Top Ten

The Ten Most Read Posts in the First Decade of the Parlando Project

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I worry I’m going to get all meta on you, writing posts on posts, but before I leave the Parlando Project’s 10-year anniversary, I thought I’d do a brief rundown of the most popular posts as a companion to the series on the most listened to audio pieces.

Typical posts here have changed over the years. Some of the earliest ones were quite brief – just small introductions to the audio pieces – and for the first couple of years they more or less duplicated the show notes for the podcast that distributes the audio pieces. At launch I had hopes short format (typically 2-5 minute) podcasts might be something that would find an audience. This didn’t turn out to be the case, though a small number of people do subscribe and download the audio from Apple Podcasts or other podcast directories.

Soon enough I realized that there was a much greater audience for the audio pieces from readers of the blog. The posts here got a bit longer and more substantial, to the point that a casual visitor might think the songs were a sidelight to the posts.* I myself remain hesitant to do the typical blog, the episodic personal journal thing. Other writers, with other personalities and experiences, can make that focus work, but for me I cringe when I fear I’ve slipped into a self-indulgent mode. I suppose I touch on that sort of thing obliquely, but the posts here have evolved into a casual record of my encounter with the poems and their poets: impressions I received from their art, interesting details I came across, occasional afterthoughts on how the music was made. Long time readers may have noticed a shift in tone over the years. As a writer I sometime use a specific supposed reader to guide my presentation, and for a great portion of the posts over the years I used my kid as that “reader in mind.” Now as far as I know, they’ve not read anything I’ve posted here, nor would they likely care to, but they and their peer group were who I imagined as I wrote many of the posts in the middle of the Project’s run.** Because of that, the posts over those years start out being addressed to a curious middle schooler and the age of this imagined reader increases through the teenage years.

Now In the last few years, the lodestar of that imagined childhood reader has become less prominent. I still think about speaking to the now 20-something demographic, but I’m also considering a broader, blurrier audience. And that audience has grown considerably, as best as I can tell. Spates of bot activity make the audience growth seem very dramatic, but when I analyze the granular breakdowns in the stats there are more “real” visits demonstrated amid the web scrapers.

Here then is the list of the most visited posts. As with the first-ten-years songs rundown, there’s a seniority bias in the list: all but one are from between 2017-2020. Every daily or weekly report I look at reminds me that some posts, written years back, addressed to a young teenager, are still getting visited.

sunrise through the pergola on Powderhorn Lake

Sunset or sunrise? The Parlando Project’s 10-year Anniversary August is ending, but September begins.

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10. The Aim Was Song.  Frost’s poem is one of only two that appear on both the most listened songs and most read posts. I honestly can’t tell why this post, among the many Robert Frost posts I’ve published, is the most read. Possibly the popularity of the song I made from the poem.

9. The Sparrow.  The outlier, a later post from 2024. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s short poem of poetry and music being put out there without assurance of an audience might just resonate generally with poets and musicians. But also, written by a pioneering Afro-American poet, it’s a metaphor for the great gift that Black artists have given to American culture.

8. Orpheus with his lute made trees, or springtime ambiguous.  I don’t always do a explication of what a poem means, as I can be satisfied with a poem that goes all Marrianne Moore, sufficient just to be. But this popular post tries to untangle Shakespeare.

7. The Stare’s Nest at my Window.  Here I write about Yeats causing me to read up on the particularities of the Irish Civil War, something that I knew nothing about before reading the poem. This is the second – with the Frost – that appears on both the song and blog posting Top Ten.

6. To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing.  Yates again. Unlike other popular posts I can be pretty sure why this one gets so many visits: I did some research to find out who Yates’ “Friend” was, what the “Work” was, and how did that turn out in the end.

5. The Lake Isle of Innisfree.  Yeats wants to dominate the middle innings of this list it seems. This one’s fun fact that may have drawn visits: it tells how this echt Irish poem (it’s even printed on the country’s passports), verse so full of rural charms, was inspired on a busy commercial street in London.

4. The Red Wheelbarrow.  I assume the wide presence of this famous short Modernist poem on reading lists and school anthologies draws the hits, but I (uncharacteristically) spend more time talking about the musical tactics I used in setting it. Another schoolbook favorite, Sandburg’s “Fog” just made place 290, about a quarter of the way down, and with that one I wrote more about the poem than the music. Maybe this one generates a lot of disappointed “I searched for info on” folks?

3. “Hope” is the thing with feathers.  I’ve written a few “hot takes” or “wild ass guesses” about what poems are getting at over the years, and this “I’ll bet you’ve never read this poem looking at it this way” post is the most popular of the bunch. The key supposition here is that avid poetry fan Emily Dickinson is commenting on a poem by a fellow Emily, Emily Bronte, in this well-known poem of Dickinson’s.

2. Poem 1 from Twenty Love Poems.  I like me some Surrealist verse, but that doesn’t mean I’ll let the Surrealist off the hook for attitudes that I sense are being put forward. This is from a book of 20 love poems by the young Pablo Neruda that is extraordinarily popular in Neruda’s Spanish. The series opens with this one, and as I translated it for my performance I had to snort a bit at the macho overstatement I found in it. The same week I translated the last poem in the sequence, a much more measured and bittersweet love poem – still self-centered, but one I personally preferred to the opener. That post is popular too (#89), but not read as often as this one.

1. Chains At Her Feet.  On one hand, I wouldn’t have guessed this one would top the list, if only because its audio piece is one of the minority of audio pieces here where I wrote the words, and wrote them likely thinking from the start to sing them. But then, every evening it appears on the daily leaderboard, mixed in with the most popular just-published posts. My best guess, the little-known photo in the post that shows a detail most visitors to the Statue of Liberty never see: that the grand lady welcoming immigrants is standing with a broken shackle and loosened chains at her feet.

