A song made from Fenton Johnson’s “Revery”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Longtime followers of this Project will know that I’m a proponent of early 20th century Chicago Afro-American poet Fenton Johnson. The “elevator pitch” for Johnson is that he slots in between Paul Laurence Dunbar and the slightly later Harlem Renaissance. Back then, prominent contemporary Black critics such as the remarkable polymath James Weldon Johnson categorized Fenton Johnson’s work as altogether “radical” and “full of despair,” enough so that they were of mixed feelings about the value of his verse.

Fenton Johnson’s poetry does speak at times of hardship, oppression, even hopelessness, but upon further reading of his overlooked work, there’s a side of him that’s aspirational. In his short-lived attempts to establish an Afro-American focused journal he presented himself as a conventional Black Republican, perhaps hoping that the Reconstruction era of his elders could still be invoked.*  In addition, there’s another facet in his poetry: elements redolent of the modern Black Gospel music tradition which was forming up in Chicago while he was actively publishing just before WWI. The folks creating that music were attempting to fuse decidedly Black secular music like the Blues  and Jazz with the older (slavery era) strains of spirituals and preexisting hymnal songs. If the somewhat younger Langston Hughes gets due credit as a premiere Jazz poet, Fenton Johnson seems to me to have been trying to do the same thing with his poetry and Afro-American gospel.**

I could go on about Fenton Johnson, but instead I’ll try your attention by finishing up today by talking about making a musical piece out of his poem “Revery.”  Earlier this month I for some reason saw the text from which I adapted this week for my performance. Published in 1915, “Revery”  is one of the small number of Johnson’s poems available at the poets.org site. Reading those words, it struck me immediately that they could be a hymn to the Creator – or one could read it as a recounting of the “oversoul” that passes in an out of human lives. Having gone through September anniversaries for death and birth associated with Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane, this poem attracted me. I started by thinking I’d condense Johnson’s published text to more succinctly bring out that sense of soul essence passing through our human lives. While I think I retain the “The Creator Has a Master Plan”  sense of the poem***, in a human-limited lifetime I could see the result being used at a funeral.

Revery

The link above will show you Johnson’s full poem, which I shortened in my adaptation for performance.

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Beginnings of musical pieces have quite a variety of first movers for me. This one started when I saw a new-to-me voicing for a Csus2 guitar chord. Sus is short for a suspended chord, a favorite of mine. The sus recipe is to drop the 3rd of a chord, the note that makes a chord major or minor – even in a basic simple 3-note triad – but then put something else in its place. In a Csus2, it’s the second degree of the scale, D. From what I understand in classical harmony, sus chords are considered an unstable, transitional chord, one that traditionally asks for a quickly following major or minor 3rd decision to resolve it. Me? I don’t mind sounds staying out there in an unresolved fog for a good long time. I began to write the whole song with three sus chords and one minor 9th chord. To better fit my voice, I used a capo to shift the Csus2 voicing and the rest up two semi-tones, and if the minor9th is the resolving chord and key center, the recording of the song is in Bminor.

Revery Chord Diagrams

The alt-tuning and easy to finger guitar chord forms I used for this song. That A7sus4 could be given other names, and I think it has some sort of G flavor as I sound it. The 3rd chord in the picture, the one that started off the composition, has a so much deeper sound that the common conventional tuning Dsus2 voicing.

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I’ve been doing a great deal of work in my studio space in the past month or so. Lots of multitudinous clean up and organizing work – rejiggering what goes where recording-wise and seeking a richer environment for my keyboard playing compatriot Dave to record there.**** All the bending and crawling around really challenges my elderly body – and my memory taunts me, recalling running some of the connections I was changing when I was a much younger man for whom diving under a desk or contorting myself to work in the backside of a low equipment rack was routine. I took a break, not even half-way done in this, and told myself I should allow my aching body a creative vacation day. And that was the day when I recorded this setting of Fenton Johnson’s “Reverie.”

I was feeling tremendous gratitude when playing this. I was using equipment accumulated slowly over decades arrayed in an ugly looking space that still had piles and boxes of stuff from the re-org to sell, give away, or store properly – but that ugly looking place sounds fine. In my monitoring headphones and when listening to the recording tracks later I was pleased as how well my space sounds. Some famous studios with envied sounds were not purpose-designed and architected rooms. Motown was a residential basement. Its reverb chamber was the house’s attic. Sound Techniques where Joe Boyd and John Wood produced the recordings of Nick Drake  and the cream of British folk-rock was upstairs in a former dairy with a naturally reverberant high vaulted ceiling and slate-lined walls. Stax in Memphis was a neighborhood movie house, the floor still slanted to accommodate the now absent movie chairs. Bert Jansch and John Renbourn’s first significant LPs were recorded in an ordinary London flat, the sound treatment: whatever the odd furniture was in it.

My space? Low ceiling, and noise from those in the floor above can easily be an issue, but it’s irregular in floor plan without any complete parallel walls. Sound treatment? It’s frankly clutter and happenstance. Today’s piece is a simple, unadorned recording. The recorded solo acoustic guitar has no reverb or delay, what you hear is just it and the microphones in this odd shaped room where I’ve recorded since the 1990s. You can hear me rebroadcast the soul of Fenton Johnson from there with the audio player gadget below. No player to be seen? Has it passed over the horizon in the meat-wheel of rebirth? No, it’s just not displayed within some ways of reading this blog, and so I supply this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

 

*It may be confusing to 21st century readers, but before the New Deal era, the businessman oriented Republican party that was already associated with some conservative cultural stances was in the matter of Black Civil Rights still the Party of Lincoln, however weak that association had become.

**This working theory of mine is not (AFAIK) supported by any deep scholarship – it’s just a reasonable supposition by someone like myself with wide interests in music, poetry, and history. Remarkably little seems to be extant regarding Fenton Johnson’s privately expressed thoughts over his lifetime, and even those who knew him later in his life are now likely dead. A younger scholar interested in Afro-American culture could well take up investigating him.

***If you click on the link you’ll get a 34 minute Pharaoh Sanders spiritual Jazz piece that eventually meets up with an unforgettable vocal by Leon Thomas. Do your ears feel like praying for half-an-hour? I’m listening to it now as I finish formatting this for the blog.

****His keyboards can now be more often recorded in stereo. I now have a different vocal mic that may better suit his voice. When we record “live in the studio” we use loops I create with sequenced drums and bass, and these are now going to be separated tracks in my new plan and routing. We’re not going to start sounding like a Steely Dan record or anything, but the plan has promise.

