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.

.

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.

.

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.

 

.

 

 

*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 ~ 1 Comment

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.

.

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.

 

.

 

*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?

.

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.

 

 

.

 

*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.

.

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.

The least listened to audio piece in the decade-long history of the Parlando Project

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Remember, I said there was a bias in the top ten most listened to stats for the Parlando Project toward older pieces from the first three years of this Project. That’s due to a long tail effect: a quick bunch of listens when first published, followed by an accumulation in smaller daily numbers over the following years. Poetry – and the art I seek to meld with it, recorded music – is “The News that Stays News.” After completing the top ten run-down on this 10th Anniversary month of its public launch, I wondered today about the converse, about what was the least listened-to piece.

I scrolled down the hundreds of lines in the table of the reporting stats to see. Surely, it’d be some piece from this summer, and I’d have to explain that I must ignore the lowest listened-to piece because it wouldn’t have had a decent chance to find an audience yet – but it turns out I need no such adjustment.

The least listened to piece was from the very first month of the Parlando Project, published September 5th, 2016. Just 19 officially audited listens in ten years! 19.

Why would that be so? Well, it was one of those live LYL Band performances – something that makes up a substantial portion of the Parlando pieces over the years. None of them made it to the highest popularity levels. Musically, those are almost entirely first-thought-best-thought first-takes with no preparatory work at arranging the music. And this one’s got the limited technology of its time: the drums are just a canned loop. Keyboardist Dave Moore’s playing on a somewhat cheesy Casio rendition of an organ. I checked my recording dates: it was recorded a couple of weeks before release. I mixed it down and was considering it a only few days after that. I’ve got a number of Parlando pieces here (still available to stream, I’ve “unpublished” nothing) that seemed better in some fresh moment than a retrospective consideration says they are.

But listening to this piece, “The School Year Begins”  again, I don’t find it all that bad. My embarrassment-meter is calibrated to my personal enjoyment scale, and I don’t mind unpolished musical performances. In this day and age of highly processed “real” recordings and uncanny valley AI simulations of that, I’m hardly less receptive now to this performance than I would have been then.

So, I figured I’d share it today in the Parlando Project’s anniversary month. I went looking for the document file of the words so that I could include them in this post. I got a surprise – it doesn’t exist. I’ve never been careless about such files, there’s almost no chance that any such was lost due to some computer accident or event. I searched my wrinkled wet grey-matter memory next, and this result came back: that would mean that I likely improvised the words while improvising the music. As a younger person I would do this sometimes. A few Beat poets did this sort of thing, though I don’t know how much preparatory material they brought to spontaneous live performance. Some of my other personal influences sound in performance like they might be improvising their text: Ken Nordine and his fellow Midwesterner Laurie Anderson. I don’t have detailed knowledge of how they worked – but my guess is that those two want to give the effect that they are improvising while working largely or entirely from script. Patti Smith in her younger years would improvise poetry in performance regularly, though referencing some basic premises and lines while Lenny Kaye improvised in musical “fields.” Two songwriters dear to my heart: Leo Kottke and Robyn Hitchcock will regularly go into fractured-facet spoken monologs on stage between songs, and these sound improvised to some level.* But in this case, I know how I would have done it. I would have had an image or situation in mind, and some trust that the words I’d choose to depict it would come out. I might have had a starting line, but the rest would be pure improvisation. This morning I had to transcribe the words I performed back in 2016 to present them to you today as if it was a page-poem.

The Schoolyear Begins

Old as I am, whenever I pass a schoolyard at any school I look at the very-much-the-same worn grass and I’m into a Whitmanian reverie.

.

Does my improvisation work? Who can say – well, an audience, even a small one, like 19, determines that I guess. Could it have been better as a poem worked on in succeeding drafts? “Better” varies. Some poems are better in different ways. Those of us who enjoy improvised music often do so with a heightened empathy for the improvising musician, and in doing so our appreciation of their performance is bolstered by knowledge of the risk of their working without a net. That feeling simultaneously meshes with our own risk-taking, of time and attention. Improvised words are not exactly the same, but something of this might apply.

I certainly appreciate your risk of time and attention here. You can hear the LYL Band’s 2016 performance of “The School Year Begins”  with the audio player below. No player? It hasn’t plummeted to the sawdust, it’s likely suppressed by the way you read this blog. I supply this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player for you.

 

.