*Eventually I’ve written some posts, even a couple of series of posts, that aren’t tied to any audio piece at all – but this remains a blog about the Parlando Project, and I personally still think the Project’s songs melding mostly literary poetry with the original music in differing styles is the point of it all.

**Might she someday age to the point she’d want to read these posts, or hear this music? I can’t say for sure, but given that things posted to blogs on the Internet share the impermanence of all things, they might not be there then.

The most listened to song from the first decade of the Parlando Project

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Before I reveal this Project’s most listened to musical piece, some short notes about a couple of things that didn’t appear at the top of the stats which informed this all-time (so far) Top-Ten.

No LYL Band songs. This Project grew out of music that I’ve been making with keyboard player and vocalist Dave Moore for more than 45 years as the LYL Band. From the start of playing together we sometimes included poetry or other peoples’ words they had not designed to sung or performed. This continued after the Parlando Project launched, and they make up a portion of pieces shared here throughout the years. Many of these Top Ten pieces are worked-out and worked-on arrangements, often done “one-man-band” style where I play and track each part, discarding inferior takes and thinking through what works best. But, when Dave and I play together, we track “live” in the purest/rawest sense: most often one-take and without really introducing the song to each other. I usually provide Dave with a chord sheet for the pieces I bring to a session – Dave sometimes does for me when he’s singing one. It’s extraordinarily spontaneous. Given that neither of us are virtuosos or trained improvisors, that this ever works well enough to present something worth retrospective listening surprises and pleases me. As time passes, as cultural expectations of craft and technology engender rising baselines of sound quality and tightness in recording, I still treasure that kind of music. Against Artificial Intelligence it brings Art-farcical Intransigence.

No recent songs. Nothing from the last six years made it to the Top Ten. I should have expected this. While blog readership has steeply increased over the ten years, listenership has had a much flatter curve, so the longer a piece has been available, the more likely it is to have gathered higher listens. Most new pieces gather a blip over the first couple of weeks from those who follow here, but then there is the “long tail” where listens accrue over time. When I look at daily stats reports the list of pieces getting a listen on the past day is typically 40-60 listings long.

The Top Ten is full of stuff from 2018-2020, and seeing this I wondered if this was a sweet spot in the Project’s development. It was a time where I could spend four-days-a-week working on composition and recording, largely unhindered – and I can hear some of the concentrated care and regular, scheduled, luxurious, time in the Top Ten I’ve been presenting to you this week. I also envy the level of energy and endurance I could marshal as a younger person. But still I tell myself: I’ve learned things over the years of doing this – even garnered some improved recording technology and techniques – and I think (comparing best to best) that I can at least equal the level of those earlier pieces.

So what was the piece with the most listens out of the more than 900 I’ve published here since 2016? Emily Dickinson’s “Ample make this Bed,”  that broadly referencing and deeply felt ode to love, to rest, to death from 2018 – a piece I did shortly after visiting the Dickinson Homestead museum in Amherst that summer.

Listening to it now eight summers later I marvel at the number of tracks making up this recording: drum-set, bass, electric piano, some synth line in there, my chant-not-quite-singing vocal, and that patient, excellent, and fair electric guitar solo. Could I equal it now? I can’t say for sure – it’s hard to judge “equal” between differing kinds of musical expression too – but I’d be happy if any piece I complete next week would work as well as this one does.

Here’s the audio player to hear that performance. Your player “called home?” This alternative, a highlighted link that will open a new tab with the audio player your way of reading this blog suppresses.

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“Or if you want something visual, that’s not too abysmal” as one of the recent additions to the choir invisible sang, here’s the lyric video of this recording of “Ample make this Bed”  I did a few years later.

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And before I leave this post, thanks to everyone who’s ever listened to one of these Parlando Project musical pieces, and more than double thanks to those who have listened to more than one.

The Top Ten most listened to songs from the first decade of the Parlando Project, part 2

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Returning now to our countdown of the ten most listened to Parlando Project musical pieces, already in progress. Today we pick up at the fourth most-listened-to song.

Number 4 is Jean Toomer’s “Her Lips are Copper Wire.”   I’m in the middle of doing a series on founding Surrealist Paul Éluard, known for his Modernist love poems. Now, I believe Best! And GOAT rankings should remain silly exercises – but as much as I like Éluard and want more English-speakers to be aware of him, it’s entirely possible that the greatest Surrealist love poem is this one, written by this American, Toomer. Musically, I use acoustic guitar and spare piano, a combination I see in several other of this Parlando Top Ten – and there’s what I think is a more successful electric guitar solo at the end here.

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Moving to the podium steps, we have the third-most-popular song in the decade of this Parlando Project, Robert Frost’s “The Aim Was Song.”   This one is an outright electric guitar song. That statement should go double, as I played the synth part that weaves with the guitar using a second guitar with an added MIDI pickup which lets my fretboard fingers work with electrically-generated instrument sounds and control virtual instruments.

Samick Greg Bennett line MIDI pickup guitar

I went to a store to look for a guitar to host the MIDI pickup, seeking the cheapest thing with a neck I liked on their wall of low-end used instruments. This battered Samick fit the bill. The red strap is a string damper, as I don’t want any open string overtones to confuse the MDI signal.

