Robert Frost's meditation on work performed for American Labor Day in a setting for guitar and voice. For more about this and other combinations of various words with original music visit frankhudson.org
Charles Kingsley's strange garden/graveyard poem presented here in a folk-rock performance. For more about this and other combinations of various words with original music go to frankhudson.org
8th century Chinese master poet Li Bai solves the problem of drinking alone, but there may be a catch! For more about this and other combinations of various words and original music, visit frankhudson.org
American satirist Mark Twain jotted down these skeptical notes about poetic genius around 150 years ago, I perform them today and wonder how much still applies. For more about this and other combinations of various words and and original music visit frankhudson.org
In the course of his novel Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain gives us a parody of 19th century memorial verse written by his character Emmeline Grangerford. For more about this and other combinations of various words and original music visit frankhudson.org
This song from Shakespeare's play Cymbeline asks what in the sum of life that death subtracts do we count. For more about this and other combinations of various words with original music visit frankhudson.org
A tale of an urban encounter representing our American moment in a time. For more about this and other combinations of various words and original music visit frankhudson.org
Rainer Maria Rilke's summer "picture poem" has dark undercurrents brought out in this stark performance with just guitar and voice of my own fresh translation from the German. For more about his and other combinations of various words with original music visit frankhudson.org
A musical performance of a monologue about the experience of change in a small town, how change happens after it happens. For more about this and other combinations of various words with original music visit frankhudson.org
John Keats charming little poem about the sounds of summer performed. For more about this and other combinations of various words and original music visit frankhudson.org
Emma Lazarus wrote more than the one famous poem of hers which became part of the Statue of Liberty. For example. this lovely sonnet about summer I sing here with a rock trio, cello, and contrabass. For more about this and other combinations of various words with original music visit frankhudson.org
8th century Chinese poet Li Bai (Li Po) wrote a pair of poems in the voice of a wife of an traveling river merchant, Ezra Pound made one of them famous with his translation. Pound took considerable liberties with the original poem in the effort to make it vivid to his audience. Here's my transformation of the other one into English. I too took many liberties in modifying a 1922 English translation by Shigeyoshi Obata.
For more about this and other combinations of various words with original music, visit frankhudson.org
A German poem by Anarchist Erich Mühsam written in 1909, now translated to English in 2020 to see if it applies today. For more about the story behind this and other combinations of various words with original music go to frankhudson.org
William Faulkner's and Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize speeches made claims about the value of their art. I perform here bits from both of them. For more about his and other combinations of various words with original music visit frankhudson.org
Gerard Manley Hopkins' gorgeous nature poem performed with a rock band and viola. For more about this and other combinations of various words with original music visit frankhudson.org
Carl Sandburg's mysterious poem about things gloriously becoming left and gone performed. For more about this and other combinations of various words with original music visit frankhudson.org
My attempt to sing a folk setting I composed of Longfellow's hymn to the American Experiment as the Civil War approached. For more about this and other combinations of various words with original music go to frankhudson.org
Parts of Allen Ginsberg's assessment of his personal America written in 1956 performed with a rock band. For more about this and other combinations of various words with original music visit frankhudson.org.
Tender Ears Warning: one famous F-bomb
As we enter the celebration weekend of American Independence Day, a complex look at our country from a black immigrant written in 1921. For more about this and other combinations of various words with original music visit frankhudson.org
A musical performance of my loose translation of a classical Chinese poem by Wang Wei about human sadness. For more about this and other combinations of various words with original music, visit frankhudson.org
Two sections of one of Emily Dickinson's strangest, yet most beguiling poem are sung here. For more about this and other combinations of various words with original music, visit frankhudson.org
For Father's Day, I perform Edgar Guest's tribute to blue-collar fathers with a small group musical arrangement. For more about this and other combinations of various words and original music, visit frankhudson.org
Carl Sandburg's vision of government starts with corruption and moves somewhere you might not expect. For more about this and other combinations of various word and original music visit frankhudson.org
Carl Sandburg's ghastly yet enigmatic Imagist poem performed. For more about this and other combination of various words with original music visit frankhudson.org
Two Dickinson poems are combined in this musical performance so that they illuminate each other, and maybe say something about our our country's present moment. For more about this and other combinations of various words with original music, visit frankhudson.org