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Hearing John K. Samson’s "Highway One West"
We have been reading John K. Samson’s Lyrics and Poems 1997-2012 in one of my current undergraduate classes. One of things I want to interrogate critically about this book is the nature of that “and” in its title: what can these texts tell us, as close readers and as attentive listeners, about the relationship between lyrics and lyric, between song and poem? I’m looking to describe a certain nascent melopoeia in John K. Samson’s conception of how words work, in his conception of the cultural work of both singing and saying, of performing. What, he seems to be asking in most of these pieces (repurposing a famous provocation from Rainer Maria Rilke), what can singers and singing be for in a destitute time such as ours?
I say nascent because, as you thumb through the book, you’ll see that most of the lyrics are printed as if they are prose, like brief essays or prose-poems. Spatially – at least, on the page – this visual arrangement in discrete typographical blocks echoes the cover design (which gestures, as well, at the cover for his 2012 album Provincial and at the graphic design of his webpage), a grid page from an old ledger, sections of which have been filled in with brown and blue hashmarks in pen. The effect, I think, is to gesture at an imaginary map of a parceled rural landscape, the Latin squares of prairie agricultural space. Hand-drawn lines – lines of ink but also lines of poetry – take on topographical resonances. These are songs preoccupied with articulating a human subject in space, with what amounts to placing oneself. In Canada, questions of who I am often become, following a lead from Northrop Frye, questions of where I am and where here is. But rather than fall back on mythopoeic cultural nationalisms – generalizing an Anglo-Canadian psyche as Frye might by locating and defining its (or our) territorial idiom – Samson queries that relationship, and tends to inhabit its inadequacies, and to create a pathos from and within that shortfall. In Vertical Man / Horizontal World, Laurie Ricou reframes the prairie psyche as nascent rather than determinate (and please pardon the gender bias here, which I think is symptomatic of the time at which Ricou’s study was published): “the landscape, and man’s relation to it, is the concrete situation with which the prairie artist initiates his re-creation of the human experience.” Ricou understands this particular landscape as initiating re-creation, as aesthetic disturbance, not as affirming a particular regional identity. The persona, the speaking or singing subject, of a Samson song is usually “left or leaving,” remaindered or else in the process of departure, “undefined” (as the lyric to “Left or Leaving” puts it), but always seeking a positional relation, for better or for worse, with a sense of home, tracking the “lines that you’re relying on to lead you home.” Those lines are also literally nascent, at least in their print form; reading the prose, you can hear metre and rhyme begin to realize themselves, as if lines were gently beginning to extricate themselves, audibly, from an undifferentiated (undefined?) verbal flow, a lineated poem emerging – although not quite emerged – from the prose. It’s not so much that the prose-poem aspires to the condition of song as it is that we experience a sort of hiatus, a space of what the lyrics for “Left and Leaving” might call “waiting,” between conception and realization, between text and song: a betweenity Samson thematizes as “and,” as an unclosed ampersand.
The printed lyrics to “Highway One West” realize this betweenity both typographically and compositionally. The poem begins and ends with nine single-word lines. (The exception is the first line, which adds an extra word, tellingly the first word of the poem, another “And . . . .”) Framed by these narrow plummets, between them, are five lines of what look like prose – although they’re not prosaic in any sense, but tend toward metaphorical density:
And it
didn’t
take
long
for
the
words
to
slow,
roll over the gravel shoulder, thump into the ditch,
engine cut, battery dying, the station metastasizing
tumours of evangelists and ads for vinyl siding,
the city some cheap EQ with the mids pushed up
in the one long note of wheat.
Too
far
to
walk
to
any
where
from
here.
The 9 + 5 + 9 line-structure mimics a kind of overlapped sonnet. (“(manifest)” and “(past due)” from Reconstruction Site are both sonnets, in fact.) More than this ghostly resonance with literary form, however, the spatial disposition of the lines offers a visual analogue to the physiography in which the subject finds himself immersed. If you turn the page sideways, you can see the high-rise buildings of Winnipeg – or at least of “the city” – emerging in the centre of a flat prairie, the horizon created by a line of upended words. “Here,” the last word of the poem, is produced as a mimesis of distant surveillance, too far away to walk back to. The where of the poem is too far, moreover, from everywhere else; it is an elsewhere, alienated and alienating.
