one-offs: curtis l. crisler

by W. F. Roby

Welcome to The B-Sides — the gritty side of the album. Think of the Beatles’ track “The Inner Light” as opposed to “Lady Madonna.” Sure, “Madonna” has a great beat and you can dance to it, but “Inner Light” is a little piece of psychedelic perfection. Pop music told through a thin veil of McEastern Philosophy. Listen to it — sounds like Gershwin after a couple of listens. Or a couple of beers.

Just like “The Inner Light” was a B-Side track that far outclassed the A-Side, so the poems and journals I feature here turned me on more than anything I read in the larger press venues for a given month or two. Not very scientific — hey, you can’t force genius. After I show you a poem and talk about it, I’m gonna share some questions about the poet’s favorite music. See what I did there? “B-sides” … questions about music. It’s a theme.

Anyway, I hope to ask questions that people want to hear, so I’ve started out very generic at this point. Let me know what questions you want me to ask the poets, and I’ll pick a few, and the whole “interview” process will become interactive — which people tell me is a good thing on the Internet. So I’ve got that covered.

Curtis L. Crisler’s poem “They Will Say” is featured in the fifth issue of Anti-, an online journal that goes out of the way to call itself “contrarian” and “a devil’s advocate.” Don’t confuse Anti- with Nicanor Perra’s school of poetry called antipoetry — though the URL might lead you to believe otherwise — the editors at Anti- appreciate Perra’s work but serve their own master. Steven Schroeder, the editor, wants to fight against the confinement of poetry “in too-small boxes,” hoping instead to publish poetry of all types and across all genre lines.

Crisler’s poem is dedicated to Jam Master Jay, best known as the DJ for hip hop act Run DMC. Crisler is playfully blurring the lines between freestyle rap and formal poetry, and a highlight of the poem for me is an early section where the poet steps in to editorialize:

… [The rule
of code switchin’ is to code switch: you must
trust true prophets spreadin’ good news]. Some will

say it disrupts mind to small silent hush,
and this disease can’t be saved with a pill.

The poem itself reads like a freestyle rap between friends — note that the last word of each individual strophe is the word that the next verse begins with. Reading through Crisler’s poem the first time, I felt a familiar sense of excitement. When I was in high school, I participated in plenty of “battles” between those of us who considered ourselves “street poets” — this poetry is kind of like rap with brains but very little in the way of maturity. It is typical hip-hop dressed up in fancy “vocab” and balanced out by plenty of cruelty and outright perversion.

Lots of you are familiar with the idea of a “battle” from television and films — think Eminem in 8 Mile or whatever the hell that was Saul Williams did in Slam — and I know opinion on this type of wordplay is divided in the world of contemporary poetry. That is to say most of the people reading this think there’s no value to hip-hop in terms of the more “literary arts” … you know, like the heroic epic you wrote in dactyllic hexameter when you were an undergraduate … smart people stuff.

We could argue all day if so called “slam poetry” or “performance poetry” is on par with our Great Bearded White Man canon, but there’s no doubt that what Crisler has created is good poetry.

I love how he uses the brackets in the above selection. I came into this poem as a casual reader and, after some of the images stuck with me, I went back to it with a more critical eye. Only on my third reading did I notice the effect those simple little brackets have. If I approach the poem as a recorded bit of street poetry, I have to assume that the poet is indicating some sort of stage direction here. The poem comes alive for me — I envision the poet stopping to break this idea down at a different tempo, slower and with a little less emphasis, a bit of speech to break up the rhythm.

If I don’t approach the poem this way — as some sort of freestyle rap in the blankest of verses — then I’m forced to read the bracketed section as one man’s editorial on a scene-wide meme. This is how this poet feels about the concept of code switching as it plays itself out in the clubs and bars, in private MC battles and yes even on the boards of a slam poetry stage. I come away from Crisler’s poem excited to be a part of his world, to take part in the heady pseudo elegy he’s decided to share with us.

I love what Crisler does. I’m a fan of all types of rhymes from Shakespeare to Andre 3000 — I don’t discriminate between the spoken word and words written in a book. Feel how you want about hip-hop or slam — Crisler’s poem is successful. Sure, it sounds like three verses of freestyle rap. After all, the tropes are all here. We’ve got name dropping, slang, calls to duty veiled as bare bones emotional appeals, etc. And the poet is clearly in hip-hop’s debt in terms of inspiration.

What makes Crisler’s rap/soliloquy work is that the idea of the poem is solid. The substrate that his wordplay is growing on is good. We’ve got “music as judge” — the Beastie Boys as backslidden MCs and Lauryn Hill described as “singing hopeful from death-boxes of pine,” like something out of Whitman but used to describe a contemporary musician’s state of mind. As if she’s a victim. OK — I could go on.

The larger point to make is that I wouldn’t have read Crisler’s pitch-perfect “They Will Say” if I hadn’t been paying attention to what’s going on at Anti-. Full disclosure — I had two poems published at Anti- a while back, but I’ve been reading this journal since the first issue came out in January of 2008. Psst — that makes them 2 years old now.

Celebrate this big birthday by checking out all five of their issues and even larger number of “featured poets.” The editors at Anti- consistently publish interesting work from names I’ve never heard of — and the poet’s bios are a joy to read, containing short lists of things the poets themselves are “anti.” Many thanks to Anti- and their editorial staff for allowing us to excerpt this poem so soon after it first appeared in their journal.

Here’s a short Q&A I did with Crisler about his favorite music.

W.F. Roby: What are your top three albums of any musical era?

Curtis L. Crisler: Bitches Brew, Miles Davis — Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder — and One Nation Under a Groove, Parliament/Funkadelics

alternates

The Chronic, Dr. Dre — Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morisette — Nevermind, Nirvana

This was really too hard to do, but these are all albums that established followers and opened up a new kind of dialogue, and that are still revered. Now, I’m thinking about Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Sugarhill Gang, Brides of Funkenstein, Tina Marie, LaBelle, B.B. King, and it can go on and on. Sorry.

WFR: Is there an album in your collection that you love but would never let your friends see?

CLC: Most people who know me know that I have a weird eclectic taste, so they would cut on me, but would not be surprised. I’m thinking of Streisand, The Shins, Tchaikovsky, or Fred Astaire’s recordings.

WFR: Do you listen to music when you work on poems?

CLC: Not usually. At times it just happens, for example when I am driving down the street and I get an idea, the radio could be on, and it could be anything, but a line will come through, or I’ll see an image and I can’t say if the music did not get me there, so I can’t discount it. But when I have something established, sometimes I have used music just as background and it is usually up to the tone of the piece what it is that I am listening to — like The Beatles, Ray Charles, Angela Bofill, Rene and Angela, The Stylistics or The Isley Brothers.

WFR: What one song do you want everyone in the world to go out and listen to right now?

CLC: “Under the Moon and Over the Sky,” by Angela Bofill

Lyrics to “On Saturday Afternoons in 1963,” by Rickie Lee Jones

Either one would be a great addition to anyone’s library.

W.F. Roby’s poems have appeared most recently at Umbrella, Stirring, Spilt Milk, Yareah and Anti-. His short plays have been produced across the country. He will soon be seeking his MFA at Simon’s Clown College and Radio Repair.