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.