Katie Bowler: Sketches of the Mississippi

 Jack Foss: Here I Am

Christopher Luna: from “it will be more than we can bear"

Ronnie Pontiac: Three Poems

Sue Rhynhart: Five Sonnets

Joe Richey & Randy Roark: Collaboration 10 Dec 2001

Randy Roark: A Wake (for Anne Waldman)

Jane Siberry & Randy Roark: A Conversation

Tamra Spivey: Four Improvised Lyrics

Alison Carb Sussman: Six Poems

I knew her first
in her ending,
where she was dark and sully,
vast and rough, like a melting mountain
surging into a forgotten
and empty sea.

II.

When I was nine,
still wearing overalls,
I walked barefoot along her edge
as foreign-flagged ships
hauled past with romantic names
and tiny deckhands—
the loading docks forbidden territory,
trespassed upon so that I could go
where the ground invited cow belly-making:
squishing my feet into muddy sand
to bring her juice to the surface,
as though my toes were enough
to command her.

III.

I cross the river to arrive an hour early
for an uncle's funeral,
and when the Kleenex & lipstick & Altoids
have been put away, I return over the same rocky
surface that feels like a regurgitating god
in a blinding fog sky evening.
One dollar gets my car ferried
across her rolling moguls that spin
like black silk crusted brown
on an unyielding, unending liquid highway.
When I stand at the railing,
cool air misting my hair, I breathe
cigarettes between images that my camera steals:
dock lights like white orbs in a Jack London mist,
the crush of water against a hull,
a small child standing still,
watching me watch the water,
both of us silent.

IV.

When I try to tell the story
of the river—of the faces
along her banks and on her
boats, of the fishermen and the foreign
seamen, of the preachers & mourners
perched on bluffs above her, of the hobos
burning fires beneath her
abandoned bridges & slabs—I begin
confusing the drama with the drama's audience,
one not creating the other but becoming the other,
the stage ravaged and silenced and then ravaged again
by a sea of faces and lives as fluid as her movement.

V.

This river of lives becomes a stack of binders
lined up alphabetically on bookshelves
in my apartment in a New Orleans,
just blocks away from the old lady
who has half a dozen different lopsided wigs
and who sits on her porch waving to everyone
crossing from one parish to another
in her bend of the river along River Road.
I am 2158 miles from the spot
that a South Dakotan photographer returns to
every weekend, capturing the moon
as it rises above Lake Itasca and hovers
above the river where
the river is just a creek
that will grow into an insurmountable
courier of sediment and stories
before she settles with her sea.

Gold and white-gold fish swim in the pool
at the bottom of the waterfall in the concourse
near May's Coffee Shop in the Kinokuniya
Building in Japantown. The place is readying
for Christmas—small trees like birches
that I remember from Michigan are covered
with lights, and an inflated Santa Claus
who might be filled with helium is anchored
by slender ropes to a metal railing.

I'm eating meat loaf and rice and drinking
lemonade. May's serves large portions
of everything—enough rice on a plate
to feed a family. The other day when I ordered
corned beef and cabbage it came with a mountain
of rice and several boiled potatoes.

I wander corridors past an inflated snow man,
past the Ikebana Society's austere flower
arrangements, past Ukiyo-e prints, past dishes
of inedible plastic food in restaurant windows,
past the S.F. Taiko Dojo to the immaculate
Tan Tan coffee Shop with a small vase of flowers
on the table in front of the big window
where I drink café latte from a bowl, eat
a small package of almond cookies and watch the cars
and buses and the afternoon passing on Geary Street.

Tuesday . . .

Sherman & Patton were military geniuses, descendants
of an ancient Greek general.

Reading "The Soul of Battle" by Victor Davis Hanson:
"Epaminondas . . . was to create a land army more democratic
than the Athenian, and yet more deadly than the Spartan."

This is a Greek place—I didn't realize it the first time
I came in, but now I see that the men who run it are Greek,
probably brothers, and they fill the background with Greek
music while I think about Epaminondas, the philosopher
general who led a few free Boeotian farmers—Thebans—
against a superior force of Spartans and defeated them.
Epaminondas couldn't have known that anyone
at a distance of more than two thousand years would be
speaking his name and admiring him. Nor could he realize
that he would have inheritors at this end of time's corridor.

Wednesday . . .

At home. Clouds and drizzle
beyond the window
while I wait for mail
and maybe some good
news. Sent an e-mail
to Talkback Live, the television
show, but they didn't
use it. Not enough time
devoted to substance—nothing
gets finished or talked out.
Commercial interruptions
are what's important. Everybody
sells—all the time, and it's a sad
seductive effort—titillation
to get us to buy what we don't
want. The commerce
of the nation doesn't deal
with human needs—give
thanks for simple nourishments.
Is anybody really grateful
for widgets like cell phones
on which we talk as we walk
so we can inform significant others
that we just tripped
over a bump in the sidewalk?

Thursday . . .

This cold keeps me in.
TV parades go by at a distance
and I see things in books
at an even greater distance
—not much of worth in this age
of media and technology
when cosmic variety batters
the mind. Cinematic
violence flickers and cinematic
death is nothing. Dinner was
a disappointment, but—un-
expectedly—I've found chocolate
ice cream in the freezer.

Friday . . .

Tony Bennett says he left his heart in San Francisco, but I think not here
at the Sausage Factory in the Castro where I lunch on spaghetti with meat
sauce. This was once a working-class neighborhood with lots of German
immigrants—I used to have a friend who grew up here. His parents were
German, and he carried a spear and sang in the opera chorus until he died.
The Sausage Factory's music is all oldies—favorites of the mostly male gay
customers: Tony Bennett, Sonny & Cher (I got you, babe), Aretha Franklin
(Respect!) and Elvis (Don't be crool!). The decor is cozy/funky
pseudo-Victorian. I'd forgotten the goodness of crusty sourdough bread with
pasta. Reminds me of the Old Spaghetti Factory in North Beach, where you
could spend almost nothing and feel very Bohemian and where Donald Pippin
used to present esoteric chamber music concerts in a back room—before he
became an impresario who staged "pocket operas." This neighborhood still
has the greatest hardware/variety store in the world, but the gentleman who
managed the place and operated the key-duplicating machine and let people
assume he was Cliff, the owner, is probably dead by now. The store has
survived the progress of the neighborhood from German-American enclave to
unofficial capital of the queer nation. A queer flag is flying, and there
will probably be a map of the region in the next Oxford Atlas of the World.

Saturday . . .

The wind is almost lethal today—trees and bushes
agitated as if in panic. This wind would be hell
if I were riding a bike—I think I'd be blown off the bridge
if I tried to make the crossing. Something in the storm
knocked out cable television this morning, but it's restored
now and I tune in to an animated version of Dickens'
Christmas Carol for the sound—not the images. I listen
to it without watching, as if it's a drama for radio—
the voice characterizations so much richer
than the shallow colors of the cartoon world.

Sunday . . .

Seen through my kitchen window in the dark of early
morning, the bright disk of the moon seems to append
from scumbled clouds stretched across the horizon
and its light has singled out and silvered this room.

Note: For the finished manuscript, I intend to break up this section into shorter paragraphs which will serve as occasional interludes between other sections of the poem.
                                                                                              —C.L.

VI.

He was an incredibly loyal and loving friend. She was one of the loveliest people on earth. He loved the brotherhood and the camaraderie. She was a great businesswoman, but most of all, she loved being a Mom. He was in the war zone. He had no business being there. She was such a loving thing. He loved his country. He taught scuba and had multiple degrees. She did not often get to see her older sister. He always wanted to live in New York. He woke up one morning when he was eighteen and promised himself he would stop doing drugs and become something. She was a Boston area sports fan with a great sense of humor. He was very proud of his wound. She participated in many special projects. She had that special spark that great buyers must possess. She loved American Airlines, loved her work. He was always ready to go whenever he was asked. He was a tremendous, incredible kid. He always wanted to be a pilot. She was the mother of an 11-year-old son and a college-age daughter. He had an immense passion for basketball and will always be remembered as the incredible coach Bob. She was probably the ideal flight attendant. She was very brave. He was always dedicated to others and available to whoever needed him. He was active in his community and church. She was loved by the students. He was going to learn as much as he could about rivers and oceansides. He was a kind gentleman with a quiet exterior that masked one of the sharpest comedy minds ever to write for television. He was making sure everyone got out of the building. He died trying to get people out of the building. She was the glue. He was the glue. He liked sports a lot. He broke a school record for punt returns. She knew it was going to happen. He was very happy in the service. His job was very dangerous that day. He got along very well with his siblings. He was moving up. He loved his life. She had tons of phrases. He was watch commander. He thought about others before himself. She was a serious student of pop culture. He worked for years as an electrician. She was extremely dedicated to her job. He said he was going to call back. He had no paranoia about working there. He had to pay the bills and make sure his son was taken care of. She worked on the 101st floor of tower one. He was a great defensive forward and a real smart play-maker. She was a great nurturer. She was always smiling and laughing and joking. He worked his way up until he was in an office instead of on the floor of the stock exchange. He delighted in bungee jumping and feeding sharks. She was ma'rachim al ha'brios—a person who cared about all sentient beings, including those stuck in airports with reservations on overbooked flights. He was a father of three, a baseball and basketball coach, a reservist in the Army Corps of Engineers, and a firehouse leader. She didn't put on airs. He was a used car salesman. He had a karaoke machine with thousands of songs. He was a civil war buff. She sold, like, computer software to hospitals and medical companies or something. He loved his job as a switch engineer at General Telecom. She also worked at General Telecom, and she died that day, too. He was in the business of saving lives as a New York City firefighter. She was the peacekeeper. He read them bedtime stories, tucked them in and kissed them goodnight every night he was home. She was a resourceful networker. He was off duty the morning of 9/11, but he jumped on the truck anyway. He wasn't ever a fan of dull moments. He called his wife and said he was headed for the scene. He built a pond in the backyard. He was never unhappy. He never gave his mother any trouble. He was always ready to show the latest dance. He was a prolific traveler. He walked the streets with a digital camera pressed to his eye. He knew it was a terrorist attack. He had been expecting something like that for a long time. He was like a big kid. He always wanted to get married young and start a family. He could cook chocolate chip pancakes for a crowd and thrill a small cousin by juggling balls, beanbags, and flaming sticks. He'd helped her with some computer problems and some social problems in her life, and she wrote me a three-page letter that said he was one of the few people who'd ever touched her life. He loved playing hockey. He was an international equities trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, but he saved his finest work for home. He was a glutton for life. He was six feet six inches tall. He found any excuse to head for the water. He preserved the hole he punched in his basement ceiling while celebrating the Yankees' World Series victory over the Mets last year. She doted on their two feline companions. He had that whiff of danger about him. He didn't always actually smoke cigars, but he would just have one in his mouth to sort of chew on. She was just very open and very eager to be there for anyone. She is now in a place where His ever-renewing life is coursing through her body. He really did love music, especially the Beatles and James Taylor. He cooked stuffed peppers for his daughter. She was like a mother to them. He won the bronze star for bravery in Vietnam and then returned to the States to put himself through law school. He was a Christian. He was a midfielder on the University of Baltimore soccer team that won the Division II NCAA championship in 1975. She left a lasting impression. He was a software consultant who loved New York because it reminded him of Bombay, India. He loved the best of everything, whether champagne, Cuban cigars, or sushi. He got up early for a technology conference. He joined the fire department in February. He was a surfer and skier, and he loved to go out. He chose to go back into the north tower. He overcame dyslexia to achieve a double major in math and physics. He loved Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Simon & Garfunkel. He and his wife were looking forward to his retirement. He was an avid Boston Red Sox fan. He eliminated his own job rather than break up his programming team. He made a mean meatloaf. He was a natural storyteller. He had even begun talking about playing at an open-mike night in a Greenwich Village bar. She wanted to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland one of these days. He worked as a vice president of risk services at Marsh & McLennan, on the 100th floor of tower one. She worked hard as an assistant bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald, and she was a veteran of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He first played CBGB when he was seventeen, with a band called the Psychotics. He stayed true to himself. He really had his life in order. He was always in motion. He always had to be moving. He got along well with everybody and was being groomed to be a long-timer. He just couldn't stop crying. He said, "Mommy, something hit the building,
and I need to tell you I love you. I love all of you."

IX.
ANTHRAX RANT

I am the Law.
—Anthrax

I don't believe in anthrax
           anthrax hysteria
           or anthrax mania.
Anthrax has killed less people
than the West Nile virus
           another disease hyped as "epidemic"
           in order to perpetrate some heinous shit
           on innocent people without fear of protest.

Anthrax is the ultimate maguffin
a government-created ruse designed to distract
from the continued destruction of the Bill of Rights.
Who has time to write a letter to John Ashcroft
           when every piece of unsolicited mail
           could spell certain doom?
And those hundreds of American citizens held without charges?
well, they must be guilty of something

           evil knows no holiday
           extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures

THREE DIE AFTER KNEE SURGERY
                                                BIOTERRORISM NOT SUSPECTED

Anthrax is the number one non-story of the New World Order
an inside job intended to draw attention away
from U.S. terrorism in Afghanistan
complete with ludicrous and insulting                ("ANTRAX")
efforts to make it appear as if "foreign elements" are responsible

meanwhile there is a curious lack of photographic evidence
of increasing civilian casualties
                                 corpses are bad for morale
                                 need to keep 'em buying
                                 those PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN sweatshirts

the newly terrorized revert to early childhood habits
a willingness to bow to the voice of authority
           without question
fear inspires a desire for the jackboot
take care of me Daddy
I don't wanna die
           no freedom no privacy
           racial profiling concentration camps
                      where do I sign?

A world-renowned Harvard scientist and expert in highly contagious and deadly viruses mysteriously disappeared in Tennessee last Friday,
leaving a rental car on a Memphis bridge.

