Last night I had the pleasure of hearing one of Marty McConnell’s newer poems, from her series-in-progress exploring fidelity. In this poem, the speaker is addressing her lover, who is leaving for a short trip. Aside from McConnell’s always-lovely image work, the poem stood out to me for how it uses structure, simile and symbol rhetorically.
In the poem, the speaker begins with a series of what are more or less literal images — (“our bodies toss toward each other in the night,” etc). Once the speaker begins to use figurative language, she makes what seem at first to be expected comparisons — “we are like our fathers,” and the symbolic image of the horses in the field: “the horses face each other in the field, daring each other to run.”
In the beginning of the poem, every sentence contains either a coordinating conjunction or dependent clause, which does several things: 1. underscores the speaker’s own ambivalence about not only what is happening, but also what it means, 2 it acts as a structural symbol for the the several dualities in the poem: the speaker’s internal struggle to identify as someone who is faithful, and two characters, who are joined together in love, but are also discrete people, and 3. creates a particular music we start to expect. When this suddenly doesn’t happen at “Do horses dare?” the sudden shift in sentence structure makes the statement stand out. The speaker then makes several such short, direct statements, mostly in the middle of the poem.
And it’s what these statements are doing that drives the poem to an unexpected place. The question, “do horses dare?” and the subsequent questions and observations (“we are not our fathers,” etc) unpack the previous section’s figurative language. The speaker disassembles her own myth-making about the relationship because though the narrative she first created will describe the relationship, she is not satisfied with what that description will allow her to make her lover’s absence mean.
She wants it to mean something more. So, she rejects the impulse toward romantic myth-making, and, under the guise of being empirical, leans toward a new set of images altogether, ones more mundane in construction, but also more capable of performing the task she wants them to: making the lover’s leaving understandable as a vehicle for her own transcendence away from the past faults hinted at in the end.
This disassembly is mirrored in the poem’s second half; for most of it, we are given a string of short declarative statements comprised of only one clause. As the poem progresses toward the end, though, the speaker begins to construct her single-clause sentences more and more like they are clauses in her compound or compund-complex sentences at the poem’s beginning. At the end, she leaves us with one final compund-complex: as the speaker’s lover’s plane is taking off, we get a sentence that syntactically and grammatically makes a pair out of the two characters again.
The poem itself, being divided into two parts, therefore has a rhetorical parallelism: first the speaker makes similes and symbols for us, then she unpacks them and ultimately creates new ones, giving the poem a feeling of winding and then unwinding, which feeling is enhanced by the dancing from complicated to simple sentences structures and then back to complicated again.
I think we are meant to know the speaker is a writer. That she makes so much of language use, and that the poem itself relies so heavily on grammar and structure to make its meaning is amplified by the image the speaker uses to generate the new myth of her relationship: that of writing a word on her foot (and here’s where I geek out even more about how the grammar and structure underscore the poem’s movement and meaning: in the most important and last of the single-clause sentences, the speaker, alone now, writes a single word on a single foot. Contrast that with the image of the two horses, who the speaker asserts cannot speak to each other.)
She is a writer, and like many of us, cannot always get out of her own head. She wants this absence to mean something more than simply an absence, and more importantly, wants it to take her somewhere new. She hints at this with: “I know what it is to be faithful.” One gets the sense that the speaker is so troubled by this leaving, and finds it so important to create a new myth about her lover’s absence because she has been unable to do so well in the past. Her solution is to write “home” on the sole (and note the obvious homophone association with soul — this reminds me of a passage in the Christian Bible, in which St. Paul argues that spiritual maturity is like having God’s law written not on tablets of stone, but on one’s heart — the speaker is coming to adulthood in this way — figuring out how to use language to change her innermost being). This final image, of a word on the bottom of a foot, paired with that of an airplane taking off, creates a mirror image, “home” coming down in a footstep, “love” going up in an airplane, home being that which grounds us, after all, and love, that which can takes us away and out of ourselves, to new selves, to new grace.

I briefly considered writing about my top ten favorite album of 2009, but since am not good at picking favorites or putting things into hierarchies, I made this mix of my favorite moments from my favorite 25 albums of 2009. If pressed, I could look in the play count of songs in my 2009 smart playlist in iTunes, which will tell you that Neko Case’s “Middle Cyclone” and Jay-Z’s “The Blueprint III” are about neck and neck in terms of listens. Neko is a little ahead, actually, but seeing as how her album had about a four month head start over Hova’s, I think it’s fair to say that those two albums tie for my favorite.

