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Short Take on Brad Cran, Elizabeth Bachinsky and Jay MillAr
Nightwood Editions launched a trio of new poetry books in Vancouver tonight, with readings to a packed house at the Western Front. Publisher Silas White introduced Jay MillAr – himself a poetry publisher, helming Book Thug in Toronto – as one of the country’s underappreciated talents. MillAr set up half a dozen poems from Timely Irreverence by noting jokingly he’d seen a Green Day concert a few days ago and had now found a proper punk-inspired stance for reading poetry.
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| You can still see a little of the Green Day-inspired stance here. |
MillAr’s writing foregrounds a wry self-awareness: most of the poems thematize themselves as poems, as avowedly contingent verbal artifacts (as in the title poem: “I’m tinkering with these lines . . .”). Another preoccupation in his work seems to be with collisions of representation and violence, as in “More Trouble with the Obvious,” where in a kind of dark comedy of innocence he describes how “kids” turn found objects into imaginary guns, which still – as mundane alchemies, blurring creativity into threat – have the potential to “blow you away.”
Elizabeth Bachinsky’s poems from The Hottest Summer in Recorded Historyhave a lighter touch, but draw on a similarly intensive, if playful self-consciousness, setting formal detachment and poetic “craft” (“Eliot was right, it’s useless to describe a feeling”) against confessions of personal investment, of getting her feelings hurt:
To dislike this poem, to dislike me.
[. . .]
Astonishing. Poets like this word.
I like this word. I’ll use it again. Astonishing!
How could you not like me? Not like this thing?
She reminds me at times of Colleen Thibaudeau, with her fearless attachment to expressive particulars and to the pleasures of major-keyed melodic diction. As with her other books, Bachinsky’s range of forms (from villanelle to sonnet) is impressive; her reading of the mono-rhymed “Nails” was a highlight (check it out, get the book).
Brad Cran read a set of four poems dedicated to Gillian Jerome. These, too, are personal pieces, but very different in tone from Bachinsky’s. Some of the pieces in Ink on Paper have developed into what Cran has characterized as essay-poems: long-lined, longer texts that combine a narrative plainness (“It was days before Halloween . . .”) with almost journalistic descriptions of personal history and contemporary politics, like open letters, cut through with occasional moments of melopoeic density: “Fear beat in our chests like second hearts.” These are poems designed to communicate, without pretense or highfalutin obscurity: civic poems. Moving and provocative, they work so well when read aloud.
Never Be Touched Enough
This morning, writer, DJ and Poetry Is Dead editor Daniel Zomparelli posted to Facebook a snapshot of himself lecturing – at Pecha Kucha Vancouver, on April 11 – in front of an unnaturally large PowerPoint slide featuring the front cover of a trade edition of Suzanne Somers’s only poetry collection, Touch Me. The photo garnered a slew of likes, mostly from people who seemed to regard the image as a kind of playful meme. But Zomparelli takes Suzanne Somers’s writing seriously, as poetry. And I want to think about why he might be right, because I do, too.
I own a hardcover copy of the first edition of Touch Me. Along with my Bruce Springsteen mirror and my Sex Pistols coffee mug, it’s been one of my prized possessions, for years. I’m not sure where or when I found it or bought it – probably in a remainder bin at Zellers, although it’s not struck or marked as a cut-out. I can’t imagine I paid full price, but it looks like I might have. At first, I must have thought of the book as a joke buy, but in the last decade, as it sat unblinkingly on my office bookshelf, I have come to think of her collection of poems as significant, and as worth reading properly, fully and well.
To take these poems seriously, to take Suzanne Somers at her word, you need to learn to read in a mode that the poems can support. While they present themselves as intimate, confessional lyrics, it soon becomes apparent that they will buckle and wilt under even the slightest pressure of a close reading, of trained formal scrutiny. But they’re not meant to operate as what Cleanth Brooks would have called, in the decades of his influence, the decades leading up to their publication, “well-wrought” literary artifacts. Touch Me is a key instance of what early 1970s, post-Jonathan Livingston Seagull American popular culture would have understood as aspirational self-expression: “You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way” (Richard Bach wrote this, somewhere in the second part of his groovy fantasia). Furthermore, it’s impossible to separate poetic text from its intentional frame, from Suzanne Somers’s nascent public persona, her unabashed desire for celebrity, to make herself known, as human commodity.
Pages of the book are interspersed throughout with black-and-white images (re-textured to resemble canvas) of Somers in various wistful and contemplative poses; this isn’t, or isn’t only, a faux-naiffeint of authorial presence, but it also openly describes how that sense of intimacy can be simultaneously authentic and constructed, at once a fully-fabricated persona and the real “me” of the title, almost touchable. “I could be all those things for you,” she tells an absent lover in “Some Other Time,” or tells us as his reader/stand-ins; the line mixes the artifice of role-play with erotic candour and intentional deference—and she sustains herself, in these poems, for “him” (often, but not always, Alan Hamel, who appears in two of the photos), and, as his surrogates, for us.
The poems always, always direct themselves at concocting privacy: “I like the gentle quiet loneliness of being alone.” The redundancy here is all-too-obviously awkward – again, it bears repeating that these poems will easily crumble under too close, and to my mind too unfair, an analysis – but as a refrain it overstates the outcome that all of her poetry craves: a fiction of proximity. The untutored, off-the-cuff bathos of many of her lines – “House plants have a way of invading my privacy” – only further reinforces the sense that we keep drawing closer, poem by poem, to her unguarded self.
Wikipedia dates the publication of Touch Me at 1980, on the crest of Somers’s success on Three’s Company, but the book actually first appeared in 1973, when she had had only a handful of small roles and cameos in film and had been a regular on the TV show Mantrap. More to the point, in 1970, just prior to the composition of Touch Me, she had done a nude “test” photo-shoot for Playboy, but had refused to be photographed for the magazine the following year; those photos were eventually published in 1980 by Playboy, in response apparently to Somers’s repeated public denials that they even existed. Significantly, her disavowal of such intimate images points up the fakery, the constructedness of an all-too-close, masculine scopophilia, exactly the same sort of desire – to be looked at, and to be touched – that her book of poems unerringly affirms. Touch Me, it’s worth noting, contains a satiric poem “The Model,” which offers an extended critique of her exploitation (“The smiling girl obediently transforms . . .”) by the erotic image-mill.
But her acknowledgement that such representation, in word and in image, inherently offers falsehood and deception, is counterposed in a poem fittingly titled “Lies” to the ability of the body (“my hands, my mouth, my caress”) to deceive; corporeal “lies” are worst of all because they mark not simply an artifice but a failure of connection, a hiatus: “And now I know something is over.” The denuded body can still obfuscate and play false, but in candidly confessing her failure, Somers restores a vestigial connection with her readers, as if we were sharing a secret, her small shame. By admitting that her body lies, she strangely reaffirms its truth.
This is a kind of celebrity apophasis, a disavowal that nonetheless delivers, or at least implicitly claims to deliver, what it withholds. And it’s a confessional marketing tactic that Suzanne Somers has used throughout her working life, a tactic that a severely negative review of her failed 2005 one-woman Broadway career retrospective The Blonde in the Thunderbird (a reference to her cameo in American Graffiti), made abundantly clear:
Ms. Somers is undoubtedly sincere in her desire to bare her battles with insecurity and shame in order to serve as a model, and perhaps a healer, for those whose therapy cannot be subsidized by the sale of Torso Tracks. [. . .] Liberally laced with the bland jargon of self-help books, her story proves the peculiar truth that a victory over low self-esteem often comes at the price of a swan-dive into narcissism.