Anthrax is a fiction
Anthrax is a lie
Anthrax is a decent metal band
           which chose the name because it sounded cool
           and no one knew what it was             at the time
                      we still don't know

Anthrax is convenient
Anthrax is a construct
Anthrax is effective
as a panic-inducing device
as a method of producing legions of instant sheep
Anthrax is Pearl Harbor
Anthrax is the Gulf of Tonkin
Anthrax is marijuana
Anthrax is Dungeons and Dragons
Anthrax is Judas Priest
Anthrax is Madonna
Anthrax is N.W.A.
Anthrax is 2 Live Crew
Anthrax is Columbine High School

Buy Anthrax: Kills Democracy Dead.

X.

Even Jesus would never forgive what you do.
                                                              —Bob Dylan

The Onion: PRIVILEGED CHILDREN OF MILLIONAIRES
                                                    SQUARE OFF ON WORLD STAGE

"I think the hawks are reacting from their pelvises and their bellies."

           U.S. BOMBS STRIKE THREE VILLAGES
                      sorties at four a.m.
                      38 of her relatives
                                 multiple fractures

Mr. Khalil wept: "The village is no more. All my family, 12 people were killed. I have lost my children, my wife. They are no more."

Admiral Quigley: "If we had hit a village causing widespread death that was unintended, there was no chance the village was targeted improperly."

Mr. Best: "People develop an emotional stake in
defending a number."

the numbers tumble
           6,700
           then 5,000
                      4,500
                      4,000 now 3, 300

           September 11 no longer has the distinction
           of being the bloodiest date in American history.
           On September 17, 1865
                      3,650 people were killed, and thousands injured
                                 at the Battle of Antietam

some felt that they had a personal relationship with the buildings themselves

           the recovery efforts are now necessarily subterranean
                      four floors below ground
                      the remains of a dozen
                                 who had been trapped in a stairwell
                                 when the north tower collapsed

Ironworker Andy Jacobs, member of the Mohawk tribe from the Kahnawake reservation near Montreal: "I'm Indian, so I can adapt. Those are human beings, eh? But you got to detach yourself. I try to think of them as big stuffed dolls."

only 492 have been positively identified
Mary J. Gerhardt: "We want to find something of our son."

           about half of the rubble has been taken away: 600,000 tons
                      those on the night shift suffer from
                                 strained marriages, strained eyes

Eddie Reinle: "The winter nights are long and dark and cold. They're 14½-hour days now. Maybe in the summertime I'll get some sleep, if I live that long."

James McKee spent 3½ years on the World Trade Center
an ironworker just like
his father, who was crippled on the job
and his great-uncle, a member of Local 40
           he watched his brother Gerard fall to his death
           while helping to construct the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge:

"All these people died for what? Let us not forget about all the civilians who died here, and the people who lost them. Who salutes them?'

           the bombs struck eight tribal soldiers
                      ethnic Pashtuns who were working with the U.S.
                      to capture Osama bin Laden
                                 warplanes bombed their headquarters
                                 in the mountains near Tora Bora
                                 more than 200 civilians lay dead
                      in the surrounding countryside

airport bars are doing a booming business these days

           the media salivate over
           the black art of
           spore concentration
           drying, sifting, milling
           removal of impurities
                                                       dry powder
                                                       virtually indistinguishable
                                                                  in critical technical respects
                                                                  from that produced by
                                                                  the U.S. biowarfare program

                      "It's coming from another source. This is high-quality stuff."

All letters to Santa are being irradiated
                      to kill any trace of any disease
           Roy Tidwell of Imperial Missouri
           who visits stores each Christmas dressed as Santa
                      has been banned by security at the South County Mall

"An unidentified person dressed as Santa Claus approaching children is a
security concern, especially someone that can't be identified
                                 other than 'he looked like Santa Claus.'"

           More than 1,000 detained

Osama Elfar, mechanic, Trans State Airlines, St. Louis, did not hide from his interrogators: "I still admire the American people. But staying here for Middle Eastern men will be very hard. I thought everyone has equal rights no matter their sex or color or religion. I don't believe that anymore."

freedom itself was

           Attorney General John Ashcroft
                      invites those that fit the description
                      down to the station for a little chat
                                 providing a definition for terrorism
                                 that could easily describe foreign policy
                                 as practiced by the United States:

"Those who perpetrate premeditated, politically motivated violence against noncombatant targets. Those who pit Americans against immigrants and citizens against noncitizens. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil."

                                 and exactly who is George W. Bush talking about
                                            when he excoriates

                                 "somebody who encourages young people to kill themselves
                                                       and he himself refuses to stand and fight"

A closer reading of Ashcroft's public statement reveals his true intentions:

                                 "Fear the United States,
                                            for you will lose your liberty
                                                       we have engaged in a deliberate campaign
                                            crafted carefully to infringe upon constitutional rights
                                            I cannot and will not consult with you."

Their once Bohemian parents
well versed in Jung and Dylan spoil every show
with cameras and dredged up dowagers
because every other doctor in Brentwood wants
his son to be a high school rock star and
every other lifted and enlarged Palisades mom
wants her daughter dancing on TV for Pepsi.
Behind every Platinum selling supergroup
there's a mother, the admiring announcer proclaims.

Before rock and roll, a parent's discovery
that a child is an artist was viewed with the aggrieved
loss and betrayal, the guilty rage otherwise
reserved for murderers and homosexuals.

The rest of us, vainly wanting something we
could easily have had, we know the one who
comes with the eyes of an angel hides a devil inside.
We must learn to trust other human beings again.
While they sit smiling beside Fate at family dinners
we crouch like animals in the dark, sick
and afraid in screen glow, tapping codes, trying
to arrange these black ants into coherent patterns
before they carry us into the silence.

Oedipus Discovered America

I hear them through the wall.
They're talking about Lewis and Martin on TV.
"Surprisingly," she says, "Lewis was a dom top
and Martin a rather femme bottom."
"That conjures an ugly image," he laughs.

"The only thing worse than Lewis's ceaseless
need for ass kissing," she continues,
he finishes her sentence: "was his relentless
obsession with cock sucking."
"The only thing worse than being an ass kisser,"

her voice deepens, "is being a cock sucker."
"There's the rub," he laughes, "how can such henious
contempt be attached to so pleasurable an act?"
"Force," she says, "Force isn't as exciting
or sexy, or romantic, as people pretend."

The predictable loud bumps and a crash,
her muffled gagging. His gutteral "You love it."
I guess she did, because she seemed especially
relaxed and cheerful after, absent mindedly stirring
my canned spaghetti in an old pot on the gas flame,
my mother, both my mother then and the mother I married.

Everyone knows American boys marry their moms,
apparent from a chronic cough, hue of hair and eyes,
hesitant laughter, or gossipy sincerity.
Mistakenly praised as sweet and romantic,
this psychosis triggers beatings, rapes,
and cancers in our supposedly civilized society.

Unconsciously vengeful and apocalyptic,
helpless against the laws of psychological physics
mom's only giving what she got. All that swallowed rage
has to go somewhere. With careful and caring snips
the best bits of life are clipped away. Sitting
at the table, sorting through her coupons,
pretending it's a card game.

Wish Fulfillment

In a dream I had
a famous unknown band
was playing Leonard Cohen
at midnight in Disneyland.
There was a punk rocker
he wasn't much of a talker,
and there was a raver
like a cat she would savor.
A stoner dude was
willing to share his food
because a free style MC
cued a DJ soulfully and
a blue grass folkie did not
care who thought he was hokey.

