Marquee Moon

Television’s Marquee Moon is #38 on that Rolling Stone list from 1987. I didn’t hear this record until my sophomore year of college, after I started working at WCBN, hosting the stereotypical 3-6 a.m. slot one night every two weeks and spending those three hours running back and forth between the broadcast studio and an old production studio so that I could not only get music out over the air, but also dub four albums every shift. One of the first tasks I gave myself was to track down as many of those 1987 top 100 albums as I could. Marquee Moon was one of those.

And I loved it. The vinyl that I taped it from was a little beat up, and the whole thing just barely fit on one side of a tape, but I loved that thing. It was one of my go-to tapes that winter and I have clear memories of walking to my logic class listening to it and taking an extra lap around a hallway so that I could hear those last few desperate notes of “Prove It” before I sat down to an hour of Venn Diagrams.

And God, it’s still good. The tape has been replaced by two different CD issues, but the thing is still magic. It still crackles with this intensity, this tension, this electricity that’s unmatched, for me, by anything else from that mid-1970s New York punk scene. It’s not just the twin guitars of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, either (though they are justly lionized). It’s the skittering drums, always solid, but rarely predictable. It’s Fred Smith’s bass weaving its own melodies around the guitars. It’s the songs themselves, with their interlocking riffs and the bizarre couplets that emerge from Verlaine’s pen, like

My eyes are like telescopes
I see it all backwards, but who needs hope?

Yet it’s the guitars you remember. Lloyd’s more traditional solos and Verlaine’s unexpected jumps and leaps, the flashes of Neil Young rumblestorms and the moments of Richard Thompson fury, the psychedelic raveups and the third-eye explorations. It’s the neurotic, tense quality of Verlaine’s solo on “Friction.” It’s the way the notes of “Prove It” seem choked off, emerging from whatever the guitar equivalent of clenched teeth is. It’s the way the riffs of “Venus de Milo” run around the lyrics with what seems like complete abandon. It’s hearing Lloyd’s solo in “See No Evil” and comparing it to Verlaine’s in “Friction” and wondering just how much of the band’s greatness was driven by fundamental tension between their differing approaches to the guitar.

The only song I’m impatient with now is “Guiding Light,” which, in the context of so much that seems otherworldly, that taps this anxious, desperate nerve so effectively, comes across as predictable, as pat, as out of place. It feels like a song that anyone could have done, whereas the rest of the album is almost dauntingly singular. I remember really liking it in college, appreciating its relative calm, its chiming arpeggios, even Lloyd’s melodic solo, but now I just feel like it drags, and I find myself impatient to get to the glorious barbed wire solo of “Prove It.”

And last thing: this is Television’s debut. The debut. The first record. How many other groups can claim such a debut? How many other first albums are this strong? Big Pink, maybe? Freak Out? Appetite for Destruction? Please Please Me? Slanted and Enchanted?

I don’t know that I’d move it any higher than #38, but I have absolutely no problem with this making the list.

Introduction to "Rock Polisher"

What an illusion this one presents. What a dream this one becomes. What a fantasy. What a wish: take all the less-than-perfect aspects of your life, all of the nostalgic longings, the disappointments, the memories that hurt and the memories that simply drag, the embarrassing haircuts, the useless items, the hopes that went unfulfilled and the seemingly promising moments that slipped by without delivering anything that mattered, anything that would last. Take all of this and toss it in the rock polisher. Let it churn for a week, let it all tumble around, the disappointments with the loss, the petty nonsense with the hurt, and let it emerge brilliant, perfect, and pure.

A fantasy. A beautiful fantasy (at least at first), but a fantasy nonetheless. And in this fantasy, even God’s mercy gets perfected (“at last”). I love that, love the implication that the mercy had been imperfect, had been in need of polishing – that that mercy, like a Christmas without snow when snow was all one wished for, had disappointed. And I love how the poem compresses everything that gets put in the polisher, how it equalizes everything: your school shoes, your eighth grade haircut, your parents, your God, all get elevated to the same status, to the same level. They are made equal. The poem reminds us that it’s a nonsensical pursuit to try to rank our disappointments, our failings, to try to claim that one thing hurt more than another. It’s not a matter of one thing needing polishing more than the next, but that all things are imperfect, and that if we’re going to polish one, we better be prepared to polish them all.

