Getting In Tune (or,
It Must Double Over) - An
Afterword in Verse
I'm singin' this note cause it fits in well with the chords I'm playin'.
I can't pretend there's any meaning here in all the things I'm sayin'.
But I'm in tune – right in tune.
I'm in tune, and I'm gonna tune
right in on you!
- The Who, "Getting In Tune"
I.
Wu Bai (or “500”) is the performing name
of Wu Jun-lin – Taiwanese guitarist-
singer-songwriter, and top man behind Taiwan’s
premiere “hard rock” act – the four-member China Blue
(I think the name’s from a Burroughs novel).
The poems you’ve just read are based on his melodies
(assuming, that is, you’ve read that prior to this).
Why poems based on foreign language pop songs?
“Hang on to your skivvies,” as my dad used to say
(“I’ll get to that in time” is what he meant, I think).
First, a few further facts about Wu Bai:
He came to prominence in the early ‘90’s.
Prior to Wu Bai’s rise to national stardom,
“hard rock” was a marginal style, at best,
the Taiwanese preferring a lighter pop sound –
though Anglo-American bands would make their rounds
(REM’s Michael Stipe compared Taipei
to the city in Blade Runner when he was here…
don’t know if the locals took it as an insult),
and Michael Jackson was still a big hit
long after his fall from grace back in the U.S.
And then there’s your occasional Beatles cover
(three years back it was “Yellow Submarine” –
done by a Hong Kong singer who lives in Taiwan).
But from their own local writers and performers
the Taiwanese expect love songs (“silly
love songs” as in the famous, acrimonious
exchange between John Lennon and Paul McCartney),
easy rhythms, pitch-accurate crooners,
and melodies that can be sung in KTV’s
(the Taiwanese version of Karaoke bars).
Wu Bai has done his part to change all that.
The ‘90’s were a decade of exploration.
In addition to the “hard” sound of Wu Bai’s band,
the concurrent invasion of hip-hop
did much to reinvigorate the Taiwan scene,
leading to a vibrant Mandarin R&B,
with frequent incorporations of rap.
I should mention the Japanese-American
singer Utada Hikaru – a musical
prodigy who, like Prince, plays everything
and was composing highly original songs
by the age of fourteen when she was discovered
in New York by singer Lenny Kravitz.
Became an overnight success two years later
with a tune she composed for a Japanese soap.
News of her spread throughout Southeast Asia
in a matter of weeks, and her debut CD,
First Love, is the region’s all-time highest seller.
As a lyricist, she shifts back and forth
between English and Japanese. A smaller voice
than that of the big-name American divas
(Mariah, Whitney, Celine, whoever),
with less emphasis placed on vocal bravura
for its own sake, yet with a comparatively
sophisticated flair for arch of line
and a much richer harmonic disposition.
Damn good R&B, in summary. Check her out.
Why did I mention her in the first place?
Oh, because she seems to have given regional
R&B a boost just as it was beginning
to run out of steam.
But I should backtrack…
Mainstream popular music in post-war Taiwan,
from what I’m able to gather, at any rate,
came together as a combination
of mid-century American pop song styles
and various forms of Taiwanese folk music
(which, if my understanding is correct,
claim Japan and not China as their place of birth,
Taiwan having been a Japanese colony
for fifty years prior to World War Two).
Foreigners tend to find it little to their taste
(mainstream pop music, that is – not Taiwanese folk,
which, in my opinion, “really kicks ass”
and still enjoys broad appeal in modern Taiwan).
My first thought was “The Carpenters in Mandarin.”
(The Carpenters are quite popular here,
in fact – though you’ll have to tell me if they’ve survived
the decade of plaid and polyester at home.)
“Saccharin”, I believe, is the word of contempt
we often bestow upon music of this sort.
But someone likes it. Can it be that bad?
Well, I’m not a snob. But I do associate
the recent “coolification” of pop music
in Taiwan with democratization,
freedom of speech and end of single-party rule.
It all coincided with hip-hop and Wu Bai.
Taking me this long to get to Wu Bai…
Well, it’s my absolute love for his songwriting,
in fact, which provides the cause for this repeated
deferral, fearful of coming up short
of homage or (otherwise) long of description.
