Their Beauty Has More Meaning, or parachuting from a trainwreck

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

So, a momentous American Election Day, and the LYL Band reconvened during the noon-hour while voters were still casting their ballots. If you recall, I – acting as recording engineer, musician, and half-time vocalist – played the first few notes on electric guitar, went to sit on the stool beside my microphone position, and…

…I’d moved the stool that morning to check some audio wiring patch points. My blind ass couldn’t see that, and I plopped butt-first on the floor.

No matter how ominous great human events are, there’s room for a pratfall.

When the LYL Band plays – and we’ve done that for over 45 years – we’ve followed a practice of alternating between song leaders. Recovering my dignity (such as it is) I’d done my Stephen Vincent Benét selection. It was Dave’s turn, and in the Parlando Project spirit he had a poem by Robinson Jeffers. Just as Dave didn’t know what I would play or what I’d be singing or speaking, I didn’t know what Dave was starting to perform. I had a recording software screen in front of me, keying drum sequences and occasionally checking levels while trying to inventory and retrieve my limited stock of musical skills within myself – but no lyrics or music, not even a scribbled chord sheet. My posterior may have been sightless when we were thrown down from heaven, but in this musical situation, I have the decades that Dave and I have played together to guide me. I’m not sure what I’m thinking when I spontaneously play with him, and that’s a strange, yet somehow pleasant feeling. On one level my mind fears and braces for what bands call “a trainwreck,” where timing and pitches collide, and as I begin to play my ears will sometimes hear that collision emerging. I must try to repair the parts of the train as they are exploding! Other times, when it starts to work, I feel like a cartoon character rebuilding the train-track while sitting on the front of the moving locomotive: how fast can the rails and crossties be laid-down? When playing, I’m hastily searching for the “good notes,” the safe ones that won’t conflict with what Dave is playing while trying to allow the ones that rub and stretch with the other parts in urgent ways.*

I happen to like loosey-goosey music that finds itself in the playing, though not all musicians and listeners do. Without brag or pride I say: when mixing the recordings later, I’m often surprised at what makes enjoyable sense to my ex-post-facto composer’s judgement from what I remembered as a frantic grab for the emergency parachute rip chord.

In the midst of all that, I’m hearing and trying to react to the words Dave is spinning out. This time, they seem slightly familiar, but I can’t be bothered to wonder much about that. We finish the single take, the one you can hear below, and Dave says it was a poem by Robinson Jeffers. Here’s a link to the text of that poem.

Robinson Jeffers on the rocks

Robinson Jeffers, rock star, which is to say he built his own home out of rough-hewn stones.

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I’ve always found Jeffers an odd case, and he interests me even if I suspect the two of us wouldn’t agree much. He’s a pioneer in the 20th century intensification of the 19th century American Transcendentalist theological examination of nature as the revealed truth – something I see in some contemporary poetry – but even if that approach retains currency, Jeffers take on these matters remains unusually strong and strange. He called a core tenet of his animating thought “inhumanism.” Today’s poem, chosen by Dave for performance, “Their Beauty Has More Meaning,”  examines the experience when the poem’s speaker (presumably Jeffers himself) examines a morning in its one-in-an-ages-long sequence of dawning and knows that he is as brief or briefer than a single day in the face of astronomical and geologic time. Even the birds and their birdsong, (always a handy metaphor for the musician’s or poet’s art) issues from any creature’s short life, though generations will perhaps repeat this utterance.

When Jeffers expresses his beliefs, one could find this outlook too fatalistic, even despairing – but in this example that Dave selected, Jeffers is, I think, at his most comforting. We, the ordinary people of this world (or the artists in it) are making our morning songs as best we can or must – beautiful to some ears at some moments, though we still have so little power to move the universe. Our “I Voted” stickers of last Tuesday are – at least at the individual level – tiny, constrained circles. Where I live, we’ve been through a year where the birdsong of whistles and car horns were arrayed against masked and armed troops, and two who did such were shot and killed. Is it comforting to know that we are small, temporary, things, doing the small, temporary things that are what we can do? In contrast, the self-styled great men who rule us think (as the previous piece in this series put it) that because they have great power, they must have great wisdom.

Jeffers wanted his message of human inadequacy to judge, and find lacking, the deadly engines of warfare – a human imitation of the great destructive acts of natural disasters. So strongly did he feel the human vanity in war that he steadfastly opposed WWII, the mighty violence that we often judge as on-the-whole necessary to oppose great human evils.

We finished playing Dave’s presentation of Jeffers’ poem. It was my turn at the mic. I had a chord sheet page for Dave, and a surprise. The nature of that surprise is part of the next post, coming up soon.

To hear the LYL Band perform Robinson Jeffers’ “Their Beauty Has More Meaning”  live in the studio on Election Day, you can pull the lever** for the audio player below. No player visible? You can request a provisional ballot – well, another way to get an audio player: this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*We do use rough chord sheets for some pieces, we usually try to guess and announce the key center for a piece; but we don’t work out an arrangement between players, and the sheets are sketchy and undetailed. Is this the best way to do what we intend? I’m not sure, but it’s the way Dave and I have done this. With the rest of the Parlando Project pieces I’m increasingly working in the one-man-band scheme, playing and then rejecting or excepting the tracks I lay down or compose.

There are folks who intentionally skill themselves in free music improvisation, who come at the situation with more musical chops and theoretical knowledge. I admire, and praise that commitment, but I don’t believe art is essentially a hierarchy. I act instead on what I feel was the core belief of the 20th century folk revival and the later (but highly similar) punk-rock movement that saw music and art as the sharing of necessary expression.

**Old person reference. Voting machines used to be these 8-foot-high booth-sized contraptions where you flicked little levers like a pinball machine racking up points and then registered your choices with a bigger lever that felt like you were shifting a truck into gear when you yanked it over with a satisfying clunk. Filling little exam ovals with black ink lacks the tactile and auditory richness of the old ways. I could even say the modern silent ink seems like composition abstracted in musical notation while the old voting machines felt like grabbing a Bigsby whammy bar while slamming out a chord on a guitar.

Litany for Dictatorships, a Pratfall

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Tuesday was Election Day in the United States, and I had a lot of hopes and fears. As a matter of displacement for those fears, it was also the day I’d scheduled to get back together with Dave Moore to make and record spontaneous musical performances. Like the election, an event I was looking forward to, while retaining some worries. I’ve spent the entire summer rewiring and repatching the recording system in my studio space with the goal of improving captures of this kind of performance. But as the months passed, both Dave and I were getting older. We first started doing this kind of playing and recording over 45 years ago to cassette tapes, and now we have to deal with the frailties and energy levels of old age to continue this.

