Kevin Rabas’s Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano

Kevin Rabas’s second poetry collection, Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano, explores the effects of a life structured by music, woven amid a series of failed, yet forever impacting relationships. From learning (“Jack McCann’s Own Hometown Marching Band”) to playing (“Playing for Dave”) to understanding its power (the title poem, “Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano”), music is the backdrop, the blood, and the fuel to this series of beautifully taut relationships.

The collection relies on this powerful tension amid intimacy to justify the apparent cruelness expressed by many of the characters. These vignettes in verse, tiny slices of relationships, reliably build to arresting final images. “Spare Change” caps a brief encounter between a suited man and a homeless woman with the man’s unknowing theft of her change. “Bend Credit Cards” describes the destruction of a failed couple’s final charge card, shared hatred abundant, ending on a note of promise. And perhaps the most stunning poem, likely by means of its content contrasted against the rest of the poems, “To Eat Just Once: Remembering a Ranger Lecture at Yellowstone National Park,” addresses the visceral inevitability of a hunter and prey relationship. However, even given the cruel setup, the piece still manages the understood optimism promised by a Rabas poem.

In addition to the individual beauty of the poems, the collection utilizes a clever framing device to address the importance of a close reading. The opening poem, “Slow Words,” insists the reader slow down, enjoy the words, while the closing few pieces offer the reader a childlike experience involving sidewalk chalk and the rains that will wash those scribbles away (“On My Chalk,” “Economics of a Summer Rain”).

Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano works so well to not only promote Kevin Rabas as a beautiful poet but perhaps more importantly to promote the art of poetry. In addition to the framing mentioned above, Rabas reliably reminds the reader that not only these words, but all words, are worth digesting slowly:

There must be a reason
we are given a view
of our small part of the universe

from “After Stephen Hawking’s Address on Yahoo!”

My grandparents
said that there was
no more reason for church.
Card games and yarns
told their stories
better than bible verses,
and too many friends
had already passed
for them to enjoy the service.

from “Afternoon with Crows”

Review by Caleb J Ross

A MiniView with the author, Kevin Rabas

Caleb J Ross: How much of the material represents actual life occurrences? The use of “Kevin” as a persona in many of the poems alludes to biographical material; is this a fair assumption?

Kevin Rabas: Except for the one where the character’s head glows, “No Saint,” the poems that seem like real life are from real life. Of course, sometimes I do stray from the truth for the sake of the story of the poem, but, for the most, part the poems are stories that really happened, and they happened fairly close to what is on the page.

You asked about the way my name is in some of the poems, especially in dialogue, and this is a little bit metafictional. I did think about how Philip Roth uses his Zuckerman stories to examine the critiques of his life he has garnered from people who read his earlier works. This self-reflexive aspect is also dominant on Olson’s Maximus poems as well as in the work of many of the confessional poets, such as Lowell, Plath, Sexton, Berryman. In my efforts to get the story right, sometimes I had to be right there in it. So, the poems stem from that need–to be  energetically in the poem. Nick is this in the Gatsby story. He’s not at the center, but you always know he is there.

CJR: So many of these poems depict lives post some type of failed relationship. Are the failed relationships the ones that shape us most?

KR: Failed relationships have a darkness, like the blues, that creates energy–and leads to better stories. You’ve heard the phrase: All happy families have  the same story, but unhappy families are all different. Or, something like that. This is also true, perhaps, with relationships. However, examining a failed relationship, in prose or poetry, can also lead the writer to a greater sense of understanding, or just to awe, and that is useful. We make peace with the subject by writing about it. There’s little reason to make peace with something that is already peaceful.

CJR: A poem I found personally interesting is “Oedipa Discovers the Circuitry of Real Estate: A Montage of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.” What about Lot 49 resonated with you enough to write this poem?

KR: I wanted to explore this image from Pynchon’s work further. Pynchon explores it some on the page, in his novel, but I wanted to meditate further on that image, in my own work, and see where it took me. I wanted to try to compress and condense some of the material of Pynchon’s novel and see what  happened in poetry. I read most of that book at home, but  then I also listened to the rest of it, as a book on tape, on a trip to AWP Austin. While listening, the images came to me differently, more vividly, and I knew I would try my own hand at that image I was hearing over the car stereo, once I parked the car, and once my thoughts had settled and come together. It was like taking notes from an  interview and turning them into something artful, something condensed and ready to use.

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