of my approach to the instrument to this day. Due to Don Williams’ entirely generic name (no, he’s not the late 20th century country crooner) I’ve never been able to track him down to thank him.

****Kottke would have been largely unknown outside of the Twin Cities at this point. His 6 and 12-string Guitar  (the “Armadillo LP”) was freshly released on John Fahey’s tiny Tacoma label, and the Kottke song Williams sang was written before that LP.

*****The same year, singer Buffy Sainte-Marie thought so to, and recorded a musical performance of the “God is Alive, Magic Is Afoot”  section of the novel. Other than that passage, nothing of Cohen’s novel made much of an impression on the culture, even among the eventual admirers of Leonard Cohen as a singer-songwriter. Cohen himself didn’t retrospectively speak much of it, describing it as a grab-bag, last-ditch effort to make a literary reputation beyond his native Canada just before his pivot to music. Cohen did recount though that when he first met Lou Reed at the Chelsea Hotel in NYC in 1966, Reed immediately gushed: “You’re the one who wrote Beautiful Losers!”

The Sound of Sense

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Today’s piece is kicking off a Summer where I’m going to be doing some different things here than what the Parlando Project usually does. Though the Project’s “usual” varies, the capsule description typically applies: “Combines various words (mostly other people’s literary poetry) with original music in differing styles.” What’s coming this Summer?

I’m not entirely sure yet. There may be more behind-the-scenes stuff, even some “inside baseball” topics about recording, composition, and musical instruments. I think, some personal memoir, a few more peculiar “cover versions” of other folk’s music — we’ll see. I’ve never emphasized those things, so I don’t know how this will work yet. Come September, I intend to return to our regular stuff: writing about my experience of other poets and their poems as the Project moves toward its 10th anniversary. I hope there will still be some things of interest to those who come here for that. For regular readers, particularly those that have followed this Project for a while, I’m hoping you’ll enjoy this Summer’s personal digressions.

I recorded music with Dave Moore last week. Dave and I have known each other since we were teenagers, and we’ve made music as the LYL Band for 45 years. For much of that time Dave was a driving two-handed keyboard player, pounding first an upright piano, then a Farfisa combo organ and electric piano. The Farfisa had grey keys for the bass register, and Dave was often effectively the bass player in the various LYL lineups. Two-handed keyboard players are a tough thing to integrate into the typical Rock band. That kind of playing can fill a lot of the harmonic space — but in some of Rock’s history, guitar voicings are expected to outline the chords. As it turns out, this was OK for me, as I was never a competent conventional rhythm guitar player. Though LYL had an additional guitar player sometimes, I worked out an unconventional role, most often playing single notes and double stops that decorated the chords that Dave laid down, or adding timbral color with guitar effects.

By the turn of the century, we fell into a regular pattern: around once a month we’d set a date. Just before the appointed time, I’d be ready in my studio space and would start to play a little melodic line or spare pattern. Dave would come by a few minutes later, let himself in, and he’d walk up to the keyboard position in the studio space as I continued to play. I’d lean over and reveal the key I was playing in, and off we’d go. I’d have some words ready, a literary poem for Parlando perhaps. Our familiarity bred musical content: I was accustomed to Dave’s keyboard moves, he likely knew mine after all this time too. We’d extemporize a weaved top line. In 2-6 minutes I’d wind it up. We’d say hi to each other. Dave would next hand me a sheet of lyrics. Sometimes with chords, sometimes just some jottings as to predominant ones or key, sometimes just the words. He’d start to play and sing and I’d find my way to play something that I hoped would fit in. That piece would end, and then I’d hand Dave a chord sheet with lyrics to something I had put together. Though sparse, my sheets would be more organized, allotting info for Dave to drive the basic harmonic content for what I would sing and play along with him.

The alteration proceeded as such from there.* After about an hour we’d take a break, talk a bit, and then we’d pick up the rotation for another hour. There would sometimes be partial takes, even (rarely) a “let’s play through it again” request. There’d be short delays as we shuffled through papers, or switched instruments or keyboard sounds, but there wasn’t much deliberation.

What did the recordings reveal afterward? Some trainwrecks certainly. Some searches for inspiration that snoozed off. Particularly in my case, a lot of poor attempts at singing. None-the-less, there’d also be some stuff I’d think worth working with. You’ve heard some of those spontaneous live-in-the-studio takes here.

As it happens, other than their being two alternating songwriters, this is close to how Bob Dylan worked in the studio throughout much of his career — though he worked with trained studio musicians for the most part — skilled folks who could bring a lot more facility that Dave or I can supply.**

Why’d Dylan do that? Well, I’ll have to ask him, though somehow, I haven’t had the chance. My guess is that when it did work, a real sense of something happening in the room among a group of people was transmitted. An exploration. An edge of the seat, this hasn’t yet been formed, a how will it turn out feeling the listener can share.***

Let me repeat myself for necessary clarity: my skillset as a musical instrument operator is such that I think that it doesn’t fulfill the job description of a musician. I won’t impose a summary on Dave, but I think he’d be unlikely to claim high-level musical skills. I do call myself a composer, and Dave has started to call me a producer. I wish I had more skills, but I work artistically with the ideas and actualities I have.

