“To say death is to know, to marry your death / I Do”
—Alice Notley, Lana Turner At Versailles

Baltimore-based hardcore band, Turnstile, released their new album NEVER ENOUGH on June 6, 2025. In combination with 80s-style glam rock and hardcore, the band has been redefining what the heavy rock genre can be when it goes back in time for a more dreamy sound, premiering this new twist with their 2021 LP GLOW ON. NEVER ENOUGH nosedives even further into this shimmery groove and swank. Its longest track, “LOOK OUT FOR ME”, opens with glammed-up pangs of guitar and a soft crescendoing drum roll that soon explodes into high energy buzzsaw & drop-kick guitars with vocalist, Brendan Yates, refraining percussively “Now my heart is hanging by a thread!” As the song accelerates past its first act, we get stuck inside a sonic interlude with the heavy use of phaser (a modulation effect dominating the sound on this record) that many would call a whirring or a swishing, creating a sense of movement in the sound. But once really pushed, the phaser becomes comparable to a jet taking off. This brief mid-section pushes the phasing so intensely that it completely overwhelms the entire soundscape. With drummer, Daniel Fang, pounding on the kick drum, the mid-section gets you stuck inside a rocket engine, cusping on unlistenability. The song drops off into Yates' vocals alone drenched in wet reverb slipping up against house-style synths for the entire rest of the song, completely flipping the melt-your-face-off intensity of the front half of the track into a cool pool of rich solitude.

The brief “intermission” of the Turnstile track (if one could call it a reprieve) mirrors what Irish shoegaze band, My Bloody Valentine, had solidified on their first EP in 1988 with the title track “You Made Me Realize”, where the stringy guitars crescendo straight into a heavy distorted jet-engine vortex that MBV was (in)famous for holding out at live shows for several minutes, absolutely bathing the audience in prolonged ear-bleed frequencies (McGonigal 6). MBV’s guitarist Kevin Shields said in a 2005 Buddyhead interview that the band would wait to shift back into the remainder of the song until they felt the crowd “turn” and give in— even once waiting forty minutes until one resistant individual finally submitted to the domineering wall of noise. When My Bloody Valentine’s “Only Shallow” comes on in my car I usually freak out and turn it all the way up—I love to indulge in the blaring “vacuum cleaner” sweep (a noise as a kid that I was extremely sensitive to and unsettled by) from Shields’ Fender Jazzmaster. The brittle and off-kilter “wall of noise” has become addicting in a way that perhaps used to, primitively, scare me. Similarly, Fontaines DC’s “Nabokov” opens with wailing guitars as the upper-end strings bend in and out of tune, and the riff eventually pots out into a slappy jagged delay with signal feedback whirring in the distance, as if crashing through a wet tunnel that hasn’t been serviced in decades. Guitarist Conor Curley demos this effect in a Premier Guitar Rig Rundown interview with a delay pedal he has called the Industrialectric Echo Degrader which algorithmically off-sets the signal produced by a guitar and “decays” it into chaos—modulating the sound towards degradation and destruction. 

As a poet, I always find myself writing to this kind of music. Catch me in a new document with my fingers bobbing against the keys to "Head in The Ceiling Fan” by Title Fight, the bridge riff in “Stars” by Hum, and Kurt Cobain’s pencily worm over David Grohl's drumming at the backend of "All Apologies”. I’ve always dreamt of writing a poem that hits me in the chest the exact way the sandbag guitars do in Hum’s “Step into You” or writing a guitar riff that mimics “Just Under The Skin of The Left Leg” in Alice Notley’s Disobedience. Notley ends this poem with 

I don’t want to create any meaning
I want to kill it…
You made meaning, I’m
trying to make life stand still
long enough so I can exist.
I, truly, am speaking. (48)

Both seem to scrub against the surface of something I’ve never been able to entirely access. Both leave me with the same feeling in my chest that create almost infinite rooms of incomprehensibility with such solidity. Kevin Shields, in the same 2005 interview, discusses the prolonged “You Made Me Realize” mid-section saying, “It was such a huge noise with so much texture to it, it allowed people to imagine anything. Like when you hypnotize somebody, and nothing becomes something. That was what the whole purpose became.”

