A Ballad of Remembrance is about power and corruption, religion and need, family and identity, racism and murder. The iconic “Those Winter Sundays” and similar poems provide a remote, mournful melancholy, exploring the poet’s complicated upbringing and “greatest discouragement.” But mostly, Hayden explores the human need to presume, to value, to maintain faith at the expense of human rights or even basic logic.
A dense and lyrical vocabulary abounds. In chiseled cinema, Hayden draws up the actions of bejewelled, remorseless preachers and kings. He displays the “outrageous flair” of a superstar false prophet with “hypnotic no-words planned (and never failing) / to enmesh his flock in theopathic tension” (“Witch Doctor”); the compliance of an emperor’s petrified foot soldier performing “useless errand[s]” and living life to “curse the moon and fear the rising of the sun” (“The Wheel”); the horrific pride of an an aging Klansman regretful that he can’t participate in a lynching with his Boy, who has “earned him a bottle– / when he gets home” (“Night Death, Mississippi”). “Middle Passage,” one of the most severe poems of the 20th century, chronicles the bloody voyage of the slave ship Amsitad. The long poem births America’s most central contradictions (“voyage through death / to life upon these shores”) and might be the best thing of its kind ever written.
The title poem is a tribute to the influential poet and critic Mark Van Doren, a noted influence on Hayden, the Beat Generation poets, John Berryman and others; Van Doren “arrived, meditative, ironic, / richly human,” stealing the poet away from magic and “hoodoo.” The book concludes with an elegy for Frederick Douglass, who was “superb in love and logic” and worked for “a world / where none is lonely, none hunted, alien.” A Ballad of Remembrance is a book about how everyone is an alien in their own skin; it is a book of great sympathy, but also an uncompromising indictment of human ignorance.
John Deming, a poet and musician, has recently released Eight Poems (Eye For an Iris Press 2011) and Tugboat EP(BozFonk Moosick 2011). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in BostonReview, FENCE, Verse Daily, POOL, The Best American Poetry Blog, Augury, Tarpaulin Sky and elsewhere. He lives in New York City and teaches at Baruch College and LIM College. He is Editor-in-Chief of Coldfront.
Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner (The Physiocrats 2011)
In Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner ponders whether any emotional response to art or religion is purely an affectation or desperate insistence on more than the “actual.” This chapbook is an excerpt from the poet’s novel of same name, published this year by Coffee House Press. Any overlap between real and fictive is beside the point, but it is worth noting that both Lerner and his narrator Adam received Fulbrights to work and study in Spain, and both grew up in Kansas. In Leaving the Atocha Station, Adam does what we might imagine a real Fulbright poet does: gives readings, has conversations, smokes spliffs, visits museums. He lets us observe one particular morning ritual:
I was usually standing before [Roger Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross] within forty-five minutes of waking and so the hash and caffeine and sleep were still competing in my system as I faced the nearly life-sized figures and awaited equilibrium.
One morning, his routine is interrupted because another man is standing at the painting. The man weeps, and proceeds from painting to painting, sobbing at each and garnering the attention of museum guards. What is a museum guard to do, our narrator wonders, when “on the one hand you are a member of a security force charged with protecting valuable materials from the crazed or kids or the slow erosive force of camera flashes” and “on the other hand you are a dweller among supposed triumphs of the spirit and if your position has any prestige it derives precisely from the belief that such triumphs could legitimately move a man to tears.”
Lerner’s narrator is skeptical of “profound experience[s] of art.” He also wants to avoid the pitfalls of pure pragmatism—after all, he is in Spain because he “claim[s] to be a poet.” But he questions his own actions in every circumstance, revealing a vulnerability when encountering Maria Jose from the foundation (“I had been convinced…that my fraudulence was completely apparent to her”) and when kissing people hello, as per the local customs (“when you were drunk or high and foreign, you could easily slip up and the catch the corner of the mouth”). But the machinations of the mind and the things of the world are too mysterious to allow for final interpretation, and to doubt the value of heightened spiritual awareness even hints that such awareness has value. Lerner reminds us that total understanding is always a myth. His spirituality, if you can call it that, is based on curiosity pursued, never on the presumption that humans have the capacity to find a coherent answer. The novel is excellent, but this chapbook excerpt features a wonderful excerpt and is ideal for anyone who doesn’t have the time or attention span for the full novel.
–John Deming
*
Laked, Fielded, Blanked, Brooklyn Copeland (alice blue books, 2010)
This lovely, wee book from alice blue books is a miniature museum draped in Thai handmade paper. If you go inside, tune in. Sound counts most in Copeland’s “Laked, Fielded, Blanked.” The poet also relies on observation to get from spot to spot. Her poems explore the geography and geology of Morse Lake Marina, where “The Big/ creek meets/ the Little creek” and “Hammers break open geodes: scalene/ jig-jags.”
Copeland mixes natural observation with (perhaps) confessional verse about a relationship between the speaker and the “you” that suddenly appears—and then dominates—the experience. This relationship, though suggestive through layers of metaphor, is less compelling than the precise, intricate beauty of her descriptions. In that sense, Copeland recalls the influence of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and their progeny:
Someone’s anemone
Unelaborate runtbud
Muscling through
Woodwork
The wordplay, even letterplay, of “someone’s anemone” is part of a complex score that spans the entire chapbook. The poet also reveals a gift for negotiating tight spaces with apokoinu and other enjambment techniques(“from the word/ go we’ve/ done as one, laid/low”).
I close with one of my favorite stanzas, as it shows the work at its best—lyrical and clever:
Rotted out boat
Bottom—
the boat
will stay afloat
as long as you pretend to
row
–Gregory Murray
**
Dendrochronology, Greta Goetz (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009)
The cover of Greta Goetz’s Dendrochronology reveals both the immediate and cumulative effects of the collection: cluttered, impossibly large for its square-shaped cover to hold. Similarly, Goetz’s twenty-eight poems (the first twenty-six of which are not titled but numbered), with their exceptionally long sentences jammed into square forms, turn quickly and forcefully, from recollection to reflection, down the page. These techniques coupled with the omission of punctuation at the end of many poems create an urgent voice from a speaker whose thought or search has not finished despite the fact that the poem has.
Dendrochronology is the study of a tree’s rings to understand both its age and its history of environmental conditions. Thus, Dendrochronology is a study of a self—its history and growth as well as the changing tenors of its experience. Goetz’s poetic forms, particularly at the sentence level, mimic the growth rings–their overall shape, the tree’s trunk. In this, they effectively contain their subject, especially in the poems where a contrast of concrete image and abstraction creates brilliant tension propelled by her driving syntax:
…me, the stranger or accent ague,
a sign more than a well-peopled phrase, the accent not concrete
enough to be riveting, just there at the edge of everyone
else’s interests, homeless, alone, a mark, a reminder
of the primordial need to speak yet unable to promise
in the recognized code, there where the horses gallop
from cave walls into eternity…
There are few grammatical signposts or pauses for readers. This is only a problem in Dendrochronology when the poet lays in too many cumbersome conceptualizing (“it is easy to react in the face of carelessness belonging to/ adolescence, viewed through hindsight or clarified by regret”; “the privilege that is history and upbringing, which despite compassion creates a blindness that cannot be broken without humility”) and clumsy or obvious language (“this is how/ I spell discouragement; a feeling of being unanswered”; “I am a traveler in all of/ the senses of the word that I know”). But perhaps this is Goetz’s point, as stated in the first poem: “Talking mouths block the exit/ entrapped in frustrated good will/ like a dense city,” for its effect is certainly similar.
At their finest, Goetz’s poems refrain from confession and indulge instead in what emotions—particularly questions and doubts—arise amid particular human experience. Too often, however, Goetz creates an exhausting read; amid the dead wood, there is little space for a reader to breathe. Or bother.
By all accounts, the First Annual New York Poetry Festival was a huge success. With perfect weather, three stages, and over a hundred poets and performers, Governor’s Island proved the perfect venue for two straight days of verse.