New Studio Space MIDI keyboard

One thing was different last week. For nearly 20 years Dave usually played an older non-MIDI keyboard at my studio space. I may write more about the context later, but I’m thinking it’s time to move to MIDI. Dave has no experience with MIDI and computer instruments, so this will be a journey. I was able to find a good open-box example of this affordable, semi-weighted MIDI keyboards with aftertouch.

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So, last week, after decades of this, when Dave and I met, I was in progress, playing a guitar riff, and he, on arrival, began playing electric piano. I had set out a drum loop and had a bass track running that hung around the key center. The piece I read as I played my electric guitar was a sonnet, a recent one in my sonnet-series about Alzheimer’s disease and a care-home for those suffering from it — and how we, outside the disease, interact with those within it. “The Sound of Sense”  doesn’t lie: Robert Frost actually did think there was a basic undercurrent in how poetry works — that it’s like how we hear others speaking just out of earshot.

Dave’s not Bill Evans or McCoy Tyner. I’m not John Coltrane or Mike Bloomfield. Some people say I sing like Bob Dylan, but I think on a good day I might sound something like Bob on a bad day. Here’s something I’ve been thinking lately, as successful music gets more produced and marketed from the moment of conception on: it’s still good to have some notes made that don’t know what the note to follow will be. If that next note is unexpected, even “off,” — well that’s better than always knowing what the next note is. And that latest artistic worry: Artificial Intelligence and LLMs? They’re programmed to work-to-rule, creating statistically what you’d expect next.

Two old guys playing live in the studio together. I perform a sonnet I recently wrote that Dave hasn’t heard. He and I weave together in a loose, homespun warp and woof, and unlike a lot of poets reading to music, I spend a minute playing electric guitar at the end, trying to not play the next note that you’d expect. You can hear that performance with the audio player below. No player? You aren’t out of AI credits or something — this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

I hope we’re going to have an interesting summer.

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*When other musicians played with Dave and I, I tried to continue that strict arbitrary rotation — everyone got to start a piece in turn.

**A few years back a huge box-set including alternate partial and unsuitable takes from Dylan’s classic Sixties period was issued. Fascinating, listening to and hearing the outright failures or “just not it” attempts. Given what I know those musicians involved could  do, knowing those failures keep me from utter despair when I listen to a busted LYL take uttered from my limited skill-set.

***Some classic Jazz recordings of the LP era were done this way, though often with a substantial shared mental “book” of structures and cadences for the skilled musicians to rely on. It may be one of those shared illusions, as there’s no strictly technical reason that Kind of Blue  or A Love Supreme  couldn’t have been recorded as most modern pop music is recorded: many instrumental tracks played separately and laid behind featured top-line tracks constructed of many passes collaged together. Those old Jazz records feel like the musicians are breathing together in the room to me, in my mind’s eye I can see them glance at each other — but we can be fooled.

Langston Hughes’ “Cabaret”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Before we close the book on National Poetry Month and International Jazz Day, here’s a musical performance of a poem by Langston Hughes. I didn’t think I’d be able to complete it today — but the opportunity arose, and it’s more than appropriate for both observations.

Langston Hughes was one of the founders of Jazz poetry, and that style of reading poetry that interacts with a musical accompaniment (even if it’s not sung) is an influence for some of the performances you’ve heard here in this Project. I can’t say what year Hughes first performed his poetry that way, but there’s another meaning to Jazz poetry without a band: poetry that writes about the experience of Jazz music itself. And Hughes was repeatedly doing that in the early 1920s.

Decades later, a 1950s Hughes reads his 1920s poem “The Weary Blues” in front of a Jazz combo

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This, a combination that appreciated Jazz, was not a sure thing in the early 1920s. Afro-American intellectuals and cultural critics were not universally fond of Jazz and Blues music, these great Afro-American Modernist musical forms arising right under their noses. There were reasons: it was associated with drugs, drink, criminality, and sexual promiscuity — and none of that promoted Black achievement and excellence in their minds. And some young white folks were taking an interest in Jazz for those very reasons. Tut-tut voices from both racial camps were observing their young people and thinking it was all about mindless, hedonistic partying. Let me repeat myself: when the last decade to be called “The Twenties” was called “The Jazz Age,” it wasn’t meant as a compliment.

I’d suspect this isn’t widely known to many readers. Jazz, to our 21st century Twenties, might be felt as supposed-to-be-good-for-you-but-boring-art music made up of too many weird chords and snobbish old men with a fetish for instruments you blow into. If we take it too seriously, too often now, the problem in the 1920s was they didn’t think it had a serious bone in its body.

Maybe it helped that Langston Hughes was a young man, a teenager when the 1920s began. He appreciated things in Jazz and Blues that even his Afro-American elders didn’t see. He knew it could be a balm to pain and disappointment, its expression and expiation — and he could see the art in it, an art to wrap into his poetry. This small poem of his, published in 1923 in the W.E.B Du Bois/NAACP The Crisis magazine, hears something others couldn’t: he hears a Jazz band cry — or rather his poem reports a woman heard this. Here’s a link to the full text of the poem.

Even in the shortness of his poem, note the dialectic here. The band, earlier in the night, had dancers, “vulgar dancers” it says. The older cultural gatekeepers at the Crisis would agree as they accepted this poem, “I see the young poet is aware of the dangerous moral unseriousness of the Jazz hounds.”

