How many people, in 2024, remember the Alternative Revolution in 90s rock music? When Kurt Cobain and Nirvana showed up, a gauntlet was laid down about originality, integrity, and independence. For a few years, independent purveyors of rock music took to the mainstream, so that what was on the radio, and MTV, didn’t have to be just corporate hoopla. Where poetry was concerned, the Aughts had its own version of Amer-Indie to sell, city by city, community by community. The issue was the same as it had been for the Alternative Revolution— independence, originality, and integrity. Corporate hoopla in poetry was turned on its head, and practitioners who had been forced into the margins moved center-wards. In Cessation Covers, Steve Halle takes the remnants of who Kurt Cobain was a lyricist— allusive, playful, self-contradictory, abstract— throws them together, with punk-level concision and O’Hara-level alacrity— and does Seattle-to-Chicago his way. Released from Philadelphia in 2007, Cessation Covers does, indeed, cover the entire relief map of the continental United States, to bask in the glow, from Frances Farmer on out, of what it means to be alternative.
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