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The Mirror in Our Music release party | June 4, 7 p.m. | Shadowbox Studio, Durham
Side A: Music You Can See
When Fred Joiner was a kid in the ’80s, his father was a house musician at Philly soul hot spot Sigma Sound Studios.
“Basically any music that came out of Philadelphia, if there was trombone, my dad was probably on it,” Joiner says, sitting in his book-stuffed living room in Carrboro. At age 51, the former Carrboro poet laureate finally has his own tome in the stacks: The Mirror in Our Music, a collection recently published by Raleigh small press Birds, LCC.
“My father has a very distinctive sound,” Joiner goes on, in his soft, warm, even rasp. “He once told me, ‘You want to play the center of the note.’” His parents happen to be in the next room, a kitchen full of yellow balloons from his younger daughter’s 10th birthday. “The emotional center. When you hear a musician who’s hitting it, it’s transformative.”
Like father, like son. The poems in The Mirror in Our Music are spare and elemental, seldom longer than a few etched stanzas. Restlessly broken lines snap and curl on the page, like reliefs on a gallery wall. Spacing guides the eye, not the breath.
“I view my poems as a visual art as much as a literary art,” Joiner says. “A lot of what I do is collage.”
Reading straight across, one poem, “On why Duke did not win the Pulitzer Prize in Music,” clearly pursues its theme: “perhaps because / some note / refuse to be flattened / some only exist / in the hot moment, / the crash / of breath & bone.” But the lines are riven in two columns, pulling the eye downward, hinting at secret mazes of meaning.
The writing dazzles, but The Mirror in Our Music contains so much more. Joiner encrusts his poetry with color photos, drawings, essays, epigraphs, and annotations. Done up in square trim like a vinyl record, the book has an A-side, which grew out of Joiner’s graduate-school thesis. You flip it for the B-side, which features his ekphrastic writing—poetry responding to other works of art—an interest he curates on his website Black Ekphrastic. The B-side crackles with vernacular photographs from an Ackland Art Museum exhibit and powerful self-portraits by photographer Ewané Samuel Nja Kwa.
“What do I want people to know about me?” Joiner considered while assembling the collection. “Well, I want them to know that I have a love for African diasporic culture and music, and that I’m adept at collaboration—that I’m open.”
So the book is about jazz and moves like jazz. It’s about the mysteries of art, how “the grayscale song of a camera’s / eye says what our words cannot.” It’s an atlas of everywhere Joiner has lived…
