Tonight's Poet Corner: Percussive Experience

Percussive Experience
by Belinda Roddie

September night, all alone in a space
that holds gold in some places and silver in others -
my brother's downstairs, my pant legs are covered
in hair from my cat.
He's a little fat, but mighty and
majestic, though he thought it best if
he stayed somewhere else while I
pull copious volumes
off the shelves
before turning to my
keys,

please.

And I'm suddenly reminded of
evenings and greetings and weavings
of people in a coffee
shop, where our lips popped
and our teeth
knocked out fiction
by the clock above our heads. Storytelling's dead? Not so,
my friends,

it's not the end of pages or ages, or
staring into
the faces of people who lose sleep over
chapters and segments and fragments
of some sort of
beatdown memory breathing
bleeding thoughts into their wood-notched skulls.
The pen is mightier than the
bone used to sign a
will or the sentence of the abused
in a dusty courtroom.

We had short story nights, bright nights, dim lights, fresh spite
and whim and fancy and dancing and crashing and dazzling
spectacles of white, and gray, and blue, and dark red
from the blood spread out by a serial killer hero
or a leering protagonist with too many words

crammed
into his brain until the membrane burst
and all his worst
dreams and wishes
spilled out
like hot coffee on a shaking knee.

I pleaded to listen forever, but my turn
brought together
my eyes to my
paper, where I told little vignettes
about holding hands and
dumb drivers and cheap regrets and losing bets and paying off
lover's debts.

There was one night
when I read a story
that was nestled in all its glory in a
novella I wrote.
Bella Noche!

was what we hollered
to the sky with its velvet collar and sparkling hat
and that's when we scattered off to our cars
and geared our hearts
(and stomachs) to a spot
called Paul's.

A rather nice bar
carved into a groove between a
street corner
and a place that sold vintage shoes.
We went there regularly
after we read
other-weekly submissions to the microphone
and to usually over a

dozen pairs of ears without headphones
to blot out the
noise.

We drank good beer of amber
and
clambered outside to smoke and toke and laugh
and clamor
past the odds and ends of unbending
conversation. And

once I had socked my mouth
with Bailey's on the rocks,
I had a thought:

Every storyteller to ever live
is a beat poet.

Of course, that seems silly
when your head's all
willy-nilly, and the liquor's
dripping
sweet on your lips as you
trip over phrases and frowns
but it didn't faze me
and I kept

questioning this
in an unintended
bliss while my friend Shervin
drank a buddy's White Russian and started
rushin'

back to the bar for another. Any other person
would have stopped the stream of
consciousness for one night of clip-clopping
revelry, or the dream that seems to never want to
take a breath until death
knocks at your door
and hands you a pamphlet.

Because the fact
that Jack Kerouac
was nearly revolutionary
with a dictionary and a set of
percussion

did

paint a pretty
painting
untainted
in the corners
of my disordered mind:
was he not, in every sense of the word,

a storyteller? Did he not, when you heard

his verses, his mantras, his sense of worth
on this misunderstood earth, give
someone
a saga or a spiel that could be traced back
to a laced up tale of madness?

But so often we imagine
that a clash of arms harms any connection
between the retrospection and introspection
of a poem versus a story.
People would tell me:

"Stories ain't poetry!

They've got narrative! They're incomparative
to a drug-
addled rhyme! There's no time
for couplets and sonnets and words of ladies in bonnets
and scarlet tops and golden hair
so when the light
hits just right, they look like a living flame,
a beautiful flame! Stories don't

gamble
with woes! They don't

amble
across valleys with rallies of battle cries
and sad cries over long lost loves!
Next we'll be talking of doves! What are you
thinking,
to have the gall and the imaginary balls
to haul up beat poetry next to grandiose fiction!
Next, you'll be pitchin' that fanatical

rants from men with too tight of
pants behind
podiums,
their
odious tempers oozing outward
as they bitch about Congress, or try to bewitch
the populace about social issues,
deserve
Pulitzer Prizes for
literature!

Stories don't bother with

wordplay!
Wordplay is irrelevant! What's

important here
is that
character and
action and an
awesome but strict
plot
are the only things that can qualify

your clots
of bloated thoughts

as a story!"

