Michael Turner, Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems

 

Everything I think I am beginning is already in motion and never ends. An infinite middle that “begins” with my periodic need of origins.

This book has its beginnings. One of them came in the fall of 2019, when I was on hold waiting to speak to my cable provider. The song playing was the Beatles’ “Yesterday.”

Another came in 1979, when Debbie, mark, Phil and I began spending after-hours at the Avenue Grill. Each booth had its own jukebox, and we fed ours regularly, colouring our world with song.

A third came ten years before that, in 1969, captured in a long-lost Polaroid of my mother, my sister and me standing uncomfortably around our piano while my father led us in a sing-a-long. On top of the piano was a cloth-bound book called A Treasury of Our Best-Loved Songs.

The latest from Vancouver writer, poet and musician Michael Turner is Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2024), a collection that follows multiple poetry and prose titles across thirty-plus years that play with genre, music and narrative layerings, from the infamous Hard Core Logo (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993)—the only Canadian poetry title adapted into a feature-length film—Kingsway (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995), American Whiskey Bar (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997), The Pornographer’s Poem (Toronto ON: Doubleday, 1999) and the most recent 9x11 (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2018) [see my review of such here]. As the back cover of this new collection offers: “Playlist fiddles with a two-part writing system that begins with the songbooks’ contextual introduction and ends with the songs – or in this instance, poems – to which they refer. Though these poems aren’t expressly critical, their formal method of construction qualifies them as that subgenre of poetry known as the protest poem.”

Turner has long been engaged with the the hows of narrative, offering book-length twists, blending working-class first-person commentaries into the lyric, or a book-length poem as long as a particular city street. There are threads here that run through the length and breadth of Turner’s work, from an interest in genre, working class flexibilities, autofiction, tour notes, rock ‘n’ roll songbooks, the lyric sentence and the straighter lyric, and the dual-aspect of commentary and poem in Playlist provides an inverse kind of call-and-response to the pieces. It is almost a reversal of the poem-and-response of Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Lady’s Man (McClelland and Stewart, 1978), or even Ken Norris’ COMMENTARIES (above/ground press, 1999), his chapbook-length prose poem response to his own full-length collection, The Music (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1995). Turner offers a story, and a song; another story, and another song. Sometimes the story is directly tied to the song that follows, but often it is not, allowing for a series of suggested links. There something of the folk-crooner, the work poet, through these pages. If Peter Culley (1958-2015) wrote songs, or if Gordon Lightfoot (1938-2023) composed poetry titles, Michael Turner’s Playlist lands somewhere between, perhaps.

I was seven when my mother enrolled me in piano lessons. Mrs. Sather was a nervous widow in her late-sixties who lived across the park in a magazine clean house with a blind Boston Terrier. It was fun at first – Mrs. Sather’s piano was brighter than ours, its action quicker. But after a year of scales I lost interest. Plus I didn’t like the way her dog looked at me.

I return to music in my early teens, first with the mandolin, which I found in a junk shop my father liked to visit and taught myself to play. After that, the guitar, especially the folkier aspects of bands my friends and I were listening to – the music of T. Rex, David Bowie and Led Zeppelin.

There were others in my grade who played musical instruments. Phil was already accomplished on trumpet and guitar, and I marvelled at how he could listen to any song and figure out its chords and solo by ear. Mark also played guitar and sang well enough to turn the words of songs I was familiar with into moods that I was not.

Eventually Phil and Mark and others would gather with their amps, drums and keyboards to jam in Phil’s basement. But while they were rocking out on Zappa fragments, flirting with jazz fusion, I sat on the edge of my bed reading bluegrass tabs, or trying to get my hands around the songs of Melanie Safka, Joni Mitchell, Joan Armatrading and Kate Bush.

Paul Pearson, Lunatic Engine

 

            The book you hold in your hands came together slowly over the course of a much-interrupted decade. I do not need to describe all the delays and peregrinations that came next, the cul-de-sacs, dead ends, pits and valleys. Somewhere in all of this was a transition. Somewhere we stopped being young newlyweds. Somewhere we stopped being angry at our upbringing. Maybe it was Galileo, maybe it was the poetry. Maybe it was the kids, the garden, the funerals, the crushing routine boredom. Or maybe it was trying to figure out how I could answer the questions my children will inevitably ask. I will say that I am happy that this collection does not end where it began.
            So back in the snow at Emerald Lake, I was holding what I thought to be a book of answers. It turned out to be as treacherous as all books are and became a book of questions in my hands, asking me: What do you value? What are you striving for? Does the endless, repetitive minutiae of daily life mean anything? What will you stand for? Who will be the witness? How have we as a species survived? Why can’t we see that we have too many different words for the same concepts?—of course the Tower of Babel confused all of our names for God. Did you really think that there was a difference between science and religion? What do you believe? (“RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: DIALOGUE CONCERNING THE TWO CHIEF WORLD SYSTEMS”)

