Adventures of Isabel

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 been familiar with as Frost, Eliot, or Millay: Ogden Nash. A few years back Dave Moore and the LYL Band gave Nash's "Adventures of Isabel"  a go as a song, and that's what I present today as I continue my National Poetry Month series using selections from Untermeyer's anthology. 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 combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org