Besinger tries to be poet — and he succeeds

Famed poet and longtime University of Minnesota professor Michael Dennis Browne once likened song lyrics devoid of their musical buoyancy to “a boat without water.”
Those of local punk mainstay STNNNG's (pronounced “stunning”) lead man Chris Besinger, displayed in his debut collection of song lyrics and a few fresh poems “The Usual Beast,” are (if you are still following the metaphor) one of those Bond- esque car-boats that can aptly propel on land or sea.
STNNNG has been hard rocking and unabashedly vowel-less on the Minneapolis scene since 2003, and Besinger’s gritty intellectual lyrics are one of the band’s main attractions. With “The Usual Beast,” we can pick up all the poetic nuggets that get muffled by the guitar-riffed and drum-filled madness.
“I had a bunch of people talk to me saying they really liked the lyrics, and sometimes they couldn't really hear what I was screaming about,” Besinger said. “So, that was part of the reason we released the book.”
“Putting out a book was something that's always been a dream of mine, but I waited for somebody else to tell me to do it,” he added.
In “The Usual Beast,” it’s remarkable just how well the song lyrics stand on their own two feet. Besinger’s words are like an orphan who ran away from his punk music parents to fend for himself on the streets of hard rock. The result is closer to Besinger’s poetic idols John Ashbery and Bill Knott than to Johnny Rotten and Joey Ramone.
“When we write a song, the tunes always come first, so I try to shoehorn the lyrics to fit the music,” Besinger said. “When I write the poems, I'm freer to do anything I feel like. Usually, with the lyrics, I'm pretty limited by how long the song is and stuff like that.”
Plenty of people have pronounced poetry as good as dead. Whether its killer be the Internet, rock ‘n’ roll, adderall-sized attention spans or the death of Allen Ginsberg , many folks have given up on the most ancient of art forms. Besinger doesn’t look for it in the halls of academia but rather in the dudes that drop you off there.
“I’d rather read some poetry written by a bus driver instead of some twit that went through a (Master of Fine Arts) program,” Besinger said.
Besides his apparent interest in the transportation system, Besinger said that his future involves more poetry and a new STNNNG record (finally). With fans who have waited four years for a follow-up to 2006’s “Fake Fake ,” the punk rockers have built up a “Chinese Democracy “-esque cloud of expectation.
“I think it’s going to be the best thing we’ve done,” Besinger said.