The Manchester Review

Stella Wong, Stem, reviewed by Ian Pople

An energetic and resonant collection of lyric poems and dramatic monologues

Stella Wong | Stem | Princeton University Press: £14.99
Reviewed by Ian Pople

In her second collection, Stem, Wong offers a series of poems entitled, ‘Dramatic Monologue…’, followed by the names of several forgotten female composers. These forgotten female composers have tended to specialise in electronic, often avant-garde, music. These poems allow Wong to explore issues such as creativity, technology, and lack of recognition. Amongst the several composers in Wong’s second collection the most well-known are Wendy Carlos, composer of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, and Delia Derbyshire, composer of ‘Dr Who’. Wong’s collection examines how many of these electronic female composers have become absent from musical canons. Wong addresses this lack of recognition in the ‘Dramatic Monologue as Johanna Magdalena Beyer,’: ‘This is some hard / music to listen to. My Dutch clogged /name. What you’ve heard about me is // whom I’ve predated.’

Wong’s female composers produced electronic scores that were site-specific and built around sounds from the immediate environment in which they worked. The everyday sounds that made up their electrical compositions were often amplified. As such, the compositions were, by their very nature, ephemeral. Wong, basing her collection on the music composed by forgotten electronic female composers, examines how art on the fringes is both ephemeral and memorable, as with Johanna Magdalena Beyer, who was born in Germany in 1888 and came to New York in 1923. She started her musical career in a traditional manner, by teaching piano. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Beyer studied with other avant-garde composers, although at the time her performances gained very little critical attention. It wasn’t until the 1980s, some thirty years after Beyer’s untimely death from Lou Gehrig’s disease, that her music was rediscovered and achieved the critical attention it deserves. The line break of ‘Dutch clogged / name,’ across the second and third lines quoted above, might suggest not only how easy it is for an artist’s name, particularly a female artist’s name, to be lost over time, but also lost to the artist themselves. This loss is re-emphasised by the way that ‘whom I’ve predated’ is isolated at the start of the second stanza of the poem. Here, Beyer becomes less herself than a predecessor.

Wong’s ‘Dramatic Monologue as Mira Calix’ begins with a nod to Calix’s alternative career as a DJ. During her career, Calix was a support act for bands including Radiohead and Boards of Canada; she also appeared at Glastonbury. Calix’s monologue begins, ‘You know when you’re one of the ones they used / to work the pilot light or the sax at the blade // runner clubs when you glitch in neoprene / and reject the capitol, capitalism // and neon tube all caps. Really. What’s in a right / click? Glowing ball-joints or peeping // potato eyes.’ What we notice here is the self-directed ‘you’ in the first and third line. This, ‘you’, is contrasted to the ‘they’ in line two; thus, personally pulling the reader into Calix’s life. The personal pull of ‘you’ works against the impersonal musical history that has forgotten her: ‘they’ who ‘used’. The adjectives broken from their nouns across stanza breaks, i.e., ‘blade // runner’, working in conjunction with the long first sentence also pulls the reader into the clubbing world of Calix. The long first sentence is followed by staccato phrases and questions which seem to come from deep in the narrator’s consciousness. The punning reference to ‘capitol, capitalism and neon all caps,’ is because Calix rejected capital letters out of an attachment to e.e. cummings as a child. The awareness of performing as another, which was a key element of Calix’s musical composition, is also demonstrated in Calix’s choice of moving away from her birth name and adopting her artist name. Wong, perhaps in an analogy to Beyer, demonstrates how Calix within her music must perform as somebody else to become recognised.

Many of Wong’s poems explore the ‘I’ of the poem. Wong’s ‘I’ in her dramatic monologues could represent the speaker of the poem. It equally could represent the authorising consciousness of the poem, i.e. Wong as a writer, giving female composers a voice in her poetry.  As we have seen in Calix’s dramatic monologue there is often a negotiation with a ‘you’ and a ‘they,’ where ‘they’ may be larger forces outside either the ‘I’ or the ‘you.’ The second person, ‘you,’ so present in ‘Dramatic Monologue as Mira Calix’, occurs throughout Stem. That poem begins with a ‘you’ who is likely to be Calix herself; the ‘You’ negotiating with the ‘Self’, which, in the case of ‘Dramatic Monologue as Myra Calix’, adds a further layer to the doubling. Elsewhere in Wong’s poems, the ‘you’ is an Other, and the address can seem like a way of more fully representing the speaker. The speaker presents perspectives and demands that are as constitutive of the speaker as they are of the addressee, the ‘actual’ second person. In ‘Scorpion W2,’ Wong writes, ‘You’re too pretty / to war with, but that’s what we play at // week after week. Friendly fire / like you should always watch your back // around girls who look / barely legal. / After college, your prized possession // should be owning / your own / washing machine /’. The forward slashes between ‘look/bare’ and ‘owning/your’ and at the end of the quotation, are Wong’s. The ‘you’, here, is treated with some extravagance; the ‘you’ is like ‘friendly fire,’ and its most ‘prized possession should be owning [its] own washing machine.’ The relationship between the speaker and the ‘you/Other’ is almost surreal. Wong’s great ability is to shape these triangulations between the author and personae, between the ‘I’, the ‘you’ and ‘they’, into a world which has considerable resonance and depth. This is a world in which images and ideas are accumulated with a rapid, fizzing, centripetal energy.

Reviewed by Ian Pople

 

Comments are closed.