Tell me where is Fancy bred: Shakespeare the Songbird Poet

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

In writing about Sara Teasdale last time here I mentioned that she has been grouped with a set of 20th century female poets as a “Songbird Poet.” The implied charge here is that these poets are less concerned with the deep meaning of poetry and are content to just make pleasant word-music.

If we are to attend the deeper meaning school, I’d have an opening to report that in nature the songs of birds are not all pleasant and meaningless – for they sing for desire, for companionship, to legislate territory, and for existential defense among other things. If birds are likely deficient in theology and philosophy, I’m too ignorant to know if a sense of avian metaphor is present.

I, of course, am being stubbornly literal there, Teasdale appears to be without feathers and everyone should know this, save for those who are sure the female mind is insufficient and therefore may have doubts. One of the things we may claim as humans is that we are a flexible sort of creature of many moods and levels. One kind of song, one kind of poetry? There’s no handy phone app that can identify our songs as one sort of human.

So, even if calling them “songbird poets” is plausibly belittling, as a person in this Project I have to say that making a song, something one appreciates uttering, can be a worthwhile thing. Here’s another minor poet who I’m sure we’ve kept in a parlor cage as a songbird, one William Shakespeare. This tidy little song, from his play The Merchant of Venice, talks about idle, surface-deep, love (“Fancy”). But wait – like is often the case with the Songbird Poets, there’s a more complex message inside it. In the play, one of a pair of lovers is given a test: a choice of three boxes and selecting the correct one will allow them to marry. Shakespeare, prefiguring the ding-dong theme played when the Jeopardy game-show contestants are making their final answer and wager, provides this song to fill the stage time as the lover thinks it over.*

Tell me where

I made a point to write this one entirely with my ham-handed skills on keyboards.

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As a poem it seems simple doesn’t it. Sure, there’s some now-archaic language in it, but to modern readers or listeners, that probably only makes it seem more the nursery rhyme.

But it turns out there’s a little bit of metaphysics in the modest verse: where does “Fancy,” that insubstantial, fickle, flimsy love come from? From the mysteries of the heart and its desires? From some reasoning of the mind? Nope. It’s all from looks – all “I’d hit that” surface the singer warns – it’s hardly born, and it’ll die. Finally, the singer asks us to celebrate the death of that kind of infatuation, and joyously ring its funeral bell, as time is up and the lover must make their decision.

So, is a little song like a Fancy: never more than a flimsy, momentary thing? Or can it tell us something about food, partnership, where we are, where the predators are?

Well in the present case of my performance of Shakespeare’s song, I’m the dun, leaden box since I needed to use my voice for this, and I made a simple pealing accompaniment with a viol, a reed pump organ, and a harpsichord. You can choose to hear it with the audio player gadget below. No gadget? It hasn’t flown south in a honking V arpeggiation, it’s just hiding in the brush cover of some ways of reading this blog. I offer this alternative then, a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I believe that none of the music used in Shakespeare’s plays in his lifetime has survived. Merv Griffith, himself a gameshow host and producer, wrote the tune used on Jeopardy. I haven’t watched that long-running TV show in decades, yet his tune (in its original version) is still stuck in my head.

September Midnight

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Well, as more-or-less promised, here’s a return to literary poetry that may probably meet audience expectations: a season-appropriate poem by American poet Sara Teasdale titled “September Midnight.” Teasdale’s been a long-time favorite here, which goes back to one of my models of setting literary poetry to music. She’s one of a group of American female poets firmly in the early-20th century Modernist era, reflecting by degrees a Modernist outlook, but without adapting Modernist poetic language and prosody. Others I’ve presented here multiple times with this stance would include Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elinor Wylie, or even Dorothy Parker and Margaret Widdemer.

Canon-wise I sense a push-pull with these poets. On one hand they provide a female poetic outlook that coincides with important cultural movements for women’s equality, but on the other hand they – somewhat like the “Georgian Poets” in Britain – get marked down for not getting on with the new prosody. Of course, sexist blinders enter into this – the very idea of writing from a woman’s perspective is still often weighed as “slight” by the male dons of poetry, who might be Modernist in verse but old-school patriarchs regarding what’s important. For much of their century, the more through-going Modernist women poets like Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and H.D. had to dance backwards in high heels while Robert Frost’s metrical-syllabic net balls were allowed to freely score points with vers libre Modernists.

And all this happened as it slowly dawned on the summary American literary establishment that Emily Dickinson was quite possibly America’s greatest poet. All of which doesn’t necessarily make Sara Teasdale some sort of upper-level-of-the-Pantheon “great poet” in current 21st century estimate.*

Which brings me back to a point I make repeatedly: poetry isn’t some serial single-file hierarchy, which might well direct us to only read the top ten or so – or to carefully guard against anyone paying the slightest attention to poets ranking numbers 238 and below or something. Poetry isn’t poetry, singular – it’s poetries.

Poetry like Teasdale’s likes to be sung out loud, even if there are elements of old-fashioned poetic diction that come along for the ride. That means that this Project puts it thumb on the scale for her work.

Teasdale was a contemporary of T. S. Eliot in St. Louis Missouri, then a commercial hub in the middle of the U.S., but like Eliot her family has roots in New England. Like Dickinson, I can sense the American spiritual thread of Transcendentalism in her fabric, particularly when she writes about nature, as in this poem. Transcendentalists tend to see nature not simply as a handy metaphor for the divine or highest reality, but the very incarnation of it. Transcendentalist scripture isn’t a bound book of thoughts and laws, it’s the Book of Nature, observed.

September Midnight

Chord sheet in case your grasshoppers and locusts want to sing this with you.

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So besides falling easily into a singing voice (even one as limited as mine) her “September Midnight”  is a Transcendentalist hymn I think, and the lesson it wants us to take after our breath and voices finish with it is that we do not presume to go to some heaven after we die, but that heaven (as in the sublime reality) is with us in the creation we are presently living.**

My song performance of Teasdale’s poem can be heard with the audio player below. If there’s no audio player to be seen, it’s not that you’ve forgotten our present heaven, but more likely that the way you’re reading this post eliminates showing the graphical audio player gadget. “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite,” wrote Blake. I write that you can click on this highlighted link and a new browser tab will appear with its own audio player – not quite the same thing, but there’s music in it.

 

 

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*Rankings inevitably become silly, and it’s hard to keep them contained into casual, personal preferences – but still one can fairly observe a 20th century progress with Dickinson from “somewhat interesting and eccentric” to “wow, there’s some deep stuff incredibly condensed into its own original and attractive prosody.”

