Perhaps the ultimate anxiety, however, is overcoming and transcending entirely the fear of futility as it relates to art and its role in society, which can no longer be thought of as traditional in the traditional sense. A “back-to-basics” approach to aesthetics à la pastoralism, or longing for the past by lamenting the present for what it lacks in terms of the former: this approach just won't do. However, the answer to this dilemma is not necessarily novel, either. In fact, it's unavoidable for any artist that is interested in standing the proverbial “test of time;” though not in the universalist sense as, perhaps, advocated by many structuralist teachers and writers alike—that is, the sense that a true work of art can and should be defined as timeless. On the contrary, a true work of art is timeful. In other words, it is dated; mimetic and representative of the time in which it was created. As previously stated, this is not some groundbreaking modus operandi: Dante did it when he employed vernacular Italian, as opposed to ad litteram Latin; Whitman did it in his “democratic” poetry; Eliot in his blend of high- and low-culture; O'Hara in his lunch poems à la Personism; and, now, Robbins does it in his poetry collection, Alien vs. Predator: an artistic smoothie comprised of too many fruitful influences to list here, but ranging from Wordsworth to Jay-Z; from Hart Crane to Bob Dylan; from Wallace Stevens to the Wu-Tang Clan. This Eliotian blend of high- and low-culture content is “democratic” in its ability to engage a diverse audience on multiple levels—regardless of academic status and privilege—yet still adhering to certain properties of formalism.
“To the Break of Dawn” is written from the perspective of a DJ with an eclectic, encyclopedic knowledge of music, as is characteristic of a disc jockey. However, this perspective is not revealed until the final stanza:
"I take this cadence from the spinning plates
where the DJ plots the needle’s fall.
I take it, and I give it back again
to the dollar dollar bill and the yes yes y'all."
Here it is important to note the allegorical use of a DJ as it is used throughout the poem. As a metaphor for an artist, and a poet in particular, a DJ spends countless hours “digging in the crates,” i.e. going through milk crates, in which vinyl records are traditionally stored, in the basement of some secondhand shop, looking for new music. A poet undergoes a similar formative process, say, in the basement of a used-book store: reading line after line of verse and prose, taking mental notes, adding to the memory bank the influential ecstasies; and then, walking up stairs with an armful of books to the register, and handing over “the dollar dollar bill” in exchange for the affirming “yes yes y’all” the books contain: encouragement, reinforcement, the sublime, etc. When poets read, they “take it” in, and when they write, they “give it back again.” However, they are in control; “the DJ plots the needle’s fall.” The DJ determines the setlist, and accepts its aptness to change; poets write like those they've read, even if it’s just a phase. While the DJ spins wax (vinyl) on plates, poets also spin plates in a kind of circusy balancing act. They juggle their influences of the past and of the present, despite the cognitive dissonance that may occur due to those cumbersome one-eighties, or near-Oedipal reformations, in terms of style and taste.
However, unlike the centripetal force of a turntable, the development of an aesthetic is centrifugal in the Derridean sense; that is to say, it’s messy. Although the poet’s journey seems to be moving toward some kind of center—some point of overall aesthetic satisfaction—that center is continually shifting as an elusive endpoint. The DJ in the poem has a similar wandering experience:
"I wandered lonely as Jay-Z
after the Fat Boys called it quits,
before the rapper from Mobb Deep
met up with the Alchemist."
The first two lines of the poem is a playful combination of Wordsworth’s lyric poem, “Daffodils,” and Brooklyn-native Jay-Z’s hip-hop hit, “Heart of the City.” The former begins, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” and the latter begins, “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up. Somebody got a problem with Hov’.” (Hov’ being short for Jehovah: a nickname proclaimed by Jay-Z, himself, “the messiah of hip hop.”) As a classic example of the Eliotian blend of high- and low-culture, this stanza allusively demonstrates the aforementioned wandering experience that accompanies an artist’s development that is somewhat cyclical. While the DJ “wandered lonely [...] after the Fat Boys called it quits,” this void would soon be filled when “the rapper [Prodigy] from Mobb Deep met up with [the hip-hop producer] the Alchemist.”
From there, the DJ continues his journey of wanderlust, again to some dismay:
"I wandered lonely all along
The Watchtower’s office front
in Dumbo, then across the bridge
that tempts the bedlamite to song."
What begins as a reference to Bob Dylan’s song, “All Along the Watchtower,” becomes a reference to Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose headquarters happens to be located in Dumbo (Down Under The Manhattan Bridge Overpass), Brooklyn. They published The Watchtower, a religious text prophesying the apocalypse, i.e. the end of the world which, in some sense, was soon to come. The second stanza also alludes back to first, which contains the Brooklyn-born Jay-Z (Hov’) reference. However, the DJ has outgrown his early influences—i.e. Jay-Z is no longer the “messiah of hip hop” and the Alchemist, like alchemy, has become antiquated—and has decided to continue his journey by wandering “across the bridge that tempts the bedlamite to song.” As an allusion to Hart Crane’s modernist epic, The Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge—a modern marvel of its time—symbolizes “an act of faith.” In Crane’s words:
"The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exists any real links between that past and a future destiny worthy of it. If only America were half as worthy today to be spoken of as Whitman spoke of it fifty years ago, there might be something for me to say [...] The Bridge is symphonic in including all the strands: Columbus, conquest of water, land, Pocahontas, subways, offices. The Bridge, in becoming a ship, a world, a woman, a tremendous harp as it does finally, seems to really have a career."
