#dobyns

Lloyd Dobyns, Co-Anchor of an Innovative TV Newscast, Dies at 85

2020 NPM #29: Loud Music and Brink by Stephen Dobyns

Stephen Dobyns (1941 - ) is a prolific writer, author of fourteen books of poems, two books of essays on poetry, and two-dozen-ish novels. I thought it was odd that I had never read any of his books, then researched a little further and realized that many of them were detective novels, or had luridly effective titles aimed at what is referred to in the book trade as the “mass market audience.” Understood. My personal interests lie elsewhere.

That being said, he is a very effective storyteller as a poet, despite the fact that his topics are often painful things to talk about.  I’m going to comment on two of his pieces today, Loud Music, and Brink, that deal, in similar ways, with identity.

The voice in Loud Music is a man who, as a parent, I have a slightly more than subconscious desire to throttle. The scene it describes is a man in his car with his four-year-old stepdaughter, playing absurdly loud music: 

My stepdaughter and I circle round and round. You see, I like the music loud, the speakers throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound whether Bach or rock and roll, the volume cranked up so each bass note is like a hand smacking the gut.

Instead of thinking about damaging her ears, he only observes that,

But my stepdaughter disagrees. She is four and likes the music decorous, pitched below her own voice-that tenuous projection of self. With music blasting, she feels she disappears, is lost within the blare, which in fact I like.

He envisions her relationship to sound,

But at four what she wants is self-location and uses her voice as a porpoise uses its sonar: to find herself in all this space.

And recognizes his own desire is very different. Where she is trying to define herself to understand her surroundings, all he wants is to erase himself, to find a grey emptiness in which to define himself,

Loud music does this, it wipes out the ego, leaving turbulent water and winding road, a landscape stripped of people and language- how clear the air becomes, how sharp the colors.

The second poem, Brink, is the opposing viewpoint. Instead of a self absorbed step parent, it is  a very involved parent, voicing the frustrations and worries of raising a child and constantly seeing them, or at least perceiving them or imagining them, on the edge of danger:

My son stands at the shore's lip and skips flat stones across the water.

- - -

He is ready for any adventure And waits on the brink like someone waiting in line.

To the worried parent, watching their child on the edge of each new ‘adventure’ is nerve wracking, and he likens each of these encounters to dancing blindly on the edge of a cliff.

And won't the story be repeated until we ourselves take the page and tear it from the book?

But we can’t magically make the page disappear, not any time soon, at least, unless a bigger, darker fear takes its place, or until time blurs or erases some of the pages for us. 

Hmmm. Go back and read the last part of Loud Music.