Last time in our Halloween Series, an A. E. Housman poem combined with music had death on a knife edge. Placed at the end of the growing year in northern places, Halloween comes at a time in a yearly cycle that suggests death. Note: that statement includes the word “cycle.” Humans have memory, and song, and eventually writing, so we know the turning round — the end of the growing comes before the white none of winter and before the regreening of spring.
Should it be so with death, that full nothing? Some hope and believe that so, though we can have no memory of that. But even one life has many turnings, places we pass through and leave. Today’s piece ends by portraying that we open and close gates of memory, gates that are no longer there.
Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote this poem of a non-threatening ghost. It’s an earlier work, and some see the ghost as a wisp of her not-long-departed girlhood. I’ll add that the choice of having the ghost appear in a garden speaks to the placement of Halloween in a harvest/leaving time of the year. Gardens have needs: nutritious soil, water, sun, and care. Perhaps they need ghosts from time to time as well?
“She paused—then opened and passed through a gate that once was there.”
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The music I composed and played for Millay’s “The Little Ghost” shows South Asian influences, what with harmonium, tambura, and my vibrato note electric guitar playing. You can hear that combination of words and music with the audio player below. No player to be seen? This highlighted link is an alternative, it’ll open a new tab with its own audio player.
When I said Halloween series, did you assume that that would mean the sidelines and backbenchers rather than the serious literary poetry we sometimes take out for a musical spin here? Let me break through that expectation quickly with today’s selection from seven years of the Parlando Project — it’s a part of a literary poetic landmark, T. S. Eliot’s“The Waste Land.”
When it comes to dread, I’m not a fan of jump scares — I rather prefer the slow build — but did I frighten some casual readers who are reaching to click to the next web site already? I hear you muttering.* “The Waste Land’ — isn’t that long, boring, indecipherable, so full of stuff you need footnotes for?”
OK, so you believe you have a fresher aesthetic than some old Modernist war-horse — but I do wonder if there isn’t a chill as sudden as a just unconcealed weapon or bared fangs, a suppressed shuddering beneath the contempt. “Is there going to be a test? Do I have to write an essay on what it means — pretending it means anything to me?”
Schoolwork. Many learn to love and to hate poetry in that single place.
Done over several Aprils here on this Project, I used music and performance in my serialized presentation of the whole poem to remind us of the abstract ways that music makes us feel through non-literal modes, without explications and decoder rings. The unreal city section of “The Waste Land,” sliding for now over the specifics of place names and time-jumping references, is just a nightmare of the possessed and undead, of a speaker so PTSD’d by a world decimated by violence, epidemic, and careless oppression that the masks have fallen off the faces of his city. The dark humor of friendly small talk is of dogs digging up corpses.
Additional advisories: wear sunscreen, and don’t look directly at the sun without the proper filter.
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You can hear the performance of the unreal city section of “The Waste Land” with the audio player many will see below. No player visible? This highlighted link will open a new tab with a player that will let you hear it.
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*Sure, you have that over-tape or closed shutter on your web cam, but rather than composing, recording, or researching new pieces, I instead have been listening to the microphones on your devices. I actually don’t care what you say about parents, children, partners, bosses, or coworkers. I’m listening with dread to what you say about my making the best of my voice and somewhat restricted musical skills. Dogs digging corpses out of the garden aren’t scary compared to those fears.
And of those infamous footnotes in “The Waste Land?” Have you considered this: are they a frightened nerd being asked to show what he means?
I think today’s audio piece is something many writers will relate to, but since it’s one I wrote I’ll be brief later down the page in writing about my encounter with it. The top part of this post will be a process post about music and working “live in the studio” with Dave Moore again after a long break. Feel free to skip to the bottom if this process stuff isn’t your thing.
For many years I’ve taken time every September 18th to remember guitarist and composer Jimi Hendrix. This September 18th I planned to get together with Dave Moore to do what we’ve done off-and-on for more than 40 years: attempt to make music together as The LYL Band.* For almost all that time we’ve done this in a peculiar way.
I have a space with various guitars, basses, drum pattern software, and a couple of keyboards. Dave comes there after I’ve setup the recording equipment. I start playing something harmonically simple (often a one-chord groove) and Dave walks up to a keyboard. I start with some words (usually something from another writer) as we play off the top of our heads while the recording software rolls.
After that, Dave hands me a sheet of paper with something he wrote or wants to play. Sometimes there are chords handwritten on the sheet, sometimes not. I ask for a key center. He starts off and I try to follow and figure out a part on the spot. We finish playing to that set of words. I hand Dave a chord sheet with chords written out, something I’ve composed or want to play. I start out and Dave tries to come up with a part on keyboards.
We almost never do second takes. We rarely present the songs to each other by playing the sections through to demonstrate before recording. This alternation of I, then Dave, leading a piece continues for a couple of hours with a short break in the middle to rest our hands and voices.
A great many musicians cannot do this, wouldn’t do this, are perhaps afraid to do this. It is not an exact way to accomplish the art of music. Many skilled folk, Blues, and Jazz musicians can do this if they choose to.** Dave and I are not at that skill level. What comes out can be inarticulate, chaotic, of no use whatsoever. We give it permission to utterly fail.
Are we just lazy or eccentric. Well, maybe the latter, but the aim is to catch moments when something happens spontaneously that has a quality of that type of creation. You know the expression “Building an airplane while it is flying?” That’s the feeling when something coheres as we feel our way into the piece. I believe the best of the pieces that come out of this process may transfer some of that feeling to a listener later on.
When I work on the Parlando Project pieces I work as a composer, usually playing or directing most of the parts myself. It’s a thoughtful process, painstaking to a degree though I try to create more pieces rather than a few most perfect and maximally impressive pieces. There’s lots of do-overs, retakes, instruments attempted and rejected. What Dave and I do when we play together uses a very different part of the brain. I love the change, each type of music-making refreshes the other.
Part of collating the useable material from a session is creating a cover image. I had no idea who Epimetheus was until I encountered this Greek titan in a Longfellow poem that you may hear more about later this fall.
