New uses for the slash chord
Existing Music
by Nick Thran
Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, 2025
$19.95 / 9780889714861
Reviewed by Joe Enns
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Existing Music by Nick Thran is a complex and self-referential work that explores how shapeshifting through senses and mediums allows the poet to build a deeper metaphoric complexity. In his fourth poetry collection, Thran (If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display) includes translations, but the entire work interrogates the act of transposition (“that marriage / between dance and speech”), and what it means to step between languages, scopes, or even provinces to “feel around notes for their edges.” Clouds and musical chords, Thran doesn’t just outline the indefinable, he interrogates the underlying poetic process.
Thran quotes an interview with Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief in the poem titled “C/G,” and how “Adrienne loves using this C/G chord, / in the slow stuff as well as the howlers.” C/G is also known as a slash chord: a C major chord, but with G as the lowest note (bass or root note). This slash chord is a fantastic symbol for what Thran accomplishes in Existing Music, he presents a series of notes with a unique shift or a difference that creates an emotional resonance (“the sonic proletariat”). Thran effectively plays with sound throughout, using the poetic line as a “tone row” and creating a deeper meaning to musical chords (“the ‘o’ / that rings a ‘root’ to ‘rot’”).
Like the slash chord, individual notes compiled in shifting ways can also represent the act of writing (or even arranging a book display), where an item in isolation is given a more complex meaning when placed in the context of a community (“oscillate between extremes / of total isolation and hyper-connection”). As well, the space around the items can have its own significance. Like a wave, the outlines and edges are at the extremes. Thran describes how shifting between scope and senses allows a poet to find the wavelengths where things don’t line up, like a G root to a C major chord.
Complex poetic works—or any abstractive, expressive work that might be defined as “poetic”—often act as fractals (geometric shapes where the smallest scales are emblematic of the whole shape regardless of magnification), but fractal works become the most meaningful when the reader realizes that the broadest magnification of the shape (meta) includes the reader as well. Thran explores this levitating from micro to meta by not just comparing art forms where this relationship exists, but also showing that the differences between forms and languages can create a deeper diversion (“a room of goodwill might unlock / what was never really present”) where the audience is transported and reborn, relearning how to navigate this new ideological place.
This second room is a metaphor too, of course, and Thran also seems to describe this place as a “partner.” In Samuel Beckett’s short story “Company,” Beckett describes a sort of second and third voice in one’s head that is them, but also not them at the same time (“and in another dark or in the same another devising it all for company”). Who are we talking to when we talk to ourselves? Beckett and Thran both identify this interesting phenomenon where we tend to imagine personas or spaces where they don’t physically exist, whether inside ourselves or within works of art.
But while Beckett’s “company” might be an ever-present voice within us, Thran’s “partner” presents itself when we devise works or absorb the works of others: “the partner is some person / living or dead // It is the end / of your isolated masterpiece.” Thran writes that “by ‘text’ / I do not mean ‘partner’,” and “the partner is of importance,” which clarifies that the words aren’t the objective, like how the menu isn’t the meal, the sounds made by the words and the diversion of our thoughts are what create the “partner” and the insight.
Thran knows how to close a poem. While the poems in Existing Music are reflective in nature, the closings act as a pause (“taking a beat”) that ties things together or provides a proper “so what” moment. The closings often step outside of time of the poem, and Thran considers the ways that time works in writing: “how it takes a little time / to become a passably upbeat tune.” Often referencing the world of novels, Thran explains how you don’t really figure out how to read or absorb a novel until the end (“reading a novel before / you’ve learned to read”). As though each time the reader steps into that literary imaginative space, they become reborn as a different person (“a hand that was mine / but did not move like mine”) and learn to navigate the new landscape from scratch (“is there anything better than being a total baby”). Each of Thran’s poems works well as an immersive reflection into a new world that rests neatly with an insightful resolution.
Prince George-born Thran pulls meaning from the mundane in a practiced and authentic interrogation of lived experience. Often poetic works can be rife with posturing, where the poet tries to explain their clichéd artistic status or present themselves as a tortured soul. I didn’t detect any of this in Thran’s work. Existing Music is a deeply layered and memorable work of poetic metaphor and imagery, and Nick Thran succeeds in playing with sound and shapeshifting, or transposition, to evoke an “Oh” in the reader as we look over his shoulder.
[Editor’s note: Victoria’s Planet Earth Poetry will host Nick Thran and Laurence Hutchman in James Bay (234 Menzies St.) on Friday, May 9. Doors open at 1:30pm.]
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Joe Enns is a writer, painter, and fisheries biologist on Vancouver Island. His writing has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, FreeFall, The Fiddlehead, GUSTS, and Portal Magazine, and book reviews in Event, The Malahat Review and The British Columbia Review. Joe has a BA in Creative Writing and a BSc in Ecological Restoration. [Editor’s note: Joe has reviewed Zane Koss, Sean Arthur Joyce, Cathy Stonehouse, Clint Burnham, Nadine Sander-Green, Spenser Smith, Rodney DeCroo, Barbara Pelman, Karl Meade, M.W. Jaeggle, Ali Blythe, Emily Osborne, Will Goede, and Evelyn Lau for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster