It’s the first day of Spring. This E. E. Cummings poem is often read as delightful. And it is. It’s also a poem some encounter in childhood. At least in my youth, it was an anthology favorite that …

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I went out at night alone;  The young blood flowing beyond the sea Seemed to have drenched my spirit’s wings—  I bore my sorrow heavily. But when I lifted…

Yesterday was some kind of day to celebrate Wales, and I asked the teenager in the house what they did to celebrate since they have an interest in languages and had recently been studying Welsh lan…

My father once broke a man’s hand Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man, Rubén Vásquez, wanted to kill his own father With a sharpened…

For the first two years of his directing career for Monitor, Ken Russell had exclusively worked with shorter items of typically 10-15 minutes in length. By 1962, his reputation was such that Monitor's...

This is a song made from a section of Carl Sandburg's 1928 poem "Good Morning America"  which I sang this month in order that it shed some light on the nation's current state. The Parlando Projec...

I woke up to economic tumult around the world this morning after finishing a mix of this song I made from a poem by Carl Sandburg last night. I’d gone back and forth on mixing this simple piece of …

Kenneth Patchen's moving and remarkably structured poem of two conversations in a bar performed with an electric band. For more about this and other combinations of various words and original music vi...

Here's a poem by John Keats, his notices about the theater of the seasons. I performed it with my "voice of subjective quality," the one I have handy, accompanied by cello and acoustic guitar. The Par...

The lead vocalist in Wilco reflects on what Guthrie wrote in The Times in 1943.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was another poet who offered little to the “New Criticism” critics who largely set the canon for the 20th Century, even though her career, which covered the first half of th…

Early on here I mentioned that I didn’t care for Robert Frost when I was young. When I first was introduced to him he was still alive, but the very image of an old man. I think of him on a cold, wi…

What you’re doing is important:maybe to you, maybe to others, maybe today, or one day. Music’s claim on our attention comes from its sense of urgency. The economic worth of a piece of music is a wi…

Here’s one of the best-known of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which means it’s clearly one of “Poetry’s Greatest Hits.” Since I’m not a real scholar or expert in such things, let’s take a look at it as if…

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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 slot…

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 Lau...