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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Erika Meitner’s poetry collection Assembled Audience lyrically distills our current troubled world to reveal its wonders and joy.
Camille T. Dungy wrote of the book:
“Assembled Audience is a tour d’force to treasure. With sharp attention and bright wit, Erika Meitner’s poems gather the good, the bad, and the ugly of our present day and refine what’s assembled into pure and splendid glory. I love this book.”
In her own words, here is Erika Meitner’s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Assembled Audience:
1. Come Together – Daphne Willis
Assembled Audience is a book I wrote over four years from 2019 to 2024, about the ways people gather together: in celebration and in mourning, in public and private, in airports and on beaches, for leisure or to protest.
This Daphne Willis cover of the Beatles song “Come Together” from her 2016 five-song Beatles cover album has her great raspy alto vocals over catchy updated percussion, but Willis is a really interesting genre-hopping singer-songwriter—she’s done pop, hip-hop, R&B, soul, rock, folk, and even EDM. As a poet, I aspire to what I think of as the ‘delta factor’—being a little stylistically unpredictable from poem to poem—and Assembled Audience has all different kinds of work: documentary, narrative, enigmatic, lyric, prose, colloquial, braided, formal.
Fun fact: the original “Come Together” was written by John Lennon in 1969 as a campaign song for Timothy Leary’s run for California governor. It’s original title was Leary’s campaign slogan: “Come together, join the party.” Leary was the father of the psychedelic movement and introduced LSD to many as a way to promote social interaction and raise consciousness, which is basically what I always want poetry to do. Lennon eventually added nonsense lyrics to bulk out the campaign song, and Paul McCartney added swampy bass, and it became the opening track for Abbey Road.
2. Tumbalalaika – The Barry Sisters
My book opens with a poem that’s all existential questions, then moves to the beach. I wrote a lot of Assembled Audience at a few different residencies at the Hermitage in Manasota Key, which is this magical place you can’t apply to; they just send you a tiny vial of sand and seashells in the mail one day and invite you down. Manasota Key is a nesting beach for endangered sea turtles, and I grew up going down to Florida to see my grandmothers, who both lived in Hallandale. The Barry Sisters’ “Tumbalalaika” has the upbeat slightly comedic rhythm of shlepping to the beach with all your stuff: the towels, the umbrella, the chairs, the cooler. The Barry Sisters—Minnie Bagelman and Clara Bagelman (who were originally known as the Bagelman Sisters before they anglicized their performing name) sing it entirely in Yiddish—and it reminds me of my Yiddish-speaking Holocaust-surviving grandmother, who appears later on in the book in “A Strikingly Unsettled Portent” and “To Survive I Need You to Survive.”
3. Despacito – Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee
Since 2017’s Hurricane Irma, I’ve been going down to Miami with photographer Anna Maria Barry-Jester to work on a long-running documentary poetry / photo project on sea-level rise and the built environment. We listen to a lot of Zeta 92 in the car driving around the city, and the first year we were there “Despacito” was on the radio like every other hour—it’s a Spanish-language reggaeton pop song—and we could change the station and it would just be on the next station too. It was like we had an actual theme song that came on every time we started our car. Many of the poems in the book take place in Miami, and are part of that ongoing project.
4. Self Control – Laura Branigan
As part of the Miami project, and while I was often down in Florida at the Hermitage, I took it upon myself to watch (or in many cases, rewatch, since I was a big fan as a kid) every single episode of all five seasons of Miami Vice—114 episodes. Laura Branigan’s “Self Control” features in what is potentially one of the worst episodes ever of the show: “The Great McCarthy,” in season 1, where Crockett and Tubbs use information from Izzy, their informant, to catch a drug smuggler who’s also a powerboat racer. In the actual episode the song is covered by a local Miami band called (no joke) “The Gloryhole Drillers” and they’re wearing these amazing sequined outfits. There is a poem in the book made entirely of lines from Miami Vice episodes called “Watching Miami Vice Reruns at the Vagabond Motel.”
5. Mercy Street – Peter Gabriel
The album Mercy Street came out in 1986 when I was eleven years old, and it has some of my favorite songs of all time on it—“Don’t Give Up” (his duet with Kate Bush) and “In Your Eyes” are two songs I spent a lot of time singing to myself as I wore out the cassette tape in my Walkman. Things take a more serious turn in Assembled Audience when I start writing about immigration and displacement, via Our Lady of Charity shrine and Cuban refugees in Miami, and my own grandparents—who fled the Nazis and eventually landed in Queens. The song “Mercy Street” also appears in the third episode of the third season of Miami Vice: “Killshot,” which also features a Jai Alai subplot. The song was actually inspired by Anne Sexton’s poem “45 Mercy Street,” and has some of her poetry in the lyrics, which is wild to me. It’s also super-haunted and melancholy and evokes the loss of a home country to me. Fun fact: Peter Gabriel and Sinéad O’Connor had an on-and-off affair in the early 1990s. You can hear her on his 1992 album Us on “Come Talk to Me” and “Blood of Eden.”
6. Holocene – Bon Iver
Bon Iver is fronted by Justin Vernon, who’s from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and I live in Madison now, so I felt like I needed some Wisconsin representation in here. This song spoke to me deeply when I was writing some of the more simultaneously hopeful and depressing poems in Assembled Audience about climate change and pandemic existential despair, like “Gnostic Spring, or That New York Times Article on Languishing,” and “the world that has been entrusted to us.” Its rising and falling chord changes give the song a sense of motion, but it’s also deeply melancholy, with a little bit of upbeat hope at the end with “But I could see for miles, miles, miles.” I think a lot about poet-as-seer, or poet-as-oracle, and in this book the speaker is definitely a Cassandra of sorts. But that feeling is often tempered with this feeling from “Holocene”—“and at once, I knew I was not magnificent.” Fun fact: the B-side of the single is a cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Come Talk to Me.” Everything is connected!
