Poetic resonances in Joanna Newsom’s work are suddenly embarrassing, too much, as if poetry and song were not born twins. Given that bloodless distance, it becomes pompous and highfalutin to call a song ‘literary’ by the same stroke, ‘literary’ comes to mean intimidating, distant and implicitly upper-class. Away, really, from mortality. Yours for a song…Petridis’ discomfort implies that writing should stay chastely on the page, away from bodies, breath, and animation. Yes, and why are these comparisons highfalutin? Is the page, in its seeming permanence, so much higher than a song that breathes, dies and breathes again? Don’t make a song and dance about it.
Joanna Newsom Lyrics Full Of LiteraryWas Nick Cave – also with an abrasive voice, writing songs full of literary allusions – ever met with such suspicious condescension?Divers sink into water and surface again, releasing their breath ‘divers’ also means diverse, different, multiple. Her voice is unflinchingly feminine (flying high, she stings and floats), and it is hard not to see resistance to her intellect as gendered. In Visions of Joanna Newsom (2010), Tim Kahl writes “Your feyness, forgive me every time I hear your music and feel like a middle-aged Japanese man who visits vending machines to hold and fetishize soiled schoolgirls’ panties.” Each of Newsom’s albums has expanded her range, breaking her out of that queasily infantilised box. This imaginative bookishness, combined with a slightly clichéd association of harps with fairy tales like Jack and the Beanstalk, lead some listeners to indulge breathless fantasies about Newsom as an elf-maid or unworldly character from the pages of dreams. Her first full-length album, The Milk-Eyed Mender (Drag City, 2004), began by sailing towards Narnia in “a little wicker beetleshell its bearings on Cair Paravel”, and continued through “bedraggled ghosts” of sonnets and inflammatory writs, rhyming “blue” with “a page of Camus”. Sappho sang to the lyre, Joanna Newsom sings to the harp (and, on this album, piano, keyboard, harpsichord, violins, accordions, full orchestral arrangements, a musical saw choir…).Joanna Newsom is a lyric poet, in the sense of both poetry and song, and her work has always been influenced by written culture.By ending Divers on a half-word, she (transc)sends me back nine years to her song ‘Only Skin’, from her second album Ys (Drag City, 2006):Last week, our picture window produced a half-wordWe stood and watched her gape like a rattlesnakeI said a sort of prayer for some rare graceThen thought I ought to take her to a higher place.Said, “Dog nor vulture nor cat shall toy with youAnd though you die, bird, you will have a fine view”Here the gasping bird hovers on the edge of articulacy, panting and labouring within Newsom’s own singing voice. Like Finnegans Wake, this is a circular work and like Finnegans Wake, which begins with “riverrun”, it’s full of water.Newsom’s songs are almost endlessly rich in these kinds of connections and motifs, creating a vast and expanding web. The final song, ‘Time, As A Symptom’, is accompanied, like ‘Anecdotes’, by an image of arching trees, and ends with a quotation from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (“ a way a lone a last a loved a long”) in the flight to its final lines: White star, white ship–Nightjar, transmit: transcend!White star, white ship–Nightjar, transmit: transNewsom ends the record on a half-word, looping back to the first line of ‘Anecdotes’, which is “Sending the first scouts over”: trans-sending, transcending. Each landscape is distinct, but linked by transcendental mistiness, full of moisture and shifting clouds the word “transcending” runs through the album, like water evaporating and returning to its source. By the time Newsom reaches ‘Goose Eggs’, we’re in the mountains. In the lyric booklet, each song is set collaboratively beside a different luminously detailed landscape painting by Kim Keever, and the music video for the title-track ‘ Divers’ depicts Newsom as a sky-god, dwarfing the landscape and singing through clouds, as if she’s in a vast Frida Kahlo painting.The first song, ‘Anecdotes’, is accompanied by shadowy woodland and a tangle of branches the second, ‘Sapokanikan’, by a fallen tree, as if a storm just passed through.![]() ![]() In other songs, past moments are fleetingly regained, in a migratory loop like the flight of a swift. / Nor is there cause for carrying on.” The lyrics are seemingly at ease in a static present moment of loss: there is “no cause for carrying on”, no need to move beyond it. / Nor is there cause for grieving. Newsom begins in trilling spirit, but the final stanzas are marked by a tender shift in her voice, addressing an imagined daughter who recurs in her work: “you will not mark my leaving, / and you will not hear my parting song. This army battles the passing of time: “round every bend I long to see / temporal infidelity”, accompanied by cascading harp notes. Bs tweaker 312Shelley’s sonnet reads:Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. ‘ Sapokanikan’ references the Native American settlement that preceded New York’s Greenwich Village, placing a history of suppression and aggressive conquest alongside Shelley’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ and many buried ghosts. Like a medium, she tries to speak the dead. Newsom describes the researches that go into her work as emotionally, rather than intellectually, driven.
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