{"id":596,"date":"2011-05-28T21:00:39","date_gmt":"2011-05-28T21:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/?page_id=596"},"modified":"2011-09-28T04:14:49","modified_gmt":"2011-09-28T04:14:49","slug":"spencer-gordon","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/writings\/essay\/spencer-gordon\/","title":{"rendered":"Spencer Gordon"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Review of Nick Thran’s Earworm<\/em><\/strong>
\n<\/strong><\/h1>\n
Spencer Gordon<\/h6>\n

<\/em>If I were a poet, I would want my poems to sound and feel like the life I see around me. I would want my work to be vital and new, an affirmation of my emptiness and a sad hymn to happiness. I would fail, most likely, to do so convincingly; life is too big, too absurd, too messy to hobble together in a line or stanza. You can’t blame me for being intimidated. I peer from my urban window and catch a m\u00e9lange of contradiction: pop songs blasting from passing cars; sparrows scrambling in sunlight; construction workers jack-hammering an alley to pieces; famine on the faces of children in grainy newsprint. What sensibility, what sort of depiction can serve such spectacle? Who am I? How do I work and play and form a responsible contribution to such disorder? And why can\u2019t I get that J-Lo track out of my head?<\/p>\n

Tracing the content of this<\/em> reality (the throbbing urban life that so many of us now inhabit) seems especially important for a collection of Canadian<\/em> poems. In a blurb on the back of Nick Thran’s sophomore effort, Earworm<\/em>, David O\u2019Meara describes the book as \u201cside-stepping the more likely subjects\u201d of Can Lit, now so evident to any sensitive reader that they\u2019ve become wretched clich\u00e9s: the ragged and lonely beauty of the North, spiked with the tortured trees and remote lakes of The Group of Seven; the majesty and fragility of our dwindling natural species; the historical anxieties of a bilingual divide now blossoming into the swirling cacophony of multiculturalism; our enduring inferiority complexes beneath the shadow of colonialism and the neon hush of American dominion. But where is my <\/em>daily experience? Where are the stories and subjects most suitable to my own fragmented, pop-addled, twenty-first century outlook?<\/p>\n

If I were to believe certain critics, the answer can be found in the work of a growing number of Canadian writers, Nick Thran included. By merely avoiding the conventional narratives of our country, Thran\u2019s poetry seems shiny and fun and altogether contemporary. In its better moments, Earworm <\/em>sounds and feels like the life humming and growing around me; it is unabashedly urban, cheeky, pop-minded, and charismatic. It talks of punk rock, baseball, celebrities, cartoons, and familiar urban landscapes as lovingly and as seriously as it treats the visual arts, classical poetry, aesthetics, and standards of form. It carries a kind of electric glow, a youthful and crackling energy, moving between readers (as Michael Lista describes in The National Post<\/em>) like a \u201csecret handshake.\u201d As Jeff Latosik suggests in a recent interview for Open Book Toronto<\/em>, it inspires the sort of fan-boy excitement typically reserved for cool bands releasing long-awaited albums. And while clearly eschewing the clich\u00e9s of tradition, Earworm<\/em> does not sound like a protestor’s agenda, nor does it strive so violently against<\/em> the Can Lit status quo that it risks crying too petulantly against the past, providing too little to stand on for future practitioners. It owes more to New York School lightness, urbanity, wit, and MTV-inspired irony than to Canadian moodiness and anxiety. In addition to thematic concerns, Earworm<\/em> also boasts a lighter-than-your-average-poetry-book tonal register and range, keeping itself conversational and direct, often dealing with surprisingly rare sentiments of happiness and pleasure. But rather than summarizing further, let’s move to a few examples.<\/p>\n

