Dear friends,
We just published an episode featuring an interview with the brilliant poet Adrian Matejka, the editor for Poetry magazine, whose most recent release is Be Easy; New and Selected Poems.
To sum up the first part of the interview in one word is, in this case, easy: music. It’s everywhere in his work, his conversation, his approach to the world: Prince, Miles Davis, David Bowie, brass, hip-hop. He was born into a military family, his early years were spent speaking German, and he’s also got some French and Spanish, so languages and their musicalities through different vocabularies are fluent to him in speech and writing.
We talk about other things too: identity, bullets, masculinities. But for our question here today, it’s the music I want to stick with.
Once, with a five-hour drive in ice and snow ahead of me, I made a playlist, the selection criteria for which was that I had to know every lyric to every song. I sang from Cork to Belfast, and it took six hours, not five — but I’d made the soundtrack longer than I thought it needed to be. The hours were swallowed up.
Another time, I was part of a scratch choir at a festival in England: 1,000 people singing harmonies. I looked around at one point, and the man next to me was weeping as he was singing, cheeks soaked with his own salt water, and he was holding his hands — fingers spread wide — in front of him as if to soak in as much of the glory of the music as he could.
On her album The Ugly One with the Jewels, Laurie Anderson explains the title track (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube) as a nickname given to her once when she visited her anthropologist brother. While telling the story, she moves seamlessly to The Tempest by Shakespeare:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,— ding-dong, bell.Way before I had read The Tempest, I could recite this, because of the ache in Laurie Anderson’s voice and recital, the breath, the music of her speaking, the bell of it all. When I listen to it again, as I did just now, I am back in the house in Belfast I’d just moved to, wondering if I’d made the right move, knowing that only time would tell and knowing that I’d get through that time with poetry and voice. I heard a radio interview once with a musician-turned-psychologist who had researched the emotional effect that certain notes of music can have on a person, how memory, transportation, change, feeling, and entire seasons of a life can be held in a small phrase of a few notes, a trumpet solo, or a choir’s combined chord.
My question this week: What is the music that lives in you? Miles Davis? Laurie Anderson? Phil Lynnot? Phoebe Bridgers? Joan Armatrading? What does it hold for you?
I’ll see you in the comments, and for those of you in England — I’ll see you in London on Wednesday night or at the Greenbelt Festival.
The Latest from Poetry Unbound
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Poetry in the World
A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Frenchtown, NJ; Hickory, NC; Cambridge and Stockbridge, MA; Collegeville, MN) and England (London, Kettering)
Join me in celebrating the launch of my new collection, Love Between Men, hosted by St. Martin–in-the-Fields Church, beginning at 6 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
August 27–30, Kettering, England
I’m absolutely delighted to be returning to this year’s Greenbelt Festival, a gathering of arts, activism, and belief in England. (For registration info, click on the date heading.)
I’ll be leading evening worship alongside Nadia Bolz-Weber and Doug Gay as part of the Festival of Preaching, beginning at 5:30 p.m. GMT. (For registration info, click on the date heading.)
October 1, Frenchtown, New Jersey
Join me at Frenchtown Bookshop for a conversation and book signing, beginning at 6:30 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
October 11, Hickory, North Carolina
Join violinist and fiddle player Liam Bailey and myself for an afternoon of music and poetry at Grace Chapel, beginning at 3 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
I’m leading a virtual craft intensive on poetry and desire through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
I’m delighted to be joining Ellen Bass’s wonderful Living Room Craft Talks Series for a discussion of the poetry of eros, beginning at 12 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
November 2, Cambridge, Massachusetts
I’ll be reading alongside Susan Stewart as part of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series, beginning at 8 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
I’m leading a virtual course on lyric address through Arvon, beginning at 7 p.m. GMT. (For registration info, click on the date heading.)
December 18–20, Stockbridge, Massachusetts
I’m leading a retreat on poetry and prayer at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
Michelle Penn and I will be reading together in a virtual event with Café Writers, beginning at 7:30 p.m. GMT. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
May 24–29, Collegeville, Minnesota
I’ll be returning to the Collegeville Institute to lead a workshop on poetry and prayer; applications are open through the 13th of December. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
Lost Words: There's a wonderful project here in Britian to retrieve the words of nature being stripped from every day use, led by the gentle prescient Robert MacFarlane. Alongside his poems a group of musicians created songs to celebrate these same small creatures, birds, nuts. As a conclusion to the set is The Lost Word Blessing. I've danced away sorrow, sat with acceptance and mourned those leaving this life including my most beloved happy beacon of a cousin, Cathy. She listened to it as life slipped away:
Even as the hour grows bleaker
Be the singer and the speaker
And in city and in forest
Let the larks become your chorus.
And when every hope is gone
Let the raven call you home.
https://youtu.be/Hg1xFYpXuWA?is=QKLejFxZ8m_UXySM
I think you can get a new tattoo that somehow seems to have always been a part of you, and the same goes for songs; you can hear something for the first time and need it like it was your own substance. A few of those songs for me are Newcastle by Lankum, Watching you Without Me by Kate Bush, Mercy Street by Peter Gabriel, Only Skin by Joanna Newsom.
I also feel myself transported by a good Irish reel—I know they are meant for dancing but when I hear them all I can see and feel is the land, the birds and rivers and fields—even though it's a land I've not yet met. Music, language, poetry and land—all family to each other.
I'll also just drop here my heartfelt gratitude for heavy music. When I was just quitting smoking, 20 or more years ago now, I got into yoga so I could forge a new relationship with my breath. I lived in a 600 sq.ft. cabin with my partner who was simultaneously deep diving into obscure Southern sludge metal—low, droney, riffy, distorted, desperate music full of rage and sorrow with griefy screaming vocals. In yoga classes I would brace against the soothing music—nothing in me felt like that. At home, my whole being would soften in the resonant container of this heavy, distraught music.