William Walsh’s novella The Poets is an inventively told and entertaining reckoning of poets, and through them, life.
Joseph Fasano wrote of the book:
“It’s rare to find a genre-defying work that is by turns—and sometimes all at once—absurdly comedic, straight-faced satirical, psychologically insightful, and unexpectedly heartbreaking. The Poets is such a work, and readers are bound to see—somewhere in its fun-house mirrors—their worlds, their neighbors, themselves.”
In his own words, here is William Walsh’s Book Notes music playlist for his novella The Poets:
I love reading literary biographies—Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, Brad Gooch’s Flannery, and Deirdre Bair’s Beckett are longtime favorites of mine. A longer list of great literary biographies would include Tracy Daugherty’s Hiding Man, about Donald Barthelme; Heather Clark’s Red Comet, on Sylvia Plath; and Burning Boy, Paul Auster’s recent book on Stephen Crane.
What I like best about literary biographies is the effect they have on me as a reader. It’s a form of storytelling that encapsulates why I read—to be entertained, to be informed, to be enlightened. With The Poets (Erratum Press), I was attempting a short-cut to the effect of a hundred literary biographies.
“April Fool” by Patti Smith
April is such a maligned month. But Patti Smith resurrects its reputation with this cheery song. The song is an invitation to race through alleyways on rusted bikes in tattered coats. “Come,” she songs, “we’ll break all the rules.”
“Summertime in England” by Van Morrison
Morrison has sung about poets often through the years, such as “Tore Down ala Rimbaud” and “Rave On John Donne.” In “Summertime in England,” a 15 minute-plus suite, he asks, “Did you ever hear about Wordsworth and Coleridge? They were smoking up in Kendal.” He notes that “Yeats and Lady Gregory corresponded,” that “T.S. Eliot chose England,” and that James Joyce “wrote streams of consciousness books.” The arrangement includes propulsive horns and slashing strings, but much of the song is just Morrison singing over drums and bass.
“Cemetry Gates”
All due respect to Morrisey and Oscar Wilde, but Keats and Yeats would not lose any kind of match against them. I heard the line as “weird lover Wilde” but Smiths’ drummer, Mike Joyce, confirmed on Twitter on September 12, 2020 that the lyric is “whale blubber Wilde.”
“John Allyn Smith Sails” by Okkervil River
A dream song about the poet John Berryman, born John Allyn Smith, Jr. It’s an elegy for the poet that slowly gathers wind and transforms into a solemn and sincere rendition of “Sloop John B.”
“Crackle & Drag” by Paul Westerberg
Westerberg took inspiration from the last line of Plath’s poem “Edge,” one of the last poems she wrote before her suicide in February of 1963. He sings, “Her hair was dirty in February/She was thirty in 1963/A thousand seconds more/On the oven door/She took a long deep breath/While her babies slept.”
“Bobby Peru” Luna
Bobby Peru, portrayed by Willem Dafoe in David Lynch’s 1989 film Wild at Heart, is no poet. He kills himself with a shotgun after an unsuccessful bank robbery—his head comes clean off his shoulders. But this song is not really about Bobby Peru—it’s an apologia to Sylvia Plath, with an “S” is for sorry chorus. Dean Wareham speak-sings, “Murder is bad and suicide is sad/Why would a girl like that put her head in the oven?/You have your theories, and I’ve got one too/It’s such a waste.”
“Poetry Man” by Phoebe Snow
Rumor is the poet in this song is Jackson Browne (though Snow said that is not so). The “Poetry Man” is a cheating husband who “makes things all right” for his mistress, then goes home to see his wife. The poet in this song isn’t really a poet, he’s just a guy who is good in bed. He is a “bashful boy” but he is also “a genie.” He has “eyes that light the night,” and he turns the singer into a “giggling teenager and then a sultry vamp.” Most importantly, the poetry man “makes things all right.” He also makes “things all rhyme.”
The Poet’s Resume” by Tim McGraw
The poet has some gaps in his resume. He’s had some dead-end jobs, like “washing dishes in a no name diner” before he “worked his way up to line-cook on the weekdays.” The song was written by Lori McKenna, a prolific songwriter from Stoughton, Massachusetts who has written more than a few country hits.
“Poem and Closing Time” by Luke Bryan
Bryan has a more famous song about closing time, a duet that he sings with Casey Musgraves, but this one connects poetry to that feeling when the honky-tonk closes and you have to go somewhere. “Poems and closing time/I’m lost again past two.”
“I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain” by Andrew Bird & Phoebe Bridgers
The poet of Amherst liked a singalong as much as the next recluse imagining her funeral services, with “Mourners to and fro.” Bird & Bridgers sing the poet’s lines well. The song has a sparse arrangement that highlights their harmony vocals.
“Tortured Poets Department” Taylor Swift
The title track of Swift’s eleventh studio album, which turned out to be a surprise double record of 31 new songs, offers the image of an atavistic typewriter (“straight from the tortured poets department”) that an ex-boyfriend left behind in the songwriter’s apartment. She wonders, rightly, “Who uses typewriters anyway.” The chorus sums up the relationship perfectly, “I laughed in your face and said, ‘You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith/This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.’”
also at Largehearted Boy:
William Walsh’s playlist for his book Forty-four American Boys
William Walsh’s playlist for his book Unknown Arts
William Walsh’s playlist for his book Questionstruck
William Walsh’s playlist for his novel Without Wax
William Walsh is the author of The Poets (Erratum Press), Forty-Five American Boys (Outpost 19), ON TV, Stephen King Stephen King, Unknown Arts, Ampersand, Mass., Pathologies, Questionstruck (all from Keyhole Press) and Without Wax (Casperian Books). His work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Artifice, LIT, Rosebud, Quarterly West, Juked, New York Tyrant, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency The &NOW Anthology: Best of Innovative Writing, Dzanc’s Best of the Web, and New Micro: Norton Anthology of Exceptionally Short Fiction.