Why could Hughes hear what others didn’t? Well, he’s a great poet, and a poet that wrote often and empathetically of other people’s experiences. There’s another possible element. Do modern ears hear the poem’s second line differently than his readers in the last Twenties? “They say a jazz-band’s gay” he wrote. “Gay” in the 1920s would have clearly meant “happy.” As far as scholarship understands this, gay=homosexual seems to have come into use a bit later, perhaps in the 1930s, and to general readers, that meaning emerged in an even later era.

Hughes’ own sexuality is not something we know a lot about. Some say he was gay, some say he was asexual. One thing I get from reading Hughes’ early poetry is that he’s hearing and telling his stories not just from a stereotypical straight masculine viewpoint. Is it his anima that’s the she who “heard the jazz-band sob” in the poem? Or is he just listening to a woman?

Well, my performance of Langston Hughes’ “Cabaret”  is ready to be heard. Unlike the last piece, I made no pretense of Jazz music as it’s classically understood this time, but I do throw in some weird chord extensions. You can hear it with the audio player below. No player to be seen? The dancers have left, and some ways of reading this blog suppress the display of the audio player. If so, use this alternative, a link that will open a new tab with its own player.

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Ars Poetica

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today I take on one of those poetic expressions a great many poets have engaged with: the poem about the state of poetry. The title gets written in Latin to puzzle readers, and because Horace wrote in Latin back when the world had to worry about the whims of tyrannical kings and poets got their words carved in marble. We’re much more culturally advanced now. You can hear this poem anywhere in the world using the Internet. Dozens will listen with you during National Poetry Month. Dozens!  Imagine the value of that if that dozens was of eggs.

I briefly hesitated to share this poem of mine publicly. Not only is this project largely about other people’s words, but my Ars Poetica poem starts off comparing some poets to assassins. That’s a metaphor, a conceit, a simile.  I’ve shared other civic poems about the fate of nations this month, but I’m not a big fan of political assassination — but then I’m also not a big fan of making fun of poets, and I’m going to do that today. And it is  a civic poem. On my way to comparing poets to assassins I make note of the state of mass transit in my fair-sized midwestern American city, which is: pretty bad. Not assassination bad. No! Rather my point is that it would be bad for an assassin. Or for poets trying to get to and from poetry readings.

Ars Poetica

32 bar AABA tune. Chords are F C Am G and then Cm Gm Cm Dm in the bridge, though there are some substitutions.

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Well, you don’t have to go anywhere to listen to the performance. And it’ll be doubly good to do so because the last day of National Poetry Month in April is also International Jazz Day, and I’m going to make some fake Jazz.* Poets, we get a month! Jazz — like a whole world of it — gets only a day. Well, it’s an international day, sliding across the globe’s time zones, but still…

You can hear me reading my Ars Poetica poem with a Jazz combo using the audio player below. No player? The Jazz Police haven’t come for it, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress it. There’s an alternative: this highlighted link will open its own browser tab with an audio player.

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*Way back in the 20th century, when we had to carry the dead weight of a constitution around all the time with laws, and due process, and so forth, a group of local improvisational comic performers used to get together and the agenda was to play bad Jazz. No, not to parody or put down Jazz, more at an honest admission that their musical skills weren’t up to that level, but the desire to have a go at it was still there. That’s me making up this Jazz quartet today. I’ve cut a corrupt deal with the composer to only write things I can play on bass and guitar, and I give the computer the chords to tickle on the piano.

She Dreams of Sewing Machines

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I wondered what I’d do for this April’s U.S. National Poetry Month. I’ve usually done something to observe it, though what I do may not be similar to other places. The audio pieces here almost always use literary poetry we combine with original music, so appreciation of poetry is business as usual there. What about writing poetry? I’m not a big fan of overt poetry prompts, instead working from a personal expectation that anything in life or art worth creating a poem over will let you know; and while I write sometimes about the process of creativity, I’m not a creative teacher. I’m also not promoting my own poetry — an honest, necessary task, just not one that I’ve chosen to do much of. Similarly, I’m by present resolution non-commercial with the music I create here. The current music business situation is difficult enough that the least troublesome and most assured way to make nothing from music is to start with, and keep to, the goal of doing exactly that!

So, what to do this April? I’d considered a close-focus theme, or the presentation of the work of a particular poet, but I’ve recently tested my appreciated readers a bit with a long series on the mystery of a musician’s scrapbook that came into my possession decades ago. Enough long- form for a while I think.

Online, I asked for requests, and got one: anti-fascist poetry. I’ve been bending somewhat away from my usual “you can get your complete diet of politics many other places” practice due to my nation’s current situation, which frankly disgusts me in the present and frightens me in its extrapolated expectations; but as a practical matter I almost always use older Public-Domain-status words for the poetry texts I combine with music here. Unlike our current Twenties, the last decade to be called The Twenties (where PD status generally ends) had yet to come upon that brand of authoritarian superiority.*

I found my solution by looking at the materials made by the organizers for this 2025 National Poetry Month. I saw that this year’s theme takes off from a line in a Naomi Shihab Nye poem “Gate A-4”  which offers me a suitable theme for the Parlando Project this April in this country in this year. That line is: “This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.” So, there will be some civic poetry on civic issues. There will also be poems of varied shared experiences. I haven’t completed any translations from other languages recently, but if I don’t get to that this month (and it’s usually a very busy month) I may feature some of my favorite not-originally-in-English poems from my past decade’s work.