Damn it to hell, then – I’ll just get right to the point
(after this obliged, ten-syllable line):
There’s simply nothing better in pop than Wu Bai.
On a par with the Beatles, Elvis, Aretha,
Hendrix or whoever you care to name.
And I’m writing this very poem to tell you so!
Since 1993, six studio albums
(seven, if you include the one he cut
before hooking up with his China Blue bandmates).
In addition, a handful of live recordings
(many of his finest songs are only
performed live), as well as film and TV soundtracks.
No more than a hundred songs or so in ten years.
Yet, as is true of the compositions
of all major songwriters from Stephen Foster
and Robert Johnson up to Dylan and the Clash,
each of his songs increases our knowledge,
our understanding and our appreciation
of popular song, that prince of modern art forms.
What’s more, each recording adds something new,
though without compromising what has gone before,
to what we’d denominate “The Art of Wu Bai.”
Ours is an age of song and minstrelry.
Simply put, Wu Bai ranks with our greatest minstrels.
(The Microsoft Panopticon has informed me
that “minstrelry” is not indeed a word
and offers “minstrelsy” as an alternative.
But seeing that I used it in an early poem
and that it’s been ringing in my mind since,
you’ll understand that I’m loathe to abandon it.
Anyway, Webster’s and Oxford hire teams to scout
new recruits in the symbolic order,
and Big Brother cannot gainsay the Big Other.
If you don’t get that, consult Žižek and Lacan.)
I’ll list some of his attributes of note:
A guitar player of the highest caliber,
his earliest recordings showcase a master
of both lead guitar and rhythm playing
(though it’s true he’s toned down his virtuosity
in his turn recently towards trickier song forms).
His study of rock’s top virtuosos
signals an orchestral sense that’s reminiscent
of Hendrix (minus Hendrix’s occasional
recklessness and sense of going nowhere),
a talent for sonority not unlike Page
(and unlike Page, Wu Bai’s solos are thoroughly
performable in a live medium),
and, finally, a lyricism that rivals
Clapton (albeit without that master’s frequent
study-unto-academicism).
While Wu Bai’s Taiwanese detractors frequently
tell us that Wu Bai’s singing is not up to par,
I am of the opposite opinion.
People compare him unfairly to Andy Lau,
the popular Hong Kongese singer and film star
(performers in Hong Kong must act and sing –
even Jackie Chan, I believe, has recorded).
It’s like comparing Bob Dylan with Sinatra
or Chrissie Hynde with Ella Fitzgerald.
Lao and Sinatra are fine if you want crooning.
(Lumping Ella with those two was inadvertent;
Peggy Lee or Doris Day would suffice).
But has crooning added much to the art of song?
Wu Bai has done this much, incontrovertibly.
In addition to a wonderfully
melodious and coffee-rich high baritone
(and please excuse this adjectival overkill),
he has opened rock to Chinese diction –
to Mandarin and to Taiwanese (which differs
from the former as French or German to English)
and has shown how East Asian languages
are thoroughly assimilable to a rock
idiom.
But it is in the composition
of songs that Wu Bai’s true achievement lies.
For not only has he broadened the horizon
of Chinese-language song and popular music;
equally, he has helped revitalize
a music that has been languishing in the West
since the aging of that post-war generation
to whom we owe our central idiom.
(And what a shame if he continues to remain
unheard in Europe and in North America.
Certainly a motive behind this book
is simply to make others aware of his art!)
One of the uncanny effects of Wu Bai’s work
is dislocation with respect to time.
If somehow the vocal line could be overdubbed
with a melody sung to nonsense syllables,
and listeners could be quizzed as to precise date,
you might get answers spanning three decades
with respect to a particular recording,
the field of possible provenance is that rich.
In a given song, one might detect, say,
references to ‘60’s psychedelia,
to the ‘70’s AOR guitar-anthem
(to which genre, by the way, he’s added
a handful of songs at least as good as “Stairway
to Heaven,” “Hotel California” or “Freebird”…
the number I’ve rendered as “Molly’s Song”
is perhaps the most memorable among them),
to Asian and Central Asian modal practice
(or to their commercial importation
into Anglo-American music via
Led Zeppelin, light jazz, and so forth – hard to tell which),
to funk and Latin American styles,
to the cheekier modes of metal, punk and grunge,
and, of course, to Mandarin and Cantonese pop
(which some journalists have dubbed “Bel Canto”
in reference to its easy melodizing).
