poets off poetry

To drift along inside Joanna Newsom’s music, which has (under)scored my most profound relationships and has seeped—continually seeps—into my mind.  To depict my mind, ‘…’, using ellipsis: the omission of details herein is not intended as a gesture to protect the innocent; there is no safeguarding: ‘I claim my mind,’ I claim my mind.  Nor is that which appears to be the most direct statement ever the most direct: I claim my mind, which dwells inside three records—The Milk Eyed Mender, Ys, and Have One On Me—the latter being that from which I borrow cues for this.

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[On A Good Day]

To name a few important things.  It is early June 2010.  I  am sitting on a train to New York City from Providence, Rhode Island.  Sky is overcast.  There has been, is always, an ending.  To end, to be drunk, to desire, to dwell in multiple minds, to inhabit several bodies at once.  To remain mindful, involved, and perplexed.  And to recall—begin with a voice.  What do you say to someone who disapproves of a voice?  Say, ‘Surrender to the mothball, which keeps away the moths.’

To “Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie,” 2004, “Sawdust and Diamonds,” 2005, and to“Good Intentions Paving Company,” 2010.  To claim my mind again.  To guard it again.  To love another through an alcoholic haze—again from a distance—turn back: let the luminous image appear, the mind black against it.  What image belongs to the present?  I felt the door open, letting in this cold shapeless.  My mind remembers, will never forget.

*        *        *

Relationships involve records.  To begin (again), there are individuals, and there are records.  And there are endings each record transcends.  Each record, each ending, transcends each individual with whom each recorded ending is associated.  Without records, each ending would no longer exist, would no longer entangle the mind.  Each ending entangles the mind. And each ending is held in the body, the mind, that little wooden box which contains signification, dissonance, and lyrics.  Lyricism: nervousness contained in the body that, in the end, transforms into a wooly, tangled skein that loops around the brain’s core, which is turning now to endings.  And so let us begin with an ending.  Let us begin now by ending.

*        *        *

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[Jackrabbits]

It was three o’clock in the morning, although you never paid attention to time or listened to anything.  I repeated myself over and over; again, it was impossible to measure if you’d heard. Tick-tock, you sounded, your eyes growing dark.  Tick-tock, you erupted, my time bomb, my ending. Tick-tock, the walls echoed, reflecting nothing to speak of at all. Some nights I never go to sleep, and some nights I accompany my body on its voyage into your chest.  Once I read through your sea in my fog, my ivory hopeless, I will have read with disdain, and an unprecedented sheet of loss will enter my body, my mind, which kindly partitions itself.  So there’s rope—string that hangs from a dress—and some semblance of order.  What must I embody?  What will unravel this crisis, dear trumpet, dear sheet of paper on the floor?  And it is impossible for you to ever know whether these nouns all relate to you, my former.  Nor is everything recorded here entirely factual: one always distorts another living being’s record in one’s mind, in memory’s ugly veneer.  Like this.  Have One On Me is a living record insofar as it has been imprinted and reprinted inside my brain, my body, my mind.  Thus, in a sense, my mind rings, reminding me not of the past, but of the future: a momentary eclipse that transcends itself, blocking out no light.

*        *        *

A mnemonic device:

By the time you read this, I will be so far away

Daddy Longlegs, how in the world am I to be expected to stay?

I have been so drunk (‘bottle of white, bottle of red’) and have had to coordinate unconsciousness by looking through a window somewhere far away from the city, my city, a city in which you—I once lived.  (Say ‘and’ and connect the pronouns—but no—not again, never again.)  That night, you told a story that triggered my mind, thank you.  Now where is my mind?  Alone, somewhere concrete or abstract, I think of you, pull the trigger.  Mind is a fish.  Pay attention.

*        *        *

Relationships form by listening, which moves and is defined well beyond devoting one’s attention to a sound.

I insist that I have heard a recorded voice’s sound because it is now part of my body, my mind, my total viscera; and so it seems the sound is related to all I contain.

With my heart, I am trying to contain some things.  Things, little impressions related to and separate from the mind’s dwell in the brain, one source of anxiety. I was tired of being drunk. Were there bodies? There are always bodies.

We crack.  We cracked.  We both want.  Nor am I the only one to have ever relinquished control, which cracks out from your mighty jaw and turns this time line inside out, making this sequence fall into, out of disorder.  In the middle of the woods, I knew you once, felt the cold.Scent of sweat mixed with lavender, asphalt. And on the mantle, the most evil book, which, when placed over the face, caused me to stop breathing. Oh, my grainy film, my melancholy dog.  It’s been a long time—how are you? I too have become a ghost.  ‘To burn and twist and grimace against you’… Now night is a ghost, and the woods too. Now gauze again; again, your back turns toward the little brook facing the cluster of houses.  Only you can follow this, say, ‘may I touch you,’ and look away.  Goodbye from afar, my word, my tired insufficient.  How in the world in the night do you stay where you are?

You stay where you are.

*        *        *

You stay where you are.  We stay in two places.  I go for a walk.  The night envelops it.  My foot presses down into a mood, a most basic feeling. Our nature does not change by will—does it?  In winter, your frozen skin takes on the most grotesque shade of blue, and your beige walls are so callous, forbidding and enclosed.  A formation of tissue forms over my bones, and water pools inside your shallow basin, your wicked heart.  We pray I am the one to save you, and the woods enclosed by red cake over rouge, noir as birch.  Rouge rinses out; again, water surrenders.  Thus, I fall asleep in this opaque.  I lie awake.  We stay up all night, and all is nocturnal, a moonless cluster of buildings. Where decisions are made, the basement smokes time, and a flute sounds through the air, one hallucination.  ‘Say something, god damnit.’   And something is said.  Something I cannot remember, will never forget.