The “narrative DJ” is torn between the America Walt Whitman, the romantic/transcendentalist, sees in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” before the bridge was built; and the America Hart Crane, the modernist, sees in The Bridge after it was built. However, the America the DJ finds while standing on the Brooklyn Bridge would be unrecognizable to both the aforementioned poets in the ingenious stanza that follows:
"From here you could've seen what planes
can do with luck and delta-v
as that fire-fangled morning
jingle-jangled helter-skelterly."
When two planes hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 2001, many have said it marked the end of irony; however, where one thing ends, another begins, but what? Is it now a seemingly meaningless world of “luck” and chance à la Big Bang and chaos theory; i.e. a world only explicable by way of science? All because of delta-v (Δv): literally, because of the “change in velocity,” however abrupt, of two planes? Perhaps the DJ, while rummaging through crates in a dingy old basement, came across a book of poetry by Wallace Stevens; particularly the poem, "Of Mere Being," which contains the line, “The bird's [fire-fangled] feathers dangle down.” More interesting, however, is the third stanza of the poem: “You know then that it is not the reason / That makes us happy or unhappy. / The bird sings. Its feathers shine.” In short, meaning, or lack thereof, as a precursor to happiness, or unhappiness, cannot be fully explained in terms of logic, reason, or science; likewise, nor can logic, reason, and science be explained via transcendental meaning so as to enable happiness.
The line that follows, “jingle-jangled helter-skelterly,” attempts to explain by example this misconstrued disparacy. The jingle-jangle fallacies refer to “the erroneous assumptions that two different things are the same because they bear the same name (jingle fallacy) or that two identical or almost identical things are different because they are labeled differently (jangle fallacy).” Take, for example, the meanings and usages/uses of “helter-skelter.” It denotatively refers to “disorderly haste or confusion.” Meanwhile, as the title of a Beatles song, “Helter Skelter” refers to an amusement park ride which, to Paul McCartney, was meant to symbolize a ride from top to bottom, and to contain “the most raucous vocals, the loudest drums, etc.” However, for Charles Manson, Helter Skelter was not only a Beatles song but, in conjunction with the Book of Revelations, “an apocalyptic war he believed would arise from tension over racial relations between blacks and whites.” Clearly, this is an example of the jingle fallacy which, in effect, is nothing new to those who deal with the denotation-connotation binary on a regular basis.
Stanzas four through six read like an O’Harian lunch poem in which the DJ/poet is, perhaps, driving home from the record, or used-book, store with the windows down and the radio blaring; all in the face of the supposed collapse of American culture this poet refuses to accept and attempts to transcend through art’s release:
"From your gravity fails to whoops
there goes gravity, from Céline
to Celan, from “Turn the Beat Around”
to And the Band Played On,"
The radio is on in scan mode. It goes from Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself;” from Vicki Sue Robinson's “Turn the a Beat Around” to college radio station playing the Jaggerz fourth studio album, And the Band Played On, in full. He stops at a redlight and grabs the paperbag on the passenger seat. He pulls out and thumbs through two of the books. One is a novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The other is a book of poetry by Paul Celan. The light turns green:
"from the Live Free or Die
of plates from New Hampshire
to Musidora vamping
her way through Les Vampires,"
The car ahead of him has New Hampshire plates: Live Free or Die. They're either lost or they're not paying attention. The poet doesn't honk, or hang out of his window to yell, at them. Instead, he looks in the distance and sees an advertisement for an independent screening of Les Vampires, a 1915–16 French silent crime serial film written and directed by Louis Feuillade. Maybe he'll go. Eventually, the car in front of him does, but not that it matters. There’s traffic up ahead, and it looks like gridlock:
"from It Takes a Nation
of Millions to Hold Us Back
to Daydream Nation,
from Station to Station,"
It’s rush hour, bumper to bumper, and every horn possible honks in the key of futility. The poet rolls his windows up. He opens the glove compartment and pulls out a few cassette tapes. Not only had he forgotten about cassette tapes, but he forgot he still owned some, especially these ones: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy, Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth, and Station to Station by David Bowie. He pops the first one in and listens to it straight through while his car inches forward. Some cars have run out of gas; others have turned theirs off, put them in neutral, and are pushing them to save gas. Luckily, the poet has a full tank. He pops in the second tape. The sun is setting and an end is in sight. He pops in the third tape, Station to Station by David Bowie. His front tires are just now rolling onto the abutment of the Brooklyn Bridge. As he gains speed, he rolls down the window. The mystical moist night-air rolls in. No one is honking anymore. The concluding song on the album comes on, “Wild Is the Wind.” The poet sings along with the song’s last chorus:
"Like the leaf clings to the tree
Oh my darling cling to me
For we're like creatures in the wind
And wild is the wind
Wild is the wind"
The poet, then, looks out upon the East River, and in a frame spliced by the web of bridge cables, he sees the wind-filled shirt of the bedlamite, sitting upon the bridge parapets, his feet dangling, never to be seen again.
can do with luck and delta-v
as that fire-fangled morning
jingle-jangled helter-skelterly."
