Labor Day weekend in America is often the occasion for end of Summer activities. In this poem from the 1894 Songs from Vagabondia, poet Richard Hovey rows down a river in Maine connecting a lake and ponds. What does he find? The sense that Summer feels like a dream.

The Parlando Project combines various words (usually literary poetry) with original music in different styles. We've released over 750 of these combinations. You can hear any of them and read more about our experience with the poems at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Pioneering Canadian poet Bliss Carman included this fantastic prose poem in his breakthrough 1894 collection "Songs from Vagabondia." Is it the slightly intoxicated wonder-talk of two tipsy young men, or the account of two angels playing with the universe?

That Carman seems to have designed that blurring makes for an interesting 19th century SciFi vignette which I perform today.

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in different styles. We've done over 750 of these combinations, and you can find them at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Pioneering Canadian poet Bliss Carman's break-through collection was called Songs of Vagabondia,  a popular 1894 book which extoled the adventurous and sensuous life. In this selection he jauntingly compares Robert Burns and Robert Browning.

The Parlando Project combines various words (usually literary poetry) with original music in different styles. We've done over 750 of these combinations, and you can find more at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Ancient Greek poet Sappho's poetry survives in fragments and spaces, but in 1904 a Canadian poet imagined Sappho's poems as if they were complete. The audacity of that project undertaken by Bliss Carman must be conceded, but the results can be judged on their own merits.

The Greeks said that Sappho's poems were sung with lyre music, and the Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music we create. We've done over 750 of these combinations, and you can find all of them and what we write about our encounters with the work at our blog and archives, located at frankhudson.org

August 6th is the 8th anniversary of the launch of the Parlando Project — but it is also the 23rd anniversary of my late wife's death and Hiroshima Day. The Parlando Project is largely about performing other people's words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in various styles, but for this August observance I used a poem I myself wrote about grief and have now turned into a song. 

The Parlando Project blog and archives is where I write about my encounters with the words combined with music. There are more than 750 examples there. You can find them at frankhudson.org