In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Chet’la Sebree’s poetry collection Blue Opening magnificently connects the corporeal to the universal.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“These poems wrestle with the cosmic without losing sight of the personal…. Wistful yet undaunted, this collection forges new beginnings out of elegy.”
In her own words, here is Chet’la Sebree’s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Blue Opening:
As I sit down to write this intro, after having selected and written about the songs, I think: what does this playlist say about me?! A former colleague proclaimed he was a sad-girls-with-guitars connoisseur when it came to music. And now I think this playlist reads a little sad-girl writes poems. Despite a bit of that tone, so many of the songs, and the book itself, fill me with a lot of hope. I guess this is my brief disclaimer?
Anyway, I wrote Blue Opening over a decade—during which I didn’t know I was writing it—while I worked on three other books—two published poetry ones and a forthcoming essay collection. I wrote the poems that became Blue Opening to clear the decks before diving back into the throes of other writing projects that had clear centers and cores. About six years into these writing exercises, though, I realized there was a thread about origins, about beginnings—of the universe, of language, of life, of illness. And so, I started to write intentionally into questions about creation. I also started asking myself why I kept returning to ideas of origins until the speaker of those poems arrived at the question of whether or not she wanted to bear a child. Once I had a clear sense that the question of whether the speaker wanted to be a site of origin through motherhood was central to the collection, I wrote poems that brought the, suddenly not so, disparate threads about beginnings together.
So, unlike Field Study or Mistress—my two previous poetry collections, which both had far more concretized goals at their onset—Blue Opening felt more amorphous, which means I couldn’t claim that there are many specific songs that suffused my space while writing them over ten years. That said, there are songs to which I return when I am working (often instrumental or with few lyrics) and songs that get to the ache of how I felt when writing some of the poems in this manuscript. So, I guess the playlist could be broken into two categories: songs to which I might write or edit; and ones I vibe to when I need to console or re-hype myself.
“War Anthem” by Max Richter
Richter composed this song for Woolf Works—a ballet that engages with three Virginia Woolf novels. This piece focuses on Septimus, a WWI vet in Mrs. Dalloway, his shell shock, and the haunting of a fallen friend. The song pulls at the center of my chest—pervades me with melancholy, seizes in a corporeal longing—not just for the sounds themselves but because the song implores I think about the ballet, about the two danseurs who labor to hold each other up—ultimately failing. The song and the accompanied movement are achingly beautiful; I am grateful for pieces like “War Anthem” that capture a tenor of our human emotion from which we often try to run. Blue Opening, though written scattered across years, has a lot of poems that were constructed with the ache of “War Anthem.” I am proud of the life in them, the beauty I feel they hold, but they are, also, at times, painful; I am grateful to sit in the midst of that as a maker—to push forward and create with this weight resonate in my chest. I play this single song for hours ad nauseum.
“Spring I” by Max Richter
My father would see it as a cardinal sin to put two songs by the same artist on a curated playlist, but I do listen to an awful lot of Richter when I’m working. Richter’s Recomposed: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons is a staple in my writing life, or maybe even my life more generally—often looped. Honestly, I could pop “Winter III” on here as well from the album, but I listen to it for the same reasons I listen to “War Anthem,” so I’ll skip to “Spring I” instead. It has a quintessential rebirth vibe, a fresh beginning—a brightness the former song lacks. “Spring I” compels me to see the possibility, the light, the bright of the stars on their slow arc across the night sky. I feel like I’m bounding through a field in springtime—morning still crisp, dew’s kiss on tulips—when I listen to this song, which is what it’s supposed to evoke. How powerful. It reminds me how I, too, seek to transport, in word instead of intonation, my readers. In its sonic effervescence, I am inspired to see what’s possible in the work, to keep going.