7. Wagon Wheel – Old Crow Medicine Show
Old Crow Medicine Show is an Americana string band out of Virginia, and since I’ve spent most of my adult life living in Charlottesville (6 years) and Blacksburg (15 years), I’ve been listening to the band since the early aughts. Ketch Secor, the band’s co-founder, used to play with The Hackensaw Boys, a popular Charlottesville band that started in 1999—the year I moved to Charlottesville, and they used to play around town all the time. Many of the poems in Assembled Audience chronicle the landscape and culture of rural Southwest Virginia—the area of Southern Appalachia where I lived from 2007 through 2022 as faculty at Virginia Tech. There are poems about the gun culture in the area (“Liquid Nitrogen” and “It’s Gunna Be All Right”), the political conservatism (“Light-Sensitive Puzzle Piece” and “What I’m saying is the planet is on fucking fire”), the protests against the Mountain Valley Pipeline (“Another Possible Future / Hedge Yer Bets”), and the mountain landscape generally. The poem has a moment in the lyrics where it mentions Roanoke, which was the closest big city to Blacksburg, and whenever I hear it it’s some kind of weird stand-in for my entire time in the region. Also my husband’s old bar band in Blacksburg, The Mud Daubers, used to cover the song, and we’ve heard it everywhere—even in the public market in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where we lived for six months in 2015. It’s like the ultimate Americana song, and the poems in this book are distinctly American, with all this country’s flaws.
8. It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me – Billy Joel
This song came out in 1980, and reminds me so much the childhood summers I spent in the late ’70s and early ’80s in the Catskills at a Bungalow Colony—a series of rustic summer cabins arranged around a communal court where people from working-class (often Jewish) neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn and the Bronx and Staten Island (the outer boroughs) would spend their summers with their kids. Husbands would come up on weekends unless they were public school teachers. There’s a poem in Assembled Audience called “To Survive I Need You to Survive” that takes place at the bungalow colony and it’s an elegy to a childhood friend’s mother. There was a ‘casino’ at the one I spent summers at, which was just a big gathering space with a stage and a jukebox, and a soda fountain counter. When my dad came up on Friday nights or Saturdays we’d go to the casino for ice cream cones, and he’d put “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” on the jukebox. The kids roamed these places in packs, and when it was mealtime, whatever mom was around would usually feed us hot dogs or Kraft mac and cheese on picnic tables and paper plates. Also the first concert I saw once we all had Covid vaccines was Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden during his residency, and it was so joyful to gather again like that, even if we were masked. The whole crowd was on their feet the entire time singing every song, including this one.
9. It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me – Sinéad O’Connor
Sinead O’Connor died while I was writing this book, and the day it happened, I was at an artists’ residency—Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. We were all so distraught that we decided to gather that afternoon at the pool, and one of the composers brought a portable speaker down, and started playing all of her songs, including “Just Like U Said It Would B” while we drank beers and sang along in her honor. Later that night I went back to my studio and wrote “The Shape of Progress,” which is an elegy to Sinéad, but also a poem about invasive species, climate change, and the particular rural landscape of Amherst, Virginia, where the residency was located. There are a lot of songs that appear in poems in this book: “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye, which my kids were obsessed with for a while; “Okay I’ll Admit That I Really Don’t Understand” by The Flaming Lips, which appears in an elegy to David Berman set in Charlottesville (“I tell my students to listen for memory triggers”); “King of Oklahoma” by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, which was on the radio all the time when my family and I were road tripping across the country through National Parks; “Pour Some Sugar on Me” by Def Leppard—but it kind of felt too obvious to put these in the playlist for the book.
10. Di Shvue – Isabel Frey
Assembled Audience ends with “Manifesto of Fragility / Terraform,” which is a poem that’s about the act of resistance—and nature’s survival and the way it’s inextricably tied to human actions. The poem cites an old Yiddish resistance song called “Mir veln zey iberlebn,” but the only version of that song performed that I was able to find while I was writing the book was by the Klezmer band Tsibele on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk_1pw70Qjc). For this playlist I swapped out that song for a rendition of “Di Shvue” by Isabel Frey, which literally means “The Oath” in Yiddish, was the anthem of the socialist Jewish Labor Bund in the early 1900s, and Bundists still sing it when they meet. One of the difficult things about publishing this book is that since I wrote many of these poems, our cultural moment has changed, and the current administration is using the memory of the Holocaust and what they define as antisemitism as a pretext to dissemble and defund higher education, curtail constitutionally protected free speech and the right to assemble, and disappear lawful US residents affiliated with universities who advocate for Palestinian human rights and freedom. As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, as a professor at a major research university, and as an artist, I firmly believe that the only safety we have is through solidarity with others, and not via persecution, repression, and threat.
Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Useful Junk; Holy Moly Carry Me, which won the National Jewish Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Copia; and Ideal Cities, a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely and have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry, Orion, The Believer, and elsewhere. Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Loghaven Artist Residency, T. S. Eliot House, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Marble House Project, Bethany Arts Community, the Mandel Institute, and the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the Creative Writing program and the Conney Project on Jewish Arts.