visionary

This is not the Christmas Carol you’re looking for: The Burning Babe

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

This is a Christmas poem, a miraculous one – harrowing too – and I’ve made it into a song. I’ll write more about that later, but first let’s engage in imagining something human. Let me intentionally start the story in present tense, as all history, like all miracles, is felt by flesh and blood men and women.

It’s summer, July, 1586. A twenty-something-year-old man landed surreptitiously on the coastline of his own country on a mission he’s spent several years preparing to do. He knows this secret mission risks imprisonment, mistreatment, torture, and death. Perhaps he’s relieved that his landing seems to have kept its secrecy, but his country’s police-state spies had already gotten wind of it, knowing at least in general that he, and others like him, are coming. The kind of things he’s planning to do are illegal.

Let me not leave present tense: I’m writing this story today in a country where the state of having crossed a border without central legal approval is subject of considerable governmental concern. There are secret police, established by the authoritarian head of state, to seek such people, and anyone who shelters them, out.

In 1586, the country is England, the monarch Queen Elizabeth, and the man landing as a huntable alien-in-effect in his own country was Robert Southwell. Southwell took an assumed name and begins to do his work. He’s a priest and a writer, and these things, done by someone like Southwell, were what the secret police are charged to suppress. During the 16th century, England is whipsawed by vicissitudes in the official state religion, from Catholic to Protestant, back and forth – the religious beliefs once seen as proper, even required, could become forbidden. Southwell, this Catholic priest, is now operating in a time his beliefs and practices are outlawed. English laws speak plainly about this: in 1584, it’s declared that any English-born man who entered the Roman Catholic priesthood during her reign had to leave the country within 40 days. Like the laws and practices about borders that change over time, this could seem strange to Southwell, or to us, reading about this now. Southwell would have known people who had lived in England when the Catholic church was the state’s religion. Now it’s a state crime.*

Southwell’s foray as an underground writer and priest, an alien in his own country lasts six years, until someone who knew of his activities and location gives him up under duress in 1592.

Over the next couple of years Southwell is tortured and mistreated, but he did not give up others’ names. I suspect this interval was because he would have had valuable information on others due to his prominence in the underground, and that to break him into a confession or renunciation would have propaganda value, but I haven’t read details on this. This could be long work. One of the torture interrogators writes down that their subjects’ resistance under torture was so steadfast that he had to ascribe such strength to either God or the Devil.

Did that state official wonder too about God or the Devil regarding themselves? I can’t say that was written down.

That next couple of years will be the last years of Southwell’s life. Some of the treatment was so rough that Southwell’s own father petitioned the authorities to get on with executing him rather than to continue the mistreatment. Yet, at other times, though he was locked up in the Tower of London, Southwell was allowed some books and was able to write. Was this a “good cop/bad cop” move by those looking for information from Southwell? Again, I don’t know the details, but then most of these details are sorrowful stuff.

In the new year of 1595, that execution came. Treason is the crime they write down. Our current Mad King throws around this very charge rather casually, but his midnight blathering will sometimes include a reminder that the penalty is death. Southwell’s execution was by being hung, drawn, and quartered. I’ll spare the details once again – look’em up if you want torture porn. It’s an act that is supposed to dehumanize the criminal – what it says about the state and its agents, I’m going to assume goes without me writing more.

Piero della Francesca's Nativity

This is not the depiction of the Nativity in Southwell’s poem, but I choose it since it included human music in the event.

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Why have I quartered your attention for this story which I’ve made as brief as I can, and with worries that it’s inappropriate for what is the nation’s leading holiday of gift-giving and children’s joy? It’s all in the hope that you can experience this visionary Christmas poem, apparently written during Southwell’s imprisonment, more completely. Here’s a link to the text of that poem. The Christmas in Southwell’s poem is the ignition, the conflagration, of the moment the Godhead crosses the border to humanity; and so it is that “The Burning Babe”   is a vision of the infant Jesus, not sheltered in a stable however far from hearth and home, not asleep in a manger with livestock and farmworkers in attendance, but suffering in flames, his tears accelerants to the flames, not balms to sorrow. Despite being newborn, this vision miraculously speaks not just of the suffering, but that somehow merciful  justice exists and may even increase from some refinement of mankind’s souls.

