Almost a Memoir
What would you do if you knew the month of your death? How would you survive that month every year? How would you take advantage of your eleven months of immortality?
Almost a Memoir, a new book of poems by M.C. Rydel, poses this question and others with a collection of lyrical narratives and metaphysical conceits. Performed since 2010 as spoken word poetry in bars, bookstores, theatres, and coffeehouses in cities as diverse as Chicago, New York, Grand Rapids, Flagstaff, and Sedona, this book of poems is almost a narrative, almost personal experience, almost faraway, and almost a memoir, yet it is always about loss & change, work & family, friends & lovers, cats & dogs, moths & bats, and Pablo Neruda & Joseph Brodsky.
This book brings poems from the stage to the page by describing interrupted dreams, heroic and ironic journeys, villanelles, pantoums, ballads, and thirteen poems from the plague year of 2020. Over 100 characters appear in 67 poems. They live in an apophatic universe. Created and then abandoned. They find themselves looking for signs of divinity in a godless world.
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Reviews
Reviewed by Mary Banas
A certain melancholy suffuses the 67 deeply personal poems in this debut collection by spoken-word poet and academic M.C. Rydel. Yet, glimmers of sly humor appear in many poems, shining an absurdist existential perspective on matters of death and immortality, the occult and religious belief, and obscurity and fame. As with many such collections, these poems are uneven in quality and execution, but a dozen or so are standouts, including the opening poem “Months of Immortality,” “A Call for Missionaries,” “Giving It All Away,” “Elegy for a Merchant Marine,” “A Feast During the Plague—A Song,” and the closing poem, which serves as a bookend (literally and figuratively), “You’re Already in Heaven.” Rydel experiments throughout this volume with structure (free verse, prose poetry, and formal patterns) but always vividly captures telling details. He has a knack for creating unusual juxtapositions that startle the reader into a new awareness. And his original use of commonplace images, exotic references, and melodic wording make passages in even his more obscure or imperfect poems worth a look.
Reviewed by Carolina Restrepo
M.C. Rydel answers one of the most asked questions, what would you do if you knew when you were going to die? He changes the rules; the storyteller only knows the month of his death, not the year. His ingenuity has brought forth an answer in the shape of poems where reality is portrayed from a different point of view, with different priorities in mind. Certainly, if you know your days are numbered many things will lose value and others will gain value. Which year is lived through all the way and which ones aren’t? Almost a Memoir is a collection of poems that not only deal with this constant face with death but also with loss, change, fear, oblivion, work, friends and family, and all the things that life has to offer, even Moth Suicides. Almost a Memoir is an atypical perception of life and all the tricks under its sleeve. “Truth replaces beauty and everyone knows exactly how everyone feels.”
While reading, I was sometimes confused, other times I felt related and seen by some poems, but isn’t that what life is all about? Some things will never be understood and others will feel like they belong to us. Uncertainty and change are the most constant things in our lives. Whether done consciously, I appreciate M.C. Rydel’s cryptic approach toward life and what even the most trivial things mean in the end. Some of the poems are very personal and introspective, and others are as impartial and detached as can be. I never thought that combination worked well together, but this compilation of poems has demonstrated the opposite. There is a certain type of beauty in the combination of opposites, they cancel each other and also complement each other; it is confusing yet clear as day.
Midwest Book Review
The poems in Almost A Memoir represent metaphysical reflections of the end of life, immortality, and destiny. They will especially delight poetry readers who choose this book for these themes and their literary exploration.
The subjects are provided in sections of chapters (an unusual format for a poetry presentation) that both divide and define the works, creating a linked series of investigations that are striking in their reflections of life, death, and living in-between these states.
Almost a Memoir lives up to its name with its progressive chronicle of relationships and experiences. The collection opens with a cautionary note in “Months of Immortality”: “Everyone in my family/Dies during the month of October./You’ve got to know that about us/Before you get involved.”
As the chapters evolve, moving readers from the author’s life experiences to those of others, poetry readers will appreciate both the free verse’s astute reflections and the psychological analysis embedded in scenarios that range from life changes to family relationships. One such example is “Fabric of Coincidence”: “We’ve exposed the fabric of coincidence./Space and time like warp and weft/Guarded by three phantoms of fate./The first specter spins the thread of life/From her distaff onto the spindle./The second measures the thread with care./The third cuts the thread as it unravels/With her abhorred shears and assures us/Of an identical demise on different continents.”
More so than most collections, these poems work as a unit, building a continuity of analysis that assumes the form of autobiography, the plot of a novel, and the impact of literary analysis.
These poems have achieved the level of performance art since 2010, and have been presented as spoken word poetry in urban bars, bookstores, theatres, and coffeehouses.
Their appearance here, in print and under one cover, offers a fine opportunity for absorbing a narrative of life, relationships, and evolving perceptions of what it means to at once be moral and immoral, both on paper and in life.
Libraries strong in contemporary poetry representations, especially those that move from performance art to the written page, will find Almost A Memoir a fine example of this process and its impact. Creative writing discussion groups will ideally utilize it as an example of contrasting delivery devices between spoken and written word.
Interviews
Almost a Memoir is a collection of poetry that explores family, love, change, work and a variety of other things we face in life. Why was this an important collection for you to publish?
I figure I have about 10 good years left. With no cure in sight for my PD and MG, I feel a sense of urgency to memorialize my ancestors, family, friends, and others with these poems. The verse also reveals the distractions of daily life that compromises our search for divinity and our spiritual lives. I also want to shine a positive light where it doesn’t seem to appear.
This collection was performed as spoken word poetry in bars, bookstores, theatres, and coffeehouses. How has performing your poetry changed how you write it?
I started performing at the Heartland Café in Chicago in 2010. As a true open mic, the show provided a stage for poets, musicians, comedians, and a few magicians. They sat in the audience waiting their turns. Veterans of slam poetry, they were not shy reacting to the poems. Their reactions helped me change first drafts into final drafts that combine the voice of spoken word with the techniques of both form poetry and traditional free verse.
What are some themes you find yourself often exploring with your poetry?
Most of my poems have characters, extended metaphors, and a narrative element, which explore a world of illusions, disorder, and fate. Like the family who has eleven months of immortality and one month of doom, sometimes you’re timid and sometimes you’re bold, and not always at the most predictable times. These poems also follow apophatic thought. If God created the universe, God is by definition outside of the universe. Thus, God is unknowable, which paradoxically proves that God exists. Just not with us. “You’re already in heaven / it’s just not that good.”
My favorite poem from the collection is “Our Collection of Masks.” Do you have a favorite poem from this book?
I like “Second Shift at the Fermilab.” It’s about the one thing every poet needs: a day job. In this case, the job is supervisor of young scientists who use a particle accelerator to solve the mysteries of matter, energy, and space/time. They perpetuate a mutiny and start dancing in their underwear in an obsolete accelerator. They end up changing the space/time continuum. In the words of George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove, “I wish we had one of them doomsday machines.”