**I’m thinking today of Annie Dillard, whose work I paid some slight attention to back in the Seventies where parts of what we later think of as The Sixties™ happened. I saw in an obit that she’s yet another American figure who left off from poetry to find an audience. Her one book of poems was quickly eclipsed by the audience for the prose of her second book, Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek.  Dillard’s “Tickets for a Prayer Wheel”  briefly returned to print more than 20 years ago, and I’ve located and ordered a copy of it.

(Note: as I was proofreading this post, a notice came back that my order for “Tickets for Prayer Wheel”  has been cancelled – now unavailable from that store. I’ll try to re-order this afternoon.)

So, you want 8:50 of wailing electric guitar without much in the way of poetry?

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Perhaps there are some out there who think 4 minutes of raging electric guitar isn’t enough, so I spent the afternoon today making a video release of the full nearly 9 minutes of my 2026 Jimi Hendrix Memorial piece. Here also are a couple follow-ups after that longish post last night.

I wrote yesterday that Eric Burdon might have recorded his answer song “Yes, I Am Experienced”  before the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s debut LP and its title song “Are You Experienced?”  were released. I should have double checked that unlikely event, because that’s highly unlikely. Both groups, the Experience and The New Animals were forming and recording around the beginning of 1967, but Are You Experienced  was released in the Spring and the New Animals’ “Winds of Change”  album with the song I borrowed some words from was put out in Autumn.

Let me say a few more words about the New Animals’ LP though. Regardless of its unalloyed embrace of 1967 hippie ethos and the plausible charges of over-reach by Burdon as a wordsmith, it is a unique mix of spoken/chanted word with full-throated singing by the acclaimed singer. The new band was talented. It was produced by one Tom Wilson, the incredible Afro-American producer who had worked with Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, The Mothers of Invention, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, The Soft Machine, and the Velvet Underground.*   Besides the song I borrowed some remembered words from yesterday, the LP’s title song chants the praises of a number of other historic and contemporary musicians. There’s a strongly sung expansion of the Rolling Stones “Paint It Black,”  and the witty (and Top-40 charting) song lauding Burdon’s new hometown of San Francisco. The spoken word highlight for me is “The Black Plague”  a Poe-worthy tale of class paranoia and separation.

It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Burdon is  audacious to pretentious. That’s part of what I love about him and this album, and I’m probably guilty of every sin he can be charged with, without the grace of being able to sing as well as he can. I was trying to describe how odd it is to my wife today by saying that the well-known LP it’s most like in its oddness is the Patti Smith Group’s debut Horses.  With “Paint It Black” it’s got its boldly recast cover song ala Smith’s “Gloria.”  Like Horses “Elegie”  and “Break It Up”  it has its Hendrix related and praise-for-departed-inspirational-artists songs. Weird tales? Smith “Birdland”  has its considerable incantatory power, but the tale of Burdon’s “Black Plague”  increments in it’s stately telling. Both band’s frontperson is comfortable slipping between spoken word and singing. And, of course, Horses  isn’t for everyone either. AFAIK, Patti Smith has never spoken about any fondness for Burdon, but it wouldn’t surprise me that Lenny Kaye might have had some appreciation for the Animals, New or otherwise.

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Much of the work in making the video came from finding and appropriating the photos of Hendrix and the New Animals I put in it. Most of the places I found them didn’t credit the photographers –and they should be credited. I increasingly feel bad about not doing that for videos. Luckily for my conscience, I have access to a couple of stock photo and video clip libraries as benefits to two programs I use, but their off-the-rack blandness can be unsatisfying too, although I worked to spice them up with some composting tricks in this one.

At one point I thought ethical AI might be a way out. I used Adobe’s Firefly product during its beta stage, which claimed to be trained only on work they had licensed. I even used it extensively for one of my Hendrix memorials a couple years ago. But there are more issues with AI than just training sources, and the stuff still produces mostly horseshoes and hand-grenades approximates. I like the additional audience that videos can bring, but these things keep me concentrating more on recordings.

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*There a movie, documentary, book, something that should be made about Tom Wilson. What’s been tried at article length hasn’t found many sources, and death has claimed most of the artists he worked with. Maybe the best that could be done is a novel or roman à clef film imaging what his life must have been like for him.

UPDATE: Well, there will be a book length consideration of Tom Wilson! Just saw this this morning: Everything Is Everything | Stanford University Press

Yes, I Am Experienced: the 2026 Jimi Hendrix Memorial Piece

~ Frank Hudson ~ 7 Comments

I worry some that I’m shorting my appreciated audience its rations of expected poetry, what with the recent series of poorly received short Dadaist French translations – but if there’s one thing guaranteed when working in this self-managed Project it’s that I can go where chance and mood takes me. For those wondering if I’ve left more conventional poetry behind, I ask for a short dose of patience – I have variety in my soul, and I’ll be back to that soon.

But not today. Today this thing where Music and Words Meet will be about words meeting music.

Almost every year this century I’ve taken to noting the anniversary of the death of the American musician Jimi Hendrix. Initially it simply meant that on the morning of September 18th I’d plug in an electric guitar, turn the amp up loud, and play.* When the Parlando Project started in 2016 I began to publish some of those recordings memorializing Hendrix each September.

I’ve been thinking recently about an aspect of that decade called The Sixties.™ There was over its ten-year allotment (which carried over into the decade where a lot of what we think of as The Sixties™ happened, the merely The Seventies) an increasing appeal and practice of freedom in music. I believe this started first in Jazz.** Bebop liked to see how free one could be within ever more finely woven harmonic frameworks, which tempts one to point this out as a metaphor for the Afro-American experience. How expressive can you be though constrained? But as The Sixties™ approached, a new thing was coming into Jazz. No one worked too hard on what to call it: it was called “Free Jazz.”

A number of things happened within this expanding freedom, often all at once – in practice, decidedly all at once – harmonic structures were relaxed, no more making the rapid chord changes; improvisation became not just the rule of the featured solos, but the rule of entire compositions, and more than one musician could be soloing at once, even musicians in the “rhythm section;” allowed instrumental expression and articulations were expanded every which way into sounds that would have been considered defects in technique or propriety; and song length became limited only by the endurance of fiery young musicians.

Such endurance and allowance didn’t extend to audiences. Many of the practitioners of Free Jazz never knew substantial audiences that extended beyond fellow musicians of the same movement – but two who had achieved audiences took different paths through this freedom. One was Miles Davis, but I must leave him out for lack of time.

