Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet

Here are Sara Teasdale's words, an American poet who wrote this prayer for her life and its relationship to the world. Her contemporary Robert Frost said that he had "A lover's quarrel with the world," and Teasdale expresses the same thought here. I set Teasdale's poem to music and sang it with my rough-hewn voice this week. The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and com...

This Project presents a variety of poets work that I combine with original music, but Rabindranath Tagore wasn't merely a poet, he was more at a remarkable man, a significant spiritual, cultural, and political figure in his country – but I likely wouldn't have known of him if it wasn't for Bob Dylan winning a Nobel Prize for literature. That award provoked a measure of outrage: "It's for literatur...

English poet Frances Cornford published this concise poem of jaunty dread when she was just 24 years old. I don't know if this is a "persona poem" or some kind of poetic exercise on her part. I can't assign any biographic info toward the losses quickly cataloged in it. The words' briefness and quick poetic movement pushed me toward the music I composed and performed for her poem. My performance is...

Here's another early 20th century poet singing a faery song.   Instead of Yeats, this time it's the American poet Elinor Wylie with a poem called "Escape."   When Wylie writes here of "a little house I'll build" in some magical natural setting, I can't help but think of  the Irish poet's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." I'm sending this song version of Wylie's poem out today to anyone who needs to im...

Long-time followers of this Project will know I've proposed an illuminating test for substantial collections of poetry that I call "The Sandburg Test.*" This test is to ask "Within any substantial collection, does at least one poem deal with the world of ordinary work?" Early 20th century Claude McKay's poetry is wide-ranging, and here's one that lets one answer "Yes, certainly" to the Sandburg Te...

Here's William Butler Yeats with an early poem of his about age, and heritage; and youth, and wishes, as presented with some music I wrote and my rough-hewn voice. The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 900 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the...

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 be read as a comment on our own era's confrontation with Artificial Intelligence ("AI"). Listen and see what you think.  The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with or...

Here's a strange and deadly little poem by Walter de la Mare that I recently set to music and performed. De la Mare was writing a literary ballad, but in this one he compresses the story's length considerably compared the double-digit stanza numbers of many a broadside or folk ballad telling a similar story. The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with o...

I found this unpresupposing poem as the 5th one within a series of short poems by 20th century American poet Conrad Aiken called collectively  "Variations."   As the title suggests, Aiken often had musical forms in mind, and so I then set out to compose some music to sing his poem.  The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing...

Today is the last day of U.S. National Poetry Month which has been given the additional observance of Poem in Your Pocket Day where poetry lovers are asked to carry and share a poem. Today is also International Jazz Day – and so I chose this poem, "Drum"  by Langston Hughes, the pioneering Jazz poet, and his poem that reminds all of us that the rhythm of life asks us to take our beat, take our lig...

I hope you've been enjoying the bountiful crop of new musical pieces this month during our celebration of National Poetry Month. All the poems I've set to music this April were found in Louis Untermeyer's between-the-wars anthology Modern American Poetry,  and today's selection is by another of the poets that Untermeyer noted but that time then has forgotten, a Pennsylvania school-teacher named Ro...

Continuing in our National Poetry Month series presenting poems found in Lewis Untermeyer's between-the-wars anthology Modern American Poetry,  here's Hart Crane's "The Hurricane."  Crane has chosen here his own idiosyncratic poetic diction, half Anglo-Saxon epithets and alliteration, half Marlowvian bombast in order to churn up this attractive piece of word music describing a storm. To remember t...

This is the 900th publicly released Parlando Project piece, an adaptation of a poem by Emily Dickinson about poets and poetry that I set to music in order to perform it. It continues our April National Poetry Month series in that the poem I adapted was from Louis Untermeyer's between-the-world-wars anthology Modern American Poetry. I plan to write later today about how it feels to have reached 900...

The celebration of National Poetry Month continues with another song made from a poem found in Louis Untermeyer's between-the-wars Modern American Poetry  anthology. Today's poem is by Louise Bogan, something of a poet's poet who mastered the short impactful lyric poem form in the 1920s, but didn't gather the same general readership as her fellow Maine native Edna St. Vincent Millay.  Her "Cassand...

Just a few days ago, during this year's National Poetry Month series, I was posting my rough and untrained voice singing with orchestral instruments. Today I've got an acoustic guitar and I'm going to whop on it to deliver a performance of a poem by David McCord, a poet that specialized in light verse and poetry for children – even so, between-the-world-wars anthologist Louis Untermeyer included t...

Here's a song I made from a sweet poem of enduring love by Amy Lowell. This in another in this year's April National Poetry Month series were I'm performing poems found in Louis Undermeyer's between-the-world-wars anthology, Modern American Poetry.  The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of th...

Here are some words from another poet, Robert Hillyer, who's now lesser-known, though he was a Pulitzer Prize for poetry winner and was included in Louis Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry survey published in between-the-world-wars era. His "A Letter to Robert Frost" is a long poem in rhyming couplets about the comic mutability of poetic fashion, which he tells us is applied even retroactively to...

Three things mark Louis Untermeyer's taste in his between-the-world-wars Modern American Poetry:  comfort with the Modernist avant garde, appreciation of the fantasy/gothic (Poe) strain in American poetry, and the inclusion of humorous verse in a "serious" anthology. This selection from his collection has elements of the last two, and was written by a poet as many mid-century readers would have be...

Here's the next poet plucked from the pages of a Louis Untermeyer's between-the-wars anthology Modern American Poetry as part of my series for this year's National Poetry Month. The poet today is Maxwell Bodenheim, once the self-styled "King of the Greenwich Village Bohemians." As I've found is common over the years with my Project, this is poem that deals in old age written by someone far from ol...

Here's another lesser-known poet and poem found in Louis Untermeyer's between the world-war anthology "Modern American Poetry:" Elizabeth J. Coatsworth and this poem about mystery and strangers. I'm using poems I found in this 85-year-old anthology to celebrate National Poetry Month this April, and this is another one that strongly asks on the silent page to be set to music. I'll write more about...

Continuing on our National Poetry Month series of performances of poems contained in a between-the-world-wars anthology "Modern American Poetry," here's a poem by the pioneering Imagist H.D. "Lethe"  H.D. often left interpretive space in her poems, and so it is with this one. One could read it as a curse or a elegy. I've chosen the latter.  The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary...

I kick off our annual celebration of U. S. National Poetry Month with the first of a series of poems (some well-known, some, like this one, less-known) found in the 20th century anthology  Modern American Poetry. George Dillon's "Memory of Lake Superior" is a well-observed Spring nature poem, and sitting lesser-known on a page in this old book made me want to bring it, now sung, to you. The Parlan...

I've been telling folks I've been working on my Emily Dickinson "No Kings" piece this week, and here it is. Though not really a statement on current political regimes, but it is something of a statement about having too great an expectation of rewards from potentates. The poem I made into a song is Dickenson at her most snarky: the king is springtime sun, and the foolish morning thinks that this "...

Edna St. Vincent Millay presented a complex self that wrote complex love poems and complex Spring poems. This sonnet of hers I made into a song may be any one or more of these. The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinaitons, and you can hear any of them and read about our encount...

Are we through with Irish poets? Nope. How about less politics? Well, maybe. Here's a poem by Wiliam Butler Yeats weary of politics which I performed on a cheap, battered, plastic guitar. The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinaitons, and you can hear any of them and read about...