The Woodlot

By Chris Banks

I’m tickled by Stan Rogal’s lovely poetry collection …more songs the radio won’t play… out with ECW Press this Spring whose hypothesis, at least as I see it, is that the human mind is a transistor radio full of allusions and well-worn “pop” melodies, the human body a jukebox repository of classic “oldies” and personal experiences, so these poems remix not just popular songs across decades, but splice in memories and interior monologues so every poem becomes a multi-track, polyphonic “tune”, a poly-imagistic lyric; a “text” that is both song and structure. 

I love how Stan Rogal turns up his music allusions to “eleven” in his new poetry collection, and he hints at his purpose early in the book in the prose poem “You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio” which takes its name from a 1972 Joni Mitchell song: 

. . . you spin the dial madly
through the garbled frequencies . . . a wind of milk & blood whistles
static over the borderline airwaves that marries melodrama to postpunk
goth rock, dead wave & doom metal, J-pop & hip-hop, corny
country & smooth jazz, bubblegum & classic, garage & grunge, reggae
& new wave synth-pop, court & spark . . . amid the snap/crackle/pop
buzz, “the Text” becomes a multi-dimensional space

I like this idea of a poem as a multi-dimensional space, something more sculptural than synthesizer, or at least not the type of synthesizer we usually think of when it comes to music, for the poet Rogal is not making his poems easy to read in this collection, and hmmmm….experimental poetry is not the right word here. Maybe Alt-poetry? As a kid who grew up listening to late night CFNY 102.1 in the Eighties, that sounds better: Alt-poetry. More in keeping with the immense mixing down of personal experiences and pop music that Rogal has undertaken in this book. For instance, read just the first section of a longish poem entitled after one of The Cure’s classic tracks:

Friday I’m in Love
          The Cure

Another manic Monday, can’t trust that day
Nothin’ really wrong, just feel I don’t belong
Emergent theme of unsettling otherness
Twilights of androgyny & inattention
Wanna shoo-ooh-ooh-ooh-oot the whole day down
Sun comes up, it’s Tuesday morning
Tuesday’s a heartache, love comes, love goes
Lying with you, you turn your face from me
Tuesday afternoon I’m just beginning to see
That’s right, you’re wrong; you’re wrong, that’s right
Anyway, I’d rather listen to Coltrane
Than go through all that shit again
Waiting for Wednesday, Wednesday morning 3 a.m.
Watch my chest gently rise, gently fall
Now straight, now slightly bent
As yesterday was the day for watching
A universe tethered to the corporeal form
A fulcrum between scales of the heavenly body
& temptations of the flesh
We used to meet every Thursday, remember?
In the afternoon, for a coupla beers, a game of pool, &
— well . . . one thing leads to another, yeah? —

In this first section alone, there are allusions to John Coltrane, The Boomtown Rats, The Fixx, The Bangles and The Cowboy Junkies (and I know I’m probably missing some but my pride won’t allow me to search for anymore) which is a strange way to remix The Cure, but not if human consciousness is the producer, the human ear taking a backseat to the human imagination and human memory, the poet’s chest gently rising and falling with breath. Consciousness, and a little poetic mischief are the real ‘remix’ here. These poems are fun and excessive, comforting and slightly manic in their musical obsessions.

Honestly, the colossal breadth of music allusions to be found in these poems–The Ramones to The Small Faces to The Judds to The Psychedelic Furs–is a real treat, just as is Rogal’s poem about an Alt Country musical icon Lucinda Williams which is a personal favourite of mine: 

Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings
          Lucinda Williams

Get loose, lighten up
You holler before you’re hurt
Not how the world is but that it is
Is the mystery
Floating through a palladium
Of mineral ash & anthracite
Waiting in vain for love’s sirocco
Where do I stand & how does it feel?
It’s real live bleeding fingers
& broken guitar strings
Are you listening to me yet?
Smoking du Maurier Lights & slapping five
Sounding like overloaded bulb wattage
Post-Creedmoor electroshock clarities
Deliberate flattening of tonal register
Extensive use of non sequitur
Coming out in riddles of oracular demon pulleys
& the pregnant pause
It’s real live bleeding fingers
& broken guitar strings
Get loose, lighten up
Laughter is the sneeze of the soul
Who’d acquired attributes of promiscuity
& emerged as a dominant poet of the victimized
A one resembling Ingeborg Bachmann
Perhaps it was the poetry
Perhaps the cigarette burns on the arm
[Have you sent for me? Have you sent me this?]
Better, real live bleeding fingers
& broken guitar strings
Real live bleeding fingers
& broken guitar strings.

It strikes me how these ‘remixes’ work in this poetry collection is that the poet Rogal is taking a melody made up both of notes and words he has heard (think well loved classics and deep-cuts), and then reimagines them as human poetic monologues. For instance, the first two lines of the actual lyrics of this song read, “You’ve got a sense of humour / you’re a mystery” become “Get loose, lighten up” and instead of you, it’s “Not how the world is but that it is / Is the mystery”. I love Rogal’s mischievous wordplay and associative leaps so the original lyrics fade there in the background, but somehow I’m still humming the song.

This is Alt-Poetry ( I termed I just coined now to my warm my little New Wave guyliner, Gen X heart) at its best, and the poems are fun to read not just for their odd rhythms and riddling sound devices, but for their near obsessive crossword puzzle cataloguing of pop music allusions. I think opening more songs the radio won’t play to any page is going to leave readers surprised and smiling, which is to say Rogal’s poetry is ‘a wild thing’ that makes everything groovy (sorry, I couldn’t help myself). It is a poetry collection that is both endearing and fantastical.

Chris Banks is an award-winning, Pushcart-nominated Canadian poet and author of seven collections of poems, most recently Alternator with Nightwood Editions (Fall 2023). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, The Walrus, American Poetry Journal, The Glacier, Best American Poetry (blog), Prism International, among other publications. Chris was an associate editor with The New Quarterly, and is Editor in Chief of The Woodlot – A Canadian Poetry Reviews & Essays website. He lives with dual disorders–chronic major depression and generalized anxiety disorder– and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.