Cassandra

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 "Cassandra"  is written in the voice or shared experience of the figure from classical mythology, who had the gift of prophecy, but when she spoke her doomed predictions of the fall of Troy and the fate of those (on both sides) who were part of that conquest, was deemed mad.  The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done nearly 900 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