Perhaps the element that serves to bind them all
together is his unmistakable
debt to the older folk traditions of Taiwan,
which shows up everywhere but which predominates
in certain melodic and rhythmic traits
that recur from song to song, and perhaps also
in a peculiar declamatory pathos
ostensibly borrowed from folk singers.
And herein lies the secret of Wu Bai’s genius –
that he has brought a “local” sensibility,
without a trace of exoticism,
into the “supranational” framework of rock,
and in so doing has restrengthened that framework
from the inside out (more on this below).
And China Blue ain’t half-bad either…but enough.
II.
I guess I should now say something about myself
and how and why I came to write this book.
I’d been carrying Wu Bai’s melodies around
in my head for a few years before it occurred
to me that I might devote a project
to the rendering of Wu Bai’s songs in English –
either direct translations out of the Chinese
or new lyrics or poems altogether.
Perhaps my firstmost goal was simply practical –
to study those lyrics I hadn’t understood
and to provide for myself English words
so as not to have to croon along in Chinese.
Beyond this, though, I also hoped that such a task
might provide a secondary outlet
and alternate format to my accustomed ways
and habits in the production of things called poems.
Further, it would be a sort of return;
for it was rock lyrics that first got me thinking
as a child about art and written expression.
My favorite poets in youth were Poe, Frost
and Dickinson, but also Taupin, Morrison
(Van and Jim), Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Robert Hunter…
I was loathe to admit a difference.
I loved all manner of meter, rhyme and wordplay.
The idea that there might be a distinction
between lyricists and poets proper
bothered me as it suggested I had to choose.
Well, it doesn’t bother me now as it once did,
as I’ve made my choice. I’m no songwriter,
though it’s possible I’ll give it a shot someday.
At any rate, it has long been my conviction
that verse proper is best when it maintains
(or keeps open, let’s say) avenues of approach
to song – to popular song, in particular.
Burns, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Dickinson and Donne –
bards who prove that “that verse is best which would to song,”
even if the song in it would remain unsung.
Modern verse has shunned its sweeter sibling.
My Wu Bai book, however modest the outcome,
might serve as a contribution to the effort
of returning the poet to his song,
after decades of modernist ingratitude
to poetry’s older, nobler, more comely twin.
So…
One day in the late fall of last year
I sat down with a notebook and a stereo
and began puzzling my way through my favorites.
My goal was, first, to produce a lyric
commensurate in full with the original
with respect to metrical and syllabic count.
In a word, it had to be singable.
In addition, it had to read well as a poem.
I knew this would provide something of a challenge,
as most lyrics do not read well as poems
(even true of Dylan, our greatest lyricist).
“An impossible task, perhaps,” I told myself,
but I’d learn much from the experiment.
The first thing I learned’s that you don’t know a lyric,
or, more precisely, the lyrical arrangement
of a song, until you have transcribed it –
its stanzaic and metrical disposition.
It’s necessary to write it all out by hand,
as lyric sheets do not record stresses
(those stresses occurring in each and every song
that alter the “face-value” of any lyric).
If the reader will take me at my word
that I’ve been exact and scrupulously faithful
in my procedure of metrical transcription,
then he or she may gather from my book
the spectacular diversity of song forms
and poetic types that fill Wu Bai’s repertoire.
Rather than laying out a technical
description with Latinate terminology
of Wu Bai’s often complex versification,
instead I’ll offer a few examples
of challenges presented by various songs,
obstacles I came up against, etc.
***
I’ll begin with my very first effort –
“Molly’s Song,” which I’ve already mentioned above.
The tune is nominally in a major key,
though it spends an equal amount of time
under the aspect of the relative minor,
and it is an anguished minor that’s remembered.
Wu Bai’s title is “Norwegian Forest” –
perhaps a reference to the John Lennon song,
though it also refers to a lake in Taiwan.
The brightest moment in the song occurs
following on the verse that precedes the chorus.
The incipit of this bit sounds like “Nolly Hoo.”
