Compliment Table: Books on Tape
Not audiobooks (those are cool too)(?).
A little while ago I learned from looking at social media on my phone that a poetry friend (poet friend?) (realizing now that my (our) meaning of this second word might be fundamentally corrupted) (would hate to be assuming an unwelcome degree of familiarity here, like one of those microwaves that says “hi!” or “ENJOY” when the popcorn is done) (though it is true in the very worst sense; “friend” in the present, internet tense; friend like “like”) had a trio of long poems previously published as discrete chapbooks coming out on cassette tape. Yes, an audiobook. But not.
That poet is Ben Roylance and that tape (is the word “collection” correct here?) is called A Talking Skull, from a small Philadelphia label called Peace Isn’t Luck. I don’t know of all the people involved in this project and am hoping this sufficiently credits, cites, etc. I also don’t know of similar projects that might exist right now but I doubt this is the only one. Let me know? (Yes, finally, I am also coming out in favor of broadcasting one’s ignorance and investigative laziness publicly.) Anyway.
I have distantly half-known Ben for about a decade now, and have become a quiet fan of his work in that time for its arcane sense of lyric maximalism and hi-key, freak-academic obsessions with parapsychology, conspiracy theories, and the occult. That and the fact that he just keeps doing it. I was excited to learn about his new publication (is “publishing” correct to invoke here?) from the poetry-friend standpoint, but even more so from a project-level, thing-in-the-world standpoint (I’m realizing right now that a lot of the joy in writing and making art, at least as I experience it, is derived not from “the process” or some form of background magic but from dumbly thinking about what might exist in the world, some process of pre-envisioning the life (of object or artifact) as part of a future I might like to be in, which finally pushes the work from play through work to something beyond) (actually, this totally magic, never mind).
Putting poetry books on cassette tapes in 2021 is profoundly exciting to me. Not just because I am a nihilistic, hipster asshole (I was originally going to write about the Dante Award for this piece but that felt too hard, too layered, though I do love it just as much, for a set of different but related reasons). Putting poetry books onto cassettes feels just as appropriate as putting poetry books into books. There is some false dichotomy to be mapped between books and cassettes, audiobooks and streaming services. I’m not going to attempt that here. Instead I’m just going to say that I love that poetry on cassettes exists for the same reason I love that poetry in books exists, regardless of whether anybody listens to, reads, or buys it.
from the desk of Zach Peckham