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Today’s new audio piece
Back to today’s new audio piece. It’s the first thing Dave stepped up to the keyboards to play with me this past Monday. “The Terror of the Blank Page” is a poem I wrote more than a decade ago during what the US liked to call “The War on Terror.” I think the germ of the idea may have come from finding out that Saddam Hussein had fashioned himself as a novelist and had several books published attributed to him as an author. The finished piece isn’t really about that, it’s about how we punish ourselves if we are writers for fearing and avoiding starting new work. What if it’s not the best idea? What if it’s bad, embarrassing, revealing of our faults as artists? In the end, I think my poem and this performance makes fun of that fear as it names some imagined incarnations.
The process I talked about above, the one that Dave and I use to make music quickly is a way to get out the door before the fear arrives to arrest us. To hear our live in the studio performance of “The Terror of the Blank Page” you can use the audio player gadget below. No gadget? This highlighted link is there for those whose way of viewing this doesn’t show the gadget — it will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*Various other musicians have played with Dave and I from time to time in The LYL Band. Given our peripatetic musical path, it takes a special kind of musician to enjoy playing with us. One could easily say that a model for The LYL Band is The Fugs, an intently impolite band created around a core of two poets and assorted others. Don’t go listening to The Fugs recordings around your parents, your children, your school board censors, or anyone who can’t help but mention when your singing or guitar is out of tune.
**Two accomplished musicians who have used something like this approach are Miles Davis and Bob Dylan. Dylan’s classic mid-60’s ensemble recording sessions would start off pieces live in the studio which (just maybe) a music director of a sort had prepared the musicians somewhat for. He’d try a few takes, and if it didn’t work, he just went on to something else or some other combination of musicians. A record like Highway 61 Revisited is corralling the best attempts to make chaos cohere. Miles Davis hired exceptional musicians with extraordinary ears and knowledge of the Jazz repertoire. Even though Davis was comfortable with charts and pieces with set forms and sections, he had periods when he worked with a roomful of musicians given little direction. He made a series of records from In a Silent Way on that were mostly assembled after these live sessions by editing and collaging the best parts of this spontaneous playing.
That approach by Davis is similar to what I do with some pieces that Dave and I originate together in spontaneous live playing. I’ll add parts and remove or edit parts to create a resulting hybrid recording that contains live and composed playing.
This Monday, Labor Day in the U. S., is a legal holiday which arose from the idea of a day to celebrate workers. Some see this holiday as being in conflict with May 1st, International Workers Day, but I myself have no beef with having two days to celebrate work and those that do it.
Poets and poetry are not, as a rule, oversaturated with attention to labor. Creative work such as writing is, in itself, labor — but the wages are so scant for poetry that it’s hard to see it as allied with such. Currently television and movie writers are on strike, but poets have little in the way of wages and rights to negotiate. If the weekend and the 8-hour workday were obtained through labor struggle, it’s hard to imagine poets picketing for a full honorarium for the 12-line sonnet, or chapbooks for sale on every bookstore shelf that stocks James Patterson books.
What I find less forgivable is that poets don’t write about labor as much as I think is due. Poetry’s Greatest Hits will tell us about mystery, death, love, war, dreams, desire, loneliness, family, friendships, every facet of our non-commercial relationship with nature, all the panoply of pain and joy. What poetry won’t speak of much is the third or so of our lives spent making or getting a paycheck.* And I don’t think the situation for the subject of labor is getting better. Farm work, even if romanticized into shepherd tropes or the like, supplies many of the poems in the canon that speak of work. As the percentage of Americans engaged in, or even living among others engaged in that line of work decreases, we see fewer of those poems.
Around Labor Day or May Day, I often find myself dipping into the work of Carl Sandburg. Despite his less than illustrious education, not of the Ivy League but more a Row-Crop League college with hobo semesters, and attendance in The Front Page era of journalism, rather than sessions abroad and drawing room soirees. Sandburg was by intent a thoroughgoing Modernist artist, making it new as much as any of the early 20th century Americans, but his Modernist solutions and prosody get little respect currently. Maybe they’re right, though I find Sandburg can be effective for my purposes. Judge those things as you might, he does pay attention to labor and laborers as colleagues. He can portray all kinds of struggle in doing so, but also endurance, achievement, and harbored joy.
Before I get on to the piece I found in Sandburg to celebrate Labor Day, let me suggest a rough analog of the Bechtel Test. Let me call it the Sandburg Test. To be clear, it’s not my suggestion that every poem has to be about work, about the things we do for our daily bread. But, if we are viewing an anthology or substantial poetry collection from a poet, to pass the Sandburg Test it has to have poems that deal with work in some substantial way. How does the speaker or characters in the poem relate to work? What are they doing that work for? What is it in presenting them that portrays something about life? What are the mysteries, sensations, and systems of that work?
What Sandburg poem did I choose? I picked a selection from the 6th part of a longer, multipart poem, “The Windy City.” This one is sort of an extended revisiting of Sandburg’s Greatest Hit “Chicago,” sometimes remembered as a boosterish paean to the great Midwestern American city, which it’s not — “Chicago” is a poem about a city and a workforce in struggle. “The Windy City” on the other hand is more mystic, and the section I chose is essentially a labor hymn. Physicists tell us that the things we see about us, solid things apparently, are in fact full of moving atoms and vibrating particles, their close motion making solidity. Sandburg’s windy city is such. The labor we celebrate on Monday, and do most every other Monday, is the gusty current that makes our world.
Looks solid enough, but it’s made of something as transitory as work. Carl Sandburg looks out on mid-century Chicago.
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My music for today’s piece is in my punk orchestral mode: simple musical structures making use of orchestra instruments and a few interlopers. You can hear it along with Sandburg’s words with a player gadget below. No gadget? Here’s a highlighted link, that’ll open even on Labor Day to present you with an alternative audio player. Want to read more of from the poem from which I selected today’s passage? Here’s a link to that.
Thank you for reading and listening. Thank you for the work you do when you’re not doing that. Yes, you may be paid for that, well or not, but our lives and communities are made out of that work. How can that not be mystical?
