An odd notion I had while planning for this year's National Poetry Month: could I perform an Amy Lowell poem with a rock band in the spirit of the Patti Smith Group? 

Well, the result still sounds like me, but sections of this Amy Lowell poem do presage methods of later poetic expression.

The Parlando Project performs various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in different styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations, and you can hear all of them and read about our encounter with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org 

A. E. Housman's poem of fleeting wildflowers set to music as part of our celebration of this month's U. S. National Poetry Month. 

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations and you can hear all of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

William Butler Yeats wrote this oft-quoted poem of the rise of evil in the world. I found it more challenging that many other Yeats poems to put to music and to sing, but tonight I've judged this full-rock-band version complete. 

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations over the years, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Here's another Edna St. Vincent Millay poem turned into a short spell-song for Spring and Poem in Your Pocket Day.

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

This is a song made from a section of Carl Sandburg's 1928 poem "Good Morning America"  which I sang this month in order that it shed some light on the nation's current state.

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations and you can hear any of them and read about our encounter with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

I started doing an English translation of a poem from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's youthful series of love poems, and in that process I thought of something else on my mind, and so began to connect the poem with two husbands taken from the US and their families based on dubious charges this Spring. 

This poem from Neruda's series speaks of lovers separated. It was not so wild a leap to finish the translation and set it to music as a song regarding this fresh injustice. I note too that Neruda notes that his poem was after a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, so the poem is already an adaptation.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry, and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations and you can hear any of them and read more about our encounter with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Our National Poetry Month celebration continues with a musical presentation of this sensuous Edna St Vincent Millay poem. Since I awoke this April morning to tree branches covered with wet April snow in my northern clime, I felt part of "the shared world" with this poet as I completed this song setting today.

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations. and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

I might think of this as the first piece of my National Poetry Month observance this year, or as a piece the follows on from my Alice Dunbar Nelson "I Sit and Sew"  performance earlier in March.  "She Dreams of Sewing Machines"  is part of my set of Memory Car sonnets dealing with a daughter's experience of her mother's dementia. 

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these, and we will be adding several more as part of our April  #NPM2025 participation.  You can hear any of our previous audio pieces and read about experience performing them at our blog and archives, located at frankhudson.org

John "Paddy" Hemingway died this St. Patrick's day. Dublin born, and in Dublin he died, but he was in the news because he was the last surviving RAF pilot from the Battle of Britain during WWII. 

I immediately thought of this Yeats poem, about a fatalistic Irish pilot during WWI who flew into battle having no love for the British Empire. His Wikipedia summary mentions nothing about his weighing of the enormous risks he took in RAF battles, but a recounting of the number of times he was shot down and got back to flying again makes me think he'd accepted his death as a probable result of his service. Fate had sport with him, he lived to be 105.

In his honor then, I performed Yeats poem with music I wrote this week. The Parlando Project has done over 800 of these combinations over the years, using various words (mostly literary poetry) with music in different styles. You can hear any of them and read about our encounter with the words at our blog and archives, located at frankhudson.org

Poet e. e. cummings hopscotched across a page with this classic Spring poem. I've now made it into a little song for the first day of this year's Spring.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of those combinations over the years, and you can hear any of them or read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives, located at frankhudson.org

Instead of literary poetry, here's a little SciFi. This is a Dave Moore song about R. A. Lafferty, the electrician turned daft Speculative Fiction writer, whose stories often sounded like they were spoken by an intoxicated man at a bar who needs just one more drink to wrap up his tale. 

This is older piece, recorded as the Parlando Project was starting, that I remastered today in order to finish our St. Patrick's Day series honoring Irish-American writers. 

The Parlando Project normally takes various words (usually literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles.  We've done over 800 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read what we write about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Two Irish-American poets, now dead, used to lead a poetry reading every St. Patrick's Day in St. Paul. Earlier this week I presented a performance of a poem by one of them, Kevin FitzPatrick. Tonight, I release this song I adapted from a poem by the second poet, Ethna McKiernan. 

I saw "Barn Burning" as a beautiful, wild, mystical poem. I hope my version presented as song with guitar, bass, piano and harmonium brings out those qualities. 

The Parlando Project combines various words, mostly literary poetry, with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounter with the words at the Project's blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Here's a performance of a poem from FitzPatrick's final collection done in remembrance of the St. Patrick's Day poetry readings he used to lead every year. That poetry collection, Still Living in Town, told of his life working on his life-partner's farm in Wisconsin. One of the characters in that book's series of poems about rural life was the farm's dog, an incongruous poodle named Katie. 

