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November 15, 2022
Sara Moore Wagner's Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "Swan Wife"
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.
Awares the Cider Press Review Editors' Prize, Sara Moore Wagner's poetry collection Swan Wife cleverly adapts myth and fairy tales to illustrate her own transformation.
Maggie Smith wrote of the book:
"Sara Moore Wagner's Swan Wife toggles between the world of fairy tales and the world we live in, both of which are gruesome and tender, beautiful and dangerous. Wagner masterfully employs classic tropes from the Brothers Grimm, Joseph Campbell, and the Bible to explore what is to be a woman here and now, and to shapeshift into a wife and mother, her skin a 'fine new hide/ to carry home to the children, to place by the fire.' It's no wonder that a book so much about transformation would be transformative."
In her own words, here is Sara Moore Wagner's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Swan Wife:
My book Swan Wife is an eight-year labor, one about the first year of my own marriage, but on a larger scale, about challenging perceptions of a woman’s role in marriage, and how a woman can keep her wild, untamable self within those confines. I set it in the structure of the swan maiden fairy tales which, like other animal-wife tales, are about a man who discovers a maiden who’s taken off her animal skin, steals that skin, and forces her into a traditional marriage. It's a blend of what I like to call “angry housewife” poems and love poems.
Music made me the poet I am. As a child, I was drawn to poetry and would write in cheesy rhymes, which is, I’m sure, the place we all start. When I first heard Tori Amos, I was a 12-year-old in the '90s. I saw myself entirely reflected in her fractured, discordant lyricism. I puzzled through her lyrics, which felt like riddles, to find meaning, and this gave me permission to expand my own writing. In that way, she has always been a poetic mother to me.
The playlist I’ve made to go along with Swan Wife mirrors the book in structure and theme and includes many of the songs and artists who made me a poet, who have been the soundtrack to my life and journey. Each song listed here relates to a poem or grouping of poems, and it should be listened to from beginning to end, as is what I think you should do with every album (and poetry collection!).
“Look at Miss Ohio” –Gillian Welch
Gillian Welch makes me nostalgic for my childhood, which is where my book begins—in wildness, in the sense that, like this song says, “I wanna do right but not right now.” In the first poem of the collection, “Licentious,” that mama is also “pushing that wedding gown.” The speaker in this poem wants another kind of marriage, one where she can be seen and loved for that wild, not turned into something else.
I am also from Ohio. The first poems in this collection provide some setting details, as does this song.
“Bachelorette”—Bjork
The next section of the book, “Free Flight” is about the period between finding “the one” and marriage. I love the weirdness of Bjork, and this song has always felt very close to my nature. It’s theatrical and big, she calls it “epic.” It also has this sense of a woman being transformed into something else, “I’m a fountain of blood/in the shape of a girl,” “I’m a path of cinders,” “I’m a tree.” This sense of becoming and unbecoming is central to my collection of poems. It’s also, chronologically, the “bachelorette” section of the book, so the song fits in so many ways.
“First Day of My Life” –Bright Eyes
I sent this song to my husband when we were dating. We had known each other as friends for many years before this. He saw me go through my wildest stages. When we came together again, years later, our first kiss made me feel like this song. Like I was “born right in the doorway,” like “I could go anywhere…and probably be happy.” It, as the love poems are in this collection, is authentic to our actual love story, which I think is so beautiful.
“I Want You”—Tom Waits
Like “First Day of My Life,” this is just a pure love song. It’s simple and the beat of it feels like walking down an aisle, like giving yourself entirely to another person. Tom Waits is another foundational artist for me. He’s a storyteller who mixes in the mythic and surreal, which is something I aspire to. This song, though, is stripped down to just the simplest, purest desire to have and be had by someone else.
“Samson” –Regina Spektor
In Swan Wife I move from the love poems to what I call a “mentor study.” This and all the sections follow Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. In those stories, the hero finds someone to show him how to survive. In my book, I explore mythic wives and lovers in persona poems as mentors. As women, these are our first examples, and they aren’t great. I love how Regina Spektor turns Samson and Delilah on their heads. Delilah is transformed into this beautiful loving character. She’s not what we think she is. She tells Samson, “You are my sweetest downfall.”
“Upside Down” –Tori Amos
After the “Mentor Study” in Swan Wife there’s a section called “Descent” or going under, a catabasis, into the underworld, into the belly of the darkness. This is the section where I explore and destroy what it means to be a housewife. The speaker here is fighting against the chains society (and she) has placed on her. In this song, Tori says, “God I love to turn my little blue world upside down.” That’s what this section feels like to me, like knocking the bowl off the counter, like thinking “what have I done, what have I gotten myself into.” And perhaps, in part, it’s like Tori says, “I’m OK when everything is not OK.” I also think sometimes you must break and reset a bone to make it just right. This section is the breaking.
“Both Hands” –Ani DiFranco
This is such a great fighting song, and it makes the '90s girl in me happy. People say the first year of marriage is the hardest, and this song feels like that disconnect that happens when two very different people try to live together. It’s also very sexy. It encapsulates desire, to be heard, to be touched, which I think is present in poems of mine like “Dead Wife.” She also mentions the neighbor listening to their “swan song,” so that’s too good to pass up for a Swan Wife playlist.
