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.
The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay is filled with inspiration for both writers and teachers of writing.
Ander Monson wrote of the book:
“The lyric essay is at heart a freaky space. The lyric essay is resistance to norming forms. The lyric essay is characterized by leaps: through white space, between different registers of meaning, between ledges of one kind of thinking or writing or genre and another. The lyric essay does not hide its stitches or its seams. What it seems is what it is. The lyric essay is disjunctive and refuses to be simplified for your convenience. The lyric essay is unruly and dislikes boxes. Like Super Happy Fun Ball we do not taunt it. Like a jart, we throw the lyric essay in the air and close our eyes and wait for it to fall. It could pierce us or something else. That it’s sharp means it works, that it reveals. I mean it’s dangerous. It’s risk. It’s that and these and all of this. Read instructions before application. Use The Rose Metal Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay with care.”
In their own words, here is the editors’ and contributors’ Book Notes music playlist for the anthology The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay:
Heidi Czerwiec, Co-Editor: “Frontier Psychiatrist” by The Avalanches
Like the cover image for this Field Guide, lyric essayists are crows and magpies, collecting shiny interesting bits and collaging them into something marvelous. The first time I heard the song “Frontier Psychiatrist”—composed entirely of samples from such sources as John Waters’ Polyester, recordings of comedy bits by Wayne & Shuster and Flip Wilson, and a 1968 orchestral and vocal performance by the Enoch Light Singers—I giggled all the way through it, which is how I react when delighted. Music critic Matthew Horton’s description of it equally applies to many of the best lyric essays: “busy, daft, composed of countless unconnected parts, yet somehow entirely natural as a whole.”
Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, Co-Editor: “Your Ghost” by Kristin Hersh
Kristin Hersh’s “Your Ghost,” from her 1994 debut solo album, Hips and Makers, is about a haunting, a loss or absence so powerful it becomes palpable. Not the jangling post-punk edge of Throwing Muses, or the reverbed ferocity of 50-Foot Wave, but something that hybridizes the emotional intensity of both bands into something new, something lyric, something stunningly vulnerable. Here, Hersh’s voice is unadorned, a raw wild honey that’s all sweetness and sting, accompanied by a simple background of acoustic guitar. She is Orpheus, with his lyre, padding down a darkened hallway, ready to “wake your ghost.” Poetry, song, and image all awaken, blur, complicate, and clarify the narrative in this liminal space between worlds, and Hersh, the singer/artist/writer, is unafraid to cross between the overworld and the underworld. The chorus consists simply of Hersh repeatedly singing “I think last night / you were driving circles around me” surprisingly harmonized by Michael Stipe, until everything becomes pattern, repetition, and visual poem as elegy, invocation, and resurrection.
We also invited contributors to this book to suggest songs that they felt captured the lyric essay quality or strategy that was the focus of their piece in the Field Guide. Many thanks to those who played along! Their picks are below:
Camille T. Dungy: “Shockedelica” by Prince
The ways Prince can weave narratives, tones, and influence to create such splendor of strength and tension while remaining ultimately playful never ceases to amaze. And the is song also braids in multiple vocal registers, all produced by the same voice. Prince name checks his alter ego. Listen carefully and you’ll not that he pitches his voice at a different register when Camille comes on mic. What an object lesson in telling more than one story from the same mind, much like the braided essay.
Sarah Minor: “The Problem With Your Daughter” by Lord Huron
Lord Huron’s album Lonesome Dreams came out the year I started writing my visual essay “Into the Limen” (an excerpt of which appears in this book), which would take me another 5 years to complete. I wrote another piece from the same collection by staying up all night in the University of Arizona library, listening to the album on repeat. Once I was also a daughter with a problem, a kid who put words to what the family passed wordlessly. “Into the Limen” explores that kind of in between space as both a subject and a visual metaphor-—the wee hours and doorjambs where lyric essays seem to be able to reach their tendrils.
Diane Seuss: “Tom’s Diner (DNA Remix)” by Suzanne Vega
Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner (DNA Remix)” makes broad use of the present tense via concrete details from the point of view of an alienated speaker. It contains a newspaper story, and rain, and rain-drenched hair, all of which appear in my model poem from frank: sonnets, and then the cathedral bells call Vega’s speaker back to a nostalgic past, a beloved “you,” and a picnic, but time’s pressure comes along in the form of the train the speaker must hurry to catch in the song’s present tense. Vega first recorded it a cappella. It was then remixed by the duo DNA, and it became a dance club hit. I love the notion that Vega wrote the song using tried and true narrative strategies, and then DNA brought the beat to the party. This is an example of the process of literary influence and improvisation, playing between forms.
Rowan McCandless: “My Favorite Things” by John Coltrane
I love to write while John Coltrane, a Black jazz artist, plays over my stereo system. This song, “My Favorite Things,” reminds me of the memories I collect, write about, and collage together. The way he weaves experimentation and improvisation inspires me; how he is able to take this song, a white musical piece, and transform it to become his own.
torrin a. greathouse: “Lateralus” by TOOL
Many of the same qualities that drew me to Alice Fulton’s engagement with fractals are the very same qualities that underlie my interest in progressive and experimental rock/metal. In particular, this track by TOOL embodies a complex utilization of fractal logics. Organized around the Fibonacci Sequence, “Lateralus” is at once winding and deeply structured. To name only a few of the constraints the band employs, the syllables in each line of the verses correspond to numbers within the sequence, while several of the lines occur at moments that align with the Golden Ratio. Despite this complexity, the lyrics of the song urge listeners to embrace randomness and a lack of control, to “swing on the spirals of our divinity and still be a human.” It’s hard to imagine a more valuable imperative for the application of fractal poetics than that.