 

*The only artistic place performed word-improv is widely practiced is in comedy. From the same Fifties as the beat poets who tried to Word-Jazz improvised poetry, an entire school of think on your feet that are resting on banana peels emerged. It’s now highly common for modern standup comics and comedy writers to have formed their craft-skills doing improv.

The most listened to song from the first decade of the Parlando Project

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Before I reveal this Project’s most listened to musical piece, some short notes about a couple of things that didn’t appear at the top of the stats which informed this all-time (so far) Top-Ten.

No LYL Band songs. This Project grew out of music that I’ve been making with keyboard player and vocalist Dave Moore for more than 45 years as the LYL Band. From the start of playing together we sometimes included poetry or other peoples’ words they had not designed to sung or performed. This continued after the Parlando Project launched, and they make up a portion of pieces shared here throughout the years. Many of these Top Ten pieces are worked-out and worked-on arrangements, often done “one-man-band” style where I play and track each part, discarding inferior takes and thinking through what works best. But, when Dave and I play together, we track “live” in the purest/rawest sense: most often one-take and without really introducing the song to each other. I usually provide Dave with a chord sheet for the pieces I bring to a session – Dave sometimes does for me when he’s singing one. It’s extraordinarily spontaneous. Given that neither of us are virtuosos or trained improvisors, that this ever works well enough to present something worth retrospective listening surprises and pleases me. As time passes, as cultural expectations of craft and technology engender rising baselines of sound quality and tightness in recording, I still treasure that kind of music. Against Artificial Intelligence it brings Art-farcical Intransigence.

No recent songs. Nothing from the last six years made it to the Top Ten. I should have expected this. While blog readership has steeply increased over the ten years, listenership has had a much flatter curve, so the longer a piece has been available, the more likely it is to have gathered higher listens. Most new pieces gather a blip over the first couple of weeks from those who follow here, but then there is the “long tail” where listens accrue over time. When I look at daily stats reports the list of pieces getting a listen on the past day is typically 40-60 listings long.

The Top Ten is full of stuff from 2018-2020, and seeing this I wondered if this was a sweet spot in the Project’s development. It was a time where I could spend four-days-a-week working on composition and recording, largely unhindered – and I can hear some of the concentrated care and regular, scheduled, luxurious, time in the Top Ten I’ve been presenting to you this week. I also envy the level of energy and endurance I could marshal as a younger person. But still I tell myself: I’ve learned things over the years of doing this – even garnered some improved recording technology and techniques – and I think (comparing best to best) that I can at least equal the level of those earlier pieces.

So what was the piece with the most listens out of the more than 900 I’ve published here since 2016? Emily Dickinson’s “Ample make this Bed,”  that broadly referencing and deeply felt ode to love, to rest, to death from 2018 – a piece I did shortly after visiting the Dickinson Homestead museum in Amherst that summer.

Listening to it now eight summers later I marvel at the number of tracks making up this recording: drum-set, bass, electric piano, some synth line in there, my chant-not-quite-singing vocal, and that patient, excellent, and fair electric guitar solo. Could I equal it now? I can’t say for sure – it’s hard to judge “equal” between differing kinds of musical expression too – but I’d be happy if any piece I complete next week would work as well as this one does.

Here’s the audio player to hear that performance. Your player “called home?” This alternative, a highlighted link that will open a new tab with the audio player your way of reading this blog suppresses.

.

.

“Or if you want something visual, that’s not too abysmal” as one of the recent additions to the choir invisible sang, here’s the lyric video of this recording of “Ample make this Bed”  I did a few years later.

.

And before I leave this post, thanks to everyone who’s ever listened to one of these Parlando Project musical pieces, and more than double thanks to those who have listened to more than one.

The Top Ten most listened to songs from the first decade of the Parlando Project, part 2

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Returning now to our countdown of the ten most listened to Parlando Project musical pieces, already in progress. Today we pick up at the fourth most-listened-to song.

Number 4 is Jean Toomer’s “Her Lips are Copper Wire.”   I’m in the middle of doing a series on founding Surrealist Paul Éluard, known for his Modernist love poems. Now, I believe Best! And GOAT rankings should remain silly exercises – but as much as I like Éluard and want more English-speakers to be aware of him, it’s entirely possible that the greatest Surrealist love poem is this one, written by this American, Toomer. Musically, I use acoustic guitar and spare piano, a combination I see in several other of this Parlando Top Ten – and there’s what I think is a more successful electric guitar solo at the end here.

.