Appropriately, celebrity and the power associated with a name seem essential to Thran’s understanding of the contemporary. In one of the collection’s most talked-about poems, \u201c756*\u201d, Thran assembles a range of public and private responses to Barry Bonds’ monumental home-run record and series of media controversies, using the plural \u201cwe\u201d to evoke a sense of community or collectivity. The millions of fans and critics who make up this cultural \u201cwe\u201d <\/em>react to Bonds’ record by <\/em>\u201cfill[ing] him up\u201d with a spectrum of longing and expectation, expressed as everything from \u201cfictitious baseball works by masters like Roth\/ or DeLillo,\u201d to \u201cfake wars, fake breasts, fake reports\u201d and \u201cour loathing,\u201d pinpointing how a larger-than-life celebrity persona is both constructed and consumed by an audience that is simultaneously worshipful and disgusted. In \u201cFound Psalm for Altamont,\u201d the legendary encounter between police officers, Hell’s Angels, and The Rolling Stones at the 1969 Altamont Speedway Free Festival reaches a sort of symbolic, archetypal order through the use of rhyme and Thran’s description of a gang-member as \u201cThe Angel.\u201d Personalities from television, music, sports, and film are invoked with jubilant insistence throughout the rest of the book \u2013 Adriana Caselotti (\u201cvoice of Snow White\u201d), Black Flag, E.T.<\/em>, Ninja Turtles, Pink Floyd, Law & Order<\/em>, Joe Carter, and the Smurf’s foe Gargamel just a few among them. In Earworm<\/em>, <\/em>figures from popular culture become the backdrop and setting for poetry, the source from which a world of symbol, order, and emotion can spring (and one, I would argue, to which a generation of twenty-first century readers can easily relate).<\/p>\n

Thran’s first collection, Every Inadequate Name <\/em>(Insomniac Press 2006), is often lauded for its creative engagement with popular music, and most frequently for the inventive poem, \u201cHow Pop Sounds.\u201d In Earworm<\/em>, I’d argue that Thran goes beyond striving to describe<\/em> the appeal of pop music and instead attempts to sonically imitate its sweet-sounding addictiveness and directness. This can be at the literal level of quoting pop lyrics, as he does with Tom Waits’ line \u201cYou can never hold back spring\u201d in \u201cAria With a Mirror and No Earplugs\u201d or Bruce Springsteen’s chorus \u201c57 channels and nothin’ on\u201d in the poem \u201cTrigger.\u201d This emulation can also be found at the deeper level of the author’s own rhyming verses; in \u201cGlowworm,\u201d for example, the lines \u201cMiss you. Love you.<\/em>\/ Wish you were here<\/em>\u201d seem as though lifted from any saccharine chart-topper, while \u201cEdelweiss\u201d has the charming rhyme and simplicity of song, with couplets such as \u201cEdelweiss, her favourite flower\/ She was sixty-one, dead from cancer\u201d and the closing pair, \u201cit catches the eye.\/ It’s hard to see it otherwise.\u201d Additionally, Thran’s pop-dedication can find its expression in a kind of radical translation of original lyrics. The poem \u201cRaining in Darling\u201d takes its title and inspiration from a song by Bonnie \u201cPrince\u201d Billy, re-constructing the singer’s confessional lyrics into a conceptual and minimal arrangement bearing little in common with the original.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Pop music is often criticized for its lack of sophistication and innovation, for its lack of clear social or spiritual utility. The conception of the pop song as shallow, aggravating media-morsel composed of simplistic progressions and lyrics and without redeeming value \u2013 \u201cmere entertainment,\u201d as some would have it \u2013 is a popular and pervasive one. People often look to poetry to provide the depth<\/em> so often missing from what wails from the radio. However, Earworm<\/em> pursues another tack, building similarities with the pop songs it discusses by employing an ethereal, barely-there quality \u2013 poems so light they seem to float along in consumable gulps, airy and insubstantial. In \u201cIt’s Not Easy for Her on the Phone to Describe…,\u201d seven prose-like lines etch a fleeting portrait of distance between lovers, ending with the familiar sound of \u201csteady rain over the roof\u201d and \u201ca car driv[ing] by.\u201d \u201cYour\u201d father in the poem \u201cPower\u201d is described as wearing \u201cfabulous cuffs\u201d and \u201cfloat[ing] on the air,\u201d throwing \u201cmoney\u201d about in \u201cheaven,\u201d \u201cwaving his arms\/ and \u2026 gather[ing] it up.\u201d There’s not much more to the image than this; it’s drafted quickly and then dismissed. Beyond scant outlines of images and ideas, Thran carries other forms of lightness on his casual tone. In \u201cQueen Street,\u201d the speaker remarks that \u201cMost of the staff has gone down\/ with the flu. I’ve been reading Bola\u0148o’s The Savage Detectives<\/em>\/ and Liz, you would love it.\u201d Not a whole lot happens in poems like \u201cQueen Street,\u201d but we do get a vivid sense of a neighbourhood \u201cin transition,\u201d an antique store going out of business, a man trying to \u201cget his foot in the door of the fire department\/ [to] start to fight some fires\u201d (with its regrettable notes of class-based condescension somewhat souring the experience). Lightness can also translate to whimsy, as in \u201cThe Age of the Pineapple\u201d (where the word pineapple stands in for what seems like everything under the sun) or in \u201cThought Bubbles Hovering Over the Canadian Taxidermists Association’s Annual General Meeting,\u201d which is exactly what it sounds like, with its ‘bubbles’ firmly tongue-in-cheek and seemingly anachronistic.<\/p>\n