Monday I tested the new scheme out, as best I could by myself. Everything seemed to be working. Dave would arrive at our accustomed mid-day hour Tuesday. That morning I repeated a quick sound-check and left everything powered up and ready for his arrival.

Dave carefully traversed the rickety stairs and I greeted him. I explained that there was now a computer system at his position running Mainstage* that would allow him to load a variety of soundbank instruments for his main keyboard. I said I’d show him how it worked after we tried an opening song.

So here was yesterday: a country (and to some extent, a world) awaiting to find out what would happen with America’s current ruling cabal and this more localized concern about two older poets/musicians trying to create something with sound and words. I stepped over to my microphone position wearing a Telecaster electric guitar strapped across my body and began to play the first few notes. Dave was looking at a new keyboard setup, and as is our customary scheme, neither of us would have forethought of what were going to play. I quickly told him what key center we’d start in. We were beginning – we had to begin, even not knowing more than that. I had a serious poem of tyranny and the end of empire to present. Heavy stuff.

Litany for Dictatorships

You can read the entirety of Stephen Vincent Benét’s harrowing poem at this link.

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I keep a stool near my mic, just as I do at Dave’s position in the studio space, so neither of us has to stand for the whole recording session. I stepped back to sit on it –

But I’d moved the stool a few feet away, probably to check or adjust something during my soundcheck. So, there was no stool where my butt was heading. My fat ass sat down on thin air, which I would then traverse much more rapidly than Dave took to the entryway stairs. An utter comic pratfall.

And like any good comic pratfall, no injury, other than the illustration of pride in serious intent. Dave asked if I was all right. I said yes, got up and kept playing. Telecasters are a 76-year-old design, but they aren’t fragile – the guitar, as I, was still intact and in-tune. Five minutes or so later, there was the performance you can hear below with the audio player gadget of a portion of Stephen Vincent Benét’s “Litany for Dictatorships.”

Are you thinking that any such audio player must have fallen off your computer screen? Well, some ways of reading this blog suppress showing the player, but this highlighted link will order a recount and pop up returns of a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*Mainstage is an app sold by Apple that allows computer hosted instruments and effects to be selected and controlled from a simplified user interface during live performance or recording. As these things go, Mainstage is getting a bit long in the tooth, and there are more sophisticated systems that more sophisticated modern stage computer musicians might choose to use these days, but it allowed Dave to use the menu I’d set up with only a couple of minutes of instruction.

The Vampire (Part 4)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

This is the final section in our Halloween series this year, a setting of Conrad Aiken’s narrative poem “The Vampire.”  It’s the longest section of the four parts as I’ve divided it, and I find it by far the most disturbing. As I have done when releasing these movements in the musical piece, I urge you to listen to them in order, starting with Part 1.

I had this post all written and ready go before I finished mixing my recording of the last part late this afternoon. Before hitting publish, I decided to check to see if Aiken himself may have suggested some context when he published it. I had found Internet statements that the poem was first published in 1914, which I assumed was a simple uncontroversial fact. I even jumped to the conclusion that this publication must have been in Aiken’s first book-length poetry collection published that year. I got a copy of that book, Earth Triumphant  and – it was not in it!*  Another web search gave a variant publication date: 1916. I downloaded copies of all public domain Aiken poetry collections before 1931. Searched each one of them. No “The Vampire”  in any.**   I even searched for distinctive words to see if the poem the Internet calls “The Vampire”   had another title or was only a portion of a longer poem. No winners. By this point I could even wonder, did Aiken even write this poem?

After supper I did more searching and found this tiny listing on The Internet Speculative Fiction Database that led me to the archives of The New Republic  for April of 1924 where Aiken’s poem appears as “The Vampire (subtitle line) 1914.”   In context that subtitle is almost certainly a reference to the beginning of WWI, that first great war of mechanized and chemical slaughter, not the Internet-mistaken date of the poem’s publication. It turns out that Aiken’s “The Vampire”  is yet another poem where 1914’s world-wide war inspired eerie and apocalyptic poetry, some of which escaped their specific inspiration to become more generalized poems brought out on Halloween.

Vampire Part 4

That plowman that ends Aiken’s poem made me think of William Blake’s “Drive your plow over the bones of the dead.”

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So it’s apparently a 1924 poem from the time when Modernism was fully in ascendence, which makes its archaic (if effective) prosody and its unusual narrative style more anachronistic. Aiken knows this. He edited the Harvard literary magazine with T. S. Eliot for example and was an active critic and anthologist promoting current American poets – but he expressly admired a lot of French symbolist poetry. Perhaps he was thinking too of that American antecedent to those 19th century French poets he admired, Edgar Allan Poe? In my childhood, some Halloween costumes were made from old clothes, and if this poem’s storytelling is old-style, its terror might still come through, particularly in today’s section. Further violating Modernist rules, Aiken is mostly telling here, not showing what exactly occurs when the mysterious creature arrives and reveals that the world’s populace will either love and worship her or suffer ignominious death. Throughout the poem, he mostly treats this situation with eldritch Lovecraftian rhetoric reflecting how strange and horrific the apocalypse strikes those experiencing it – but as today’s section gets underway, he adds the most horrific detail of all: many (most?) of the world’s people not only accept this deadly tyrant, they find her erotically attractive. In my last post I wrote that Aikin’s choice of a female gendered villain here is problematic. Thinking again this morning, and considering the erotic charge in the words of the subject populace’s reaction to the tyrannical “love me or die” vampire he portrays, and assuming Aiken assumes hetero-normative readers, then it’s possible (though unstated) that the hetero-normative women in the poem’s world are seeing a male identified vampire simultaneously with the female villain he’s describing.

Beyond the costume it wears, how old-fashioned and fantastic is this poem?

At the beginning of this series I wrote that when searching for a text to use for a Halloween piece this year I wanted to find something playful, because I have an overstock of disgust and fear for my country and the world right now. I did find pieces that might have fit the bill: benign ghosts, saucy witches, mischievous spirits. And then I read Aiken’s poem. I read a poem of the arrival of a deadly and narcissistic tyrant proclaiming that those in thrall to them must love them amid widespread devastation. This is what is most horrible – as savage as extra-judicial killings, dire mocking leadership, needless and cruel wars and callous destructions are, that express expectation that we love and bow down to its bringer disgusts me more. Or maybe the supreme horror is this: the sight of some of my fellows accepting – nay, even cheering such a creature on. And that’s what I ended up portraying today as I completed presenting Conrad Aikens poetic tale.

