Poetry: 2007

You knew you were dead in my dream. You said drive me. The doctor. I’m so late. I said no there’s no more doctor you know that. I hugged you, you hugged me. I felt weird nights waking up. The walls flickered with light and the shadows of pine trees. Each needle was visible. Their patterns outrageous. I knew ghosts were coming. I waited for ghosts. And then they did not come. More scary than them coming is they do not come.

William Coyle's poem “Clown Bikes”appeared in Broken Bridge Review (Vol. 3, 2008) and a short play, “Faith,” is anthologized in Stage This!Volume 3: Monologues, Short Solo Plays and 10-Minute Plays. He is a theater critic for Offoffonline, and holds a Master's degree in English from the University of Buffalo.

Speaking In Code

Speaking In Codea film by Amy GrillsQuare Productions, 2009What drives, obsesses, and eventually breaks impresario David Day in the new documentary Speaking In Code is that most elusive of quarries: getting something started in Boston.The something in this case being the techno music scene. A Midwestern American art, electronic dance music has moved so deep underground in its home country you’d forget it was ever here. But Europe continues to dance to it, and it’s to Berlin and Barcilona that David and his wife, Amy Grill, economy-jet to be a part of it; and to meet and get to know the people who live around it, people who—like journalist Philip Sherbourne—move clear across the world in search of “a more complete techno lifestyle.”Electronic dance is a music of fluorescence, of squatters in abandoned buildings, clubs so dark you can’t see the DJ. It’s also a music of bright, empty mornings. Fittingly, Grill places her interview subjects off-center, counterpointed by stray graffiti or AV cables. There is an off-and-on color rhythm as schemes alternate between the pale light of northern mornings and the powdery dark of clubs.In their drive to get closer and closer to the music that defines who they are, the filmmakers go broke and split up on camera (filming David, studying him, Amy begins to see him differently; he grows apart from her as he lives more and more for the scene). Though the breakup could easily feel gimmicky or tacked-on, it ends up providing a necessary foreground to the story, which involves lots of lightly sketched characters, locations, and great stretches of time. The movie ends up being about time, too, and about growing older, making choices, seeing how they play out, then making new ones.Ironically, the music itself seemed hardly there. Maybe because we’re so inured to electronic, repetitive film scores, the background tracks tended to blend together or fade away. What we’re left with are the people who make the scene, their idiosyncrasies and tics. Surprisingly, this turns out to be enough.“What’s our plan?” director Grill asks the on-camera David Day. He squirms away: “It’s party time. I think. I don’t have a watch… so…” He rents a loft space for music gatherings, but the space is shut down. What next? A rave in Thuringia at 4am.Will electronic music ever find a home in Boston? “It’s going to take someone, somewhere, from someplace,” muses David, abstractedly. He’s facinating to watch—an ultimately appealing dreamer who hasn’t quite had the space and time to think things through—he carries the film. His passion does, his absorption. We leave the theater hoping the best for everyone involved in Speaking In Code. It speaks well for its world.___John Cotter‘s novel Under the Small Lights was published by Miami University Press in 2010 and his short fiction is forthcoming from Redivider and New Genre. He’s a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly and lives in Denver, Colorado.

Survey Says!

Survey Says!Nathan AustinBlack Maze Books, 2009Survey Says is a short book of white margins and large type, considering solely of answers provided on The Family Feud (in 2005 and 2008):

I soak my dishes. Bambi. Hamburger. Hamburgers. Camel. Camera. James Bond.

The answers are complete — the author says he didn’t skip any, and we’ll just have to trust him — arranged in alphabetical order by the second letter of each phrase: Sing, Singer, Lingerie, Fingernails. What emerges is something like rhyme, and it carries the sound of the long poem well. Sometimes Austin lucks into the first letter, too “A bra. Abraham Lincoln.” I didn’t notice the pattern being disrupted, though I might have missed it. I didn’t even notice the pattern itself at first because the phrase combinations can be a lot of fun. Hillary and Bill Clinton still manage to wind up next to one another (can nothing sunder their love?), pigs is preceded by nightsticks.

They brush their teeth. They buy groceries. They cash their check. They change their jobs. They change their underwear. They cheat on their spouse. They chew gum. They comb it over. They develop more hair. They don’t like to look pretty. They don’t put on their seatbelt. They don’t take care of their bedroom. They dry flowers — like dried flowers. They dye it. They eat. They fall out of love. They gargle. They go out to dinner. They go to see a Woody Allen Movie. They have kids.

Reading this, I occasionally worry about taking part in a cruel mocking of Middle-America, and middle-of-the-afternoon America. And then, I think, well why shouldn’t I have a laugh at boobs on game shows? They’re not an endangered species or anything. “I’m going to have to go with Ashley Simpson.” Yeah.And if you’re a word artist looking for non-academic and non-specialized language to manipulate, look no further than game show answers. Quite quickly, I quit reading the poem as a social critique and settled in for the flipping-channels. A nice-like rhythm develops. The voices almost never come off as individual; a single soul is trying to communicate. Stories emerge:A nice, comfortable mattress. Knives. In line. Only tell one person your secret. Enquirer. Insomnia. Insult them. Insurance.

O mercy! America’s dark heart. A mirage?

___John Cotter‘s novel Under the Small Lights was published by Miami University Press in 2010 and his short fiction is forthcoming from Redivider and New Genre. He’s a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly and lives in Denver, Colorado.