Maybe so. But it’s this inversion of “The Emperor has no clothes” – a baring all that leaves her fully veiled, publically private – that has informed her self-presentation since Touch Me first appeared. “This is a book,” it says in the one-page introduction, “about touching—about human hands and arms, eyes and mouths, lives and memories, all the instruments of touch.” Well, only in so far as Suzanne Somers can present herself as common, as typically human. “Touch me,” the title poem concludes, “For I was made to be touched. / I can never be touched enough.” This kind of self-making, this auto-poiesis, both depends upon and mitigates against that commonality; we know, after all, that what we’re actually touching, holding, is a book of poems and pictures, a surrogate. She can never be touched enough because she can never be touched at all.
The echo, hardly deliberate but real enough, is of the Biblical Noli me tangere, “Touch me not,” which the unascended Jesus says to Mary Magdelene (John 20:17), caught in a post-Easter hiatus between flesh and light, humanity and transcendence. In The Space of Literature (1959), Maurice Blanchotconverts and rephrases this distancing imperative, a metaphysical disavowal, into a figure of what constitutes literature per se, Noli me legere, “Read me not”:
La même situation peut encore se décrire ainsi l’écrivain ne lit jamais son oeuvre. Elle est, pour lui, l’illisible, un secret, en face de quoi il ne demeure pas. Un secret, parce qu’il en est séparé. Cette impossibilité de lire n’est pas cependant un mouvement purement négatif, elle est plutôt la seule approche réelle que l’auteur puisse avoir de ce que nous appelons oeuvre. L’abrupt Noli me legere fait surgir, là où il n’y a encore qu’un livre, déjà l’horizon d’une puissance autre. Expérience fuyante, quoique immédiate. Ce n’est pas la force d’un interdit, c’est, à travers le jeu et le sens des mots, l’affirmation insistante, rude et poignante que ce qui est là, dans la présence globale d’un texte définitif, se refuse cependant, est le vide rude et mordant du refus, ou bien exclut, avec l’autorité de l’indifférence, celui qui, l’ayant écrit, veut encore le ressaisir à neuf par la lecture. L’impossibilité de lire est cette découverte que maintenant, dans l’espace ouvert par la création, il n’y a plus de place pour la création — et, pour l’écrivain, pas d’autre possibilité que d’écrire toujours cette oeuvre.
Pardon the long quotation, but what Blanchot is getting at is pretty close, I think, to what Suzanne Somers manages to articulate, in a more popularly pitched and less obviously “literary” text, as the stuff of poetry, of her poetry: the paradox of touch, which Blanchot characterizes as an impossibility of and within reading itself, a kind of persistent secret, the remains of a refusal to be remaindered, to demeure: a fleeting horizon of experience, however immediate and however publically private it might appear.
Time Pressures: Short Take on Roscoe Mitchell with Tyshawn Sorey and Hugh Ragin
Roscoe Mitchell’s new, eponymous album on Wide Hive records presents him, as composer and as improviser, in shifting configurations: in a trio with himself on saxophones (alternately sopranino, alto and bass), Hugh Ragin on trumpet and Tyshawn Sorey at the drum kit; in duo (on flute and alto sax) with Sorey, who switches to piano for two of the three tracks; and solo with a set of percussion miniatures, played on what in his work with The Art Ensemble of Chicago used to be called “little instruments,” which would include everything from small tuned gongs to found objects. The album is sequenced as an extended palindrome, solo-duo-trio-[solo-trio-duo-trio-solo]-duo-trio-solo, creating an interlace of varying sound-textures while also suggesting recurrence, a cyclical symmetry.
Mitchell’s solos all involve delicately a-metrical plunks and tintinnabulations; he has recorded similar percussion pieces on previous solo projects, but here they feel artfully succinct and carefully realized. Striking his tabletop array of wooden blocks and metallophones with compact sticks and mallets, he produces fleeting, irregularly cadenced clusters of pulses and beats. Time takes on a certain plasticity in these brief performances, as Mitchell alternatively presses toward and draws back from an implied downbeat, a centred measure that never quite arrives. Time hangs between counted and uncountable, openings and distensions, small extemporaneities, spaces. His saxophone tone is always fully-blown, reedy and firm, but his pitch – like his rhythmic sense – often seems to skirt around its centres, as he deliberately manipulates micro-pressures of breath and embouchure to stretch and pull the notes just slightly sharp or flat, creating subtly thrumming layers of detuned harmonics. This plasticity is a hallmark of Roscoe Mitchell’s sound, as I hear it, his improvised lines pushing and tugging at their audible edges.
Tyshawn Sorey’s drumming develops a similar kind of temporal openness, and his sense of auditory space recalls for me some of the work of Paul Motian and Jerome Cooper, and – perhaps echoing a little of Roscoe Mitchell’s early Old/Quartet sessions – Phillip Wilson. I love his playing here, working a middle zone between pulse and arrhythmia. His piano is also compelling; his touch can be hard, but Sorey uses what could potentially be taken for an underdeveloped pianism to great advantage, treating the piano the way maybe it should be treated, as percussion. On “A Game of Catch,” he starts by thrumming and plucking inside the instrument, working the interstices of Mitchell’s melodic fragments. But I especially like his playing on “The Way Home,” where he develops waves and surges, dispersions and clusters, that feel reminiscent to me of Sam Rivers’s piano forays with his trios and with Dave Holland. Sorey’s playing evinces a compellingly nascent rhythmatizing – texturally, a marked contrast from his Morton Feldman-influenced “Permutations for Solo Piano” on his 2007 release That/Not (although, as sound conceptualists, both Sorey and Mitchell are not that far removed from Feldman’s interest in resonance and refrain, what a recent article in The Guardian called “the substance of sound”). And Hugh Ragin is excellent throughout the record, drawing on sonic vocabularies developed in his Sound Pictures for Solo Trumpet(Hopscotch, 2002, a CD that featured his own compositions as well as a suite by Wadada Leo Smith). A master of free improvisation, Ragin evokes at times in his tone and attack the clarion spectre of Louis Armstrong, at others the more laser-like inflections of Lee Morgan: his playing is that fine, that good. I could listen to him all night and day.
Centripetally and centrifugally, convergent and divergent, the music of Mitchell, Sorey and Ragin explores the elastic and uneasy verges of time present, wanting to make its ragged limits sing.