And I stopped thinking for a second,
letting my head hover and my legs govern
me to a
pool table where some writing colleagues of mine
had set up a game, all
lined up with numbers and colors
and calculated geometry and physical
momentum
that sent 'em pleading for a pocket to embrace their strike.
I like
watching pool because there's  

movement to the game,
there's movement in how they play. There's manipulation
of a stick
and a
ball, and that's all it is: A game of stick and ball
with a bunch of freaking holes set out as your goals.
A caveman could have thought of pool. But you know what's cool?
There's

rhythm to it. An unprofessed, unfiltered,
unhindered rhythm and sound to the pound of the
click-clack, click-
clack, tick-
tack pirouette
on rather cheap green
velvet.

I use this saying in lots of poems
and it roams to conversation as well these days,
but I believe in
percussive experience

and it suits me well. The bell
and the drum and the
thrum of a guitar
and the
hum of bass in a car
and the
ringing of piano keys in a bar:
It's all
percussive experience,
rhythm that
leads our lives,
rhythm that
breeds our stories.

So using that logic, is not beat poetry
the

essence
of that experience
in a bar, in a car, with a guitar or somewhere far,
far away from
civilization, in a

space station,
with some relations or in a scene
where a kiss starts up an
orchestra
and the strings blow
north just between
the heads of those in love.
Is that not a

story? Is that not
wordplay that still takes the day
to give a narrator a
job,
to
lob a coin at a beggar
who wants a leg of lamb
and a tale to clam him up
for the evening meal?

The time on my watch
and the view of a crotch by my face
as a novelist friend
stooped
down
to do loop-the-loop on the eight ball
brought me
back
to the bar
where the stars cleared just above
my eyebrows.

I didn't know how I had become so lost
in the frost
of time, when all of a sudden
I wanted to recite words to the sound of
bongos
and a song on a stand-up bass in place of
a mix tape or a
turntable.

I realized that

wordplay had been a talent of mine
that I had nearly forgotten. I had
struggled with storytelling
and been
muddled with poetry all my life, but the
strife went deeper than that. I was
sleeping and
that was the whole reason why my words were never
seasoned right.

Too much salt!
 Not enough pepper!

My fiction had gotten better,
and my poetry, with the same honesty,
could return to the
boisterosity
that I had harbored since
hyper adolescence
under the
crescents of waxing and
unwaxing moons.

Soon enough, I would write colors
and tastes and
paste them together
(kind of rough, but
whatever) into
beats
and stories run by percussion
and the

crushing of language into powder
to put in a drink and savor.
The flavor was
palpable. I had
favor
now with the writing gods. I drained my glass,
kicked myself in the ass, went to class
the next day, and I went

right up
to the faces of stony men and women who had declared
fiction
to have "required" standards

and I

threw my middle finger
toward the heavens and cried, "That's what you get
for making us almost forget what story really is!"

Because unlike the tired definition
brought out by tradition in
classes,
with word counts and standards and old table manners,
the definition of a story is this:

A story

is a recounting
of an experience

(no matter how
real 
it may be
or how
artificial 
it may seem)

that has a
pattern.

A beat.

A heartbeat
with a
pulse
and a rhythm that keeps the
characters
moving,
and  

alive.
That's how stories
thrive, isn't it?
When our characters are most alive.
When their chests are

cut open, exposing
the veins of irrationality beneath -
that is a story!
And that is what

Ginsberg and
Kerouac and
Minchin and

all the other quacks
and alleged hacks brought us
in their smatterings and mentions
of faith

(or
lack thereof)

from above or below.
How do you
know
that beat poetry is storytelling?
You
know

when your emotions are
dipped
into dark chocolate and presented as dessert
to an audience who
hurts for a bittersweet
treat of fears and traumas and trials
and

denials, and the rupturing of a
soul like a frayed
capillary pulled
back at full force.

When I went home that night,
I looked quite a fright
with tousled hair and narrowed eyes,
but I tried to scrawl rivers
in books and give looks to my
slivered fiction,
and I

realized that the beat was there
all along - it just needed to be shaken
awake and set to Bake in an oven
where it glowed
 red hot.
And when my fiction had

predicted
the rhythm would flow
like icy champagne at a wedding, I knew
that I had found the right sticks to
beat the drums with.

And like the people in the
stories I scribble
or the emotion I dribble
off pen and keyboard
and words
gorged with spicy
trickery and

games - I came
to the
resounding conclusion
that I have woven illusions
that are very real indeed.
And I did breathe (and still
do breathe)

a story
that was
and always is

very well

and truly
alive.