Southwell ends this poem, this vision, somewhat flatly with a statement mundane on the face of it. Perhaps that’s the only way human beings can speak when trying to understand such suffering we as creatures create and practice with earnest effort while congratulating ourselves on serving correction, justice, and the solemn dictates of our tribe, religion, nation, leader, party. The ending? Southwell simply notes, that he’d forgotten it was Christmas Day. That’s my point in taking your time today: so you could hear that statement knowing what I’ve laid out above, about why he’d forgotten this.

To hear my musical performance of Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe”  you can use the audio player below. No player? Some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing the audio player gadget – I don’t know why, but do you suppose Bari Weiss has something to do with that – so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I’ll leave this a footnote, but this battle between Roman Catholics and Protestants – including official state-religion sanctions – lasted a long time, with many deaths and atrocities on both sides. If Queen Elizabeth’s secret police could seem to be concerned about mere heretical spiritual beliefs and practices, they bolstered those practices with the uncovering of murderous plans of resistance among the Catholic underground.

And oh – if you want to hear of gifts – around the time the poet/priest Southwell was arrested and executed, a poet/actor named Shakespeare was starting to make a name for himself in the same Elizabethan London.

Barn, Burning

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here is a piece based on a poem by a second Irish-American poet, Ethna McKiernan, who before her death in 2021 would host a reading every St. Patrick’s Day. I can’t say I knew her very well as a person, though as mentioned last time she was a long-time participant in the Lake Street Writer’s Group with myself, Parlando contributor Dave Moore, and the poet featured last time, Kevin FitzPatrick. I’ll next be going off on a short tangent, as is my nature, but it any of this writing displeases or tires you, just skip to the bottom. I quite like the piece that is the occasion for writing this today, and you are excused to go there and just listen to it.

I don’t think Ethna liked me much as a person, and I can imagine any number of reasons why that might be so. Let me leave most of those guesses behind for today’s purposes. In my old age I’ve come to the realization that I am often a careless and inappropriate person. I suspect that’s for neurological reasons, but who can say, it may be a defect in my soul as would have been said in the old ways.

One peculiarity that I had in writing groups is that I was prone to writing long responses to drafts shared by other members. I’d often get quite detailed with noticing what works, and at least as much so with what I thought didn’t or had alternatives to be considered. The audience of this Project know that I have a broad appreciation for styles and approaches. I don’t hold to a narrow poetic style and down-rank anything that doesn’t follow it, but just as I do with editing audio or trying out compositional ideas in music, I tend to look closely, and over the years of doing this, I’d notice how zoomed in and nit-picky some of my responses were — and I wasn’t at all sure my suggestions for alternative approaches were actually improvements. It’s been a few years since I’ve done that, but I still cringe at some of the things I wrote, particularly in response to Ethna’s poems. After all, here was a poet with several published collections, a grant-winner with a distinct cultural connection to a great poetic culture, and who had taken advanced academic creative writing study. Me? I’m a high-school graduate from nowhere, who has no distinct poetic style to trumpet, who last was published in the 20th century. And need I add one more kicker — I would be in Etna’s case a man writing to a woman poet. Women poets reading this know how that often goes.

So in summary: matters of technique and poetic tactics vs. being emotionally myopic. A lot of the first only emphasizes the second.

My reactions to Ethna’s poems continue to trouble me because, at her best I considered her to be an excellent writer, but one that left me tantalized by another poet within her — a far stranger one, one that only materialized from time to time, and seemed to be constrained by her internal editor and self-anthologist.* Yes, it’s a writer’s prerogative to choose what to present or emphasize, but I wonder if other writer’s group respondents, creative-writing seminars, or outside editorial preferences/fashions kept that element down in McKiernan’s writing. Those things have standing, and it may be me who’s out of step, whose taste is questionable or unlikely. But that’s how I felt when reading the poem “Barn Burning” used to make today’s musical piece. I was compelled to do something that may be regrettable. I strongly thought that a developed image just past the midpoint of the poem was not quite as vivid as possible, and that the poem’s ending was short of how sharply spoken it could be.**

Light Rolling Slowly Backwards front cover

Want the author’s final selected poems collection without my blather? Ethna McKiernan’s “Light Rolling Slowly Backwards”  is available here.

