Here's a strange and deadly little poem by Walter de la Mare that I recently set to music and performed. De la Mare was writing a literary ballad, but in this one he compresses the story's length considerably compared the double-digit stanza numbers of many a broadside or folk ballad telling a similar story.
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 found this unpresupposing poem as the 5th one within a series of short poems by 20th century American poet Conrad Aiken called collectively “Variations.” As the title suggests, Aiken often had musical forms in mind, and so I then set out to compose some music to sing his poem.
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
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
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