Fred Wah Speaking, and a Little “Ayler Music”
Thanks to Fred Wah, who gave a very fine and intellectually poised talk yesterday afternoon—“Permissions: TISH poetics 1963 Thereafter – ”—as the 2013 Garnett Sedgwick Memorial Lecture here at the University of British Columbia. He described the emergence of his own poetics alongside the founding of the mimeographed poetry journal TISH by a small group of student poets, studying with Warren Tallman and Ron Baker, among others, in the English Department here in the late 1950s and early 1960s. (The history of TISH is by now fairly well documented: see work by C. H. Gervais, Eva-Marie Kröller, Frank Davey and Keith Richardson. Those young poets—George Bowering, Frank Davey, David Dawson, Jamie Reid and Fred Wah—would go on, along with others associated with the group including Daphne Marlatt, to have substantive impacts on English-Canadian poetry and poetics.) Wah’s title, “Permissions,” alludes to the first poem of Robert Duncan’s The Opening of the Field (1960):
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,
that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is. (Duncan 7)
Wah suggested that Duncan’s visit to UBC in the summer of 1961, following on the publication of The Opening of the Field, offered an opening for him into a set of poetic possibilities, and presented “a place of first permission” in as much as it directed his thinking toward place, and seemed to offer him permission “to engage the local,” to turn to his own locale, Vancouver in 1961, as viable source matter for poetry. He remembered the impact of Duncan reading this specific poem at the university that summer. (Extensive audio of three lectures at UBC by Robert Duncan, delivered from July 23 to 25, 1961, and attended by Wah, can be found hosted on the Slought Foundation website, in a cluster curated by Louis Cabri; Cabri has edited Wah’s selected poems for Wilfred Laurier UP. The Fred Wah Digital Archive provides open access to essential materials, ranging from manuscript to video recordings, from throughout Wah’s body of work.)
His lecture traced a trajectory of concern in his own poetics, over the course of at least 50 years now, from place to face to race, as he put it, coming to his more recent interest in cultural hybridity. But at all points, he suggested, he remained attentive to particular figurations of opening, with Duncan’s text serving as locus (non) classicus, coalescing in the “space of [creative] equivocation” marked by the hyphen, an equivocation between permission and restriction that gives rise to certain uneasy formal traits in his writing. He referred to the impact of Gary Snyder’s innovative diction (in “Riprap”), of Robert Duncan’s “tone-leading of vowels,” and of Charles Olson’s projective verse, a “poetics yet to be found out” in which prosody served as a musical, generative tool. I don’t want to give the wrong impression; most of Wah’s talk was historical and anecdotal, and he occasionally drew out members of the audience (such as W. H. New) who had also been studying at UBC at the time. But I think I was drawn, as I listened, to the more technical and formal claims Wah made, his disclosures – sometimes in passing – about how his own ear for language works. Jazz improvisation, he suggested, “flipped him into poetry,” and as in jazz, he liked to play around with the music of words. I asked him afterward during the question period if he could elaborate a little, and he said that he understood improvisation “as a way of questioning assumed structures,” drawing analogies in particular with the capacity for chafing at the strictures of composition (and overly careful composure, perhaps) in the awkward excess of “the long phrase, the long ad lib.” (“I never did do well at composition,” he admitted.) A trumpet player himself, he referred to Miles Davis and Chet Baker; I understand the subtle instabilities Wah suggests he hears in both of those players’ phrasings, although I’m not sure about the length of their lines. In any case, the sense of the poetic line as interrogative breath seems to me to be crucial here, and something at the core of how Wah’s writing happens.
I first came to Wah’s poetry in the early 1980s when I was an undergraduate at the University of Western Ontario. I found a copy of his Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh (fresh and unopened from Coach House Press) on the shelves in the Weldon library, and I remember what struck me most were the indentations and spacings of the poems on each page, their typographical shapes. What caught my eye, too, was what I recall as a reference to Albert Ayler, to “Ayler music,” in one of the texts. I was getting deeper and deeper into Spiritual Unity and Vibrations and Witches and Devils at that point, and here unexpectedly, surprisingly, was someone writing poems that emerged, somehow, out of that open listening. It had been years, but before Wah’s talk I tried to search out the phrase, to find where it came from. It wasn’t, it turns out, from Wah’s book. It’s funny how lines can blur. I re-located it in George Bowering’s introduction to an earlier selected poems from Talonbooks, Loki is Buried at Smoky Creek (1980):
What the referential-descriptive mind sees as disorder (Chinese or Ayler music, for examples) is really part of another order. & not a competitive one, either.
So Wah is essentially a musician. He does not write fiction because his aesthetic is not geared to construction. (Once, trying to build a cabin, he put the hammer thru his front teeth.) Rather his muse urges continuity, making a line of music that disappears as it goes, like mist thru the branches. He blows solos that derive their meaning from their con-text (see how many of his poems are “letters” to other poets), in the whole forest of the composition. With others he conspires to sound our world.
He is the most musical of us all. (Loki 17)
The disorder-order dyad, which Wah reframed yesterday in his talk as permission-restriction, still obtains in his thinking, and Bowering’s intro is replete with resonances and flares (although he doesn’t quite anticipate the “bio-fiction” of Diamond Grill, and he makes Wah’s partial “Chinese” background seem a little too unproblematic). But when he says that “with others”—and Wah is, preeminently, I’d say, a poet of shared and open alterities—Wah sounds our world, sounds us out and sounds out to us, I think Bowering has it exactly right. And it’s this improvisational word-music, which some of us years ago thought we might have heard in a kind of generative relation to Albert Ayler, that Wah continues to pursue, and to make happen.
Some Books I Cited
Duncan, Robert. The Opening of the Field. New York: Grove, 1960.
Wah, Fred. Loki is Buried at Smoky Creek: Selected Poems. Vancouver:
Talonbooks, 1980.
– – -. Breathin’ My Name With A Sigh.Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1982.
My Poem of Ruins
(In February, I lectured on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land for Arts One, a first-year undergraduate humanities program at the University of British Columbia. Video versions of that lecture, which is an overview of the poem with an eye to the course theme of the “monster in the mirror,” can be accessed here. With my colleague Jon Beasley-Murray, I also discussed the poem, along with J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe, in an audio podcast, that can be found here. This brief essay is an attempt to come to some personal terms with a poem I’ve been reading for over thirty years.)
Amid the iterative crescendo, the torrent of abstruse and fractured references with which The Waste Landbuilds toward formal closure (citing Arthurian legend, the Book of Isaiah, nursery rhyme, Dante Alighieri with Arnaut Daniel, the Pervigilium Veneris, Gerard de Nerval, Thomas Kyd, and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, almost all at once), one line stands out, anomalously clinging to a reflexive, lyric plainness and to a rhythmic heft that would soon come to characterize much of Eliot’s nascent liturgical poetry:
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down
falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why the Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”: for me, and I’m sure for many late readers of Eliot’s poem, this line offers without too much irony a small key to the interpretative challenges of The Waste Land’s broken whole; it encapsulates, with as much directness as the poem can manage, its difficult and seductive music. Not that this line stands alienated from any cultural intertext, as some nonce moment of romantic originality; I hear echoes of the autumnal decrepitude of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, where the leafless and bird-abandoned branches of a deciduous tree – themselves part of a sustained conceit, an ingrown metaphor comparing the poet’s aging aspect – are compared to “[b]are ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” Eliot’s line offers an instance of what the poem elsewhere names “that Shakespeherian rag,” when the allusive backbone of poetic canon begins to shred itself; the pentameter-based sureness of the sonnet is not lost, but starts to give way – with its missing end-stop and outriding unstressed final syllable – to its own audible ruin, shored up but crumbling. In a way, the line stands as a next-to-last gasp, a feint of vestigial originality, the expiration of the uninspired: Eliot briefly, nostalgically culling one more time, out of time, what Ezra Pound had called a “penty” lyricism from the shards of his trans-Atlantic English.
