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May 21, 2019
Kristin George Bagdanov's Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "Fossils in the Making"
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, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.
Kristin George Bagdanov explores both physicality and climate change in her innovative poetry collection Fossils in the Making.
The Georgia Review wrote of the book:
"At their most successful, George Bagdanov’s poems offer an engaging approach to the environment and the body. Her wordplay frequently feels fresh and inventive, and her repurposing of language and form allow the collection to resist easy answers to the questions posed by climate change."
In her own words, here is Kristin George Bagdanov's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Fossils in the Making:
My poetry is grounded in music. I do not consider sense to be more important than sound in any hierarchy of “meaning” and often trust what I call the “sonic logic” of a line or phrase more than its semantic logic. For this playlist, rather than choosing songs that influenced or inspired individual poems, I collaborated with musicians Trevor Welch and Levi Bagdanov to do the reverse: to find songs that were conjured or evoked by the music in the poems themselves. What follows, then, is a type of sonic accompaniment for Fossils in the Making that echoes, recalls, and responds to different aspects of the collection.
1.“Canticles of the Sky: I. Sky with Four Suns,” John Luther Adams (composer)
This instrumental piece is geological in scope and apocalyptic in feeling (the four suns in the sky a sign that something quite unnatural has occurred). It evokes a feeling of deep time and deeper space. My collection opens with a proem (prologue poem) called “Lines Written After Crisis” in a form I call a disarticulated sonnet. Each line is its own poem. But the lines also hang together, like four suns in the sky, offering different paths for interpretation, accumulating until the poem reaches a breaking point wherein “mourning would make a method // to take / from every / form.” It is apocalyptic in so far as “apocalypse” is both that which destroys and that which reveals.
2. “Say Valley Maker,” Smog
This song probes the relationship between self and environment, repeatedly asking to be buried in wood, stone, fire, and water. Fossils speaks to the fact that we humans, creatures, plants, plastics are in the process of decomposition, of leaving a record of ourselves and our relations. Making is also about poiesis—the poem that wants to leave a record of its own making rather than simply appearing as made. Images of burial abound in poems like “sediment / sentient,” which considers what we’ve buried deep within our psychological and material ground. Bill Callahan’s desire to be buried within and by these natural elements, to be consumed by them, reverses the usual process of the human consuming those resources or using them to consume others.
3. “I Novel,” Radwimps
If you’re listening to this soundtrack while reading the book, this track should take you by surprise. This collection is really interested in moments of contradiction, of places where logic fails, voice falters, lines break. So what better representation of that jarring moment than the smooth vocals and synthesized beats of J-pop? This song wants to lull you into the world you want to exist rather than make you face the one that does. This plastic, saturated fantasy edges us away from facing the contradictions of capitalism and grappling with its relationship to ecological crisis. However, the reprieve of this song also signifies how hard it is to sustain a state of emergency, of heightened awareness, and asks us to consider how we release and relax without ignoring reality altogether.
4. “Nereidas” - Acerina Y Su Danzonera
This bold and brassy instrumental piece makes you want to get up and dance and extends the fantasy world created by the Radwimps song. This song represents the “good life,” which in this era of the Anthropocene is a carbon-heavy existence. Is it possible to live well without the exploitation and death of others? The poem “sacrifice / circumference” doesn’t think so, as it states: “proof that violence is / rational that I keep living / because someone else does not.”
5. “Lives,” Modest Mouse
This song reveals the crisis of living any life at all. A song marked by existential crisis—of being afraid of one’s own life—resonates with the section “Wagers” in the middle of the book, which tries to navigate a world in which every choice, every action has repercussions that extend beyond one’s intentions. This song is filled with disjunction and contradiction, as it begins by building slowly in the depth of despair and then suddenly lifts into brightness with a key and tempo change, reframing its own pessimistic perspective in order to try to find a way of making a life in spite of sorrow and uncertainty. While the song does not resolve this fear of being alone, the fear of being in relation with others, it does find a way to hold this fear and love next to one another, which is what Fossils in the Making is trying to do.
6. “Mythological Beauty,” Big Thief
Alongside this fear of being in relation with others is a fear of production and reproduction. This song contemplates a difficult relationship with a mother, of relating to someone who seems both strange and essential to one’s identity. This theme of mothering (of matter and mater) emerges in different forms throughout the collection, often as a source of anxiety regarding production and consumption. “Proof of Hunger,” for example, feels guilty for the unborn, whose future we have already consumed: “a child (there is always a child) / born tomorrow judges me for my lack / of discretion, brings legal action against my hunger.” Motherhood is figured as a process of being consumed and consuming others, as when in “Proof of Parasite” the image of a caterpillar being consumed from the inside-out by wasp larvae measures “the distance between membrane & mother” while in “Wagers” the self fears being “crowded out by smaller bodies cell glucose antibody babybody,” reframing what it means to make and remake life.
7. “The Stars vs. Creatures,” Colleen
I love how this song begins with a conversation between the stars and creatures about who will “have the last word.” This “last word” can be interpreted as the one that survives extinction—the last in the world. The final poem in my collection, “Echo / o” is a self-erasure, an echo chamber that extracts sound and sense from what’s preceded it. The poem can be read as both a long goodbye and the awakening to a new beginning. The final lines cascade down the page: “hello? / lo / o,” thereby ending with the traditional sign of lyric invocation—the turn to address an absent other—as if to say “O, you.” This final utterance, the lonely o, can also be read as the last fragment of the last word—the sound and shape the mouth makes one realizes that having the last word also means being that last one.
Kristin George Bagdanov and Fossils in the Making links:
The Georgia Review interview with the author
Chicago Review of Books interview with the author
The Eco Review essay by the author
Yale Climate Connections interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
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