A blog of fragments.
DISPATCH 2
Note: When the text below was first dislodged from the mud, a burst of music played. But we couldn’t hear its notes.
Today, I went on a walk to Highbridge Park. It was chilly and overcast and I retreated home at the first few drops of rain, but I got to see the river and the city’s skyline so it felt all right. I wore earphones and listened to songs that passed as invisibly through me as the air in my lungs.
As a sonically illiterate person, my most meaningful encounter with music is unemotionally brushing past buskers on the subway. And yet, when I read Reuben Gelley Newman’s Feedback Harmonies several months ago—a chapbook centered on Arthur Russell’s music—its joy and intimacy played deep into my mind.
I can’t quite remember where or in what context the following was uttered, but I remember a writer telling a musician they were jealous because, unlike writing, music is so immediately felt. I have always disagreed with this sentiment—I find music and writing to be both bound up in the exertions and glancing blows of mediation and interpretation. As a frequently exhausted reader and fully incompetent listener who dove into Feedback Harmonies during some of the most stressful months of my life, I immediately connected with these poems in a way that is quite rare even in the best of times. Tumbling through medical anxiety and work burnout, Reuben Gelley Newman’s work felt like a lifeline, a beautiful record of a musician’s work brought into living relation with the urgent desires of life.
This is not a review. I had the pleasure of reading Feedback Harmonies because Reuben Gelley Newman sent it to me after I complained about how I desperately needed more chapbooks to review on social media. I feel very badly that I am not writing a review but my drafts were destined for the recycling bin. The first was solipsistically fixated on the position of the reviewer in relation to an unknown subject—I had never heard of Arthur Russell and never listened to his music until I started reading this chapbook—but it felt both self-defeating and like a self-reflexive movement toward specially (un)qualified mastery: the Reviewer is very small and it’s his birthday, so let us be generously subservient to his pronouncements, if just for today. Subsequent drafts focused more on the chapbook’s queer intimacy, which I was immediately drawn to, but adumbrating the technical context through which such intimacy emerges felt like a fruitless and remedial exercise.
This is all to say—I return to Feedback Harmonies as I came to it: a reader in need. The world has still ended so many times over, yet returning to this collection of poems filled me with the same eagerness, appreciation, and respect for the author’s work that I experienced months ago. What is there for me to say other than, thanks, it was a joy, looking forward to more?
Tonight, a little bit of Arthur Russell’s music will be playing in my apartment. Then, I think, I can lay my head down and wait for morning.