SongBu®st, Stephen Bett, Blazevox Books, 2024, ISBN: 978-1-60964-476-5, $18.00
About SongBu®st:
Breaking into song, or breaking it apart? Maybe a bit of both. Simultaneously a celebration & a send up of iconic pop culture lyrics. SongBu®st is a book-length serial poem that plays like a metafiction anchored on Marcel Duchamp's concept of infrathin, & featuring characters, or rather figures, recurring & reframing themselves throughout.
SongBu®st Review by Billy Mills (from Elliptical Movements):
Stephen Bett's SongBu®st is a series of glorious celebrations of popular song, linguistically exuberant, politically engaged, and lots of fun. Most of the songs referenced come from the 'long' 1960s (one exception is Dylan's 'Slow Train Coming', but Dylan is the 60s for many) and range from The Archies to the aforementioned Zimmerman. Bett's focus (via footnotes at the end of each poem) is on specific recordings, rather than songwriters, unless the recording happens to be by the writer. Again, there ae exceptions, with Burt Bacharach and Carole King getting shoutouts via other people's versions of their songs.
Running through it all is Marcel Duchamp's (via Marjorie Perloff) concept of infrathin, an aesthetics of tiny differences, an idea that plays out here by turbocharging the common experience of misheard or deliberately distorted song words:
I wanna be hobby' gurl
I wanna be da lobby churl
At times, this move from sense towards sound dissolves into joyous Joycean anarchy:
I got a certain little girl ...
Ahh nice one, gag, pee-U
Nabs & Lol gone Zap
(wuz always off)
Nabokov colliding with Frank Zappa in a Deep Purple looking glass world.
But Bett's intent is profoundly serious, fired mainly by the rise of the American Alt Right, with its racist, misogynistic ideology standing in stark contrast with the unselfconscious inclusivity of pop. In particular, he points at one group: 'of all the disgusting militant far-right white supremacist creeps, the Boogaloo Bois (or Bois; a.k.a boojahideen, Big Igloo, etc.) seem the most hideous presently.' (In a footnote to 'Nickle & Diming Al the Way to Maga Boogaloo', a poem that riffs on two Dylan songs 'Please, Mrs Henry' and 'Maggie's Farm' and following, infrathinly, to poems that embed Hilary Clinton's vote-losing 'deplorables' remark:
Ain't No Mo room at the morgue
We's after hours (on the nail)
...BOO'ga'loo
rearin' up deplorable nuttin'
you could say or do
There's so much to unpack here, much of it covered in the notes, but two infrathin echoes are not annotated, the opening line carrying an echo of Dylan's (via Poe) Rue Morgue Avenue (if you don't know the song that's from, you better go back to from where you came) and the closing six words summoning up Mary Wells' glorious 'My Guy', a musical journey from despair to love, swamping the swamp dwellers between.
I can only hope that I've given some sense of Bett's indefinable something and am going to close this review with the last words of the final footnote to the last poem here, a sentiment I wholly concur with: '"grrls" - liberated, independent womyn are our only real hope.' Amen to that.
Other Reviews of SongBu®st:
"Stephen Bett's new book SongBu®st sounds like a ship-wrecked wit ("we are coast people") riffing at the end of the world. Here you'll find snippets of old American pop songs morphed into takes on gun carnage and quotes from tech bros, each separated from the other by an "infrathin delay." I've sometimes wondered what I would see (hear) if my actual life flashed before my eyes when I died. It might be a lot like this."
--Rae Armantrout (Pulitzer Prize-winning poet)
"These SongBu®st poems are quicksilver, mercurial, reJoycan. You get whisked away and the ride is full of surprises, dark trouble and elation all at the same bumpy time. I get the music, the rhythms as they disintegrate. In fact I'm jarred by all the songs and melded songs in play here. The concept "Infrathin," too, is so fascinating and black holish that I'm already moving / pulled into a call to engagement with these poems. The footnotes are a blast, as well: I'm caught by them and what that space (allusion, explanation, fishook) is and does. The poems, above all, are smart and sassy. They are fabulous, and the collection as a whole is greater than its parts."
--Michael Kenyon (ReLit Award-winning poet/novelist)
"What I began to realize, reading these sinuous poems from SongBu®st a second time through, is the musicality of the pieces. There is a syncopated energy, a forward drive that is very appealing. I have to say, they sparkle!
--Ken Cathers (author of Missing Pieces and Letters from the Old Country)
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