Frank Hudson

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 … Continue reading Toward the Exit (Dem Ausgang zu)

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 … Continue reading Millay’s Tavern

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

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 … Continue reading The Human Seasons

Longtime followers of this Project will know that I’m a proponent of early 20th century Chicago Afro-American poet Fenton Johnson. The “elevator pitch” for Johnson is that he slots in between Paul Laurence Dunbar and the slightly later Harlem Renaissance. Back then, prominent contemporary Black critics such as the remarkable polymath James Weldon Johnson categorized … Conti...

In writing about Sara Teasdale last time here I mentioned that she has been grouped with a set of 20th century female poets as a “Songbird Poet.” The implied charge here is that these poets are less concerned with the deep meaning of poetry and are content to just make pleasant word-music. If we are … Continue reading Tell me where is Fancy bred: Shakespeare the Songbird Poe...

Well, as more-or-less promised, here’s a return to literary poetry that may probably meet audience expectations: a season-appropriate poem by American poet Sara Teasdale titled “September Midnight.” Teasdale’s been a long-time favorite here, which goes back to one of my models of setting literary poetry to music. She’s one of a group of American female … Continue reading September Midnight

I worry some that I’m shorting my appreciated audience its rations of expected poetry, what with the recent series of poorly received short Dadaist French translations – but if there’s one thing guaranteed when working in this self-managed Project it’s that I can go where chance and mood takes me. For those wondering if I’ve … Continue reading Yes, I Am Experienced: the 2026 Jimi Hendrix Mem...

Today I’m going to wrap up my late summer series of fresh English translations of the early poems of French Surrealist Paul Éluard. Frankly, these poems are having trouble finding an audience – and in my suppositions, this is understandable. Earlier in the series I wrote (generalizing) that modern audiences have expectations of poetry – … Continue reading Habitude

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 … Continue reading Giorgio De Chirico, but this is a&#1...

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 – … Continue reading In Order To

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 … Continue reading Among Others

OK, I warned you. It’s summer, this is where I get weird, maybe even self-indulgent, since the poetry audience consistently drops off for some reason during this season. We’re going to travel time and space a bit before we get to poetry – but we’ll get there. This morning I saw that writer and musician … Continue reading Drunkboat, Lenny Kaye, Patti and Cordwainer Smith, Rimbaud

Just time for a short post presenting a short musical piece made from a short poem by Sara Teasdale. Teasdale’s “A Prayer”  goes over some of the same ground (or gravely, below ground) as her better-known poem “I Shall Not Care,”  each poem ending a telling stanza with a variation of and end-of-life caring not.*  … Continue reading Sara Teasdale’s “A Prayer”

Close readers will notice that I’ve slipped into my sparser (and sometimes weirder) summer publishing schedule with this Project. After a few years of doing Parlando, I noticed that summer readership/listenership predictably dropped off, so as a result I’ve come to treat summer as something between a vacation and what-the-hell-write-about-odd-topics season. However, as spring was … Continue...

It’s been a while since I presented a musical performance of a poem by English poet Frances Cornford, but here’s one from her early book-length collection published in 1910 when the poet was 24 years old. The poem is brief, but it presents the speaker as having had their life and soul ransacked by evil. … Continue reading Frances Cornford’s Dirge

The process of creating music/recording performances of other people’s poetry as part of this Project usually leads me to some deeper understanding of the poem’s text. It’s not something I have to try to do, some preliminary task I need to check off to complete a Parlando Project piece. What kind of music? Who is … Continue reading Elinor Wylie’s “Escape”

When I last posted I was planning on a trip to an off-the-grid cabin on the north shore of Lake Superior. I’ve now returned, and I’ll have some things I’ll write about here shortly. My goals for this trip: to spend some isolated time with my wife, and then while she would take the opportunity … Continue reading Claude McKay’s “On the Road” – and I went to a cabin in t...

My wife, who I suspect of having some strain of a woodland nymph in her genetic background, is going to take me to her elflin grot  this summer – well, an off-the grid cabin on the North Shore of Lake Superior – close enough. During this stay, she will take supervisory woodland hikes where she … Continue reading A Faery Song (We who are old)

I had worked on setting this 1920 poem by Marianne Moore to music for a few weeks, but it wasn’t until a couple of days ago that I had a shock of recognition: the words of this poem could easily be read as a comment on our own era’s confrontation with Artificial Intelligence (“AI”). Coincidence … Continue reading To A Steam Roller: Marianne Moore comments on art and artificial int...