Playlist: a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems documents the life and practice of a writer who grew up in a musical household, and spent his early adult years as a touring musician and his later years programming nightclubs, hotels, galleries, and festivals. Modelled after the American folk music revival songbooks of the 1950s and 60s, Playlist fiddles with a two-part writing system that begins with the songbooks’ contextual introductions and ends with the songs — or in this instance, poems — to which they refer. In Playlist, introductions can act less as supporting words than as discrete stories. At the same time, the poems they are in service of can appear indifferent to story, sentiment, and a writer who, in claiming to contextualize them, can only reduce them further.
The approach championed here is derived from Angela Carter’s writings on burlesque — the exaggeration in this instance born from binaries our progressive liberal culture claims to deplore but, often whimsically, deploys on its social media platforms, too often without regard for consequence. Though these poems aren’t expressly critical, their formal method of construction qualifies them as that subgenre of poetry known as the protest poem.
Michael Turner lives in the garrison town of Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish territories. His books include Hard Core Logo, The Pornographer’s Poem and, more recently, 9×11 and Other Poems Like Bird, Nine, x and Eleven. His wartime journal mtwebsit.blogspot.com continues to cause him problems.
