For the Love of Lyric
Language, Expressed and Expanded
Summer season is one for the full bloom of creative expression. In NYC? Sign up for my in person workshops below — Suminagashi: Meditative Marbling meets this week. Prefer virtual? Explore this month’s virtual workshops on Meditation and Journaling.
I stand three paces from the edge of the stage. A bright spotlight, cascading across eyesight, obscures most of the noticeable details in the crowd, shadow a shroud turning faces’ specifics to undulating terrain in the dark room. Think of starlight. Take a breath. Remember your body. Think of sunlight, earth, horizon, wind as it caresses your face. Exhale. Feel your heartbeat, and though everything is humming, your nerves are not the only thing. There is a vastness. Remember feedback, your heart-body-mind as instrument. Embody rhythm, texture, tone and turn on command, presence, and expression. Still breathing. Root into your feet. Opening sounds.
Begin.
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I spent the cusp of my adulthood — late teens and early twenties — exploring visual and vocal forms, textures and shapes, expressing, studying printmaking during daylight hours and, some nights, as songbird behind a microphone. Late nights found us crossing boundaries of state lines, crammed into vans, tracing the outline of the East coast, passing lapses of time, finding rhythm and losing it as we traveled, gear in hand. Nights in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia. On occasion to the South and the Midwest. Dark to light, driving dusk to dawn expanses. Nerves, and far too much whiskey. Delight in singing. Bare bars transformed into shimmering experience.
My achilles heel as a singer, as it would go, is that often my lyrics were in process. They were more shoreline than mountain, more fluid than fixed, and I’d remember and forget my own words in varying cadences. Nevertheless, poetics were the place I went, and practice, the expression I turned to in order to weave together and start my creative life again and again.
As a kid, I played with sound, color, song. I played in basements. Memories of Mariah Carey on the radio. I’d sit transfixed in front of the speaker that glimmered with brushed metal knobs and voice, wooden sides and guitar lines, as if each note and track was a horizon, my eyes wide gazing up in wonder at the peaks and valleys of vocal range and soprano. Sade on Saturdays, I’d watching the room morph, imagination turning dust from debris into starlight, glimmering and suspended in the atmosphere of the room. I’d hear the hum of music, wishing I could be elsewhere, starlight too, transcended. Standing on stage in the decades to come, bright lights were strands of light weaving over and under audience, eardrums, each other, our bodies swaying, as we braided sound, song, and timing with my own then-soprano. I’d take a deep breath, call up some transcended quality, and be at once rooted in my own form and expanded — voice a channel to feeling, tone, life, larger. My wish, a truth: I, too, became starlight.
Lyric came to me, maybe by combination of nature and nurture, hands extended. Or heart wide like a wingspan. Here, it said — here, a way with words that feels natural, strong, and playful, a bird knowing what to do inherently, soaring on gusts of breath. With lyric, a sense of opening wide, creative liberation. I found release through language: a place, style, and way to sense the dimension of the essence of a sentiment or mood without over explaining. Free from full sentence, the thoughts, feelings, essence of my conscious and unconscious experience could live, breathe, move, and thrive, a grounding place for my vague intimations to live and be safe. Lyric, prose, poem, became my incantations and places to verbalize, vocalize, let the sound out, and express, a place to play with tone, rhythm, pacing.
In lyric, I found a place I could write about death, life, wonder, terror, euphoria, longing, unease, release, love, confusion, and the essence of my humanness in a language that speaks in subtlety and strength. Tones, words, like flecks of gold, drops of purple like dusk light, across song as a canvas. With lyric, poem, song, I found the grounding solace of a home in the spirit of experimentation. I can play with the joy of the texture of word, of force, of breath, of lightness, of process.
With lyric, we give ourselves essence, the poetic. We let the tone hang — like a meditation, rising, peaking, and passing — and let our creative voices speak. Lyric becomes ocean, mysterious in depth, and playful, at once like salt spray and shoreline. We can be serious and not, cutting and smooth, biting and atmospheric. We make sound in sense and non-sense, and riff with the rhythm in heart, body, hand.
The lyrical essay is seed in the ground of creative expression that contains “the capacity to live between worlds, those of poetry and prose,” write Sheryl St. Germain and Margaret L. Whitford in the arriving pages of Between Song and Story: Essays for the Twenty-First Century. “Narrative moves us forward in an essay, while poetry stops us; an image, a simile, or a gorgeously tuned phrase makes us pause, give a piece psychic weight.” I found my copy wandering around my neighborhood one day in the same way I found the phrase that unlocked my writing — unassuming, open, surprised by someone’s front yard library.