They represent sort of opposite ends of my consciousness and aesthetic sense, but also, a heartening breakdown of the social, racial and aesthetic walls of genre. On the one side is Neko’s lush, haunting masterwork, in my opinion an album worthy of standing next to Paul Simon’s “Rhythm of the Saints,” Johnny Cash’s “American Recordings,” and Over the Rhine’s “Good Dog Bad Dog” as an example of the best in folk-influenced pop music. On the other end of the spectrum is Jay-Z’s incredibly hooky, listenable 13th album, which I think, over time, even its harshest critics will realize represents a game change for mainstream hip hop, mostly because it is an incredibly joyous, adult album. Both albums feature some incredibly strong, moving writing.

In Neko’s “The Pharoahs,” we’re offered a complex, layered portrait of disillusion in romance: “You left me lying there awake/but you never came to bed/You kept me wanting, wanting, wanting like the wanting in the movies and the hymns/I want the Pharoahs, but there’s only men.” Neko’s choice of religious imagery is telling, highlighting, among other things, the unreasonable expectations our culture has of marriage and romance in general. And, not for nothing, it’s hard not to hear political disappointment as well. When our political leaders, handed a majority in Congress unprecedented in my lifetime, can’t conduct the most basic business of governance, Neko’s sentiment seems all too fitting.

Jay-Z’s album is filled with so many moments of transcendence above the normal tropes of hip hop, notable for the fact that he reworks tired concepts, like that of an emcee bragging about how ahead of all the other emcees he is, and using it to offer up a new version of power. In the second verse of “Off That,” it has its greatest moment, where Jay-Z redefines racism itself as something not only unjust but also uncool and indicative of immaturity: “This ain’t black vs. white, we off that/Please tell Bill O’Reilly to fall back/Tell Rush Limbaugh to get off my balls/It’s 2010 not 1864.” There’s hope that rises out of that, as Jay-Z celebrates his racially diverse friendships, his social mobility, and the simple fact that we finally elected a black man to the presidency.

In a year of disillusion for many of us, of economic hardship, war, and disappointment, there is still music, and there has been some amazing, lovely songcraft this year. The surprising and outstanding project by the Black Keys, resulting in the “Blakroc” album, the luscious clutter of Grizzly Bear, the pointed pop of Tegan and Sara, the exuberant post-rock of Kuan, the geek revival of progressive rock on the Decemberists’ “The Hazards Of Love” all indicate that as the first decade of the 21st century draws to a close, pop music in all its forms isn’t in decline. It’s becoming more diverse, more cross-cultural, and, as the for-profit music industry struggles to justify its existence, more based in a sheer love of music itself.

All Is Not Lost: Favorite Music of 2009

This will play in iTunes or QuickTime, and on any iPod/iPhone. You may need to right-click to download.

Back in October, when I first discovered Karen Finneyfrock’s blog, she appeared on KUOW to discuss The Poetics Of Great Lyrics with Jeremy Richards. I got the idea for this mix back then, and have been working on it since: what would I have said were examples of songs whose lyrics could stand on their own as poetry? This is the result. These songs cover a wide range of genres, but they share in common simply that I can imagine discovering any of them in a book of poetry.

I Felt A Suddenness

This will play in iTunes or QuickTime, and on any iPod/iPhone. You may need to right-click to download.

I’m going to leave the debate over what is and isn’t poetry for someone else. For myself, lyric is lyric, whether it be traditional poetry, spoken word or the words that come with pop music. Hip hop, whose lyrics are mostly spoken, feels like poetry even more than rock lyrics. The border is porous, to say the least.

Denizen Kane has long been one of my favorite poets and once he began making music, one of my favorite emcees. I met Denizen back in the 1990s during the early days of the Mental Graffiti reading in Chicago. Like most of my favorite spoken word artists, Denizen preferred to write more lyric compositions rather than opting for the more rhetorical, expository Henry Rollins style of spoken word. I remember the first time I heard him perform; in one poem he made allusions to Li Young Lee and Jurassic 5, using a flowing, smooth delivery that eased his listeners into his image-dense, complex poems. His writing has always connected with me on a very personal level; raised, like I was, in a Christian home, Denizen has wrestled to reconcile the faith with which he was raised with his growing understanding of his cultural heritage, his politics, and with his personal poetics.