There was a goth ghoul,
emo boys two by two,
several metal heads and
rastafarians with dreads.
There was a riot girl,
she was ready to change the world
but she twirled the wrong curl
and off Olympus was hurled.

Smiling crusties talking,
even walking with hippies,
classic rock flunkies,
spastic jazz junkies,
Beethoven's monkeys,
even cowgirls into country
all on our way to a party
in Washington DC
and our scheme was
to paint the White House green
because life is like a garden
under a slowly sliding hill
the garden is so beautiful
but the hill is never still.

Sue Rhynhart

Five Sonnets

main
TOC

The way you saunter your hips about
draws me to you. There are words that
is why there is caution & appropriate
use of language. After all we've been thru

I bleed for months after you've gone
my hands and my heart take me
to study, to change, to flourish
I cannot live without blossoming

every night I sleep alone with shadows
I am so sensitive . The migration patterns
of swans, and doves, and pelicans
cross in my dreams. I feel that

love field is larger than me
that gives this line to you to breathe

Sonnet 68

                        for Jack

Long ago wagons creaked through
these vast spaces that we now call
home. Albion mountain
stood out to me as you named it

What was there then that held us?
It wasn't a crackling or a sour note
It was the re-assurance of always being
never a promise. My cats gather

their bird kill, feathers of all the great ones
flicker, stellar, jay. I want to call
up Jack to give these birds some advice
about how to stay upbeat & in flight

tonight a blue moon a full truth
spinning of wheels of things left unsaid.

This Night

This night that I rebel against. The moon
is so blue in its full beauty of first winter
elegance. Reiden will come with such thrust
catalpa blossoms fall over our shoulders

Tis beyond weight. I cry openly
then find laughter such wings that move
independently, transparent
dragonflies of turquoise lingering

I am bonded to each person here
Stories & songs are nested in the heart
Yet how they diffuse and travel. Broadcast
like seeds. Quickly sprouting anenomes

open & shut on the ocean floor. We here
above sea level know our hearts to be true

The elegance of breath transmitted
into the sails. A boat float with touch
& laughter, skin cracking smiles.
Green meadows for miles, I'm dreaming.

A friend suggests to man & a woman to go
to dine. The woman thinks with a man, a man
oh man. Humma humma mumma
this is what both the man & woman said.

Humma mumma. Tomorrow
brings the wake of day. Pink light
where the river in fact is always awake
where one can sit and contemplate

to touch a soul with your fingertips
sleep, flowers of all colors our blanket

The elegance of breath transmitted
Into the sails. A boat a float transmitted
& laughter. Reiden will come with such thrust
Catalpa blossoms fall over our shoulders.

Tis beyond weight. I cry openly
Then find incessant laughter,
Such wings flutter independently
Transparent dragonflies of turquoise lingering.

I am bonded to each person here.
Stories & songs nest in the heart.
Yet, how these friends scatter, broadcast
Like seeds. Quickly sprouting, colorful

Anenomes open & shut on the ocean floor.
We here know our time has begun.

Jack Collom celebrates the publication of his selected poems, Jack Collom Day, and his 70th birthday by giving a reading with his sister, prose writer Jane Wodening (at one time known as Jane Brakhage)

Wet the reed
with something from the Aztec
like Guayaki Yerba Mate
who was hiding under
the Spanish moss—
transported on the soles
of the sandals of the 17th c
Jesuit missionaries
     still dripping
     at Iguazu.

If she were a statue
  she would be the blue flower
    of Juarez—but morning
      stalled her.

Once wet rest it
on bottom lip
lick it to keep it moist—

but there was no water within him—
   whispering as shadows colored
      their faces, chipped
or jagged crystal
retaining a rock and roll
glitter—

the only thing that was certain
was that something terrible was
about to happen, and he arrived
with a young blonde, the December
clouds letting through a hint of moon—

they descended into the
vault on Avenue B
for a drink—
he must have been startled,
for from under the ice a flame
began to warm her into water—

            meta-comment:
     "you're in a dark moon
               aren't you?"

fire ice terrible clouds
hiding Spanish moss

nearly perfect, he wandered
in and waited in the shadows—
she was dark and he was
what she wanted—
a slow creak of leather
the slide of a slippery
shoe bottom and
a warm necklace—

when the hissing ceased
she saw his muscles glistening
under his skin, a leather
rumor retaining its imprecision
until she probed first
with her thumb down his belly
and his presence became a kind of
wandering mirror, weeping, some-
what beat—and that there
they both were,
hovering from a cobweb
licking their legs,
arms tangled in
prayer—
          the time of secrets
is over, and masks, and
how am I supposed to argue
with her ghost in the gloom?

A glow of a Marlboro lite
and her eyes like its satellite
but the metaphors are
beginning to bury us—
no fuel at all here
for a whole day now—
the warm out from under
her eyelids—how she hid
there—

How to get the key to the city?

Write poems every day for 45 years.
Live on Nescafe and raw eggs.

Let the wind work for you—
feeling that there's some dark-
ness brewing and singing
without limits.

A WAKE (for Anne Waldman)

I prefer tributes when the person is actually still alive. It's like everyone's fantasy—to be present at their own funeral—a rehearsal for death. I'm so tired of memorials everyone gets up and says how great they were or what a great poet they were or how they changed their lives.

Walking up to a live person and telling them what it is that you admire in their work isn't really scary. Sometimes the truth is "I really liked your poems. They were just the right length. And they were smart, but not too smart—they weren't like poems that were smart in a superficial way, so that halfway through you begin to realize you've lost your audience, and they're staring at you like it's a mercy killing—"Please, God, let it be over." And you feel like a fish on a dock, just flopping around, not quite knowing how to get ouf of this thing. I don't know what goes through other people's minds, but that's what goes through mine. Anyway, you found a way to make it clear enough and circle back once in a while so no one really got lost." That's what I told Cole Swenson tonight.

Or what I told Akilah Oliver: "I really liked what you did—how you passed out copies of Anne's books to the audience and brought up the houselights so we could turn around and face each other."

Her instructions were to ask a question and then open the book at random—bibliomancy she called it. And we stood up in the crowded auditorium to read bittersweet, sad, innocent, tender poems to each other. Some of them were written when Anne was living in the Village, documenting the wild and extended party that surrounded Frank O'Hara and Andy Warhol and Ted Berrigan and Burroughs, Corso, and Ginsberg.. Everything seemed to be happening all day, every day—they just had to think it up and it would be real.

BE HAPPY O SAD WORLD BE HAPPY

Be happy O sad world be happy!

because you are the way you are
between joy and sorrow

Be happy O sad world be happy!

we're alive today, gone tomorrow
but you go on and on.

Anyway, that's what I told Akilah Oliver tonight after I borrowed a match from her and we talked together from the Bug Theater to the reception to the gallery.

Lewis Warsh was there on videotape, reading one of his first poems to Anne that was so impossibly true that it almost broke his heart to read it.

And we all know by now that when we die our friends will be sad and there will be emergency phonecalls and gossip and fond memories and tears—and that then everyone will adapt and the world goes on, and we go on too, without them. And that's really a good thing.