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*My diagnosis of this avoidance is that poets may still feel an expectation that they should either be full-time poets earning a living from their poems, or if not that, rich enough to not need a “day job.” Their day jobs then are not poetic, and so don’t appear in their poems. Poets with academic jobs are a considerable middle case however. I suspect administrative policies and faculty politics still don’t seem poetic. Perhaps office-based work in bureaucracies is harder to press into non-humorous verse than the village smithy or a steel-drivin’ man?
All too often there is someone dying that interrupts the summer. In my neighborhood, a musician* named August — even doubling the metaphors, named August Golden — was shot and killed last week. His friends speak highly of his kindness and good heart, and we don’t know exactly why he was killed when someone shot up a house concert in a backyard, wounding several and killing him. The story is the shooter came up, said nothing, fired a bunch of shots, and escaped running down an alley. There’s speculation that the attack might have something to do with the young gay and trans audience at the concert, and so — beyond the don’t-knows — that community has fears that this could be.
I’m thinking of August Golden on the anniversary of the poet Lorca’s killing in the midst of the Spanish Civil War. Revisiting Lorca’s story today to see if there was anything new — for example there have been multiple efforts this century to locate where the celebrated poet’s body was buried — I see that there’s also no agreement on who killed him in 1936 or why. It could have been Lorca’s politics, or because Lorca was gay, or even some personal dispute.
Today’s text is not by Lorca, but by his American contemporary Langston Hughes, a poem he called “Summer Night.” You can follow along as I discuss my impressions with this link to the poem. Hughes doesn’t say what summer month this night was in, but it feels very much like August to me. In America, and its northern parts, August has endings all over it. Long daylight hours recede. The freedom of summer for the young approaches the beginning of school weeks. Autumn and cooler weather beckons, and I’ve started wearing a jacket on some early morning bike rides.
Young Langston Hughes, writer and poet, and one of the early proponents of “Jazz Poetry”
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Hughes’ poem seems like that August of calendared endings, because he starts out with a litany of “lasts” in his poem. As in another Hughes poem I’ve presented here,“Railroad Avenue,” what he sees is as much what he hears, and it’s full of music of his turn of the century youth: “last” pianos, a “last” wind-up Victrola record player playing Jazz, and the cries of others — or their absence — with a “last” crying baby ceasing to silence. This section ends with the whispers of a heartbeat.
Hughes’ poem continues with its speaker (for simplicity, let’s assume it’s Hughes) now refraining on the word “empty.” What’s this night empty of?** Music and the companionship of voices. Hughes could have spent the entire poem describing tossing alone at night, but he doesn’t. He spends almost as much time on those things that depart in the poem. Maybe mechanical pianos don’t play in your neighborhood. Maybe it’s break-beats leaking from cars or punk rock not Victrolas, or the house on my corner that plays Mexican music on the weekend as folks gather under an awning on the front yard. This is what we miss when dying interrupts August. This noise that keeps us up, keeps us living.
For my noise tonight, I wanted to summon remote, leaking, night music. I decided to take a cue from the poem and use piano, but as I worked on the piece with my limited keyboard skills I chose to depend on sound design more than other musical ideas. The piano parts are simple triads, but mixed in the grand piano sound is a subtle melding of electric piano. And for the bass part, which was the musical line I followed when speaking Hughes’ words, I decided to mic my Epiphone Jack Casady hollow-body bass as if it was an acoustic instrument and to mix that with the electric pickup output the bass was designed to use. You can hear the result with the audio player below. No player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*The stories told about August Golden make him out as an embodiment of DIY punk, the whole idea that you learn to make what you want to have happen by making it happen. I recently wrote of the same spirit as a large part of what animates this project.
**Expanding on that final section where Hughes also talks of desire and “Needing someone, something.” Hughes sexuality is something of a mystery. There are some who believe he was gay, and others who thought he was largely asexual. This poem was included in his first poetry collection published while Hughes was in his twenties, and we do know that in his Victrola-era youth he yearned to be a writer, while this was strongly discouraged by his father.
I released the 700th Parlando Project audio piece earlier this month. I consider this an extraordinary achievement. I’m unaware that anyone has ever done anything like this* at this scale.
Sometime around 2015 I had an idea: that while poetry and music had long been combined, the ways you could do that hadn’t been fully exploited. I thought of the strains of Modernist poetry that were presumed to be obscure and non-musical, and believed that they had musical elements that would allow those poems to seep into one’s consciousness under the decoration and repetition of music. And I thought too of dusty words safe in their paper alabaster chambers — obsolete poetry, or lesser-known poets — could some of them be asked to come out and sing and dance?
If one would combine these words with music, how could the music illuminate or vivify them? I knew there were answers that’d already been given, so I wanted to try some of the other answers and maybe even find new ones. I knew the traditions of Art Song a bit, admired much of that; but I sometimes felt that Art Song settings and performance styles, while beautiful, didn’t always communicate all a poem’s possible environments and emotions. I knew the old-fashioned mid-century traditions of Jazz and Beatnik poetry pretty well, and despite Rap owing something to those things ancestrally, Rap’s insistent flow of words sometimes seemed more demonstrative than denotative to my ear. Indeed those two traditions, Art Song and Rap, poles apart in cultural associations, often suffered from a similar flaw: they needed to demonstrate talent and skill in the singer or rapper to execute tricky stuff, vocal feats. I’m not against that per se, I just thought there could be more than that.
Musically I was more aligned with two movements, also closer than superficialities might lead one to suspect: “folk music” and what was called variously punk rock, alternative, and indie music. These two musical movements could allow virtuosity, but they didn’t require it. They knew that simple could be as effective as complex, that one could be both simple and distinctive, that expensive equipment and recording perfection wasn’t essential.
I originally thought that the Parlando Project could best be done by other people. I even pitched it as an adlib series of collaborations between various musicians, bands and ensembles with words that might not be overly familiar to them. Sensible radio network people listened and wisely chose not to try this. They were wise because such an effort has opportunity costs, and the results could fail embarrassingly. My idea was not a good bet and would take resources from safer bets.
