Customer Reviews

Music Like Dirt

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I wish Bidart were more prolific, but on the bright side, each rare collection is an irresistible distillation of some thought-elixir. "Music Like Dirt" treats how humans are essentially art-making, art-sharing creatures. Since this is Bidart, we get both the good and evil consequences of this impulse - the grotesques along with the geniuses - in language that is simple, clear, but also finely wrought and deeply emotional.

Note that this is a chapbook, so even though it's beautifully printed it still has something of a flimsy feeling... It's perfectly sized and shaped to be a little gift to the favorite creative or artistic person in your life.

The real standouts in the collection, "For the Twentieth Century," "Advice to the Players," and "Lament for the Makers," are all available online, albeit coarsened by lousy layout and banner ads. Don't just read them quickly at your desk; print them out and read them somewhere peaceful in solitude, and you will probably end up wanting to buy the book anyway, they're that good.

I was originally assigned to read this collection of "poems" during my final year of high school and I didn't enjoy them much at all. I found that they were cryptic, humorless, and lacking in both wordplay and cleverness.
Still, I thought that four years later upon my completion of college, perhaps there would be more there. I thought that perhaps I was naive and had missed the point. And so I decided to give Music Like Dirt another try.
But after a second reading -- and then a third, I found myself thinking the same things all over again and then wishing I could award 0 stars. This book is a waste of space. It pangs of "art for art's sake" and loses itself in its vagueness. Moreover, the challenge of writing poetry (that is writing in verse as opposed to writing in prose) is the challenge of working within constraints. It is about playing games with words and committing to a form and then using it to flourish. Bidart does none of these things. Instead he comes up with a collection of randomly arranged lines, none of which contain things called literary devices. This is the kind of stuff that is so random and obtuse that one feels as though anyone could do it just as long as they could get over the embarrassment of allowing themselves to show such crap to others. He may as well have pooped on the pages. At least then teachers would be more hesitant to assign it.