Or maybe it's true that the dead live on in the people they've touched. (I know this is true. When Allen died a little spark of him flew off into dozens of people, each picking up a facet of him.) And it's sad when they get to the point where they don't know anymore, where they're not so sure, where they begin to feel in the way—as if they're cluttering up the highway, so it's time to go.

Nothing, not even this, lasts—or maybe even exists—and that's pretty sad at first, and then it's both sad and miraculous—then it goes back and forth.

The mail piles up, there will be letters that arrive too late. What people say about you at your funeral is never what anyone expects. There's a poem by Catullus about his brother who died in Greece, his body too far away to be returned to Rome, and how Catullus journeys there, at least to bury him, wondering what it means, that his brother is dead and he is still alive.

What Lewis Warsh has gained from being no longer beautiful or young is an amazing presence that has all the wide-eyedness of knowing what's really true. His appearance on videotape, reading poems from Anne's childhood steps in front of her MacDougal Street walk-up, squinting up into the sun, was like someone waving goodbye from a burning ship.

You start out writing poems you think will do something or be something because you think that's what you're supposed to do. And then you realize that reading the poem can only bring you to where you are at that moment, and it's got to be something more than being self-conscious about being onstage or not knowing what kind of poem to read at a reading or how to read it.

Sometimes I worry about poets like Frank O'Hara and Ted Berrigan whose work was so obviously written during a headlong race toward death. Ted was always more alive than anyone in the building, and he knew it. He wasn't afraid. His readings were like tragic masses—when Ted crashed and burned, it was horrible, but you also never forgot it. It was like a village sacrifice.

But no one changes anything forever, like we think they will. That's part of the tragedy, too.

I didn't understand Ted until I heard him, and how the first thing I noticed was that he was the same person between poems. He was always bigger than his poems too, but he never made himself small in order to read them—he never burlesqued. Sometimes he was above them or beside them, and that's where his humor came from—that he read them with equal seriousness, especially the funny ones.

On the day Laurie Anderson took her Buddhist Refuge Vows in NYC in the eighties, I think, it coincided with the appearance at Tibet House of young monks, who had never been out of Tibet. While Laurie was repeating her vows, she felt as if she was hearing them for the first time. Panicking, she grabbed one of the monk and dragged him to a coffeeshop directly after the ceremony. She sat him down and handed him a double cappuccino and asked him what she'd just done. Did this mean that she could never again look to her music as entertainment—did she really have to turn it into a vehicle for relieving all humankind from suffering? The monk drank his cappuccino down in one long swallow, and then listened to the exasperated Anderson. Finally he raised his hand and shouted at her: "Don't limit yourself! Don't be so strict! Open it up!" He paused for a moment and started at Anderson: "And another thing. The Mind is a wild white horse and when you make a corral for him, make sure it's not too small. And another thing: When your house burns down, just walk away. And another thing: Keep your eyes open. And one more thing: Keep moving. Because it's a long way home."

Notes: "Be Happy O Sad World Be Happy" is, of course, a poem by a teenaged Waldman.

The monk that Laurie Anderson abducted was one in the Dalai Lama's retinue, who had come to NYC (in 1991) to perform the Kalachakra Ceremony (a prayer to heal the earth).

Randy Roark: There's lullaby-ish qualities to the songs themselves as a whole, as a unit, as a CD.

Jane Siberry: So there's that too. That's actually more of what I should probably say. You're my first interview, Randy, so you're going to have to bear with me while I actually try to remember the process. Why I came to certain things.

RR: I'm really excited about this CD. I've followed your career forever.

JS: Well, what do you think of it? Or where it will stand or what it means?

RR: I think it's my favorite CD of yours. I'll tell you, there's a personal reason why, as well. My father died the day after I got an advance copy of it.

JS: I'm sorry to hear that.

RR: As you probably know, the days after is a very difficult period, and I could only listen to two things. I could listen to your CD and I could listen to silence, but I couldn't listen to anything else. As far as where this CD stands in my mind as a fan and a listener for years, I found it to be my most favorite album of yours as a listening experience. And the reason I think that's true, for me, is that there's a stripping away of everything except Jane Siberry in this, and so when you speak and sing through the songs—and it's interesting because they're not your songs—there's a presence in the room of this person everyone who's ever followed your career has always been charmed by, only now the concentration is solely on the presence of this human being as a spirit or a voice or a presence in the room. And I tell people, and I sincerely believe it, that it's my favorite Jane Siberry album. And when I tell people that it is, and then I tell them that its songs are traditional, public domain songs—none of the songs are originally yours—they look at me as if I'm slightly insane, because what everyone has always been drawn to and charmed by in your records is that sense of getting to know Jane Siberry and how could that possibly be with these songs? However, as an artist, I find that often when I have to read someone else's poem, I can often put parts of me into the voicing or phrasing of it in ways that I almost can't support in my own work, without any kind of self-consciousness.

JS: Very interesting.

RR: So did you find a sense…?

JS: I like the way you describe that. It is purer, more direct, I guess, contact with my essence than ever, just because of the nature of the arrangements, I guess. And that I'm out of the way in an odd way, making more room for other people.

RR: Or the sound or the song itself, to be able to communicate the song. You say that you used as much of the traditional song as possible, but you did they choral arrangements, right?

JS: All the arrangements are mine.

RR: They are absolutely beautiful. The layering of voices and the honoring and almost celestial . . . I keep coming up with the word "angelic" around it.

JS: Well, it was a luxury, really. It was a luxury because I love doing my own harmonies. I always have. And it's an odd thing that happens when I start arranging. I don't try to . . . when I try to arrange I can't do it, but if I just listen to the song, they start to sort of descend like these beautiful mathematical equations. And then they fit together. And I don't get a chance to do that very much, because I've found, in the past, for example, on "When I Was a Boy" where it . . . as soon as you heard more than one of my voices at the same time, the connection was not as direct with the listener, and I was going more for directness then. But now oddly I think because the context is correct on this record for a lot of me, that it hasn't lost its intimacy.

RR: Oh, not at all.

JS: But I haven't had this luxury for a long time, and so it was a joy for me to do this.

RR: How did you choose the songs that you included on this CD?

JS: Well, it was a bit of an adventure, pilgrimage. I wanted to do a collection of my favorite songs and I thought they were going to be mostly Celtic, but slowly they transformed . . . they started moving across the ocean to North America, and then became a mixture of Celtic and American spirituals, and then they sort of started to weave themselves together because, in fact, songs like "Shenandoah" are rooted in the British Isles. Or these songs came from people who migrated from the land of the Celts. So there was a connection that surprised me. And I also . . . there was a little girl called Rhona—there is a little girl called Rhona—R-H-O-N-A-who I spent quite a bit of time with in Scotland and she has Down's Syndrome, but she loves music so I found if I sang the right song on piano, certain songs would just light her up, like a candle. Other songs would just sort of leave her blank. And so it became sort of a goal to create something that would make people really happy—not just her but a collection of songs that had that affect on people.

RR: Did you learn anything from this process? What it would be in a song, say, that would light somebody up?

