I've long wanted to do a piece using the words of early 20th centery American poet Michael Strange, if only because her life story is so interesting. But there was one problem: her poetry wasn't very good, or at least it wasn't "good" in the ways I appreciate poetry. This week I came up with a compromize between this poet and my own sense of poetry: I revised and adatpted one of her poems by taking as my guide a principle I use when translating poetry written in other languages, to seek to convey the images the poet was portraying in their own language into vivid contemporary English.
I'll explain more about how I adapted the poem and write some about Strange's extraordinary life in a post on the Parlando Project blog later tonight.
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