When two planes hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 2001, many have said it marked the end of irony; however, where one thing ends, another begins, but what? Is it now a seemingly meaningless world of “luck” and chance à la Big Bang and chaos theory; i.e. a world only explicable by way of science? All because of delta-v (Δv): literally, because of the “change in velocity,” however abrupt, of two planes? Perhaps the DJ, while rummaging through crates in a dingy old basement, came across a book of poetry by Wallace Stevens; particularly the poem, "Of Mere Being," which contains the line, “The bird's [fire-fangled] feathers dangle down.” More interesting, however, is the third stanza of the poem: “You know then that it is not the reason / That makes us happy or unhappy. / The bird sings. Its feathers shine.” In short, meaning, or lack thereof, as a precursor to happiness, or unhappiness, cannot be fully explained in terms of logic, reason, or science; likewise, nor can logic, reason, and science be explained via transcendental meaning so as to enable happiness.
The line that follows, “jingle-jangled helter-skelterly,” attempts to explain by example this misconstrued disparacy. The jingle-jangle fallacies refer to “the erroneous assumptions that two different things are the same because they bear the same name (jingle fallacy) or that two identical or almost identical things are different because they are labeled differently (jangle fallacy).” Take, for example, the meanings and usages/uses of “helter-skelter.” It denotatively refers to “disorderly haste or confusion.” Meanwhile, as the title of a Beatles song, “Helter Skelter” refers to an amusement park ride which, to Paul McCartney, was meant to symbolize a ride from top to bottom, and to contain “the most raucous vocals, the loudest drums, etc.” However, for Charles Manson, Helter Skelter was not only a Beatles song but, in conjunction with the Book of Revelations, “an apocalyptic war he believed would arise from tension over racial relations between blacks and whites.” Clearly, this is an example of the jingle fallacy which, in effect, is nothing new to those who deal with the denotation-connotation binary on a regular basis.
Stanzas four through six read like an O’Harian lunch poem in which the DJ/poet is, perhaps, driving home from the record, or used-book, store with the windows down and the radio blaring; all in the face of the supposed collapse of American culture this poet refuses to accept and attempts to transcend through art’s release:
"From your gravity fails to whoops
there goes gravity, from Céline
to Celan, from “Turn the Beat Around”
to And the Band Played On,"
The radio is on in scan mode. It goes from Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself;” from Vicki Sue Robinson's “Turn the a Beat Around” to college radio station playing the Jaggerz fourth studio album, And the Band Played On, in full. He stops at a redlight and grabs the paperbag on the passenger seat. He pulls out and thumbs through two of the books. One is a novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The other is a book of poetry by Paul Celan. The light turns green:
"from the Live Free or Die
of plates from New Hampshire
to Musidora vamping
her way through Les Vampires,"
The car ahead of him has New Hampshire plates: Live Free or Die. They're either lost or they're not paying attention. The poet doesn't honk, or hang out of his window to yell, at them. Instead, he looks in the distance and sees an advertisement for an independent screening of Les Vampires, a 1915–16 French silent crime serial film written and directed by Louis Feuillade. Maybe he'll go. Eventually, the car in front of him does, but not that it matters. There’s traffic up ahead, and it looks like gridlock:
"from It Takes a Nation
of Millions to Hold Us Back
to Daydream Nation,
from Station to Station,"
It’s rush hour, bumper to bumper, and every horn possible honks in the key of futility. The poet rolls his windows up. He opens the glove compartment and pulls out a few cassette tapes. Not only had he forgotten about cassette tapes, but he forgot he still owned some, especially these ones: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy, Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth, and Station to Station by David Bowie. He pops the first one in and listens to it straight through while his car inches forward. Some cars have run out of gas; others have turned theirs off, put them in neutral, and are pushing them to save gas. Luckily, the poet has a full tank. He pops in the second tape. The sun is setting and an end is in sight. He pops in the third tape, Station to Station by David Bowie. His front tires are just now rolling onto the abutment of the Brooklyn Bridge. As he gains speed, he rolls down the window. The mystical moist night-air rolls in. No one is honking anymore. The concluding song on the album comes on, “Wild Is the Wind.” The poet sings along with the song’s last chorus:
"Like the leaf clings to the tree
Oh my darling cling to me
For we're like creatures in the wind
And wild is the wind
Wild is the wind"
The poet, then, looks out upon the East River, and in a frame spliced by the web of bridge cables, he sees the wind-filled shirt of the bedlamite, sitting upon the bridge parapets, his feet dangling, never to be seen again.