Most writers I know are locked in the midst of their own wrestling — we wrestle with something from our pasts and presents — it is what pushes us to write. For poets who wrestle with religious traditions, which themselves perform functions similar to poetry — imaginative redescriptions of the world that give its hearers and readers new ways of interacting and being — words themselves become the subject of the wrestling. As poets, we maintain a sense of wonder and mystery, but as poets we find ourselves continually pushing for new ways to see things. We can’t help it to a certain extent. There is a long tradition of writers dealing with this difficulty, from the book of Job and the texts of the ancient Hebrew prophets to Muslim poets Rumi and Hafiz to modern poets like Yeats and Dylan Thomas to Ginsberg, Li Young Lee and others, and, in music, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Michael Franti and Mos Def, just to name a few. Denizen continues this tradition, and draws on all these listed, and more, to weave his own, new personal theology and politics that’s born of his relationship with words themselves.

This video from his latest album, Brother Min’s Journey To The West. Listen to how he reforms old concepts anew to apply to his particular context, and how natural the syncretism he’s built out of hip hop aesthetics and imagery from almost every major religious tradition. The result: a personal statement of mission and faith that’s easy and strong as the gentle power of water. Not overpowering or overbearing or preachy, but familiar, open-hearted, and beautiful.

(Here’s an interview with him after his appearance on Def Poetry Jam.)

I’m on the internets, reading poems! Firstly, if you don’t know about The Encyclopedia Show, it’s my favorite poetry show in Chicago. Each month, hosts Robbie Q Telfer and Shanny Maney-Magnuson select a topic and invite certain poets and musicians to perform an original piece based on that topic. I was asked to perform in the Serial Killers show that happened in October. The online archive of the show is now up, and you can hear me reading my poem “Why We Suck” about the Ken and Barbie killers.

Secondly, tonight, November 15th, I’ll be appearing on the local Chicago radio show Wordslingers, hosted this week by Kurt Heintz. You can listen to a live stream of the show, which starts at 8PM Central Time, or Kurt will make an audio archive available in the future via his amazing website, e-poets, which has been offering online recordings of Chicago poetry for more than 10 years.

A recurring theme in Megan Thoma’s poetry is the feeling of being trapped in a failing relationship. Her poem “Fine. Fine. Our Love Is An Ocean” explores that theme in a memorable and powerful way. Thoma uses magic realism and comedic narrative in a fresh and unusual way to explore her subject matter (a hallmark of her writing in general, actually. If you can find her excellent chapbook, There Are Things, I recommend it.
The poem’s momentum carries the reader/listener almost entirely through the poem, relying on the charming quirkiness of the speaker’s descriptions and Thoma’s vivid imagination to create a very impossible but totally believable scenario: the speaker’s husband offers her the gift of living underwater because she’d said she’d always wanted to live near the beach.
The complete wrongheadedness of that gift (a houseful of ocean and fish is the farthest thing from owning beachfront property) and the not merely bizarre but also dangerous perspective of the husband character are well-drawn. Crazy is actually a difficult characterization to pull of well, because writers often opt for characters who are too inhuman. What makes the husband character’s choices so creepy and realistic is the oddness of his perspective; it’s only a hair away from being romantic, but it’s wrong in the worst possible direction.
The details in the poem seem at first to be there simply for providing a compelling story, and it isn’t until the end, when the poem shifts mood suddenly, that the creepiness of the details rush back into our minds — the husband actually thinking the idea was a good one, that his solution is to propose cutting gills into the speaker’s throat, but most importantly, that the speaker actually considers going along with “his way- the easy way” long enough that her life is in real danger — these are carefully piled on us. The poem’s mood changes and the speaker ends the poem with an alarming and brilliant simplicity ( “I ran. I ran, and I ran, and I ran” ). This stands in a sharp contrast to the complex and vivid imagery and diction in the entire rest of the poem, and is what gives the ending the incredible rhetorical power it has.
Up til now the speaker has been almost drowning us in description and detail, but once outside the house, her diction shifts to this simplicity that is almost stark, communicating with this shift the speaker’s sudden and necessary change of perspective. This is coupled with the repetition and the rhythm of the final lines, which are also unique in a largely chatty poem.
The end result is a radical linguistic shift from the loquacious to the rhetoric of urgency, and we can feel it, without the poet ever having to tell us overtly that the speaker has had a paradigm shift. She doesn’t need to tell us because she has allowed us to witness the speaker’s thought process as it happens. Brilliant.