So, I decided to try another route, one most consistent with my alignments: Do It Yourself. Like hootenannies, sing out, kick out the jams, get in the van, DIY is a way to bypass the might-have-been, the we’re-not-ready, we-haven’t-been-given-permission obstacles. My singing voice didn’t suit Art Song, my less than agile speaking voice didn’t suit Rap.**
Who’d write the music? Mostly, I would. Who’d perform the music? I planned to pitch-in on what I could play as things started out, but later it was often myself playing all the instruments. Who’d select the words and present them? I would. Who’d record the music? Me. Who’d promote this and call proper attention to it? Alas, mostly me.
The result? It got done, however imperfectly. Things that hadn’t even been imagined had realizations that now exist, that others could hear. What was beyond my imagination? How many writers work I’d have meaningful encounters with. Those writers are almost always long dead, yet the work of composing, performing, and recording these combinations with music means I have hours of collaboration with them. The poem I start out with is often not the understood poem I’d write about at the end — and frankly, my understanding sometimes changes after I finish presenting the audio piece to you. We understand poems, if we understand them, with our whole lives.
I’ve learned new things musically out of necessity. I’ve become a somewhat better vocalist. As a recordist, I’ve figured out some things that work well enough. Would the pieces be better if someone more talented in each of these fields did these things? In most cases, yes. But that didn’t seem the choice. The choice seemed to be: nothing, silence, possibilities that remained “how about/what if…” thoughts and nothing else.
Then there’s that last part of the DIY bargain, promoting this Project and bringing it to attention, something that was done badly. I’m a lousy self-promoter. Many artists are. When I get up the courage to do it — which I consistently fail to do — I often do it badly with insufficient skill at figuring out the hook that draws interest. It’s also quite possible that the general idea here: a variety of words (not always “poetry’s greatest hits”) combined with a variety of musical styles has a very narrow appeal. That musical eclecticism, a choice that suits me, I suspect reduces appeal. The listener who might like my simple folk music style examples will not care for the electronic pieces will not like the let’s give it a go live small rock combo stuff, will not care for the “Punk Orchestral” pieces, will not care for the weird drone and minimalist stuff, and so on. I fear it may only take one or two examples someone doesn’t like to end their engagement with the Project. Yet, I can’t help myself, all different kinds of music are always in contrasting discussions in my head.
In summary, as I look over the more than seven years I’ve been doing this, I’m left with pride at what I’ve done. The self-questioning and pitying part of my emotions whispers to me “No one else is astonished. Are you the fool for thinking it astonishing, or are they the fool for not?” The sensible me judges those self-whispers. Replies that a few hundred read or listen on the best days to things that would not exist otherwise. I’ve received kind words from some of you, and if I haven’t replied enough to those messages it’s because I’m so grateful for them I can’t think of adequate words to respond. Some readers and listeners have gone even further and re-blogged or re-posted some of the things from the Parlando Project on your own blogs or on social media, something that’s been important in growing the audience for this.
But still the question sits in my mind on my doubting days: literary poetry and approximately realized indie music are both smallish groups. The combination of the two may not be additive as in my initial hopes, but subtractive. It’s possible I’ve done the most substantial job ever toward a goal inherently of not-much-interest. Or that I’m not good enough at it. Sobeit, it’s what my soul wants to do, and if such doubts try to stay me from doing this, I’ll listen to them and try to continue.
Earlier this month, as this post sat in drafts as I wondered how embarrassing, needy, or self-aggrandizing it was, I saw this quote in a column by someone who I never really knew, though she was technically a co-worker.*** In a final column in a local arts and entertainment paper, The Dispatch, that was itself folding its tents, long-time local radio host Mary Lucia wrote:
“Ultimately the world owes you nothing, but it’s OK to secretly believe it does.”
How can I tell if that’s true or not? I can’t even tell how I could tell. It’s one of those things that might take more than one lifetime to know. I remember that quote and I remember the trio of things I wrote above examining myself: “embarrassing, needy, self-aggrandizing.” I may not have enough time in my aging lifetime to find out what is most true in the balance — and any younger person reading this, even you may not have enough time for whatever you bill out to the world. Doubt has value, doubt may keep you from doing something foolish, but as of now, doubt doesn’t tell me what else to do. If I’m a fool, I must do what fools do, or nothing.
I can’t draw for beans, but I’ve had fun generating illustrations this year using Adobe’s new AI technology that claims it doesn’t use uncompensated work of artists.
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* New here? What’s this? Words, usually literary poetry from a range of eras, combined with a variety of original music, with posts here discussing my impressions of the poets and poetry as I encountered them in the making of those pieces.
**More than 50 years ago, in my naïve solitude, I imagined a type of music that would use a chorus of rhythmically spoken words to represent music. I even composed a couple of short pieces that I imagined could be performed that way, and eventually a script for a short play that expanded on these ideas. A year or so later, I heard The Last Poets recording and heard something partway like what I had imagined. I looked with admiration at the beginning of Rap, but I honestly have to say that I haven’t kept up with it. Besides my lack of speedy vocal chops, and generational distance from the modern masters of this form, the word-music I hear in my head sounds more like Carl Sandburg and Langston Hughes. I’m just as generationally removed from that latter pair as from today’s rappers, only in another direction. I guess I’m just weird that way.
***She would come to work about the time I was leaving my shift at a radio network, so I knew her more the way ordinary listeners did, as an on-air host.
Death is a funny thing, mainly because dying is treated so damn serious. Have you ever asked yourself this: are you afraid of death or are you afraid of dying? If you answer, “Well I’m afraid of death.” I ask you to further question yourself. Non-existence is easy, a gimmie, a non-task. Dying on the other hand? You can fear pain, suffering. You can fear what is left unremedied, unfinished, left undone. One can fear you will not do it well. That you will show too much or not enough emotion. You can fear you will do it too slow and draw out suffering — or have it happen too fast before one can set an agenda for the occasion.
This weekend is the anniversary of the official launch of the Parlando Project in 2016. This weekend is also the anniversary of my late wife’s death decades ago. Last weekend I learned that a poet/blogger who I’ve followed through much of the seven years of working on the Parlando Project has received one of those months-to-live diagnoses.*
In-between those weekends, someone posted the text I’m going to present today by Aldous Huxley. Here’s a link to where I saw it. The poster knew it as if it was a poem titled “Island.” Instead, it’s a passage from Huxley’s last book, a novel called Island. In using this as text I decided to call this short excerpt after a repeated invocation in the passage: “Lightly.”
