MUSIC, NONSTOP: Patty Seyburn’s Latest Book of Poems

Sometime during my college years, I was back in my hometown of San Clemente for the weekend, driving my Toyota Tercel while listening, on my Pioneer stereo, to Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door. “All of My Love” was on, and as I passed by Poche, the beach where I learned to surf when I was still in middle school, Robert Plant sang, “One voice is clear above the din.” That was thirty years ago. I cannot, to this day, drive that stretch of coast without that lyric, and the sounds that held it up, coming to mind. And if I encounter that song, in a restaurant or a doctor’s office, Poche comes rushing to my memory like the waves that crash on its shore.

I once heard the late poet Dean Young talk about the weird difficulty of writing poems: You look for a way into them and, once in, immediately look for the way out. You might want to write about your youth in Detroit, or your twenties in New York, or your career years and family years in Orange County, California, a place where your Jewish identity is both sustained and developed and also somehow exotic, exilic. Where is your entrance, what is the lingua franca that will unlock the door to, and offer a key for decoding, all that personal and global history for the readers who happen upon it?

In her latest book, Jukebox, Patty Seyburn offers a deceptively simply answer: Music. “Today, say ‘every’ with all three syllables, / the way KISS did in a rock’ n’ roll anthem,” Seyburn begins “Weather in the OC.” Too low-brow for your tastes? Try this: “The dynamics allegro commodo non agitato indicate a fast / though leisurely tempo without restlessness // or agitation…” It’s indicative of Seyburn’s gift for making swift and subtle connections and layers that the title of this poem, “A Little Bit of The Moldau by Smetana,” echoes the title of an intentionally less rarified piece of music, A Touch of Schmilsson in the Night. A poet’s mind is a web, and the pleasure of poetry comes by the poet’s voice acting as a witty, sure-handed guide leading us through its workings. The guide, in this case, assumes that her readers love music as much as she does. Speaking as one of those readers, I’d say she’s right.

Each of the poems in this wondrous collection (a grounded wondrousness, to be sure) use music—descriptions of it, enactments of it, references and faint allusions to it—as a kind of small but powerful circuit holding the poem’s thoughts together. The motherboard directing the flow of these circuits is “All the Conversations I’ve Ever Had That Mattered,” the book’s second poem, which acts as a dumb show to the larger play, or as a lyrical table of contents. Over the course of eleven, big, blocklike stanzas, Seyburn addresses a “you” in her monologue, perhaps a particular “you,” or perhaps any number of “yous” known over many years. To this audience she recounts conversations all having to do with opinions of, experiences with, and judgments on music: 

I selected this passage pretty much at random, but it shows something about how the book is put together. As already mentioned, this poem introduces in miniature the incidents and anecdotes that will furnish much of the book’s narrative material. (Bedřich Smetana, as you’ve already seen, eventually gets his own poem, named after one of his own compositions.) 

You also get in this passage a taste of Seyburn’s technique, the offhand sonic talent of a practiced improviser: “I memorized all the lyrics / of Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair. You liked Emmylou Harris. / I listened to Rickie Lee Jones with no respite.” The rhymes and near rhymes, alliterations and assonances pile up like syncopated beats: memorized, Christ, liked, lyrics, listened, Hair, Harris, Rickie, respite. There’s much more chiming in this little raft of sound than in the words I’ve extracted from it, and it predicts more to come. Later on, we’ll read “Wild One,” where the speaker recalls being rescued from a mosh pit by a fellow named Dimitri (one of the incidents previsioned in “All the Conversations”), and we hear in that recollected memory the melody Seyburn makes out of earthy experience: “I licked / a little blood off my teeth. A guy flicked / ashes on my shoes. This was before tattoos.” I chose those lines because they sound so good (say them aloud to hear what I mean), and because the voice and the ear (and blood and teeth and skin) are parts of the body, an object this book is very interested in. Because this book sounds so (bodily) good, I could quote many other passages to make the point. My dog-eared copy proves it.