Please check out our video footage of day one below, featuring a handful of readings by poets Ben Pease, Coldfront’s own Melinda Wilson, Timothy Donnelly, Farrah Field, Claire Donato, Yusef Komunyakaa and more. Thanks again to Stephanie Berger and Nicholas Adamski of The Poetry Brothel for organizing the event. Can’t wait until next year!
Video by DJ Dolack
Watch it in HD!
Here are some more photos of the event! Drag your mouse over the pictures to find the name of each person picture. Or browse ALL NEWS.
Even though we have mentioned The First Annual New York Poetry Festival in a previous post, we figured it couldn’t hurt to mention it again. This Saturday and Sunday the two day poetry festival will populate Governors Island- a quick free ferry ride away from NYC/BK/NJ.
We’d also like to remind you that Coldfront Magazine will take part in the festival. On Stage 1 of the Commodore from 12:30-1pm Coldfront’s founding editors, John Deming, Melinda Wilson and Greame Graeme Bezanson will be joined by POP Editor Jackie Clark, News Editor Steven Karl (me), and Video Editor DJ Dolack. Come out to the festival, drop in on our reading and say “hi” to us afterwards.
If you find yourself in Boston definitely check out the Boston Poet Tea Party featuring Coldfront’s Features Editor, Ken L. Walker.
Both Ruefle’s and Donnelly’s books were published by Wave Books in 2010. Graber’s book was published by Princeton University Press, and Mlinko’s was published by Coffee House Press.
In a citation on the PSA Web site, Rodney Jones writes, “What a civil, undomesticable, and heartening poet is Mary Ruefle: fond of experiment, but just as pleased to write of tilapia or county fairs; always novel, but never pandering to a mode; refusing neither the absurd nor the sublime. Any Ruefle poem is an occasion of resonant wit and language, subject to an exacting intelligence. For more than thirty years, she has freshened American poetry by humbly glorifying both the inner life and the outward experience. Her Selected Poems, like the work of William Carlos Williams, is a testimony not only to the power of artfulness, but to human empathy.”
New York — Dean Young’s heart has an eight percent ejection rate, the poet Mary Karr told an audience at the National Arts Club last night.
“Imagine that your heart is pumping out one teaspoon of blood when it is supposed to be pumping out two tablespoons,” she explained.
Karr, along with Joe Di Prisco, Matthea Harvey, Edward Hirsch, Matthew Rohrer, Gerald Stern and Dara Wier, read at the benefit for Young, who needs a heart transplant. Each poet read favorite poems by Young (set lists below) and expressed their love and respect for the poet and his work.
Stern called Young the writer of great mournful elegies, but also “a man so kind and so tender it makes you weep.”
Karr concurred.
“It is not acceptable to live on a planet where there is no Dean Young,” she said.
Joe Di Prisco, Young’s friend and coordinator of the fund, reached Young on speaker phone at the start of the event, and held the phone up to the microphone. Young expressed gratitude, and jokingly told the audience, “have a good time, for god’s sake.”
Di Prisco explained that Young’s treatment costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. More than 800 donations have already totaled more than $116,000, he said, but there is still a ways to go.
Thursday’s event was hosted by Poetry Society of America Programs Coordinator Robert N. Casper.
To read about Dean Young and make an online donation, please visit his page at the National Foundation for Transplants.
You can also read about his work here and here. Here is a list of the poems that each poet read. All poems were written by Dean Young unless otherwise indicated:
Joe Di Prisco
1. Mission Statement (written by Di Prisco)
2. How I Get My Ideas
by James Richardson Copper Canyon Press 2010 Reviewed by John Deming
“…that not to think is to think everything, which is what the universe excels at”
James Richardson seems very interested in the interplay of macro and micro. He is one of few contemporary poets who actively pursues the art of aphorism, an art that is about saying something large in a small space. An aphorism is always an oversimplification, but in piling dozens of them on top of each other, Richardson at once delights and raises questions about the human capacity for knowledge and wisdom. His oversimplifications serve as a natural counterpoint to his dense, lyric explorations of a limited, yet potentially infinite universe. We find in the end that no matter how thorough or exhausting an investigation – be it lyric, scientific, or otherwise – one always return to the limits of personal experience, and to a generalized, sometimes caustic, sometimes ecstatic unknowing.
Richardson churns out aphorisms with surprising regularity. Two previous books, Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays and Interglacial: New and Selected Poems & Aphorisms, are also full of them. The 170 collected in By the Numbers are a conscious extension of his previous work, and form the long centerpiece of the book, which is titled “Vectors 3.0: Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays.” They range from charming to wise to clever to agitating, and recall constantly the human need to sum up the universe with an easy, blunt understanding. By piling so much “wisdom” on top of itself, Richardson reminds that a final understanding of what something is immediately exposes what that understanding is not.
You will feel like you have read some of these before: “When it gets ahead of itself, the wave breaks,” “Spontaneity takes a few rehearsals,” “Too much apology doubles the offense,” “The will has a will of its own,” “My best critic is me, too late.”
Some of the more limited in scope seem like they come straight from the wall of the dentist’s office: “Work is required play,” “Nothing important comes with instructions,” “Build bottom up, clean top down.”
Many of them simply invert or reframe received aphorisms – “Do unto others and eye for an eye have the same payment plan” – while others read like quips from stand-up comedy routines: “Office supplies stores are cathedrals of Work in General. They forgive, they console, they promise a new start. These supplies have done work like yours a million times. Take them home and they will do it for you.”
Yet many of them are undeniably lyric – “It is the empty seats that listen most raptly,” “All those days that changed the world forever! Yet here it is.” – and the final two provide a payoff that winks at the blend of limit and liberation in the physical universe: “That one thing in Life I’m meant to do?—well, I have to finish this first,” “Closing a door very gently, you pull with one hand, push with the other.”
All of these aphorisms have the potential to be “true,” but only if given context. As the goal of an aphorism might be to succinctly sum up the universe in a way that leads to moral action, we learn through this onslaught that any stated truth says as much about our need for truth as it does about whatever idea, example or metaphor is at play.
But Richardson doesn’t limit this idea to the realm of aphorism. To him, it seems, even the densest physical equation is, from a perspective of total knowledge, nothing but an oversimplification. The best poem in the book is a long poem, “Are We Alone? or Physics You Can Do at Home.” The poet dwells on parallel universes and the range of possibilities they create; he dwells on cosmology, and our fruitless attempts to find signs of life elsewhere in the universe:
…it’s a big empty universe, averaging only five atoms per cubic meter,
though wherever we are is by definition very crowded. I think of walking
out in the snow
which would then be very, very crowded, for though the air seems
clear, glassy with silence,
odds say in every breath there’s at least one atom of the breath of everyone
who ever lived
and if to breathe them is to hold them all in mind,
which I hope is true…but surely this feeling of a thought being too big
to think
is the accelerating expansion of the universe, which means I should try less
and less
to think it, and be still like a tree letting stars and snow stream through
its branches,
for scientists agree that not to think is to think everything, which is what
the universe excels at…
The poet is dazzled by the physical universe and by its study. But every answer leads to greater questions, and human wisdom, it seems, exists only to satisfy a human need.
Richardson tests the limits of cleverness in this book, and those turned off by “wit” or even “charm” might find little use for some portions, including shorter poems that read like aphorisms broken into lines. Here is the three line poem “Birds in Rain”:
Studious silence in the trees.
Later they will tunefully dispute
whether the drops came down in twos or threes.
One could read a range of metaphors into this if asked to, but his knowingly absurd idea –that birdsongs following rain are actually a dispute about how the rain fell – is a willful imposition reminiscent of some of his weaker aphorisms, perhaps cheapened in its singsong rhythm and rhyme.
