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Known for being part of Sonic Youth since 1980 and a pivotal figure in rock and experimental music, Thurston Moore's interests have always perfectly balanced music, poetry and live performance: what we can call art. His recent collection of poems, "A is for Silence" (Ecstatic Peace, 2025), is an eloquent testament of it, a work that functions as both an intimate logbook and an aesthetic manifesto. This is true in both its content—Moore's poetry unfolds as a mosaic of scenes, images and aphorisms—and its continent, as the poems were written directly on the author's old typewriter and published in a very limited and beautiful run reminiscent of a fanzine.
Moore's poetic vision offers narrative impacts, life anecdotes, such as tour and gig memories in "Tour Diary" or intimate confessions (not confessional poetry) in "Due for Service" or "She's in Heaven Now." However, the collection also includes poems woven from minimal flashes with an almost mystical resonance, like "Deadly Silence" (look at this beautiful autumnal breath and measured pause when reading verses like "Leaves / Thoughts sentient / Nothing more") or the poem "Lesson."
There are also cosmic and visionary poems, like "The Coming Dimension and Acropolis Hovering Across the Memorized Landscape," where the chaos and baroque style transport us to the Beat tradition of Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara or Hettie Jones). The alternation between brief and expansive thoughts creates a fragmented rhythm akin to musical improvisation: the cadence of a score transferred to the page.
We can see three pillars supporting the poet's perspective: phantasmatic memories (the deceased who visit us in "Dead Friends"), music and sound as a form of transcendence, and the lyrical exploration of the everyday life, which transforms coffee, insects, or a spring walk with dogs into poetic material. In these poems, the domestic thing is charged with spiritual electricity, leaving us with a set of vibrant sensations, in a delicate and almost invisible tension between the sacred and the trivial—between synonymous extremes, oscillating from formal sobriety and economy to a verbal collage that verges on automatic writing.
As I said before one can glimpse echoes of Beat poetry, punk counterculture, and American minimalism, but all filtered through a distinct voice that sees the poem as a space of resistance against both conformity and the domestication of noise ("Why Must It Always Rain on Sunday?" or "Paperboy").
The book is also imbued with a biting sense of humor and irony that serves as a counterbalance to its elegiac density. These texts hold an awareness of life's ephemerality and the fragility we are made of, but these ideas are also presented as a vitalist gesture: "Rock n Roll / Will never / Lie" he proclaims as a declaration of faith, as the famous Neil Young verses.
The strength of "A is for Silence" lies in the unexpected, its back-and-forth between the intimate and the public, and the power of surprise. Like a show, there are moments of pure revelation and moments of wandering, of mental drifts where poetry is noise, memory, and prayer all at the same time, in a remarkable unorthodox collection of poems. Let's continue looking at this other sound form of what poetry is.
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