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March 24, 2021
Laura Cronk's Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "Ghost Hour"
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.
Laura Cronk's poetry collection Ghost Hour is a profound examination of American womanhood, its identity and ancestry.
In her words, here is Laura Cronk's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry colection Ghost Hour:
1. “Ghost Waltz” by Jolie Holland
If I had to choose one song to accompany my book, it would be this one. The one, two, three of a waltz instantly feels linked with memory. This waltz hints at sweetness but also owns up to regret and error, to the ways we both haunt and are haunted. “I’ve been a ghost in houses I’ve loved, I’ve been a stranger to Heaven above.” I think it’s safe to say that Holland shares my interest in the past and its various ghosts. There’s also an interest in the lineages we’re born into and the ones we choose. Holland’s work is connected to old time music and blues and folk but is a contemporary and original thing of its own. There’s the cool drawl of her voice, tender and savvy at the same time. There’s her soulful and literary lyrics, and in “Ghost Waltz” the spare guitar, the interjections of banjo, and then, what’s that? The spookiest instrument on earth, the theremin, hovers at the edges of this gorgeous song.
2. “Always Will” by Steve Martin
There’s something uncanny and bewildering to me about the sound of a banjo, though it is a sound I grew up with. It was both lauded and panned as low class, friendly and distant at once. Ghost Hour has echoes of my musical family, on one side my grandmother who studied opera, directed the church choir, and taught her twin daughters to sing harmony. On the other, my banjo-playing great uncle owned a music shop and ran a weekly bluegrass jam session. Uncle Doug’s music shop was outfitted with giant rubber spiders that would drop from the ceiling when he pressed a button he had rigged by the cash register. The kids gravitated his way on holidays to see what outlandish things he would do to make us laugh. It seems fitting to bring in another hilarious silver-haired icon who happens to play banjo, Steve Martin.
3. “First Cut is the Deepest” by Cat Stevens
My mother is a singer and her clear soprano voice formed the soundtrack of my childhood. In one of the poems called “Before” she sits on the back step playing her guitar and singing, which is such a quintessential summer memory. It’s only having distance from childhood that we’re able to see what was particular in ours and I realize how lucky it was to have a mother with an irrepressible artistic spirit. It was very rural where we lived, but occasionally someone would walk past and remark admiringly as she sat on the step or hung up laundry singing '70s folk songs. My mom was a big Cat Stevens fan. Her singing “How Can I Tell You” is an unrivaled loveliness. I don’t remember her singing “The First Cut is the Deepest” but that record often came out when we were playing cards or she was set up at her sewing machine working. Though I would argue that later cuts can be just as deep, this song articulates the intensity of teenaged attachment I was trying to approach in several of the poems in the first two sections of Ghost Hour.
4. “Cranes in the Sky” by Solange
This is a song that reminds me of the inescapable connection between poetry and song writing. The list poem construction of "Cranes in the Sky" charts everything the speaker has done to escape pain.“I tried to work it away / but that just made me sadder...I slept it away, I sexed it away, I read it away” Are the unmentioned ghosts that Solange is pushing away the cranes in the sky? The song combines a moving and straightforward listing in the verses with a mysterious, or at least mysterious to me, refrain. Solange’s songs are often clear and powerful statements with openings into something stranger, more elusive, and complex. My favorite kinds of poems.
5. “Grown Woman” by Beyonce
I love Beyonce’s version of "Grown Woman." Not to be too literal, but it was dawning on me, while writing the poems in Ghost Hour, that I’m a grown woman and I can say whatever I want. How many hours of therapy and women’s meditation groups and texting with friends go into claiming that power? So this song isn’t available on Spotify, it’s on Tidal, the streaming service Jay Z started, but I highly recommend getting yourself over to YouTube to check out the video - there’s footage of little girl Beyonce frolicking and dancing with her sister, there’s teenaged Beyonce practicing with Destiny’s Child looking wide-eyed and people pleasing. And then there’s grown woman Beyonce in a frothy pink pageant dress and black leather gloves, smacking gum, holding a tumbler of whisky in one hand and a huge first place trophy in the other. The dancing is amazing, of course, ending with a cameo by the queen mother, Tina Knowles, and a final image of beatific Beyonce with babies on her lap, laughing.
6. “The Holy River” by Prince
I love poets who have a current of spirituality in their work. Lucille Clifton and Jean Valentine immediately come to mind. And I love Prince for the same reason. The way that what is holy is connected to the body, that spiritual questions can be answered through the body. I also love the metaphor he uses in this song - “Let’s go down to the holy river.” Let’s choose refreshment and eternal connection. I have a lot of spiritual questions and some of them come up in my poems, but I believe in Prince.