Future Perfect by The Durutti Column
Like with Richter, this song can play on a loop. There are so few words in it but still too many for me to write to, so a song like this might echo through speakers while I edit or re-order a manuscript. This one reminds me to tell a story but also to remain in the present, to not project into the future too much (i.e. think less about how this book might live in the world and more about the experience of a single reader). The song was really grounding as I walked circles around my manuscript spread out on the floor of my living room, as I tried to see the order of the collection; this book had so many orders, so many poems that entered the conversation, left, and returned again. Sometimes I still wonder which poems got lost, which got renamed. When you write poems in isolation, without conceiving of them as a book, they have their own individual lives, but then you bring them together in a book and they are having different conversations. So songs like this looped really put me in the zone, made me think about what shape the work could take.
“Lullaby” by Tasha
This song is such a balm to me. It tells us Black girls to breathe deeply, to let someone else take up the fight, to rest. It honors the daily difficulty it is to endure a world that asks us to prove ourselves, a world that does not make space for us. This lullaby lulls me, reminds me I am held in a community of Black women who want to see me rested, nourished, loved. It reminded me to get the rest I needed in order to do the work. And now, that the work is done, I want to sing it to the speaker of Blue Opening, to remind her that she is enough in and of herself—no matter what is to come.
“Reyna’s Interlude” by Rapsody
Like Tasha’s “Lullaby” this song speaks to my Black womanhood. But unlike Tasha’s, the piano and the 90s spoken-word-style interlude remind me less of rest and more of resilience, of what I’ve endured to be exactly where I am, of my power and agency as an assembler of words and worlds. This book, which came to pass through many a turbulent season, speaks to finding truth in the midst, how truth, though buried, can surface, can exhale itself into the page, how we as Black women are our own origin stories. I, too, want to sing this song to my speaker.
To Zion (ft. Carlos Santana) by Lauryn Hill
Once I realized the fundamental question of Blue Opening surrounded parenthood, I decided I needed to bring that concern into conversation with the other concerns of the manuscript. I did this through a 14-part sonnet crown called “Genesis.” I turned to the long poem as a form for its pliability and breathability; I turned to the sonnet for its compression. I had so much to say but needed to wrangle the conversation into a form that contained ideas I felt I could write about for the rest of my career. I arrived at the poem being a direct address to a future child eventually, inspired by songs like this one. I often think about my own mother, a young mom, pregnant with my brother when I hear this song; I’m overwhelmed by its tenderness. The speaker in “Genesis” is also overwhelmed in these ways but steadfast in moving toward this potential child like my mother, like Lauryn.
“Common Sentiments” by Typhoon
Before Blue Opening was a manuscript, I was working on a one about tumors and their manifestations in the bodies and lives of three different women as I processed the grief of losing my aunt to terminal brain cancer. “Common Sentiments” was a song that I listened to repeatedly in the years immediately following her passing. The lyrics explored how one can be okay despite the frustrations of the body; they echoed in me as I thought about how my aunt was so light in her spirit, so filled with gratitude for her time on Earth, so devout in her faith, as she slowly died over fifteen months. I returned to the song when I wrote Blue Opening, as I meditated on the speaker’s chronic health challenges, as she navigates illness and pain.
On My Own Time (Write On!) by the Gym Class Heros
Like “Common Sentiments,” I return to this song when I feel a little run down by the world to remind myself of the victories and accomplishments—everything from getting a tenure-track job and publishing a book to getting a diagnosis that clarified my relationship to my body. But I also return to this songto remind myself I did all this as a single person. Yes—I had community and family that held me up (literally, at times) but I am and continue to be immensely proud that I traveled the country, maintained a house, had a career, managed my health, on my own and on my own time. My adulthood has looked so unlike many of the people in my life who I love and respect, sometimes I am hard on myself for that. So I put this song on full volume when I’m giving myself credit for building something beautiful for myself. This aligns with my speaker who, on her own, decides she wants to be a mother, whether or not she “orbits another” to do so.
“Dog Days Are Done” by Florence + the Machine
Need I say anything at all? Turn it on. Have a spin around the room. Despite how my speaker might feel defeated at times, she’s also empowered. Even in the end, she sees the possibility for beginnings.
Chet’la Sebree is the author of Blue Opening: Poems (Tin House).