The Soul of Rock & Roll: Poems Acoustic, Electric & Remixed, 1980-2020 - by John Repp

Publication Date: July 1, 2021

Paperback, 112 pages

ISBN: 978-1-937968-84-7

If one goes Googling John Repp, one soon learns that he is a native of the Pine Barrens region of New Jersey (a location that often appears in his work), but has since lived many places, attended many universities (picking up an MFA along the way), has worked at seemingly every sort of job from gravedigging to teaching creative writing (so at least some of them useful), and has an eclectic and eccentric list of interests. And that he has, over the past forty years, written many books of poetry and prose, garnering awards and critical recognition along the way. All of which finds its way into The Soul of Rock & Roll, which serves as a “greatest hits” selection from those four decades of poetry. Such an outsized life has yielded a commensurately wide-ranging body of work, and any attempt to gist it in few words would do it poor service; but a good point of entry is “The Tiny-Montgomery-Mother-Poem” in which Dylan’s The Basement Tapes plays in the background while Repp’s mother is dying, and his family rails at him for speaking of such things: “They say These things are private. Why do you keep / making these private things public? It’s so long ago.” Yes, he writes of private things, and of things from long ago, from a time of innocence and the rush to lose it, documenting not merely his life but that of his generation, a generation for which rock & roll provided the soundtrack and the thrum sounding throughout these pages, love and loss amid the worn crackle and hiss.

It may be true, as William Carlos Williams observed, that it is hard to get news from poetry, but it’s a good source of history, of understanding how we arrived where we are. Repp reports in one poem here that he learned of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in part from a Robert Pinsky poem. Now it is his turn to educate us, to share the lessons from his life and times. Not all may be the sort of things that people die for want of knowing (to complete the Williams quotation), but they can be comforting – and what a needful thing that is for these times. “Who doesn’t climb from the mere world” he asks in “Ovaltine” – with the emphasis on mere, lest we take our lives too seriously, reminding us to dream –

to where Ponce de Leon and Wyatt Earp rein their horses

while you spur Silver to column’s head? The wind hits you first,

wind unheard before that, nothing ahead but fire and new mountains.

Praise for John Repp and The Soul of Rock & Roll

A quiet brilliance drives The Soul of Rock & Roll, a quiet that “blasts that Chevy/into black light/sucked into dusk.” With 10-gauge steel strings, Repp solos electric in images that shred until we are heart-deep in the bodies of real people. He’s an intellectual, and he’s salt-of-the-earth—an endangered species. “I want Lorca un-shot & singing,” he says—who else can take us from Iggy Pop to Apollo on the “ancient road home” with such soul? Repp’s voice—underrated and never overstated—bottleneck-slides the heart of night and makes us believe in the spirit of living again—it’s that good.

—Jan Beatty, author of The Body Wars, University of Pittsburgh Press

I have admired John Repp’s poetry for twenty-five years. This generous selection showcases his gifts: creating a brilliant sense of immediacy from the past, his hunger for luscious observation, his wisdom about nature and community, work and home, son-hood and fatherhood “peering into memory’s blue flame.” There is celebration, “fraught wonder,” and sorrow cascading through these pages. Repp bends sentences and stanzas until they sing, his lyricism, image-building, and eye and ear for detail composing “one concerto, rewritten and rewritten.” Long may Repp’s music blast!

—Robert Hamberger, author of A Length of Road: Finding Myself in the Footsteps of John Clare, John Murray Press/Hachette UK

The Soul of Rock & Roll captures naïve then jaded times before arriving at the wisdom long reflection brings. I don’t say this glibly: This book is the history of a generation. I felt it. I knew it. I remembered those times and tunes as I read. Repp searches half-understood pasts that slowly reveal themselves as he matures. No extra words live here; a variety of stylistic choices entertain, but Repp’s voice is never lost. I give The Soul of Rock & Roll a ten—the words are great, and it’s easy to dance to.

—Elizabeth Kerlikowske, author of Dominant Hand, Mayapple Press

Near the middle of this wonderful book, these lines appear in “The Maltese Falcon”: “My never-ending work/is to work to make this & everything else in our life’s work true.” The work is the poem, of course, but it is also the memory of the work John Repp and his people have done over their time in New Jersey. In America. He has chosen that memory to organize this selection of work done over most of a lifetime. He memorializes the people, places, and times that have shaped his imagination, one that is precise and vivid and evocative. Henry James was probably right when he wrote that “we work in the dark.” But he was also right about some writers when he added, “we give what we have.” John Repp has given us a great gift in this book, this work, a gift that I, for one, will cherish.

—Keith Taylor, author of The Bird-while, Wayne State University Press

Click here to read a review article about John and his book in the Edinboro University magazine.