*        *        *

There were others.  There are always others. And there is another who is a little older who carried me into my new anonymity.  Now I am estranged from myself: I go for a walk without face, reflect shop windows, dog collars, and the sun, the sun, the sun.  Oh, my sun, my late, my crooked loveless: make yourself known.  Transform into endless.

*        *        *

I will pack all my pretty dresses

I will box up my high-heeled shoes

A sparkling ring for every finger

I’ll put away and hide from view

There is always premonition, and always too, the feeling you and I were never, are nevertheless.  I write you a letter, choose never to mail it.  Or, ‘I will,’ transforming to ‘I’ll,’ literally contracts, affecting (effacing) the body, the mind. And thus ‘I’enters into a contractual agreement with ‘myself.’  ‘I’ becomes ‘myself.’  And it is not uncanny that the word ‘will’ echoes the language  of a bequest, a list of what I will you: a tarnished spoon, a library book.  My torn dress.

Everywhere I tried to love you / Is yours again and only yours.

*        *        *

The heart is a muscle that contracts seventy times a minute.  Listen.  I am writing about being boiled down.  I have alluded to your collection of rings, your blue birds, your jaundice.  Do I stay sustained by that which was already said, that which wasn’t?  Once again, you arrive.  Once again, what is said has already been said and is never straight forward.  And there are reverberations: ‘starry, starry, starry’;‘no-no-no’; and ‘I regret, I regret.’  All my weight is positioned atop my subject’s shoulders, and I am caught within or upon him. I am in love with him. Does this make me a fish?  Fade to black.