This is where my poem begins (“Molly, who’s
gonna do this, who’s gonna do that,” and so forth).
I penned a tale of a housewife who’s up and left,
and the “Molly, who’s” are the Big Other
in its guilt-laden and persecutory mode.
The bit of major-key gladness that we’re given
(apart from the sardonic “Molly, who’s”)
come belatedly at the end of the chorus,
in which Molly dreams of reaching her promised land –
a mysterious town built on a well –
with her unanswering companion and driver.
In contrast, there’s no tale in the original,
which presents a lyric of thwarted love
and of solace taken on the banks of a lake.
If the reader will kindly direct his or her
attention to the poem I’m discussing,
I’ll use it to make several general points,
as I find it representative of the whole.
First, note that most of the lines in the poem
begin on accented syllables, and, further,
that the poem is predominantly trochaic
(meaning “DOWN up DOWN up DOWN” and SO on).
The first departure from this is with the dactyl
that occurs at the end of the first two stanzas
(“HOW much WILL it COST me, BUS man to RIDE…”).
The point I’d like to make is my discovery
that 2’s tend to predominate well over 3’s
in Wu Bai – to a far greater extent,
I believe, than would be the case with British or
American songwriters – and, as with this song,
the order is most commonly STRONG-weak,
in contrast with the fundamental iambic
comportment of English (“to BE or NOT to BE”).
I’ll also note that Wu Bai uses 3’s
to effect movement between major and minor
(as in the “TAKE me or MAYbe” of the chorus,
with its vectoring up towards the major).
(Note, as well, that in my rendition the triples
are given exclusively to the narrator –
to Molly, that is. The italicized
taunts from the stolid Big Other are in duples
and fall on her in ominously minor steps.)
The reader by now may well have wondered,
“How do the Chinese tones enter into all this?”
From the standpoint of overall comprehension,
it is true that the tones are a challenge.
That is, even native speakers of Mandarin
often resort to a printout of the lyrics,
as spoken tones tend to drop out when sung.
Still, though, words tend to commingle in 2’s and 3’s,
much as in English. Take, for example, the phrase,
“Wo you yige hau pengyou.” We’ll render
it as follows: “I have got a very good friend,”
which could be read, “I have GOT a VEry GOOD friend.”
Trochaic all the way. Similarly,
the Chinese could read, “WO you YIge HAU pengYOU.”
Yet read out in this way, both sound like doggerel –
maybe an intro to a bawdy joke.
In “normal” everyday speech, however, we’d say,
“I’VE got a VEry good FRIEND,” in pronounced dactyls.
The Chinese: “WO you YIge hao PENGyou.”
As a rule, I’d say Chinese is more flexible –
more malleable, perhaps – with respect to stress.
Why? Because tones must be left at the door
when words and phonemes enter the Kingdom of Song.
(I should add as an aside that these reflections
hold only for Wu Bai’s Mandarin songs.
A quarter to a third of his compositions
are in Taiwanese – a tongue I don’t understand,
although I’ve lived here for eleven years.
Few foreigners bother to learn it – no textbooks
are available, seven tones rather than four,
and the locals can’t explain them to you…
It’s the language spoken by the majority
of Taiwanese at home and in the family.
In schools and at work, they speak Mandarin.
Connoisseurs will tell you that Wu Bai’s Taiwanese
lyrics are superior to his Mandarin
and have literary worth of their own.
Having to rely on my wife and friends for help,
I’ve possibly gone about his Taiwanese songs
with a freer pen than with the others.
See “High In May” and “The Window and the Faces.”)
***
You’ll also wonder where the inspiration came
with respect to particular pieces.
Sometimes, as in “Molly’s Song,” it was a single
phrase that evoked a phrase with a similar sound
in English, and the poem grew from that phrase.
This book’s final sequence (entitled “Singapore”)
is another example of this, my title
sounding like a phrase from Wu Bai’s chorus.
I had hoped in several cases to attempt
translations, though this ended futilely each time.
I had especially hoped to render
Wu Bai’s great lyric “Bai Ge” (“White Dove”) in English.
This is a special song in Wu Bai’s repertoire
as it was composed for a dying child
from whom the songwriter had received a letter.
Benjamin’s “task of the translator” in this case
proved more than I was able to muster.
