Pops
If she were to ask me,
What’s the sound of luxury?
I would tell her Dixie Land.
Putting vinyl on the table,
hearing musicians able
to make joy sound contraband
amid acetate scratches
or the normal small catches
of non-transferred medium
is us drinking straight whiskey
under a green canopy
of oaks in midday’s tedium.
Our ardor through the windows
drifts now in heat-dark shadows
where we calm our transformation.
Somewhere flows the long River
that speaks in ceaseless whisper
the timeless incantation
to Time’s schedule-weary children.
We hear Dixie’s favorite son
as our devoted father
because he rode River’s cadence
concealing open grievance
with the heart of his mother.
~
When I write poetry, I need a landscape of some kind. It is usually one of the three points within which I find the poem (the other two being the subject and me). If I could write a poem without explicitly referencing something, I could easily do without myself and likely do without the subject (an explicit one, remember).
But it is difficult for me to write without an explicit geography. I have this sneaky suspicion that geography plays as big a role as culture in the creation of myth. Why I think that is a subject for another time. For now, assume that is the case. When I write a poem I am contributing to ongoing mythology, and I discover that point of myth by seeing the intersection of the three things above.
Understand that I’m writing about a process that must remain forever in hindsight. If I put it before me as I write and try to see through it to the poem, the results are disastrous, the kind of poem that you are loathed to read because you feel like the poet is standing over your shoulder and every time you look around to tell him to scram, he winks at you.
It’s no good writing crap like that. The act of writing a poem is the act of seeing from an altered state. I never talk the way I do when I write a poem. I never think the way I do when I write a poem. I never see the way I do when I see a poem. I’m not talking about some kind of trance or possession (the “demonization of the poet,” as Allen Grossman would put it). I think the idea of a muse is valid, whatever form that muse may take, but I am reluctant to go so far as to say I am possessed by another voice when I write poetry. However, it is totally valid, and ultimately necessary that I use another voice when I write poetry.
The Christopher Raley who conceives of and executes a poem is not the same as the Christopher Raley who writes this that you are reading, and one of the things that differentiate the poet from the rest of me is a hyper-awareness of place, location, landscape, geography, whatever you want to call it. If there is any transcendence in my poetry it doesn’t come from within me or the subject matter. It springs from the land.
~
One of the challenges of writing about music is that the piece of music conjures its own landscape. (In fact, a song or piece of music is its own mythology, so the act of writing poetry about music is not one of mythologizing, but one of translation, as we saw last week. The poets that I mentioned translated the myth of the music or artist they loved into the humanity that they related to). So rather than triangulating a point within a mythology (one that I am a part of developing), I am rootless in a kind of geographic freefall. There is no earth to plant my feet on, but a series of images from any or all of the following sources: the memory (as in history) of the artist, my memory, the memory of the music itself. I believe intuitively, not rationally that music remembers. If you ask me for proof, I’ve got nothing. You can take my word for it, or not.
If I’m left to piece together my own landscape, then I feel a bit lost. Not like I’m in an unfamiliar place, but more like I’m in no place at all. I have to make it up and give the contour of it its own logic. Since I am competing with the domineering influence of the music, it is a little like stepping into different persons in order to rob them of something useful.
In my normal way of writing poetry, landscape, at least in part, forms the poem. I think of this as somewhat analogous to what Mira Jama, the renowned fictional storyteller, says about dreams in Isak Dinesen’s story “The Dreamers”: “There the world creates itself around me without any effort on my part.” This coming from a maker of stories who is a wholly different person from a maker of poems.
On the other hand, in that same story, there is the situation in Lincoln Forsner’s tale to Jama. Near the beginning of the tale, Lincoln asks his lover, Olalla, who the wealthy man is that often stands beneath her window. Olalla tells Lincoln, “Have you not noted about me . . . that I have no shadow? Once upon a time I sold my shadow to the devil, for a little heart-ease, a little fun. That man whom you have seen outside—with your usual penetration you will easily guess him to be no other than this shadow of mine, with which I have no longer anything to do. The devil sometimes allows it to walk about. It then naturally tries to come back and lay itself at my feet as it used to do. But I will on no account allow it to do so.”
Then at the end of the tale, Olalla says to Marcus, “It is she, it is she herself again—she is back.”
Writing a poem about music is like that.