From Edmonton poet and Olive Reading Series co-founder Paul Pearson comes the full-length debut, Lunatic Engine (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2020), a poetry collection with a hefty, multiple-part preface/introduction, outlining how, why and how much this book owes a debt to American writer Dava Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love (Penguin Books, 1999), a book “based on the surviving letters of Galileo Galilei’s daughter, the nun Suor Maria Celeste, and explores the relationship between Galileo and his daughter,” and Letters to Father: Suor Maria Celeste to Galileo, 1623-1633 (Penguin Books, 2001), an assemblage of letters translated, introduced and annotated by Sobel. Through the poems of Lunatic Engine, Pearson interplays two distinct threads—of both celestial (including notions of God and of Galileo’s explorations of the universe) and domestic examination—and writes out, as part of his preface, a semi-facetious “INTRODUCTION: THEMES FOR BOOK CLUB,” that lay out the six concerns of the larger collection: “The relationship with your father, stargazer, absent parent,” “The death of your mother,” “The love poems, your relationship with your spouse,” “Becoming a father (and the deep concern that you’ll do it right),” “The mirror world of Galileo and his daughter—another complex but loving relationship” and “The drive to understand the universe, then and now, given the tools we have.” It is a curious way to not only shape a poetry collection, but to offer as outline those same structures. Rife with footnotes, his preface offers, these “are also fragments from the letters between Galileo and his daughter—as if they were commenting on phrases in this book,” and the interplay is intriguing. “To be so close to the truth,” he writes, as part of “SINCE THE LORD CHASTISES US / WITH THESE WHIPS,” offering the footnote: “it is certain that when we possess this treasure / we will fear neither danger nor death [.]”

Within the framework of a collection of seemingly traditional, first-person lyric narratives, Pearson’s Lunatic Engine offers a more complex structure for the book-length poem. The only comparison I can think of, off the top of my head, might be with Vancouver writer Michael Turner’s American Whiskey Bar (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997), a novel about the making of a screenplay that included the screenplay, and the faux-story of how the process of writing and producing the screenplay all went to hell: a relatively straightforward narrative within a larger and more complex framework. “this is the first two body problem,” Pearson writes, to open the poem “OBSERVANT EXECUTRIX OF GOD’S COMMANDS,” “a daughter of God and the father of science separated / what Galileo’s eye augmented by bending / light to curiosity.” Pearson’s poems offer explorations on some pretty hefty concepts, and the interplay of the minutae of daily interaction in curious ways, writing on faith, marriage, parenting and loss, and the possibilities and impossibilities of all of the above.

IN THE VERY FACE OF THE SUN

the first draft of this was an imagined account of the
teenager next-door’s death by driving too fast down the
dump road the late afternoon sun flashing on the nearly
still beaver-dammed creek just off the shoulder a sharp
turn taken over undercut gravel crumbling and the old
truck is on its side

water pouring into the cab from below sun pouring in
from above

the second draft of this was all about the science the
immutability of the heavens the immobility of the Earth
Galileo and the Nova of 1604 the true word of God an
authority even higher than the Bible

Copernicus pulled the pin on the heliocentric grenade
then promptly died before it could go off

Galileo picked it up tested its weight through math
and motion even before his telescope and his satellites
holding that grenade in the very face of the sun and its
spots its clouds its vapours attracted from the aether

when you get to the end of all of this you’ll look back and
know this is the point

the quality of miracles isn’t what it used to be^5-20

caught between the metonymy of dump roads and grenades
and the memory of your first childhood encounter with death
you’re sitting suspended immobilized
the mutable sun blinding you
as the immutable waters rise

  

__________
5-20 obliging me to hide in silence

 

 

Michael Turner, 9x11

X

My current project is based on the later poems of Baudelaire. I have on my table a copy of Paris Spleen and a stack of books about his work, stuff that is not yet online.

I am interested in his thoughts on poetry, how he arrived at making poetry through prose. I am less interested in distinguishing between poetry and prose than I am in our perceptions of them.

Perceptions are what I am particularly interested in, like what I said about stock narratives, stereotypes… Perceptions, like nightingales, are two things poets have to work with. (“9x11”)

The latest from Vancouver writer Michael Turner is 9x11 (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2018), subtitled “and other poems like Bird, Nine, x and Eleven.” A follow-up, one might suspect, to his previous poetry title, 8x10 (Penguin, 2009) [see my review of such here], both for the minimalist form displayed throughout, as well as the obvious linkages between titles, but a collection that also plays very much off the ripples and consequences surrounding September 11, 2001. Composed as short, lyric vignettes, 9x11 is a book of distances and collisions, of ground-level street life, including coffeeshops, corner groceries and contemporary housing anxieties. Turner writes of a constant, and underlying potential for violence and repeated near misses, referencing a series of tensions, and acts of terror both contemporary and historically, such as the poem “Synesthesia,” that includes: “not the opposite of bombs dropped / concurrently on Hanoi, Nam Dinh and Viet Tri / but the appearance of an opposite / because what was sent to the moon / and what fell on North Vietnam / was the coffee mom bought at the supermarket [.]” Or, as the poem “Cold War” opens:

all day long we accumulate, and when we stop to ask ourselves why

we are shown a Soviet bread line, or a winter’s day in July

a spy satellite explodes – the Space Shuttle – and Israel responds

with bombs on Southern Lebanon

South Africa is a class problem, not a race problem, and for saying so

she is beaten by her sisters

In short, sharp lyric turns, Turner blends the daily mundane with the horrific, articulating how easily such terror becomes muted, presented and eventually dismissed, writing out wars in other places, and left far behind, yet with a violence that often perseveres; carries through, is carried, and continued. As the press release informs: “How you view 21^st century life depends largely on the view from your place, which depends on where you can afford to live. In this suite of texts and poems written over twenty years that span the infamous towers, Michael Turner drops in to see what condition he’s in, a subject whipped into insistence by the rhythms that shape his city, his neighbourhood, his universe.”