Tonight's the Night

by Catherine Meng

Poetry. TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT, the first perfect-bound edition of this exciting Bay Area poet's work, features 48 poems titled TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT. In the Author's Note, Meng explains that the poems inside "began as an experiment in repetition after reading biographies of both Neil Young and Glenn Gould." "In this poem, the camera spectates on what to do with a darkness/ so overwrought the hand can't steady it. The kind/ that furiously dwindles until it cancels its mouth/ & the tongue thumps grotesque & unhinged/ Unhinges each blad of grass, unhinges the pasture from the wire/ & fence posts that hold cattle from the road. Swiftly, swiftly,/ it unhinges both road & cattle. Where canyon was cut from rock/ by water, a wind moves, so the voice goes/ rising as darkness does, wildly undocumented./ The voice unhinges from the country it springs from--"--from TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT. Meng's poems have appeared, among other places, in The Boston Review, Crowd, JUBILAT, FENCE, and Fulcrum.

Genres: Poetry

69 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2007

About the author

Catherine Meng moves her own couches.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read about this book via a review on Octopus.

http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue0...

The beginning of the review isn't one of my favorites (the whole church imagery seemed a tedious long way into the review + the use of lodestones) yet its sheer obsessive-ness is a testimony to the book. This book is obsessive. I should have been reading other books- I am behind on reviewing two books already! I had just planned on reading the first poem when the book arrived in the mail and guess what? I couldn't put it down- I put the other books down (except for Lynn Xu's June- another intruder that caught and kept my attention).

There are many things to say about this first(?) book but basically you should buy it and read it. Here are my favorite lines from the book:

...How wings pinned/ to a sky look as if history has burst in the face./ How one note gets caught beyond the song/ & starts a new clattering

Whether you write or just read poetry I think that after you read this book you'll be one note beyond song & clattering anew.

[Patrick Duggan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meng’s poetry is a work of research and collage, originality and history. A biography committed to music, and then back to the page. On the surface, her work seems to exist as fugue, imitative counterpoint, but a deeper meaning and music emerges as the line, breath, and constant refrain of "Tonight’s The Night” carry the movement forward into a place of grand collision.

Meng uses repetition as hook and line, as a bar and scale for language. Bach appears at first seemingly as himself, but soon becomes sign and symbol for Bach the artist and Bach the man, and eventually as fugue itself, a constant reminder of the falsehood inherent in the very fact of Bach.

The repetitive word beat and syllable flow serve to highlight the music and image of her poetry, especially as she moves from an extended breath across several lines, to something more Oppen, a tight snippet of thought stilting the breath and slowing the eye. As the fugue and collage dance and collide into something new, something wonderful happens within the poetry. The new language art becomes self aware, new life self referencing the music and narrative poetry of its own creation.

[Michael Lindgren · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surreal, deeply allusive, and challenging set of modernist verse from a young Californian poet via new experimental press Apostrophe. Meng lives and writes from an appealing if strange universe where Glenn Gould and Neil Young argue about aesthetic theory while J. S. Bach frets and sinister geese menace passerby. Not for the intellectually lazy, but fun in its way.

[Matt Walker]

This will be the first book I buy when I resume buying books (June 1).

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last & tallest gable hit by sun

holds one slender window drawn

so what is real as the day is long is no longer

than the length of this room.

Where it fades from the baseboards

geese glide toward a shore

confused with a shore reflected.

- Tonight's the Night, pg. 8

* * *

In this poem, the camera spectates on what to do with a darkness
so overwrought the hand can't steady it. The kind

that furiously dwindles until it cancels its mouth
& tongue thumps grotesque & unhinged.

Unhinges each blade of grass, unhinges the pasture from the wire
& fence posts that hold cattle from the road. Swiftly, swiftly,

it unhinges both road & cattle. Where canyon was cut from rock
by water, a wind moves, so the voice goes

rising as darkness does, wildly undocumented.
The voice unhinges from the country it springs from -

- Tonight's the Night, pg. 16

* * *

Your face is something you attempt

by studying faces on the train.

Some seem set in lead & others

shed themselves like petals.

Some are louder

& make you weak in the ankles,

confused by the passing trees

which have recently stopped

or just started up. Geese

honk out a rut in the sky,

an oblong response or a

washboard. Wind either way

whistles through the window

cracked. Bach has no true face

beside the one he cut

in the side of his head,

for the sake of his audience.

- Tonight's the Night, pg. 27

* * *

The two musics betwixt until
the gutted piano rings like a bell

& girls glitter like cribbage pins
so the eye is betwixt as well

drawn into rest by green on green
by the windmills soundlessly working

from which the voice must surface
to unwind geese from other geese

calling -

- Tonight's the Night, pg. 34

* * *

Highway, unfurl your asphalt tongue

without accompaniment,

without flock or field, desert absent

of windmills or wind. Light

from a city, thrumming the middle distance

beyond the darkened ridge

& the oncoming headlights

carve the unseen

switchback, from the unseen

stone that rises somewhere before this.

Please don't shoot the piano

player, he's doing the best he can.

- Tonight's the Night, pg. 41

* * *

The unplowed mirth of objects

acts as objects do beyond the camera, full of faltering ring,

a time change, down the road & back,

back against the lake frozen over, it slows

into a sustain when the ear gives way.

We're nearer now than we've been

to the birds leaving the tree, leaving the tree

more tree-like, the sound itself, so you see it -

(they flew, they did, they did flew)

before you hear it. The space where they once were

granted to the quickest eye.

- Tonight's the Night, pg. 54

* * *

Breeze marks the difference

between scrap metal & music.

Chimes hung from fishing line

rattle thievishly the night

long toward a soaring sleep whole & disorienting,

so every edge is made soft by fire. Start one

with a camera. If the faces go out

there are negatives to make new

the distance of one to the next, until there is

reason to leave in formation, to take up the sky

& ride honking from the throat toward a home,

or an image of home, made purely from sound.

- Tonight's the Night, pg. 61

[Kit · Rating 4 out of 5]

All of the poems in this collection are named after the same Neil Young record. That's certainly one way to arrest my attention, and the insistence of that refrain, along with some allusions to lyrics from that record ("as real as the day is long"), becomes powerful. Many poems rely on surreal or synaesthetic imagery that turns out to be fresher and more interesting than one might imagine, though that perhaps isn't saying much. Other repetitions with variation of words and tropes seem related to Meng's interest in musical fugue. I'm not always sure what she's going for in that regard. I am interested in reading more by this poet.