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Funeral Playlist - Softcover

Gorham, Sarah

 
9798988198512: Funeral Playlist
Softcover
ISBN 13: 9798988198512
Verlag: Etruscan Press, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Using her own “funeral playlist,” Sarah Gorham examines the intricate connectionsbetween music, consolation, and human mortality.

The essays in this unique collection explore a diverse range of songs, including Mozart’s“Benedictus” (The Requiem), Nina Simone’s rendition of “Black is the Color of my True Love’s Hair.” Caccini’s 17 th century madrigal “Amarilli, mia bella,” the Irish “Parting Song,” Matthew Houck’s (aka Phosphorescent) dirge-like “Be Dark Night,” and “King and Lionheart,” sung by Of Monsters and Men. But there’s also the song of a mourning dove, and the nonchalance of a human hum. All may become a medium of transcendence for the living (and, possibly, the departed).

What makes the book distinctive is its deeply personal approach. A series of memoir-like interstices reveal what art and artmaking can do to unite these subjects. By sharing her own story and the music that has shaped it, Sarah Gorham invites readers to think about their own relationship with death and what they want their own funeral playlist to look like.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

SARAH GORHAM is a poet and essayist, most recently the author of Alpine Apprentice (2017), which made the short list for 2018 PEN/Diamonstein Award in the Essay and Study in Perfect (2014), selected by Bernard Cooper for the 2013 AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. Both were published by University of Georgia Press. Gorham is also the author of four collections of poetry— Bad Daughter (2011), The Cure (2003), The Tension Zone (1996), and Don’t Go Back to Sleep (1989). Other honors include grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, three state arts councils, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Media coverage has included Bomb, Kirkus, Salon, NPR, Publishers Weekly, Agni, Diagram, Utne Reader, Slate, Library Journal, Shelf Unbound, The Nation, Real Simple, The Missouri Review, and more. She is the retired co-founder and editor-in-chief at Sarabande Books, an independent, nonprofit, literary publisher. The press was selected as the inaugural winner of the AWP Small Press Publisher Award in 2013. And recently, CLMP chose Sarabande as 2022 winner of the Golden Colophon Award for Paradigm Independent Publishing.

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“King and Lionheart”
Vocals: Of Monsters and Men

“Howling ghosts they reappear
In mountains that are stacked with fear
But you're a king and I'm a lionheart
A lionheart”

Forward.
The song is set on repeat. The infant, though scarcely a foot long, shifts inside its mother, resembling a mouse under a carpet or small mogul. The mother’s skin accommodates, for the nudge reassures despite its inconvenient timing, far into the night when she would be sleeping. Everyone else is sleeping, but this does not make her feel isolated or lonely. After all, she’s not one, but two beings, each with a heart, a brain, and two lungs. From a paper cup on the tray, she takes a sip of Sprite. A wonder, how this clear, nutrition-free liquid will turn to milk. But not yet.
Back.


“Black Is the Color of my True Love’s Hair,” Compact Jazz recording, 1989
Vocalist: Nina Simone
Every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.
—Gaston Bachelard

In 1980, my mother lay dying. I was twenty-six, my sisters twenty-four, twenty-two, eighteen, and thirteen, all of us shattered and completely unprepared. Her death that July guided me north to a high Victorian mansion in upstate New York called Yaddo and, within just three days, to my beloved. He too was mourning—his marriage a heap of burned and trampled things. When a coup de foudre, “cup of lightning,” strikes two people simultaneously, surely the readiness to love came first. This might have been experienced as grief, a concavity so intense it sinks to all areas of the human heart, or quite simply an age-appropriate hormonal overflow. In any case, mind and body are in concert: Something must be done.


“Perchoo,” or the Music of Mourning
Song
It’s below freezing, and the maple, cherry, sycamore, and beech trees are stripped to their bones. Most animals are silent, sleeping away their territoriality and sexual insistence, or wintering in milder climes. The mourning dove sits on a knotty branch, its silhouette black, as the sun dissolves into the grass. What is the sound of mourning? Consider the dove, its plaintive call—Perchoo-oo-oo-o—sound slurring up and fading into a kind of musical ellipses. What elegant pining. What perfect music for the transition from evening into night, fear into lament. After death there should be a bird, and why not the mourning dove? We imagine the bird speaks to us—Ah-YOU-you-you-you. How human it is to transpose, to carry what is wordless into our own field of aural signs, our language.

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Verlag
Etruscan Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 13 
9798988198512
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
143
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Verantwortliche Person
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