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 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 encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

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 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 encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

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 "sun king" will marry her and crown her his queen. Dickinson knows how this turns out.

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 encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

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 encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

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 our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Today, a poem that I've turned into a song for second post honoring two Irish-American poets who led an annual St. Patrick's Day poetry reading in Minnesota for several years before their death. Of the two, Ethna McKiernan had more direct ties to Ireland, having spent some time living in Dublin, and eventually in Minnesota running an Irish arts store in the Twin Cities for many years. When she would read her poem "The Day My Mother Gave Me Away to the Tinkers" she would instruct the listeners that, just as with many people, her busy mother had issued that threat in jest, and that the subject of this poem was her teenage mind thinking "Well, I'll take her up and that, and then she'll be sorry."

Of course, in order to realize this new song, there's a man singing this mother-daugher poem. That might be a detriment. And I made a mistake singing the name of a baker mentioned in the poem, Johnston Mooney and O'Brien. I dropped the "Johnston" but at first figured, no one would care, that it must be just some immaterial tiny particular bakery -- but it turns out that firm is a very famous Irish bakery, Oh well. I hope you enjoy the song anyway. And if you want to get it right, it's in her final new and selected collection available from her Irish publisher at this link.

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 encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Two Irish-American poets who Dave Moore and I knew and worked with (Kevin FitzPatrick and Ethna McKiernan) used to give an annual St. Patrick's Day poetry reading in the Twin Cities, a tradition that was ended by their final illnesses and death a few years back. It's occured to me that I can carry on that tradition here, and so, here's a poem of Kevin's, and like a lot of his best poetry, it seems kind of off-hand (though with a dry sense of humor) -- until you stop and think about the parable point the poem's story is conveying. So it is with this poem about borders that might speak to American events this year.

Kevin FitzPatrick's poetry is available though this web site: https://www.kevinfitzpatrickpoetry.com/

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 encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Here's an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem of complicated love, or something somewhat like that. Millay's original text deals with the moment where two people, two consiousnesses, meet and sepearate. She wrote a weave of images, and as I made her poem into a song I decided to refrain one line from her text to emphasize the two consiousnesses present.

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 encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Do you think of Edna St. Vincent Millay as a poet of wistful love poems? Well, yes, she wrote those. She also wrote poetry like this example that stands up pretty well as a punk-rocky declaration of public disgust over war and its civic decorations and deodorizers shouted over electric guitars. Who's going to supply the noise for this? That our job today.

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 encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Around 100 years ago, Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay wrote this poem about a poet's hope for posterity. I was taken by a pair of lines in his poem where he prophesies that "Modern kings will throttle you to greet/the piping voice of artificial birds."

I composed a rich and strange musical setting for the poem: a piano trio playing simply augmented with an oboe, viola da gamba, and a hurdy-gurdy.

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 encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org