🎵 Phoebe Bridgers Lost Weekend Album:
I came to Lost Weekend nervous for what six years of silence might have done to a voice I love. I have followed Phoebe Bridgers since her first album. In her most recent six year hiatus she had some pretty charged spotlight moments: went through a public lawsuit from a music producer who she spoke out about abusing herself and other women, broke off her engagement to Paul Mescal, moved almost immediately into a public relationship with Bo Burnham, and in the narrow space inbetween, her father suddenly died. What I did not expect was an album that treats grief and joy not as opposites but as the same act of attention, held under different angles.
The record is an elegy for her father, with whom fans will know she had a complicated relationship and about whom she wrote her earlier hit “Kyoto.” But this album is also, unashamedly, a love letter to Bo. And Bo is everywhere on it, not just in the song that bears his name. He surfaces in the asides and private jokes, until the whole album feels sung in his direction. He is the room the grief is processed inside, the named witness who lets her go as far into the dark as she does. “Bobby” is the closest she has come to writing love without irony, unashamed, and the lack of shame is its own argument: to name what you love plainly, after loss has taught you how quickly it vanishes is courage not naivety.
What runs beneath all of it is resurrection. Not a denial of death, but its stranger companion: what is buried does not stay only buried. When she nods to the failed engagement, she does not write it as wreckage. It returns transfigured, folded into the new love rather than erased by it, as if nothing truly felt is ever wholly lost, only changed in form. As above, so below (she says). The dead father and the living love mirror each other; the ending and the beginning turn out to be the same door seen from two sides. What she offers is not the body returned but its meaning kept alive, carried forward into a life that continues.
A few weeks ago I sat replaying old voicemails from my own father, now gone, so when a recording of her father’s voice arrives at the close of “Never Going Back!” I was a wreck. Loved it so much. Those voicemails are exactly this: a voice preserved and a person who cannot be. And yet the voice does return every time I press play, a small resurrection under “Never Going Back!”.
Honestly the whole album is great as a cohesive piece, but some notes and highlights
The Outside - if this isn’t how it feels to bury your father I dont know what is
All the love songs for Bo: Kill Me, Bobby, Haunted, I Can’t Wait, Liberty Tree .. and there is still more! But Bobby might be my favorite so far.
Other Plans - Sad sad sad
Hi New York. Back & can confirm Florida tan is different than California tan
⭐️ New Blog Post Up!
# The Sovereign Interior / a door is a door is a door
The diagnostic everyone reaches for is are they sincere? That worthlessness is the first real discovery. Sincerity is fully compatible with harm, fully compatible with the total dissolution of responsibility, because the dissolution happens upstream of the sincere utterance. The question was never whether the interior report is honest… It is whether the interior has been arranged so that no honest report could ever indict it. It is artfully dodgeful.
Read the full piece thing → Here
⚡️🌩️ natures fireworks
Finished reading: The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imaginat… by Wallace Stevens 📚
What I appreciated most were the times Stevens leaned into the spiritual; the faith and hope underwriting his claims for poetry. His conviction that the imagination presses back against reality is genuinely felt, but it begins to break when he reaches for grand generalizations; the philosophy lands better where he trusts the image over the argument. The poet as orator of the imagination is a special moment. And the sign he quotes at the garden entrance in Tarbes:
It is forbidden
To enter in the garden
Carrying Flowers
Also want to note:
“There has been an age / When a pineapple on the table was enough,” 🍍
🎵 This Is Lorelei’s single came out today, I was nervous he wouldn’t be able to top his 2024 album, but I am thinking he just might!
On No Now My - This Is Lorelei
Other songs I’ve been repeating today–well, mostly just Oklou, who was my top listened to artist last year and should be again this year too… I want to do a whole blog post about her music, and just might. TBH her whole choke enough deluxe album is a no skip time, but for now some recs:
Dawn by Oklou, Casey MQ this is a cover/reimagined version of Carly Rae Jepen’s Run Away With Me, which is so fun, I love how far Oklou takes it – she makes it sound like a horror song, which maybe it is… 🫣
⭐️ New Blog Post Up!
