David James Brock, Ten-Headed Alien. Buckrider Books, 2018.
PROG I
GRUNGE
PROG II: TEN-HEADED ALIEN
My Head Becomes a Cadillac Escalade
And the stereo kicks, so you like me better. You can’t blast Van der Graaf Generator tunes
with the head of a Cadillac Escalade. It defeats
the purpose of a Cadillac Escalade for a head.
You can play Chance & Drake & Gaga where my
opinions on politics once were. I can get you
from A to B if A is where you are and B is where I’m going. “” david james brock, Ten-Headed Alien
when we respond positively to a poem, we often feel that it resonates with us, as if it’s looped us into a vibrational waveform (or an electric shock) running through our shared reality. it’s much less common, i think, to find ourselves thoroughly within a poem’s world, engulfed by it like jonah by the whale (or the Millennium Falcon by that giant space slug from The Empire Strikes Back). but that’s exactly what david james brock’s Ten-Headed Alien does: it swallows you whole. equal parts enviro-existentialism, great sci-fi, ridiculous sci-fi, and acid grunge——brock’s set pieces are variously bleak, invigorating, relatable and bizarre. e.g., here’s one that grabs you like a claw machine——immediately and with no explanation required:
My Head Becomes a Cadillac Escalade
And the stereo kicks, so you like me better.
You can’t blast Van der Graaf Generator tunes
with the head of a Cadillac Escalade. It defeats
the purpose of a Cadillac Escalade for a head.
You can play Chance & Drake & Gaga where my
opinions on politics once were. I can get you
from A to B if A is where you are and B is where I’m going. “” My Head Becomes a Cadillac Escalade
brock——who probably got much of his world-engineering expertise from his work as a playwright and librettist——excels at transforming the merely strange into the intensely strange precisely because we find the latter’s components so familiar. his earth is our earth, but under pressure. his characters are us, but longer-suffering and more adaptable.
while the speculative impulse of this work is akin to cinema, it would be wrong to call his writing cinematic. put simply, the imagery of his poems are incomplete——but in a way that hurts your gut more than your head. more than just story——pictures, they’re also thought-pictures, feeling-pictures, dream-pictures. pictures not just of non-realities, but of non-realities distorted by desire and desperation. more often than not, brock’s poems distort space and time. for example, “I Only Eat What I Kill: Volume 1” opens with “I shot its neck while it sipped from a pink / and fast stream”——as if the stream were already running crimson from the wound, or in hopes of inflicting the wound. nonetheless, as the poem continues we find its speaker suspended, somewhere between an infinitely belated bio-future and a sepia-toned nostalgia——and very, very hungry:
I approached the kill. for field dress, and pressed my sharp knife at its stagnant windpipe. No blood at the bullet, none in the snow, no blood when I cut through the fur. Just clockwork at the trachea, mainspring in the mandible, spring and ratchet at the gut of the tongue. “” I Only Eat What I Kill: Volume 1
speaking of the pink of the veins (i promise i’m not crazy reading the above as blood), here it is again in “I Love the Laser”:
I love the laser that kills the man in the first minutes of the movie. I love the laser’s boom.
I love the elephant ivory grip of the laser held
at the cowboy’s thigh. He didn’t know he’d kill
The Fox today – with the laser – but there is
pink blood in the dirt of a Mexican cantina. “” I Love the Laser
while the poem’s parody of gun culture has a political ring, brock is much better at detonating the more aesthetic masculinity of action movies and Monster Energy drink by coaxing it into full bloom; by insistently trading gunmetal grey for neon pink (forgive me if i also see the lasers as pink), he stylizes stern survivalism to the point that it becomes effusive, effeminate, full of itself.
as a book object, Ten-Headed Alien is beautiful, though beautiful isn’t the right word. it’s more that the collection’s “Roger Dean-esque prog rock book design” (as brock puts it in his acknowledgements) has a stranglehold on the vaguely retro-contemporary-futuristic vibe demarcated by various eras’ codenames for ‘cool’.
in any case, the collection’s sense of psychic urgency and geophysical out-of-time-ness hits its pinnacle in the main event, a suite of poems whose anchors are titled after the ten heads of the alien: voice, trees, oceans, fresh water, beauty, war, thought, emotion, action, and diplomacy (who, it turns out, is sleeping). actually, the heads swivel between being kaiju-esque mega-monsters, military leaders from an alien race, and voices at the back of brock’s lizard brain—a nether that’s just where the acid trip wants them. they dizzy the landscapes of the human earth, the human mind, and the human imagination. here’s “Head Seven (Thought)”:
Exoplanet koi-7711
came close to defending itself with abstract cannons, but we’ve yet to lose. The noise you try won’t drown my suggestion. I know
you’ve been restless. I knew your thirtysomething insomnia. Squirming with coin flips, four a.m. and wondering if you were
in the right bed. You worried about $$$ and mortality. You were paralyzed on a metronome’s tock. Your muscles are not bored
by the limo wreck of your planet. Be honest. You once regretted your free time. You jotted milestones on napkins, scratched light
bulbs in book margins. Live in a van. Live in Greece. Learn sheet music. Your parties skipped tremor. Yet you’re alive, and I want
to tell you that I haven’t solved you yet. You. Yes, you, David. Don’t think it’s a sign of your superior intelligence. It’s just, you
lie to yourself so fucking much. “” Head Seven (Thought)
but brock reminds us that language doesn’t only speak truth or lies, it also imagine our world(s) for us. in this sense, the poetry of Ten-Headed Alien is an ultimately visual, sensual, and phenomenological art.
c. The New Map Replaced the Old Map,
but the Old Map is Collectible Memory (0:54)
dust and tan, puce, no blue.
khaki, umber, no green, nut.
ochre, ecru, beige, just brown. dust and tan, puce, no blue. “” The Ruins (23:04)
John Nyman is a poet, critic and scholar from Toronto. In addition to reviewing for Opera Canada and The Dance Current as part of the 2018/19 Emerging Arts Critics program, he has reviewed literature for publications including Broken Pencil and The Puritan as well as visual art for Border Crossings and Peripheral Review.