In other poems, a lack of penetrating depth is replaced by erratic, yet appealing, variation, owing much to Whitman’s urban cataloging and its many re-imaginings throughout the American tradition. In \u201cOrigins of Gloss\/ Through the Logic of Dreams\/ During the Twilight of Periodicals,\u201d Thran’s narrator begins with \u201cNo loop-de-looping around the gorgeous birds,\u201d but \u201cjust gliding over a\/ major city,\u201d for \u201cthe public\/ needs to see this,\/\/ a pigeon whispers.\u201d This <\/em>being the cornucopia of colour and design and beauty shimmering beneath the wings of a soaring eye, observing a breathing, living metropolis without judgment. In this instance, I’m powerfully reminded of Frank O’Hara’s famous poem \u201cSleeping on the Wing,\u201d which begins as follows:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness \u2026<\/p>\n

that one flies, soaring above the shoreless city,<\/p>\n

veering upward from the pavement as a pigeon<\/p>\n

does when a car honks or a door slams, the door<\/p>\n

of dreams, life perpetuated in parti-colored loves<\/p>\n

and beautiful lies all in different languages<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Frank’s snappy, lunch-time tonality and tireless love of his environment makes for a decidedly joyous, atypically happy<\/em> stanza. Similarly, Thran’s \u201cOrigins …\u201d is at least \u201cat ease\u201d in its upfront encounter with the contemporary urban spectrum. In \u201cAmanda Is the Sunshine That Keeps the Plants Alive,\u201d \u201cthe city is swarming with couples; they huddle\/ happily under the blossoms of multicoloured umbrellas,\u201d recalling Thran’s city-street romanticism portrayed in the Bloor Street of Every Inadequate Name<\/em>. And in \u201cReflective Neon Vest,\u201d a first-person narrator describes his predicament (or mental environment) in the following way:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The space<\/p>\n