#The Common Denominator: Girlhood and the Education of the Body in Eliya Smith’s coming-of-age dramedy play, Dad Don’t Read This
We are used to thinking of a girl’s subordination as something done to her by men, and it is. But the daily labor of enforcing it, of making sure each girl learns her place and keeps to it, falls largely to other girls. This is the quiet horror underneath the whole exchange. The friends are not Sophie’s opposites in this scene, nor the safe harbor against the man’s incursion. They are his instrument, though they would be appalled to hear it, because the lesson he began to teach they finish. He tells her body it is readable. They tell her the reading is her fault.
At this age the policing is at its most merciless, because everything is still being decided — who is desirable and who is not, who belongs and who is cast out — and a teen girl often falls into the pitfall of securing her own footing by finding the fault in another.
Read the piece thing → Here
🌬️ If you’re around Smith Street in Brooklyn this month, check out the store-front poems at Poetry Society of America (119 Smith Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201), my poem “And Even You, With Your Lucky Breaks” is up! 🎲
Full moon yesterday from Pier 17 🌕
Saw Wolf Alice under a full moon! Ellie Rowsell is a rock star. I loved hearing some songs from Blue Weekend, which has been such an important album to me these past 10 months or so. My favs below:
Finished reading: Metamorphoses by Ovid 📚.
I just finished Stephanie McCarter’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses after it was highly recommended to me by a friend and I am buzzing over it.
McCarter’s interview about her translation in The Brooklyn Rail is also epic.
I use iambic pentameter not only because it is the best vehicle for epic poetry in English but also (if I’m being honest) because no other woman had translated the poem into metrical English verse. I wanted to prove, mainly to myself, that it was possible to write a poetic translation, an accurate translation, and a feminist translation all in one.
It is very tempting to commit ourselves to a translation, but part of the fun of reading Ovid in English is looking at various translations and seeing the metamorphoses that this text (appropriately) has undergone. A two-thousand-year-old text needs constant transformation to keep it in conversation with changing times.
To read the Metamorphoses is to be confronted at every turn by the marvelous and the unexpected. Part of this marvelousness is that Ovid refuses to validate easy assumptions. This starts in the poem’s very first lines, where he declares his intention to write of “shapes transformed / into new bodies,” undermining our expectation of “bodies transformed into new shapes.” In Latin, the first (impossible to translate) words are in nova, “into the new,” or even “into strangeness,” sweeping us into a world that is unfamiliar and destabilizing. Entering this world makes it easy to let go of our established notions of what, for instance, a “body” is or of what an epic poem should be. Ovid’s is a world that compels us too to transform.
I think translators should, like Ovid, recognize their narrative subjectivity. We too make all kinds of choices, but translations are usually praised for “objectivity” and “fidelity,” as if the translator’s job is not to make choices. But translators’ choices are always subjective, the result of their own readings and interpretations—we are not human versions of Google Translate.
For Ovid to outlive Rome and continue to be read on people’s lips, he simply must be translated for new times and places, and each iteration gives him replenished life. I hope my translation will help Ovid realize the epic’s powerful last word: vivam, “I will live.”
💬 In Something Close to Music, some of John Ashbery’s music playlists are listed. So much of it is John Cage, of course, whom Ashbery thought deeply about and wrote adjacent to. Crediting him to O’Hara for bringing him out of a block and giving him a new way of seeing. He saw Cage as a kind of kindred spirit, someone who understood music the way Ashbery felt he understood poetry.
Ashbery worked on John Cage multimedia piece “Lecture on the Weather,” check it out → here & listen to the full piece here on soundcloud.
Quote:
The man who answered said: “You may think I’m not serious, but I am; if you’re interested in aspiration, go to the Children’s Library on 52nd Street. I did. I found that anthologies for children are written by adults: they are what adults think are good for children. The thickest one was edited by Commager (Documents of American History). It is a collection of legal judgments, presidential reports, congressional speeches. I began to realize that what is called balance between the branches of our government is not balance at all: all the branches of our government are occupied by lawyers. Of all professions the law is the least concerned with aspiration. It is concerned with precedent, not with discovery, with what was witnessed at one time in one place, and not with vision and intuition. When the law is corrupt, it is corrupt because it concentrates its energy on protecting the rich from the poor. Justice is out of the question
Some of my other Cage favorites:
🌬️ In honor of his 99th, here is a John Ashbery marathon from me.