Moving to the podium steps, we have the third-most-popular song in the decade of this Parlando Project, Robert Frost’s “The Aim Was Song.”   This one is an outright electric guitar song. That statement should go double, as I played the synth part that weaves with the guitar using a second guitar with an added MIDI pickup which lets my fretboard fingers work with electrically-generated instrument sounds and control virtual instruments.

Samick Greg Bennett line MIDI pickup guitar

I went to a store to look for a guitar to host the MIDI pickup, seeking the cheapest thing with a neck I liked on their wall of low-end used instruments. This battered Samick fit the bill. The red strap is a string damper, as I don’t want any open string overtones to confuse the MDI signal.

.

Runner up in this list of most popular Parlando musical pieces? “Backyard”  by Carl Sandburg.  What a great piece for a late August evening in America. Sandburg, this child of immigrants, listens from his porch as darkness starts to come earlier now in his Chicago, and hears the sounds of other immigrants under a benevolent moon-universe above all borders and clocks. I know I played the synth and string parts here with my little plastic keyboard because those parts use volume and modulation wheels on the keyboard to modify and shape the notes. Vocally I add what I call “inline epigraphs,” little quotes from other songs that I hear echoing with Sandburg’s poem.

Little Plastic Keyboard 2026-Novation Launchkey 25

This Little Plastic Keyboard replaced an even smaller one that I wore out over the decade of this Project. I have a cousin who teaches piano and she’s agast that I put a scribble-strip with the white notes names above the keys. The two wheels to the left of the keys are volume and modulation controller wheels. The Novation MIDI controller is one of the least expensive  currently sold with both of these implemented as real wheels.

.

What was the piece with the most listens among the more than 900 audio pieces I’ve published here over the past ten years? Check back soon as I reveal that one in my next post.

.

The Top Ten most listened to songs from the first decade of the Parlando Project, part 1

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I can’t let the anniversary month of August go by without doing a summary of what have been the most popular of the more than 900 musical pieces and more than 1,000 posts since the Parlando Project publicly launched in 2016,

I’m going to do this Top Ten in a 6-3-1 format to keep these posts from running too long. Another difference: I tend to talk most about the words we use here and their authors, but the next few posts are going to be more about the music we compose and play as part of this Project. So, let’s not waste any time, on to the countdown.

At position 10 we find pioneering Imagist H.D.’s “The Pool.”   This is a personal favorite of mine, not only for the enigmatic poem that provides the words, but for the early use of an arpeggiator to let me incorporate the – what is it? – mandolin or zither or oud virtual instrument here along with low bowed string riff that I played with a little plastic keyboard or my MIDI guitar. Maybe I should note here that “virtual instruments” (VI) does not mean AI by any definition of the term. They are databases of recorded notes, often with a range of articulations that can be called up instantly and played, just as “real” instruments are played or scored and played.

 

At position 9 we have another set of early Modernist initials: E. E. Cummings’ “Crepuscule (I Will Wade Out).   I had forgotten that Bjork had already set a version of this poem when I did this setting in 2018. The instrumentation chosen is a favorite of mine: acoustic guitar and spare, sustained piano. The way the strings on a small wood box mix with the strings in large hardwood coffin struck with hammers as their overlapping waveforms combine never fails to please me. Here, as I often do, I’m playing single notes on the piano so as not to challenge my nearly non-existent piano skills. The piano is doing what a simple electric bass or solitary low bowed-string part might do in the arrangement.

.

At number 8 we get Arthur Rimbaud’s “Eternity.”   I try to mention the influences on this Project from time to time. They are many, and they are strong. They need to be strong because I’m not a “natural” as musician or performer. While I think I have some talent, however simplistic, as creator of musical ideas from the composer’s side, no one is going to pick me as the best choice for a vocalist – and even on “my instrument,” the guitar, I have inconsistent and varying skills. Patti Smith then is one of the influences, partly because she took her poetic vision and then went on will and audacity to become the frontperson in a band. Her championing of Rimbaud led me to consider that poet, and in my setting of “Eternity” I’m sort of emulating the sound of the Patti Smith Group, phrasing the vocal somewhat like she would.

.

7 is held down by William Butler Yeats’ “The Stare’s Nest at My Window,”   one of his poems about the Irish Civil War. A few weeks after I presented this poem musically, a man, George Floyd, was killed by callousness and negligence on the part of my city’s police force a few blocks south of where I live, and remembering this Parlando piece, I felt Yeats was speaking to my time and place. Listening to my musical setting now more than five years later, it still evokes that time for me. I can’t remember exactly how I treated the ominous string parts in it to get that sound, – some kind of delay or reverb I think – and the same spare sustained piano playing that I’ve use elsewhere in other pieces chills to the bone here.

