The Frank O'Hara line "I am never quiet, I mean silent" prompts an exercise asking young writers to distinguish "quiet" from "silent." Workshop participants imagine a bird making song with wingbeats and a body that refuses stillness, producing unavoidable noise. The listening experience of Racing Mount Pleasant's new album evokes that contrast between emotional quietude and sonic grandeur. The band formed as a collective at the University of Michigan, with founding members Callum Roberts, Connor Hoyt, and Sam DuBose meeting at freshman orientation in 2019. Additional members include Sam Uribe, Casey Cheatham, Kaysen Chown, and Tyler Thenstedt.
The Frank O'Hara poem "Katy" features seven lines of self-assessing declarations. It is the fifth line that I get the most mileage out of: "I am never quiet, I mean silent." When I am teaching writing workshops, specifically with young writers, teen-agers who-in many cases-have not let their sense of wonder be battered by waves of irony or cynicism, I ask them what distinctions they see between "quiet" and "silent."
There is no correct answer, no sweeping conclusion. I'm asking them to tap into that sense of wonder and invent an explanation for what O'Hara might have been suggesting. One participant insisted that even a bird with no capacity for song can still make a kind of song, with its wings beating against the wind. Another added that a person can attempt silence but will often fail: the machine of the body makes its own noise, sometimes against our will.
The group is a collective that first came to life on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, in a manner that seems pulled from a romantic film about a band's origin story: the lore is that three of the group's members, Callum Roberts, Connor Hoyt, and Sam DuBose, met and discussed forming a band within the first minutes of freshman orientation, in 2019. Eventually, more members were added: Sam Uribe, Casey Cheatham, Kaysen Chown, and Tyler Thenstedt.
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