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Poetry and Pop
Page 8
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("Meet the Supremes")
And here's the opening of "Very True Confessions" by Sidney Burris:
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Page 8
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |A number of poems focus on particular songs, singers, and musical events. There's a poem titled after the long-running American television show for teens, "American Bandstand," and several with "Elvis Presley" in their titles. There's "An Elegy for Bob Marley," poems about "Christ at the Apollo, 1962" (James Brown), and "Brian Ferry." Poems titled "Johnny B. Goode," "Tumbling Dice," and "Rocket to Russia." The musical references are clearly varied. What's less various is the style of the poems and their tone -- the poetic voice in most is unwaveringly serious, sincere. Conventional as these rock-related poems are, most nevertheless seem unaware of their own artifice.
While some poems are largely celebrations or first-person accounts of rock and roll "moments," most imbed their rock-related references in stories about adolescence. Of these, some are mini-essays along the lines of a recent article in the magazine Q, in which rock stars told about "The Record That Changed My Life." Here, for example, is the opening of a poem by David Trinidad.
When Petula Clark sang "Downtown," I wished I could go there with her. I wanted to be free to have fun and fall in love, but from suburbia the city appeared more distant and dangerous than it actually was...
("Meet the Supremes")
And here's the opening of "Very True Confessions" by Sidney Burris:
Once, I grew long hair in a town with a Howitzer parked in the town square. I didn't want to want to belong.
Not that I was odd. I shot up gangly and light-headed as milkweed and pod, saw Vietnam in black and white at six o'clock on eight...
While some poems romanticize the cultural space that sixties rock opened to adolescents (and continues to open in the nineties), other writers in Sweet Nothings who are less nostalgic find ways of testing rock-related cliches. David Wojahn's five poems in this collection, for example, form a sequence which serves as both an elegy for his narrator's identification with rock culture, and a critique of that community's complicity in its own dissolution and commodification. Walter McDonald and Yusef Komunyakaa write interesting and well about the relationship between the Vietnam War and rock from a multi-layered, I-was-there, soldier's point of view. Other writers, too, including Lynda Hull (whose writes about rock in the context of the dark side of urban life) and Dorothy Barresi (whose quirkly musical lines demonstrate a real ear for the venacular) find new ways of exploring in their poems social issues that inform certain musical/life histories.
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