The Marbled Sigh

Sequences

SELECTED NOTES ON ‘MAKE’

While the preceding poetic territory relies on the insistent enigma of the writing process as a source of music, I offer these notes to readers interested in delving further into the minutiae of the text. Generally excluded are identifications of historical figures, place names, and other entities that might be located via obvious Internet keyword searches unless there is a detail to add not readily available to the public and which I deem of importance to understanding what is happening.

SPREAD 9 (SRO: SINGLE ROOM ODYSSEY…)
the strand
My favorite bookstore in New York City, located at 828 Broadway, where a red sign advertising “Miles of Books” is visible. As a graduate student I combed the sale racks on the sidewalk out front. There I discovered, among other distressed treasures, works by the English novelist and songwriter Thomas Deloney (1543-1600).

plenty of eel
My favorite sushi bar roll that somehow plays a role in all I do, I think.

sens
Echo of the chant prevalent among drug dealers in Washington Square Park when I arrived in NYC in the fall of 1986—referring to Sensimilla, a powerful form of pot. This refrain accompanied every nightly walk around the park. I never bought stuff from these Rastamen, rather I became hooked on the quiet urgent music they made.

completed her last painting at 94, my hero
Ref. to Iowa landscape artist Vivian Heywood (1923-2019).

G. Epos and Sons
Ref. to the pork store on Court Street in Brooklyn specializing in fennel sausages.

the snoctern
A nocturne destroyed by the uninvited involvement of sinus passages.

KSTT, WBGO, WKCR, WGN
KSTT (Davenport, Iowa) introduced me to “Dr. Demento,” a show featuring manic novelty songs like “Fish Heads” and “Kinko the Clown.” Bob Porter’s “Portraits in Blue” program, a “weekly look at the great artists and entertainers of American black music,” I still listen to on WBGO, out of Newark, New Jersey. The marathon completion-ist broadcasts of Phil Schaap on WKCR (New York City) far extended my jazz education, and on Chicago’s WGN, late at night, as a teenager, I caught “Extension 720” hosted Milt Rosenthal, an interview program featuring composers, novelists, economists, and philosophers. It was like getting a college class for free.

SPREAD 10 (STILL A FEW LAWS…)
aching of hugo wolf
This Austrian composer (1860-1903) of lieder—a short, sometimes dynamically explosive, form incorporating poetry—created a song I have listened to hundreds of times with interest: Fruhling ubers Jahr based on words by Goethe (1749-1832).

pat instead of pay utilities
A notion that tends to cross your mind when you make less than $15 an hour.

quedtion
When one question has many editions issued over the duration of a lifetime.

TORRINGTON
Ref. to Scottish author Jeff Torrington (1935-2008) whose novel Swing Hammer Swing counts as one of the finest depictions of urban devastation I have ever read.

the half people, the lost tribe
Those who emerge from an unfortunate childhood that has taken from them things they cannot ever get back, or will struggle a lifetime to regain.

Ben Miller‘s writing has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Experimental Writing, Kenyon Review, Raritan, AGNI, New England Review, Yale Review, Southern Review, Fiction International, and other national venues. Miller is the author of River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa (Lookout Books, www.riverbendchronicle.com)