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Brainlifts
Poetry. In his tenth book, BRAINLIFTS, long-time New York poet Tom Savage writes and riffs off films, music, dance and art with a sustained aphoristic style, each thought exploding and reverberating in a complex music. Of Tom's work Dean Kostos writes that Tom's idiom "can become a trapdoor through which we fall, finding other structures and ways of speaking." Bernadette Mayer writes, "He transforms the pretty rational souls of stuff into the pretty anti-rational souls, leaping elliptically, sometimes elliptically logically from perception so quickly to its part and art." Alice Notley writes, "I've been reading Tom Savage's poems for a long time and have come to realize that I need each new book."
78 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2008
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May 8, 2011Brainlifts is a joy -- a cloistered joy. The poems are mostly one and a third pages long, and at the end of most of them is a small subscript explaining the artwork which inspired them; so they become like riddles. (I think I only guessed one, though -- because they are usually highly obscure films and operas that only advanced cineastes and opera-knowers will recognize. (For example "Awake, Dear Pigeon" was "written after watching Marcel Carne's Bizarre Bizarre ou Drole de Drame by Jacques Prevert many, many times".))
Most of the poems have long lines, which are aphoristic (though strangely they do not resemble prose):
Even a wolf or dragongirl can become a monk
Brainlifts describes a very 21st-century process: watching a movie while thinking of three other things. Each poem summarizes the essence of the artwork, while also avoiding it. Sex and God linger just below the surface:
At her first musical orgasm
She orders an erection,
Stupendous and safe.
(That's from "Farinelli, the Castrato, Fucks & Sings." Tom has great titles!)
Don't scratch your balls if you want to be a girl.
(That's from "My Life in Pink.")
Heed the voice of whichever God you hear
Until you feel you must disagree.
It is your universal right.
Just ask the sky. You needn't comply.
(From "The Father of All Wars")
Tom is a big Buddhist, but he writes about God anyway, for once. I love it when nonbelievers tackle God.
Why is empty space white?
Ask the sun about waterfalls in Heaven.
(From "Life on a String," based on Life on a String, a Chinese film set in Mongolia.)
Most of the poems have long lines, which are aphoristic (though strangely they do not resemble prose):
Even a wolf or dragongirl can become a monk
Brainlifts describes a very 21st-century process: watching a movie while thinking of three other things. Each poem summarizes the essence of the artwork, while also avoiding it. Sex and God linger just below the surface:
At her first musical orgasm
She orders an erection,
Stupendous and safe.
(That's from "Farinelli, the Castrato, Fucks & Sings." Tom has great titles!)
Don't scratch your balls if you want to be a girl.
(That's from "My Life in Pink.")
Heed the voice of whichever God you hear
Until you feel you must disagree.
It is your universal right.
Just ask the sky. You needn't comply.
(From "The Father of All Wars")
Tom is a big Buddhist, but he writes about God anyway, for once. I love it when nonbelievers tackle God.
Why is empty space white?
Ask the sun about waterfalls in Heaven.
(From "Life on a String," based on Life on a String, a Chinese film set in Mongolia.)
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