Field Recordings

by Russell Brakefield

Overview

Poetry that uses American folk music as a lens to investigate themes of family, art, and masculinity.

Firmly rooted in the dramatic landscapes and histories of Michigan, Field Recordingsuses American folk music as a lens to investigate themes of personal origin, family, art, and masculinity. The speakers of these poems navigate Michigan’s folklore and folkways while exploring more personal connections to those landscapes and examining the timeless questions that occupy those songs and stories. With rich musicality and lyric precision, the poems in Field Recordingslook squarely at what it means to be a son, a brother, an artist, a person.

Inspired by the life and writings of famous ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, Field Recordingsis divided into three sections. It is anchored by a long poem that tracks Alan Lomax on his 1938 journey through Michigan collecting music for the Library of Congress. This poem speaks to the complex process of recording the voices and stories of working-class musicians in Michigan in the early part of the twentieth century. It is rich with the pleasures of music and storytelling and is steeped in history. Like the rest of the collection, it also speaks to the questions and anxieties that, like music, transcend time and technology.

In poems alternately elegiac and rhapsodic, Field Recordingsexplores the way art is produced and translated, the line between innovation and appropriation, and the complex, beautiful stories that are passed between us. From poetry readers to poets, music fans to musicians, this collection will undoubtedly appeal to a wide audience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814344972
Publisher:	Wayne State University Press
Publication date:	03/26/2018
Series:	Made in Michigan Writers Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	511 KB

About the Author

Russell Brakefield received his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. His work has appeared in the Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, Poet Lore, Crab Orchard Review and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the University of Michigan Musical Society, the Vermont Studio Center, and the National Parks Department.

Table of Contents

I

The Way We Learned to Sing 3

This Is America and We Are Boys 5

The Butcher's Boy 7

Orchestra 8

The Boy Whose Every Word Was Song 10

Florist's Apprentice, Age 19 11

Northern Michigan After Bar 12

Rag 13

The Ballad Form 14

Pardon, Trout Farm 15

Gate Keeper 16

Calendar Customs 17

Myth 18

After the Labor Day Procession 19

Minstrel 21

Silent Movie with Playback Slowed Down 22

Barn Dance 23

Rules for Recording Traditional Music, An Erasure 24

River Song 26

Distances Between the Head and Chest 28

Effigy 33

II

Field Recordings 37

III

The Wraith in the Creek 61

Mackinaw Island 63

Nain Rouge, Red Gnome 64

The Dog-man from Luther 65

The Girl with Birds for Hands 66

Raccoon Sighting Before Intimacy 67

Habitat Diorama 68

Unreliable Auguries 69

Halcyon and Her Mortal Lover 71

Carnival Song 72

The High and Lonesome Sound 73

Fermata 79

Ode to Joy 80

Shutter, Lag 81

Morning Song 82

Ruby Creek Road 83

Kalkaska County, Michigan 84

Wedding Song 85

The Perseids 86

Origins 87

Notes 89

Acknowledgments 91

What People are Saying About This

Raymond McDaniel of the Cataracts

Brakefield says a man can't be 'anything that doesn't / move for fear / of standing still' and all sound, all music, is motion, the cure for stillness. But these poems occupy both states equally: the ways we craft sound and story to crowd out silence and fear, and the stillness that precipitates but also defines whatever music we can manage. Here, the necessary paradox is sweet and stark, carefully tuned to its places of origin, and the people— here and gone— whose echoes haunt them.

author of Where Now: New & Selected Poems - Laura Kasischke

Russell Brakefield is that rare, best kind of poet whose insights can change the world for his readers, who unveils the wild surprises and lurking dangers behind the seemingly familiar. Beneath his buildings falling into pieces there is the rapture of foundations, / a storm of rust // and bodies raining up / against the sky. The world becomes clearer, stranger, and more uncanny as we read this poetry. Brakefield astonishes again and again in Field Recordings—a book full of individually riveting pieces, but one which, as a whole, casts a serious spell with its accumulating music and beauty and everyday sacredness, with its sacred, ordinary horror and wonder. Brakefield has written one of the strongest and most subtle collections of poetry I've read in a long time. This a collection to which one will return again and again, becoming ever more impacted by its power and more appreciative of the serious talent of this poet.

