Turn Down the Music and Read: Emergency Anthems

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Turn Down the Music and Read: Emergency Anthems

I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Alex Green’s just-released poetry collection Emergency Anthems (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015.) One, Alex is one of my favorite music writers, at the helm of blog-turned-tumblr “Caught in the Carousel,” the insider’s insider when it comes to music. (You can read a “Still in Rotation” guest post he wrote for me here.) Two, even though I am seriously intimidated by poetry and Alex has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry, Emergency Anthems is a book of prose poems. As in, beautiful morsels of poetry that read like extremely short stories and are even accessible for poetry idiots like me.

Alex’s musical chops inform the entire collection. What I loved about reading this slim little book is how much it replicates the experience of listening for the first time to an album that you are destined to wear out and buy in two additional formats. At first read-through, the stories are a disconnected. A guy plays the Stone Roses for a girl who doesn’t fall for him, a woman writes a book about the history of the parasol, a captain sets his boat on fire. Maybe you like Songs 1 and 3 and 6 immediately, but the rest of the album may take a few more listens.

Then you listen (read) again, and themes emerge, threads that tie the whole work together: sharks, love doomed to miscues, musicians whose bands break up. A third read and you’re picking out which stories thread together, skipping pages to see what happens if you read this poem next to that poem instead of the way they’re sequenced. It’s the book equivalent of playing albums in reverse and seeing if there are any hidden messages. (Fun fact: I just Googled “backmasking” and learned that if you play “Detour Through Your Mind” by the B-52s, you’ll hear “”I buried my parakeet in the backyard. Oh no, you’re playing the record backwards. Watch out, you might ruin your needle.” B-52s, you sassy rascals.)

At the same time, each poem story is a little universe in itself, satisfying even when it suggests there’s more to the story. If that’s not the definition of a perfect song, I don’t know what is. Everyone who reads this will have a favorite poem, a favorite line; mine may be “Air Fountain,” with the line “I hope you come home soon. No one else things I’m funny.”

Emergency Anthems is a fabulous way to add poetry to your music-loving life, and to give yourself fifteen things to ponder while you stare into the middle distance. And I’ll make it easy for you. Alex is reading from the collection tomorrow night, Wednesday January 21, at Great Good Place for Books in Oakland at 7 pm. (Join me there if you can!) I’m going to have him sign a copy to send to a Midlife Mixtape reader, who I’ll pick at random using Random.org. To enter, just leave a comment below with what message YOU’D like to see backmasked into an album. I’ll announce the winner on Friday, January 23 at 5 pm PST.

And in Alex’s honor, since he’s a huge Stone Roses fan (he wrote The Stone Roses volume in the 33 1/3 book series that I’ve raved about to you before,) here’s Fools Gold from a band whose anorak game had no equal: