Contributor’s Marginalia: Katie Hartsock responding to Cindy Hunter Morgan’s “Antique Sound”

Reading Cindy Hunter Morgan’s poem “Antique Sound” brought back deep memories of listening to vinyl records, in a way that made the memories feel deeper than they actually were. A child of the 1980s’ VHS and cassette tapes, I learned to love later, in my teens, that older technology. The rituals I developed with my vinyls—the sleek removal from sleeves, the blowing off of dust, the slow strategic placement of the needle—did what rituals do: they made the motions feel ancient, embedded in the body since forever. If sound is now and antiquity is always, then “Antique Sound” opens a window into this non-linear swirl of memory and music.

But what immediately enchanted me about the poem was the authority with which the speaker listens to “twelve-inch discs” of topography maps, and later the “thin cross section from the stump / of an old apple tree,” as if they were vinyl records. Yes, we imagine the rush of solitude and reverie that good vinyl gives, but the imaginative world of the poem plays, clearly and loudly, the importance of place to this speaker’s solitary reveries. The grape vines, the briars, the bleeding beagle—the poem suggests how each of us might have located recollections like these populating our love for certain albums or songs. I just adore how the speaker plays a sheaf of the apple tree itself, its cross section (concentric as a record’s grooves) implicitly giving a glimpse of how many years its life goes back, long before the speaker’s own time on earth.

It reminds me of how Whitman wrote in Specimen Days of the lessons to be learned from “affiliating with a tree”—oh, that verb!!! On my birthday, August 4th, in 1877, one hundred and 5 years before I was born, Whitman wrote,

Lights and shades and rare effects on tree-foliage and grass—transparent greens, grays, &c., all in sunset pomp and dazzle. The clear beams are now thrown in many new places, on the quilted, seam’d, bronze-drab, lower tree-trunks, shadow’d except at this hour—now flooding their young and old columnar ruggedness with strong light… with many a bulge and gnarl unreck’d before. In the revealings of such light, such exceptional hour, such mood, one does not wonder at the old story fables, (indeed, why fables?) of people falling into love-sickness with trees….

As the speaker of “Antique Sound” lies “stretched / out on the floor with my eyes closed / just like a teenager,” it’s clear she is no teenager, but is returned to one, as the poem is filled with Whitman’s trees’ “young and old columnar ruggedness,” and the columnar becomes circular, imploded by a needle. I do not think it is an accident that this poem took my mind to Whitman, perhaps our great poet of the “you.” I remain struck that the first line of “Antique Sound” introduces a “you” who never returns. This withholding adds to the solitary listening of the poem, and the creations within.

Just as Morgan makes memory into a topography map or a cross section of tree, and THEN makes those into records, I love to look inside the words of a poem for poems waiting inside those words. Here is a partial gloss (a commentary, and a vinyl flash, for which I relied on and heavily quoted from the OED) on some of my favorite words from “Antique Sound”—they all happen to be words for different materials, the very medium the poem rethinks.

Shellac: Lac melted and run into thin plates; formerly used esp. in the manufacture of gramophone records. <Lac: A dark red resinous substance produced as a protective coating by certain scale insects… and found as an encrustation on the twigs and branches of infested trees… Lac was used originally in medicinal preparations and as a dye, pigment, and varnish. Its various etymons, from Anglo-Norman, Middle French, Arabic, and Persian, point to a long history of trade. Cf this line in the OED’s usage history, from Heylyn’s Cosmographie (1652): “Lacca, (a Gum there made by Ants, as here Bees make wax).”

Vinyl: Latin vinum (wine) + -yl suffix, from Ancient Greek húlē: wood, matter. Coined by German chemist Hermann Kolbe in 1851 because of its relationship with ethyl alcohol. Thus we could back-translate “vinyl” as “wine-stuff.”

Crystallizing: from classical Latin crystallum, from ancient Greek krustallos: clear ice. In ancient and medieval thought (rock) crystal was surmised to be congealed water or ice ‘petrified’ by some long-continued natural process. Here’s a 1450 remedy for mothers with low milk supply involving crystal from A leechbook, or collection of medical recipes from the fifteenth century: “For Womans mylke that faylith, take crystall and pound it and giff hire to drynk with the mylke of an oþer (other) woman.”

Tags: Known shortly after 1400: origin obscure. Originally, one of the narrow, often pointed, laciniae or pendent pieces made by slashing the skirt of a garment; hence, any hanging ragged or torn piece. A shred of animal tissue. A shred of metal in a casting. A final curl, twirl, or flourish added to a letter. An aglet. A ribbon bearing a jewel. A footman’s shoulder-knots. A catkin of a tree. The tip of the tail of an animal, esp. when distinct in color or otherwise. An epithet; a label. A price. The last words of a speech in a play.

Cambium: late Latin for exchange, or bartering. In botany, the layer of tree where its interior exchanges, cellular bartering, and annual growth take place: “A zone of delicate young cells interposed between the wood and the bark” (Gray’s Botany Textbook, 1879).

Heartwood: The dense, inner part of the wood of a tree trunk, yielding the hardest timber, often darker in color and more resistant to decay; also called duramen. Contrasted with sapwood.

Pith: The soft internal tissue of a plant part. The soft interior tissue of an organ or animal structure. The spongy core of a feather-shaft or the core of a horn. The substance occupying the spinal canal; the spinal cord. The soft inner part of a loaf. The innermost or central part of a thing; the spirit or essence; the core, the nub. Strength of character; mettle, backbone. Force, power, energy. Substance, import, meaning.

To which I’d add, for “Antique Sound”: the record, and where the record ends.