Happy Halloween. Enjoy your costumes, your microscopic candy-bars, and the twilight will-o-the-wisp fancies of wonderous spirits. Celebrate the treasures that are the memories of the ancestors. The grown men with masks and guns citing unilateral laws, such as they are, that apply to you but not them, expect at least your grudging acceptance, if not your loving worship of their faultless goals and grandeur. Set your Halloween joy in the first against the dire schemes of the latter.

Oh, and you can listen to my musical performance of the final section of Aiken’s poem with the audio player below. Out of candy-bars? No player?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Given that the Earth of this poem is utterly devastated, it would have made an ironic inclusion though.

**This included his Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winning Selected Poems  of 1929. I checked out a copy of the later 1961 edition too. No “The Vampire”  there either. I also quickly checked a 1961 book length consideration of Aiken’s life and work written by Frederick Hoffman. “The Vampire”  didn’t appear in the index. Checking out Reuel Denney’s 1964 Aiken book, no mention, though it does note the vampire that appears in Aiken’s 1916 “Jig of Forslin.”   What remains a mystery? There’s no indication I’ve seen that Aiken was especially fond of the poem. No sense that it once stood out in regard from within the large corpus of work that the long-lived and prolific Aiken wrote and published. Someone is responsible for the many modern Internet occurrences and performances of this more than 100-year-old poem. My working theory there: someone in fantasy and horror fandom put it forward before literary scholars caught on to it.

The Vampire (Part 3)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

This is turning out to be an interesting Halloween experiment: announcing here that I’m going to present a suite of songs (or a multi-movement musical setting, whatever I’ll end up calling it) using Conrad Aiken’s narrative poem “The Vampire”  – before I had conceived, composed, performed, or mixed them. And I did it quite late, with less than week before Halloween.

Scary? No, I’ve been too busy trying to complete this. I hope you’re enjoying the story unfolding with “new episodes” being released nearly every day – but if you’re coming to this post just now, I do suggest this way of hearing the pieces, in the proper order.

In Part 1 the world of the poem encounters a mysterious and distressed creature. In Part 2, this creature brings with it a frenzy of sorrow and deadly intimations, transmitted with disturbing dreams and visions. At the ending of that section, we’re told the creature has started to speak directly to the world of the poem. Today’s song tells us what the creature says.

The Vampire Part 3

Aiken’s poem gathers power from the incantatory power of its rhymes, so I’ll forgive him using the archaic version of “blended” in line 2

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In short, the creature announces that the citizens of the poem’s world have a choice: they will choose to worship and love her, or they will be slaughtered. This situation is so fantastic that the world seems in shock. Is this real? Is each citizen who has seen the portents in the earlier parts, and now has heard the creature’s dire pronouncement, insane or in trapped in some as yet unawakened nightmare?

Since this is a poem, we might see this is the dichotomy in most any fantastic poem: if it is proximally a poet’s imagined reality – how are we meant to take it? Yes, the poet could end the poem with an envoi “it was all a dream” or some other explicit framing device. Spoiler alert: Aiken will not do this. The world in this poem is doomed. In the midst of this horror is another horror: many (most) of the world’s people are enthralled by the creature, even after its tyrannical statement, most are following her around in some kind of adoring daze.

You may note that I’ve constantly used “the creature” and “it” to refer to the sinister eminence of Aiken’s poem until a couple of paragraphs ago. He never calls it a vampire outright, and his depiction so far has only had two elements in common with the vampire trope: it’s deadly, and it enchants its victims. The final section will include more depiction, including that that attraction has erotic dimensions. If I’ve avoided gendering the creature in my writing so far, Aiken doesn’t: his creature is a “she.”

Yes, I’m bothered by that, perhaps as much as I’m bothered by the rest of what is going to be described in the poem. I don’t know enough about Aiken to say if he consciously or subconsciously desires that choice’s resonance with misogyny, or the fear of female sexuality that can often underpin it.*  I think I’ll probably say more after I’ve completed presenting the poem, but one thing that allowed me to engage with the poem when I could have cast it aside: it’s plausible that Aiken, its author, is a young heterosexual man who seeks to confront two things in his mind (or the minds of others like himself): that beauty and charisma is not a reliable sign of virtue, and that desire is a strong force with strong dangers surrounding it.**

The musical mode shifts again for Part 3. If last time I wanted a little fuzz-tone frenzy as the ominous visions and dreams are unleashed, today’s music returns to a quieter sort of weird folk with the cello, violin, guitar and now bass clarinet ensemble. The world’s populace is in enthralled shock, caught between disbelief and horror, with a third element (even more disturbing) to be introduced in the next part. I hope to complete that final section within the next two days, so check back for it. Oddly, for the first time in the suite of songs, today’s gentler music uses something like conventional harmonic cadences. “Well, I guess we’ve got a murderous tyrant ruling the world, but at least we’ve got a more conventional and attractive song structure.”

You are listening in order, right? If it’s the proper time to hear part 3 of “The Vampire,”  there’s an audio player below for most of you. No player for you? I’m more accommodating than our story’s vampire, I offer this second way: a highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

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*Of course, women can do evil things, and some have evidenced overripe amounts of human villainy. If they’ve lacked a consistent power base in a largely patriarchal history, they’ve had their innings. Given such a history though – one that largely assumes male gender when creating a powerful character – Aiken’s choice is worthy of examination.

There’s an opportunity to write more about the male lothario vampire or the darkly attractive bad-boy-with-a-habit vampire tropes, and what they say to heterosexual women about their desires and attendant dangers, but in the interests of length and needs to complete the music, I’ll pass tonight.

**I think of the Shakespeare song from The Merchant of Venice  recently presented here, which occurs within a play with a stock ethnic stereotype villain (though made a bit more humanized and complex by the Bard) where the little song is a parable about the deceptions of surface “fancy,” a polite word for desire.

The Vampire (Part 2)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Did I set any expectations (musical or poetic) with the first part of my planned multi-movement Halloween presentation of Conrad Aiken’s “The Vampire?”  Well, this first: if you’re just coming onto this post someway, you’ll want to hear how Aiken and I tell this frightening tale in the proper order, so go ahead and leave this post and listen to the parts in order.

The opening had a small ensemble of mostly orchestral instruments, playing the simple parts in a mode that I sometimes use and call “punk orchestral.” In Aiken’s opening words we met a mysterious creature that interrupted the normal life of the poem’s world. We learned that the creature seems distressed. In the second movement today that distress is more widespread, as those in the poem’s world come under the thrall of the creature. Inescapable dark visions are rife. The creature is starting to speak, and what it says is the matter to be covered in the next section which I plan to release soon.

