Frank Hudson

@frankhudson

Founder of the Parlando Project — “Where Music and Words Meet.” Composes, records, researches, writes, & those things feedback into each other.

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Frank Hudson@frankhudson· 12d

I had to post in a hurry this morning from a tablet. (Friday's are often busy days for me) Now I'm back. Here's the text to Langston Hughes poem of that lonely & left boxcar.

RAILROAD AVENUE by Langston Hughes

Dusk dark
On Railroad Avenue.
Lights in the fish joints,
Lights in the pool rooms.
A box car some train
Has forgotten
In the middle of the block.
A player piano,
A victrola.
942
Was the number.
A boy
Lounging on the corner.
A passing girl
With purple powdered skin.
Laughter
Suddenly
Like a taut drum.
Laughter
Suddenly
Neither truth nor lie.
Laughter
Hardening the dusk dark evening.
Laughter
Shaking the lights in the fish joints,
Rolling white balls in the pool rooms,
And leaving untouched the box car
Some train has forgotten.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· 12d

I'm back home after a busy Friday. Here's the text of Sandburg's train poem.

LIMITED

I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air go fifteen all-steel coaches
holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the
diners and sleepers shall pass into ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where he going and he answers: “Omaha.”

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· 14d

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· 28d

Closest AQI reporting device near me (Powderhorn area)

AirVisual report on high air pollution from fire smoke in Minneapolis tonight

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Jul 7

When I got to George, Duke in the account this morning I couldn’t help but think of:

American Jazz/Fusion keyboardist and composer George Duke on stage showing complete disregard for the question of if a keytar can ever be cool.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Jul 3

Nor did I think these would be my winter bike’s tires. …also, I thought the wheels would need to have spokes.

A 45 North Dillinger 4 bicycle tire which is 4 inches wide, knobby for Minnesota snows, and can be studded for grip on ice. For some reason the tire is pictured mounted on a rim without any other part of the wheel being present.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Jul 3

Here’s Sandburg’s page poem without the clatter of the LYL Band’s live recording.

Sunset From Omaha Hotel Window

Into the blue river hills
The red sun runners go
And the long sand changes
And to-day is a goner
And to-day is not worth haggling over.

Here in Omaha
The gloaming is bitter
As in Chicago Or Kenosha.

The long sand changes.
To-day is a goner.
Time knocks in another brass nail.
Another yellow plunger shoots the dark.

Constellations
Wheeling over Omaha
As in Chicago Or Kenosha.

The long sand is gone and all the talk is stars.
They circle in a dome over Nebraska.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Jul 1

A Fifties Ike Eisenhower campaign button recontexualized to express admiration for saxophonist Ike Quebec.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Jun 29

OK Twin Cities, it’s a week forecast with Extreme Heat Warnings. I found this deep in my closet clean-out this past weekend.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Jun 29

I admire Rick’s attention to novels (a rare thing in my own lights) but particularly lit up with the lessons he drew from Vonnegut:

Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five brought home to me that you should simply write like yourself, and that there is nothing ignoble or trivial about being funny or sentimental or understood.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Jun 21

The Radio Enthusiast (1927) by Kurt Günther

A very serious looking man smoking a cigar and wearing headphones sitting next to a receiver while studying a manual or program guide.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Jun 19

Here’s the text of Frost’s poem

Acquainted with the Night
Robert Frost 1874 - 1963

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain-and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of
feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height, One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor
right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Jun 17

Forgot the picture. Here it is.

Noted boutique luthier J C Penny’s sold this $40 nylon string Checkmate guitar to me back in 1974. It’s the guitar I learned to play on. By the end of the decade it got a stick-on Texas Transducer so I could plug in during the LYL Band’s Punk Folk days.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Jun 12

Here’s the text of Dickinson’s #WrongBody poem

I felt my life with both my hands
(357)

I felt my life with both my hands
To see if it was there-I held my spirit to the Glass, To prove it possibler-

I turned my Being round and round And paused at every pound
To ask the Owner's name -
For doubt, that I should know the sound -

I judged my features - jarred my hair - I pushed my dimples by, and waited - If they - twinkled back - Conviction might, of me -

I told myself, "Take Courage, Friend - That - was a former time - But we might learn to like the Heaven, As well as our Old Home"!