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Ethna is some years dead now. Poets have trouble finding audiences when alive, and once they cross the Lethe, our forgetting often matches the dead’s. Improper, inappropriate, imperious, presumptuous — convict me of the lot. I’m taking the risk that I’m damaging the poem, though that’s not my intent. It’s done out of love for the poem and in hopes of bringing forth this element of the poet who might be condemning me from the other side.

If the worst is the case, take the performance below as damaged, counterfeit goods. If the best of the case is so, enjoy this poem’s mystical experience with my best efforts at adding music to it. I’m not Irish, I just hung out with some Irish-American poets, and it seems consistent to make this offense out of admiration.

You can hear the resulting “Barn, Burning”  with the audio player below. What, has the player been incinerated and not even ash remains? Well then, your listening can be reborn with this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I remain puzzled why her poem “Letting Go the Wolves”  was not included in her own final new and selected collection Light Rolling Slowly Backwards.  While it’s a fine collection, well worth reading, to my tastes that’s a pluperfect anthology piece, one I’d say any poet could be proud of having be the one poem others know of their work. Of the poems included there, poems as strange as “Stones”  and “Barn Burning”  display moods not widely indulged in, even though her other poems have their virtues too.

**Should be? Let me say again, I don’t know. I’m just one reader, but one who chose to perform it, and who wants to maximize its impact. Here are the last six lines of “Barn Burning”  as McKiernan had them in her final collection: “The outline of the lit barn/and its lean bones;/the world changed suddenly/as baptism, my life changed/forever with the knowledge/of fire.” Here is what I performed: “The outline of the barn,/the eager edges of its light/surrounding reluctant bones./The world, now sudden as baptism./My life forever with fire knowledge.” And as evidence of how zoomed in my suggestions sometimes were: I think the poem’s title is stronger with a comma in the middle.

from The Book of Urizen, Chapter 9

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Let’s return today to the English mystic and poet William Blake, but continue on a thought that is inherent with the last two pieces, one by Yeats and the other by a long-winded guy who writes this. Poetry, just like other writing can, within its levels, do any number of things. One can seek to teach, to reassure, to tell stories, to amuse, to make philosophical points, or to abstractly portray beauty in poetry. Some poets, some critics, some projects, believe some of these are more worthy aims than others. From one day to another I may favor one of these over another in my reading, my performances here, in my own writing.

There’s a certain “high church” of poetry that feels that which aim and which methods are used in reaching it is crucial—and that other choices harm the art. I’m not smart enough, or well enough read, to know if they’re right.

But there’s one thing impactful poetry shares with the other arts: that’s the texture of the immediacy of experience, of how its creation, its creator, its reader, its listener feels and shares of any of this.

So, it largely makes no difference to readers today what political side William Butler Yeats was on in the Irish Civil War. And if post-WWII “Westerns” dealt with certain horrors: racist terrorism, genocide, colonialism, and the responsibilities of citizenship in an uncertain and sometimes buffered way, well so be it. What remains is the emotional and perceptual core transferred now.

Today’s piece is a section from one of William Blake’s “prophetic books,” a series of very small editions he wrote, illustrated, colored and printed himself. As a young man I admired that. Blake bows to no other as far as “Indie Cred,” “get in the van,” and DIY spirit. Furthermore, he developed (or envisioned) his own mythology to explain his metaphysical outlook.

I can still remember first reading about Blake in a list of minor poets*  in some leftover textbook of one of my parents sometime in the mid-60s. The note said that while he wrote some charming short lyrics he later descended into longer works that were judged as borderline insane. To many a young person that’s not a tragic story so much as it’s intriguing.

A year or two later the rock’n’roll band The Doors dropped a Blake line into an album cut and I eventually was able to get a few paperbacks collecting Blake poetry. “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” youthful Byronic mythos was part of this no doubt.