I can further attest to the fact that this stuff works not just on me. I read “All the Conversations” to two of my friends from the backseat of a car as we drove home to Southern California from Las Vegas, where the night before we attended a concert by country singer Ray Wylie Hubbard. These guys I shared the poem with are not poetry readers. But they are music lovers. After I read aloud the verbose, discursive, momentum-building lines of all fourteen stanzas, my friends registered wonder at the fact that poetry could be that much fun. 

Their sense of fun may have been helped because the names they heard, like many of the names dropped throughout the book, are from a certain era: Emmylou and Rickie Lee, Neil Young and Cream, Chaka Khan and Parliament, The Clash, Iggy Pop, and the New York Dolls, Amy Grant and Chet Baker and Foo Fighters. (And so on and so forth.) My friends and I, a marketer might say, reside in the target demographic. But this book is full of names that transcend the late twentieth century, from King David to John Coltrane, from Mozart to Al Stewart, from the Roud Folk Song Index to the Rodgers and Hammerstein songbook.

To talk like this is to suggest that the book’s references, which extend far beyond music, are its meanings. Instead, the subject of these poems is love—or love-as-attention, a definition from the movie Lady Bird that still thrums through me. The attention here is to music, of course, but also to literature and family and the rituals of religion. And to keeping track of where one falls short. Seyburn figures that falling short into the shareable object of lines like these:  

This poem, “What I’m Really Sorry For,” which mixes (as so much of the book does) humor and pathos, the seemingly serious and the seemingly inconsequential, continues,

Or to put it more modestly, when we read Seyburn’s book and encounter its attention that is akin to love, attention as the necessary condition of love, we might recall the words of the groupie Sapphire, from Almost Famous: “They don't even know what it is to be a fan. Y'know? To truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts.”

It does hurt, indeed. And in saying so, in acknowledging what has been loved and and followed and lost, as each moment of attention must be, Seyburn has made something new, some future tense of joy waiting for the reader to open its pages, where the pleasure of song will then be activated in and by the human voice: 

Those lines read like a statement of purpose as well as a description of method, made profounder by the involuntary nature of the grammar: “the noise of the brain” is doing the “trying” and the “sorting and disposing” and not the speaker herself, just as her mother, who does seem to have agency (“could conjure up the words / to Mean to Me”) is, apparently, summoned into that act of conjuring by the sound of the song itself. We are, through language, our memory’s song. Poche comes rushing back to my mind in melody.

Poche the beach like Seyburn the poet, resides in Orange County. I grew up there, and (disclosure time) it’s where I first met Seyburn, who has become a friend. She, like me, ended up at UC Irvine’s MFA program, though she graduated before I arrived, and she moved to Houston for her PhD before returning to “The OC” to take a job at Cal State Long Beach, where she has taught for several years. Jukebox is her sixth book. She’s in this poetry business for life, having practiced it for years, a seasoned pro.

Seyburn’s writing is therefore both learned and loose (these poems swing, baby!), yet they still make space for the unfunky: Frost, Bishop, Pushkin. I didn’t talk about how these poems look for their ways out, but their endings are indeed satisfying—natural and surprising and wise. It’s the reading and re-reading of figured speech that marks the life of a poet, or a poetry fan, just as it is for the priest and the rabbi. That Day of Atonement is, annually, on its way, as Seyburn recalls in “What I’m Really Sorry For.” In “My Pocketbook,” Seyburn reminds us of what else is on its way, “I can’t wait for Yom Kippur this year / when we rehearse our own death.” Death is the ultimate way out, and knowledge of it coming to us through language is one way through. Jukebox is, among other things, a memento mori: Remember you will die. So let’s dance!

Chris Davidson was born in Laguna Beach, graduated from San Clemente High, and has lived all over Orange County—San Juan Capistrano, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Tustin, and Seal Beach. His poetry has appeared, most recently, in The MacGuffin, The Mockingbird, Social Alternatives, Ekstasis, and Zocalo Public Square. Davidson's poems are included in the anthologies Orange County: A Literary Field Guide and Why To These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers. His chapbook, Easy Meal, was published in 2020. He lives in Long Beach.