New Episode of Handful of Wheel up today! Our conversation with poets Sarah & Jeff Boyle about writing, the art grind, and the perils of corralling fellow poets to make awesome things :)
Notes Toward a Better Understanding of Bigfoot as Metaphor
by Jeff Boyle, June 4, 2015
Amy Pickworth, Bigfoot for Women, Orange Monkey Publishing 2014
Cryptozoology is weird. The search and hope for animals that don’t exist, or might exist, or might once have existed makes for great stories, over-long books, marginally compelling Discovery channel “documentaries,” occasionally sub-par X-Files episodes, and rarely much else.
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Please add to the above list: awesome books of poetry, in this case Bigfoot for Women (Orange Monkey Publishing) by Amy Pickworth. In the third poem (like many of the other poems in the book, it is titled only by its first line, which gives the impression of a book-length poem, though this book is not that), Pickworth begins, “I wrote to a cryptozoologist / a while ago and asked What do you think / it means, that we want Bigfoot to exist?” Unsurprisingly, his answer is both evasive and unpersuasive. But in this book, the question pervades, serving as the catalyst for the entire investigation the book undertakes.
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Bigfoot, of course, is America’s homegrown cryptid—our proto-hobo, our archetypal wanderer, our manifest desire to burn it down and walk away into the woods, with the time and quiet that sort of thing entails. But Pickworth uses Bigfoot’s elusiveness (and the question of whether he exists, or ever did), as well as the half-memories and desperate need to fill in the holes of our own histories, to build the story of a girl’s childhood and her relationship with her father—Pickworth’s own father, we are told in the dedication, emphatically does not deserve to have a book written for him. She also juxtaposes the romanticism of Bigfoot’s freedom and inclination to wander with the consequences of that wandering for those who might want him to stick around.
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But before the reader understands the person Bigfoot represents, she is treated to the exhaustive research that comes with an obsession with a cryptid, rendered from the far-flung reaches of internet wandering into Pickworth’s relaxed, conversational style.
Make a chart detailing what every call
might mean. Also rhythmic pounding and grunts.
Don’t look them in the eye. Make lots of noise.
Run (or don’t run.) Research what you should do
if you encounter a bear or lion.
Watch a bunch of Bigfoot stuff on YouTube.
The link is included in the poem. Her style however, does not equate to a dismissive or relaxed mind in its investigation.
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Make no mistake: this is a book about owning one’s obsession. Pickworth is under no delusions when it comes to being obsessed with Bigfoot and other natural oddities (real and hoaxed)—these are the kinds of things that take over your life if you let them:
http://pinktentacle.com/2010/03/human-faced-dog
Read everything on this page. Everything.
Oh my god. Japanese human-faced dogs,
dead office workers. You love it too much.
The hyperlink is the first line of the poem. It links to a real page. Included is the hyperlink to the page. It’s still there. You can read what she read, eyes wide (in delight and healthy disbelief).
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There are links within many of the poems. They take you to sites that explain the allusions she’s making or the references in the lines of the poem. They take you to the sites that she uses in her erasures. They take you to the YouTube videos that make up the track list that accompanies the book. These are Hansel’s glittery stones rather than the impermanent breadcrumbs he’s forced to use later. Pickworth wants you to see where she’s been and what’s she’s seen. The search and the process are important to understand the work and the writer. She owns her obsession and she can show you how she did it and where she stumbled along the way.
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There are several nearly identical prose poems describing (and reenacting) a recurring dream. They read in part:
The you at the table is you. You are eight. You are also your mother (who is thirty-eight), the table, the indoor-outdoor carpet stamped with a print resembling something like linoleum or stained glass […] And you are Bigfoot, who walks past the window you, through the back door you, and picks up your mother you […] Bigfoot then disappears into the woods, the woods that are also you.
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To my mind, this is as interesting an integration of book and internet as is possible. As writers, we can write around the internet. It’s been done forever, obviously. But to not only admit but embrace the wandering, the ephemerality of that-cool-thing-I-saw-on-that-one-site-I-goddamnit-forgot-to-bookmark nature of seeing where the immensity takes you, enacts the associations that poetry triggers and provides the neural lily pads on which to land.
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I love that funny poems are flourishing in 2015:
There are also a few Bigfoot movies,
including Bigfoot porn. This does exist.
While you don’t have to watch any of it,
it’s clear that you should know it’s in the world.
There’s actually a lot of porn.
The final stand-alone line is a tired device, one usually indicating that it is the bringer of truth by nature of its solitude. That it becomes a caveat regarding Bigfoot porn, turning the expected self-seriousness into a punch line, is a delightful reversal and exemplifies the awareness this book exudes.
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While the first part feels often diffuse, as one does after significant hours on the internet, the second part of the book is more straightforward, pulling in the subject that the book is working toward, the speaker’s relationship with her father, cast as Bigfoot, with all the self-doubt and reconsiderations attendant to a child’s relationship with an absent parent and the want-to-believer’s early morning visions while “out ’squatchin.’” It collapses mythology into reality, while at the same time never fully allowing the father to appear without the filter of constructed distance. Pickworth’s speaker may not ever fully distance herself from her father, but he’s never really there, not in any meaningful way.