There is also an internal iteration, a dying echo: the line picks up and semantically retools the word “shore” from the mention of the fisher-king just above it. The western shores of Albion, the Atlantic verges of both promise and twilight, figure the sea both as mortal desert – the saline whirlpool picking the bones of the Phoenician sailor; the stale sea of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, water everywhere but not a drop to drink – and as creative protoplasm – the transformative bath of Ariel’s song, the pearls that were his eyes. To shore fragments against one’s ruin is both to beach the shards and remainders of self and culture, but also to shore up, to secure, to gather, and even to culture the scattered pearls of what might be left of Western European wisdom. What gets shored here on the poem’s formal terminus, at its ragged edge, is also subjective, personal: whoever this speaker is – and it’s tempting, given the scattered references to Eliot’s troubled private life in the poem (like the shoreline at Margate mentioned in “The Fire Sermon”), to identify this last “I” not as a persona, not some overdetermined Tiresias, but with Eliot himself, speaking candidly – whoever this speaker is in this particular line, he or she links those ruins directly with subjective agency, a reflexive capacity in language identified with a moment of intervention, of productive action: the lyric first-person staking its claim (“I at least”) as a speech act, in the iterative stuff of the poem: “my ruins.”
In a poem that appears to declare the exhaustion of its own means, and of poetic means generally, this one line offers a tenuous but palpable moment of verbal surety, of measure. Readers come to The Waste Land in these late days, ninety years or more after its first publication in The Criterion, with a sense of trepidation, of being culturally intimidated. But I think this trepidation has been carried alongside the poem since the inclusion of the footnotes two months after that first appearance: what was ever left to say about a poem that tries to say too much, and knows it does, making its bed in its own overwhelmed and overwhelming wreckage? Not much. But what does remain, for me, what lets me make these ruins also mine, somehow habitable for me as a reader, is the poem’s pulse, its measure, that music. In a 1988 speechintroducing a celebratory reading of The Waste Land, Ted Hughes remarks on “the curious fact” that “this immensely learned, profound, comprehensive, allusive masterpiece is also a popular poem. And popular with the most unexpected audiences.” (I tend to trust Hughes on Eliot, pretty much on the strength of his recorded readings of Eliot’s poetry; his Yorkshire intonations, much more than Eliot’s mid-Atlantic accent, resonates for me in these lines.) Its accessibility as poetry, Hughes declares, rests on a reader’s capacity to listen to and to hear its cadences, as well as its deeper music(s): “this notoriously difficult work is wide open, in some way, to those who can hear it as a musical composition.” Early on in the poem’s critical reception, F. R. Leavis noted that the poem’s order is essentially musical rather than logical or thematic, so in this regard Hughes isn’t saying anything that hasn’t been said before, but what he does reaffirm, for me, is the sustained immediacy – despite all the critical wear and tear – of Eliot’s “whisper music,” or what Hughes identifies as the poem’s “assemblage of human cries”:
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down
a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns
and exhausted wells.
Reminiscence and nostos, the pool of cultural memory, may be exhausted, fraught, depleted, but those voices still sing. And they don’t merely seem to sing; they do it. The poem doesn’t just thematize song, but aspires to it, to a condition of music. The iterative echolalia out of which the poem fabricates itself – drawn out in the eighteen-syllable last line of the passage above, which gesticulates toward its own extension, its excess – isn’t so much a set of traces or afterimages as it is a persistence, a choral sustain. Something like what Gilles Deleuze, thinking of late modernist composition, might have called an assemblage (though I’m sure this isn’t exactly what Hughes might have had in mind when he used the term). No matter how many times I come back to The Waste Land, I keep thinking that I can hear it. Still.
Reminiscence and nostos, the pool of cultural memory, may be exhausted, fraught, depleted, but those voices still sing. And they don’t merely seem to sing; they do it. The poem doesn’t just thematize song, but aspires to it, to a condition of music. The iterative echolalia out of which the poem fabricates itself – drawn out in the eighteen-syllable last line of the passage above, which gesticulates toward its own extension, its excess – isn’t so much a set of traces or afterimages as it is a persistence, a choral sustain. Something like what Gilles Deleuze, thinking of late modernist composition, might have called an assemblage (though I’m sure this isn’t exactly what Hughes might have had in mind when he used the term). No matter how many times I come back to The Waste Land, I keep thinking that I can hear it. Still.
A last note about Hughes, Eliot and – incidentally – me: in his speech, Hughes compares Eliot to what he transliterates from Gaelic as fili, a composer-bard. “Ideally,” Hughes says, the fili “carried the whole culture of the people. He was the curator and the re-animator of the inner life which held the people together and made them what they were.” Big boots for a late modern poet to step into, but boots that Hughes, a little extravagantly but appropriately, suggests that Eliot, with his Mallarméan ambitions to purify the dialect of the tribe (and which Hughes had echoed in his own acceptance of the laureateship), might fill. One possible Celtic etymology for my own last name is mac an filidh, “son of the fili.” Which means something like I might come after them, trying to find a few of their footprints.
Short Take on Nicole Mitchell, Solo
I spent the day yesterday off and on with Nicole Mitchell‘s remarkable new cd on my player. Engraved in the Wind, released on the French Rogueart label, is a set of compositions and improvisations for solo flute (with a track or two overdubbed, but most cuts using a single live instrument). Nicole Mitchell has worked in a number of musical contexts, from collaborative ensembles and AACM repertory groups to her own Black Earth Ensembles, but here she is in many ways at her most vulnerable — and also, her most moving. This album doesn’t merely showcase her virtuosity, which is thoroughly impressive; she is hands down and unquestionably one of the most accomplished and brilliant flautists in the world, working now in any idiom or sub genre, from classical to jazz and beyond. Mitchell’s huge instrumental technique, whether focused on fundamentals or developing an extended sonic palette, inevitably serves the musical demands of a given moment. The disc intermingles commissions from colleagues (and one piece from the emerging contemporary repertoire for solo flute, Alvin Singleton‘s “Agoru III”) with a series of improvisational explorations of various elements in Mitchell’s instrumental language, a concept akin to Anthony Braxton‘s For Alto, although Mitchell’s rhythmic and harmonic senses are entirely her own; her playing sounds little to nothing like Braxton’s, and she prefers (to my ears, at least) a more folk-based and lyrical melodic tactic. There is a debt here, perhaps, to James Newton‘s Axum, and Newton is one of the composers to offer an original composition, in this instance “Six Wings,” for Mitchell’s recital. But while she often acknowledges her indebtedness to traditions of Afrological music-making — “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future” — her voice, at this point in her career, has become fully her own. (Joe Morris provides excellent liner notes that speak to her technique and to her musical approaches much more eloquently than I can here.) On the album, she explores a wide range of textures and timbres, but my favourite cut so far is “Dadwee,” a folksy (even blues-ish) line co-composed with Aaya Samaa that demonstrates the almost buttery richness and harmonic density of her flute tone. Her music nourishes as it unfolds. The recording, done at UC Irvine, is intimate and full, very present, which helps, of course. But what most impresses me, as I listen, is the warmth and closeness of her music. Nicole Mitchell has created a definitive album of solo flute music, one to which I am sure I will return again and again.
