Author Archives: weinberg

Woe is us (and you) in our next open session, focusing on poems of SPLEEN–by Baudelaire, Mullen, O’Hara and Bennett–this Sunday, March 4, in Charles Village, from 1-2:30 PM. All are welcome.

His bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb.

We shall be recording the following splenetic poetic missives:
Charles Baudelaire (tr. Robert Lowell), “Spleen”
Gwendolyn Bennett, “Quatrains”
Frank O’Hara, “Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed]”
Harryette Mullen, “All She Wrote”

Email paralleloctave@gmail if it’s your first session and you need the address for the house.

Five (five!) newly pressed Paroctavious recordings from 2011 sessions, for your listening pleasure:

Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky”:

C.P. Cavafy, “The City”

Emily Dickinson, “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain…”:

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This Sunday, from the throes of February’s languor, Parallel Octave presents Beyond the Dirge: Poems on the Absent & Dead Beloved Object, featuring the following poetic mourners:

You should have died at the apples' dropping.

Christina Rosetti, “A Dirge“;
Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays“;
William Wordsworth, “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways“;
and Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dirge Without Music.”

But she is in her grave, and, oh, the difference to me!

We will meet to record these poems in Charles Village from 1-2:30 PM. As usual, all are welcome, including actors, musicians, and friends (or foes) of the poets.

Email paralleloctaveATgmail for more information and the address if this is your first session, or just wander around Abell and Guilford listening for the sound of people gnashing their teeth in woe.

I am not resigned.

The Call for Filmmakers is now online: Parallel Octave is accepting applications for ANTHOLOGY II now through March 15.

Why should you make a short film based on one of our Greekchoralesque recordings of poems, you ask? Perhaps these hapless ducks, squawking to the tune of Wallace Stevens (filmed by Danny Schwartz for last year’s ANTHOLOGY I) will convince you.

You can watch more films from last year online here, or on Parallel Octave’s YouTube channel.

Parallel Octave will meet every other Sunday this spring; our next upcoming open sessions are February 19 and March 4th, both 1-2:30 pm, at D. Schwartz’s house in Charles Village. Poems TBA.

There may or may not be a lyre.

Please email paralleloctaveATgmail for the address if this is your first time at a session.

Welcome back! In our first open session of 2012, we will record four poems for, of, or about existentially disgruntled people.

This is the moustache of my discontent.

Poems:
Lucille Clifton, “shapeshifter poems”
C.P. Cavafy, “The City”
Robert Frost, “After Apple-Picking”
Emily Dickinson “I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain”

As usual, all are welcome, including musicians, actors, and friends or foes of the poets. We will meet from 1-2:30 PM at D. Schwartz’s house in Charles Village. Please email paralleloctaveATgmail for the address if this is your first time at a session.

No more Parallel Octave meetings will be held in 2011; the chorus awaits you some time near the end of January 2012.

Poems:Yeats‘s “The Second Coming“, Lewis Carroll‘s “Jabberwocky“, and Marianne Moore’s “The Steamroller.”

[Sound files from this session not yet edited for posting.]

One, two! One, two! And through and through / The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

'Twas brillig.

In the previous session, Gertrude Stein twisted our tongues into oblivion once again. This session, we gave ourselves the chance to untwist our tongues with Yeats‘ “The Second Coming” and Lewis Carroll‘s “Jabberwocky.” Side effects may include sudden loss of vision, heart palpitations and schizophrenia.

The darkness drops again...

Side effects may also include perfidy of recording equipment. No poems were captured in this session. We will re-record next week.

Poems: More from Gertrude Stein (selections from “Stanzas in Meditation“) and Amy Lowell’s super-short “A Lover”:

If I could catch the green lantern of the firefly
I could see to write you a letter.

I'm a poet; my name is Amy Lowell; and I'm wearing a hat.

[sound files from this session not yet edited for posting]