Below is a favorite poem of mine, titled, “From Estuaries, from Casinos” that leaves me so tearful, especially:
I wish I could tell the next thing. But in dreams I can’t, / so will let this thing stand in for it, this me / I have become, this loving you either way.
The full poem can be found here but a note that on the bottom of the page you can listen to the reading!
⭐️ New Blog Post Up!
#Getting Down Into the Thing: On John Ashbery
Read the full thing → Here
So much of poetry, to me, is understanding that in the future, one person will stand somewhere you are not and read what you wrote without you beside them to explain, argue, or clarify on your behalf. All they have are the words. Someone you will never meet, who is taking time out of their life to read your words. And the page is a distance you cannot cross yourself; you can only send something across it and trust it to arrive. Like this quote gets at, why load that crossing with harsh judgement and more reason for alienation, when instead you might reach across and touch them?
Thrilled PSA posted more about the fellowship I was part of, such a genuine group of poets that have filled my summer with amazing theory, books, laughs, insider-information, feedback, hangs, beer and so on.
💬 John Ashbery’s 99th birthday is tomorrow!
I loved reading Robert Wood Lynn’s substack post this week where he gives JA flowers and talks about his experience with JA’s work, which is very familiar to my own:
“what is remarkable about this poem is not how [JA] sinks his little word-ship, but the salvage operation he makes at the end—this is the human gesture that AI is still a ways away from understanding. Ashbery has done poetry’s version of breaking the fourth wall by establishing the poem as a character in the poem, the intermediary O’Hara imagines between speaker and reader. The poem is a smokescreen for the speaker the whole time, who hides behind it—appearing only once at the end of the second stanza to briefly substitute his definition of play”
It’s really hard to explain JA and poets love to write about his work because there are so many ways to break it apart and look at it again, which is part of the play and genius of it!
Here is a poem by JA, “Down by the Station, Early in the Morning”
💐 I’ve been obsessed with the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, here are some recent favorite names of the species growing there (& bonus pictures):
Sunny Knock Out
The Poet’s Wife
Blushing Wife
Sweet Flag
Detective Eren
Lamb’s Ears
Lady Bells
Fairy Clouds
Perry’s Baby Red
Golden Hop
Donkey Tail Spurge
Dame’s Rocket
Tall Weeds Rocket
Moon Carrot
Moonshine Yarrow
Shrub Rose
Morning Mister
Desire comes from the Latin, desiderare, “from” and “star” 💫
Desire, desire, desire, that’s what makes the engine go… —Stanley Kunitz
🌬️ new poem published at Poetry Society of America
Notes from the Mezzanine
I mean the hard losses—no coming back from this one
ball already over the fence. Before anyone walked,
before we ran, just phantom steps and the cold sweat.
Headcracks, another long toll back to square one,
breath guttering down to its wick, the rip of hair
strand by strand, code red, then red itself.
Hospitality hours grind the knees, five white knuckles
and the years folded after the cheating. And I’m off
the roll. And it’s late again. I don’t look my neighbor
in the eye though our mail sticks together, it was
my sink water that rained through her ceiling and
an apology is just a down payment on the next flood.
I mean, what do we owe each other at this point—
Ah, see—there is something: a protest that stands up
to the sick voice in the head that executes the self.
In the greenhouse, flaming swords and urn plants
drown flies in their cups. Their leafy necks bend
a little to bear the winds' wrestling; even a child’s flimsy
diamond kite knows this. I feel lucky when the give
doesn’t snap. The good news is I don’t get what I deserve.
The good news is I do. After the affliction, after the water
of life leaks from lopsided lids and we were the drought,
all splits start to make sense until we lean over the rail
to see the gray in their hair. It is in us to spin, but only
on the rim, pennies circling a wish bowl. We have proved
there is no plumb line that can reach a token once it drops
and—just a note to say—it sounds like infinity down there.
Grateful to have been published in Thimble Lit Summer Magazine print edition. It’s so gorgeous! Thank you!