See “Tales of Yo,” a sci-fi yarn in three sonnets.
(The one thing I retained from the original
was the use throughout of the same end-rhyme.)
With others, I tried to capture the song’s spirit,
as in my rendition of his “World Number One” –
a drinking song and Taiwan’s de facto
national anthem, used by current President
Chen Shui-bian and his party in campaign rallies
(see “Brothers’ Drinking Song” in this volume).
In at least one case I borrowed Wu Bai’s title
but wrote an entirely different sort of poem
(“Broken Radio” – and “Asshole,” as well…
which matter-of-factly translates a Japanese
curse popular with adolescents in Taiwan).
In most cases, “stanzaic alignment”
was requisite. That is, I would try to locate
the stanza I felt was most representative
of the song’s “metrical situation”
and utilize that as my own poem’s cornerstone
or building block, the artificiality
of the procedure compensated for
by the consistency it would lend in a poem.
It was often necessary, in addition,
to add a stanza here or modify
a chorus for repetition’s purposes there,
in order to flesh out the space where a guitar
solo was played in the original
or add variety where simply repeating
would not still suffice in a poetic format.
***
The longer sequences in “Molly’s Song”
are the result of having to “acclimatize”
gradually to Wu Bai’s metrical puzzles.
See “Seven Progressively Better Poems,”
which is based on a song with a Brechtian feel.
(I’m somewhat stupefied as to precisely where
the references to Kurt Weil come from –
possibly via the Doors’ first album, although
I find it more likely that German cabaret
or elements of it filtered down to
Wu Bai through various modern “folk” idioms.)
The big trick in this song is the “bone in the throat”
posed by a trochaic line in each verse,
apart from which the song rollicks along in 3’s.
My first couple attempts were strictly doggerel.
The fourth resulted in a decent poem,
but as a lyric it was a bit too abstruse.
The sixth one approached the original in tone.
A good lyric, it falls short as a poem.
I felt that the seventh satisfied both genres.
Also, there’s “Singapore,” which I’ve mentioned above.
A fantastically difficult stanza
of nine uneven, metrically varying lines.
When I started out, I simply wanted to write
a tongue-in-cheek poem about Singapore
in the manner of Bob Dylan’s classic early
send-up of New York City. Before I knew it,
though, I had embarked on a travelogue
based on a journey I made there in ’96.
As can be gathered from a reading of the poem,
I found, when I had gotten to the end,
that my week-long experience with Wu Bai’s form
had led me into a set of contemplations
entirely off my initial topic.
I wrote these up as a prolonged “intervention”
which concluded, at last, with my final effort
to provide Wu Bai’s song with a lyric –
“Ringamore.” If you like it, then I’ve succeeded.
***
Alas, though – do I feel that I have succeeded?
Succeeded in creating poetry
and in providing lyrics for Wu Bai’s best songs?
“Too early to tell” (as Mao purportedly said
as per the French Revolution’s merit).
In some cases, my lyric’s better than my poem;
in other cases, rather the reverse is true.
My lyric on occasion improves on
the original; just as often, it falls short.
In at least two or three instances, I fancy
I’ve got a perfect match. A match, that is
to say, of poem, lyric and song. Won’t tell you which.
III.
The phrase "lyrical ballads" in my subtitle
is a reference, of course, to Wordsworth.
The young Wordsworth, in the late 18th-century,
hoped verse would return to the state of common speech.
He sought a "deliterarization"
of poetic writing (pardon the awkwardness
of that coinage – as far as I know it's my own).
His plan of attack was a double one:
On the one hand, he studied common balladry
and wrote metered verse derived from popular airs
(poems like "Lucy Gray," "Ruth," and "Hart-Leap Well");
this, in turn, fueled a renewed approach to blank verse,
resulting in some of his greatest poems ("Michael,"
the Tintern Abbey lines, and "The Prelude").
Like Wordsworth, my goal has been to return to song.
It's not that verse has become "too literary"
(today, in fact, it often doesn't seem
literary enough). The trouble lies elsewhere:
First, you had the modernists, who lost their public –
readers, that is, who would buy and read verse.