And with that, the poem reveals that this fantasy is not as beautiful as it may have appeared. It took me a while to catch this fragment of a line from about the middle of the poem: “It’s way past lights out now.” But there it is. See it? See the suggestion that this process becomes a trap, becomes a prison? Once you start, once you make the decision that all of these disappointments should be polished, should be perfected, you become trapped in the process. You can’t stop. It imprisons you. You try to perfect the way you love. You try to perfect the ocean, itself a rock polisher, but one that works too slowly. You try to perfect the sky, the sky that was good enough for Christ, good enough for Mozart – but not, in this prison, good enough for you.

Why can’t the moment when the girl on the track team touched your wrist be enough? Why can’t you see that as a perfect moment in and of itself?

Or, as Robert Bly, in “Wanting Sumptuous Heavens,” puts it: “There is no end to our grumbling: we want comfortable earth and sumptuous heaven.”

Chris Forhan: "Rock Polisher"

Your father bought it, brought it
to the basement utility closet, waited
while a test pebble tumbled in it.
One week: he’d willed it to brilliance.
The grit kit’s yours now, the silicon
carbide pack. Split it, have at it.
Jasper, agate, amethyst crystal,
it’ll churn to a luster. Listen
to small rocks grind the big one down.
Stones in the driveway, pry them up, why not,
they’ll fit, glass knobs on your mother’s
bathroom cabinet, your baseball
and mitt, polish them, polish that
zero-win Peewee League season.
The thing your sister said and then
took back, you still have it, polish it,
polish the snowless Christmas
when all you’d hoped for was snow.
It’s way past lights out now, you’re crouched
above the barrel, feeding it
your school shoes, your haircut
in eighth grade—flat bangs
to the bridge of your nose—the moment
that girl on the track team touched
your wrist, then kept her fingers there,
the way you loved dumbly
and do. If the sun’s up, it’s nothing,
you’re polishing, you’re pouring in
the ocean rolling rocks into cobbles
too slowly, and the sky, it was
Mozart’s, was Christ’s sky,
no matter, dismantle it, drop it
into the tumbler, and you too, get in there
with your Dad and your Mom and the cat,
one by one, the whole family,
and God’s mercy, perfect at last.

Introduction to "Practicing"

I first heard this poem when Orlean Anderson read it at a Northern Virginia Writing Project party in the summer of – what was it, 2002? 2003? I remember her reading it to us as we sat on the floor of someone else’s living room, the lot of us, for the summer, if not forever, writers, professionals, teachers, committed to our teaching and our writing, our learning and our students’ learning. And I remember thinking, as I heard the poem, that someday, maybe, I’d bring that poem into my classroom.

I never did.

As the file of poetry grew – first on overhead transparencies and later simply stored on the school’s server as a whole mess of zeroes and ones – it somehow never made the cut. It was just a little too much, I thought. It went just a little too far, like the one line about a “stifled come-cry” in Galway Kinnell’s “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” a poem that, like “Practicing,” I’ve also never read in class. And while I like the poem, like both poems, there never really seemed to be a compelling reason to offer it to the class. It’s somehow more acceptable, I suspect, to read something like Sherman Alexie’s “On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City,” with its line about “Don-fucking-Henley” than it is to read of girls sucking each other’s breasts and leaving marks, lifting their nightgowns and letting the straps drop.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’re both unacceptable. Maybe I’m fooling myself into thinking that either one was so much merit (either as poetry or as motivation to kids to read more poetry) to warrant its presence in my classroom. Maybe it’s just an illusion I sell myself: that we’re old enough, mature enough that this isn’t a problem, that the fact that AP English is a college class justifies treating it as such, as possessing the kind of freedom you might find in public university classroom.

Here, in any case, is what I like most about Howe’s poem: the pretense of what the girls are doing, the artifice with which they cloak their actions: this is practice, just practice; now you be the boy (for one of us has to if this it to be merely practice).

And what is kept internal, what is thought but not said, and the two ways that that works in the poem: first, the girls thinking (but not saying) “that feels good” and “I like that, and, second, the truth of the first kisses kept, for the most part, unmentioned, though obviously remembered.

And how there is something left unrevealed in the daylight, kept hidden, no matter how pure that “unreluctant desire” might have been.

