« older | Main Largehearted Boy Page | newer »
September 15, 2022
David Ebenbach's Playlist for His Poetry Collection "What’s Left to Us by Evening"
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.
David Ebenbach's poetry collection What’s Left to Us by Evening illuminates both the beauty and decay of the modern world.
Matthew Olzmann wrote of the book:
"The world is on its way to you' writes David Ebenbach, and the world in these pages is one made of equal parts grit and tenderness. It's a world of work, violence, politics, and little apocalypses, but also singing, birdwatching, prayer, and flowers bursting into bloom. At one point, a 'worker lowers / his bag of tools / through the cherry blossoms'―and this might be an apt metaphor for the perspective of this evocative book: behind the world's tough machinery is an undeniable beauty, and these poems are made by a poet skilled enough to help us see it.>
In his own words, here is David Ebenbach's Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collection What’s Left to Us by Evening:
I’m grateful to David for having me back for another Book Notes piece; I love the way designing a playlist helps me to see the book in a new way, and I hope it’ll do the same for readers.
This particular book, What’s Left to Us by Evening, sits in an uneasy space of tension. What I mean is that the poems in this collection are rooted in the complexity of the present, which for so many of us seems built out of opposing forces. And so these poems are about beauty and community, but they’re also about social divisions, anger, and violence. As poet Matthew Olzmann wrote about the book, “it’s a world of work, violence, politics, and little apocalypses, but also singing, birdwatching, prayer, and flowers bursting into bloom.”
And so I’ve pulled together a playlist that tries to hold this diversity of experiences all at once; the tracks included here range from the uncomfortable and even threatening to the energizing and sweetly peaceful—sometimes happening in the same piece of music. Meanwhile, since the book itself is divided into two major sections (the titles of those sections are below), I’ve divided the playlist into an A-side and a B-side.
For what it’s worth, maybe because the playlist consists of mostly instrumental music, I find it very nice as a backdrop for reading poetry!
Side A: The Bare-Limbed Trees
This track really captures the tension I’m talking about. There’s a piano line that might be soothing if it were left by itself—and yet on top of that piano there’s a slightly frenetic synth sound that injects significant anxiety. Those moods coexist here, just as they do in What’s Left to Us by Evening, in poem after poem, such as “In Glover Park,” and “The Weekend Before the Election.” In “City of Sides,” for example, a kid dressed as the President for Halloween encounters “the strange anger/of some houses and the unearned welcome of others.”
George Winston, “Rain”
Rain is a recurring theme in the book; rain strips the blossoms from trees (as in the poem “Today”), falls on a person who’s been robbed (“Double Rainbow”), acts like prayer and applause (“Still Talking About It”), falls in places human eyes don’t see it (“Sometimes It Rains on the Ocean”), and returns again and again. Rain is life-giving and can also be quite destructive. I picked Winston’s piece because it evokes so much in its exploration of rain: melancholy, excitement, concern, and play.
Air, “Mayfair Song”
This downtempo track is yet another mix of moods—there’s a kind of lo-fi, trip hop beat, but it’s underscored with melancholy. It reminds me of poems like “The Archaeologist’s Story,” and “Northeast Regional.” In “Plague City,” trees “spray the air white, pink./It’s almost like they don’t need us.
Rob Dougan, “Clubbed to Death”
As I said in the description above, What’s Left to Us by Evening keeps its eyes open to the violence in the world. Some poems address angry political division, others mass shootings and war. I don’t think we can fully understand our world unless we recognize the violence that’s still all too common among us. From the poem “Shots Rang Out”: “Today it’s cloudy. Yesterday shots/rang out.”
Side B: The World Is a Garden
Air, “Mer du Japon”
Unlike “Mayfair Song,” this piece by Air is pretty consistently upbeat, musically—but the repeated lyric translates to “I lose my mind in the Sea of Japan,” so there’s complexity here, too. Despite a potentially difficult theme, it feels like it’s reaching for something higher. Poems like “Falling,” “Saturday Morning,” and “In Flight” try to do that, too. Also, I wanted the reference to Japan, because so many of my poems talk about cherry blossoms. (I include Japanese artists in this playlist for the same reason.)
Susuma Yokota and Rothko, “Path Fades into Forest”
Like “Mojito” above, there’s a confluence of soothing sounds (this time from a guitar) and more frenetic beats, but in this track they develop into more of a groove. I treasure the times when tension resolves into something beautiful, and I try to explore that in poems like “The Cherry Trees of Glover Park,” where “hurt/doesn’t hold buds/closed,” or “ViaductGreene,” where I “wonder at what comes from destruction./Which is us.”
Matisyahu, “Shalom/Salaam”
I’m including this piece for aspirational reasons. What’s Left to Us by Evening takes on some serious topics, and I am hoping, hoping, hoping that peace ultimately carries the day for this planet of ours. As the poem “Double Rainbow” prays, “There are so many ways to destroy a world./What I mean is, may we only lose things./Please, may we all have enough time left.”
Susuma Yokota and Rothko, “Clear Space”
The peace and calm of this song evokes the same mood I was trying to go for in poems like “Sometimes There’s Only a Train” and “Yard Sale, St. Patrick’s Day.” (Fun fact: “Yard Sale” is the poem that provides the title for the collection as a whole.)
Takagi Masakatsu, “Piano”
This track brings us full circle. Like “Mojito,” there is something both gentle and uneasy about the music. And while What’s Left to Us by Evening is meant to move from the more challenging to the more hopeful, the overall message of the book is, I think, this: we have to find a way to hold it all.
Thanks again to David for making space for my book and this playlist!
David Ebenbach is the author of numerous books of fiction (How to Mars, Miss Portland, The Guy We Didn't Invite to the Orgy, Into the Wilderness, Between Camelots), poetry (Some Unimaginable Animal, We Were the People Who Moved), and essays (The Artist's Torah). He lives very happily with his family in Washington, DC, where he teaches creative writing at Georgetown University.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
