We live in an age suspicious of beauty. And why not? Aesthetic matters can feel like distractions and luxuries in light of the more pressing concerns of morality and social relations: friendship, atrocity, divorce, the rise of the authoritarian character, all that weds us to the news. The paradox remains: in times of stress, both personal and cultural, music, as the medium most about beauty (a.k.a. itself), rises in importance. You find it everywhere, in every camp of refugees and the otherwise displaced. It crosses every border. Odd how the wordless can go deep enough to unravel us, lift us, bring us together, to tears no less, and so refer us elsewhere. Music, like beauty itself, is never merely formal. Like a poem, it works most generously as both summons and a gift. André Breton’s sole criterion: the marvel. And so embedded in the wordless. Inconceivable for a composer to say, the world is ugly, so here, here’s one more ugly thing, in good conscience. On the contrary, music and the poems that embody it affirm aesthetic experience as a spiritual necessity, a participation in a gift exchange that helps people live, or want to live. Given its roots in the natural order, to hate beauty is to hate oneself.
In his new volume, Dark Souvenirs, John Amen explores, in a time of personal crisis, the consolation of song, the reprieve of focus and surrender found there. Music serves as counterpoint to the trials of the poet’s uncle, Richard Sassoon, a musician who struggled with addiction and eventually committed suicide. As a world apart, music is no less embedded in a complex of familial relations that contribute to a more inclusive but no less problematic testament. Rather than relaxing into the authority of personal narrative and the ad hominem that encourages a sense of language as transparency, these poems branch out in search of multiple perspectives, an intricate web wherein Sassoon appears as brother, son, friend, teacher, and stranger. Addiction and suicide constitute more than individual afflictions. To be seen clearly, suffering must be explored in context. That said, the sense of mutual entanglement throughout Amen’s book coexists with a heartbreaking and complementary sense of distance among parts. Indeed, the extremes of connectivity and disintegration inform the book’s overall vision, one that refuses the monochrome of the merely cautionary, sensational, or sentimental.
The paradox of intimate distance gets underscored by an intensified inwardness of many of the characters whose shared loss spawns a variety of symptoms. In the book’s opening poem, “Family Systems,” for instance, the connective principle implicit in a familial “system” provides both a pretext and foil for the less “systematized” privacies of dislocation, repression, and loss:
A month after my brother’s funeral—
spackled sky, red blooms on the gardenia—
I could hear my father grinding his teeth
from across the room. My mother stared
out a window, whispering to herself,
deciphering omens in the birdsong.
If the poems themselves constitute “dark souvenirs,” that darkness suggests more than mere grim material or the obscurities of history. Eclipsed psychological spaces likewise exert a pressure expressed indirectly, symptomatically, as intimations of interiors that both arouse and resist the interpretive imagination.
No doubt the conversational style and literal presentation in the book stand in contrast to the high degree of its fractures in narrative coherence. This is a book with many of the metaphorical gestures that engender their own sense of the real within the real. Interiors erupt in a varied, magical-realist texture of moving in and out of dream. You can see a kindred mutability in the taking of a story, so personal to the author, and casting it in a variety of voices, all in first person. If we are conditioned to expect a consistent sense of the “I,” we are no sooner reminded of the constructed nature of the story at hand. Amen’s collection bears an affinity with Louise Glück’s Ararat, in terms of suggesting a narrative by way of shorter, related lyrics that enlarge their significance and emotional resonance in context, but in Amen’s work, the “I” appears less stable as an organizing center and point of reference.
Darkness, however implicit in the subject matter, thus becomes central to the book’s aesthetic, its troubled sublime as figured locally, within the conflicted and alienated realms of the individual. The book’s frequent paratactic leaps and syntactically fragmented poetic images favor a complexity of feeling and idea wherein birdsong and gardenia remind us of the consolations of beauty as central to the music herein exemplified and explored. In poem after poem, music provides not only comfort but a means of spiritual survival, tragically abandoned by the addict who chooses, in the advanced stages of his illness, his pipe over his trumpet.
The prevalence of drugs among the book’s musicians suggests yet another net of interrelations, another context for the suffering of any one musician alone. In one such poem, “The Music at Hand,” written from the point of view of a friend of Richard, a drummer at the time, the speaker’s associative mind provides the connective principle:
I saw the news about the famous drummer found
pulseless in his hotel room in Bogotá, the boulevard
outside the Casa Medina lined with sunflowers,
fans singing through the night. Truth is, I didn’t know
much about him, & I flashed on my old friend Richard,
how we used to chop lines of speed in his garage,
Richard pounding those flea-market Ludwigs as I
banged on my knock-off Gibson, slobbering into a
Radio Shack microphone. . . .
So many dead by needle, pills
in fiery wrecks, souls who refused to succumb to the
tempo life demanded, drummers who flogged the beat
until no one could find it or lagged until the song fell apart.
A wealth of singular details (signatures of their modest means) pins this poem to world, but, in the context of the book, they provide less of a sense of narrative mastery than immanence, or rather, the longing for it, for the intimacy that eludes the poem’s speaker:
Today my city’s young again with the rhythms of spring,
but I’m spelled by ghosts . . .
& I hear them, at least for a few measures, before I turn away,
shoving myself sunward, back to the music at hand.
The immediacy of music appears as a primary means of coping with the abundance and consternations of tangled memory. The closing plant-like motion “sunward” toward beauty, focus, and vitality mirrors the book’s larger arc, how it enacts no transcendence or resolution of conflict, only the more modest and credible movement from tragedy to life-affirmation, to the chill of the water of an evanescent world. To embrace this world is to participate in its ephemerality. Music reminds us. The sustained exploration of the book as a whole makes it one that rewards close reading. Indeed the book constitutes one large poem whose parts do what great poems must. They elude us, just enough, with the precision of their means and the liberality of their imaginative intelligence. Dark, yes, but no less luminous. A deeply beautiful and moving book.
_____
Dark Souvenirs. By John Amen. Beacon, NY: New York Quarterly Books, 2024. 88 pp. $18.95.