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[Does Not Suffice]

~~~

Chopping with Blue Down

She finds herself without a thick cloud covering her conscience.
She finds herself synonymous with light—light, my love.
She finds herself asleep under his fast, pretending
Sex, where she unsurprisingly ceases
To climax, to climax, to climax, to
Culminate
Against a whippoorwill
That sheds its feathers, refusing
To call her by name—only ‘Claire,’ ‘Clarice,’ ‘Clara,’ and ‘Constance.’
Leave grief to the animals that blink inside her brain.

One facet of dualism, consciousness, splits.  She braids her hair.
‘I am in love with the lines in your brain.
Must I continue inhabiting my body?’
Now the surface of the water is undressed, peels back
Its waves toward the grass, and what was said
Has gone dead, has been brought to a halt.
Water is naked.  She too
Will eventually pass.

And he is so indifferent in his coat, holding a blue flower.
Her mouth is full of geese.  He noticed that.
And this little violet splays out across the table.
And his elegant method of torture is called ‘C++’.
And henceforth, it’s snowing, it’s snowing, dormez-vous Jörgen there’s
Silkworms and snow on the ground, which represents
Glaze.
Re: ‘I love you; feel nothing’?  Write back.

Claire Donato lives in Brooklyn, NY.  She is the author of Someone Else’s Body (Cannibal Books).  Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Octopus, and Action Yes. She holds an MFA from Brown University, where she received the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction. She is a member of the Electronic Literature Organization and currently teaches at Eugene Lang College (The New School). Her hometown is Pittsburgh, PA.

Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints? Contact Jackie Clark: jackie [at] coldfrontmag [dot] com.  Check out previous POP essays here: http://pop.coldfrontmag.com/.

Stevie Nicks is my chanteuse library. What I mean is that she is my Influence. She is one of my greatest muses (if I believed in muses.) There is little music that is more important to me than hers. There are so many reasons why.

Until recently, I believed that she grew up in Florida. But that’s not true––she actually grew up in Arizona. But until I found that out, I loved her songs for what I assumed was their wet Florida heat. Behind her songs, I always heard white sand, hot pink bathing suits, and palm trees.

When I think of voices that I can hear, either spoken or sung, I often consider their notes. You know how a perfume has notes that you can smell? For example, Chanel No. 5, we smell as one thing, but that smell is actually complex with layers. Within that one smell, is ylang-ylang and neroli first, then jasmine and rose, then a warm vanilla woodsy burst. Senses feel like one thing, but there are many strata to our experience of them. This happens with food, too. The tastes often happen in layers, especially in the best food. In the best heard voices, there are notes to the person’s accent. Stevie Nicks has a great sounding voice, so hers has a lot of layers.

During the long time I thought of Nicks being from Florida, I had always thought that when she sang it sounded like a family of crocodiles had shredded her voice and the notes you heard coming at you in time was a time-line of the sounds of the shredding. When she sings, the first note you hear is the large father crocodile taking a bite of her voice, then a mother one has it, then the baby chomps, then a teenage crocodile bites softly. Then there is a note of flowers thrown in, some flowery perfume (but not Chanel No. 5, I think of it more like Quelque Fleurs), and then something metal rings around, maybe the metal taste of blood or maybe a truly metal object. Or maybe it’s both.

Stevie Nicks has always been important to me. I’d say my love for her really took flight around ten years ago when I heard this song in a grocery store:

I’d always liked Fleetwood Mac songs (“Don’t Stop”–sorry I am still a really big Clinton fan), and of course, loved her “Landslide” as we all do (hell, even those Dixie Chicks can appreciate that one), but “Room on Fire” is the one that really threw me into a deep love for her. It seemed sort of overlooked. Or maybe I’d heard it before when it came out when I was 10. It’s probably the most spiritual song I know. It is the layers of life within the poem that make it so. Listening to it (listen to it!), it’s easy to think it’s about fate or physical attraction or some great sea of love (“where everyone would love to drown”). I know it is actually about specific things that happened to her, but I tend to forget about them. Really it is about living and dying and memory: the great questions. She says there is magic all around you when you walk in the room and you believe it. The faith she has in the magic in this song is sometimes the only thing that can get me through a dreary day. Its faith is more loyal to me than my most loyal friends. That song is my friend.

Stevie Nicks’ second solo album is called The Wild Heart (1983). Just an aside, but is there seriously a better name for an album? No, I don’t think so either. Anyway, on that album the title song “Wild Heart,” is about what else but a wild heart. If you spend your free nights watching Stevie Nicks videos on YouTube like I do, then it is easy to find this short clip:

The clip is from 1981, a few years before the album was released. To me, this fact has always meant something important about the swiftness with which songs are written and the lag between their creation and public consumption of their slickness within an actual album. In the clip, Stevie is getting her make-up done and she is singing with one of her back-up singer’s prompts (which you don’t realize until late in the clip). I love this clip for at least three main reasons. The first is because I think performers are not always better when they are practicing their songs, but at least more connected to the actual song. I don’t think her voice ever gets better than the way it is in this clip. As she practices, she is deep into the song, because she isn’t worried about anything else, like the eyes on her. (This of course begs the question: does she realize she is being filmed? Probably so. But we never know.) The second is the end of it, when she throws her head into her friend’s lap. I like thinking of her as this sweet and maybe a bit like an animal. (If you didn’t know, I love animals more than I love people, and I love people a lot.) The third has to do with a strange connection I feel to it because of this thing I used to do when I was little. Growing up, I wanted to be an actress. To study on my own, I’d always think of the best performances I’d see on TV or on a stage as the ability of the performer to seem carefree (almost careless), so that the actual performance seems effortless. In my room, I used to practice this skit I’d made up where a waitress is taking orders, but is distracted, but never messes up her orders. Or I’d sing songs into the mirror and look away from the mirror until the final moment when I’d look in the mirror straight on, so that the perceived audience then knew that I was in control, not distracted, the whole time. In this clip, I think it is so great that all of these activities are happening around her, but she is still singing like she means it. It is carefree, seemingly effortless, but there is a lot of actual effort in it.  Maybe these three reasons are one main reason. I thought I’d piece it out just in case they aren’t. The three reasons can probably best be summed up by the famous Emily Dickinson line: “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.”

I like the young Stevie Nicks that is so witchy that people actually thought she was a witch. Her song “Rhiannon” was a reason why. This is a really great video of her singing that song:

I like the song “Rhiannon” because it is not afraid to be an unironic song about a witch. There is no wink to the audience that she is singing about anything else. The song believes in every over the top thing that it says. In the video, you can see what makes watching her perform for an audience so wonderful. If you know that song well, you know how she is gently riffing on the beats (just like a witch!). Also, her dancing. She spins around for no reason, but for every reason. She owns that microphone. It is her pivot point. The whole song is sung from the power its placement creates. Sometimes I think I want to live my life being the Stevie Nicks in this video.

Stevie Nicks sings about nature, wildness, and love and she couldn’t do it without the witchy total belief of a song like “Rhiannon.” Another wild song that I love is “Gypsy” from the Fleetwood Mac album Mirage (1982):

In the song, the singer is a witch, a gypsy, everything a so-called “bad” female should be. She “faces freedom with a little fear” but she really “has no fear, has only love.” She’s a gypsy and she doesn’t give a shit and I love it.

There is a Stevie Nicks who is past being a gentle witchy persona and moves into being something who is both hard and sad. This is the Stevie Nicks that wrote “Rooms on Fire.” The shift is not totally sequential in time, because some of it happens simultaneously during The Wild Heart album. Here is “Stand Back” which I associate with this other persona:

There is a better video from a Saturday Night Live performance of this song that I don’t think is available anymore on the internet. There are slices of that performance in the video above. In the actual video, the person who is announcing her (God help me, I don’t know who he is), says something like “Some singers are rock stars and some are beauty queens, but Stevie Nicks is a rock star beauty queen.” The crowd goes crazy when he says that and she comes out afterwards punching the beats of the song. I’ve always felt that the way she hard sings the endbeats of that song is akin to a poet wanking the hell out of the end of each line, or pumping out a punctuation mark, especially a period. Like: Period—boom! Stevie Nicks punches those beats out. It is both hard and sad.

A similar busted-out song to me is “Talk to Me” from Rock a Little (1985):

In the song, Stevie Nicks is full of despair. She is totally at point zero, but that is also a place of empathy and power, as she asks for the listener to let her in. She punches those beats, but they are sad beats. The crocodiles of her voices have slithered away and now the voice is just ragged, shot out. Nevertheless, in this song, like all the others, she is singing for freedom. Nature has been beaten into her voice and she still rises throughout the song, resounding. And she’s sweet, too, a spring rain.

Watch this short clip in which Nicks supposedly talks about her songwriting.  It’s hilarious how she suffers the stupidity of Rita Braver in that interview, who seems to have no clue about her music or even what to ask her, so she just lets her ramble on about her permed 80’s hair. I love how unafraid Stevie Nicks is to say nothing of substance at all. She does say something interesting though about her songwriting in the beginning—that she gets inspired a lot by everyday things and she’ll write a line down and start a poem (I think it’s cool how she thinks of her songs as poems). She seemed to indicate also that there are lots of lines that don’t become poems, that are just random lines floating in the ether. I respect this kind of quotidian freedom of hers to create beauty out of seemingly nothing at all.

I remember a video I watched a long time ago of her talking about going solo out of the success of Fleetwood Mac. The excuse she gave was how many songs she wrote and how she never got to sing them as part of the band. She said that they rotated who wrote which songs that they all sang and that she got frustrated. She said something like “It was too hard when you are writing literally hundreds of songs a week and you have to rotate the time between band members. So, I had to go solo.” I believe in the unending generative nature of creative writing, so I believe in this. I think it would be great if Stevie Nicks taught a poetry workshop.

Just like everyone else who loves her music, I’ve always been curious about her love life. Even knowing everything about her I can voyeuristically get my hands on, I still think Lindsay Buckingham is her one true love. I think that is kind of pretty amazing, as he could not be more of a cheeseball and completely not her equal at all.

It makes sense though. Geniuses often fall in love with people who are not as smart as them—it’s just the way it works. About seven years ago, I went to see Fleetwood Mac for my birthday in Boston. I went there with my best Stevie Nicks shawl, fake flowered ensemble and was prepared to dance my ass off. She did play a couple of greats, but the largest portion of the night was devoted to Lindsay Buckingham belting out his guitar for 45 minutes like a 13-year-old schoolboy. You kind of have to love a person who is willing to be on a stage with one of the greatest American songwriters ever and completely upstage her. The hubris was fantastical. I understood why she loved him.

People tend to make a big deal about her drug use or other things she’s done that are less than commendable. I could care less what she does in her spare time—just as long as she manages to write some more songs before she dies. To steal a phrase from the great movie, Pootie Tang (2001) (“Pootie know what Pootie do”): Stevie know what Stevie do. I’ll only give that license out to greatness. Hail hail, Goddess Stevie.

~~~

Baby of air

Baby of air
You rose into the mystical
Side of things
You could no longer live with us
We put you in a little home
Where they shut and locked the door
And at night
You blew out
And went wandering through the sea and sand
People cannot keep air in
I blow air in
I cannot keep it in
I read you a poem once
And you called it beauty
And then I read you another one and
You called it harmony air
My brother is not air, he is water
He is not a baby, he is older than me
And when he brushes the hair from my face
I cannot see him, but he surrounds me
I cannot see you baby of air
I put you in your bed and you get out
I put you in the air and you blend
I put you on the beach and you blow out
Like an air bird, flying and flying
I find other things similar to you
And like you, they are air and
Are nothing eventually
I am not made out of air
I hold your baby body in me
As I am a mother to you
I am a mother to you
My brother is my mother
He tells me when I have lost you
To grieve grieve
He says grieving is good
He says crying is good
He says sadness hits you in waves
Of water and air
I feel your fine hair hit me when I am sleeping
I feel your hair hit me in the head
Will you remember me
When you breeze upon the other world
O you are already there
O you are already there
My brother tells me, you are already there
He is already there, he says
And I cry
And he tells me
It is ok to cry
It is ok to cry,
He says
You are not made air
It is ok to cry, he says
When you are not made of air

Dorothea Lasky is the author of two books of poetry, Black Life (2010) and AWE (2007), both published by Wave Books. She is also the author of an educational text, Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). She currently lives in New York City.

Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints? Contact Jackie Clark: jackie [at] coldfrontmag [dot] com.  Check out previous POP essays here: http://pop.coldfrontmag.com/

Day 29.

Yesterday, on one of his long walks along the beach, Brian found a conch shell and named it Shelby. As the studio executives selected this island specifically for its lack of sharp objects, I’ve already planned to hide it from him the first chance I get. But he carries it everywhere, offered it spoonfuls of his Lucky Charms at breakfast, and slept with it under his toga last night. I dread the stomach-churning, wounded moose-like cry Brian’s going to wail when he discovers Shelby’s gone—he’s so terribly lonely, after all—but he could do a ton of damage with that thing. He’s not even allowed to have shoe laces, for Christ’s sake.

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[Let's Go Away For Awhile]

Day 30.

Tonight, Brian set Shelby down next to him on a stool as the sun was setting, and picked up his bass guitar. Carl perked up like a deer, dropped his metal detector in the sand, quietly walked over, and strapped on his 12-string. Dennis exhaled a large bong hit, calmly stood up, and slid in behind the drum kit. Mike strolled over to the Theramin with his head down, looking more like a shoplifter, and flipped the ON switch. Al strapped on his guitar, and I turned on the tape recorder. We stood in readied silence. Brian diddled absently on the bass. Soon a melody began taking shape within the random notes he was plucking. A bouncy ditty that reminded me of Oklahoma. Perhaps we were witnessing an evolution, a departure from the young genius’ increasingly downbeat, minor-chord melancholia. If I could bring back twelve singles good-to-go for radio, they’d probably make me Vice President or something—at least get me a date with Nancy Sinatra. The melody bopped along happily. With his brow knit in concentration, Dennis raised his sticks, but Carl shook his head. Brian continued to noodle, and finally bellowed operatically, “Oooooooh the wheels on the bus go meow-meow-meow, meow-meow-meow, meow-meow-meow…” Dennis whipped his sticks into the serene, blue sea, and I switch the recorder off.

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[On A Holiday]

Day 31.

