A Poem is a Song: On Douglas Kearney's "Sho"
Douglas Kearney | Sho | Wave Books | 2021 | 82 Pages
A poem is not a song. This is a devastating reality for me, a poet with nearly zero musical ability. A poem, despite its greatest efforts, is not music. Lyric, verse, rhythm, repetition, rhyme, sonics; poetry frequently borrows the vernacular of music, a frustrating trick for the poet who is ultimately left alone in their room with the quietude of a page and the pathetic clack of a keyboard. But I get it. More than most essays or novels, poems are concerned with the sounds of words themselves, the particular relationship between syllable and silence, and what their accumulation yields.
As far as things that are not music go, poetry bears more than a passing resemblance, aesthetically and metaphorically. Meter’s steady metronome, the end-stop’s percussion, caesura’s surprising syncopation, open vowels as power chords, and the punk rock turn a poem takes when the tempo picks up and punctuated lines give way to enjambment. But no, poetry is still not music. I know this because of what a poem asks of me: words are much more self-conscious than a chord progression strummed searchingly as the player lets their mind wander.
The formula for musical improvisation seems both carefree and mathematical in a way that is antithetical to the arrangement of language. I often fantasize about the freedom and collaboration of a jam session, pulling up to some other poet’s house, pen in hand, and just letting loose as the notes suck and soar and (thank god) the stakes do not matter beyond the pleasure of the sounds we make when we make them together. But no, this doesn’t happen. I am afraid that even the freest poets I can find on Twitter might be too self-serious for something like this kind of jam session. I count myself among them.
Put another way, poetry cannot be music because poems are too lonely on the page. Music is only lonely when it wants to be. I want the contrast of a piano played softly with a blaring vocal. I want a lullaby sung too loud to sleep to. I want my voice to crack. Can a poem duet? Not like I want it to. I want a guitar solo when words won’t wail the way strings can. Maybe a tone shift mirrors a key change, but that’s not enough. I want a poem to be all-consuming the way a song can be. I want to turn a poem up.
I realize I may be revealing gaps in my knowledge of both poetry and music, but it’s sometimes tempting to be absolute with my woes about this art (how much more a piano could say than this laptop keyboard!), so I’ll ask that you bear with me as I attempt to articulate feelings and ideas that may in the end be better expressed in song. I’ll never know for sure due to my aforementioned musical shortcomings and early-onset arthritis.
It was in this state of self-indulgent disappointment that I encountered Douglas Kearney’s Sho. To call this work a collection of poems is both undeniable and, if you have the same preconceptions as I did, imprecise. Operatic, multi-vocal, and self-aware of its songness, Sho is at once a record, a song, and a stage performance (not meant for some later stage, but written for the stage that only a page can be). While I could certainly stretch my imagination to accept the modes of musicality in poetry, I needed a poet to show up and disrupt my ears and eyes in such a way that I would have no other choice than to say, “Okay, I was wrong. A poem can be a song.”
Sho was my introduction to Kearney’s work, the body of which is expansive. In the margins of “Demonology,” I wrote “opera?” and felt self-satisfied when I learned that Kearney is indeed a librettist. Kearney’s record of works shows he is concerned with the study of music and sound. It is because of this that the choice to make Sho a collection of poetry is just as consequential as the poems themselves. This is not an artist whose one way of expressing is poetry and therefore he had to make his poems poems. In addition to six books, Douglas Kearney has written four operas and recorded a live LP, Fodder (released the same year, it features a few of the poems from Sho) with composer Val Jeanty. I have to assume each choice of medium is very intentional (can I say the same for myself?).
That this show is performed on the page signals that the written form offers a necessary dimension to the poems as they appear on paper. With cool wisdom, Kearney tells David Naimon on the podcast Between the Covers that “all poems are performing something.” To my mind, this resonates as a sort of linguistic double consciousness; language functions as language (communicating within the syntactical rules of English) but is also aware of itself as language (and therefore breaks those rules, not so much that the communication is incomprehensible, but enough to trouble the expectation of what a word carries with it). This connection to W.E.B. Dubois’ concept of double consciousness seems purposeful. For one, Sho is constantly playing with language that can and will be read differently depending if one is reading with the framework of and fluency in African American Vernacular English, and while the audience is always a relevant party to any art form, Sho is constantly reminding us that it sees us working out the words it’s giving us. It sees our struggle and delight.
This has been written elsewhere, but it bears mentioning now that Sho is a noteworthy departure from Kearney’s previous collections of poetry, which utilized a technique the author calls “performative typography,” “Indesign poems,” or “eye weather.” The latter phrase feels particularly relevant to Sho, where poems appear to be “straight” poetry—that is, in a consistent typeface and font size, margins respected on all sides. The eye hears the sound of these poems much differently than it does when engaging with the noise chorus of an Indesign poem; if the sourced texts of the Indesign poems can be seen as a type of sampling, what does it mean for Sho to be devoid of that? It is an album with no features, so to speak. But that does not mean the collection is a solo endeavor. Its speaker may be a different person or multiple from one poem to the next, and often within the same poem.
