Installment II: Poetry as a Sounding of Metaphor:
One forgets, amidst the succession of disparate names (some of them being venerated and canonical historical gatekeepers like Beethoven, Mozart, the Beatles and Miles Davis), exactly how the process by which a piece of music becomes a part of one’s being transliterates sound into the molecular coherencies suffusing networks of intertwined cultural DNA. Mark E. Smith, Schooly D., or maybe Big Daddy Kane, or four anonymous looking androids from Akron Ohio, with esoteric electronics and voice modulators remembered from a loft party in 1979; Led Zeppelin, NWA, Wagner, Aaron Copeland, The Residents, Buffy St. Marie, Live Skull, or even the fucking Partridge Family; whomever triggered the response and wherever it may have occurred, it is the moment when the self dissolves, as in the act of erotic communion, into a variegated tuber-bundle of myriad other selves resonating to the echo of a particular place—a lifelong vibration jarring the sensorium.
Music is to sound, as poetry is to word, as dream is to thought; each entwining the other. Yet, they cannot be disentangled in the sense of defining where one begins and its counterpart ends, for it is not a relationship of continuity or dualism. Rather, the synergy is between manifestation and possibility, the idiosyncratic particularities woven from a spectrum of potential apertures of emergence; each wrapping its compliment in a translucent word bubble of reconceptualization, stylized and metaphoric, distilling the very mitochondria of an underlying thingness by displacing it into articulated fractals of ambiguous resonance, proliferating innumerable cross-pollinations of contingency—the arcane icons and symbols through which we show ourselves who we are, are becoming, want to be, or wish to evolve towards, at any given moment, in stroboscopic packets of infinitely condensed eidetic wisdom.
It is about our respective vocabularies of sounds, construed as disparate lists of favored songs, treasured albums and thumb-drives of remembered ecstasies, apotheosized and reified into tangible aspects of the self. One is never sure where the desire to make something more real by documenting its existence or distilling it into ingredients/superlative moments/discrete properties, comes from: It could happen standing in the back of the old first avenue Bar and Grill/ CBGB’s/the Gas Station/ an apartment rooftop on the Lower East Side or the South Bronx; even sitting in the audience at Madison Square Garden or the Hollywood Bowl.
Music and poetry exponentially alter sound and meaning and, in searching for their own echo, bifurcate and repeat themselves—a mitosis which sometimes leads to mutation. This is the heart of art’s creatively proliferating DNA; it is unstable and yet also sublime, alchemically transforming everything within its sphere of influence, until it too is transformed by the process that it has set in motion. This harnessing of random energies is constantly re-inscribed into the clay palimpsest of the present moment; a moment built on countless prior moments, invariably boiling over in a crescendo of decisive inertia.
It is inevitable then that one should write of sound, and its emotional resonance, and reinscribe its tonality with the coded symbology of words. Such an act translates the qualities of one idiom into another, profoundly altering the essence of one variety of experience through gestures forged within the heart of an incommensurable knowledge, thereby encoding a radical form of synesthesia, a metaphoric alchemy integral to both music and to poetry. Accordingly, it is only natural to take the poetry of music and express its vision in words, knowing full well that its structure will ineluctably change in the course of translation.
Such evocations can take the form of lists, raves, reflections, one-sided epistolary expressions, dedications, inspirations, and polemical arguments, the squashing of existing canons, autobiographical narratives, and descriptions of un-producible esoteric songs or movie soundtracks, even surreal attempts at impossible transcriptions. The varieties of such poetry are infinite, and can mutate into a multiverse of hybrids and miscegenation’s, as varied as the sound-cultures which might have inspired them. Hence, the possibilities for transcendence, inherent in the exploration and creation of new worlds, are perfectly inscribed in Hassan i Sabbah’s famous maxim, “Nothing is true, everything is permissible.”
Let this credo of epistemological terrorism function, in this instance, as a prompt and a challenge. Write what you like; reinvent the familiar as something new, transforming sound back into primordial breath; restoring through poetry a unity whose ghostly vigor still haunts the disassociated sub-divisions compartmentalizing the contemporary landscape. Send it in to dimcitylit[at]gmail[dot]com with “Installment Two” as the subject.
– J Zachary Rothstein
Innumerable Stumble 