Notably, the song begins in performance with the looping repetition of the last segment (“Too far to walk . . .”), accompanied by a heavy, slow down-strum on the electric guitar, the repetition reinforcing the sense of resigned exhaustion, that “here” might be both everywhere and nowhere. The sounds coming over the car radio – not music but distant voices, a verbal garbage offering false promises of commercial or spiritual satisfaction – metastasizes into diseased noise, rough static. Sound technologies – both for recording and reproduction – offer another metaphorical (as opposed to metastasized) resonance to the geographical descriptors; that urban bump in the middle of the landscape mimics a graphic equalizer with the midrange sliders pushed up. The song gestures, in part, at the electronics used to produce it, and to reproduce it. But if, both visually and sonically, the lyrics and the recorded performance gesture at alienation and at loss, the text also frames and even recovers a degree of expressive potential – finds its voice – from within those horizontal margins, pulled over onto the shoulder of Highway One West, the Trans Canada. The page layout also mimics, coincidentally perhaps, a photograph of John K. Samson, used by The Globe and Mail, that looks like it was taken somewhere out on Highway One.
(I don’t know whom to credit for this photo.) The singer’s image, particularly with his back turned to the lens, echoes the middle section of the poem, while the highway and prairie skyline are picked up by the one-word horizontals. (Again, the page has to be turned sideways to see the mirroring.) What this accidental similarity suggests, for me, is a version of Ricou’s vertical man / horizontal world. The song itself has only a vestigial subjective presence: there is no “I” among the words, which are primarily objective and attenuated. But the voice, the speaking subject here, presents itself, ghosts itself into the song, as a hiatus, an opening in the mids and in the midst of this landscape. The singer pauses on the shoulder, at the left-hand margin of the road and of the page, to look out and, especially, to listen. The song models, I want to suggest, a late or “weak” practice of attention, an opening of the self to audibility – both heard and hearing, left and leaving – that positions the subject as initiating its own recreation, cobbling itself together from interpellative fragments that he tries to hear, see and identify with as maybe, elsewise, his own.
Singing in Public
Last night, I saw and heard John K.Samson (of The Weakerthans) perform for the second time this year, at the studio theatre of the Chan Centre at the University of British Columbia, where he has been appointed writer-in-residence in the Creative Writing program for this school year, 2012-2013. The first had been on May 12 at the Biltmore, on tour with a band (including Shotgun Jimmie) supporting the release of his solo record Provincial. Both performances were remarkable, not least for his ability to connect directly and feelingly with his listeners. The May show was high-energy and electric, and turned me into a fan, if I wasn’t one already. The previous fall, I had started supervising an undergraduate thesis by Bronwyn Malloy on Samson’s lyrics, and the enthusiastic conversations I had been having with her had really affected my growing belief that Samson was an undeniably powerful poet with a startlingly original sense of line and voice; Bronwyn’s essay turned out to be one of the best pieces of creative criticism I have read in my twenty-odd years as an academic, and I’m happy to admit that many of the better insights into Samson’s work that I want briefly to outline here must derive from my interactions with her writing and her thinking.