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For me, the sequencing of the book is the only thing that doesn’t entirely work for me. By splitting it into two halves, Pickworth cleaves the internet traipsing from the story of the father unnecessarily, as if the reader needs the introduction to the Bigfoot mythos and ongoing strangeness as background. The arc of the book would have held together entirely if the entire thing had been integrated. There are enough digressions and out-of-time references (with attendant footnoted links) that it would have stood as a whole without the split.
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That said, in the second half there is, in no particular order: a pantoum, a poem about King Kong, an imagined interview transcription between Bigfoot and Dick Cavett, an (out of order) annotated timeline, and finally, whatever peace can be found:
Eventually Facebook tells you Bigfoot
is dead, because Facebook is like that.
[…]
You weren’t
listed in the will. You never needed
to learn any of Cordelia’s lines,
and not any of Edmund’s lines either.
Pickworth’s dedication reads, “This is for my mother, who deserves to have a book dedicated to her, and for my father, who doesn’t.” She doesn’t need to kiss her father’s ass—she honors him, whether or not he deserves it, in the most basic way one can honor a parent, by being better than him. Further, she honors herself and her mother (more fully, and more deservedly) in this singular book.
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Jeff Boyle spends the vast majority of his life in a house just north of Pittsburgh where he both lives with his family and works in educational publishing.
Top image, “Bigfoot Sighting,” by JD Hancock via Flickr.
Blue, Mostly Other People Do the Killing, Hot Cup Records 2014
Seven American Deaths and Disasters, by Kenneth Goldsmith, powerHouse Books 2013
What happens when a person tries to exactly copy someone else’s piece of art? Not just reprint it and represent it as one’s own, but create a facsimile as close to the actual original as possible? Where does the ephemerality inherent in a piece of art show through? And what does that ephemerality do for the original over the copy? The most recent album the jazz quartet Mostly Other People Do the Killing and writer Kenneth Goldsmith’s newest book seek to answer that question.
Mostly Other People Do the Killing (MOPDtK) is a post-bop jazz quartet with a penchant for kicking jazz history in its shins and tweaking its nose. On past records they have used everyone from Ornette Coleman to 1920s hot jazz as their jumping off point, managing to avoid pastiche through virtuosity, chutzpah, and delight in the endeavor. On their new record, Blue (2014, Hot Cup Records), they have taken their consideration of jazz history to one of its logical conclusions: can the jazz be rendered out of jazz through slavish devotion to replication? To this end, a the band spent a period of three years transcribing Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, hewing as closely as possible to every breath, pluck and brush. Bandleader Moppa Elliott described it as a thought experiment pushed to its logical extreme: a consideration of the question of what does it mean to be jazz?
To wit (and some of this comes directly from an interview with Elliott on WNYC’s Soundcheck): if jazz fundamentally involves an element of improvisation, then by transcribing (thereby through-composing) a work of jazz, does that make it not jazz? The first-level answer is “of course.” Beyond that, however, further consideration of the question makes the answer a little murkier. If someone listens to Blue, with no knowledge of its provenance, isn’t it jazz to that listener? It does, then, contain the necessary element of improvisation; it’s just that the improvisation doesn’t belong to trumpeter Peter Evans or saxophonist Jon Irabagon. Rather than being the jazz musicians, they are the instruments (sorry) of the original improvisations by Miles Davis and John Coltrane and “Cannonball” Adderley. So, again, is this jazz or not-jazz?
Blue is, just as Kind of Blue was, coolly jazzy. It swings, it is modally constructed, and it is a lovely and amazing piece of musicianship. Upon first listen, Blue is admittedly uncanny. I’ve listened to Kind of Blue dozens of times, and I think it deserves its reputation as a masterpiece of cool jazz. Knowing that MOPDtK went so far as to transcribe things like moments that the horns are ahead of or behind the beat or when bassist Paul Evans played notes out of tune and that they tried to figure out why the musicians made those choices, I can definitely say it’s an extraordinary achievement of simulacrum.
But as Elliott puts it, the task of replicating Kind of Blue is ultimately "impossible." Peter Evans (amazing trumpeter though he may be) can't sound exactly like Miles Davis. Because he is not Miles Davis. And Jon Irabagon can't sound just like John Coltrane (let alone "Cannonball" Adderley as well), because, well, he's not them. Here’s where the questions of ephemerality reemerge: Evans necessarily breathes differently than Davis, because they are two different people (also one is actually improvising). Irabagon is shaped differently than Coltrane, his hands move differently. These are the things that the record brings to the listener's attention as she listens, trying to suss out why copying Kind of Blue sounds so much like Kind of Blue, except, you know, just not. More than anything else, the experience of hearing this recreation makes the listener consider how music is made—less the concept and more the actual, physical reality of making the music happen, with breath and arms and metal and wood. Art happens in a moment, and all the ingredients are unique to that moment, and the attempt to replicate the ephemeral is a doomed enterprise.
