Most of us are taught what to fear, and the speaker of "Open-Backed Banjo" starts by crossing the whole list off. Serpents, bears, bees, even the devil can't rattle him. The devil, he says, has nothing to teach him anyway, since he can invent any evil he needs "on my own." The bracketed aside, "(forgive me if I don't delve into the details)," sounds like a man politely shutting a door on his own worst thoughts. After all this swagger, one sentence flips the poem over: "What makes me break down is a banjo."
From there the poem rests on a single bold comparison, the banjo as a clock. The clock is "our only god," a bleakly funny phrase that suggests the thing we really bow to is time. The banjo is just as "lonesome," but it has "two hands, both of them fast." That line works on several levels. The hands might be a clock's, running ahead of the hour, or a player's, picking at speed. Since "fast" can also mean fixed in place, there is perhaps a hint of hands that can't be stopped.
The title matters here. An open-backed banjo has no solid panel behind the strings, so you can look straight into the instrument, and the speaker does so the way you'd peer into a watch with its case popped. The vocabulary changes accordingly. "Balance wheel," "escapement" and "gear train" arrive as three short questions, each one a tick of the mechanism he expects to find. What he finds is "nothing but a bare rod / & the smell of rain." The answer disappoints a mechanic and delights a poet. The inside holds no moving parts, and the poem switches from sight to smell. Judging by the imagery, rain suggests damp wood, weather on the way, something in the air before a storm. Whatever drives this machine can't be seen.
That is why the next line reaches for "the ghost in its machine." The phrase is a familiar way of talking about a mind inside a body, and here the animating spirit is the music itself. Then the voice changes: "Play it, son!" The poem doesn't say who speaks, whether an elder, a crowd, or the banjo. But the instruction sets the speaker free, and the poem stops looking and starts making noise. The sounds it asks for are violent and industrial: "a hammer on steel," a "Gatling gun." The first also nods to the banjo player's own "hammer-on" technique. The machine imagery that failed to explain the instrument returns as a weapon, and the poem ends by wishing the banjo would play "until it smokes." The clock's tidy ticking has become friction and fire.
The sound of the language backs this up. The opening is full of plosive b's, in "bears," "bees," "bedevil," then "break," "banjo" and "bare." They pop like plucked strings and tie the speaker's bravado to the instrument that undoes it. The poem uses no rhyme and no regular meter. Long, chatty, confident lines give way to the clipped questions about the gear train, then to the shouted commands, so the rhythm itself moves from explaining to performing. The ampersands, used twice, give the page a quick, handwritten feel, as if the poem were being played rather than composed. It also runs as a single block with no stanza breaks, like a tune that never stops for breath.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it packs into twenty-one lines without losing its sense of humor. It makes a fair point about art, that you can take a thing apart and still miss where it lives. The scientist's questions are reasonable, and the answer to each is a shrug and a smell of rain. It also reverses our usual ideas about fear. The speaker isn't afraid of snakes or the devil, but he comes undone by beauty, by time, and by a sound with no visible cause. The poem lets us laugh at that while understanding it completely.