JS: Good question. I don't know, Randy. I guess I sort of . . . they're all my favorite songs, too. I guess it was just whatever lights her up probably lights me up, except I just wasn't looking at myself. But what is it about these songs? You know, when you hear the words "Swing Lo Sweet Chariot," you just go, "Oh, I love that song." The words are uplifting—even the sound of the words. Words like "sweet" and "chariot" and "home" and "carry me" and "abide" and "faith"—the words are uplifting, and then the music has a beauty to it; a poise and a balance in the thirds and fourths and sixths and sevenths moving around, and the resolutions all seem to . . . I'd say they're gems. I don't know how to describe it more than that but they feel good in my body anyway.

RR: It seems like the real turnaround. In other words, when an artist is in the studio recording songs for their own ears, they're listening for certain things and pleased by certain things. It seems like you took the experience of being with Rhona and cast your eye out to see what was happening—the focus of the attention became something outside of yourself. And in this case a very simple situation or a primal situation with Rhona. Did you find that that changed your orientation as a performer to looking at the audience?

JS: Yes, it did. Because I was very careful in the arrangements to not exaggerate a part of myself that wants to interest my own ear. My goal was just to make . . . create something that was very easy for me to hear it—that wasn't unusual or unique in any kind of way that would not feel soothing. So, yeah, I put on a bit of a different . . . I used a different filter system to make all my decisions. And at the end there were a lot of beautiful introductions—intros and outros—but I cut a lot of them right off. I felt it was a creeping in of more of Siberry-isms than . . . gee, you're helping me crystallize my thoughts here. Anything that was too Siberry I kept out of it.

RR: And then by that process, as a listener, you became more Siberry.

JS: Oddly enough, that's how it works, isn't it?

RR: I had an interesting experience of the same thing—I had to give two readings this week and I got rid of all my good poetry the first week, I thought, and so I had to give this other reading, so I read what I thought was secondary poetry, and people said it was the most beautiful reading I'd ever given, because I think that I realized that the poem wasn't going to carry it, it was my presence that was going to carry the reading.

JS: Oh. So you . . . I know that feeling. Yeah, so you…..

RR: So maybe I said the words with a little more passion or I said the words with a little bit more clarity or the focus wasn't on this cool poem that I'd written. The focus was on the emotion or the sadness or whatever it was that was behind it. So that in your situation with these songs it'd be what you connected with in the song that . . . the word "simplify" isn't the right word but by highlighting, in a way, those words like "home"—what it meant to you or what it could mean to somebody else, so that the words themselves become powerfully charged with meaning.

JS: Right. And all I had to work with was, you know, the song that someone else had written. Like you, I put . . . I made more with less.

RR: And that's the odd paradox I found about art is that almost the less the art takes the attention the more the person or the presence or the art of the moment of being human in that place with other humans communicates, so the attention is not "Oh, I've got to do this stuff to keep people entertained," it's that I will share this moment of being human with someone. However, that oddly becomes the most artistic moment—and powerful moment—for a listener as possible.

JS: Yeah.

RR: Which song on this would you like to hear most on the radio?

JS: Oh, I don't know. I don't really think that way. Or I don't have any thoughts that way.

RR: Do you ever listen to the radio?

JS: Yeah.

RR: I kept imagining hearing certain songs like this mixed in with what I hear on the radio, and I think it would stop people in their tracks. I actually would love to hear this on the radio. It has a classic feel that I think will connect with a lot of people. I think it could be huge if enough people hear it. It's pure, pristine. When you credit on the album Frank Sinatra and Paul Robeson—especially Frank Sinatra—"Only the Lonely" or some of his classic albums, I think it would fit right into that mode. Why did you credit…?

JS: Well, I credited him because of his version of "Ol' Man River," and Jimmy Stewart because of his role in the movie "Shenandoah."

RR: Oh, right. And Paul Robeson because….

JS: Many many reasons.

RR: You had mentioned back around "When I Was a Boy" that it was very important for you, the idea of androgyny—that you wanted to incorporate the masculine parts and to embody them as well. And I've heard that along your recording career. This CD, though, strikes me as being almost transcendentally feminine. Did you have a similar experience?

JS: I'm not sure. I think we would have to agree on what we mean by masculine and feminine, but I don't know if I would agree with saying that this record my most overtly feminine.

RR: Maybe it's the lullaby aspect or the sense of singing to Rhona, a child, that comes through as this nurturing, almost maternal, loving that maybe I….

JS: You associate with feminine. Yeah. And yet, how would you describe the masculine? What would you say masculine is?

RR: I would say more insistence on presence, active role, less nurturing, but more powerful in a certain way. Is that clear at all?

JS: Yeah, I guess I used a lot of masculine energy just making it happen because a lot of things were quite complex, and as I did the vocals and I would end up with so many vocals and I'd use a certain amount of time as free vocals, because that's where certain things happen. But then when you have five tracks of a beautiful vocal that's been created but there's a few things that have to be cleaned up, it's so . . . it can be mindboggling and stop you in your tracks and you have to really . . . you have to be really—what's the word?—goal-oriented or you just can't concentrate that long. So a lot of it took a lot of brain power.

RR: I got a sense of that when I was listening to an early version of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," and you just had the "coming for to carry me home" part . . .

JS: Right.

RR: . . . at that point. And I got the sense of the architecture of the song. Although it sounds simple, because it's clear, the conception and the practical aspects of building it . . . it's almost a solo record in many ways. You've constructed this cathedral of sound.

JS: Yes, that's a lovely . . . you have so many great words. I hope you talk to Mark Riva before he does his press release because already I can hear more . . . a lot of strong soundbites. Or ways you've captured things.

RR: Let's talk about some of the songs, too.

JS: Okay.

RR: Starting with "Jacob's Ladder." I didn't know this song. I know a lot of folk music….

JS: You didn't?

RR: No, I did not. But I was playing it for two friends of mine who had grown up Baptist in a Baptist church and I put this CD on and they started singing along. They had known these songs from childhood. So where did you first hear these songs, such as "Jacob's Ladder"?

JS: In childhood. I'm not sure whether it was in church or not. I'm not a Baptist, but it was just part of my childhood soundscape. I don't recall wherefore. But everyone knew them.

RR: And you mention singing with your mother beside the piano.

JS: Yeah.

RR: On "All through the Night."

JS: Yeah, that was her father's favorite hymn. He was Welsh. And that was the first piano duet that I learned and it was with her—she taught it to me. So she'd play the bottom hand, and I'd play the top hand.

RR: It's a beautiful song. I don't think I'd ever heard that one either.

JS: No, it's less well known, but there are many versions of the lyrics, but these ones I thought were particularly beautiful. Although, oddly enough, I was reading a book about hymns last week and . . . who was it, some famous hymn-writer-or was it a famous poet? Yeats?—had written a poem called "Hushabye My Child and Sleep," which I think was a version of "All through the Night," and although "All through the Night" is considered traditional, it may have come from this church hymn-writer. Or this poet. I can't remember. Isn't that interesting, too, Randy—I can't remember the details, but all I'm saying, in short, is that I think might be from a very famous . . . the lyrics might be from a modification of a very famous writer's song. Even though I listed it as traditional.

RR: The lyrics I find interesting because the beginning and ending are a lullaby, obviously and clearly, but the middle section seems to be singing to someone who has either just died or is in the process of dying.