Then you had the ugly aftermath to the Beats –
"slap it down on the page and call it poetry"
(our national pedagogy likely
played its part in our poetic Entkunstigung…
not that I'm against teaching poetry in school).
Finally, the post-war generation
took it upon itself to come up with an art –
a sort of poor man's Gesamtkunstwerk – in which verse
was granted higher command and stature
than it had been in the dumb old bourgeois art song.
Thereafter, who cared to read unmelodied verse?
Who can say today what poetry IS?
As it seems I'm the sole guy on the fabled dump
(see Wallace Stevens' poem, "The Man On the Dump"),
I'll set about my own definition:
Let's begin with my chosen Wordsworth epigraph:
"The Knowledge both of poetry and of science
is pleasure." The quote is from his famous
"Preface to Lyrical Ballads" – the landmark book
he wrote with Coleridge. For pleasure, read enjoyment –
Lacanian enjoyment. Thus, jouissance.
"Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge."
Presumably, it precedes science and ends it.
Thus, myth at the outset, punk at the end.
From Homer bypassing Newton to Sid Vicious.
I'm joking. Let's follow Wordsworth a bit further.
Paraphrasing Shakespeare, Wordsworth goes on:
"The Poet is he who looks before and after."
Let's wrestle with these alternate formulations.
Verse was, science is, verse again will be.
But at the same time, poetry straddles the Now
(or surmounts it, assuming it's Stevens' dump) –
science's older and younger sibling.
The poet concerns himself with knowledge in that
he surveys where knowledge was and where it would be
in a spirit of Heideggerian
Sorge, while his alter ego, the scientist,
pursues his path in blithe and wanton unconcern.
Now let's turn to our second epigraph,
this time from the French philosopher Althusser.
“I do not rank art with the ideologies;
rather, science makes them conceptual
and art, sensible.” (A metrical paraphrase.)
From the same passage: “Art does not replace knowledge…
Science gives us knowledge of the object;
art allows us to perceive – to see and feel it.”
First, note that, whereas knowledge in Wordsworth's passage
was a neutral third term between science
and art, it is now equivalent with science –
reflecting French conceptions undeniably,
but certainly also the change of time.
Platonic third terms are no longer feasible.
Ideology is now the operative
and non-ideal third term between science/
knowledge on the one hand and art on the other.
To picture Althusser's conception graphically:
life and life practices comprise the roots
(these are non-verbal, though not essentially so);
ideology – the trunk – consists of statements
on life and on the practices of life
(statements that are pre-reflective but that further
life, its practice, production and reproduction);
finally, knowledge (or science) and art
are branches forking up from ideology.
Ideological statements come to order
(or are reflected upon) in knowledge,
whereas ideology is made sensual
in art, which composes pictures of what we speak,
makes it available to the senses
in rebused configurations of the spoken.
Althusser's emphatic point is that art is not
an ideology, as orthodox
Marxists routinely claimed – that it does not reflect
ideology for the simple reason that
it itself is a sustained reflection
on ideology's contents and discontents –
although its reflections are not conceptual
as are the reflections of its sibling.
Thus, we’ll say that Wordsworth’s science has been replaced
(or else displaced) by ideology. That perch
or fetid mound upon which Stevens stands
is ideological, not scientific.
Knowledge has been demoted – or, rather, exposed
as ideological. That’s to say,
we don’t really know what it is that we’re saying,
and we do not assume the site from which we speak.
A blow to our immediate knowledge,
though knowledge through science is granted dignity.
You’ll say we've weaved quite a prolixity of terms.
From Wordsworth: science, poetry (and art),
knowledge – its enjoyment, its pleasure, its jouissance.
Stevens’s dump. Althusser’s ideology.
What have I added to this confusion?
What does it have to do with the business of verse?
Here I'll attempt a restatement of what I wrote
in my "intervention" to "Singapore"
(and I'll tally up my points by numbering them):
1) Poetry is a dream of what is spoken.
You see how this follows from Althusser.
It clarifies the fact that ideology
is primarily a linguistic entity.
Verse is a dreamy reflection on it,
not of it, in contrast to the vulgar Marxists.
2) Prose is a synonym for what is spoken,
a written account of all that is said,
its archive – speech insofar as it's remembered.
Bark, perhaps, on the trunk of ideology.