But generally, poems like this are in lock step with Richardson’s projection that even though the human need for understanding can never be completely satisfied, we need not be unpleasant about it. He broods, but never excessively. The book becomes a feast in its variety; there is a range of forums wherein our narrator finds himself haunted and perplexed by his own disappearing life, by his own memories and losses. He tries to shape them into something like meaning. But in the end, he does not so much seek wisdom, but finds himself charmed by the idea of wisdom. He is compelled by human need. By the Numbers is a book of incredible sympathy.
by Kathleen Graber Princeton University Press 2010 Reviewed by John Deming
“Loneliness, our one defendable Empire.”
Kathleen Graber is an incredibly serious, intelligent and technically-gifted poet. She moves forward into the lonely present by associating deeply into the serious past, and finding how much of human endeavor has been predicated upon Imaginative need. “Our sacrament,” she writes, is “to chase what has vanished &, finally, to vanish / ourselves.” We live in the physical world, and we live in our imaginations, and our brains are physical too, and we wish desperately to link all of this:
…The Eternal City,
Brodsky writes, is like a gigantic old brain, one that’s grown
a little weary of the world.
(from “The Eternal City”)
The Eternal City is a city in the clouds, your head in the clouds, leaping into imagined memories and plans, stitching them to the caricature of their realizations. In his long prose poem “The System,” John Ashbery points to what could be considered the Great Flaw of fundamentalist religion:
The great fright has turned their gaze upwards, to the stars, to the heavens; they see nothing of the disarray around them, their ears are closed to the cries of their fellow passengers; they can think only of themselves when all the time they believe that they are thinking of nothing but God. Yet in their innermost minds they know too that all is not well; that if it were there would not be this rigidity, with the eye and the mind focused on a nonexistent center, a fixed point, when the common sense of even an idiot would be enough to make him realize that nothing has stopped, that we and everything around us are moving forward continually, and that we are being modified constantly… … so that merely to think of ourselves as having arrived at some final resting place is a contradiction of fundamental logic…
He goes on from there, essentially pointing to the common delusion that things can only be one way, and that chosen humans can comprehend one specific, unalterable truth. Graber’s poems often allude to the obvious risk inherent in this kind of certainty: sometimes, people are willing to kill or die for it, are willing to suppress the freedoms of ‘non-believers’ in its name. So dutifully they fight to protect the Kingdom of the Imagined Specific, because without it, what is life? What is death?
Graber does not look to Christian history, or to the many thinkers that she cites (there are many), for a fixed point or absolutely explicable end result. Instead, she sees the history of human thought, and its correspondence with human action, as patchwork — a work in progress at best. For her title poem, she summons Philosopher King Marcus Aurelius. Aurelius, Roman Emperor from 161 to 180, “was in love / with Wisdom.” But Wisdom “married him off to Duty instead.”
Aurelius is important because he embodies the fantasy of the leader-philosopher, one who, looking down upon his civilization from the height of meaningful power and success, finds “that all of this has been for nothing.” A leader who realizes his nation’s struggles and loyalties and beheadings take place in the name of sinister fictions. Would that he could contemplate all the day long, and arrive at powerful ideas that would buttress meaningful legislation and create a freer and more tolerant world. But alas, he has an Empire to defend, to expand, to cater to.
The title poem consists of twelve short “Books,” each with an epigraph from Aurelius. Her narrator is an associative philosopher, matching epochs-old philosophy and history with day-to-day autobiography. She doesn’t try to justify the present, or make it seem too cute a resting place; nor does she speak of it with suicidal gravity. She is both austere and conversational:
How slowly time seems to pass when we’re waiting.
When we return from a walk, my dog begins immediately
to wait for the next. If you are waiting, Reader, I can tell you only
that somewhere it is still summer. That there are a dozen books
in Aurelius’s Meditations, written in his old age, in his tents
on foreign battlefields as he waited through the last decade
of his life to die. Do you know Jack Gilbert’s poem about a man
carrying a box in his arms? He balances his burden, shifts it,
so he will never need to set it down. My cellar is full of boxes.
(from “The Eternal City,” Book Four)
Graber is engaging in measured association. She sees in her present not ends, but opportunities for association and metaphor: openness and change. Her book presents a relentless need to prove the whole that unexpected and disparate parts can constitute. She seeks and finds patterns. The same section concludes:
…Archimedes gave numbers to the spiral
of the sailor’s coiled rope, but the nautilus waited centuries
for Descartes to decode its elegant equiangular whorls.
Without shells, the cycloid arc, Christopher Wren concluded,
the spire would not be possible. The dog stares at the door & sighs.
We carry our waiting & our calcium carbonate cage.
We wait for the future to divine for us the past. I think of Aurelius
who thought of Epictetus: Thou are a little soul bearing a corpse.
(from “The Eternal City,” Book Four)
The narrator is a researcher or reporter. She threads the thinking of a variety of heads and establishes them in the abstract as somehow present in the room with her and her dog. Her poem follows a format used to great effect by Natasha Trethewey in her long poem “Native Guard” — each separately titled section opens with the line that closed the previous section. As a result, she is able to constitute new associations, find further metaphor. “Book Seven” concludes with a quote from Aurelius:
…Aurelius, opening another day: Nature will soon change
all things which thou seest…in order that the world may be ever new.
The succeeding book, “Book Eight,” begins:
In order that the world may be ever new, my brother & his wife
are going to have a baby. Earlier this month they heard
the tiny heart: out of the whorl of the mother’s organs, suddenly,
a galloping, celerity, hooves. And yesterday, they saw their child
somersaulting in the unlit paddock of the womb. It turns
its animal face to the camera it cannot possibly imagine,
raises its arms as if to wave. Gibbon traces the beginning
of the end to Aurelius’s brutal son. Aurelius, who turned his back
on the blood of the Coliseum, has sired the Secutor, who straps tight
his helmet & buckler to kill naked, unarmed men before the crowd.
In order that everything be questioned, Graber develops an interplay between her family life and the life of Aurelius and his son. It works, because the analogy is not literal; surely, she is not presupposing that a new nephew will bring about the fall of the Roman Empire, or whatever the equivalent. Aurelius is her subject, and so is life and human action, and she is open to the innumerable patterns that relate things to each other. Her very style presents an honest and open-ended conception of meaning. Everything is connected. Everything is separate. Contradictions must be permitted.
In his book The Condition of Man, Lewis Mumford diagnoses the decline and fall of the Roman Empire:
Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was an inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword — as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks.
A fear of change from the status quo — from an established idea, loyalty or conception of God — can lead to obsessive, and in due time, sloppy security. A Roman Empire yields a British Empire, a British Empire an American Empire. And the whole while, the need for security or fixed point sameness has makes it hard for any potential meditative philosopher king to do the work of the future. Strict loyalism and fundamentalism (be they a devotion to a God, to a person, to any belief) are aimed at eliminating surprise, change and newness. They mean a devotion to security and meekly “holding on.” Change comes anyway. As Graber states, “We fill our hands when they are / empty. We empty ourselves when we have held too much too long.” Not with a bang, but a whimper.
A fair criticism could be made that Graber relies too heavily on complex ideas developed by other individuals, and that she only really adds to them the specific nuances of her narrator’s life. A few of these meditations become labored, lack surprise, or simply work to reaffirm the concept forwarded by whichever philosopher supplies the epigraph. The poem “The Magic Kingdom” concludes with an image of children at play:
…They turned each other into princesses
& super-girls & then, they pretended to change back. Oh, no. You forgot to say forever! they took turns repeating
with dramatic dismay, melting into puddles of themselves,
their sandals & sunburned knees vanishing beneath their hems.
The poem is otherwise quite serious, and includes a cancer scare; as a result, this conclusion lands with undue dramatic force. The fact that these girls cannot stay princesses forever is treated as the tragedy that it is not. Nevertheless, the poem raises appropriate questions about human Imagination – how an imaginary excuse-making that begins in childhood too easily follows one into adulthood. And how it might be there to distract from the fact of how little we are truly able to control.