I couldn’t make head nor tails out of Blake’s “prophetic books.” I could see the Milton and Books of Moses references, but that didn’t illuminate things much. In the decades since, there have arisen many Blake scholars who worked out his structure and epistemological themes to a great degree. That’s helped. But even then as a teenager, and now as an old man, I could and can still catch glimpses of how it felt to apprehend and sing these things Blake wrote. The poems are like their illustrations in Blake’s great plan for “illuminated books:” they are meaningful in their impact without necessarily telling you what they are meant to mean within some overall structure. And that’s probably how visionary works should be.

Blake's Ancient of Days on St. Paul dome

A recent special exhibition of Blake works in London was celebrated by projecting one of Blake’s most famous images on the dome of St. Paul’s cathedral. Not shown: the irony of nonconformist Blake’s image on a national religious landmark.

 

So today I’m going to perform part of the final chapter of Blake’s Book of Urizen  which comes after Blake has told something like a condensed tale of “Paradise Lost”  or the book of Genesis;  but with his own vision of the creation of the world and religion and the fall and fate of humankind. It doesn’t require that you understand or agree with Blake’s ideas if I can help illuminate Blake’s words so that you can understand the feeling of creating in a failed and fallen world.

In Blake’s mythos mankind is descended from fallen Eternals, blind to the infinity of the universe and their own souls. When we see his famous picture of a bearded Urizen with a compass at right angles measuring the world it’s not only a picture of visionary might—it’s the picture of a fallen, blind Eternal assiduously measuring a world with a puny device.

I didn’t go directly Doors rock’n’roll for today’s audio piece, instead the words led me somewhere else, to one of the things that influenced that band: the mythos of another visionary: Sun Ra, the Birmingham Alabama born Afro-American who recast himself as a prophet from the planet Saturn, and thereby encoded African and Afro-American culture as an infinite thing.

So Afro-Futurist saxophones today in gratitude to Sun Ra and to William Blake. The player to hear my performance is below, and the full text and illuminated plates of Blake’s Book of Urizen  is here if you‘d like to read along, The section I perform is near the bottom, Chapter 9, verses 3-6.

 

 

*Blake started gaining some reputational ground by the late 19th century in England, but American literary forces lagged in appreciation for him.

See Emily Play: May-Flower

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

The great thing about Emily Dickinson and her around 2000 poems is that there’s always one you haven’t experienced yet—and just this week over at the Interesting Literature blog I saw this Dickinson spring poem. “May-Flower”  has Dickinson doing her most subtle music to accompany her most Blakean attention. Just like it says itself: it’s a “bold little beauty.”

It’s short and compressed, and if you read it quickly and silently it may seem slight and slide right by you. Spring, May, flowers, check. Robins. Yup, spring. Its abrupt ending might stop you for just a moment. It ends: “Nature forswears/Antiquity.”

Oh, I get it, the flowers in early May are new, there isn’t such a thing as antique flowers. Easy enough to see that—but the undercurrent is deeper, because this is another carpe diem poem, though this time without much bombast and no overt hey-baby-what-about… pickup lines. Yes, there are no old flowers, and so this flower will come and go with May.

Not many words in this poetry-machine, but without choosing any esoteric ones, Dickinson has made some choices that may arrest you the second time you read it. “Punctual,” the flowers know right when to be there. “Covert” those early signs of spring, like some advance spies. “Candid” for May, and spring fully here, no need to hide as a generic bud. Even “Dear” in “Dear to the moss” is a choice I wonder about. I’ve even read it incorrectly as “Near to the moss” once or twice, and sound-wise “near” works very well and is clear in meaning.  Does Dickinson want to pun on deer, another spring poem perennial? Does she want to pickup and connect that D sound from “Candid” in the line before it rather than predict the upcoming N sounds of “Known,” “knoll” and “Next?”

Which brings me to this: if you listen to the poem, or plant it in your own mouth, the sound is exquisite. Rhymes and near-rhymes abound without locking down to a scheme: “small/punctual/low/April/knoll/soul” and “every/beauty/thee/Antiquity,” and consonants and vowels are echoing each other too.

See Emily Play Games for May HD

Foreswears antiquity: I’m not sure if anyone who reads this will remember the poster I’m referencing here.

 

To perform “May-Flower”  I made some choices. First, to slow the listener down, and to give extra chances to hear that echoing sound-play, I repeated each line. And to emphasize the moment rather than its passing, I interleaved the first and second stanzas as responses to each other. In the last stanza, the responses are just additional echoes of that stanza’s lines.

