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April 14, 2020
Cynthia Atkins's Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "Still-Life With God"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Cynthia Atkins's poetry collection Still-Life With God offers startling insight and lyrical wisdom in these glimpses at the intersection of faith and life.
The Los Angeles Review of Books wrote of the collection:
"All the trauma stored as silence becomes a source of language, a song that is itself a mastery of the pain and history. In this context, the collection’s struggle finds rapid resolution. The final pages expand with a voice that shapes the air into a kind of web, like a spider, producing something protective and a source of nourishment."
In her own words, here is Cynthia Atkins's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Still-Life With God:
My book Still-Life With God (Saint Julian Press) grapples with a heathen’s spiritual life in a culture running amok with hardcore consumerism and social media frenzy. No, the poems are not “religious” in scope, but in fact, attempt to take God back from religion. These poems address coming-of- age, adulthood, motherhood, womanhood, selfhood—a Yankee, a Jew, a feminist living in Southern Appalachia. My life, it seems, is filled with dualities, rubbing up against each other. The poems speak in many tongues and voices. With titles like “God Is a Library, “God Is a Medicine Cabinet: “God Is the Butter-dish,” “God Is My Editor.” My work speaks a lot to mental health and the self as exploited figure in this crazy new maze of social media. Music is a salve. This playlist is the art meds to combat the demons. Every day most of us are confronting an existential crisis—depression, anxiety, existential loneliness.
I listen to a lot of eclectic music as preamble—but when composing, I don’t like to write to music that has words. I listen to a lot of Jazz, but a lot of other music when I’m gearing up to write. Many on this list are tuning forks, and they all have brought me to a place in way or another. In Still-Life With God—the word “God” makes me feel naked. It strips me down like bare trees in winter and makes me feel vulnerable and exposed. I felt it was a risky title—and also somewhat indelicate, kind of like the f-word. Just where does this word belong; well, this is the kind of thing the book tries to excavate. And here are my music meds that kept me buoyed and engaged along the way.
1. Peace Piece: the great jazz composition by Bill Evans is the piece I go to when I want to plunge the depths of my being. I think it is just an exquisite dirge. It makes me sad in the way that makes me want to write, makes me want to disclose and connect the dots to things, people and objects. My go-to piece that allows demons and angels to congregate at the same dinner table. There is such a sense of utter solitude in this ballad. Both discordant and holy, it gives me a real sense of awareness and peace—pun intended. I love the quintessential photo of Bill Evans where he is smoking a cigarette, playing piano, ruffling his forehead. Just about the best image ever.
2. Nick Cave—“Into My Arms”: Nick Cave always brings me to deeper places of being. His music feels like the ghosts that never leave the party. Always haunting and haunted. Echoes of a self here. This song brings me to an edge, the one I like to write from and look down and see what you can see. “I don’t believe in an interventionist God. Into my arms, Into my arms O lord.”
3. Twenty One Pilots—“My Blood”: Still-Life With God is about the bonds, familial and made family. This song is about tight bonds and being loyal to your blood—your people, whoever they may be. I love the lyrics “You’re facing down a dark hall. I’ll grab my light and go with you.” What amazed me most about the tune is that I only heard the song no air, but when I saw the duo playing it live, Tyler Joseph’s range spans two octaves, and it wasn’t until I saw it performed, that I realized he was singing both sections, which I thought were two entirely different people. It amazed me, what a range. The song has a funk beat, but when Joseph sings that “Stay with me, no, you don’t need to run, stay with me, my blood,” it is just exquisite, and the same voice for both octaves.
4. Keith Jarrett—“My Song”: I like to listen to music filled with adrenaline and happiness. And I like to write to sad ballads. This is a tune that always brings me to the core of myself, the place I need to be to compose. It is lilting and flutters with that high piano pitch. “Still-Life with God” is a study in the self in all its incarnations—good, bad, and ugly. It feels like an old coat, and holds me close.
5. “Mountain at my Gates”—Foals: “Show me a foothold from which I can climb”—this tune feels like a heathen’s spiritual—“I see a mountain at my gate. I see a darkness in my faith. I drive my car without the breaks.” These lines speak to many of themes I was addressing in my book: the idea of mental health, of darkness and trying to hold on, to find a foothold when things seem really dim.
