SKIP TRACER #2
“SKIP TRACER #2”
Sumo orange and static crush.
This morning I’m texting
with a rockstar about stardom. I mean
the kingdom of them over our heads
when it’s dark. Everything is
over my head, but what you want
to know is who the rockstar is, only
I’m not telling. There is no telling.
In writing, which is what this is,
we show up and make a difference.
The way the name Indiana means
something different to me
than to most people—something
I can’t explain, but can only express
or suggest or demonstrate not rightly.
So what this is is notes for a poem
as a poem that understands
its true nature. Speaking of—I am
here now, but later I will be missing.
And someone or other will be the contender
That is, someone—very likely my daughter,
if no one else—will contend with who I was
and who I will continue to be for some
amount of time as a memory. For now, however,
and in other textual matters, we do this
family thing via group text—though not
consistently—where one of us is designated
to ask a question of the week. This week
it’s my turn, but “What is your favorite
Sonic Youth song by Lee Ranaldo”
doesn’t seem appropriate to ask.
Nor does it seem inappropriate.
It’s just that no one will understand me
if I ask it. They don’t like Sonic Youth
the way I do. And no, Lee was not the rockstar
I was texting with before. Guess again.
The other question I have has to do with
making a distinction between a work
of art, which is coherent versus
one that coheres—what’s the difference?
Can something cohere, but not be
coherent? I say yes, and I have
my reasons. Pinery, pants, penury,
collage. Those are not the reasons.
Those are words I’m turning over
a new leaf with, but they may be instructive
when I return to them later. When I think
of the lyric “Where are you now/
When you’re broken eyes are closed/
Head in a cloudy dream of green and sailboats,”
the question of the week is, “Do we really need
a question of the week?” Let’s just stare
at the horizon of stardom. Or maybe,
more simply ask, “Coleridge or Wordsworth?”
My daughter answers Wordsworth, because
he’s mentioned in a Taylor Swift song.
My wife just looks at me like I’m a rabbit
and she’s a hawk.
-A poem by Matt Hart
ON “SKIP TRACER #2”
1. “Skip Tracer #2” is a kind of poem that I write—notational, personal, a document of a process of thinking and being—articulating the world, cataloguing experience—an attempt to make sense. It is a constellation of moments, ideas, impressions—and as such—at least I hope—something which coheres. That is the various aspects of the poem can be connected, but in a variety of ways—associatively, connotatively, narratively (though, to be clear, this isn’t a narrative poem; it’s a lyric—an effusion of thoughts and feelings of the inner life of the speaker). A constellation coheres, but, when we say something is coherent, we also often mean that it’s explicable, understandable. Poems are a mystery that always—apart from whatever else they may happen to be doing—ask us to consider the miracle that anything exists at all. They are, like life, in some sense inexplicable. Life is (a) happening (which includes dying and ice cream socials and forest fires and loud music and people sitting at desks or on porches or in classrooms thinking about it all, sometimes writing it down). As the poet A.R. Ammons noted, “poetry has/one subject, impermanence,/ which it presents/ with as much permanence as/ possible.”
I don’t know if I agree with that entirely, but certainly time is short, so the time we spend writing is consequential time. We could be doing anything else, and the powers of transaction and consumption would rather that we be doing anything else. Writing poetry—the activity of it—does not (in any significant way) generate capital and it wastes nothing, but it does generate value and time is as lost as we often are…
2. Since the context for this blogpost is Punk Rock/street art, I started to wonder: Could “Skip Tracer #2” be a punk rock poem? I don’t really know what a punk rock poem is, but I am me, so probably any poem I write is a punk rock poem. It’s also a personal poem that mentions my wife and daughter, alludes to the song “Skip Tracer” by Sonic Youth—as well as to one of their guitarists/vocalists, Lee Ranaldo—and the English Romantic poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Does all of this cohere—can it?
3. As already mentioned, “Skip Tracer #2” references (and quotes from) the song “Skip Tracer” by Sonic Youth, which appeared on their 1995 album Washing Machine. Is Sonic Youth punk? I bet some people would say no, but given their steadfast commitment to alternate tunings, wild effects, visual art aesthetics, dissonance, feedback, sprawling and non-traditional song structures, and poetic imagery, they seem pretty defiantly punk rock to me. In any case, “Skip Tracer” (the Sonic Youth song) features a vocal performance by their guitarist Lee Ranaldo, which is more a poetic recitation than a sung lyric, until the end when he does in fact begin to sing. The lyric begins as a description of a (punk/rock) show by an unnamed band (though I will say the way it’s described reminds me a lot of Royal Trucks):
This she did in public for us to see
She came here to drunk to do the show
[…]
The guitar guy played real good feedback, and super sounding riffs
With his mild mannered look on, yeah he was truly hip
The girl started out in red patent leather
Very I'm-in-a-band with knee pads
We watch her fall over and lay down,
Shouting the poetic truths of high school journal keepers
Interspersed with this is a much more dreamy, nearly surreal, and tornadic list. It almost feels like someone reading from a journal that turns into a movie as it’s being read.
