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April 21, 2021
Ellen Hagan's Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "Blooming Fiascoes"
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.
Ellen Hagan's poetry collection Blooming Fiascoes is a vital and vibrant examination of womanhood of all ages.
Vincent Toro wrote of the collection:
"In this courageous and jubilant collection, Ellen Hagan implores the reader to embrace what is messy and difficult in the world—to see the rough, awkward edges of our daily lives as the buds that eventually sprout into a ‘migratory swarm of praise.’ These poems are exuberant. They throw tantrums and chuckle. They yearn. They reminisce about broken mattresses and ‘a miracle of pigeons.’ They revere women with endearing odes to daughters, mothers, friends, colleagues, women who fall asleep in bakeries and on buses. Blooming Fiascoes is a feast of image and lyric that reminds us there is magic to be made of torn jeans, traffic jams, and a daughter’s missing tooth, that we must carry all these things with us and ‘hold it like a charm.’"
In her words, here is Ellen Hagan's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Blooming Fiascoes:
All the time, I am thinking and moving to sound. Could be a playlist, or the M4 bus that barrels down Fort Washington Avenue outside our apartment. Could be the sirens screaming their arrival on Broadway or the boom boxes carrying a drum beat or the gospel outside of the Children’s Place on the corner of 181st street. My neighborhood of Washington Heights is alight and alive with a cacophonous soundscape that keeps me awake and in constant tune with the world. My songs add another layer – a continued thread of rhythm as I move through each day. Blooming Fiascoes was written for and about this home that I love. The place I adore and rage against. The one that brings me such awe and ache – all at the same time. These poems bloomed forth from the glory and stench and wilderness of city living. An ode to all of it, each page – a love poem. And these songs carried me through from start to finish. And some were added at the end – during the final days of editing and shaping – and then holding it in my hands and sharing it out. Offering grace and dance moves, reflection and party, community and revel. Hope you make your own playlist and walk the streets of wherever you call home. Take it in. Watch it unfold around you. And then write it down so you can carry it with you – always.
Give Me the Night – George Benson
“You know the spirit of the party,” rings so lovely and rich. Love this song forever. Full of music, rhythm, romance – the sway, the swagger. At their best, I hope for these poems to lift up and off the page. Cocky and rambunctious. Poems about dancing until you sweat through your underwear. Poems that wheel and sashay, that lift your shoulders and carry you home when you’ve had enough. Before covid, our home was always open. Artists coming through to work, have coffee or a bourbon, create, dialogue and best of all – dance. The poems in Blooming Fiascoes feel like a house party to me sometimes. Everyone is invited. The windows thrown open to the city streets. So the music is mixed with the night. “Just gimme the night.” Forever.
Gold – Sister Sparrow
From the very first lines of this stunning song, “I got patience, I can wait,” I am all the way in. Think of this work and this life as patience. And though I don’t always have much of that, what I do have is relentlessness. And an always pursuit of making art. No matter what. We stay in it. This song feeds my work. What does it mean to show such love to so many places and items and people? What does gold love look like? How can you shape that love onto a poem? This collection is so full of love poems. To the holy grains of rice, a woman’s tattooed thigh straddling a workhorse, a splayed avocado on the street, the bodies of crabs crawling over one another. To love it all is effort and work. This song holds that energy, “Dig in, dig in to me/ To find all this something inside of me.”
Sunflower – Remix
I love, love this song. When I first heard the original from Spider-Man: Enter the Spider-Verse, I was huddled up with my partner and two kids. We played it on repeat. The energy, the movement, the collaboration. All fluid and so cool. That became my lift-off song for any time the plane took off. I was on tour for Watch Us Rise – a YA collaboration with Renée Watson, and the whole time I was thinking of the poems in Blooming Fiascoes. They were living in tandem with me as I went from Massachusetts to Wisconsin to Arizona to Texas to Tennessee to Oregon. It was winter 2019 and the gatherings felt so beautiful. Sharing one collaborative book and working to bring another into the world. This song reminds me of all the people it takes to make something fly. Reminds me of take-off, reminds me of many things at once. The artistry, the conversations, the heart in the mouth when the plane lifts up into the sky.
