Take Five: Bright stars in a dark age
Another week of connections: Alice Notley to Ted Berrigan to Joe Brainard, Charles Mingus to Jeff Beck, and Four Tet to Mazzy Star
“Take Five” is posted each Friday, and offers five things I spent some time with over the course of the previous week. No criticism, no in-depth analysis, just a few things I think you might be interested in checking out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other times.
This week was one of discovering things that had been right in front of me as I finally took the time to notice. I suppose there truly is a season for everything, but the older I get, the more I think I should pay closer attention the first time.
1. Alice Notley — Mysteries of Small Houses
This week was one of exploring poetry as if following a sort of daisy chain of connections, a path started by happenstance when I read that poet Alice Notley had died. She was wildly prolific, but I had never picked up one of her books. Her Pulitzer-nominated collection, Mysteries of Small Houses, was on the shelf at the library, and I happened upon “April Not an Inventory But a Blizzard,” a poem that tells of when she met her husband, poet Ted Berrigan, while she studied and he taught at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. I learned this only after seeing “Iowa City” mentioned in the poem. It’s a wild creation, long, discursive lines of autobiography as details and ideas and references butt up against one another, sometimes seeming to interject before another thought is completed. Walking backward through the collection, I found “As Good As Anything,” which still likely captures the sentiment of some poets who come here with the idea that they must endure two years in the sticks before they can return to civilization:
I don’t see the point of
remembering you, you’re too boring
Iowa City, Iowa
I’m surprised I wasn’t aware of this for any number of reasons — the Iowa City references chief among them — but particularly the fact that this was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1999, the year the prize was won by my favorite book of poetry, Blizzard of One by Notley’s fellow Iowa student Mark Strand. I suppose my curiosity at the time was sated by Strand. Better late than never.
2. Ted Berrigan — The Sonnets
Notley's husband, Ted Berrigan, taught briefly at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and while I was familiar with the name, I wasn’t really familiar with his work. I picked up The Sonnets, his 1964 collection. It is more formal than Notley’s collection, yet just as playful, as the poet flouts the rules and absorbs the influence of artists like John Cage and his friend, Joe Brainard. Don’t take my word for it: Notley wrote an introduction to the 2000 reissue that reads like a master class. Some of these sonnets, though they do not follow the rules of a sonnet, qualify “[B]ecause they're so slablike and each word so owns its own space, but it’s also because the traditional sonnet structure tends to be underneath.” This version of the book contains poems not included in earlier editions, and Berrigan continued working on his sonnets for years. It also includes notes that explain things, such as that “From a Secret Journal,” with discordant lines like
My babies parade waving their innocent flags
An unpublished philosopher, a man who must
column after column down colonnade of rust
was composed from Brainard's “Secret Journal” “by method.” No idea what that method is, but it leads to a headscratcher in the best possible way.
3. Joe Brainard — I Remember
Notley to Berrigan, Berrigan to Brainard, who was Berrigan’s friend and frequently illustrated his books. His own book, I Remember, is the most accessible thing I picked up this week, a sort of episodic prose poem where every line begins, “I remember,” and is followed by a reminiscence. These range from the mundane (“I remember cherry Cokes”) to the relatively profound (“I remember wishing I knew then what I know now”). They are mostly personal, and many deal with sex and young Brainard’s feelings before he understood that he was gay (and after he embraced it). Individually, they may not seem to mean much, but in aggregate they are a sort of history of a time and place through Brainard’s lens. They look back, but they are not nostalgic. There are few if any superlatives; Brainard remembers things but doesn’t pass judgement. Conveniently, I found a recent New Yorker article about a new collection of Brainard’s letters. It quotes a letter to poet Anne Waldman about I Remember: “I feel like I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written.” That comes through when reading it, as if Brainard is opening a door to a collective memory that parcels itself out through his own synapse fires, sparking the reader’s recollection by recounting his own.
4. Jeff Beck — ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’
In my foolish younger days, I dismissed Jeff Beck as a boring white blues guitar player in the same mold as Eric Clapton et al. Then someone pointed me toward Truth and Beck-Ola, and I realized there was much more of merit to discover. My explorations stopped before the mid-’70s (there is only so far I'm willing to go to rehabilitate blues rock), so I hadn't yet made it to 1976’s Wired. When I heard Charles Mingus mention Beck in his introduction to “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” from the newly released recording of a 1977 show, In Argentina: The Buenos Aires Concerts, I was intrigued and went searching. Not everything on Wired grabs me, but Beck’s take on the Mingus classic feels more Weather Report than blues jam, a sort of jazz-adjacent interpretation that pushes and pulls Mingus’s melody, adding a bit of wailing grit to the plaintive tribute to Lester Young. As my tolerance of fusion has evolved from acceptance to more frequent enthusiasm over the years, it seems I’m primed for more of this, and a Mingus cover is a perfect gateway.
5. Four Tet — ‘Into Dust (Still Falling)’
Kieran Hebden’s career as Four Tet has been hit or miss for me over the years. I loved 2003’s Rounds with its mix of electronics and acoustic instruments, and admired but never fully fell for much of what came after. His new single, “Into Dust (Still Falling),” seems to recapture a bit of that early-aughts feel, blending a steady electronic beat with a gentle acoustic guitar line and breathy vocals. Those latter elements are from an album I completely missed a decade before Rounds, So Tonight That I Might See by Mazzy Star. I’m of course familiar with the duo’s “Fade Into You,” that ubiquitous movie soundtrack staple, but had never listened to the rest of the album. I suppose I figured I had gotten the gist from the single, and the combination of expensive CDs and marginally remunerative employment did the rest. Listening this week, I find there is much to like (though I’m more interested in guitarist David Roback’s earlier, more psychedelic work with Rain Parade and Opal), but I still was probably right to use my meager CD-buying dollars elsewhere back in the early ’90s. In some ways, the Four Tet track is a cover, liberally sampling the Mazzy Star song of the same name, but I do find I like it more, the urgency from the pulsing beat adding a dimension lacking from the dreamy original.