One of my most prominent memories of this hypnotic psychic state came from lying in bed listening to Alice Notley read “At Night the States” for the first time when I was 19. I knew very little about anything at this point in my poetic life. I only knew that this was a poem about the loss of Notley’s husband, Ted Berrigan. At the reading, recorded in 1987, Notley addresses the audience about the seven page long poem. She chuckled in the mic with a sly dare, “if you think you can handle it” —and surely, I accepted the challenge. Right from the start, the poem was intense, heaving its way through its choppy grammars, but for me, when Notley got to the line “Anyone can live. I / can. I am not doing any- / thing doing this. I / discover I love as I figure”, any sort of tenancy I had to living outside of the poem immediately got sucked inwards. This was what oblivion felt like. Not a crash against something external, but to be pulled from somewhere “inner” that felt directionally incomprehensible in its totality. It was to be awoken to a sense of danger that makes itself a familiar, so instead of running away, you only want to run in.

“At Night the States” is a rare poem that has an innate capability to send you, no matter where you are, into this oblivion. It's a poem that takes apart language to the point where its instability and its disobedience to form, lyric, syntax, and grammar is actually what makes it speak naturally to any real living resonance in the soul. Its resistance to adhere to any romantic posturing of language gives it the ability to slip past any artifice and defenses of the heart and go straight for the jugular. I think what it means to actually be alive is to resist. In her essay “The Poetics of Disobedience”, Notley says “It’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against... everything. One must remain somehow, though how, open to any subject or form in principle, open to the possibility in liking, open to the possibility of using” (Notley, 13). The feeling was very much one thing that began to feel like anything, or an opening of towards anything, “a nothing becom[ing] something” as Shields had said, which is why it felt dangerous. In that way, to say I felt inspired after reading this poem was actually false—I became overwhelmed by the death of anything impossible. 

When I was told about Notley’s passing, I was sitting in a taco place in Bushwick. In an average moment, just after having one bite of taco, my friend Jo had seen something on Twitter (or X, whatever) that Alice Notley had died. The immediacy of the oblivion: wanting to fling myself into the harmful sky and never come home. 

It began to hit me as I was reading through everyone’s submissions to this folio, alongside reading poet Jennifer Soong’s most recent collection of critical essays Slips of The Mind: Poetry as Forgetting, that my fondness for heavier music and my gravitation towards Notley’s work were about the same thing. This was all about the work pushing me to oblivion. At the start, Soong introduces the word oblivion “as some kind of place, time, or condition, while it is rendered as an in-accessible non-place, non-time” (Soong, 3). Notley had a specific capability to write towards oblivion and to induce it. Both the experiences I was having reading Notley’s poems—rhythmically propulsive and syntactical reckless—and listening to My Bloody Valentine or Turnstile— the loudness, the thrashing and choking of buzzsawing guitar riffs—created a space that swung me so close to a nothing-space.

Reading Notley feels like I’m on a tilt-a-whirl at its peak motion, when the car swoops down with its utmost velocity, right before completing a full spin. This is felt in Shields’ nauseating wall of sound, in Fontaines DC’s “Nabokov” with guitarists Conor Curley and Carlos O’Connell distorting, destroying, and shattering their guitar signals as vocalist, Grian Chatten, cries out “Well, this is what it is now / Pain, pure sky / I’ll be your dog of submission / My mission, to help you forget”. These pieces participate in bringing the audience to the threshold of oblivion. Like the “dog of submission” in “Nabokov”, Soong later in her essay collection likens oblivion in Lyn Hejinian’s work to an intrinsic operative to memory and forgetfulness. She says, “Oblivion, like the sun, can’t be looked at” (79). Soong unravels that oblivion is something we can only experience in direct indirectness. However, oblivion doesn’t reside in complete darkness. Because we cannot look at it in totality and cannot know what it is exactly, the state of oblivion produces an inexhaustible gap or space where our bodies refract it and try to re-cast it as something else (Soong, 79). I think this is why we feel oblivion so strongly when it is successfully provoked in art. It’s urgently trying to make something seen in a broader gesture of unseeing. Just as trying to remember something we have forgotten is not necessarily about generating any original image or material, forgetfulness patterns itself in a residue, shadowing, and partial traces of a real memory (Soong, 79). Its abandonment gets bound to its existence in reality, and part of its recollection. Oblivion constantly tries to move us towards something, as Soong writes “oblivion encourages us to ‘exceed’ ourselves” (79). Oblivion, thus, is not a static object, despite its singular intensity, but one that moves us toward itself. 

