The Soul of Rock & Roll: Poems Acoustic; Electric & Remixed; 1980-2020

Poetry. If one goes Googling John Repp; one soon learns that he is a native of the Pine Barrens region of New Jersey (a location that often appears in his work); but has since lived many places; attended many universities (picking up an MFA along the way); has worked at seemingly every sort of job from gravedigging to teaching creative writing (so at least some of them useful); and has an eclectic and eccentric list of interests. And that he has; over the past forty years; written many books of poetry and prose; garnering awards and critical recognition along the way. All of which finds its way into THE SOUL OF ROCK & ROLL; which serves as a ?oegreatest hits?selection from those four decades of poetry. Such an outsized life has yielded a commensurately wide-ranging body of work; and any attempt to gist it in few words would do it poor service; but a good point of entry is The Tiny-Montgomery-Mother-Poem in which Dylan's The Basement Tapes plays in the background while Repp's mother is dying; and his family rails at him for speaking of such things: They say These things are private. Why do you keep / making these private things public? It's so long ago. Yes; he writes of private things; and of things from long ago; from a time of innocence and the rush to lose it; documenting not merely his life but that of his generation; a generation for which rock & roll provided the soundtrack and the thrum sounding throughout these pages; love and loss amid the worn crackle and hiss. It may be true; as William Carlos Williams observed; that it is hard to get news from poetry; but it's a good source of history; of understanding how we arrived where we are. Repp reports in one poem here that he learned of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in part from a Robert Pinsky poem. Now it is his turn to educate us; to share the lessons from his life and times. Not all may be the sort of things that people die for want of knowing (to complete the Williams quotation); but they can be comforting--and what a needful thing that is for these times. Who doesn't climb from the mere world he asks in Ovaltine--with the emphasis on mere; lest we take our lives too seriously; reminding us to dream--to where Ponce de Leon and Wyatt Earp rein their horses / while you spur Silver to column's head? The wind hits you first; / wind unheard before that; nothing ahead but fire and new mountains.