incidental music

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa's incidental music presents an atonal surround sound of turbulent registers. In this work there is dissonance and friction at the level of figuration-a "welding of phenomenological scalpels". These poems are filled with humans facing human conundrums. Joritz-Nakagawa's lyrics emphatically convey that a wound is not a tomb-the tone is often solemn but also wry. "These are not full truths" - chaos threatens time and despair close to oblivion is unraveled in paradoxical lines, yet there is a bold confidence emitted, a pact is made to keep going. Amidst the rumble is an evanescence that can't be collapsed into a flat plane. -BRENDA IIJIMA incidental music is attentive to the deep formal traditions of poetry in the western tradition: the sonnet, the pantoum, the cinquain, the rondeau, the triolet, the ghazal. And yet, as Jane Joritz-Nakagawa well knows, these traditions get their strength in how they intertwine with the contemporary. Incidental music is both innovative and inclusive of all that poetry can do. -JULIANA SPAHR