Minus the Hovercraft: Father of Noise by Anthony McCann

Have I said yet that you must purchase Father of Noise by Anthony McCann? Well, you must. It is chockfull of "church diction" and rayguns and aliens (in both senses). It's an urbane cousin to Maurice Manning's Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions dipped in James Dickey, tinted with just a drop or two of Stevens's kookier colorings, feathered by the white chicken escaped from WCW's coop, possessed of the breath of a Denis-Johnson bender and plenty of jazzy blow. Accurate? I don't know, but it feels close.



Here, I'll type in a poem for you (or a sequence, really) and you can see better what I mean. (That's a not-lazy activity. I am trying to shake this slouch.) Then some notes.



Confessions



beginnings



Before money and California;

before the state of Massachusetts

there was a river and it had a name.

Another moseey indian-sounding name.

Woodlands Indian.

There was a river and it loved the land.

The land was rich with whatever land

is rich with, vitamins and minerals I guess.

But then it was scraped away, into the river,

with imported tools, by incompetent invaders

who were cruel and stupid

and filled the land with package stores

and the towns grew and grew around them.

And into this land I was born.

Or so it is said. All I want to tell here Lord

is that I do no know where I really came from

when I was born into this life.

But I was content to suck.

And so I grew to the next stage.



adolescence



I could call this a revolt.

This next stage.

I don't remember when it started.

I could call it Woburn.

Or I could call it Braintree.

What I remember is that boredom,

its shape. I have driven

that car. But this was one time

I was in love--this was before California.

This was after Panama

but before the Gulf.

I had a brand new pair

of excellent boots and

I drove my car fast

along the river's curves.

Forgive me Lord, I didn't know

what I was really like.



confession



There was a young woman from another state who in my youth I mistreated. We said angry and sappy things as youths will do because we thought we understood our tongue. There are no photographs of us. But take it that she was an unattractive girl and I was an unattractive boy. Together we did unattractive things. Until then I had imagined that I was kind; a somehow wounded young man. I don't remember what actors I admired. But then I discovered arrogance and cruelty and silence in particular and she went back to her boyfriend a small and truly kind boy who played the acoustic guitar. I went and stood on the edge of a frozen parking lot on the edge of that city where the city gives way and the liquor gives way to an empty Taco Time and the death of all enthusiasm. I had some other friends with me, they were asleep in the car and, Lord, I thought they all looked retarded.



received wisdom



Once there was a boy

who wouldn't look up

or he wouldn't look down

I can't remember

and in his mouth he held

a precious stone

He was a stupid boy

The End

Or once there was a boy

who lived all alone in the world

except for his friend

Mr. Egg

And he got what he deserved



and the next stage



And the next stage

is California.



california



The coast was covered in fog

as I came up over

the ridge in our car

listening to a sad

and triumphant

California song.

I was some kind

of superstar, pissing

in the parking lot

over the Pacific

near the RV's.

What else

can I say?

I came here

searching for you,

through the

interior, dry like a mouth.

Subsisting on bagles

and dope.

And I drove on

into the city, where I went amongst them.

I examined their flesh

and found it to be weak.

Pushed to a certain wall,

my arms and legs

bent to their pleasure,

I expired at dawn.

Giving up the ghost, this body and breath, up

into the cruel blue air.

Beginning again, naked and curled,

in a stranger's bed.





"Confessions" is not the only poem addressed to the Lord. The attitudes of prayer throughout Father of Noise permit McCann's occasional archaisms (like "amongst" here) while alliterations and assonances ring hearty internal chimes (pissing/Pacific, parking lot/RVs, cruel/curled, giving/ghost, body/breath). The heightened diction is interrupted with little gasps of slangy air (as in that hilarious and adolescent final word in "Lord, I thought / they all looked retarded"). Ending the final section "in a stranger's bed" echoes nicely the friends sleeping in the car where everything gives way to "the death of enthusiasm." If you didn't grow up in a dry "blue-law" county, this image may be lost on you, but trust me, it's dead on: Just past the city limits lie the liquor stores amid an ever-changing spangle of boom-then-bust businesses. Then nothing.



In "Walk and Missive," McCann translates a Korean version (the poem is set in Seoul) of Williams's red wheelbarrow scene on which still so much depends: "...back in the neighborhood / the local children are dragging the chicken. / This involves a tricycle, a length of pink ribbon, / and one four-year-old with all the enthusiasm of the world / required to counter the pure reluctance of chicken." It's no accident that "enthusiasm" is pops up again in this poem--just as "cruelty" and "pleasure" and "noise" play throughout the book. McCann's noise is verbal, visual, and spiritual. It can be enthusiastic (America's an idea about milk / Conceived in a bright sweet machine), pleasurable (O my heart, manic mudskipper), cruel (I will people Nebraska with tight lips and cold. / With the silence of kitchens at night following domestic violence), or just plain noise ("Pfft" is the sound / of my karate kick / in empty space).



It's surely the dramatic monologues and the prayers and "Oh Lords," but I sniff Berryman here too and Jeffers, and it's powerful stuff, though thank god McCann displays more humor than the crank in the tower. I mentioned the spaceman before and haven't yet explained that he functions as a mask for the "foreigner" or immigrant, particularly through the section called "Empire State." In "Jack" a new arrival seems to be taking notes: "Jack is a Large American Man of a Typical Brand. He is like a Helicopter or he is like an Amphibious Assault Vehicle. His entire body is covered in hair." In "Experience" the new arrival has graduated to explorer and journalist: "I attempt to describe it here for the journal I will publish upon returning to the angry and colorless city of my birth. It is shapeless, and yet its meat seems firm, with eyes unlike any creature...." And by the time we reach "Report from the Surface," the foreigner is not just not-American, he's downright otherworldly:



You do not understand but

I have been to the other side and

part of me is not here, here

in this parking lot, on this planet

with the parking meters like stray hairs.

...

...On this planet

with the wird thing bubbling

just beneath the surface. All that we can do

is to stand here in our too-tight suits with the insignia.

...

Call me Visitor.



Or maybe the visitor, by this time, is the reader--I suspect some kind of switcheroo. When we peep at the future in "My People" we find ourselves "in our apartment complexes / smoking cigarettes in our Teflon suits / while admiring ourselves." Come to think of it, that sounds pretty close to what we're doing right now, minus the hovercraft.



Now, unwrap them gift certificates and get thee to yer local indie.