Graber’s book concludes with the exceptional short poem “The Festival at Nikko.” It is a meditation rooted soundly in time that is passing, and in undying curiosity and wonder:
Would I like things to be better? Yes.
But what does it matter? Intent seems so small
a part. And will. I have come a long way
to stand before this window in a harsh light
above a tap of undrinkable water. I pass daily
through the town’s old gardens to see the peacock
in its cage. In the cold, it turns its back
to the opening. It holds its magnificence close
to its sides. And whatever this resembles—
shyness or restraint, greediness even—it is not.
Fetishized Christianity is probably mostly about loneliness. Graber’s system of worship, if I am to limit it, would best be defined as Pantheistic, or a worship of Nature. Nature is seen as adaptive to circumstance, self-contained but always changing. In these lines, the peacock hides its feathers. An onlooker might see this, and upon acquiring a resounding urge for metaphor, determine for certain that all such peacocks are greedy, and ought to be punished.
Probably not – but a lot of contemporary fundamentalist thinking reaches that level of absurdity. The Eternal City demonstrates that humanity’s religious fictions have led to moments of astonishing philosophical clarity, but more often, to a meek protectionism rooted in undying fear. Yet in stitching history, ideas and experience, Graber demonstrates the power of the imagination. To that end, she seems most staunchly an advocate of what might be termed honest imagination: open-ended imagination that hints at liberation, but only insofar as we don’t allow the imagined to become a literal certainty that must be defended at all costs.
Kid A was released ten years ago this month. You will find below 22 short pieces of writing about or inspired by Radiohead’s landmark fourth album. The ten tracks comprising Kid A are peppered throughout, culminating with the music video for the album’s final track, “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” The full experience of listening Kid A actually includes two and half full minutes of silence — at the close of “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” a full-minute of silence culminates in a gorgeous meteor shower-crescendo; this is followed by a further 90 seconds of silence, creating a lovely effect when the album is listened to on repeat. We have included each separate track throughout so that you may listen as you read. For more artwork and video, click here. Otherwise: listen, read, enjoy. Ice age coming.
Featuring writing by: Julie Ann, Stan Apps, Joe Bueter, Jackie Clark, Brooklyn Copeland, John Deming, Brent Goodman, John Harkey, Jeff T. Johnson, Peter Bogart Johnson, Steven Karl, Amy Lawless, Masin Persina, Michael Schiavo, Christopher Snyder, Matt Soucy, Justin Taylor, Adam Trull, Ken L. Walker, Alice White, Melinda Kaye Wilson, Jim Wood
***
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[Everything In Its Right Place]
***
Stan Apps
Kid A as contract
What was it he said? “We have heads on sticks, and you have ventriloquists.” Our assets are different, but our interests are convergent. Some sort of bargain seems imminent. What form may that bargain take?
One possibility is partnership, an LLC to profit from production of allegory. For the allegorical process, the floating heads and disembodied voices must perform concurrently, on cue, for an indefinite period: cooperation best established by pooling assets under independent new authority.
Or it could be a supply contract. Head-owners could pay cash for rights to ventriloquists. It must be ventriloquist-suppliers who sell, because where gains from trade take the form of symbolic knowledge production, those with most need for justification have the greatest capacity to profit.
I was exploring the south of France right around the time when this album took off, and I remember seeing the graphics in the record stores. Part of my travels always includes collecting the rare-in-my-country recordings, and communing with music lovers from not-my-country in record shops (How to Disappear Completely). A Radiohead fan from Pablo Honey days, I was blown away by their presence. I bought a small poster with French fine print, and display it when the colours are where they should be (Everything in Its Right Place). Four years later, my husband used Idioteque as background music to one of several postmodern pastiches of images and videos from our European travel. It turned out scarily amazing. The way he focused such dramatic attention on me makes me totally understand but also turn from the “release me” of Morning Bell. Radiohead knows how to make melancholia utterly wretch from your heart and gut, and to make it ok, a bit, because the music is so sublimely lovely. Which makes it cool. I think I’m crazy, maybe… but I’m doing good enough (Optimistic). (Yikes!)
***
Joe Bueter
Kid A on the Bus
I visited England for two weeks right after Kid A was released. My friend burned me a copy for the trip. It was his copyright-approved backup copy—I swear. I think he warned me about the album in that way enthusiastic music fans do when they pass along something unbelievably new. I found myself listening to Kid A at night on these giant charter buses that took me to tourist destinations and the school I was an exchange student at. The buses had huge picture windows that provided wide views of Buckingham Palace and Ely Cathedral, although I don’t remember seeing those landmarks from the bus.
I remember dozing until the fractured horns of “National Anthem” woke me to some muddled sky over the country. Once it was an orange-colored storm turning over the sky across a field. Once it was Guy Fawkes Day and several distant towns were shooting fireworks into the clouds. By the time “In Limbo” started, my eyes fell from half-opened to closed, only to be jacked open again by “Idioteque.” Somehow the album made me feel calm, strange and solitary, but powerfully immune to the shadows of those emotions. It was like being a low-ranking god out on a budget tour of earth for a report no one would read, but feeling good to be out of the office and noticing large, beautiful scenes.
Everything in its right place and you sucking a lemon. Everything in its right place, and there you are, sucking a stupid lemon, they say. You understand everything beginning with a tentative rift. Everything always beginning with the same few notes, the same repetition. A static foundation given the status of home, distorted, then amplified. You woke up yesterday sucking a lemon and everything else was just right. You were wrong. You woke up and tried to say something but everything was in its right place. You gave yourself a name, a song, you introduced ambiance and echoed your plea. You scrambled your soliloquy and confused guitar wails for baby cries. There are two colors. You know there are two colors. But those that are not you define the collective artifice. They project onto others, they speak unto others, offer friendship through affliction. They put everything is in its right place, escalating toward the very top, the very last breath, but you will always understand the part of the whole, the full-throttle synecdoche of sour.
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I first heard Kid A as an exchange student in Finland. I was 16 years old. I’d spent the two years prior obsessively collecting every piece of Radiohead (albums, EPs, singles) I could find. When I heard a new album was in the works, I was really, really hoping this one song I’d heard in the Meeting People is Easy documentary (which I’d recorded from MTV on a VHS tape and kept until a friend of mine gave it to an older guy she’d wanted to impress) would make the track list. I believe the song was called Follow Me Around. Obviously, it did not appear on Kid A. Kid A was the first thing I ever ordered from Amazon. It arrived well after the release date. Having ignored the online reviews and the buzz on the only real Radiohead website (greenplastic.com), I played the album immediately after school the day it came in the mail. My host sister, Ida, was doing homework at the dining room table. I was in the living room on the couch. I listened all the way through. I asked Ida what she thought. She tried to be kind. “It sounds like background music,” she said. I agreed. I still do. I was one of those annoying people who resented Kid A for not sounding like OK Computer. And I’ve been annoyed with Radiohead ever since. A year later, when I got back to Indiana, I traded in my entire Radiohead collection for Rolling Stones albums.
Just before Kid A was released, some music channel broadcasted an image of a phonograph and played the whole album. In between each track, the record player was replaced by one of Radiohead’s now famous ‘bear’ faces:
At the time, I was reading Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s post-apocalyptic tale “The Portable Phonograph” for a critical analysis class. The story is about a man who has invited other men over to his shelter. They listen to music and have conversation. The man explains that when he realized “what was happening” — the apocalypse — he told himself, “It is the end. I cannot take much; I will take these.” “These” are classic books, as well as his records and portable phonograph. Much of the story is devoted to descriptions of an empty, frozen, bomb-scarred landscape.
In a landscape constructed entirely of silence and desolation, any sound has tremendous gravity: Was that wind? Or a bird? Or some signal transmitted from another living human? The thickness of sound in Kid A evokes the expanse, terror and beauty of that world, among others. It is filled by its own emptiness; it twitches with death and with life insisting on itself. Brooklyn Copeland’s comment that Kid A is “background music” is apt. It is atmospheric, and mood-inducing, and for me, the only record that enhances the experience of writing rather than distracting from it.
