Frank Hudson
LightNews LightNews
frankhudson.bsky.social
Frank Hudson
@frankhudson.bsky.social
610 followers 390 following 1.8K posts
Founder of the Parlando Project — “Where Music and Words Meet.” Composes, records, researches, writes, & those things feedback into each other.
Posts Replies Media Videos
frankhudson.bsky.social
The LYL Band did use this idea awhile back: frankhudson.org/2018/07/30/i...
Original dust jacket of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here with the Can’t crossed out. Cover image for the LYL Band’s song.
November 15, 2025 at 10:55 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
I've completed my piece for Veteran's Day/Armistice Day, a poem, now song by Padraic Colum, "Old Soldier." I was thinking this was the 1st time my long-running Parlando Project had encountered Colum, but it turns out I mentioned him in passing in this account by Carl Sandburg of a poet's guitar pull
Once when the night was wild without and the wintry winds piled snowdrifts around the traffic signals on Cottage Grove Avenue, Chicago, we sat with Robert Frost and Padraic Colum. The Gael had favored with Irish ballads of murder, robbery, passion. And Frost offered a sailorman song he learned as a boy on the wharves of San Francisco.
November 11, 2025 at 3:44 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
I think this is a US-only release, but the group was so poorly served album wise it’s clearly their greatest. My copy had marks I made next to each of the cuts: Clapton, Beck,Page.
Cover of the US Epic records LP Yardbirds Greatest Hits.
November 10, 2025 at 11:56 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
November 9, 2025 at 4:13 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
November 8, 2025 at 7:49 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
Donald Byrd covers especially come to mind
November 8, 2025 at 7:48 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
November 8, 2025 at 7:40 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
A small blue DeArmond fretless electric bass with white nylon strings that have replaced the original translucent silicon rubber set. As a size gauge, a CD copy of the just released Patti Smith Group “Horses” 50th anniversary re-release sits next to it.
October 29, 2025 at 2:38 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
Enjoy the name-rhyme
Picture by Joni Mitchell, the similarly named artist best-known for her singer-songwriting works. While not fully abstract-expressionist as the Joan Mitchell work, I picked this one for similar effect.
October 23, 2025 at 3:55 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
Thanks John for mentioning the music. Somebody once said poetry is words that want to become music—that was something that inspired me & my Parlando Project. Or there’s this quote about film editing from the post about this poem that indicates that aspiration might be more general:
It's all music-my brother, Ric, said that all art forms, when they die and go to heaven, want to be music." -Ken Burns
October 17, 2025 at 4:05 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #BreakTheMould I know most folks post new work of their own, but here's a 50-year-old poem written by my late wife Renée Robbins in her youth that I just rediscovered this Fall. Link to my fresh performance of it here: frankhudson.org/2025/10/14/i...
In Another Language By Renée Robbins, circa 1975-77 Crab in snowbank – plastic waves tattered claws – residue of an earlier life I call my own now left by the road. Where could I free you in this land of demarcated fluid and ice? A bathtub lacks salt, but I drift there as if a wind blew another flood to wipe out contracts and families nations and genders a Finno-Ugaric world with one word for both sexes one mind for the self and those I love and ten claws to speed into buoyant lift.
October 17, 2025 at 1:07 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
Mid20th century paperback green-tinted cover of a James Joyce classic Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. To lure the reader we see a large sailing ship, a many-spired church, and a young woman just slightly hiking her skirt up as she wades in water—and all these things are observed by a tall chiseled young man looking sideways from the smithy of his soul.
October 13, 2025 at 8:46 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
Here's an English translation of the whole poem. It says "words by" as I'm working on music to sing Éluard's words (in English) to. One translator's note: I chose to change the gendered language ("hommes" as "men" etc) in my version partially for inclusion & partly for more echoing sounds.
Beautiful Justice (Bonne Justice) by Paul Éluard – English translation: Frank Hudson This is the warmest law of mankind: from grapes we make wine, from coal we make fire, from kisses we make mankind. This is the harshest law of mankind: to remain intact – despite wars and misery, despite the dangers of death. This is the sweetest law of mankind: to change water into light, the dream into reality, and enemies into family. It’s an old and new law – one always perfecting itself from the depths of a child’s heart to the highest reason.
October 12, 2025 at 10:15 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
Knowing how thorough Hickey is, I’m sure he covers everything I could say. I’m currently going through a “death cleaning” of stuff I accumulated while in my 20s & learning what little I know about music, & so Mickey Baker means this to me & to many in my generation:
Cover of one edition of a series of Mickey Baker instructional books on how to play guitar, first published in the late 1950s. Given that they were Jazz oriented, they likely puzzled many young Rock-oriented kids with their just bought catalog store guitars.
October 6, 2025 at 2:50 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
I didn’t bring this up in the linked essay with musical performance, but I wonder if Emily Dickinson was punning “apotheosis” with “hypnosis” in this poem. frankhudson.org/2025/09/24/t...
'Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe by Emily Dickinson 'T is whiter than an Indian pipe, 'Tis dimmer than a lace; No stature has it, like a fog, When you approach the place. Not any voice denotes it here, Or intimates it there; A spirit, how doth it accost? What customs hath the air? This limitless hyperbole Each one of us shall be; 'T is drama, if (hypothesis) It be not tragedy!
October 5, 2025 at 11:01 AM
frankhudson.bsky.social
Here's a quick 1 1/2 minute "lyric video" I made for this #MichaelmasDay piece combining #music and #poetry
September 29, 2025 at 3:42 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
My Parlando Project likes to tie a couple of “Sixties”sometimes.
Psychedelic style concert poster from the 1960’s that originally advertised the Jimi Hendrix Experience but is altered to show 1860’s Emily Dickinson for the Parlando Project
September 13, 2025 at 2:04 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
The opening quote in the interview sums up the task of #poetry quite well I think.
The finest lyricist of her generation is explaining why words are, ultimately, inadequate. "Everything you say is only a fraction of everything you feel," says Adrianne Lenker, the dizzying creative force behind alt-folk act Big Thief, and a solo artist of renown. "Trying to think about things as deep as love, trying to get to the bottom of anything with words - it's the tool we've been given, but it's not the best one."
September 5, 2025 at 1:21 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
Seamus Heaney has entered the chat.
Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills We trekked and picked until the cans were full Until the tinkling bottom had been covered With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's. We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre. But when the bath was filled we found a fur, A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache. The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.
August 24, 2025 at 9:43 AM
frankhudson.bsky.social
for #PoemsAbout #chandoliers I thought this Rilke translation might inspire some. The statue's strange glow gets translated as candelabra or lamp by other translators. I chose chandelier for its sound & rhythm all those years ago. There's also a musical performance: frankhudson.org/2019/01/01/a...
Archaic Torso of Apollo – Rilke Translated by Frank Hudson 2019 We do not know his unheard-of head in which eyes ripened like apples. But his torso still glows like a chandelier. Even if the lights are turned down low, it still persists, gleams. Otherwise the carapace could not hold our gaze, and in the quiet turning the loins would not curve into a smile above the terminus, above his groin. And this stone could seem disfigured, stunted, from shoulders down, descending into nothing, no flickering below of a wild beast’s pelt. But there are no borders here, no broken edges. Like starlight suffused, there is no place it cannot see you. You must change your life.
August 22, 2025 at 4:00 AM
frankhudson.bsky.social
I wrote this earlier this week describing state-of-the-art AI tackling pop music vocals: frankhudson.org/2025/08/13/a...
Centuries of musical theorists from the days of music theory treatises written with a quill, and onward to the accretion of hardened commercial songwriting craft, have supplied all the steps in ink-stained longhand to create a coherent musical structure with predictable effects. The computer coders only have to apply a light dressing of adaptation to transfer this consensus for robotic mass-duplication. The singers would still have remained a challenge – except by a fateful choice: popular music has increasingly prized machine-aided polishing of human voices to remove the inexactness they are prone too. Ironically, what could have been the last rampart to be surmounted by AI was dismantled by meticulous vocal production and ubiquitous auto-tune before the tech-bro Visigoths arrived.
August 14, 2025 at 8:48 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
I love the way Andrea Cohen starts off the included interview when she’s asked how she writes her poetry:
Thank you for all those kind words. What do I think about the joy and delight of poetry? I feel lucky that I get to get up every morning and sit down at a table and think about poems. Or not think too much, and just see what happens when I begin. With a word, a phrase, an idea. Then it’s off to the races. Maybe the horse stumbles. Or wanders off to a field. Maybe the horse meets another horse and says: hey, let’s have a picnic, let’s talk about why we prefer anything to these races. The delight in writing is the not knowing where one is going and the discovery along the way.
August 14, 2025 at 8:56 AM
frankhudson.bsky.social
I can recommend the 3M 8511 respirator masks made for workplace/handyperson filtration for biking in the AQI smoke. The valve helps keep the seal working when breathing hard. May help keep glasses from fogging to some degree too.
Picture of box of 95% filtering 3M 8511 face masks, showing effective nose-shape area metal seal and downward exhale valve that also helps the face to mask seal working
August 2, 2025 at 2:47 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
busy Friday with music/literary work, & so tardy with #PoemsAbout #glamour

Oddly, that busy included writing about presenting this piece to a mostly puzzled audience 44 years ago. It's about discontented changes & glamour in the archaic sense of spell or enchantment.
China Mouth, A Changeling Oh, China mouth, your months are long You have no crime to call your own No, you have not crime to call your own And other people’s troubles are not your own. Your hair was long, until last week You cut it off because of the heat You cut it off because of the heat Yeah, it’s been hot around here all summer You took a bath, and turned to stone Just like the frog and dove Just like the frog and the dove That’s what happens when you fall in love -Frank Hudson
July 26, 2025 at 3:08 PM
frankhudson.bsky.social
My Fantastic Four
Cover of the Gang of Four’s album “Entertainment”
July 20, 2025 at 10:57 PM