Today is the last day of U.S. National Poetry Month which has been given the additional observance of Poem in Your Pocket Day where poetry lovers are asked to carry and share a poem. Today is also International Jazz Day – and so I chose this poem, "Drum" by Langston Hughes, the pioneering Jazz poet, and his poem that reminds all of us that the rhythm of life asks us to take our beat, take our light, take the dancing words, and to briefly shine.
The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 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
I hope you've been enjoying the bountiful crop of new musical pieces this month during our celebration of National Poetry Month. All the poems I've set to music this April were found in Louis Untermeyer's between-the-wars anthology Modern American Poetry, and today's selection is by another of the poets that Untermeyer noted but that time then has forgotten, a Pennsylvania school-teacher named Roy Helton. More than any other poem I found in Untermeyer's literary anthology, this one seems as if it was intended as a song lyric, though information on Helton is hard to come by. Untermeyer wrote that Helton had spent time in the hill country of Kentucky and North Carolina. and this poem is a mysterious tale from that region written in dialect.
The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 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
Continuing in our National Poetry Month series presenting poems found in Lewis Untermeyer's between-the-wars anthology Modern American Poetry, here's Hart Crane's "The Hurricane." Crane has chosen here his own idiosyncratic poetic diction, half Anglo-Saxon epithets and alliteration, half Marlowvian bombast in order to churn up this attractive piece of word music describing a storm. To remember this poem and poet I peformed it with a rock quintet combo.
The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 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
This is the 900th publicly released Parlando Project piece, an adaptation of a poem by Emily Dickinson about poets and poetry that I set to music in order to perform it. It continues our April National Poetry Month series in that the poem I adapted was from Louis Untermeyer’s between-the-world-wars anthology Modern American Poetry.
I plan to write later today about how it feels to have reached 900 pieces, about the adaptations I made with Dickinson’s text, about why I choose this poem for this milestone, and how I see the future of this Project. Those reflections will be posted at the Parlando Project blog linked below.
The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. All of our previous cominations remain available, 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 celebration of National Poetry Month continues with another song made from a poem found in Louis Untermeyer's between-the-wars Modern American Poetry anthology. Today's poem is by Louise Bogan, something of a poet's poet who mastered the short impactful lyric poem form in the 1920s, but didn't gather the same general readership as her fellow Maine native Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Her "Cassandra" is written in the voice or shared experience of the figure from classical mythology, who had the gift of prophecy, but when she spoke her doomed predictions of the fall of Troy and the fate of those (on both sides) who were part of that conquest, was deemed mad.
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
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