Movie night. The only thing Brian will allow us to watch is Brigadoon, because, he says, he likes watching Gene Kelly sing at cows. “Gene Kelly would sing into a tube if the other end was up his ass, and so would you,” Mike barks, and staggers off into the darkness. The boys have been hitting the bottle harder in the last few days. We watch the movie on a bed sheet hung between two palm trees. As Gene whirls and twirls around the cardboard glen, Brian begins to giggle. I look at him. “You can see his underpants!” he says, in a voice as high as a little girl’s. He holds Shelby up for a better view of the screen, and whispers to it, giggling.

Day 32.

Brian emerges from his hut wearing his underpants over his toga, leaping around like he’s having a seizure. It’s not pretty. For some reason, the inside of his mouth is bright blue. He must have been eating candy all night. “You think your studio big shots can afford to buy my brother a clean pair of drawers?” Dennis asks me quietly under his beard. “I mean, come on, man—that’s disgusting.” “Dennis, I brought a whole carton of underwear for him! He won’t put on a new pair!” “Where’d he get blue candy?” Al asks. “I have no idea,” I say. “I want some blue candy,” Al says.

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[In Blue Hawaii]

Day 33.

While eating an entire birthday cake at lunch, Brian says, “I’m writing an album of songs played on nothing but dog whistles—ones that are too high to be heard by the human ear.” “You are so fucking crazy, I don’t even know how you keep on breathing,” Al says, his angry eyes on the horizon.  Brian doesn’t hear him. “And I’m gonna call the album, Farty-Fart-Shitty-Shit-Dumpy-Dump.” The collapse of the sessions seemed to be taking the greatest toll on Al, who’s been jogging in circles around the tiny island screaming, “Fuck!” Al says, “How ‘bout callin’ it Crackers, Fruitcake, Screwballs and Nuts?” “Shhhhh,” Brian says with one hand in the air, “can you hear that?” No one speaks. “Neither can I,” Brian says, shaking his head, as a single tear slides down his cheek.

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[I Just Wasn't Made For These Times]

Day 34.

Sometime in the middle of the night, Peter O’Toole showed up, drunker than I’d ever seen any human being, ferried by a heavily-tattooed native man in a canoe. How they had found us, I would never know. O’Toole’s could barely stand and his speech was incomprehensible. He tried to bugger me in my hammock, but I fended him off with a badminton racket. Suddenly Brian was standing in the door of the hut, naked, covered in something sticky that smelled like cling peach syrup, with his own name written across his chest in toothpaste. In his left hand, he was holding Shelby; in his right, his bass guitar. “Mother!” he shouted, and embraced the crumpled thespian with all 283 pounds of his mighty, insane, sticky nudeness. “Let’s make some magic!” he whooped, and dragged O’Toole out of the hut by one arm, leaving a deep rut in the sand.

Day 36.

Recording for 48-hours straight. Everything from spectacularly weird, complex masterpieces to a a three hour-long version of “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie.” O’Toole tried swimming away several times, but Brian finally tied him to a tree, leaving one of O’Toole’s hands free into which he placed an uncapped bottle of bourbon, said, “Happy Mother’s Day,” and kissed the old man on the mouth. O’Toole actually seemed to be enjoying himself after awhile, and even requested “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Ol’ Kit Bag.” By my calculations, we have just enough booze to keep O’Toole alive, and way more than enough jars of Goober Grape to get this sucker in the can by Christmas.