A Windy Boy and a Bit
[This is another review essay that never made it into Canadian Literature. I delivered a version of part of this text as a paper to the Dylan Thomas Society of Vancouver in October 2003, I think.]
A Windy Boy and a Bit: Dylan Thomas at Full Volume
1.
When I was fifteen — in tenth grade in Truro, Nova Scotia — poetry started to matter to me. What held me was the built-in abstraction of any poem, what I took to be its inherent difficulty — something that appealed to my pretenses of alienated sophistication, one of the worst of teenage vanities. Small town adolescence creates a dire need to believe in your own young genius. You end up driven by palpable faith in your unheralded yet overwhelming significance, and you’re pushed by cosmic injustice to be, for a flash, “famous among the barns,” singing tragically in your local chains.
Late in that school year I horned in on a song by Pete Townshend, longstanding bard of teenage wastelands, a song I thought nailed my predicament dead-on (from Rough Mix, a record he made with Ronnie Lanein 1977): “I want to be misunderstood, / Want to be feared in my neighbourhood. / I want to be a moody man, / Say things that nobody can understand.” Well, maybe I didn’t want to be feared, but at least found out, remarked for my cryptic and appallingly contrived bitterness. The poetry I liked — and I was very particular about it from the get-go, although I’d barely read enough of anything — resonated with what I thought I absolutely knew, the crux of my goofy, half-baked intellectual machismo. I craved poems with a kind of latter-day masculine bravura, perhaps to offset what I wrongly assumed were the frailties of artistic work, and I wanted hard and strident voices to make their way into my breaking, pubescent croak.
So, there were three writers to whom I gravitated immediately. Robert Frost’s formal elegies, his temporary stays against confusion, bespoke an untenable paternity setting its teeth against its own inevitable collapse: it was heavily Oedipal, and I heard in Frost’s arch lines a way to wrestle with the laws laid down by all the fathers, my own or anyone’s. (For Christmas that year, my mom and dad gave me A Tribute to the Source, a Frost selected with misty New England photographs by Dewitt Jones; I couldn’t ever get past “Buried Child,” and still can’t.) The second of my triumvirate was John Newlove. I had found his selected poems, The Fat Man, in the high school library, and their chiseled ironic edges cut at the world the way I thought I wished I could, grimacing through the hellish existential manhood of his Samuel Hearne. (I had also asked for a copy of Newlove for Christmas, but the cashier at the bookstore sold my mother Irving Layton as a substitute, telling her it was “the same sort of thing.” Not exactly. Although Layton’s “Cain” — a poem of restrained father-son violence — is still one of my favourites, for some reason.) And then there was Dylan Thomas.
I bought a used copy of Thomas’s Dent Collected Poems from the “Nu to Yu” shop. I’d also saved some money from my summer job as a boxboy at the IGA, and bought Quite Early One Morning — a scrapbook of reminiscence, poetry and radio scripts — and, probably the first book I can say I really valued as a book, as an object: a sandy-colouredNew Directions hardback of the 1930s Notebooks, edited by Ralph Maud. This rough and unready Dylan had a sprawling immediacy that seemed especially ripe in my own meager time and place. He had remained suspended on the page young enough to be relocated to small town Nova Scotia, I think, because of the way those obscure and elitist performances, an adolescent brashness finding and wagging its tongue, tended and still tend to lift themselves out of history, out of context — even, or especially, as the material aspect of those unfinished holographs in scribblers, tends to reassert those very limits. These books unknotted and then retied their lacings, and became Truro poems, teenage poems: mine.
For me, as for many readers, Thomas’s recorded voice offered a form of verbal religiosity, of spirit possession; the man himself long dead, his speech could nonetheless carry forward from the spiral scratch of a phonograph track to animate and stir our tenuous present. I found a Caedmon double-album of Thomas readings in the Truro public library, and kept renewing it. (I had recently progressed from the Junior to the Adult card, a major shift in borrowing possibilities.) From this compilation, however, I found I leaned toward the later poems of ecstatic resignation, flush with fractured verbiage and hobbled by overripe nostalgia; the spittle-cloyed choruses of “Lament,” the hawk- and curlew-heavy upheaval of “Over Sir John’s Hill,” and the chiming, verdant bluster of “Fern Hill.” Harper Audio has issued Dylan Thomas: The Caedmon Collection, an 11-CD set gathering all of Thomas’s spoken-word recordings released by Caedmon. Thomas’s records, as many will know, were both the foundation and the mainstay of Barbara Cohen and Marianne Roney’s Caedmon label, which went on to release some of the most significant recordings of poetry and prose in the mid-twentieth century. Thomas also recorded a number of poems included in this set both live and in the studio for the CBC at Vancouver in “late May 1952,” as the notes to the collection point out, when he was on the second and last of his two reading tours of the West Coast. (This date, however, remains problematic; according to some sources, Thomas read and recorded — in conversation with Earle Birney — on 6 April 1950; his second appearance in Vancouver was on 8 April 1952, and he was not likely here in May of that year. Surviving letters and postcards place him and Caitlin on a ship at sea that month.) The transplanting that I managed to effect as a teenager, carrying Thomas across time and the Atlantic into my own embrace, retooling “Wales in my arms” for Canadian reception, was already ghosted into the recordings themselves; his voice had already arrived here, only to take flight again into the false eternal present of the stereo lp.
The Caedmon Collection reproduces in CD-sized miniature the covers of Thomas’s albums. As anyone who collects records knows, their particular material presence, their 12-inch square glossy cardboard, matters a lot, and the Caedmon compilation gestures at this nostalgia, in a conveniently reduced format; you can hold all the transcriptions of Thomas’s voice, his digitized remains, in your hand. This wan materiality emerges in Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Bookcase,” from Electric Light. In his lyric, Heaney eyes the coloured spines of his books, and remembers not merely voices but encounters, intersections, coursings; the thickness of paper and binding melds with the poems themselves, their verbal textures:
Bluey-white of the Chatto Selected
Elizabeth Bishop. Murex of Macmillan’s
Collected Yeats. And their Collected Hardy.
Yeats of “Memory.” Hardy of “The Voice.”
Voices too of Frost and Wallace Stevens
Off a Caedmon double album, off
different shelves.
Dylan at full volume, the Bushmills killed.
“Do Not Go Gentle.” “Don’t be going yet.”
Unlike the Heaney of this reminiscence, or Thomas, I was never much of a drinker — in fact, when I was wearing a groove into “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” I remember being more often than not strangely prudish; poetry seemed to fill the same selfish gaps as Heaney’s Irish whiskey might, that indulgent loneliness every boy wants to pickle in — but I know exactly what he’s writing about here: the poem that wants not to fade away, to keep going, even as it manages to sustain nothing but, nothing much more than, its own bald longing.
In “Dylan the Durable?” — the interrogative title is significant, and suggests much of the unresolved duplicity of “The Bookcase,” where the invitation to stay that remains largely unanswered — a 1991 lecture reprinted in part in his Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001, Heaney reads in Thomas’s villanelle a formal reflex “turning upon itself, advancing and retiring to and from a resolution”:
The villanelle, in fact, both participates in the flux of natural existence and scans and abstracts existence in order to register its pattern. It is a living cross-section, a simultaneously open and closed form, one in which the cycles of youth and age, of rise and fall, growth and decay find their analogues in the fixed cycle of rhymes and repetitions.
