"Lana Del Rey and Her Poetry" by Jasmine Ledesma
The afternoon is dead.
My fan rotates and stutters, breathing harshly. I stretch my legs out for the fourth time in ten minutes. I need a haircut. A fruit fly perches on my dresser to rest. His wings twitch anxiously. He dreads his own weight. I eventually get up like a king from the throne, full of self-imposed boredom, and head to search the fridge, one of my many duties. I pluck a box of hairy raspberries from the second shelf and wash them with tap water. My delicious red children. I go back to my spot on the bed and as I pop a berry into my mouth like a pill, I decide to listen to the audiobook of Lana Del Rey’s new poetry book, Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass. I’ve been resisting the urge but with nothing else to do, I push play on my phone and let it lay beside me. I watch the fan break its neck as Lana’s plush, rosary voice begins to fill the air like strawberry-flavored vapor.
—
Lana first emerged onto the mainstream music scene in 2012—the year of gaudy reality television, Blue Ivy Carter conspiracy theories, and a possible apocalypse—with her debut album Born To Die, a moody ode to glamorous ugliness and self-destruction. Lana’s lush green Fordham education hung from her faux leather belt as she crooned death in smoky tones. Nobody knew what to think. Where was the punchline? At the time when a perky twenty-two year old Taylor Swift, and British lover-boy Ed Sheeran ruled the radio, Lana’s music came without a laugh track. Who was this droopy eyed newcomer? And what did she want?
I would sit in the back of my Texas history class, drawing icky eyes, and hear murmurs of this new artist, this cool girl. She wore jeans, kept her hair big, and was always smoking! At first, she was impossible to avoid. There was always a single of hers playing on the radio, always another award show. But another year went by and like so many other teenage girls, I grew into my sadness. We all carried Lana, our tragic ruler, in our ears, cheap headphones like an IV.
In her music, Lana lives in a tender world of blue, mean men, sizzling midnights, rough housing glamour, record players, and bruised fruit. Her poetry lives close by. The book’s cover features a painted tree with bright, ripe oranges hanging like California suns.
The book starts off with a poem titled LA, Who Am I To Love You? This poem most resembles Allen Ginsburg’s 1956 poem America, which reads like a Jazz song, in which the speaker asks, “America when will we end the human war? / Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.” Lana begs the city, that unapproachable rash of golden dust and gaping waters, in a similar manner. “L.A, I'm a dreamer, but I'm from nowhere, who am I to dream?” she asks in her hushed, delicate way.
Lana has long admired the scrawny, good for nothing Beat poets, frequently making allusions to their spiky freedom such as in her song Brooklyn Baby from her silver gelatin, melancholy album Ultraviolence. In that song she first sings, “I'm churning out novels like / Beat poetry on Amphetamines” and again a few lines later, “I've got feathers in my hair / I get down to Beat poetry.” It seems that the Beat poet is a stand in for a GI Joe, the broad shouldered savior. They are cool, brave, hungry heroes. Their cigarettes are guns.
In the title poem, the speaker walks into a room fat with indecision, unsure of which way to go or what way to go about it. Then she sees a little girl in all of her wondrous, carefree splendor and decides to do “nothing about everything.” The later “SportCruiser” is a poem about flight. The speaker takes flying lessons and learns to trust in herself, and thus, in her poetry. There are talks of grocery stores and the gooey blue, seafood coast. The speaker makes metaphors of everything and that makes her a poet.
These moments, though small, stretch out into sprawling, sometimes long-winded notes. Lana is using every inch of our attention. In the press release for this book, Lana states that these poems, “are eclectic and honest and not trying to be anything other than what they are and for that reason I'm proud of them, especially because the spirit in which they were written was very authentic.”
A spade never has to convince anybody it is a spade. You can fill my mouth but you cannot make me swallow.
It isn’t all predictable, though. There are some gems hidden among the poems, lines that dazzle and flaunt. In the poem, “Quiet Waiter Blue Forever,” the speaker says, “I'm the crying crustacean Sunbathing on paper.” A riveting image, truly and simply. And later in “Happy” a poem that if turned into a song would be a hit single, the speaker describes how “the noise from the cars got louder and / louder / during rush hour / until it sounded like a river or a stream.” The speaker is naked, stripped of everything—her fine jewels, her heavyweight titles. All she has is sound and heat. Her loneliness is refreshing.
In one of her songs, Bare Feet on Lineoneum, a commentary on the parasitic, frantic nature of pop culture, of crowds and shared thoughts, the speaker ends by saying, “People love mysterious / People love visions.”
And isn’t it true?
—
It is 2020. All of the Beat poets are dead and the general understanding of poetry as well as the general consensus as to what exactly poetry is, how it snipes and sways, has changed. There are those who have claimed a crisis of creativity. But the idea fountains still flow, undoubtedly. Instead, I would argue we are in a crisis of consumption. Everybody wants to be consumed and consuming at all times. We stand in domino lines, waiting for our turn.
Rupi Kaur has killed the long-form. She capitalized on our minute, flimsy attention span, our liking for tight ratios and tiny, pretty words. She gave us exactly what we wanted, right into our palms. She made it so easy.
The art of poetry has gone under the knife and come out thirty pounds thinner. Poets like Rupi Kaur and Amanda Lovelace, among others, have furthered an anybody can do it mindset, perhaps unconsciously, by delivering bite-sized, effortless poetry. This has inspired fires of young, teenage girls to try their hand at poetry, to call themselves writers. I actually love these new poets. I love their bad galaxy metaphors, their devotion to the dove aesthetic, their capitalized speeches about high school and heartbreak.
But I do not love the notion that poetry is easy.
The anatomy of the poet is one of obsession and secrecy. It mirrors only that of a criminal. You have to hoard moments, details, feelings and then have the patience for them to fill themselves with meaning. You have to wait for the right moment, a twitch of the air. My older brother stole a cold six pack while I wrote down, “A wound will always come when called” into my beaten notebook. Twins in instinct.
That being said, I believe Lana is a poet.
I believe she falls asleep with words knocking around her head, to be let in, to be let out. I believe she keeps napkins to write on, and thinks everything can be written about, can be beautiful if she writes it that way. But is it enough? What about the knife opera? Is Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass the deepest she goes?
—
When I finish the audiobook, I get up to put what is left of the raspberries back in the fridge. I stretch out like a beach towel. I find the fruit fly from earlier sitting on the face of a clementine. I begin to sing to it in a thready, cartoonish falsetto: “This is the last time / cause you and I / we were born to die.”
“I used to love that song!” the fly seems to say.
Jasmine Ledesma lives in New York. Her work has appeared in places such as Glitter MOB, Gone Lawn, The Southampton Review, and [PANK], among others. She was nominated for both Best of The Net and the Pushcart Prize in 2020.