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[Good Vibrations]

~~~

I Led the Horse to Water

because it said it was really thirsty. “Water’s
right there—go for it, horsey,” I said. “I’m not
gonna drink from that puddle of bilge,” it said
disgustedly, then again, “but I’m really, really
thirsty.” I looked around. The nearest thing
I could see that wasn’t a bush or a mountain
was a gas station, maybe about 10 miles away
through a curtain of the wavy heat lines coming
off the desert. I could probably get there and
back before the meaner, wilder animals came out
from under their rocks to howl and hunt. I explained
what I had in mind, expecting a whinny or nuzzle
in gratitude. It was a really long walk—I could
die! “I wasn’t talking to you,” said the horse staring
off in the other direction, “I was talking to no one,
to myself maybe, to the mysterious force that led
me here.” “Uh, I led you here, you idiot. This is
my puddle,” I gestured to the little wooden sign
that read, “Jen’s Puddle” in crudely carved letters.
“And you could at least thank me, you big jerk.”
The horse gestured to a littler sign next to it
that read, “Do Not Drink. Poison.” He raised
his eyebrows and waited. “Well…you
get me all nervous!”

Jennifer L. Knox’s new book of poems, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, will be published by Bloof Books this fall. Her work has appeared three times in the Best American Poetry series, and in publications such as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and others.  She wants you to know that she no longer absolutely hates The Beach Boys.

Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints? Contact Jackie Clark: jackie [at] coldfrontmag [dot] com.  Check out previous POP essays here: http://pop.coldfrontmag.com/

Some friends and I were recently exchanging embarrassing stories from adolescence and it was no surprise that most of these stories ended with some form of appreciation of books and music—the two things that got us through the sticky, dorky periods of our lives. I don’t think this need for music was all that unique—it’s a basic need to have someone sing how we feel (sound plus words equals getting lost equals being found). What is rare is being the young person making music. I would’ve never touched an instrument on a stage in front of other people when I was seventeen. Young performers and entertainers, the boobs-out and biceps kind, delivered through the System of Normal corporate media over-saturation, come and go, but young musicians, actual musicians, are the ones we tend to grow with. They are so bafflingly gifted with their awkward courage, their blossoming ability to collaborate (read the liner notes of any record to know just how many people are involved in the process), their willingness to experiment with sound, to not wait until they “grow up,” their keen insight taken from their musical influences and the determination to emulate them, and their early yet strong motivation to make art. Laura Marling, a singer from London, makes music with quite possibly all of these qualities, with a soulful voice and a provocative nature to boot. Although she is now twenty years old, she completed her debut album, Alas I Cannot Swim, at the age of eighteen.

When I was younger, I wanted to spit every time someone said, “you’re so young.” Why not say, “all I noticed about you is your age and I’m older than it.” So it’s with great hesitation that I point out Laura Marling’s age, but I must admit it sort of attracted me to her music. My boyfriend and I were driving to Massachusetts and we turned on the radio with the hopes of hearing a traffic report, but caught a Laura Marling song instead. She was playing her wordsy, folk but not folksy songs and was being interviewed by David Garland for the show, “Spinning on Air, which was recorded two weeks before her eighteenth birthday. Alas I Cannot Swim came out not too long after that.  If having an album out by the age of eighteen isn’t impressive enough, Marling had been in the popular English band Noah and the Whale prior to making her album. After hearing her sing, I was awfully surprised to find out how young she was. Age—the years you are, the years you have left, and the time period in which you were born—is something I often think of while listening to Marling’s music, which coming from a young person or not, is some of the smartest music I’ve ever heard.

“Her music is interesting but not complicated, but a complicated experience,” David Garland said on air. His succinct description encapsulates the pulling and tugging of Marling’s music: personal as well as abstract, poetic, planned yet surprising, and observational yet private. Her music generates the same kind of thinking that reading a poem does. She said in the 2008 interview that she wanted Alas I Cannot Swim to be “one consistent piece of work,” to cohere thematically. Her website, in fact, used to describe a limited run of a song box that was sold with the cd, including little handmade trinkets and a songbook, furthermore stressing the idea of her album as an object, as a well put together thing.

The arrangement of the album itself was clearly important to her and she somewhat shyly yet knowledgeably described the lyrical thematic movement (water, birds, love, death) and musical arrangement, a “purposeful lift” from minor to major. Indeed Alas I Cannot Swim moves musically first through songs that have a sort of chorus of back-up voices, to the soulful alone toughness of her voice, eventually adding other sounds (birds, footsteps, more instruments, more voices), and finally leaving us in low registers.

Lyrically, she delves into love and meaningful relationships, death and rebirth. She often explores fraught relationships, trying to keep up with unpredictable people and particularly in the first song, “Ghosts,” investigating lovers’ history.

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[Ghosts]

She tickles her songs with pronoun play, most successfully in “My Manic and I,” she sings, “I can’t control you/ I don’t know you well/ These are the reasons I think that you’re/I’m/we’re ill,” describing with simple wordplay the snarled entanglements of being with someone who’s out of control, being the one who chooses unhealthy people, and the combinations thereof.

The album takes on rebirth and death with a bold face. Marling’s songs may never outright declare what it is she wants exactly, but it’s pretty clear she doesn’t want to be dead. Her songs time and time again reveal a fear of turning into one’s parents and reject the high and mighty version of God. In “Failure,” she emphasizes that if God made her in his image, then he’s a failure. The concept isn’t self-deprecating as it is self-correcting, self-aware in the sense that it supports active living. (Blind faith is a sort of sinking, a giving up). Besides, how are women supposed to live in “his” image? If that’s the case, we don’t stand a fighting chance. (Why can’t God be hermaphroditic or at least fully half and half? Doesn’t seem fair).

Marling is incredibly invested in the idea of rebirth as a burst of personal strength, a self-baptism if you will. Water and birds are the glue working in her songs’ periphery. Water tends to serve as a measure of distance. “There’s a boy across the river but alas I cannot swim.” Everything is out of reach—the lover you’d rather have, the person you’d rather be, the fauna around you both wild and tame for its daily accountability, in other words, birds. They’re all-knowing with their beautiful songs and their sense of direction, sense of the seasons. Birds, however, are a dark subject matter. You can’t touch them, can’t cage them, and they have the feet of monsters. Birds are iconic Laura Marling imagery, in the sense that there is a dark side to most of her songs. They may be constructed like pretty folk songs, but pretty frightening depths are composed in these songs.

For instance, “The Captain and the Hourglass,” is one such Laura Marling song that attains weird levels.

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[The Captain And The Hourglass]

In a Melville sort of way, the title alone suggests the itch for adventure marked or stifled by the passage of time. Marling mulls over falling into water, which among other options, could very well indicate being so far to one side that you’re off the boat and in the water. (My father likes to describe liberals this way). In this song, she introduces the elements (wind and rain) in a holding-her-fists-up-to-God sort of way, a rain-on-me-I-can-take-it way, and an I’m-not-afraid-of-you-you-big-blue-sky way. What threads together the song is Marling’s most memorable, exemplary lyrics. “Inside every man is a heart of sand/ You can see it in his face/ He’ll tick tick tick tick tick tick tick away.” The spell of this song is in these words, the ticking away of time, growing older, seeping with a violent regret as though this song could be played while reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. The use of “captain” is pretty witty too, juxtaposed against God’s judgments, and instilled with mocking self-mockery of the man who thinks he’s in charge, but is really slipping away. After all, who is in charge anyway?

Late last year I saw Laura Marling perform for the CMJ Music Marathon. Her live performance is incredibly different than her record. First of all, her accent is not what I expected at all. I guess I prepared myself to hear something hard-edged and Londonish, but her accent was rather grassy and rolling. In any case, I couldn’t believe how different she sounded during her show, commanding the stage with a voice much bigger and more resonant than the album suggested. I don’t know whether this is saying something about recording technology or how artists cut and mix their first albums. I also don’t know if Laura Marling’s vocal talent has been developing because of her constant touring, and growing a bit older, but there was a noticeable difference between her voice on the album and her voice during the live performance. Live, Laura Marling isn’t fussy or showy. Accompanying her was a cellist who added a lush quality to all of the songs. I know she could have comfortably filled out the room, alone with her guitar. Laura Marling simply opens her mouth in a seemingly effortless way and out comes beautiful sound. Her second album, I Speak Because I Can is due out soon.

Author’s Notes:

~~~~~

The Girls Talk of Troilus

Consider the possibility.

