Privado
Daniel Tiffany
April 2011
Patrick James Dunagan
With Privado Daniel Tiffany offers up a pop-cultural remix of sorts on, as he tells it, “cadences used by the armed services in marching drills,” so every “poem” or “section” here is titled “Cadence.” However, the nearest he allows for hitting a rhythmic stride is the oft repeated:
With Privado Daniel Tiffany offers up a pop-cultural remix of sorts on, as he tells it, “cadences used by the armed services in marching drills,” so every “poem” or “section” here is titled “Cadence.” However, the nearest he allows for hitting a rhythmic stride is the oft repeated:
Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh
Whoa, oh-oh, oh-oh-oh
Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh
Whoa, oh-oh, oh-oh-oh
Other than such set instances of found refrain (which always arrive in italics), Tiffany resists having either rhythm and/or sense appear to take form in his clusters of lines. This sharp refusal is driven by a commitment that his “troops” be individuals and not blocks of droning dolts. His lines refuse to come together in “chorus” but rather howl out of turn:
Damien’s warped sensibility radiates
An ape-like curatorshiplessness.
A fine abandon.
Changes in game eroticism
Revive the medium of the album jacket.
Lie down on the grass.
Thus while there are plenty of directives given there’s no clear direction being headed and little or no encouragement to follow along. Tiffany’s resistance to the very form he seeks to exploit is clear, as he explains “these training songs” are “chanted in formation by recruits for lengthy periods” but the only “training” anybody is doing here is one of resistance and that includes the resistance to “in formation”(al) tools. There is no “form,” no “informing,” and no “information” of use included. The poems may take place within, and possibly intend to celebrate, “the colorful realm of living beings” but any such celebration is presented as random, rather trivializing convergence of competing sounds and images dedicated to resisting meaning, narrative or otherwise. It’s a pity because when the “Goons gone home, / Black cat bone” song has done, the wind blows lonesome as ever.
