Excerpts from letters to a friend:
So, Thursday nights at home, I help run a weekly open mic I’ve mentioned to you before. We run a monthly songwriter’s challenge, also open to poets, instrumentalists, comedians, performance artists … whatever. Everyone can throw topics into the hat. We draw three and the whole room votes on what they want to see written/write about. You have a month. It means I have to at least produce one complete new composition a month, which is good when inspiration is lacking. People have proposed things as random as “soup,” or “the unique quality of Pee Wee’s Playhouse.” Some of the selected topics have been sandstorm love affair, you never answer, little spiral notebook, making sacred spaces of ordinary places, transcending time, disappearing friends and the owls see everything. For “the owls see everything,” I wrote about the Great Owl from The Secret of NIMH, and was surprised that almost none of the kids knew what I was talking about. I thought it might have been generational, but a few of the teachers at school gave me the same blank expression for what was a Newbury-award-winning children’s book turned movie.
Anyway, this month’s is “the algebra of life,” a stroke of luck for me since I just finished that month-and-a-half stint teaching algebra one and two. So my inspiration came quickly. I decided to write a performance poem instead of a song this time. This is not literary high art in the least, and not even autobiographical as so much of my work is. Really, the title came to me right away, obviously the word “Ex” as a variable, which spawned this entire silly endeavor. But its fun … and the intelligent laugh at all the right parts. There are about 70 math term puns and a handful of school-related metaphors. It took me three days and a hefty math book glossary.
The Able Birds performing at the New Deal Cafe in Greenbelt, MD. Andre Cutair has always been an amazing songwriter – and he’s finally found musicians that truly back him well. A little bit of alt-country, a whole lot of indie – absolutely beautiful, charming and exquisitely talented.
I know it’s dorky as hell, right? I tried the first version of it out on my calc class last week, and when they laughed at the cosine on a lease bit, I figured it wouldn’t be lost orally on most of my audience. That was the only one I thought had to fall toward the end once it’s become more than clear that the poem is going to be all math puns. Too early, and it goes by aurally unappreciated where visually the spelling is an immediate giveaway. And number always had to be the last word because it was the most simple and obvious of all the puns, so you have to hold out on the listener. They’re waiting for it … so you don’t give it to them until they almost think they are never going to get it. And then you reward them for their foresight and attention by meeting up with their mind right at the end. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always loved great performance poetry, and why I’ll go off into that land when I need a break from singer-songwriter inundation.
Something was creeping on my vehicle.
Half Lit performing at Sach’s N O’s in Mount Pleasant, PA. Fun band, good fiddler and an amazing lead guitarist. (note the HUGE ASS speakers!!!) It wasn’t the perfect night – the audience didn’t give a fuck that we existed, but the other artists enjoyed us and the food was good. Sometimes (especially sometimes after already having played a paying college gig) that’s enough.
I normally post my songs and poems as I’m working on them to my myspace blog so the other writers can see my process, but in this case I want to hold out. I feel like, for this one, the punch line needs to sort of be kept a secret until it’s performed in front of them.
So, no, the poem isn’t autobiographical, which actually brings up a really good conversation about the nature of my art and who you/I am as part of one’s art. Forgive the long, rambling bit you’re about to get on that … but my writing projects tonight haveme thinking along these lines already. We’ll see how much of this you have the patience to read …
After playing on Tuesday night we went home to our friend Keren Lee and practiced late into the night, learning him some new ilyAIMY tunes on bass. It was crazy to play things like Hands, Allergy, Love a Girl and rearview quietly – but there were sleepy peoples in the house. We had to be like mice. Little rock mice.
There are two types of songs (and really two types of written arts of all genres): A) The crazy story that is totally unique and B) the shared human experience. It’s about either impression or identification. Then within those two categories, the songs/novels/poems can be fiction or non-fiction. Type A usually results in the, “Oh, my god … that happened to you!?” response from an audience. Type B usually results in the: “That exact thing happened to me!” response from an audience.
Sometimes the tale is autobiographical, and sometimes it’s the power of observation … the sort of kernel-of-truth writing style that gives fictional novelists, songwriters, etc. that toe-hold in something that seems feasible and identifiable to people and their own experiences. You imbue fictional stories with smaller details of realness that make the entirety credible. It’s why a good pop song can be so damn hard to write well. I had a journalism teacher in college who told me cliches were cliches for a reason, and all powerful stories had their roots in them (man versus god, the underdog, boy meets girl, growing up …), so working from one of those guaranteed people would relate. Pop songs require such an archetype, usually love, of course. But it has to be written as Type B to work. People have to relate … or that pop song will not be successful.
I’ve written both Type A and Type B songs, and then both subcategories within them. I wrote a Type A, Non-Fiction (sounds like blood typing) song about a girl in Oregon who gave me her tooth and a homeless man in DC who told me something funny. I wrote a Type B Fiction song about hitting on left-handed people through arts and crafts, all red construction paper valentines and left-handed scissors. But I never did that. I wasn’t even in love when I wrote it, but I had a line I liked: “This heart looks like a teardrop folded, but you’re opening me up.”
