‘A statement worth making’

Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems
by Michael Turner

Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2024
$20.00 / 9781772142280

Reviewed by Joe Enns

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Vancouver writer and musician Michael Turner describes rummaging through his archive (that takes up a fifth of the study in his home) in Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems. This image of a poet opening old boxes and resurfacing memories, while also drifting through thrift stores to peruse pop culture artifacts, embodies perfectly the nostalgic and sentimental experience created by Turner (9 x 11: And Other Poems Like Bird, Nine, X, and Eleven) in this newest work.

Playlist is a two-form lyric memoir meant to resemble old songbooks—like the cloth-bound A Treasury of Our Best-Loved Songs Turner remembers from his childhood. Arrangements of Turner’s poems are preceded by a few paragraphs in prose that provide autobiographical context.

Playlist is an inversion of the homage. Turner presents each poem as an ‘after poem’ — “after Sylvia Tyson” ; “after Pete Townshend” — dedicated to musicians and songwriters between the ‘60s and ‘80s. Turner samples well-known song lyrics from the selected musicians’ works, then flips the meaning to create a new sentiment that he twists into an introspection (“I reached up for a variant of his variation”), often with political messaging. For example, Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” becomes “Yellow Clarity” and June Carter and Merle Kilgore’s “Ring of Fire” by becomes “Squares from Water.”

You might expect a verse memoir to be dripping with sentimentality, which is true of this book, but Turner plays with that sentimentality by twisting what’s popular to show a contrasting version, always contradicting its mainstream reception. Clearly, Turner views his life through the countercultural lens of the 1990s and early 2000s; that comes through loud and clear in the imagery and messaging and gives Playlist a sharp and intimate vibe. Turner’s life, relationships, aesthetic choices, opinions, and personality resonate on every page. 

The introductory sections provide a deeper context for the book, which works well to position the poems within an overarching framework. The song selection plays a pivotal role to underpin the imagery and meaning. In those prose sections, Turner emphasizes the importance of his taste in music, describing what others were listening to at that time compared to what he was smitten by in the context of musical genre labels, especially punk. 

Because Turner presents himself as a contrarian, the reader might expect an eclectic song selection, deep cuts from albums of that bygone era. But no, Turner has chosen some of the most popular songs. The source songs selected for Playlist are the shallow cuts, the standards, keeping to the nostalgic old songbook motif. 

The poems in Playlist have moments of strong imagery and clever phrasing. For instance, here’s an excerpt from Turner’s “Reparation Landfill”:

You forgot your swim trunks 
Dark and hardened, hanging 
With the bats above my head 
A bee crawls drunkenly across my foot
A young woman stabs at a parking meter

One of the most memorable images from the book because of the strong imagery, the stanza mirrors Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” (a 1967 hit that Donna Summer made a bigger hit in 1978):

I recall the yellow cotton dress
Foaming like a wave
On the ground beneath your knees
The birds, like tender babies in your hands
And the old men playing Chinese checkers by the trees

But the imagery is only strong in Turner’s poems when the imagery is strong in the source lyrics. Turner’s work is always dependent on the context of the popular source. And that raises questions about counterculture in general: does the “counter” always need to be dependant on the mainstream to give it context? This contrarian and cynical attitude seems to lack originality.

Turner’s morphing of the ‘inverted’ songs also introduces vagueness and confusion. Popular songs are often generic and simple in their messaging, having been streamlined and revised and run through the cultural medium and performance. Turner’s flipped lyrics introduce complexity with a political message shoehorned in (“Never was scarcity withheld / As it was in oblivious spaces”), which dials back the coherence and clarity of the work. That technique creates a misalignment where the poems use complex phrasing, but are vague at the same time, confusing the reader. 

Another avenue of ambiguity is Turner’s use of pronouns. Most songs contain an “I” and/or a “You,” and so in Playlist, Turner flips these pronouns where “You” becomes “I,” and “Us” becomes “Them.” On its own, this concept is interesting as a statement about egocentrism and tribalism; the treatment of these pronouns in the context of the poem introduces more confusion, however, especially around the “You” of the poems. The “You” of the poems seems to drift between the proverbial you, the reader, and a specific person the speaker might be addressing, often possibly a father or authority figure.

Allow us to think my nails aren’t short enough
If you’re indifferent without me, that’s the difference
My big foot apart from yours
If you go down, they’ll follow

Naturally, many of the popular songs chosen as source material are about love, and Turner leans into the idea that the opposite of love isn’t hate—it’s indifference. Since love is a common topic, and a seemingly positive one, the flip becomes a negative, and indifference is referenced frequently, which gives the speaker a pessimistic tone: “You want enemies, enemies from joy / Tears, hatred—you crave these things!” The reader gets an impression of the speaker as a generally negative person surrounded by failed relationships: “When can’t I buy your time, confessions from mother, bored // With the predictably clean and super lucid.”

When this persona is added to the counterculture rebellion attitude, it makes the reader wonder if Playlist isn’t presenting cultural rebellions as inherently based on negativity, toxicity, and a victimhood mentality.

In one prose introduction Turner explains that “popular music is filled with mondegreens like ‘mantel of the moon’ and homonyms like mantel/mantle. At their best, mondegreens turn benign lyrics into political declarations.” Turner attempts to pull political statements from the inverse of benign lyrics (“Never have I chosen stasis / When wrong was wrong, I never was”). But what is he declaring? 

Playlist is full of passing references to trendy social justice topics like anti-capitalism, race, and gender (“slavery’s the only possessive on the road to accumulation”), but lacking in any original or insightful statement on the topics. The word “gender” is used several times (“preferring to hold firm to your gender”), which is a strong word choice that the reader can’t help but notice. Turner generally uses the word “gender” in place of male imagery as though any masculine reference should be neutered and contextualized by gender politics.

Turner claims in another introduction that he has “always enjoyed the range and depth of women’s voices, and have more recently come to associate them with honesty and emotional intelligence, qualities that have taken me years to appreciate, if not understand.” Yet the next poem is based on “I Got You Babe” by Sonny and Cher, but Turner only dedicates the poem to Sonny. 

In the next introduction, Turner talks about Joni Mitchell, yet doesn’t use a Mitchell song; the next poem, “Yellow Clarity,” is “after Jimi Hendrix.” Turner seems to be criticizing masculinity through his word choices in the poems yet prioritizing male voices in his source material after mentioning the importance of the female voices. There’s several contradictions in Playlist where Turner pays lip-service to social justice ideologies (“our mass whiteness only reinforced our privilege, and that this privilege would keep us ignorant, useless to a world”) while the choices and content of the book don’t seem to be putting these statements in practice or offering any alternative.  

Cultural ideology criticisms aside, Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems is an authentic glimpse into Michael Turner’s roots and perspective through a lens that only Turner can provide. By flipping the context and sentiment of popular oldies, the reader experiences Turner’s perspective on society and life while gaining a new appreciation for popular songs that often play in the background. Turner unearths memories and musical artifacts that will resonate into the future, and that some Vancouverites may identify with and find interesting.

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; he’s also contributed book reviews to Event and The Malahat Review. Joe has a BA in Creative Writing and a BSc in Ecological Restoration. [Editor’s note: Joe has reviewed Daniel Cowper, Nick Thran, 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. Harold Rhenisch reviewed Enns’ book of poems, No Lines in Nature.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line 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.

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