The other was John Coltrane, and this month it’s the centenary of Coltrane’s birth. As I worked on my annual Hendrix memorial I thought of this other great artist, one whose life can be properly studied like the lives of saints without inappropriateness. Coltrane did not start out as a young phenom. He was a perfectly average saxophonist in an age where there were many, many others, and like others in his era, heroin addiction tampered his resources early in his career. Somehow his dedication to his craft survived this, and even among his most ardent contemporaries, his study and practice regimen was legendary. By the late Fifties he could write and perform structures like “Giant Steps,”  a set of abrupt, up-tempo, leaping chord changes that he would arpeggiate over – a task to challenge any post-BeBop Jazz player to the upmost.

Coltrane also made music with a popular footprint. He was featured on the most popular Jazz LP of all time, the Miles Davis Quintet’s Kind of Blue,  and with his own quartet his revolutionary, yet popular, reconception of the Broadway tune “My Favorite Things” sold well and became a juke-box staple.

Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”  was Free Jazz adjacent, so that performance’s popularity with audiences was another achievement. Coltrane was the featured soloist on it and the chord changes were now sparce (as were the charts on the Kind of Blue  LP), but the quartet’s rhythm section stayed in a catchy Jazz waltz groove on that record. Performing live around this time, Coltrane would feature fellow genius improviser Eric Dolphy, They might solo simultaneously and unleash extended articulations – outright Free Jazz in all its general audience baffling ways. As The Sixties™ continued, Coltrane increased the freedom in his work, live and on record. More soloists, extended rhythm sections sometime doubling bass and drums who were also freed to solo or extend themselves from strict time-keeping. This didn’t help Coltrane maintain his audience, but soon enough he was dying of liver disease, expiring during the “Summer of Love” in 1967. One of his last popular LPs was also among the last with the simpler Quartet, 1965’s “A Love Supreme.” “A Love Supreme”  is one of the most overtly spiritual albums in history, and Coltrane seemed unconcerned that his devotion to extending musical freedom should bow to commercial expectations.

Winds of Change LP cover

OK, what’s this LP cover doing in a post about Free Jazz, John Coltrane, and Jimi Hendrix?

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Now if Free Jazz wasn’t topping record charts or filling large venues, that didn’t mean it wasn’t impacting popular music, by way of musicians appreciating musicians. In general, rock musicians weren’t Jazz musicians in theoretical knowledge or technical skills, but this call for musical freedom became quite broad in The Sixties™. I’m going to short change that history today, but rock musicians were listening to Jazz, and wanted to try to take part in this kind of Free Jazz expression.***

Which brings us to two rock musicians: Jimi Hendrix and Eric Burdon. Not a natural pairing it might seem, but a close one none-the-less. Eric Burdon was the lead singer of the Animals, a northern England R&B band with soul-Jazz tinges, that by 1966 had reformulated themselves as Eric Burdon and The New Animals – the new DBA designed to escape the clutches of a shady and money-skimming manager named Mike Jeffery. This new group was going to play “progressive rock,” the name I would have called the sort of Rock groups who wanted longer pieces with more expressionist soloing.****

Through a convoluted but happy set of accidents, that year the going-nowhere American Hendrix was taken to England by the now obsolete Old Animals bass player, Chas Chandler. If Chandler was tired of being screwed over by managers, he decided what he would do is become one – a supportive, musician centered one – and with Hendrix he could see the potential to make a ragamuffin couch-surfing Afro-American R&B player who loved Bob Dylan lyrics and SciFi into a going commercial concern.

Which he did. Alas, he needed front money to establish even a stripped-back power trio to launch Hendrix, the newly formed Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Chandler had to enlist his old devil Jeffery to get that cash. Over the next 3-4 years of a Jimi Hendrix career we now remember, Chandler’s role diminished and Jeffery’s role expanded – but in the winter of ’66-’67 Chandler’s old lead singer Burdon and his new band was hip to the idea of this new force Hendrix, and they concocted a tribute to Jimi and musical freedom to close the first side of their first LP, a short yet expansive jam they titled “Yes, I Am Experienced.”  I wondered: how soon after Hendrix had released his first LP with the song “Are You Experienced?” did Burdon and the Animals do their tribute?  A quick search result says Burdon released his “answer record” before that Hendrix LP that contained it – but I heard them in the correct order.

Back then I liked the Animals. I liked Eric Burdon and the New Animals as much, but there are elements about them that might be, well, embarrassing. Burdon was one of those ecstatic converts familiar to religious movements, all-in on what they understood about this upcoming Summer of Love, psychedelia in drugs and art, free love – and yes, this Free Jazz inspired expansion of musical arrangements and expression. So much so, that he embarrassed some acolytes of these things even in The Sixties™!

And so it was that Burdon’s lyrics on “Yes, I Am Experienced”   have a mixture of enraptured naivete and cringe. Back in The Sixties™, I can remember my eventual LYL and Parlando musical partner Dave Moore finding Burdon’s performance there a tad pretentious,***** while liking the new band on the record, particularly guitarist/violinist/sitarist Vic Briggs.

So, for the 2026 version of my Jimi Hendrix memorial, I’m releasing this recording which adapts a few words from Burdon about Hendrix, but it’s mostly about taking the electric guitar and getting on with playing long solos using that instrument’s expressive colors, despite not being a John Coltrane.

I laid down the bass part with my Jack Casaday bass, using the melodic line there to inform the harmonic scheme for a vibraphone track. Then I picked up a somewhat problematic Telecaster that’s in my studio space, one that has a very noisy P90 neck pickup. Undaunted by buzzing from the single coil pickups plugged into a considerably overdriven amplifier, I played a one-pass freely expressive solo extending for nearly 9 minutes. It’s not really in Jimi Hendrix’s style, or Vic Briggs’ either. Perhaps it’s my style? Well, playing for 9 minutes you have to be somebody. I misremembered some of what Burdon went on about in his recording praising Hendrix, but I yelped out an adaptation of part of his lyrics, while the music has nothing to do with what the New Animals recorded in the winter of ’66-67.

What you can hear with the audio player below is less than 4 minutes of that, a foreshortened “single version” that fades out less than half-way in. If I have the time, I may indulge the full-length “album version” release a bit later. No player?  This highlighted link will open a new browser tab with its own player.

The initial point of these annual exercises was to use Hendrix as an example to memorialize musical creators – to do this, however imperfectly with my musical limitations, because I’m alive and can do what I can do when they no longer can do such in a present moment – to notice, to underline, to pay attention to that, to feel it in my body. This is like what I try to do for the dead poets here other days: to bring them inside myself, a living being.

