Volume IV, Issue 3 - Summer 2005 - "Noise"

Reviews: Trip Picks

From the Editors | Feature | Spotlight | Poets | Reviews | Yawp

"The Saddest Noise, The Sweetest Noise"
by Tania Van Schalkywk

Once upon a trashy ‘80’s time, glam rockers Slade, followed by the even more glimmering Quiet Riot screamed, "Cum on Feel the Noize!" Flash forward 20 odd years and Triplopia’s poetry picknicker Tania van Schalkwyk is still trying to decipher what it means to ‘feel’ noise. Therefore, she decided to ask a few wordsmiths the following question:

Which words have you read or heard that effectively explore either the beauty or the horror of NOISE ?

Judging from the responses below, Emily Dickinson’s proclamations in the eighteen hundreds still hold true today:

An ear can break a human heart
As quickly as a spear
We wish the ear had not a heart
So dangerously near
--Poem 1764: Poems of Emily Dickinson, The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955

Without further clamoring ado, we present Trip Pick’s choice of "The saddest noise, the sweetest noise" . . .

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

"In the beginning was the Word." And then sound, and then noise. But before all that, before, there was silence. The Word emerged from it, like the cry of the newborn, the words spoken in the silence of the analytic space, the first jottings on the blank page. And ever since, fantasies of returning. Scattered across line upon line in books, through layers of paint, in reverberating notes, fantasies of return to that first container, that first "Ur"-place. The womb, the soul, the ultimate being. And nightmares of its other side: of sealed spaces, of suffocating, of being buried alive, of being consumed in the bowels of the earth.

Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle rides on this double fantasy of return to the dark and silent chambers of man’s soul. The mechanical cry of a bird ‘that sounded as if it were winding a spring,’ reverberates through the novel, acting as a portal to the underworld. His main character, lost in a world he experienced as mechanical, descended into a deep, dry well to attempt his return. Initially, he listened for ‘any sound my ears might pick up, but there was nothing: no cicada or bird cries, no children’s voices. Maybe, while I was down here in the well, the wind-up bird had not wound the spring, and the world had stopped moving. Bit by bit the spring had run down, and at a certain point in time, all movement - the river’s flow, the stirring of leaves, birds flying through the sky - had stopped.’ Eventually a space emerged, that took Murakami’s hero to bizarre, other dimensions of being, leaving the reader to work out the sanity, and madness, of the attempt.

Will it encourage others to imitate the hero’s feat? Discourage them? It certainly won’t affect the fantasy of return in our minds. Of a Dantean journey through the woods, to new beginnings and altered potentialities, where dreams come literally true and boundaries dissolve; where the disconcerting meets the familiar and the surreal the grotesque; where man comes face to face with the unspoken stories hidden in his cells.

--Stella Pierides, Writer

"Spring," by Thomas Nashe

Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year's pleasant king;
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing,
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

The palm and may make country houses gay,
Lambs frisk and play, the [shepherds pipe]1 all day,
And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay,
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit,
In every street these tunes our ears do greet,
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!
Spring! The sweet Spring!

"Spring" by Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) uses onomotopoeia to explore the beauty of noise. After being reminded of the magnificence of this poem at a conference panel organized by Bruce Smith, I found I couldn't get it out of my head. I suspect the reason is that the noise in it is untranslatable. It is what it is. And then I began to understand something else: a person walking out of a country house in the Renaissance, before automobiles and the destruction of habitat had so impoverished our ears of birdsong, would have heard so much more of a riotous and inspiring music from the birds than we can ever hear now. This makes the noise in this poem even more precious: a missive from the past, a time capsule from a time before tape recorders. Last spring I performed "Spring" with my five-year-old at a Waldorf School spring celebration gathering; she memorized and performed the bird song part. I will never forget her voice making those precious noises.

--Annie Finch, poet, Director of Stonecoast low-residency MFA Program

"Dulce et Decorum Est," by Wilfred Owen

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling form the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile incurable sores on innocent tongues
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est
Pro Patria mori

Lately I find myself thinking of an old poem that makes us hear noises we (as readers) don't want to hear-don't want to have to think about-but noises we (as humans) must hear if we are to survive. Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" brings me the numbed noise of exhausted soldiers marching toward their "distant rest" - "Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots / Of gas-shells dropping softly behind." If I am alert and lucky enough to hear the soft hiss of Owen's gas shell and able to move fast enough ("An ecstasy of fumbling / Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time"), I will live to witness the one who is not so lucky through sound as well as sight images: "He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning." In the final stanza Owen directly calls my attention to sound, the sounds both of someone who will never speak again and the ongoing spoken Lie.

--Bette Lynch Husted, Poet and Author of Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Land & After Fire

Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk, Reg. E. Gaines & Savion Glover

Watching the show Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk was a literal life changing experience for me. Reg E. Gaines' words with the poetry of the tap moved me so much I couldn't even clap or whoop or holla...I sat silent for 2 hours, leaning forward with a tear coming down every now and then. I was studying performance/politics and frustrated at the lack of cultural diversity at school -- both in the student body and the curriculum we were being taught. That, along with the fact that most Broadway shows are sleek, pretty cheesy, and filled with white folks in both the audience and in the cast. So to watch an all non-white cast tapping raw, soulful beats and spitting rhymes that addressed topics like the banning of drums by slaves to the Harlem renaissance to the inability of a black man to hail a cab sent chills up my spine. It reaffirmed the work I wanted to create and perform was out there and could make it to the forefront. And lastly, I always hated show tap because it seemed contrived and way too slick. But in the back of my mind I knew if I could hear rhythms that encompassed the whole body and touched my soul, I would fall completely in and never turn back. But I fell in love with tap that afternoon while the lyrics and score helped me find my place in poetry and song. Jason Samuels Smith, one of the show's hoofers, told me one afternoon performing the show "was a big fuck you...we were doing what we love on our terms." Amen.

--Jennifer Cendaña Armas, writer, actor, singer, dancer, community worker






Tania van Schalkwyk is the cross continental spawn of a Hamburg sailor boy and an Indian Ocean mermaid. Born in Africa. Raised in Arabia. Uneducated in America. And currently lost in Words. Some have called her ‘Mongrel’, others ‘Jezebel.’ She spends most of her life traveling, being in love, having ‘fun’ in various forms & guises, thinking & wearing clothes too much, sleeping, staring and writing. She has a passion for global kitsch (from scratchy pink satin nylon bras sold in Mauritian markets to plastic water-squirting sunglass wearing Buddha toys, red velvet roses and glittering disco balls), Barbarella & Flash Gordon (the movies, the clothes, the style), red wine, chocolate & Marmite, The Little Prince (the book, the memorabilia, the philosophy), Nature with a capital N -- and numerous other life-affirming things, events, places, spaces. Sometimes, her work is broadcast, published, exhibited or performed. She has recently been published in UK magazines: South, IQ, & Decode. Future publications include Agenda & Green Dragon Literary Journal of Dye Hard Press.