Book Review

Secondary Sound
by justin sirois
BlazeVOX Books, 2008
www.blazevox.org
ISBN: 1934289647

The Corporate Poetry of justin sirois's Secondary Sound

As soon as any new gadgets are invented, artists stand ready to appropriate the thing and bend it for critique. In his exciting and danceable new book, justin sirois dabbles with the idea:

Technologies, they go:

development
marketing
immersion
adaptation
obsolescence
art

Accordingly, there's a land rush on literary innovation, a race to spike a claim on the newest forms. The epistolary novel worked out well, who can do the same thing with e-mail? Who's going to trick out Amazon's Kindle? Who will publish the first book comprised completely of IMs? Poets have been revising spam as poetry since spam became randomly sublime, and one of the most far out and successful experiments is Douglass Rushkoff's open source novel, which made it into print in 2002, five years before news broke about the role audience input played in Snakes on a Plane. And, thus, the fact that some attic trendsetter has done it better already is always the problem.

Secondary Sound, justin sirois's new book of poetry, brilliantly subverts all of this while exhibiting a keen awareness of it. It's natural that a book about a trend-savvy consumer-activist named (oh the savvy) "Pirate," who is commissioned to develop the greatest of all possible ringtones by a media conglomerate named the Grope Group, would include some graphical reference to text messaging. And so it does, but in a blithely noncontiguous, impossible way:

if you text::

I don't understand

to the number::

phenomenologically speaking, it's no longer about you, it's about the Tesla of palms collectively pressed to the prism of colliding idiom

you'll Katamari every dream in the Eastern Ameropean market . . .

Boxes are printed around the text messages, which is a suggestive way to separate the text message from the rest of the poem (most of Secondary Sound can be read as a series of individual poems, but it works most effectively as a comprehensive story, an epic poem). This delineation serves as inquiry about the relationship between "text message" and "text." It's a prescient line of questioning, considering that text messaging is, in a real way, an entirely new form of communication. It's the form that disregards formal rules in the service of meaning, that operates unmediated by teachers so that what the 11-year-old writes is indistinguishable from what her mother scrawls off of her BlackBerry.

You know—they go like this: "where r u" "at strbks"—text messaging strips from language its concern with grace, so that all that's left is meaning. This is Husserl's dream (he got on the phenomenology bandwagon early; it was his idea to "bracket" distracting phenomena and in this way to approach the ground of being), so—phenomenologically speaking—sirois is nailing all the right questions. Does he care? Nope, and who does, and who should? The philosophical underpinnings of Secondary Sound are tenable and fun to think about—but, but

but the thing that sirois gets best, and what makes the book so convincing, is the liquid language he uses to outline the story. Comprised primarily of instructional memos from the Grope Group to the Pirate, with a couple short story interludes, the book has a way of enticing the reader with sparkles of plot and sharp tropes while simultaneously befuddling any concrete assertions about what, exactly, is going on.

Because what's going on is that Pirate, by his existence and quirky day-to-day, is cataloging everything that needs to be included in this new chime. And every salable thing needs to be in there; the chime is an Hegelian endeavor to incorporate all history ("and film history because" it's pointed out, "film history is a separate history"), so we can expect a little vertigo from the narrator's perspective. In fact, the most dizzying abstractions are preferable. Writing sensory overload, sirois has nailed the dazed tone most capable of sensibly addressing the subject of our modern situation. This piece closes the first section, concluding the introductory memo from the Grope Group:

when the day is done their ears will ring & this is how they'll judge how the night went, wet with sounds dripping from drums, kettles of letters steaming like tea. In cabs they'll croon, make nookie in the books of napes & grapple with new text that tent chests

the night will be done because their ears are ringing

Apparently, the Grope Group aspires to develop more than just a ringtone, but by using the ringtone they will exert power over the consumers and over time itself; they'll ring in the night. And Google is taking over my life because I'm letting it—I use Google Docs to write, CheckOut to shop, their search engine to look up my friend's address—so the hegemony of the Grope Group is not implausible. What is more horrifying is that they have made Pirate complicit in their ambition. They will reach full power on the strength of what he creates, and he seems to be one of the conscientious few with the ability to resist their goals. As the hero, he is the other between the two modalities in the book, the business world and the daffy punk resistance. This latter group, like punks in the real world, seem to have given up serious protest and now take "antipolitical political action," like arranging zombie parties aimed at repealing the Estate Tax. Good times, sure, but not really fueled by the same urgency that their forebears had when they took issue with, say, the Stamp Tax.

All of this isn't a terribly difficult metaphor to pull out of the book, or to decipher. Take away his commission to create a ringtone and Pirate becomes practically every US citizen alive today—a person subject to the myriad imperatives of corporate marketing; Pirate just has a more involved role in the game. But sirois masterfully describes the principality of the powers not by vilifying any of the players (there is no clear Big Brother), but by highlighting the qualities of the ringtone. It's something that can't be escaped, and that's okay, because

when the chime is going for a run
or standing on the train
it won't annoy other passagers or pedestrians...when your favorite draught is being poured at an airport lounge, each bubble of foam will have this chime swirling inside...

The ubiquity of the chime is matched by sirois's ability to cross reference different sections of the text, which instills an equally vertiginous feature to reading it. Several pieces are called "echo"—that's a good gag, especially bearing in mind the books title. And at one point, Pirate takes exception to having to say "Private SNAFU" as a code. A later poem takes that acronym, expanded, for its title. Grope Group opens every memo with "Ahoy," a quirk that sirois knows might get old and which he addresses by way of apology: "Ahoy!/I hope that doesn't get annoying," and "oy vey! I mean ahoy!" There are so many links from page to page that the reading becomes blissfully hypertextual, and finding selections of the poem to excerpt is a simple task. There are two scoops of noteworthy nuggets inside this book, plenty at which to laugh, marvel or cringe.

I am enthusiastic about this book. I have rarely been more enthusiastic about any book. I ought to say that I know justin (at least well enough for my understanding of this work to be complicated by the fact that he has a pretty sweet cell phone), and that he lent a poem from Secondary Sound to my outdoor journal Baltimore Is Reads—so I guess it's not news that I would like what he's done. But now that I've finished the task of reading Secondary Sound for review purposes, I intend to read it again and again, for all the reverberations that it invites. I guess I ought to give justin his $10.

(NB: The Grope Group maintains a website that really enhances the book, unfolds the mystery and broadens it a bit. Be a cog and check it out at www.gropegroup.com)—Adam Robinson.