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.
Erin Belieu’s career-spannimg poetry collection Cocklebur showcases her inimitable talent for ever lyrically capturing darkness through whimsy.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Spanning her four-decade oeuvre, [Cocklebur], the sparkling sixth collection from Belieu (Come-Hither Honeycomb), captures her propulsive lyricism and trademark imagistic dynamism. Here is Belieu’s fully realized poetic voice singing clearest and most poignantly in self-proclaimed ‘early dotage’—’a savage trick.’ . . . Readers will find this scintillating and memorable.”
In her own words, here is Erin Belieu’s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Cocklebur:
Two conundrums were built into my effort for the lovely Largehearted Boy: this playlist for my latest book, Cocklebur: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, Oct 2026) meant feeling my way through much of a lifetime’s poetry and music, and where they’ve intertwined most significantly for me. That’s a lotta years. Lucky for you, I finally accepted that I couldn’t include all 500 songs that insisted they needed to be on my list.
The other challenge stems from the autobiographical fact that I was once the girl who worked at the record store for years and briefly pointed myself in the direction of rock journalism as a career path before finding my way to Boston to study poetry. In that context, making this list was both the most writing fun I’ve had in a good while and self-inflicted torture for a music nerd.
What’s reflected here is the music that first shaped me into a poet and songs that have specifically been in conversation with my six poetry collections as I was writing them. Most of the choices are songs that have stood the test of time, which is fitting given the project that is a new and selected, cutting down, sometimes ruthlessly, to the essential.
“Books of the Bible”—various artists
As an antsy child, who believed maybe one in twenty things any adult told me, I dreaded my weekly Presbyterian Sunday school. But the morning we were taught the “Books of the Bible” song, I roused from my stupor with a feeling I’ve never forgotten. “Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy...”
I’d no idea what our teacher was talking about, but when I heard her sing “Doot-uh-ron-o-meeeee,” the complex bounce and rhythm of it, I was stunned. The strangely mesmerizing colors of its sound; how extraordinary words suddenly seemed. I tried the taste of it out loud for days, randomly stuffing it into sentences. I remember this song giving me the gift of my first poetic response to language around the age of five.
Aretha Franklin—”Ain’t No Way”
Early memory of my friend’s dad playing this song at the neighborhood’s happy hour where our parents got sloshy on Manhattans and fluorescently pink wine while we played around them in the yard. I remember full stopping in the middle of a game of Ghost in the Graveyard just to listen. My first awareness of the potential nuance and profound power of voice and phrasing. No surprise here—whatever Aretha served stayed served.
Guys and Dolls—”Adelaide’s Lament”
My father scraped up college tuition playing trombone in pit orchestras for out of town musicals. In my childhood, he’d play their cast albums for me, telling the shows’ stories between songs. I know much of my poetry’s sense of rhyme, syntax, and rhythm is influenced by those brilliant early and mid-20th century songs. One vivid example (as Adelaide details her hypochondria caused by her boyfriend’s failure to put a ring on it):
You can spray her wherever you figure the streptococci lurk
you can give her a shot for whatever she’s got, but it just won’t work
If she’s tired of getting the fish eye from the hotel clerk
a person can develop a cold…
The delayed completion of the syntax! The syncopation of its language! I still marvel at a perfectly executed triple rhyme (see E. A. Robinson’s “Eros Turannos” for an evergreen banger of an example). It’s like watching a figure skater land a triple axel, requiring the same degree of difficulty.
Glen Campbell—”Wichita Lineman”
For me, born and raised in Nebraska, country music (I mean good country music) was threaded into my daily life: floating from windows, the background music in any store. The Johnny Cash Show and Hee Haw were in our regular TV rotation when frequently visiting my grandparents out in the state’s far western panhandle. A particular favorite in terms of poetics are the lines in which Glen Campbell sings “and I need you more than want you/and I want you for all time…” which is a great example of how deeply affecting a completely rhetorical line can be. No sensory sparkles to hide behind—just the risk of earnest longing constructed with a propulsive wordplay that recontextualizes the meaning. I think of this when a line I’m working on is in rhetorical mode and I’m trying to dig the energy from what doesn’t offer the shiny beads of figurative language.
X—”Johnny Hit and Run Pauline”
Given my mildly misspent youth, there are many candidates for the punk songs that haunt my work, but probably X more than most influenced my sense of narrative drama and speed in a poem, and my early interest in the corrupted corporeality of the gothic. X was one of the best storytelling bands of the era. Despite some if its appealing intensities, the punk scene I swam around was (unsurprisingly) a brutal space for teenage girls. While I had the snake brain instinct not to get too far out on the ledge, I saw many young women end up face down. Much of my budding feminist consciousness developed in reaction to the violence I saw and heard during the late 80s and had me actively seeking out women’s voices (Patti Smith, Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney) in response to that testosterone tsunami.