If we believe the author that all poetry is performance, then the use of italics throughout the text seems to be a way of utilizing performative typography as a kind of musical notation within the tightened constraints of Sho. In the terms of eye weather, when a reader sees italics, we are conditioned to set the italicized words apart as somehow different or different-sounding from the non-italicized text. Perhaps a thought, a quotation, or the (imminently outdated) signifier of non-English language being integrated into an otherwise Engish text. In Sho, it seems that italics often signify the presence of an additional voice, if not an additional speaker or speakers.
That logic is introduced early, with the second poem, “Well”: “Would I / then rung down myself to that stood water, / to what’s drown down in it / — by which i mean us / us / us.” The italicized collective carries over to the next piece, “Property Values,” where recurring italics become a sort of backing vocal, the em dash denotes a held-note that fades out behind the lead, and the indented lines indicate a second speaker speaking (or duettist):
I aspire to be a CVS: Lord, I wanna be
a drugstore inna my heart—.
Or a nice NEIGHBORhood,
a rapless gas up—
inna my heart— a “legit” “ballot”—
I perspire all night at it.
This creates constant interplay between singer and choir. When there is, at all times, the possibility of a multitude of voices and instruments, suddenly the solitary speaker of any poem becomes an an undeniable aberration, a shift that can’t go unheard by the reader. Part two of the book includes “Deformation,” the only poem in the collection that is entirely italicized.
Silence is also an instrument (think: the breath mark before the sonata’s finale). In Sho, silence carries intensity due to its proximity to the polyphony that surrounds it. The final poem of part one, “Demonology” spans eight pages. The first six are populated by couplets, one pair per page, each accumulating detail on the titular demon. The final couplet “I know exorcize–what first meant to conjure, / but drifted to later, drive out what was called” is followed by a mostly empty page, not entirely blank, but almost. Instead of another couplet, a pair of quotation marks appear in opposing corners (the black background of part two’s title marking the start of the next section shows through the paper, a detail I find remarkable even if unintentional). On the page that follows, the poem concludes with a single line:
Come here. Come here. Come here. Come here.
Who is the speaker now? The haunter or the haunted? Who is doing the conjuring? This unknowability offers an answer as to why a librettist might choose to make Sho a collection of poems rather than an opera or an album. For all of the information that the eye can give us, we can’t know for sure who is speaking or how they are delivering their lines. This ambiguity is the point. The apparent lack of information creates the specific type of tension that a poem can accomplish but another form can’t achieve; to know who is singing or which instrument is being played gives the listener too much certainty. Some songs need to be played on the page.
Several moments in Sho reveal that the poem actually knows it is a song. In “Dogged,” a poem in ten sections, the speaker says toward the beginning of part eight:
“Not singing just now, though o—”
The section ends:
Singing now: —of thee—
Section nine begins:
Done singing just now. / Even so, I’m song, used to.
Whats left, whats left but the maw set upon my body.
The em dash again is carrying on the note that can’t be written. But it seems important, too, that we are never given the whole song. The track cuts short, the curtain falls for a moment, and the speaker finishes singing behind the scenes. Only the escaping “o—” that ends section nine suggests the song isn’t quite over. In this poem, a poem in part concerned with naming, Kearney makes specific room for the mms and ohs, the weighty vocalizations I once thought weren’t possible in poetry the way they are in song. Again, though, Kearney proves me wrong.
In Sho, the proverbial distance between the page and the stage collapses; the eye becomes the thing that can hear the harmony, the chorus, each instrument, the whole song. Section two opens with the titular poem “Sho” and proves that the word is an instrument. The poem holds two truths: words get their meaning in the context of the other words around them. Yes. And: a word holds a world all on its own. Like a single key on a piano, a word can be played over and over and cultivate meaning with each repetition and rest in between. In “Sho,” which is a torchon, a sestina-like form created by Indigo Weller, the requisite repetition of end sounds register in a way that could only exist in a poem.
look fresher for show
ing, I got deep, spit
out my mouth, a rig
id red ring. Bloody
melon. Ha! No sweat!
Joking!
This keeps building across 24 stanzas, each playing off the other with a similar quick attention to sonics. The dual meaning generated when a word breaks across a line is a visual sonic that only poetry can deliver.
While the ear can hear several instruments and voices at once, the eye can take in a whole landscape in a single glance. In assessing the eye weather of a poem, the reader has information about how long the poem is, if words are crossed out or capitalized, how words are spelled, and what sort of punctuation is used and how often. If the eye is a thing that listens (something that hearing-impaired people are already well aware of), then it must be the case that a poem can be a song. At the very least I can say this: while reading Sho, I heard music.