Nifty bloggy social media stuff: Seattle poet Karen Finneyfrock, whose poem, “Crystal Radio” I wrote about last week, linked to that post and also to the post of Jenn Eakin, an artist who, inspired by the same poem, has created an illustration of the poem. Take a look at the illustration on Jenn’s blog, and note how she picked up on something I didn’t really touch on in my comments on the poem — the image of the nuclear reactor which, of course, relies on the breakdown of molecular structure to generate its energy. The poem’s closing image, of a town filled with people realizing they’re the source of light, is informed by this, and it raises a question the speaker of the poem maybe doesn’t want to explicitly address — in the poem the speaker tells us the people are the source of power. But at what cost? The poem offers this progression: coal to diamond, then an unstable isotope of carbon to a stable one — both instances of movement from instability to stability, but with opposite outcomes — a diamond or nuclear waste. Interesting, yeah?
The other point of interest is the poem’s title, which I literally didn’t know until reading Karen’s post this evening — another image that is never explicitly addressed in the poem itself — that of a crystal radio, which was an old radio that used a zinc oxide crystal as the tuner circuit. Yet another image of something whose structure determines its function. And, like the lightbulb, something that performs its function by being a conduit for energy. I had a crystal radio when I was a kid (and wrote a very bad poem about it, actually) and the process of finding a station is very inexact — doing it successfully gives one the feeling of accomplishing some feat of magic, because even though I’d read up on the science of it, when I was actually performing the task of finding a station, it didn’t feel like science. It felt more like praying.

Now (and I avoided this in my last post) what is the speaker getting at? Far from being the simple “power to the people” statement it seems to be at the end, the images are doing a lot of work to imply that while, yes, we light up our own nights, we do so at a cost, and mysteriously, and as part of something much larger than ourselves. The image of the network is important here — we’re not lighting up the night as little individual light bulbs all alone, but as part of a giant grid, a constellation. We need each other. That’s the power the speaker’s all about in the poem.

Why is this poem by Robbie Q Telfer so powerful? It’s a pretty weird poem, with a narrative whose plot never resolves and actual historical facts interspersed with fake facts about real people, and imaginary characters treated as if they were real. At the center of it is the dominating conceit — comedians as clowns and their audiences as hyenas.
The poem’s innate weirdness is a poetic device, not an accident though. A performer runs a high risk in critiquing the performer/audience dynamic, the risk being that the performer might alienate the audience altogether if they’re made to feel too uncomfortable about the critique being offered. Robbie gets around this with the fake facts about real events/narrative about imaginary people. The speaker is clearly discussing some events that didn’t “really” happen, and some that did, and some that happened, but to actors instead of to their onstage personae, and some where the actor/persona line is blurred – so the audience is put at ease — they’re not being asked to examine themselves – yet. But the poem does eventually ask the audience to examine the performer/audience relationship, but it does so by inviting the audience to identify with the performer. This happens in the Big Bird segment:

Big Bird
came out to sing “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green” and for
a moment it sounded as if there was a human being
living inside of this giant yellow body, for a moment it
sounded like this impossible real person was starting to
crack and cry inside of this now trembling feathered body
all because a frog didn’t want to bother people
by going to the hospital in time. Later, the ashes
of someone named Jim Henson were scattered
on a ranch in Santa Fe.

The speaker wants us to stop and consider the cost the culture of celebrity and performance exacts on performers. By using Big Bird, an imaginary character, the speaker gets us to the point of identifying with the performer and then flips the concept around with the idea of an “impossible real person” inside Big Bird, which, of course, we all know is true — an actor is inside Big Bird’s body. Then when the speaker tells the story of Jim Henson’s ashes being scattered, we are drawn into the real world again and make the connection between the performer’s onstage persona (symbolized by the Big Bird puppet-suit) and the performer as a person (symbolized by both the “impossible real person” and Jim Henson). Henson, of course, played Kermit, so the speaker deliberately calling Henson Kermit (and the other Muppets too – an actor playing Big Bird sang at Henson’s funeral, and Richard Hunt, who played Scooter did as well – see the YouTube videos Robbie graciously sent me below) as if the actors are the characters they portray opens us up for the next story about Samuel Clemmons/Mark Twain:

The speaker draws the rhetorical circle closed with the completely true story about Samuel Clemmons’ daughter dying, and Clemmons burying himself in his work for the remaining 13 years of his life. We’re invited by this to reconsider the facts, real and fake presented at the beginning of the poem: the story of Jon Lovitz and Andy Dick (true), the story of Bill Hicks (true), the story of David Foster Wallace – false – but wait. Wallace’s book was called “Infinite Jest” but Wallace (like Brynn Hartman) committed suicide. The statement is factually incorrect, but emotionally true and it foreshadows the poem’s final lines (“it really is a wonderful joke, you know”).

