[ed. note: Associate Editor Clay Matthews steps in with a few words about karaoke & the sublime.  I’m too tired to type after the lively & loving comment stream initiated here & which continues here.]

Clay Matthews

It seems when teaching or talking about poetry we often compare it so some other genre as a means to discuss it: music, story, image, etc., and perhaps most often to music. On a related note, I love karaoke. I never sing, unless a thousand circumstances are right, but I like to watch, listen, laugh, take it all in. I’ve been to a hundred different karaoke bars in several different small towns and cities. Once, at the Holiday Inn bar in OK City, I saw the most ridiculously good karaoke show of all time. Elderly men and women sang the oldies perfectly, a young girl killed Patsy Cline, and people danced. I saw an old man on my way back from the bathroom asking some young girl if she knew how to promenade, and since she didn’t, he was trying to teach her in the hallway. The first karaoke bar I went to in East TN was an all-beer joint on the side of Hwy 11-E. It was dirty, and smoky, and the kind of bar you didn’t stay at long because it was clear you were an outsider, but for the little while I was in there I listened to some haggard middle-aged man belting out “I love the way you love me,” in all sorts of keys and notes. I like karaoke for the same reasons I like gas stations in the U.S.—they’re democratic in theory. Anyone can sing, you just have to show up, and so you get a mix of people that might not otherwise ever hang out together. That’s gas stations, too—all these people have to stop to get gas on the road, and there’s not really “upper-class” or “lower-class” stations, so we all get to mingle for a little while, the bells on the doors dinging to let us in and out.

So, what does all this have to do with my thoughts on poetry? I think about authenticity a lot in writing, or sincerity, or whatever you want to call it. Auden said something in The Dyer’s Hand about how originality is something we shouldn’t ever bother about it poetry—but, rather, authenticity should be our aim. So, in a music world that often covers old songs by younger artists, or for different genres, karaoke sees that at the ground level. It’s not necessarily originality that makes a karaoke performance good for me, but the “feeling” behind the song. It’s not talent, or craft, or any of that stuff that I really value watching people sing the words coming off the little blue screen. That guy that sang “I love the way you love me,” for instance, was awful. But, awful comes from “awe,” and I was in awe about how this guy was up there, not embarrassed, or hesitant, just belting away this song. He meant it. I could hear it in his voice, and so I liked that, I liked that he was putting his heart out there in the smoke, laying it on those tables with wobbly legs, amid the rings of beer sweat and cigarette butts.

I have difficulty explaining how or why I find something authentic. There’s no set genre, style, tone, voice, etc. that consistently hits it. There’s no program for it, it doesn’t pass out fliers at the beginning of the ceremony. I like karaoke because I see it both as a metaphor for poetry, but also just for what it is. People trying to sing. People singing. People meaning. I spend a lot of time talking about how or why something is good, bad, etc. And I think it’s important to think about that, I try to teach students to think about that. But, I also spend a lot of time just appreciating things, for no clear reason to me, other than it spoke to me in some way, it moved me, it seemed real to me. Real is a shady word any more. Get real, reality t.v., fo’ real?, etc. Theorists spend a lot of time discussing whether or not we’re really in reality. But there’s something real in karaoke to me, in poetry, in art, in life, too, most importantly. For some, the sublime is this place we transcend to, a higher state of being. For me, I think, the sublime is a place I come down to: it’s got bad lighting, one microphone, and a d.j. taking requests.