But this is only one of Kid A‘s applications. It significantly rewards focused, active listening. You can press your ear against it and hear blips and transmissions. Buried syncopation. Sounds are timed, flipped, remade. The songwriters specialize in nuance, momentum, subtlety and repetition. Johnny Greenwood’s string arrangements in “How to Disappear Completely” swell and absorb; Colin Greenwood’s bassline in “The National Anthem” punishes as horns flail like slaughtered innocents. Fragmented, associative, representative lyrics hint that saying anything is saying too much. Still, there are quotable moments in every song:
* yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon
* we’ve got heads on sticks / you’ve got ventriloquists
* everyone has got the fear / it’s holding on
* in a little while I’ll be gone
* treefingers
* this one just came out of the swamp
* I’m lost at sea / don’t bother me
* here I’m alive /everything all of the time / ice age coming
* cut the kids in half
* I think you’re crazy
Kid A can be an intensely solitary experience and the quintessential example of music that opens itself up with repeated listens. It ends on “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” one of the saddest songs in a generation. (Hear a very nice demo version with additional verse here.) Really, the sounds in Kid A were new to a lot of ears, but not entirely new in the music biz. (Aphex Twin, a major influence on the band and album, famously didn’t see what the big deal was.)What it is: a transformative amalgam of pop songs, and the best of its kind. You can live in Kid A,or die there, you can expect experience both the terror of inevitability and the freedom of letting it go.
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1. Above the muted pulsing progression, cut to a dreaming man the moment he realizes he wants to run. The most disturbing note the one which doesn’t modulate.
2. All the children’s toys lift off the floor, suspend, begin to melt. The Speak & Spell spirals, singing.
3. Outside, on the back of a flatbed truck breaknecking backwards downhill in neutral, someone uncases a baritone sax, another a slide trombone. Crashing at the bottom, the bannered park gazebo shatters into patriotic splinters.
4. Watching from beneath dripping trees, a transparent guitar considers which calm suicide might claim him.
5. Ice water skin. The river carries our bodies submerged past sunken swan bones.
6. Ascending two scales at once, you can try the best you can. Somewhere in the near distance, tom toms drone almost tribal.
7. When a dreaming man runs, the ground whirlpools around him. The fixed note a sonar beacon.
8. Scrape a screwdriver down your arm. Cast the flashback between a tied-down boy and a beatbox metronome blinking every quarter note.
9. What a stunning sunrise through the charred window frame.
10. The reed organ you bellow with bare feet thinks itself giving birth to embers. Your curved fingers spaced equally apart, raking the glow. Both of you breathing now. Angels too, invoking their top-heavy harps.
11. Every dream ends in sine wave. Every wave wakes before the first pulse.
O millennial epitaph, encrusted with phonemes.
O you cobwebbed-attic puppet-theater of fire and ice, you wet/dry vac, you shotgun marriage of heaven and hell.
O damaged space-baroque pageant of drones, drifts, winding sheets, lurches, lapses: we find ourselves in successive ecologies, swerving from revelry to reverie to resignation and back.
……………
If it takes two-and-a-half species of sonic flora elapsing for a creature-voice to wriggle to the surface, so be it: those searching, mewling, lovely melodic strains are so many cursive etchings on your gleaming obsidian tray. We swoon in several new ways.
O creepy Garden of Earthly Delights—sumptuous, polymorphous, lush with obscure deviance and pleasure and spoilage—you are the true sound of the suburbs!
O mission statement in how convulsive beauty might survive when it finds itself subjected to varying types and doses of sedation, we can think of no more cogent synthesis of the ominous and the elegant!
……………
Your composite cloud of disembodied emanations bespeaks not precisely paranoia or an android future but what felt and still feels like the cosmic undercurrents of THE PRESENT MOMENT: the aching and respiring and babbling of all manufactured material substance itself, of the aggregated gestalt that’s made up of every human-generated object on earth at any given moment—un-nature’s collective cantata-mass.
O you nice dream, thanks for haunting us.
ALPHA. I can’t think about KID A without thinking of AMNESIAC. I don’t even think of them as part one and part two. More like side one and side two, though there are eight sides total (each album released as a two-record ten-inch vinyl set). EVERYTHING IN ITS RIGHT PLACE just ended—in the space before KID A, a dog barked out the window, digging into the open grooves. Now Thom Yorke’s going YZOWWWW. This was what Yorke had to say after OK Computer. Could I have predicted that KID A and AMNESIAC would age more slowly than OK Computer?
BETA. Yes and no. Everyone is so. Near. We thought KID A and AMNESIAC would go away, and we’d return to or be left with OK Computer. Until we realized we liked this strange new Radiohead, which had more to say about the new millennium. We could hear Radiohead better on this side. So alive? So allowed. So alone. Horns battle bass for most relentless instrumentation. We drool along, pry open the tray to find the hidden liner. Soon we’ll know HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY. Nice dream. Listen carefully. This isn’t happening. The band comes around. We’re still not here.
GAMMA. Ten years are self-evident. Five years can’t be recognized. Eight years are hard to grasp. Ten years make sense. Your co-worker liked OPTIMISTIC. You knew why. The best you can is good enough. Your co-worker was a nice person. You didn’t keep in touch. OOH OOH OOH. When are you IN LIMBO and when are you OPTIMISTIC? Check the readout, mark the groove. Trap doors that open. You know what comes next. You’re living in a fantasy. Between here and there is better than either here or there. The warp and wend of you and you and you and
DELTA. Here they are. Glitching mad. Recall a hidden vocal. Ice age come and ice age come in. This is really happening. Will this sound classic and new in another 10 years? Everything all the time. They’ve forgotten their titles. They’ve missed a few beats. The bump on the head. Welcome to the afterfuture. Everything is dated and now. A chorus of woe. Setting consonants. Shrieking strings. Watch them go. Harmonium for their troubles. The same last song as next time and the time after that. The crackling grows with the giant fluttering. In their world, the songs go on.
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It’s the Tuesday after Kid A came out, and I’m driving down 70th past El Cajon Blvd. There’re just a few lights and I can speed a little. San Diego’s just cooling down, which means a gimmicky shade of cold – low 60’s and everyone’s in pea coats, scarves. Windows closed. I’m on my way to drop off the photos I shot for Alan and Stina’s wedding, glossy black and whites of the condo pool area, the minister in sunglasses and an AA hat. They absolutely played Time of Your Life. This little girl got her finger stuck in the pool gate. Right now, on the other, much better hand, Idioteque’s on loud and making my crappy speakers almost go fuzzy, skirting that boundary but holding tight in the blue margin just enough. So good.
But this is just a slightly awkward detour: my new girlfriend’s flying in this afternoon from New York, and at this exact moment she’s almost certainly bleary eyed in Vegas International before the final leg of the budget flight we’ve been talking about for months, and a couple of desperate husbands are absolutely running back to the slots in the smoking area, probably checking her out, and she’s listening to the exact same thing, headphones on tight. I know it. She called me two days ago and said she got high and rode the D train just to watch the maintenance lights pass the windows in time with it, and for that how could I love her any more, really? How?
Let’s start somewhere near the beginning. The second time I saw Radiohead live they were opening up for Belly at the University of Maryland. Thom Yorke mentioned that he had overheard a record-store clerk refer to them as a “one-hit wonder.” Fast-forward to Kid A— the double 10” LP that I had to have. Naturally, despite various media reports of this album being “cold” and “not a rock record,” the vinyl sold out almost as soon as it hit the rack (so much for being only a “one-hit wonder”).
I remember pedaling all over Portland (Oregon, where I lived at the time), scouring Seattle, visiting family and hunting through bins in Philly and South (& North) Jersey for the record. I also searched my favorite record shop in Barcelona where I found Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psycho Candy, The Cure’s Pornography and a Moose 12-inch (remember them?).