At first … I couldn’t write it if it hadn’t happened to me. When I first started songwriting professionally, it was straight out of journalism school. So I couldn’t lie … Meaning, I couldn’t fill in the gaps between distant truths with poetic license. In journalism, they always warn you: if you didn’t ask, don’t assume. Don’t fill in the gap of a detail with something that seems right. It better be exact … especially with emotions, thoughts. If you imagine someone, very archetypically, standing over their lover’s grave in a black veil, don’t throw that in to set up the scene in a news story unless you know it for a fact. But creative writing is ALL ABOUT filling things in with the best detail, whether it’s the truest one or not. It took me almost two years to write a song that was not directly fact-perfect from my own life.
That first transitional song, “In the Water,” was born in truth … or at least something close to it. I heard a psychic on a talk show discussing the fate of a disappeared child. Her statement to her mother’s “Where will find her?”: “You’ll find her in the water,” made me look up from what I was doing. A storm had taken the child’s body (in a shallow grave) into the local water source, and a good storm would bring the child’s body out, the psychic said. I was enthralled. So it’s Type A – a very wild and unique story …
And so I braved the first steps of writing the gaps, and writing from a perspective other than my own for the first time, as well. I wrote from the perspective of the drowned child sleep-away camp), the way a child might understand her fate and her new surroundings – children’s games and stories and songs and friends with lilypads and boats. Since you asked about accolades, that song won me a 25 Narrative Songs of the Year award from the International Narrative Song Contest, the 1st prize at the Cape Fear Acoustic Shootout and a couple other honors. But the real satisfaction was, when the song was first completed, calling up my butchest female friend and succeeding in making her cry with it. That’s honestly when I knew I had something … I always say, if you’re a metal musician, you’re goal is to make people headbang; If you’re a techno musician, you’re
goal is to make people dance; And if you’re a folk musician, you have one and one goal only: To make people cry. 🙂
The lyrics are here at:
http://www.sonicbids.com/epk/lyrics_view.asp?lyrics_id=156436&epk_id=52457These days when I write truths about myself, I hide it under some safety metaphors. That song “Phantom,” which I sent you a video of, started with a grain of truth both inside and outside of myself. One of my students was an amputee and described phantom pain to me. I immediately thought it a great metaphor for something applicable to my own life: the relationship that dies, but you can still somehow feel it. Type B, Non-Fiction, which is the most raw kind. But hidden under a metaphor.
SO … A MILLION YEARS LATER IN THIS LETTER (sorry!), she got back to her original point about the poem …
I put a copy of the first draft of that poem in front of a poet friend of mine about a week ago, and she immediately said, “Oh, is this about ______?” Another friend of mine who read it immediately asked me when my ex, had clearly recently broken up with his current girlfriend since this had to be directed at him. No. No.
So this is an example of Type B, Fiction. I made every damn bit of this one up to fulfill the needs of the metaphor I wanted to exploit with cool puns. But to make it funny and relatable, I needed to paint the picture of a girl who people could all sort of roll their eyes at together … who’ve they’ve known someone at least a little bit like. She’s a parody, certainly, as most women are not nearly so evil.
But the expectation of most audiences is that you’re always talking about yourself, which can be awesome and annoying at different times. There’s a songwriter idol of mine who writes what I wish I could, and you identify with it all … so apt is he at striking to the very heart of the human condition … so you imagine you could very easily identify with him … But as it turns out, he’s an observer and not a participant. None of his songs have a damn thing to do with his life. He is completely and totally Type B, Fiction. You relate … but it’s all essentially a lie. Some people cannot deal with that from their artists. Too impersonal.
And that can be frustrating. People want to like and identify with their favorite artists, and sometimes audiences feel entitled: You’re giving so much of your life to them in the songs, so they comment on it. Want to tell you their own stories, want to know the stories behind even the songs you’ve given to them. And sometimes … there’s less story to it than they figure and they feel jipped. Fans also invite themselves into your life way more than they should when they assume the songs are all autobiographical.
When I wrote that You Minus Ex poem, I immediately stepped away from it and worried that people who knew me might think I was talking about ______ … and it’s far more insulting of ______ than I would be. And being not about _______, I even accuse my character of things _______ never did. Because I want the best words and imagery in this case, whether they are true or not.
So this was what I wrote. Someone who has seen the movie will see all of the references (stepping over the bones, the rats in the rosebushes, the box in the mud):
Oracle
I come to you, humble and willing
brave, stepping over the bones of my brethren
I wouldn't come here if I wasn't desperate
but I am too small, I cannot lift this.
They said you were Great, and they were not lying,
but why is greatness so terrifying?
Great and terrible, always in pairs
so we come to an oracle, trembling and scared ...
And will I never be Great
if I cannot be terrible?
Will I always be afraid?
Will I always need
an Oracle?
One little box can hold all I love
each moment sinking, deep in the mud
and I would do everything in my own power,
but I am too small and so is the hour.
So if you are Great, if you are wise,
if you let me leave here to save little lives
I will tell everyone how Great you are:
all death and wingspan, talon and claw ...
Will I never be great
if I refuse to be cruel?
Will I always be afraid?
Will I always need
an Oracle?
I do not steal like the rats in the rosebushes
I do not kill like the owl in the forest
I do not lie like the leaders of fortresses
so will I die with the kind and the powerless?
I do not steal like the rats in the rosebushes
I do not kill like t he owl in the forest
I do not lie like the leaders of fortresses
so I will die with the kind and the powerless.
So I say that I will never be Great,
because I refuse to be cruel.
I will always be a little afraid
I will always be little
I would rather be little
than ever be
an Oracle.