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Runner up in this list of most popular Parlando musical pieces? “Backyard”  by Carl Sandburg.  What a great piece for a late August evening in America. Sandburg, this child of immigrants, listens from his porch as darkness starts to come earlier now in his Chicago, and hears the sounds of other immigrants under a benevolent moon-universe above all borders and clocks. I know I played the synth and string parts here with my little plastic keyboard because those parts use volume and modulation wheels on the keyboard to modify and shape the notes. Vocally I add what I call “inline epigraphs,” little quotes from other songs that I hear echoing with Sandburg’s poem.

Little Plastic Keyboard 2026-Novation Launchkey 25

This Little Plastic Keyboard replaced an even smaller one that I wore out over the decade of this Project. I have a cousin who teaches piano and she’s agast that I put a scribble-strip with the white notes names above the keys. The two wheels to the left of the keys are volume and modulation controller wheels. The Novation MIDI controller is one of the least expensive  currently sold with both of these implemented as real wheels.

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What was the piece with the most listens among the more than 900 audio pieces I’ve published here over the past ten years? Check back soon as I reveal that one in my next post.

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The Top Ten most listened to songs from the first decade of the Parlando Project, part 1

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I can’t let the anniversary month of August go by without doing a summary of what have been the most popular of the more than 900 musical pieces and more than 1,000 posts since the Parlando Project publicly launched in 2016,

I’m going to do this Top Ten in a 6-3-1 format to keep these posts from running too long. Another difference: I tend to talk most about the words we use here and their authors, but the next few posts are going to be more about the music we compose and play as part of this Project. So, let’s not waste any time, on to the countdown.

At position 10 we find pioneering Imagist H.D.’s “The Pool.”   This is a personal favorite of mine, not only for the enigmatic poem that provides the words, but for the early use of an arpeggiator to let me incorporate the – what is it? – mandolin or zither or oud virtual instrument here along with low bowed string riff that I played with a little plastic keyboard or my MIDI guitar. Maybe I should note here that “virtual instruments” (VI) does not mean AI by any definition of the term. They are databases of recorded notes, often with a range of articulations that can be called up instantly and played, just as “real” instruments are played or scored and played.

 

At position 9 we have another set of early Modernist initials: E. E. Cummings’ “Crepuscule (I Will Wade Out).   I had forgotten that Bjork had already set a version of this poem when I did this setting in 2018. The instrumentation chosen is a favorite of mine: acoustic guitar and spare, sustained piano. The way the strings on a small wood box mix with the strings in large hardwood coffin struck with hammers as their overlapping waveforms combine never fails to please me. Here, as I often do, I’m playing single notes on the piano so as not to challenge my nearly non-existent piano skills. The piano is doing what a simple electric bass or solitary low bowed-string part might do in the arrangement.

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At number 8 we get Arthur Rimbaud’s “Eternity.”   I try to mention the influences on this Project from time to time. They are many, and they are strong. They need to be strong because I’m not a “natural” as musician or performer. While I think I have some talent, however simplistic, as creator of musical ideas from the composer’s side, no one is going to pick me as the best choice for a vocalist – and even on “my instrument,” the guitar, I have inconsistent and varying skills. Patti Smith then is one of the influences, partly because she took her poetic vision and then went on will and audacity to become the frontperson in a band. Her championing of Rimbaud led me to consider that poet, and in my setting of “Eternity” I’m sort of emulating the sound of the Patti Smith Group, phrasing the vocal somewhat like she would.

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7 is held down by William Butler Yeats’ “The Stare’s Nest at My Window,”   one of his poems about the Irish Civil War. A few weeks after I presented this poem musically, a man, George Floyd, was killed by callousness and negligence on the part of my city’s police force a few blocks south of where I live, and remembering this Parlando piece, I felt Yeats was speaking to my time and place. Listening to my musical setting now more than five years later, it still evokes that time for me. I can’t remember exactly how I treated the ominous string parts in it to get that sound, – some kind of delay or reverb I think – and the same spare sustained piano playing that I’ve use elsewhere in other pieces chills to the bone here.

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Place 6, “Pied Beauty”  by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Once more listeners seemed to like, or at least try, my writing for bowed orchestral strings. Here the spare strangeness of the parts and the odd note choice, leaping interval, electric guitar solo over the top intends to evoke majesty of rustic nature – but I’m somewhat surprised at this one reaching this level of popularity, as I’m not sure the piece succeeds.

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Free Jazz all over the place

Not that anything in today’s group of songs explicitly references Jazz…

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Last one for today, number 5, returns to a piece that is a favorite of mine and one that I think represents elements of what I do well: Emily Dickinson’s “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.”   Another piece largely composed with orchestral instrument parts. I fear serious orchestral composers and aficionados think these compositions of mine simpleminded – and furthermore, practical necessity dictates that they are implemented by virtual instruments making up the orchestra, and so no matter how well recorded and implemented these approximations in software are, they lack the full detail of their real counterparts. In my defense, I’ve taken to calling my approach here “Punk Orchestral” – trying with that name to make the point that I’m using the tools, ideas, and opportunities that I have to make what music I can make now, without deferring to the prerequisites of virtuosity and more theoretical knowledge. Let me make this clear as I wrap up today: I recognize my limits, respect those skills and the dedication to practicing and perfecting them that I lack, but I persist in doing what I can with what I can marshal none-the-less.

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Winter 2022-2023 Parlando Top Ten

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

It occurs to me that it may have been a while since I’ve reminded new readers what the Parlando Project is, has done, and tries to do. It started as an idea around 2015 to focus on something I’d done off and on for decades: to combine other people’s words, usually literary poetry designed to be seen on silent pages, with a variety of original music.

