by G.C. Waldrep
Tupelo Press 2009
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

Dad, Who is Benjamin Britten?

“What does it mean to listen to poems the way poems listen to paintings?”  Thus spoke G.C. Waldrep when I recently interviewed him.  That is also the statement (as he called it) or question he put to the bobble-heads at Tupelo Press as to what the in-betweens and leg-rooms of his new book Archicembalo represent.  There is nary a question mark in the entire book, which is the invisible omission of the human beings all the questions are put to – as in the book’s primary poem “Who Is Josquin Des Prez” – as Waldrep skips and sings, “How do you do. How does one do. A snowdrop reminds.” 

The poems are prose blocks.  Some are sweet and succinct, others are dark and lengthy.  All of the titles are questions involving their selves in a tetherball game of poetic call-and-response.  Of note is the notion that questions are sentences, which begs the impulse that all that has gone underground or died is to the left of the question word itself – as in, “Who is Benjamin Britten.” might as well be, “Dad, Who is Benjamin Britten?” 

In a word, Waldrep is a cantonment; in the very same way he claims that a “hymn” is for “one certain culture.”  A “hymn” can also “be heard across the river” and/or is “an obstruction in a winter park.”
In another word, Waldrep is a gamut.  A gamut is an entire series of hexachords.  Excerpts of the poem “What Is a Hexachord” highlight:  “I sing as I walk when I have breath which is not always.”…(and at the end of a page and a half) . . . “And so the music makes me.” 

The glass feels tough to break, hammer or not.  The wood is dense, full of knots.  The brain is thick, unlike a dinosaur’s and rolling on its own intellectual river.  The only balance to this lowered teeter-totter plunges itself deep inside the reader’s psyche as utterly lightweight gasping and laughing.  Waldrep seems to be laughing at himself, dark enough to slide his body into a dead opera, yet fluorescent enough to go “wicked wicket into the wide wide world” and allow his heart to become a third arm.  Ironical enough, Wittgenstein assumed the art is just another limb.  Organs are things for production, and what does the heart produce but a reaching.

Humor bounces along like a rubber girl on a lunar hopscotch court.  Take the poem, “What Is a Tenor” (one of the few pithy poems):  “If astonishment then replica.  If porcelain than mourning.  If hero then metamorphosis.  If abstinence then flight. // Very well thank you.  If yucca then savvy then delight.”

In fact, the witty and drolling poems that Waldrep conjures later conceal any presupposition that he is an Amish man.  You forget you are dealing with a professor, a man who possesses strange talents that none of us would even consider, a man who has an alternative poetic background.  While these poems would ideally be fun to sip a scotch around and hear your friends read out loud, they are difficult to puncture without a Wikipedia or (as old-school as it might seem) an actual encyclopedia at hand. Yet, Archicembalo slides and skills enough to be its own Google-fun search.  And do not forget that even a piano, to Mr. Waldrep, is a prism inhabited by a small bird, a wren, maybe.

Captivatingly, in our interview, Waldrep listed Arvo Part as one of his top five favorite recording artists.  Part composed a minimal piece titled “Spiegel Im Spiegel” (“Mirror In the Mirror” in German) in 1978 about departure.  The piece sounds like it’s mourning, yet like it is gripping two eye-droppers of hope.  This is Archicembalo’s methodology as well – that the opera of life is death and joy.

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