I’m not very well-read when it comes to novels, but as a teenager I read Huxley’s best-known book Brave New World. I loved the SF world-building of it even if I likely missed good portions of the satire at that young age. After that I tackled Island as well, promoted on the paperback cover as an updated companion to Brave New World. I don’t recall much about Island, certainly not this passage. What could I remember? That Island had a bunch of ideas to present, but since I read it so long ago and so young, I retained nothing else. Looking at synopsis’s online this week, it appears that Huxley was trying to synthesize a long fascination with Asian spirituality and philosophy and apply that to his contemporary mid-20th century Western world.
I think this is the edition I read as a teenager
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Today I was able to look at a copy of Huxley’s novel, and the passage, presented as I first saw it in broken lines as if it was free verse, is indeed a block of prose within it. I said Island was Huxley’s last novel. He died of cancer a year after it was published.** I don’t know if Huxley had received one of those “months left” estimates as he worked on Island, but the passage spoken by a character in his final book could be the author speaking from, or to, himself — a reminder of how he felt he should approach dying.
In the book it’s spoken to a woman who is dying, attended by her husband and family. As I read the larger section the excerpt was from, I thought of being beside my late wife as she was dying. Yes, in essence, the teenage me with my youthful experience, could not have read the same book.
I was only able to do that reading for context this afternoon, a day after I had already completed the new audio piece. Maybe that’s of little matter. After all, even shorn of context as I saw it online, it immediately resonated this week with my thoughts for my distant faintly-colleague. Perhaps you will find resonance as you hear it too.***
I made a couple small alterations to the excerpt to generalize it. Then I composed the music for it on acoustic guitar, playing that instrument in a somewhat pianistic style,**** and then combined the two in the performance you can hear using the graphical audio player below. No visible player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*This poet and blogger, Robert Okaji, has been mentioned elsewhere here in the Parlando Project blog. Besides being a fine poet in general, Okaji helped me by example and brief comment to continue developing my penchant for freely translating classical Chinese poetry, something he also did. Sometimes we would adapt the same poems from the same literal glosses, producing two facets, two impressions, of the Tang Dynasty masters. I never met Okaji, though I’m glad I got to see him read his work online once during the pandemic.
**A darkly comic touch to Huxley’s death. His fame from Brave New World was still considerable in the Sixties. After all, in many ways, his book was more relevant to the US/British culture in that era than its quasi-competitor 1984. Another late work of his, The Doors of Perception about the benefits of psychedelic drugs (also a subplot in Island) was a pioneering examination of that idea — and the source for a Californian rock band’s name a few years later. But instead of Huxley getting the few days of reassessment that would normally have attended his death, he got bupkis. You see, he died on November 22nd, 1963, the day the American President was assassinated. The world’s news-hole was filled with non-literary matters.
***As it turns out, this excerpt has been shared numerous times that I found when I searched for information about the words this week. Sometimes the passage retains its prose layout, other times it’s presented as if it is a poem. A small point, but most of the online quotes have slight wording differences from what I saw in a 1975 edition of the book I looked at today.
****By using the whole neck of the guitar and alternate tunings, one can expand the pitch and timbral range of the acoustic guitar beyond that of the more folk-song style pieces I present here otherwise.
A great many countries have holidays honoring their nation’s soldiers, often with an emphasis on memorializing the dead of past wars. The United States has two such holidays, a Veteran’s Day on the date of the WWI Armistice and the one that arrives this weekend, Memorial Day.
Long time readers here will know I’ve presented a lot of soldier’s poems in this Project, and poems otherwise about wars. This is fitting, war as a poetic subject matter goes back to Homer and further.
Many soldiers’ poems are at least ambiguous about the worth of war, some are outright harrowing. But that’s poets. Outside of poetry, many in the US have developed a particular carefulness in speaking of our wars, a hesitancy to speak honestly about those ambiguities mixed with a deadened obligatory reverence for veterans — a reverence with no other required obligation or attention. Yet we have these two holidays.
Well, do we have such an obligation to remember the horrors of war and the hard-won realities the warriors helped enforce? Asked this way the answer is suggested: yes, we do. For this year’s Memorial Day, I’m going to present two poems that suggest something else in addition.
The first one is by poet Kevin FitzPatrick, who I’ve been memorializing since his death in late 2021. Kevin was not a vet, but he helped with the arrangements that led to his father Bernard FitzPatrick’s memoir, A Hike Into the Sun, about his WWII experience as a prisoner of war in the Bataan Death March. Let me briefly summarize that, for those for whom this is ancient or foreign history: In the early days after Japan declared war on the US, the Philippines came under attack. The fighting was fierce, with Americans and Filipinos resisting without anything like sufficient logistical support to hold out very long.
After they surrendered the near 70 mile march began, with brutal mistreatment and wanton execution of captives adding to the suffering of the weakened and injured soldiers. Forced labor for the duration of the war followed for those who survived the early days. Death counts vary, ranging from 5600 to over 10,000, continental American soldiers and their Filipino comrades. WWII had many accounts of human depravity. This was one of them.
Kevin’s father survived the march, survived the years as a POW doing forced labor, and then wrote his book about it in the 1990s. That’s only background, this isn’t what today’s poem is about. “Survivor” is about his son Kevin visiting his dad in the 21st century while the infirm father in his late 80s was in a care home. How much can someone like myself know about Bernard FitzPatrick’s experience?
It just happens that one of the Parlando Project’s mottos is “Other Peoples’ Stories.” That motto also admits, understands that I (and you) can only partially understand others’ experiences, even if poems and performances might inform us somewhat.
I’m not going to spoil the ending of the poem, you’ll need to listen to my performance in order to hear it. Without spoilers I can say that when I first heard Kevin’s poem, when he read it in draft form, his tale of a chair transfer reminded me of my time working in nursing homes and like Ray was performing those kinds of tasks, but the ending took it another place I didn’t expect the poem to go. You can hear my performance with the audio player below. If you don’t see that player (some ways of reading this blog hide it), this highlighted link will open a new tab to play it.