In point of fact, Eric Burdon is still alive. The evening before Jimi Hendrix died in a London flat after taking too-strong European formulary sleeping pills, he showed up at a gig in London with Burdon and his then new in 1970 group, one called War. Yes, the War who would put out sublime chill Latin-funk songs later in the merely Seventies. Eric, unlikely that you’re in the hardy audience here that indulges poetry and varied music, but this is the second or third time I’ve tipped my hat to you in this Project. I think you influenced me, though of course not as a convincing singer, but (oddly enough) as being naïve enough to do this anyway.

 

 

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*This became easy for me to do after the death of my wife – no one to disturb. It’s become harder to do in the past couple of years – more folks who can be disturbed.

**As I wrote this, I thought: did avant garde orchestral-instrument art music do this first? As Andrew Hickey’s Law has it, “There’s No First of Anything,” but my casual thought on this was that a great deal of the “classical music avant garde” (yes, this sort of oxymoron was used) was focused on abstracted and system music in the mid-century. Yes, rules were broken and discarded, but often new rules or procedures for chance were brought in. Those designed abstractions might challenge audiences as much as Free Jazz did, but Free Jazz did it from what seemed to listeners as too much indulgence in unfettered human expression.

***Examples of direct influence: the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”  is a loose adaptation of Coltrane and Eric Dolphy’s live recording “India.”  Highly underrated drummer John Densmore of The Doors often speaks of how the John Coltrane Quartet drummer Elvin Jones’ example showed him how to ground freer soloists without constraining them. Other rock drummers of this era, including Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, used Jones as a model.

****Let’s be careful around music nerds: not to be confused with Prog Rock, a name generally given to bands as The Seventies dawned who were more influenced by European orchestral instrument composers than the American Jazz influenced bands of The Sixties™. Of course, these two things intermixed, but we must maintain distinctions!

*****The song’s fade out, as Burdon essays the “Good Morning Little School Girl”/”Sweet Little 16”  trope of rock stars having sex with presumably underage girls is particularly objectionable. As a horny young man when the LP came out, I’m not sure I can claim retrospective acknowledgement of the power imbalances there so much as remembering the unintentionally comic idea of Burdon, a great singer without ever being able to sustain the erotic charisma of others of his era as an irresistible love god. Yes, there’s real harm in real life in such conceptions, but the aura of Bottom with the asses head in Midsummer’s Night’s Dream  was unavoidable.

Habitude

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today I’m going to wrap up my late summer series of fresh English translations of the early poems of French Surrealist Paul Éluard. Frankly, these poems are having trouble finding an audience – and in my suppositions, this is understandable. Earlier in the series I wrote (generalizing) that modern audiences have expectations of poetry – pre-requisites for our attention and valuation – and these early Éluard poems refuse to meet those expectations.*  That’s a large part of what I like about them: their laughter at their refusal.

This abrupt ending means that I won’t get a chance this month to write more about what I know of Éluard’s life and how it might inform that refusal. I probably should know more about the details before writing such an account anyway, but the shortest summary would say: WWI vet therefore likely suffering its endemic PTSD, a leftist in a world where communist and fascist regimes are the current weather fronts, and an unruly, committed lover bilaterally lucky and unlucky in love. He would eventually write some grander poems, poems more full of the stuff that might please more readers and listeners, but this summer’s set of early refusenik poems are one way to confront the way of the world.

Talk to the hand Eluard

Paul Éluard, not a window-shutter hand.

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As performed, Éluard’s “Habitude”  is so short that it’s one of the shortest pieces in the history of this Project. It says, I think, a few things about the rules of desire and constraints of propriety. Written when Éluard was helping found Surrealism, it shows how influential the absurdity of Dada was in that movement’s birth. The poem is just long enough to have a contrasting middle section, and I try to highlight that contrast by switching from speaking to singing in performance. The truth, that Éluard proclaims “without saying it” here is that he wants an open window and an ever-expanding wind rushing in.

Habitude

Even with this foreshortened series, my  translations here have likely increased the number of easily online-available English translations of Éluard’s early poetry by 50% or so.

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I’m not sure what the next piece will be (I have several in various stages of completion), but your presenter values variety highly, so it’ll likely be different. This Project is “oversized” and off-the-rack clothes can’t contain it.

To hear my translation and performance of “Habitude”  you can weigh the audio player that should be below – but Internet viewing doesn’t make that gadget mandatory, so I offer this highlighted link which will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*It’s also possible that my musical settings and performances might have been less worthwhile, or my being unable to refrain from connecting Éluard’s poems with present political and civic concerns in my recent posts was tiring or awkward to readers. I almost released another musical version of “Habitude”  late last week, but I decided my singing on it – though my singing is always roughshod – wasn’t up to the impeccable standards of exquisite vocalizations you’ve come to expect here.

Giorgio De Chirico, but this is a poem

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Returning now to my series presenting the early poems of French Surrealist Paul Éluard, you may recall that I was talking about the small contemporary presence early Surrealist poets like Éluard have in America compared to their contemporaries in Surrealism who were painters and visual artists. I wrote then about few reasons you may not have heard of, much less considered, Éluard’s poetry. Here’s another reason: we generally expect poetry to deliver a message to us, if not an explicit moral, memoir bit, or assayable philosophical, spiritual, or political point, then something that conveys a comprehensible, palpable, report of the experience of these things. Sure, poetry might be condensed and shorn of elaborate contextual frameworks – just as a text we might receive on our phones would seem vague to those not party to the conversation and the ongoing relationship of its writer and reader – but we fill in those things most of the time when we consider a poem worthwhile, while visual art is allowed a great deal more freedom. No one is required to hold forth on what water lilies or sunflowers mean in a painting, and melting clocks or obscuring apples may sport with our expectations, but still intrigue us.

So today’s Éluard poem is an appeal to readers to cut him some slack by presenting an ekphrastic poem, a poem implying a case that you could consider its set of words beyond finding its message, but to just enjoy it as a not-fully-decodable object in itself. If we don’t know what a Surrealist painting means, we might still have an experience with it, and one such experience is what Éluard’s “Giorgio De Chirico”  means to convey.

One side-effect of that open field we allow visual art is that we may have varied and dynamic experiences – derive entirely new and novel “frames” in our experience of it. As I wrote recently in my run-down of the most popular posts over the decade of this Project: the most popular post here was about how the Statue of Liberty, which is most often seen as a clear expression of freedom and welcome, has another context, partly intended by its creator, but unseen from our usual perspective, the metal giant’s feet have broken free from shackles and chains, and the small island its pedestal rests on once had a jail. Or let’s take the ubiquitous image of the Mona Lisa. What did Da Vinci intend? We don’t know, and we even like to think the enigmatic smile depicted intends for us to wonder. To its patron, the painting they commissioned might mean something about patriarchal ownership. Some surmise that the woman is pregnant and is musing on the child that is to be born. Others, pregnant themselves, could take that same framing and wonder if that face is attempting to misdirect its body from a bout of morning-sickness nausea.