For the music, I decided to refer to The Pink Floyd. No, not the auditorium and eventually stadium-filling rock band, but the original 1967 Syd Barrett-fronted line up, which was based more around the sound of that era’s electric organs with a taste of Barrett’s unique take on slide guitar. So, time to dabble and wobble organs and break out the Telecaster and a finger wrapped in a vase of glass.

Emily’s poetry-machine obliviates the need for dodgy recreational chemicals. Attention is the drug. This is not the first time I’ve referred to Emily Dickinson’s visionary side here. I see it coexisting with her skeptical wit. And this poem, for all it’s Blakean a heaven in a wild-flower aspect was also intended by the botanically knowledgeable Dickinson as a riddle, the correct answer is a particular New England wild-flower, the trailing arbutus.  See Emily play. There is no other day. Free games for May….

Here’s the text of Emily Dickinson’s May-Flower if you’d like to read along.

May-Flower text

This is the regularized version with conventional punctuation. Emily’s own was full of her dashes.

And here’s my performance of it with original music. Use the player below.

 

The Death of Richard Wilbur, A Difficult Balance

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

It was only days ago here that I was remarking that Richard Wilbur was still alive while talking about the roughly half-portion of dead white men in a collated list of the most anthologized modern American poems. His poem “Love Calls Us to Things of This World”  written in the middle 1950s was one of that list, and one of the few I had no memory of having read.

Richard Wilbur 1950s

The modest house, the pipe, the tweed jacket, the Brylcreem hair with the straightest furrow—
Richard Wilbur impersonating the 1950s so that we don’t have to

 

So of course I read it, and rather enjoyed it. You could do the same via the hyperlink. There are a few things in it that one might quibble about, the heightened language (even if that is undercut by its over-riding conceit, a meditation on hanging laundry) including words that stop the modern colloquial speaker, such as “halcyon,” and the brief but passing use of rape for an image which causes me a concerned pause and objection now. There need be nothing censorious about such thoughts, as they are about the writer with his peculiarities, his time, and his blinders. They might remind me of my own limits in these regards.

The obituaries point out a controversy over Wilbur that, like his poetry, I was not much aware of. He was increasingly thought out of touch with the later 20th Century with his, on the face of it, impersonal outlook, his wit in place of rage and heated vision, and his devotion to a classic verbal music of accentual/syllabic meter.

All that may be so. Like I said, I’m generally unfamiliar with Wilbur’s poetry. But let me bring up some possible approaches from our current century, now nearly matured to voting age, to query those opinions from the 20th Century. The first is, how much do we need our poets to act as the shaman and feel for us?  Does such a need say that we ourselves cannot feel or imagine adequately, or that we cannot validate or understand our feelings and visions until demonstrated by the artist? I do not know a complete answer for this. I know that artists expressions seem to have helped me clarify and understand visionary and intense things, but I also think that the lens of wit makes clear the limits of our perceptions and emotions. Is the ecstatic visionary who can make real and palpable the dark shapes outside the fire-circle the wise one, or is the wise one the one who sees clearly that we cannot see far into the darkness and are apt to stub our toes on rocks if we think otherwise? Can only the former move us to action, can only the later keep us from recognizing foolish action?

I don’t think I know the answers, though I do think I see some of the questions. Just yesterday I wrote about how one of the  Parlando Project mottos “Other People’s Stories” shows a paradox. I feel it’s interesting—no, I’ll go farther—it’s important for us to experience other people’s subjective experience, to inhabit it to the degree we can. To do that, I’ve chosen to predominantly present other writers’ self-expression here—but to do that, I rely on others who interestingly express their own subjective experience. So, in a sense, I require others to not follow one of the principles that my artistic project goes by.

That brings up another Parlando Project principle: “Various Words with Various Music.”  Does not soft and consonant music not sound softer and more consonant when considered in the context of loud or discordant music (and vice versa)?  To fully have either, you must have both. Wilbur may have seen enough darkness to look for truth where the light is, to try to see, as his poem “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” concludes, a “Difficult balance.”