Walter Turner

The Parlando Winter 2018-19 Top Ten part 1

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

It’s time to look at the most liked and listened to pieces here during our just ended winter. Overall, listenership was down in December and January, and I was a little discouraged by the drop off from the growth I was seeing throughout the rest of 2018. But then February was one of our most listened to months and March has started off strong too while readership of the blog posts here continues on a general upward trend.

As I’ve done for the past couple of years I’m going to count up our Top Ten audio pieces from 10 to 1 the rest of this week. I always enjoy tabulating these totals, as just like the Parlando Project in general it’s usually a mix of the “big names” as well as the lesser-known writers who I come upon looking for material we can use.

10. There Came a Lion into the Capitol. And we don’t have to wait long for a lesser-known. Walter J. Turner was a friend of Yeats who I hadn’t heard of until I read a book from 1920 seeking to summarize the British poetry scene, and saw Turner’s name. This one seems full of occult symbolism, something that links Turner to some of Yeats work as well. Since the lyrics mention the lion coming to the “blare of a great horn” I tried my best to play a trumpet line using a synthesizer “virtual instrument.”

 

Mew and Sinclair Virago Collectors Cards 16

A Lioness Comes to the Capitol, or ‘Shipping the Poets. At least by the accounts I’ve read, Mew and Sinclair’s relationship was more troubling than these trading cards have room to recount. The “sudden end” involves May unexpectedly chasing Sinclair around a bed

 

9. The Trees are Down. The same 1920 book that mentioned Turner had considerable praise for Charlotte Mew, who’s become a personal “talent deserving of greater recognition” cause  for me this year. You can see some similarities to Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy or Christina Rossetti in Mew, but she’s got her own sensibility that immediately stood out as I started to read her work. She seems to have been an eccentric person in her life, but one of the joys of art is that different often attracts. This one’s a surprisingly modern meditation on a group of urban trees and spring. I liked what I was able to do with the bass and guitar parts following each other as Dave’s piano playing filled up the middle of this LYL Band performance.

 

8. Archaic Torso of Apollo. Even though he wrote in German, Rainer Maria Rilke is, on the other hand, well-known even to English speakers. There’s a spiritual/philosophical element to his writing that seems to attract many seekers, whatever language they read him in. Several translators have tackled transmogrifying this poem from German to English, but I try to do my own translations here.

In the process of doing this project I find I have to dig into the words I use and try to figure out what they’re asking for in terms of music and presentation, but doubly so when I attempt translations to English. I’m not sure how good I am at the translation task, but it’s a very intimate experience, trying to see, sense and think like another poet. I highly recommend doing your own translations to poets seeking to stretch their literary muscles.

Musically I spent even more time than usual on getting the drum part right, as the opening of my performance is all spoken word over percussion.

 

I’ll be back next with numbers 7-5 in our Top Ten Winter Countdown.

China Mouth, a Changeling

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I’m reading another critic/minor poet’s book about the early 20th century British literary scene, Edward Shanks’ First Essays on Literature.  He’s in general more backward looking than Herbert Monro’s 1920 Some Contemporary Poets  where I discovered Charlotte Mew (Shanks’ book has essays on Keats and Shelley) but I was interested what he had to say in his chapter “The Later Poetry of Mr. W. B. Yeats.”  Shanks seems ambivalent about Yeats, and this is one of the pleasures of reading contemporary assessments of still active artists. He notes with approval that Yeats’ language has with the 20th century become less formal and fusty, though Shanks feels that gain comes at a loss of a singing quality.*  Another conclusion he reaches is that Yeats’ is best when he’s describing the fantastical: “It is not Mr. Yeats’s business to describe the actual world, but to make beautiful pictures out of his dreams.” Though giving Yeats his due, Shanks doesn’t seem to think this is a good thing.

Interesting comment that, though I was already aware of Yeats’ appreciation of Irish myths and his dabbling in his era’s contemporary occultism. It caused me to stop and connect Yeats, and the two lesser known poets I’ve presented this month: Charlotte Mew and Yeats’ associate Walter Turner. Both have aspects of fantasy in their poetry too. And even our staid prelate of High Modernism, T. S. Eliot, while seeking his correlates within the whole timeline of culture, picks out elements of unreal gothic horror to weave into “The Waste Land.”  Elements so broad as to make me compare a section of “The Waste Land”  to Metal bands.

Did the horrors of WWI and the shifting ground of artistic Modernism impel some poets of the time to retreat (or advance) into fantasy? With the war poets, many of which had been “reporting” from the front-lines, no longer lining-out contemporary events while those events’ questions of outcome and action were pressing on all, was there now after the war a countervailing mode to step away from the pressing real?

If so, it’s no simple thing, and not just a matter of “give me some beautiful art to not let me think about hard questions.” Fantasy is just metaphor presented on another layer of art. Eliot, who unlike many of his contemporaries did not serve in WWI, would have trouble writing about the war as the veterans did after all. And the Surrealists—well their whole point was those “pictures out of…dreams” might reflect something essential.

Sir Joseph Noel Paton - The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania

Fantasy. Escapism? Surrealism? Metaphor presented in another layer of art?

 

Mew’s “Changeling”  from my last post? Yes, it’s a fairy story, as is Yeats’ great “The Song of the Wandering Aengus,”  but either connects first on an emotional level deeper than any amazement at the fantastic. Talking fish or fairies knocking at windows are mundane compared to the loneliness of old age or the alienation of being an unlike youth.