Chelsea Biondolillo: “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead
Like a great essayist, one called upon to balance research, memoir, and no small amount of fine art, Radiohead is a band of many talents—from infectious earworms (“Creep”) to soaring cinematic epics (“Exit Music for a Film”). I saw them play in Portland in the 1990s for a couple of bucks and have been a fan ever since. One thing they do incredibly well is weave disparate parts into complex sonic wholes. “Paranoid Android” is a stellar example of this—we start in a subdued ballad, Yorke’s voice full of longing, then after two verses, wander into a starker bridge with a snarl. Suddenly we’re in a banger—guitars and drums thrashing. The song seesaws through these two sides, keening and rage, which seem as different as oil and water (or image and text), and yet…the result is cohesive, nuanced and moving. Just like a killer lyric essay.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil “Homegrown Tomatoes,” by Guy Clark
I double-dog dare anyone to listen to this song and not have a big goofy grin on your face: “Plant ‘em in the spring, eat ‘em in the summer / All winter without ‘em is a culinary bummer.” As I tend my vegetable garden, I find myself humming this song while I’m checking for pests and plucking off any leaves scorched by the brutal Mississippi sun in late June. And if you can’t grow tomatoes at home, please do treat your tastebuds to getting your summer tomatoes from a local farmers’ market, I beg of you. What a bounty and burst on your tongue. My wish for you is that this song opens your heart up for a little joy, a few hours (days?) barefoot, no socks, wider possibilities and shapes for your food odes, and the taste of a summer day on your tongue.
Natanya Pulley: “It’s In Our Hands” by Björk
I prefer the live version because of the choir of Inuit women—in particular the youtube live version, because you get to see the choir and it’s a better recording—but the studio version is also wonderful. Listening to Bjork always feels like entering an environment-–which is my favorite part of writing and reading as well. It’s not pure escapism, which allows us to disconnect and hurdle ourselves into a new realm, but living in the art is a commitment of the senses to be present in another’s voice, audio textures, and rhythms. I crave this and it is how I understand my own experience of writing. I chose “It’s In Our Hands” because of the layering of beats and the anaphoric returns it offers—the delightful surges and deep pulls of it. But also because of the possibility shared in the lyrics. We all need the hope that is inherent in seeking possibility—especially at a time when it is very easy either to escape to safer places in our minds or to churn in a political reality that seeks and has succeeded in dehumanizing sentient beings and sacred earths. I also suggest looking for the live version performed at the Royal Opera House in 2001 because of the performance’s joy and energy.
Ching-In Chen: “Sound Patterns” by Pauline Oliveros
I can think of no musician who had a greater influence on my time in Houston where I wrote the lyric essay “Elgin” (included in the book) than the musician and composer Pauline Oliveros. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, Pauline Oliveros’ deep listening technique reflects my own method of paying attention to the landscape of my neighborhood, including the nighttime song of incessant frogs. Oliveros’ improvisational compositional strategies also deeply influenced some of my closest collaborators.
I chose “Sound Patterns,” created for a cappella mixed chorus in 1961, because of the movement that the work makes from white noise (created vocally using consonants “sh” and variations) to ring modulation (changing the vowel content) to percussive envelopes using the various instruments of the body (tongue clicks, snap fingers) and filtering through muting, as discussed in Heidi Von Gunden’s The Music of Pauline Oliveros. These techniques create transformations from section to section, a journey through the variation and mixing of techniques, much like the leaping between segments in the lyric essay.
Katrina Vandenberg: “The Long One” (medley, side two of Abbey Road) by The Beatles
The first time an editor asked me to write a 4,500-word essay for a magazine, I froze: that was nearly half the length of a book of poems. But I said yes, thinking that, even though I didn’t know how to write a piece that long, I knew how to write forty-five words one hundred times. From there I delved into the exciting process of figuring out how to sustain a lyric over longform. What worked for me was writing a series of fragments around my subject, knowing that I could eventually edit and arrange them to make a whole. I think of this process when I hear The Beatles’ arrangement of eight fragments, arranged into a cohesive sixteen-minute suite. I print out my fragments and arrange on my studio floor, using scissors and Scotch tape, and find the process satisfyingly analogue, like playing vinyl.
Julie Marie Wade: “On the Air” by Girlyman
In the final passage of my lyric essay “Third Door” (excerpted in the book), a disembodied voice, representing my parents speaking in unison, eschews the vision I’ve rendered of them as contestants on a game show during the time of their courtship in the mid-1960s: Come now, we were never On the Air. As it happens, several years after I wrote this essay, I bought all the CDs I could find by a band called Girlyman, a folk trio I had heard open for Dar Williams in Pittsburgh and whose sound and lyrics I loved. The first track on Girlyman’s album Little Star is fittingly titled “On the Air,” and even the sound of the song without the lyrics evokes the era of my lyric essay.
The speaker in the song is a game show host, disgruntled now in the new era of “On Demand.” He reminisces about the years of his televisual reign—”Back when Bob Hope was king / Back when every choice felt right / Back when life was black and white”—which hearkens to a time of certainty and (false) binaries that my parents also embraced. Lyric essays, of course, are about what happens after we surrender those black-and-white illusions, when color comes in—and with it, so much ambiguity and complexity regarding our identities, our choices, and our dreams.