And the imagery that constantly reminds us of childhood and of youthful indiscretion and experimentation: we were stoned on kisses, sleeping bags, Linda’s basement being like a boat, etc.

Growing up might mean learning how to acknowledge the truth of such desires, learning how to bring them into the daylight, but it also means learning how to hide others, learning how to be less and less emotionally open, emotionally available in order that the world, the others, the other selves, the other lives, can’t press quite so insistently, quite so painfully, and quite so joyfully on your own.

The poem calls it “practicing.” And that is what we call it. Getting ready. We tell ourselves that so much of being young is practicing, is preparing. Preparing for adulthood. Preparing for real life. We call it practicing, but I’m afraid we rarely have the courage to actually participate in the game itself, to move beyond rehearsal, to stop getting ready and start being ready, to stop preparing and start living, start participating, and start being.

Marie Howe -- "Practicing"

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:
That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each others’ mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and
one was the boy, and we paired off -- maybe six or eight girls -- and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our
nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.
Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,
plush carpeting. We kissed each others’ throats.

We sucked each others’ breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs
outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost
in someone’s hair… and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

the first kiss really was — a girl like us, still sticky with the moisturizer we’d
shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,
just before we made ourselves stop.

Introduction to "Keeping Things Whole"

Mark Strand’s poetry confuses me. It’s often, though not always, a pleasant confusion, but a confusion nonetheless. This might be what that AP prompt from twenty years ago refers to as a “healthy mix of pleasure and disquietude,” though I have a feeling they mean something more along the lines of the fractured chronology of, say, Catch-22, or the fantastic imposition of a nightmare upon reality in Metamorphosis. Strand’s words, his images, give me pleasure (think of “Eating Poetry,” with its panicked librarian, its dogs on the stairs), but they also unsettle me, not because they raise uncomfortable questions for me (like, say, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), and not because they disturb me (as, say, The Road, might), but because I feel like I don’t quite get them, like I can’t quite put them together into a coherent whole. I understand the words. I can make sense of the images. He’s not writing sentences like “toothbrush flies painted a dog,” sentences that syntactically and grammatically work but which convey no meaning. But they resist – just a little bit, just enough to unsettle me – quick readings, quick understandings.

That said, I enjoy this poem a lot. I’m continuously startled by the opening stanza, by the sense I have, reading it, like I’m seeing a fundamental truth fresh and anew, like I’m seeing something that I should know but have never thought about, like I’m seeing something that was always there but whose thereness I couldn’t see until Strand pointed it out to me. “In a field / I am the absence / of field.” How perfectly true, no? If I step into a field, I fill a piece of that space that was formerly field. I replace a piece of field. I become, in essence, what simultaneously becomes missing from that field, from that space.

And then, when I move, the field returns, becomes whole again.

Wonderful.

And made better by the turn: the speaker then tells himself, insists to himself that this is why he moves: in order to keep things whole. What a perfect reason. I move to keep things whole. It’s justification and rationalization all at once. It’s what we tell ourselves whenever we can’t handle what we’ve become, whenever we don’t want to accept the responsibility for being the absence of the thing that we have replaced: this is what I do. This is who I am. It’s my responsibility. I have to move or things won’t stay whole. “We all have reasons,” Strand writes. And he’s right. We do. We might invent them, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re there. Nor does it change the fact that we might invent them because we’re unable, or unwilling, to face the truth of what they cover, to face the reality behind the illusion they create.

Note, by the way, how the last stanza moves from four words, to two, to two again, and then back to four. Symmetry. And the total: twelve words out of four lines. Twelve words that could have been twelve lines, that could have been the foundation of a sonnet, that could have been everything but a sonnet’s payoff – that payoff that, in a sonnet, is revealed in the final couplet, in the final comment that tells us how to read what came before. In this poem, in this stanza, that final couplet is missing. It is the absence.

Note, too, the absence of sense in that last paragraph. It’s a nonsensical argument. It’s a desperate reach – albeit a deliberately desperate reach, an attempt to create an understanding where there isn’t one. An attempt to cover a truth that I might not be willing to face, to create an illusion that allows me to live, to live both with the poem and with myself. After all, we all have reasons. For moving. For creating. For believing.

Mark Strand: "Keeping Things Whole"

In a field
I am the absence
Of field.
This is
Always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
And always
The air moves in
To fill the spaces
Where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
For moving.
I move
To keep things whole.