JS: I saw it as singing to someone as they go from birth to death.

RR: That brings up the idea that listening to this is a very close experience of being in the presence of William Blake and his "Songs of Innocence and of Experience." Are you familiar with Blake's work?

JS: No, although certainly I've heard of him and that.

RR: I was wondering if you had . . . well, the idea that I heard in this collection is the idea of innocence and experience, or that opening up of the world that you can see in a child, and yet also the adult version of having to give these things up at the same time that they become conscious of them, and so you realize the value of your childhood when you look back at a child, but only from the position of not being a child any longer, but you have this other experience that now includes that holiness of being able to appreciate what your childhood really was. And it seems to me the songs that you've selected and collected here are an interesting mix of inspirational songs—of courage in a dark night, or tender songs that a mother might sing to a daughter—but there are also several songs of longing and loss and saying goodbye and that kind of bittersweet sadness. Did you want to balance these two forces in this, or are you aware of that?

JS: It feels balanced to me so I don't recall doing it on purpose but it does feel balanced. And as you were saying that, I thought where I am right now, and I'm not unaware that it's just before the new millennium, or however you want to put it, and my life, my life has never been so stripped—down, on all levels—possessions, friendships, work, money, time—that to have this record be the right record to come through at this time seems significant somehow. That it's a sort of a reduction of sorts. A reduction to the songs that have stood the test of time—a handful of gems. I don't think I have many more favorites than what are on this record. So it's a distillation itself. And then the arrangements.

RR: And then the songs that you've selected actually speak to that exact . . . where you get to say at the very end, with "O Shenandoah"—it's the feeling that the listener or I heard is that same sort of feeling—of maybe life is stripped down now but at the same time there's a certain . . . what's left standing is very powerful because of that. There's less distractions, there's more reality. No bullshit.

JS: That's right, yeah. These songs are what's left standing. Yeah, that's interesting.

RR: And what I found really interesting to me as a listener is that you've somehow taken these songs from different times and different cultures and different histories and different parts of the world and yet you've made them all . . . you've found something in them that's contemporaneous with each other—which is, it seems to me, to be a human presence in the world, looking at the world with a little bit of longing or sadness.

JS: Yeah. It's maybe also a distillation to what I think is important and what I guess has . . . you know, the most important things to people throughout time, and it hasn't changed now. Love, home, your connection with God at the end of your life, or whatever.

RR: And children, and dying.

JS: Yeah.

RR: Or to go into the next stage of your life, the necessity for leaving behind one stage—whether it's an Irish person going to New Orleans, or "Shenandoah." The version of that [of "Shenandoah"] that you have is absolutely beautiful. It so captures that feeling of "I know I have to go, but the beauty that I'm leaving—the love of what I am leaving—is almost crippling. But still, I know I have to go."

JS: Oh, yeah. Thank you for saying that because that's the nut of the human condition. And I had to change the words a bit because through the years there was so many verses added that it stopped making sense in a funny way—it was illogical. So one important change, so that I could sing it anyway, was to add the word "tho." That simple thing made it make sense to me. "I long to see you, away, I'm bound away." That didn't make sense, so "I long to see you, tho I'm bound away." And those two sentences are the most poignant, heartbreaking thing I think about the human condition.

RR: "The Streets of Laredo" was another song. I actually learned that—I'd heard it my whole life, of course, but at one time I was working with Allen Ginsberg and he was teaching that song in class and I was quite surprised. But what he loved about that song is that same touching . . . what he loved about it most was that it was, for him, obviously a man looking at a young man who has died too young, and acknowledging the heartfelt sympathy and sense of loss. And he found that so touching in a way. At this point he was quite elderly. And that same feeling of looking at someone—or a man looking at another man, say—and to find that in the Old West! But in that same way, that's a similar situation of someone longing or leaving or looking at something that he or she has lost, and the tender feeling of "Beat the drum slowly." He found that quite moving.

JS: Yeah, and I'm not sure . . . a lot of the lyrics are quite different than what you hear there. There are probably about twenty verses that go on and on but I think for me the most moving thing is the melody, perhaps. The sound of the word "Laredo." And then a man in his prime, like you say. No one likes to see something full of life . . . it's almost more upsetting to us. It is more upsetting to us to lose something as vital as youth or something really beautiful.

RR: Yeah, there seems to be an order in the world which is that children should see their parents die. There seems to be an order. When that order is stripped away some way in the way that it can be, it accentuates the pain or the loss or the "could have been." And there's that sense in "Ol' Man River" as well.

JS: I had heard Paul Robeson's version, and that was a family classic, and a lot of people sing it in the showers, as I discovered, and that's the only song that isn't really old. But for me it was the song of my childhood, that's why I included it.

RR: The version of "False False Fly" that you've included….

JS: I'm just reading your notes here. Oh, a ballad. I did a search on the internet and found something weird.

RR: When I was working for Allen he was teaching ballads one year and I was his teaching assistant so I got very interested in a song called "The False Knight on the Road," which is Child Ballad number 3, which is the same….

JS: Oh, my goodness, look what you've got here.

RR: It's a great song, but the thing I find the most interesting about it is you said that you learned this song in Ireland, or this version of "False False Fly" in Ireland?

JS: Yes.

RR: Because Ewan Maccoll had a series of records that versions of this appear on. At that time, it was actually the sixties, it was very rare in the United States, and only in Nova Scotia was there a culture that had incorporated this tune. And so you had gone from Canada to Ireland to learn a song that was only popular in Nova Scotia.

JS: Oh, isn't that strange? That's so fantastic. Yeah, well there you go.

RR: How songs move.

JS: And there's a song called "She Is Like the Swallow," which I did for Hector Zazou's record . . .

RR: Right.

JS: . . . an Irish man told me that it was Irish and sang his version of it. So it came from Ireland originally.

RR: It's like these songs have lives and histories like families do. And "Pontchartrain." You said you learned that song in Ireland as well.

JS: Yes.

RR: Because I've always associated that song completely as a New Orleans . . . I don't know the history of the song.

JS: Oh. So you knew the song already?

RR: Bob Dylan actually did a version of it in the seventies.

JS: Really.

RR: During live concerts. He never released it.

JS: He didn't release it.

RR: No, it only appeared in concert.

JS: Oh, I see.

RR: In the New Orleans area, it's a very . . . in their area it's almost like "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"; it's just something that's thought of as New Orleans. It also has my favorite line of all time in it that I hadn't heard till I heard your version. "If it wasn't for the alligators, I'd sleep here in the woods."

JS: Well, Randy, I have to tell you that that's one of my favorite lines too because I'm very afraid of alligators so I would be very excited when I sang that line. And it was hard not to laugh, too, doing it, because it just really charged me up. But I agree.

RR: I leapt right out at me. As a poet I hear words often and I was listening to the album as song and sound and all of a sudden there was like this incredibly startling, almost surreal line. It's so absolutely true. I mean, if there's alligators you wouldn't sleep in the woods. But that somebody would say it and say it so plainly and simply and also incorporate it into a longer story where there's not quite that sense of danger. It just startled me in a very pleasant way.