While Heaney seems keen to fall into step with mid-century mythopoeic interpretations of Thomas — the Biblical archetypes, books of nature and Blakean contraries that saturated the first flush Thomas criticism — he nonetheless finds the vital instability at the core of this thoroughly formalized not-yet-an-elegy. But where Heaney abstracts and generalizes this uncertainty into a thematic of “youth and age,” the poem is actually more specifically gendered: it is about fathers and sons, a refusal to relinquish the bond to his father, even as it takes up the poetic work of fathering, of parthenogenesis: the poem itself, rather than merely producing formal analogues, rages against a deathly, stultifying parental stricture even as it affirms, in that contradiction, a fierce and fatherly imperative. And it performs that rage, most famously, in the contradicted doublet of its penultimate verbs: “Curse, bless, me now.” The child, as Wordsworth says, is now father to the man; Jacob and Isaac exchange places, and then trade again, in the urgent pleading of Thomas’s blasted prayer. This demand, as simultaneous question and plea that refuse not to be put, seems to me best grasped as adolescence. It cannot accept its dutiful forms, and chooses defiance of the paternal in order to affirm its surging and unruly life-force that drives its green age, even as it wants only to inhabit those forms for itself, and discovers itself blasted and made dumb by childishness. It wants, like all adolescents, to be both adult and child at once. If we scan Heaney’s selected essays, we discover too what is obviously a need for poetic maturity and respect — he tends to write only about the poetry of Nobel laureates, Harvard lecturers and old friends, to position himself within a kind of transnational academy — coupled with a pervasive nationalist pastoralism, all those Irish vowel-meadows where he ran and the peat-bogs where he dug in his youth. I don’t mean to deride Heaney, but instead to point to the necessary and vital adolescence of what he does. And to use such a claim to look back, and forward, at my own willfully unresolved reading practices.
2.
Heaney mentions no Canadian (and very few commonwealth) writers, and we could hardly expect him to. Or maybe we could. But he does provide a hinge into a more localized nationalism, one that inheres not in artificially stabilized cultural thematics, a Canadian-this or Canadian-that, but in its own ardent instabilities, an adolescent discomfort that is not to be overcome but embraced. This sweetly duplicitous craving permeates Albertan (now Mexican-resident) Murray Kimber’s illustrationsfor Fern Hill (from Red Deer College Press), the middle volume — from 1997 — in what now appears to be a trilogy of work commencing with his brilliant 1994 collaboration with Jim McGuigan, Josepha: a prairie boy’s story, for which Kimber won the Governor General’s Award for Illustration , and concluding with The Wolf of Gubbio, a retelling of a legend of St. Francis of Assisi by Michael Bedard, published in 2000. But where both of these texts are narrative, and lend themselves to a kind of captioning, as events from story are depicted by brush, Thomas’s “Fern Hill” has, at most, only shards of plot, and coheres musically rather than descriptively, in the relative abstraction and obliqueness of time remembered, a blurring of present recollection and past recollected in incantatory pastoral surges: “Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs . . . .” Temporal modalities collide in this famous opening gambit, interlocking the immediacy of the poem’s writing, the jetztzeit of that conventional “now,” with its historically orchestrated and orchestrating subject, “I was.” Kimber intensifies this interlace of here and there, now and then, both in the arrangement of his sixteen illustrations and in their subject matter.
Kimber’s work focuses on two principal figures, represented in two small watercolour cameos that frame the main text: on the title-page, he offers us the head and shoulders of a prepubescent boy, rendered in reddish fleshtones against a purple wash; on the recto of the last page, facing a page-sized reprint of the complete text of “Fern Hill,” he sets his counterpart, a patriarch in tweeds and cap, whose open eyes and quiet pinkish smile suggest a knowing serenity. This final image echoes the first illustration, apposite to the first three lines of the poem, which shows the same old man, now rendered in light blues with oils on canvas, but now with his eyes closed and mouth gently crimped. Kimber’s intention is to suggest the poem’s tenor of reverie in age, despite the fact that Thomas was in his early thirties when he wrote it, and to link memory both to aestheticized wonderment — the “darling illusion” of recollection as Charles G. D. Roberts once put it — and to pastoral vitality; the green apples that decorate the old man’s red scarf (their tones in sharp contrast to his pallid complexion) displace the real apples of those sagging boughs onto textile pictorial, past life sustained as lovely wearable art. In the second illustration, we see this capped figure walking, but now the boy and a horse run forward from him, surging right toward the next page of the book. The palette, too, shifts from blue to peach, yellow and deep green, as the present is revived in “the heyday of his eyes,” that splendid driven vision.
Kimber’s fourteen oils (not including the watercolour miniatures) form a visual sonnet, structured in a nested frame. The image for the first three lines, the solitary face of the dreaming man, are recapitulated in the image for the last three, the same figure, now shown head to toe in the middle ground walking alone with his bare feet in the surf; the second image — man, boy and horse — is replayed in the second to last illustration, where these three figures are rejoined, although now to close the loop as we go “riding to sleep” under an equine constellation, the forward push of the former image moderated by dark purples, as man and boy, his old and young selves, walk homeward hand in hand, their backs to us as they depart across the pasture into a shadowed, moonlit farmhouse. Thomas’s poem, though highly formalized, bears little resemblance to a sonnet, but Kimber’s visuals nonetheless uncover a version of the form, dividing the first and last stanzas in three, and the remaining four stanzas in two (grouped mostly in clusters of three or four lines, with no illustration crossing between the existing stanzas). In effect, Kimber’s illustrations surround a core octave, made up of four pictorial pairs, with two tercets or triptychs, creating a recursive envelope (3-[2-2-2-2]-3) that, as I’ve already tried to indicate in my description of the opening and closing illustrations, affirms a fixed architecture. The strong outlines and lapidary textures of Kimber’s figures confirm this essentially sculptural, even monumental tendency to his style, an effort I think to stay the mutable, and to arrest the ragged arc of time. Recurrent motifs — farmhouse, ladders and fences, a married couple holding hands or standing kissing, burnished barns, even the vertical trunks of trees — solidify this stasis, a circularity that emerges from the almost obsessive repetitions of motifs and even whole phrases in Thomas’s poem: “green and golden,” “nothing I cared.”
Simultaneously, Kimber energizes this visual torpor, the viscosity of his oils, with diagonal flashes and unresolved tangents: river flow, shooting stars, floating drapes, running horses that refuse to be contained by borders or grids. This kinesis, too, comes from Thomas’s poem, in the ungraspable syntax of the third stanza, for example: “All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay/ Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air/ And playing, lovely and watery/ And fire green as grass.” The run-on, thematized in the poem itself, distends and stretches Thomas’s closed, formal architecture like so much verbal taffy. Time, though chained and bound, sings excessively, testing the tensile bonds of poetic enchainment. Kimber’s paintings embrace what Thomas appears to understand as the creative push of memory, the force that drives his green age, in their lovely dehiscence, as they catch at the fraying of time itself, at the doubled assembling and dismantling that inheres in the sustained “now” of the image.