I am<\/p>\n

Thirty<\/p>\n

Giddy<\/p>\n

Perversely<\/p>\n

Happy<\/p>\n

Reflective neon<\/p>\n

Hey<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Because contentedness is so rarely expressed in ‘serious’ poetry, there is something refreshing about this kind of earnest calm. The happy restlessness with which Thran moves between images and ‘scenes’ can be intoxicating; in some cases, the effect is reminiscent of quickly alternating TV stations or frantically clicking through web browsers. \u201cTo Lean Into the Hands of the Second-Person Pronoun Is Also a Kind of Love\u201d sends the reader leaping among couplets that conjure scenes as diverse as the Great Wall of China, cave hieroglyphics, basketball player Ray Allen, references to Rilke poems, Pink Floyd albums, firing squads, the ruins of Troy, Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs, and more. The poem takes \u201cwalls\u201d as its subject: barriers of defense or ignorance, to keep things in and to push them out. A poem ostensibly about barriers that provides such a panoramic view of culture shows Thran’s understanding of a world in which traditional limitations between ideas and categories have loosened, creating that sort of messy exuberance we encounter in our daily living. Yes, there are \u201ctrickles of blood,\u201d \u201cscreaming through walls,\u201d and someone \u201cmurdered by dealers for a debt,\u201d but such snippets of pain or suffering seem strangely removed, as if overheard through a dense veil; they dissolve in the joy of Ray Allen’s fifty-one points scored in a single game, or any number of methods we use to cope with the irreconcilable injustices constantly flickering around us.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve described Thran’s engagement with popular culture and his pronounced lightness<\/em> in largely positive terms: as a vitalizing, robust grappling with a certain moment in time, a certain localized present. However, what works for some readers may just as well turn others away. Many of the poems quoted or summarized here also perhaps sketch too <\/em>lightly, skirting weighty emotional and topical concerns and failing to delve to a depth that can allow real insight, revelation, or moving involvement. Poems like \u201cPower,\u201d \u201cEdelweiss,\u201d \u201cThe Year of the Gun,\u201d \u201cGlowworms,\u201d \u201cDopamine,\u201d and \u201cFestival\u201d leave me feeling unmoved and uninvited; I’m not sure what effect \u2013 other than airiness \u2013 such poems are designed to produce. \u201cRaining in Darling,\u201d while interesting in arrangement, is quite lacklustre if the inspiring and gem-like pop song is brought into comparison. The jokiness of \u201cThought Bubbles Hovering Over the Canadian Taxidermists Association’s Annual General Meeting\u201d and \u201cYear of the Pineapple\u201d wash over me without much effect (perhaps owing more to a difference in sense of humour than anything else). Thran’s \u201cSeven Cicadas\u201d gives seven haiku-like perspectives on the noise and reputation of the eponymous insect. Given such an arrangement, I don’t think I’m remiss if I’m naturally inclined to compare said poem to Wallace Stevens’ classic, \u201cThirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.\u201d Though the poem pleases, I’m not sure what Thran’s rendition can offer beyond the innovations set by Stevens. Furthermore, in the poem \u201cA Species a Second\u201d in the collection Back Off Assassin! <\/em>(Mansfield Press 2009), Toronto poet Jim Smith runs through a catalogue of unfortunate cartoon characters, describing various ways each one is killed or maimed, and ending with the powerfully moving lines, \u201cIt is so lonely. It is\/ So lonely.\u201d Here, the sunny world of pop culture reaches an elegiac and unforeseen plateau. Thran’s \u201cCartoon Pyramid,\u201d on the other hand, lists the select activities and relationships of a different set of cartoon characters, but our appreciation or understanding of them and their activities does not deepen or broaden by the conclusion, making Smith’s poem seem all the more sublime and \u201cCartoon Pyramid\u201d all the more unnecessary.<\/p>\n