So, as I translated “Giorgio De Chirico”  I could see things about De Chirico’s paintings that Éluard was experiencing and reporting on. I enjoyed finding singing English words to convey that from his French. I performed it, tracking just voice and solo acoustic guitar this time, during the same sessions where I was working on the other Éluard poems that I presented in August.

Four De Chirico paintings

Here are four representative De Chirico paintings. The sharp lines of shadows and bright light, the tiny people dwarfed by structures, all were motifs he commonly used.

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Then yesterday, instead of buckling down and preparing a final mastered mix of the song I’d made, I watched a documentary about 9/11. The one I watched focused on the part not usually considered: the experience in the Pentagon, that giant military office building in Washington D. C. that also suffered a deadly hit by a hijacked airliner that day.

In it, one survivor told her tale of that day. She was a light colonel, working in an administrative desk job, in a building that (other than its massive size) is like a great many other office buildings many work at during any workday, and furthermore she was about to give a presentation on some matter in that common workday misery, a morning meeting in a small conference room there.

And then the speeding fuel-laden airliner slammed into the wall of her facet of the five-sided Pentagon. In darkness, thick smoke, and heat she led a small group trying to find an exit. She grabbed a damp sweater that she found by touch to try to stifle the smoke. She didn’t know the dampness was from jet fuel, not water. The building segment was already aflame, parts not yet immediately destroyed were collapsing in the heat. No one could see much of anything, they had to hold hands to stay together. Her small group made it to a window, a bit of light in the dark chaos. Like many modern office windows, it was not designed to be opened – more than that, it had recently been upgraded to be “blast proof” as protection from something like an outside truck-bomb attack. It was made so that it couldn’t even be broken! Someone in her party picked up that trouble-spot of many an office day, a heavy laser printer, and hurled it at the window. It bounced right back off the glass. Somehow in the dark and smoke, they found the printer again, and threw it again – and that time the blow started to uncase the window’s frame. They pried it out and leapt outside.

Now that’s more excitement than many poetry blogs will offer you most days. Watching this account, everything was intensified by the story’s setting, for I’ve worked in modern office buildings like this, I’ve had the boredom or anxiety of meetings, I’ve carried heavy laser printers and made them work again the second time – frames that make it easy to share that experience.

The documentary also had an account from a man standing outside who saw them pounding ineffectively on that window and who went into the burning building to try to see if he could lead them out, only to find the destruction and conditions inside made it impossible to find any way to them from that exit. It wasn’t until a decade later he found out those pounding at the window had escaped, but for ten years he thought he was the last one to see them alive.

And then, I expanded in my empathy as I watched these accounts, including those who didn’t escape. It called to mind that folks elsewhere in buildings or working boats struck, perhaps nowadays with un-maned mechanisms that don’t need suicidal fanatics inside them, but have up-the-chain commandants upwards to the Commander in Chief who’ve loosed them thinking they have good and sufficient reason to do so.

Now, I’ve ruined a perfectly good essay on art and poetry – and your expectations if you came here for that – but as I revisited this performance this morning to make a final mix you can hear below, those sudden and shuddering skies, the words I translated in August from French: denounced and spinning walls, daylight through leaves, and those who speak without knowing. Mysterious, enigmatic poems and songs can act like objects (as painting or sculpture) engender new feelings, new meanings.* Perhaps it takes a Surrealist, with a willingness to combine outlandish things without favoritism to sensible intent to portray some realities.

Giorgio de Chirico

A chord sheet of the song I made from my translation of Éluard’s poem.

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If you want to hear my performance of my own translation of Éluard’s “Giorgio De Chirico,” there’s the audio player below. If it’s not there, don’t throw a printer, there’s this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

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*Regarding art and unintended re-framing due to the events of 9/11, I think of the breakthrough work by one of my acknowledged models for this Project, Laurie Anderson’s 1981 “O, Superman.”   What with it’s “Here come the planes. They’re American planes” and the spookiness of disembodied voices abstracted and preserved by machines, it can be, and has been, experienced differently post 9/11.

In Order To

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

In the U.S. this Monday is Labor Day. I’m not sure how often it occasions particular observances these days. To some degree, it’s the unofficial end of Summer, and is observed as that. I suppose there will be some celebrations of work and workers, even among the workers in song, our musicians and poets – but they will not overwhelm the American zeitgeist. The important things of the world, irregardless of our political philosophies, we ascribe to the powerful: politicians, oligarchies and the individually famous; or to nameless fate or divine will. The minor things of our enjoyment and sustaining survival we may well do this weekend, but we won’t make odes about it.*

I’m going to call on the words of Kenneth Patchen for the day, though his poem “In Order To”  isn’t strictly speaking a celebration of work and workers. I love its slyness in observing some asymmetrical things about this matter. It opens with something workers may recognize: we can take, even perversely, pride in getting some assigned job done, while laughing at the ignorance of our taskmasters. We think, after all, that such forbearance is survival. Patchen wants us to note: that’s not necessarily so, the survival part.

Patchen ends on a killing joke. The damn fool stuff we put up with, because that’s “the way of the world” or a bill of work we can’t see our way to change, we endure – but we (or our fellow workers, feeling similarly) may not endure from it. Does that make those things, as they slide from idiocy to cruelty, from callousness to killing, our fault? Would he, would I, would you, say that, in part, that is so? Patchen wrote this poem in the 1930s, gave it its title, before the plea “I was just following orders” became infamous. The strongmen and monsters of history may give the orders bourn from their evil notions, but even as machines and mechanisms increasingly, inhumanly, carry them out, we are still asked to do our part, or to look away.

For those who’d like to read the text of Patchen’s poem, here’s a link to it.

My apologies to those looking for something merely restorative during this long weekend. I’m no consistent model of noble actions, and I know you can’t be that either, what with the burdens you carry. As summer ends, I think back to what I called out to the young men wearing their irregular uniforms and masks, deployed on the broad urban avenues on either side of my home last Winter: “Go home. You can quit your jobs, and go home. We’re already home – this is where we live, and we don’t want you here.” Some of them seemed to just be standing around, unsure of what to do. The more senior, perhaps more experienced, among them had a work plan: tear gas and flash-bangs. Other times the work was incarceration, or yes, bullets.

Winter 2026 in Minneapolis

On this Labor Day, Minnesota crowds might be at the State Fair or in a park, but at the beginning of the year ordinary workers – not on holiday, but in dismay, – chose to stand together. When you saw captions then writing, “activists,” that would be inexact – mostly just folks who didn’t want to say “yes” to governmental activists.