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Knowing how Filipinos and US troops suffered in the hands of the Japanese, what does the ending say? There’s no secret right answer, this isn’t a pop quiz. Instead of defining a clear answer, let me supply another poem in a performance I shared here many years ago before some of you followed this Project. I think of it as a great Memorial Day poem because for it to achieve its greatness you need to think about it, think about what it implies in the compressed story it tells. The poem is Carl Sandburg’s “Grass.” Coincidentally, Sandburg was a veteran of the Spanish-American war, the conflict that made the Philippines an American Commonwealth up until independence just after the ending of WWII around 50 years later. Sandburg as a soldier wore Civil War era heavy woolen uniforms while stationed in tropical Puerto Rico, and his commander was a Civil War officer. That’s how close his time was to the bloody American Civil war whose battles are mentioned. “Grass” was written when the bloody battles of WWI, also mentioned, were contemporary events.
Kevin FitzPatrick and Carl Sandburg. A couple of poets imply some things you’re not likely to hear elsewhere this Memorial Day
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Sandburg’s poem in its short duration reminds of the costs of war — but what does his ending mean? Does it mean it will be best all-tolled when we have the option to forget their sacrifice? Does it simply observe that time passes, and we will forget, eventually? Is he saying that more wars, more bloody battles, obscure the dead of past wars? Chances are you won’t hear any of those statements in any Memorial Day commentary or post — but you will hear about Memorial Day discount savings, and rote uncomplicated praise for service.
Here’s the audio player for The LYL Band performing Carl Sandburg’s poem “Grass” live several years back. And here’s the backup link for it.
I have a new audio piece today, combined with a continuation of my Parlando Project influences-as-episodic-memoir series. The audio piece uses text from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons — worthy in itself — but what suggested it was a question that reading about Stein brought to my mind during The Seventies when I started to look into her life and work a bit.
Despite being nothing like an expert on Stein, I could fill this post with stuff about what she did and how she went about doing it. I’m going to make a summary of that a footnote, though that’s worth reading if you know even less about her than I do.* There’s one detail from Stein’s life that hooks into my story as I entered The Seventies. I’ll come back to that. Watch for it.
In the last post I’d left college in 1970, disconnected in the aftermath of the political activism post Kent State and my failure as a young editor of my college’s student newspaper. I wrote of some musical and poetry experiences in the early Seventies there. Another thing was both continuous and changed at this point: I needed to find a job. This was continuous because I’d most always worked from my middle teens. I’d had paper routes, did odd jobs for the local bank, and besides my work in my second year with the school paper, I’d been what was called a “work-study” student working most days in the college cafeteria. Although it didn’t occur to me then, I suspect the more well-off students may have noticed that I was doing kitchen work while they were only concerned with regular college life, but this continuousness of work was ever more complete from the time I was 20 until I was past the age of 65. Another way to say that was that I worked full-time hours all those year with no more of a break than a worker’s vacation. After leaving college I worked frying hamburgers at a fast-food restaurant and on a factory floor making vertical blinds, but in 1971 I was back in my small Iowa college town looking for work. I went to a nursing home in the town, thinking they might have kitchen work. Instead, they asked if I wanted to work as an orderly/nurses aide.** I took that job.
So, if work was continuous for me, what was changed? In some expectations one is supposed to find one’s career in their 20s. I had decided earlier that I wanted to write. In some other lifetimes perhaps I would have found an entry-level writing job, in another I might have wandered into something with politics. I’m not sure however if those alternative livelihoods would have suited me, for reasons I may discuss later in this series.
My job in the nursing home was in the Extended Care Facility, the wing for those patients who needed more-or-less complete bodily care for the rest of their lives. Many were completely bedridden, and many of that portion also unable to communicate. I worked the overnight 11-7 shift with one RN. I’m guessing we had around 20 patients in the unit. Our night work was turning the incapacitated every four hours to prevent bed sores, to clean up the incontinent and their bed linen, and to occasionally minister to those who awakened, often with some level of anxiety and agitation. It was hard physical work, and I will confess that I let the physical work deaden me somewhat at first to the Sisyphean nature of their lives and my tasks with them.
If one has a lot of triangles to move from Iowa to New York…
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I moved to New York state to stay after a few months of that, carrying everything my wife and I owned in the bed of a rusty 1960 Chevy pickup truck that I’d purchased for $200 from my wages. The truck was so rusty that I could see the tires through holes in its floorboard, but other than a hydraulic clutch that would reengage itself if depressed too long, it ran OK in its rattly way. Back in New York I was living in a poor, mostly Black section of Westchester, renting a room from an elderly Mrs. Whitted who had a framed life-time membership certificate to the NAACP on her living room wall. I worked there first in another nursing home, a much fancier one in upscale Westchester, on the day shift this time. There were more staff there, but some elements of the care bothered me.*** Being low on the care system org chart I chose not to try to remedy that, and left for a job working on a med-surg floor at a Catholic hospital on the overnight shift again. The regular charge nurse on my floor was Miss Watson, a young highly competent Black Anglo-Jamaican with an impeccable English accent that would match a Sidney Poitier. We worked along with an LPN and at least one female aid (usually one of several Afro-Americans with a Great Migration southern-American accent) to complement my coverage of the male side of the patient census. I fully enjoyed working with Miss Watson. The most peculiar absurdity of her life that I got to observe was when patient relatives came in around the change to the morning shift after talking on the phone with Miss Watson. They’d assumed a starched-white Englishwoman, and so the recognition scenes when they arrived and saw her dark black skin always had me stifling a laugh. How much humor Miss Watson could consistently find in this might be another matter.
These orderly/nurse’s aide jobs paid a dime or so over minimum wage. The work was physically hard and even at its most basic levels it involved deep responsibilities all out of proportion to what it paid. Around this time, I came to embrace this necessary and underpaid work. It provided an inescapable, palpable, meaning to my life, something that struggling over a poem or prose draft could not demonstrate objectively. It allowed me access to all kinds of people in a wide range of economic classes and backgrounds. Occasionally, I thought of the members of my generation who served in the military, some drafted, and I told myself this was my service.
