…more songs the radio won’t play…,
Stan Rogal
ECW Press, 2025
Stan Rogal is very serious about not being serious – even when interviewing deceased poets who briefly return to this plane to mess with him. Sitting down with his latest collection, …more songs the radio won’t play…, I didn’t know what not to expect, and it turns out I wasn’t wrong. The concept behind the collection is simple: take a song, use the song title as title, mention the singer or group’s name, and use the lyrics, or any aspect of the song, really, and transform it into something that is more than the song and more than a poem. Let’s get the verdict out of the way: most of the resulting poems function on their own, without knowledge of the original; the other ones will send you running to the song; and all will heighten your appreciation of the song and by your capacity to relate back to it.
But there’s no formula here. Not one way for Rogal to depart from the song, to remix it, to weave himself in and out of it. The book lets itself be read like a song, but it also begs to be studied, for the reader to read it like a musician would listen to a song so they could figure out the parts by ear, find allusions to other songs, understand the texture, and hit those notes.
I won’t give it the satisfaction.
I won’t! I won’t dissect “Shock the Monkey” and compare it to the song even though it’s much shorter than most other poems and I’m more familiar with it. I won’t, even though Rogal is dangling Wittgenstein explicitly on four separate occasions. The Wittgenstein who’s given up on order and sees everything as a game, is impressed by the games, and kind of wants people to come up with more, better games. The book wants its academic article, subtitled “Reading popular music through Rogal through Wittgenstein,” titled with a witty popular cultural reference.
Because that’s also what happens to the title of the collection, a deformation of Kathleen Edwards’ “One More Song the Radio Won’t Like.” The first trick is to make the allusive (won’t like) into the descriptive (won’t play), all the while adding to the original titular irony by attaching it to poems which, of course, the radio won’t play, seeing as they are poems. The second is to get rid of the capitals in the title so it’s 2020s poetry (in spite of the poems having titles). And then Rogal makes it seem like the title is part of a larger text by adding in ellipses. AND THEN the cover makes us believe there’s nostalgia in this collection by setting up cassette tapes in an artful tableau. The tape is even let out of one cassette (and an old cassette, not the late 90s type!), in a shape that evokes eyeglasses on a string or a baby carriage. More feigned nostalgia: side B is almost done playing. It’s almost time to flip the cassette and start over. Old life returns to new life.
I don’t know Rogal’s age but I can see there’s at least a decade between us just by the choice of songs. Again, there’s no nostalgia in the poems: there are newer songs in there, and the songs from the 1970s and 80s are very much alive, present as they are in their corresponding poems. They’ve stayed with Rogal, he didn’t stay behind with them (and isn’t that the dream for someone whose musical taste belongs to a past era, I was thinking, a Smashing Pumpkins song stuck in my head). He isn’t afraid to spend time with Duran Duran or A Flock of Seagulls and reminds us there are several reasons why their songs were so popular. But I’m NOT going to analyze these poems’ relationships to the original in depth. You figure it out.
Because after all, these are poems. Look at this, in “Hungry like the Wolf”: “Here exists the condition of besidedness / A grammatical sense of adjacency / Do do do do do do do dodo dododo dodo.” Rogal floats an idea, throws us into the song, messes up the meditation, takes us away from the proximity the poem was going to create. Instead, we are pulled behind the scenes of a music video. The dododo line reappears and we are clotheslined, thrown down into an exploration of fascination. Simon Le Bon might be comparing himself to a wolf; Rogal instead subsumes the pop star and the animal under a common concept (take that, Wittgenstein), as mysterious and beautiful but not alike in the least, but nonetheless comparable – the birth of symbolism. And then we get back to the poem’s chorus, with the explicit naming of red riding hood which the footnote informs us was the claimed inspiration for the lyrics; we get back to the singing.
Because yes, these poems have choruses. Things happen in poems when lines repeat, poets have used this device sparingly or quite formally. There’s a modulation, a return, renewed meaning, emphasis. But poems don’t have choruses like songs do, do they? Have you found yourself raising the intensity of your reading in a poem because shifts in its atmosphere led you to understand that a change was coming? Speaking along enthusiastically with the repeating stanza? Reciting part of the poem in your head all day? What’s the poetic equivalent of turning up the volume and tapping your feet while singing your head off? Rogal gives us the chance to give it a shot, to move along with the poems to be moved more than metaphorically.
But also he doesn’t, not always at least, but that’s also on purpose. “I Ran (So Far Away)” appears twice in a row: first as a poem in free verse, then as a prose poem that mixes reviews of the song with descriptions and impressions. In the first iteration, the dynamic from “Hungry like the Wolf” is reversed, we find ourselves on the other side of fascination when the speaker (oomph) says he can’t get away. There’s an end of the world feel to this poem, with nuclear obliteration diction and a knowingly misplaced focus on linguistics. There’s such beauty here, like in these lines: “looking back over your atomic shoulder / you play a beam of alabaster across your face / give me your hand, try to find some surface of yourself / that doesn’t impose too much upon / too late, too late.” How’s this for fascination and desire at the end of the world?
The second iteration of “I Ran” takes a step back and shows us what creates this fascination. Chord progressions, guitar techniques, technical observations, descriptions, songs it references. It all seems helpful and correct, but also extraneous, and through this cascade of details and quotations and additions we get the simple pleasure of enjoying a song, perhaps in spite of all we can know about it and what makes it just another pop song (but isn’t that also the essence of everyday pleasures?).
Wait.
I didn’t do this on purpose. The pulling back, pushing back in… There’s a pattern in these poems. I discovered it while writing. I picked the poems because the songs made sense together for me. I can’t help it. And I’m not even done! Check this out: both poems (this one and the Duran Duran one) share a line: “are you a wind instrument, are you breath?” Who says it to whom? The fascinated, or the fascinating? Isn’t this the essence of fascination, the presence of something beyond the corporeal? And of our relation to singers, given the life they breathe into us? I had to look it up, since it’s so striking. Should I tell you where it’s from? Where Rogal found it? Fine – a 2017 poem by Meredith Striker in the chapbook anemochore. But it’s not the first time he’s brought it up in a poem, so it’s also self-referential. Or is it parallel? Online journal publications are much faster than book releases.
There are other more explanatory poems, more references beyond the songs, more replacement of meaning. Take “Sweet Emotion”: a mention of class consciousness and then “It’s so serious today, the party’s over, or haven’t you heard? / We’re bleeding out, & while you deliberate, bodies accumulate.” (A Perfect Circle, really?) With an injection of Marxism and existentialism (no really, check it out). Take the rewriting of “Radio Ethiopia / Abyssinia” by Patti Smith or “Mama He’s Crazy” by the Judds where Rogal makes new poems and explores what analysis can’t do.
These poems are smart, clever, and they laugh at that part of themselves. They’re fun. They push the poetic experience into the extremely familiar. They attest to the life and staying power of other people’s words and songs, to everything we receive from our mediated relationships with others. And they push the poetic forms by destroying the single line of thought and making the presence of the past known and deeply felt.
So yeah, this is good stuff.
Jérôme Melançon writes
and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth
collection, Prairial·es, is now out with Prise de parole. Let us not
forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water
(2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020),
his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans
l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal
issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with
some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome,
notably at bsky.social.
