That’s the proposed title for my album of Death Cab for Cutie cover songs. But also, how’s the poetry chapbook project coming so far?
Well I’ll tell you –– when in doubt, I usually start with research. Figuring out what kind of book to make generally requires being familiar with books somewhat similar to what you’re trying to make. And fortunately for me I live in Seattle, home to Open Books: one of only two poetry-only bookstores in this great nation. (I got banned from the other one.)
At Open Books I attended a reading of feminist speculative poetry, and picked up a volume by one of the poets. The book is Unmanned by Jessica Rae Bergamino, and I got it because of one poem she read in particular. Well, really, the title of one poem in particular: “Self Portrait of Voyager Two as a Hologram of Princess Leia Imagining Voyager One in Drag as Han Solo Frozen in Carbonite.” It’s a good piece and an excellent premise, a series of poems written by the twin Voyager spacecraft cruising at the edges and beyond of our solar system.
"Frozen" by Scott Shingler Photography is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
But before and after the reading, I flipped through their bins of chapbooks and emerged with two that seemed promising. The first was 66 for Starters, which I decided to grab because it met several criteria I was looking for:
• Be written by a poet I’d never heard of before – in this case Serge Gavronsky.
• The book itself should be simple: this one looked cheap, just letter-sized pages folded in half and stapled down the center.
• It cost less than $10: it was actually four bucks, probably since it had been published nearly twenty years ago.
The other one was Rae Armantrout’s Entanglements, which I picked up because it met several other criteria I was interested in:
• Be written by a poet I’d at least heard of (in this case I’d already read maybe a half-dozen of her poems).
• The book itself should be quality: this was a small, glossy volume with a fancy front and back cover, and even included a designer credit.
• It cost $10 or less: this one was right on the money at ten bucks, since it had been published in 2017 after the author had already won a Pulitzer Prize.
So from this you can correctly guess a few things about me:
• I have opposite and conflicted feelings about what kind of chapbook to be aiming for.
• I often fall back on studying things instead of doing things.
• I am cheap, and would never allow poetry to get in the way of a bargain.
Over the last few weeks I read through ‘em and did some scribbling inside. I was looking for clues as to how I do or don’t want to move forward, finding some things I liked or disliked to help me get my bearings. Here are my brief descriptions of the two:
66 for Starters is a set of weird, disjointed and usually short pieces that often read like run-on sentences. Gavronsky tends to free-associate from one topic to another, and then circle back around. I kept a running list of the topics he kept returning to that included:
beginnings
syllables
the dead
pictures
paper
Judaism
revolution
beards
Entanglements is a set of short, terse poems that focus pretty exclusively on quantum mechanics and astrophysics. Armantrout often lays out a set of scientific theories or facts, then switches gears to make tangential points that line up with the technical details already laid out. She has titles like:
Spin
Integer
The Emotional Life of Plants
Fundamentals
The Ether
Chirality
Given those brief descriptions, I would have guessed that someone with my interest in science weirdness (and my aversion to Beat Poetry) would absolutely hate 66 and love Entanglements.
As it turned out, both have their strengths but I would actually rather re-read 66 for Starters. One of my notes on the book was that the individual pieces don’t so much stand on their own as lean against the others. You kind of have to keep going to make sense of it all, and the further you read the deeper it all goes. There’s work and craft and experience, but they’re hidden enough to make the book seem casual and throwaway.
Entanglements, on the other hand, is kind of labored to the point of exhaustion. The fact that the author included a freaking Preface in which she lays out what the book is about and why and which science texts she read that inspired it... Woof. It all feels laid on thick, like somebody who wants you to know that they have TOTALLY read Einstein’s seminal text Relativity and it’s super good and they’re super smart for having read it. (Incidentally, that book completely rules and you should read it. To be smart. Like me.)
There are good and bad moments in each, but I was more interested in the specifics of the books and how they were put together.
66 starts out with a long series of eight-line stanzas, numbered in pretentious Roman numerals. But the rhythms are pretty tight, especially since he repeatedly refers to counting syllables in a kind of meta way. And breaking up a long text into short pieces really proves a huge help in readability (for the same reason that people generally don’t watch Gray’s Anatomy in seventeen-hour chunks).
He has an interlude that neatly separates the book in half, and provides a nice framing device to helps us see that he’s changing focus and moving from his contemporary life circa the year 2000 into a meditation on his Jewish grandfather who left Russia just after the Revolution.
Here’s the opening piece, “I” (Roman numeral 1):
Beginning tonight at 8
count syllables eliminate
8 there left tonight at
beginning starting gun off
tonight knocked out then deep
solicitation break break ambulance
parked submarines urban beginning.
I really enjoy the sudden shifts, the opening end rhyme that then doesn’t recur anywhere else, the rhythms both loose and held fast by the seven- to ten-syllable lines. I dig the use of “break break” in the middle of a line. And the way it gives concrete images when it brings in the starting gun, ambulance, submarines… We don’t know where it’s going yet, but it seems like a fun ride.
And then there’s Entanglements. It both starts and ends with what I thought of as weaker poems, pieces that obviously meant something to the author but didn’t do much for me as a disinterested reader. That’s especially weird since everything I know about how chapbooks are put together emphasizes the importance of having really striking, effective pieces at the start and the end. (It’s like a pop song – if you’ve got a good intro hook and a good final chorus, a lot of other stuff can be forgiven.)
The book felt like a lot of ideas that were only lightly explored. Here’s the ending of the opening poem, “Accounts”:
The fading laser pulse
Information describing the fading
laser pulse
is stored
is encoded
in the spin states
of atoms.
God
is balancing his checkbook
God is encrypting his account.
This is taking forever!
It’s a fun idea, taking the quantum confusion of the micro-world and bringing it into the everyday boring stuff of accounting. But the last line is a complete tonal shift, and I can’t understand what it’s doing there or why. And the comparison between physics and banking doesn’t really… say anything, does it? It seems like it’s going somewhere and then just stops.
So all that to say, my research seems to be starting off well. I’m learning what I do and don’t want, what my own personal tastes might lead me to, and it’s doing the most important job: alleviating my guilt at not actually doing much work on my own chapbook.
Next time: how’s the work going on my own chapbook?
This post brought to you courtesy of:
- Procrastination
- Blogger, a Google product!
- Ego
- The letter “J” and the number “4”
- A desperate sense of panic at wasting one’s life
- The Poetry Establishment As a Whole
