Hello. Fennel and columbine flowers have joined the lilac.1 I’m back, as promised, with an and-then-some newsletter. It’s mostly the final few strings, the last of the threads to weave in. An easy read for you at the dawn of this long weekend.
At the business end:
Paula Green had 25 poets write a paragraph about what poetry means to them in 2022, and what they want from it, and has now released the responses on NZ Poetry Shelf. I wish there were more opportunities for people to speak about the processes behind their work, and how they relate to their chosen form, so I’m always tickled by insights like these—and perhaps you might be, too! (I provided a paragraph, but am only 4% of the thing, so a meditative, thoughtful read overall even if you are sick of me!)
If you are under 25, a writer, and from/in/significantly-embroiled-with Aotearoa New Zealand, Starling is accepting submissions for Issue 14 (Winter, 2022) until midnight on April 20th. I’d love to perhaps get your work allotted to my first-round reading pile, or to encounter it once someone else has had the chance to grasp it in their hands and say I will fight you for this; it has to go in. What joy!
Now—onward!
“Dancing on My Own” holding such a prominent position last newsletter made me very aware of the prevalence of ‘dancing’ in song titles. On one level: uh, duh. It’s the physical action most tied to music! Of course! Be quiet, Tate! But on another level it does provide rather a lovely catalogue of how this physical action might manifest: one might be dancing ‘on [their] own’, ‘with [themself/ves]’, ‘in the dark’, or if not the dark, then ‘the moonlight’. One might be the queen of dancing, even! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can be dancing anywhere, in any state—
At any rate, these ‘dances’ (or states of dancing) all pull something different out of you. The Billy Idol could draw me back from, and out of, anything; the Bruce Springsteen fills my chest with that titular starry, blanketed darkness; this cover of the Springsteen by Eddie Berman and Laura Marling carries something similar within it, but rolled toward a quiet, solitary morning, when a teaspoon against ceramic seems jarringly loud; and just now I discovered this King Harvest stereo version of “Dancing in the Moonlight” and felt like I was looking at someone I love and noticing the base texture of their skin had changed. What I was building to at the beginning of this paragraph was that the Billy Idol and Bruce Springsteen songs particularly make me want to weep. (Or scream, actually—both distill an urge to externalise the volume [pun part-intended] of an emotion.)
The former would have me weeping in the same way I feel compelled to while listening to several tracks on Mitski’s latest album—propelling me toward life, and beyond that an aliveness; something fathoms-deep and soaring, not always happy but never less than full. Springsteen, meanwhile, in “Dancing in the Dark”, is all lack: man, I ain’t getting nowhere / just living it up in a dump like this / there’s something happening somewhere / baby, I just know that there is. And lest we forget(!):
They say you gotta stay hungry
Hey, baby, I’m just about starving tonight
I’m dying for some action
I’m sick of sitting ’round here trying to write this book
I need a love reaction
Come on now, baby, gimme just one look
I think that hunger speaks to something in me—the same something in me that wants to punch the air at this statement by Jenny Slate:2
All this to say, the Springsteen weep is much more a ‘you’re placing yourself just outside of things, close enough to be aware of the fizz of the space, but far enough away that the distance feels cavernous—and something within you is making it cavernous—and perhaps it is cavernous, but perhaps it isn’t—perhaps you could just open the door and walk in—but something in you would feel without there, too, wouldn’t it—’. And I’m not saying that’s the read on Springsteen proper, but it’s the impulse it awakens in me. It’s not just a lump in the throat, but a kind of cool, heavy sheet weighing down all the viscera. That said, I love it, and I love “I’m on Fire”, and they’re much the same feeling. Actually, while we’re here: “I’m on Fire” and its introduction from a performance in Paris, 1985—I am always thinking about it, on a simmer:3
Good heavens.
As an overhang from last newsletter’s discussion of lilac, I wanted to bring up this painting by Joan Mitchell:
I think the digitised version ups the saturation a bit—perhaps just with my screen resolution. Nevertheless, when I kept banging on about lilac I did think about this painting, and while it wasn’t right for “Dancing on My Own” (though it’s arguably a better match for the song’s artwork than the other paintings I supplied), it put me in mind a bit of the “Friday I’m in Love” cover that Phoebe Bridgers did for Spotify.4
The original is one of my favourite songs, by the way. Not a crier at all. (Maybe I only want to cry about dancing? Hm—that’s not true—) It’s just such a giddy, delicious bridge:
That’s love, that’s love, that’s love! And above all else: wonderful.
For my talk of weeping earlier, I don’t think I’ve ever actually cried to or over any of those songs. I think it’s more a state of pre-weep, when you can feel something enormous-but-not-actualised. Which is more potent, anyway, isn’t it—in the same way watching an actor hold back tears often hits you harder than watching them bust a gut sobbing. It’s enough to feel emotion pushing against the layers of your skin. Some pearl within you spinning round and round.
And here we are, at the end of the add-on. To close, something that will mean nowhere near as much to anyone else as it does to me:
Sometimes you are in love with a painting, and have devoted much of your time to it, studying it and writing about it in what is perhaps an unproductive or at least as yet unpublished way, and you love the palette of it, and would know it anywhere, and then you are going through another favourite painter’s website for a newsletter and you spot a diptych and you go oh my god ‘Irises’, except it is not ‘Irises’, is it, it is another painting entirely, except they share a colour scheme, and by god does it feel like the world’s come together for you—
In short, isn’t this cool(?/!):5
Stay safe. Be well. Kia pai tō rā.
I would give you some violets, but they withered all when O’s father died.
For the record, I’m pro ‘part of a finer tapestry’. Which ties into the nuance of the sad banger, too, doesn’t it—taking Abdurraqib’s ‘[sadness as] one smatter on a canvas’ idea and extending it into textiles instead. Lovely stuff! How great to be so many things all at once, and each of them informing the others, understanding joy through the context of sadness, and desire, and humour, and fury, refracting forever—
For a while at the end of last year I was desperate to write a poem about this video—or, rather, the content therein. I haven’t yet. Perhaps I still will. But in a way that’s the whole poem, already. Sometimes there is enough depth in a thing that it doesn’t need to (and can’t) be written about.
‘La Vie en Rose’ is, of course, a song in itself. But if we’ve come this far—!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!