Preferring Top 40 With Brandon Brown
At Jacket2, a sharp review of Brandon Brown's Top 40! "In writing Top 40 (Roof Books, 2014) as a conversation with the Top 40, Brown creates an expectation that his poems do some of what the songs do — that they occasion singing and dancing with the reader. We’re all in this together, in Brown’s poems, even when we’re allied in each being alone," writes Davy Knittle. More pretty information:
Top 40 is a procedure, or a few at once: forty sentences extending from each song in order to consider how pop music and making friends and keeping lists are all procedures. Brown cares, too, about how procedures usefully and gorgeously break down: “A transit strike can be breathtaking actually in how it redistributes / the possible,” he writes (58). Brown shifts among procedural unpackings of the songs and their lyrics, anecdotes of his daily routines and recent events, exchanges with people close to him, and accounts of what he’s reading (from Norse mythology to Kathy Acker to Rousseau). The book presents a time warp, where the poems catalogue their writing as it becomes October (“sweater weather”) and then winter as the book progresses, where the poems are in the present of the September 14th Top 40 and also in a shifting present where that Top 40 becomes a continuously receding past. The poems assemble into a kind of fragmentary completed portrait, a snapshot of the months around the writing of Top 40 in some of the ways a Top 40 is itself a biography of an American moment. Brown writes: “The structure of the Top 40 is not seismically safe, it cannot survive / unagitated longer than one week” (57): and yet the poems survive, even as they shift. The book is meant to become dated, but also to live on.
Brown thinks often in this book about lineage, as when he quotes from Alice Notley’s Culture of One: “‘The world isn’t a text to be deciphered, it is a new / creation though ancient — but what is antiquity to me’” (59).[2] And to Brown? Part of it is this: “When I look in the mirror I’m subject to a number of fantasies / about history and time travel” (69), which is the companion to the statement “The momentary eternal sounds like heaven to me” (71). These poems are a document of their moment, and a meditation on how antiquity and memory are carried on in the present as moments erode. They aspire to a momentary eternal, a trick of time where the present goes on forever, even as they map its impossibility. Through them, I learn that I prefer Top 40 with Brandon Brown to Top 40 with Ryan Seacrest as a way of keeping track of the present and its slippages.
We couldn't agree more. Read the full review at Jacket2.