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February 3, 2023
Stephanie Burt's Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "We Are Mermaids"
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.
Stephanie Burt's poetry collection We Are Mermaids dazzles both the intellect and the heart, a brilliant collection from one of our most talented poets.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Burt’s imagination is rendered in mellifluous, energetic language in this memorable book."
In her own words, here is Stephanie Burt's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection We Are Mermaids:
These songs stand or swim behind the poems in We Are Mermaids in an unusually direct way: most of them, or the bands and artists that play them, are mentioned by name in the book, and some provided the seeds for the poems that contain them! I work in response to music that way as well as in the usual "what's on in the background, what inspires me" way. I also used to be a college radio DJ ("You're listening to the Record Hospital, WHRB 95.3fm in Cambridge, give us a call at 617 495 WHRB if there's something you want to hear") and that very 1990s experience backs up, perhaps alas, everything I do now-- especially when what I do involves poems that speak to my own past, to the songs long hanging around in my head...
Spinanes, "Spitfire"
Catchiest track on their catchiest record. This duo blew me away on their first tour, when the drummer played trumpet; then they headed back to our studio and blew me away again. Shhhh.
Small Factory, "What to Want"
Enthusiasm from Providence! And one of the bands on the bill for the most important single show I've ever seen: they, and the Velvet Crush, opened for Heavenly at the Middle East in the summer of 1991 and after that show I knew I was a pop kid. Though I wasn't quite ready to tell the world.
Shamir, "Gay Agenda"
I have a gay agenda. So do they.
Dead C, "Hell Is Now Love"
My favorite of the semi-improvisational, gritty, grimy, feedback-driven anti-musical acts I had to pretend to like for postpunk college radio. This band I really did and do like. You can also use their music to clean your sink or sandblast your storm windows!
Crown Heights, "Moving from the Small Room to the Big Room"
The last of the songs used or mentioned in my poem "My 1993," except that it's not: the unjustly near-forgotten 1980s Boston act Sorry, whose song "24" really ends the poem, cannot be had for love or money on Spotify, and the album Imaginary Friend is tough to find anywhere online, though you can find their wonderful bruised-indie, proto-emo second album The Way It Is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RQ3Uh2GMkM. You can read more about Sorry here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RQ3Uh2GMkM. Jon Easley, the singer for Sorry, later brought his raspy intensity to Crown Heights, who released one grindingly beautiful album in the late 1990s before Easley passed on: this is that band's best song, itself an anxious protest about how hard it is to move away.
Kate Rusby, "The Mermaid"
The first of the mermaid songs. Because we are mermaids. This one's a pretty ballad, and like much of Rusby's work it feels contemporary as well as ages-old, like a faerie storyteller brought forward in time.
Blueboy, "Stephanie"
it's me! It's also an early acoustic track from the great duo Blueboy, described in one of my poems and remembered (since singer Keith Girdler is gone) in another. The band never quite identified as trans-- it was the 1990s after all-- but their songs gave me my first musical models for transfeminine joy.
Blueboy, "Imipramine"
The same great band in later electric mode. This one rocks. "They say that love could break a boy's heart/ I say there's no such thing." No such thing as a boy's heart? Or no such thing as love?
Galaxie 500, "Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste"
This moody Jonathan Richman cover goes with my very free version of Jaime Gil de Biedman's "Himno a la juventud." You can read my doomed effort on behalf of the song in prose here: http://marchxness.com/round1-rundmcvsgalaxie
Brandi Carlile, "Mama Werewolf"
This one goes with my poem "Prayer for Werewolves," and both go with the wolfy Marvel Comics teen hero Rahne Sinclair. Teen wolves need mama wolves; both of them sometimes have trouble with silver bullets, and self-hatred, and finding real friends. (The solution might be the gay agenda.)
Holly Hobbie, "Over It"
Holly Hobbie was a popular image by a 1970s artist and then a line of dolls and toys and a board game and a cartoon and, most recently, a live action tween TV series with a lovely pop-country soundtrack: think Hannah Montana, but painfully earnest, and ineluctably connected to mostly white people in Americana-drenched small towns. My poem reacts to the boardgame, and to the tween girl, calico retro, yearnings and sense of safety that the board game and the rest of the mythos provides. This song is just catchy as heck.
Hayley Kiyoko, "Sleepover"
This quiet dramatization of gay teen angst belongs with the line "Let's make our sleepover plans." Raise your hand if you're gay and you had a crush on your best friend and you just couldn't say because you didn't want to Crush the Friendship. But you wanted to kiss him or her or them so bad. Especially when they spent the night. (Yes, this kind of things lands differently for trans girls who transitioned later in life: I had the experience but also I missed it. It missed me. We miss each other. Hayley Kiyoko is, as you may know, the Lesbian Jesus. https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/who-is-hayley-kiyoko-2338444)
Lilith Ai, "Teenage Brain"
Another teen superhero crush song, this time from a bi point of view, and a lot less glossy: Lilith Ai should be a superstar. Like Hayley Kiyoko. This part of We Are Mermaids brings the teen angst.
Taylor Swift, "The Archer"
You knew this was coming. Goes with "Love Poem with Archery." Cupid's arrow, Kate Bishop, Cissie King-Jones, all the targets, all the young hearts.
MYLK, "Mermaid"
We are mermaids but we are also hyperpop fans around here, and this song is both: hyperpop is the most trans pop music genre ever to pop, or to trans, because in it everything is self-chosen, artificial, and also anxious and sped-up and maybe (don't tell the others) contagious. You can catch it. You can let it go. Hyperpop is literally a kind of pop music that emerges from other Net-based electronic-pop subgenres around 2018, and its most notable practitioners, like the late SOPHIE, Laura Les, and fraxiom, tend to be nonbinary or trans: its rapid, artificial beats allow singers to treat and accelerate their voices, which means it's the only kind of pop music where someone with my own natural vocal range can make herself, as a matter of course, not only a mermaid but a mermaid soprano. More on the transness of hyperpop, for example, from a youngish listener, here: https://www.cooperpointjournal.com/2021/04/29/hyperpop-transness/
Stephanie Burt is the author of five poetry collections, including Advice from the Lights and Belmont, and several works of criticism, including Don’t Read Poetry and Close Calls with Nonsense. She teaches at Harvard University.
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