Sunday Culture: Album picks & the luminosity of poetry
Arts & Culture editor Adam Coil shares what albums he can't stop listening to and a poetry collection he can't stop thinking about.
What I’ve been listening to
“Guts” by Olivia Rodrigo
These past few weeks, Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore LP has usurped coffee as my morning stimulant. The album abounds with emotional and musical energy from front to back, mainly because of the genuine passion that Rodrigo brings to it. She doesn’t phone anything in — a genuine triumph for a 40-minute, commercial album. Being a heartbroken, teenage girl is not required to enjoy this album (but I suspect it might help).
“Lost and Safe” by The Books
This album is bizarre. Take, for example, my favorite song, “Vogt Dig For Kloppervok,” an anti-epic that samples Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky” and a recording of Greenland’s national radio. The album is a giant nexus of these kinds of disparate instruments, voices and ideas. I would never claim that this album is fun, but it does pique a unique sense of curiosity, and I think that’s why I keep coming back.
“Ask Me Tomorrow” by Mojave 3
Listening to Mojave 3 when Fall rolls around is one of my most sacrosanct traditions as a human being. It’s perfect for this time of year. The first track, “Love Songs on the Radio,” is the warmest song I’ve ever heard, and the rest of the album displays a decent attempt to match its beauty. The instructions here are pretty simple: get underneath some blankets, throw on a pair of headphones, press play and dissolve into the music.
“Quiet Music For Young People” by Dana and Alden
The best way to describe Dana and Alden’s music is probably indie-jazz — the duo combines the drums and the saxophone to create a sound that seems to demarcate the boundary between summer and Fall. I can’t recommend “July 98” and “Dragonfly” enough — the two tracks that seem to stretch their artistic range to the max.
“Pop 2” by Charli XCX
Somewhere in between commercial brilliance and artistic genius, “Pop 2” is a fascinating inflection point in Charli XCX’s career. In “Pop 2,” we hear Charli start to question what she can really do with her music, and for that reason, the growing pains on this project are just as rewarding as its peaks.
Poetry // All of the Lights
Ben Lerner’s latest poetry collection, “The Lights,” signifies a sharp, encouraging turn in his artistic vision. Typically, Lerner’s poetry collections draw on obscure scientific phenomena — his previous three books are “The Lichtenberg Figures,” “Angle of Yaw” and “Mean Free Path.” However, with “The Lights,” things are, well, obviously different. You may not know that the mean free path of a particle is the average distance it travels before colliding with another particle, but you do know what lights are, and I think this break in titular tradition goes a long way in capturing Lerner’s new ambitions.
Over the years, Lerner has received a lot of criticism and frustration for being too academic or too complicated — he even writes in “The Media,” “I’m just clicking on things in bed, a review by a man who says I have no feelings and hate art.” These new poems are nothing like that. Even though Lerner is still just “promoting syllables, trying to avoid the twin traps of mere procedure and sentimentalism,” his words feel more luminary than ever before. They’re filled with the belief that trace amounts of the sublime are all around us, that the denouement of loose strands of daily life can produce a euphoria of meaning — think of Woolf’s line about matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
Maybe this is what all poetry does in some way, but I love the methods Lerner takes to get to those manic realizations. Quantum physics, voicemails, Walt Whitman, fireflies — you name it. Everything is surging with poetic potential. While reading “The Lights,” one gets the sense that the world, itself, is poetry if only we had the linguistic power to handle it: “But if you’ve ever seen a dendritic pattern in a frozen pond, lightning captured in hard plastic, or the delicate venation of an insect wing (the fourth vein of the wing is called the media), then you’ve probably felt that a spirit is at work in the world, or was, and that making it visible is the artist’s task, or was.”
More than anything, “The Lights” is about community, or “the spontaneous formation of a public.” And if you think about a clear night sky, the bird’s eye view of the metropolis at night or the sway of phone flashlights at concerts, then you can intuit how Lerner wields light, lets it provide a framework for thinking about how people can feel genuinely connected and independent at the same time. The tension between the lyrical “I” and the rhetorical “we” is everything for Lerner (see his obsession with Whitman’s poetic dogma). And if this book succeeds, it does so because its very reception and consumption are exemplary of the kind of interconnected autonomy that Lerner is interested in.
As Lerner, himself, writes:
I think of myself as having
people, a small people
in a failed state, and love
more avant-garde than shame
or the easy distances.
All my people are with me now
the way light is.
Til next week,
— Adam Coil