Here's a fresh English translation of Paul Éluard's poem "La Vie" performed with original music. Éluard was one of the prime Surrealists and this poem casts its heroine as living dreams seriously, or life as if it's a dream. 

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinaitons, 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've recently made this 16th century poem into a song, but then I hesitated to present it this week – because Robert Southwell's "The Burning Babe" seems both inappropriate and appropriate for Christmas. 

Inappropriate because it's an intentionally harrowing, visionary poem. If what it describes was made into a film, its horror might ask it to be kept from children who are, after all,  a central part of modern Christmas. And for whatever audience, at whatever level of understanding of Christian dogma that it expounds, it's a stretch to call "The Burning Babe" celebratory – and that's what we expect from Christmas. 

This makes the case for appropriateness a difficult one – and, at least in the United States, it's not a common part of Christmas services. The poem's metaphysical religious point would be appropriate for Good Friday or Easter service, but the poem is set explicitly at Christmas. Perhaps, on a Christmas when many in our country (and elsewhere) are suffering during a celebratory time, the lines within “The Burning Babe” that speak of justice and mercy, or the possibly of defiled souls being refined and recast – even though these things happen post-anguish – may speak to some.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinaitons, 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 a new-made song from the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The music is jaunty, and I think that fits the language of the poem as I read it, but best as I can determine this is a poem that fits into the genre my wife calls "Cozy Gothic." Gothic? What? There's sunsets, mornings, cottages in this little 8-line poem made into a tidy 2 minute song. Don't you mean Cottage-core? 

Nope. 

Listen to this poem, now song, again. I think the cottages are graves.  I'll write more about this at our blog and archives later this week.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinaitons, 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've long wanted to do a piece using the words of early 20th centery American poet Michael Strange, if only because her life story is so interesting. But there was one problem: her poetry wasn't very good, or at least it wasn't "good" in the ways I appreciate poetry. This week I came up with a compromize between this poet and my own sense of poetry: I revised and adatpted one of her poems by taking as my guide a principle I use when translating poetry written in other languages, to seek to convey the images the poet was portraying in their own language into vivid contemporary English.

I'll explain more about how I adapted the poem and write some about Strange's extraordinary life in a post on the Parlando Project blog later tonight.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinaitons, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

The Parlando Project is predominently about its encounter with other people's words, but I do occassionally use my own, Today's piece is a setting of a sonnet (this poetic form's name means "Little Song") for acoustic guitar and piano.  If the words are mine, my encounter with them is not unlike what we usually do here. 

How so? I've been doing a big cleanup of old boxes and shelves this autumn and I came over a notebook of mine with the first 9 lines of this piece in it. I can't date the notebook for sure, but I'm guessing 1990s. It seemed like it was a fragement of an unfished poem, and so while resting near bedtime after a day of dust and toting off stuff for disposal or donation I added the final 5 lines to fufull the sonnet, based on a incident I observed while biking this month.  Later in the week I did a couple of revision sessions and produced the text you'll hear performed. So, if the text today is my poem (not another's), the bulk of it was an encounter with someone's work I haven't seen for a few decades. I'll write more about this at the blog later this week.

The Parlando Project combines various words (usually other people's literary poetry)  with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about how we came to make the piece at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org