« older | Main Largehearted Boy Page | newer »
June 29, 2022
Renia White's Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "Casual Conversation"
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, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Renia White's poetry collection Casual Conversation is an insightful exploration of conversations both personal and political.
Aracelis Girmay wrote of the book:
"In Casual Conversation, White attends to an axiomatic ground in the pagefield. She teaches me something about the collaborative dreaming that we can be. I am saying that there is something for us here in the complex Quiets of this meditative, sustained, and intimately political work. It is something so vital and so unstoppably generative that I can only think to call it unrest."
In her own words, here is Renia White's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Casual Conversation:
While there are references to “song” or music in some of Casual Conversation’s poems, the book doesn’t mention specific artists or songs. It is, though, informed by music and the possibilities music has presented me: some of the same questions music has brought me to.
Making a playlist feels like world-making. & there are some songs that feel parallel to the book’s world. &/or they articulate a feeling or thought the poems might not have, but that they approached.
I’ve long been interested in music in the way I’m interested in poetry, just without the ability. & out of that curiosity, with the playlist, I get to bring a few songs together with the same care I hoped to gather the poems with.
[In the World] Lance Skiiwalker & Nick Hakim
Nick Hakim is a given for me when it comes to creating a complex landscape of beauty and emotion.
And this song has that, but also, he & Lance Skiiwalker articulate this attempt toward ease, acceptance, integration, etc. in the face of an exasperating world, which feels like a concern the book also has. How do we acknowledge what’s afoot and keep on? when the bizarre is our daily experience?
[Love Within] James Tillman
There’s a surreal earnestness to this song that feels true to the book and to the world we inhabit. The intimacy of the lyrics—the vulnerability of having hope re: what you might find internally, of hoping that there is love there when you go looking for it—is absolutely similar to the book’s intimacies.
“O, I really hope it’s there. // I hope there’s love to spare”
The song’s slight and nearly unassuming nature feels similar to what I might strive for in a poem. Sometimes the clarity feels closer to purity; to the truth of our tender questions and undertakings. And that feels productive but also kind of magical each time—to arrive in a rigorous place via means you can return to with ease.
[Way Out] Jean Deaux, prod. by Saba
I love how this song takes a term like “way out” and brings it down to earth. And it feels like the kind of irony we always live among: that “way out” we might find that gets us elsewhere, but also, that latent implication of “way out” as the beyond. The song considers personal and familial history. It yearns and seeks. And the sonic experience still allows this distinct pleasure.
It feels like it gets to keep its mystery but also gives us a space to sit with ours? And I’ve definitely pursued that kind of end in poems. If your mystery is here, you’re open to what you don’t know and I think that’s a fruitful place to be.
[Inflatedbyspinning] Ambrose Akinmusire
I remember listening to this song on the train on my way to my job I didn’t like. After my workday, I’d tinker with this collection’s poems and absolutely think of the movement of songs like this one.
The elegance and surprise of it are striking. It makes me think about the brink(s) we can reach with a feeling or thought; the textures that become visible when you really look at something startling. Also, what a title? I love the thinking it makes possible.
[Lazyeaterbetsonherlikeness] Liv.e
“Did I lose this game, did I lose my money? / Did I lose this game, did I lose my honey? / I’m still looking at these cards.”
The love poems in my collection tend to sit at a juncture—to think through a conundrum that love only seems to answer. This song also puts me there: in the mess of mind/heart collisions. The lightness of it alongside the ineffability of some of the feelings it brings to the surface: I like how it holds that balance. Feels true.
[Lighthouse] cktrl
I’m kind of obsessed with just how much you can hear in this song. That’s probably not a very musical way to talk about it, but I’m grateful for the emotion it inspires with just how much you can hear: the instrument itself. I can almost hear the hands, the heart.
[Don’t Run Into the Dark so Quick] Jon Bap
Casual Conversation often references the voices of folks we lean on—like the voice in this song here.
“Wait up, here I come / don’t run into the dark so quick”
Many of the book's poems walk right out of the dark, in a way, as evidence that it’s possible to do so. & often it’s because of a pal or a softening toward the self. I think it’s important to acknowledge that there is much to buckle under the thought of out here. Many things happen that seem to have no reason that satisfies the heart. But we reach for each other and it sustains us.
[Simply Put] Chromonicci
There’s this feeling of “if I am talking to you, then I am talking to you and I want you to hear me” that wades through much of the collection. There’s this sense that some things don’t have to break down further—that sometimes you say a thing with the words & feelings that it’s made of. & that doesn’t always simplify anything at all. & I love that.
This song feels like a good way to gesture toward clarity, while the production’s tone & energy feels intentional, smart, careful. And that feels analogous with some intention on my part.
[Lullaby] Tasha
“You can keep your magic to yourself / keep it tucked away / they’ll have to find another wonder for today”
I quite agree with Tasha. But also—as in the playlist—the lullaby isn’t the end. The rest it lulls you into isn’t the end either. It’s a part of continuing on toward the joy that’s available for us. The rest is a vital part.
[Nature (Outro)] Ego Ella May
Nature like, go outside, but also nature as in vs nurture. The poems are often concerned with our “whys.” It cares from whence we sprout and scatter, what we build, etc
And, as Ego Ella May says, that discovery also doesn’t have to be a struggle, was not meant to be a struggle. But the book, of course, wonders beyond that as well (if there shouldn’t be struggle, then what now, now that there is and we know it doesn’t have to be? What then?)
[Sun, Moon, Stars] Yasiin Bey
I love the way the song lists. I love its exuberance.
With the poems, if read chronologically, I would say there’s a point where they turn toward the “light” and try to face that way from then on. And I like this song’s light-keeping because it seems intentional too. Its energy feels like light.
It’s like the song gestures toward these larger sources of light in order to illuminate the present moment. And there are poems like the last one in Casual Conversation—”bright, bright, bright”—that deal with this complex light and what it reveals or makes possible.
Also, the chorus has that quality that some poems can: where it just sticks.
[Thanks & Praise] Krystle Warren
This is a love and gratitude staple of mine. To hear it live; you can hear what inspires it within it—the weight and beauty of the love. And that over the rim, pressing at the seams energy—I think it buzzes beneath the gratitude & love I try to capture in poems.
[Never Ending] Lady Donli
There’s this thinking in Casual Conversation—about history and perpetuity. There are questions and epiphanies alike that arrive at this never-ending quality. There is always something smaller within the larger thing. Somewhere, something is going on and on. And we are among it. And we are of it. And so is love. And that seems like a good place to “end.”
Renia White is the author of Casual Conversation (BOA Editions, 2022), a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Editor-at-Large Aracelis Girmay. Originally from PG County, Maryland, her family relocated to the southside of Atlanta the same year she turned 13. She went on to earn her BA from Howard University and her MFA from Cornell University where she also taught. A BOAAT fellow, she received the 2015 Hurston/Wright Foundation College Writers Award in poetry. Her work appears in publications such as The Offing, Slice, Witness, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She lives and works in New York City.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
