Even though the subject of this review is Brandon Brown’s latest collection, Top 40 (Another Volume), it will inevitably, by necessity, be a double review of both collections from Brown’s Top 40 series, the first of which was published by Roof Books a decade ago. What strikes us first about Brown’s constraint is the paradox of its temporality. “It’s true that by the time I finish my book, much less by the time you’re reading it” Brown says in volume one, “there will be an entirely new Top 40.” The pretext of Brown’s constraint, his intention to write forty sentences that correspond with each song off of the American Top 40 charts is challenged outright by the impossibility of the present tense. The Top 40 then is not a fixed or stable hierarchy of cultural run-off that enables our poet some controlled, ruminative glimpse into our contemporary psyche, but something subjective, malleable, and wildly inconsistent––dare we even say, alive? It would be easy to observe the ubiquitous, often canned, production of American popular music, skim the obvious dross, and make a flat critique about the multifarious symptoms of capitalism, or vapid obsessions as consumers, the whole industrious practice of manufacture within the arts. This, however, would be as obvious and reproduced as the songs themselves. What Brown does do is enter the consciousness he perceives of these songs (if they have one) and allow their synapses to enter a dialogue with his own. 

The first line of Top 40 (Another Volume) reads, “My favorite song is ‘Night Life’ by Willie Nelson.” This line is in direct response to the song “Lavender Haze” by Taylor Swift. By telling us this, Brown is making his preferences, and thereby his canon, known. The statement of this preference could be read as an antagonistic slight against Taylor Swift, since the direct subject of her song has already caused the poet to run adrift to a more venerable country songwriter. However, this is not entirely the case. Brown is invoking the mysterious process of association. He continues this method again. “After listening to ‘Lavender Haze’ I want to hear ‘Purple Haze’ by Jimi Hendrix.” Brown’s way to the subject of Swift is, perhaps, peripatetic. He has to move around her to get closer to her. Brown ruminates on Hendrix and then, appropriately, high school social dynamics (a beautifully instrumental time for Are You Experienced?) and drug use. This train of thought is instigated by the mysterious haze in question. We know Hendrix was talking about a psychotropic experience, but what the hell is Swift talking about? “Swift,” Brown tells us, “says the song’s title derives from a phrase she heard on Mad Men [...] If it were up to her, the lavender haze would spiral forever, bloom evergreen as aroma and cirrus surrounding.” Swift’s haze is not experiential, as Hendrix’s and, likely, Brown’s hazes are, but something appropriated and extrapolated for the purpose of a pretty abstract. This is fine. We are not ascribing value to Swift’s estimation of this haze, but to understand Brown’s approach when the light from Swift’s synapse seems to suddenly go dark, or if it never sparks in the first place. The delight in Brown’s meandering poetics is that they do not get discouraged. He quickly moves to a passing thought while high on psilocybin, to a quote by Marcus Aurelius, to Monimus the Cynic’s notion of typhos, and from there we are not even sure how important Taylor Swift’s “Lavender Haze” is to Brown’s poetics, but we also must accept that we wouldn’t have received this specific concatenation without her. One surmises quickly that each song is not necessarily the subject of Brown’s poetic interest, but a mere provocation of its deliverance. 

While the subject of temporality is slightly inscrutable, at least to the degree that postulating a linear, or even “contemporary” fixity feels strained at best, the very placements of these songs (both constituently within the individual books and in the divide between them) delineate a loose but useful decade. Brown addresses this very inscrutable temporality in the first Top 40: 

America’s Top 40 attempts to draw a matrix of collective attention in the present.

Its definition of “the present” is the week. 

I’ve been reading The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week by Eviatar
Zerubavel, it’s pretty good. 

Zerubavel suggests that wherever there is a “week,” which is most places, with various lengths,
this week provides a temporal “beat” by which members of a given culture experience time. 

Max Weber adds that the week emerges in the west concomitant with market days, the
recurring opportunity to shop musically organizes what is known as the week. 

So the weekly structure of America’s Top 40 rides the beat, inextricable from the marketplace
and its logic, and its structure fitted precisely to a culture obsessed with competition and rank. 

There’s something desperate about it too in how it strives week after week to canonize the
contemporary. 

