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[with poems from Duet by Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar]
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Listening to Paul Simon
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Such a brave generation.
We marched onto the streets
in our T-shirts and jeans, holding
the hand of the stranger next to us
with a trust I can’t summon now,
our voices raised in song.
Our rooms were lit by candlelight,
wax dripping on the table, then
onto the floor, leaving dusty
starbursts we’d pop off
with the edge of a butter knife
when it was time to move.
But before we packed and drove
into the middle of our lives
we watched the leaves outside
the window shift in the wind
and listened to Paul Simon,
his tindery voice, then fell back
into our solitude, leveled our eyes
on the American horizon
that promised us everything
and knew it was never true:
smoke and cinders, insubstantial
as fingerprints on glass.
It isn’t easy to give up hope,
to escape a dream. We shed
our clothes and cut our hair,
our former beauty piled at our feet.
And still the music lived inside us,
whole worlds unmaking us in the dark,
so that sleeping and waking we heard
the train’s distant whistle, steel
trestles shivering across the land
that was still our in our bones and hearts,
its lone headlamp searching the weedy
stockyards, the damp, gray rags of fog.
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Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar
from Duet, Jacar Press, Durham, NC; © 2016
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Here I am again, six years old this time, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the pinnacle of 1959 technology. I wind it up, carefully lay the 6-inch plastic disc on the little turntable (it’s bright yellow plastic, I will never forget that), and position the needle at the outer groove. The wind-up box is white and red and has a picture of Mickey Mouse grinning; it looks like Mickey’s arm is what holds the stylus. The needle itself juts from a hollow flat cylinder, sort of like a tuna can with perforations; the little holes are what transmit the sound. No electronics, no electricity involved.
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I push a lever and the disk begins to rotate. The needle finds its groove (at least a decade before finding one’s groove will mean anything to me) and in between all the scratches from a hundred earlier renditions – music! The little record finishes, I lift the needle from where it’s begun making little whump whump sounds with each revolution, I place the needle back at groove one, and it starts all over again.
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And even so my mother remained sane to her dying day.
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As the years passed, Mom and Dad began to let me listen to their records on the Hi-Fi (mono, not stereo; Uncle Carlyle soldered it himself). It never seemed to drive them crazy to hear Peter and the Wolf or The Music Man a dozen times a day, or even Bobby Darin singing Mack the Knife. Hard core. Finally the big day – I was 11, I had saved my birthday money, I had laid awake at night tallying which of their songs were included: I bought my first LP, Introducing . . . The Beatles.
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Introducing . . . is an anomaly in Beatles discography. It was released by Vee-Jay Records because Capitol/EMI had farted around about agreeing to a first USA Beatles album and Vee-Jay scooped them. Apparently it was only on the market for a year or so before the suits prevailed and forced them to cease and desist. Anyhow, I listened to that vinyl disc about a thousand times before I bought Beatles ‘65. In fact, I might just go slap it on the old turntable right now. Scratches and all. Please, please me!
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And that little yellow record? Easter Parade. Sixty-five years later I still find no evidence that there has ever been such a parade, but now the melody has wormed it’s way in again: “In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it . . .” And even so, my mother somehow remained sane.
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Mick Jagger (World Tour, 2008)
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He stands on stage
after spot-lit stage, yowling
with his rubber mouth. If you
turn off the sound he’s
a ruminating bovine,
a baby’s face tasting his first
sour orange or spitting
spooned oatmeal out.
Rugose cheeks and beef
jerky jowls, shrubby hair
waxed, roughed up, arms
slung dome-ward, twisted
branches of a tough tree, knees
stomping high as his sunken chest.
Oddities aside, he’s a hybrid
of stamina and slouch,
tummy pooch, pouches under
his famous invasive rolling eyes.
He flutters like the pages
of a dirty book, doing
the sombrero dance, rocking
the microphone’s
round black foot, one hand
gripping the skinny metal rod,
the other pumping its victory fist
like he’s flushing a chain toilet.
Old as the moon and sleek
as a puma circling the herd.
The vein in this forehead
pops. His hands drop into fists.
he bows like a beggar then rises
like a monarch. Sir Mick,
our bony ruler. Jagger, slumping
off stage shining with sweat.
O please don’t die. Not now,
not ever, not yet.
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Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar
from Duet, Jacar Press, Durham, NC; © 2016
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Uno Voce – when Sandy Beam rehearsed an a capella selection, he required us to blend our tone with each person singing near us until it was as if we all sang with one voice. Vibrato is anathema; sibilance is sin! Of course, Sandy would have been happiest if we had all been boy sopranos, but at least we could strive for that brilliant transparent evocation of light he desired.
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Light and truth evoked by a single voice – not at all unlike these poems in Duet. They are each about music – Bo Diddley, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Cher. They build a portrait in layers of color, tone, and years, filled with the music that infuses our past and vibrates in our bones to create our present. And they are written by the duet of Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar, but the tones and melodies blend until we readers hear a single voice.
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Not an ear worm in the bunch.
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Duet is one in the continuation of the Greatest Hits Series, originally conceived by editor Jennifer Bosveld at Pudding House Press in 2000 and acquired by Sammy Greenspan of Kattywampus Press in 2010. Jacar Press was asked to take over the series under the careful eye of series editor David Rigsbee in 2017. More about the book, the Series, and Jacar Press HERE
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