Just a few days ago, during this year's National Poetry Month series, I was posting my rough and untrained voice singing with orchestral instruments. Today I've got an acoustic guitar and I'm going to whop on it to deliver a performance of a poem by David McCord, a poet that specialized in light verse and poetry for children – even so, between-the-world-wars anthologist Louis Untermeyer included this poem in his 1937 Modern American Poetry. I'm not sure if McCord intended "Reflection in Blue" for children, but I found it a delightful little painting in musical words, suitable for any age.
The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done nearly 900 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
Here's a song I made from a sweet poem of enduring love by Amy Lowell. This in another in this year's April National Poetry Month series were I'm performing poems found in Louis Undermeyer's between-the-world-wars anthology, Modern American Poetry.
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 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
Here are some words from another poet, Robert Hillyer, who’s now lesser-known, though he was a Pulitzer Prize for poetry winner and was included in Louis Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry survey published in between-the-world-wars era. His "A Letter to Robert Frost" is a long poem in rhyming couplets about the comic mutability of poetic fashion, which he tells us is applied even retroactively to dead poets. To introduce that theme (as reflected briefly in the parts I excerpt today) Hillyer tells how he remembers, when he was a younger poet, talking about Emily Dickisnon with multiple Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost during the years Front taught at Amherst College.
I set some quotes from Hillyer’s poem to original music. I plan to write more about it and its testimony of the tides moving in and out regarding Emily Dickinson later this weekend. That longer consideration, along with nearly 900 other musical pieces combining various words, mostly literary poetry, with original music in differing styles that the long-running Parlando Project has done will be found at frankhudson.org
Three things mark Louis Untermeyer's taste in his between-the-world-wars Modern American Poetry: comfort with the Modernist avant garde, appreciation of the fantasy/gothic (Poe) strain in American poetry, and the inclusion of humorous verse in a “serious” anthology. This selection from his collection has elements of the last two, and was written by a poet as many mid-century readers would have been familiar with as Frost, Eliot, or Millay: Ogden Nash. A few years back Dave Moore and the LYL Band gave Nash’s “Adventures of Isabel” a go as a song, and that’s what I present today as I continue my National Poetry Month series using selections from Untermeyer’s anthology.
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 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
Here’s the next poet plucked from the pages of a Louis Untermeyer’s between-the-wars anthology Modern American Poetry as part of my series for this year’s National Poetry Month. The poet today is Maxwell Bodenheim, once the self-styled “King of the Greenwich Village Bohemians.” As I’ve found is common over the years with my Project, this is poem that deals in old age written by someone far from old – the author was 26 when it was published. I’ll write more about Bodenheim, his poem, and my experience with it soon at the Parlando Project blog location linked below.
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 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
Here's another lesser-known poet and poem found in Louis Untermeyer's between the world-war anthology "Modern American Poetry:" Elizabeth J. Coatsworth and this poem about mystery and strangers. I'm using poems I found in this 85-year-old anthology to celebrate National Poetry Month this April, and this is another one that strongly asks on the silent page to be set to music. I'll write more about Coatsworth and her poem later this weekend, which you'll be able to read in the Project's companion blog linked below.
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 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
Continuing on our National Poetry Month series of performances of poems contained in a between-the-world-wars anthology "Modern American Poetry," here's a poem by the pioneering Imagist H.D. "Lethe" H.D. often left interpretive space in her poems, and so it is with this one. One could read it as a curse or a elegy. I've chosen the latter.
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 kick off our annual celebration of U. S. National Poetry Month with the first of a series of poems (some well-known, some, like this one, less-known) found in the 20th century anthology Modern American Poetry. George Dillon's "Memory of Lake Superior" is a well-observed Spring nature poem, and sitting lesser-known on a page in this old book made me want to bring it, now sung, to you.
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 been telling folks I've been working on my Emily Dickinson "No Kings" piece this week, and here it is. Though not really a statement on current political regimes, but it is something of a statement about having too great an expectation of rewards from potentates. The poem I made into a song is Dickenson at her most snarky: the king is springtime sun, and the foolish morning thinks that this "sun king" will marry her and crown her his queen. Dickinson knows how this turns out.
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
Edna St. Vincent Millay presented a complex self that wrote complex love poems and complex Spring poems. This sonnet of hers I made into a song may be any one or more of these.
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
Are we through with Irish poets? Nope. How about less politics? Well, maybe. Here's a poem by Wiliam Butler Yeats weary of politics which I performed on a cheap, battered, plastic guitar.
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
Today, a poem that I've turned into a song for second post honoring two Irish-American poets who led an annual St. Patrick's Day poetry reading in Minnesota for several years before their death. Of the two, Ethna McKiernan had more direct ties to Ireland, having spent some time living in Dublin, and eventually in Minnesota running an Irish arts store in the Twin Cities for many years. When she would read her poem "The Day My Mother Gave Me Away to the Tinkers" she would instruct the listeners that, just as with many people, her busy mother had issued that threat in jest, and that the subject of this poem was her teenage mind thinking "Well, I'll take her up and that, and then she'll be sorry."