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Jun 12

Later to launch Jimi Hendrix, Chas Chandler in the Animals.

Group band pics usually had Chandler standing in the back—such as this example.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· May 31

I’m been away & busy today. Did I miss somebody needing a solution to a metaphoric bee problem? Loud, low pitched noises—yup, I can convince that bee to flee.

A dark red “Gumby-snapped”DeArmond electric bass guitar, a circa-2000 reissue of a 1960s Guild medal.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· May 29

#PoemsAbout #EarnTheRight @thebrokenspine.co.uk #poemsaloud Once more I’ll give the living poets the words of one of our ancestors, the largely forgotten Edmund Vance Cooke. A poem about truth earning its rights.

Sedition
Words: Edmund Vance Cooke (1917)

You cannot salt the eagle's tail
Nor limit thought's dominion
You cannot put ideas in jail
You can't deport opinion

I can’t edit this mangled alt text on a small touch screen. I’ll try to fix this with a later post, but for now there’s also the audio version liked in replies.

Then drag it to
the light
out in the sunshine evil dies
But fattens on the night

You cannot make a truth untrue
By dint of legal fiction

Bor thineer and by sack
Truth has been crushed and palled and black
The truth has always risen
You cannot quell a vicious thought
Except that thought be free ag it, and you'll find it taugh n every land and se
ruth asks no favor for her blac on the field with erro for are her converts ever madi y threat of force and terro
u cannot salt the eagle's ta
I limit thought's domini
You cannot put ideas in jail
You can't deport opinion

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· May 28

This building on University Avenue.

Google steer view of a building with large signage along the top of Minneapolis on the west side and Saint Paul on the east.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· May 8

#NamesNotNumbers @thebrokenspine.co.uk I'm mostly about presenting other people's words in my old age, but here one for today's #PoemsAbout theme. I remembered this poem often during our recent Minneapolis winter counting of performative cruelty.

2ebruary

February, the month that comes with a crooked 2—
But to what? I hop on my Asian Schwinn and pedal
Past hardened snowbanks we long have tired of,
Wheels trained to the track of the ice ruts on the side-streets.

The man on the radio last night trumpeted making greatness again.
But February does not seem to agree. Sure it holds Presidents—
But also the long blue history of Africans impressed here
To build this country. “Property” that repaid those centuries
Not with mere rage, but with the only American song
Strong enough to say that oppression can be subdued.

As I ride on, I look to see what February tells us.
The interrupted thaw of last weekend, with winds
We would not call warm by May, had Brancusied
A snowman into a twisted beauty, a turning question mark.
Two Mexican men have the hood up on a Ford sedan
Discussing, I surmise, why it will not start,
While a woman and child stand bundled beside it.
On the hill rising up to 36th Street, I shift down,
But still my legs remind me: I am an old man on a bicycle.

I crest the hill and now have turned grateful that I can still do this.
However slowly, it is a sufficient pursuit. The to in February
I decide, will be a plate of eggs, French bread and a glass of tea
At a bakery on Chicago Avenue where the traveler sun emerges
Over the rosemaled Shenandoah building, an emigrant
Spring.

Frank Hudson

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· May 2

If I’m going to but-in I should put the text of my “After Du Fu” effort up too. Wishing you a non-tragic spring.

Rain on a Spring Night (after Du Fu)

A good rain knows things:
Knows it is lively spring, Knows secrets, knows a way,
Knows how to follow the wind in the night.
This morning, everything's moist,
Yet I never heard it, never felt a drop.

Only last night, the dark clouds were capitols.
Red lights flashed in the dusk.
This morning: left yellow wet tapes, The flowers - such a heavy brocade.

-Frank Hudson

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Apr 30

#music #poetry For #InternationalJazzDay I composed a short musical piece to combine with a poem by Langston Hughes. Hughes was early in understanding the value of Jazz in expressing the American experience. Here’s some of what I wrote of Jazz today in gratitude frankhudson.org/2026/04/30/l...

