Disco Metronome in Cordite

Great to have a poem in the recent Cordite, one of my favourite online journals – always full of fantastic new poems. This issue is no different, the editors Zenobia Frost and Bec Jessen used idea of POP as the guide for this issue. In the editorial they shared a little about the types of submissions this attracted: ‘Welcome to the POP! edition of Cordite Poetry Review, in which Gatsby’s green light hovers over this text to tell you we are °º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø σηℓιηє °º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø, baybee. As pop connoisseurs, we already had a sense of where our tastes diverge. (Bec, in Zen’s words, listens almost exclusively to gay club hits of the ’90s, huge soppy ballads and whatever the soundtrack is this week on Grey’s Anatomy. In Bec’s words, Zen’s diet is androgynous sad-girl belters, cult documentaries and Star Trek by way of Star Trek podcasts.) But we were surprised that our survey of submissions from nearly 400 poets resulted in zero marital barneys; generally, we agreed, and the shape of POP! came together as easily as the Babadook became queer culture.’

I started off with the aim of writing a poem that bounced off my love of a good disco tune, To start with I was thinking about Loleatta Holloway and First Choice and the way their songs are stretched and extended by the great House remixers. Thinking about that made me think about all the times I’ve been in a room hearing those songs stretch and reshape to become all the things the people in the room need. I’m a great lover of Theo Parrish and the way he creates his own Ugly Edits of songs – there are some great examples floating around the web, including these from Jill Scott, Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes,

All the Ugly Edits are hypnoptic and fantastic, it’s a great rabbit hole to go down. But I got stuck on a particular mix Theo was doing in the early 2000s where he stretched out the ending of Catch me on the Rebound by Loleatta Holloway, that became the drive behind this strange poem

If you’re interested you can find it here: Theo Parrish and Rick Wilhite live at Baltic Room Seattle 120305, Loleatta Holloway comes in at 45min 30sec, just after James Brown…and it is pretty much exactly the version of this song that I’m thinking about for this poem. Anyway, enough context…here’s a bit of the poem!

Disco Metronome