Booklist - Maggie Reagan

With folk music as his guide, Brakefield traverses the Great Lakes region in these poems, from its primordial beginning to its modern days. In the beginning all art was audible, he writes in a collection that ambles through the natural world while keeping a finger firmly on the pulse of how the world shapes people into what they are. At its center is one poem: a long-form, multi-stanza piece inspired by oral historian Alan Lomax, who, in 1938, traveled around the Great Lakes basin, collecting recordings. This titular poem has elements of Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry in its dreamy scope and its traversing of time and space. But the rest of the collection roams widely as well, touching on ideas of family and masculinity (This is America and we are boys / slowly tiring into our fathers) and on how people so often cannot be still (Movements of people / or animals across land is called migration / and also displacement). Deeply rooted in its oral histories, Brakefield's collection sings.

author of The Bird-while (Wayne State University Press, 2017) - Keith Taylor

Like the great Alan Lomax, Russell Brakefield has traveled through rural Michigan making "field recordings." He listens to the music and to the instruments that make the music (the double bass "gathers up grace" – which seems the perfect description of those notes!). And he talks to the people who make the music and the listen to it. These poems don't forget the shores and the birch trees, the sea birds or "the clumsy pub." He tells us that in "this Peninsula I'm no more minstrel than ghost,/minor chord blue note." I don't think Russell Brakefield's chords, his poems, are minor at all; they are strong and clear and make the necessary music.

author of The Cataracts - Raymond McDaniel

Brakefield says a man can't be 'anything that doesn't / move for fear / of standing still' and all sound, all music, is motion, the cure for stillness. But these poems occupy both states equally: the ways we craft sound and story to crowd out silence and fear, and the stillness that precipitates but also defines whatever music we can manage. Here, the necessary paradox is sweet and stark, carefully tuned to its places of origin, and the people— here and gone— whose echoes haunt them.

Laura Kasischke of Where Now: New & Selected Poems

Russell Brakefield is that rare, best kind of poet whose insights can change the world for his readers, who unveils the wild surprises and lurking dangers behind the seemingly familiar. Beneath his "buildings falling into pieces" there is the "rapture of foundations, / a storm of rust // and bodies raining up / against the sky." The world becomes clearer, stranger, and more uncanny as we read this poetry. Brakefield astonishes again and again in Field Recordings-a book full of individually riveting pieces, but one which, as a whole, casts a serious spell with its accumulating music and beauty and everyday sacredness, with its sacred, ordinary horror and wonder. Brakefield has written one of the strongest and most subtle collections of poetry I've read in a long time. This a collection to which one will return again and again, becoming ever more impacted by its power and more appreciative of the serious talent of this poet.

Editorial Reviews

Firmly rooted in the dramatic landscapes and histories of Michigan, Field Recordings uses American folk music as a lens to investigate themes of personal origin, family, art, and masculinity. The speakers of these poems navigate Michigan’s folklore and folkways while exploring more personal connections to those landscapes and examining the timeless questions that occupy those songs and stories. With rich musicality and lyric precision, the poems in Field Recordings look squarely at what it means to be a son, a brother, an artist, a person.

New Pages

[...] it is fascinating to see a young poet staking his claim forcefully and beautifully in his first book.

Ann Arbor Observer - Keith Taylor

Brakefield beautifully inscribes how one internalizes the ephemeral nature of home.

Rain Taxi - Kevin Carollo

With folk music as his guide, Brakefield traverses the Great Lakes region in these poems, from its primordial beginning to its modern days. "In the beginning all art was audible," he writes in a collection that ambles through the natural world while keeping a finger firmly on the pulse of how the world shapes people into what they are. At its center is one poem: a long-form, multi-stanza piece inspired by oral historian Alan Lomax, who, in 1938, traveled around the Great Lakes basin, collecting recordings. This titular poem has elements of Whitman’s "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" in its dreamy scope and its traversing of time and space. But the rest of the collection roams widely as well, touching on ideas of family and masculinity ("This is America and we are boys / slowly tiring into our fathers") and on how people so often cannot be still ("Movements of people / or animals across land is called migration / and also displacement"). Deeply rooted in its oral histories, Brakefield’s collection sings.

Booklist - Maggie Reagan

Brakefield says a man can't be ‘anything that doesn’t / move for fear / of standing still’ and all sound, all music, is motion, the cure for stillness. But these poems occupy both states equally: the ways we craft sound and story to crowd out silence and fear, and the stillness that precipitates but also defines whatever music we can manage. Here, the necessary paradox is sweet and stark, carefully tuned to its places of origin, and the people— here and gone— whose echoes haunt them.

author of The Cataracts - Raymond McDaniel

Russell Brakefield is that rare, best kind of poet whose insights can change the world for his readers, who unveils the wild surprises and lurking dangers behind the seemingly familiar. Beneath his "buildings falling into pieces" there is the "rapture of foundations, / a storm of rust // and bodies raining up / against the sky." The world becomes clearer, stranger, and more uncanny as we read this poetry. Brakefield astonishes again and again in Field Recordings—a book full of individually riveting pieces, but one which, as a whole, casts a serious spell with its accumulating music and beauty and everyday sacredness, with its sacred, ordinary horror and wonder. Brakefield has written one of the strongest and most subtle collections of poetry I’ve read in a long time. This a collection to which one will return again and again, becoming ever more impacted by its power and more appreciative of the serious talent of this poet.

author of Where Now: New & Selected Poems - Laura Kasischke