Thumbing a Ride to Eccentric Poetry

Brian Brett’s stage charisma is possibly larger than his huge frame, casually leaning on the microphone stand, with an equally huge grin from under a brimmed black leather hat. His hitch-hiking tales and style is inspired by the Chinese philosophers and poets, but “mostly I write whatever scares me.” His rock band adds to the poetry rhymes, with lyrical axe to grind against classical poetry. I enjoyed Brian Brett’s reading, as I write poetry and play bass guitar and piano. His skills as a speaker are polished, as the poet rolls smoothly from the introduction into the poem’s reading. Brett’s musical composition adds to the experience of how the poetry becomes part of the arrangement. The poetry transforms into a dramatic act, with props and instrumentation, to deviate from the usual poetry readings. Brett simplifies the poems into rhythmic wording and repeating choruses, similar to a rock ballad. The “walking bass-lines,” vocal echoes, 1970's guitar riffs, and Far Eastern mystical melodies intertwine, complimenting the poet’s booming, baritone lyrics. His poem, “No Riders in the Storm” pays homage to “The Doors” famous hitch-hiking song. It sent tingles down my spine from tranquil “riffs” of the guitar, to nightmares of the hitchhiker. “Thunderhead breaks loose silver nails to pound the horizon; I’m alone on a western road going to nowhere...” I almost shouldered my knapsack after class, to head for the open road of adventure. The breathtaking mood, created by guitar harmonies, brings alive "...a single crow in the western sky, eyes gunshot and grey waters that change every day, the call of the wild." Despite how exciting it would be to hitchhike, it’s now more dangerous. Oh Mayuo! “Like Billy the Kid said, as the bullet flew through the night, to let his brains out onto the dirt… ‘Mayuo.’ ” Pardon? Mayuo is a shocking, but bawdy, amusing poem, in which Brett demonstrates the matter-of-fact Chinese saying. “Everything is broke, you’re s___t out of luck, bad deal, too bad, adversity in life is so complex; you’re simply f___ked.” Brett’s non-conventional writing spans cultures from his sighting “Two Old ladies with a Trans AM Convertible” on the Malahat, to provincial Chinese urban mazes of back alleyways. The poet writes about following small mysterious man to an ancient poet's shrine. Brett simply grabbed his knapsack and ended up in foreign ghettos, realizing “I was lost, but I’ve been lost for years, everywhere and nowhere all at once.” The poet’s writing takes a politically darkening mood describing the death of the neo-Marxist poet, Pablo Neruda, during the 1972 CIA funded coupe in the Chilean Quiet Revolution. He brought it to “the mountains of my youth of freedom and wild flowers.” He cautions not to write for causes; “if you write propaganda, you've already lost.” It’s awesome to see Saltspring Island eccentric culture recorded. Brett summed his writing up as “there are far too many writers and poets churned out of the cookie cutter at college nowadays.” I’d like to hitch-hike to Saltspring, to soak in more of Brett’s avant-garde style of poetry. Bravo!1