The idea for More Songs the Radio Won’t Play came to Stan Rogal while he listened to singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards’s “One More Song the Radio Won’t Like.” In these poems, he takes formerly “popular” tunes (from various genres) and transforms them. Self-referentiality; mashups of the erudite and the profane; allusions to other arts and sciences; the insertion and bending of biographical and historical facts; problematic snippets of philosophy and literary theory, quotes, and bastardizations; deploying non- or a-poetical language to challenge notions of how a poem should work; sampling; and off-kilter humor work together to update Rogal’s playlist for a present-day audience.
While his poems unavoidably serve to comment on the world today, Rogal resists a central message; the true emphasis of this collection is on the process of creation. It’s not the destination but the journey that is of significance. Not mere cover versions, not exactly parodies (though parodic), these poems are redactions, mutations, Frankensteins … they resemble the original — somewhat — yet are also grossly different. And it’s Rogal’s sincere hope that the originating artists, like his readers, accept these burnt offerings as tributes.