2025 National Poetry Month Poster 1080

This year’s poster by Christy Mandin.

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To start off #NPM2025 I’m going to do something that’s not representative of what this Project normally does: from the start we’ve focused here on other poets’ poetry, even though Dave or myself could’ve supplied a great number of song lyrics and poetry to be recast as such. That decade-long primary practice is not followed in today’s audio piece — instead, it’s a sonnet from the Memory Care Series I’ve been writing for several years — some of which have been performed here in draft form. Though I wrote these words, it doesn’t really violate this Project’s maxim: “Other People’s Stories,” because it’s the tale of a daughter with a mother descending deeper into dementia, and of the connections and slow-motion mourning the course of this disease assesses.

Earlier this month I performed Alice Dunbar Nelson’s “I Sit and Sew”  a civic poem about a woman who wished to help the war-distressed and injured. Sewing was a bitter consolation in that poem — but in today’s sonnet, sewing is an image of a different, though still bittersweet, connection. You can hear my performance of “She Dreams of Sewing Machines”  with the audio player gadget below. If you don’t see any such gadget, it’s likely because you’re viewing this blog through a reader that suppresses showing it, and so I offer this highlighted link as an alternative.  It will open a new tab with its own audio player.

Return here throughout April to see what other, varied poetry, music, and performance styles I can complete and add to our shared world, or just use the blog follow feature.

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*Arrogant ignorance, prejudice, persecution, vain greed for glory and gelt — that all existed before the name fascism, and that may still provide some PD poems. The pieces that I have nearer to completion are more about the human experiences that we all share, and by telling of them we by implication speak against callous disregard.

Kevin FitzPatrick’s Farewell

~ Frank Hudson ~ 7 Comments

Nearly 50 years ago when I moved to the Twin Cities I fell in with a group of Irish-American writers — only they didn’t call themselves that, they called themselves the Lake Street Writer’s Group, and when my friend Dave Moore wanted to roughly categorize them back in those days he’d say many of them worked as bartenders. And so, at first, their monthly meetings would be at a bar table, I think the first one I attended was at the Artist’s Quarter, a bar and music venue.

Time and writing changes one, and so it changes groups of writers. Over the years some wandered off to other pursuits, or to other cities, and one or two died. In its last decade of existence, the group winnowed down to four people. Dave Moore and myself, and two other poets: Ethna McKiernan and Kevin FitzPatrick.*  None of us remainers were bartenders. Dave worked for a co-op grocery after working in bookstores. I worked for a public radio network. Ethna ran an Irish-Arts store until it needed to close, and then worked as a social worker. Kevin had a job with the state labor department, but he spent every non-workday at his life-partner Tina’s farm across the border in rural Wisconsin.

The poet I perform today and his last book.

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Kevin was a healthy seeming guy, able to handle the manual small-farm work in contrast to his desk job. During that decade our little quartet of poets would hear Kevin recount his latest news from the farm, and then we’d hear what he’d transformed out of that when he showed us drafts of poems about the odd turn his post middle-aged life had taken. In this series of poems an office-worker who grew up in the Cities was encountering country labors, mores, and situations, being befuddled or making sense of them.

Kevin’s poems were narrative, and he had a real knack for that form, particularly in his talent for drawing characters in a few words and letting you get a sense of them in a stanza or two.**  One of the charming characters we met as the series of poems spun out was the farm dog: an incongruous poodle named Katie — not a Collie or German Shepard, not any other breed you’d naturally think of protecting the flock and farm. The poet didn’t invent that detail of the farmstead’s dog, but the poet knew a symbol when he came upon one.

Farm dogs are pets with job descriptions, but I don’t think Katie was a herding dog in a professional sense, any more than Kevin was a professional farmer. Still, there were in the poems a sense of Katie being an intermediary between the livestock and the bipeds, and she was portrayed as a useful watchdog and companion when Kevin needed to return to his workweek office job.

In Kevin’s poems we learned that Katie had gotten sick; and though it strained budgets, she had gone through some veterinary treatment. Then, at one month’s meeting, we learned that the poodle farm-dog had succumbed to her illness.

The Kevin FitzPatrick poem I perform today came shortly thereafter. For me, this poem works well, even though intellectually it could seem maudlin or sentimental if summarized. We should be wary of such reduction — poems are much more than AI summaries. Kevin undercut the merely weepy here with his dry sense of humor and understated anger — and then too there’s the poem’s sensual detail: a man at work with the remains and memories of a working dog, the corpse as light as a cardboard cutout, the unthawed March cold.

The poem’s ending has extra poignance for me: it was not that long after the poem was written, and the collection that contained it, Still Living in Town,***  was published, that Kevin unexpectedly took sick and died. I think I remember talking with Kevin — before that knowledge on either of our parts — about liking the final part of the poem, how it implies that when the fear and final of death might come to the poem’s speaker, that the dog’s spirit, preceding over the hill, that hearth and home animal in-between livestock and us humans, would be there faithfully there to assuage the fear of what may be nothing in an empty darkness. I call the piece today “Kevin FitzPatrick’s Farewell”   because to me its writer ended up making that statement while writing a poem about a farm dog.

