Name: Mays 20
ISBN: 9780902240421

John Darnielle

Mays 20

Gavin

It's impossible to be the Darnielle completist I am. On top of the maybe 400 commercial objects ("8 to 20 On a Weapons Charge is a bonus track from ~1 copy of Taking the Dative"), there are: a complete but unreleased album, three dozen online-only ephemeral downloads, a hundred covers, a hundred live-only bootleg-only songs, a hundred more known "missing" songs, dozens of songs with no attestation but a title or a verse, and who knows how many more we couldn't snatch from him out of the air. Some of his best have been performed exactly once, and probably never again.

There's two good strong pages of JD here, plus his hand in picking and ordering some really ordinary student poetry. It's sort of nice that it's so ordinary; if the bar were higher it would leave people behind, and poetry is now the last place to leave anyone behind. (Except the reader.) It's sort of terrible that the ordinary student art in here will attend much greater success, commanding heights, just because it is in here.

Scott Annett's 'Cranes' is quite nice. Alexander Freer's 'Preliminary Communication' is an unsuccessful attempt at my favourite, difficult sort of poem, the bipartite-contrasted-abstract+concrete thingy, more than three words to a line. Felt nothing for the photos.

I was a student writer, in fact more of a student writer than a student. What makes student writing? Earnestness, of course, and the attendant humour gap. An excess of night, nakedness, ribs, blood, pain, the word "fucking" but not much fucking. Syntax shortage. Sensual tongue effects without sensible teeth. Formulas hidden behind frantic formal experiment and pique. Derivativeness as homage. Either sensitive outsiderdom or cartoonish total radicalism or both. 

It's hard to imagine that student writers could get over themselves, could become less clumsy, could settle into themselves, could understand others, could try to actually affect the world. But apparently some do, like Darnielle.