Mule Is Headphone Poetry

Shane McCrae and I trade YouTube clips of bands we like over e-mail. There's a tonal quality in the types of clips we send -- the bands we like tend to have lyric sensibilities while their words and their guitar sounds are distorted through a tangle of reverb and fuzz. I know Shane's favorite band is My Bloody Valentine. I know he likes the Jesus & Mary Chain. He likes bands with guitars that sound like purring chainsaws. Of course, I like these types of bands too. There's something about the union of the lyric with the cacophonous that puts me in a meditative state. Drone music. Layered music . . . music that I can feel in my jaw. Ultimately, it's music that breaks my heart. The hum of it rising from my stomach into my blood so that the bass syncopates with my pulse. Distortion is part of the message. That no matter how hard a musician strives for that perfect note, for virtuosity, there's beauty and grace in his or her failure to reach the achievement.

This is all to say that Shane McCrae's first book of poetry, Mule, breaks my heart in the same delicious way that I enjoy having my heart broken again and again while listening to my favorite LP's on a slow Sunday morning. Such art asks for active cooperation between reader and artist in order to achieve transference. The reader must be willing to surrender, since a total understanding of the speaker's grief in Mule occurs beyond the bounds of reason or logic. At the heart of Shane's work is a heavy layering of formal poetic impulses -- much of the book is written in meter and rhyme -- with the distortion of the meter through caesura, elision, and slanted lines that signify a break in the metrical count. There is no punctuation throughout the book unless you're counting the forward slashes as punctuation. Shane also makes use of heavy repetition. I'm telling you this now because I want you to understand something -- the tension taking place in Mule between the poems' collapsing sonnet-like forms and the highly emotional material (the end of love, fatherhood, race, and loss) will slay you as it did me.

The poem, "Internal Horses" is one poem that tore me up. The poem follows the speaker whose marriage is dissolving while he observes his autistic son:

As we divorced        Nicholas rode

internal horses          / And watching him

from the bench at the edge of the park/ In wildflowers

him in wildflowers in fields/ Of wildflowers him in fields        on

playgrounds which

Blossom from the ground

and then the ground

Must be covered over         with foam with bark

The stammering syntax suggests a speaker who is feeling for some solid, verifiable ground and in failing to find it, resorts to a stutter. I like to think of the loop machine employed by Merrill Garbus, the lead singer and performer of the tUnE-yArDs. She deftly records multiple tracks of her voice and then intersperses them in the song with a touch of a foot pedal. The effect is astounding. The impact of the vocal repetition is primal. So too the impact of the repetition of "wildflowers" in this poem.  The portrayal of the speaker's sense of the child rocking and horses running is a pitch-perfect dissolution of form.  It gives me the impression of a climber searching the crevasse of a sheer rock-face for a foothold.

Speaking of which, the iambic meter surges the scene forward while the speaker seems to attempt to hold the action back by breaking the metrical count. The forward slashes signify the end of a metrical line. The image of "internal horses" suggests that the autistic child is rocking to sooth himself while the speaker imagines an idyllic place for the child's attentions. The poem continues:

To love him just enough     to sit there watch-/ ing not enough         for

us to stay together

Not more enough than us

The above lines refer to one of the central themes of the book -- how to stay "married" despite everything in the world . . . how everything is "Not more enough than us." The idea of marriage, throughout the book, is mutable. Though marriage refers to the speaker's ending marriage, it also suggests the fusion of other disparate selves. In this case, the child is not enough to keep this marriage from collapsing. But in other cases in the book marriage refers to race, fatherhood, and a myriad of other selves that cannot keep the speaker's world from bursting apart.

Finally, the poem closes:

If we had put our ears to the ground

we might have heard the horses/ Carrying him our son away

the sound      carried away and al-/so back        both    both together

Not running from and not             running to us

Imagine this last stanza to be the closing quatrain of a sonnet. The speaker speculates what might have been had both speaker and his soon-to-be ex-spouse listened to what the son might be hearing. But of course, we know that such an exercise is a futile one. The poem is a momentary stay against confusion and ultimately fails to keep the speaker's world together.

Now, I understand that one of the pitfalls of writing challenging work is the potential for readers to feel required and not invited to participate. It's the old issue of accessibility and whether or not the poet is being generous. Let me say that the work in Mule is generous beyond measure and that Shane McCrae's poems are more than inviting. It's so easy to provide the reader an answer, a simple hook, a stable core, but the materials that Shane McCrae handles in Mule can't be touched with kid gloves. There's nothing easy about heartbreak.

I had this discussion with a couple of friends about Radiohead's new album The King of Limbs. It's a difficult album, but if you're attentive. If you listen closely, it will break your heart with every listen. The album's use of layering as well as distortion, plus the barely audible sounds in the background add tremendous resonance to the entirety of the album. I like to call this type of music "headphone music." It's not an indictment of the album, but rather high praise. It means it requires immersion, an attentive listen. It means it's the reader's moral obligation to give over an afternoon or morning to the celebration of the work. Mule is headphone poetry. It's the type of music I expect Shane to link in his e-mail. It's the kind of poetry I'll play on a loop.