Vampire Part 2

Text of the second section of Conrad Aiken’s The Vampire, performed today.

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With the poem’s now revealed dread, the sweet violin from last time starts keening, and my black Telecaster electric guitar rasps chords thru a fuzz-box distortion. There are broad statements reporting cries and anguished words in Aiken’s text, and so a second electric guitar enters halfway in – an instrument which I aimed toward amp speakers for feedback in its part.* The cello has nothing to play in this section, but my most “rawk” electric bass takes over the low end.*

The gentle vocals in that first part might have benefited if I had a trained and sweet voiced singer instead of myself. Today’s vocals? Well, I like shouting and ranting, but I’m no Ozzy Osbourne either. I did my best. Only after I completed the mix for today’s section did I think that that fuzzy Telecaster part I played was more akin to Norman Greenbaum’s immortal “Spirit in the Sky”  than sinister dark metal.

OK, if you’ve done your part and listened to Part 1 first, you can now listen to Part 2 with the audio player gadget below. Do your “Fixed and burning eyes” not see any such player? It’s not the end of the world, you can use this highlighted link which will open a new browser tab with just an audio player.

 

 

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*It’s a recent Squier Rascal short-scale solid-body electric bass with pair of thick voiced humbucker pickups. I bought it earlier this year to replace a similar sized and equipped bass that I traded Dean Seal for decades ago. The pickup switches and finally the volume pot on the older instrument used since the early days of the LYL Band 40 some years ago have given up the ghost.

**I’ve sought a somewhat controllable version of that sound from the first time I plugged a cheap, used, thin brown hollow-body guitar into my phonograph amplifier and received an unholy wail of distortion sliced open by the squeal of feedback. Maybe part of the fascination is that “somewhat controllable” aspect of using such sounds in a musical piece, that mixture of challenge and chance. The sound also annoys people, which can be good or bad, depending on my mood.

The Vampire (Part 1)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

  I’m going to be out on a limb in this Project’s treehouse of horror this Halloween. How so? With today’s post I’m starting to present what at completion will be a larger musical piece than this Project usually presents, and I’ve decided then to publish this poem setting in sections over a week, as movements or a kind of suite. That in itself is a bit ambitious. Among the hundreds of pieces the Parlando Project has issued, only two strike me as similar. The most ambitious of those two? I set with music all of T. S. Eliot’s Modernist landmark “The Waste Land”  – and that piece too was presented here in sections, but it was composed and performed over a period of years. The other similar suite of songs goes back to the formative times of this Project: a series of songs largely written by long-time Parlando collaborator and keyboardist Dave Moore about the pioneering early 1950s late-night horror movie host Vampira – but as I recall, all those Vampira songs were written and recorded before the first one was published here. I knew what I had before I made them public.

Not so with this planned Halloween 2026 piece, which is Conrad Aiken’s narrative poem “The Vampire.”  As I woke up this morning, I had a rough idea for the final section, and some music for that section recorded, but no vocals for that. But if I’m going to present this longer poem serially this week, I would need to start with the first section. I had Aiken’s words, and nothing else.

Conrad Aiken sharpens a scythe

Conrad Aiken: harvest time or sundering time?

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So after a quick breakfast and glass of iced tea, I was onto composing the music for what will be the first, and shortest, section of Aiken’s “The Vampire.”   Working quickly, I started with modifying a drum sequence to use as a guide track for the rest. I next laid down two cello parts, a track using a pair of tape banks from the computer-emulated version of a 1960s’ tape storage “virtual instrument” the Mellotron,* and a clean electric guitar part. Despite the different instruments being sounded, and playing them one at a time, those three tracks were all played on an electric guitar, the non-guitar parts being played thru a MIDI pickup. I finished with an arco string-bass part – that one played on a little plastic keyboard MIDI controller because I want to use its volume wheel to articulate the bowed bass notes. “Real Musicians” and trained composers will recognize the simplicity of these parts. To explain myself, I’ve taken to calling compositions like this “Punk Orchestral.” This is shorthand to explain that just as a melodically simple 2-3 chord rock song played in an entirely non-virtuosic manner can still arguably be an effective piece, so too one might attempt the same thing with instruments we associate with “classical music.”  The vocals here are both spoken and sung. I have a limited skill set for this sort of singing, but I’m the one handy to realize this composition.

As we start then with my series of “The Vampire”  I feel called to do the Andrew Hickey** thing and warn listeners that this Aiken poem I’m presenting is a dark and distressing fantasy.  I had considered a more playful Halloween piece this year, partially because my country and the world has generated non-imagined horrors a plenty. Perversely, Aiken’s poem may have captured my attention because it approaches those current practical levels of fear, terror, and pity – and it has (I believe) a message about the dangers of human fancies. Today’s section of the poem isn’t telling us yet what will occur before we reach the poem’s end, for Aiken opens his story quietly with the world of his poem meeting a distressed and mysterious creature. You can hear it with the audio player below. Has the world darkened, and you can find no such player?  This highlighted link is your only hope (and fear) – it will open a new browser tab with its own audio player for the piece.

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*One tape bank is a Mellotron string section, the other male choir voices. The voices are mixed very low today, for they are off in the distance in this part of the poem’s story.

**Hickey’s long-term project, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is amazing and goes further into detail and research on its subjects than even I do on mine. I think Hickey’s project’s title is less attractive than the series is – for yes, music nerds might be up for it, but it’s much more than that: it’s a still unspinning story about history, culture, capitalism, the large caldron of creativity, and racism, and sexism. Hickey is meticulous about warning listeners that they’re going to be hearing more than a treatise on what color a record’s original pressing label is or the most effective settings for a Fender Deluxe guitar amp.

Toward the Exit (Dem Ausgang zu)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Hans Arp was born split in two. His mother was French. His father was German. I just called him Hans, the name he was given at birth, but he used a French version of his first name as well, Jean.* He was born in Alsace–Lorraine, a set of disputed provinces that were alternatively French and German as wars whipsawed borders. During Arp’s lifetime, those two countries, those two languages, would be fighting as principals in two World Wars. Just by existing Hans Arp could be an enemy alien simultaneously in two ways.

Until this month I knew Arp vaguely as a 20th century modern artist, but while scrolling on Bluesky I saw four lines of an Arp poem that had been translated by Herbert Read as “The Exit To” posted. That immediately intrigued me.

These were eerie, surprising, wild lines – a kind of poetry that has long attracted me.** Was this all of the poem? Could I find it in its original language and work out my own translation for performance? What else could I find out about Arp and his art, visual and literary?

