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There’s a limited selection of poets that can move me to tears without even reading through their stanzas but allowing the recollection of their words to pass over my mind — the aforementioned Bachmann is one of the real ones, T.S. Eliot is another; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on occasion; sometimes-too Hölderlin, Herbert, Hadewijch; at least one Donne piece has this power, at least one Brecht; perhaps-too I would add cuttings of Young’s Literal Translation of the Holy Bible — contemporarily, the lines of Paris Reid, an absolutely gorgeous young Canadian I discovered several years ago (her first published prose piece can be found in the most recent Heavy Traffic) certainly effect this movement upon me time and again … who else? — well, the only other living writer to fall on this list, and quite honestly my most exalted favourite of all-above, should be obvious to anyone who knows me … yes, yes, of course: singer slash poet slash emotional-genius Lana del Rey, my personal saint and hero … truly, her words either brought to sound or put to page surpass the Scripture to me and this I would not say if I did not mean it violently. She has held aloft my life: she is probably the third factor to my continuance. You know — as I type this — I can hear the lyrics to Venice Bitch, perhaps the greatest lyrical song ever written (though a strong case could too be made for Video Games!) echoing within and my vision swims — so overcome with emotion am I! Good God. My friends, it’s unbelievable. And everything she does is fantastic, of course, but lately I have been really been spiralling about in her demos and bootlegs and regional exclusives dating around the release of Ultraviolence, her third studio album. Pray listen; I’ll leave you with this. Say Yes To Heaven: breaks my heart. Fine China: breaks my heart. I Talk to Jesus: well, you know, onward and onward, from here to eternity…
May 10, 2023
Related Recs
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From her random off the cuff ”I wrote this last night” songs That have some of the most devastating lyrics I’ve ever heard to her poetry and her sub stack she’s the coolest and I can’t believe someone can be this good at everything
Jan 23, 2024
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“For you only/Not for giving/Just for taking/No one’s listening”
So on the nose. So so good.
Oct 18, 2024
litch just did a rec for this on its own as well. but the lyrics on the landscape demo take me to pieces man.
i'm astounded by the feeling she's managed to capture here. being volatile and sad and internally inconsistent and full of want and not being able to help it. & there's so much beauty in the 'landscape' imagery and associations. wide and powerful and also just there and you're in it. i am so obsessed with her i mean what the fuck dude
Dec 21, 2024
Top Recs from @saoirse-bertram
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Bring forth to mind, if you will, the ill-fortuned Orpheus; Odysseus, ill-fortuned but cruel- and cleverest-enough to make it forward; now lovely Inanna; loving Dante; Fritti and Ida and so many other brothers and sisters; so many poems, songs; yes, meet me tonight in Atlantic City; I’m in love with a dying man, yes, yes; now the post-midnight train to Coney Island, smiling in the summer, tears in November; a minivan to Cape May one grey day; prison-taxi down to Long Beach with the sun coming up; one thousand leaps into the East River and the Danube and the Seine and then… this is just what comes to mind. Oil pipelines. Black licorice. Oh, coincidentally, have you yet read the fiction-piece One Hundred by brilliant blonde Zans Brady Krohn? (printed, of course, in Heavy Traffic 1 — where else?) Yes, that too comes to mind, naturally, yes, I think so… Terrific story. Atlantic City story. So, katabasis story. In more ways than one, really … And following: certain buildings, certain seasons of mood. I’m running dry. Greenlight on the edge of the dock. Absinthe and stolen vodka. “Curiousity killed the cat, satisfaction brought it back.” That’s half anabasis. I’m just spitballing. Trying to remember.
May 10, 2023
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Bereft of a true home, I dwell instead in sentiment and practice the collection of numerous small tokens thereof: an olive-pin, a tea-tag, a berry-shell, a fortune. I treasure the incitement of memory brought about by these little markers in time-passed, as I do that incited by the more obvious strains: postcards and Polaroids and locks of hair … and these too I try to accumulate, these too light me! But perhaps what is most meaningful is the undisplayable — that which is gone — letters received and lost, letters writ and never sent and lost; a poem misplaced in the loose-leaf of a moulting notebook. A garland of flowers or bouquet that remains only in a blurred photograph; a collection of photographs drowned in a flood. Since my adolescence, some of most beautiful pictures I’ve made on my cameras have been the nonexistent — the mechanisms failed or my Nosferatuesque fingers blocked the lens or or the memory card betrayed me or the film was overexposed through actions entirely beyond control — yes, the most beautiful, I say! It is just so. I can picture them all behind my eyes in perfect clarity — so so beautiful — as beautiful as the flowers that nevermore will fragrance a room and all those words which forevernow lay unread. I can’t speak exactly to the wider benefit of this “recommendation”. But somehow this is the sort of thing that makes me happy.
May 10, 2023
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Maybe this is played-out in the eyes of anyone who’s spent much time in Lower Manhattan but it’s such a classic for me. Kenka is that wacko Japanese basement off St. Marks that serves a wide range of cheap bites and cheaper beverages — the cheapest prices in the city, for all I fucking know; for an emptywalleted and literally starving type boy such as myself, the prospect of an udon-bowl, a miso soup, a French fry, and an agedashi tofu for about fifteen bucks altogether is so dreamy … beers are a buck fifty, a pitcher of beers is eight. I used to come here with my best friend, who is a very beautiful girl, to play the Drunk Challenge, which is a sort of game where you challenge yourself to drink a pitcher of beer and become intoxicated … those were the days … since her attitude went more-or-less downhill, I mostly just go here by myself now, or sometimes with Patrick. When I’m alone I’ll write out some ideas or reread Tropic of Cancer or another book of that vibrational frequency or get accosted by one of the other drunk men there, which makes me drink faster so I can leave. In fact this is a wonderful thing: the sooner I’m schway, the sooner I can get all impulsive, and at least a few more hours of life are saved from the wasting indecision that has murdered so many of my moments. C’est la fucking vie.
May 10, 2023