“Metal Heart” –Cat Power
After the “Descent” comes the darker “Submerged.” This is where the speaker stops fighting and gives up. She loses something, like the song says, “[loses] the reasons why.” No one makes me feel as completely underwater as Chan Marshall. In this song, and in all of Moon Pix, her voice haunts. It hurts. For the Swan Wife, she is unseen, she is, as the song says, “changed and everything.” She is a “sad, sad zoo.”
“Fast as You Can”—Fiona Apple
I thought it was important to have this song, which feels exactly like the madness I was trying to capture here, follow “Metal Heart.” When I married my husband, in that first year, part of me felt too “crazy,” too “ruined” to love in the way he wanted to love me. So, this song gives both sides, is he the “Metal Heart” or is it something else? Is the speaker pushing love away for some other reason? I’m someone who struggles with depression. That is a major undercurrent in this collection and is laid bare in poems like “A Study on Cracking.” This song feels like just that to me, a study on holding yourself together and pushing someone away.
“Maybe Sparrow” –Neko Case
This is not, ultimately, a collection about a relationship unraveling into nothing. It’s about how to survive and get back to the self, as the hero does in any of those grand stories. “Maybe Sparrow” feels like a break in the clouds. It’s also a simple and pretty short song, so it’s a literal break in the heaviness of the previous songs. Towards the end of “Submerged,” in the poem, “Bridal Suite,” the speaker and her love learn to speak again, and we get the impression that it might not be OK. It’s possible that, if the Swan Wife, doesn’t hear or change, she’ll be crushed like the sparrow in the song. This song is representative of the speaker in this book hearing and understanding that warning, then turning down another road.
“Wildflowers”—Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris
This song is a nod to my daughter Daisy who makes an appearance in the poem “Reward” at the end of the “Submerged” section. It also sets the tone for the “Return” section, which is the next section. The speaker comes to a crossroads, to lose the self or to return. She chooses to return in more than one way, to return to her nature and to the real love that she found. Because, as Dolly says, “when a flower grows wild/ It can always survive.”
“Born at the Right Time” –Paul Simon
I had this song on my birth playlist for my daughter. I can’t hear it without crying. It’s such a simple and pure wish for a child, who’s “never been lonely/never been lied to.” We all started like this, with the hope that we can change something about the world—that we are “born at the right time,” that the whole world sees that. There’s so much promise in this song, which really fits with both the newborn baby who’s present in the “Return” section of Swan Wife, and with the hope that the marriage itself can be reborn into something as pure as this.
“Selkie” –Tori Amos
Forgive me my second use of Tori Amos, but I’ve been doing that since I was that twelve-year-old just discovering her. She always gets two songs on my mix tapes! This song is too perfect not to put on this album. It’s so interesting about Tori Amos. So many of my fellow '90s girl fans don’t connect with her newer stuff. She’s different now. For me, this comes from her “settling down” and becoming a wife and mother. Her voice changed. Her tone changed. She’s not as angry or sad, but she’s still Tori. She’s still got that wildness and passion and curiosity. It’s transformed, as she has, but it’s there.
A selkie is a seal-wife, is related to a swan maiden. It’s pretty much the same story. I like to think her impetus here was the same as mine for Swan Wife. The speaker in this song says, “I've been waiting on the love of my life to find/ He's been waiting on his selkie to come back.” This is the same thing my speaker has been waiting on—her love to find he’s missed who she was, that wild he fell in love with—and he does. That’s the “Return.”
“If We Were Vampires”—Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
We’re back to the love songs now, but this one is different. Jason Isbell sings this with his wife Amanda Shires. The first time a friend played this for me, it ripped my entire heart apart. This song does what I tried to do in poems like “Halcyon Days,” to reflect on how little time we have together. “Knowing that this can’t go on forever…Maybe we’ll get 40 years together,” they sing together. It’s an understanding that life is short and precious, and if we find someone who sees us and loves us as we are, well, that’s something to hold onto for as long as we can. The last section of this book is very focused on the fleeting nature of this moment we have with the world so beautiful, with our new child, with spring in full bloom, just on the cusp of turning.
“Days Like This” –Over the Rhine
This was our wedding song. I can’t hear it without picturing my two lovely friends singing it into a microphone while we danced in front of everyone we love. That day changed us both. I suppose I could have put it with the marriage section of the book, but it fits so much better here, as a final song. This song, with its chorus: “All I want to do is live my life honestly./ I just want to wake up and see your face next to me./ Every regret I have I will go set it free,/ and it will be good for me” sums up the message of Swan Wife. I chose this life, to live my life “honest” and good in the best, purest way, and to stay, to keep myself, to honor who I was and who I will be, for as much time as I have with the person who sees me and loves me just as I am.
Sara Moore Wagner is the winner of the 2021 Cider Press Review Editors' Prize for her manuscript Swan Wife (expected late summer 2022). She the author of the poetry manuscript Hillbilly Madonna (2020 Driftwood Press Manuscript prize winner), a 2021 National Poetry Series Finalist, and the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award. Her poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Sixth Finch, Waxwing, Nimrod, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. She lives in West Chester Ohio with her husband Jon, and children Cohen, Daisy, and Vivienne.
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