Luckily, I was able to quickly find Read’s 1968 book Arp, which covers Arp’s life and work. The book provides a good number of examples of that work, including not only the entire poem I was seeking in Read’s English translation, but the full text of two versions in the original German (as “Dem Ausgang zu”)  and in Arp’s own French translation. Read spends most of the pages on the visual art, but tells us that Arp was a life-long poet that considered his literary work an integral part of his expression.

Arp’s lifetime reflects his dual nature. Born in a then German territory, and soon connected with the early 20th century avant garde in France and Germany, he fled to neutral Zurich Switzerland at the outbreak of WWI. Significantly for the fleeing Arp, Zurich was the birthplace of the nonsense-word-named art movement called Dada.

Dada was formed by young people from all the sides in the First World War, who didn’t want to be on any of the sides offered. As France and the various monarchies ground themselves into doit and wurst on the battlefield, the Dada folks were pretty sure that exuberant non-sense was the best rebuttal. Arp himself dispatched his German draft status by going to the German consulate in Zurich, genuflecting and making the Sign of the Cross at every picture of the German minister Hindenburg there, and making non-sense patterns on the forms. He did not seem to the German recruiters there to have a keen tactical mind, nor the possessor of the cool sanity required to make sacrificial charges and retreats through no-mans-land.

You, valued reader and possible listener, may counter that patriotism and bravery, like poetry and art of wisdom and clarity, are not valueless. I myself am a confused soul. I like to fancy that I, gratefully, can engage with either outlook – a variety. I do weigh and consider that this is a luxury. Earnest warriors and confounding satirists have each expended their lives in dialectic for that luxury in art.

A man such as the great French Surrealist poet Éluard I recently featured here can fight on what I think of as the good side of the two World Wars, and still write Dada and then Surrealist poetry. I know much more about Arp now due to the English poet and critic Herbert Read’s book about him – Read who was a decorated and profoundly discouraged vet of the WWI trenches who became committed to art, pacifism, and anarchism as a result, yet then felt compelled to serve his native country when the armies of fascism were arrayed against his nation in the second World War.

To the best of my initial knowledge, Arp seems like a fine person. Modest, unpretentious though a persistent artist, with a sense of humor and somewhat rare ability among his peers to see value and collaboration with women artists in his circle and romantic life. Spontaneously he took to abstraction in his visual artwork quite early in the 20th century, independently of, and often ahead of other Modernists. He explained this by saying that he felt humans are pretentious when they try to depict nature, and that instead they should create things like nature does – not reflected depictions, but abstract though attractive, palpable things like a stone or leaf.***

So where does that leave him with poetry? Dada enjoyed nonsense of course. Surrealism brought forth odd and even random combinations. We may be more accepting of these tactics in visual object than a poem, but in today’s poem the young Arp is using those Dada and Surrealist tactics in this 1912 poem before either movement had been declared. What are we to make of poetry such as this that seeks to surprise us without the comfort of giving a clear path to a denotative meaning?

We might be attracted to its novelty. We might take comfort in our surprise rather than displeasure in our confusion. We might choose to delight in our sense of disorientation. In the same way that we might enjoy the texture and shape of an abstract sculpture, we can enjoy the words as sounds and texture. But I suspect all these are fleeting things to most of us much of the time. So, let’s look at such Dada verse as Arp’s poem another way, the way I had to in order to make my translation. The world of generative AI could easily produce endless combinations of nonsense, but it’s trained to go the other way, to give us the very thing we’ll think is expected of it.   Arp chose his words in German, and then went at it again and chose his words in French. A particular human made a particular set of choices. In Read’s account Arp did intend beauty in his art along with the humor, and he seems absent of any haughty sense of the hermetic artist who means to be misunderstood. He also had a sense of humor. My working understanding of the poem I perform today is that its mood is darkly humorous.

Dem Ausgang zu in three languages

I’ve changed, and think I’ve improved, my last line since I recorded my musical performance earlier this week.

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Long time readers here will recall my primary goal in translation: find the images and convey them vividly in contemporary English. I’ll continue to do this, even as Arp’s images wish to burlesque and fracture reality. When an AI LLM hallucinates (and we use that very term) we are disappointed in it. When another human wishes to speak of an altered reality we wonder at the purpose, the intent, even unexpressed or accepted-accidental intent. This isn’t stone or wood that’s being shaped abstractly, this isn’t a dollop of paint, these are words we must array to make our human sounds, and we will find it hard to avoid making shards of meaning out of them. Arp may be laughing as he wrote down these words in one language, and then another – two languages that would be fighting and killing each other multiple times in his era – but he’s also delighting in the sound and stretch of his words, and I tried to convey that in English too. In the first two lines I see reflective eyes and mysterious night. In the next three lines, a litany of time and movement constrained by something as old and massive as the mountain.**** I see a tree’s lifetime subject to a timber harvest, long ago logs, then cut down and floating away. The poem concludes with night birds in barn lantern light gobbling a season’s harvest that must then have needed the labor of a manual threshing floor to gather, while the divine (angels) are effervescently seen condensing in clouds (baskets of air). And the final line: (as “when pigs fly” in another idiom) fish are holding their hiking sticks walking through the stars, a rising litany of impossibility leading to a certainty, that the poem and all our human effort will end.

If Arp was to perform this poem at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, would some patrons be availing themselves of the exit? For that matter, how many are still reading this far down in this post of mine, how many will want to hear this poem?

Did Arp intend for that to be in a cryptic poem about the absurdity of life’s effort? I can’t tell, but that’s what I found there, and he surely didn’t intend hard enough to prevent me from finding this.

You won’t have to work hard to hear my musical performance of Arp’s poem. I composed the guitar part in my head, silently, while doing other things this week, visualizing exactly the fingering I would use to play it. That’s something I used to do in my youth, but I can’t recall the last time I did it as an old man. I derived a chord structure from the guitar line for a piano part, laid down a bass line, and worked out a drum pattern, and there you go: angels in a basket of air. The audio player should be luxuriously there for you, brave listener. No player? No, Elon hasn’t muted Starlink, but you can also use this highlighted link which will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*I’m using Hans Arp as I relied here much on Herbert Read’s book, and Read uses Hans. Wikipedia lists him as Jean, says than name is preferred in English, but there’s a German language page under Hans. Arp seems to have continued to use Hans when speaking German, and Jean when speaking French throughout his life.

** Yes, I enjoy Dada, oftentimes more than I think I would, and I take pride that I work to make fresh English translations of Dada poems publicly available for poetic work that is hard to find online in English, but I have noticed that even my hardy audience, whose attention I’m grateful for, has little interest in this. I cut my recent early Paul Éluard Dada-style poem series short due to lack of interest.