Wherever, Whenever – Shakira
Araceli (10) and Miriam (7) are the names of my children. They show up everywhere and always in my work. They careen and rambunctious through the poems. They become their own bodies. Their voices loud and insistent around me. They lose teeth, run away from me, become whole other people in my midst. They walk with us through our neighborhood. They see the beautiful and complicated right alongside us. They are Filipina, Assyrian, Irish, Italian – they are mixed race. They go to a dual language school where they are learning Spanish and carrying the languages of their ancestors: Tagalog and Arabic too. This song by Shakira is everything to us. We listen in Spanish and then in English. Look up Shakira and her Colombian and Lebanese roots. We play it again, again. How to be of one place and of everywhere. How to be the whole world. Always, I am hoping my poems are personal and the world. How they encompass one and everyone. We will play this one on repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Love – Kendrick Lamar
“I wanna be with you, ayy (just love me)? / I wanna be with (just love me, just love),” this whole song is a love poem. My partner is an artist – a filmmaker and photographer. He makes short films in collaboration with me and my work – making it our work. Sees the city and our life in images and documents the whole way. Blooming Fiascoes is a study in love. All the ways to love, all the things to love. All the ways to say love. And that matches so beautifully with Kendrick Lamar’s song. On heavy rotation this song has become like a chant and calling to me. A reminder of how much love it takes to make art – to make anything that matters, that stays with you. “I wanna be with you, ayy (love me), I wanna be with/ I wanna be with you (love me, just love me).”
9-5 – Dolly Parton
This song is 100% in thanks to my oldest, who loves Dolly and her brilliant songwriting skills. This song is all feminist, all bravado, all shut down of anyone who is gaslighting you. All work, all the time. I think about the song as an anthem and call to getting it done. To showing up and out. This work of being a writer is constant and continual. I think about Dolly Parton now – writing songs endless in her pursuit of creating. When writing this collection I was always thinking of the long road. How we work to craft and shape our stories. How we stay steady. Keep at it. Heads up. Doing the work.
Pynk – Janelle Monáe
This song! This ode to vaginas and their power and their stunning and their beauty. Janelle Monáe says this: “PYNK is a brash celebration of creation. self love. sexuality. and pussy power!” Just what I needed to get to the finish line. My poem: On hearing in middle school that a pussy smells like fish – rides right alongside this song. Sexuality as celebration, as honor, as love! I have poems to mattresses and condoms on the street. Poems in ode to my partner and our own love. Poems for my children claiming and loving and honoring their own bodies and pleasure. This song will forever be on my Blooming playlist.
Hold On – Yola & the Highwomen
The poems in Blooming Fiascoes started soon after my second child was born. Two kids rummaging through our home and our lives – still nursing and wild bodied. Becoming their own small people. It was both glorious and disconcerting. Writing poems while holding onto the new words of a two and three-year-old. How language was becoming a pathway for my work. Their voices carrying me through. Having young children during a time of such traumatic racial injustice, global warming, a corrupt presidency and political upheaval made my ear stay tuned to their voices. To what they had to say. This song travels with me. What it means to hold on – carry through. How we hold our people close, close.
Ellen Hagan is the author of Hemisphere (TriQuarterly Books, 2015) and Crowned. A writer, performer, and educator, she is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in poetry and has received grants from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her poems and essays have been published in Creative Nonfiction and Poetry Northwest and in the anthologies She Walks in Beauty,Southern Sin, and Women of Resistance. Hagan is the director of the poetry and theater departments at the DreamYard Project and directs their International Poetry Exchange Program with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. She coleads the Alice Hoffman Young Writers Retreat at Adelphi University. She lives with her partner and children in New York City.
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