So, this is much more than a children’s book; perhaps the music of this sometimes confused and difficult poem would attract a child’s ear, though the nostalgia of the text itself is fully that of an adult. It is best thought, perhaps, as an adolescent work, the text and visuals hovering between the child-like wonder the writer craves and the deathly adulthood he wants to refuse. It is a fine and engrossing work of male desire, of longing.
Kimber’s work is also mindful of its history; his landscape style echoes primarily the post-impressionists, especially Paul Cézanne’s rectangles and triangles, although his green forests clearly draw on Emily Carr’s vortices and his fields on the horizontal plains of Illingworth Kerr (perhaps something of a carry-over from his work on Josepha ). His portraits fuse the blue ovals of early Picasso with the ripe colours of Frederick Varley, I think. I’m not suggesting that Kimber’s work is derivative, nor do I wish to claim that he has merely Canadianized early European modernism. Rather, like my own youthful transport of and by Thomas, Kimber’s paintings position themselves in a kind of negotiated middle, resolutely of this place and yet thoroughly conscious of their own displacement. Thomas’s poem, Welsh though Fern Hill itself may appear, actually takes place nowhere, or rather in the many imagined nowheres of memory from afar. It can’t quite be grasped, but can only be, to take Pete Townshend out of context, misunderstood, misprised and, as Heaney suggests, respoken at full volume, reintroduced into your own place and time. Just as the poem would have time stretched into the present, and across it like a screen, so too can Thomas be reimagined, remade in the crucibles of eye and ear, as he and you and I go running together “out of grace” and into a world where, however much unheard, we can still somehow sing.
Evan Parker Live at the Western Front
It was a privilege to hear Evan Parker play last night, Friday March 22nd, at The Western Front. The concert was a return to a venue that has become a Vancouver landmark for the avant garde, presenting cutting-edge music, dance, film and visual art for 40 years. It also marked the release of Vaincu.Va!, an LP version of a recording from The Western Front’s archives of Evan Parker’s first solo concert there on November 8, 1978, which was the last performance in his North American tour that year, a tour that Alexander Varty credits as “the first of its kind to be undertaken by a European improviser, paving the way for an invasion of exciting new music.” In the unfolding of this music, its trans-Atlantic dissemination, last night’s concert was a significant moment, reinvigorating an important improvisational archive, making a history happen. Again.
Evan Parker played two sets, each under three-quarters of an hour: one, an extended solo improvisation on soprano saxophone (echoing the 1978 concert), and the other in an improvising trio with Gordon Grdinaon electric guitar and oud and Kenton Loewen on the drumkit. The Front’s recently refurbished Grand Luxe hall, upstairs, was packed to capacity; there must have been close to 150 people in the palpably supportive and expectant audience, a mixture of neophyte listeners for whom this would be a first experience with Parker’s music live and others who had been following Parker’s music for decades, some of whom I even overheard saying that they had attended the first concert there 35 years ago. I felt a very real sense of a listening community, not only because I was able to reconnect with friends I’d first encountered years ago at events like this, a fairly dedicated long-standing following for improvised music in Vancouver, but also because, before the concert and at the set-break, people seemed genuinely keen to talk with each other, not just about the music they were hearing, but about themselves; it seemed to me that, whatever the aesthetic gifts and challenges that this particular music offered us, it also occasioned a sense of bonding, a coming together, however briefly, of good shared human energy.
The solo soprano set was a single continuous piece that was sui generis for Parker. “Well,” I think I heard him say quietly before he began, “here we go.” Hearing his solo soprano music feels to me like stepping into a thick stream of layered arpeggios, intersecting torrents of 32ndnotes and harmonics that Parker sustains without pause through circular breathing for half an hour or so, at which point he stops; when he plays he doesn’t produce a finished work so much as enter into an ongoing process, a rivulet of shared aural time. The rapid shifting among at least three registers on his horn produce a kind of counterpoint not unlike the compositional practices of Steve Reich (who, like Parker, acknowledges John Coltrane as an early influence), but where Reich’s music seems marked (and this is not a criticism, but an observation) by sculptural calculation, Parker’s polylinear music seems to me not so much an effect of abandon or looseness, but more accommodating than Reich’s to the unpredictabilities and small excesses, the momentary remainders and overflows, of body and breath. I could hear, I could fell the fleeting intensities of those cascading lines resonate and pulse in my ear canals. Resonance: that’s exactly the right term, I think, for what Parker’s solo music seeks, and moment by moment what it finds. He stopped playing as unceremoniously as he had begun, just taking the horn out of his mouth (as Miles Davis had told Coltrane to do back in the heyday), and was met with huge applause for that small room. I have never attended an Evan Parker performance that was less than great, but this short improvisation felt tremendous. He returned to the centre of the stand for what seemed like an encore, but instead of more, he played a 20-second head of a Thelonious Monk tune – I’m not sure what it was, maybe “Ugly Beauty,” though I’m sure that’s wrong – during which his tone shifted markedly, more rounded and plainspoken; he was hearkening back, if only for only a passing instant, to Steve Lacy. At the set break, James Coverdale (I was sitting beside him and Lynn Buhler) said he thought of Lacy too, and that it was something like an invocation to Lacy’s spirit, Lacy who has played the same room so many times, solo and in duo with Irene Aebi and others, in the past. Again, he had sounded an improvisational historicity, in the present, in our presence.
At the beginning of the break D. B. Boyko, the Western Front’s artistic director, presented Parker and artist Eric Metcalfe with copies of the LP, which they autographed for each other. (Metcalfe’s artwork adorns the album cover. He mentioned that he was one of those present who had attended the original concert.)
The second set consisted of two improvised pieces by the trio. For the first, Grdina on hollow-bodied electric guitar sometimes traded flexible lines with Parker, now on tenor saxophone, and sometimes provided resonant string texture; his tone, I thought, was sometimes reminiscent of Joe Morris, although his melodic and harmonic conception was certainly all his own. Kenton Lowen’s percussion – speaking of echoes and allusions – recalled for me the multi-directional playing of Sunny Murray (as on his sixties recordings with Cecil Taylor or Albert Ayler). Loewen started the second piece with sparse bowed metals (although I was back in the audience and couldn’t actually see what he was doing with his hands). Grdina switched to oud, and the idiomatic character of the instrument seemed to affect the playing; Parker offered what I think were largely Phrygian lines, a sort of Spanish-Moroccan tinge: lovely, moving, instantaneous world-music. There was no encore.
Bud the Spud at the Boy Scout Jamboree
When Stompin’ Tom Connors died a week or so ago, I thought back to the time I saw him perform live at the Canadian Boy Scout Jamboree at Cabot Beach, Prince Edward Island in July of 1977. His abbreviated concert now seems to me to have been both apt and inappropriate: a contradiction that haunts most of Connors’s music, at least as I hear it. For me, it’s hard to listen to the thudding polka beat and reedy vocals of “The Ketchup Song” – for instance – and not be utterly embarrassed by the bathos and yet wholly enthralled by his strangely unshakable commitment to Canadian regional quiddities: Stompin’ Tom’s quirky lyrics voice a wryly ardent poetics of his, of our places, and of our brands.
 |
| Foxed snapshot of a row of flags near the entrance to CJ’77 |
A duplicitous adolescent nationalism attaches itself to this mid-seventies moment in my own life, like an ideological push-me-pull-you, epitomized in my participation in Boy Scouts that summer.
 |
| Lighthouse tower with the jamboree logo |
I wore the uniform, happily and a little proudly and doubtless naively, but was also (more by preadolescent instinct than conscious choice) a bit of a skeptic and a cynic. Wanting to believe, as the troubling Friedrich Nietzsche says somewhere else and about somebody else, is not the same thing as believing. I wanted the buy-in, and tried hard, but could never fully manage it. And that’s how I hear my own version of Stompin’ Tom, then, for what must have been the first time, and now, for the umpteenth: with ambivalence, as a sound wanting my buy-in, but me being finally unwilling or unable to let go and do it, to just “tune [my] attitude in.”