How Notley’s poetry engages oblivion is in her consistent damage to the poetic line and to the principles of language. The way “At Night The States” uses repetition and refrain; the destruction and instability required in order for the poet to bring something of resonance back, “to be re-encountered after being lost and re-encountered frequently” (79) as Soong says. It’s the same impulse guitarists have to turn their amps up all the way to achieve the “natural breakup” in their tubes, its why the riffs need to be so loud, why they flip on effects pedals to purposely off-set and distort the signal. It’s all an attempt “to break” in order to get up close and see something that refuses to be seen fully. 

Oblivion, to me, is much more aligned with Federico Garcia Lorca’s mediation on Duende, rather than this idea of oblivion being an exterior muse. The force, despite its crashing intensity, comes from an inner place. Oblivion taunts on the rim of the wound. It's so powerful and hypnotizing that it can only come from what lies often dormant deep inside us. It's what magnetizes us towards it and makes us feel so at home with it.  Oblivion, like duende, only makes itself available to us in the face of death, as Lorca would describe. We rediscover and reconnect with oblivion, not only through pain, but through love—one of the most consequential and totalizing acts of all. “Abolish these categories of pain / (Or is it love) / Let it all be one pain / Pain swallows itself, dies like a star” writes Alice Notley in “Meet Me at Le Chapelle for Some More Salami”.  Notley’s most obliterating work isn’t all “doom and gloom", it actually comes from the consequences of experiencing and participating in great and enormous love—poetry, womanhood, wifehood, and motherhood. In Notley’s 1978 long poem, “At the Foot At The Belt of The Raincoat”, she writes “Love / sees what is invisible / and looking is what saves us… from something…” Notley’s work is that love, trying to get us up close to seeing something in the nothingness oblivion veils itself as.

Works Cited

Fontaines D.C. “Nabakov”. Skinty Fia. Partisan Records, 2022.

"Fontaines D.C.'s Carlos O'Connell & Conor Curley Rig Rundown." YouTube, uploaded by Premier Guitar, 18 October 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eDbUOoT7XU&t=1952s

García Lorca, Federico.“Theory and Play of The Duende”. In Search of Duende, translated by Christopher Maurer. New Directions Press, 1998, pg 48-62.

McGonigal, Mike. LOVELESS. 33 ⅓ Bloomsbery Publishing, 2007.

Notley, Alice. “At Night The States.” Grave of Light. Wesleyan University Press, 2006.

Notley, Alice. “At Night The States- Reading in Buffalo, New York, April 10, 1987”. MP3 file, University of Pennsylvania- Pennsound.

Notley, Alice. At The Foot At The Belt Of The Raincoat. Fivehundred Places, 2020.

Notley, Alice. Disobedience. Penguin Poets, 2001.

Notley, Alice. Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018. The Song Cave, 2023.

Shields, Kevin. Interview by Aaron North, Buddyhead. 19 Jan 2005. https://samizdat.co/shelf/archives/2005/01/kevin_shields_1.html

Soong, Jennifer. Slips of The Mind: Poetry as Forgetting. University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Turnstile. “LOOK OUT FOR ME”. NEVER ENOUGH. Roadrunner Record, 2025.