I did this not only because I think it’s fun, but because the process allows me to more deeply absorb some sense of what the poets are trying to convey. At least for me, I can read a poem with my eyes and sense that there’s something wonderful there — but then to read it aloud, perhaps even to sing it, allows me to inhabit it, to visit the environment inside it, as if one is deep inside some forest, awash at a water-brink, or walking down its street or inside some meaningful building.

Reading a poem silently is like looking at a picture. Performing it aloud is painting the picture with the words still wet.

Early in the Project many of these performances were with others, most often my long-time musical partner Dave Moore. For a number of reasons those opportunities have decreased. These days the typical musical setting here is composed, and all the parts played or scored, by myself. I’ve done a handful of pieces in the Project without instruments, but that’s unusual. I think that even though they are played by a one-man-band I want the words to have companions. Even the loneliest poems can have these here.

I do these pieces myself, not because I have great confidence or a high appraisal of my musicianship. Far from it. I compose and play the parts because I’m available. I’m an amiable contractor to myself, I enjoy playing different instruments, and I’m unafraid to dive into a variety of musical environments. My estimate is that most musicians who hear what I produce for the Parlando Project are unimpressed by this work, in that I almost never get responses from them when they are exposed to it.*  My guess is that is because I use simple ideas, and my realization of even these basic conceptions via my own playing has imperfections. My musical “thing” is more at participatory folk music or the punk/indie ethos — and though I try to produce good work here, and I’ve put effort into that, I don’t consider many of the Parlando Project pieces the best realization they could have. When I’ve taken to putting up chord sheets of some of the simpler acoustic guitar pieces here in the past year, I’m thinking that a better singer or player might take them to a better musical place.

Hepcats of Venus

Imaginary band gets down in beatnik cellar. Illustration shows my younger self & spouse in the center. W. H. Auden taps his cig on the ashtray in the foreground. Behind the drummer, Gertrude Stein considers Virgil Thomson.

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Now let’s get on to a brief rundown of the Parlando pieces that were most liked and listened to this past winter. I do this countdown style, from 10 to the most popular. The highlighted titles are links in case you’d like to see what I wrote about the pieces when I first presented it.

10. All Souls Night by Hortense Flexner.  Long-time readers here will know I like to go beyond “Poetry’s Greatest Hits” here, and this spooky piece by a little-remembered author from the time of WWI continued to be listened to long after Halloween.

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9. “Uncle Sam Says” by Waring Cuney.  This one, jumping forward to the WWII era, is almost cheating, as Cuney, a friend of Langston Hughes, engaged here in straight-out songwriting with bluesman Josh White. I’ve been playing a bit more bottleneck slide guitar this winter, and that’s what I used to accompany this message song about a segregated military.

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8. “Now Winter Nights Enlarge” by Thomas Campion.  Speaking of songwriters: poet, musician, and Elizabethan-age physician Campion also intended this to be sung — although, as with “Uncle Sam Says,”  I didn’t use the original music for my performance.

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7. “The House of Hospitalities” by Thomas Hardy.  A poet who spanned significant chunks of the 19th and 20th centuries, Hardy was well-versed in poems of rich remembrances, as in this Christmas season memory of holiday celebrations past and gone.

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6. “I’m Sorry for the Dead Today” by Emily Dickinson.  One of three appearances by this crucial American genius, this one a jolly remembrance of a cooperative harvest time in Amherst.

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5. “I’m Afraid to Own a Body” by Emily Dickinson.  An opening line or two in a poem can grab even the most inattentive reader sometimes, and this poem’s opening pair of lines certainly did so for me this winter.

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4. “Fairy Song” by William Butler Yeats.  Like many a Yeats poem, this one beguiles you and me with its lovely word music. Then I read the play whereupon the poem appears and discovered that its context is exactly that for the song’s singing fairy: a beguiling away of a distressed person from their heart, hearth, and home. That wind that opens this poem is chilling once you know.

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3. “I felt my life with both my hands” by Emily Dickinson.  I cannot say authoritatively what Dickinson intended the context of this poem to be, but I read it as an examination of body dysphoria, though I’m unsure if anyone else has “read” her poem that way. As I have sometimes done, I’ve performed this with what I call an “Inline Epigraph,” quoting a line from a Lou Reed’s song “Candy Says”  before the concluding section of Dickinson’s text in my performance. I often think of poems as being in conversation with each other.

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2. Railroad Avenue by Langston Hughes.  I spent an enjoyable but inconclusive time searching for the “real” Railroad Avenue, thinking it could be like Van Morrison’s Cyprus Avenue or a NYC address in a Frank O’Hara poem. Couldn’t find it. May be it’s only mapped in Hughes’ imagination, a construction for the purposes of the poem. Long-time reader rmichaelroman reminded us in comments that America’s separations often are lined by being right in one’s memories from the “wrong side of the tracks.”

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1. “I’m Gonna Make Love to my Widow ‘fore I’m Gone” by Frank Hudson.  Another bottleneck guitar piece that readers and listeners liked a lot this winter. Well — a self-penned piece about good old-fashioned winter randiness made it to the top of the Top Ten. Go figure. They’re talking single digit wind-chills and a March snowstorm as this week ends up here in Minnesota. Codger cuddling is carbon-free heating people!

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*I ascribe this to politeness on their part. I tell myself that I overvalue the audacity and aims of what I do, when simple competence with simple ideas might be preferable.

The most popular Parlando Project piece, summer of 2022

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

They tell us: yesterday was the last hot day of the year, with temps peaking above 90 F. The summer night ended, like a fair or exhibition with fireworks lightning and booming thunder, and the coolness of fall seems to have arrived today. The urban trees here have just a touch of autumn colors on the edges of avant-garde branches. A city’s pretense is that it is artificial, a human-made place, but the trees are here to remind us.

