San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
STATE LINES California Poetry
Few poets make their readers want to dance, but the rhythms in Heather June Gibbons’ “Anthem” achieve that goal. The poem’s authority partially comes from the way in which Gibbons has crafted her lines — very few of them end with punctuation, so they accelerate and gather power as we read along. Also, the poem is written in one sinuous sentence energized by a surplus of action verbs ( dancing, singing, bobbing, vogueing, etc.). In addition to these pulsing rhythms, Gibbons’ poem makes the convincing argument that our bodies need music — even pithy pop music — to feel alive: “surge of blood / away from the brain… where we can have all the feelings.”
Anthem
Every pop song is just another song about California, the waves, yeah the waves, kids in the boom-boom room shaking ass in the smoke machine smoke like they’re dancing in a gold cage, dudes singing along bobbing their heads in midlife crisis cars like they’re not alone in traffic, blonde girls vogueing a looping dumbshow on Vine for faraway boys with lathery torsos, and the chorus goes hi-lo blow-pop shuga-shuga shake — every club song is lonely, is a song about longing generally, every song about California dreaming
“Anthem” appears with the permission of the University of Utah Press. All rights reserved.
Heather June Gibbons is the author of “Her Mouth as Souvenir,” is sad the way a Solo cup rolling on its side under a palm tree is, and neon blinking Palms Read Here is just another way to say take me to the bridge, let that big 4/4 beat build to the bridge, surge of blood away from the brain, beats like boxes where we can have all the feelings, dance so close to the speaker the bass hurts our kidneys, be predictable as let’s stay for just one more, anonymous as bodies on the floor.
winner of the 2017 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize. She teaches at San Francisco State University, the Writing Salon and Performing Arts Workshop. She lives in San Francisco. David Roderick is the author of the poetry collections “Blue Colonial” and “The Americans.” He is co-founder of Left Margin Lit: A Home for the Literary Arts, in Berkeley.