Before David Baker was a professor, an author, or a poet, he was a musician. He started playing guitar as a child, performed often in high school and college, and taught lessons for many years. Until he decided he didn’t want to be a musician.
And so, Baker became a poet.
“What I was doing was writing poetry because it was music,” Baker explained. “Poetry is by far the closest written language to music: phrase, fugue, counterpoint, rhythm. It’s about sound as much as it is about cognitive meaning.”
A collaboration with River Song Quintet combines talented musicians and beautiful spoken word in a piece titled “Scavenger Loop,” based on a poem by Baker. Gregory Uhlmann, guitarist for the River Song Quintet, whom Baker has known since Uhlmann was a teenager, wrote the music for the work.
“When you write the lyrics to a song, or you write words you know will have music with them, you can trust that the music is going to supply some part of the narrative. When you write the poem, you need to embed all those instruments in the poem, in the language on the page,” said Baker.
“Scavenger Loop” was performed at Denison’s 2015 Tutti Festival, a week celebrating collaboration in the arts. The piece began with a section, layered with music and sounds, titled “You Belong to Me.”
Projected on a screen behind the performers were videos of Patsy Kline home movies, fifties culture, rockets and bombs. The rich images and sound created a multilayered experience.
“How much can you take? How much can you process? The layers get so dense you can’t see. The sound gets so multiple you can’t tell what you’re listening to,” Baker explained.
As “You Belong to Me” ends, the guitarist seamlessly transitioned into the music for “Scavenger Loop,” which ties together two strands, an eco-poetic component and Baker’s mother’s death. They loop the personal narrative with the political.
“I love the fields and villages and life of the Midwest, where people live so close to things that grow. I started to gather information about farming and fields and agribusiness and corporate farms that aren’t really farms. They are factories and exist to feed a lot of people, yet there are too many of us with nothing to eat,” Baker said. “They also produce the most awful chemicals and residue and destruction, and they exist to line the pockets of a few very rich people. I thought this is what I have to write about.”
“Scavenger Loop,” also is the title of Baker’s latest book of poems, described as “moving fluidly between unity and disorder” by the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company. “Baker reveals how everything bears the potential to be both invasive and life-giving: plants that beautify and conquer, chemicals that heal and destroy, words that mislead and instruct.”
Baker won the prestigious Theodore Roethke Prize in Poetry in 2011 for his volume of poetry, “Never-Ending Birds.” He is poetry editor of the Kenyon Review, and a recipient of the Ohioana Book Award. In his current work, he is focusing on environmental aptitude and awareness in literature.
“What nature looked like in the imagination in 1820 is far different from what it looks like in 2015: nature as finite, scarred, not as a place we go to heal or be made whole again, not a place we know for certain will be intact and pure. We know it’s not and that’s our fault. How do you write that?”