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| Anaal Nathrakh: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonanamary/5726107057/ |
I’m clueless about the nuances of extreme metal but have been trying for a few years to develop a broad, if not particularly deep, awareness of it. It was in the course of this exploration that I encountered ‘Of Fire, and Fucking Pigs’: a fantastic piece of music, yes, but really, that title. The Miltonic opening word, the odd register and rhythm brought about by the comma, the ambiguity of the curse: a brilliant and knotty word-cluster. I had by that point come to enjoy exposing my poems’ tidy received forms to influences that would warp and corrupt them as they were written: I decided to do something with the Anaal Nathrakh title in a poem, to put the violence and darkness of it into the context of a snowy romance and watch the decay. Taking on another writer’s image rather than inventing my own seemed a good way both of startling myself with a foreign object over which I’d little control, and of acclimatising the rest of the poem to the culture into which it was being very modestly pitched.
I can’t really be the judge of how successful the outcome was; anyway, people mostly just assume it’s a reference to Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, or, more recently, that it’s a David Cameron gag (so to speak). And fair enough. I credit it at readings (and at the back of the book), but in the poem the phrase isn’t actually presented as a song title, and nothing hints that this arrangement of words isn’t original to the poem. This is emphatically not a dishonest effort to claim responsibility for the line as its composer. Rather, it’s an attempt not to absolve myself or the reader of responsibility, of complicity: the song exists in the culture at least marginally, the language has specific invocations that can, as I’ve said, be attached to general or specific persons and imaginary or real events, and I don’t think it’s my place to set myself apart from that, to act as if I’m acknowledging the concept but keeping it at bay.I saw the title and I liked it for its aggressive nihilism as much as for its acoustic-semantic shape: how dishonest it would be to imply that I had, or deserved, some critical distance from it.
Louis MacNeice believed that a poet is ‘a sensitive instrument designed to record anything which interests his mind or affects his emotions’, and – with all sensitivity to the datedness of that ‘his’ – I agree with this as a working principle. It’s a principle, though, that should include the awareness that the poet is inevitably interested in their own mind and how it processes these other phenomena. I’ve no interest in stealing other people’s work, but I also don’t think it would be right to pretend that the art that affects me is over there whereas my writing and thinking, such as they are, are sealed in an airtight box over here.
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| Clarence Clemons: https://www.flickr.com/photos/manu_gt500/3786782700/ |
Further, keeping these things distant implies that one’s engaged in irony, and, essential as I think a complex sense of irony is, that’s not entirely what’s going on when I reframe a line from a song, which happens a lot in the book. When a metal or country reference appears in a poem, or when I write a series of ‘Blues for…’ poems inspired by possibly my favourite type of human (female American guitarists)and opening with riffs on classic blues lyrics, or when I write an elegy for Clarence Clemons or a tribute to Pussy Riot, this isn’t done with a knowing wink, or with the implication that pop trivia is being made briefly relevant to some objectively more serious and large-scale issue.
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Caitlin Rose |
I might be preaching to a particularly bored choir here, but the myth of the low-high cultural division persists. You might enjoy, for instance, a Ke$ha song, but to write a poem that incorporates a Ke$ha line is to be brilliantly, admirably arch and postmodern and and and… No thank you. Ke$ha’s great, I think: and when my poem ‘Rhyme’ adapts her ‘Think you’ll be gettin’ this? Nah, nah, nah’ into its closing line, it does so wholly out of love for the original lyric and wanting to be on the same side, perhaps cowering behind it. When I worked a line by Caitlin Rose into a poem about gun violence, the context certainly altered the line’s meaning – ‘Who’s gonna want me when I’m just somewhere you’ve been?’ – but I still called the poem ‘Caitlin Rose Knows’ as a nod to how popular music can offer some small comfort and indeed knowledge in the face of fear and loathing. This might seem insufficiently critical, and I hope that other elements in the book do something to register and complicate the unbelievable privilege of the straight white middle-class Cambridge-educated male who reckons he’s allowed to use the word ‘blues’ in his sonnet titles. (One poem, ‘Poem’, addresses somebody who ludicrously fancies themselves Blind Willie Johnson, and tries to talk them down to earth. Cold was the ground.) But I want it to be something better than sarcasm. I don’t think about Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’any more sarcastically than I think about heaven, or doors.
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| Ke$ha https://www.flickr.com/photos/oouinouin/5249365145/ |
At the same time as not wishing to defuse it, I want to avoid writing as if the music I love needs me to do it any favours, elevating it to some higher standard via the sacrament of my stupid jokes and ace rhymes. If anything, given my distrust for any easy notion of the transcendent properties of verse, I am with awkwardness and humility figuring out how to engage constructively with my relationship to pop music through my writing without just forcing it down to my level and ruining it for myself. In the December 2010 issue of Poetry, Michael Robbins said: ‘There are pop music references in my poems for the same reason there are biblical references in George Herbert’s.’ This is aterrific sentence, and I think it gestures not only at the reverence one has for the songs that shape one’s life, but also at the constructive irreverence via which a poet can approach them, not in order to make them better but in the hope of becoming, through them, a better maker.
If this all sounds as if it’s in the realms of the ‘personal’, then I should say that I dislike the word even more than you do. And yet, as Frost tells us, you can’t expect your poems to have much effect, much affect, unless you are affected by them. In the second chorus of his song ‘Springsteen’, a song about music and youth and nostalgia and regret, Eric Church sings: ‘When you think about me, do you think about seventeen?’ I became very fond of that song in the course of a now long-gone relationship with somebody a few years older than I, and when I wanted to write a poem for her (shut up) I wondered if I could borrow something from Church that would establish the tone. And I ended up writing, as the opening line to ‘Dirge’: ‘When you think about me, do you think: “about seventeen”?’ Not the most subtle reference to the mild (five-year) age difference in the relationship, but it set me up for a poem about, well, not music and youth and nostalgia and regret, but time and insecurity and dying and defiance. Having got the idea from the Eric Church line, it seemed wrong not to keep it in there: and that means that the emotional hugeness of the song and all the apparently terribly important personal history of the poem are entangled. The specific dynamic only works for me, of course. But maybe, as it’s translated into a few other people’s heads, the poem benefits from having its private affairs set against some rock ’n’ roll.
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The point is that I’m not, I’m never, using the song as a joke; and I’m not improving upon it. Even ‘paying tribute’ sounds a bit grand. I’m trying to pay, or at least admit to, a debt. And, to steal from Seamus Heaney, I’m aiming to get a ‘clean new music’ into my voice by dirtying it up with some music that’s simultaneously already out there, and (tapping his head) already in here. Funny how a melody sounds like a memory.
I’ve assembled a YouTube playlist accounting for (most of) the musical references in Several Deer, arranged in order of their appearance. (Actually, of their first appearance: four of these appear in two poems each. You might wonder which four.) It’ll perhaps be of some amusement, and it goes a little something like this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCZdk1N1vX27_Px-CL9vcU87kRPwmVMtS
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