3) Melody relates to the spoken
the same as all art does to ideology.
(Note: I've forgotten to mention that Althusser's
thesis is axiomatic – that's 4).)
5) The spoken undergoes shifts when melodized.
These shifts are paradigmatic of change in speech.
Perhaps all linguistic change begins here.
6) The changes that melody makes audible
are fleeting but are harbingers of the future –
of speech as it one day may be spoken.
7) It's up to verse, to poetry proper,
to make a record of these possible changes.
8) But verse is also a memory,
since it merely remembers the changes in song.
Each poem is but a remembrance of its lost twin.
QED: Wordsworth's before and after.
9) All art takes place in advance of reflection.
And here we proceed a step beyond Althusser.
While reflection monitors the changes
that take place in ideology, it is art
that provides an auditorium for such shifts.
10) Poetry is, then, the central art
in that it intermediates most directly
between ideology and its reflection
in science/knowledge as well as in art.
11) Materialism is that thought
which deals with matter either directly (science)
or through investigations concerning
how humans effect change in their material.
Poetic practice always entails a theory
of change in the material of speech.
Therein resides our practice, our truer practice.
***
I'd like to conclude this "Afterward to Wu Bai"
with a few comments on that shadowy
presence that has been haunting these last few pages.
"Karl! Mein Karl! Heraus, heraus, wherever you are!"
Materialism. You sensed his shade
there, surely, if you didn't sense it earlier.
"Marx? What are these clownish references to Marx?
Surely, Gilchrist Haas, you must be joking!"
I would like to try to explain my interest
in Marx – a passion that I've held for many years.
The trouble is, there's so much to explain
concerning Marx when addressing Americans.
In Europe, by contrast, you don't have this problem.
Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Heidegger…
Simply another name among the big thinkers.
"Maybe I'll get to him someday, maybe I won't."
In the U.S., he falls out of this crowd.
All manner of nonsense is assumed about Marx.
First, that he wrote a theory of communism.
Second, that Marxism as we know it –
as a doctrine propagated by powerful,
oppressive states in the 20th-century –
is a direct outcome of this theory.
My good Americans, let's set a few things straight:
The mature theory of Karl Marx is not about
communism but about capital –
what capitalism is and just how it works.
He was supported by a communist party,
it is true – one of the many offshoots
of 18th-century utopianism.
And yes, his most memorable early pamphlet
is named The Communist Manifesto.
But Marx himself did not invent communism;
nor did he waste much breath on it in his writing.
"If Marx dint do all that, what did he do?"
Calm down, Beavis. I'll enlighten you presently.
First, in his early work (most notably, perhaps,
The German Ideology – also
the Manifesto and many things left in draft)
he developed a material conception
of history based on economy,
which studies how humans fulfill their basic needs.
(In fact, the theory itself was largely Hegel's.
Marx just took it and fleshed it out a bit.)
This conception adumbrated in sketchy terms
how need-fulfilling production in modern times,
along with the means of its ownership,
would eventually give way to a better,
more equitable system of distribution.
The assumption was it would happen soon.
What happened, instead, was partial revolution –
the European miscarriage of '48.
Marx's response was to lock himself up
in a London library for twenty-odd years
and devote himself to economic study,
which culminated in Das Kapital,
Volume One – the most detailed description to date
of the European economic system.
Unfortunately, Volume One is just
the gleaming tip of a conceptual iceberg
that melts away in his drafts for later volumes,
left in the hands of Engels at his death.
Marx's theory is not about communism;
nor is Marx himself particularly "Marxist"
("I am not a Marxist," he told Engels).
Yet just the other day I read in the paper
that "Deng Xiao-ping had improbably wed Adam
Smith with Karl Marx" in his market reforms –
the author of this quite remarkable statement
ignorant of the plain fact that Das Kapital
is an update of The Wealth of Nations,
that Marx is beyond doubt Smith's most gifted pupil.
("Alright, where's he going with all this Marx nonsense?
What's Marx doing in a piece on Wu Bai?"
Patience and (as Neil Young sings) "you will come around."
For see how the argument returns to itself:)
As a poet, my interest in Marx
is two-fold: First, his theory of material
production at some point opens up upon words.