With lyric, I found a place to express. It could make sense, it could be non-sense — but it could be, and that was the point. The feeling, the tone, the sensation. The not-yet-formed understanding. The language of the latent, the in process, the unknown. I listen to those songs now with a greater depth of understanding and compassion. To sing or speak or write or create is to breathe in a whole life vivacity. To give dimension to the fullness of our senses. Creative inspiration breathes big air and exhales fully into the dimension of our thinking and being.
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There’s a kind of divinatory, alchemical quality to the poetic, the prose, the lyric — a vibratory mysticism infused with mystery and depth, asking us to focus and tune into the unknown. I look for, then let go of seeking the specifics in meaning as I listen to Karen O sing-shouting the words to “Y Control”, a song I loved as a teenager, and rediscovered as stronger than a cup of coffee. Is it starlight, or something different that Adrianne Lenker writes in “Masterpiece,”? Lyrics show us the shape of tone, rhythm, and and play, cascading across time and brilliant, like Kendrick Lamar’s “Euphoria”, or the almost-all rhythm of Broadcast’s Tender Buttons, an ode to Gertrude Stein, who writes, in her own poem, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” reminding me, now, of “A Rose is Still a Rose” by Aretha Franklin.
When I met — or rather, found myself affirmed — in the lyrical essay, it was a cosmic, lock-in-key moment, a realization of one’s own two feet standing firmly in the practice. A home. A ground. A belonging. A method of expression wide enough to encompass experimentation, the desire for both communicating and poeticism sharing life and being in rhythm — and a place I didn’t know for so long I’d been seeking. This phrase arrived like a feather floating down from some unseen bird; arriving often, as moments that arise in life that can only be described and felt as cosmic, do. The phrase was at once a firm footing, a widening vision, and a deep exhale. As if one day you find yourself waking, key in hand, not realizing you’d been keeping yourself in a cage of your own making. The key fits, and no longer is the cage locked. Isn’t that what we look for in our creativity? To let something speak to us and through us, personal and universal, with us, together, co-creating and liberating.
In the time between stage, singing, and now I converse with myself, listening to the tones of my teens and twenties. I hear her croon, cry, sing. I hear her joy and wonder, and through writing, embodiment, and practice, speak back to her now in a stronger voice, understanding more now what I was, at that time, yet to feel, see, or sense. I sense songbird and learn to hold her in compassion, grateful for the process of singing; the lyric, the poem, the word, the sound, and sharing the vibration became the soil, the hold, the grounding place. The safe place to express the ineffable. The bud of an idea or feeling, the soil to root in, the voice as it rises, the rose, rooted and blooming.
Now, I am more rooted, grounded. I teach, I tend the room, and I have to stay lucid. Less nerves, more water, and no whiskey. I watch as sunlight shines through into yards, bars, apartments. I still speak sometimes from this singing place, finding rhythm, turn to the day, feel how life ripples out through language, discovering what the dialogue between sky, self, ground is saying. I sense when the spirit of lyric is present, sensing as it fills each atom, blood vessel, and pulse when reading a book or poem I love, hearing a song, or expanding language enough to include the way we communicate through taste, tone, and flavor. Michael Ondaatje’s English Patient and Coming Through Slaughter and Pure Colour by Sheila Heti come to mind first. Then meals, resonance in landscape, and the languages of food spoken, made, shared, moments in solitude and connection. The languages beyond languages; the words, shapes, textures, and tones that make us feel alive. Those places of cosmic wonder that cause us to pause and ask, is that heart, thunder or drumbeat?
*
In the kitchen lately, I write recipes and sketches for pieces on notebooks, notes app, scraps of paper as the inkling of idea for an essay forms. I sing loud on car rides, in the way that somehow windows up in a moving car make us feel invincible, imperceivable, and safe. At night, sometimes to soothe, sometimes for sound, I take a deep breath, lay back, and hum, equal parts play and pranayama — see bee breath. I taste an ingredient, and it lands like a song note, and I watch how they vibrate and speak, letting the ingredients tell about their harmonies, dissonance, and resonance. I read menus, pretending they are poem, sifting through tastes and ingredients instead of liner notes.
This month, invite in expression, voice, and play. Play with texture of word, of sound, of tone. What does a sentence sound like spoken from the belly, with the arms wide, or curled in the dawn hours on your side and whispered? Listen to your own voice. Listen to what your heart and body says. Is there a song you love? A word you hold dear and cherish? When you sense it, how do you know? A language both with words and beyond — in color, texture, taste, tone. Notice it. Then, express. Let your creativity be birdsong on wind, expanded wing — untethered, untethering.
Classes and Upcoming Experiences
Nourished by, Nourishing:
Fig! Season! Infusing fig leaves in butter. Morning runs and cool breeze. For more, The Intuitive Writer: Listening to Your Own Voice by Gail Sher. I’m celebrating thirty three years on this earth this weekend. Use code celebrate for 20% off your order of journals and cards at Odette Press.
