Rose McLarney’s poetry collection Colorfast is filled with strong women and provocative explorations of their world.
Shane Perlowin – Owls
Colorfast opens with a poem titled “Question” and an inquiry inviting the reader’s own thoughts. So, this playlist will start with a contemplative, instrumental track to interpret as you will. Also, this is solo guitar and avant-garde, yet connected to classical and international influences. The poems in Colorfast, at times, may feel lonely or lost, still they too seek connections between time periods and places. And Perlowin’s music—including recordings with the band The Ahleuchatistas, which I highly recommend—comes out of the mountains of western North Carolina, where I grew up, and with its innovation, exceeds expectations for regional art.
Palace Music – The Brute Choir
Will Oldham must appear near the beginning of this list because, though I am categorized as an Appalachian writer and have written a book that takes its name from a ballad, I arrived at an interest in such sources only after hearing their influence on contemporary artists such as him. “The Brute Choir’s” words “Withdraw, withdraw, you live so far from town” feel like they describe how my speakers live and what I write about. And I suppose there have been times when a man’s voice saying, as this song’s does, “I’ve never hurt someone so young, and never held someone so sweet,” or implying sentiments along those lines, were once part of my and my speakers’ experiences too. These days, I have folkways to thank for material such as a superstition that, to predict who she will marry, a girl should, “Hold a dumb supper. Set the table in silence, / with your eyes shut, while walking backward.”
Adia Victoria – And Then You Die
The next few selections reference lyrics that correspond with themes in the book (though I don’t mean to imply too much comparison between the perspective I can offer and others’). Victoria’s words in this song are about wanting a mother’s stories and about mortality, ideas I address in Colorfast. Also, when I really like the song is after the intensity suddenly escalates well over halfway through. Some of my poems twist at the end, with the pleasanter meaning I’ve been trying to construct or uphold giving way to a hard truth. If you finally extract the story a woman has long kept to herself, will it be easy to hear and what will it change?
Broadcast – Locusts
Colorfast’s central color is red, which the poems consider as both a pigment applied and vividness faded and discover in rocks, roots, cosmetics, fabrics, stains, and blood, among many sources. The color on which Broadcast is concentrating in this song is yellow. They dwell in their color as I did in what Christopher Kempf, in his review in Prepositions, called “the Albersian color study” of Colorfast. (Albers wrote, “If one says ‘Red’ – the name of color – and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds.” I wanted to reference his theories both because they convey how subjective perceptions are and because Black Mountain College, where Albers taught, is an important part of western North Carolina history.)
Ibibio Sound Machine – The Pot is on Fire
Another of Colorfast’s focuses is food—and how those people denied other powers tried to find pleasure in it and expressed themselves in the preparation of meals. The poem “Studying the Silences” reminds, “kitchens have always been loud / with lids banging on pots come to boil, bursts / of bubbling oil, knives’ clash and cleave, / talk of meat and bread, curing and uprising.” Eno Williams, whose bold voice and beats fill the room in a way I wish more women would, has explained the lyrics of “The Pot is on Fire” on the Merge Records site: “The song is a food dance that celebrates the ‘happy place’ when the food will be ready soon… ‘It’s also metaphorical”… ‘Something is brewing which will soon bear fruit.’”
Blouse – Time Travel
My work contains many poems of lost love, which are broadly about the past more than they are about any one person. And I spend so many of my hours remembering that I’m sure I fail to focus on the present when I should. “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory,” as Louise Gluck wrote. Or as Charlie Hilton sings, “Time machines can be unfortunate when they’re in your head.” All of the songs on the album on which “Time Travel” appears, regardless of lyrics, express nostalgia with their synthy sound—nostalgia for the 1980s, which may make particularly apparent how ironic or even foolish it can be to romanticize preceding eras. And the idea of time travel provides a segue backward to my high school years, to some songs I listened to over and over then. These songs might well have been playing in the car of the adolescent speaker in Colorfast who loiters at gas stations and tries to feel attracted to the small-town boys who would never let such weird stuff come through the speakers of their big trucks.
Sonic Youth – Bone
Again, the lyrics: In “Bone,” they’re about a thirteen-year-old girl, what mama don’t know, the body, sexuality, and freedom, but the latter “just for a little while.” Additionally, in the song, there’s the alternation between Kim Gordon’s voice, which could not be cooler, and the noise the listener has to suffer, which must be like the “just taking it” (abuse) and not telling the girl endures. While my poems have no quality like feedback, in many of them there are questioning searches for meaning that exist in combination with moments of more composed pleasure. In “The Ladies Home Journal of Interior Decoration,” I examine oppressive advice such as this quote about decorating girls’ rooms: “Temporary expressions ought to be recognized as such and made easily convertible to another style.” Yet the poem goes on to show a granddaughter repurposing her grandmother’s dressing table as a desk, determining, “On the surface where once / she set a bulb- circled mirror, leaned in to determine / what to line, to gloss to shine, to powder flat, and / blend away, I now revise, mark and erase.”