***To give some flavor to Arp sense of unpretentious, humorous absurdity, here’s his 1921 account of Dada first being uttered as a name:

I hereby declare that on February 8th, 1916, Tristan Tzara discovered the word DADA. I was present with my twelve children when Tzara pronounced for the first time this word which has aroused in us such legitimate enthusiasm. This took place at the Café Terrasse in Zurich, and I wore a brioche in my left nostril. I am convinced that this word has no importance and that only imbeciles and Spanish professors can be interested in dates. What interests us is the Dada spirit and we were all Dada before the existence of Dada….The morality of idiots and their belief in geniuses makes me shit.’”

Arp’s last sentence there sums up a lot of my current newsfeed and the pronouncements of our honored and self-sacrificing leader and his cadre of acolytes.

****In the black horse hitched to the mountain litany I thought of an element of Arp’s biography summarized in Herbert Read’s book. Arp joined in and exhibited with The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) group of artists around the time he wrote this poem, and that brought to mind Franz Marc’s 1911 painting that I visit at one of my local art museums.

Millay’s Tavern

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

In my Human Seasons, I awoke to the first cold morning of fall, and I thought that this just completed Edna St. Vincent Millay musical piece would be just the thing to release and write about today. Oddly, I had started working on the music for this in the midst of summer. Millay’s poem is one of those that sits up on the page asking to be sung, and from such temptation I’d worked up the basic musical idea back in a time when I could hop on a bicycle just wearing the clothes I was wearing around the house. This morning I needed a wind-proof beanie, three layers across my torso, and I had to wiggle into tights. An old man getting into tights is a rickety procedure, a vignette unfitting association with carefree bike rides.

I asked myself yesterday “What did this song need?” How dressed? How many layers? I have been presenting a lot of songs recently featuring acoustic guitar, and the tracks I had from summer were just my voice and guitar – acoustic, yes, but at least there was some variety in that it was my large-bodied 12-string. I pick the 12-string harder than most, hitting the strings with more of the flat-pick surface. This produces a bell-like clang, and I thought I’d underpin that sound with some gamelan gongs. I then added a bass line and thought about a top-line riff. For some reason – woodwinds,* and I played the left-channel part using one of my sampled “Virtual Instrument” libraries with my MIDI pickup guitar. I tried to mix this oboe part to a realistic level as it would be if this was an actual acoustic ensemble playing this live instead of myself playing track by track in a “one-man-band” format. The gamelan gongs? I wanted them distant, as if they were outside the tavern window in the scene of Millay’s poem. The final mix of the song works best on headphones or modern ear-buds, so go ahead and put those in your ears if you have a set handy when you listen.**

If you’d like to read the full text of Millay’s poem, here’s a link to that.

In these musical choices I was trying to bring out the mystery I sensed in Millay’s words. “Tavern”  could be read superficially as a desire to run a bread-and-breakfast or the like, perhaps somewhere in the Maine of Millay’s childhood. A nice enough way to understand the poem, but Millay put in something that undercuts reading it as a New York Times style section feature on charming getaways: a repeated reference to this inn she envisions being specifically for “grey-eyed people.”

If one searches for what “grey-eyed” might signify, you’ll get the usual cold under-contextualized information that search engines offer up. Grey is a very rare eye color. OK, is Millay saying she’s going to market her inn with some “Think Different” focus on gathering unusual people, perhaps the artists, writers, and bohemian figures of her youthful 1917 Greenwich Village times? Not impossible, but why then does she write about learning from the grey-eyed “long ago.” Is there something else about having grey eyes? There are results that say that eye color is supposed to be a sign of wisdom, including some that report it as an epithet applied to the famously wise Greek goddess Athena. OK, she learned something from the grey-eyed, but that seems an obscure way to say that, though evoking an air of generalized mystery with this grey-eyed matter seems to be part of her intent. The whole casting of her tavern in the poem doesn’t seem selective. It’s near the top of some mountain, but it would seem to be a welcoming place for all who come upon it. Is the voice in her poem going to ask everyone to take off their sunglasses or tinted contacts to see if they’re allowed in “Tavern.”  I don’t hear those that arrive pleading at the door: “Look, my fake ID says my eye color right here!”

Another sense I got from this poem is that it was possibly in conversation with another poem, one by Christina Rossetti, her poem called “Up-Hill.***”   I don’t know if Millay knew this poem, but it’s not so unlikely. In this case then the grey-eyed are the souls ascending up some mystic mountain toward a heaven or afterlife. They are grey-eyed because their eyes are clouded in the moments after death. One other, allied, possibility for why grey-eyed: her mid-19th century ancestors might have been pictured as early photographs, faces whose colorful eyes would all be rendered in shades of grey. Our poems, our songs, our memorialization, our celebrations around a table – these are to bring colors back to the grey eyed.

Grey-eyed in Carl Van Vechten’s photo, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

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You can hear my performance of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Tavern”  with the audio player below. No player on your mountain? Damn your eyes, or rather the way you’re reading this blog which might suppress showing a reader – but this highlighted link will open the door, or new browser tab, with its own audio player.

 

 

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*It would have been subconsciously, but perhaps the mixture of oboe, 12-string guitar, acoustic bass, and unusual percussion may have been a ghostly presence in my mind from the times I saw an admired the musical ensemble named Oregon that used that mix of instruments.

Which reminds me of a tavern joke: An ego and a super-ego walk into a Freudian bar. The bartender says, “I’ll need to see an ID with that.”

**I used to have time and opportunity to check my mixes on various ways to listen to them. I particularly miss my old car for this, as it had a great stereo for revealing aspects of a recording mix. In my current living situation I often have no opportunity to mix my recordings on external speakers, much less give them a quality check with these extraverted noisemakers. A check I still do before release: listen to a new song on at least one pair of mobile-device ear-buds, which I assume are the most typical “hi-fi” system for modern listeners.

***If you have the time, the song version I made of Rossetti’s poem is a favorite recontextualization of mine. You can see and hear that at this older post from the Parlando Project at this link.

Artists filmed, young and old, and the most obscure Bob Dylan cover ever

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I have a fair number of “started” to “nearly-finished” musical pieces, but I for various reasons I’ve not been ready to release one for a week or so. This of course is a weird expectation on my part – it’s not normal to present original music that rapidly. Today is a day with a quiet studio space available where I could work on more, and yet here I am at a computer keyboard typing this.

I spent the weekend oddly enough watching two documentaries made over 60 years apart on people doing visual art. Both gave me resonances compelling me to write about them. The first I watched was a 40-minute piece directed by Ken Russell, first shown on the BBC in 1962, Pop Goes the Easel.