Thinkers indebted to Marx's theory
(Benjamin, Adorno and Lacan among them)
have made this clear, though poets haven't yet caught on.
Further, the grand systematicity
of his central work has been greatly inspiring.
The speech that the poet confronts is a system
not unlike Marx's capitalism.
Certain things are allowed, others are disallowed.
The poet must fathom the great complexity
of that in which he seeks to intervene.
This is where my professed "materialism"
encroaches upon Freudian territory:
The spoken is one with the unconscious,
one with the symbolic order, the Big Other
(in Lacan, these three terms are interchangeable).
The poet, like the infant child, enters
and confronts a system of language that was there
in advance of his entry (which, indeed, was planned,
was prepared, was taken into account).
The poet goes about the difficult business
of metaphor – or of how the material
of spoken language changes over time.
Can one individual alter the system,
as Marx fancied to do from his library perch?
Perhaps the question's undecidable.
My theory suggests that it's not the poet's task
to effect changes in the realm of the spoken,
but to unveil nodal points of such change.
In my most recent poems, I've turned my attention
to the question of poetic repetition.
Wordsworth spoke of verse as a renewal
of speech and of its resemblance to the spoken –
of the pleasure that we take in this resemblance.
This pleasure is thus a "doubling over"
of prose (which is already doubled over speech).
As such, it provides us with an alternative
to ideological nostalgia
which arises first in the post-traditional
era as its fundamental "doubling over."
The poet questions how we get back home –
whether those old roads lead us back to our true selves.
This he does by registering the nodes of change,
the true nodes made visible when speech sings.
And these nodes resonate in turn with older nodes
that were forgotten or were never taken up
(what Benjamin meant by Jetztzeit – "now-time").
I have also been preoccupied recently
with the way in which the poet's "interventions"
in the realm of the spoken may suggest
or forecast interventions in other domains
such as the contemporary global market.
In my long poem from Baron, "Steeplechase,"
I attempt to show how John Ashbery, more than
three decades ago, gave us an eerie outline
of what's transpired since the millennium.
And this brings me back full circle to my passion
for popular music, rock 'n roll, and Wu Bai.
Popular music frequently, perhaps
mostly, evinces bad universality.
Like Hollywood and like "late capitalism,"
it argues on the behalf of an all
to which the parts of which it's made do not add up
(it pretends to speak for one and all, simply put,
but stacks its revenues in the corner).
Wu Bai has re-enlivened our music’s first thought,
a century and a half after Beethoven
and Schiller: to provide a medium
in which men and women, as in the song of Bob
Marley, can all “get together and feel alright,”
thus granting themselves a respite from work –
a repetition of production aimed to serve
the enjoyment of homus oeconomicus
(Rousseau’s “economic man” (and woman!)).
It's when the provincial comes to speak for the whole
that true universalism again presides.
Florence, Mannheim, New Orleans. Now, Taipei.
***
To return one last time to Wordsworth's example:
Perhaps his attempted ballads are not so great
and fall rather short of "Tintern Abbey"
and the epoch-making blank verse of the Prelude.
What counts for me is his effort to bring back verse
to song and to the change that song effects.
If I've done even half this much in Molly's Song,
and if I've contributed to the enjoyment,
the jouissance we take in repeated speech –
in that speech that reflects upon what's been spoken,
that sweeter, nobler, higher speech we know as song –
and if I've managed to interest you
in Wu Bai, a true prince of song - then I'm happy.
Don't Let Him Remain Unheard in the West!
- introducing Wu
Bai - Taiwanese guitarist,
singer, songwriter -
Wake up, America – your pop music is dead!
The old banalities have been rehashed
all too thoroughly. There's no blood left in those stones.
But behold yon orb, newly aloft in the East:
Wu Bai, his name; magnitude, 500.
Verily I tell you, if the world were to end
tomorrow, self-extinguished in a pestilence
brought on by our latter-day alchemists
and facilitated by multinational
edutainment cabals (the news, etc.) –
in such a great calamity as this,
the loss of losses, the sadness of sadnesses,
the single greatest tragedy of humankind
and world history would be: that Wu Bai,
the sublime Wu Bai, had gone unheard in the West!!!
Taipei and Shuang Xi,
September 1 - 7, 2004
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