.

Place 6, “Pied Beauty”  by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Once more listeners seemed to like, or at least try, my writing for bowed orchestral strings. Here the spare strangeness of the parts and the odd note choice, leaping interval, electric guitar solo over the top intends to evoke majesty of rustic nature – but I’m somewhat surprised at this one reaching this level of popularity, as I’m not sure the piece succeeds.

..

Free Jazz all over the place

Not that anything in today’s group of songs explicitly references Jazz…

.

Last one for today, number 5, returns to a piece that is a favorite of mine and one that I think represents elements of what I do well: Emily Dickinson’s “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.”   Another piece largely composed with orchestral instrument parts. I fear serious orchestral composers and aficionados think these compositions of mine simpleminded – and furthermore, practical necessity dictates that they are implemented by virtual instruments making up the orchestra, and so no matter how well recorded and implemented these approximations in software are, they lack the full detail of their real counterparts. In my defense, I’ve taken to calling my approach here “Punk Orchestral” – trying with that name to make the point that I’m using the tools, ideas, and opportunities that I have to make what music I can make now, without deferring to the prerequisites of virtuosity and more theoretical knowledge. Let me make this clear as I wrap up today: I recognize my limits, respect those skills and the dedication to practicing and perfecting them that I lack, but I persist in doing what I can with what I can marshal none-the-less.

.

At This Minute

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s another new translation of a poem by pioneering French Surrealist Paul Éluard that I made in order to perform it with music. This one, “A La Minute,” which I’ve rendered as “At This Minute,” also lacks the extravagant imagery that one might expect in a poem associated with Surrealism. I hear its language as informal speech, though this could be a mistake – remember I’m far from a fluent French speaker, nor am I an expert on early 20th century France. The only solid objects referred to in the poem are the eye and a more vague “instrument.*” There’s also the pronoun “it” present, and from the poem’s title and inference that may refer to the abstract concept of time.

a la minuteAt this Minute

Éluard’s original French, and my translation to English. That translation may still be a WIP. This morning I was thinking I should revisit the penultimate line.

.

What the poem is talking about is elusive. Like the Éluard poem last time, the greater context and situation are left out of the poem, leaving a set of statements about it. At the time I performed the poem – as with “The Naked Truth”  – I had decided that my performer’s subjectivity was going to use my dissatisfaction with my country’s current regime to animate the words. On deeper reflection afterward I’ve begun to think that both of these poems are complicated love poems. Perhaps if this series continues, I’ll write more about Éluard’s complicated love life, but even in the absence of that biographic information I remembered that Éluard is famous in his native France as a great love poet.

Those two frames can become congruent in poetic expression. If one loves one’s country and residents, one can have a complex relationship with its civic actions and outlook. Similarly, the intimate relationships between erotic partners cannot escape political and power questions. If early 20th century, or modern French readers, are expecting a poem about the affairs of love from this poet, they will likely hear it as such. As to the political reading? One thing I often see myself here in America: those women who carry experience with incompetence, reflexive lying, and lack of responsibility from intimate partners see immense resonance in my country’s current leadership. That is not a happy feeling, but it’s a clarifying one.

Éluard had a lifelong political side, and so consciously or unconsciously he may have intended this ambiguity. The poem seems to me to be addressed in hopes that a relationship will change, perhaps with the ending of it. What a speaker in the poem is declaiming then is that they are aware, can clearly see, what is wrong there. It may be a “who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?” situation.

Since I’m accustoming you to link two seemingly disparate worlds when hearing this poem, let me jump now to the music I made for performance. There’s a producer/musician and music theory teacher, Rick Beato, who has a very popular YouTube channel. One of his regular segments is to listen to the top 10 contemporary pop music streaming songs. This sort of thing is red meat for older listeners who eagerly click on those episodes wanting to hear Beato’s declarations of the lack of merit in modern pop music which will include objective reasons for that lack of achievement.** In one recent episode he noticed that many of the streaming hits didn’t “go anywhere” – meaning that they didn’t modulate to new keys, change tempo or time signature, or even change chords very much. Since there is a universe of sophisticated things that a composer or performer can do with all that, there’s value in pointing out the potential of using those musical tactics. But what he doesn’t stop to ask himself (or his audience) is: why might acts make that choice, and are then rewarded with large contemporary audiences for doing so?