Kevin heard a couple of my performances of his poems, and his feedback was that I overstated them — and my performances were certainly different from his. He had that drier Robert Frost reading tone down whenever I saw him do public readings, mixed with the kind of Irish wit that evidences just a slightest eye twinkle and unvocalized “a-ha!” while it spears some folly with an off-hand brickbat or dagger. So, to honor that contrast between us I had to fire up the electric guitar and make the speaker in his poem a little shoutier than Kevin. You can hear that performance of mine with the audio player below. No audio player to be seen? Listen: Katie is barking that you can use this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Kevin and Ethna took to hosting a poetry reading every St. Patrick’s Day. The last ones not at some Lake Street dive bar, but at a more tony academic site: The University Club near St. Paul’s Summit Avenue. I’m not Irish, but personally I don’t favor the mandatory cute intoxication elements endemic to that celebration, so I preferred a spotlight on that culture’s poetic side. As the holiday approaches this year, I’m planning to get to Ethna’s poetry too in time for St. Patrick’s Day.

**I admire conciseness. I’ve sometimes compared Kevin’s poems to the narrative poems of Robert Frost. While Frost’s longer blank-verse narrative poems have their power and richness, it’s not the mode that I read for pleasure. Kevin’s rural life poems take more after Frost’s shorter narrations like the “Mending Wall.”  And Kevin’s poems make more use of humor than Frost’s do.

***That book, and others, are available via this web site link.

Racial Relations and gender play in the 1940s-‘50s scrapbook, Part Ten

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Early this morning, I was reading a blog of a modern avant garde poet who has lots of philosophic theories about prosody, and there this quote of Walter Benjamin’s is brought up: “To write history is to give dates their physiognomy.”  Well, yes, I thought, that’s what I’ve been doing in this Black History Month series. This scrapbook, its photographs, ephemera, ads, and clippings from newspapers — all a picture of the history of an American Black man: Lawrence Kasuth “Hank” Hazlett, a musician and singer who lived from 1911 to 1990. That scrapbook that had come into my hands portrays his nation-touring time in the 1940s and a residence in South Minneapolis in the 1950s. When it comes to civil rights or diversity, we tend to see change, or the preceding things that needed to change, from a later vantage point. The scrapbook documents such a preceding time, and the sort of things that musician Frank Zappa liked to call “mutations” — the tiny breaking of norms. But, isn’t it just a scrapbook?

There are pieces in the scrapbook that may give us a glimpse into what its maker noted and selected to save. In the last post, we saw a picture of Hazlett playing on stage with a white bass player with the hippest of truncated neckwear — but overall, the performance photos show black musicians with him, playing (as far as I can see) to black audiences. Yet, here’s a photo from the scrapbook that stood out from that segregated norm:

Bedsitting photo

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In this photograph two black men (the one on the left appears to be Hazlett) are sitting on a cheap enameled-bedstead bed eating. Sitting on the same bed is a white woman and behind those three, a white man in a dark suit is standing. Black and white, men and the woman are smiling. It looks like an inexpensive hotel room, and maybe they’re all on tour.

Jeannie and her Boyfriends promo

On the back of the postcard they wrote: To Edith and Hank. So nice meeting you, it’s a pleasure to be an entertainer along with you. Jeannie Bill and Don

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The scrapbook also collects this promotional picture postcard for an act called Jennie and her Boyfriends, who issued a single 45 RPM do-wop style record in 1959. Jeannie in the promo picture has a completely different hairstyle and hair-color, but it’s plausible this is her and one of the members of her trio in the bed-sitting photo.

Also in the last post in the series, we showed some clippings in the scrapbook of Black entertainers working to defeat limiting stereotypes, but one thing that struck me was that the scrapbook also contains clippings showing white entertainment figures. Ephemera in the book, like that MGM W2 form from ’44 and Los Angeles addresses for Hazlett make me think that he might have had at least tenuous connections with some of them during the 1940s. Here’s a page from the scrapbook showing a clipping featuring Lana Turner, which may have been included because its caption says Turner likes Duke Ellington records.**

Lana Turner likes Eillington records

Lana Turner isn’t into vinyl, she’s spinning shellac.

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These are old clippings, sometimes from lower-res reproduction, and occasionally I’m misled by the ambiguities of race in the photographs. Take this one of Jean Parks found on this page with both white and Black entertainment figures. I figured she was white.

Jean Parks et al

Find the second Afro-American woman on this page.

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Those who’ve followed this blog will know that I was immediately saying to myself “Who’s Jean Parks?” The story outlined from asking that is as rich or richer than the story of Bruce Dybvig from earlier in this series. WWII military service put a crimp on the supply of male musicians — so just as with other occupations, there soon arose a number of female bands — Rosie the Riveter, only with saxophones. Popular pre-war bands often enough had female singers, and there were a smattering of woman pianists (and small-group guitarists) — but women playing horns, reeds, drums in big bands— important featured instruments in those ensembles — I can’t think of one. Then came the war and mobilization. All of a sudden there were groups entirely made up of Black or white lady musos sprung full borne from the brow as it were.