Everyone likes poop.

The weight of his armor equaled three of us.

We learn how to love during lessons.

We want someone who can handle us.

We sit on the wall and watch him pass.

From the book with the war and a woman.

What are you supposed to do besides what you have to?

He loves older women. They were lovers through the gapped stones.

Our parents have that look again.

Replacement. Kneecap eyes. Dress with only a center.

We have everything to look forward to when we grow up.

Farrah Field’s poems have appeared in many publications including the Mississippi Review, Typo, Harp & Altar, La Petite Zine, Copper Nickel, Effing Magazine, and Ploughshares and are forthcoming in Mantis, Cannibal, and Memorious. Rising, her first book of poems, won Four Way Books’ 2007 Levis Prize. She lives in Brooklyn where she co-hosts a reading series called Yardmeter Editions. She blogs at adultish.blogspot.com.

Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints? Contact Jackie Clark: jackie [at] coldfrontmag [dot] com.  Check out previous POP essays here: http://pop.coldfrontmag.com/

by Nate Pritts

Out here in the fields I find myself surrounded by Syracuse slush if by “fields” we understand that I mean both exterior & interior plains & if by “slush” we agree that I mean both the quickly melting snow & the icy drifts of blankness clouding my head.

I find myself surrounded by what I am surrounded by but know, too, that there’s a transcendental reality to all this.  I hope, however, that my hopes for a fully realized life can be real & here & right now (more than ever) & can exist between breathing people & not just shimmery glowing essence.

Lots of people with brains have written about The Who’s record Who’s Next (1971) – & they’ve done a good job of articulating the fantastical, utopian vision that Pete Townshend had in mind for Lifehouse, the concept performance/religion out of which wreckage Who’s Next was forged.

Though I have a brain, I mostly listen to The Who using equal parts ear (I have two of those) & heart (just one, but it’s big) & maybe soul (I imagine I have one of those).  So though I am incredibly drawn to the story of a mad rock god who tried to facilitate a moment in which the music played could reflect every personality in attendance on a given night, that he could play hard enough & better enough (& ENOUGH enough!) to blend those people together, to shake them from their separate lives & accelerate them all together to some revelated state of being, I’m also living in a world in which I know the great experiment failed…at least on the terms Townshend laid down at the time.

The rains are coming in as I type this & my head is buzzing with the word “compathy” because I typed it in a letter to a friend.  I’m thinking about how I communicate.  Though sometimes pegged as melodramatic – over the top – to me, Who’s Next will always be an earnest, rip-your-face-off statement of Romantic Sentiment, music that embodies the soul & makes luminous the body, an undeniable pull to live life more fully than you think possible & to be happy to fail more grandly than ever in the attempt.

Track 1: Baba O’Riley

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“The happy ones are near.  Let’s get together before we get much older.”

Sally, take my hand.  This is an introduction to the record’s method, the complex weaving of the far ends of The Who’s range – melodic, musical, composed & beautiful, paired with a barely contained rage, a ragged & driving guitar that picks its way across desolate fields.

Townshend can barely croon “Don’t cry, don’t raise your eye” before he’s overpowered both by Moon’s explosive & unpredictable percussives & his own voice going rough.  Implicitly, this modulation of tones, this deployment of emotion, gets us closer to the bone of the authentic utterance.  It puts your back into your living.

Track 2: Bargain

“I’d gladly lose me to find you.”

Again, a melodic lure before the Moon landing assault begins.

To find you, I’m gonna drown an unsung man.  That’s a bargain?  Yes.  Punctuated again with light bursts of Daltrey’s signature lilting vocals, the context here is much more frantic, desperate.  The underlying theme is “whatever it takes.”  The drive is to drive – to keep pushing.  To give everything your all.  Thankful for the tragedy; gratitude for the anguish.  Our salvation is that we can, if we’re lucky, be with someone else.  Sally, take my hand.

Track 3: Love Ain’t For Keeping

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“The air is perfumed by the burning firewood.  The seeds are bursting.  The spring is seeping.”

A bucolic moment.  A romantic, & Romantic, breath.  The song starts recollected in tranquility & stays there, despite the resignation of the repeated sentiment: Love ain’t for keeping.  But such tenderness in the acceptance of this – such buoyant affirmation in recognizing your place in a world where even the bad is good (black ash from the foundry perfumes the air) & where we can, yes, be everlasting today.  There’s a subtle shift here as the push for connection foregrounded earlier may have a crack – that maybe searching is the best we can hope for (see also, “The Seeker,” Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, also 1971).  Finding never lasts.

Track 4:  My Wife

“Gonna lay down on the floor; I gotta rest some time so I can get to run some more.”

Panic switch; relay point; terror.  To me this song moves more than the others; perhaps this is the jump cut exterior action the listener responds to after the mostly lyrical moments presented in the previous tracks.  Again & again, after listing consequences, Entwistle (who wrote the lyrics as well) takes solace from the fact that “I’ll still be alive.”