Bob Dylan—Idiot Wind (Bootleg #6)
“Idiot Wind” is a song I’ve known since I was a teenager. But it wasn’t until hearing the Blood On the Tracks bootlegs years later that I felt this song’s authentic pain, akin to listening to an artist perform surgery on himself. There it was—the regret, complicity, sorrow, as well as the furious anger he’d flattened into one bitter flavor on the version he chose for the album. I’d never felt the depths of that song until then because Dylan hadn’t originally trusted his listeners (and himself, I’d guess) with the most honest draft of it.
Dylan’s original mistake is something for which I have great sympathy. It’s not easy to make good choices when you’re bleeding out. But the cautionary difference between those two versions came to my mind when choosing the poems for the selected part of my collection. In my books Black Box and Cocklebur, there are poems that for me now exist as (mostly) healed wounds, and I recoiled from showing my reader those scars, even while knowing the art of them meant they had to be in Cocklebur. The truthful version of “Idiot Wind” is a song in the purest confessional mode, an autopsy sawing through bone. But as is seen in Dylan’s failure to choose the most complex and revealing version of the song for his album, such self-dissections come with a dear price, one Dylan was not yet ready to pay. A corrected mistake in Dylan’s case, but the evolution of “Idiot Wind” keeps me asking my poems, no matter their subject, “Where is the lie? Where is the truth?”
The Raspberries—”Go All The Way”
Besides being one of the most musically sophisticated three minutes of pure power pop ever recorded, and its charmingly ecstatic joy at getting laid—a fine rock-n-roll tradition, and a poetic one too —I’ve always loved that the woman participating here (in the 1970s no less, peak era of rock stars adopting their girlfriends) is so clearly consenting to getting it on. And the singer (Eric Carmen), literally WHOO-HOO-ing at his great good luck, is so unabashedly smitten with her. No tedious emotional taxidermy of the cool boy’s pose. No maidenly dithering about whether she has the right to want what she wants and ask for it. Just sex as joyous, sex as a soul restoring good. How mutually delightful. As someone who’s written throughout my six poetry collections about the pleasures and erotics of living in a human body, particularly a woman’s body, there’s an unusual sex positivity and emotional wholesomeness to this song in which the woman is clearly in charge of her own choices and pleasures.
Billie Holiday—”I Loves You, Porgy”
(Here I use the name as listed on her recording, though Holiday chooses to change the Gullah/Geechee dialect pronunciation of “loves” to “love” when singing it for her own good reasons.)
If I can write a poem with the distinctness of phrasing, depth of character, and truthful vulnerability of this song, I will go to my rest happily. This isn’t necessarily Billie Holiday’s “most important” song (because how could we ever choose that?). But for me, it’s the one in which the genius of her vocal interpretation shines through the song’s dramatic narrative with the most bespoke artistry possible. The singularity of Holiday’s artistic consciousness is profound. To embody the craft that captures your particular mind and soul so thoroughly and dimensionally that you’d never be mistaken for anyone else—for me, that’s the definition of poetic voice.
Etta James—Stop the Wedding
I love all of Etta James unreservedly. But from a poetry perspective, this song especially demonstrates how to start a subtle sound pattern in a poem, keeping the bubbles low, then letting it come to full boil at the end for maximum impact. In this case, James spends much of the song in a melancholic middle gear, with tantalizing nods throughout to the roof shaking places her voice is promising to go. She’s edging us toward what becomes the fully realized pattern in the end, finally blasting the church doors off their hinges with, “NO. NO. NO. NO. DON’T DO IT! STOP THE WEDDING!,’ releasing her monumental vocal power that’s been seeded throughout the song. It’s not only her legendary voice but the satisfying completion of that pattern that thrills her listener. And it’s one way to think about how we build structural integrity into free verse poems.
Give me a time machine and one of the first places I’ll go is to a performance of James singing this live in 1962. The official recording of “Stop The Wedding” quickly fades on her voice at full throttle about 10 seconds after she unleashes it. This is a musical felony in the first degree to me, and whoever made that call on the production should still be doing time. Oh, to have been in the audience when she burned that church all the way to the ground.