One of those was Eddie Durham’s All-Star Girl Orchestra.   OK, now we’re studying history, so we have to do dates. It’s Victory over Japan Day, the war is over. In NYC a sailor grabs a nurse in a crowd without her consent, starts kissing her in front of a cameraman, and everything thinks this is splendid because the immense horrors of world war are over — and the, you know, sissy stuff  of regular old living is to return. The All-Star Girl Orchestra are in the middle of an engagement on the opposite coast, in Oakland California. The link above says that manager Durham sees that the men are going to return — and just then, dissolves the act. Well, sort of. Some remainder is rebranded around singer Jean Parks. As it turns out, the post-WWII years will be tough for all big bands — and all-around, the all-girl band thing doesn’t survive the peace.

And here’s what happens when Parks meets the world of The Fifties. Just look at the bad-girl triple-double implied and indicted in this paragraph: Black, caught with a 6-foot-tall platinum blond “friend”/roommate, sex-work — and drugs? We got’em all: reefer, opium, cocaine. Other than a Communist Party membership card signed Mr. and Mrs. and documents linking her to a plot to cancel Howdy Doody, this is complete “All-Star” material.***

Parks arrestHard luck singer Jean Parks Jet cover

Seeing that other headline on the Jet cover, and suddenly I’m a teenager in the back row of the classroom muttering to a classmate “I must be drinking the wrong kind of booze.”

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Two other pictures in the scrapbook seem to tell some kind of story about connections between the races, likely in Minneapolis in the ‘50s. There’s this snapshot, pasted on the same page as the similarly posed picture I speculated last time might be of a child of the Hazletts. I have no idea who Maxine is, or who’s Chuck. But as with the other pictures and accounts in today’s post, I’d reckon that mixed race connections like this had elements of risk beyond just social disapprobation. White school integration riots, Emmett Till, the beating and burning of the Freedom Riders buses, all were contemporary with the scrapbook.

Maxine Chucks wife

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Then there’s this picture, inscribed to Hank’s wife Edith and so presumably from the early 1950s. So many of us have awkward school-picture-day photos, but I found this one more arresting than awkward. This is hard to detail, so I’m going to be more awkward than the picture, where after all Loretta is smiling and seems comfortable with themselves: Loretta looks quite masculine. Unattributed, it could easily be a 20-year-later photo of a mullet-head male guitar player in someone’s high school rock band. Burn-out the long-point blouse collar and retouch the long tresses in the back and it would be a 1950s boy who wants to grow up to play in Elvis’ band.

Get Back Loretta

Loretta.

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There’s no other context other than the inscription and being in the scrapbook. Looking at Loretta’s photo this month I immediately thought of “Get Back,”  the Beatles lyric. Some of you may be singing the applicable verse in your head now that I’ve said that. My second thought: I’d love to know Loretta’s story, but there’s next to no chance I ever will.

And now a transition that may or may not be apt. There are several pictures of Hank Hazlett, and Hazlett with his Trio, dressed in drag. I can’t place the club stage shown in most of the pictures. The Telecaster he’s playing says this is likely during the Fifties when he’s largely working out of Minneapolis, and it may be a Minneapolis club. Everyone looks like they’re having a good time, and dressing in drag is a multivalent act that can be meant to convey different things.

Drag performance Hank Hazlett Trio

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Everyone seems to be having a good time. Of course, right now we know it’s supposed to mean danger to children, and therefore we must let rich folks get richer so they can stop those goings on, because…religion. That’s a very serious opinion, mandate and all — you ought to pay attention to it instead of looking at this approaching 20,000 word series on — what? — a scrapbook about a Black musician who few have even heard of. And the scrapbook is mostly pictures,  where’s the meaning in them? Of course, then there are these other Walter Benjamin quotes: “Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future” and “We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them, when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.” Benjamin’s life, which we know more about than Hank, or Edith Hazlett’s, or Loretta’s life, could be called in to rebut those quotes. In a corporeal sense, he had little future, books didn’t extend his human, breathing, skin-coated living. But Benjamin did have his quotes, groups of words that might work like poems to let us see something new, and there are even some who will read philosophy at length.

There’s a new musical performance today, taken from a piece of folded and unfolded paper that was pasted into the Hazlett scrapbook. Did Edith carry it? Did Hank? On it, in faded pencil, are written 6 quotes, 6 maxims that someone wanted to carry in order to carry on. They are from a mixed-bag of writers, numbered 1-6 on the page, and in which order I read them in this performance: M. B. Whitman, H.D. Thoreau, Lloyd C. Douglas, Helen Keller, Herbert Kaufman, and Ambrose Bierce.

You can hear that performance with the audio player below. What? No player to be seen? Well, there’s injustice, carelessness, and cruelty we don’t see, and that’s a bigger deal than a couple of minutes of me dressing up in weird Jazz-band drag and reading some inspirational quotes — but you could use this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Marv Goldberg mentions that the Cats and the Fiddle might have had some involvement with the 1945 MGM Judy Garland film The Clock,  which would have been several years and lineups past the original Cat’s quartet burst of Hollywood film appearances in 1938 — those all even before they had made their first appearance on recordings. A 1945-released film would have overlapped the time that Hazlett was in the Cats, could explain the 1944 W2. Mysteriously, I distinctly recall seeing a clipped advertisement for that movie when I first looked into the scrapbook years ago, thinking I should check the film out — but for some reason it isn’t in the scrapbook now.