7. “Both Hands” by Ani DiFranco
After my senior year of high school, on the last day of my summer job, my boss called me into his office to thank me and wish me luck at college. He told me I did a good job, etc. and then warned me about where I was heading. Bloomington, Indiana was either a shining city on a hill or a den of sin in an otherwise God-fearing landscape, depending on your perspective. My boss asked me what I would do if another girl came onto me in the dorm showers. The poem “Dear Autobiography” begins in the arts dorm I lived in at Indiana University. My summer boss would not have been able to appreciate the scene there. It wasn’t designed to conform to his fantasies, but to mine. Collins Living-Learning Center was a Gothic castle of a building that used to house star male athletes but by the time I was there had transformed into an arts dorm with a vegan friendly cafeteria, open mic readings, ska concerts, and its own student-led curriculum. There was lots of lounging in the warrens of rooms listening to Ani DiFranco in candlelight, braiding each other’s hair. It was exactly as wonderful as it sounds.
8. “Family Affair” by Mary J Blige
Family Affair is a bumping block party of a fabulous dance song. You have to get up when it comes on. And if you love words, you also have to pause and admire Mary J. Blige and her brilliance and invention. I lived in Jersey City for ten years and wrote many of the poems in this book there. The poem “Garden of Earthly Delights” is dedicated to my Duncan Avenue friends. The city-scape in the poems is all Jersey City, full of camaraderie and angst and sudden moments of pure connection. I think even neighbors with years-long feuds just have to put down the hateration in Mary J. Blige’s dancery.
9. “Head to Head,” “Salvation is Created,” “Women” by The Blue Devils
I played the mellophone - the marching band version of the french horn - in high school and one year of university marching band. The long middle poem “As Made” is partially set on the marching band field. The Blue Devils are a first rate Drum and Bugle Corps and “Head to Head” is a taste of what a drumline plays just for themselves to warm up and show off. “Salvation is Created” is a song that has a choral, spiritual feeling with the swift builds that make your stomach drop. My senior year of high school, our show was a compilation of choral music by John Ritter and I know that aesthetic has followed me in life. I love a big, formal, somewhat religious outpouring of emotion. “Women” is not exactly a pleasurable listen, but it has the performance art feeling of the competitive marching band experience I had, both eerie dissonance and big showboat moments in the composition. I’m careful about who I talk to about the experience of high school marching band. It’s so often a punch line having to do with adolescent dorkiness, but my experience was intense and formative. The art you’re making is communal and embodied and unlike most other types of performance relies on an ant-like obliteration of the ego. The only out-of-body experience I’ve had in my life was during a high school band performance. My friend Carin Sherrard, who is a musician, gave me Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy as a birthday present and when I read it I thought about the pleasure of dancing in a crowd of dancing people, but also of the transcendent, collective joy of being in a marching band.
10. “KGB” by Miss Ohio
When we were still just grad school friends, my husband made me mixtapes that I would listen to on headphones at my Kelly Temps office job. And then he began to pass along recordings he made on his eight track. The eight track tapes had such a great variety of songs - “Joey” from Concrete Blonde, “Rosalie” by Alejandro Escaveda, “Rid of Me” by PJ Harvey. Obsessive, heartsick songs, perfect Gen X falling-in-love music. I thought about including one of those because they link with that time that several of the poems in the book draw on. But instead, I thought I’d include an upbeat indie-rock bop of a song that he wrote before he knew me. It’s set at the KGB Bar on the Lower East Side and makes me nostalgic for being packed into that space listening to live poetry. It also makes me nostalgic for hearing live music. This is one of my favorite songs that his band would play live. It contains several ghosts: old school answering machines, smoke filled bars in NYC, the twin feelings of loneliness and possibility that come from being young and people watching, looking for your future. I love this song’s simplicity and how good it is to spontaneously dance to in a crowded place like the now vanished Lakeside Lounge on the Lower East Side. And I love that the KGB Bar existed in some symbolic way for both of us before we really knew each other. The man behind the song doesn’t like being written about and here I go, doing it again. Keep an eye out for his new project, David Wilson & The Summer Husbands.
11. “Don’t Tell All Our Friends About Me” by Blake Mills
Writing personally, if not always autobiographically, there are waves of shame and bargaining and second guessing that might just wash away the whole enterprise. The speaker in this song is asking not to receive the same treatment that he dishes out which, well, is relatable.
12. “Song for our Daughter” by Laura Marling
“The book I left by your bed” is a powerfully succinct way of capturing the communication between mothers and daughters. This song is also about being a woman artist and navigating the bullshit, about what it takes to be believed, about recognizing the pain in store for the people we love, about losing innocence but remembering it. And Laura Marling’s voice. What to say? The freshness of Joni Mitchell plus a whole damp, gorgeous, old growth forest full of birds.
Laura Cronk is the author of two collections of poetry. She is Associate Director of Creative Writing at the New School University. Her poems have been published widely, including in the 2019 edition of the Best American Poetry series. She lives in Fair Lawn, New Jersey.
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