So, I have been clicking and surfing now for a few days off and on, but can’t find any electronic evidence that Stompin’ Tom actually performed at the jamboree. My memory might be faulty, sure, there’s always a chance of that, but I’m sure, sure it was also real, that this concert happened and that I was there, one among 16000 uniformed, preadolescent boys and their leaders. There must be others who remember him. As I recall things, he might have been the opening act for Anne Murray, who was an even bigger deal then than she might be now, and who had come to the jamboree to film part of an Anne Murray and Friends specialthat was to air on CBC television maybe that fall. This was the first national – even international – scouting event of its kind in Canada since 1961, and the fourth jamboree ever to have taken place. (They now recur at four- to six- year intervals.) The tent-city of boys near the Atlantic seaboard represented a resurgence of idealistic, late colonial Canadian nationalism, ten years after the centennial, for which we were both constructive participants and captive audience. The backdrop of the main stage offered a map of the country, with the provinces coloured in pinks and greens reminiscent of the elementary school geography class wall-hangings we all knew by sight, but enlarged. At the outdoor spectacle – which was staged like an oversized set of “campfire” songs – we heard Anne Murray and experienced a flyover by the Snowbirds jets (which now seems to me like a kind of parodically sentimentalized Canadian militarism).
 |
| Snowbird flypast, over the ocean. |
Apparently, a kilted and uniformed Prince Charles – as the movement’s and the dominion’s “chief scout” – addressed us, although I can’t remember what he said or even that he was there.
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| The outdoor stage. It is too small to see who is talking or performing, but I think it’s Prince Charles. |
(I was even interviewed on tv – it might have been ATV or CBC – as some sort of representative boy scout; I think my scoutmaster had some connections in Nova Scotia, and he was kind enough to get some of his scouts out into view. Sadly for me, there’s no tape I know of to prove that this happened, but my parents saw it, all five seconds of it.) But I do remember Stompin’ Tom.
This must have been the biggest crowd he ever played to. He would have just turned forty, although he had, as he always did, the worn, pinched thin-lipped face of a perennially older man. He looked country. I don’t know how I can picture these details. I was pretty far back in the welter of boys, but I think I can see how he was dressed: black hat, peglegged black jeans, flowered polyester cowboy shirt, tall-heeled cowboy boots, belt with ornate silver buckle, bolo tie, black vest, maybe real leather maybe imitation leather. His own uniform. He played some of his PEI songs I’m certain, “Bud the Spud” and “Lester the Lobster.” We all knew these songs, knew the words, and sang along if we weren’t too ashamed to sing. They were stupid, they were beautiful, they were awful, they were great. I don’t know how it was that we had heard them all before often enough to know them, but it was true that we had. Small-town country radio was almost all there was where I came from. He also did “Sudbury Saturday Night,” I think, and some inappropriate drinking songs. He may not have realized he was playing to amassed twelve year olds. Then again, he might have. It was, the way I remember it, a short concert, which is why I think it may have been the opening act. For maybe 30 minutes, he really kicked the heck out of his plywood stomping board, his left leg flailing at the stage: Stompin’ Tom had still come stompin’. In the end, he hadn’t played enough to wear a hole in the board. So he and the emcee just picked it up, and he finished punching a hole through the middle by hand. It had to be done.
There was one kid in my scout patrol called Huey. His father owned some construction business or other around town; he was a boy-child of privilege, as most of us were in that troop. As we walked back from the concert to our tents, and for the rest of the trip, he must have been cued by the music to ask everybody within earshot over and over again the same two questions about the current top-forty: “Do you like ‘Sir Duke’?” “Do you like Fleetwood Mac?” For days afterwards, he wouldn’t stop. “Do you like Fleetwood Mac?” “Do you like ‘Sir Duke’?” Now I couldn’t admit it, but I actually kind of liked Stompin’ Tom. Uncool as he was, and so far off the un-Canadian charts, he still kicked it around. The sound of Tom Connors from Skinner’s Pond had got into my head, a relentlessly nasal, driven throb that no needy kid’s voice could ever dislodge.
lovellevellilloqui: Short Take on Thomas Chapin
Yesterday I received in the mail a copy of Never Let Me Go, a three-disc compilation of two performances by Thomas Chapin‘s nascent quartet (with Peter Madsen on piano, Kiyoto Fujiwara [’95] or Scott Colley [’96] on bass, and Reggie Nicholson [’95] or Matt Wilson [’96] on drums), a recording of some of Chapin’s last concert appearances before his illness the following year and his death in 1998. The recordings are good, and seemed to have been clarified and cleaned up a little; the first two discs, sets from Flushing Town Hall in NYC in November 1995, are reminiscent acoustically of a high-end bootleg: the music is present and immediate, but there are still a few recalcitrant rough edges. The piano, for instance, sounds a bit rubbery, like a poorly tuned upright. Not that I’m complaining: I think the sound suits the vital exuberance of the playing all round, its ardent velocities. (In fact, on the better recorded Knitting Factory gig, the upper register of the club piano is also pretty detuned, but Madsen makes a virtue of necessity, on “Whirlygig” for example, producing metallic percussive textures as if this were a “prepared” instrument.) This quartet as I understand it was a new and evolving formation for Chapin; principal reference points for this music include post-Coltrane hard bop — Madsen’s left hand plumbs the lower registers and jabs at chord substitutions much like late-60s McCoy Tyner, and also Jaki Byatd — but the group also takes up Chapin originals, some penned for his long-standing trio. (I really like their version of his “Sky Piece,” with a terrific solo intro by Colley.) Chapin’s alto seems at times to find its lineage from Charlie Parker sieving through Eric Dolphy, maybe with a touch of Lou Donaldson, but his most obvious influence here, if influence is the right word, is Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Like Rahsaan, Chapin is a virtuoso of excess: he never has anything short of too much to say, too many more notes to play. His improvisations are flush with as much music as he manage, and his saxophone tone is reedy, robust and fully blown. He enacts extemporaneously, in track after track, what Giorgio Agamben variously calls resto, excess, remainder, outside, the open–a kinetic space of vital negotiation between animal Eros and creative will, aisthesis and aesthetics, feeling and making, body and soul. In a word, his sound strives to express. The quartet’s version of Rahsaan’s “lovellevellilloqui ” (originally from The Inflated Tear) both re-enacts and bears witness to, as a now-posthumous recording, what made and makes Thomas Chapin’s music so important to hear: its virtuosity of abundance, its intensely sounded love.
Flow, Fissure, Mesh 