JS: I almost didn't do the song because of that line, because it jarred me at first, and then it became my favorite line. You can't have that on a . . . you can't talk about alligators on this record. And then it became . . . and now it gets my vote for best pick-up line. Most original pick-up line.

RR: Yeah, "Do you have a place to stay? I'd sleep outside but there's alligators."

JS: That's right.

RR: It's original. And it could work, too. I mean, you can't argue with it.

JS: No.

RR: Do you plan on touring behind this CD?

JS: Not so far.

RR: I'd love to see you tour, Jane. Really.

JS: I don't know why, but I've turned everything down. I don't know what I'm making space for but that's where I am right now.

RR: Well, yeah. I hope that at some point you come again to a feeling that you would like to get out on the road again and meet people and sing not only these songs but other songs too. It seems like this is such a special, pristine recording. I would love to see how you would translate that—the experience of singing to Rhona only it's a thousand unknown Rhonas sitting in your audience. To sing these songs to them. It would be difficult to get the choral arrangements, of course, in it somehow, but I had this vision of people falling in love with you totally having the courage to have done the work you have done to get to the point in your life and your career where you've collected these songs, recorded them in this way. It's a real . . . it's a landmark moment and it would be workable, I think, and a very charged experience if you did. I can understand that you're not in the place where you want to do it.

JS: Well, it may well be the perfect thing to do, Randy, but until energy starts coming toward me. Maybe when the record comes out it'll start to dictate certain plans for me, but right now everything feels really quiet and I do feel like very solitary and when I introduced different musicians into the arrangements—I had worked with an uilliean pipe in Ireland when I was there, and a percussionist, and I didn't feel right introducing other people's energy to the record. I feel very solitary right now, in other words, and so I kept reducing the record back to mostly myself, and that's how I feel right now, timewise. I don't feel like being available onstage or working with other people right now. That might change.

RR: Well, I'd say go with that feeling as long as you can and hopefully I'd like to . . . I hope some more work comes out of this. It would be amazing to document this time that you're moving through.

JS: Yeah, well, I think you have that . . . this is a special record for me too because . . . and I'm surprised at how thrilled I am with it because I've never had a record that I could hand to older people or certain people that I really love without apologizing for being me. You know what I mean?

RR: Absolutely.

JS: And so I have so much pleasure thinking that I can give this to the people in the old age home, because I guess I've never had something like this before, and I'm so thrilled, just for that simple reason. And I think that's why I tried to keep myself out of it as much as possible. A certain part of myself. And as an aside, like you said, it pumped up more of another part of myself. I do think it's a landmark record for me of sorts, and significant, although I haven't put it into words like you have, but I really appreciate that.

RR: I think as we're going through the world together in a way and you're slightly ahead of me, and in that sense I'm learning from you with the things that you record. So you're experiencing things on the frontlines in many ways, and the burning away or the stripping away and the acknowledgement of what's left and to find meaning and where it is that you find meaning and to be able to, like a jazz musician would say, "blow" on that is a real inspiration to me. I'd be interested to see what you do . . . where you go next. Do you have an idea of what's up for you?

JS: Not sure yet, but just sort of vague shapes around me, but I'm not sure. One thing I thought of was the arrangements on the record I was hoping to do a lot more elegant work with the strings, etc., but every time I tried to get too fancy, I felt false. So I ended up with things I'm not necessarily even that, as a musician . . . using string pads—I would have preferred to replace them with real strings more often, and yet as soon as I did that, they started to pull focus, and so I felt I had responsibility to use almost nondescript synth sounds, and ignore a part of me that felt they were a bit, what's the word, "cheap" or whatever. So that the ear would not become interested in them and the focus in the painting, so to speak, would be the vocal arrangements.

RR: And the emotions behind the words themselves, and the phrasing of them.

JS: Yeah. It could have been a much more complex and elegant record in a certain way, and yet it would have lost so much, so that surprised me. And then vocally there's very few places where there's a single vocal. In an odd way, although I did . . . it was right to have a bed of just me, for some reason it seemed too intimate when there was just one of me, so I did a lot of doubling and tripling to create a mat that felt more correct for putting out on the common table.

RR: And, if I remember right, "As I Roved Out," I think, the first stanza is completely acapella. Do I have the right song?

JS: I'm not sure. I think there's a pad there.

RR: Oh, maybe. But the single vocal is so forefront. I think your instincts were right in how you assembled this record. I have no complaints about the arrangements. There's no arrangement that feels false or phony to me. There's nothing that seems to be bringing my attention to a place that has less power and emotion than where you have decided to lie them, which is a mixture of the lyrics themselves, and also, I have to say, your voice sounds more angelic, especially the way that you have it layered here, than I've ever heard it, which I think is what people who have listened to you for years now are going to be humbled by. Just how beautiful you were able to make the human voice, traditional lyrics, and simple . . . the word "simple" doesn't cover it. I think it's appropriate arrangements. The way that you would say at a party listen to someone who played the piano, but it was real in that moment, and it was real in a way that no studio orchestra could ever capture—that same sense of immediacy and emotional content, that these arrangements . . . that you were able to capture.

JS: Emotional-content wise, when I had a single voice, they become too emotional, oddly enough. That to get the right emotional amperage, I had to mask my voice a bit by doubling it or tripling it, because I had a solo version of "Shenandoah," but it would make me . . . too much information was carried in my voice when you could hear it alone.

RR: Maybe it softens it a bit when you have….

JS: Yeah, it takes me out of it a bit. It takes . . . because these aren't my songs, so it's not really appropriate that I sing them too intimately.

RR: I found that with a song that— "Water Is Wide," I'm thinking of, which I've heard a lot of versions of—I've heard versions that literally make me cry from a sense of the person being broken down in their life in that moment and saying "I can't make it on my own; I need a boat that'll carry two." And yet I found that with a lot of these songs, the lyrics are incredibly almost tragic and world weary, but you're able somehow to soften that or heighten a more transcendent quality of that so that they don't come across as tragic or sad, even—they come across as transcending that sadness or worldweariness to a realm of beauty. But I imagine that you connected with songs like "Water Is Wide" and "Shenandoah" because the lyrics are tragic, in a way, or sad.

JS: Yeah, and they're a distillation of people's thought for many, many years, right? They've stood the test of time, so they've spoken to many, many people, and endured. So they must the nut of, you know, the human heart.

RR: Yeah, those specific moments like "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." Like when my father died, you become a part of a world that has had to live with fathers dying for all time, and there's certain emotions that you'll experience only, and they're very private, and yet, at the same time, if you're able to capture them in a song, they can reach out and speak to somebody and touch them in that moment. And so these songs are more or less a collection of moments.

JS: Yeah, distilled moments—exactly that. Of man's journey. I'm sorry to hear about your father, Randy. I'm not saying I'm sorry to say he died, necessarily, but it's always hard.

RR: Thank you for saying that. Actually I listened to your CD off and on for those three days. It was the only thing I could really listen to. I guess I was Rhona at that moment. And I think that's why I connected so deeply with it, because I was in one of those moments where the world outside stops in a way, just the way the cars pull on the side of the road to let a funeral cortege pass. I had to, in many ways, let a lot of things . . . I couldn't touch a lot of things or be touch