Michael Turner, Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems

 

Everything I think I ambeginning is already in motion and never ends. An infinite middle that “begins”with my periodic need of origins.

This book has itsbeginnings. One of them came in the fall of 2019, when I was on hold waiting tospeak to my cable provider. The song playing was the Beatles’ “Yesterday.”

Another came in 1979,when Debbie, mark, Phil and I began spending after-hours at the Avenue Grill.Each booth had its own jukebox, and we fed ours regularly, colouring our worldwith song.

A third came ten yearsbefore that, in 1969, captured in a long-lost Polaroid of my mother, my sisterand me standing uncomfortably around our piano while my father led us in asing-a-long. On top of the piano was a cloth-bound book called A Treasury ofOur Best-Loved Songs.

Thelatest from Vancouver writer, poet and musician Michael Turner is Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press,2024), a collection that follows multiple poetry and prose titles across thirty-plusyears that play with genre, music and narrative layerings, from the infamous Hard Core Logo (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993)—the only Canadian poetry title adapted into a feature-length film— Kingsway (Arsenal Pulp Press,1995), American Whiskey Bar (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997), The Pornographer’s Poem (Toronto ON: Doubleday, 1999) and the most recent 9x11(Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2018) [see my review of such here]. As the backcover of this new collection offers: “Playlist fiddles with a two-partwriting system that begins with the songbooks’ contextual introduction and endswith the songs – or in this instance, poems – to which they refer. Though thesepoems aren’t expressly critical, their formal method of construction qualifiesthem as that subgenre of poetry known as the protest poem.”

Turner has long been engaged with the the hows of narrative, offering book-lengthtwists, blending working-class first-person commentaries into the lyric, or abook-length poem as long as a particular city street. There are threads herethat run through the length and breadth of Turner’s work, from an interest ingenre, working class flexibilities, autofiction, tour notes, rock ‘n’ rollsongbooks, the lyric sentence and the straighter lyric, and the dual-aspect ofcommentary and poem in Playlist provides an inverse kind ofcall-and-response to the pieces. It is almost a reversal of thepoem-and-response of Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Lady’s Man (McClellandand Stewart, 1978), or even Ken Norris’ COMMENTARIES (above/groundpress, 1999), his chapbook-length prose poem response to his own full-lengthcollection, The Music (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1995). Turner offers astory, and a song; another story, and another song. Sometimes the story is directlytied to the song that follows, but often it is not, allowing for a series ofsuggested links. There something of the folk-crooner, the work poet, throughthese pages. If Peter Culley (1958-2015) wrote songs, or if Gordon Lightfoot(1938-2023) composed poetry titles, Michael Turner’s Playlist landssomewhere between, perhaps.

I was seven when mymother enrolled me in piano lessons. Mrs. Sather was a nervous widow in herlate-sixties who lived across the park in a magazine clean house with a blindBoston Terrier. It was fun at first – Mrs. Sather’s piano was brighter thanours, its action quicker. But after a year of scales I lost interest. Plus I didn’tlike the way her dog looked at me.

I return to music in myearly teens, first with the mandolin, which I found in a junk shop my fatherliked to visit and taught myself to play. After that, the guitar, especiallythe folkier aspects of bands my friends and I were listening to – the music ofT. Rex, David Bowie and Led Zeppelin.

There were others in mygrade who played musical instruments. Phil was already accomplished on trumpetand guitar, and I marvelled at how he could listen to any song and figure outits chords and solo by ear. Mark also played guitar and sang well enough toturn the words of songs I was familiar with into moods that I was not.

Eventually Phil and Markand others would gather with their amps, drums and keyboards to jam in Phil’s basement.But while they were rocking out on Zappa fragments, flirting with jazz fusion, Isat on the edge of my bed reading bluegrass tabs, or trying to get my handsaround the songs of Melanie Safka, Joni Mitchell, Joan Armatrading and KateBush.