Late September Days cartoon

The above cartoon presented without further comment.

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I’ve said that when I look at what pieces were the most liked and listened to each quarter that the results often surprise me. The Parlando Project takes words (mostly poetry) and combines them with various original music. For practical reasons,* the poetry we use is largely in the public domain, poets whose reputation has usually settled to a stable level. We’ve done many pieces from such poets that retain readership into our century: Dickinson, Frost, Yeats, Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Eliot, Millay. I also enjoy reviving work by poets that once had considerable readership, but who have fallen out of favor or esteem: Longfellow, Teasdale, Sandburg for example. And there are poets that have higher profiles in the UK than here in the US: Edward Thomas and Thomas Hardy. And there’s my translations or adaptations of work outside of English: Du Fu, Li Bai, Rimbaud, Rilke.** That’s a big world of material, and my attempts good, bad, and indifferent are up in the archives for all to hear. But then there are the wildcards, the poets that only indefinitely reached and failed to retain much regard.

Apparently, Robert Gould Fletcher is one of those. He was identified early on as an Imagist, a form of early English language poetic Modernism that I think has values worth revisiting. Curious, I dipped into a couple of his many books from the first half of the 20th century and found a short nature poem that intrigued me. As I worked to set it to music my city had a summer storm whose aftermath was a striking yellow/green/brown sky tint. In the heat of that evening I started to recast Fletcher’s poem, producing a result that’s a “after a poem by” or “inspired by” work — but it wouldn’t exist without Fletcher.

Despite Fletcher’s non-existent current literary standing and my own low profile as a poet, “Yellow Air”  was the most listened too and liked during our past warm summer. I wouldn’t have predicted that, which is a pleasure.

You can see Fletcher’s original text and the full text of my subsequent version along with guitar chords which you might use if you want to sing it yourself by clicking on this link to the original post. Or you can hear it straightaway with the player below.

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*Submitting writers may know how slow and inconsistently editors will respond. Well, I found the response asking for permission to present poems here was even worse. If an unsought grant was ever to fall from the sky for this Project, I’d ask first for someone to bug and cajole rights holders for the rights to present more recent poems here.

**How much have we done this? Over 600 times! And all of the results are still available here via the archives. If you just want to sample the music more rapidly without my comments on the encounters with the text, the most recent 100 or so are available as podcasts on Apple podcasts or most other places that offer podcasts. Note that the Parlando Project podcasts are just that: the typically less than five-minute audio piece. From time to time I’ve considered a more conventional talking-about-stuff podcast, but I’m unconvinced the interest would replay the work on top of the research, composing, and recording effort that goes into this Project.

Abbreviated Summer 2022 Parlando Top Ten

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

There were fewer audio pieces presented this past summer, so I’m going to abbreviate our traditional Top Ten review of the past season to reflect that — but I still kind of like this part of the Project, as I get to see what pieces got the most response. Like the Parlando Project in general, the most popular pieces tend to be quite various, and it’s often the pieces I’d least expect that bubble to the top. As a proper Top Ten, we’ll look at them as a countdown, starting with the 10th most liked and listened to one and ending with the most. The bold headings are links to the original posts in case you’re new here and would like to read what we said then.

Very briefly here are the pieces that make up numbers 10 through 6.

10. Arthur Hoehn by Frank Hudson. In the summer doldrums I felt free to include more of my own words. This is a short elegy for a classical music DJ who worked the overnight hours. I’m quite proud of the final lines of this one.

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9. Staying the Night at a Mountain Temple by Li Bai. Another of my loose translations of a Tang Dynasty classical Chinese poem. I based my translation on my understanding of Li Bai’s (his name is also rendered as Li Po) general outlook. An example here of how I work with orchestral instruments.

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8. Stratocaster by Frank Hudson. Really, this project is usually concerned with other people’s words, but this sideways ode to an ingenious radio repairman whose swoopy electric guitar design was enshrined in the Museum of Modern Art got a good amount of response.

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7. The Dick and the Dame by Dave Moore. Alternate voice and keyboard player here Dave Moore says some of this is adapted from Robert Coover, but this really holds together as a poetic liturgy for pulp noir. Also I got to wail on guitar.

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6. Let us be Midwives by Sadako Kurihara (translated by Richard Minear). This was my piece for past August’s Hiroshima Day, a short tale of the huddled human aftermath of the first atomic bombing. Is there a word for sad/hopeful? If so, that’s this poem.

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don't underestimate 800

Getting ready to lock up my bike late this summer, and my attention is drawn to a message on top of the post.

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Now let’s move on to the top 5 and say just a bit more about each of them.

5. From Cocoon forth a Butterfly by Emily Dickinson. We’ve done lots of Dickinson poems here over the years. Though we did this one in summer, it talks about harvest time. While poetically condensed, Dickinson observes harvest workers and the proverbially productive bee and contrasts them with a no doubt lovely, but also somewhat unoccupied butterfly. Is Dickinson, the poet, the butterfly? I’m not so sure. My understanding is that Dickinson’s domestic duties in her mid-19th century household, while less than those of poorer families, were also not insignificant. Is the butterfly then poetry, or the poem she’s written, or a fancied life of a full-time artist which she wasn’t? Dickinson ends with this point: at the end of it all, however joyful or laborious, is the Sundown, which is Extinguished. Like the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, I’m thinking she sees vanity in the whole scene.