Well, let’s end for now with an audio piece, an old one of my own. I wrote “China Mouth, A Changeling”  over 40 years ago, after listening to a conversation where someone else was bemoaning their alienation. During the conversation the main talker paused to reapply some very red lipstick, its deep red the China in the mouth of the title. Unlike Mew’s changeling—who will run off, who cannot be stopped—there seemed to me to be an element of stasis in that overheard conversation. They seemed resigned that they would have their art and their alienation in a frozen balance. That brought to mind a story in Robert W. Chambers’ “The Mask”  from his 1895 collection The King in Yellow  in which a liquid turns living things into statuary. That idea informed the last verse. Depending on one’s taste for mystery, it either saves or ruins the song. Use the player below to hear it and decide for yourself.

 

 

*I don’t think I agree, Yeats never stops being musical to me. Shanks himself has an interesting connection between poetry and music, as another chapter in his book “Folk-Song as Poetry”  deals with Cecil Sharp and other contemporary attempts to conserve British Isles folk music. Shanks’ first book was a collection of poetry called Songs, one of which lifts the floating verse that found its way into many folk songs, the one that starts “The cuckoo is a pretty bird, she sings as she flies.”

Memo from (W. J.) Turner ‘There Came a Lion into the Capitol’

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

One thing I loved doing to stretch my culture and entertainment dollar back in the 20th century was to go to a used record shop and look for unusual records. The more disorganized and undiscerning the shop, the better for my purposes then—since the lowest price was important, and whatever the time spent, it was enjoyable.

It felt so good to come home back then, less a dollar or two, but with a record by someone I’d barely heard of, or never  heard of. What would it sound like? What would they be trying to express? There’s a universe of art out there, commercial and not, music, words, every art. What hides itself, unlooked at, unheard, while our summarized cultural attention is elsewhere?

This project has allowed me to do the same thing with the poets of the early 20th century.

One way to find the overlooked is to read contemporary journalistic accounts of an era. They are unfiltered by later consensus, and focused on the day to day of their day, not overly informed by the judgements of history (which aren’t complete, much less unerring). And so, I’ve spent time this week reading Harold Monro’s* 1920 book Some Contemporary Poets.  Monro is himself a poet I thought might be an interesting minor writer to examine. Instead, his book led me to at least two other writers that I found immediately interesting. Today you get to hear something from the first of them.

Monro didn’t much like Walter J. Turner, who he refers to as W. J. Turner.** He leads off his book’s short notice on Turner by saying that Turner was “Rumoured in literary circles” as “a genius.” Monro then wastes little time getting on to disputing that, saying that Turner has only learned “the ‘tricks of the trade’ in the neo-Georgian school.” So facile but vapid? No, Monro, extends his critique to Turner’s technique too: “Simple monosyllabic epithets like cold, dim, dark, pale, wan, bright, grey, still, occur in all he has written to such excess that they cloy the reader’s memory like some unwanted tune.”

I happen to think that one of the common faults of poetry is its resort to too many and too uselessly fancy a set of adjectives, so I looked at a few Walter J.Turner poems. I didn’t have to go far to see one that called to this reader’s memory for some—who knows?—unwanted tune.

I haven’t found out much yet about Turner’s life, but those rumors of greatness back in 1920 largely came from William Butler Yeats—a blurb any lyric poet would be glad to get. Turner isn’t as fluid a poet/word-musician as Yeats is (is anyone?) but he seems to have been struck by the fanciful, exotic and even occult aspects that are one thread in Yeats. Today’s piece “’There Came a Lion into the Capitol’”  shows this.

Walter_James_Redfern_Turner_bust_by_Lady_Ottoline_Morrell

Besides poetry, Turner wrote music criticism.

 

Turner published that title in quote marks, but I can’t find the literal phrase he might be quoting exactly. Lions and rulers and rulers’ seats are a rich trope of metaphor in general, but he may be referring to Cassius speaking about Julius Caesar in dialog from Shakespeare’s play. If so, his poem is very impressionistic, mentioning nothing that links it to Caesar, to Shakespeare, or any particular time or place.

The poem is entirely fantastic, in the strict sense of the word. The title lion somehow materializes from the page of a book (Shakespeare’s plays? The Bible***  or some equivalent? A spell-book? Some other book of lore?) and an apocalypse occurs. By the last stanza, planet Earth is gone and cold space is left.

Musically, I may have unintentionally copped a bit of the sound of one of my favorite used record store finds, the masterpiece of one of the great overlooked Afro-American-led bands of “The Sixties,” Love’s “Forever Changes.”****  My playing and arrangements don’t reach that level, but the orchestration of “Forever Changes” is what comes to my mind when I think of acoustic guitar mixed with a horn section, so maybe one of those dark-horse used records from long ago did become a muse here.

loveforeverchangesLion Cover

Hey, what happened to the rest of the band? A classic LP cover and my W. J. Turner parody of it.

 

To hear my performance of Walter J. Turner’s “’There Came a Lion into the Capitol’”  use the player gadget below.

 

 

*H. Monro is not to be confused with H. H. Munro, the other writer whose penname was “Saki.” Monro and Munro were contemporaries. This might have been embarrassing at literary get-togethers!

**Not to be confused with J. M. W. Turner. He’s the painter.

***Lions appear in the Bible from the Old Testament to Revelation, but though the title phrase sounds like it could be in Revelation, I haven’t found an English translation that has it.

****The group Love was led by Arthur Lee, not to be confused with ace guitarist Albert Lee, who in turn is not to be confused with Albert Lea, the county seat of Freeborn County in south-east Minnesota. If you haven’t heard Love’s “Forever Changes,”  you should. “Forever Changes”  sold next to nothing—and the lyrics and some of the melody lines are unusual enough to explain that I suppose—but the LP’s arrangements are so rich and attractive that it’s difficult to imagine the real-world timeline that we actually lived through, the one where this wasn’t one of the biggest records of 1967. In our still ongoing time continuum, maybe Flying Lotus or Frank Ocean ought to do a tribute mixtape.