ANTI- Album - Orphans What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear.

Just like true mythopoeic narrative is returning to its roots through TV series after a brief intermezzo of the novel. Poetry is coming home to song through popular music - Eminem, The Dressden Dolls, Randy Newman. Standing head and shoulders above these is Tom Waits. But there’s more. I’ve been thinking for several years now, inspired by Michael Hoey, about oeuvres as units. And listening to the extremely powerful Road to Peace available for free to download through Pitchforkmedia, eMusic or Anti.com, I was reminded how powerful an oeuvre can be as cohesive and conceptual interpretative framework. This song is a simple retelling of newspaper stories from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with concluding commentary - almost like a New York Times op-ed piece mixed with Sting’s Russian’s Lover Their Children Too - but it gains its power from two very simple devices. 1. Breaking of the rhyme structure on the resolution of each verse. 2. The refusal to offer any linguistic/surface level tropes. While the former is nothing new in Tom Waits, the latter is very surprising. With every line I expect to hear a psychedelic Waitsian image (such as the one above), really hoping for one to distract from the concrete images presented in the song. The constantly breaking expectation of style and structure (poetic frame) is a common poetic and general narrative device (and also commonly used to bolster an argument through tropic resonance where other evidence is missing - see Team America). But in this song, it is intensified because we have a textual space of Tom Waits’ song activated when listening to him. The reaction might be less acute for somebody who has never heard another song by Tom Waits. I suspect that the other devices would still be sufficient to convey the effect (particularly given that the absence of tropes breaks the general expectation of any poetic unit). It would be interesting to study this with some control groups but my guess is that some effect could be discerned.