A. Van Jordan
REVIEW
Kyle Dargan. The Listening. University of Georgia Press.
The Listening by Kyle Dargan is a debut collection of poems that evokes not only a diversity of subjects and life lessons, but also a symphony of voices to report them. The poems have a feel of sincerity and the craft is often quite deceptive for two reasons: 1) the poems often are understated in their tone, even quiet, and, 2) the sonic quality of these poems is often percussive, rife with four-beat lines, linguistic play and spondees. The marriage of this music and tone is often striking because it allows Dargan to teach without being pedantic. Here is a poet who has thought about the relationship between subject and form; the rumination has paid off.
And although music is often used as a conduit for subjects as disparate as childhood memories in New Jersey, an Ali vs. Frazier fight of 1975, Muddy Waters, or the occupant of a halfway house, there’s more afoot here than jazz and hip-hop as the book’s back cover intimates. Music indeed is woven in these poems, but it’s not what carries these poems. The Listening is book ended with two sections: Chronograffiti and Chronograffiti 2 (The B Sides), which feels like a misstep: this is not simply a book with jazz, hip-hop or blues rhythms, despite some of the titles and subjects of the poems--Muddy Waters, Black Jack Johnson, Misornithology—but there’s a dichotomy that develops over the course of the collection that seems more rooted in the power of reverie on the present moment, the toggling between the past and the present. What we learn from the past and its effect on the present is the real strength of the collection; the music merely complements this dynamic; indeed, the music is a soundtrack to this reckoning. Of course, there is also the implication of “tagging” time, like a chronograph measuring time intervals through the language of experience, which delves deeper than the grooves on an album.
The real misstep, however, would fall on a reader who approached The Listening only on a musical level. The title indicates—calls for, really—two kinds of listening: one in which we listen to our lives and the music they make and the other that allows music to work as a salve to the issues with which we struggle. An apt example of this can be found in Melody Forensic, epigraph et al:
If somebody told me I had only one hour to live, I’d spend it choking a white man. I’d do it nice and slow. –Miles Davis
Years in the gristle of knuckles. Thick muscle
at the palm’s base. Fingers squeezing,
digging valve keys to mold exhales. Some pain
pinched by the mouthpiece—would it wail
if you found a pink neck before lead-pipe brass?
Forgive the epigraph. Don’t apologize—
your music may taste funny to someone
after reading this. But damn, Miles (if I can call you
Miles), why do black me have to scream in art?
If poems truly begin with their titles, the epigraphs to them are certainly the second lines. I can’t think of an American poem that uses an epigraph more effectively than here. Dargan continues to annotate the pain in Miles Davis’s life brought on by the racism and violence he experienced and how music was therapy for it.
But it’s the quiet moments that really sing in this collection. Single Ride is a poem about language, communication across generations and classes and the peculiar manner in which people connect when taking public transportation. This poem takes the platitudes of every day and turns them into parables:
“Brother, brother” a man
calls me in a language left
to monolithic hair and revolt.
It’s become hustle-talk…
but this man rooted next to the turnstile
says “come on, I got you”—
pointing at an entry for downtown
C and E. I watched him get three “sisters”
through for free. His trick—
take a dead single-ride Metrocard,
rub the magnetic strip with a furious thumb
until the paper warms. The skin
and electrons he strips from his body
make the gate sing…
I want to say “good looking out
brother” as my pelvis pushes
against the metal bar. Instead I nod my head up,
meaning to say thank you in my language
trained to disbelieve simple kindness.
In a section entitled, Rememory, Dargan offers a sequence of largely unrhymed-sonnets of reverie that still holds the linguistic music of other poems, but the music recedes to the background, a soundtrack for the subjects at hand. The names of people return in these poems like a collection of connected short stories, but the language maintains the connection to the rest of the book. It reminds us that this is the recollection of a hero with a history, a journey of trials inherited, making sense of the ground on which he currently stands. In Nine Winters, the final five lines covers the relationship between three generations of men—grandfather, “Brownie”; father and son:
My father/ learns the last lesson of manhood, pathos—attending/ his father’s side for the long string of final days.// The grave wants all forgiven, and Brownie dissipates/ in 1979. I am born soon after, too late.
And when Dargan hits his final note in the collection, it’s a call for action, once again, and the poet reminds us to look back and to continue looking, in the present progressive:
there is more
than a sea
between
us.
Your story waits, swelling,
taking shape
like a wave
craving to reclaim
the sand.
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