Later I found myself in Paris shopping in some large mega store (like Virgin) thinking that a PJ Harvey record might have been released in France before the US and instead stumble onto a bin full of Kid A records. Score!
Much later that same year my girlfriend (at the time), a roommate and I piled into the car at 2 in morning, pumped on caffeine, Kid A blaring from the speakers, to make our way to see Radiohead play at Gorge Ampitheatre located in Washington on the Columbia Gorge. It was the best Radiohead show I’ve seen and I will always remember Thom Yorke squealing away as the sun was swallowed up by the gorge and then there were stars and guitar feedback. What more could a person ask for?
Kid A’s anniversary will come and I will make myself a drink, think of landscapes, road trips, past loves, old friends— the life thus lived, the life which remains. I will think of “Idioteque,” “Here I’m alive/ Everything all of the time.”
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August 14, 2001–I was at Suffolk Downs with my friends seeing my first Radiohead show ever. For those unfamiliar, Suffolk Downs is Boston’s horse racing track. Previous to that night, I had never been there. All you need to know is that it’s both awful (isn’t all horse racing kind of awful?) and near Logan Airport. We gleefully smoked a ton of pot making merry horse and dog racing jokes. I couldn’t even bore you with a description of who said what. Memory does not serve. I do remember, however, what happened during the show.
The sun finally started to fucking set in that August blue that makes everyone want to live forever. But unfortunately, Radiohead was in a foreshadowing mood. Idioteque. During Idioteque the planes from Logan began to pound down overhead at rush hour pace. Low. Loud. Almost as loud as Radiohead.
Ice age coming
Ice age coming
…
Here I’m alive
The intensity of these words while the planes flew low (I mean dangerously low over the crowd) was terrifying. Women and children first. I felt like something really bad was happening or about to happen and please don’t assume it was a weed freakout. My friends all felt like something bad was going to happen also. The whole crowd’s energy implied something bad was about to happen.
Something bad was about to happen.
This was really happening.
I felt a message in the song and in the planes over head – that is, in the juxtaposition. Since that night I have learned a lot. I don’t believe in fate. But that night cross my hahhht there was an awful stink in the air and it wasn’t the horses’ shit from Suffolk Downs.
I realize how common it is to hear of an album changing someone’s life. Nonetheless, may I tell you how this album brought me from an economics degree at Wake Forest, NC to writing poetry in Oakland? Nearly ten years ago I decided to pledge a fraternity. What could I do? I was a liberal, attending (for foolish reasons) a conservative university and actually feeling more lost than in high school. I don’t remember what prompted me to make a stop on a pledging errand to pick up Kid A, nor the many of dozens of listens to the album that semester. However, I do remember writing my first poem while Kid A played on my earphones. Yes, my first poem, outside of a school assignment, was about outer space and inspired by Kid A. Granted, it was not a good poem, but I’ve never recovered from the boundless feeling writing it gave me. That spring, I took a poetry workshop and found my passion. The rest followed in quick succession. I worked in Manhattan for two years, writing poetry at my cubicle. I then moved to UC Davis for an MA in Poetry, where I met my wife, Allison. And here I am, writing poems and teaching English and Creative Writing to high school students in Oakland. Always one for completing circles, I recently played Kid A to my Creative Writing class during their warm-up activity and joined them.
Temple Mount visit prompt intifada, when the previous evening brought new reports of growing dissatisfaction
satisfactions of literature discarded, revolution mauve, sonics belonging both to people & planet, concrete rose
rose planetary hallucinations not without appeal—after all, we find ourselves in circumstances yet revealed
revealed in the crusades, the human-looking voyages that passed for republics without history or religion
be very difficult for a democratic nation: to start a war and to end it.
We think we are on the right road to improvement because we
are making experiments.
Out of deserts, out of brute, boutiques glance at farms only to sneer about real
“real” the other, somehow “unreal” . . . It was just freeing to discard the
notion of purely
pure soul menace, dance billions, tower, tours of the dent & mortuary, tours of folly
& November never once beat us, the bluebells long gone by the time any federal
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I had never listened to Radiohead before. Ok, maybe “Creep,” on the radio back home in Los Angeles, but I don’t think that counts. In any case, “Creep” didn’t sound a thing like this. Kid A is a problem. It is noise. It doesn’t make any sense. “You like this stuff?” I say to my freshman year roommate. I remember being 10 years old and hearing Achtung Baby for the first time: flamboyant, dirty, flanged out. I didn’t get it. Kid A was different: sterile, depressed, computerized. I don’t get it, either.
Some months later, on a flight from Boston to Los Angeles, maybe I’m going home for Christmas. But anyway, Kid A is on my headphones, probably because I’ve decided to give it a second chance. I can’t sleep on airplanes, but I can’t stay awake, either, so I doze off. Later, I wake up. “Motion Picture Soundtrack” is just starting. I’ve never ventured this far into the album. The song is gorgeous. Is sad and beautiful and perfect. (There are harps. There is a pump organ.) I play the song again. I start the album again from the beginning. I don’t know what has changed. Something has changed. The album ends. I start it again. Ok, I get it now.
I despaired when I heard that Neil Young, a major music hero of mine, had made the comment that music cannot change the world. It bothered me for months, until I came to terms with the fact that nothing can change the world. Then I reflected on the moment that changed me and realized that only individuals can be overthrown, altered, or improved. I can remember exactly how I felt, where I was, and how it smelled the first time I heard Kid A. I thought, “Everything is changed.” It was all I could think. Kid A has been a filter wrapped around my brain from the moment I turned on MTV2 and watched a record spin and heard Kid A come out. I immediately lost all sense of place and time; during that first listening, I was crippled. Kid A is a towering piece of musical art that left me feeling like a stranger in my own self. The sounds are disembodied, the lyrics are modern poetry, the mood is so unnerving the listener can only be left with catharsis. Even the song structure, the use of plot arc from Greek tragedy, rips Kid A from everything that came before it in popular music and forces itself on you like a revolution of the personal.
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Kid A came out the fall of my freshman year of college, and I guess I was more or less aware of it (I’d seen Radiohead live as early as 1995, when they opened for REM on the Monster tour, and were still willing to play “Creep”) but it didn’t make an impact on me for roughly a year. My group of friends and I blasted Kid A compulsively all through the long strange fall of 2001. Kid A seemed then (and still seems now) to have best embodied, validated, and salved the schizophrenic charge of collective possibility and doom that infused wake-of-9/11 America—in our little cranny of Northern Florida no less than anywhere else, as unbelievable as that may sound. It was a record you could play while sipping rotwhiskey alone at sunset, brooding over the wounded country and the lying war, but then put on again at ten-thirty to start an impromptu dance party in your living room. And if you queued it up a third time at say two AM, it would lend tremendous depth and romance to your lovemaking or else rock you off to lonesome self-pitying oblivion—whichever the case was. There seemed to be nothing that Kid A was incapable of making better and more true and so we loved it until it was thin and ruined for us. I took a several years’ break from it and still only listen to it rarely, when I am hungry to be sucked back up into the old beautiful bullshit and magic.
I’m going on too long but let me tell you this one more thing. In a late scene in my first novel, a character stops by a record store. The book is set around the turn of the millennium, and I needed her to buy something that would serve as an emblem not just of her own change, but for all the ways in which the country and culture around her had changed, were changing still. I wanted very badly to give her a copy of American Water, because the Silver Jews are one of my favorite bands and because I honestly believe that she would’ve liked it, but of course that was not the answer. She could only have picked up a copy of Kid A.