Two putative answers that quickly come to mind: we are seeking something that seems stable and comforting – and conversely, we may be quite frustrated by the lack of positive change in our world and want to express that.

There’s a great, complicated, love song made famous by Aretha Franklin, written by Don Convay: “Chain of Fools.”   Lyrically, that song may be a cousin to Éluard’s poem, and the song’s harmony is an interlocking one-chord riff, broken only for a few bars where all the instruments fall away and only voices and handclaps carry on in the same key. Whenever I hear someone make a statement that assumes that harmonic complexity is the key to effective music, I will call Aretha Franklin to testify.

Now I’m not Aretha Franklin – as far as I can determine, no one is  – but my music for “At This Minute”   is based on one chord (Em) with the tiniest movement in how it’s voiced. I built this composition starting with the rhythm, a pair of related and repeated broken chord piano arpeggios expressing that chord, underlaid with a simple bass part I played on my U-Bass.***  To drive home the statis, I plucked my kalimba (thumb piano) right up next to the microphone so that it sounded almost like musical hammer blows.

Rather than performing my translation from Éluard’s French straightforwardly, I decided to improvise repetitions of phrases in it. While it doesn’t sound like ecstatic Afro-American gospel a la Franklin, conceptionally, it’s akin. You can hear that performance with the audio player gadget below. No audio player? It hasn’t said goodbye, but I hope and hope you’ll see this alternative: a highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

.

*What is that “instrument?” A clock or watch face perhaps? Or since the poem wants to riff on the eye and seeing – the spider face of Éluard’s poetry is as full of eyes as Emily Dickinson’s is of bees – the instrument could be the instrument of vision, the eye. If one was to create a Surrealist painting to illustrate this poem, both of those instruments should be melded together.

**To Beato’s credit: while he savvily promotes these run-downs (both senses of the word) as disparagement of modern pop music, he’s got a wide enough musical taste to offer praise for things he hears and likes in these top-tens. His grasp of music theory and enthusiasm for how it can be deployed is infectious, and that’s a good thing. As to how good or bad modern pop music is compared to the golden era that (just coincidently) happened when the oh, so, objective evaluator was a young person, I’ll call to the stand Mr. Theodore Sturgeon with his law that “90% of everything is crap.”

***The U-Bass is the size and construction of an ukelele, but with very thick nylon strings meant to be tuned to the same notes and register as a bass guitar (EADG). I love the upright bass, but I can’t afford, store, or play one well-enough – but I have three or four ways to make something like that instrument’s sound, such as today’s U-Bass.

The Naked Truth

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Last time I had a chance to record a new piece using guitar, I rattled the bones of a Jazzmaster amid synth keyboards played with the same guitar. Monday I had another chance. My studio space was quiet, I could have made it loud – or I could open a sensitive microphone. Organic, wooden music? I uncased an acoustic guitar. I do like the directness of that instrument. I have microphones setup for recording in my studio space, so it’s as simple as opening a preset template on my computer recording software, arming the tracks, and clicking the red screen button.

The contrast that resulted could have been even greater. I tend to attack the strings on an acoustic guitar pretty hard. I use a flat pick, but I’m most often not strumming the way other plectrum players do. Instead, I skip from string to string, not striking them consecutively or with a “boom chuck” alternative strum either. I use that single flat pick’s point to do in succession what a “finger picking” guitarist does.* Many years ago when I tried to learn how to finger-pick, I noticed that many patterns didn’t strictly require that you strike two or more strings simultaneously, and I just spontaneously started to move the single point of a flat pick around to play what I would have done using thumb and fingers.

I had a new song to record – really new. Over the weekend I decided to crack open my old paperback of Paul Éluard’s Capitale de la douleur, Mourir de na pas mourir , Éditions Gallimard, 1966. The book’s entirely in French, and I can’t remember what bookstore I found it at in Iowa. As I’ve mentioned occasionally here, I had the impression that French poetry was an important influence on English Modernist verse, and living in a state (Iowa) that retained some French place names and seeing French on signs and labels when I visited Canada for fishing trips as a kid made me feel that French was a logical second language for me.**

Somewhat like finger-picking, I was a washout studying French in school. I had a terrible time pronouncing the words anywhere near correctly, and the introductory classes I took in high school and in my foreshortened college years had nothing to do with the French poetry I wanted to get ahold of.

So, kind of like guitar playing, I just went self-taught. Back in the 20th century I brute-forced my way through a handful of poems with a French-English dictionary and vague memories of basic French syntax and grammar from my school-room failure. Eventually, it was just easier to get the poetry already translated, where and when available.