Music too is about expression - all music is - but Jazz is about American expression, expressing our particular place, a land taken from its natives and largely peopled with others taken or driven or fleeing here. What a strange place it is - yet and beside this history, we are filled with wonders, the freedom even of theft and exile, leavened with love of the variousness of all the ourselves found here. Jazz is a music residents here invented to express this, and Langton Hughes was early and important for recognizing and recording the experience of all these things.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Apr 30

#PocketPoem #NPM2026 Here’s my short post on a short Langston Hughes poem & 2 minute musical piece for Poem In Your Pocket Day/International Jazz Day. frankhudson.org/2026/04/30/l...

DRUM
By Langston Hughes

Bear in mind
That death is a drum
Beating forever
Till the last worms come
To answer its call,
Till the last stars fall,
Until the last atom Is no atom at all,
Until time is lost
And there is no air
And space itself Is nothing nowhere,
Death is a drum,
A signal drum,
Calling life
To come!
Come!

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Apr 16

#NationalPoetryMonth #NPM2026 #poetry #music #PoemsAloud Here’s one on the longing side, and a musical performance of it: frankhudson.org/2019/11/08/a...

November - Amy Lowell

The vine leaves against the brick walls of my house, Are rusty and broken.
Dead leaves gather under the pine-trees,
The brittle boughs of lilac-bushes
Sweep against the stars.
And I sit under a lamp
Trying to write down the emptiness of my heart.
Even the cat will not stay with me, But prefers the rain
Under the meagre shelter of a cellar window.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Apr 16

Here’s an attempt, written after her death and posthumous Pulitzer Prize, to sum up the poetry of Amy Lowell. Is that so? I’ve found within her poems some examples of passionate poems of love and longing. 🧵

Paragraph from Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry: “Miss Lowell was not at home among the emotions. She triumphed in the visual world, in the reflection of reflections, in capturing the minute disturbances of light and movement. It has been said that, though a poet, she failed as a humanist, that she never touched deep feelings because she never knew where to look for them."

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Mar 30

“Briefly, we shine” Spent Sunday going through 500 pages of poems collected in a between-World-Wars anthology of American verse. From this I have culled 50 poems, some of which I’ll sing & share with you this April for National Poetry Month. #PoemsAloud

The poster for the 30th National Poetry Month. A storybook figure in a purple robe reaches for a hovering sword in an arched doorway, while a fox & crow look on. A line from a poem by Arthur Size: “Even if the darkness precedes and follows us, we have a chance,briefly, to shine” is imprinted on the picture

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Mar 15

As we wake up to a new day with snow still falling, here’s the text of Patchen’s blessing that I performed with original music a few years ago #poetry #music #blizzsky

The Snow Is Deep On The Ground

The snow is deep on the ground.
Always the light falls
Softly down on the hair of my beloved

This is a good world.
The war has failed.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the snow waits where love is.

Only a few go mad.
The sky moves in its whiteness
Like the withered hand of an old king.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the sky knows of our love.

The snow is beautiful on the ground.
And always the lights of heaven glow
Softly down on the hair of my beloved.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Mar 7

I’ve read less about company thoughts and intents at Gretsch, but another earlier in the 50s it must be for Rock design candidate would be the Sparkle Jet.

1953 Gretsch Sparkle Jet with silver metal flake finish & Bigsby vibrato in a vintage case.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Mar 4

Saw a small-print goof in this daily feature this morning: Chris Rea died late last year. Not a big thing, but I don’t recall that error in this kind of feature before.

This morning’s Minnesota Star Tribune feature for notables celebrating their birthdays today lists musician Chris Rea who died in 2025.

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Mar 2

It’s March. It’s Monday. The sun’s out & it’s above freezing in Minnesota. Should I sing William Wordsworth’s poem? He’s been to March even if he hasn’t been here. Hey WW, do you mind a little bottleneck slide? frankhudson.org/2020/03/31/w...

Written in March
The cock is crowing, The stream is flowing, The small birds twitter, The lake doth glitter,
The green field sleeps in the sun;
The oldest and youngest
Are at work with the strongest;
The cattle are grazing, Their heads never raising;
There are forty feeding like one!
Like an army defeated The snow hath retreated, And now doth fare ill On the top of the bare hill;
The Ploughboy is whooping-anon-anon:
There's joy in the mountains;
There's life in the fountains;
Small clouds are sailing, Blue sky prevailing;
The rain is over and gone!

Frank Hudson@frankhudson· Feb 13

Zappa’s “Joe’s Garage” is a classic of that topic.