Radiohead’s Kid A has left an indelible and significant imprint in the history of music and art. These marks do not come easily. First, it requires that the particular work of art breaks the status quo. Kid A yanked the steering wheel and publicly established a new and crucial musical genre in the new millennium. With heavily-textured, post-apocalyptic electronic layers; Thom Yorke’s desperate and despondent vocals; Phil Selway’s perfectly-syncopated percussion; Yorke, Ed O’Brien and Johnny Greenwood’s polyrhythmic bass and guitar work; and hosts of live instrumentation that included string-orchestras and afro-beat horn sections, Kid A forged a path whereby thousands of progressive/“indie” rock acts could perform, but know their limits. Second, it requires that a musical work not only engages the listener, but also immerses them in the experience. Kid A forces listeners to submerge themselves in heavy solitude and blindingly bright consciousness. At times, it is so unbearable that, like staring into the sun, its listeners sharply pull away.
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Thom Yorke, during the recording of Kid A, said his favorite record label was Warp Records. I liked that a whole hell of a fucking lot because my favorite musical act were signatories with Warp—the Anti Pop Consortium. Yorke listed the “abstract rat pack” as one of his favorite acts, too. This was 1999, the same year that I heard The Roots’s Things Fall Apart, specifically a track called “You Don’t See Us,”—where Black Thought spatlines: “Ok Computer/Radiohead’s knock to the future/shock like Curtis/at your service. . .” I realized Radiohead was righteous enough to get attention from these types of folks I thought were in another musical realm which was merging jazz, fusion, sampling and electro into one apparatus of sound. This is what good hip-hop does—shouts you out and expands your audience, samples you and revives you, big-ups you and exalts you. Deserved attention is just that.
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Alice White
Kid A
fireworks and hurricanes
howling down the chimney
red wine and sleeping pills
fodder for the animals
lost at sea
that’s not me
I wanted to tell you
standing in the shadows
this is really happening
floating around on a prison ship
it’s not like the movies
the lights are on
you’ve got ventriloquists
trapdoors that open
at the end of my bed
sleepy jack the fire drill
cheap sex and sad films
two colours
a bunker
a bump on the head
another message I can’t read
I wanted to tell you
on the lawn with the furniture
this isn’t happening
the moment’s already passed
in its right place
all of the time
little white lies
women and children
rats and children
the first of the children
sucking a lemon
that’s not me
I’m not here
I wanted to tell you
I will see you in the next life
strobe lights and blown speakers
now I might as well
if you try
to say
until I
walk through walls
spiral down
good enough
everything
is so near
I wanted to tell you
yesterday I woke up
***
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I’ve always stubborly maintained that OK Computer is a better album than Kid A. I’ve argued this relentlessly. I remember attempting to support this claim one night maybe four years ago at a bar in the East Village. I was outnumbered. I was inarticulate, and I was fighting a losing battle. But no one could convince me. It was “Motion Picture Soundtrack” that finally made me see I was wrong. I listened to it over and over. It stuck, covered me in a thick syrup. Ten years later, this is my official statement of surrender:
Kid A is perfect. Yorke’s voice is distorted in all the right places. The Wasteland backdrop radioactively hums. Civilization continues to decline, and the apocolypse approaches with “Strobe lights and blown speakers / Fireworks and hurricanes.” When “Treefingers” plays, I think of the droning tree frogs of my childhood. They have these vocal pouches that allow them to make their alarm and distress calls, their static meditative noise.
There’s a certain horror in the measured dialogue of Idioteque, where one side insists, “We’re not scaremongering,” and the other side demands, “Let me hear both sides.” In fact, the release of Kid A coincided with the start of a decade of terror, where public attention was consumed by fear: and Kid A is a terrifying album.
I’d been in the Air Force for two years when Kid A came out. I remember ‘my first time’ very clearly, and I haven’t listened to music the same way since. I didn’t have much good to say about the album right away, but I couldn’t really say anything bad either. I wasn’t neutral; I just realized I didn’t quite ‘get’ what I was hearing. A few days later I had the (at the time inexplicable) urge to listen to it again. After this second run-through, it stayed in my CD player for a while.
It wasn’t just innovative because it incorporated electronic music in an unprecedented way; it had horns, distorted bass, 1950′s-pop-music-style string arrangements, forwards/backwards loops, thick vocal layering (again, backwards and forwards), polyrhythms, and possibly the most beautiful album ending I’d ever heard.
Kid A is a terrifying album but it is soothing at the same time– possibly because it reflects the terror and structured discomfort that already surrounds us. Kid A offers a catharsis to this, an almost religious kind of comfort, when it finally ends with “I will see you in the next life,” (whatever that might be). And it makes good on its promise with the short, Treefingers-like reprise after a moment of silence. It remains an album that I listen to from start to finish, and there is still nothing out there quite like it.
Your poems are full of still lifes that also seem to contain action or motion – still, dark rooms that wait to be lighted, tire tracks in snow that “leave the driveway.” How does the tension between pause and the perpetual passage of time inform your poetry?
The passage of time is an essential and unavoidable subject for poetry—at least on some level—since a poem itself must be experienced temporally for it to have its meaning(s). Without time, a poem’s just a collection of symbols organized in a certain shape on the page. It’s moving through those symbols in their order that lets us read the poem. Yet, when we’re done reading, the poem is exactly as it was when we started it—though it’s changed, and will continue to change upon further readings, for each of us personally. Thus, poems themselves—or at least our experiences of them—are both still and in motion.
I think what draws me repeatedly to the particular kinds of scenes you describe above is this sort of paradox—the stillness and motion concurrently at work in our apprehension of a poem and of the world. In this way I’m in agreement with Cleanth Brooks about the essentialness of paradox to poetry—though I didn’t know that until I read Cleanth Brooks, quite a while after I started writing poetry with any seriousness.
Your poems contain philosophical conceptions, but also carefully rendered images and sometimes, scenes; often as in “Walking Through the House with a Candle,” an “idea” is enacted in the action of the poem (“The bay window reflects my light / back into this shifting space, // of which I am for the moment / so indisputably the center.”). Is it difficult to create poems that contain ideas without letting the ideas overwhelm whatever else is being enacted in a poem?
What you describe is what I tend to like in many of the writers whose work I admire, so I’m flattered by your description of my work. Thank you.
I guess I’m not very interested in poems that operate as something close to pure philosophy—at that point, why not just read philosophy? But at the same time, poetry is a poor medium for conveying pure images—photography is much more effective. (And, while I’m at it, I’m not particularly interested in straight narrative poetry—which, unlike fiction, is so often grounded in the idea that an experience matters because it’s true in a narrow, literal way.)
What I often love most about poetry is its capacity to give the reader an image or a scene and, at the same time, allow the reader access to a mind at work interacting with (or inside) that image or scene. I guess I buy into the Rilkean notion that if you look hard enough at something it will give up some essential thing about itself. In many of the poems in The Book of Props, the speaker is seeking that sort of connection or experience with the world around him.
There is a light touch in these poems, an ear for measure reminiscent of poets like William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Robert Creeley. Could you describe your revision process, and in particular, how you negotiate line breaks?
I can’t say how much I appreciate being called “reminiscent of” Williams, H.D., and Creeley—thanks again.
I’m an obsessive reviser—I work on poems for weeks and months after I finish a first draft. The image I have when I think about revision is that of a slide puzzle—that little plastic toy with letters or images on little tiles that you can slide around until you get a word or picture or whatever. Sometimes you get a corner done, but then to get the whole puzzle finished you have to take that corner apart before you can put it back together again. When I’m revising, I feel like the poem in front of me is one of those slide puzzles. I keep shifting words and phrases around, changing a letter here, a line break there, until the whole thing finally feels set.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I also record myself reading my poems out loud: I record, walk away for a while, then come back and listen. Often the wrong word choice or the wrong piece of rhythm in the language immediately jumps out at me.
In terms of line breaks particularly, I like the idea that the line operates as an independent unit of thought—as does the stanza, as does, potentially, the poetic section, etc. And all these units cut across the thinking conveyed by the poem’s sentences. It’s these multiple units interacting with each other that give us much of a poem’s multiplicity and surprise, that allow a sentence as it unfolds to complicate itself across a line break.