A life of being on the run, of resting only so as to be able to run some more, gets drilled into our heads while brass drones & a piano bangs around.  This is the fallout of the failure.  But, tellingly, it’s never the end.

Track 5:  The Song Is Over

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“I’ll sing my heart out to the infinite sea.”

Maybe the biggest Romantic proclamation on the whole record & it’s both BIG & ROMANTIC.  This epic lost love song repeatedly reinforces the need to simultaneously embrace the past & the future.  Our love is over; it’s all behind me; they’re all ahead now.  While the speaker asserts the confusion inherent in his project (Thought it was me I was looking for), the outstretched heart pleads to be sung out – to be given voice.  As if that’s enough.

It is – if coupled with the bust-your-ass aesthetic implied in a lyric like “I must remember even if it takes a million years.”  Childish, maybe.  But honest & full of feeling.  Sally once took my hand & then let go.

Track 6:  Getting in Tune

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“There’s a symphony that I hear in your heart sets my head a-reeling.”

The song starts as a statement on the process of art-making – ie, singing this note only because it fits in with the chords he happens to be playing.  Whatever one has to say will come out with the proper occasion & the proper occasion may be no occasion at all.  But along with the interior pledge to sing a song & sing it well, comes the drive to connect with an other.  When I look in your eyes and see the harmonies, the heartaches soften.  Never mind the concision of the image spheres & word choice.

There is something lovely in the way Daltrey’s voice alternates between clean & clear sentiment & ragged yowls that seem to try to either 1) cover it up or 2) be overwhelmed by it.  Such complexity of registers makes this a model.  We’ve become more committed than ever to the failed math equation proposed earlier (“One & one don’t make two; one & one make one,” “Bargain”).

Track 7: Going Mobile

“I’m gonna find a home & we’ll see how it feels.”

Daltrey has Townshend take over to lighten the vocalization even more, airing it out a little, while Pete adds some electrifying squeals to the principal project– one of being out on the run, experiencing, not stopping.

The speaker says all this momentous momentum is his “solution” to the problem that has been posed in song after song on this record.  How do we live?

How do we live in a world that has other people in it when, ultimately, we have to live without other people?

Track 8:  Behind Blue Eyes

“No one knows what it’s like to feel these feelings like I do.”

An opening croon disables your defenses for the anger barely concealed underneath this ode to separate living.  There’s a fallacy in the very first line – obviously we all know what it’s like to feel – that gets clarified after the emotional floodgates are opened.  Logistically, we feel isolated & alone in our emotions until we learn to actually express our anguish & hope (my love is vengeance that’s never free).  Then, we come to the truth of the matter – that no other person knows what it’s like to feel these feelings like I do.  Rewind to “compathy,” a term that means essentially sharing your feelings with other people (maybe a little more possible, in this Next world, than empathy which takes as its fundamental principal that you can feel the feelings of others).

Once unleashed, the speaker has no choice but to enumerate all the instances in which an other might be able to help mediate an experience of the world.  But this just seems like so much fist-shaking.  The hope has long since been given up on.

Track 9:  Won’t Get Fooled Again

“Smile & grin at the change all around.  Pick up my guitar & play.  Just like yesterday.”

 

What’s left?  Now that the world has been revealed as a kind of disappointment in & of itself, that the only thing left for all of us is to keep on keeping on, just like yesterday, we shout out loud that we won’t get fooled again.  We know better!  Though certainly that’s a lie – that the Romantic spirit carries us ever & always hopeful in search of that connection, that transcendence.

If the world is a failure & human interconnection doesn’t work, what choice do we have but to keep trying?  We pray we won’t get fooled again while being pretty sure we will & are glad of it.

Why else end the record with a scream?

~~~

How To Say Goodbye Early Morning

When the words don’t add up, skyrocket
the marigold picture you’ve kept in your heart.
If accumulation isn’t

a poem it might just be some drift.  I’m just
snow; I’m typing miles of slush.

I’m just but I’m being tried & the discussion
splinters the shut door.  Today
is decommission day, a frantic blocked

transmission hitting its beak against the glass
lonely for the living room.  I’m done with

hummingbird.  I’m ready to stay put or drop
broken to the ground after one frantic rush
too many.  But the sky was clear!  Some invisible

brick, some crack on the wing.  I’m done
with trudge though I’m marshaling

my forces.  I’m putting on my boots.  I’m
a parade dress, obvious lockstep as I blanket
the bed & check my watch.  We’re going

through maneuvers.  I can’t remember
if I mentioned the sun.  I’m afraid to look back

& check.  I’m afraid to stop.  The workings
a mystery, the feelings of hunger & heat.
People, here are the results.  Here’s the arc

stuck far up my sleeve, ready to throw down
at the right time.  Here’s the trajectory for today.

Today, I’m left or leaving. Would I have stayed
a few more minutes if someone had tricked me
into thinking those minutes repair & build?

Nate Pritts is the author of three full-length books of poems – The Wonderfull Yeare (Cooper Dillon Books, 2010), Honorary Astronaut (Ghost Road Press, 2008) & Sensational Spectacular (BlazeVOX, 2007).  His poetry & prose have been published widely, both online & in print, in journals such as The Southern Review, Jacket, Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Octopus, & Forklift, Ohio among many others.  He is the founder & principal editor of H_NGM_N.  Find him online at http://www.natepritts.com.

Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints? Contact Jackie Clark: afterthoughtgraveyard [at] gmail [dot] com.  Check out previous POP essays here: http://pop.coldfrontmag.com/