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This blog has a small audience. I think of it, I’m grateful for you, I’m not here to hector anyone or say I know better than you do with your best thoughts, best knowledge, best hearts. I imagine some will just nod in agreement as they read this. Others have tuned out before reaching this paragraph, tired (as I often am) and having no mood for civic matters, and this Project doesn’t intend to make you endure that instead of its usual inexact attempts at beauty and wonder. And maybe, even after reading this far, someone is reading this and saying “You don’t understand. It’s complicated.  There’s this, and this, that you’re ignoring or don’t know.”

Yes, the things I think are evil, some may think are “complicated.” They are. They are. Evil – and even more certainly, even more so, is the restoration of things after evil acts. As I look toward the next Thirties that are to come after previous Thirties when Patchen wrote his poem, I can’t see how the great work of fixing evil and ineptitude can be imagined into plans, much less attempted, much less accomplished. I think of this as I laugh at the killing joke at the end of today’s piece.

You can hear my musical performance of Kenneth Patchen’s “In Order To”  with the audio player below. If you think I’ve forgotten the work-order for that player, I assure you I haven’t, but I know you might be reading this blog in ways that won’t show the player, so there’s this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

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*What about art on Labor Day? I think about the duties of artistic workers toward other workers, but in my observation many artists, and specifically poets, don’t reflect this in their poetry. Since most poets (and increasingly, many musicians) are not solely employed working in poetry, I suspect this is due to embarrassment at that lot – or it may be a hard-bitten escapism, a choice to do, and separate, their art work as respite from the everyday context of the “day job.” Joy is resistance! Beauty is opposition! Or you may not be called to be evangelists, you may be called to be saints. You may take spiritual pride in not writing dreary tracts in the costumes of poetry, and this may be blessed work. Anger, even righteous anger, can scare away the muses. Or you could simply need the commercial art paycheck to make ends meet.

Among Others

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

After our Anniversary Month celebrations, I’m returning to performances of some more poems by principal Surrealist poet Paul Éluard. It’s struck me that Éluard is less well-known to English speakers than he should be. I have only half-formed ideas why that may be so. Let me briefly list them.

Was it his politics? He was a self-avowed Communist – which as we know from the wisdom of our peerless American leader is correctly the name for anyone with a smidgen of concern for how the government might organize it’s efforts beyond the interests of the wealthy – but back in the midcentury when I was growing up, it meant support for corrupt one-man-rule authoritarians who erected bulwarks against free elections, sent spies and armed thugs against their opponents, and gloated in jails, prisons, and the power to exile. Despite his full-throated poetic odes to liberty and acknowledged heroism in the resistance to fascists during WWII and the run-up to that war, Éluard didn’t forthrightly oppose Communism when those things were mistakenly taken to be the bad things about Communism – before we knew better.

Was it Surrealism, or specifically being a Surrealist poet?  Defined broadly, at least in my youth, Surrealism as a force in the visual arts was important and popular. How popular? Magritte, Dali, and Escher were inescapable as LP record-covers, posters, or reproductions on the wall. But Surrealist poetry? Not so much. Oddly, Surrealist poetry’s 19th century inspirations as well as its post-WWII descendants were popular enough. Baudelaire to Rimbaud to Bob Dylan to New York and Black Mountain School poets have substantial presence in our culture, but in the middle parts between the World Wars where we have Surrealists like Éluard, their Dada and Surrealist poetry falls into a memory hole.

Is it something as simple as the tastes of translators?* The masses of monolingual readers in English-speaking countries rely on them to embody poets like Éluard. They are an underappreciated and (even within the realm of poetry) underpaid lot – but they, for a large part, get to pick who we pay attention to. Maybe they just didn’t encounter or take a liking to Éluard? Particularly in his early poetry, which supplies the examples I’ve used so far, Éluard doesn’t have as much esoteric imagery as some other Modernists. It may sometimes be hard to explicate exactly what he’s saying in his poetry, but he often writes, at this point in his career, in what I read as plain-spoken colloquial speech that doesn’t dazzle with its decoration while remaining elusive in intent. I’m not immune to being caught by surprising language myself. Afterall, the first Éluard poem I ever translated (and likely his best-known in English) begins “She is standing on my eyelids…” – and once you translate that, you want to continue and complete a translation of the entire poem. Today’s poem, “Among Others,”  doesn’t go that hard.

None of the above have stopped Spanish language poet Pablo Neruda from having a footprint in English-speaking culture that I casually measure as being a bit larger than Éluard’s. Go Figure.

Among Others

This can’t be so: if I complete everything I’ve planned in this Éluard series, will this blog will be the site of nearly half of all the English translations of his French poems on the Internet?

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So, now let’s get to another of Éluard’s early poems, “Among Others.”   My usual mode of translation is to try to convey the poem’s images. As a side effect, that allows me to land a beachhead without having forward intelligence as to what the poem means to say as if it was ordinary prose. Best as I can tell (I’m not a French linguist by any means) the language here is as plain as that in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “Fog,” or “In a Station of the Metro” – poems from American Modernists in the demotic yet diffuse-meaning mode. There’s a single clue simile that something in Éluard’s short poem may call for extraordinary attention: “as in the time of miracles.” Could this be an ordinary bit of French idiom, or is it a tip that something miraculous is to occur?**

What is Éluard getting at in this poem? I’d say the betting odds are that he’s portraying some men talking about whatever they think is important and compelling, but the poet’s voice says that while he is among those men, his attention is on other, more carnal or incarnated thoughts, a vision of a desirable woman.***

Yet, as I worked with the poem, and as I finally performed it, I decided to place my bet on the longshot: that it’s not that the poem’s speaker’s thoughts are just like a woman, but that the poem’s speaker is, at least for that moment “in the midst of all these men,” seeing themselves as that vision of a young, tall, beautiful woman – in other words, in his image he gender changes.

Now, I am sporting with authorial intent there – but even in the first, best odds, version there could be an element in the male poet’s imagination seeing union with that woman.

Anyway, here’s my performance which is taking the long odds, including side-bets that my voice can put this song, from this point of view, over. There’s a good chance there’s a player gadget below. If not, don’t tear up your betting slip, there’s a highlighted link too – and if you click that, it’ll open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*I base my estimate of Éluard’s popularity by casual searches for English-language translations of his poems on the Internet. I haven’t done any strict count, but my impression is maybe 10-20 poems are extant there. “L’Amoureuse”  and “Liberté”  have a footprint in English online, but the air gets thin quickly past those two poems.