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4. To Whom It May Concern (Carry Them Away) by Kevin FitzPatrick. Dave and I both admired Kevin’s poetry and outlook, even if neither of us wrote like him — but then as I said elsewhere here this summer, too few poets write like Kevin. Here’s a short poem written entirely in another’s voice, whose words Kevin the poet recognizes deserve repeating, deserve attention, deserve concern. If I don’t write like Kevin, that essence, that principle, is part of what I do here with the Parlando Project.

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3. Palingenesis by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Poets today read Dickinson (should) and Whitman (must), but few literary poets will admit to reading Longfellow now. Dickinson and Whitman are great rebels, geniuses of make it new. Longfellow worked in traditions, replanting them in America. If you want to rebel with your attention and consider Longfellow, I’d suggest the shorter lyrics. Was this lyric referencing Longfellow’s wife who died too young in his arms? I can’t say for sure, but I used it to reference my late wife who also died too young more than 20 years ago.

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2. Generations by Frank Hudson. This is a tiny poem in a tidy setting. I’ve been noting recently the lack of perspective in many older persons’ views of the young. Old people are supposed to supply that perspective, to know from intimately observing things over longer time that stuff thought new is just a variation or a carrying forward of the flow of society. Instead, I see all too many who want to proclaim some past got it right and the present is a decadent signal of end times. So, in this short piece I cast myself as the sage of advice to the young, but with a twist.

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What was the most popular piece this summer? Come back tomorrow for the answer.

The most popular Parlando Project piece for spring 2022

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

One unusual thing I did this spring to celebrate National Poetry Month was to re-release 31 pieces from the early years of this project. This was a way, despite reduced time and opportunities to create new pieces, to still celebrate and demonstrate the various poems and music combinations of the Parlando Project.

That April batch does show something of the range of words I’ve used. Famous poets? Shakespeare, Dickinson, Yeats, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Frost, Pound, Millay, Cummings, Eliot, Sandburg. Foreign poets less known in America than in their native countries? Edward Thomas, Tristan Tzara, Du Fu. Afro-Americans less-known to their fellow Americans: Fenton Johnson, Raymond Dandridge, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer.

As part of this April celebration, I spent more time that I thought I would creating “lyric videos.” I figured I would just put in a couple of pictures in a video file and place the words to the poems on the screen in time with their appearance in the music, but they got a little more elaborate.

How popular were they? It doesn’t look like YouTube counts as views any plays of those videos from the inside-the-blog-posts thumbnail images, but it does count those who found them on YouTube itself. Given that sub-set it does count, the most popular of the April Poetry Month videos was our Parlando version of Yeats’ “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.”   No surprise there: William Butler Yeats’ poetry is welcome to so many ears around the English-speaking world. If I was to look at most viewed posts (a metric I don’t use in these Top Ten lists) four out of the top ten most viewed posts so far this year are concerning Yeats’ poems. Yeats is a Poetry’s Greatest Hits poet.

The most listened to and liked piece this past spring was an Irish poem, but it wasn’t by Yeats. It was one of the April Poetry Month re-releases though, “Night, and I Traveling”  by too-little-known Belfast-born poet Joseph Campbell (who also published under the name Seosamh MacCathmhaoil).

I’m partway through a biography of Campbell that was an Anniversary gift from my wife. From it I’m getting more of a sense of the young man who wrote this poem — a poem which is remarkable not just for its tightly compressed and effecting scene, but for being published in 1909 so that it might be counted not just as the work of the first Irish poet to use free verse, but also as one of the earliest published examples of Imagism. It wasn’t until 1913 that F. S. Flint and Ezra Pound published their “A few Don’ts by an Imagiste”  and laid out the three famous Imagist suggestions/rules, but before that in London Flint, Pound, and T. E. Hulme had been working out how to radically strip back poetry to a fresh, precise, and direct essence in the months before Campbell published “Night, and I Traveling.”

Night and I Traveling

The chord voicings I used for the 12-string guitar part here are bit unusual.

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I now know that Campbell was in London and meeting with those incipit Imagists in that first decade of the 20th century. Alas I don’t know how junior a partner he was in their meetings, but “Night, And I Traveling”  is to my judgement as fine an early Imagist poem as the more famous and anthologized ones, arguably a more worthy example because of its empathetic attention to the isolated rural woman in a still-colonialized Irish hut in place of Pound’s  damp impressionistic leaf-faced Paris Metro riders published four years later.*   The biography, Joseph Cambell Poet & Nationalist   by Norah Saunders and A. A. Kelly, reminds us that Campbell liked country walks at night. Campbell wrote: “Night walking — all my best thoughts, I find, come to me that way. Poetry, like devilry, loves darkness.” Devilry? Campbell did write some of the supernatural, and would mix Christian and pagan mythologies —but in this one, this night, he stays in our earthly plane. Am I reading too much into the poem to note the poem’s only simile has the lone woman crooning “as if to child” when there is no child depicted? Is that child dead? Or perhaps emigrated to America?


Not as popular as Yeats on YouTube, but here’s the “lyric video” I did for this piece

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You can hear my performance three ways. The “lyric video” is above, an audio player gadget should be below, and this highlighted link is a backup for those ways of viewing this blog that won’t show the player. Thanks again for reading about these encounters and listening to our combinations of music and words.

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*Make of this connection what you will: Pound and Campbell would both eventually be imprisoned by their own countrymen for acts during wartime.

Synchronicity: Spring 2022 Parlando Top Ten numbers 4-2

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Sometime before The Police made it an album title, this project’s alternate voice and keyboard player Dave Moore took to using the term synchronicity to explain some things that going forward cause significant effects where there was no pre-existing reason or even connection. Maybe me seeing Dave read a poem in a church while we were both teenagers would be an example. Or here’s another one: an American poet who had generated no interest in America travels to England and creates not one but two poetry careers. And then that runs together with the next three pieces in our countdown to the most popular piece with listeners over this past spring.

