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March 17, 2021
Kim Addonizio's Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "Now We're Getting Somewhere"
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.
Kim Addonizio's poetry collection Now We're Getting Somewhere manages to bridge the personal and universal with precise humor and observation.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Several moments in these poems suggest a universal despair and loneliness that feels in keeping with the present moment, but Addonizio’s incredible comedic timing and brilliance at subverting the reader’s expectations ensures the mood is never too dark for long. These poems are brilliant reflections from the high priestess of the confessional."
In her words, here is Kim Addonizio's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Now We're Getting Somewhere:
Music has always been my passion and my aspiration, intertwined with my growth and failures as an artist. I began playing guitar at fourteen, attempted to become a classical singer in college, picked up the flute in my twenties and studied classical flute, and put it down when, nearing thirty, I discovered poetry. My earliest dreams of becoming a musician never came to pass, but I’ve spent a large chunk of my life pursuing it one way or another. Toss in a dulcimer somewhere, a tambourine, and occasionally raiding the silverware drawer to figure out a rhythm or two on the spoons, and I probably easily hit that ten thousand hours Malcom Gladwell famously claimed as a precursor for greatness. Starting in my mid-forties, I began learning the harmonica, and for several years I literally listened to nothing but blues. Blues, and jazz, ended up informing two books of poetry: My Black Angel: Blues Portraits and Poems, in which the pieces were accompanied by woodcuts of blues musicians and a word/music CD; and What Is This Thing Called Love, which took off from the Cole Porter tune of the title and included poems with titles like “Lush Life, “So What,” and “You Don’t Know What Love Is.”
So here’s this latest book of poems, wherein not a lot happens, strictly musically speaking. Leonard Cohen makes a couple of appearances. One of the epigraphs is his lyric “Everybody knows the captain lied,” easily identified now, in early 2021, as Everybody Knows The Asshole I Mean, along with advice from Elizabeth Taylor: “Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together.” Those are the twin poles I feel announce the themes of Now We’re Getting Somewhere. It’s not much directly informed by my near-lifelong playing of various instruments, many of them passably, none of them expertly. It’s hard to say what wires in my language brain have gotten crossed with those in my musical one; but just as I read as a writer, with a different set of antennae than someone who’s a mere reader (and I consider a “mere” reader, especially of poetry, as an admirable creature), I listen to music differently because I have a fairly intimate relationship with some of its means. And as a writer, having a good ear is an invaluable asset—an ear for the rhythms of a line or sentence or passage of prose, an orchestration of the necessary silence as well as the sounds.
So, what music to suggest for this book? Breakup songs, drinking songs, wolf songs of howling at loneliness and injustice. The thumping beat of something danceable heard across a quiet harbor or through a graffiti-scarred door of a club. The music of longing, and ultimately hope and solace. Here’s a set list to listen to as you read, broken down by the sections in the book:
Night in the Castle
Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam”
A song that became one of the great anthems of the Civil Rights era, released in 1964. It was all in the air then and it still fucking is. Angry and unapologetic, Simone calls out hatred and oppression and pushes back against the image of the “good Negro” and the idea of gradual “progress.” Do it slow…Do it slow…the chorus sings, to which she essentially replies, to hell with that. And here we are, coming on nearly fifty years later and Black Lives Matter, hopefully approaching a long-overdue racial reckoning.
David “Fathead” Newman, “Hard Times”
Newman was a sideman with Ray Charles, and went on to record many albums of his own. His rendition of “Hard Times” will buoy you right out of them. (He also played on Charles’s similarly named tune, a slow, bluesy number called “Hard Times (Nobody Knows Better than I).”
Sam Most, “At the End of the Night”
During the writing of this book and the flute peregrinations (don’t you love that word) that accompanied it, I spent some time trying to learn jazz and became obsessed with Sam Most’s percussive, airy, exuberant renditions of several tunes, especially on the album “Simply Flute.” The song was written by an Argentinean composer, Fernando Gelbard, as “Al Fin de la Noche.” I finally emailed him because I couldn’t find any sheet music for this simple, lovely tune, and he kindly sent me a version of it. Then I wrote an accompanying flute part, sat down with Sam in a parallel universe, and played along with him.
Songs for Sad Girls
Deb Talan, “Forgiven”
This is one that got me through—or at least accompanied me—through a painful breakup. Good to listen to while having your own drunken self-pity party and wishing the person you’re crying about was there to hold you while you wept.
Chopin, “Prelude in E minor, Opus 28, No. 4”
I love all the Chopin preludes. The first time I heard this one, I thought it was the saddest song on earth. I still feel that way. I can hardly bear to listen to it. But then I have to hear it again. That heart-crippling pause toward the very end, the silence of the fermata before the final three chords. Beckett: I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
John Martyn, “May You Never”
This is one I used to love and had forgotten about until a friend in New York, where I wrote many of these poems, gave it to me. It’s just a beautiful, heartening piece that always makes me happy when I hear it. A song that says: You’re not alone.
Confessional Poetry
The Civil Wars, “Poison and Wine”
I discovered this great duo in a sort of backwards way; John Paul White, who later went solo, was the second act for Rodney Crowell at a City Winery concert in NYC, and I fell for him immediately. Partly because he resembled my last (as in possibly truly last and final) boyfriend. I love his album Beulah. This section of the book is really one poem, spread out in one-to-four-liners over several pages, that explores “The Confessional” as a mode; that is, on some level, you’re performing emotions, and that’s what I think these two musicians do beautifully in this song. They are selling the emotion here, as if they’re lovers. They’re with other people, but that doesn’t matter; you invest in the song, and it’s true after all.
Archive of Recent Uncomfortable Emotions
Gymnopedia #1, Erik Satie
“The Miraculous” in this collection is a poem I wrote after my brother’s death; the song I played on my flute, over and over right afterwards, was Satie’s famous piece. Written for piano, but I found an online recording of the piano accompaniment with space for the flute to play the melody. Every year on his birthday, I play it to remember him, the wordlessness of music sometimes the best way to inhabit grief.
These Days, Gregg Allman
Because you know, nostalgia. The kind you feel when you’re young, before you really know what it is, and the kind you feel years later, when it’s like an archeological dig, layers and layers of old letters, photos, memories, arrowheads, bones. Strangers and exes and all those other lives.
Darius Rucker, “Wagon Wheel”
The final poem in the collection is “Stay.” It’s for anyone and everyone who has gotten within a mile of considering doing themselves in because sometimes it all feels too hard. I dare anyone to feel that way listening to this song, an irrepressible, joyous dance-around-the-living-room tune.
Kim Addonizio is the author of eight poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her 2016 collection, Mortal Trash, won the Paterson Poetry Prize. Addonizio’s awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. She lives in Oakland, California.
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