Eventually I moved up to Newburgh, New York, which will need to be another post. I worked my last overnight shift at the hospital and then I hitchhiked up to Newburgh at the end of my shift. I’d already gotten a job at St. Luke’s Hospital there in the Emergency Room. I’d work the 3-11 shift there the next day.
Are you waiting for Gertrude Stein to return? Here’s the connection. I can remember reading about the little Paris apartment she and her partner, edibles pioneer Alice B. Toklas, shared with Stein’s brother and a wall-smothering collection of Modernist art bought directly from artists that she knew, and the world would know later. It was there Stein lived from 1903 after leaving Johns Hopkins Medical School short of a medical degree.
As a time-travel destination that place is five-star. Artists, writers, critics, composers who once needed only to travel geographically to go there, wrote of it in their memoirs. A famous place.
Gertrude Stein in front of some of the Modernist paintings collected in her Paris apartment.
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You know what I thought reading of that apartment? Yes, there was wonder. How did they figure which artists to collect? He, she, they, all of them were there, people before the pronouns. So and so met so and so there? Hemmingway finding part of his prose style in this small apartment — and from a woman? But my most nagging thought? Something else, another question: “Who paid the rent?”****
Many (most?) writers have the ability to be motivated by that experience, though in reading I can tell some are, and others are not. I myself am inconsistent. I have written and performed poems here that the richest and most comfortable person in my time might have written or could easily relate to. And then again, I may overselect poems whose speakers are in extremis.
Some take a commercial-first approach to their art, making sure it earns the rent money. My nursing work from age 20 to nearly 40 illustrated a variety of life to me, but it also allowed me (with worries) to pay the rent.***** Others take a cause-first approach, advocating with their art resolutely for remedies to what they see. Could my nursing work have reduced that aspect of my writing? That has just occurred to me. I’m not sure, though looking back I’m more at glad I didn’t have to point to my writing, and later my music, as what justified my life. And “Other People’s Stories?” Each day in the Emergency Room you’d meet up with other people’s stories. If your own were limited, or intractable, you could move their stories forward.
I had found a job that in those days allowed one to pay the rent. Inside that conceptual room, paid for by working with the sick and injured, I worked on the writing. And those years of unbroken work, of clock-in every working day, and rotating shifts? I suspect a habit retained as this Project approaches 700 pieces this year.
Today’s audio piece is from Gertrude Stein’s still controversial, still avant-garde, collection of “Cubist poems” Tender Buttons. That book is divided up into three sections: People, Objects, and Rooms. I performed the opening to the final section, Rooms today. Tender Buttons remains gnomic. Though the words themselves are plainspoken, a straightforward meaning is most often hard to make out. My performer’s working theory during the recording was that she’s making a statement about Modern Art and Cubism. Rather than a center and conventional panorama, Stein holds for more perspectives at once. She seems to be advocating for something not just decorative or the easy dessert of sentiment (“silver and sweet”). She sounds a “Life is real, Life is earnest” almost Longfellowean note when she says “A preparation is given to the ones preparing.” She perhaps compares a conventional painting with a center and a border to an empty dress, flat on a hanger. The final paragraph/stanza moves, synesthesia-wise, to music where the flowing facets of a Cubist painting may show a sequence of time.
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Though printed as prose, the musical rhythm and rhyme of this poem arises with any earnest effort to read it aloud. If one was to modify it to conventional lineation, parts might almost pass as Emily Dickinson, albeit the more obscure and compressed Dickinson.
You can hear my performance with a drums, bass, piano, and electric guitar quartet with the player gadget below. No graphical gadget? This highlighted link is an alternative way to hear it.
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*These footnotes are going to be long, and are for the more curious. They’re not necessary to enjoy the audio piece. Stein is easily classifiable as equal to Apollinaire and Ezra Pound (both of which she knew and interacted with) for influence on the emerging Modernist movement in the first quarter of the 20th century. Her influence on English language Modernist writing is not consistently admitted or admired, but her influence also extends to Modernist music — and along with her brother Leo, she’s absolutely central to the development and appreciation of Modern art.
The most amazing thing about her pre-Paris youth is that in a 19th century when women’s education and careers were constrained, she attended Radcliff (meeting, being mentored by, and admired by, William James) and then sought to become a medical doctor through graduate work at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Her center of interest was how the mind and its perceptions work, something she was studying at a time when Sigmund Freud had just started publishing. She dropped out of Johns Hopkins before graduating however.
**Job titles and even jobs listings were routinely gendered in 1970. Orderly was a male job, nurses’ aide the woman’s. Training for either was generally informal and on the job. Later in the Seventies I barely started an academic RN program, but affording the classes and especially the time and automotive costs of traveling to the nursing school put the brakes on that. Since I worked in teaching hospitals for over a decade after this as an aide hand-in-hand with nurses, interns, residents, and staff doctors, I learned a great deal of practical knowledge along the way. Administering medicine was not legally allowed, but I eventually did much of everything else the LPNs and RNs did. Afterwards, I always called what I did nursing, as it was a better description of my role for most of that decade-plus. In the middle 70s I helped in a small way to train early EMTs and given how much I liked the pace and variety of work in Emergency Rooms, I might have gotten into that line of work if I had come along a few years later.
The gendered job titles may have faded out as the Seventies progressed, but some of the work remained gendered. Despite having a poet’s level of athleticism and large muscle development, I was often called on to move or lift heavier patients, or to help restrain out-of-control people. Given how many stories there have been in recent years of people killed while being restrained (one in the news this month) I have wondered retrospectively if a different fate could have involved me in such a case. As things worked out, I never injured anyone while restraining them, though besides wear and tear I got a couple of minor injuries.
***I suspected a co-worker of patient abuse. I was new — they’d been there for some time. I had nothing concrete, and other longer-tenured coworkers thought they’d seen more, and that was part of my unease. A better person would have tried to organize a complaint and urge an investigation.
****Did you go to this footnote to find the answer? I’m not enough of a scholar to know all the details. Paris was dirt cheap then, there was some Stein family wealth, and the idea of artistically curious Americans of some means being gifted with broadening time abroad was common. Another Stein sibling, Michael, who also lived in Paris, has been cited as the man who handled the family finances there. The Stein bought-cheap-then paintings eventually became capital gains. At one later point someone noted a missing painting from the crowded apartment walls and Stein explained “We are eating the Cézanne.”
