Thursday, January 29, 2004
Jeff Tweedy Publishes Poetry
Of all the sonorous melopoetics heard in the lyrics of contemporary music culture, some of the sweetest and asphaltiest are Jeff Tweedy's. While Beck paints with absurd sexual ironi-country strobelights (see "Hotwax" or "Nicotine and Gravy"), and the Jurassic "four" wrap mad assonance around block-rocking rhythms ("Jurass Finish First"), Tweedy's surrealism revolves around sour-hearted trips to hardware stores or viewing America from a highway (and not Tom Cochrane's metaphorical one). From his beginnings with Uncle Tupelo, he was occasionally gifted with the turn of a new phrase: "my heart/ it was a gun/ but its unloaded now/ so don't bother." In the context of cow-punk, it works. And maybe even as poetry.
But now there is in publication a book of his poems, and I can't help but be skeptical. The publisher's website posts (in what is probably a miscalculated promotional effort) three of the collected poems, and apart from some formal chicanery, they read like polished poetry-group homework with bad titles (like "Way of Light," "Singing Combat") like "Yachting?" ? well, you tell me. IS it yachting, or isn't it? Lines like these
they fall in heaps at the bottom of these stairs
wounded and comforted only by beauty
they come tangled in twine to tie this package
and limping away whisper combat
and say later it was a somewhat shaded sunshine
approaching along with your face
are, while Tweedyish, not as moving or alive as the best of the words in songs from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot:
unlock my body
move myself to dance
into warm liquid
flowing blowing glass
classical music blasting
masks the ringing in my ears
Abstract? Yes. Nonsensical cartwheeling? Probably. But there is more of what makes Gerard Manley Hopkins acrobatically beautiful in these lines from "Heavy Metal Drummer" than there is anything of significant poetic lineage or originality in "Singing Combat." I know a few worthy unpublished poets personally; one is my friend and co-worker at the school. Maybe he should just form a cult-alluring musical group, tour for years while molting members and bandnames like worn, toe-holed argyles, create a masterpiece ignored by a major label but release it to the obvious critical victory it is, and THEN put out a book of his poems. But would he still get street credit?
Of all the sonorous melopoetics heard in the lyrics of contemporary music culture, some of the sweetest and asphaltiest are Jeff Tweedy's. While Beck paints with absurd sexual ironi-country strobelights (see "Hotwax" or "Nicotine and Gravy"), and the Jurassic "four" wrap mad assonance around block-rocking rhythms ("Jurass Finish First"), Tweedy's surrealism revolves around sour-hearted trips to hardware stores or viewing America from a highway (and not Tom Cochrane's metaphorical one). From his beginnings with Uncle Tupelo, he was occasionally gifted with the turn of a new phrase: "my heart/ it was a gun/ but its unloaded now/ so don't bother." In the context of cow-punk, it works. And maybe even as poetry.
But now there is in publication a book of his poems, and I can't help but be skeptical. The publisher's website posts (in what is probably a miscalculated promotional effort) three of the collected poems, and apart from some formal chicanery, they read like polished poetry-group homework with bad titles (like "Way of Light," "Singing Combat") like "Yachting?" ? well, you tell me. IS it yachting, or isn't it? Lines like these
they fall in heaps at the bottom of these stairs
wounded and comforted only by beauty
they come tangled in twine to tie this package
and limping away whisper combat
and say later it was a somewhat shaded sunshine
approaching along with your face
are, while Tweedyish, not as moving or alive as the best of the words in songs from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot:
unlock my body
move myself to dance
into warm liquid
flowing blowing glass
classical music blasting
masks the ringing in my ears
Abstract? Yes. Nonsensical cartwheeling? Probably. But there is more of what makes Gerard Manley Hopkins acrobatically beautiful in these lines from "Heavy Metal Drummer" than there is anything of significant poetic lineage or originality in "Singing Combat." I know a few worthy unpublished poets personally; one is my friend and co-worker at the school. Maybe he should just form a cult-alluring musical group, tour for years while molting members and bandnames like worn, toe-holed argyles, create a masterpiece ignored by a major label but release it to the obvious critical victory it is, and THEN put out a book of his poems. But would he still get street credit?
