Of saying something (or nothing)

It struck me, sitting among a smallish group of poetry nerds, whose workshops I regularly attend, though I bitch about it endlessly, up to my ears in "organic" pizza, that (you were probably wondering when I'd get to the point and stop blathering on about pointless mood setting) poets and those of us who condescend to write about them, these days at least, are terrified of saying anything about music, especially if it happens to be particularly germane to some metrical or phrasal concern in a poem. It's not that they lack the education to speak of such things in at least a rudimentary fashion: most edumacated types know how time works in music, the difference between measure and phrase, the effect of certain rhythms and intervals, etc. But any obvious analogy between poem and song, perhaps as a result of our resentment of Victorian and Modernist obsessions with music and verse--after all, we write about Victorians and Modernists these days; we'd never emulate them--or our innate fear of true interdisciplinarity, is demurred or ignored or outright dismissed. Of course, by we I mean we nervous hand-wringing whitey types; our savage friends need not apply.



Analogous to this fear of music, rather of saying something about music, as if music were porn and, even though we all listen to it, no one really wants to admit owning any, is a fear of media; scholars of poetry (well, the more ancient the poetry the more unavoidable this concern is) are generally not held to account for failing to interrogate the materiality of their texts, and those who do attempt to hold them accountable are typically dismissed or treated in an excruciatingly condescending manner. The danger is that we as scholars will become ever increasingly alienated from poetry. Poetry isn't just also aural anymore, it's visual as well. Images, not just descriptions of them, in motion are now just as germane to the study of poetry as music always was.

I'm a whisper in water
a secret for you to hear
you're the one who grows distant
when I beckon you near

No one could ever accuse Bjork of being banal, occasionally incomprehensible and hard to listen to, but never banal. At the moment she sings this verse, if you were merely listening to the song, say, on a bus on your way to teach yet another class on the Antigone to a group of fresh-persons who barely understand the plot much less the complexities of the imagery, you might think this yet another in the series of perplexing existential statements Bjork lays before you. But in the context of the video, it is precisely at this moment that the staged version of "My Story" has arrived at the point where "My Story" is staged. Not only does the play alienate "My Story" from its audience by adding this extra medial layer, it becomes alienated from itself. As the lyric says, "you're the one who grows distant / when I beckon you near." Any attempt to to create greater intimacy through art (thru artifice?) is futile or merely perhaps complicated by the manner in which it reinforces the distinction between "you" and "me." The very act of beckoning, calling one towards yourself, a kind of desperate invocation, implies distance and reminds us of the separation that is almost synonymous with the manner in which numerous iterations of a message, a poem, a song, will ultimately call attention to their respective medium.

I'm a fountain of blood
in the shape of a girl
you're the bird on the brim
hypnotized by the whirl

It is possible, isn't it, that our media are so new (not all that new, though) that we have yet to form the vocabulary that will eventually alienate us from them, so that we may discuss them and dissertate as we do with those Victorians and Modernists. There is a moment now in which our silence permits us to enjoy music and the lyric cinema that accompanies them, just like porn. For the moment, perhaps it is okay for us to say nothing.