**Frank O’Hara poetry fans will note Turner is fully upright and operational in this photo.

***Like The Clock ad, I also distinctly remember seeing an article about someone in entertainment arrested for prostitution when I first looked through the scrapbook years ago. It too is missing now. The scrapbook was part of at least one move, and when I look at it now, I have to take care, as it’s falling apart. I now suspect that might have been more on the Parks case. The All-Star Girl Orchestra could have shared bills with the Cats in Hazlett’s time — they played the same theater circuit during WWII.

Arcadian Ewes (Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Today is Robert Burns’ birthday, which I hear is much celebrated in Scotland. While this Project has done over 800 audio pieces over the years, none of them (before today) have used Burns words. Why not? It’s a personal limitation of mine: his poetry uses a lot of Scottish words and dialect, and I have a hard time doing that.*

But, at last, I’ve finally snuck in a bit of Burns. And while it’s not as novel, I’m also using a set of words I wrote for the bulk of today’s performance, though the Parlando Project remains overwhelmingly about experiencing other people’s words. The second part of “Arcadian Ewes”  is a draft version from a work in progress: The Memory Care Sonnets.  Drafts of other poems in the series have appeared here before, but for those new to this, they tell the story of a daughter visiting and caring for a mother with increasing dementia.

While hearing the original account of a daughter and the daughter’s friend going for a weekly singing session at the memory care facility last fall, I was somehow struck at the time with the story’s Arcadian sensibility. That’s a place I know from this Project. Poetry and folk-song is rich in Arcadia: there are shepherds, flocks, meadows, love, peril, loneliness, peace, gifts, songs, a sense of time ever-present without fences, taking place over the hills and away from our actual daily lives. Here, in the sonnet, the shepherdesses go to the place, gather their flock of singers. What songs will they sing?

Even as I was writing the poem the refrain of Burns’ song that now begins the recorded performance was in my mind. I can’t quite account for why, other than the song for some reason often brings me to tears — and I can’t fully explain that either.

Ca the Yowes status Dunfries Scotland

Today’s musical piece begins with part of a Robert Burns’ song  displayed on this monument in Dumfries Scotland
(photo by: summonedbyfells via Wikipedia)

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“Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes”  was collected and reshaped by Robert Burns in the late 18th century.  He published at least two versions, and the folk process has given us other variations, including differences in how much of the Scottish accent and wordage is retained. As a text though, it generally isn’t a sad song. The song’s shepherdess, taking her ewes among the hills seems happy enough in her labor, but happier yet to find a swain in her Arcadia who promises her unending devotion and care. That story isn’t sad now, is it — unless one dotes on how love’s promises aren’t always faithful, that human lives are not unending. But as I said above, poetic Arcadian time doesn’t end, and maybe that contrast with human time is the essential sadness. Perhaps it is those elemental parts of Burns’ story, of the care for the carer, is what linked it to my resulting poem of the daughter taking care of the mother.

However inexplicably, I believe it’s the music that makes me cry when I hear that song’s tune. Music, that same powerful class of thing that is the balm that restores a connection to the mother on one of her “bad days” of deeper withdrawal in the sonnet. The music for the performance you can hear below doesn’t hew exactly to the old song’s tune, for I don’t know if I could have stayed with the reading if it did. You can hear my performance with the audio player gadget below. Has your audio player strayed away over the hills? No, just some ways of reading this blog suppress displaying it, so I also offer this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*That lack of the ability to hear and then repeat back sounds bedevils me several ways: it’s often relied on in musical endeavors, and it’s long frustrated me in my desire to speak other languages, or even pronounce some names correctly. I suspect it’s a neurological quirk of my brain.

Journey of the Magi: or the Wise Men were following a star, not four stars

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Are blogging and social media as much about complaints as they are about praise? I can’t say for sure on that. One reason there: my personal appetite for a good rant or jeremiad has limits. But sometimes — even when the subject is something you’re fond of— within a negative review, you might see something new you never appreciated.

The Christmas season ended yesterday with Epiphany, the Christian church calendar date on which the Three Wise Men, kings or soothsayers from the East, legendarily visit the newborn infant god-head.

It’s a favored event for painters of Christian religious scenes, since it has the rich aroma of an Incarnation appearing in a rude stable, and yet at the same time it allows the depiction of exotic, wealthy, well-attired prince/priests bringing gifts to the child. The Renaissance artists often loved depth of detail, and this gives them so much to depict.

For the holiday season at the end of 1921, T. S. Eliot wrote a poem for this last day of the 12-days of Christmas. In his “Journey of the Magi”  he exercises one of his youthful talents: flavorful disjointed poetic dialog expressive of different human aspects infused with sound and high and low cultural references. His poem is a poetic monolog by one of the Wise Men — but it omits the moment in the paintings: the worshipful giving of gifts to the baby Jesus. You can read the full text of the poem at this link if you’d like to follow along.

Instead, the poem opens with a bad review of the travel to Bethlehem. To paraphrase, the first stanza: look, we had it good in our temperate-zone palaces, servants bringing us cool sherbet treats, and now we’re out here where it’s either too hot or too cold, in a place no one knows how important we are.