Robert Frost went to England largely unpublished and un-heralded in 1912. He was 37. If you were thinking of starting a fantasy draft league for poets in 1912, Frost could not be your pick. I’m not enough of a scholar to know all the reasons for this move, but it might well have been because some of what Frost was writing chimed with poetry that had been published and reached an audience in the UK, poetry that used a rhymed/metrical lyrical voice to portray unpretentious countryside settings. While living in England Frost met another writer, the 35-year-old Edward Thomas. Thomas, also not your fantasy poet draft pick — he wasn’t even writing poetry. The two took a liking to each other.

Frost rather quickly found an English publisher while in England, and published two book-length collections containing many of the poems he’s still best known for. American Ezra Pound took to praising Frost to Americans, and Frost’s career was launched!

4. The Aim was Song by Robert Frost.  Coming in at number four in our spring countdown this year we find the now successful Frost with a poem published first in America. It’s a natural text for this Project because it uses music as a metaphor in a very musical poem. It’s been popular here over the years since I first presented it, and it was one of the most popular pieces among the 30 I re-released for National Poetry Month this April.

You can hear my performance of “The Aim Was Song”  with a player many will see just below this paragraph, or with this alternative highlighted link, which is here for those that won’t see the player.

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So, what happened to our Edward Thomas? Thomas’ writing was focused on work-for-hire, the scriveners gig-economy of the time set to fill column inches in magazines and newspapers. Thomas’ personal interests were present in some of those works: he was an avid walker, bicyclist, and amateur naturalist. Like Emily Dickinson, no plant is encountered in Thomas’ writing and is not given a specific name or description. And likewise birdsong. Thomas kept journals, and they too have passages filled with the countryside carefully observed.

Frost saw Thomas’ writing, declared to his friend that he already had the stuff of poetry, and analyzed Thomas’ situation as a “suffering from a life in subordination to his inferiors.” Thomas subsequently took up writing poems with the now published and becoming-known Frost’s encouragement. However, time was marching up on the pair with a large surprise — a world war was about to break out.

Thomas’ non-militarist outlook, his middle-age, and his family for which he was the sole support non-withstanding, Thomas seemed drawn to military service for his country. Frost moved back to America to further build on his growing reputation there. He put forth a standing offer for Thomas and his family to join him in the United States.

3. Gone Gone Again by Edward Thomas.  Here’s a poem Thomas wrote during this time, and it’s a wistful evocation of war’s absences. In England Thomas is often thought of as a war poet, and there are reasons for that. But one of the uniqueness’s in his poems set during the time of WWI is that they avoid tableaus of the battlefields and the action set thereupon. “Gone Gone Again”  is a poem of what’s not there: people, workers who are now soldiers.

Thomas enlisted, trained as a lieutenant, a most dangerous job in the warfare of the time. After duty in England (he helped make maps, an apt job for a man who so well knew the countryside) he shipped overseas to the battlefront, where he was shortly killed.

Like for some young poets and musicians, death was a good career move for Thomas. Friends posthumously published a collection of the freshly-written poems that Thomas had crafted in only a couple of years writing verse. Attention was paid in the UK to the “war poets” and everything Thomas wrote was read in the context of that cataclysmic event for Great Britain.

One poem Thomas wrote, based on a journal entry from a train ride he took on this very day, June 24th in the summer of 1914, became his best-known and loved poem in his home country: “Adlestrop.”   You can hear my performance of “Adlestrop”  here.

Or you can celebrate “Adlestrop day” with this “lyric video” from earlier this year.

.Most Americans don’t know this poem or Thomas. I didn’t, until 2016 when one summer day of unwonted heat the train I was to make was subject to what became an hours-long delay in arriving at Kingham. The heat was such that trains had been stopped for fear of track failure. I can recall the trees and foliage swaying in the summer breeze at the little station, some small bird activity, a station caretaker who arrived to drip a watering can into some hanging plants on the platform. It was only afterwards that I learned of this poem, set in the very next town on that trainline, the even littler town whose trainstop had been removed some years back. Rod Serling should have come out the station door with a skinny tie and a summer-cut suit to quip on that synchronicity. Did I miss him because I wasn’t looking for him, because I didn’t know any of that until after I had been in Kingham that afternoon? Thomas’ poem was, and to some significant degree still is, loved because a few days after Thomas was stuck in Adlestrop, an Archduke got assassinated and the slow-motion trainwreck of WWI broke out over the ensuing summer. Thomas wrote his most famous poem afterward, referring to his memory and journal entries, and so he likely intended this poem to be read, like “Gone Gone Again,”  as a study in absences, a summer day with a peaceful nothing-urgent before “the guns of August.”

To hear “Gone Gone Again,”  there’s a graphical player for some — and you others? This link.

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2. Cock Crow by Edward Thomas.  So, is Thomas only  a war poet? Could he have been something else? I think it’s highly likely. He was a troubled man, some other calamity less nation-shared than a World War could have taken him early, but the more I read, even his slightest poems, the more I see why Frost was taken with him, and why even Americans who may not share the cathedral-plaque reverence given UK war poets might still discover him. When I read “Cock Crow”  in a 1920’s anthology of Thomas’ contemporaries this past spring I was struck by how much fresher and less puffed up with ineffective references Thomas’ writing was set against the field. And Americans, whose culture received a 19th century dosage of Transcendentalism, love our closely observed nature poetry perhaps more than Brits. Maybe I feel a connection from that afternoon in Kingham, and that prejudices my reading?