Aphex Twin – 4
I can’t tell you how long it has been since I heard anyone playing Aphex Twin. Well, now I’ve put it on a playlist as a reminder of when electronic music seemed so original and to be rebelling (against easily danceable beats). These are qualities that, as a quiet girl, I wished were associated with me. While, if you’d asked me why I was drawn to Richard D. James’ music then, what I would have talked about was the edginess, what I really loved was the beauty of his melodies. Now, James’ shimmering notes that transcend the grinding, glitchy sounds suggest to me the minds of people rising above whatever settings or roles they’re stuck in, like a woman in one of my poems who escapes the chore of pushing a rattling shopping cart across a parking lot by imagining where Native footpaths were and how rivers travel.
The Fall – My New House
Perhaps the aesthetic of my writing seems a far cry from—or an overly equivocal aside compared to—The Fall’s. But I do try to achieve brevity when it suits the poem’s purpose, try to get each line down to the essentials, so I notice how Mark E. Smith often finds just one or two phrases that are worthy of repeating for an entire song. I get more than one use out of some my titles. “Her Own” is the title of a poem that mixes up sillage (“the scent following after the wearer / of perfume moving through a room”) and silage (fermented pig feed). It’s also the title of a second poem about pure notes, “Soliflores…perfumes / featuring a single flower—/only the lily, or only the rose.” Furthermore, the external soundscape of many of the women in Colorfast would have been dominated by, if not post-punk, male voices. And I mean to set up a contrast:
Clogs – On the Edge
Following The Fall with this track is jarring, but so is the experience of trying to find another home after your first. In the poem “Realizing”, a woman who has had to leave her childhood landscape where mica sparkled in the creeks and soil attempts to comfort herself with the notion of “Mica the mineral / made into insulation for toasters and vacuum tubes, / felt, paint, roofing, joint compound…Mica as filling in wallboard, fragments of / the Appalachian chain, linked, companions to me yet.” The juxtaposition of these songs, the harsh “new house” and the dreamy “cabin for two at the end of the world,” captures something of the struggle in Colorfast, about which Rebecca Gayle Howell has written: “This is a book for anyone who has ever longed for a home, even when it hurts. In other words, this book is for us all.” I hope the eclecticism of this playlist does reach some readers who wouldn’t otherwise think Colorfast might be a book for them.
Jorge Ben – Chove Chuva
Ben’s samba is aiming for rapture (never mind that its words are about rain). In my sequencing of the poems in Colorfast, I intended to create an arc over the course of the three sections, moving from the darkest poems in the middle section toward a sort of redemption in the last. I didn’t force the book to reach a state of un-tempered joy—which would have been false—yet it does contain poems of celebration. Nothing I write is purely autobiographical, but, after poems alluding to troubling male behaviors, there are poems for a man like my husband whom a woman can love, in spite of it all. The collection includes a poem inspired by our wedding and about odds-defying exceptions, that reads, “the day I was a bride, I pulled on / the strapless dress, trusting the fabric, for a time, to hold. It did.” And the records played at our wedding reception included “Chove Chuva.”
Ought – These 3 Things
The vocals in this song are almost ridiculously glam. The album it’s on was a change from the band’s original tenser, more angular sound, which attracted me. But, however acerbic my first thoughts on a matter may be, by the time I’m finished with a poem, rhyme or alliteration or another auditory embellishment will have worked its way in. And that linguistic music will likely lead me to reveling in imagery, such as that of “The American Museum of the Housecat” and its cat mummy, cat carousel, and 10,000 cat-depicting oddities, which I considered until I could spin them into symbols of hope. “It merits this,” “These Three Things” declares about life.
Kikagaku Moyo – Dripping Sun
This Japanese psychedelic band was the last group I saw perform before Covid and its quarantines (and a great deal of worrisome time to try to salvage by writing). The multiple layers and moods contained in a single Kikagaku Moyo track suggest the kind of complex impressions of the world and inner life an individual has to hold in her head in isolation, be it imposed by international events or personal circumstances such as a remote location or a death. In “Dripping Sun,” a delicate voice coexists with the loud guitar riffing. My poems see desiccated leaves clinging to a tree in the hush of winter and cast them as “streamer, banner, fanfare.” As a writer, I aspire to entertain tenderness, some indulgence and extravagance, though I don’t pretend I can do away with what threatens such qualities.
Bonnie Prince Billie – Even if Love
I’m circling back to Will Oldham to move this playlist towards a close, as my poetry collections tend to have elements that are returned to and revisited. For example, there are two poems in Colorfast about blackberries, one of which sees their seasonality as a metaphor for all that cannot last, and another that, in a later section, argues back, showing making blackberry jam, quite practically, as a means of preserving what can feed us. “Even If Love” makes a gesture like Colorfast’s final poem, “You Must Know,” which looks at loved ones moving into shadow—and persists in pronouncing love for them, even knowing that love does not save anything. But this song is so stripped down and desolate, I need one more:
Dollar Brand – The Pilgrim
“The Pilgrim” is a long journey gives the listener time to make peace with what’s to come and a subtle piano crescendo for a finale. My poem “You Must Know” concludes, “May this be small enough to carry with you,” and I believe lines of poetry can, no matter how conflicted, be small things people wish to and are permitted to keep.
Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Colorfast, Forage, and Its Day Being Gone, from Penguin Poets, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books. She is coeditor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, from University of Georgia Press, and the journal Southern Humanities Review. Rose has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell and Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences; served as Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the Frost Place; and is winner of the National Poetry Series, the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Appalachian Writing, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry, among other prizes. Her work has appeared in publications including American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and The Oxford American. Currently, she is professor of creative writing at Auburn University.