It was only once the Parlando Project got underway in the twenty-teens that I returned to translation. Nearly all the English translations I had read are not in the public domain and free to reuse. And furthermore, I found that not every poet’s work I was interested in had even been translated extensively into English. This was true for many of the Dadaists, and I was also somewhat surprised that it was true of Éluard.

Éluard, as best as I can tell, is a big deal in Modernist French poetry. Present at the creation of Surrealism. Not just an important avant-gardist, admired for his love poetry too. Patriotically valorized for being a stalwart member of the anti-fascist Resistance during WWII. But none of that makes him all that important in America.

I wanted to go through the early poems collected in my book that would be in the public domain. Many of them do not have English translations I can find propagated on the Internet. I used my limited French vocabulary to scan them for what looked like interesting lines, and concentrated on the shorter ones that fit this Project’s needs.

I took the ones I picked out and put them through machine (computer) translation. Machine translation has gotten much better in the past few years,*** but it still doesn’t produce poetry. What it does produce seems, to my inexpert eyes, to be mostly accurate glosses of the literal poem. My job is to take those words, discern what they are trying to represent, and to make that into a poem that will seem vivid to a modern American reader.

In that process I would find even a pristine word-for-word translation inadequate. I want to translate the sequence of images as much as the words, and I want the result to have some musical or incantatory power (even if I don’t usually go so far as to try to duplicate a meter or rhyme scheme).

The Naked Truth in French

The poem, “Nudite De La Verite,” in its original French

.

Éluard’s “The Naked Truth”  was not hard to work with. There’s not much wild imagery to it. There is the image of the incorporeal state of despair that has no wings in the literal translation. I decided to sharpen that to “no flight,” both to link it with the rest of the short catalog of always-present no-action and so that the sound of “no flight “ can better flow into the “no face” that follows.

I really wanted that negative flow about resistance to despair, and for that I made the most significant choice to change the sentence structure of Éluard’s text, which has the line stating despair at the start followed by the line about love. I reversed the order, putting the line about love first, almost as an interrupted side-thought that prefaces the statement about despair that we will momentarily think is what all the adamant stubbornness is about – until we get to the payoff at the poem’s end.

Perhaps this isn’t the best choice? It’s not the order Éluard wrote down in French, and I want you to know that I changed that order. I may have been influenced by the way I, and many others feel – particularly in my town – with the current regime and its performative cruelty and callousness. Goddammit, we might see this through this little poem: a hope that our level of our despair at those things must be equal to a level of love.

The Naked Truth

My version in English, presented as a chord sheet for those that want to sing it themselves.

.

You can hear my musical performance of my translation/adaptation of Paul Éluard’s “The Naked Truth”  with the audio player below. What? Has any such audio player taken wing the way your despair or love hasn’t? Well, I offer this consolation: a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

.

 

*For the added volume and sharp attack, some guitar finger-pickers use picks too, but different ones than a flat pick – typically a plastic thumb-pick that fits ring-like, but over the distal part of the thumb, and metal or plastic picks somewhat like half-spoon thimbles on one to three fingers. Others use some combination of fingernails and flesh. I have terrible nails and my skin can only allow me to play a limited amount of time with my thumb or fingers on bass. I tried to use fingerpicks as a guitarist, but found them finicky to manage.

**If I was a kid in my present residence, it would be natural to have gravitated toward Spanish. While my town has a significant number of Francophone African-Americans, Latin American Spanish is often in the air around here, and whenever I delve into Latin American poetry I find great riches.

***I suppose these computer-translations could be called Artificial Intelligence of a kind.  The AI label gets thrown on a wide range of things these days both for promotion and disapproval. In my defense I’ll point out that computer translations aren’t “generative AI,” the thing that (deservedly) gets the most heat. When I type Éluard’s French into a machine translation entry box I’m not asking it to generate some reheated reprocessed slop of other, uncredited, artists’ work in order to present the pretense of originality. I’m asking it to do what I did when thumbing through my French-to-English dictionary, along with making some effort at producing an understandable syntax order for the resulting words. As for other AI issues: I casually assume my request to render a 35-word poem has a modest carbon footprint.

I still end up working with French-to-English dictionaries to check significant words, to see examples of the words or phrases in use, and to make at least an effort at understanding possible idiomatic usage. Would it be better if the poetry was translated by a bilingual poet with extensive knowledge about early 20th century France? Yes, but I’m not sure that Éluard’s fate has given us that – and so I make my efforts.