Episodes
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Millay’s Tavern
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 …...
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Artists filmed, young and old, and the most obscure Bob Dylan cover ever
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...
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The Human Seasons
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…
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A song made from Fenton Johnson’s “Revery”
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...
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Tell me where is Fancy bred: Shakespeare the Songbird Poet
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...
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September Midnight
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...
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Yes, I Am Experienced: the 2026 Jimi Hendrix Memorial Piece
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…
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Habitude
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…
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Giorgio De Chirico, but this is a poem
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...
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In Order To
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...
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Among Others
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...
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Elinor Wylie’s “Escape”
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...
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Claude McKay’s “On the Road” – and I went to a cabin in the woods
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 …...
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A Faery Song (We who are old)
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 …...
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To A Steam Roller: Marianne Moore comments on art and artificial intelligence?
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 …...
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The Silver Penny
I found this strange and deadly little poem in a collection of Walter de la Mare’s children’s poetry. It’s a literary ballad – a poem referencing that style of folk and popular song while not being explicitly designed to be sung. The subject matter of a doomed voyage was a common one in British...
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Variations V.
Poems as we encounter them on the page often try to attract us: “Here’s something I want to say, an idea I want to convey to you” or “I’m playing with language and I think you will enjoy playing with me.” And then there are poems that don’t make much of show of any of … Continue reading…
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Langston Hughes “Drum” for Poem In Your Pocket Day and Jazz Day
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’ve chosen to share this poem by Langston Hughes, the pioneering...
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Lonesome Water
I hope you’ve been enjoying the bountiful crop of new musical pieces presented here this National Poetry Month.* Each of the dozen I’ve presented were based on poems found in Louis Untermeyer’s between-the-wars literary anthology Modern American Poetry. Here’s another of the poets that Untermeyer...
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Hart Crane’s “Hurricane”
One of the things I liked about the early English language Modernists when I began to examine their pioneering works was their clean unshowy language. While they sometimes slipped into colloquialisms (Sandburg, Langston Hughes) their time and place was close enough to my own that I never felt…
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I reckon when I count at all: our 900th Parlando Project audio piece
This is going to be a two-part post to celebrate reaching a milestone in this long-running project. This, the first part, will deal with the Emily Dickinson poem I adapted for this occasion, and the second, to follow, will be more a reflection on the decade or so of this Project along with a hazy…
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Cassandra
Louise Bogan is somewhat of a poet’s poet – and that’s sort of a mixed blessing. Earning that title means that other folks who work at the craft of poetry recognize the things she’s able to do even if they may not be noticeable by the general reader. Indeed, when done well, the kinds of ……
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Reflections In Blue
Just a few days ago I was posting my rough and untrained voice singing with orchestral instruments. Today I’ve got nothing but a small and plainly ordained acoustic guitar and I’m going to whop on it to deliver a performance of a poem by David McCord that I found in Modern American Poetry, the...
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Amy Lowell’s “A Decade”
Our most recent post in our April National Poetry month series using poems found in Louis Untermeyer’s between-the-world-wars Modern American Poetry contained some quotes from a long poem, contemporary with the anthology, recounting a conversation between two prize-winning male poets concerning...
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from “A Letter to Robert Frost”
Last time in our National Poetry Month series of musical settings of poems and poets included in Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry we heard from the poems of a leading practitioner of light verse, Ogden Nash. Today’s piece was made using some brief quotes from a much longer poem that...
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Adventures of Isabel, or weighing light verse
Three things mark Louis Untermeyer’s taste in his between-the-world-wars Modern American Poetry: comfort with elements of the Modernist avant garde, appreciation of the fantasy/gothic (Poe) strain in American poetry, and the inclusion of humorous verse in a “serious” anthology. We’re only partway...
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Maxwell Bodenheim’s “Old Age”
“I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’ I heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter I heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley” -Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” How much did the young Bob Dylan learn about Greenwich Village history that … Continue reading...
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A Lady Comes to an Inn
We first meet any poem as a stranger. And in going through Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry for this year’s National Poetry Month series, I often met on its pages poets I knew nothing about. Elizabeth Coatsworth was one. This poem of hers, “A Lady Comes to an Inn” is emblematic of that –...
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The Parlando Project - Where Music and Words Meet
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