And I think that's why this record comes down to feeling like an exercise. It is an exquisite forgery of the original, to be sure, but ultimately, a reinforcement of the project of replication as being fundamentally impossible.
From Sound to Word
Kenneth Goldsmith presents a consideration of replication from the other direction. Goldsmith, interested in (non-)creative writing as he is, seeks in his book Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013, powerHouse Books) to wrest the “sublime” back from “cliché.” As Goldsmith puts it in his afterword, “[C]liché often begins with sublimity and degrades into numbness.” Goldsmith’s project with this book, then, is to reintroduce his reader to moments in recent and contemporary American history, involving the titular deaths and disasters, that have fallen into cliché by dint of everyone knowing enough of the stories to have sublimated them into the collective unconscious. These are stories and historical happenings that seized people when they happened, and either by time or the simple fact that news keeps replacing itself, have become yellowed paper and shorthand for tragedy.
Set off only by the dates, each piece of (non-)writing is a transcription of speech—either television, radio, or, in the case of the section about the shooting at Columbine high school, a recording of a 911 call made by a substitute teacher during the shooting itself.
Each section (with one exception) is populated with the transcribed voices of people who report news for a living improvising their way through a story as it is happening. With none of the polish that a written, structured newscast provides, these are people hemming, hawing, stumbling their way through the words that have not been provided for them. There is confusion and emotion that is otherwise professionally removed from a story by journalistic training and practice, and this emotion begins to shape these stories that we know part of (and thus, in our imagination, know the whole of) back into the tragedies and disasters that they were when they happened.
Because the words were never meant to be repeated, these transcriptions carry the weight that the newscasts at the time lacked. Contrasted with Kind of Blue, these stories were blurted into the air, free of any expectation that they would be revisited, much less transcribed, which gives them the immediacy of amateurism. To have purposely recorded an improvisation for posterity is one thing. By condensing into text words-on-the-fly that were meant to evaporate, the replications in Seven American Deaths and Disasters retain the power to surprise and move in a way that Blue fundamentally does not.
It is inevitable that I read the sections about the incidents that I remember more closely, as I think any reader would. So the sections “April 20, 1999” (Columbine), “September 11, 2001”, and “June 25, 2009” (Michael Jackson’s death) resonate the most for me (less so, but to some degree, “January 28, 1986” (Challenger disaster)). Meaningful events happen every day (which is dumb and obvious, I know). But unless these events personally affect our lives, we can file them away and let them be ephemera, easily take them out of the air to cursorily use and reference as curios. The emotional impact of events we are not personally affected by doesn’t have a long reach.
And we’re showing you live pictures now. Smoke and fire taking place in both towers of the World Trade Center. It is a terrible scene. People are just walking down the street with their hands covering their mouth in disbelief. They can’t believe it. And then you hear the sirens and people screaming as they look up at the building and see people trying to get out and some people jumping. Now the EMS is here, fire personnel, police, everyone’s here trying to keep calm and get everyone away from the building and keep it safe. Let’s listen.
…but, um, I did see someone jump. I did. And I talked to someone and in her own voice you could hear it and she just lost it…
…they…they’re throwing themselves off the building. Oh my God.
But to have these moments displaced from our vague memories and set in text in front of us has a real power to yank us around in time; to make us recreate the time and place that we experienced them is uncomfortable. And to have the people living those moments recreate them strips them of whatever sheen our memories have lacquered over them. The replication makes these moments disastrous again. And in that way, Goldsmith accomplishes his goal: to steal these moments back from cliché, giving them back their terrible sublimity
Curiously, when setting out to write this essay, I believed that the MOPDtK record better accomplished its goal of investigating the power of replication than did the Goldsmith book. Upon reflection, however, I’ve come around to Goldsmith’s idea of re-subliming the cliché as the more interesting project. Don’t misunderstand: I love Kind of Blue, and respect the hell out of Blue as a concept. But it ends up being a curiosity that took a band four years to create—all just to see if it could be created.
(The failure of Blue feels to me not unlike my reading of Spivak’s monumental essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in an undergrad English class. After 40 pages of dense essay, turns out the answer is no. It was maddening to my 19-year-old self to machete my way through that text and find out that the answer was no. In the same way, why go through 3-4 years of transcription and recording to see if you can create Kind of Blue note for note? The answer is yes, mostly. But it doesn’t seem like the journey is quite worth that payoff.)
Goldsmith on the other hand, sought to defamiliarize the reader with these moments of tragedy, by taking the words off the radio waves in the atmosphere and affixing them to the page. The replication turns these stories that we were able to forget into stories we can’t forget. For all of its supposed non-creativity, it’s an unexpected and mysteriously affecting project. In the end, Goldsmith shows us replication can give us back almost everything associated with a given moment—except the moment.
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Jeff Boyle spends the vast majority of his life in a house just north of Pittsburgh where he both lives with his family and works in educational publishing.