**If an American football fan was to write about a “hail Mary play” we know not to call to imagination the venerated Blessed Virgin being hurled tens of yards through the air by desperate athletes. Some naïve translator-from-English making that image clear and literal would likely mistake the authorial intent.

***A more facile and time-granted musician might be tempted to musically quote one of the last hits from England’s The Hollies while they sing the poems last sentence.

The Ten Most Read Posts in the First Decade of the Parlando Project

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I worry I’m going to get all meta on you, writing posts on posts, but before I leave the Parlando Project’s 10-year anniversary, I thought I’d do a brief rundown of the most popular posts as a companion to the series on the most listened to audio pieces.

Typical posts here have changed over the years. Some of the earliest ones were quite brief – just small introductions to the audio pieces – and for the first couple of years they more or less duplicated the show notes for the podcast that distributes the audio pieces. At launch I had hopes short format (typically 2-5 minute) podcasts might be something that would find an audience. This didn’t turn out to be the case, though a small number of people do subscribe and download the audio from Apple Podcasts or other podcast directories.

Soon enough I realized that there was a much greater audience for the audio pieces from readers of the blog. The posts here got a bit longer and more substantial, to the point that a casual visitor might think the songs were a sidelight to the posts.* I myself remain hesitant to do the typical blog, the episodic personal journal thing. Other writers, with other personalities and experiences, can make that focus work, but for me I cringe when I fear I’ve slipped into a self-indulgent mode. I suppose I touch on that sort of thing obliquely, but the posts here have evolved into a casual record of my encounter with the poems and their poets: impressions I received from their art, interesting details I came across, occasional afterthoughts on how the music was made. Long time readers may have noticed a shift in tone over the years. As a writer I sometime use a specific supposed reader to guide my presentation, and for a great portion of the posts over the years I used my kid as that “reader in mind.” Now as far as I know, they’ve not read anything I’ve posted here, nor would they likely care to, but they and their peer group were who I imagined as I wrote many of the posts in the middle of the Project’s run.** Because of that, the posts over those years start out being addressed to a curious middle schooler and the age of this imagined reader increases through the teenage years.

Now In the last few years, the lodestar of that imagined childhood reader has become less prominent. I still think about speaking to the now 20-something demographic, but I’m also considering a broader, blurrier audience. And that audience has grown considerably, as best as I can tell. Spates of bot activity make the audience growth seem very dramatic, but when I analyze the granular breakdowns in the stats there are more “real” visits demonstrated amid the web scrapers.

Here then is the list of the most visited posts. As with the first-ten-years songs rundown, there’s a seniority bias in the list: all but one are from between 2017-2020. Every daily or weekly report I look at reminds me that some posts, written years back, addressed to a young teenager, are still getting visited.

sunrise through the pergola on Powderhorn Lake

Sunset or sunrise? The Parlando Project’s 10-year Anniversary August is ending, but September begins.

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10. The Aim Was Song.  Frost’s poem is one of only two that appear on both the most listened songs and most read posts. I honestly can’t tell why this post, among the many Robert Frost posts I’ve published, is the most read. Possibly the popularity of the song I made from the poem.

9. The Sparrow.  The outlier, a later post from 2024. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s short poem of poetry and music being put out there without assurance of an audience might just resonate generally with poets and musicians. But also, written by a pioneering Afro-American poet, it’s a metaphor for the great gift that Black artists have given to American culture.

8. Orpheus with his lute made trees, or springtime ambiguous.  I don’t always do a explication of what a poem means, as I can be satisfied with a poem that goes all Marrianne Moore, sufficient just to be. But this popular post tries to untangle Shakespeare.

7. The Stare’s Nest at my Window.  Here I write about Yeats causing me to read up on the particularities of the Irish Civil War, something that I knew nothing about before reading the poem. This is the second – with the Frost – that appears on both the song and blog posting Top Ten.

6. To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing.  Yates again. Unlike other popular posts I can be pretty sure why this one gets so many visits: I did some research to find out who Yates’ “Friend” was, what the “Work” was, and how did that turn out in the end.

5. The Lake Isle of Innisfree.  Yeats wants to dominate the middle innings of this list it seems. This one’s fun fact that may have drawn visits: it tells how this echt Irish poem (it’s even printed on the country’s passports), verse so full of rural charms, was inspired on a busy commercial street in London.

4. The Red Wheelbarrow.  I assume the wide presence of this famous short Modernist poem on reading lists and school anthologies draws the hits, but I (uncharacteristically) spend more time talking about the musical tactics I used in setting it. Another schoolbook favorite, Sandburg’s “Fog” just made place 290, about a quarter of the way down, and with that one I wrote more about the poem than the music. Maybe this one generates a lot of disappointed “I searched for info on” folks?

3. “Hope” is the thing with feathers.  I’ve written a few “hot takes” or “wild ass guesses” about what poems are getting at over the years, and this “I’ll bet you’ve never read this poem looking at it this way” post is the most popular of the bunch. The key supposition here is that avid poetry fan Emily Dickinson is commenting on a poem by a fellow Emily, Emily Bronte, in this well-known poem of Dickinson’s.

2. Poem 1 from Twenty Love Poems.  I like me some Surrealist verse, but that doesn’t mean I’ll let the Surrealist off the hook for attitudes that I sense are being put forward. This is from a book of 20 love poems by the young Pablo Neruda that is extraordinarily popular in Neruda’s Spanish. The series opens with this one, and as I translated it for my performance I had to snort a bit at the macho overstatement I found in it. The same week I translated the last poem in the sequence, a much more measured and bittersweet love poem – still self-centered, but one I personally preferred to the opener. That post is popular too (#89), but not read as often as this one.

1. Chains At Her Feet.  On one hand, I wouldn’t have guessed this one would top the list, if only because its audio piece is one of the minority of audio pieces here where I wrote the words, and wrote them likely thinking from the start to sing them. But then, every evening it appears on the daily leaderboard, mixed in with the most popular just-published posts. My best guess, the little-known photo in the post that shows a detail most visitors to the Statue of Liberty never see: that the grand lady welcoming immigrants is standing with a broken shackle and loosened chains at her feet.

*Eventually I’ve written some posts, even a couple of series of posts, that aren’t tied to any audio piece at all – but this remains a blog about the Parlando Project, and I personally still think the Project’s songs melding mostly literary poetry with the original music in differing styles is the point of it all.

**Might she someday age to the point she’d want to read these posts, or hear this music? I can’t say for sure, but given that things posted to blogs on the Internet share the impermanence of all things, they might not be there then.