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Episode 5: Poetry

from Broken Links: Season One by David Kulma

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about

The fifth episode of this web series of stories in which a man has difficulty with poetry.

Go here to watch the full video on YouTube: youtu.be/n0dlPock_pk

lyrics

He tried reading poems. They
never made sense to him. He
couldn’t slow his abnormally
slow reading speed down
enough to pick up the scent
of their metaphors, their
similes, and their imagery.

This doesn’t mean he didn’t
want to get them. He spent
many hours reading poems.
He subscribed to magazines,
purchased collections, even
memorized them. But he
always felt like the pace of
his mind was like a car
speedometer. There is
no measurement between
zero and fifteen miles per
hour. He guesses the
poems he tries need him
to go seven. But whenever
he taps the accelerator, he
is already passed fifteen.

He needs to learn how to
glide. To develop the ability
to pause his mind midstream
to notice the well placed word,
the interior rhyme, the time
it takes to find the three-way
pun buried deep under the
surface of the enjambment
of thoughts on the page.

He continues to fail. Each
stanza he approaches holds
its meaning away from his
understanding. It is a
masterful game of keep-away.
It is as if his mind is blank after
reading. He sees the poem,
notes its title, tries to place the
poet’s name, and then the
poem is over. It’s gone.
If we went to the replay
booth to find out if he
stepped outside the line,
we will see him reading
each word. The visual
of his eye movements like
the machinery of a typewriter,
(do you remember what that is?)
move sideways slowly and
then snap back to slowly
move on the horizontal again.
The referee signals an
amnesia penalty, which requires
a replay of first down and a loss
of fifteen yards.

Years ago he memorized
one of the major poems of the
canon. This one sends the old
man from Yale into raptures
discussing the four-fold pantheon
of Night, Death, the Mother and
the Sea. It took twenty minutes
to recite without stopping. He
mourned the loss of this country’s
great President in this confused
meditation incantation. The poem
isn’t confused. He is. There is
music in the words. The way the
unmetered lines pile up in
celebratory listicles. Commas
enumerate the visual spectacle
of a coffin passing through
lanes and streets, and a lilac
sprig placed upon it. The poet
and the man remembered by
him live for those minutes
in his mind as he speaks.

Three quarters of the way through
the poem, a song appears in
italics. The bird and the poet sing
to Death in beatitude. The beauty
of this music after a slow build
of visuals that joins the internal
and the external brings tears
to his eyes. He has rarely
met language that moves him
this much. This is why he keeps trying.

His continued poetic failures
gave him the way into a music
that was beyond his comprehension.
A man speaks over music. It’s
not really speech. Is he singing?
It’s not really that either. It sounds
like speech, but the pitches are too
accurate. The cadence, rhythm,
and intonation are too precise
for it to just be talking, but I don’t
think I could write down the notes
he sings. But he calls it singing, so
I will too.

A man sings over music.
There is astounding improvisatory
piano joining his song. It is at
once over the top, stunningly beautiful,
and unbelievably banal, as asshole
art critics use that word to describe art
that doesn’t meet their upperclass
twit of the year award requirements.
What this really means, is that the
chord progressions and the musical
phrases make sense to normal
human beings and make an apt
space for the man’s song to live in.

This song is meant for television.
It has episodes like a sitcom. They
fit an old version of the televised half
hour. That is, if some douchebag
executive ever had the intelligence
to beam this early eighties brilliance
into American homes. Sadly,
the networks never did. You have
to find this music on your own,
from your weird friend, find it
described in a book by a scholar
of the American experimental
avant-garde, who is also a
practitioner of having your cake
and eating it too. And when you
do, you couldn’t understand how
you lived without it.

He didn’t feel that way at first.
It was odd. It felt as though it
had a purposeful screen to
keep out the bugs of his
mind. It just passed in front
of him without leaving anything
more than a huh. But that twenty
minute poem made him reconsider
this opera for television. And he
attacked it via memorization. It took
him years to learn it. Many early
mornings at five AM before work
with pencils to count the repetitions
to drive the words into his brain.
The words reformatted the hard
drive in his head. He learned to
take the lack of understanding as
it came. He still doesn’t know what
some of it means, but he does know
that it moves him deeply. Somehow,
the description of counting breaths
makes him want to do tai chi as
he says the words. The purposeful
placement of curse words shows
him the way forward. The verbal
tics that make the song more human,
more approachable. He feels
as though he owns this music,
although he knows it is not his creation.

This music has changed his life.
It helped him out of a dark time
by becoming the scaffold upon
which he built his new existence.
He knows about the bank heist
that is only the setup for the
narratives that constantly
change narrators. That insert
personal biography inside a plot
outside of his own experience.
How to sing words fast enough
that they come out like speech.
His experience with learning
other’s extended verbal art
gave him the impetus to make
his own. Rather than poetry
in books, or television operas,
he chose the medium of today.
He tells his own stories through
videos he posts on a website
owned by the largest search
engine on the planet. After a
decade of trying to find his voice
as a creator, he finally found
a way to connect his serious
nature and his absurdist sense
of humor with his musical imagination.
If only he knew how to make better
animations.

credits

from Broken Links: Season One, released June 27, 2016
David Kulma made this.

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David Kulma Rock Hill, South Carolina

David Kulma is a composer-performer living in the Carolinas.

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