To start with, “powerful” is probably the wrong word to apply – at least, without some qualification – to Samson’s art, despite how unreservedly laudatory I’m trying to be here. The actual power of his songs and lyrics derives, I think, from their ability to tap into a pathos of powerlessness, of the social and linguistic disenfranchisement that the characters both represented in and speaking through his texts all seem to share. He voices the weaker than. At the Biltmore, he closed out the set by unplugging himself from the PA – my ears, I have to tell you, were ringing that night; some of those songs, casting back to Samson’s early days as a Winnipeg punk, still asked to be thrashed – closed out the set by unplugging himself and his guitar, climbing up onto one of the monitors, and doing a stripped-down acoustic version of “Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure.” That song is the sequel to the “Plea from a Cat Named Virtute,” a song about his cat composed in response to a request, as Samson explains it, from Veda Hille. The subject-matter might at first glance seem incidental and patently lame. (A catsong? Really? Two cat songs?) But this veneer of weakness is belied not only by the cat’s Latinate moniker – derived from the motto on Winnipeg’s civic coat-of-arms– meaning “strength,” but also by both songs’ reach into a common human experience, the tenuous uncertainties around returns on our investments of affection: both lyrics ventriloquize an anthropocentric projection of meaning onto a mute and vanished animal – the cat pleads and explains. But those explanations are hardly conclusive or satisfying, and the latter song ends with the cat’s detachment from language, from meaning, and from human connection, as it struggles to recall what its unusual name might even have been: “But now I can’t remember the sound that you found for me” (Lyrics and Poems 80). The attachment to a name, to a verbal guarantor of a distinctive personhood, reduces to semiotic dehiscence, to sound and sense coming apart. But, what was amazing at the Biltmore show was that, as Samson reached the song’s close, his audience – many of whom had his words by heart and were singing along anyway – turned this line into a choral refrain; unplugged, he became for a time a kind of latter-day balladeer, singing with not just to the sum total of his listeners. Undifferentiated by the electric trappings and apparatuses of performance or broadcast, Samson became a part of his public. (Became his admirers? At last night’s event, he talked about the influence of W. H. Auden early in his life. Maybe so.) And there was nothing saccharine or maudlin, and more importantly nothing cynical, about singing for a lost cat; instead, what he managed was genuinely affective: feeling, shared. He closed out last night’s performance with the same tactic, a version of this same song delivered standing on a chair, unplugged from any amplifiers. Reaching quietly out.
Still, Samson’s songs often doubt, or at least call into question, their capacity to cross through this daunting alterity, this public divide we all seem to share. In “Pampheleteer,” he repurposes a line from Ralph Chaplin’s famous 1915 union anthem, “Solidarity Forever,” turning political call into a lament for lost love:
Sing, “Oh what force on earth could be weaker than the feeble strength of one” like me remembering the way it could have been. (37)
As tempting as it might be smart to re-appropriate Herbert Marcuse’s collision of revolution and Eros to explain the doubled trope here, I think it’s better to see the feeling represented in these lines as an unsteady amalgam of alienation and community. The inherent weakness of failed or failing desire becomes what binds us, erotically and socially becomes a name for the absence we all appear, in a kind of contingent solidarity, to feel. In this song and in “Virtute,” that strength in weakness depends on the shortfall not only of memory – of knowing for certain what might have been – but also of re-membering, of picking up the disparate pieces of a civic body in disarray: cats, friends, acquaintances, lovers . . . all the inhabitants of a particular home or place or city, whether hated or great.
Last night’s concert included two on-stage interviews with John K. Samson by novelist Keith Maillard, the current chair of UBC’s Creative Writing program. When Maillard asked about how he composes his songs, Samson remarked on his slowness, on the agon-like struggle he goes through writing and finishing songs. He said something close to: “The process of trying to remember how to write a song is how the song gets written.” Again, it’s the sometimes effortful reconstituting of failing memory that’s key in his conception. Samson’s songs both thematize and enact the approach of expression, of saying something, to the constantly retreating and collapsing edges of language, the unsayable. Part of his humility, I think, is a recognition of a pathos of the failure of meaning at the core of the lyrical. As one of his characters, a broken-hearted dot-com entrepreneur, puts it in a one-sided overheard plea to an former lover, “So what I’m trying to say, I mean what I’m asking is, I know we haven’t talked in a while, but could you come and get me?” (77). A lyricism of the colloquial emerges in these lines through missed connections, through tentatively expressing the desire to be heard and to make contact with someone else. Community, that is, starts to consist in desire rather than realization, in the mutual recognition of our absences, as both speaker – or singer – and listener. We start to empathize across, and because of, our mutual distances. When in another lyric Samson obliquely defines his poetics, his practice of making, in terms of utility and labour (“Make this something somebody can use” [86]), the insurmountable ambiguities of everyday language convert into common weakness, into lyric public address.
(I have left out specifically discussing the deftly crafted, mercurial imagery and evocatively kiltered phrasings that are hallmarks of his style. Most of what I’ve cited above are examples of moments of colloquial diffusion rather than of poeticism. But he’s great, trust me. Take a close look at any of his lyrics. You’ll see what I mean.)
Book
Samson, John K. Lyrics and Poems 1997-2012. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2012.
Flow, Fissure, Mesh 