Of course, in order to realize this new song, there's a man singing this mother-daugher poem. That might be a detriment. And I made a mistake singing the name of a baker mentioned in the poem, Johnston Mooney and O'Brien. I dropped the "Johnston" but at first figured, no one would care, that it must be just some immaterial tiny particular bakery -- but it turns out that firm is a very famous Irish bakery, Oh well. I hope you enjoy the song anyway. And if you want to get it right, it's in her final new and selected collection available from her Irish publisher at this link.
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
Two Irish-American poets who Dave Moore and I knew and worked with (Kevin FitzPatrick and Ethna McKiernan) used to give an annual St. Patrick's Day poetry reading in the Twin Cities, a tradition that was ended by their final illnesses and death a few years back. It's occured to me that I can carry on that tradition here, and so, here's a poem of Kevin's, and like a lot of his best poetry, it seems kind of off-hand (though with a dry sense of humor) -- until you stop and think about the parable point the poem's story is conveying. So it is with this poem about borders that might speak to American events this year.
Kevin FitzPatrick's poetry is available though this web site: https://www.kevinfitzpatrickpoetry.com/
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's an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem of complicated love, or something somewhat like that. Millay's original text deals with the moment where two people, two consiousnesses, meet and sepearate. She wrote a weave of images, and as I made her poem into a song I decided to refrain one line from her text to emphasize the two consiousnesses present.
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
Do you think of Edna St. Vincent Millay as a poet of wistful love poems? Well, yes, she wrote those. She also wrote poetry like this example that stands up pretty well as a punk-rocky declaration of public disgust over war and its civic decorations and deodorizers shouted over electric guitars. Who's going to supply the noise for this? That our job today.
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
Around 100 years ago, Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay wrote this poem about a poet's hope for posterity. I was taken by a pair of lines in his poem where he prophesies that “Modern kings will throttle you to greet/the piping voice of artificial birds.”
I composed a rich and strange musical setting for the poem: a piano trio playing simply augmented with an oboe, viola da gamba, and a hurdy-gurdy.
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
A second poem (now song) by Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay on winter, following up from our last example. The last time McKay embraced winter as reflecting his own moods, but in this one emmigrant McKay imagines a warm island respite.
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
Continuing in our celebration of the poetry of Claude McKay, here's a short, bittersweet song made from his poem "To Winter." As a Jamaican emmigrant who lived much of his American time in the northern U.S., McKay here outlines a complex set of feelings about this time of the year.
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
Continuing in our series this Black History Month focusing on the work of Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay. Here's a sonnet of his published The Liberator magazine in 1921, now performed with a new musical accompaniment.
Long-time followers of this Project may remember that I've proposed something I call "The Sandburg Test:" does any substantial collection of the a poet's work include at least one poem dealing with the world of work? McKay tests positive with poems like this one.
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
For Valentine's Day and Black History Month, here's Claude McKay's poem of desire "Flower of Love" from his 1922 collection Harlem Shadows after I turned it into an exuberant song.
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 year for Black History Month I've doing series of song-settings of the poetry of Claude McKay, and today's piece has McKay expressing the hope that his poetry might survive the particulars of his life.
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
Starting off our Black History Month series this year featuring musical presentations of poems by Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay with this one about the immigrant experience, “The City’s Love.”
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's a short poem by Robert Frost that I made into a song and sang this month. Like the bird song Frost hears in his poem, it's in a minor key.
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
It's been more than a week since I could begin to think of putting out more work on this Project. As I continue, this note is going to read like propaganda, but I'm not much for that, and as best as I can this is an attempt at a objective summary. Our home state of Minnesota is currently subject to a intentionally vindictive incursion by the secretive armed forces of our mad and illtempered ruler, who says this is retribution. To a significent degree, no one knows who is being taken out of their homes, cars, schools, workplaces, or their footsteps. The armed forces generally don't say, but the point is to make a great many feel they could be next, particularly if they object to this, since that's being a "violent agitator." These so called agitators are often standing on sidewalks and streetcorners in their own neighborhoods, on their own blocks, even on their own doorsteps, or they are at their own shopping sites, schools, or workplaces, armed with but cell phone cameras and whistles to call others similarly "armed" to protect them (somewhat) from the masked squads. Some step forward to try to get the names of those who are being detained (the secretive authorities do not release those names) and getting near enough to hear that risks their own detention. Their cameras minimize, but do not eliminate the vindictive street beat-downs and such that would otherwise occur.
These encounters are not prayer circles. Many observing this are angry and disgusted and they are shouting out shames and curses.
Today song is going to seem topical. It's not. It was written and performed in 2014 by the LYL Band, and the song's refrain is a statement made by 19th century American Abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Phillips was asked why he aways had to be so fiery in denouncing the enslavers and slave catchers of his time. Phillips response was much-loved by a former U S Senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone. Phillips replied: "Yes, I'm on fire, because I have mountains of ice to melt!"
So, not a topical song. For historical interest only.
The Parlando Project takes various words (usually literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 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 hiking poem by Vachel Lindsay seems appropriate for January as many look back and foreward at the beginning of the year, and in the Parlando manner I've made it into a song.
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