"I Sit and Sew"  is likely Alice Dunbar-Nelson's best-known poem, a strongly worded statement of a woman wishing to assuage the suffering of war. I've now made it into a short song, as that's what the Parlando Project does. I'll write a bit more about the particulars of the poem at the Project's blog and archives later today, but I thought her poem could speak well for itself on this International Woman's Day. 

That blog and archives is located at frankhudson.org by the way.

Long work this week to find a set of words I could use and sing, ones that would meet our world and times with some measure of hope and purpose.

These are the ones I chose, written over a hundred years ago by early American Modernist poet and publisher Alfred Kreymborg. 

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives, which are located at frankhudson.org

This February during Black History Month I've been writing about the discovery, history, and my subsequent impressions of a scrapbook featuring the life and career of a mid-20th Century Afro-American musician and singer Lawrence "Hank" Hazlett who played with a swing Jazz quartet The Cats and the Fiddle from Chicago and then with his own Hank Hazlett Trio out of Minneapolis. 

In the scrapbook this creased and folded sheet of 6 numbered inspirational quotes was pasted on a page. They must have been meaningful to him, so I composed some music and read the quotes as a spoken word with music piece this month. The quotes are from (in order) M. B. Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Lloyd C. Douglas, Helen Keller, Herbert Kaufman, and Ambrose Bierce.

The Parlando Project combines various words (usually literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our experiences with the pieces at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Here's Alice Dunbar Nelson's passionate love poem from the last decade to be called The Twenties performed as a song. I just saw this poem this morning, but I was so taken with it that I spent my afternoon composing some music to perform it with. 

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations, and you can hear them all and read about our encounters with them at hour blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Our Black History Month celebration this month is more focused on new articles on the Parlando Project blog, but I thought it'd be good to provide some new musical pieces too. Here's Langston Hughes' poem "Dreams"  which I've cast as a blues for acoustic guitar, bass, and piano for this performance.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and performs them with original music (in differing styles). We've done over 800 of these combinations over the years and you can hear them all and read what I wrote about our this Project at our blog and archives, located at frankhudson.org

Here's the somewhat forgotten Modernist poet Carl Sandburg in a weird mode. I still don't know what this elusive poem of his, titled "Couples," is describing, but I felt compelled to make it into this short song anyway.

That's what the Parlando Project does. We take various words (mostly literary poetry) and combine them with original music. We've done over 800 of these combinations over the years, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

I start this piece singing the refrain of a song attributed to Robert Burns, and then the music continues as I read a sonnet from my memory care series. 

The Parland Project combines words (usually literary poetry) with music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations and you can hear any of them and read about our encounter with the words and making the recordings at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

What is poet Emily Dickinson describing in this poem I've turned into a song? Is it soldiers marching off to the American Civil War? Or is it just maybe a partisan political campaign march in time that her country's political failure was leading it to that war?

There's more on this, and over 800 other combinations of various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing style at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

This William Carlos Williams short poem of disappointment and survival seemed apropos for this American January, so now I've made it into a song, just me with my rough-hewn voice with a lonely acoustic guitar. "Dreams are not a bad thing" he says. Perhaps it will speak to you too.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations, and you can read more about this and hear all of the previous audio pieces at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

What if one of the Three Wise Men left a Yelp review after their Epiphany visit to the manger? Presented that way it sounds like a sketch-comedy bit, doesn't it? But T. S. Eliot had an ear for poetic dialog, and he wrote a poem that approaches the sacred on the back of a sore camel.

I took Eliot's poem and performed it with some original music yesterday. Today, I mixed the recording so you can hear it. That's what the Parlando Project does: we made over 800 combinations of various words (mostly literary poetry) and combined them with differing styles of music I can record. You can hear all of those pieces and read what I wrote about the experience of making them at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Kenneth Patchen wrote this poem sometime before the middle of the 20th century, but it seemed so apt today that I felt that I had to sing it as a statement for the end of our year.

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations, and you can hear all of them and read about our experiences with the words at the Project's archives and blog located at frankhudson.org

Once more we put an Emily Dickinson poem into a song setting. Today's piece weighs fears: haunted houses, ghosts, graveyards, assassins, but says the greatest fear is, or should be, ourselves.

A full rock ensemble for this one: bass, drums, piano, two electric guitars and a 12-string acoustic. 

The Parlando Project takes various words, mostly literary poetry, and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations over the years, and you can hear them all at our blog and archives at frankhudson.org