I was led to this film by reading a short excerpt from American history professor Sean Wilentz’s new Bob Dylan biography covering the bard’s early performing years. This is essentially the period covered in the recent Dylan Hollywood biopic, but the level of detail and narrative appears to be at the more granular level a book provides. In the excerpt, Wilentz recounts Dylan’s first trip to the UK in 1962, ostensibly to take a featured acting role in an original TV drama. Turned out Dylan was a washout as a conventional actor, so the teleplay was rejiggered to make him a folk singer who sang some songs, a role that he must have been entirely convincing in, though no video survives. While there, Dylan did what visiting American folk singers habitually did in those days, he absorbed Martin Carthy’s arrangements of a couple of British Isles folk tunes and fashioned them into his own songs.*  For habitation, he had to put up with staying in the London flat of a beautiful young woman, an artist named Pauline Boty. Wilentz figures that Dylan got a song out of that too, a somewhat awkward song about a somewhat awkward affair, lashed to a floating-between-lyrics folk tune that I know as “Lily of the West.” **

Wilentz mentions the artist Boty had been in a documentary about young artists, and I found Russell’s Pop Goes the Easel  online here to watch.  After the tweed-suited and stiff to the point of parody series host intro,*** the film starts with the only artist in the movie I knew anything about before this month, Peter Blake. Blake is found, slightly chunky, closely approaching 30, bearded, dressed in work clothes, sawing on a door (I cannot help but make the Blakean pun that he’s cleansing the doors of perception, to be what they are: infinite). We are then led to a pair of younger, good-looking men of the narrow tie and nicotine milieu, who like Blake are making Pop Art out of the commercial detritus of contemporary culture: comics, SciFi prognostications, movie and pre-Beatles pop stars. Like Blake, we see them making their art and earnestly talking their gallery catalog place cards about it. Intercut are scenes of them cavorting in a clearly French Nouvelle Vague way about London and at a circus midway. Among these three young men, a beautiful woman also appears as part of the group, and the documentary’s final segment lets us know she’s the fourth artist. This is Boty.

All these 20-somethings are a bit self-consciously playing roles, but Boty is better at it, easily more charismatic. One quickly sees how she achieved the sobriquet “The Wimbledon Bardot” – but here’s the punch-line, the kicker: her artwork is also easily the equal of the three men. Not to slight those men, all of whom are clearly serious  as the French would say about their art, and all of whom would be still making art into their eighties and into our current century. Boty though died Keats-like at 28 – her illness, cancer, a few years after this film was made. Maybe less than two-dozen of her art works survive. The film doesn’t show this of course, no more than Russell’s film knows it’s being made within a year of when Bob Dylan revolutionized song-lyrics or the Beatles made self-contained quartet bands of young artists a model to follow. But we as modern watchers are able to appreciate the unheard music on that black & white TV Grecian Urn as we hear the films found sound-track of pop music hits from the “decade” of the early 1960s that happened before The Sixties™.

Only around a couple dozen of Pauline Boty’s art works are known to have survived. Some of her early work used stained glass, and here are two examples.

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And then the next day of the weekend, I watched Who Is Martin Mull,  a long-story-about-how-it-got made documentary about the singer/comedian/actor/visual artist Mull. In place of Ken Russell we have a work helmed by Bob Saget, a club comic and actor who admired Mull’s work. Apparently filmed over a period of years with extensive interviews and scenes of a 70-something Mull in his home studio working on his visual art, as well as testimony from friends and family about Mull’s character and achievements. Then in 2020 Saget unexpectedly died from a lonely hotel room closed-head-trauma injury after a fall on tour. Then in 2024, subject Mull died at age 80. From subsequent efforts of others, the film about a dead “cult figure” class actor made by younger sort-of-famous comic was completed this year. That’s remarkable, but it would generally promise to be either a work of the “you didn’t know all the dirt about” or the “gee, he’s dead, let’s all say nice things about ‘em” sort.

It’s not. It’s tender and relaxed about telling its story, and the story is a man who at the age in life of our British quartet of pop artists, and just four or so years later than them, graduated from a prestigious American art school. Just like the Pop/Easel  artists, this American’s work seemed to be based on reexamining how we view the world through our commercially infused culture and art. His family, or at least his father, put no value on visual art and artists, and perhaps the US puts less value on art that the UK did or does, but Mull never envisioned the lottery work of trying to establish an artist’s career. As it turns out, he was also musically talented, and the suddenly post-Beatles and Dylan world offered work for musical performers. This is where I knew Mull’s work. In 1970 he had a fluke C&W hit when a gender-playful answer record/parody song of his, “A Girl Called Johnny Cash,”  was recorded by a Nashville singer, and he began to tour himself as “Martin Mull and his Fabulous Furniture.” It was a weird act, but one that you might see reflected in others’ performing acts: Steve Martin, Biff Rose and Leon Redbone, or in other comics who would bring an instrument on stage like the Smothers Brothers, Neil Innes and Eric Idle, or folk musicians who told comic stories like Billy Connolly or even Leo Kottke.

But Mull the performer was his own thing. His act was performed in persona, a smarmy chap who deconstructed the nature of performance and audience expectations. The bit I remember most was his presentation of young white folks getting into the Blues by playing bottleneck slide on a ukulele using a nipple-equipped baby-bottle. The difficulty of the trick? He had to make that inefficient pairing work musically. How well could he make it work? He might be performing it while opening for an act like The Allman Brothers at some early 70s hippie musical ballroom or theater show. Live recordings indicate the joke went over, and the minstrel show critique inside the bit must have been absorbed by some.

After working that act for a decade or so, he transitioned to becoming a comic actor in TV and movies. It paid the bills. He found a happy marriage. Had a kid. Got old. But remember, that’s not the story. His story is an aged-American version of the young UK Pop/Easel  artists in a way. The story is: he is, always was, a visual artist. He paints. He always paints. This might sound – the danger is it sounds – like a “weekend painter,” the hobbyist who paints to relax. But he insists – and the testimony of others in the film buttresses this – his constant internal conviction was: he’s an artist and the other stuff was just a “day job.” The amount of work, the decade after decade length of its effort, the variety and quality of that work, says this is not some vain-glorious affectation.****

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The part that moved me the most? The scenes of Mull gratefully working on his art in his 70s in his studio space. This is inescapable: I think: that’s me – but the possible diagnosis of vain-glory is a differential yet to have all the test results returned for my case. It appears that, at least in general, Mull knew he was good. He did the work to make his work seem skilled to others. I can’t say the same for my own work, which I think has value, and also imperfections.

