A Review of Liner Notes by Julia Knobloch
Liner Notes, by Julia Knobloch
Julia Knobloch has organized a number of poetry events at Der Nister. The first was one of our earliest in-person events. She published two collections before Liner Notes: Do not Return in 2019 and Book of Failed Salvation in 2021. While I appreciate her poetics, her preferred style differs from mine in a way that I have a hard time putting my finger on. The title of her latest collection offers one explanation of what she means to do with her poetry.
Liner notes are the text that one finds on the back of a record album cover. They sometimes extend to the centerfold on albums packaged that way. Sometimes the notes are written by the artist themselves. Other times they are written by some other well-known figure or music journalist of note. They became a standard aspect of the packaging of Jazz and Classical records in the 1950s as 33 rpm records replaced 78s as the main format. Folkways Records had such prodigious texts that they couldn’t be kept to the 12 inch by 12 inch square and instead were issued as booklets that nestled in with the record album inside the album cover.
Liner notes could be the equivalent of the blurbs on the back of a paperback bestseller. However, for the types of music whose fans were more fanatically scholarly, they provided details of who appeared on each cut, the composers and sometimes the producers as well. The atmosphere of the recording session might be included to add to the drama of writing. Another approach was a biographical (/hagiographical) note. These notes gave the primary performers history and role in the music scene. Many albums combined these two forms. The artists themselves might be the ones to put together the notes at times.
These texts could grow into the listener’s memory recordings themselves like ivy woven back and forth through a fence.
It seems to me (and if I am wrong, I suspect I’ll be hearing about it) that the poems in Liner Notes are the text that goes with the actual music of Julia’s life. There is often a melancholy in her writing that comes with the inability to return to the unrecorded actual moment in life, and the compromise inherent in trying to play back the imperfect recordings of memory. The poems are the liner notes to those moments. Their intention is to try to fix and stabilize past moments with a meaning or just a fixed sensation that can be returned to.
Julia’s life has taken her from Germany to Portugal to New York to Israel to Los Angeles to the California Desert and back again to these places. Her returns to earlier homes are often uneasy and her poetry struggles to join and separate these places as they cross paths in her memories. Her sense memories of place are strong and challenging when they appear out of place. She is willing to be less decorous and people pleasing in the honesty of her self-description. This is a fork in the road for writers. Poetry can be a masking or an unmasking and Julia chooses the latter.
I purchased the Record Store Day release of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” as it was originally conceived. It includes four more songs which were only available on bootlegs, but of even more interest, the original liner notes by the music critic, Nat Hentoff. I was curious as to why they had been left off. Hentoff is a real master of liner notes and he appears on the covers of a vast array of artist work. The problem, I think, was that his notes include a generous helping of Dylan’s outrageous self-mythologizing. These were stories that Dylan used to sell himself and his authenticity in the folk clubs and the basket houses of Dinkytown and Greenwich Village, but the fame that started to come to him would have made these tall tales a burden to carry any further. Or maybe Hentoff himself had grown dubious. As Dylan said not long after, “to live outside the law, you must be honest.” The moral I am drawing here is that honest liner notes are the way to go.
Soledad Canyon
Between lost hills and dry ravines, a church
and an adobe house, a brick reservoir
Agua Dulce, Zanje Madre
mother of all aqueducts
In Sylmar, power winds down the mountain
like the fence between Eilat and Taba
like Mulholland meandering
past empty homesteads and lonesome oaks
like the pass snaking down to Sycamore Cove.
On the day after Yom Kippur, sheltered
by my open door, I see ships land
and missiles fly--
Little have I changed although I contain
shards from all the places I have been.
I always hear the desert wailing, trains whistling
on arid tracks in the Sonora, an ocean
sweeping from the Kinneret to the Arava
where air and water taste of sulfur
danger hides across the border, landmines
and fault lines
shattered pitchers
at stolen cisterns in the valley, on US 395