Between the trains and cars
Broken glass and lost hub-caps, images of a gun
Row house row house pass through
Let the city rise up to fill the screen
Clothes flung out of closets, doorknobs falling off[…]
Row house row house pass through, let the city rise up
Twister, dust buster, hospital bed,
I'll see you, see you, see you on the highway
Now we're told so merge ideas, of song forms and freedom
Miss seafood, miss cheesecake, a couple of miss donuts
The edge of a blade pressed to the throat of your reflected image
In any case, the entanglement of the more observational narrative, mixed with the associative listy-ness above, creates a woozy kind of back and forth that I really enjoy for the way it signals that it won’t be pinned to the wall of being just one thing—or about one thing—it is more a constellation of observations, images, descriptions, associations. It has a kind of centrifugal quality to it, an energy that spins until it gets to that bit that I quote in my poem, where Ranaldo begins (near the end) to sing, “Where are you now/ When you’re broken eyes are closed/ Head in a cloudy dream of green and sailboats.”
I love the dreamy weirdness of the “green and sailboats” since often one thinks of sailboats on the water, which is typically rendered as blue—or blue-ish, more than green. It’s just a little off and beautiful for it. The melody, too, when it finally kicks in here is weirdly soft, wistful, almost nostalgic before building again to a tornadic rush, where Ranaldo nearly shouts, “Hello, 2015! Hello, 2015!” which was at the time the recording was made ten years in the future, but now, nearly a decade behind us. So, the song is in fact nostalgic without intending to be. It was looking to the future and painting a portrait of a moment—one of intensity and abandon and recklessness and possibility. Maybe all art is the way, something that significantly stops time and alters the past and the future.
4. A “skip tracer” by the way (in case you don’t know) is a kind of detective, somebody whose job it is to locate people who’ve skipped out on a debt or who have gone missing. Sonic Youth’s song “Skip Tracer” is full of clues that take us somewhere and also don’t quite add up—not in a neat narrative way with a setting and a conflict that gets resolved the way a detective as a character might go about solving a mystery. The song is a mystery all right—of swirling noise, impressionistic vision—but it’s glorious for that, something to breathe in… something to look out for…
5. Obviously, my poem “Skip Tracer #2” owes a debt to the Sonic Youth song “Skip Tracer”—not just in terms of the title and quoted lyrics, but as a kind of centrifuge of associations and narrative scaffolding. I think that opening line, “Sumo orange and static crush” came (in)directly out of thinking about that “head in a cloudy dream of green and sailboats” lyric. It was similarly vivid and painterly in my mind. However, it’s also a poem, about poetry where we “show up and make a difference,” and yet the missing person, here, the person who’s “skipped” and needs tracing is the speaker. And while I suppose that speaker is a version of me—the writer me and the author are two entirely different things. A writer can be located; an author really can’t. An author is a construct. As the 19th Century French poet Arthur Rimbaud put it in his famous “seer” letter, “I is somebody else”. As the poem notes, “I am here now,/ but later I will be missing.” The skip tracer of my poem (and of me, when I go missing, because we all go missing) is you, dear reader.
6. The English Romantic poets, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, are touchstones for me and my poetics—arguably the original punks, who, like a lot of other punks, drifted away from their earlier radical views toward something more mainstream. They also had an aesthetic falling out. Coleridge was a mystic visionary. Wordsworth was more… controlled. I have, over the years, been in many conversations with other poets that wind up in disagreements about who was the more superior poet, Coleridge or Wordsworth. (The answer is Coleridge, of course, “Richlier burn, ye clouds!” But I do love Wordsworth, too—“The Prelude” especially in its several iterations.)
7.It seems odd to end things on that last note, so I won’t end it there. I’ll end it here:
“THE END OF THE LINE”
—for Jay Ponteri
Light a match and watch it flaze.
Blow it out and breathe its wake.
Lose what’s left in a Cincinnati summer,
the windows open, so the light
licks your face. A daughter flies away
in a ruckus of blue feathers. A love
goes lifting and pulling the cloud-flake.
The love will return in a few hours, but
the daughter is hard to say. She is making
herself formidable, as is necessary.
You and your love are receding, or being tugged,
into the past after so much future.
Grab a pink pencil and feel its small weight.
Watch the snail pass in a palace of glass.
You wonder if the passing means that it moves
you, or moves past you, or dies. Everything is too much
punctuated now. Everything coming to a close
in your mind. You wish you could tell yourself
a triumphal story. You wish that the world
still resembled itself to resemble yourself
to assemble. The pollen count contains two sixes.
The atmospheric pressure is changing
all the time. Changing all the time
into not much change after all of it
you’ve spent. Flail to imagine
the space curve around you. Now
go back to the end of the line.
*****
Matt Hart is the author of FAMILIAR (Pickpocket Books 2022) and nine other books of poems. Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous print and online journals, including American Poetry Review, Big Bell, Conduit, jubilat, Kenyon Review, Lungfull!, and POETRY, among others. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a grant from The Shifting Foundation, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He was a co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety from 1993-2019.
Currently, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band NEVERNEW: www.nevernew.net. He is also a faculty mentor in the PNCA/Willamette Low-res MFA program.
Find him on Instagram @forkliftmatt and @nevernewband.