Bird song occurs in “Cock Crow’s”   title and text, and in reply I was pleased I was able to end my performance of it with a choral part. You can hear it with the player, or its backup, this link.

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“Cock Crow”  got a lot of listens. I thought it might be the most liked and listened to one, but when I totaled them all up this June, another piece beat it out. I’ll be back soon with the most popular piece this past spring. It’s a surprising one.

May Music Find a Way. Spring 2022 Parlando Top Ten numbers 7-5

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Tonight is Jazz Night here at the Parlando Project Top 10 countdown. I’m going to ask the folks who come here for the talk about words to murmur down quietly today as I speak about the music.

Funny how these quarterly counts sometimes become nice little “sets.” Both today and tomorrow’s segments as we countdown to the most popular piece this past spring are as good as any planned ones I could have devised. So, let’s get the musicians on stage!

7. Sonny Rollins, the Bridge, 1959 by Frank Hudson.  Remember that the bold-face headings at the start of each entry in this countdown are links to the original post presenting them, where you can read what I had to say about it then. I had a lot to say about this one back in January, and so even though this is a piece where I wrote both the words and music, today I’m going to talk about how this (and many of our Parlando Project musical pieces) was realized.

With significant accuracy I hesitate to call myself a musician. My home instrument is the guitar, but even there my knowledge is not something to brag about, my skillset a bit unusual, but limited, and my consistency not up to a professional (or even many dedicated amateurs’) level. But I have a secret weapon: I can choose to compose or improvise (spontaneous composition) the things I present here. My Jazz guitar chops are not strong, but the chordal part was something I was able to execute. Listening back today to the second guitar part I improvised for this I think it was a good day with the wind at my back for me.

In another world I’d more often use other musicians who could add their skills to this enterprise, but logistically and financially the one-man-band approach is what makes it possible for me to express the variety of different musical ideas that I present.

To hear this or the other musical pieces here, use the player that may appear below, or this highlighted link.

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6. Lenox Ave Midnight, an Extension by Langston Hughes.  Another little miracle pulled from my limited, if a bit unusual, skill set? On a good day I can do a passible impression of a guitarist, but my keyboard playing is always naïve. The advantage I can find? Modern MIDI lets me use my mind where my fingers don’t know what to do. In a piece like this I figure out some kind of harmonic flavor by trial and error and my sketchy knowledge of music theory. I played that part and then improvised a right-hand part, editing on a MIDI “piano roll” to correct bad dynamics or altering notes I didn’t like. To an actual pianist this could be called “cheating.” To a composer, it’s called “composing.” You see, I use the term composer protectively, because I really do feel ashamed sometimes that I couldn’t play in real time with two hands the keyboard parts that to casual listeners make a sound like I could. And I think: to a real pianist realizing this simple composition would be a trifle. To me: achievement!

Near the end of this piece, to open up its musical world before I speak the two lines I added to Langston Hughes poem (the reason I call this piece “an extension”) I did something I rarely do here, which I personally try to avoid, because it really does feel like cheating to me. I used a couple of small loops of recorded melodic material from Apple Logic’s free-to-use loop library. My composer’s need here was that my simple and not very convincing saxophone part, that I did play on MIDI guitar, needed something to camouflage those issues.

Why does this bother me to do? After all sampled loops have been part of popular music since the hip-hop DJ’s started dropping riffs from vinyl records. Because I use “composer” as my excuse, my get-out-of-pretender-jail free card, I believe I (or at least some human present in the room with me in the creation process) should have played or scored the notes. I think the two short horn section loops used here sound fine, helped make this piece successful for listeners — but that’s why I feel guilty for using that tactic. Whoever played them, devised those short motifs, didn’t know what I was doing, wasn’t working in concert with my aims.

Now look, I don’t generally mind when other artists do this. Returning to words briefly now: I spent many an April here performing the words of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”  which includes — even more than I imagined — squadrons of quotations and paraphrases from pre-existing works. Selection, curation, recombination, and recontextualization are easily defined as creative acts. Maybe my qualms and self-imposed rules in this have a most self-interested reason: I worry that the casual listener here will think I’m just reading poems over pre-recorded music, when I’m proud that I had to write and play and record the majority of the music on this Project, one track at a time.

Player below, or link.

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Sonny Rollins, inspiring to me, yet my distance from that discipline shames me

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5. Autumn Movement by Carl Sandburg.  I stopped writing this post here yesterday, because what I had written so far seemed embarrassingly solipsistic, pretentious, and uninteresting to my audience, and yet also because some of the things I’m feeling as I write about my musical work are hard to condense into a reasonable length post — to be better, it would be even more. And so here we are at this, my presentation of a short nature poem by one of my heroes Carl Sandburg, illuminated by lovely music I made for it. How am I to feel about it tonight? Amazed that I, a non-musician, was able to make it? Or something that feels almost like shame or embarrassment that I present it publicly, when there are days I can’t play anything of any value? Knowing enough to know that what I know as a composer (little) and what I can bring to the composer as a player (limited). Knowing that at my age (old) there isn’t much lifetime to remedy those things.

This, though I cannot say I have sufficient understanding or skills, is where Jazz comforts me as no other art does. Jazz is always confronting the empty sky. Always a critique of silence — and able to the fears inside silence, now, not later, and with surprise and failure. There can be no surprise without failure. I’m a small man, it’s a big sky and a big silence. There are better musicians, better composers, but it’s a big sky and a big silence. This the musician’s and composer’s prayer: may music find a way.

Player below, or link.

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