Stumbles aside, there’s still something terribly attractive about Earworm<\/em>. Thran is at his sharpest when he juxtaposes his abundant wit and enthusiastic embrace of pop culture with more weighty works of poetry and visual art. He riffs an ekphrastic poem in \u201cDavid,\u201d juxtaposing Caravaggio’s baroque depiction of the decapitation of the monstrous-yet-mournful-looking Goliath with the \u201csite where they stream the beheadings.\u201d Such juxtaposition throws contemporary voyeurism into haunting comparison with a classical rendering of pain. In \u201cMurder In Hawaiian Shirt,\u201d Thran gives a lurching, sea-faring interpretation of a devouring, violent work by Dennis Oppenheim. Similarly, in Thran’s opening poem, \u201cHouse by the Railroad,\u201d Edward Hopper’s 1925 painting is taken as ekphrastic inspiration. I love this poem for its curiosity and depth, the sense of a speaker \u201cwalking toward\u201d the canvas’ Victorian mansion and his plans to \u201clive there for a time.\u201d Two separate perspectives interpret the manor in Hopper’s painting as a different inanimate object: the first as a piano and the second as a rolltop desk. The poem’s speaker envies his friend’s \u201csecond guess,\u201d his refusal to settle for the first image that came to mind, and \u201cthe care he took to get [the interpretation] right.\u201d Such a conversation questions our very use <\/em>of art and entertainment, asserting that a right <\/em>reading of entertainment (if such a thing is possible) only comes from care and patience, a \u201csecond guess\u201d after our first and most knee-jerk responses subside (a consideration that would benefit anyone too quick to dismiss the potential power of pop and other variations of so-called ‘low-brow’ media).<\/p>\n

Other works boast a deeper relationship to poetry and its traditional formal constraints \u2013 \u201cfound\u201d poems, a villanelle, and a pantoum \u2013 which elevate Thran’s free verse musings into a lean and cutting music. And in \u201cChlo\u00eb,\u201d Thran delightfully translates and transforms the famous Horatian Ode (1.23), shifting the poem’s perspective from the eager male pursuer to the female pursued, Chlo\u00eb, described by Horace as a skittish fawn seeking her mother’s protection in a wild forest. In Thran’s version, Chlo\u00eb is a young woman working at a pub, serving \u201cbarflies\u201d and \u201cslimeballs openly eyeing [her] appurtenances.\u201d The poem is sucked out of antiquity and given the modernizing accessories of \u201cChucks\u201d and \u201cBlack Flag, punk rock, 80 proof stuff.\u201d However, echoes from Horace’s original still blow through the tight fourteen lines: Chlo\u00eb strides home through \u201cwoods where the paths stay damp,\u201d leaving her beer-pouring job that ensures she’s away from her \u201cmother’s doting.\u201d The most compelling aspect of \u201cChlo\u00eb,\u201d though, is Thran’s re-imagining of the male Horatian poet from Chlo\u00eb<\/em>‘s perspective:\u00a0 he’s \u201cno predatory cur<\/em>,\u201d she can admit, and still something of a poet, sending her his \u201cscribbled notes\u201d that no doubt announce his ardent, refined desire. But this Chlo\u00eb has watched the poet’s literary \u201cfawns slip\/ their hooves through \u2026 perfectly placed little Os\u201d for \u201ctwo thousand years;\u201d she’s no clueless recipient of love letters, but an entirely modern girl wise to the literary and objectifying game afoot.<\/p>\n

The poem vibrates across multiple historical and cultural levels while still remaining a carefully-wrought, visually appealing construction. Aside from its fearless breaking-away from the old Can Lit standards and its willingness to offer an engaging, common sort of talk, poems like \u201cChlo\u00eb\u201d prove that what makes this collection so special is the way high and low forms of entertainment find a warm reception in the same generous voice. In \u201cChlo\u00eb,\u201d as in other poems, Thran demonstrates how high and low can be perfect bedfellows with a wise technician working behind the scenes. I have my fingers crossed that the author follows this fruitful path in future collections, mining the collisions that occur across the strata of culture. If the best of what Earworm <\/em>has to offer is any preview of upcoming work, then I believe that the urban multiplicity swarming through my window \u2013 from high to low, from sweet to sorrowful \u2013 is in trustworthy hands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Review of Nick Thran’s Earworm Spencer Gordon If I were a poet, I would want my poems to sound and feel like the life I see around me. I would want my work to be vital and new, an affirmation of my emptiness and a sad hymn to happiness. I would fail, most likely, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":46,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-596","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":669,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/596\/revisions\/669"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/46"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}