Like a Box of Chocolates

Abstract

Like a Box of Chocolates Bill Tremblay (bio) RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music Jim Daniels and M. L. Liebler, eds. Michigan State University Press https://msupress.org/9781611863369/respect/ 362, Pages; Print, $29.95 I used to teach a class called Beat Lit. Once I gave an assignment on the idea that if the Beats wanted to take a reading of the soul of America they went to jazz. The assignment asked students to write about what music they go to take the pulse of the nation. They were encouraged to create a mixtape or CD and use any media they thought relevant as illustrations for their conclusions. RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music doesn't draw conclusions. The editors (to quote Ezra Pound) "heap up the components of thought" and leave the connection-making implicit in the text for the reader to engage with. RESPECT would make a great anthology to teach from because it offers not just poetry and song lyrics but a paradigm of how to put together any anthology on any topic on any place and time. RESPECT (or R-E-S-P-E-C-T as Aretha Franklin spelled it) is an astonishingly comprehensive presentation of poetry in response to Detroit music and its scene, organized chronologically in five sections, the first being "Detroit Jazz," and then, successively, "Detroit Blues," "Northern Soul," "Detroit Rocks," and finally "Hip Hop into Techno." Each section is organized alphabetically by the names of the poets; so, e.g. "Detroit Jazz" starts with Mark James Andrews (more about him later) and ends with Al Young. As readers continue through the sections, they will see Eminem and June Jordan, Rita Dove and Robbie Robertson, Philip Levine and Jack White, Nikki Giovanni and Paul Simon, i.e. if the reader wants to put them together that way, or according to whatever juxtapositions the reader wishes to create. The materials are under one roof, there for exploration and use. There aren't any bad chocolates. The dimensions of this anthology open onto the infinite. The substance, the organization of it, the brief bios of the contributors, all invite readers to listen to the musicians, singers, composers, band leaders, band members, and lyrics that triggered the poets to write. RESPECT is like a surrealist game. If you (dear reader) type in a name on a search engine to find out more about a singer/composer, the information often suggests leads to other artists. I typed in Johnny O'Neal to get some background on George Kalamaras's "Every Note You Play Is A Blue Note" because I wanted to hear what made Kalamaras say "You move through clusters of stars // with your Milky Way hands" and found Johnny born in Detroit, starting in R & B but shifting to jazz, playing with various bands, notably Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. And, as happens when vast herds of written pieces are put together, associations form. In other words, RESPECT is a vast resource, not only to follow leads driven initially by love of the music, by memories it evokes, by reflections on how the music struck the poet, but also the personal and public experience as delivered by the poet when the related arts of poetry and music are the occasion of social solidarity. Or social displacement, as Toi Derricott says in "Blackbottom," "We had lost our voice in the suburbs ... we had lost the right to sing in the street and damn creation." Or Rita Dove's recollection of herself and the music in "Golden Oldie" where she recalls being "a young girl dying to feel alive / to discover / A pain majestic enough / To live by." Responses to the music can extend from one's first high school dance to meditations on the ineffability of "soul." What is Soul? (Didn't Louis Armstrong say, "If you got to ask, you'll never know"?) Never mind the Soul Train it rode in on. Soon you are wandering through this crowded anthology thinking "The Sociology of Music." The record is wide enough to get you thinking "The Anthropology of Music." Or Economics. What did Detroit do but put the means of production...