6. Laura Nyro, was my first muse. Her voice and music are so indelible and unique. I had the joy of seeing one of the last performances at the Bottom Line in New York City. In the small audience that night, Phoebe Snow and Patti Labelle were sitting at a small table to watch her. Her Tin Pan Alley delivery, her bluesy staccato, her words so full of joy and pain, just spoke to me. “Upstairs by a Chinese Lantern” was so different from any pop lyric I had heard: “Milk, soap, tobacco, matches. Sweep the floor, while the dishes drown.” These lyrics are poetry and they always inspire me.
I think Laura Nyro is the soul mother of Amy Winehouse, whose range of lyric and voice euphony seems symbiotic. I relate to this subject matter in my poems. Subjects that address the mind, the body, and the abuses incurred on women as a whole in our culture.
7. John Coltrane’s Blue Train: the album was recorded in 1958 when he was part of a band with Thelonious Monk. All compositions are Coltrane’s. I have written to this album for many years—it always takes me places my feet can’t go. There is something about a jazz ballad that opens many doors in the psyche—for me, this album allows me to free up, compose, and find a mental and spiritual space of refuge. There’s a lot of ache in Coltrane’s notes. I feel the ache.
8. Les McCann & Eddie Harris “Swiss Movement” to get in the mood—my happy place—this album (live) just lights the house on fire. Gets the adrenaline flying, full of vim and vigor. I think this is one of my favorite albums. Perfectly arranged and performed.
9. Vampire Weekend—“Step”: Sometimes you just need tunes that make you nostalgic and make you feel good—“They didn’t know how to dress for the weather—I fee lit in my bones, I feel it in my bones. Such a modest love. I can’t do it alone.” All these themes speak to me: love, weather, not going it alone. My book speaks to the way that things go deep within us, way beyond the surfaces of things. We feel it deep in our bones. It’s always somewhere between the sacred and the profane.
10. Death Cab for Cutie—“Soul Meets Body”: “If the silence takes you, I hope it takes me too. When soul meets body. I can’t believe it’s true that there are roads left in both of my shoes. A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere.
11. Atlas Genius—"Trojans": This tune to speaks to the daily pathos I feel in writing and in life: “Write a song, make a note for the love that sits inside your throats. Trojans in my head.”
12. Coldplay—"Clocks": A refutation of time, Borges said. Yes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. As a writer, I am always battling for more time. It is the thing there seems to be never enough of. In Still-Life with God, time is part of the social construct, it is part of the existential sense of our destiny. In a poem, I think the sense of time and narrative structure is more like a painting. It is a synesthesia effect, in that all the senses are being engaged at once.
13. “Everything I Wanted”—Billie Eilish: I love this new fresh talent with an old soul. Her voice is bluesy and it bellows. There’s such a sense of fight and vulnerability in this song. It reminds me of “Be careful what you wish for.” Usually the things we want are just a little out of reach, for a reason. We need to reach. How often do we look back at what we wished for.
14. Velvet Underground—“Venus in Furs”: Well, enough said.
15. Pat Matheny Group—“Are You Going with Me”: I recently heard Lyle Mays of the Pat Matheny group died. I listened to this recording a lot when I was in college. A few months back, I was in the car and it came on. And as I listened, I began to weep uncontrollably. I hadn’t heard it in years, and what came to mind as I started weeping was a very visceral sense and memory of my life, my writing life—before the advent of the internet. Yes, I am old enough to remember that. It came over me like a flood, a real sense of longing for the days where you got up for a cup of coffee and you didn’t already have five hundred people in your herd. I truly think social media is a tragic addiction of our culture and it has really stolen our souls in large ways. This is also a big subject in my book—where does the self and spiritual life belong this new paradigm?
Cynthia Atkins is the author of Psyche's Weathers and In The Event Of Full Disclosure. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Apogee, BOMB, Cleaver Magazine, Cortland Review, Cultural Weekly, Diode, Florida Review, Green Mountains Review, North American Review, Seneca Review, Tampa Review, Tinderbox, Thrush, Valparaiso Review, and Verse Daily. Formerly the assistant director for the Poetry Society of America, she has taught English and Creative Writing, most recently at Blue Ridge Community College, where she curated a quarterly Reading Series. Atkins is an Interviews Editor at American Microreviews and Interviews. She earned her MFA from Columbia University, and fellowships and prizes from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Writer's Voice, and Writers@Work, with several nominations from The Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes. More work and info at: www.cynthiaatkins.com
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