One of the nice things about this project is that I’m still running into poets that were essentially unknown to me. This is like one of the joys of my youthful musical life: digging through used LP records or a bin of “cutouts” looking for an interesting title, some compelling cover art, or an intriguing song listed, and bringing home a record that as far as I could tell, no one else knew.

In theory this process is easier now, expansive catalogs of recordings available instantly for streaming, but I’m not sure if my son or anyone currently young will do a revised version of that. I suppose part of that was the imminence of the next object, the foot-square cardboard housing with or without wear, perhaps with someone’s name scrawled on the corner against sibling or dorm room misappropriation of the thing, or the shameful diagonal corner amputation, branding the still shrink-wrapped “cutout” record a failure of expectations.

But for poetry, particularly for poetry before 1924 that is in the public domain, there is no lost former ubiquity of sources for discovery of the less-known or passed by, and happily the Internet makes them near alike in availability: Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay—or Fenton Johnson and Charlotte Mew. And so I can come upon work by Louise Bogan who published just over 100 poems in a long 20^th century lifetime where she was perhaps best known then as being the poetry editor of the New Yorker  magazine for a few decades.

Louise Bogan. I got nothin’ snarky to say today.

 

I’ve only started to sample her work, but she has a very interesting voice. One could compare her to Millay, and like Millay a complex examination of love and romance seems to be a prime subject, and like Frost she uses metrical and rhymed verse while having a thoroughly Modernist outlook.

Other than the vagaries of fate and the culture of her time, there’s no reason for her work not to be better known. Take today’s example. “Song”  is as condensed in expression as it’s title might lead you to expect. It’s a love song of a kind, but its kind isn’t conventional. Unlike some other poems of Bogan’s, there’s also not a single unusual poetic or high-culture signifying word in it. It could have been written yesterday, and it could be sung yesterday as a song for general non-literary or art-song consumption, streamed on Spotify* or iTunes.

And of course, thanks to the magic of the Parlando Project, it now is. Also thanks to the current limitations of the Project, I had to sing it, but then it’s better that it’s sung than not. If somewhere out there there’s a charismatic singer for this, that would be wonderful.

Bogan’s “Song”  is a request, a command, a begging cry, a lament, a report, a prayer, a need, a meditation, a love song. You can hear it with the player gadget below. The full text of “Song”  is here. You may note that I come in singing with stanza two in the version I present. I think of this song (as I performed it) as a repeating cycle capable of expressing all of those things above, so it can start with either stanza. I also repeated the opening lines of each stanza, a tactic ingrained in me by blues singers.

 

 

 

*Speaking of which Dept. The audio pieces featured here have been, from the beginning, available from the same places that you get podcasts, such as Apple podcasts and the like. Spotify also has podcasts in it’s app, and as of late this summer you can add Parlando Project pieces like this one to a Spotify playlist on the Spotify mobile app, which seems like a good way to spread the news about what the Parlando Project does.