As my day progressed, I had to know the song Dylan is supposed to have written to visual artist Pauline Boty in 1962, and the surest way for me to know the song is to perform it. “Liverpool Gal”  kept deep cover, even after decades of Dylan instigating the modern Bootleg/Special Edition album. For most of its life it was known by a single obscure performance of it done by a little-known act Lennon & Hyam live for a BBC radio broadcast in 1992. How Lennon & Hyam heard the song is mysterious. It wasn’t until a year ago that a rough performance by its author emerged, taped at a party in Minneapolis by local musician and writer Tony Glover back in 1963. Dylan stumbles on his own lyrics in that recording, and the song differs slightly from the Lennon & Hyam version. I quickly cobbled together a third version and a quick and dirty arrangement for acoustic guitar and my voice of subjective quality. Quickly – my studio-space time was now limited – I did four takes all the way through, the last one was the best I think. I call my interpretation “London Gal” as it dispenses with the appendix of Liverpool origins to a London-set story. Even cutting the final (dispensable) verse in my version, it’s a long song, over 7 minutes, ambling along in its plot like many a traditional folk song. Here it is via an audio player gadget. No gadget seen? Lennon and Hyam didn’t steal it to protect their monopoly position, and Tony Glover has joined the blues-harp choir invisible, but I also offer this highlighted link to hear it via a new tab which will supply its own audio player.

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*For Dylan, “Masters of War” and “Bob Dylan’s Dream”  tunes were copped from “Nottamun Town”  and “Lord Franklin” via Carthy. Paul Simon swiped a guitar arrangement for “Scarborough Fair”  from Carthy on an early Sixties UK trip of his own. The Folk Process is promiscuous.

**Wilentz makes an interesting point: this early Dylan “love or something like it” song is a predecessor to the kind of complex songs about romantic relationships and power-relations that would become a Dylan specialty. This kind of writing seems so embedded in Dylan’s songwriting that it would probably come out anyway, but a moot court case could be made that Boty engendered it.

***Oh, let’s give Huw Wheldon his props: he was a decorated D-Day landing veteran, and as a producer he not only helped introduce Ken Russell, he boosted David Attenborough, and later Sir Kenneth Clark’s mighty Civilization series. His host job was largely to act as a flack-catcher to divert fellow Greatest Generation types from strafing the BBC for giving attention those frivolous young people.

****I gather the fine art world doesn’t truck much with the person who isn’t publicly artist first, not hyphenate – allowed to be an artist who becomes a celebrity, but the reverse is suspect of affectation. And there’s nothing in the film that says Mull did the grants application and hob-nobbing prerequisites for most modern American arts careers. He was AARP age before he had his first small gallery show.

The Human Seasons

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I was reading a social media thread this week and John Keats name came up as a youthful gateway into poetry. Being a long-obsolete child, I don’t know if 21st century young people, and particularly young Americans, are introduced to Keats and the British Romantic poets in high school as I was, and as I suspect many of my ancestors were. It would be good to establish that the time of my youth was another era. Poetry was probably a bigger part of the arts, the arts an obligatory part of education, and we were only about a generation past the late 1920’s American poetry anthologies for young people that were oversubscribed with UK authors. We got Shakespeare and Milton and a smattering of 17th century poets from before the Americans even got up to bat, and we moved on to the principle British Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly, and Keats.* The last three easily attractive to the adolescent mind and emotions.

That trio’s language was close enough to modern while far enough removed to seem a little exotic. The emotions in the poems, anger, desire, dread, disdain, close to the skin.

Did it help that all three could be fitted into foundational “live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse” models? Why is that stance catnip to so many young people? Is it a force multiplier for their considerations and thoughts to add as context that they are distressed, senses intent or bent, experienced in risk taken and disregarded, living or not caring about mortal danger?**  Does that sound harsh to say? Well then, I sometimes see myself reaching for the same imminent mortality filter in my old age. Poets don’t necessarily outgrow this reflex.

It probably helped these poets that back in my youth we barely had our Buddy Holly and James Dean, and as yet no full constellation of dead young music and movie stars to compete with poets.

John Keats Drawing 700

John Keats writes today about old age, which he didn’t get

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Of the three young romantic poets, all doomed to die young,*** I was team Keats all the way. He seemed the wisest of them, and I could identify with his unprivileged background, and his earnestness about writing. I still remember telling myself that Keats died at 25 back in my twenties, and so I had better get on with my writing. Now past three-times that I don’t allow myself the luxury of worrying what years I squandered in incomplete, mistaken, or mediocre work, or of insufficient promotion of my best stuff, taking comfort that it will all be forgotten, even the best of it. In many cases, we old folks no longer play the immortality lottery, and so forego the costs and damaging mitigations of a busted ticket.

The romantic young Keats writes often of dun mortality while propounding the ardent song of beauty. Let me be clear: in Keats’ case, this dichotomy is more than a stance. Sometimes a young poète maudit risks finding themselves, embarrassingly, surviving – but this wasn’t Keats’ fate. With his medical training and caretaking through to the death of his brother he knew his own tuberculosis prognosis for a full year before he died. He wrote “The Human Seasons”   in between that brotherly caretaking and his own onset, and in this poem he presumes a full lifetime, the titular seasons being perhaps a couple of decades each, while he’d be dead in three years. The dying was indeed young, but in consideration there’s these dancing words that still may ask for a tune. Here’s a link to Keats’ words.

You can hear my performance of John Keats’ “The Human Seasons”   with the audio player you should see below. Audio player called home? No, likely just a side-effect of the way you view this blog, but I can prescribe that you take this highlighted link that’s been shown effective in opening a new browser tab with a working audio player of its own. Side effects include hearing my voice “of subjective quality,” acoustic guitar, cello, and contrabass.

 

 

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*What about Blake? Nope, not in my schoolbooks, I had to seek him out on my own. Did my textbooks move on to Americans Whitman, Dickinson, and Poe? Yes. From my recall the American Fireside poets may have been already largely relegated out for high school readers, though I knew Longfellow from illustrated children’s books. Then there was some Browning, Tennyson, and “Dover Beach” and finally Frost, Eliot, and Sandburg – those final three still living, literally and in practice treated as contemporary poets.

**Beyond the self-imposed dangers some young people choose or are led into, I don’t want to minimize the real dangers externally inflicted on them: war and oppression exist, and such titanic Cronuses devour children. I’m speaking here of the young who generate or amplify mortal risks because it makes them seem louder.

***Shelley 29, Keats 25, and Methuselah Lord Byron at 36.