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September 18, 2020
Zoe Hitzig's Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "Mezzanine"
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.
Zoe Hitzig's poetry collection Mezzanine is a brilliant and thought-provoking debut.
Tracy K. Smith wrote of the book:
"Do we sound like robots or do robots sound like us? In poems of conscience, intelligence, and wit, Zoë Hitzig presents arguments in support of both possibilities. Mostly, throughout Mezzanine's many ingenious premises and modes of address, what I hear is an ageless stark wisdom calling us to decide who and what we are, and what we are willing to heed."
In her own words, here is Zoe Hitzig's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Mezzanine:
Mezzanine takes place in a state of radical in-betweenness. The poems are spoken from a sort of purgatory, a world that has engineered its own demise and must take stock of its prior ways of being in order to find a way forward. Though I started writing the poems in this book over six years ago, it is fitting for these poems to arrive in 2020, a transitional year in American history. These poems often deny the reader an ability to cleanly distinguish between the nonhuman and the human, the self and the other, the victim and the accomplice. In so doing, it asks: what lies between subjectivity and objectivity, value and worthlessness, responsibility and blamelessness? Probing this netherworld, the poems hope to learn something about how we relate to each other, and how we can rewrite our social code to celebrate interdependence and cooperation rather than independence and competition.
The songs I collect on this playlist are by artists who also dwell in the in-between. I rarely listen to music while I write, but these artists have all at some point made me want to sit down and write. Sounds are lost and found. Noises are gathered, strummed and sung by humans and machines. Motley choruses arrange themselves into recorded artifacts which can themselves be played by all manner of instruments and devices. The first half of the playlist, much like the first few sections of Mezzanine, is comprised of displaced, misplaced and disembodied voices. Continuing to mirror the development of the book, the second half of the playlist is more human-centered, tender and melodic. I annotate a handful of poems from the beginning of the playlist, and a handful from the end.
“Born, Never Asked” – Laurie Anderson
Mezzanine is in debt to Laurie Anderson, especially her album Big Science (1982) on which this track appears. The beginning of this song transports me to some imagined circumstance that lies outside all political and economic systems—a State of Nature or Original Position. As if a group of people are about to make a very good or very bad decision with lasting consequences. “It was a large room full of people. All kinds. And they had all arrived at the same building at more or less the same time. And they were all free. And they were all asking themselves the same question: What is behind that curtain?” (The title phrase, “Born, never asked,” also appears several times in a poem toward the end of the book.)
“Frontier” – Holly Herndon
It was hard to choose just one Holly Herndon song for this playlist—her work pulls off so many tricks and maneuvers that I attempt in my poetry. The Berlin-based artist performs and composes many of her songs in collaboration with a non-human intelligence, known as Spawn, whom she and her partner, Mat Dryhurst, have trained to sing. The result is a visionary soundtrack for a better future. It stages a warehouse rave in the demilitarized zone between the human and non-human, simultaneously resisting and celebrating the ways machines augment human intelligence and creativity. This track from her latest album is a psychedelic sonic braid woven by Herndon, her AI baby Spawn, and a chorus of Sacred Harp singers.
“Sonik Drips” – Jeff Wootton
Continuing the theme of sonic exploration, restless innovator Jeff Wootton blends hazy vocals and shadowy guitar loops on this keyed-up track from his debut solo album. This song is like running through a city street at night, looking down at the patterns of light on the sidewalk ahead of you—shapes the lampposts cut through the occasional tree or crane. In your peripheral vision you see a shadow coming up behind you. You’re being followed? You run faster. But the shadowy figure keeps pace. You turn a corner and—of course—you realize it was your own shadow chasing you. For a brief moment, you ease into a jog, relieved. Then you sprint home, fixing wide-open eyes on a plot of empty sky.
“Limerence” – Yves Tumor
Mezzanine is filled with dramatic monologues. A rod of iron speaks. A frog-shaped ring at a department store speaks. A levee that witnessed a murder speaks. A lotus on a bay surrounded by glassy skyscrapers speaks. An ancient stone used as currency speaks. When I write these monologues, I feel like a sound artist, wandering around with a mic on a boom. I hold the mic up to objects and wait for them to speak to me. Yves Tumor takes a similar approach to composition on this piece from Mono No Aware, an ambient compilation album. “Mono no aware” is a Japanese phrase which translates to “the pathos of things,” and evokes a wistful recognition of impermanence and transience.
“Black Milk” – Massive Attack
In some ways this playlist is redundant, because Massive Attack’s genius 1998 album Mezzanine works well as a playlist for my Mezzanine. For example, these lines from Pitchfork’s Nate Patrin about Mezzanine the album could just as well describe Mezzanine the book: “On Mezzanine, it’s alienation all the way down. There’s no safety from harm here, nothing you’ve got to be thankful for, nobody to take the force of the blow: what Mezzanine provides instead is a succession of parties and relationships and panopticons where the walls won’t stop closing in.” Of all the panopticons on this album, I chose “Black Milk” because its title recalls the imagery in Paul Celan’s extraordinary (and extraordinarily famous) poem “Death Fugue.”
“Cybertronic Purgatory” – Janelle Monae
Android, rapper, popstar, conceptual artist, queer icon, producer, actor, activist… Janelle Monáe does it all. And how! This piece is from her Metropolis project, a conceptual series inspired by Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 science fiction film of the same title. This song pairs especially well with my poem “Stylized Facts”: “Every morning I / wake hoping to uncover / some slab of my body / hollowed out and encased / in steel. Everyone’s entitled / to her own magic bullet / theory of self.”
“A_X” – Dean Blunt
American capitalism is killing us in a very precise way. The refrain of this song—half-sung and half-spoken in Dean Blunt’s world-weary rasps—summarizes the way American capitalism knocks us down and gives us no way of standing up again: “I feel just like a roach on his back / and there’s no way for me to get up.” The roach image also reminds me of a poem I love called “American Cockroach” by Robyn Schiff (who is among the contemporary poets I most admire). That poem, which has so many quick twists and mercurial turns that it is difficult to quote, begins: “When the American cockroach lands / on its back trying to / flick the glorious / wasp off that moves like the hybrid of green tin / and blue glass, gem- / tragic cerulean / task, finite and fathomable as / a photoshopped sea, the / plan is already / in full swing.”
“thefeelingyougetwhenyouwatchthenews” – Wynnm
Wynnm is an otherworldly singer-songwriter raised in Pocatello, Idaho and currently living and recording in Amsterdam. Her silky voice is distinctive: It’s what an elaborately woven spider web would sound like if played like a violin. This single, just released in summer 2020 with an aptly 2020 title, trades in imagery that reminds me of my poem “Silent Auction.” Wynnm sings “what does it feel like to crawl out from the sea” and my poem continues “do I salt the sea + curl myself into it.”
Another World – Antony and the Johnsons
Mezzanine is transitional. It is an elegy for a way of being that we haven’t quite yet left behind. A world we have to mourn in order to summon a better one. What better way to end this playlist than with ANOHNI warbling us into another world: “I need another world / This one’s nearly gone.”
Zoë Hitzig is a poet and PhD candidate in economics at Harvard University. Her poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, New Statesman, Boston Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Her writing about poetry has appeared in BOMB and Prac Crit. Mezzanine is her first book.
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