The Low End Theory by Alex Porco // Jeremy Luke Hill

Alex Porco’s chapbook-length poem The Low End Theory takes its time coming up with its own title. It first introduces the problem of what to call itself in line ten, where it proposes the name, “Poem about Fears,” and then dismisses it as perhaps “too on / The nose.” In line 21, the narrator suggests that the poem is still in its early stages and recommends that we “see how / Things go,” but by the third page, the absence of a title has developed into a full-fledged crisis of meaning. “Still / No title,” the narrator says. “Sorry.”

I’m worried it / Will be misleading / Or not misleading / Enough, or too / Dry when I / Want it to / Be wet, or / Too thin when / I want it / Wide enough to / Include an aquarium’s / Worth of feelings.

The concern here is clearly that no title will be able to speak to the totality of meaning and emotion being expressed through the whole of the poem, specifically to the fears that the narrator experiences in the Georgia Aquarium and in other places also, like airplanes and hotel rooms, fears that are described as “Real / And particular. But / Also unreal and / Particular.” It takes until page seven and an ex’s return of the narrator’s Tribe Called Quest T-shirt (neatly folded) for the poem to title itself after the hip hop collective’s sophomore album, The Low End Theory. The only reason offered is that it’s “a / Great album”—no explanation of how a ’90s rap album might resolve the questions of meaning that have delayed the naming of the poem almost to its end, no indication of what it might have to say about all those particular fears, both real and unreal. In some ways, it’s interesting that the poem has a title at all, since it’s part of Porco’s ongoing serial poem, “The Minutes,” which usually names its sections only with roman numerals. Portions of this larger work have appeared, titled in this way, in Canadian Literature, Lemon Hound, New Poetry, The Toronto Review of Books and elsewhere. So why a title at all in this instance? Perhaps it’s only the publication format, where this section is published as a chapbook through Gary Barwin’s serif of nottingham press, rather than in a magazine or journal. Still, wouldn’t “The Minutes” and a number have sufficed for the chapbook also? Why does this particular contribution to the larger work not have a number like the others, not even as a sub-title? Without a number, how would a reader even go about fitting it into the chronology of the longer poem? Porco’s The Low End Theory never answers these questions directly, but I think it might be interesting to understand the chapbook as playing the role of title for the longer poem, not in a standard sense, but in precisely the sense that the shorter poem enacts it – as a problematic that lingers throughout the writing process, getting deferred again and again, until at last it becomes answered most of the way through. Perhaps The Low End Theory should be placed like a title at the beginning of The Minutes, though it arrived unexpectedly in the middle of things, like a returned t-shirt. In this role, it would admirably serve as a reminder that no title would be adequate to the whole of the poem, to the whole aquarium of its meaning, to it real and unreal fears. 

Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Gordon Hill Press, a literary publisher based in Guelph, Ontario. He has written a collection of poetry and short prose called Island Pieces, along with several chapbooks and broadsheets. His writing has appeared in The Bull Calf, CV2, EVENT Magazine, Filling Station, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, The Maynard, paperplates, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Rusty Toque, The Town Crier, and The Windsor Review.