I’m not sure, exactly. I don’t personally like sleeping all that much. I find it boring—I’d rather be up and about.
So maybe that’s it. I’m interested in the way sleep removes us from the sensory world—disconnects us from our thinking in time, and thus makes us vulnerable. It seems to me that we know ourselves best not when we turn inward but when we turn outward—when we interact with the world around us. From early on in my reading I was attracted to Georg Trakl’s “emotive landscapes” for this reason, and I like the Socratic notion that we don’t really know what we know until we put it into action—into language—in conversation with those around us. Sleep, in contrast, unlatches us from the world so that we swing, disconnected, beneath it—and that’s both a wonderfully calm and, at the same time, vulnerable place to be.
Do you tend to remember your dreams?
I had a wonderful poetry professor, Stuart Friebert, who insisted that his students keep dream diaries. Very quickly I remembered just about every dream I had. (I was amazed at how soon I had trained myself to hook my dreams as I was waking up and reel them into consciousness.)
But I also found that I wasn’t all that interested in writing about my dreams. They almost never seemed particularly interesting for me as material for poetry. Consequently, I haven’t kept a dream diary since I was in college. These days, I guess I remember my dreams just like anyone else—which is to say: sometimes.
In a short article in The Washington Post, you wrote that “Nude Asleep in the Tub” was on some level inspired by Pierre Bonnard’s paintings of his wife bathing. Could you describe the relationship between poetry and painting?
For me, some paintings—or photographs, for that matter, or simply spaces in the world—present an image that feels freighted in a way I don’t yet understand. Writing the poem is generally an attempt to figure out what “meaning” is buried there.
With those Bonnard paintings, my initial discovery was that looking at them made me feel like I was inside the bather’s thoughts in that contained space—of the painting, of the bathroom held inside it—which so effectively appeared to be filled with watery light. (Perhaps it was the light’s lambency that made the room feel like it reflected the flickering movements of thought.)
Later, I realized I felt similarly when I was in the room with my girlfriend while she was in the bathtub—and that strange spacial entanglement felt to be a particularly strong representation of domestic intimacy. But those paintings were moving and meaningful to me before I drew those later, more personal connections.
The Book of Props contains a section called “What Night Says to the Empty Boat (Notes for a Film in Verse).” Explain what you mean by “film in verse”; what drew you to the concept?
As I see it, that subtitle can be read one of two ways: “notes in verse for a film” or “notes for a film in verse.” I guess I like that both of those possibilities are there.
More than anything, in that sequence of 23 poems, I was trying to play with narrative while still writing poems that were clearly lyrics. I’d been trying to write some fiction and failing miserably, but the impulse toward narrative was still in me, and this project was an outgrowth of that. Also, my friend, Brian Barker, who’s a wonderful poet, had said to me one night that my poems always seemed to be about an individual sitting by himself just to the side of some sort of action—and he wondered if I could write poems in which people interacted with each other more directly.
Thus, the film conceit gave me a way to introduce many of the things I can’t stay away from in my poems—light, space, image, stillness—while still self-consciously writing poems that were more social than my previous work. And I also got to play with building a narrative through-line while writing lyrics that attended to image and scene. Perhaps, now that I look back on it, the film conceit was like a set of training wheels as I tried out new types of poems.
Was it important to tell a story, or to create characters whose stories are ambiguous, or are any person’s story? Do the characters’ names have any particular significance?
Yes, the desire to tell a story was important—and in my mind there’s a definite and complete narrative down there beneath the surface of these lyrics. (I think of the “notes for a film in verse” sequence as Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” enacted across lyric poems.)
Regarding the names: The two male characters—Clarence and Andy—are based very loosely on people I knew. I didn’t want either of them to feel particularly literary, so I gave them names that didn’t have famous antecedents in literature (at least that I could think of). In contrast, Justine—as the object of both Clarence’s and Andy’s affection—is intended to possess an aura of “specialness” that I thought I could intimate by giving her a literary name. “Justine” seemed a good choice, since my character Justine also strives to be virtuous, doesn’t manage to be wholly so, and is a touch naïve about the effect she has on the men around her. Those men, though, aren’t roguish, cruel, or unduly lascivious, so the reference to Sade is clearly there and, at the same time, a little ironic. (It also isn’t lost on me that “Justine” echoes my partner’s name—Jeanne—though I wasn’t consciously thinking about that when I wrote the poems.)
In what ways does life in the Midwest inform your writing?
I’m from the Midwest—that is, if you consider Cincinnati the Midwest, which folks on the East Coast surely do and folks in Kansas City mostly don’t. I think that growing up in a city that’s been in decline more or less since the Civil War—with all the history and dilapidation that entails—informs my work in that I’m often drawn to a kind of decaying urban environment that Cincinnati has in spades.
But I also traveled a lot when I was growing up. Between the time I was in grade school and when I went to grad school my dad lived in Houston (Texas), Anchorage (Alaska), on Long Island, in D.C., and in Tampa (Florida)—and I visited him a lot. Also, when I was five my parents and I lived in Rome, Italy, for a year; most of my first memories, in fact, are in Rome.
So I’ve always had one foot planted in the Midwest and the other relatively unplanted. As such, I feel both at home and a little out of place in a sleepy Midwestern city such as Kansas City.
In the Post piece, you mention that you used to live in New York. Is this New York City? If so, could you describe any difference in the way that the Midwest informs your writing and the ways that New York City informed your writing?
I lived in Brooklyn between college (in Ohio) and graduate school (in Houston), during which time I worked as a paralegal in the Appeals Bureau of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. I also spent a lot of time in New York when I was growing up—my grandparents lived in Ridgewood, Queens, where we visited many summers, and later on, as I mentioned above, my dad lived out on Long Island, in Hampton Bays. To this day I feel very at home in New York.
But in my mind, much of what informs The Book of Props—the sense of dislocation that hovers beneath the book—has more to do, I think, with moving from big cities (New York and Houston) to the small, rural Missouri town of Warrensburg, where I teach. I felt absolutely derailed and isolated there, and I lasted for all of ten months before I moved into Kansas City and started commuting out to work.
Now that I live in KC—in relatively urbanized Midtown—I don’t think the things that spark my imagination are all that different from those that excited me when I lived in Brooklyn. While Kansas City surely isn’t New York, it still has more in common with New York than it does with rural Warrensburg, just fifty-five miles down the highway.
When did you first begin writing poems, and why?
I guess I started writing poems in high school. I had an outstanding English teacher who sometimes brought contemporary poetry into the classroom, and that showed me that poetry was a living, breathing art. Many of the poems (terrible poems!) I wrote in high school I wrote for the same reason lots of young people write poems: I was heartbroken and wanted to give dignity to that emotion.
When I went to college, I knew I wanted to go somewhere I could study creative writing, though I wasn’t sure what that would mean. I ended up at Oberlin College where I studied writing, history, and literature. My writing skills, coupled with a research project on the post-Soviet mafia, got me the paralegal job at the D.A.’s office, thus taking me to New York.
But, as far as I’m concerned, it was when I was in New York, working 9 to 5, that I first felt like I was maybe, just maybe, a poet. I didn’t have any assignments or classes to push me, and yet I was writing more than I ever had before. I was also reading a ton of poetry, and I felt like my work was developing on its own. It wasn’t long before I was looking to get away from a steady workweek schedule and go to grad school so I could have more time and space to write.
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[This interview took place via e-mail in January 2010]
John Deming, a poet and musician, has recently released Eight Poems (Eye For an Iris Press 2011) and Tugboat EP (BozFonk Moosick 2011). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, FENCE, Verse Daily, POOL, The Best American Poetry Blog, Augury, Tarpaulin Sky and elsewhere. He lives in New York City and teaches at Baruch College and LIM College. He is Editor-in-Chief of Coldfront. 
