Wendy Vardaman reviews The Story of Andro (CD) by R. Virgil Ellis
The Story of Andro (CD). The Chamber Rock Ensemble. Words and vocal by R. Virgil Ellis; with Jeff Lundgren, engineering and guitars; Bryant Guy, drums; Rob Hecimovich, bass; Al Jewer and Duane McCarthy, flutes; recorded by Jeff Lundgren. Woodhenge Productions, www.poetrvellis.com. $15.95.
Reviewed by Wendy Vardaman
Free Verse, Issue #90, 2007, pp. 33-34
Poet and editor Ron Ellis, author of The Blue Train (1990) and Bone Flute (Parallel Press, 2007) doesn't just write. He also performs his poetry with various groups like Fuzzy Logic, which he founded in 1995, and, dating back to 1983, The Chamber Rock Ensemble, which has appeared in Chicago, New York City, Milwaukee, Madison, and other Wisconsin venues. Previous collections include Open My Eyes (1987), Lunar Crescent Wrench (1993), and Hard Science (1999). Ellis calls what he does in these CDs "fusion poetry, in which musical, electronic, and visual elements interact with language."
The poetry that Ellis wrote and recites in The Story of Andro comes from his ambitious, unpublished work The Tenting Cantos, a 100-canto poem available at Ellis's website (www.poetrvellis.com), that explores the boundaries between oppositions in Western thought, e.g., East/West, science/religion, male/female, mind/body. "Canto 27 This fabric canvassing the wind" won an Editor's Prize from Cezanne's Carrot last year and was nominated for a 2006 Pushcart Prize. The Story of Andro comprises Cantos 46-51 of The Tenting Cantos, and is, as its title suggests, a stand-alone narrative paired in various interesting, sometimes ironic, ways with Jeff Lundgren's original music on this CD, which I could imagine played in many contexts, but especially at parties that include intellectual or poetically-inclined guests. The story is by turns sinister and jocular, but always intelligent, playful, and entertaining; Ellis's delivery likewise ranges from cheerful to menacing to cocky to evil, and his poetry, with its careful attention to sound and sonic effects, is well-suited to performance. Five characters, an androgynous heroine) and four villains, appear in Andro, and Ellis mostly succeeds at the difficult task of differentiating them through his varied delivery and different rhetorical devices employed in the poetry: one villain, for example, sprinkles her speech with tongue twisters, much in the manner of Spiro Agnew (note the veiled reference in her name, Agnes Spiral).
Liner notes sketch out the story, giving a much-needed overview and providing brief statements about what happens in each of the Cantos, or Acts, as they're called on the CD. Filled with political, philosophical, and literary allusions, Andro is part science-fiction, part Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, part allegorical quest narrative that you'd have studied as a college English major, like Pilgrim's Progress or The Faerie Queen or The Divine Comedy. Top that off with symbols and terminology borrowed from Eastern and Western religious traditions, along with a sense of humor, and you have all the elements of an enjoyable, complex, and challenging post-modern text. Andro, short for androgyny, is male and female, daredevil and contemplative, an imperfect pilgrim who rides a "Mahayanaha" (fusing Yamaha, the brand-name, with Mahayana, a type of Buddhism) motorcycle through the "Plains of Free Association" seeking Enlightenment. Along the way she is captured by the militaristic Razzle, who keeps "a hot Pentagon shopping list" and subsequently hands her over to "hard scientist" Sir Richard Adamant for his grant-driven experiments on harnessing the power of Transcendental Meditation for "defense" purposes.
The opening lines of the poem pose its central question:
You could also rephrase this question as a philosophical problem with respect to the division of science from ethics, a connection Sir Richard Adamant denies later in the story. But the narrator, who recalls the opening of The Divine Comedy when he mentions woods at Andro's beginning, wants to break down oppositions, merging, in the description of Andro's birth, the "natural" and the "man-made":
Andro, fierce and contemplative, the "Evil Knevil of meditation," "speaks for herself":
The beginning of "Canto 47," or Act 2, reminds the listener of some of Ellis's modernist influences—Pound, Yeats, Olson, Berrigan —then returns to Andro who employs quest terminology, including its religious elements, in unexpected and tongue-in-cheek ways to describe her pilgrimage/journey; notice as well Ellis's characteristic attention to sound here—his use of soft sand hard c- sounds, which creates the cracking/crackling effect described in the passage:
At the story's climax, Sir Richard has fully objectified Andro, turning her into "streams of data," and the rest of the story hinges on which of them, or what, controls Andro's body, in a canto that makes virtuoso use of scientific discourse and characterization, moving back and forth from Sir Richard's observations to his state of mind: