{"id":12787,"date":"2025-01-06T12:18:42","date_gmt":"2025-01-06T11:18:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12787"},"modified":"2025-01-06T12:29:48","modified_gmt":"2025-01-06T11:29:48","slug":"stella-wong-stem-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12787","title":{"rendered":"Stella Wong, Stem, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

An energetic and resonant collection of lyric poems and dramatic monologues<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Stella Wong | Stem | Princeton University Press: \u00a314.99<\/strong>
Reviewed by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n

In her second collection, Stem, <\/em>Wong offers a series of poems entitled, \u2018Dramatic Monologue\u2026\u2019, 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\u2019s second collection the most well-known are Wendy Carlos, composer of \u2018A Clockwork Orange\u2019, and Delia Derbyshire, composer of \u2018Dr Who\u2019. Wong\u2019s collection examines how many of these electronic female composers have become absent from musical canons. Wong addresses this lack of recognition in the \u2018Dramatic Monologue as Johanna Magdalena Beyer,\u2019: \u2018This is some hard \/ music to listen to. My Dutch clogged \/name. What you\u2019ve heard about me is \/\/ whom I\u2019ve predated.\u2019<\/p>\n

Wong\u2019s 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\u2019t until the 1980s, some thirty years after Beyer\u2019s untimely death from Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease, that her music was rediscovered and achieved the critical attention it deserves. The line break of \u2018Dutch clogged \/ name,\u2019 across the second and third lines quoted above, might suggest not only how easy it is for an artist\u2019s name, particularly a female artist\u2019s name, to be lost over time, but also lost to the artist themselves. This loss is re-emphasised by the way that \u2018whom I\u2019ve predated\u2019 is isolated at the start of the second stanza of the poem. Here, Beyer becomes less herself than a predecessor.<\/p>\n

Wong\u2019s \u2018Dramatic Monologue as Mira Calix\u2019 begins with a nod to Calix\u2019s 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\u2019s monologue begins, \u2018You know when you\u2019re 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\u2019s in a right \/ click? Glowing ball-joints or peeping \/\/ potato eyes.\u2019 What we notice here is the self-directed \u2018you\u2019 in the first and third line. This, \u2018you\u2019, is contrasted to the \u2018they\u2019 in line two; thus, personally pulling the reader into Calix\u2019s life. The personal pull of \u2018you\u2019 works against the impersonal musical history that has forgotten her: \u2018they\u2019 who \u2018used\u2019. The adjectives broken from their nouns across stanza breaks, i.e., \u2018blade \/\/ runner\u2019, 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\u2019s consciousness. The punning reference to \u2018capitol, capitalism and neon all caps,\u2019 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\u2019s musical composition, is also demonstrated in Calix\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Many of Wong\u2019s poems explore the \u2018I\u2019 of the poem. Wong\u2019s \u2018I\u2019 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.\u00a0 As we have seen in Calix\u2019s dramatic monologue there is often a negotiation with a \u2018you\u2019 and a \u2018they,\u2019 where \u2018they\u2019 may be larger forces outside either the \u2018I\u2019 or the \u2018you.\u2019 The second person, \u2018you,\u2019 so present in \u2018Dramatic Monologue as Mira Calix\u2019, occurs throughout Stem<\/em>. That poem begins with a \u2018you\u2019 who is likely to be Calix herself; the \u2018You\u2019 negotiating with the \u2018Self\u2019, which, in the case of \u2018Dramatic Monologue as Myra Calix\u2019, adds a further layer to the doubling. Elsewhere in Wong\u2019s poems, the \u2018you\u2019 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 \u2018actual\u2019 second person. In \u2018Scorpion W2,\u2019 Wong writes, \u2018You\u2019re too pretty \/ to war with, but that\u2019s 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 \/\u2019. The forward slashes between \u2018look\/bare\u2019 and \u2018owning\/your\u2019 and at the end of the quotation, are Wong\u2019s. The \u2018you\u2019, here, is treated with some extravagance; the \u2018you\u2019 is like \u2018friendly fire,\u2019 and its most \u2018prized possession should be owning [its] own washing machine.\u2019 The relationship between the speaker and the \u2018you\/Other\u2019 is almost surreal. Wong\u2019s great ability is to shape these triangulations between the author and personae, between the \u2018I\u2019, the \u2018you\u2019 and \u2018they\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Ian Pople <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An energetic and resonant collection of lyric poems and dramatic monologues Stella Wong | Stem | Princeton University Press: \u00a314.99Reviewed by Ian Pople In her second collection, Stem, Wong offers a series of poems entitled, \u2018Dramatic Monologue\u2026\u2019, followed by the names of several forgotten female composers. These forgotten female composers have tended to specialise in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nStella Wong, Stem, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12787\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Stella Wong, Stem, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"An energetic and resonant collection of lyric poems and dramatic monologues Stella Wong | Stem | Princeton University Press: \u00a314.99Reviewed by Ian Pople In her second collection, Stem, Wong offers a series of poems entitled, \u2018Dramatic Monologue\u2026\u2019, followed by the names of several forgotten female composers. 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