*****I’m no economist, but it’s my understanding that rent and housing costs have risen compared to the wages that of job earns now. It’s not my intent to engage in a walk-uphill-both-ways misery Olympics, just to explain some things that led to making this Project. Has any economist explained how jobs like the ones I held then, which are physically hard, unpleasant in some elements, demanding of all-shifts work, are at least mildly dangerous, have a chronic shortage of workers (much less good ones), and can have a life-and-death level of need and responsibility, yet pay less than much easier jobs for which there is a surplus of applicants? In my last few years of hospital work I moved to being a ward-clerk: typing, paperwork, general workflow organization and support (all of which I did as a nurses aide, as well as patient care) —and I then got a small raise.
It’s usually of little use for an artist to apologize for their work, and this is so even though most have self-doubts. Perhaps more so, women artists will speak about “imposter syndrome,” but I’d guess that many/most male artists have the same feelings, they just don’t talk about it. The plain fact is that we’re all pretending to be what we want to be, to go to the place we want to go to. We maybe get there, we maybe don’t — but we’re all traveling, and we all get lost sometimes.
I even have trouble with the word “pretentious.” I say that, though I know the problem that word is describing: the embarrassing failure where something doesn’t achieve what it clearly wants to achieve. It’s just that most good, and nearly all great art, starts out with exactly that urge: to make something better, to make it new, to stretch and extend the maker’s talents, to make something over the horizon from what the artist knows. Since the same urge produces success and failure, it’s not the urge or the hubris that’s the problem. Don’t beat yourself up over that urge, don’t beat your breast over the failures. Reflexive humble-brag is exceedingly boring. If you must, get through any of that quickly. One of my animating maxims is “All Artists Fail.” As I’ve written about that maxim extensively here, that paradoxically comforts me.
I’m not an expert on Kenneth Patchen, but the general impression I get from him is like a 20th century American William Blake, that he self-invented himself and his credentials, and that’s easy for me to admire. I spent much of this week looking for a poem, a text, that would inspire me, and shake me out of some creative doldrums; and after striking out both swinging and looking during several at bats inside several books, I came upon this one. Since the text of this Kenneth Patchen poem doesn’t appear to be available to link, here it is:
One can think on the statement that “death is something which poems must be about.” That’s sort of true, and I laugh at it.
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It doesn’t appear to have a title in the early Selected Poems volume I found it in, but the first line was used as such when Patchen was recorded reading it. The poem is read unaccompanied, but Patchen predated the Beats in doing the mid-century poetry with music thing that’s an inspiration to me. He reads it slowly, precisely. I hear it silent on the page as more anguished in its effect, and in trying to record a performance of it this week I first tried almost shouting out parts of it. After trying that I decided that wasn’t working, and tried a more understated take — only to find that my voice was horse from the earlier takes. I did my best in the time I had, and that’s the performance you can hear today.
“She had concealed him” seems to be using something of a collage of voices. Not so directly as a Patchen favorite of mine “Do the Dead Know What Time It Is,”but the opening seems like the start of a fairy tale, then there are bits of realistic daily speech, and then the fantastic metaphor of the poems final lines. As so often in Patchen poems, there’s a sense not so much that God is love, but that Love is god.
The music today makes use of some concepts of mine that are, to convention and many listeners, wrong. I like the rub of outside notes and grotesque melodic contours.* Rather than having a straightforward harmonic foundation below a singular or a mathematically related set of melody notes, I’m fond of twined melodic lines that respond or contrast in turns with each other. And as an electric guitar player accompanying singers or poetic readers, I clearly don’t know when to shut up and not play my guitar. This last one I might change, perhaps should change, but in the immediacy of the playing moment I’m believing that strong words, read with force, are able to stand toe-to-toe with electric guitar.
Frankly, I worry that the resulting musical performance may have too much of all of the above. Is that from a failure of nerve, or a failure of execution? Am I reflexively using old habits, not stretching out to something else? Well, I meant what I played, meant my reading performance of Patchen** — but meaning and intent didn’t allay my doubts. Yesterday I made four completed attempts to mix this. With my self-expected release schedule and time conflicts, it’s rare to go beyond two alternate mixes. I still decided to let the music continue for a bit more than an extra minute past the reading, because I liked the echoing musical conversation in the deep dark cave.
And there’s this perspective: all that is just one musical mode here. I have other pieces that are less cluttered, more accessible, and less contrary to expectations.
Returning to the thoughts of the opening of this post: the middle parts of what I write today are parenthetical and not something I want to take more of your time with. Non-paralyzing self-analysis is likely uninteresting to readers or listeners, but it can be effective as part of the journey of making art. I’m done trying to make this piece any better. I think the best moments that I hear in it and what Patchen wrote may be worth your time. My job with this Project is to move onto the next piece, to see what I can find and do with that. Thank you for reading and listening. The player gadget to hear the musical performance of Kenneth Patchen’s “She had concealed him” is below for many, and this highlighted link is there for the others.
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*More than once, what I play has been characterized as out of tune or dissonant. Some of that is timbral, and some of it is wide vibrato, but often it is note choice and sequence. I don’t always hear it that way. I think harmony has rules, that can be broken or bent, but there’s propriety there. But melody? Melody is free. Yes, I’ll acknowledge that certain melodic contours generally cause admirable effects, but I myself am easily bored with stock moves. Two bands I admire, Television and the Velvet Underground, were each said to have banned playing Blues riffs that were part of the expected electric guitar vocabulary. I on the other hand, and in today’s piece for example, am playing Blues expression (stinky, funky notes and wide vibrato) without the expected sequence.
I think the opening electric guitar chord today was likely a subconscious attempt to refer to the chord at the opening of Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac version of his “Black Magic Woman,” and Green’s Fleetwood Mac was another band like the combo I constructed for today’s piece that tried to find room for an overplus three-electric-guitar frontline. That band’s Live at the Boston Tea Party set is foundational to me.
**I felt my earlier more histrionic reading was less effective and my more resigned reading better and more true to the poem, not a retreat.
Frank Hudson 