Dwight Yoakam— “Johnson’s Love”
Among the great inheritors of that good country music I mentioned before, Dwight Yoakam is my favorite. His album Hillbilly Deluxe is one I still listen to all the time. I briefly lived in Athens, Ohio, close to the part of Appalachia where Yoakam’s family is from, so I’ve seen up close both the beauty and desolation of which he sometimes sings. His song “Johnson’s Love” was especially influential to my second poetry collection, One Above & One Below, in that it got me thinking about the idea of high lonesome as a vocal construction and mode of storytelling; how one might attempt that effect with words alone. That led into deep dives with Bill Monroe, The Stanley Brothers, and later, Alison Krauss. Hence, my longer poem in that book titled “High Lonesome.” The atmospheric layers of both lap and pedal steel on this track are crushing. And when Yoakam’s velvet and steel twang hitches into the plaintive tremble of Hey, hey, Maureen...sweet Jesus. I will take that man any day, with his hat on or off.
Bruce Springsteen— “Nebraska”
When the Springsteen’s Nebraska album came out, I’d lived away from home long enough for my poems to want to turn around and look at it again from the distance of memory. Both the song and album strongly influenced my sense of the mythmaking of landscape, how landscape at its best is an active character in a poem. I’m always interested in where a poem is happening and how that shapes or interacts with the speaker’s psyche (Richard Hugo’s “Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg” is a memorable example of this). That an artist famously from the Nebraska opposite world of New Jersey could channel the darker undertow of my state so intensely and correctly, summoning the banshees of my somewhere that is others’ nowhere, the accomplishment of this remains astonishing to me. The Boss is one of my people.
Aimee Mann— “Ghost World”
Aimee Mann has been a big influence on me, both her brilliant songwriting and how she handles her business. Mann’s hard won, long term survival as a woman artist—along with her unwillingness to keep her mouth shut about an industry that constantly questioned her worth and appeal—I’ve found inspiring, and, as the youths say…relatable. Hard to pick just one of her songs, but “Ghost World” I think about often, given my poems’ long interest in portraiture: the signature deep character work she does with it in such a compressed space. Smartly sardonic, soulmate to the underdogs, the deepest and darkest kind of funny, no one captures the directionless malaise of our present Americana—the “raw towns we believe and die in,” as Auden has it—better than Mann. “Ghost World” gives us a portrait of the girl America disposes of daily, the one giving the speech at graduation but too broke to go to college. Two verses that float through my head frequently:
Everyone I know is acting weird
Or way too cool
They hang out by the pool
So I just read a lot and ride my bike
Around the school
and
12th of June, a gibbous Moon
Was this the longest day?
I’ll walk down to the bay
And jump off of the dock and watch
The summer waste away
Add in her voice, that to me sounds like an angel who’s maybe a little exhausted by their immortality, and her songwriting range that moves easily between wry deadpan and unvarnished sincerity, well, yeah. Aimee Mann is one of my heroes.
Otis Redding—”These Arms of Mine”
This song is my final answer to that impossible question with which music junkies torture each other: “What is your choice for greatest song ever recorded?” It occurs to me that throughout my books, from my first collection, Infanta, all the way through to the new poems in Cocklebur, the poets’ ancient work of wooing is a constant motif in my poems. Yearning, longing, rejecting and being rejected, the beauty and troubles of sex and connection, the loneliness of being a person, the rip tides of relationship that can leave us choking on a throatful of sand or pull us under completely—this has been the stuff of poetry since the first person ever thought to arrange words into a love incantation or exorcism. Redding’s song is incomparable to my mind as the greatest pulse and depth of eros, the most intense down badness, anyone ever committed to tape. And it appeared on a mix tape I received once, which did its work of catching me in its spell, ultimately leading to the wonderful surprise of my son. If that doesn’t demonstrate the power of music’s poetry, and this song particularly, I don’t know what else does.
Born in Nebraska, Erin Belieu earned an MA from Boston University and an MFA from Ohio State University. Belieu’s work focuses on gender, love, and history, filtering wide-ranging subject matter through a variety of theoretical frameworks. She often addresses feminist issues and uses poetic conventions and street talk. Belieu is the author of many books of poetry, including Come-Hither Honeycomb (2020); Slant Six (2014); Black Box (2006), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; One Above & One Below (2000); and Infanta (1995), selected by Hayden Carruth for the National Poetry Series. Belieu coedited, with Susan Aizenberg, the anthology The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (2001). Belieu has received admiring reviews for her poetry throughout her writing career. Book critic Dwight Garner in The New York Times says “Belieu is a poet who can’t abide pretension,” and “She’s a comedian of the human spirit, in league with poets from Frank O’Hara, to Deborah Garrison, to Tony Hoagland.”