Here's a performance of another in a series of sonnets I've been writing over the past few years about a daughter's relationship with her mother with progressing Alzheimer's disease.

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 words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

This episode marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Parlando Project, but it's also the anniversary date of my late wife, Renée Robbins, death. I've chosen to tie those two things together with a musical setting and performance of a poem she wrote. Though written by a young woman, it's about a complicated attraction.

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 words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

And now for something different. Last time the music was a love-lost remembrance nocturne made with two cellos accompanied by piano. Today's piece: a pair of howling electric guitars fronting a rock sextet. And the words for this? From Philip Freneau, the New Jersey resident known for a while as "the Poet of the American Revolution." But this poem of his was written long after the Revolution, 1815, and in it Freneau is warning against "embryo monarchs" who would sacrifice America's strength and renown to "prop a tottering throne." So obviously, and antique poem of no current relevance.

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 words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

The years of this Project have led me to continued exploration of the poetry of the first part of the 20th Century. Recently I've come around to reading the poetry of the writer/critic Conrad Aiken, who was one of the expatriate Americans living in England and Europe, often acting as instigators of Modernism in this era. Today's musical piece with its musical title is the concluding section of a longer poem that served as the titular piece in a 1917 collection of his. Today's simple musical setting is for two cellos and a piano.

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 words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

A wonderful thing about Emily Dickinson's large body of poetry is that there are always "new" poems to discover. Take this lesser-celebrated one for example: an ecstatic hymn to our present season, lengthy by Dickinson's standards, filled with her characteristic unusual word choices. As is the nature of this Project, I was drawn to sing it.

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 words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Willa Cather could fit in small group: writers known as novelists who also wrote some worthwhile poetry. This poem of thwarted love charmed me when I read it in an anthology this summer, and I had sense immediately that it wanted to be sung. This month I wrote some music for it and found the time to record it. At the end of that performance I adlibbed a little variation expanding on the mysterious details of the meeting under the hawthorn tree.

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 words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

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 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 words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

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 literature, and he's just a songwriter."

Someone pointed out then that when Tagore was awarded that same prize in 1913 he was largely known outside of South Asia for his book Gitanjali which he himself had recently translated into English. Gitanjali means "song offering" and that book he translated contained English language versions of some of his Bengali song lyrics. Tagore was no dabbler in songwriting: in his lifetime he wrote 2.232 songs, and in his preface to the English language Gitanjali, William Butler Yeats noted that Tagore's audience was remarkable because his countrymen widely knew and sang his songs.

I lightly revised Tagore's words for this performance with music. Later this week I'll write about the modifications and about the music at the Parlando Project blog.

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 words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

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 aimed at giving an impression of distress, yes, but also perseverance, for while it sings of the devil ransacking the singer, the singer is still singing.

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 words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

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 imagine for a few minutes an escape from the problems of life.

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 words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org