In the poem’s second stanza we do get in words some of the matter of those Renaissance paintings — you could see the brush-hand of a Bruegel in it. We smell the landscape, there’s a little stream, a water-mill, a singular white horse, a tavern with the (later post-mortem) pieces of silver being gambled for, drinker’s feet tripping over wine-skins, There should be a saint, and angel, or the Holy Family in this painting too, resplendent in the foreground — but our speaker leaves any of that out. I love the Yelp review that ends this stanza: not the max-stars that everyone is urged to leave: “(you may say) satisfactory.”

In the last stanza Eliot’s monologist gets to hint at the piety that would later take over that poet’s outlook. After all, the Three Priests or Kings or Sages that have traveled so far are not believers in the story, only esoteric knowers. Their testimony is that they know the Christian incarnation is important, but they don’t know or believe why. Our speaker says, recalling the trip on the sore camel’s back across the desert, moor, and mountains, just that he has some sense that his former comforts, his kingdom, his belief, his place in things, his magic, has been changed some way. What comes next after the death of his homeplace belief? He doesn’t know, but somehow he senses it’ll be better.

That’s often a good story isn’t it — that kings are just a convention, a shared or temporarily-enforced belief?

Anbetung_der_Könige_(Bruegel,_1564) 800

Speaking of Bruegel, here’s a painting of the Adoration of the Magi by him. Looking at the king in crimson on the left: from the expression on that face, I think we can imagine he’s the speaker in Eliot’s poem.

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Even though today’s poem is written of events remembered in the past, I’m late with this piece. I performed it yesterday, on the suitable date, but it was nearing the stroke of midnight when I laid down the last track. This morning after breakfast and grocery shopping I mixed the version you can hear below. I thought about putting in caroling bells or angelic voices in the arrangement, but as I worked with Eliot’s words I figured it might be better to decorate it with some Silk Road instruments, ones that might have been heard in the better stops on the Three Kings’ journey: the oud an the santoor. But there’s also a drum set, a piano, and an electric bass — and I can’t figure out how a camel could carry those! You can hear my performance of “The Journey of the Magi”  with the audio player below. No player seen? You’re not too late, it’s just the way some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing that, so I offer this shining star, or rather highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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Millay’s Thanksgiving

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

There’s a long tradition in poetry of civic poetry — poems not meant for an audience interested solely in the interior intimate experience of the poet, but speaking to larger, more public themes. I suspect modern poetry doesn’t do this mode directly much, even though some individualist poetry infers that purpose. American poetic Modernism began with an emphasis on the concrete, the thing specific: red wheelbarrow, ripples in a pool, a certain Chicago cat-fog, an exit on the Metro on a rainy day. Yet, a focused subject can still be an example that stands for more.

If the subject is small though, perhaps we poets expect our audience most often to be small too, compared to a variety of other, popular arts. But this was not always so. Longfellow and Whitman expected the nation to listen to their poems of democratic virtues. If the literary set eschew the mode, song-lyricists and non-literary poets will still assay it.

Just under four years ago, a poet Amanda Gorman who has written civic poetry, delivered a poem at the last U.S. Presidential inauguration, speaking of the nation’s fears, hopes, promises. The mode of the next Inauguration has changed. I’m not expecting poetry. Some will think, more-the-better — who wants a poet spouting off what I should think.

Why not, are they not citizens? What are the occupations that are allowed to speak?

Nearly 75 years ago. American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a long poem for the American holiday of Thanksgiving. She expected a good-sized audience: it was published in the Saturday Evening Post, a weekly general interest magazine, the one that often featured Norman Rockwell paintings on the cover, that claimed Ben Franklin as its founder.

Millay NFTG

The most often used pictures of Millay show the young romantic adventurer. I’m also fond of this one that seems less all that. The poem which I perform excerpts from today was the last one she published before she died at age 58.

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I’m sure there were specific things on Millay’s mind, geo-political, American issues. She writes five years after a war ended with two A-bombs. How long would be the peace? In 1950 there was another war going on overseas in Korea, there was a “Red Scare,” and to a large degree some deficiencies in American equality of opportunity were so far off to the side that too few even thought of them as political issues to address then. Millay didn’t cite any of that directly.

Instead, she wrote about how she thinks we, the citizenry, were feeling, assuming a general agreement that might be hard to gather today. Thanksgiving is a dual holiday occasion: it’s our harvest festival, a time to give thanks to what our work brought us, and it’s also a holiday to give thanks for what we’ve come through: it originated in a time of Civil War, and it commemorates the hardy survival of some early 17th century boat-people who landed without papers and survived on American shores. Millay’s Thanksgiving thoughts were more toward the latter than the former.

What will ring true in some American hearts this year will be her words of hopes dashed or at least deferred. Can one give thanks for having hopes that were unfulfilled? Can we at least forgive ourselves for hope? Her poem exists in that question. In the excerpts I performed today for this musically accompanied piece you can hear below, I focused on that sense, felt in my bones. “Cunning and guile persist; ferocity empowers” Millay writes. The lines that stand out for me as a Thanksgiving prayer this year are “Let us give thanks for the courage that was always ours; and pray for the wisdom which we never had.”

As civic prayer goes, that’s humble, but it has some bite in it.

You can hear my performance of portions from Millay’s “Thanksgiving…1950”  with the audio player below. The full poem’s text is at this link. No audio player gadget to be seen?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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