Christina Pugh’s latest collection, Grains of the Voice, is steeped in music, so her playlist speaks to both #NaPoMo and #recordstoreday. Enjoy!
https://play.spotify.com/user/northwesternup/playlist/3xpJzf6OAmAmcZH1kmrO9e
Christina on her list:
“The songs on this list play cameo roles in Grains of the Voice,often appearing as a single line or phrase taken from their lyrics. Like the fireworks on the book’s cover, these borrowed lines are flashes of melody or harmony within the poems. If readers know the songs, I hope these lyric “glimpses” will trigger a moment of remembered music. I’m also convinced that such remembered lines affect how we think – and how we experience beauty in the world.
Taken together, all of these songs form an eclectic soundscape and a backdrop for the book’s exploration of voice, both spoken and sung. The songs’ eclecticism speaks to my own intuitive (undisciplined?) listening history and my wish, as a poet, to put contrasting or dissonant sounds together: to make music in that way. The same goes for cultural references — I’d like Shakespeare and Sinatra to live together in the same room, in a marriage of true love rather than irony. Finally, I should add that Neil Young and Emmylou Harris were the patron saints of this book — the very definition, for me, of what “grains of the voice” means.”
New Hires at Northwestern University Press