Brown, with the assistance of Zerebavel and Weber, astutely points out that the very conceit of this Top 40 is indivisible from the Western capitalistic overhaul to merge currents (and canons) of “culture” with market interests. This critical lens creates a tension between the disingenuous manufacture of an inconstant (and inconsistent) demarcation of the “present” and in Brown’s own sincere interest in our national vox populi through the often painfully obvious hierarchy of the American Top 40. Furthermore, the inclusion of the song “Makeeba” by Jain in the Top 40 of (Another Volume) supports our readerly skepticism about the paradox of the present as it was released ten years prior to its rise on the charts, and finds its resurgence through its popularity on TikTok, thus rendering the figurative contemporary charts into a creeping hauntology of surveillance medias. Still, this inability to demarcate the present is not anymore an abject failure of capital’s fallow marketing strategy as it is our shared witness of time’s slippery passage. We appreciate where Brown arrives in his “collective attention to the present,” which adumbrates its own paradox with an almost Buddhist gesture, nodding enigmatically to our forced perceptions of linearity when the noumenal reality of “time” is much more nuanced.

Reading both Top 40 collections next to one another permits a strange and dizzying acceleration of impossible “presents.” The hook of Drake’s “Hold On We’re Going Home,” feels archaic next to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Bad Idea Right?” and this is, in many ways, a jarring experience. The dialogue between both books demonstrates the frightening speed of change (as if we’ve awoken suddenly en media res on the other end of a decade’s confusion) and the stultifying déjà vu of a world that seems to tirelessly rehash its same lessons, products, and meanings. For Brown, however, this decade carries massive revolutions. Top 40 (Another Volume) mourns the loss of both Kevin Killian and Lyn Hejinian, two Bay Area luminaries of experimental poetics, publishing, pedagogy, and, more importantly, close friends of Brown. (Another Volume) is shocked into action by this devastating loss while it also welcomes the life-changing arrival of Brown’s son, Earlie, whose presence in the poems are just as philosophically rich as the maxims of Anaximander or the Ethics of Spinoza. In his poem regarding the aforementioned song, “Makeba,” Brown creates a useful system for mourning the loss of Hejinian through the paradoxically atemporal resurgence of the French singer’s slightly problematic nod to the titular South African singer. Rather than use Jain as the subject of a polemic, Brown makes a more heartening gesture by remembering his late friend. “The week before Lyn died,” he tells us, “I was preoccupied with two things: trying to write Lyn a letter and listening to “Makeba” // The letter was impossible to write.” Thus, the memory of Lyn and “Makeba” are forged atemporally in the mind of Brown, an evocation that converges the two in a spirit of resurrection. Brown recalls the projects and plans of his friendship with Hejinian: studying Spinoza, then Nietzsche, then the pre-Socratics, and onto their plans to “read the surviving Greek tragedies before she got sick.” The reemergence of Jain into the Top 40 is fused with Brown’s “unfinished businesses” with Hejinian, and seems to metaphorically instruct the poet to consolation. “Our friendship didn’t end,” Brown states, “the day Lyn’s respiratory life did. Even ‘Makeba’ didn’t end when it failed to make the charts nine years ago.” Art is the place where we get to survive, regardless of the scope, context, or relative “importance” of the work we produce in our fixed, ephemeral lifetime. The resurgence of Jain’s relevance, for Brown, is the reminder that some metaphysical trace remains, even if Jain’s trace is a reified cultural product. Jain’s trace points, in this case, towards Hejinian’s trace, specifically the trace that lives within Brown, and reanimates their dialogue. 

It is through these interpersonal collisions between pop culture and their synaptic provocation of memory that Brown’s work finds considerable stride. None of the poems from either volume of Top 40 ever take the easy, petulant approach of ironic distance to analyze their subject, but implicitly trust the material to facilitate an acute and earnest witness to our collective, contemporary condition. Brown’s work is proof that even the most anodyne, zeitgeisty trash of cultural production can be traced to a meaningful undercommons of social research. The philosophical concerns of the American Top 40 have, after all, their own appeals to universality. They are not precious or esoteric. They desire love and attention. Brown gives them both in his own ways, which are absolutely precious and esoteric, but almost righteously so. When Brown’s language nears the pedantic ledge of absolutism, he becomes humanistically self-aware and humbles the poem with his endearing refrain: “But I dunno.” It’s a reminder to the reader that he is aware of their attention and, by extension of this service, their friendship. Overall, the poems from Brown’s Top 40 series postulate that a deep listening of our ubiquitous and often ignored cultural runoff can lead us to surprising places of arrival, and that they are, by virtue of this effect, worthy of our interpretation, with many of these painfully synthetic materials hiding poems in plain sight. While we are not earnest lovers of contemporary pop music, Brown actually is and offers his love as a vehicle to understand their particular poetics and place in time. There is a revolutionary potential in this kind of listening because it is collective. Brown reaches towards the nucleus of a pop hit that galvanizes the masses to prick up their ears, to listen, and to sing as one.