There are many other stories in the poem, but I’m less interested in listing them all than in the way Robbie uses parallelism to interweave these narratives so they read/sound like one seamless story. The grammatical parallelism hints at a narrative parallelism — this is a story that happens over and over to people who stand in the spotlight to entertain us. Now, here’s the really beautiful thing about how Robbie has used the non-linear narrative. The opening line, “There’s a dark club, full of hyenas, barking at an empty stage.” The line almost goes unnoticed unless you hear or read the poem more than once. This structure is a nod to the narrative structure of David Foster Wallace’s actual novel, “Infinite Jest,” but it also is the logical conclusion of this poem about performers killing themselves both literally and figuratively. Go ahead and try it — listen to the end of the poem and then replay the video just long enough the hear the first lines again. They have this new spooky, creepy weight to them because of what we’ve learned from hearing the poem the first time. (This is, by the way, in my mind the mark of a really great poem, both on and off stage — that it bears being read/heard multiple times, and in fact, almost asks us back to it without really needing us to. If I ever write a poem that is this well-crafted I will be grateful to the universe.)
This underscores the poem’s theme, expressed as a grammatical palindrome: (“We go on. Despite. Despite this. To spite this. In spite. We go on.”) The palindrome and the poem, like Wallace’s book, reboot themselves, calling to mind the cyclical nature of the performer/audience relationship — think here for a minute about how Andy Dick, Jon Lovitz and Brynn Hartman each move back and forth between being performers and audience, and how the Muppets at Kermit’s funeral do the same (because they’re doing things that the actual actors who played the Muppets really did at Henson’s actual memorial), and also how the poem itself cycles back and forth between reporting “real” events, “fake” events, and “real” events told with a deliberate confusion of actor/character — I could write a whole entire different posting on the several meanings that strike me because of this, but I’ll settle for this: the poem behaves in its narrative choices, like the very blurry division between performer/character it is discussing. Its structure does what its language is describing. Brilliant.
We can feel the speaker’s empathy and admiration for the “clowns” and also his deep sadness and concern. It’s hard to tell whether the poem’s focal point, the “We go on” section, is meant to be hopeful or simply a statement of what happens, what we do because our only other choice is the choice Brynn Hartman, David Foster Wallace and (by choosing not to go to the hospital) Kermit/Henson make: to not go on. Is that hopeful? It’s hard to tell. Maybe it’s just sad. The speaker doesn’t let us know. That’s the joke, you know.

UPDATE: Robbie sent me a link to this: Big Bird singing at Jim Henson’s memorial:

And this: Frank Oz at Henson’s memorial:

And this: Richard Hunt, the actor who played Scooter, who died of AIDS not much later:

I love love love this poem by Karen Finneyfrock. Instead of dominating the poem with a conceit that takes up the entire poem, and instead of spelling out the logical connection from image to image, she instead relies on a device similar to what rhetoricians call an enthymeme — the poem’s internal logic relies heavily on knowing that readers and listeners will draw the visual comparisons between the similar shapes of the various objects — lightbulbs, eggs, diamonds, coal mines, human brains, hearts and lungs, etc. We move easily from one image to another because Finneyfrock has done an excellent job crafting a tone that makes it easy for us to follow the conceptual leaps. The poem also (brilliantly) teaches us how to read/interpret it, so that, for example, when the speaker is overtly drawing a comparison between a human brain and a coal mine, one cannot help but internally draw a comparison between the brain and the other mentioned hollow objects whose structure determines their function (eggs, lightbulbs, diamonds.) She gets the benefit of all of these by only making one, and at the end of the poem, when she repeats the beginning, we find ourselves at the center of a node of networked metaphors that resonate with each other without explicitly being evoked, a sort of conceptual harmonics. Since the poem is also about a process (the way pressure forces carbon from one allotrope to another) it’s interesting to note that the poem’s rhetoric and structure end up behaving like that transition: from the loose molecular structure of coal to the tight, fixed, but beautiful crystalline structure of a diamond.

Sometimes it’s in what a poet choose not to say that is most important.

An autumn mix, as requested by Genesis.

Flow Just Like The Water

This will play in iTunes or QuickTime, and on any iPod/iPhone. You may need to right-click to download.