Scott Joplin
They said you were depressed
laconically, you grinned
under a flickering gas flare.
Who smells the stale beer now
you sipped in smoky clubs
as operas unfolded behind your eyes?
You saw the hanging notes waiting
to be plucked from the sides
of trolleys and bound
them in melodies that kept
Death clear and dogged madness
off-step a bit.
Playing a maple-leaf rag
you wove a quarter-note net
to catch your name
when the rest of you tumbled
Through in pieces too small to hold.
Narrative verse has found a new voice, a storyteller of verve and brio, recasting the lapidary virtues of the short story into musical lines, new American rhythms and inflections. The tales Burgess Needle tells come from all sides, from his childhood struggle with a casually brutal father, from the Arizona people and landscapes, from the travel experiences of his countercultural youth as a wide-eyed TEFL teacher in Thailand. Some of the tales come from myth and history, from anecdotes gleaned in the contact zone along the Mexican border. And some reflect on his own daily life, poems found in the mirror, in the hospital bed, in his partner’s arms. All of the stories share a vigorous and natural style of delivery, a line rich in real things, details, voices, lived experiences, all animated by a spirit of enquiry, a feeling of sympathy, a spirit of openness, candour, love of life. The quality of the tone is difficult to capture - it combines a breeziness, freshness of diction, and sense of story as natural as Chekhov’s; but combined with sharp craft, an ear for a good line, a deftness of rhythm and word-music. The stories inhabit the lines as their own true spaces, as just as the relation of adobe wall to arroyo.
-Adam Piette,Professor of Modern Literature
University of Sheffield, UK
